Dawn Patrol

111

Dave the Love God tries to tell Red Eddie the same thing.

He sits on the deck of the new lifeguard station at PB, looking out at an ocean that is getting sketchier by the second, and tries to tell Eddie that, basically, it's not a fit night for man or beast, or boatloads of boo.

Eddie's not buying it. He thinks it's shaping up to be a perfect night to do this-black, foggy, and the Coast Guard sticking close to shore. “You are Dave the motherfucking Love God!” he says. “You're a freaking legend. If anyone can do this…”

Dave's not so sure. Freaking legend or no, he's going to have all he can handle tomorrow, and more. The water is going to be a freaking zoo, with every big-name surfer and a few dozen wannabes out there in surf that should be black-flagged anyway, trying to ride waves that are genuinely dangerous. People are going to go into the trough, get trapped in the impact zone under the crushing weight of the big waves, and someone is going to have to go in there and pull them out, and that someone is probably going to be Dave. So being out all night and then coming into a situation where he needs to be absolutely on top of his game is not a good idea.

He doesn't want to lose anyone tomorrow.

Dave the Love God lives his life by the proposition that you can save everybody. He couldn't get up in the morning if he didn't think that, all evidence and personal experience notwithstanding.

The truth is that he has lost people, has dragged their blue and swollen bodies in from the ocean and stood watching the EMTs trying to bring them back, knowing that their best efforts will be futile. That sometimes the ocean takes and doesn't give back.

He doesn't sleep those nights. Despite what he teaches his young charges-that you do your best and then let it go-Dave doesn't let it go. Maybe it's ego, maybe it's his sense of omnipotence in the water, but Dave feels in his heart that he should save everybody, get there in time every time, that he can always snatch a victim out of the ocean's clutches, never mind what the moana wants.

He's lost four people in his career: a teenager who got sucked out on a boogie board and panicked; an old man who had a heart attack outside the break and went under; a young woman distance swimmer who was doing her daily swim from Shores over to La Jolla Cove and just got tired; a child.

The child, a little boy, was the worst.

Of course he was.

The screaming mother, the stoic father.

At the funeral, the mother thanked Dave for finding her son's body.

Dave remembered diving for him, grabbing him, knowing the instant he touched the limp arm that the boy was never going home. Remembered carrying him to shore, seeing the mother's hopeful face, watching the hope dissolve into heartbreak.

The night of the funeral, Boone came by with a bottle of vodka and they got good and drunk. Boone just sat there and poured as Dave cried. Boone put him to bed that night, slept on the floor beside him, made coffee in the morning before they went to The Sundowner for breakfast.

Never talked about it again.

Never forgot it, either.

Some things you don't forget.

You just wish you could.

And the chances of losing another one tomorrow are very real, Dave thinks, running through his mind the list of highly skilled, experienced surfers who have died in recent years trying to ride big waves. There were lifeguards out there those days, too, great watermen who did everything they could, but everything wasn't enough.

What the ocean wants, it takes.

So now he interrupts Eddie's stream-of-consciousness, polyglot rap and says, “Sorry, bro, it's not on for tonight.”

“Gots to be tonight,” Eddie says.

“Get someone else, then.”

“I want you. ”

He mentions the price-three months of Dave's salary for plucking people out of the current. Three freaking months of sitting on the tower looking out for other people who go home to their houses, their families, their bank accounts, their trust funds.

Then he says, “You take a walk on me tonight, David, you keep walking. You retire on a lifeguard's pension, take a job delivering the mail or flipping burgers, bruddah. ”

Fuck it, Dave thinks.

I ain't no George Freeth.