Dawn Patrol
The marine layer wraps a soft silver blanket over the coast. The sun is just coming over the hills to the east, and Pacific Beach is still asleep. The ocean is a color that is not quite blue, not quite green, not quite black, but something somewhere between all three. Out on the line, Boone Daniels straddles his old longboard like a cowboy on his pony. He's on The Dawn Patrol.
The girls look like ghosts.
Coming out of the early-morning mist, their silver forms emerge from a thin line of trees as the girls pad through the wet grass that edges the field. The dampness muffles their footsteps, so they approach silently, and the mist that wraps around their legs makes them look as if they're floating.
Like spirits who died as children.
There are eight of them and they are children; the oldest is fourteen, the youngest ten. They walk toward the waiting men in unconscious lockstep.
The men bend over the mist like giants over clouds, peering down into their universe. But the men aren't giants; they're workers, and their universe is the seemingly endless strawberry field that they do not rule, but that rules them. They're glad for the cool mist -- it will burn off soon enough and leave them to the sun's indifferent mercy.
The men are stoop laborers, bent at the waist for hours at a time, tending to the plants. They've made the dangerous odyssey up from Mexico to work in these fields, to send money back to their families south of the border.
They live in primitive camps of corrugated tin shacks, jerry-rigged tents, and lean-tos hidden deep in the narrow canyons above the fields. There are no women in the camps, and the men are lonely. Now they look up to sneak guilty glances at the wraithlike girls coming out of the mist. Glances of need, even though many of these men are fathers, with daughters the ages of these girls.
Between the edge of the field and the banks of the river stands a thick bed of reeds, into which the men have hacked little dugouts, almost caves. Now some of the men go into the reeds and pray that the dawn will not come too soon or burn too brightly and expose their shame to the eyes of God.
It's dawn at the Crest Motel, too.
Sunrise isn't a sight that a lot of the residents see, unless it's from the other side -- unless they're just going to bed instead of just getting up.
Only two people are awake now, and neither of them is the desk clerk, who's catching forty in the office, his butt settled into the chair, his feet propped on the counter. Doesn't matter. Even if he were awake, he couldn't see the little balcony of room 342, where the woman is going over the railing.
Her nightgown flutters above her.
An inadequate parachute.
She misses the pool by a couple of feet and her body lands on the concrete with a dull thump.
Not loud enough to wake anyone up.
The guy who tossed her looks down just long enough to make sure she's dead. He sees her neck at the funny angle, like a broken doll. Watches her blood, black in the faint light, spread toward the pool.
Water seeking water.
"Epic macking crunchy."
That's how Hang Twelve describes the imminent big swell to Boone Daniels, who actually understands what Hang Twelve is saying, because Boone speaks fluent Surfbonics. Indeed, off to Boone's right, just to the south, waves are smacking the pilings beneath Crystal Pier. The ocean feels heavy, swollen, pregnant with promise.
The Dawn Patrol -- Boone, Hang Twelve, Dave the Love God, Johnny Banzai, High Tide, and Sunny Day -- sits out there on the line, talking while they wait for the next set to come in. They all wear black winter wet suits that cover them from their wrists to their ankles, because the early-morning water is cold, especially now that it's stirred up by the approaching storm.
This morning's interstitial conversation revolves around the big swell, a once-every-twenty-years burgeoning of the surf now rolling toward the San Diego coast like an out-of-control freight train. It's due in two days, and with it the gray winter sky, some rain, and the biggest waves that any of The Dawn Patrol have seen in their adult lives.
Yeah, the whole Dawn Patrol got it, because they have all seen Dave the Love Guard crawl up to his lifeguard tower while guzzling handfuls of vitamin E to replace the depletion from the night before and get ready for the night ahead.
"They actually give me binoculars," he marveled to Boone one day, "with the explicit expectation that I will use them to look at scantily clad women. And some people say there's no God."
So if any hominid with a package could get an all-female outrigger canoe team member (or several of them) to issue a gender exemption for a night or two, it would be Dave, and judging by the self-satisfied lascivious smile on his grille right now, he probably has.
Hang Twelve is still not convinced. "Yeah, but, fish tacos?"
"It depends on the kind of fish in the taco," says High Tide, ne Josiah Pamavatuu, weighing in on the subject. Literally weighing in, because the Samoan crashes the scales at well over three and a half bills. Hence the tag "High Tide," because the ocean level rises anytime he gets in the water. So High Tide's opinion on food commands respect, because he obviously knows what he's talking about. The whole crew is aware that your Pacific Island types know their fish. "Are you talking about yellow tail, ono, opah, mahimahi, shark, or what? It makes a difference, ranking-wise."
"Everything," Boone says, "tastes better on a tortilla."
This is an article of faith with Boone. He's lived his life with it and believes it to be true. You take anything -- fish, chicken, beef, cheese, eggs, even peanut butter and jelly -- and fold them in the motherly embrace of a warm flour tortilla and all those foods respond to the love by upping their game.
