American Taliban (2 page)

Every great cause, she’d quoted, begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

I agree with you, John said, but that doesn’t mean that the original vision was false.

Reading, he’d noticed that the same ideas recur in all mystical systems, in all time, even Barbara’s. For example, the importance of love or aloha.

The Beatles, he’d told her, or maybe just Lennon, could maybe also make the list.

The Sufi master Halki called the variations and differences between mystics numberless waves, all from the same sea.

So waves. John watched them, surfed them, and knew each one as unique, but also the same: another wave. So he read more Halki. And Sufism. Muhammed understood his own prophecy as an evolved rather than new truth, he read. Which shows integrity, John thought.

On the radio, Dylan asked whether Judas Iscariot had God on his side.

Did he? John asked the girls.

Was he the one who betrayed Jesus? Sylvie asked.

Yeah, Katie said. With a killer kiss.

They laughed. Well, Jilly drawled. Seeing as the kiss helped him become God, he might feel some gratitude. Wouldn’t you agree to die if it meant you could live forever?

No, Katie said. Why should I care what I am after I’m dead, since I’m dead?

They continued toward Hatteras Point, a skinny bar of silence where sky and water meet, blue and blue with only a crayon line of sand between. In the slow sun the wide-angle windshield framed horizontal bands of water, sand, and sky.

This view, John announced, is as slung and slooping as __________, and initiated a road game of similes.

As my long board, Sylvie said.

As long and bleached as beach, Katie said.

As forever as this drive. Jilly sighed. I wish we would just stop. The surf here is looking really fine.

And suddenly, between breath and breath, they saw a perfect wave. John felt the communal gasp, pulled over, and stopped. They jumped out, shaded their eyes.

These were answers to prayers: lazy rolling things, heaving up and over in half time.

They looked at each other. Let’s go, John urged.

They unloaded boards, they checked leashes, they slipped out of T-shirts, slipped into rash guards, kissed the crosses at their necks, lifted the boards onto their heads, walked down to the water, and the girls flung themselves in, paddling hard and fast, to the third, then fourth breaker, though from where he stood, John could see that the best waves were farther outside. He remained on the sand watching and counting. These inside waves were rideable, yes, but it would be the outside ones that would offer the real thrills, though riding outside waves in waters you didn’t know took courage. Lines of prayer from Whitman came to his lips, his reward for reading:

The girls bobbed in the water, facing the waves, determined to ride. And then Jilly, whose strategy was to ride whatever came her way, popped up. And yes! The wave came, the wave carried her, she stood up to the sea, the tide, the forces of the universe.

She stayed on the lip of the wave, tictacing down the line, avoiding the drop until the end, when it turned over in lazy half time, and she stepped back in slow free fall. John applauded her performance.

She emerged two hundred yards down the beach and hiked back toward him. He was serving as her landmark, he knew, and stayed put. Katie and Sylvie, still afloat on their knees atop their boards, craning to see as much of Jilly’s ride as they could, raised their hands to show joy in Jilly’s joy. Then, determined to take what came, Sylvie popped up for the next wave. But it was choppy and closed out on her hard
and fast. She went under; John held his breath until she landed on the gritty, bruising sand. Katie popped up and quickly bailed out, stepping off just in time. After which they convened onshore for a quick discussion.

The best sets are out there, beyond the fourth breaker, John pointed out.

True, Katie said, but look at the way they’re breaking. There must be a reef or something.

Let’s not scare ourselves, Jilly said. Let’s just go.

