Doug Dorst - The Surf Guru

She walks softly into the laundry room, where Shane is sleeping on a fluffy tartan dog bed, and she sits down next to him, watches him breathe, in and out, in and out. His ears twitch when she scratches his head. “Shane,” she says quietly. “Wake up, Shane.” He opens his dark eyes halfway, looks at her dreamily. “You want to tell me good luck, baby?” she says. Shane sneezes and falls back asleep.

In the kitchen she makes coffee and pours it into a travel mug. The unrinsed blender sits on the counter in a dried margarita puddle. Broken glass in the sink, pizza scraps on the table, sticky dog tracks across the floor. The phone rings but she just takes a deep breath and walks out the front door into the sun and the dew and the mist of the tick-tick-ticking sprinklers she left on all night. The lawn gleams and there are puddles all along the blacktop. Water, water, water.

She climbs into her car, the blue Fiesta she’s been driving since high school. She’ll have to back out of the U-shaped driveway because Spencer parked his Beetle facing her car, with only a foot or so of space separating them. There’s resistance when she tries to shift into reverse, so she forces it. More resistance, and she hears a grinding noise, then a metallic whine. Still not in gear. She tries again: up off the clutch, then down, shift, grind, whine. Again. Again, until she pulls back on the stick shift so hard, she feels a twinge in her shoulder. She curses the car. No fourth gear, no reverse, but it better get her to Gilroy. Now.

She shifts into first and tries to steer around his car. When the bumpers meet she gives it a little more gas, trying to nudge it out of the way. Fortunately Spencer left it out of gear, so it slowly rolls backward, and a few feet later Jo is free. In her rearview mirror she watches the Beetle ease forward again, settling comfortably back where it had been. She is so focused on the gentle motion of Spencer’s car, though, that she’s slow to realize she has gone off the driveway and is leaving a deep muddy track in the Crenshaws’ sculpted lawn. Fuck me , she thinks. Can’t worry about it now, though. Got to drive.

When she gets to the freeway, she turns on her hazard lights because the Fiesta can only do forty these days. The transmission slips whenever she tries to accelerate hard. Somewhere south of San Jose, in one of those moments before the gears catch, with nervous heat running up her spine and that goddamned sweat dripping down her sides, she dry-swallows another one of Mrs. Crenshaw’s pills and prays to no one in particular: Please, just let me get there. I need this.

The Sunbeam receptionist sits behind an old wooden desk that looks like it was scavenged from a school. Around the edges of the blotter, Jo can see memorials of crushes hacked into the wood: KD + CS. WT AND AB FOREVER.

“I’m here to take the test,” Jo says. “Bud’s expecting me.”

“Oh,” the receptionist says, looking up. “You’re back.” She calls Bud on the intercom, then looks at Jo and says, “Have a seat. There’s coffee if you want it.”

Jo fills a paper cup with coffee, black, and sits in a green vinyl chair pocked with cigarette burns. She picks up a newsmagazine from a box on the floor and tries to read an article, but her vision blurs around the edges and she finds herself locking onto one or two words at a time, not absorbing them but not able to move on. She leafs through, looking at the pictures, and stops on a two-page spread in tropical colors. On the left is a toucan sitting in a tree, its beak open so that it seems to be smiling; on the right is a Happy Couple in bright bathing suits frolicking on a deserted beach. In neon red letters across the bottom it says, Lose yourself in Belize. Which, honestly, sounds like a pretty good idea. But as she stares at the man and woman in the magazine she starts to feel that there’s something important she has forgotten to do, something else she’s fucked up. She can’t figure out what it is, but that thought is there, bubbling around in the tar pit of her brain. What?

There’s a touch on her shoulder and she jumps, dumping her coffee into the box of magazines. She looks up and sees a lanky man with a red goatee and a baseball cap that says YOU PISS ME OFF in block letters. He smells like Right Guard and cigarettes.

“I’m Jim,” he says. “Bud’s busy, so I’m going to give you the test.”

“Sorry about the coffee,” she says. Her tongue feels wrong. Swollen.

“Brenda will clean it up.”

“Clean it up yourself, Jim,” Brenda says from behind the desk.

Jim looks at Jo. He has greedy eyes, she thinks. “You ready?” he asks, and she nods.

He leads her out the back door, onto the paved lot they use for the driving course. As they walk toward the tractor-trailer, he says to her, “We don’t get many girls wanting to drive. Not many good-looking ones, anyway.”

She says nothing.

“Be nice to have a pretty face around here,” he goes on.

“Brenda looks like a horse. You got a boyfriend?” He moves closer to her, their arms almost rubbing, his smoke-and-deodorant cloud closing in on her.

She knows how to play this game, she learned a long time ago, but she’s tired and a little nauseous now and she can’t quite focus her eyes, and, you know what, she’s really, really sick of big, stupid men who have to have everything their way. Fuck that and fuck them. “Yeah, I have a boyfriend,” she says. “He just got out of jail. Assault with a deadly weapon.”

Jim whistles through his teeth, looks around to see if anyone’s watching, leans in closer. “You’re tough,” he says. “I like that. Gotta be tough for this job.”

“Good,” she says, and she keeps walking.

“Bud said you’ve taken the test before.”

“Yeah.”

“Twice.”

“Yeah.”

They stop in front of the rig. It looks impossibly long and unwieldy. She understands in theory how you’re supposed to control the thing when you’re backing it up, but she can’t get her brain to make the right decisions when she’s up there. Not without time to think, breathe, talk herself through it at her own pace. “A pretty girl like you could get certified in about five minutes,” Jim says. He nods up at the cab, huge and red and painted with a tomato haloed by the sun.

She could do it — just say yes, get him off, get the job, and run. Let’s face it, she’s not at her best right now, all floaty and exhausted and numb — really, she’s so out of it that she’d hardly even notice he was there — and to fail again is to fail for good, and then what? She doesn’t want to do anything else. The thoughts spin and buzz around until she realizes she expects herself to say yes to him, and that’s when the calm blooms inside her head and drapes warmth all over her, and she decides she can beat this test, she can drive that goddamn rig as well as anyone, she could take the thing in reverse down Lombard Street if she wanted to. “Cut the shit, Jim,” she says. “Let’s just do the test.”

“Have it your way,” he says, pulling away, his eyes narrowing. He takes off his cap, smooths his thinning, greasy hair. “Start with the inspection. Go.”

Deep breath. She knows the drill, knows it cold. Check the hoses, check the oil, check the coolant. Check the belts and the clutch, the signals and the horn. Driveshaft, air brakes, tires and rims. There’s a rhythm to it, a groove, feel the patterns and forget your nerves. Shock absorbers, slack adjusters, torque arms, mounts. Mounting bolts, locking jaws, kingpin, and so on. It’s a breeze. She climbs into the cab and the engine growls all around her and she feels more powerful, more in control, than she can ever remember.

“All right,” Jim says from the passenger seat. “Now back out of here and follow the yellow lines through the cones. And I want you to pretend that every single one of those cones is a member of my family.”