The Surf Guru (2 page)

The red-haired boy, frustrated by the calm surf, slaps the water with an open palm, demanding one good set before he calls it a day. Moments later, as the sun nicks the horizon, a head-high wave rises from nowhere. He positions himself expertly, catches it. He drives down the line into a heavy roundhouse cutback, then glides through a string of graceful turns in the pocket.

The Surf Guru applauds, quietly, with his fingertips.

Sharks rarely venture into the bay. They prefer the darker, bruise-blue waters off the coast, where fear is easier to come by.

Three years ago:
It is a cold, rainy morning, just past dawn, and Bobby Cordero, a regular, has Padre Point to himself. Even the Surf Guru is gone, convinced by Chad to make a rare promotional appearance at the GOO-ROO Aloha Cup at Waimea.

The wind is up and the waves are big. Bobby needs to clear his head, and this is the way to do it. He rides double overheads for an hour and feels his spirit rise up and dance a rumba with the sea. He is oblivious to his hangover, to the rent he can't pay, to all those accusations of squandered potential, to the green-eyed girl who won't return his calls. He is also oblivious to the fin rising and falling in the surf behind him.

Bobby catches a set wave, but drops into it too late. He manages to carve off the bottom into a floater, then elevator-drops and loses his balance; he pitches into the water and is driven face-first into the sand. There is a slash of pain in his ankle, then a wrenching tug. Then fire in his legs and side, a glimpse of thrashing gray and a flat black eye, a strange warmth bathing his body. A crushing blow to his chest that squeezes the air out of him, and with that a mysterious clarity: he remembers that he should yank on the shark's gill slits, a trick he learned from the
GOO-ROO Surfer's Survival Guide
. He grabs and yanks, loses hold, grabs and yanks again.

Then he finds himself on the beach inside a ring of wide-eyed, shrieking people, and he calmly, sleepily stares at the cuff still fastened around his ankle, at the rubber cord that trails from it, at the clean slice where the leash was bitten through.

In the hospital, they have to cut open his GOO-ROO wetsuit. They try to sew him up, but Bobby has lost too much blood, and he dies on the table amid rags of black neoprene. One doctor tells the local news it looked as if poor Bobby was molting.

The Surf Guru returns to Padre Point immediately and arranges a ceremony for Sunday afternoon. He spends thousands of dollars on flowers—hyacinths, lilacs, and mums. With a single phone call to the city council, he has the road that runs along the cliff closed for the day. Everyone comes. Some weep. Some vow revenge against all things selachian. Some throw flowers off the cliff. Some of the flowers fall into the water; some come to rest on the cliff side.

The Surf Guru watches the ceremony from his deck. He wears the Greek fisherman's cap, the hat of sorrow and solitude.

The
GOO-ROO Surfer's Survival Guide
, priced at $16.95, is also available with the Surf Guru's autograph on the inside front cover for $19.95. Even though the autographed version has sold 750,000 units, only three purchasers have complained in writing that the autograph looks suspiciously like a dog's paw print.

The red-haired boy does not own the
Survival Guide
, but he knows that if a shark ever attacks him, he should yank on its gill slits. “It's intuitive,” he says.

Surfers fill the bay. A hundred GOO-ROO boards twinkling. A hundred black wetsuits with
GOO-ROO
stamped in screaming green across the chest. It is an ordinary sight, but today he is taken aback. So many pieces of himself, spread across the water, carried by the waves like so much flotsam.

He eats a big breakfast. He worries that he has been losing weight.

 

(For a poodle, maybe)

The Surf Guru's wife once bought a cable-knit doggie sweater at a church craft fair, but the dog bit her when she tried to force its legs into the sleeves.

Later, he and the dog played fetch with the sweater until it fell apart. From inside the house, she watched them with mercury eyes.

—We shouldn't do this.

—That is an excellent point. Still, it doesn't feel right; he trusts me.

—I don't understand.

—Now that you mention it, I would like to play the saxophone professionally. I'd like to be the man who resuscitates bebop.

—I'll need money.

—I love you.

The red-haired boy picks off a nice right and executes a quick barrel and a vertical snap. He swoops long, smooth lines across the wall of water.

The Surf Guru pours another glass of Chianti. Even though his back is knotted up and burning with pain, he puts on a beret, the hat of restrained contentment.

The trophy case in the dull-green house is empty. In an effort to raise capital, all 473 of the Surf Guru's trophies were sold to a surf-themed pizza chain owned by an aging former star of Hollywood beach movies. They are now mounted on the walls of Shred-Boy Pizza franchises in twenty-six cities worldwide, including brand-new airport locations in Athens, Saskatoon, and Las Vegas.

Olivia calls Chad in a panic. Next year's line of GOO-ROO boards, the Poseidon Series, must be renamed. LoweRider, it seems, has just filed on all commercial uses of “Poseidon.”

“They found out,” she says. “We must have a leak.”

“Don't be silly,” Chad says.

“I'm not being silly. I'm talking about
corporate espionage
.”

“Sometimes coincidences are just coincidences,” Chad informs her. “You can't just go around believing everything that appears to be true.”

