In the Break (15 page)

That’s what I think happened. He fell forward. He ate it in small surf in very shallow water and broke his neck. A beginner
long-boarding at Playa Chica and he broke his neck!

The first week after the accident John held his own. Except he was paralyzed from the neck down. Still, there was hope on
everyone’s part. Jamie and Amber and Mrs. Watkins had all visited him (F might have gone too, because he was in the picture
then, acting human), and they said his spirits were good. Even if John Needles tormented animals, you didn’t want him to be
a quadriplegic.

Yet that’s the very thing the doctors told him the beginning of the second week, after they had done a bunch of tests. His
spine was messed up, and he wouldn’t ever be able to use his arms and legs again. With intensive therapy they might get him
to where he could brush his own teeth. Whoopee! It was pretty pathetic, poor John.

He went downhill fast. By the end of the second week after his surfing accident he was gone. Checked out. I only knew about
it peripherally, since only his family could visit him at the end. Jamie had gone that one time right after it happened, and
then like that it was over.

It was pretty depressing shit, and if John didn’t want to hang around as a vegetable, then he was right to check out, if you
ask me. But, still, his mother and everyone was torn up. Jamie too. Too close to his father, I guessed. But it passed, though
every time I surfed at Playa Chica at low tide I thought of John Needles. I didn’t want to think of him.

“You awake?” Amber whispered, bringing me out of my morbid thoughts.

“Yeah.”

She snuggled up to my neck, kissing my face. Then she pushed herself away. “You know the thing with Robert? That he was with
someone else?”

“Uh huh.” I wondered why she wanted to talk about Robert Bonham at this time.

“Well, he wasn’t. Not with someone else, I mean. I was.”

I lay there looking at the stars, smelling the dew-covered chaparral, thinking, Fuck.

“Don’t you want to say anything? Do you want to know about it? Do you want to talk? I think I was trying to drive him away.
Maybe I was testing him, I don’t know. He’s so good.”

“Does that mean I’m no good?”

“I don’t know anything, Juan.”

As I lay there not knowing what to say, I thought I heard the drone of an outboard motor. Distant, far, far away. Tiny and
resonant. What do we do? I thought.

“Jesus?” she said.

“I hope so.” I pulled her to me, feeling her soft warm curves melt over my chest and knee, and didn’t want this moment to
end, as Jésus and his boat approached the island.

We were dressed and in the cove by the time it was light enough for the dory to land. Jésus wore a big, I’ve-saved-you-smile,
exuding the optimism of Santiago when he first catches the great fish. He
jumped into the shallow water and began pulling his dory onto the sand. I helped him.

“It is so good to see you,” I said.

“The swell was so strong I was pushed far south. And then the fog …”

“My friend is missing.”

“Missing?”

“He was lost in the big waves. Can we search for him in your boat?”

“Of course. Let us go.”

First we walked the now familiar route back to the bay. As the sun rose, heat began to infiltrate the island. Amber led, I
followed, Jésus bringing up the rear. I watched her walk, pigeon-toed, each foot crossing in front of the other, wearing her
cutoff Levi’s. I watched her, feeling excitement and emptiness at the same time.

With great anticipation we made our way toward the bay of the dolphins. Once again color permeated everything, and I could
see the succulents’ fecund drippings and smell the earth and the sea all around us. As we stood above the bay, I was again
overwhelmed by its simple beauty. Hundreds of dolphins swam below our perch up on the dunes. The shape of the waves was still
good, and they were substantial, though only breaking on the inside reef, I knew. From up here, we could see that nobody,
no human was in the water; our boards were still on the sand were we’d left them.

We dropped down to the beach, walking to the far point. I climbed the mound so that I could see into the next cove — nothing.
No board, no footprints, no waves, even. The bottom wasn’t right, I supposed. “Nothing here!” I shouted to them.

When I got back on the beach I could see Amber’s eyes were red-rimmed. “It’s possible he’s in another cove. He paddled out
of the bay, and then the current swept him farther away.”

I said this to Jésus as well. He agreed and said he knew the direction the current would take somebody.

So we made our way back to the landing cove, where we’d camped. Once back in the dory after loading our stuff, we began a
long, fruitless search for Jamie. We motored to various coves, Jésus speculating on wind and tide currents, guessing where
a surfer on his board in outrageous swells and shrouded in fog might end up. We drifted off the island; we landed in coves
that faced different directions from the bay of the dolphins, combing the beaches for any sign of Jamie. In the early afternoon,
exhausted and listless, we motored into the dreamlike bay of the dolphins. Ocean mammals surrounded our boat, chattering and
flopping and jumping into the air.

I dove in the water, and swam down, down, down, until I could touch the flat reef rocks. It was hard to see, but I swam around,
hoping to catch a glimpse of something. Two dolphins swam with me, watching every move I made, their muzzles close. Suddenly
the dolphins skittered away, and then Amber was beside me, our eyes open underwater, and in the gathering dark we were surrounded
by more and more returning dolphins. Then we had to surface.

We searched and searched for Jamie around the island; we landed in strange coves, walked on beaches that probably had never
had another human on them. We dove in bays that had sandy bottoms, we dove in bays that had jagged rock bottoms, we dove in
one bay that had a bunch of sharks in it, but we didn’t know until
we were in the water. Jésus showed me how to track the ocean current that led away from the island, and we followed it some
distance off its shore. Jamie was nowhere. Disappeared off the planet.

