and I kept glancing back, expecting to see someone pursuing me.
The one-story cottage is of teak, with a cedar-shingle roof.
Weathered to a lustrous silver-gray, the wood takes the caress of
moonlight as a woman’s body receives a lover’s touch. Encircling three
sides of the house is a deep porch furnished with rocking chairs and
gliders.
There are no trees. The landscaping consists only of sand and wild
shore grass. Anyway, the eye is impatient with the nearer view and
favors the sky, the sea, and the shimmering lights of Moonlight Bay,
which look more distant than three-quarters of a mile.
Buying time to settle my nerves, I leaned my bike against the front
porch railing and walked past the cottage, to the end of the point.
There, I stood with Orson at the top of a slope that dropped thirty
feet to the beach.
The surf was so slow that You would have to work hard to catch a wave,
and the ride wouldn’t last long. It was almost a neap tide, though
this was the fourth quarter of the moon. The surf was a little sloppy,
too, because of the onshore wind, which was blustery enough to cause
some chop out here, even though it was all but dead in town.
Offshore wind is best, smoothing the ocean surface. It blows spray
from the crest of the waves, makes them hold up longer, and causes them
to hollow out before they break.
Bobby and I have been surfing since we were eleven: him by day, both of
us by night. Lots of surfers hit the waves by moonlight, fewer when
the moon is down, but Bobby and I like it best in storm waves without
even stars.
We were grommets together, totally annoying surf mongrels, but we
graduated to surf nazis before we were fourteen, and we were mature
boardheads by the time Bobby graduated high school and I took my
equivalency degree for home education. Bobby is more than just a
boardhead now; he’s a surf mensch, and people all over the world turn
to him to find out where the big waves will be breaking next.
God, I love the sea at night. It is darkness distilled into a liquid,
and nowhere in this world do I feel more at home than in these black
swells. The only light that ever arises in the ocean is from
bioluminescent plankton, which become radiant when disturbed, and
although they can make an entire wave glow an intense lime green, their
brightness is friendly to my eyes. The night sea contains nothing from
which I must hide or from which I must even look away.
By the time I walked back to the cottage, Bobby was standing in the
open front door. Because of our friendship, all the lights in his
house are on rheostats; now he had dimmed them to the level of
candlelight.
I haven’t a clue as to how he knew that I had arrived. Neither I nor
Orson had made a sound. Bobby just always knows.
He was barefoot, even in March, but he was wearing jeans instead of
swim trunks or shorts. His shirt was Hawaiian-he owns no other
style-but he had made a concession to the season by wearing a
long-sleeve, crewneck, white cotton sweater under the short-sleeve
shirt, which featured bright quizzical parrots and lush palm fronds.
As I climbed the steps to the porch, Bobby gave me a shaka, the surfer
hand signal that’s easier to make than the sign they exchange on Star
Trek, which is probably based on the shaka. Fold your middle three
fingers to your palm, extend your thumb and little finger, and lazily
waggle your hand. It means a lot of things-hello, what’s up, hang
loose, great ride-all friendly, and it will never be taken as an insult
unless You wave it at someone who isn’t a surfer, such as an L.A. gang
member, in which case it might get You shot dead.
I was eager to tell him about everything that had transpired since
sundown, but Bobby values a laid-back approach to life. If he were any
more laid back, he’d be dead. Except when riding a wave, he values