Riptide

CHAPTER 18

Just before sunset, Jake Lassiter headed to his coral rock pillbox between Kumquat Avenue and Poinciana in Coconut Grove. He parked under a chinaberry tree, kicked one of the rally wheels just for the hell of it and slammed the door, hard. The front bumper didn’t fall off, but the grille seemed to frown and from somewhere inside, springs and cylinders and bushings whinnied like an old horse.

The front door of the house wasn’t locked, just swollen shut from the humidity. Lassiter opened it with a good drive block — head up, shoulders square — and stripped off his suit and black oxfords. He changed into cutoffs and nothing else and, for no good reason, uncoiled the hose, washed down the Olds 442, and worked up a sweat massaging paste wax into the canary-yellow finish. The exertion demanded a two-pack of sixteen-ounce Grolsch with the porcelain stoppers.

He found three slices of pizza in the refrigerator, the ends curled up like old shoes left in the rain. He dropped the Beach Boys into a tape player almost as old as Brian Wilson and sang along to “Little Surfer Girl,” missing the high notes by twenty yards.

Thinking of Lila Summers.

Regressing. A picture from a magazine. A symbol of something, what? Freedom, youth, pleasure.

Overgrown adolescent jerk, he told himself, reaching for another Dutch brew, crawling into the hammock slung between live oak trees. Falling asleep there in the yard, throwing the porcelain stoppers at a redheaded woodpecker with a machine-gun beak. Missing it, too, by twenty yards.

No use going to the office this morning. News of l’affaire Whitney had spread — and grown — all over downtown. One version had Lassiter dangling the bank lawyer out the window, a good trick in a sealed-tight skyscraper. No, his partners would swarm over him like mosquitoes on a naked thigh if he went to work.

Besides, Lila Summers was here. Final warm-ups, the race one day away, and Lila was spinning through a balletlike freestyle exhibition just off the Key Biscayne beach. Jake Lassiter dug his bare feet into the sand and, anonymous behind dark glasses, watched Lila perform. She wore a simple, one-piece white suit cut low in the front and high on the hip. Today, her honeyed hair flew free with the wind.

As her board reached a patch of smooth water, Lila dropped into a split, legs spread along the length of the board, then slid to her feet and spun a perfect pirouette, releasing the boom for a moment, relying on lightning reflexes to keep her balance. She grabbed the boom again, headed on a beam reach and put one foot under the windward rail, popped it out of the water so the leeward rail sank, then rode the board on its side until she levered it back into the water. Finally she flipped into a handstand, held it for fifteen impossible seconds, and after lowering her feet to the board, somersaulted over the booms and landed gently on her back in the sail. She was poetry and grace and her movements were all in harmony, fluid motions that looked effortless.

Alongside Lassiter on the beach a television crew was setting up equipment. “Nice trick,” said P. J. Jeter, the ABC announcer.

“She’s the best that ever was,” Jake Lassiter said. “In the history of the sport, no one has ever done freestyle like that.”

“Wouldn’t mind getting up close and personal with her,” Jeter said.

P. J. Jeter, ex-football semigreat, would rather be covering the NFL, but as the junior member of the Wide World of Sports team, he hadn’t gotten past the Texas Prison Rodeo and the Wrist-Wrestling Championships from Petaluma. In a minute he would interview a dude who parceled out smiles as if they were twenty-dollar gold pieces.

Finally the camera was ready, the microphone checked out. “So how do you like Florida?” P. J. Jeter asked.

“Flat,” Keaka Kealia said.

“How’s that?” Jeter asked.

“Flat land, flat water.”

“How about the women?”

“Not flat.”

“I mean, how about the women windsurfers? Anyone here to compare to your longtime companion, the lovely Lila Summers?”

“French girl, good form, one German girl, very strong, others, don’t know their names.”

Oh shit, this is enlightening. “Bet you miss Maui, eh?”

“Yes.”

A yes-and-no guy. Might as well interview Marcel Marceau.

“Your love for your island home is well known. What is it that makes Maui so special?”

“History. There is much to be learned if you listen to the land and the sea.”

Bet they talk more than this guy. “I’m sure there is. What lessons would you like to pass on to your fans?”

“In the Iao Valley there was a great battle two hundred years ago. Chief Kalanikupule ruled Maui but was attacked by much greater forces. Kalanikupule would have been killed, but he created a diversion by sending a warrior in his chieftain’s garb into the valley while he escaped into the mountains.”

Now what the fuck does that have to do with windsurfing, P. J. Jeter would like to have asked. Guy’s probably stoked out of his mind on Maui Wowie. “Okay, let’s talk about your world speed record…”

Lassiter listened for a moment, then caught sight of Lila Summers foot-steering toward shore. She called to him, “Take one of Keaka’s boards. He’s busy being a big shot.”

