Page 12 of The California Dreamers

11

And God looked upon it

1984

Blue Beach, California

Fourteen years old

Early in the morning, Mama and Dyl and Cap join us at our campsite.

“Happy birthday, my loves.” Mama is radiant, smothering the twins in hugs, kissing me tenderly, trailing her hand down my wild hair. The two of us waft out the fancy paisley blanket and spread it, and we all sit.

Then she tells a story we’ve heard many times, one of her few. How her labor began weeks early and she had to deliver all alone in the Gull. There was no time to drive to Carlsbad, where Cap had heard a midwife would help her for nothing. There was barely time to wave Cap in from the water.

She finishes the story as she always does: “I told him, ‘Isn’t it better, no strangers, just the three of us?’”

“And then, just as we’d swaddled Griffin, another pain hit. And you came, Magnus.” She turns to Mag and he holds still, no longer dodging her kisses. “And I said, ‘Isn’t it better, no strangers, just the four of us?’ And then I fell asleep.”

Cap tips his hat back, the lines around his eyes crinkling deep from pride in Mama, I think. Or maybe it’s a private joke they share because she’s left out some part of the story. His reaction is the same every time she tells it.

Mama pulls our battered kettle from her pack but I tell her, “You relax, Mama. I’ll make breakfast.”

“You act as if I delivered those boys today instead of seventeen years ago,” she muses in her soft voice. But she lets me take over.

She missed us , I realize. The twins and I were the ones on a ramble this time.

I build a fire and serve apples and hard-boiled eggs with our tea—a feast. Dyl unveils his birthday presents, drawings of birds that look like the twins. I bought the half-used charcoal pencil for him years ago, with fountain coins, and he’s gotten good. Mag is a myna, with hunched shoulders and suspicious eyes, scrunching his forehead, and Griff is a fluffy, smiley yellow budgie.

Cap tips his hat back for a second, studying the sketches. “Uncanny.”

Mama has traded her homemade soap for thick hand-knit sweaters and the boys pull them on even though it’s warm. “And on your eighteenth, you’ll get these. Look.”

She hops up, lifting her right foot above us with a little laugh to show us how, while we’ve been separated, she has tattooed her arch. A wave, the pattern I carve inside the van—our pattern. It was our family’s private joke that the design had come from a garbage can. Like turning “roach coach” into something regal. The joke was on them.

Then Cap, who’s sitting cross-legged on the blanket, his back impossibly straight, brushes sand from the bottom of his right foot and, in a gesture as slow and deliberate as Mama’s was sudden, flexes it. He keeps his foot taut only for a moment, enough for us to see that she’s etched the mark into his flesh, too, then relaxes it so the tattoo’s hidden again.

“Will Ro and I get them?” Dyl asks.

Mama’s radiant. “Of course, when you turn eighteen. All six of us will have them. We’re all Merricks.”

I give the twins new pucks of board wax bought with the two dollars Cap allotted me for presents (Mrs. Palmer’s brand, NOT Mr. Zog’s). Black Licorice for Mag, Blazing Cinnamon for Griff.

Griff sniffs his and pretends to pass out from cinnamon fumes. When he sits up again he says, “This is terrific, Ro. Thanks.”

Mag says, “I’ll strip my board right now.”

“Not just yet, Magnus.” Cap stands. Unhurried, leaving us all in suspense, he walks the few hundred feet to a stand of palm trees, strolling between two and disappearing into the oleander bushes.

We all stand, our backs to the surf, trying to catch a glimpse of him. A minute later, he reappears, his body tall and straight, his hat level, despite the heavy burden he’s toting. Under each arm, he carries a gleaming, custom-made board, the resin coating like glass.

At the handful of board shops we trust, it’s thirty dollars just to fix a ding. New short boards of this size, wooden, shaped to perfection…they had to cost Cap at least seven hundred dollars each. There are cheaper boards out there, but Cap detests polyurethane because it’s made from oil. So was this why he suggested we come to the Quiver? So he could get the boards and surprise the twins?

He sets them down near the blanket and the twins listen reverently, running their hands along their new babies as Cap describes them:

“Yours has a more squared-off tail than Mag’s, Griff. It’ll help you turn when the waves are small. Mag, yours is an inch thinner, a pintail, but the float should be right even though you’ve gained muscle this year…” And on and on. Our father doesn’t speak much, but right now he’s positively chatty, boyish in his excitement. I take a mental picture of his animated face, his expressive eyes that for once aren’t shadowed under his hat. I want to remember them.

Mag is so happy he teases Cap. “New boards at sixteen. Is that a rule we didn’t know about?”

Cap’s expression goes far away, and his flow of words stops. I want so desperately to know what he’s thinking. Maybe he’s recalling a favorite board, or a first one. A birthday of his own from when he was a boy. But all he says is “Thought it was time.”

***

Mama and Dyl depart for the Gull, but the rest of us want one last run, and Cap decides he’ll ride the river wave just once.

As the four of us trek over to the Quiver, boards balanced on our heads, Cap says, “Haven’t tried one in decades.”

Decades…was this the same as “a million lifetimes ago”?

“A million lifetimes ago” is also how Mama answered when I asked where she and Cap met, when I was four or five, and we passed a wedding on the beach. It’s how she answered many of my questions when I was younger, and even then I’d known that “a million lifetimes ago” isn’t truly a place.

