Chapter Five

It rained for almost a week after that. If it wasn’t raining, the fog was so thick you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. There was nothing for me to do but hang around the house, watch bad tv reruns and get bored.

By Thursday, my mom was siding with my father. “Ben, maybe you’d be better off working with your father than just moping around the house.”

“I’m not moping,” I lied. I was hiding out from the world until I looked half normal. The black had turned to blue and I hoped it was fading. I kept thinking about Tara. And about surfing. And about the fact that my life was over before I even got my ass out of high school. I ate a lot. Pretty soon I’d be fat as well.

While flipping through the satellite channels, I discovered the sports network had a documentary about old guys who surfed. It was way cool. These were the legendary surfers, now all over sixty, who had surfed the big North Shore waves of Hawaii back in the early 1960s. They showed them at Waimea and Sunset and then shifted to years later when they were surfing in the crowds in California. Some were bald, some had big guts, some were skinny and had a crazed look in their eyes.

And then there was Ray. I didn’t believe it at first. I watched him being interviewed. “Guess we can rightfully call you a kahuna now,” the young interviewer said.

“Guess you can,” Ray said and laughed. It was unmistakably him. They ran some old black-and-white footage of him in 1962 at Malibu. He was smooth as ice. Next it was back to the older Ray surfing a big wave in Northern California. He was on that board I’d seen him ride. He was amazing.

“Any advice to young surfers?” the interviewer asked over the video clip.

“Fight your inner demons,” Ray said. “Be a warrior. Don’t ever let the suckers get to you.”

And then they cut to a commercial for SUVS.

The rain was still pelting down, but I put on my father’s serious rain gear and headed out. I walked to the beach and heard the roar of the storm waves. The beach parking lot was empty—all except for the van with California plates. I banged on the side door and the dog barked.

When the door opened, Ray saw me standing there. “What’s a kahuna?” I blurted out.

Ray laughed. “You’ve been watching too much tv. It rots your mind. Wanna come in out of the rain or do you prefer to drown in it?” He coughed long and hard as I stepped up and inside. I found myself settling into a swivel captain’s chair on the front driver’s side.

“A kahuna is what they call you when you’re old. When you’re young and stupid, you’re a gremmie or a grem or a grommet. When you’re old, you’re a kahuna, or if they don’t like you, you’re a kook. As long as you’re not a poser you’re okay.”

“Poser?”

“Someone who hangs around surf, talks the talk, walks the walk, but doesn’t surf.”

“Oh.”

“What? You, a poser? No way. You got the beauty mark to prove it.”

“But I can’t surf.” I leaned over and petted Mickey D, who was already asleep and snoring on the floor.

Ray coughed again. He closed the door as the rain began to blow in.

“I want you to teach me to surf,” I said quickly.

Ray said nothing. He reached above his head and pulled down an old Surfer magazine. He flipped it to a two-page spread of a surfer, somewhat out of focus, surfing one of the biggest waves I’d ever seen. I read the caption and got the picture.

“I’m not only gonna teach you to surf, kid. I’m gonna teach you to be a wave warrior.”

“Sounds violent.”

“Not violent, dude. It’s a whole different kind of battle.”

I stared at the huge wave again—triple overhead with a threatening lip. “You made it, right?”

Ray shook his head. “Nope. Two seconds after a buddy of mine took that picture I was pearling up to my waist. I got sucked down, chewed up, pulled up to the top and thrown back down under. I got the air knocked out of me, had my arms and legs nearly pulled from their sockets and thought I saw angels in bikinis.”

“Were you scared?”

“No, Ben,” he said sarcastically, “I was feeling just fine. Hell, yes, I was scared. I figured I was about to die.”

“What saved you?”

He closed the magazine and put it back on the shelf. He grinned crazily. “I had this vision, see. It was my grandmother. Yep, right there beneath three thousand million gallons of Pacific Ocean. She spoke to me just as I was about to struggle to get to the surface. ‘Relax,’ she said. ‘If you want to live, you can’t struggle. Let yourself sink.’ Well, that seemed like the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted air and I wanted it badly.”

“But you listened?”

“Son, when your dead grandmother appears to you after the worst wipeout of your life and tells you what to do, you better take the advice.”

“I would have quit after that.”

“I did. For two weeks. But it didn’t take. I just decided to ride ten-foot waves instead of forty-foot waves. My close encounter with the hereafter gave me a new appreciation of life.”

“So now you’re a kahuna?”

“No, man. Now I’m an old kook with an old dog and a bunch of old boards. And I came here to Nova Scotia to...” He stopped himself and looked away.

“To what?”

Ray coughed. “To teach a chubby kid with a black eye how to catch a wave and stand up.”

“When?”

“Whenever the rain stops.”