In the Break (7 page)

Now we were golden tired after surfing the good waves at Swami’s, and it was a warm afternoon with the low sun glinting off
buildings and tin roofs. Traffic sounds — horns honking, buses chugging forward emitting dark trumpets of smoke, ranchera
music from passing cars — and food smells, along with bright objects for sale right on the sidewalk, assailed my senses. Street
vendors and pharmacies and all sorts of specialty shops dotted the streets. The odd thing was how you’d be walking on a sidewalk
next to a paved street and then, bam! no sidewalk, just dirt, and the street was suddenly rutted and dusty. Then there’d be
a really nice store, along with food carts, and the street and sidewalk would reappear.
And there were strip joints, which Jamie seemed very interested in and which I masked my interest in for Amber’s sake.

“I want to go to a bar,” Jamie said.

“What for?” I said. “Let’s get out of town.” Even though I was now almost relaxed about having taken my mother’s car since
there were no American police here, I was excited and scared because I
had
taken my mother’s car! We
were
in Tijuana! We had surfed the front edge of the approaching swell. And Jamie was okay, not arrested or anything. “We need
to get to my aunt’s.” I wanted to say, Let’s get some waves.

“I want to see if I can buy.”

“Anybody can buy here, dunce.” Amber was ahead of us, pigeon-toeing her way over the sudden dirt.

I looked at Amber and Jamie and couldn’t control my excitement, doing a little shuffle with my feet.

Looking back at us, she shrugged her shoulders and made a face at Jamie.

I didn’t resist, though I should have, and we now had a reason to wander the crowded streets in the time before dark but when
it is no longer day. The strange thing was — what
hadn’t
been strange in the last twenty-four hours? — a man on a skateboard followed us, it seemed. A man on a skateboard is somewhat
unique in general, but this man was particularly striking since he rode his out of necessity. He had no legs. Cut off right
where the legs meet the hips. He had a powerful upper body, and wore fraying gloves, which slightly protected his hands as
he literally paddled over Tijuana’s streets the way we paddled our boards over the ocean’s water.

I’d first noticed him after we’d crossed a street on the light and he’d followed after it had changed, right through traffic,
with cars honking and drivers yelling. It didn’t seem to faze him. I don’t know why he followed us, but he did, persistent
as hell, always there. We’d go in a shop — Amber was looking for some long pants and maybe a light jacket, since she’d only
brought her cut-off Levi’s and my sweatshirt — and Half-man on Skateboard would be a few doors away, tailing us like a bad
detective. He started to bother me, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything else after a while. I didn’t tell Jamie or Amber,
figuring I’d wait and see what the guy wanted. Probably a handout, and I didn’t blame him, and I would give him money, should
he ask.

As we entered an alleylike outdoor shopping plaza, Amber said, “I like that skirt.” She looked around at clothes while I looked
at the statuary that was all over the floors. Carved frogs and busts of Indian-looking guys, and yard ornaments. Jamie gravitated
to a big display case that had a bunch of switchblade knives.

“Here’s a nice one for F.” He pointed with his index finger toward a huge bowie knife. The edges were serrated and I could
feel at that moment the hatred Jamie had toward F. It showed on his split and raw knuckles.

“I don’t think so, Rambo.”

“Hey, guys, what do you think of these?” Amber held some tapestry pants with a drawstring next to her Levi’s cutoffs. She
also held up a jacket — a tightly woven cotton Indian one that’s warm when it’s cold but cool when it’s hot — a great jacket,
a Baja jacket, blue and white and green with a hood on it.

I watched her pay the full price for the clothes; she hadn’t even tried to bargain with the guy. “Amber, next time let me
do the talking.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause I’ll get you a better price. You don’t pay the asking price. Everybody knows that.”

“I don’t want a bargain. If that’s the price, then that’s the price. These guys aren’t rolling in dough, you know.”

“Hey, Juan, get me a deal on that bowie knife. It’s got F’s name on it.”

“You’re not funny,” Amber said, pulling on her jacket.

