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It was the tide that brought him in, the tide and the siren call of adventure. It seemed so much like a threat now that it wanted to take him away again.
*
Cody didn’t go back to Shiverpool, after the contest. What was the point? Z shrugged when he bought it up, two days before the whale set off on its one-way trip back around the world, all the way to the freezing ass-crack of the Antarctic. He plucked a bum chord on his optimistic three-stringed uke and said, “Why don’t you stay? We got boards, got the beach, got my shack you can squat in.”
“It’s your shack, man,” Cody replied, not wanting to seem eager.
“You know how to fish, right? You can pay me back in lunch.” And that was as complicated as it got with Z.
Cody took Lani with him down to the shallow pool where the dumbest fish suckled on the rocks, saving them half the work and salting themselves. He could just reach right in and pull them off with a wet smack like his Mom’s kisses. She shrugged too, making a neat pile of their dinner, but hers had more of a smile with it. “Do you want to go home?”
“No,” Cody said, not even thinking about it.
“So don’t. Stay.”
“Do you—I mean, d’you want me to?”
Lani’s shrug and smile softened. “Sure,” she said simply. So he didn’t go back to Shiverpool.
The island was calmer after the exodus, the merch stands and tents and cleaned-up trash leaving the sand pockmarked like a stricken battlefield. Cody found an abandoned pair of board shorts and remarked that he could see why their owner left them behind; Lani discovered an ancient, tattered flyer from the big surf a decade back, with Z’s youthful scrawl on it, and kept it in case someone came back to claim it. Z slept late in his tree and did not help with the clean up. Old habits and that.
Over the next week, the three of them made his shack hospitable again. They put the shards of his old board in the dirt on the lip of the forest, like a road marker, a shrine to the old king. With the island empty, though, they never got many visitors. Lani took down the rotting pine leaves that maybe once resembled a door and got Z to nail in a new, wooden one, so Cody could sleep in, have some privacy. Cody did stay there some nights, down on the beach with the sound of the surf lulling him to sleep, but most times he’d just doze in a spare hammock strung across the roots of Z’s hulking tree, too lazy and full of clams and the suspect beer Z brewed himself to lumber back to the shore.
Z sometimes forgot he was Z when he’d had a few drinks, a few more clams, and Cody had to call him Geek to get any attention. All Z’s trophies were engraved Zeke Topanga, but Z didn’t answer to that either. Besides, those trophies were beyond polishing and buried behind a year’s worth of dirty dishes, empty seashells and beach detritus. The name was as forgotten as the shine on those bronze cups.
Lani still had to work, took a class once a week for the little ones on the island, just basic strokes and board techniques. Cody helped out sometimes. Sometimes not. Sometimes he just stood at the bottom of Lani’s lifeguard tower and shouted up to ask her whether they were going steady or not yet. “What do you think?” Lani called back, not looking at him.
“I’d say yes? Yes. I’d say that, that’s totally what I’d say.” Lani didn’t reply, and Cody couldn’t tell from the angle whether she was smiling or not. He took her silence as agreement.
The night sky was crazy clear on Pen Gu, the stars like pin-pricks punched into dark paper. One night, Z and Cody lay in the sand looking up at their, their heads close, a fire crackling just out of sight, and Z told him about the day Lani’s parents died. An oil spill, closer to the mainland; their first time off the island in years, what with Lani being so young, barely hatched. They’d left her in Z’s care for the day, and he remembered arguing. He had to train, he’d better things to do with his time than babysit, the swim wasn’t that long, couldn’t she just tag along?
They’d struggled up the beach shivering and drenched in the stuff, died of the toxins within days. The spill itself never made it to Pen Gu; just its consequences. “Lani didn’t get it,” Z said, his voice quiet and calm. “Didn’t understand why her parents had left, come home, and then gone again so quick.”
Cody felt like he should say something comforting. Instead, all he could think of was, “My Pop died too. Eaten by a killer whale.”
Z didn’t judge him his lack of empathy. “Sucks not being at the top of the food chain,” he said simply.
