Doug Dorst - The Surf Guru

Jo floats naked on the inflatable chair. The tennis ball, blackened with dirt and dog spit, bobs in the water next to her. The dog sits at the edge of the pool, fixing her with smoky eyes and waiting for her to throw. She is tired and a little drunk and she just wants to close her eyes, but she gives in. She has only a few more days with Shane, a sleek black lab from a long line of movie dogs. She wishes he were her own. It takes so little to make him happy.

“Last one, baby,” she says, picking up the ball. She throws it as hard as she can, spilling her beer on herself and nearly capsizing the chair. Shane spins and bounds into the yard, hurls himself skyward to snatch the ball at the apex of a bounce, then takes a celebratory tumble through the dry grass and dirt. He trots back to the pool, tags jingling, and drops the ball in the water next to her.

“No more,” she says. “The girl needs to rest.” The dog cocks his head and eyes her curiously. Jo avoids his gaze and instead looks at her pink hi-top Chucks at the far end of the redwood deck. One of them has her car keys tucked inside. It’s not too late to drive out to Stockton to see Wayne, like she promised him. It’s really not. She could still get there in time for dinner.

Shane barks — a staccato, scolding burst — and she closes her eyes, forces herself to count off the reasons she can’t go, shouldn’t go:

One. It’s over. He needs to understand this.

Two. She’s had four or five or maybe six beers.

Three. Her car can’t make the trip. The transmission is screwed up. She lost fourth gear yesterday.

Four. She invited Spencer to come over and hang out after his shift. She could change her mind and he wouldn’t complain, but still.

Five. She has the test tomorrow morning all the way down in Gilroy. It’s her last chance at getting certified. She should get a good night’s sleep, show up fresh.

No, the best thing she can do is forget Wayne, forget the test, forget it all for now. Concentrate on the warm sun on skin, the cool tickle of sweat, the sweet haze of alcohol and early summer. The beer in her hand is warm now, but she shakes the last sip into her mouth anyway, swallows, shifts her weight in the chair, relaxes her shoulders.

Shane gives a squeaky yawn and pads off to lie in the shade under the bougainvillea that overhangs the deck. Jo lets the can roll from her fingers into the water, where it floats with the other empties, glittering silver flotsam. Within minutes she is asleep.

When Jo had awakened in the Crenshaws’ canopy bed that morning, she’d lain still for almost an hour, feeling spent and washed out, ignoring the phone whenever it rang. She finally got up to go to the bathroom, where she swallowed three aspirin. In the kitchen she made a pot of coffee and filled Shane’s bowl with water. She did the dishes from last night’s dinner, threw out the empty wine bottle, put away the bottle of Mr. Crenshaw’s scotch that she hadn’t remembered taking out.

When the coffee was ready, she poured it into the mug she’d been using every morning for the three weeks she’d been there. It had a photo of Shane on the side — a Halloween snapshot of the dog dressed as an astronaut, sniffing at a jack-o’-lantern. The costume looked professionally made: a shiny silver suit, NASA patches and all, a plastic helmet (without a face shield, so his snout could poke through), a jet pack on his back. What Jo loved about the photo was not that Shane looked cute, which he did, but that he also looked serene, like he was calmly weathering an indignity that he knew would be temporary, that soon it would be over and he would be able to go back to fetching balls and chasing squirrels. Jo had decided a while ago to take the mug with her when she left. Tell the Crenshaws it broke.

The answering machine in the hallway flashed three new messages. She carried the mug with her, burned her mouth on the first sip, and pressed PLAY on the machine. The first message was Rafael, her boss at JavaPlenty, telling her she wouldn’t be getting any shifts for a week, maybe more. The second was Missy Crenshaw, Jo’s best friend through high school — soon to become Dr. Crenshaw —calling to see if her parents were back from their trip yet. As an afterthought, Missy added a quick “Hi, Jo, if you’re there.” Jo didn’t mind; it had been a long time since they’d had much to say to each other.

The third message was Wayne, telling Jo he’d taken a fuckload of pills the night before and had to have his stomach pumped and he just wanted her to know.

Later she would guess that she had gone into shock, because she felt nothing. Played his message again and still felt nothing. Nothing. The next thing she’d notice feeling would be frustration — the door-slamming, wall-kicking kind — as she searched the house for her car keys, and after that, disgust when, with keys in hand, she realized she was about to do exactly what he wanted her to do. She played the message again and heard something she hadn’t heard before, a quiet hitch in his throat just as he hung up, a sound that could have been the beginning of a laugh or a sob or something else entirely.

She sat on the floor in the hallway with her sneakers on but unlaced, running her thumb up and down over the jags of the ignition key. Her eyes drifted to the potted snake plant, which was now a sickly yellow, and she realized she hadn’t watered anything in two weeks, maybe more. Water the plants, water the flowers, water the lawn, Mr. Crenshaw had said, pounding his fist into his palm, joking but strangely worked up, too. Mist those bromeliads. Soak that mossy-looking thing near the kitchen sink. Water the herb garden. Hear me, Jo? Water, water, water. She hadn’t forgotten, really. She just hadn’t done it.

She sat for a long time, staring at the dying plant and nursing several pangs of failure that all bled together, until Shane jingled into the room like a wind-chime breeze and blew his dog breath into her face.

Spencer’s reedy voice, calling her name. She sleepily calls back to him, then remembers she’s not wearing anything. She rolls off the floating chair into the safe embrace of the eighty-degree water.

He walks down the stone steps to the pool, carrying a twelve-pack. He looks a little like John Lennon in his Imagine phase: long and stringy brown hair; little round glasses; thin, sad face. He’s short and slight — Wayne could put him out with one punch. She probably should’ve called someone bigger and tougher, just in case, but Spencer’s the best friend she has these days. She watches him closely as he negotiates the steps; he has a problem with one of his ears and his balance often deserts him. Afraid of distracting him, she waits until he is safely seated and swirling his feet in the pool before she says anything.

“Close your eyes a second,” she says, breaststroking to the ladder. “I’m nude.”

“They’re closed,” he says.

Jo climbs out of the pool, her back to him. She knows he’s peeking but she doesn’t care. She’s grateful that he’s here keeping her company, and it’s not like they haven’t ended up in bed together before. A glimpse of ass isn’t such a big deal — maybe it’s even a small way for her to say thank you. As she wraps herself in a towel, though, she finds herself smiling ruefully, because really, it was her ass that started everything going so wrong with Wayne: they’re at a bowling alley in Lodi on fifty-cent longneck night — Wayne’s already in a bad mood, he couldn’t find his keys earlier, and she really rode him about it (hypocrite!) — Jo does a happy butt-wiggling dance back to the seats after she picks up the eight and ten, some button-down jerk-off in the next lane says something rude, Wayne shouts back as the pins reset, there’s glaring across the plastic seats while Jo laughs to herself and swigs her beer, and then there’s a volley of fists that ends with a bottle cracked over the scoring desk and a spray of red over the varnished wood. Assault with a deadly weapon. No prior record? Nine months. Bang .