In the Break (8 page)

I didn’t like the fact that we were separating. But I was glad for Jamie — that woman was good-looking. She oozed sexuality
while prancing out of the bar with him.

With nothing to say to the people from San Francisco, and my periodic howling, Amber pulled me out of Club City Light.

Hand in hand and somewhat drunk, we began walking for the car. The streets were far less crowded, and it must have been after
midnight, and Half-man on Skateboard was there, behind us, the wheels making a tiny echo in the damp street.

“That guy’s creepy,” Amber said, becoming aware of his presence.

I said nothing.

I’m not sure how we found the car, or how long it took us, but it must have been pretty late by then. I quickly opened the
passenger-side door, letting Amber in. I then stood in the dirt street, just off the broken curb, waiting for Half-man on
Skateboard. His passage was slowed, though not by much, over the hard-packed dirt. A thin
beach overcast now dusted all the cars and every object around, giving the world a dull sheen. The man rolled up to Amber’s
window and stopped. This seemed to amuse her on some level, for she began laughing.

I wasn’t amused; I was outside with the guy. His upper body was like the lower body of a regular person. His arms were like
short legs, like Shetland pony legs, and his chest was made of iron. His face glistened with sweat. But he was oddly clean
and well-groomed, as far as I could tell. Sort of like a minotaur, though without the bull’s body.

He looked through the window at Amber for a time, and then turned his gaze upon me. His eyes were dark and piercing and his
whole body seemed to vibrate with an otherworldliness. He said: “Beware your friend.”

And then skated off into the night, swallowed up by the overcast like a heavenly apparition.

“What did he say?” Amber asked when I got in the car.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“I don’t want to stay here,” she said. She leaned against me.

We looked into each other’s eyes and began kissing. When we came up for air I said, “What about Jamie?”

“Those people are staying at the El Conquistador. Can you find it?”

“You bet.” The town wasn’t that big. We could always get a tourist map, should it come to that.

“He can just wait there. We can get him in the morning.” She leaned against my shoulder and promptly fell asleep.

I sat there thinking what an odd night. I’d wanted to be with
Amber forever, and here she was actually with me, and, still, everything was so strange, and the front of my face felt as
if it weren’t even there. I remembered looking at ancient Aztecan art and thinking, How could they create that stuff? It was
so otherworldly, their art. That was what I felt sitting in my mother’s car in the early hours of the misty Tijuana morning,
water droplets on the windshield, obscuring my vision. It was as if we’d been transported to some other planet, an alternative
world in which we still inhabited our earthly bodies, but those were the only remnants of the world we’d come from. Amber
was with me. We were free of all previous social constraints for the moment, which made me excited until I thought of my parents,
and then the excitement was replaced by dread. But I could feel Amber nestled into me, could feel her soft curves and her
breath hot on my neck, and I was prepared to suffer the consequences for this moment.

Starting the car and slowly pulling forward, I drove to a beach south of town with Amber cooing in her drunken state, and
we slept together in the back of the SUV, holding each other, and I think that she too had always desired me. She must have.

Just below San Rafael, where the trailer park and houses were, below where my aunt had a trailer, was the surf spot called
Puntas. The mesa simply stopped, and the cliff gave way to a miniature bay. Round rocks covered the beach, and they also formed
a reef outside, the waves lining up in near-perfect peaks, both a right- and a left-breaking wave. Puntas was best with a
healthy swell and a receding tide.

You can’t see the waves breaking from the highway, but you can see the effects of the swell. Relentless lines moving toward
the coast. Marching in a cosmic rhythm that God only knows, and that we were trying to tap into. Since there was a swell on
this day, and it wasn’t too late, we made for more surfing. Why not? We could go to my aunt’s trailer after. I could drop
off Jamie there, and if Amber and I drove fast, we could be back home before it was too late.

Driving off the paved highway and onto the dirt road that wound its way over the small mesa, a dust cloud followed our car
as we made our way to the surf spot. There was a flat area to park and
camp, and then a gully, and then a path down the cliff’s face. We parked, stretched, and made our way to the mesa’s edge.
Except for the light wind that blew, Puntas was seemingly perfect. Tide dropping. Shoulder-to-head-high waves. Greg J. wasn’t
down here; we were getting the good waves, the hurricane swells!

