Crazy for the Storm (21 page)

I
WAS LYING ON
my back looking into a lamp. The faces of a nurse and doctor stared down at me while they stitched up my chin. The doctor sutured it from the inside, going through my mouth, then from the outside. He then worked on the punctures in my cheeks.

You’re doin’ great, said the doctor. When I’m done, is there anything you want to eat or drink?

I hadn’t eaten in more than twelve hours. My stomach grumbled.

Yeah. A chocolate milkshake, I said.

I sort of held my breath after I said it, half expecting my dad’s voice to boom out, No way, Ollestad. How about a turkey sandwich on wheat?

No one objected. And the doctor called out to someone to fix up a chocolate milkshake right away.

When he was finished stitching my face I sat up and the nurse
handed me the milkshake. I slurped it right down. I couldn’t understand why there was a sheriff standing at the door the whole time. I wasn’t a criminal. Then they put ointment on my raw knuckles and wrapped gauze around them.

The doctor took me to another room and the sheriff followed us. On the way I saw all the news people with cameras and microphones jostling at the end of the corridor. What’s the big deal? I told myself. I just couldn’t admit what had really happened. It would crush me and I could never let anything ever crush me. Those news people were forcing me to acknowledge the whole ordeal, so I turned away.

The doctor X-rayed my right hand and the nurse stayed with me when he left to check the results.

You have a broken hand, he said when he got back.

I looked at my hand. The top bulged into a red mound. Trying to flex it was impossible and the pain immobilized my whole arm. I heard the sheriff’s radio chirp—something about the rescue team needing ropes to get up the mountain. I thought of the chute—so steep it nearly pitched me backward as I hugged the ice. It seemed impossible to make it down that mountain with my hand like this. The doctor bent his ear toward the sheriff’s radio while stealing a glance at my broken hand. Ever so slightly he recoiled and he looked spooked for a second. Then he smiled.

Time to put a cast on that hand, Norman, he said.

After the cast was on the nurse re-dressed my seared fingers with ointment and gauze, then wrapped an Ace bandage around the cast—it looked like a fatheaded club.

I was lost in thought—Sandra’s wide-open eyes staring up at me, tiny chunks of sapphire, not brown like they were supposed to be. No matter how hard I pressed the blue out and pushed the brown
in, the iris remained sapphire. A voice was directing somebody into my room. I slid off the bed. The door opened and my mom rushed up to me and her purse banged the linoleum floor as she kneeled and hugged me, her tears dripping onto my cheek. Her voice sputtered. They told me the search had been called off, she said.

My mom raked her fingers through my hair. Her eyes searched as if to make sure I was really there.

Then an hour later they called again and said,
A boy alleging to be from a plane crash showed up in Baldy Village
.

My mom clenched me tighter.

Nick came forward. He patted my back and told me he thanked God I was alive. I remembered the deal I had made—that if I made it down I’d believe in God—but it didn’t seem like God had anything to do with my making it down. Instead I thanked my dad.

Did they get Dad yet? I said.

Nick glanced at my mom.

No, honey, she said. They found Sandra though.

Is she dead?

Yes.

I thought so, I said.

They said you covered her with twigs, said Nick.

Yeah. To keep her warm.

If you thought she was dead why did you cover her up? said Nick.

I furrowed my brow. Does he think I’m lying again?

What if she wasn’t dead, I said.

Nick blinked as if having been slapped across the cheek. Uh-huh, he said.

There was a window in the room and I noticed it was dark. That was the last time I asked about my dad. No tears. I felt buffered, having replaced my eleven-year-old-boy skin with something thicker.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Nick’s face was swollen and his eyes were bloodshot, the way he looked after a big night of drinking. I was wheeled into a large room filled with reporters and cameras. My mom and I answered their questions. I told them that my dad taught me
never give up
. It was something Nick had said the night before and it sounded right so I said it.

After the interview we drove back to the Palisades, to the house my dad had bought on the edge of a canyon above the ocean. My hands were useless with the gauze and cast and my feet were still numb on the tips so I didn’t get to go outside and play.

Eleanor came over that night. She rested in bed with me. My mom and Nick were very quiet upstairs. My legs were cramping and the pain made me squirm around. I couldn’t sleep. I turned on the radio, which was tuned to a news channel. They were talking about the airplane crash. Two people were speculating about whether or not the plane could have been sabotaged by
an incensed element within the FBI. They talked about J. Edgar Hoover’s vindictiveness and how he had a lot of loyal lieutenants still high up in the FBI.

Hogwash, said Eleanor, turning the dial to a different station. They’re always looking for conspiracies. People love bad pretends.

My legs were knotting up, so she rubbed them out for me. She had to massage my legs the entire night, talking me through the pain, reading to me, making me feel safe. I knew my mom was busy with Nick, discussing things, important things, I guessed. As long as I had Eleanor, my other mother, I had what I needed.

I slept most of the following day. My mom made me whatever kind of food I wanted and right after wolfing it down I’d fall back to sleep.

On my second night home I woke up around 9:00 p.m. I lay in bed for a while before I smelled the scent of weed coming from upstairs. I heard my mom and Nick laughing. It was loud. I called Eleanor from the phone beside my bed.