Most of the barkers outside strip joints left us alone as we passed, because we were with Amber, and there seemed to be a
very strong sense of propriety toward an American girl. Yet there was also a strong sense of machismo too because the men
couldn’t help but stare at her. I, of course, was always aware of her sexuality because she was constantly in my life and
I’d always had a crush on her, I think. But she was Jamie’s sister, older than both of us, and that was that. I’d never seen
the effect she had on men, however. Granted, the guys on the TJ streets were not pillars-of-the-community types, but they
were men who could see the beauty of a woman, of that I was sure. And Amber was striking in that dusk as we made our way in
the time when the streetlights haven’t taken over. She wore her new clothes and she looked happy, for the moment at least,
and we had forgotten, however temporarily, why we were there in the first place.

When finally we stood outside a bar that we all agreed seemed okay — American rock music blasted from Club City Light, and
laughter and shouting emanated from within — I’d lost sight of Half-man on Skateboard, which was just as well, for I might
have been unable to enjoy myself once inside.

Club City Light had a long polished bar in a large rectangular room. The cement floor was covered with sawdust and beyond
was a raised dance floor toward the back. It was crowded, almost exclusively with Americans, many who’d been drinking all
day judging by the loud whoops and frantic energy that hit you like a wet towel once inside. There were periodic rumbles of
laughter and sound, vibrating the large mirror behind the bar. Three bartenders hustled behind that bar, spilling liquid,
bumping into each other, and generally jamming to keep up with the consumption of the drunks.

Buying beer was not a problem. First Jamie bought a round, looking particularly tough with his battered face and aviator sunglasses
on, even inside. Then I got one, and Amber did too as we stood in various places around the bar. I didn’t much care for beer,
but after three of them, I was feeling it. One summer when Jamie and Amber and Claire had gone to Oklahoma to visit their
relatives and I was in Ensenada on a surfing trip with some older guys, I’d had gin and tonics at Hussong’s Cantina. They
had made me sick, but I figured I could stomach these beers. Yet Jamie showed no sign of slowing down. In fact, he began flirting
with an older woman, someone who was at least twenty-five. Probably because she sat at a table. Her hair was up in a bun and
she wore makeup and tight pants and a slingshot T-shirt that showed her chest.

All of a sudden I saw a guy who looked like Greg J. heading for the door. He was with some older guys. “Is that Greg J.?”
I shouted.

“Where?” Jamie yelled back, taking his gaze off the woman.

Amber, while turning to look, bumped into my shoulder. By the time she was all the way around, the guy was gone.

Jamie said so the woman couldn’t hear, “His dad’s cool, but not that cool.” He refocused his gaze on the woman.

“Ha!” I half-shouted. Jamie was right, Greg J.’s dad wasn’t going to bring him to a bar in TJ, surf trip or no surf trip.

“It’s packed,” Jamie said.

“You can sit here,” the woman said.

Jamie grinned huge, dwarfing that damn Cheshire cat. “Cool,” he said, moving toward her

Jamie was changing fast. In two days he’d fought F and won, run away, and now was with a
woman
! When he was young he had been shy on land, but aggressive in the water. Always he would stand up for himself in the water,
but not necessarily so on land. On land it had been a different deal. I guess things were changing for him pretty fast. Jamie
was with a woman in a bar!

“Moo!” I bellowed as he sat on her lap. Moo was Jamie’s name for old women, because of a sixth-grade science film that called
cow teats “mammary glands.”

“How old are you?” the woman said.

“Nineteen,” Jamie said.

Amber almost spat out her drink of beer.

“Easy,” I said.

She cracked up.

Maybe Jamie looked dangerous with his battered face, and maybe the people with whom the woman sat were so drunk they couldn’t
tell our ages. Who knew? Something happens to people when they cross
the border; something exits the consciousness of otherwise reasonable people when they enter Mexico. Under normal circumstances
the twenty-something-year-old woman probably won’t ask the fifteen-year-old boy to sit on her lap — they quickly reversed
the scene, with the woman standing so that she could sit on Jamie’s lap — and have her friends make room for us at their table,
a small wet affair. The woman and her friends ordered round after round of beers.

“Where you guys from?” one of the old men asked Amber after staring at her for ten hours.

“Nowhere, everywhere,” I said, but he didn’t hear me because he wasn’t paying any attention to me.

