A Thousand Steps

48

He parks the Westfalia well away from Moss Point, where Furlong might not look, squeezing into a shady spot between a dusty Fairlane and a pickup truck.

KFWB news says suspected narcotics kingpin Luke Lucas was one of several “high-level drug dealers” caught in a raid on a South Laguna home. Eighty pounds of marijuana confiscated. Five arrested.

Matt thinks of Luke at Mystic Arts telling Matt he looked like something that just evolved from the sea onto dry land.

Thinks of Luke telling him that the Hamsa tattooed across his knuckles protected him from the evil eye.

But it couldn’t protect you from bullets, Matt thinks. Drugs might be fun and profit for the Brotherhood but to the cops they were deadly business.

Hamsa Luke dead for a few bales of grass.

Matt wonders if they’d shoot him too, what with Furlong’s drug-riddled tomatoes and Tibetan books, French toffees, and acid-drenched Summer of Eternal Love invitations?

He turns off the news, sits for a moment looking out the window at the traffic on Coast Highway, down below. He knows that the key to dodging Furlong is to not be in one obvious place for long.

He secures his fishing rod, tackle box, sketchbook, and lunch to the Heavy-Duti. He’s facing a risky half mile of exposure, but all he can do is hope Furlong doesn’t guess he’ll use one of his secret fishing spots to hide out.

He launches for Moss Point, riding close to the curb, staying away from the open asphalt. At PCH he times the traffic and cuts right behind a speeding Mustang convertible blasting “Satisfaction.”

Pushing the bike through the sand at Moss Point, Matt sees that the swell is strong and from the south. He gets to his secret spot, a patch of beach safe from high tide, surrounded by big rocks and hard to get to — especially pushing a heavy bicycle.

He arrives with great relief. The sharp black boulders are the walls of a fortress. The sun is warm on his back. There’s an old fire pit outlined with rocks, with damp ashes and blackened bits of driftwood inside. He’d be folding his newspapers right now, if not for becoming a fugitive. He liked The Fugitive on TV more than he likes being one.

Matt kneels in the sand and bows his head and tries to clear his emotions and understand why he’s doing what he’s doing. He had no choice but to run away, right? They weren’t kidding about Youth Leadership Center. They weren’t kidding when they shot Luke.

It comes creeping up on him now that he was wrong to betray Johnny Grail and the rest of the BEL, even though they suckered him into a possible narcotics distribution and second-degree murder charges. But he’d been almost broke, which made him afraid enough not to take Furlong’s Judas money. He’d been hungry and weak, and his home was about to be rented out from under him. He had no idea there were drugs in his mom’s tomatoes, the French toffees, and the Tibetan Books of the Dead. He had asked God what to do and God had ignored him. Though he had asked God to let him escape Furlong and God had answered clearly.

But how do you make up for betrayal? He thinks. Well, you try to do what’s right.

He believes that he is right to free his sister from her tormentors. And right to help his mother recover. Right to help Kyle when he comes home; right to keep his Register paper route; right to fish, and to see Laurel and yes, Sara too. Maybe it’s right for him to help keep his father from doing something drastic in the name of Jazz, or in trying to clean up this “new Sodom.”

You do what’s right and the betrayal is made up for. It doesn’t go away, but it’s diluted.

He ties on a fresh Carolina rig — red plastic beads, egg sinker, swivel, leader, and hook — then walks the beach looking for sand crabs. They’re plentiful in summer and he catches a few left exposed by the receding foam. Puts them in the pocket of his fishing shorts, feels them trying to dig out.

Back on the boulders, Matt sizes up the conditions. Heavy swell, high waves, and the tide rising. Today’s Register told him the high tide would be at 2:55 P.M., still half an hour away. The last few minutes of an incoming tide is good, with hungry bass, perch, croaker, and halibut working the edges of the submerged rocks.

He’s after the bottom-feeders. The crucial thing is not to let his hook get caught. He’s lost more hooks than he can remember on Laguna’s hidden reefs, but he’s learned where the sandy slots between the rocks are, and to put the rig onto them. Learned to lift and mend as he feels the egg sinker dragging soggily over sand. When the line goes tight you’ve either got a fish or a rock.

He casts and lets the rig drift north. Picks his way upon the rocks, line tight, guiding the crab along with short turns of the reel, believing that a good fish will hit. The rocks are sharp and barnacle-encrusted and he trusts his Keds for grip. A sudden burst of spray hits his face. A pelican plummets into the water. Matt looks down at a jagged rock pool that is sometimes shallow enough to wade across, but sometimes not. Sea grass sways in the green-gold water, anemones glisten, and the crabs hold fast. He waits for the surge to retreat, then clomps across.

And so on, north up the coast, casting and trying to keep his rig free of the rocks and into the fish, but there are no fish. Within an hour Matt is half a mile from his safe little patch of beach between the boulders and he’s getting that awful feeling that the old man has in the Hemingway book that Londa Jones assigned him, which he loved. The feeling of being unlucky.

He knows that sometimes the sea is too rough even for the fish. He lets the sand crabs go. By the time he makes it back to his spot, he’s tired and hungry.