Jake Lassiter’s brain cells did not have to appoint a committee. If she’d told him to hang by his heels from the hotel balcony, he’d have asked which floor. Keaka Kealia already had rigged four different slalom boards and Lassiter settled for a middle-of-the-road nine footer with a five-point-eight-meter sail. He peeled off a faded Penn State T-shirt, hitched up his trunks, and beach-started by hopping onto the board in the calm water just beyond the shore break. In a minute he was next to Lila Summers, who was appraising his form. The wind was kicking at about eighteen knots and an angry cord of steel-gray clouds hung over the horizon.

“It’ll take me a little while to get used to the equipment,” Lassiter said.

“Don’t worry, you’re doing great,” she said. The board was custom-made for Keaka’s specifications and Lassiter, taller and heavier, expected it to be sluggish. Instead, the board turned so quickly on his first jibe, he barely had time to flip the sail to get going on the other tack.

After a few minutes in the swells, Lila yelled above the wind, “I’m tired of shredding back and forth.”

“Follow me,” Lassiter shouted back. More comfortable now, he raked the boom in tight and trimmed the sail, catching a gust that shot him in front of Lila. She laughed and pursued him down the coastline. The wind was humming now, twenty knots with stronger gusts as the sky darkened and they neared the lighthouse at the tip of the island, the condos and hotels out of sight. Lassiter remembered the strange trio there — Berto, Keaka, and Lee Hu — wondered again what he had barged into. He felt a sharp twinge realizing Berto was gone, then the sting of guilt, because he was enjoying this moment, enjoying the breeze and the water and the company of a young woman, pleasures Berto would never know again. While he was thinking about it, a gust caught him standing up too straight, and a second later, the mast whipped forward, slinging him off the bow. He landed on his back and skipped like a stone another twenty feet.

“You okay?” Lila yelled as she luffed the sail to slow down and pull alongside.

Lassiter came up spitting water, his neck hurting, his ego bruised. “Sure, no problem. Just was thinking about something else. Zigged when I should have zagged.”

“Concentration, it’s the most important thing. Stay there a second.” In a moment, Lila Summers was beside him in the water, their boards floating alongside. She faced him while they both treaded water, the hooks from their harnesses clanging against each other.

She was close enough to kiss, so he did, her lips salty and yielding. She kissed him back and wrapped her legs around him and his neck stopped hurting, and then the skies opened and a hard rain pelted them, and still they kissed but now the swells tumbled over them, growing with the squall that roared from the northeast.

“Getting a little radical out here,” Lassiter said, coming up for air. “I have an idea.”

“I was hoping you did.”

With the wind howling like a betrayed lover, they water-started in unison, two sails whisked out of the water on cue, each sailor slipping into the foot straps and hooking harnesses to the booms, the storm a raucous symphony around them. Tricky now with the swells building and the wind rising to gusty crescendos then falling off to diminuendo lulls.

Lassiter luffed the sail and took a cautious approach. Once past the tip of the island, they headed west into the protected waters of the bay, the land mass of Key Biscayne taking some of the sting out of the wind. In a few minutes they were at Stiltsville, a collection of twenty wooden houses on stilts smack in the middle of the bay. After Hurricane Andrew, half the structures had splintered into driftwood. The ones that remained were sagging onto their pilings and needed a fresh coat of paint, if not a complete rebuild by structural engineers.

Reachable only by boat, the houses sat empty most of the time. Fifty years ago, you could shoot craps there. Now doctors, lawyers, and bankers owned the houses and used them mainly for weekend family outings with an occasional extracurricular session on a weekday afternoon for the married guys.

Lila Summers followed him to a white house with faded green shutters and a wooden deck. They tied their boards to one of the stilts and climbed weather-beaten steps to the front door. The house belonged to his law firm, and like many a grown man’s toys, was little used. Lassiter opened the combination lock, and with the squall raging and the cold rain chilling them, they hurried inside. The house was dark and stuffy, so they opened the shuttered windows on the leeward side to let in some air without the rain.

They found towels and a bottle of red wine. He dried her, and she dried him. They talked about the storm and about the race and about everything except the subject at hand: each other and the possibilities that awaited. After a moment, Lila explored the house, her bare feet leaving wet imprints on the floor. She padded through the large, open Florida room, a mounted sailfish dominating one wall, a nautical map another. She walked through the two bedrooms in the back, then rejoined Lassiter at the counter in the kitchen.

She drained her glass of wine and said, “I was still in high school when I met Keaka. I looked up to him. I still do. He’s the only man I’ve been with, and he’s been completely faithful to me.”

