Twentynine Palms. Daniel Pyne
to give the cigarette back. Tory waves it away. “All yours, man.”
“I . . . no, better not. My, you know, mom. If she gets a whiff, on my breath—”
Tory holds up an Oreo. “What do you think these are for? Kills the stink completely.”
In point of fact, Jack thought the cookies were for when Tory got hungry. But he keeps the cigarette. Puffs and puffs and puffs without inhaling, nevertheless beginning to feel kind of tingly and sick. The Mickey’s drained, Tory throws it down into a pile of scrap lumber below, where the jade glass shatters.
“You know what’s on those islands?” Tory is pointing west, into the haze.
“Goats.” Jack did a report on the Channel Islands in fourth grade. “Sheep, sea lions, seals, gulls, fossils.”
Tory looks disappointed. For a moment Jack wonders if Tory wanted to tell him this himself, or did Tory, in fact, believe that there was something else out there?
“But at some point,” Jack continues, “somebody brought all these goats out there, and they let them go wild—” Tory’s bored already, but Jack’s in too deep, he has to finish—“and they just kept breeding and breeding and now there’s thousands of wild goats and nobody knows what to do with them. It’s messed up. Sometimes they let people go out and hunt them and junk.”
Tory shrugs. “Yeah, well I know for a fact there’s frat guys that go out there and, you know, fuck the goats. Part of the initiation.”
Jack’s horror and speculation prevent him (oh Jesus) from processing Tory’s subsequent spare but graphic (goats!) recitation of this apparently long-standing UCSB Greek system sacrament.
“Oh, man,” Jack says, when Tory finishes. “Who told you that?”
“I get things here and there. You know. And what I know, man—well, I know what really goes on. It’s like, they teach you one thing. But what really goes on? Is something else.”
Wind comes through the house like an emotion, filling it with an easy silence, pushing paper scraps around in corners and sifting the sawdust.
“The guys all said you were gonna kill me,” Jack confesses.
“Which guys?”
“You know—some of the guys—” Jack hesitates, sensing a misstep here, accidental betrayal in the making. Will Tory kill them?
“—Christ, they’re such pussies,” Tory says.
Jack’s empty grin, like a lawn jockey’s, cuts cold and meaningless.
“They don’t get it,” Tory is saying, “they’re full of shit. It comes down to one thing and one thing only.”
Jack wonders: What? What one thing?
“You know.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, hey. Girls’ll come, and girls’ll go. But you and me—?” Tory deliberately leaves the sentence hanging there, looking at Jack, without expression, as if the completion of his thought is so obvious as to be unnecessary, as if it’s implicit.
And Jack nods, pretending he knows, fourteen in full, confounded, confirmed, content. He gazes out across the lazy green ramble of the seaside city he has always known to be home.
Out toward a colorless ocean, and the vague, private islands of goats.
b.
Shapes, slender whale-grey phantasms, stumble from the foaming tide.
Surfers.
The roar of a storm-swelled ocean thunders low from the marine layer beyond them.
Black with bits of winter-white flesh, unzipped wet suits, hoods flapping behind them like weird rubber cowls of some long-submerged Benedictine order, the taller of the two young men is hauling his gasping companion to the shallows of Rincon Beach.
Tory and Jack are twenty.
“Little cocksucking Valley shit fucking cut me off!” Tory barks. Jack eases his friend down, then runs back to chase their long boards before they float away.
By the time Jack returns with their sticks, Tory is spitting seawater and blinking the salt and sand out of his eyes. “Goddamn it! They shouldn’t even fucking be out here!”
“He’s a pup. They’re Valley pups. Forget about it.” Jack drags the surfboards beyond the reach of the tide. “You’re welcome, by the way. Thank God for Junior Lifesaving, huh?”
“Never took it.”
Farther up the beach, where clumps of clothes and towels and flip-flops are waiting, Jack strips down the top of his wet suit. Tory glares back at the water. Three more surfers are coming in. Day-Glo stripes on high-fashion wet suits, they’re barely teenagers. Sun-bleached hair. Poolside San Fernando Valley tans, Calabasas or Woodland Hills.
“I’m only saying. Somebody should explain the concept to those guys.”
“There’s a concept?”
“Priority. Do not drop in on another man’s wave. The surfer who is closest to the breaking wave has priority.”
“He was already up.”
“Because he jumped my line.”
“Since when have you ever cared about the rules?”
“Fuck you.”
“Maybe you should’ve let a geek have his ride. Take the next wave. You knew he was gonna bail, Tory.”
“These are my waves.”
“Your waves.”
“Yeah.”
“Your ocean.”
“That is correct.” Tory starts to walk toward the three surfers. Amiable: “I just want to explain the concept to this dickhead.”
Jack turns his back, on Tory and the ocean. Picks up his towel and begins to dry off. He feels a chill, but not the kind you get from cold air. He knows what’s coming. He tries not to think about what his options are.
Tory intercepts the three surfers down the beach as they come out of the water. They’ve seen him coming. The smallest kid puts a hand up, a gesture of genuine apology. Without any warning, Tory attacks him. Every punch connects, vicious.
Jack rubs the towel in his thick hair. The roar of the surf overpowers the sound of feet splashing in shallow tidal water, fists slapping skin, the kid’s screams for help. Dropping his towel, Jack wraps his clothes together and puts them on his board to keep them clear of the sand. He doesn’t want to look. If he can’t hear it, and he doesn’t see it, does it exist? A smoldering sun flares hot behind Jack’s head for an instant, lending him a sudden, dim halo. He feels its heat. He cannot stop himself. He looks.
What he sees down-beach, in the water, of course, requires him to run.
He reaches Tory and pulls him away from the gasping teenager whose eyes are already swollen red, shut, a pink slick of blood from split lips draining down his chin and neck and hairless, baby-fat chest.
Tory’s fury turns. He lashes out blindly, screaming incoherently, the gist of which suggests Jack mind his own fucking business, which—in an instant—Jack knows is good advice because Tory’s wildly thrown, bone-hard fist connects with the side of Jack’s head and a pain of molten shrieking sharpness splits through Jack’s eye and buries itself deep inside his skull. His body twists, dissolves, nausea washing over him, and he vomits into the water.
Now the Valley dudes are hauling their bloody companion away, and Jack is stumbling backward, and Tory, defused, is looking on in surprise, as