“Yeah!” Jamie said. “Oh, my head.”

“Moo,” I whispered. My head hurt too. When we’d picked him up at El Conquistador, he looked sort of young and forlorn, waiting
right at the entrance. Looking nothing like the player of the night before, he still wore his sunglasses, and he looked a
little tough, but he also looked fifteen standing there on the Tijuana street in the early morning light. When he got in the
car he smelled like vomit; it was kind of pathetic. Amber had said nothing. I too gave him some time before I tried to tease
him about that woman. To his credit he wouldn’t respond, wouldn’t take the bait, had said nothing about his night. Probably
because she had chosen him, not the other way around. Or she was an old lady or something. Who knew?

Amber hadn’t mentioned last night either, but we were all dry-mouthed and grungy and weren’t talking that much. Maybe she
was embarrassed in front of Jamie, I don’t know. Maybe she was apprehensive about surfing unknown waters. I know I was scared
shitless the first time I’d surfed here.

“The rocks are rounded, and there’s a channel to paddle out in. I’ve never seen a shark here.” Last summer I surfed here every
day for a week while my family stayed at my aunt’s trailer. Jamie was with me, and the waves had been small but fun. Another
time, I’d camped down here with some older guys. Actually at San Rafael,
but we’d ended up surfing here because San Rafael was a one-man wave, and it easily became too crowded. I knew this place,
knew it better than Jamie.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said, already changing right in front of us, using a towel.

“Moo,” I said.

“Fuck off, Juan.”

The Pacific Ocean in Mexico is the same one you encounter in California. But it
feels
differently because it’s in another country. Maybe that was why Amber was hesitant, I don’t know. But she was suddenly modest,
an irony, because we’d held each other, and I hadn’t slept for her closeness and my desire that had raged all night. Still,
we’d not done it, though we’d explored each other’s bodies with a luxurious sense of time, relishing the new sensations as
if they’d last forever, as I knew they would.

I came out of my reverie, walked to the opposite side of the car from where Amber was, and began changing out of my pants.
The waves were calling, there wasn’t another soul at this very good surf spot, and it appeared that Amber now wanted some
privacy.

“It’s an easy paddle out, there’s a channel,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, suddenly unapproachable. I tried to watch her change but she gave me the knife-stare, so I took off down
the path to the water.

Getting out into the lineup was slow going. The tide was out and the stones covering the inside were round and slick with
a green moss. When it became deep enough to float my board I began paddling. You couldn’t paddle very fast because you’d hit
rocks and slip off your board in the light tidal surge inside. Even after it became
deeper, every so often you could push off rocks with your hands, but nothing mattered — the sun was hot, and I was in Mexico
with Jamie and Amber!

When it was deep enough I dunked myself in the cool refreshing ocean, drenching my aching head. I looked back and saw Amber
maneuvering the cliffside. Once in the water she paddled too fast and hit a rock, slithering off her board. Not hurt or anything,
she scrambled back on with a new awareness.

Out in the break we huddled together. From the mesa the waves had looked shoulder-high. Yet out here in the lineup, they were
overhead. Puntas is so much fun because you can take the drop fading left, hit the bottom and crank a huge turn, and then
climb up the face of the wave just ahead of the whitewater, and then bank off the lip with a snapback, and take the drop again.
At low tide, as it was now, the lip of the wave throws out just a bit, just enough to make it fun, and with the added size,
there was a little something at stake, though the waves were surprisingly gentle for how big they were getting. A perfect
wave for Amber to ride. And the reason I loved it so much: its forgiving nature.

“This wave’s cool, Amber,” I said. “It’s easy to make and the water’s not that shallow.”

“You can go either way,” Jamie said.

“I’m fine, you guys,” she said.

“I know,” I said, taking off on the first set wave, bottom turning so that my right hand dragged in the water, and then was
covered by the wave — tubed! sort of—without getting in the whitewater. The wave was well overhead, and I could hear both
Jamie and Amber yelling encouragement as I nailed a huge cutback once outside
the hollow part. With a peak wave the process of getting covered lasts for a very short time. That first wave was probably
the best wave I’d ever ridden in my life — an omen, I just knew.