Everything does taste better on a tortilla.
"Outside!" High Tide yells.
Boone looks over his shoulder to see the first wave of what looks to be a tasty set coming in.
"Party wave!" hollers Dave the Love God, and he, High Tide, Johnny, and Hang Twelve get on it, sharing the ride into shore. Boone and Sunny hang back for the second wave, which is a little bigger, a little fuller, and has a better shape.
"Your wave!" Boone yells to her.
"Chivalrous or patronizing, you decide!" Sunny yells back, but she paddles in. Boone gets on the wave right behind her and they ride the shoulder in together, a skillful pas de deux on the white water.
Boone and Sunny walk up onto the beach, because the morning session is over and The Dawn Patrol is coming in. This is because, with the exception of Boone, they all have real j-o-b-s.
So Johnny's already stepping out of the outdoor shower and sitting in the front seat of his car putting on his detective clothes -- blue shirt, brown tweed jacket, khaki slacks -- when his cell phone goes off. Johnny listens to the call, then says, "A woman took a header off a motel balcony. Another day in paradise."
"I don't miss that, " Boone says.
"And it doesn't miss you," Johnny replies.
This is true. When Boone pulled the pin at SDPD, his lieutenant's only regret was that it hadn't been attached to a grenade. Despite his remark, Johnny disagrees -- Boone was a good cop. A very good cop.
It was a shame what happened.
But now Boone is following High Tide's eyes back out to the ocean, at which the big man is gazing with an almost reverential intensity.
"It's coming," High Tide says. "The swell."
"Big?" Boone asks.
"Not big," says High Tide. "Huge."
A real thunder crusher.
Like, ka- boom.
What is a wave anyway?
We know one when we see one, but what is it?
The physicists call it an "energy-transport phenomenon."
The dictionary says it's "a disturbance that travels through a medium from one location to another location."
A disturbance.
It's certainly that.
Something gets disturbed. That is, something strikes something else and sets off a vibration. Clap your hands right now and you'll hear a sound. What you're actually hearing is a sound wave. Something struck something else and it set off a vibration that strikes your eardrum.
The vibration is energy. It's transported through the phenomenon of a wave from one location to the other.
Petra Hall steers her starter BMW west on Garnet Avenue.
She alternately watches the road and looks at a slip of paper in her hand, comparing the address to the building to her right.
The address -- 111 Garnet Avenue -- is the correct listing for "Boone Daniels, Private Investigator," but the building appears to be not an office but a surf shop. At least that's what the sign says, a rather unimaginative yet descriptive pacific surf inscribed over a rather unimaginative yet descriptive painting of a breaking wave. And, indeed, looking through the window she can see surfboards, body boards, bathing suits, and, being that the building is half a block from the beach, 111 Garnet Avenue would certainly appear to be a surf shop.
Except that it is supposed to be the office of Boone Daniels, private investigator.
Petra grew up in a climate where the sun is more rumor than reality, so her skin is so pale and delicate that it's almost transparent, in stark contrast to her indigo black hair. Her charcoal gray, very professional, I'm-a-serious-career-woman suit hides a figure that is at the same time slim and generous, but what you're really going to look at is her eyes.
Are they blue? Or are they gray?
Like the ocean, it depends on her mood.
She parks the car next door in front of The Sundowner Lounge and goes into Pacific Surf, where a pale young man behind the counter, who would appear to be some sort of white Rastafarian, is playing a video game.
"Sorry," Petra says, "I'm looking for a Mr. Daniels?"
Hang Twelve looks up from his game to see this gorgeous woman standing in front of him. His stares for a second; then he gets it together enough to shout up the stairs, "Cheerful, brah, civilian here looking for Boone!"
A head peers down from the staircase. Ben Carruthers, glossed "Cheerful" by the PB crew, looks to be about sixty years old, has a steel gray crew cut and a scowl as he barks, "Call me 'brah' one more time and I'll rip your tongue out."
"Sorry, I forgot," Hang Twelve says. "Like, the moana was epic tasty this sesh and I slid over the ax of this gnarler and just foffed, totally shredded it, and I'm still amped from the ocean hit, so my bad, brah."
Cheerful looks at Petra and says, "Sometimes we have entire fascinating conversations in which I don't understand a word that is said." He turns back to Hang Twelve. "You're what I have instead of a cat. Don't make me get a cat."
He disappears back up the stairs with a single word, "Follow."
Petra goes up the stairs, where Cheerful -- a tall man, probably six-six, very thin, wearing a red plaid shirt tucked into khaki trousers -- is already hunched over a desk. Well, she takes it on faith that it's a desk because she can't actually see the surface underneath the clutter of papers, coffee cups, ball hats, taco wrappers, newspapers, and magazines. But the saturnine man is punching buttons on an old-fashioned adding machine, so she decides that it is, indeed, a desk.
The "office," if you can grace it with that name, is a mess, a hovel, a bedlam, except for the back wall, which is neat and ordered.