It was the beginning of intimacy, Lassiter knew, plus a medical background, so important these days.

“What about you?” she asked.

“I’ve never been with Keaka,” he said.

She ran her hand through his hair. “Are you one of those men who doesn’t talk?”

He talked. He talked about the women who had sailed through his life, Susan Corrigan, the sportswriter, Dr. Pamela Metcalf, the English psychiatrist, Lourdes Soto, the private investigator, and Gina Florio, now Gina de La Torre, the ex-Dolphin Doll who kept dancing in and out of his bedroom. Then, in the spirit of the times, he told her he had a blood test every six months at the county health department, and the only thing wrong came from eating too much red meat.

She gestured with her glass for more wine. Then the hand that held the glass circled his head and she pulled him toward her. They kissed softly. He cradled her face in his hands, and the kiss lasted, and with eyes closed he heard the small waves breaking against the pilings. Rain pinged off the metal roof. In the distance, thunder echoed. Wordlessly, Lila stepped out of her white suit and pulled the drawstring on Lassiter’s old surfer trunks. The squall had worked its way around the tip of Key Biscayne and the wind roared, and even with the shutters open, it was dim inside. In the Florida room, they lay on the floor on their towels and explored each other’s bodies, and Jake Lassiter imagined they were floating on a raft, for the wooden floor seemed to pitch with the waves, his equilibrium still at sea. They made love tentatively at first but then Lila arched her back and her breasts pressed against his chest and she tightened her strong legs around his buttocks and locked him tight into her.

Lila purred in his ear. He moved slowly, and she tugged at his shaggy sun-bleached hair, gripping hard until it hurt. Pulling back his head, she nibbled at his lower lip, then bit down hard enough to draw blood. He never winced, but bit her back, though gently. She sucked at his wounded lip, and their tongues danced, and they kissed harder and deeper until their teeth struck.

A flash of lightning reflected off the water and illuminated the room. Thunder rumbled, and the house seemed to vibrate.

With his eyes closed, Lassiter felt the tide surge toward a distant beach, heard water breaking against a rocky shore. He imagined a beach of red sand and a jungle of green vines. He thought of valleys carved in volcanic rock, pictured a thousand war canoes lit by torches on a black sea, and saw orange flames rising from molten lava. He felt the wet heat rising from both of them as their gears meshed, and they moved to the same silent music.

Later, they lay there together, bodies slicked with sweat and salt water. He looked at her but didn’t say a word.

“Jake, don’t blink those blue eyes at me,” Lila Summers said. “I know what you want to ask but won’t, so here it is. It was pleasurable, enjoyable. You’re a wonderful lover. The fact that it wasn’t a hydrogen bomb — that it’s never been — shouldn’t bother you. It doesn’t bother me.”

Lassiter was silent. “And don’t pout,” she said. “You’re a very special man, everything I thought you would be, strong but sensitive, and it was very nice, really.”

Very nice. Very nice is okay for Granny Lassiter’s pot roast, not this ethereal experience. At least it had been that for him. They were silent. The rain still pelted the roof, but lighter now. Lassiter walked to the window in a daze, his joy tinged with disappointment. A brown pelican sat on one of the wooden pilings, its pouch empty, scanning the shallow water. Small waves sloshed against the pilings, a sleepy sound.

Jake Lassiter looked at Lila, naked on the towel, and saw the last train leaving the station. There would be no more women like this — young and beautiful and unspoiled. She has never tasted defeat, he thought, and cannot imagine it. How long had it been since he figured he would never sit on the Supreme Court or stake his life on principle like an Atticus Finch? How long since he realized he would never be All-Pro, or All-Anything? It was creeping up on him and the train started moving now, and he would run for it and leap aboard and wherever it went, it didn’t matter.

“Li’a, Goddess of Desire, I want to say things to you that no one ever has. My head is full of music and poetry but it’s all jumbled up, and all I can think of is, Grow old along with me…”

“…The best is yet to be,” she said, and he raised his eyebrows and Lila laughed. “Don’t look so surprised. We studied poetry at Seabury Hall on Maui, but to tell the truth, I always found Robert Browning a bit sappy. I preferred Housman”:

Now you will not swell the rout

Of lads that wore their honors out,

Runners whom renown outran

And the name died before the man.

“But that’s a little melancholy, isn’t it?” Lassiter asked. “An athlete dying young.”

“Not melancholy at all, an athlete or warrior going out in a blaze of glory.”

Jake Lassiter shook his head, in the mood to talk of romance, not blazing death. “You didn’t happen to learn any poems about Li’a at your highfalutin school, did you?”

Me ‘oe ka ‘ano ‘i pau ‘ole… With you an unending desire.

