Mavericks Prologue — Linda Breaux Bay

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
Prologue published in Thema / A Tattered Hat Abandoned, under the title The Sea of Laughing Hats
3 excerpts published in Read Me, Featured Writer Section

AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE FROM . . .

Mavericks - a love story

Prologue

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 . . .