Mavericks: A Love Story

By Linda Breaux Bay

Lana Strauss can coolly face a 20 foot wave at Mavericks but is knocked off balance by an unlikely gaggle of conspirators trying to grab her newly inherited beachfront home. With little help from her dueling lovers, two dysfunctional brothers and her fathers very cantankerous ghost, Lana must save the beach. By turns erotic, magical, suspenseful and laugh-out-loud hilarious, Mavericks is a wild ride from start to finish.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475933468

Linda Breaux Bay

Linda Breaux Bay grew up in a beach cabin converted from a glass-bottomed boat. She rode her first surfboard, tandem, with her dad Felix at the age of 4. Felix “The Cat” Seidler was an Olympic swimmer and lifeguard, who learned the art of wave riding from Duke Kahanamoku, the father of modern surfing. The family beach house was the epicenter of the 60’s surf phenomenon on the Northern California coast. This novel is a fictional tribute to that lost place and time. The author and her husband live on the Marin inter-coastal with a menagerie of pets. Awards & Publications: • Alice Phelan Jason Award – best native California novel • Bay Area Writers Workshop at Mills College – best novel • Northwest Writers Conference – 3rd place novel • Maui Writers Conference – top 10 fiction manuscripts • Prolog published in Thema, A Tattered Hat Abandoned, under the title “The Sea of Laughing Hats” • 3 excerpts published in Read Me, Featured Writer section

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Copyright © 2012 Linda Breaux Bay.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-3345-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-3346-8 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 02/15/2016

CONTENTS

Sea Of Laughing Hats

The Big Blue Now As It Was Then

Can’t Stop The Waves

Boat Is Just A Four Letter Word

The Total Absence Of Color

Personal Best

The Indicator

The Half-Life Of Celluloid Cherries

Of Hell And Hand-Baskets

To Live And Die By The Board

The Enemy Of My Enemy Is Also My Friend

Please, Do Not Disturb

Herky-Jerky Mercury

Spousal Survival

Goddess Of All She Surveys

Between The Devil And The Deep Green Sea

Measuring A Man

Tijuana Johnny

Stone-Ground Linguine Meets Tofu Tits

The Hawaiians Have Landed

Toasting The Groom

Longboard Talkstory And Black Dog Dancing

Stone Zone Surprise

In The Pink

The Mona Lisa Of Lefts

In The Eye Of The Storm

Girls Just Wanna Have Wardrobe

Avocado Surprise

Shoe Fly

A Flower And A Flame

Hershey And Candy Barr

Gator-Bait

Judicial Shrapnel

The Metaphysics Of Fog

G’wan An Kiss De Girl

It Looked Like Down To Me

Where Strawberries Met The Sea

The Stone Pipes

Eminent Domain

Karma-Suki

Ass, Gas Or Grass

Under My Thumb

Board Meeting

A Rose Is A Rose Is A Rose

The Lair Of The Wolf

Something Rotten

Mountain-Girl

Love Or Something Like It

Cracking Foamy White

Smoke And Mirrors

Big Yellow Taxi

True Effulgence

Bereavement Hallucination Theory

Impact Zone

Night Moves

Ethereal Amah

The First Tupperware Chapter

Excrement Encounters Wind-Distribution Device

Rainbow Bright

Swallow The Moon

Dead Men Don’t Pay Taxes

B H Experiment

The Devil In The Deep Blue Z

Tilt My Freaking Windmill

Scat

The Last Tupperware Chapter

Pissing Off The Higher Power

Daggers Of Jackmackerel

Tax Dollars At Work

Rock And Hard Place

Running On Empty

Crying Over Spilt Coke

Casa Hizhonner

More Is Not Enough

Running Scared

Small Circle Of Friends

The Quick Brown Fox

Honor The Dead, Damn It!

Rhino Chaser

Let The Chips Fall Where They May

Chips Are Falling!

Homeward Angel

State Of Emergency

Deportee

Breath Of The Celestial Dog

Never Turn Your Back On The Sea

Death’s Pale Blossom

Waiting…

And Waiting…

Holdfast

Brave New Dawn

Cue The Fat Lady

The Big Blue Now

With special thanks to: Dick Bay, Jim Frey, Rich Yurman, Paul Cox, Bryce Courtenay, Marge Piercy & Ira Wood, Scott Hubbard, Jill Porcino and Elaine Bergstrom

To all the old farts dead and gone… especially Felix The Cat Seidler and my brother Cary.