“Perfect,” he said. “The rest?”

Here in the beating heart.

Do not thrust away the glimpse

Of our drenching in the misty rain.

“It’s beautiful,” Lassiter said. “Our drenching in the misty rain. What a sensual thought.”

“Maui is a very sensual place. It could be our place.”

She stood there, naked in front of the window, and Lassiter looked into the star bursts of her eyes and wondered if a second mission could drop the hydrogen bomb. But soon, it would be dark, and windsurfers don’t have running lights. As he slipped into the cold, wet swim trunks, his desire waned. They locked up the house, untied the boards, and headed back to Key Biscayne.

The weather had calmed, and the wind was nearly too light now, the typical pattern after a series of squalls. Three gray gulls, shrieking stridently, kept them company as they sailed up the coast. A single osprey, the Florida fish hawk, soared above them and dived suddenly, snatching a fish with its talons. The fish struggled for a moment, but the piercing claws would not release, and bird and prey disappeared toward land.

The beach was deserted in front of the hotel and they carried their equipment up the beach. As they neared the raised pool deck, Lassiter stopped suddenly and said, “How can Maui be our place?”

She looked puzzled.

“Keaka,” he said. “What about Keaka?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, innocent as a child bride.

“Where’s Keaka while you and I are riding horses in the mountains, windsurfing on unspoiled waters?”

“Does it matter?”

“Do you love him?”

“Love,” she said, pursing her lips and cocking her head as if trying out a new word. “Oh, Jake, you are a romantic, aren’t you? Look, I love what Keaka is. I love his strength and his pride and his independence. He’s free, and not many of us are.”

I’m not, Jake Lassiter thought. I’m tied to a clock and time sheets and to bloodsucking clients. “How could I be free?” he asked, not liking the sound of his own voice.

“By doing what you enjoy most.”

He laughed. “I’m too slow to cover the flanker over the middle. All I can do is put facts together, examine witnesses, argue the law, write briefs — all useless skills except to sell your life by the hour, lease each heartbeat to corporations and robber barons.”

“Jake, there’s something for you in the islands. There’s…”

“ Lila, there you are!”

Keaka carried a board under each arm, biceps pumped from hard sailing, looking powerful and dangerous. “You left your rig on the beach, you know what the blowing sand does to the sail.”

“Lots more sails where that came from,” Lila said.

Without acknowledging Lassiter’s presence, Keaka looked hard at Lila. “I know you’re tired,” he said, “but it’s our last race. After this, I’ve got other plans.”

“I know, I know.”

“Let’s get cleaned up now,” Keaka said. “I have to meet somebody on business.”

“Not the same business as the other night, I hope,” Lila said.

“No, even easier, and more profitable.”

Jake Lassiter wondered if he’d suddenly become invisible. Finally Lila turned to him and said apologetically, ” ‘Night, Jake. See you tomorrow. Thanks for filling me in about the location of the reef. Jake was very helpful, Keaka.”

“I’m sure he was,” Keaka Kealia said, shooting Lassiter the sideways look of a Doberman pinscher. “Say, lawyer…”

“Yeah.”

“You got a bruise on your lip. You bump into something?” I “Grabbed the boom with my face.”

“That’s what I thought. Got to be careful when you’re out ‘ of your element. Got to be real cautious or you can get hurt.”

Keaka smiled a malevolent grin, then hauled his rig back toward the hotel garage, Lila following behind. Alone now, a pair of images drifted through Lassiter’s mind — that first night outside the hotel, Lila’s hair flying, back arched against the wind, and now, her kisses still lingering on his lips.

It was after six o’clock when Lassiter found a pay phone to check with Cindy at the office. “Where you been?” Cindy shouted at him. “I waited so long for you, I’m missing happy hour at the Crazy Horse. Jeez, what a day, all hell’s broken loose since you beat the crap out of Thad Whitney.”

“Cindy, I didn’t beat the crap out of him. We just bumped into each other.”

“The way I hear it, you sucker-punched him, then trashed his china cabinet. Your partners are really pissed. The MP’s been reading the office manual all day. They’re gonna court-martial you or something, conduct unbecoming a partner. Maybe they’ll forgive you if you apologize to Thad.”

“I will… the same day the pope marries Madonna. What else?”

Cindy paused, and Lassiter imagined her running a finger through a permed curl, deep in thought. “Jake, don’t get in over your head. I don’t mean to be lecturing you since you’re my boss and you’re God knows how much older than I am. And you’re a real together guy, except

… except what you don’t know about women could fill Biscayne Bay and flood Miami Beach. So don’t go off the deep end, okay?”

“Hey, Cindy.”

“Yeah?”

“Throw me a life preserver.”