Desperation Reef

3

Jen’s son Casey speeds across Desperation Reef off San Diego, headed home for Laguna, Moondance riding high, slicing through the gently rolling swell. Desperation Reef is Casey’s prime tuna spot this time of year, though it’s also popular with the charter fishermen.

Today, he’s got his bluefin tuna in the ice hold, a one-hundred-pounder, dragged, drained, filleted, and ready for the pricey sashimi specials at his mother’s restaurant.

Mae, a chocolate Labrador, sits on a bench in the cabin beside Casey, facing the sea, tongue trailing, an aging, curious dog without a mean bone in her body.

White clouds seem fixed in the blue October sky and the surface of the sea is dark and supple.

Casey is a big man at twenty-four, all muscle and bushy yellow hair, built much like John Stonebreaker, the father he never met. He’s got the same knee knobs and foot bumps, the same pale blue eyes under dark brows. Without sunglasses, the only parts of Casey’s face not tanned to darkness are the strips of skin between his eyes and his ears. He’s wearing a pendant he had made of sterling silver — a sharp-tailed “gun” surfboard with an oval orange Spessartite garnet embedded lengthwise on the deck. It’s the orange of his father’s signature big-wave guns, and the orange of his mother’s hair.

He sees the commercial trawler bobbing out ahead of him and by the time he gets closer something looks, well, wrong. Pulls near enough for binoculars, throttles down and banks to a sweeping stop. Moondance, an angler’s dream at thirty-two feet, sleek and powerful, rides the swells high and lightly.

Casey two-hands the Leicas, rolling with his boat, keeping the trawler in his field of vision as best he can. It’s a shabby thing, predominately blue with red trim, outriggers swaying empty and no fishing lines out that Casey can see. A rust-stained hull. A ragged black sunscreen flapping over the stern deck.

Two men and a woman stand hard at work at tables heaped high with fish, some big. Black rubber boots and aprons. Blades flashing. Seabirds wheel and dive. A shirtless, muscled guy in red shorts and a flat-brimmed black cowboy hat with silver coins on its band leans against the stern railing, and trains his binoculars on Casey.

“What do you think of that, Mae?”

Mae’s native curiosity has already kicked in and she steadies herself on all fours, attentive to the trawler and, of course, the birds.

Casey gets his phone from the steering wheel cabinet, unzips the sandwich bag and pulls it out. Goes to video, reverses the direction, and holds the phone at arm’s length.

Casey is Casey’s favorite subject, star, and director.

So he checks his look: very tan. Hasn’t shaved in a couple of days. Got on the big straw, high-domed Stetson that he wears all the time — fishing or not — which makes him look, at six foot two, tall indeed and not a little funny in his board shorts and shearling boots and the brazenly colored T-shirts he personally designs for his fledgling surf-clothing company, CaseyWear.

In other words, perfect.

Unmistakably Casey Stonebreaker, number ten big-wave surfer and currently number eighteen on the World Surf Tour.

He gives himself and his followers his right-hand shaka — the universal surfers’ hang-loose sign that his brother, Brock, says is idiotic and is always trying to get him to stop flashing.

“Here are Mae and I on our way home from Desperation Reef. We got one of the best bluefin tuna I’ve ever caught, best sushi on Earth, all ready for dinner specials tonight at the Barrel in Laguna Beach. You all know the Barrel. Reservations, please!”

Casey gives himself his coolest smile, then kneels down and gets video of him kissing Mae on the nose. She wipes her tongue up his stubbly cheek. Casey switches the camera direction back to normal, stands and points it at the vessel.

“And what do we find here on this beautiful sea off the California coast? Well, at least four people — three men and a girl — on a commercial fishing vessel, cleaning their catch. See, they’ve got some big ones up on the tables. But why does this look wrong to me? Because the fish look like sharks, that’s why. I’m not so sure these people are playing by the rules out here. Maybe Fish and Wildlife — hi, Craig, hi, Charmaine — would like some video and a CF number. Maybe my brothers and sisters at the Shark Stewards — hi, Booker, hi, Trish! — would like some video, too. So Mae and I are going in for a closer look.”

