I remembered Pinn firing the handgun into the ceiling of the church
basement to punctuate the threat that he had leveled against Father Tom
Eliot.
Finally, when no more loonlike cries arose, Bobby said, almost as if
talking to himself, “Probably isn’t necessary, but once in a while it
doesn’t hurt to float the idea of buckshot past them.”
“Who? Who are You warning off?”
I had known him to be mysterious in the past, but never quite so
enigmatic as this.
The dunes continued to command his attention, and another minute of
mental hang time passed before Bobby suddenly looked at me as if he had
forgotten that I was standing beside him. “Let’s go inside. You scrub
off the bad Denzel Washington disguise, and I’ll slam together some
killer tacos.”
I knew better than to press the issue any further. He was being
mysterious either to stoke my curiosity and enhance his treasured
reputation for weirdness or because he had good reason to keep this
secret even from me. In either case, he was in that special Bobby
place, where he’s as inaccessible as if he were on his board, halfway
through a tube radical, in an insanely hollow wave.
As I followed him into the house, I was still aware of being watched.
The attention of the unknown observer prickled my back, like
hermit-crab tracks on a surf-smoothed beach. Before closing the front
door, I scanned the night once more, but our visitors remained well
hidden.
The bathroom is large and luxurious: an absolute-black granite floor,
matching countertops, handsome teak cabinetry, and acres of
beveled-edge mirrors. The huge shower stall can accommodate four
people, which makes it ideal for dog grooming.
Corky Collins-who built Bobby’s fine house long before Bobby’s
birth-was an unpretentious guy, but he indulged in amenities. Like the
four-person, marble-lined spa in the corner diagonally across the room
from the shower. Maybe Corky-whose name had been Toshiro Tagawa before
he changed it-fantasized about orgies with three beach girls or maybe
he just liked to be totally, awesomely clean.
As a young man-a prodigy fresh out of law school in 1941, at the age of
only twenty-one-Toshiro had been interred in Manzanar, the camp where
loyal Japanese Americans remained imprisoned throughout World War II.
Following the war, angered and humiliated, he became an activist,
committed to securing justice for the oppressed. After five years, he
lost faith in the possibility of equal justice and also came to believe
that most of the oppressed, given a chance, would become enthusiastic
oppressors in their own right.
He switched to personal-injury law. Because his learning curve was as
steep as the huge monoliths macking in from a South Pacific typhoon, he
rapidly became the most successful personal-injury attorney in the San
Francisco area.
In another four years, having banked some serious cash, he walked away
from his law practice. In 1956, at the age of thirty-six, he built
this house on the southern horn of Moonlight Bay, bringing in
underground power, water, and phone lines at considerable expense.
With a dry sense of humor that prevented his cynicism from becoming
bitterness, Toshiro Tagawa legally changed his name to Corky Collins on
the day he moved into the cottage, and he dedicated every day of the
rest of his life to the beach and the ocean.
He grew surf bumps on the tops of his toes and feet, below his
kneecaps, and on his bottom ribs. Out of a desire to hear the
unobstructed thunder of the waves, Corky didn’t always use earplugs
when he surfed, so he developed an exostosis; the channel to the inner
ear constricts when filled with cold water, and because of repeated
abuse, a benign bony tumor narrows the ear canal. By the time he was
fifty, Corky was intermittently deaf in his left ear.
Every surfer experiences faucet nose after a thrashing skim session,
when your sinuses empty explosively, pouring forth all the seawater
forced up your nostrils during wipeouts; this grossness usually happens
when You’re talking to an outrageously fine girl who’s wearing a
bun-floss bikini. After twenty years of epic hammering and subsequent
nostril Niagaras, Corky developed an exostosis in his sinus passages,