I watched Jamie and Amber take off on the same wave as I paddled back out. Jamie cranked an outrageous bottom turn and then
flew up to the lip, where he snapped back and took the drop again. Amber just sort of angled her board right, made it past
the first breaking whitewater of the peak, and then did a nice cutback followed by a smooth bottom turn, heading into the
lineup in shallower water. She kicked out close to where I paddled and kept gliding on her board toward me. Then she dove
forward, her body crossing right in front of me, first her head and then her rear and then her calves right before my eyes
as she passed over and into the water. I dove forward, catching her from behind, and when we surfaced, we embraced, wetsuit
to wetsuit in the warm sunny waves. Jamie yelled something, but he was too far away to hear, though I had an idea.

“Is Jamie going to get all weird on us?” I said.

“What’s to get weird about?” Amber said. “We’re not doing anything wrong.” She kissed me, untangled our leashes, and got on
her board and paddled back out into the lineup.

I followed her, thinking no, I hadn’t done anything wrong. I wasn’t supposed to be in school right now or anything, and Nestor
was probably going to give me a reward or something when we got back. Ah, give it up, I thought, as the excitement of Amber
and the energy of the waves took over my consciousness.

On another ride I was tubed in the walled-up shorebreak. I raised my arms in triumph, but neither Amber or Jamie had seen
the wave — Jamie was paddling far beyond what had been the
takeoff point for a particularly large set that was approaching, and Amber was getting back on her board in the trough between
the breaking waves and where the shorebreak formed.

I’d never seen Puntas close out — get so big that the wave loses its shape — but the wave Jamie caught was as near to closing
out without doing so as it could be. He took the huge drop, the face of the wave almost twice as tall as he was, and carved
a fluid bottom turn heading left, his only mistake. It appeared that the water was deeper in the south end of the bay, the
wave’s lip holding up much longer for a rider who would have gone right. Once Jamie trimmed his board on the wave of the day,
you could see that it really was no longer a peak. The left, the way Jamie rode, was a huge uneven wall of water with no way
for him to make the wave. It engulfed him with no mercy, spitting his board in the air. Jamie surfaced, hollered, and got
back on his board

“I’m going in,” I yelled to Amber.

She agreed, and caught a shorebreak wave in. I caught a wave in too. Soon we were both back in shallow water, doing the careful
dance through the mossy rocks to get in without breaking an ankle.

It had been afternoon by the time we’d arrived, and the wind had picked up into a steady breeze, which made the relatively
unprotected waves bumpy. This fact, along with a rising tide, made for mushy waves, ones that were no longer fun. We dried
off in the sun, and for the first time I thought about our next move.

“All right,” I said.

Jamie looked at me.

“Where to now?” Amber said.

“My aunt’s trailer.”

“Do you have a key?” she said, pulling on her new pants.

“It’s not hard to get in.” Once when my father forgot our key, he’d jimmied a window and I had crawled in, then opened the
door. I could do it again, though it might be dicey if the owners of the trailer park were around. As we loaded our things
for the short ride back up the coast, I said, “It’ll work out.”

Of course it didn’t. The guard gate where you check in was unoccupied, which I’d planned on, but I hadn’t figured that someone
would be
in
my aunt’s trailer. Someone else staying there.

We idled by, dumbstruck that a car was in front, music playing, people walking around inside. Not my aunt and uncle.

“What the?” I said.

“The best laid plans … ,” Amber said.

Jamie just laughed. “No problem.”

I parked the car, and we sat there maybe fifteen minutes, flummoxed and tired, not knowing what the next move should be.

Amber solved the problem by saying, “I need some things from a store.”

The road to Ensenada curves back into a valley and then heads toward the coast once again, opening on a broad horizon that
shows all of Bahia de Todos Santos. You get a similar vista when you come upon San Rafael, though that view gives you the
entire picture, while the view right before the city of Ensenada shows you a microcosm of the same bay. Ensenada is a fishing
town, formerly a village. I like to think of it as a century behind Los Angeles in terms of population, and geographically
it’s a mirror image of Los Angeles, though much smaller. On land it’s surrounded by mountains, and one of its borders is the
sea, as in Los Angeles.