The Gentlemen's Hour

27

Boone spreads some old newspaper out on the deck and lays the tuna down on it. Taking his fillet knife, kept honed to a fine edge, he slices down the underbelly. He pulls out the guts and throws them over the railing into the ocean. Then he slices up behind the gills on both sides, cuts off the head, and likewise gives it to the sea.

Then he takes the first two fillets he sliced and cuts them into thick steaks and washes them under a spigot. He goes into the kitchen, puts two of the steaks into a Ziploc plastic bag, and puts them in the freezer.

He takes the other two, sprinkles them with a little salt and pepper, rubs some olive oil on, and carries them outside to the little propane grill that is set beside the cottage. He turns the heat up high to get the fish a little crisp, then turns it down to low, goes back inside, and slices up some red onion and a lime, then comes back outside, squeezes some lime juice on the fish, turns it, cooks it for just another minute, then takes it off the grill and goes back inside. He slides each piece of the fish into a flour tortilla, adds a thick slice of red onion on the fish, goes back outside, and sits down in a deck chair beside Dave, handing him one of the tacos.

If, as Dave believes, free food tastes better; and if, as is Boone’s motto, “everything tastes better on a tortilla,” then free fish on a tortilla is out of this world. The truth is that if you’ve never eaten fish that has just been taken out of the ocean, you’ve never eaten.

Add a couple of ice-cold Dos Equis and two ravenous appetites to the mix and life doesn’t get any better. Throw in a soft summer night with a yellow moon and the stars so close you could hit them with a slingshot, and you might be in paradise. Toss a lifelong friendship into that mix, and take the “might” right out of it.

They both know it.

Sit silently and savor it.

When they finish eating Dave asks, “So how’s it with Pete?”

“Yeah, good.”

“You close the deal yet?”

Boone doesn’t answer and they both laugh. It’s an old joke between them. For all the lineup talk about sex, when it comes down to individual women, no one talks. It’s just something you don’t do.

“When and if you do close the deal,” Dave says, “it’s over anyway.”

“Thanks for the good wishes.”

“No,” Dave says, “I mean, right now you have that whole opposites-attract,

Moonlighting

sexual tension thing going for you. Once that’s released . . . adiós, my friend.”

“I don’t know,” Boone says.

“Get real,” Dave says. “You and the Brit are totally SEI.”

“SEI?”

“Socio-Economically Incompatible,” Dave explains. “She’s downtown, you’re Pacific Beach. She likes to dine out in great restaurants, you hit Jeff’s Burger or Wahoo’s. She’s all foodie, the next great chef, tasting menu, fusion; you’re fish tacos, grilled yellowtail, and peanut butter and jelly on a tortilla. She likes getting dressed up and going out, you like dressing down and staying in.”

“I get it.”

“That’s just the Socio, I haven’t even hit the Economic,” Dave says. “She makes more a day than you do a month.”

“There are months when I make zero.”

“There aren’t months when

she

makes zero,” Dave says. “You don’t have the jack to take her to the places she likes to go, and you’re not going to accept her picking up the check time after time, gender-enlightened as you like to think you are. Right now she thinks it’s all liberated and postfem, but shortly after the first time your board and her wave slap together she’s going to start wondering—and all her professional friends are going to tell her to wonder—if you’re SEI.”

Boone pops open two more beers and hands one to Dave.

“Mahalo,” Dave says. Then, “And I guarantee you that one night you’re going to be lying there postcoit, she’s going to gently bring up the possibility . . . No, I can’t.”

“Jump.”

“She’s going to ask if you wouldn’t really be happier going to law school.”

“Jesus, Dave.”

“On that day, my friend,” Dave says, “you bail. You don’t even stop to get dressed or pick up your clothes—you can always get a new T-shirt. You backpaddle, flailing your arms like a drowning barney. We will all come racing to your rescue.”

“Can’t happen,” Boone says.

“Uh-huh.”

Law school?

Law school?

Boone thinks. The first step to becoming a

lawyer

? Show up at an office every day at nine in a suit and tie? Spend your time shuffling documents and arguing with people. People who

like

to argue?

Hideous.

They sit quietly for a few minutes, drinking in the night and the warm salt air.

Summer was slowly coming to an end, and with it the torpid sea and the days of lassitude. The Santa Ana winds would be blowing in, with bigger surf-and-fire danger, and then the swells of autumn and the colder weather, and the air would be cool and clear again.

Still, there’s a certain sadness to the coming end of summer.

The two friends sit and talk bullshit.

Boone doesn’t tell Dave that he’s working on the Corey Blasingame case.