Z camped out in the shack that night, slept close to Cody. When they woke and found their backs touching, unconsciously comforting, they didn’t comment on it. Just cleared their throats and stretched and went out for a silent surf. Cody never told Lani about that conversation, but went with her later in the day to lay a wreath on the beach, sat with her until the surf lapped at it curiously, accepted it, and pulled it gently into its steady drift and out to sea.
*
Cody had stood on all four corners of the island, and there wasn’t a speck of land to be seen from any. He knew it was out there, though. Just like he knew Pen Gu was out there, back in Shiverpool.
*
The message came via one irate dolphin, long distance, and Cody sat on the news for about a week. It distracted him; he wiped out every single tube they rode that week. Z laughed at him at first, that infantile laugh of his that still found fart jokes and double entendres hilarious, but after a while he just looked at Cody annoyed and disappointed and said, “Man, I can’t deal with you when you’re like this.” Cody watched the big black hill of his bulk paddle back to shore, and felt kind of shitty. Lani hid her dissatisfaction better, and just touched Cody mildly, on his face, and told him he could talk if he needed to talk.
It was Cody’s eighteenth birthday, and the night was heavier than usual, balmy but thick with it; the moon distant and watchful, half in shadow, only somewhat intrigued by their fireside party. Z plied Cody with booze, ignored Lani’s disapproving clucks, gave him the board he’d won the sixth annual Pen Gu surf-off on and told him not to wipe out on it and shame its good history.
“I won’t, dude,” Cody said, holding it reverently. “I won’t, I’ll take it all the way.”
“You’ve got a year to get some practice in,” Lani said, hitting him fondly. (He found out later she had taken Z aside and told him he needed to give something to Cody, for his birthday. It hadn’t crossed Z’s mind.)
“A year—I guess a year.” Z’s brew was stupid strong and smelt of grain and damp earth. Cody probably would’ve stopped there if he weren’t so drunk. “I mean—there’s other contests I could win. I could win those, I reckon so, I didn’t win this time, but I could win those.”
The fire was burnt down to its embers.
“Joe’s invited me to LA,” Cody blurted out, words thick like spit. “There’s a big thing in LA next month and I’m thinking about—I was thinking I could go.”
“Those west coast surfers,” Z said roughly. “All peacocks and posers.”
Cody shrugged. “It’s not as prestigious but we all gotta start somewhere, right?”
He had, as a hatchling, snuck out of bed when his Ma was asleep to watch their monochrome television, cruddy reception out there on the ice, volume turned down low so as not to wake Ma or Glen. He’d sit up until four in the morning watching Z slice through the water like a bottlenose, grainy on the old set, his face pressed to the chilly glass like being that close, he might hear Z whisper the secret to his skill. Every tube Z cut through, every time he turned to the wave, bowed, respectful, Cody bowed back.
“Why?” Z said now. He sounded so cold, and made Cody bristle. For all his zen attitude, Z had the tact of a teenager.
“Why? Why? Because—it’s my dream, Z. I didn’t get through all those Shiverpool winters dreaming of—of dicking around on beaches with some has-been bum.” He gestured redundantly across the fire at Z, in case it wasn’t clear. It was. “I guess you just don’t want anyone else to get the glory, huh? Don’t want anyone else to be as big as Big Z, huh?”
Cody didn’t regret it instantly, but when Z heaved his big bulk to his feet, kicked up a little sand to smother the feeble fire and trudged away into the sullen, inky night, then yeah, Cody began to regret it.
*
He asked Lani to come with him. Four days of radio silence from Z, and Cody had painted his board in reds and golds, the colors of the west coast sun, waxed it, started honing his drop ins, and hunted down Lani to ask her to come. She lived in a homely sort of shanty, built on stilts above on the far north of the island, where the palm trees thinned and the beach came to a curving point, gesturing in the direction of the mainland. She had invited Cody there for coffee once or twice, just the two of them, surfed a little with him on the low waves that licked the bottom of her house, but Z refused to set foot in Lani’s place, so they didn’t hang out there much. Lani’s driftwood mantelpiece housed a collection of framed photos of her family: her parents lifting her between them; her father and Z holding her tottering, too young, on her first board; her mother and Z trading grins, both flexing for the camera, her mother a tomboyish, vivid thing and Z all toned and twenty-something, looking so much like her. They had the same flowers etched into their fur.
