Doug Dorst - The Surf Guru

Jo wraps the towel tighter. She’s going to have a hard time sleeping tonight, that’s for sure.

She walks across the deck to Spencer, kneels and hugs him hello, the smell of roasted coffee still in his hair, in his JavaPlenty T-shirt. He opens a beer and hands it to her.

“You burned,” Spencer says.

She shrugs.

“Feeling a little better?”

“Not feeling much.” She takes a long, slow sip. “Thanks for coming,” she says.

“No big deal,” he says. “I like you.” It sounds rehearsed, like he was practicing on the drive over. He’s totally into her but is afraid of pushing too hard and scaring her off; she pretends she doesn’t know. It’s simpler that way, for both of them.

She walks to the glass-topped table on the deck and sits, rocking back on two legs of the metal chair. “That prick Rafael didn’t give me any shifts this week,” she says. “Or next.”

“Why do you care?”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t need him anymore. You’re the goddamn Queen of the Road.”

She hesitates. “I failed the driving test,” she tells him. It’s the first time she has said it aloud.

“Oh,” he says. “Sorry.”

I’m not stupid , she wants to tell him. She’s not, she’s got the inspection procedures down cold, knows S-cam air brakes inside and out, can double-clutch with drumbeat precision. It’s just backing up that’s the problem. “You ever drive a tractor-trailer in reverse?” she says, trying to make the words sound casual, fluid, not defensive. “They make you go between all these cones. It’s hard.”

He shakes his head, raises his beer in sympathy. “At least you tried.”

“I get one more chance,” she says. “Tomorrow. If I fuck it up again, they might still let me be a dispatcher.” But she doesn’t want to be a dispatcher, she doesn’t want to live down in the Sunbeam Tomato Freight dormitory and wake up every morning just to go sit in an office. She wants to be out on the road on her own, hauling tomatoes through the western states, doing speed to stay awake, making the thirty-five thousand dollars per season that the brochure promised. She wants to live her life like that Little Feat song, driving her rig from Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonopah. She wants to drive . She finishes her beer, throws the empty in the pool. “But I’ll probably fuck it up again,” she says.

“Hey,” he says. It’s supposed to reassure her. He stands up quickly and takes a step toward her, but he wavers, arms circling almost comically as he tries to gain his balance. She calmly realizes she won’t be able to catch him if he topples over, so she doesn’t move, just watches, hopes for the best.

He rights himself, then turns away from her and stares into the water. “Tell the Crenshaws to have the pool cleaned,” he says after a few seconds of silence. “It’s growing cans.”

“What?”

“Forget it. Dumb joke. I suck.”

Can’t you please just relax , she wants to say. The last thing she needs is anyone else to worry about.

The phone rings while Jo is changing. She yells from the bedroom for Spencer not to pick it up. She is surprised by how loud her voice is.

She walks into the hallway half-dressed and stands in front of the machine as Wayne leaves a nightmare of a message, careening from anger to calm to weepiness to anger again: he can’t believe she didn’t come see him this afternoon, but maybe she’s not answering because she’s already on her way, and he really doesn’t like to get so fucking mad but she doesn’t understand how bad things have gotten for him, and what’s wrong with her that she can’t or won’t understand, and she owes him, she owes him, she has to at least understand that she owes him the simple fucking courtesy of talking to him and it’d better happen soon.

She walks into the kitchen, where Spencer is dropping ice cubes into the blender. He nods toward the phone. “Crazy,” he says. She nods and sits at the kitchen table, watches him make the margaritas. Happy drinks, he calls them.

“Do you want something extra? To take the edge off?” he asks.

“Like what?”

He holds up a small baggie full of yellow pills. “Percodan,” he says. “I bought them off my brother.”

“Do it,” she says.

He drops some of them into the blender. How many, she can’t say.

Spencer pours the drinks and Jo thinks about the first time the two of them slept together. It was a Tuesday night, she remembers — evening visiting hours at the jail — and she’d really meant to go because she hadn’t for the last three weeks. She never missed the visits intentionally, but it was an hour and a half through traffic, and it was hard to see Wayne in there in those orange coveralls, and she hated having to wait in the lounge with all those people coming to visit the real criminals, and she especially hated the security pat-down and the way the guards eyed you so suspiciously that you’d begin to wonder if you really were up to something. So, instead, that night after work she’d gone for a quick drink with Spencer and the rest of the JavaPlenty crew, and whoops, look at the time, oh well, make the next one a double. She knew Wayne had nothing else to look forward to, no one else to think about, no one but her, but he didn’t understand what a burden that was. She couldn’t live up to that. No one could.

The blender rumbles and grinds, drowning out something that Spencer’s trying to say, and the sound makes Jo think of cracking teeth. Finally, Spencer sets the two salt-rimmed glasses on the table. He moves a chair so he can have her talking to his good side. “Do you think he’s dangerous?” he asks.

She makes an effort to sound confident. “Not really,” she says. “It’s just Wayne.”

She can’t remember why she and Spencer went into Missy Crenshaw’s old bedroom in the first place, or how long they’ve been in Missy’s bed together.

“Pictures,” Jo says. There used to be pictures on the wall, photos of her and Missy together as kids, at an apple orchard, at a soccer game, on their eighth-grade double date with the Fagelson twins. All gone, replaced by Missy’s diplomas, three of them, smartly mounted and framed. By moving her head, Jo can make the moon reflect off the glass of each of them in turn.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing,” she says.

She hears a series of plastic clicks. Spencer, setting the alarm. Responsible.

“Give me another,” she says.

“Another what?”

“Pill.”

“No,” he says. “I don’t want you to die on me.”

“I can handle it,” she says.

“You’ve had enough.”

She crawls under the covers and goes to work on him. When she’s done, Spencer, red-faced and sheepish, drops two pills into her hand. She takes one and feeds him the other, then closes her eyes and rests her head on his chest, feels his fingers trace the back of her neck. “Happy,” she says. “Happy.” She says this word again and again. She doesn’t know if she means that she is happy, or was, or will be — if it is a statement, a lament, or a hope — but the sound of the word comforts her, lulls her as she falls away.

At seven-fifteen Jo is jolted awake by the clock radio, tuned to a jazz station. Loud. A squealing, sick-cat saxophone. Spencer doesn’t stir. For a moment, Jo is worried, but she feels breath when she puts her finger under his nose. He’s not dead, just wasted and sleeping with his good ear down.

As soon as she sits up, she feels ice picks behind her eyes and a burn in her stomach. She makes her way to the bathroom and pops four aspirin. In the shower, she tries to shake the heavy fog in her head, running through the checklist of inspection procedures, but she keeps missing steps, easy ones. She can feel herself start to sweat — stinky, cold flop sweat — even as she’s drying herself off. She almost decides to blow off the test, just bail on everything, crawl back into bed, hide, but she takes another look into the medicine cabinet and sees a prescription bottle labeled MARY CRENSHAW — KLONOPIN — AS NEEDED FOR ANXIETY. She shakes a few into her hand. They’re small, so she swallows two. After she dresses, she puts three more tablets in the pocket of her cutoffs, just in case.