Jésus said he was running low on fuel and that we would have to get back to the mainland. Amber and I didn’t feel like staying
on the island either, so we motored back to Ensenada Harbor, arriving in the early morning hours, before light, amidst the
bustle of the fishermen unloading their catches and swampers hosing out stalls in the fish market.

We were dazed, in a surreal dream in which things just wouldn’t go back to “right.” But, still, we had to go through the motions.
And we did. We would head back home, and tell our parents. They would help us find Jamie because he was still there, of that
I was positive.

I was arrested at the border. After an hour in the chaotic traffic line of time-stop darting cars moving from one nonexistent
lane to another. Past times I’d joked with the souvenir sellers, even once bought a velvet Jesus dripping velvet blood at
velvet Golgotha. This time, Amber and I just suffered in silence the boredom of moving forward inch by inch, thinking about
the unknown fate that awaited our return. What would we say to our parents? To friends? Jamie was missing.

I’d assumed that we’d return without him — that was the original plan; he’d be settled at my aunt’s trailer, or in a motel
at the least, safe. Amber and I would return. Jamie would come back when things blew over at home.

We couldn’t even find his board. Any time I closed my eyes I saw that mammoth wave, saw Jamie take the drop, saw him airborne,
saw his rooster tail after he disappeared in that barrel, and then no longer saw his path on the wave any longer. After that
everything becomes hazy. Mostly re-creations not necessarily based upon fact.
I don’t remember Amber getting me out of the water. Don’t remember the savior dolphin. Don’t really remember riding the entire
night in Jésus’s dinghy out beyond the bay, searching, yelling, shining flashlights onto black fast-moving water.

Hindus say that this life is but a dream. Maybe everything that happened was a dream. Maybe Amber and I had run off to celebrate
our new relationship. Maybe Jamie would be home, worried about Amber and me, the same as everyone else.

Silent the whole way, Amber refused to drive no matter how much I asked, and I didn’t have good feeling because of it. I wouldn’t
beg, though. It was as if Tijuana reminded her of our carefree actions, and now we had to pay the consequences for them. “Beware
your friend,” Half-man on Skateboard had warned me. At the time I thought he was referring to Amber.

When it was our turn to be interrogated by the Border Patrol agent, I stopped my mother’s 4Runner next to the little booth,
with a bad feeling in my gut and a sinking heart. It had been hot and dry while waiting in the endless lines to reach this
point, but now, under the postmodern arch that sheltered all the re-entry bays, it was shady and breezy, almost cool. I wished
we had just walked across, but that wasn’t happening. Besides, the car …

“Citizenship?” the border cop asked.

“U.S.”

“Citizenship, miss?” he asked when Amber didn’t respond.

She still didn’t answer, only twirled Jamie’s sunglasses. She put them on. I could see tears on her cheek.

“Do you have a problem? Can you not speak?” the agent said.

“She’s U.S., sir,” I said.

“I asked her.”

“She’s upset.”

“I can see that. What are you bringing with you from Mexico that you wish to declare?”

“Nothing.”

“Will you please both step out of the car?”

I exited the car on the driver’s side. Amber remained seated. Leaning into the window, I said, “You’re blowing it, Amber.”

She said nothing. She looked straight ahead, Jamie’s aviator sunglasses obscuring her face.

The cop walked around the car, looking in all the windows, looking at our boards and clothes, at the general disarray of our
things.

Amber took off the sunglasses and began fidgeting with them, finally setting them on the driver’s seat.

When the agent stood in front of me, he poked me hard in the waist with his flashlight. He wore black leather gloves, and
they gripped his steel flashlight with authority.

“Hey!” I said, recoiling.

He paid me no mind, opening the car door, reaching under the seats, poking around. He stood up, outside the car, and seemed
to notice for the first time Jamie’s glasses on the seat. He leaned forward, putting his hand right on the glasses, breaking
them while he looked under the front seat another time. He gave Amber a hard look and then one to me. I gazed in the asshole’s
eyes, not blinking.

He walked around to Amber’s side of the car and told her to get out. She just sat there, looking at the glasses. He went back
to his little booth and made a phone call. When he came back he went straight for Amber, opening the door and pulling her
out. Amber
resisted, becoming dead weight. Once he had her out, he searched under the seats for whatever it was he looked for. While
he was bent over, Amber kicked him in the ass.

He was a big man with a crew cut, and I didn’t think he could move quickly, or with such agile grace, but he did. He was on
Amber in a heartbeat, pinning both her arms behind her back, pushing her toward the office on the right side of the bays.

“Wait!” I yelled, taking off after them. Before I’d taken two steps I found myself on the ground with a knee in my back and
my hands pinned behind, cuffed.

“Tell me your story again,” the man said. He was some sort of detective for the DEA, and he thought that Amber and I were
smuggling drugs. I’d told him the truth, the whole story, but he believed that Jamie was following us, with the drugs. He
stuck to his scenario, and nothing I said could disabuse him from that notion. Because of his belief, my mother’s car was
entirely torn apart: side door panels off and on the ground next to it; headliner shredded and the pieces lying on the ground
as if a windstorm had blasted through the car’s interior; air filter and other engine bolt-ons spread out over the ground;
Greg Scott’s sleeping bags ripped apart, flung on the cement with the other objects. I could see all this through the interrogation
room window. They’d wanted me to watch them destroy my mother’s car, probably hoping I’d come clean rather than have the car
damaged, but I had nothing to offer other than the truth, which was something this man had no use for.