This time John joined them, paddling hard, ducking under incoming swells. Katie and Sylvie stopped at the fourth breaker; Jilly, emboldened by her first success, kept going, and John went with her because someone had to. Katie and Sylvie watched, afraid for them. They were out here on their own, with no lifeguards, no help for miles, surfing in precisely the kind of conditions they’d promised their parents not to surf. But pushing beyond safe had always gotten them their best rides. When, minutes later, Jilly caught what looked like a double overheader and surfed for what felt like fifteen long minutes, Katie and Sylvie joined John at the fifth breaker. And each found bounty, brought to them by a confluence of winds and tides and ocean bottoms. The punishments, when they came, were also extreme. Each took a turn in raging water, thrashed against sand and rock. One minute John was Moses walking on water and showing off—Look, Ma, no hands—he performed a heelflip off the lip of the wave using the edge as if it were a concrete step, a maneuver he’d taken from skateboarding. But then the wave turned knifelike and closed out before he could land, and down he went, thrashing, and the force of the next wave came and held him down in the silent dark, the abyss of solitude, a place of no community. Underwater, he was free of communal life, free of Barbara and her social obligations. Here, in the dark, it was silent, and he was alone, with only himself, with only the deep and the dark and the infinite. Which invited his soul to stay and be. Alone.
Alone with the Alone
, one of the titles on his reading list. He should’ve read that book already. Note to self: Move the Corbin book to the top of the list. To do that, though, he needed air. He had to breathe.

He emerged with the skin on his shoulders raw. He emerged with a prayer on his lips, an invitation to his soul. He would become as he would become.

————

THEY STAYED
for three hours, until tide, when the waves broke into choppy chaos. Fatigued, arms and legs scraped and jellied, they were prepared to call it quits, but then Jilly caught a lefthander and they stopped to watch.

She’s scaring me today, Sylvie said.

It’s like she’s operating in another dimension, Katie said.

John agreed and wondered. What was it? Aloha, fortune, the gods?

They lost sight of her until she reemerged on the sand, a faraway exhausted speck.

Let’s drive down to get her, Katie suggested.

They loaded their boards and drove and met Jilly trudging on rubber legs. She flopped into the Saab gratefully.

If only we could have such swells at the ESA Competition, she murmured. And closed her eyes and slept.

BARBARA HAD RESERVED TWO ROOMS
at the Hatteras Motel: one for Sylvie and Jilly; another for Katie and John. They checked in and spent the afternoon taking showers and naps.

Early evening, hungry, anticipating the promised crab-bake dinner special, complete with buttered corn and margaritas, Katie nudged John awake with her sun-dried lips on his eyes and lips, with her long hair tickling his chest, with her untanned parts telling him what she wanted. So he awoke, and with long arms lifted and tucked her into his hips. Fully awake, he swung his leg over her and pinned her beneath him, the way she liked it, she said, and gave himself to her hard and fast, the way she liked it, after which he slowed down and slow and holding out and slower, until she could no longer stand to wait.

Katie dialed Jilly and Sylvie, to wake them. Meet us in the lobby in twenty.

In the lobby they compared burns and bruises. Sylvie, who bruised easily, had a huge black and blue on her thigh.

They drove to the nearby Harbor Resort, where Barbara and Bill were staying overnight and where they had reservations for dinner.

I could eat three crab-bake specials, Katie said.

Save room for the birthday cake, Barbara warned.

The girls reassured Barbara that they could eat all night and still have room for dessert.

So you think now, Barbara said, knowingly.

How was it? Bill asked.

John and the girls looked at one another. They hadn’t discussed it yet; they’d been too exhausted and too awed, even frightened.

John spoke first. It was awesome, Dad. Scary.

Bill looked at his son, then at each of the girls, who merely nodded. He noted their faraway focus, as if they weren’t quite here, at the table. Not a good sign, he thought, waiting to hear more.

There were some awesome double overheaders, John said. Jilly, especially, had the rides of her life. Probably her next life, too.

What do you mean, next life? doubting Barbara asked. And why was it only Jilly who experienced this?

Katie and Sylvie looked at each other, and at her. Because she went for it, Katie said.

But it was more than that, John thought. It was something else, he said, looking to Jilly for confirmation. I don’t know what it was, but she had some extrasensory thing going today.

Jilly agreed. I don’t know how it happened, she said. It was like I couldn’t make a wrong move. My body sort of knew what to do on its own. I felt the wave like it was a live thing, and somehow my body knew what to do. I just shifted my weight to accommodate it. She shrugged. It was sooo eerie and totally cool.

