The paddle-out was grueling. But Ethan had been through worse. Of course, that was in the months and years still to come.
Then he was in the lineup with four other guys. All of them staring out to sea, breathing hard from the paddle-out, hearts close to redline.
When the next set formed shadow lines on the horizon, Ethan moved into position.
Ready.
CHAPTER
SIX
The next morning, Ethan woke up to discover Banzai snoring softly at his side. He rolled from his bed, knowing today he would face everything the contest had kept at bay.
He stood by the cracked window in his eight-by-ten room and recalled being strapped to the gurney. Sonya hissing for him to remember. Then the blinding mental flash, the crushing weight of a stopped heart, the clenching pain, the immobility, the end.
Banzai scratched at the door and whined, drawing him back to the new present. Ethan slipped on a pair of board shorts and opened the door.
Sawyer called, “Yo, champ.”
“I didn’t win,” he replied and slipped into the bathroom. When he emerged, Sawyer was still standing there, grinning. Ethan added, “Not even close.”
“That’s not what Hennie said. He told the reporter that if Florida was growing a crop of surfers like Ethan Barrett, the pro tour had better watch out. On account of—”
“I heard it already.” He walked out back and greeted his other roomies. They looked so young, so confident. The invulnerability of youth shone from their sleepy faces. Ethan made himself a bowl of cereal and endured their play-by-play, wishing he could lose himself in the simple pleasure of rewriting his own memories.
The contest final had been better than any midnight imaginings. He and Hennie had dominated the heat. The other finalists were basically left fighting for third place. The waves backed off a trifle, the closeouts had lessened in number, and the two of them had started taking incredible risks. Pushing each other’s envelope, shouting encouragement, laughing and joking and owning the hour.
Ethan had intentionally let Hennie take the top three waves and build up an insurmountable lead. Hennie responded with a warrior’s honor, twice telling Ethan that he should go pro and Hennie would back his play. The second time he said it, Ethan paddled up close. The waves were bunched and muscled, but it didn’t matter. Nothing did. They owned the day.
Hennie’s mother was Indian, and his father was a Zulu chief. He had been barred from competing in apartheid South Africa, so with O’Neill’s support, he had taken his act abroad. The year he first won the world title, the pro surfing association gave the South African apartheid regime a choice: let Hennie compete, or they would never support another contest in their country. Surfing was the third most popular sport in South Africa after rugby and soccer. The Botha regime caved.
Ethan had actually visited the slum outside Port Elizabeth where Hennie was born. By the time Ethan arrived, Mandela was in power and Hennie was a rising star in the new South African parliament. Botha’s regime had been relegated to the history books, along with his hated secret police. But as Ethan had walked the rutted road with the sewage spilling down the open trench, he could almost hear the snarling police dogs.
Ethan said to Hennie, “This is your heat. Your contest.”
“What is this, some new form of a psych-out?”
“I’m not . . . I don’t want to go pro.”
Hennie checked to make sure there was no incoming set, then asked, “You sure about that?”
“This is your last season,” Ethan said. “Win here in Florida. Rejoin the main circuit and take Hawaii. Go out as the world number one. When you return home, you lift up some other kid from the slums of Durban.”
Hennie’s jaw bunched up tight as a fist. “You really know how to blow a mate out of the water.”
“Some other kid the world wants to dismiss as a no-account,” Ethan went on. “Some kid who is almost ready to give in to the temptation of futile rage.”
Hennie’s tension grew to where he looked ready to fight. Or weep. He pointed out beyond Ethan and said, “Here comes your wave, mate.”
He was right. The peak was taking aim straight at Ethan. He glanced around and saw one of the finalists flailing through a ragged closeout, the other struggling down in the impact zone. It was Ethan’s wave.
Sometimes the wave communicated through the board, or so it seemed to Ethan. Sometimes the connection to the ocean was so strong that the concept of limits, of fear, even of thought, just vanished. For one fleeting instant, he did not just bond with the wave. He joined it.
This was one of those waves.
Ethan entered the tube, came out, spun off the lip, slipped down to the pit, saw the lip curling over, and got tubed a second time. When the ledge started to feather and close out, Ethan took a ridiculous risk because he knew he could make it. He lifted up so that his board actually danced along the feathering lip. It was a small-wave maneuver, when there was not the sort of power and risk of today’s swell. When the wave crashed down, Ethan did not slide off and finish as logic dictated. Instead, he kept surfing the broken wave, riding on top of the foam ball. The move was called a floater, because that was exactly how it felt, just coasting over air and spume. There was no control, no way to even steer. But instead of eating him like it should, the wave did not completely fall. Rather, it sectioned, and up ahead the wall held up like a pristine invitation. Ethan’s floater brought him into an inside section where he crouched down, so tight his knees met his chest, and was tubed a third time.
When he came out and the wave ended and reality gripped him once more, he was close enough to the shore to hear the crowd screaming.
The clock showed less than three minutes left, not enough time for him to paddle out. Ethan rode the next break to shore, then watched Hennie take the wave of the day. The tube was so large that Hennie stood up straight, all six feet two of him, and extended his arms out wide to either side without touching water. He emerged and threw two sweeping trough-to-lip maneuvers that sent rooster tails up high as the sky. He rode and he flipped and he rode, and when it was all done and the Klaxon had sounded, Hennie had stepped off the board onto dry sand.
Now Ethan ate his cereal and studied the photograph that dominated the Florida Today’s front page. He and Hennie were on the winners’ stand, cups and checks in one hand, arms around each other’s shoulders, still laughing from the thrill of owning the day.
Sawyer rose from the table and tapped his watch. “We’ve got to clock in.”
There were good-natured groans from the others, until Ethan said, “I’m not coming. I quit.”
The guys who had formed his team through college stared at him. Sawyer said, “There’s the matter of your paycheck.”
One of the others said, “Second place paid twenty-five thou. I’d already be gone.”
Sawyer whined, “But you love that job.”
“I did,” Ethan agreed. He felt a flutter of nerves over changing the course of history already written. Again.
Sawyer demanded, “What are you going to do?”
Because he was his best friend, Ethan replied, “I need to give my brother a hand with something important.”
Ethan did not bother to call Adrian and say he was coming. His brother had made Ethan a key to every place he had ever lived. They were never much for personal discussions, especially when it came to family. Adrian was a closed book. He lived for work. Where so many of the firm’s young associates burned out after a few years of eighty-hour weeks, Adrian thrived. When he finally married, fourteen months before getting murdered, his widow-to-be was a neurobiologist running her own research company. Sonya was as driven as Adrian.