A Thousand Steps

34

Matt leaves for Huntington Beach at midnight.

The traffic is light this late, Coast Highway an asphalt ribbon leading north through Laguna to Corona del Mar and Newport. Just a few stoplights, at which Matt listens to the rough idle of the Westfalia engine and wonders where he’s going to go after Sunday, the last day of paid rent and utilities at Third Street. He refuses to live with his mother in Dodge City. He will not crash with Ernie or ask Tommy to put him up. He’s got other friends but they’re not close enough that he could just move in with them. Some are away on summer vacations, and he thinks about using their empty houses, but it seems uncool. He needs his own space, like when he moved out of his and Kyle’s room and into the garage. He could sleep in the van and use the public restrooms, but the cops write tickets for that.

Then a long stretch into Huntington Beach, dubbed Surf City for great waves, surfers, and surf shops. He drives past the Golden Bear nightclub, where Dylan and Jefferson Airplane and the Dead have played. Sees Austin Overton on the marquee with Richie Havens.

Huntington Beach is not as fancy as Laguna. It’s a sprawling, flat town that reaches inland for miles. Oil pumps and look-alike subdivisions. Matt finds the pickup house on a residential street off Brookhurst. The garage door is up and there’s a light on.

The young man’s name is Troy, a surfer for sure, dressed in canvas board trunks, flip-flops, and a muscle shirt. He has the knee knobs that surfers get from hours on their boards, and red-blond dreadlocks.

One of the fish surfboards lies belly up on a dirty carpet remnant on the floor. In the garage light, Matt studies its graceful design and quirky swallowtail and the twin fins. He’s surfed just enough to know how hard surfing is. Kyle is pretty good. The cream-white fish has a stunning orange wave airbrushed and the “Stoke Sixty-Six” logo under the wave in red, yellow, and purple psychedelic letters. The board’s logo alone is enough to make him want one.

Troy helps him load the fishes, carrying on a monologue about tomorrow’s surf conditions. When they’re done, he invites Matt in for some herb but Matt declines.

“One trip half done,” he says. “I’ll be back in an hour and a half.”

Matt puts in Jazz’s Aretha for the ride back to Laguna. Hopes the music can take him out of his funk over his sister, and the often inescapable thoughts of what she might be going through. He and Laurel might have knocked on sixty-one doors tonight, but Matt had never felt further from his goal. Aretha cuts through those ugly feelings with pipes and soul.

He loads the fishes into Canyon Store-It, a poorly lit commercial storage space not far from Dodge. The lock is a new Schlage but stubborn.

By two he’s back in Huntington Beach, picking up the last of the twelve boards, and by two forty-five he’s at Canyon Store-It again, fighting the lock once more. He opens it to the flatulent sounds of Harley-Davidson motorcycles, and sees the beams hitting the sectioned metal door as it rolls up before him. He turns to face four bright headlights. Dust rising. Behind the bikers a large white panel van lumbers to a stop.

He raises his hands.

Behind the bright lights, the bikers exchange gruff words and laughs. Two of them shut off their engines and tip their hogs onto kickstands.

One huge man and one skinny one are backlit by the brights and difficult to really see. Vests and jeans and harness boots. The big one is a tangle of dark hair and beard; the skinny man has a beanie pulled down tight.

“You guys don’t look like surfers,” Matt says.

The skinny guy’s harness boot drives into his balls so fast that Matt is down and gasping before he knows what’s happened. He makes a drastic, sucking sound. He needs air but the pain extrudes through him with a weight that won’t let his lungs draw. He looks up at a human shape within a dizzying constellation of stars.

“I’m Staich. Tell Johnny Grail to leave the money at the Main Beach lifeguard stand tomorrow night at one. Not one second before or after. No money, we will burn his store down with him in it.”

Matt’s voice is a high-pitched whisper.

“Okay.”

“What did I just say?”

“Money. Main Beach lifeguard stand. Tomorrow night at one.”

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“You’re a waste of skin. Okay, surf Nazis. Get the boards in the van.”

Staich slaps Matt’s face, grabs his hair and shirt and rolls him over. Empties his wallet and tosses it.

Matt stares up at the foggy night. The men are gone and the surfboards are gone but the pain remains, pulsing heavily. It feels like something that will never go away.

The pain is tactical, he realizes: because of it, he can barely remember their faces, or anything they said, except for Staich’s orders for Johnny Grail. And he remembers that their patches said HESSIANS and their logo was a skull with a sword run between the eyes, same as the bikers at Mystic Arts.

When he looks up at the fog he’s still seeing stars.

How will he explain this to Sungaard?

He’s penniless again.

He staggers bent over to the van and climbs in.