Please come over, I said.

When she showed up at the door my mom asked her what she was doing. Eleanor told her that I had called.

Eleanor. I can handle it, said my mom.

I came upstairs and insisted that Eleanor stay. Nick and my mom appeared paralyzed by my demand. I’m sure my bruised sutured face, broken hand and gauze-covered fingers had disarmed them.

A few days later Grandma and Grandpa Ollestad arrived from Puerto Vallarta. Grandma talked continually, as if deafening her
self against something wailing inside her. Grandpa was stoic as usual and his eyes were soft and stirring. They shone with tears that never dripped down his cheeks.

Aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered at my dad’s cabin-house in Topanga Canyon. We all sat in the living room and they told stories about Dad. I went to my room and cried without all those sympathetic faces watching me.

Alone in my old room, I felt my chest begin to burn. The armor around me, the animal skin, was melting from the heat in my body. My tears seemed to come out of the hot space in my chest. The faster they spilled, the more out of control I felt.

You could easily turn into a weirdo. Watch out, I told myself. Don’t fall apart.

Allowing my body to unclamp was too dangerous. The skin knitted me together. Kept me whole.

One more bad thing happens and you might lose it, I thought.

Timothy, the kid on my block who always stared at his feet, haunted me. I thought about him dragging around like a beaten dog, hiding behind his comic books, tripping over his feet as he scuttled away from the neighborhood boys throwing balls at him.

I stood up from my old bed and sucked up my pain. I wiped my cheeks and walked back into the living room with a smile, just like my dad would have.

Hundreds of people showed up to my dad’s funeral at the Little Church of the Flowers. Many stood in the aisles and the crowd seeped out the doorways because the church only accommodated 250 people and there were no seats left. I cried every time somebody went to the podium and when Eleanor spoke she seemed far off in the distance. I kept blinking and the people around me
appeared very close, then far away. I mentally shucked off these splintered images, reeling myself back to the steady world that I knew was right there.

They had to stop letting people talk because two hours had gone by and the church officials wanted to wind it down.

Uncle Joe, my dad’s half brother, whose hotel we stayed at in Lake Tahoe, threw a party after the funeral. All my relatives danced to a live Dixieland band and they all said they thought it was what my dad would have wanted. He always hooted in powder—good or bad—and fought through storms and riptides, I thought, and played guitar even when the
vaqueros
despised him, transforming that hostile night into something beautiful.

I danced at the party too and it seemed like I was on an escalator moving on a different plane at a different pace, like there was no gravity holding me. Cousins, aunts and uncles moved with their feet on the ground—they had gravity. I seemed separated from everyone by thick glass and it made all sounds a din of noise and I told myself not to get creepy like that Timothy kid.

I stopped playing hockey, stopped surfing, and mostly just hung out with the neighborhood kids and hoped I wouldn’t turn sullen and awkward. Instead I came down with a lot of sore throats and had to stay inside and alone several days a week. My body was not used to all that
hanging around
and my grief stayed crammed up inside me, with no outlet—except the sore throats.

That spring I got strep throat and a high fever, and it was Nick who nursed me back to health. He put his lips to my forehead to measure my temperature, and tenderly administered his Irish remedies, coming to my bed with a spoonful of warm
water, plopping an aspirin in the water, and telling me how to drink it down while we watched it dissolve. As Nick prescribed, I let the aspirin bits catch in my throat. Amazingly it took most of the pain away. That evening he made a hot toddy—hot tea with shots of brandy, some lemon and honey. My mom saw him concocting the hot toddy in the kitchen and she deemed him Nurse Nick. When it was ready he brought a mug of it to my bedside. Then he rolled me up inside two comforters with only my head poking free like a sausage rolled up in a pancake. He carefully poured the hot toddy into my mouth and it burned my throat and stomach.

Nick told me that his mom used to nurse him and his brother and sisters back to health with hot toddies. She hated having to take care of us when we were sick, said Nick.

You mean she didn’t want to? I strained to say.

God no, he said. She’d scowl at us if we seemed like we were coming down with something.

The hot toddy made me sweat before I even finished it. Nick tucked me in, making a big show of it—tucking the comforter under my ribs and thighs and feet. I fell right to sleep. When I woke up the next morning the comforters were soaked, my temperature was gone and my throat was just a little scratchy.

Thanks Nurse Nick, I said to him.

It was a relief to feel closer to him, but it seemed dangerous too.

At the end of June, I graduated from grammar school and Grandma Ollestad had pneumonia so I couldn’t go to Mexico until later that summer. Nick said I had to get a job. Grandpa was in L.A., perhaps picking up special medicine for Grandma, and he informed me of a new diner across from Topanga Beach
that he had stopped at while taking a cruise down the Coast Highway. So he drove me down there and I got a job as a food prepper, server and busboy. Grandpa left a few days later.