I hesitate, but curiosity forces the question: “You rode one at a Quiver like this?”

Cap tips his hat up with his right index finger and looks straight ahead, at the wave. Still so distant it’s just a bunch of people who could be admiring anything on the beach.

He takes so long to answer that I regret asking. We don’t ask him about before : the unspoken rule.

But at last Cap faces me and smiles. “Just kids. Miles from any ocean.”

Cap, a kid, miles from any ocean—I can’t picture it. But the six words are almost as good as a new custom board.

It’s an amazing thing, how the crowd parts for Cap when he approaches. It’s not new for people to admire Cap’s surfing, to recognize his carriage and his unusual hat. Most older vanners know him, and regulars at our favorite breaks certainly do. But we rarely get to see their admiration up close. Someone gestures for Cap to go but he insists on waiting in line. And when he takes his turn, he’s casual and grand at once. He surfs the man-made wave like he’s alone with it, his old black, gold-trimmed captain’s hat like a crown. I’m proud and grateful, and wouldn’t change one thing about him.

And then a single shadow appears on our trip.

“And God looked upon it and saw it was good.” A deep male voice behind me.

I whirl, trying to discern who said it, if he meant it as unkindly as it sounded. If he was mocking Cap’s demeanor. The man named Jaws smiles.

The twins share my confusion; I sense it. They’re thinking it, too:

Is he making fun of our father?

As expertly as he hopped on the wave, Cap hops off. But as he nods at us, about to give a word or two of advice to the twins as they test their new boards, his expression changes. It had been far away again. A million lifetimes ago, maybe.

And now it’s surprised, fully here in this moment on Blue Beach. He’s spied Jaws. It happens quickly: Jaws practically bows, and Cap responds with a nod so short I wonder if it was voluntary. Then Cap walks away.

I look at the twins, whose faces reflect my own wonderment at the exchange, our father’s abrupt departure.

“Your turn next, Duchess?” Jaws asks, all feigned innocence. “Or would you like a private tour of my van, instead?”

Griff, with a rictus of a smile, seems unsure what to do. The veins in Mag’s forearms show themselves. At the insult to Cap or to me? Were these insults, or is it simply that we don’t know how to be among people?

“Do you mean the van with the shark-bite board?” Mag asks Jaws. “Because I heard how you really broke it.”

“What do you mean, really ?” Jaws asks with a too-merry laugh. “Who told you how I broke my board, your captain ?” He scrutinizes Cap’s small shape in the distance. Then he lifts his right hand to his temple in a sarcastic salute.

As if Cap’s hat is anything like the absurd adornment, the lie , on this charlatan’s VW van. He’s had his hat since before we were born, Mama told us once in a rare moment of reminiscence.

Griff places a hand on Mag’s shoulder, and I shake my head at Mag. Remember Cap’s rules. Don’t spoil everything when these people mean nothing to us. He’s just jealous because people admire Cap here—they know a pure surfer when they see one…

Mag steps back, unclenching his fists. Quietly, his voice strained from the effort of backing down, he says, “What I mean is…we heard about the shark. Must’ve been terrifying.”

Griff leads Mag away, calling back, “It’s his birthday, he’s had too much beer.”

Jaws monitors the twins’ retreat, then relaxes—some kind of exemption granted. “Your brothers?” he asks.

I nod without looking at anyone.

The river wave rushes on, wasted.

***

We help fill in the wave and rake sand until there’s no trace left.

Walking back to the rest of our family, we try to laugh about Mag’s near fight. It was one tense minute, and nothing happened, not really.

“Your teddy bear friend didn’t stay to clean up,” I say. “That’s what I’m calling him. Teddy Bear.” The flimsiest of jokes, to take the teeth out of a shark, a bear trap…a small, nothing man who laughed at our father.

“No wonder Cap didn’t want to stay. Can you imagine resorting to a trick like that to make people respect you?” Griff smiles to himself. I know what he’s thinking—Cap doesn’t need such tricks.

“Pathetic,” I agree.

“Psychotic is what it is,” Mag says.

We don’t mention the man’s disrespect toward Cap. Or muse aloud about how they knew each other, what may have passed between them, or when.

Or how Cap’s warnings failed us this time. Citizens aren’t worth the trouble, he’s always said. We don’t mention how that pathetic jagged board is attached to a van, not a citizen’s commuter car.

Cap doesn’t ask what happened when he left. We leave Blue Beach and the Quiver miles behind.

But late that night, Mag sky surfs. It’s this thing only he does. When Cap’s driving at night, sometimes—not very often—Mag climbs out his bunk window onto the Gull’s roof. There, at our top speed of fifty-one miles an hour, he stands behind the board rack without holding on and balances, legs bent like he’s riding an epic wave.

I’ve never gone up there to watch him. I made Griff tell me about it, the third or fourth time I saw Mag twist out the window in the dark and heard his thumps.

Griff had said, “It’s his way of dealing with stuff.”

What stuff? I’d thought. Mag had always seemed so sure of himself, always seemed to bask in Cap’s admiration for his toughness. He seemed unbothered by Cap’s edicts and inconsistencies, Mama’s disappearing. Maybe not as blindly loyal as Griff, but like nothing could get to him, pierce that thick Mag shell.

Now I know better.

I’d love to see him sky surf. I bet it’s beautiful.