Cover art from the Cary Seidler collection

SEA OF LAUGHING HATS

SEPTEMBER 1976

THE MORNING CRACKED OPEN OVER Swayback Mountain, poking a cold, California gold finger of sun at the old man paddling a surfboard through ceaseless waves. Wolf Strauss pulled the redwood longboard toward the breakers with erratic scoops of his gnarled hands. The nose of the board sliced through the lattice of foam that floated on the water like the veil of a drowned bride.

Kick me ass over tea-kettle, Wolf said, ducking under a wall of roiling white. He surfaced. Just don’t waste no more of my time.

Nearly an hour in fifty-six degree surf, the eight-foot swell churning and twisting, Wolf felt like a rag in a washing machine—which usually meant the odds were about to swing his way. He pushed through the shorebreak, certain the perfect wave was coming from half a world away just to break in front of his house. He rested past the impact zone where the waves began as smooth looming hills. Chest heaving, bone-cold and winded, he took the flask from the waistband of his woollies, popped the cork and swallowed. Heat ripped through him like lightning.

He ran a scarred hand over his hair, thick and white as a lemon grass lawn, then tipped the flask again. This one’s for you—you fucking wonderful old bastards! He swallowed again. You old farts dead and gone: Freeth and Simmons, Dickie Cross and Dr. Del Rio! The tequila sparked parts of him near dead. He coughed and squeezed a tear from a red-rimmed eye. And the ones that died too soon. To Slappy James! He swallowed again and the liquor warmed him, gentle as kindness. He returned the flask to his waistband and paddled toward the take-off.

The sea rose and fell around him, sky and water a near-seamless gray. In his peripheral vision, Wolf saw a spot of caution-light yellow. Poppies with spikes of sharp sun at their centers, winking in and out of sight, riding the pulse of the planet. A swatch of silk tulle on a bed of bull kelp waltzed past him. Smirking: old man, gold watch, rocking chair.

Wolf’s stomach clenched bile into his esophagus. He tried to swallow the memory with the bitter taste. Easter of 1956, his beloved wife Camille wore that hat to church. Under the veil of golden poppies, in her dress of champagne silk, she was lit from within. The keyhole opening of her white gloves exposed the tracing of her indigo veins. That night he made her keep on both hat and gloves, not his first or his worst transgression.

1963, Wolf threw this hat first, then all the others—box upon box upon box—into a violent sea. On the bluff behind him had grown real poppies—a wild blanket of palpable sun. Tangible bits of his lost Camille have returned regular as regret for thirteen years. A sermon he preached but did not himself heed—guilt tossed upon the waters also returns tenfold.

Wolf pushed the memory of Camille from his mind and focused on the western edge. His muscles felt brittle as glass and his heart flapped like a beached fish in the cage of his ribs but Wolf had to push on. He had to get beyond the breakers before the young punks, already parked along his levee, headlights facing the sea, blasting their crap music, waxed down their short boards and snatched this last thing, this small scrap of ceaseless sea, from him.

Gasping, Wolf beseeched the sea god to smite the land, crying out in the Forgetting Tongue, Send me the big wave from Tahiti! Send me something to show these punks I was king of this beach when they were still shitin’ yellow!

Across the fetch of open sea one wave overtook another in haste to answer Wolf’s call. He let the first few slide beneath him. From the levee the Eagles bated him to take it to the limit, and Wolf laughed, Every time, assholes!

Then he saw a wedge of dark water on the horizon. A mountain of gray, rearing as it approached the reef. Wolf snapped to attention as the rest of his world fell away. He measured the advance. His gut balled into a fist of excitement and fear as the rogue wave ground toward him. He punched into the sea, paddling hard. The wave lifted him like a child into a giant’s embrace. Swallowing a bitter boilermaker of adrenaline and terror, Wolf crouched, hands gripping the rails and stared down the steep face. The wave was pitched so sharp he swore he could smell the briny bottom. It roared like liquid thunder. Wolf squinted into the spray. Just ahead a boiling blotch of white water opened in an enormous, expanding blossom. Heart banging, adrenaline pumping, Wolf dropped down the face. His soul flew into his mouth and slammed against his back teeth. Salt spray stung his eyes. The pocket ground toward him, certain as taxes or the grave. The glass ax fell before he could pull out, heaping a ton of angry ocean on top of him.