From a hundred feet away it’s clear to Casey that these model citizens are finning sharks. Not legal, not humane, but very profitable. Black Hat still has his binoculars on him and the cleaning crew is really hustling now, slicing the fins — dorsal, sides, and tail — off the club-stunned sharks, sweeping the bloody-edged silver-blue-black triangles into a bait well and heaving the finless sharks back into the ocean.

Moondance rocks on the chop while Casey shoots video. He notes his GPU location.

“Oh fudge!” he narrates as he resumes shooting. “See this! Those fish will either bleed to death or get eaten by their cousins. Man, there’s threshers and blues and leopards and even a baby great white! See this baby Jaws! And you know where all the fins end up? In soup! In restaurants from California all the way to China! A whole shark sliced up and thrown out to die. Shark fins are the most valuable thing in the sea except for sunken treasure. Shark-finning is illegal and ugly, brothers and sisters. See this! This is a sin against nature!”

The swell rolls Moondance closer to the trawler, Empress II, and Casey gets its CF numbers. Black Hat lowers his binoculars, raises a hand, and flips Casey off. Mae thumps her tail on the padded bench back.

Pulling broadside to the trawler, Casey keeps shooting.

“Good afternoon!”

“Fuck you and die!” shouts Black Hat.

“How much do you get for a pound of thresher fin?”

“No sharks. No fins. This is all legal. License paid.”

“Well, that’s quite a fantasy, Mr. Hat. What port are you out of?”

“Don’t you take video.”

He’s Asian looking, but it’s hard to tell with the hat shading his face. Young, ripped chest like he works out.

The finners keep slicing away and throwing mutilated sharks overboard, barely looking up.

“How can you do that to living things for money?” Casey asks. And considers the dark parallels between what they’re all doing out here. I’m fishing, too, he notes.

“Feed family,” says Black Hat. “Buy American dream. No video. No Fish and Wildlifes to come after us.”

Casey has more than enough video to post. He can edit it down and shoot a sign-off later at home. Post tonight after dinner, PST, a perfect time here, though not so perfect for the East Coast. He lowers his phone, takes another clip of Mae’s trusting face. He’s got, like, tons of posts across his platforms, containing more videos of Mae, probably, than any other creature than himself.

“This is majorly uncool,” he says. “You should think about what you’re doing,” he says. “There are other ways to make a living out here. She’s generous, this ocean.”

“Shut up. Go.”

“I’ll report you to Fish and Wildlife and the Shark Stewards if I see you out here again.”

The finners are still cutting and dropping the bloody black fish into the deep blue water. Pink contrails descend. The finners are laughing now, looking down at Casey. One waves a knife at him.

Casey sets his phone back in the steering cabinet, guns Moondance into a wide one-eighty, and away.

He’s only half an hour from the Oceanside Harbor boat launch — it’s much faster to trailer Moondance from Laguna to Oceanside to fish Desperation Reef — when he sees the ratty blue-and-red trawler lurching at a good pace toward him from the south.

Empress II flies a red-smeared white flag and through his Leicas Casey sees Black Hat waving. He slows and turns Moondance toward the craft.

Comes to a rest within shouting distance.

“We talk!” Black Hat yells.

Casey nudges the throttle, eases Moondance a little closer.

“Don’t post video!”

“I will if I see you finning again.”

“We make a living. We are legal.”

“Come on, bud — you know it’s against the law.”

“If you show or post or tell Fish and Wildlifes, it would be bad for my family. And for you.”

“I don’t groove on threats.”

Suddenly two boats appear from the west. Bigger than Moondance, and coming fast. They converge, Mae sitting up alertly and Casey retrieving his phone, reading trouble.

“Oh fudge, Mae, we have a situation.”

He emails the shark-finning video to himself as the vessels decelerate, lunging deeply — a dark green Luhrs and a Bayliner. He furtively trades out his good phone for his cheap backup burner.

The two boats then post up a little behind him, one to port and the other starboard. No names, no numbers. With big Empress II at the apex, they’ve got Casey in a bobbing triangle. Moondance rocks steeply in the wakes.

