Kook by Peter Heller

Author:Peter Heller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2010-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Dawn. I stood on the top of the cliff with my instant coffee in the half-light and I believed. In the perfect wave. Dave and Leesa were already out, the only ones. The waves arrived in that flawless long rip. I watched Dave’s shadow rock back on his funboard, spin, nose in the grainy air, lunge forward, and hook onto a wall of water that stretched across the cove and looked like it was smoothed with a mason’s trowel. A bat flitted over me. His leathery wings made the softest flutter on the sharpest cutbacks. He was surfing, too. Then Leesa took off. I timed her. For half a minute husband and wife, shadows only, sledded in tandem down the two waves. Sliding across to my left, about thirty yards apart. She made graceful swooping arcs to the lip and back down to the bottom. Ahead of her, he made sharper, almost slashing cutbacks. Like the bat. They moved, one behind the other, like the elaborations of a single thought. Maybe that’s how they knew what the other was about to say about my camper. Forty seconds. That’s how long her ride was. Forty seconds. Count it, with the full Mississippis between, it’s a hellacious long time to be at peak ecstasy. My longest ride so far had probably been about ten.

At the end, way down to my left, almost to the beach, the wave subsided until it was swishing against her knees. In the wrung-out shoulder wash, she just sat down on her board. Like stepping off a magic carpet. Meanwhile, the ocean was in a quiet labor. Her voice was in the gulls who whimpered and cried. The bloody sun crowded and breached the surface of the sea like a birth. Hit me full in the face with a wail of light.

Time, time to go. Before the crowd. Three more surfers were already paddling out.

This is where Kim drives me crazy. If I was going to have a religious experience today I had to beat all the others to it.

I trotted across the packed dust to the van. Her bare feet hung down from the top, rubbed against each other. I could tell by the rhythm she was putting in her contacts. She was humming. She still had to braid her hair. Cover every inch of exposed skin with sunscreen. Stretch on her rash guard. Meanwhile, every minute she dallied, another surfer launched from the beach. I could feel them behind me. A steady trickle of barefoot surfers walking up the bluff, boards in hand, hopping over the edge onto the slippery-smooth ladder of broken rock. I could feel the knot of surfers at the takeoff zone growing into a flock, then a crowd.

“Ting.”

Break in hum. “Hi, Ting!”

“Ting, we gotta get moving. It’s already getting crowded. The wave—the wave is like incredible.”

Taut silence. No hum, no foot movement, not even a twitching toe. The sense that my very survival was at stake. I mean that if I didn’t get down that cliff and out into the water right now I may miss my salvation.

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