Oxygen was wrenched from every orifice, even the pores of his skin. After tumbling and falling and silently calling a god whose name he had only taken in vain, Wolf followed his bubbles up from the deep. He gulped the sky, coughed and vomited. Each breath scratched like steel wool but he sucked it in. It was all he could manage to keep on top of the sea.

The ocean around him was strangely placid, windless and buffeted by soft fog. Wolf thought he heard small waves breaking, distant and diminished, on every side. He strained to hear music or motors or anything that could help him get his bearings but the music had died. Craning his neck for a sign, any sign, he caught a hint of yellow slipping by to his left. The edges softened and blurred. Gray fog eroded the yellow until just the bright center remained.

Wolf sucked in the jagged air and tried to regroup. He rolled into the deadman float. Son of a fucking bitch, he bubbled into the sea.

When Wolf lifted his head to look around him again he saw a cigar-shaped darkness break the overall gray. He brightened and stroked toward his board. I’ll be damned, he thought, and probably damned again—but somebody up there still likes me. Thirty strokes, he figured, and he’d reach the safety of the longboard. He felt like a sagging sack of rusting nails but he forced himself to frog kick half the distance before resting again. He lifted his head. The board was farther away. Must be caught in a rip, he thought.

Don’t panic, he told himself. Fear is the little death. Rest, swim, do the deadman and swim again. He went for the crawl this time, his best. Tapping the last of his leftover endurance and grace, he sprinted for the finish. Come on, you stupid shit-eating piece of shark meat!

Alone on the heaving breast of his planet, his insides gone to hard edges, Wolf slashed at the sea. Grabbing for his longboard he came up instead with a fist full of red. Decayed red, velvet red—with a broad black ribbon and a clump of celluloid cherries on the brim. He threw the hat aside and kept punching the water, but his path was barred by hat upon hat, thick as the kelp beds were in his youth. Straw boaters and pillbox hats. Raged fabrics with ravaged lace. Torn veils, peeling faux-pearl and rhinestone trim. A squashy beige number with stuffed birds on the brim. A bathing cap with rubber hibiscus . . .

THE BIG BLUE NOW AS IT WAS THEN

THE HUMPBACK MOON CLIMBED THE diamond dark sky and the western sea cooled through shades of deep purple to black. Phosphorus in the whitewater sketched a pale shifting rip in the darkness. Lana Strauss paced the berm, watching the sloop, Scorpion, moored beyond the break, listening to the strains of My Eyes Adored You by Frankie Valli weave in and out with the rhythm of the ceaseless sea. The cabin light went off, then on again and off. Then on again, their signal that Matt was lonely tonight.

What the fuck? Lana yelled at the sloop, her words drowned by the charging waves. She walked toward the sea trying to figure out what she’d done to knock her ex back into the summer of their love. That old mix tape was hell and gone from where she stood at that point in time. The Eagles started singing about the best of their love and Lana felt her whole body blush in spite of the chilly night air. This was deeply private and ancient history! It had no place being broadcast over the beach, even if there was no one but Lana and her dogs to hear it.

Yeah, Lana griped. I got the best but it’s who got the rest that still pisses me off.

She had tried to be content. To enjoy another Saturday night reading, alone when the rest of the world was paired up like Noah had the ark out of dry-dock. She’d been halfway through the Ill Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando and two spoons into a pint of carob tofutti when the flickering light in the black sea grabbed her attention. Then the music.

Shut the fuck up, Matt! she yelled at the sloop. Removing one of her topsiders, she pitched it toward the sea. The sloop went completely dark. What? Hey! Anchor light, asshole! She threw the other shoe.

Murphy, the black lab, appeared out of the darkness, smile first, and laid a sodden topsider on the sand at Lana’s feet then turned and vanished to fetch the other. Lana stripped to the waist, shuddering as the on-shore wind slapped her bare skin. She balled her sweatshirt around the wet shoe, spun and lobbed the wad toward her house. Two points, she thought, too bad she stopped growing at 5'9". Too bad her friend Brainy Delaney was all Lana enjoyed about high school hoop. Basketball got Brainy into Stanford. It might have taken Lana somewhere, anywhere, away from Matthew.

Since her sweet sixteen, Lana Strauss had been limited to a one-word definition of love: Matthew. But Matthew was not alone inside his skin—not since Viet Nam.