Olivia's heart pounds as she tries to think of a suitable alternative. Neptune? Triton? Apollo? Vishnu? Tangaroa? Quetzalcoatl? Ra? It's no use. All the gods have been trademarked.

GOO-ROO dog food is a bomb. A white elephant. An albatross. A millstone around the corporate neck. No matter how bright the colors on the bag are, no matter how scrupulously the ads are targeted, it's a money loser year in and year out. Finally, Olivia confronts the Surf Guru, suggests cutting production costs by using cereal fillers and fewer organic ingredients. The Surf Guru shakes his head—the dog enjoys GOO-ROO dog food, will eat nothing but. Olivia is instructed to change nothing.

The dog also likes Chianti. Even after a brimming bowlful, he still fetches with aplomb.

The Surf Guru notices a girl in her early twenties walking along the beach. He can tell even from this distance and in the failing light that she is beautiful. He decides that she has the features of a Byzantine Madonna. He does not care if he is imagining this.

She is returning from work. She wears a business suit and walks barefoot, carrying smart shoes in one hand. She needs the beach, he thinks, maybe more than she knows. He wonders about her name. It is certainly not Polly or Molly or Jill or Francine; it is exotic, like Nadia, or simple in its elegance, like Catherine. He quickly reminds himself that she, too, would ultimately find him turgid.

She stops and sits on the sand. She watches the red-haired boy surf. The boy launches into a snap-air floater, then drives off the bottom and carves improbable arcs all over the bowl.

The Surf Guru applauds, quietly, with his fingertips. As he watches the boy paddle back out to deep water, he tries to call up images of a long-ago self. He fails; his memory feels diffused, diffracted, dishonest.

He leans forward in his chair and pets the dog, asleep at his feet.

If the Surf Guru felt like expressing himself verbally on the subject of feelings, he would say, “What I am currently feeling is a peculiar mix of longing and fear, of nostalgia and hope, of power and restraint, of shining and fading.” His voice would tremble for an instant, but he would smooth it out, so as not to let you notice.

The red-haired boy undoes his leash, tucks his board under one arm, and walks through shallow water toward the girl. He shows her his LoweRider board.

The Surf Guru imagines the boy telling her that the LoweRider HyTyde fins shred, that they give him more control than he ever dreamed possible. With the boy's voice—an easy tenor, unroughened by time—echoing through his head, he closes his eyes and conjures up a design for a New & Improved GOO-ROO HydroRip Mark II fin.

The numbers do not work out.

Olivia scans the reports one more time. The numbers still do not work out.

She pounds the desk. She looks up at Chad with wet, puffy eyes. “I don't understand,” she says. “It's as if the money is disappearing.”

“Yes,” Chad says. “It's as if.” He sips his martini, then traces his finger around the rim of the glass, coaxing forth a high, quavering tone. With much satisfaction, he recognizes the note as an F-sharp. He has been working on his ear.

The girl takes pen and paper from her blazer pocket and writes down her phone number. She presses the scrap of paper into the red-haired boy's hand, and they hold the contact an instant longer than they need to.

The boy glances up at the dull-green house and notices the older man sitting high up on his deck, hands tented in front of his face. “See that guy?” he says, pointing. “Dude controls the tides.”

She proposes that they head back into town together, maybe grab a margarita at Imelda's on the way. This boy, after all, has stories worth hearing.

The Surf Guru closes the sketchbook in which he has calculated the specs of the new fins. He takes a swig of Chianti from the bottle.

As the sky darkens, he thinks about those kids—that Madonna in a blazer, that boy who surfs LoweRider—and he thanks them. He cannot describe what they have given him, but he knows he could never have received it from the GOO-ROO faithful, with their cash-register receipts and ninety-day warranties and worshipful online reviews.

Gulls squawk. Wind blows. Waves break. On a boardwalk in the distance, a glowing Ferris wheel spins.

He stands up and stretches his back. He walks stiffly into the house and looks through his collection of hats for something appropriate. He looks and looks.

Chad and Olivia arrive at the dull-green house to give him the bad news but find the deck chair empty. Olivia fears the worst; she knows his mind has been darkening. She searches the house, terrified of what she might find. Meanwhile, Chad fixes himself a martini, humming the lead line from Charlie Parker's “Now's the Time.”

“
He's gone
,” Olivia shouts from downstairs.

Also gone: the dog and the wide-brimmed petasos, the hat of nascent defiance.

Underlined in blue in his wine-stained paperback copy of
The Compleat Yeats
, left on the dinette:

 

Three weeks later, Olivia receives an envelope in her mailbox at home. It contains the designs for the new fins and a short note, hastily scrawled:
It's all yours now. Just don't change the dog food.
The postmark is smudged, unreadable.

The girl waits as the boy gets his things together.

T
he man at Kacy's door was smaller than she'd expected. His voice on the phone had been deep and rich and confident, full of the urgency of business. Now here he was, slightly built and barely up to her nose. Patches of sweat darkened his pink polo shirt under his arms and in a diamond shape over his chest. He thrust out his hand. “Joel Dinaburg,” he said. “That's Dinaburg, as in
dynamo
. Father of the bride.”