Casey sees three people on each newly arrived boat. Men and women both. The ones on the Luhrs look Asian but it’s hard to tell with the ball caps and bandanas and gaiters. Aboard the Bayliner are a husky Latino or maybe Middle Eastern guy, a lanky Black man, and a wiry red-headed white dude with both arms sleeved in tattoos. Casey can’t guess what nationality the women are.

From the Luhrs, a female voice cuts through the rattle of Casey’s idling engine:

“Hands up, surf dude!”

Most of the crew on the Bayliner and the Luhrs draw handguns and point them at Casey.

Whose guts drop and knees freeze. Hates guns. He got robbed once in Todos Santos, Baja, at gunpoint, and to his humiliation, peed. These pirate pistols look big and rusted. His brother, Brock, has much better guns than these, Casey thinks. He has no defenses except the flare gun, stowed back in the cabin. And two long fillet knives, sharp as razors, secured under the lid of the bait well, a gaff and a fish billy. None of them a match for guns. And there’s no way he could stab somebody or stick them with that gaff anyhow.

Suddenly, with a muffled thud, a gangplank drops from the green Luhrs onto the sturdy gunwale of Moondance.

It’s a well-padded thing, surfboard-wide, with filthy carpet fragments nailed through soft foam to a long flexing beam, down which strides a black-haired woman in black cargo pants, a black windbreaker, and a handgun holstered to her hip.

She’s aboard Moondance before Casey can get to the gangplank and pitch her into the sea. He doesn’t even try, believing her comrades might just shoot him. Mae approaches the woman, mouth open and tail wagging.

Up closer, Pistol Girl looks younger and bigger than she did coming down the plank. She’s got a yellow muff around her neck, pulled up over her nose, fierce dark eyes and fair skin, black nylon pants rolled above her knees, bare feet.

She spreads her legs for balance and holds out her hand.

“Give me the phone, Stonebreaker.”

“You weren’t joking about no video,” Casey says.

“I don’t joke.”

Casey holds up his burner but doesn’t break eye contact with her. Then backhands the phone into the ocean. Laughing and hooting, the pirates empty their pistols at the doomed device. The fusillade sends geysers of whitewater into the air, and spiraling tubes of bubbles down through the blue.

Mae tries to head past him for a better look but Casey hooks a hand through her collar, falls on top of her, and pins her to the deck.

Hoots and laughter.

“Maybe you already posted,” the young woman says, squinting down at him.

“Maybe.”

“Stand up and act brave.”

He does.

Her eyes are almost black above the yellow gaiter. They study him. “I came into the Barrel bar. Not long ago. Left you a big tip.”

“Thanks so much.”

“You don’t remember.”

It’s hard for Casey to see this pirate chick in the laid-back and upscale Barrel. He orders Mae to stay, and unhooks his fingers from her collar.

“You owe me big money for that phone,” he says, exaggerating its value. Feels guilty. Casey hates to lie. Even to a shark finner.

“Maybe I’ll come to the Barrel again and pay up,” she says.

“If you do, I’ll make you a Barrel Bomber so strong they’ll have to carry you out.”

“Why?”

“Payback for torturing sharks.”

“I don’t fin. Others fin. Illegal but very profitable. I can’t talk them out of it. I fish tuna, like you do.”

She lifts the hatch of the cold well, looks at his catch, nods. Gives Casey a dark-eyed stare and drops the lid.

“I’m more in the business side of things,” she says. “Marketing and sales for King Jim Seafoods. I do the books. Graduate of UCLA. I am Bette, with an e at the end.”

“Okay.”

Gives Casey another long look. “Hmph. You think you’re superior. I know who you are, Casey Stonebreaker. From all your socials. A surf star. Big waves. Pretty in magazines. Great abs.”

He doesn’t know what to say to this.

“I’m going to reverse out of here and head home. Tell your people not to shoot me.”

“Don’t file a police report. I am serious. Maybe I’ll get you a new phone.”

“You should.”

“Zai Jian, Stonebreaker.”

Casey surfed a river mouth in China once, a promotional gig that paid him a few thousand dollars. Memorized maybe ten words.

“Zai Jian,” he says.

The crewmen and — women point their rusty weapons at Casey as Bette strides back up the gangplank.