He retreats past the restrooms to the rear emergency exit, shoulders through the door and into the Santa Anas howling in his face.

When he rounds the building, a Laguna Fire Department engine has already claimed the prime Coast Highway parking slots right out front, and the firefighters are arching water high over the sidewalk and the embankment and onto the Barrel. A fire truck, its red flank throbbing, settles longwise—half onto the curb and half off—and its search lights illuminate the throbbing, windblown water cascading through the dark sky, into the face of the restaurant and the third-floor apartment and its roof.

Casey just stands there for a moment, feels the heat of the Barrel’s wooden walls and the warm fury of the Santa Ana wind blasting down the canyon to the sea. Embers rise and fall through the smoky night. Brushes tiny sparks off his robe.

Help us, God.

Calls his mom, who’s heading in on Laguna Canyon Road, traffic already backing up in both directions. If she can’t get onto Coast Highway she’ll use the Art Festival parking lot and run to the Barrel.

Calls Brock.

But the call drops just as two Laguna Beach patrolmen order him off the property, and when Casey hesitates, they each take an arm and guide him to the steps leading down to the sidewalk.

“Okay, man,” he says, shrugging them off. “I’m going.”

“Sorry, Casey,” one says. “You’re in danger here.”

Casey joins the growing batch of spectators cordoned off behind a police barricade. Sees the helicopter tilting in from the east, another circling high.

The wind funnels down from the mountains, pushing Brock and Mahina southwest down Laguna Canyon Road as if they’re hurrying him to the Barrel.

Short of Coast Highway, just past the Art Festival grounds, the traffic has come to a stop. He sees flashing lights up ahead and cops turning the cars around. Ahead of him, drivers pick their moments to U-turn back out of the canyon.

He waits a full minute without moving, gets a faint whiff of the same sickening smell he breathed for three straight days at the Feather Fire evacuation center in Mendocino.

Sees the faint orange smoke rising south and west of here, the sparks rising in the black sky like campfire embers.

Brock feels that familiar anger crawling up through him. Knows he shouldn’t have left Casey alone in the apartment.

Knows he should have truly listened to that sick fuck Jimmy Wu and his smarmy, know-it-all daughter making their lame moves on Casey and Mom. Turning Mom’s fire comment into a not-so-veiled threat.

You knew. You let your guard down.

Santa Anas, he thinks: best time to set a fire if you want things to burn fast. Ask any arsonist. They do it all the time.

He gets a break in the oncoming cars, cranks a U-turn and floors it back to Broadway, tells the uniform he’s Brock Stonebreaker, a licensed pastor, lies that he lives right up here on Third Street, kids at home, please let me through, and incredibly the young cadet lets him through.

He screams up the Third Street hill, tires smoking, zigs and zags Bent to Park to Short to Wilson, then down Thalia toward Coast Highway.

He can see orange flames atop the Barrel, leaning back, a rippling, wind-blown wall. Silver rivers fraying in the wind. The second-floor apartment windows belch fire and the roof spits whirling dervishes from between the tiles.

“Brock, this is most very evil.”

He parks in someone’s driveway on Thalia, runs down the middle of the street in his flip-flops and swim trunks and the Go Dogs shirt for Coast Highway, Mahina just steps behind him.

Hits Coast Highway and looks north, where the Barrel burns before him like an enormous bush.

Bottom to top.

All sides.

Flames bent west with the wind.

He gets to the barricade but the cops won’t let him through this time.

He sees his mom, Casey, and Mae standing in mute shock, their faces burnished by the flames.

20

Looking Back—

WHO WAS JOHN STONEBREAKER AND WHAT WENT WRONG AT MAVERICKS?

By Jen Stonebreaker

Part three of a special series for Surf Tribe Magazine

Remember “Adios,” the Linda Ronstadt song about running away from home when she was seventeen to be with some man on the California coast?

That was me but I had a year on Linda.

I said yes to Cortes Bank.

Which John said was the biggest surfable wave on Earth.

Said it was rough and cold out there.

Rough and cold indeed.

We arrived near Cortes Bank at sunrise, after a punishing journey in a small cabin cruiser, the twenty-two-foot Skipjack, the sky dark with clouds, a biting, six-knot wind out of the northwest.

The boat bobbed like a toy on the swells mounding and passing under us. A few hundred feet from us, the peak of the undersea mountain unleashed the waves in a succession of enormous peaks breaking right. Out on Cortes Bank you’re a hundred miles from shore. There’s no land in sight, nothing to gauge the size of the waves, or the boat you’re on, or even your own speck of a body struggling for balance on the wet deck.

Watching and hearing the waves breaking, I remembered the stories and lore that had surrounded the Cortes Bank for centuries: accounts of when this now-submerged mountain range was an island stretching north toward Catalina, where warriors and fishermen had drowned when their canoes capsized; and later of the wooden galleons and trading ships that had wrecked and sunk with all onboard, of sharks large enough to swallow a man whole, of yard-long lobsters hugging the rocks just below the surface, of compasses sent awhirl and radios jammed by atmospheric anomalies that seemed to arrive on the backs of the monstrous surf.

Nobody onboard Skipjack—there were only five of us—had ever ridden a wave there.

John and I wrestled the jet ski off its home-welded rack and into the heaving sea. He jumped in and climbed on and started it up with a burst of white noxious smoke. Revved the engine against the roar of a wave breaking fifty yards away, a plume of white tearing off its crest as the lip curled over and the face stood upright.

Thirty feet? Forty?

The seasick photographer shot.

The captain kept his pitching boat from being pulled into the waves.

Randy Payne—who had read the centuries-old charts and ship’s logs, and volumes of Navy archives and diaries to pinpoint the location of once mythical Cortes Bank—jumped into this cauldron with a rigid smile and his eight-foot gun, and paddled to the ski. I watched him, bobbing on his board like a praying mantis blown into a rushing river, praying the shark stories weren’t true.

John eased the jet ski into place and threw Randy the handled nylon waterski rope.