Lani wouldn’t take them down, so Z wouldn’t come to her house. It was the trade-off.
Cody caught her at the bottom of the ladder leading down from her porch, and asked her breathlessly to come out to LA with him. “I want you with me,” he told her. “I’ve never met anyone like you. You’re real good, too,” he added, an afterthought. “You should enter. We both should.”
Lani smiled at him. He thought it was a smile at least. It wasn’t quite like any expression he’d ever seen. “Go away, Cody,” she said. “Go find your glory, but don’t come and find me anymore.”
*
Z came and stood on the beach and watched him while he trained. Cody listened for his familiar heckling, but he never once heard it.
*
Cody kicked the sand up petulantly on his way to Lani’s place. He walked slowly, as though she knew he was coming and it’d give her more time to forgive him. But she didn’t know, and there was no reply, even when his knock at her door turned from casual to kinda pitiful. He thought about leaving something to let her know she was on his mind, and played with his necklace for a while. The shell felt smoother than it did when he was a kid, polished by the sea-salt wind of the surf, washed clean on every stumble and splash. Its engraved little moniker didn’t seem so deep cut; not so permanent anymore.
He left it dangling round his neck and tramped over to Lani’s patch instead, played with the waves as easily now as a kid with a puppy, while she alternately ignored him and tried to pretend she was.
*
Cody booked his ride to LA the week before it was due to sail. Whale travel was slow and excruciatingly dull but Cody liked it well enough. He liked being able to break out his board and slip along in the whale’s smooth wake once they hit cruising speed. He’d never got to travel with his Mom and Glen. She couldn’t abide by whale travel, she always said, it made her awful nauseous. They always took vacations in an igloo owned by Cody’s great aunt two towns over from Shiverpool. That igloo half melted every summer and refroze again just before it lost its shape, so it had a viscous, oozing quality, that had made Cody, as a child, fear the thing was the protruding mouth of some icy demon, sticking up out of the glacier and waiting for him to sleep before it swallowed him whole.
He remembered telling Z this, hazily, possibly drunk, and Z had roared with laughter, his bulk billowing unselfconsciously. Cody couldn’t not laugh along.
He was still sleeping out in Z’s hut, because he had nowhere else to go and Z hadn’t ever told him to leave. He pinned his ticket up between boards on the bamboo wall, but it looked awkward and obvious there, glaring like a goodbye not left conspicuously on a kitchen table. Cody stuffed it under his pillow instead, and couldn’t see it anymore.
*
Cody thought about putting on a spread for Z and Lani before he left, a nice gesture to thank them and wish them well and until next time and all of that. He trained in the morning – or as close to morning as he ever got these days, late nights with Z still residually screwing up his body clock – and spent the rest of the balmy afternoon looking for pineapples on the jungle floor, taste-testing berries and picking handfuls of the vaguely edible ones, kicking around coconuts like soccer balls, smashing them open milky and even against a jagged boulder. He fished in the evening, dragged a few logs around a fire and built a rack over the heat to roast his catch. The smell, he couldn’t lie, was pretty divine. He sliced the fruit roughly and piled it on palmwood dishes, and thought about going to invite Z and Lani.
Once, Cody said absent-mindedly it must’ve been so cool for Z, getting signed by Reggie Belafonte, straight up, first major contract, one of the biggest agents in surfing. Z had given him this look, somewhere between anger and scorn and pity, and told him not to open his mouth if he only had dumb shit to say.
Cody imaged that same disdainful look etched onto Z’s easy-going face now, exactly the expression he’d wear if Cody had the gall, after all this, to ask him over for fucking dinner.
He ate two thirds of the fish and a couple of mouthfuls of coconut, dried up anyway from being too close to the fire, and got rid of the rest. It probably would’ve kept until morning. But he trashed it all the same.