That’s where the gods took the rib they used to make you, he told her the first time she traced the comet-tail scar below his heart.

If love was a flesh wound, Matthew’s damage went beyond the bone. The day before his DEROS—his date eligible for return from overseas—he saw a man skinned alive. The next day he landed at Travis. On the bus to the terminal, to process out, he saw parking meters. First clue he was even stateside—gray metal sentinels. Scared, stinking, twenty-one-years-old and a trained killer still wearing the clothes he’d had on in the jungle the day before. Two weeks later he drove his white Mustang into Lana’s life.

Murphy the black dog dropped Lana’s second wet shoe at her feet and shook herself, jarring Lana back to the sloop and the restless sea.

Why aren’t you sleeping at home, Matt? Lana said, slicking off her sweat pants. Why are you playing dead in the water?

The only response: Lady by Styx.

Enough! Lana threw her wadded clothing toward the house. Her shot went foul and Murphy, the black dog, realizing the game was over, loped off to join the red dog, Olas, in the relentless pursuit of willets.

Nude, Lana braided her hair as she walked to the sea. What am I supposed to do with you, Matt McElroy? she asked the charging sea. She took a running dive and disappeared into the shore break. The cold sea gave her an instant ice-cream headache. The quarter mile swim to the sloop was equivalent to ten cold showers. It cooled Lana’s passion enough to circle the sloop three times, hoping endorphins or exposure would shock her brain into knowing the right thing to do—whatever that was. She never really knew when it came to Matthew.

When Lana fell in love with Matt he slept on the floor—back to the wall, Bowie knife in his fist. It took her a year to gentle him away from that edge. Another before he could walk past Filipino teenagers dressed in camouflage clothes at the shopping mall and not go for his knife, or their throat. A decade later, Matt considered himself to be a new man, but sudden thunder could stun him back to the jungle. Stormy nights Matthew still slept on the floor.

Lana climbed aboard the swim deck of the Scorpion to the strains of Chicago singing If you leave me now and squeezed the water from her heavy braid, feeling stupid, exposed and annoyingly excited in a romance novel sort of way. She flipped on the small dim anchor light and paused in the cockpit to measure Matt’s breathing. He was purring like a big happy cat, she thought feigning sleep so it was safe to climb on top of him. He gasped at her chilly embrace but he didn’t come up swinging. She laughed lightly and covered his mouth before he could speak. He shivered violently but gave in to her, wrapping his bed-warmed body parts around her, sharing his considerable heat. Their kiss was like drowning on dry land. He came up for air and she filled his mouth with a cold salty breast. Her sopping wet braid snaked between them and they shared a deep shiver. She arched away from the chill. He curled his body to follow. Pushing him back, she pounced low and slow. Nosing though his chest hair, taking in the scent of him—Ivory soap and Bay Rum—tasting his salt on her tongue.

His eager mouth came after hers. She straddled his hips and he guided her in for the landing. Their bodies bunched and prepared for the stretch—then collided in an unfamiliar way.

Oh no! Lana said, trying to pull free. These lovers were pieces from different puzzles. This man was not Matthew.

She attempted quick retreat. He parried with insistent advance.

Stop it! she said. Quit it!

He mumbled between her breasts. They tumbled in the triangular berth, banging limbs against the walls and low ceiling. A snarl of sleeping bag, long bones and big hair, Lana crawled over his head and rolled to the floor. She jumped to her feet, grabbed a shirt and ran aft. Stopping at the gangway, she flipped on the cabin lights. Who the hell are you? she demanded. They both blinked in the glare.

Who the hell are you? he replied, shoving dark hair from his face.

She wrapped the shirt tighter around her, trying to cover even her embarrassment. Where’s Matthew?

Home with the wife and kids?

His words were a sucker punch, the mix tape segued to Lay Lady Lay and she thought she’d die on the spot. You could have said something. She tried for tough but her voice wobbled.

What would you have me say? His moustache rode up on one side. Thank you? Thank you very much!

You should have stopped me!

Look. I’m jet-lagged to hell and, frankly, you might still have to pinch me to convince me you’re real.

I’m not. She disappeared up the gangway.

Hey! the guy yelled. Hold up! But when he got to the cockpit there was nothing left but the splash. And his shirt fluttering on the rail.

Lana hit the shore running and didn’t slow until she vaulted the seawall. Darting under the house where her family stored their vast quiver of boards she tried to compose herself. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.

