I was his loyal girl, his sidekick, and, at nineteen years old, his wife. Early, for sure, but it felt natural and right. We were married at Waimea Falls Park, then caravanned with family and friends up to Sunset Beach, which had caught a small December swell breaking six to eight feet, good shoulders, very shapely. Honeymooned all of December on the North Shore and hustled home for the winter quarter at UCI. That was where I rode my first waves over twelve feet, beautifully shaped freight trains of speed and power, the sheer weight of them enough to break boards and bones.
Married and happy. Fueled by waves and love.
Sex from the sublime to the comedic, the urgent to the languid. Frantic seconds. Long hours.
And waves. Weekends we surfed California: Blacks, Cortes Bank on the rare days it would break for us, Salt Creek, the Santa Ana River Jetty, Huntington Beach, Malibu, Rincon, Hollister Ranch, and Mavericks. Mavericks, of course. Anytime a winter swell lined up and we had a couple of days off from my classes and John’s part-time UPS work at the Anaheim hub, we’d drive all Friday night to Half Moon Bay in the Westphalia and find ourselves, teeth chattering, in the dawn darkness of the scariest break in the world. A writer once described Mavericks as “a portal to the dark side.” And on mornings like that, with fifty-foot crushers lining up to hit the reef, so much fog you could hardly see them until they were towering over you, it seemed to be the dark side indeed.
John towed me into an eighteen-foot Mavericks wave on my twentieth birthday. It was a lumbering, uneven thing but the face was smooth and after my drop, it sectioned beautifully. I rode it well but wiped out badly. Managed to get back onto my board and ride out of the impact zone on my belly, until the whitewater pushed me into a soft valley that seemed unconcerned by the fury around it. I breathed very hard for a very long time. Then paddled back into the lineup and took the tow rope from John again.
That wave didn’t change my life; it gave me focus. It gave me what I wanted. Not John and Mike Stonebreaker’s God, but something bigger: freedom. Freedom through velocity. Skidding along behind the jet ski before dropping into that wave, I looked out at the distant hills and the Pillar Point Marina filled with matchstick boats, and the houses of Princeton-by-the-Sea, small as Monopoly pieces. After my first Mavericks tow-in, I didn’t want just waves anymore; I wanted big waves. To give me freedom, speed, and release. To let me ride them, these gigantic stallions stampeding in from the depths from miles away.
I wasn’t John anymore.
As I had wanted to be, from the first time I saw him surfing Rockpile when I was twelve.
Three years later things were different.
By then, John and I had seen much of the world on terrifying, beautiful days at Mavericks, Jaws, Teahupo’o, Cortes Bank, Todos Santos, Nazaré.
In spite of spotty attendance at UCI, my writing was good, and I was on track for early graduation and honors. I’d managed to publish some surfing articles in the LA Times, the Orange County Register, and the Daily Pilot. I had full-time offers from two of them.
We’d moved into a rental on Castle Rock, high above Laguna Canyon Road, a house built on caissons so when you walked in, you were standing in the sky. Little cars and houses below, like looking down from a giant wave.
I was absolutely faithful to my birth control, but guess what?
I miscarried.
Felt some little spirit inside leave me for parts unknown. Really hurt. Empty and disappointed though I didn’t want a baby yet.
Picked myself up and got back in the water, every day, surfing hard. Writing hard, too, getting it all down. Surfing and sadness, putting my heartbreak into words that I could sell.
I’d become the ninth-ranked female big-wave surfer in the world, out of ten.
John was fourth of fifty.
We were tight, emotionally and physically.
By fall, the Monsters of Mavericks was just weeks away.
I could feel that big swell out there, headed for Half Moon Bay, building speed. The same as I’d felt that baby trying to land inside me.
21
Three days after the burning of the Barrel, Brock and Casey cruise King Jim Seafood in the Port of Long Beach in Casey’s pickup, surfboards bagged in the bed.
The main reason they’re here is to case King Jim Seafood with an eye for action.
An eye for an eye, Brock calls it. But Casey’s not so sure.
Jimmy Wu’s HQ is a low brick building huddled among others in a small business park beneath towering container ships, and rows of terminal cranes swinging containers through the sky to the docks and trucks below. The port is in constant motion, a heaving jungle of steel and concrete, chain link and railroad tracks. Skinny palms sway.
“What a place for smugglers,” says Brock. “A port that handles the entire Pacific Ocean and every country near it. And once the goods are here, thousands of trucks and trains to the rest of the Western Hemisphere. After that, you refill your containers with what the Eastern Hemisphere needs, crane them onto those freighters, and send them back.”
“Like they could have done to Mae,” says Casey. “Bette Wu is a liar. She said they wouldn’t have done that. Then she comes up to LA and tries to buy the Barrel out from under Mom and chats me up while they, like, burn it down. I could slap her for that. Not literally, I mean.”
Brock marvels, again, at his minutes-older brother’s gullibility and general innocence. A trusting heart is a liability on Earth, Brock believes. And very strongly does not believe in turning the other cheek, and most of the other Bible babble that the world—led by ministers like grandpa Pastor Mike Stonebreaker who, bless his heart—takes as, well, the gospel truth. Don’t tell the victims of fire, flood, cold, heat, starvation, war, betrayal, and disease to turn their cheeks. Help them not to turn their cheeks. Help them fight back. Help them win.
“I shouldn’t have conked in Mom’s apartment, Brock. It’s my bad and I own it. It was two o’clock by the time I locked the Barrel and went upstairs. I had some tea but still fell asleep.”
“You did what you could, Casey. You fought. You’ve got the burns that prove it.”
Brock looks at his brother’s face and arms, the backs of his hands. Small, painful, slow-to-heal burns.
“I can’t believe they put the fire bombs in Amazon Prime boxes,” says Casey. “With the logos and the black tape with the smiling whatever it is on them. You know, that squiggly, wormy thing? I guess it’s supposed to be a smile but it reminds me of an axolotl. The Japanese love axolotls. They have whole stores dedicated to axolotls. I did a Seiko shoot in Tokyo and went in one.”
“It was smart and simple,” says Brock. “A driver and a delivery guy in those matching golf shirts. A black Sprinter that any shipper might use. Easy to rent. Amazon boxes that everybody’s used to seeing. Delivered to the Barrel on a late, dark night, long after it’s closed and empty. Boxes filled with plastic bottles of gasoline, gunpowder, and cell signal detonators.”
“But I might have recognized the delivery guy from the security tape. Even with his cap pulled down low. He looked like one of the shark finners that was on the Empress II.”
“Might doesn’t count, Casey.”
Brock—with his teenage experience growing and smuggling pot in Riverside and Laguna, and later, his months as a volunteer fighter in Ukraine—is impressed by Jimmy Wu’s crafty arson.
“Then they set them off by phone,” he says. “Waited a minute to enjoy the show. That’s when you saw them scream off.”
“Sergeant Bickle said it was one of the ballsiest arsons he’d ever seen,” says Casey.
Brock agrees. “Nobody can ID them from the security video, including you, Case. It’s what security video almost always is—too fucked up to tell anything for sure. Smeared and jerky and useless.”