*
Cody stayed out on the surf all day, his last day on Pen Gu. It was just as crystal bright as all the other days, the diamante ocean glistening almost unnaturally under the lazily burning sun, taking its sweet time to trip across the horizon. He was shattered by dusk, but took a minute to check everything was packed and the hut was neat, if not tidy, before he crashed. He lifted up his pillow and folded down the corners of his ticket and covered it back up again.
Cody tried to picture what LA would be like, but all he could see in his mind was a souped up version of the stretching Pen Gu shore, without its giveaway island curves. More board shorts and rollerblades, he supposed. Sidewalks. Store fronts. Health drinks.
He was asleep and it must have been well into the home stretch of the night when Z stumbled into, and then in through, his door. Cody jerked awake in a panicked sort of alertness. Z glowed around the edges, where the moonlight hit his back. He looked, for a split second, regal and imposing, but his eyes were tired and his shoulders slouched and his voice, when he spoke, sounded little used and joyless. He smelt, not overpoweringly, just like a faint cologne, of alcohol.
“You still going, champ?” Z asked, low. The door clattered shut behind him.
“Yeah,” Cody shot back, groggily. He swallows dryly. “Come to try and change my mind?”
Z didn’t answer. He took a step towards the bed like he was going to go perch on the end of it, but changed his mind abruptly, slouched down on the sand floor, sinking to his haunches first then letting his weight carry him backwards.
They sat in silence for a long while. Z played absently with the dark sand, drawing lines and blinking them out of existence with a slow push of his flipper. He looked so much like a giant, lost child.
“You should swing by Lani’s pad before you go,” he said eventually, eyes still down.
“Lani won’t even talk to me,” Cody scoffed, forgetting he and Z weren’t really on speaking terms either.
“’Cause she’s a stubborn ass. Like you.” Z let it linger, uncalled for. Then he said, definitely, “Go say bye to her before you leave.”
They fell into silence again. Cody was unused to Z this quiet; used to his zen ramblings about the waves and, when he was more limber, anecdotes about his past – always before or after his time in the spotlight, never during.
“I’ll come back,” Cody ventured, trying to sound sure. “You and Lani, you—you guys keep acting like this is the end, forever and ever.”
“What’ll you do if you win?”
“Well, there’s the prestige, isn’t there? I’d do deals. Schmooze. Travel around, swing by a buncha competitions.”
“And if you lose?”
Cody shrugged and tried to say what he thought Z needed to hear. “’S not the end of the world. I can always try again. There’s always wins that haven’t been won.”
“Exactly,” Z sighed, exhaling the sound of utterly honest disappointment.
They didn’t talk anymore. Cody thought about going over to hug him. This behemoth who was once pure muscle, gone soft and fat from clams and sleep. Cody’s flippers probably wouldn’t even reach around him. It was the gesture, though, wasn’t it?
Cody looked at Z, saw a friend and not an icon, and thought real hard about hugging him.
*
Lani came to send him off. Z didn’t. None of his family had seen him off from Shiverpool, so at least it was half a goodbye. Cody wondered if Z stopped off at hers too, on his tipsy guilt trip last night, goaded her as well so that one of them at least would bite the bullet and get the deed done. Lani looked so beautiful, even surly and pink-cheeked.
“You could still come?” Cody said, but even his smile was feeble. Lani punched him mildly on the shoulder. It was good to feel her touch.
“Will it make you happy?” she asked, standing by his side as they watched voyagers start to populate the waiting whale. “Winning?”
Cody didn’t want to answer wrong, so he didn’t answer aloud, just shrugged and nodded.
“Weren’t you already happy here?”
Cody looked at her and wanted to drag her out with him, out to be his LA girlfriend, and Z too, their stupid beach bum uncle; not just the three of them on an isolated little island in the too-vast ocean, but an island in themselves, the ocean made of people, where they could feel the full, fiery warmth of their friendship. Jesus, he wanted that life so bad.
But he had to earn it, just like he was desperate to earn his trophy, to win his etched name on its empty space, and Lani was mad at him. He wasn’t going to win her over anytime soon.
He hiked his board further up to stop it slipping. He already said goodbye to one home, one family. This one shouldn’t be so much harder to leave, should it?
Should it?