He sits in the sand and eats his lunch, letting the sun bake the chill out of him. The rocks shelter him from the world and the waves send spray into the sky.

He falls dead asleep for ten minutes, awakened by gunshots that turn out to be his own snoring.

Ready to change his luck, Matt ties on a big blue Krocodile lure. Picks his way toward the farthest visible tip of Moss Point, a slippery shelf barely showing above the water.

This table of rock is difficult to get to, but it’s the place to fish. Because, beyond its visible end, the shelf plunges steeply underwater and ends in the sand, where big fish stage their attacks on the rock dwellers. Sharks cruise this jagged edge. There are occasionally big bass. Both species of halibut are here — the most prized eating fish in these waters — ambush predators, meaning they wait and watch. They are flat and almost round and can weigh up to fifty pounds. Their mouths are small, powerful, and lined with small, pointed razors. They can hit a distracted perch or smelt before the smaller prey senses that the halibut — a mottled brown-and-cream-colored trash can lid set into the sand — is even there.

He takes slow, wide steps for balance, feels the strength of the surge against his shins. Gulls bicker in the blue above him. At the end of the shelf, which feels to Matt like the end of the world, he casts far and slightly south and waits while its weight takes the Krocodile to the bottom. He feels the tumble of the lure in the sand, moving north with the current. Lifts and pauses, letting it rise and fall. Reels it back to him gradually, across the deep sandbar, through the deep water in which the big fish cruise.

Repeats. Repeats again.

His next cast is farther out and he lets the lure settle through the water column. The gulls overhead move farther out to keep their keen eyes on the action.

The Krocodile hits the bottom as before, moves along, then stops suddenly. Matt sets the hook. The fish is already off, a small one — maybe a calico or sand bass — but brave and hungry enough to attempt the big lure. Matt reels him in steadily, keeping the fish off the sharp, line-cutting rocks.

But he underestimates the bottom depth, and the fish digs in. A crafty little bass, no doubt.

He pops the rod tip and the fish is off again, but it has magically gained weight, a lot of it. Matt knows instantly that a much bigger fish has taken the smaller one. The new big fish runs west and down.

The line screams off the reel in a way that Matt has never heard: frantic, high-pitched, accelerating off the spool. His next calculation takes no time at all, just an admission that the fish is too big for his twelve-pound line, which will soon come to its end and snap, unless...

He jumps in.

No bottom. His Keds are heavy and the water is cold and the current takes him north.

He tightens the drag, treading water frantically while reeling up the line with rapid cranks. The chop is mean and the wind blows gusts of sea spray into his face.

Up the coast the fish pulls him. It is strong, dragging Matt along with unhurried ease. When it pauses, Matt gains some line back, but then the fish takes it again in a stubborn run. He sees he’s down to maybe twenty of the one hundred yards of the good monofilament he put on in May.

Legs churning, Matt keeps the reel up and out of the water. If the spool binds in the sandy sea, his fish is gone. He’s breathing deeply, teeth clenched against the inrush of brine.

He guides the animal toward shore. It is slowing, and Matt gets a quick forty yards of line back onto the grinding reel, scissor-kicking his way toward the shore, hoping he can land this monster on a soft sand beach and not lose him to rocks. His hands are clumsy with cold and he’s shivering.

He wonders, but only briefly, what kind of fish he has. A shark would pull steadier, more back and forth. A big bass or a tuna would fathom and rest and then run again.

I will do this.

But now, without apparent effort, the fish turns and takes him west, heading straight out to sea.

Matt swirls in alarm and sees the sandy tan water chopping all around him, feels the rip current pulling him away from shore. He’s numb with cold, loudly panting. He knows to swim at an angle toward the beach, to wait out the rip — easier said than done with a big fish pulling the other way and the heavy canvas shoes that Matt now jettisons toe-to-heel, toe-to-heel. His arms are locked at the elbows to keep the rod tip up and to fight the fish, but his bigger muscles are now cramping and his lungs burn.

The rip lets go of him far from shore. Matt guesses a quarter mile, not a problem unless you’re half frozen, cramping, and fighting a fish that’s stronger than you are.

But the fish has weakened too, and it rests long enough for Matt to roll over onto his back and begin kicking, the rod in one hand, the tip high. He sees sky, his face just barely out of the water. His ear canals fill.

And his feet churn, propelling him slowly, blessedly east toward shore. He’s done this before, riding out rips while bodysurfing at Victoria and Brooks and St. Ann’s, but always with good swim fins. This is slow going. He closes his eyes and repeats I will do this, trying to slow the words down and let the water bear him toward a clean sand beach. I will do this. Then he tries his secret mantra given to him by one of the Enlighteners on loan to Mystic Arts World from the Vortex of Purity, his very own mantra, a six-syllable sound that will plug him into the universal subconscious like a jumper cable. So, chest heaving, kicking steadily, and feeling the diminished strength of the fish, Matt meditates shoreward. When he opens his eyes he sees blue sky. When he gathers his energy and turns to look where he’s headed, he sees a yellow sandy beach bobbing distantly.

Matt washes up in the whitewater like a clump of kelp.