The journey of Lana and Matt that began in 1965 was long, rocky and in some places, completely uncharted. Those areas where love went off the map were especially hard to navigate. Where survival took over and love became a contest of wills, Lana felt she was seldom ahead in the race. Tonight, she whispered in the dark, Matt’s definitely ahead and I’m a total behind.

Shivering, she listened to the house creak and groan over her head. Trying to discern if her father was home from the bar or if it was safe upstairs. Wolf Strauss was unpredictable as the weather. Lana went to the back of the shed where the family stored their oldest surfboards and groped along the beam looking for her brother Bo’s stash. She found a peanut butter jar lid on the rafter containing two half-smoked joints and a book of matches. Puffing the smallest roach to life she consoled herself with the fact that, at least, those weren’t Matt’s married arms she fell into. She dropped the roach in the lid before it burned her fingers. Exactly what she failed to do with Matthew.

Matt proposed to Lana her senior year. The jealous cheerleaders and beach bitches, especially Hershey and Candy Barr, waited for her belly to swell as soon as they saw the diamond. But Matt was not a little boy. He was a grown man. An ex-Green Beret. He sat on the barstool next to Wolf Strauss—the terror of San Pedro Bay—downed a double shot and told him, Hell yes, I’m marrying your daughter and until I do we’re using two condoms at a time.

They celebrated their victory over Wolf with an order of Italian take-out which they carried between them on Matt’s motorcycle, his dad’s restored Indian Chief. Just over the cut from Rock-Away Beach Lana heard a rat-a-tat-tat. The safety strap had come loose and banged against Matt’s helmet. Rat-a-tat-tat. Matt thought it was machine gun fire and ditched them in a sand dune. They weren’t badly hurt, having plowed into deep sand and ice plant. Bruised but covered in tomato sauce, pasta and melted cheese, Lana kept saying, It’s not as bad as it looks, it’s not as bad as it looks, but she didn’t know Matt’s eyes saw all the way back to Viet Nam.

Two days later Matthew re-enlisted. He told Lana he had to matter in the world and he knew he’d never be worth more than he was in Nam.

You are everything to me! she cried.

When he went MIA, everyone told her to let him go—completely this time—but Lana wouldn’t believe he was dead. His promise to return held her heart. She wore his ring like a shield and held to the vision of him: whole/ perfect/ alive/ returning until she made it so.

Matthew came marching home again, saved from the conflagration of foreign war by the sheer force of true love. He kept his promise to return to her—but he brought with him a wife, a stepchild and a squalling, hapa-haole baby.

Lana threw Matt’s engagement ring overboard on a whale-watching trip, after accidentally meeting the wife and kids in Safeway. She regretted the action as soon as the gold left her hand. Every time she’d gut a bottom-feeder she’d lift the glistening membrane in hopes of seeing her jewel beckon beyond the blood.

Ten damn years older, Lana sighed, exhaling, and still stupid. She listened to the night sounds above. Her deaf brother, Joshua, was probably sleeping. Her father probably terrorizing his constituents. Deeming it safe topside, Lana leaned to replace the lid on the beam and fell into empty space where there should have been support. Groping the void, she pulled the string for the overhead light. Her father’s prized longboard was gone. Disbelieving her own eyes, she waved her arm in the empty space. There was no doubt. The board given to Wolf Strauss by Duke Kahanamoku, the father of modern surfing—was missing. Lana would be held responsible. Her mind swept clean of other concerns. The absence was all.

CAN’T STOP THE WAVES

FIVE OCTOBERS AGO—HIGH ON MUSHROOMS and low on cash—Lana’s brother Bo traded that prized surfboard for a temple ball of hashish. Wolf got the board back but he broke his son’s arm to extract payment for the inconvenience. Usually, by mid-fall, Bo Strauss was seeking his own endless summer. In the good old days BS—before Suki—the girlfriend that stole his heart and charge-carded him into Chapter 11, Bo surfed the globe.

Lana jogged to Bo’s surf shop early the next morning. You shit, she thought, and dad just paid to have your phone restored, Bo-Zo. She found her brother shaping, guiding the sander along the rail, overpowering Jimmy Cliff’s Many Rivers to Cross blasting from the foam-dusted speakers. His old T-shirt was pocked with dried resin blobs and covered with dust. A spray of foam dust plumed from the sander, then stalled and settled in a slow haze. Without him, Styrofoam blanks would float like big bars of Ivory soap. Bo, who was two years younger than Lana, had been transforming blocks to foils since 1967 when he and his best buddy, Slappy James, opened their first shop under Wolf’s beach house. When Slap died in Viet Nam and Matt was missing in action, Bo moved the shop to the old stone pagoda on Pedro Point but he never took Slap’s name off the logo.