They were from San Francisco and on vacation, I think they said through shouted snippets that I caught. Two couples and the
woman, newly divorced. That was why they were here. The older guys gawked at Amber, and when they did it for too long, I howled
the long coyote howl —
ahohh, ow, ow, ow
. Horn dogs all of them. Old guys, drunks in the bar, would come up and shout conversation to Amber.

Maybe that was why she began to cling to me, first holding my hand, and then draping her arm over my shoulder. Jamie, by then,
was all over that woman, even making out with her. I had never seen such a thing, such a public display by him.

The border, I supposed. And we were all sort of drunk, so much so that Amber and I even began kissing. I couldn’t believe
it! I was making out with Amber. In a bar. Our inhibitions had been sufficiently lowered by alcohol and geography and events,
I supposed, for the old social order was down. Gone. The very thing they
warned us about in those propaganda films about the evils of alcohol and drugs. I could make out in public with Amber, something
I’d always aspired to. Her lips were chapped but soft because of lip gloss, and her taste was sweet, somehow, in spite of
the beer we’d drunk, and her soft creamy hair fell over my shoulder as we kissed. Yeah! I’d known her my whole life it seemed,
and here we were drinking and making out in a bar in Mexico. Double yeah!

And time passed through a gauzy veil of shouted conversations coupled with the din of sluggish drunken movement. Jamie was
hooked up with the woman, and I mostly thought of Amber instead of talking even though she was right next to me, was leaning
on me, since it was too hard to talk, and, besides, Amber wasn’t a talker in the best of times. But she’d yelled at me before.
And had hit me, had hit me with one of her Hello Kitty backpacks. Right in the head.

I remembered when Jamie and I had been all over Red Vines for a time. We noticed that after eating some, when you spat, whatever
you hit would be red. We thought that detail was pretty cool. What do you expect from fourth graders?

So we’d order Red Vines from Claire Watkins or my mother, load up on them, and spit on anything that moved or didn’t move.

I don’t even remember how it happened, but I accidentally spat Red Vine juice on Amber’s white tennis shoes. Amber was in
sixth grade and quick. That Hello Kitty backpack must have had twenty pounds of gear in it, the Strawberry Shortcake bag chock-full
of makeup and lipstick and other girl paraphernalia, and she tagged me on the side of the head before my spit had even hit
her shoe. I was stunned but tried to get away. She ran me down like a cowboy bulldogging a steer, rubbing my face in the their
backyard grass.

As I now looked at her hair right in my eyes, I could smell it (ocean), and was almost mad thinking about how she had rubbed
my face in the grass. I leaned forward, licking her ear in between all the piercings dangling like tiny Christmas ornaments,
moving my way up to an ear cuff, where I chomped down. She
had
rubbed my face in the grass.

“Ow!” Amber shouted. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Sorry, sorry.”

She gave me a hard look and then went back to watching the woman with Jamie.

How could I get mad at her when I thought about how messed up the whole thing was after Mr. Watkins’s accident? She was always
strong, and willing to use her strength, as she’d done when she rubbed my face in the grass. I thought about how far she’d
come after Mr. Watkins’s death when she’d befriended the tough girls, girls who got in trouble at school smoking and drinking
and fighting even. She was kicked off the cheering squad, but hadn’t seemed to care.

But none of that shit was her true nature, and when the rowdy girls found out she was just posing, they turned on her, sort
of. They stopped hanging with her, they stopped including her in their shoplifting sprees, stopped coming to get her to sneak
out and drink on school nights.

Amber leaned forward, squinting at Jamie and the woman. I finished my beer, banishing Amber’s transgressions against me, and
looked at him too.

He frowned at Amber and me as he came toward us. Once close enough, he leaned down and said, “I’m outta here.”

“No, you don’t!” Amber said.

I was dumbfounded, but he was leaving, walking right out of the bar with that woman! What with all the drinking and with being
drunk on Amber, I was mostly unaware of the implications of Jamie’s departure, though I do remember the reflection off his
sunglasses as he looked back at us before he walked out the door.

“That’s just great!” Amber yelled through all the other shouts emanating from Club City Light.

“Moo!” I bellowed after Jamie. He flipped me the finger.

The two remaining couples simply stared at Amber and me. I stared back at the old men, howling a few times.