Paul Levine - Riptide

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.