Heaping platters of crab and corn on the cob arrived, and they set to cracking, picking, dipping, eating, cracking, picking, dipping, eating, cracking, picking, and the talk ceased. And though John loved crab feasts as much as the next person, and picked and licked the salty Old Bay seasoning which he liked as much as or more than the crabmeat itself, Jilly’s words continued echoing in his head. I couldn’t make a wrong move, she said. My body knew what to do, she said. Was it instinct? Or something more extraordinary?

He wouldn’t ask her now, not in front of Barbara, who wouldn’t appreciate the word extraordinary. But surely humans were endowed with imagination as well as intellect for a purpose, surely they were meant to rely on both. If there was anything wrong with modern man and woman, it was this: that in their attempt to grow beyond superstition, in their enlightened embrace of the rational, they’d abandoned knowledge of the extraordinary, the hidden, the transcendent, the whatever—call it by any name.

The cake arrived, revealing that Barbara had outdone herself. Only as a last resort could the three-tiered concoction be called a chocolate cake, because it went beyond chocolate and transcended cake. It was an absurd extravagant chocolate park, featuring every kind of chocolate—including M&M’s, chocolate-covered graham crackers, Almond Joys, Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews, chocolate rolls, chocolate twists, dark chocolate truffles, chocolate-covered raisins, chocolate pops, Kellogg’s Cocoa Krispies, chocolate Ovaltine balls, chocolate-dipped strawberries, chocolate sprinkles, chocolate spread, Hershey’s chocolate, Mounds, chocolate mints, chocolate nougat, chocolate crisps, chocolate gum balls, chocolate licorice, scoops of Ben & Jerry’s chocolate brownie ice cream, and chocolate kisses—each one, Barbara explained, honors a phase in John’s eighteen years of life, when that particular form of chocolate was his favorite. Where the central birthday candle would normally stand was a tiny carton of Hershey’s chocolate milk, the one chocolate passion he’d never relinquished.

How’d you get it down here in one piece? Katie asked.

I packed the parts and put them together here, in the kitchen, Barbara said. I called in advance, and the staff agreed to give me a clean surface to work on.

The girls applied themselves to tasting each form, holding it up first for cataloging. Barbara remembered aloud the year or years in which each particular chocolate treat was
it
. Which made the girls laugh.

Wouldn’t you say, Sylvie said, between giggles and tastings, that your son qualifies as a dangerously overcaffeinated chocoholic.

No wonder he’s so skinny, Katie said. All that caffeine must keep his metabolism churning.

Bill agreed that John was surely a chocoholic and that Barbara was guilty of nurturing his chocoholism, but he corrected Katie on the source of John’s metabolism. That, he said, is genetic, since I’ve always been thin and I don’t favor chocolate. So don’t get any ideas. Anyone else eating that much chocolate would gain weight.

Yes, Barbara confirmed. Chocolate hasn’t worked for me. Clearly.

John, who was preoccupied with his gifts—a
Lawrence of Arabia
DVD from Sylvie and Jilly, a biography of Richard Burton from Katie, and, from Barbara and Bill, David Carson’s
Trek
, an expensive design book filled with surfing references—looked up.

One small detail about my so-called chocoholism that hasn’t been credited is how much of it, or, I should say, how little of it, I eat in any one sitting. I taste rather than eat chocolate, though I do taste frequently.

That’s true, Barbara agreed. He has some God-given self-discipline.

Mom, John reminded, you don’t believe in God. But I think I didn’t develop neurotic tendencies because Barbara always let me have as much as I wanted. Most kids act as if they’ll never see another chocolate bar.

Meaning, Katie said, turning toward Barbara, you’ve done something right.

THE EVENING’S ENTERTAINMENT
, the girls announced, was a choreographed skateboard show, to take place on the area’s best stretch of concrete, their own motel parking lot. Barbara and Bill followed the Saab back to the motel and settled on a stoop. John sprawled beside them, prepared to be entertained. In June, when he’d moved down to OBX, he’d taught first Katie, then Sylvie and Jilly, but he’d had to talk Katie into trying it, and now she was giving back, acknowledging the significance of his sport.