Lana grabbed a facemask from a peg by the door. Foam dust coated the fishnet draped ceiling festooned with found art: cork floats, starfish, sneakers, shark jaws, beach toys and rubber doll parts—the good, bad and bizarre offerings laid upon the shore at San Pedro Bay. Splashy pin-ups of surf bunnies in string bikinis, posters of Pipeline, Waimea and the dirty old Wedge were paled to pastel by ever-raining foam dust. Lana wiped her sweatshirt sleeve across Slap’s favorite poster—Swami Satchidananda in the tree pose, balanced on a surfboard, sliding down the face of a large wave. You can’t stop the waves, the caption read, but you can learn to surf.

Lana’s shadow fell across the board as she leaned in to turn off the stereo. Bo cut the sander. He pushed his goggles high on his forehead, flattening his bushy blond hair but left the filter-mask in place. You look like low-tide surprise, Sis. The old man lock you out, again? His cheeks rose on each side of the mask.

She tugged at her wrinkled sweatshirt and caught sight of her reflection in the window facing the sea. Sleeping in a wet braid made her hair look like knitting attacked by several bad cats. She worked at undoing the end where her hair felt like it was turning to felt. Bo . . .

Any waves? he asked.

Two foot lefts at Clown’s Fence. Wind swell’s dying down. Bo . . .

Is the old man dead yet? He lifted the plank and ran his eye along the rail.

No, but when he finds out the Duke’s board is gone—again—he’s sure to at least suffer a small stroke.

Hey! Bo glared. I may be stupid but I’m not a danger to myself and others. You grill the rest of the beach freaks?

I called everybody: Huey Duck, Dewey and Louis, Hector—hell, for once I woke up the dawn patrol. Nobody’s seen it, Bo, but lots of people saw a line of shiny red Rovers checking out Mystos early yesterday morning. LA license plates, pristine boards, fluffy beach towels—heading south. If you don’t have that board, bro, it’s been lifted. My guess—it’s going to hang over some executive’s desk in Encino. She paused to let that much sink in. We’ve got to find that board, Bo-fish.

"What’s this ‘we’ shit, Kemo Sabe?"

You know the drill—my watch, my responsibility. I can’t tilt windmills for the Wolf anywhere but my own back yard. If I’m going to take on a bunch of big-money nouveau-surf-freaks from La-la land, I need back up. I need you.

For crying in the God-damned beer, Sis. I’m not getting bloody over some dumb relic—not for that old man. This is my first job in months. Cosmic Charlie wants me glassing by Monday. You play Sancho Panza, he pulled the goggles down. "Is not my job, hermana."

No job but still on the payroll. She turned to go. Oh, by the by, Papa paid your gas bill, too. You can take your damn show on the road, again. Forget that you don’t have your act together.

He glared through the scratched plastic. I’m not doing it, Lana. And before I hassled every hot-dogger from Trestles to Toes-Over, I’d pat Matthew down. He’s the only dog dumb enough to take a bone from the Wolf without asking. He’s the only one big enough.

Matt and I aren’t talking. You call him for me?

I tried this morning. Bo turned back to the board. He’s been grinding that Brown 25 since the crack. I’d walk over with you but, like I said, I’m on a deadline. But Duck says conditions have been totally longboard around Deadman’s lately.

They both knew Matt was not above using that board to bait her. They both knew he loved surfing longboard at Deadman’s.

Borrow me some brass screws, Bo said, Matt knows the ones I mean. Then he flipped the switches on the stereo and sander, end of conversation. Final as slamming a door. Bo knew that his sister would rather chew off her own foot than step near the house that Matt built for his Vietnamese wife, Mai Xihn.

BOAT IS JUST A FOUR LETTER WORD

HARD-ROCKING HENDRIX BLASTED OUT THE open garage door and halfway down the street from the neat redwood and white geodesic dome hedged with roses where Matt and Mai lived on Pedro Point. Yeah, Lana thought as she approached the house, that’s the soundtrack of his soul these days.

Though Josh Strauss