On a whim one day after work I crossed the Pacific Coast Highway and stood on the bluff above the converted lifeguard station. All the surf legends were hanging out on the sand in front of the station, and different-colored surfboards leaned against the bottom half of it, which was open on all four sides. The waves were small and I recognized Chris Rolloff, my old buddy who had surprised me in Mexico last summer. He was riding a sparkling green peeler, his front arm cocked at the elbow like a scarecrow. He was goofy-footed like me and I found myself going through the motions, pumping up and down to make the section. He rode the wave to the inside. In one motion he hopped off his board, snatched it up under his arm and danced from one slippery rock to the next all the way to the beach. Man he’s gotten good, I thought.

I skidded down the dirt path winding around the succulents where I used to play hide-and-seek and onto the access road. I crossed a slab of concrete where the lifeguards parked their trucks and I realized it was our old garage, roofless and adrift in the sand.

I stepped off this relic and approached the lifeguard station. To the south the beach curved toward Santa Monica, where tall buildings stood behind the salty haze. My eyes lowered, settling on Bob Barrow’s brick stairs climbing off the beach, the porch gone but the porch footings stabbing out of the sand, and up the dirt embankment to the access road. The stairs looked like a spine without a body. All along the beach columns of stairways lay like skeletons from another era against the ripped-apart embankment.
I thought of the ghost towns my dad and I had passed through and it hurt to imagine what this one used to be like.

I came to a standstill. The old days long gone percolated in dew across my eyes and it all dappled together like a pond reflection until Rolloff called my name.

Norm, he said.

I turned and blinked and the mist congealed into a clear picture.

Hey man. Where’ve you been? he said.

The bodies in the sand twisted around and a chorus greeted me. The ghost town came alive.

I don’t know. Working, I said.

I stepped forward and slapped fives and brandished a hang-loose sign to each legend while the various girls and guys augmenting the scene looked on.

Shane told me I looked like I healed up pretty good, and I touched the indented scar on my chin. Trafton asked me if I was ready to surf again. I wondered how he knew I hadn’t surfed in months. I nodded yes out of reflex. When Rolloff offered his board for a
go out
I used the excuse of not having trunks.

It seemed strange that I would come to the beach without trunks or a surfboard, so I explained that I worked across the street at the diner. Rolloff said it was good for lunch but everybody else said they liked George’s Market better.

I took off my shoes, plopped on the sand and dug my toes in, listening to everybody talk surf. A swell was due in a couple days from south of Tahiti. Shane thought Catalina Island might block the waves, and I glanced southward as if assessing how the swells would hit Catalina, a smudge on the horizon. Within five minutes I was on the inside of the circle, chiming in at will, and I took off my shirt and felt the sting of the sun on my skin. An hour later I was running up the access road past Barrow’s
dilapidated landing and I was excited about tomorrow for the first time in months.

Our garage was at street level. I ran right up to the door, unlocked it and searched for my yellow-railed seven-foot-two surfboard that Dad had given me on my tenth birthday. I couldn’t find it. So I walked down the stairs toward the house, which rested on the hillside below the garage. I looked in the storage space under the garage. It wasn’t there. Sunny followed me around and whimpered and I knew she wanted to play so I took her into the canyon and threw the stick until she was panting hard.

I was consumed by the notion of surfing again. I worried about whether I would still be able to hop right up and make the drop and generate speed down the line.

When my mom returned from teaching summer school I skipped the hellos and asked where my board was.

Gosh I think it’s in the garage somewhere, she said.

I looked in there, I said.

What about above. In the rafters?

Oh yeah.

I used the hood of my mom’s VW to ladder myself to a rafter beam. I pulled myself up and crawled around in the dust and heat that had accumulated in the attic. In the back on top of boxes I found my board.

I hosed it off on the grass outside the front door and my mom asked me how it felt to see Topanga again.

Weird, I said.

She waited for me to say more and followed me to the kitchen. I grabbed a spatula to clean off the dirt-encrusted wax.

She followed me back outside.

Were all the guys there? she said.

Yeah.

Was it good to see them?

Yeah, I said.

I looked at her and her entire face opened up like she was feeling something pleasant touching her skin.

I hope I can still surf, I said.

It’s like riding a bike, she said.

You used to surf, right?

Oh yeah, she said. Your dad got me out there almost every day one summer.

What happened? I said.

She stuttered.

Oh. You know. Winter came. It got cold. And the next summer you were born.

But didn’t you want to keep surfing?

To tell you the truth, not really. I did it for your dad. Once we divorced I lost interest. She flipped her hair back and looked out at the ocean. He gave me lots of attention when we were surfing, she said.

Her longing for other forms of attention from my dad did not register. Instead the notion that Nick didn’t surf either and that my mom had abandoned surfing, maybe even because Nick didn’t do it, suddenly made surfing my one and only desire. It took me by the throat. Surfing would cut me free.

After work I walked out along the dirt knoll and came around the top of the point. I crossed the mouth of the creek, shored up now for lack of rain, and it was spawning green moss. Then the crew saw me and somebody whistled. It made me smile and my cheeks crinkled, sensitive from yesterday’s sunburn.

I asked for a bar of wax and Shane himself rose and climbed
under the station and reached into the crossbeams under the top story and handed me a bar.

My secret stash, he said.

I waxed up my board and Shane said he remembered when my old man had bought the board for me.