Loud Fast Short
Lucy and Chris skipping rocks across the Carmel River, parallel to Rosie’s bridge. The slackwater where Lucy’s father once pointed out dying steelhead to them from the grating above. Lucy flinging random stones with a loose arm. Chris firing flat rounders low and hard at the surface. “Seven,” he says.
“Five.” Lucy ducks beneath the girders and sits on Chris’s skateboard, the one with the graphic of a skeletal chalice and rising, distorted bubbles. Pulls a brass pipe from her pocket and takes a puff of hash. Exhales with a sigh. The bridge shakes with the sound of hard urethane wheels over grating. Cracking and rumbling and diffuse, its constituents kicking boards up and scrambling single file under the bridge from the far end.
Lucy says, “Here come your Lost Boys.”
They greet with monosyllables and ironic tips of non-existent hats. Hands pulled from pockets and shoved back in. Walkman headphones around their necks. Not Milo looks away from Lucy, Jamison leans toward her, puts up his hand up. Lucy snorts, slaps it. “Let me see your shirt,” Lucy say to Not Milo.
Not Milo untucks the corners of his blue polyester tee-shirt for Lucy and Chris to see. A white outline of Ronald Reagan’s shit-eating grin face with crosshairs over it. “Came in the mail,” he says.
“Get’s right to the point.”
They scramble up to the tarmac, Chris skating ahead, the others straggling out behind. Lucy hiking along behind, a woven jute bag with her camera over a shoulder. Lucy sings: “The crew is me, the crew is you” as she shleps past Rosie’s Cracker Barrel and Country Store. Lucy calls out, “A posse, a brigade, a squadron. A flock of fledglings and aunt Lucy. Hi, Mrs. Sullivan.” An old woman in a pink sweater lifts her hand.
The wannabe village of Carmel Valley a dusty place not know for abundant of concrete or asphalt. Except to Chris, coming from further out, past the pavement of any kind, way out further in the valley, redeemed to civilization from a barren squalor of dust and oak trees.
To ride on things he isn’t supposed to, like parking curbs and walls and drainage culverts. To spend the lengthening summer days on reconnaissance with Not Milo and Jamison, spying over redwood fences and mapping grocery store parking lots, cutting brush back from cinder block retaining walls. To grub dirt from storm drains and sweep pebbles from the post office parking lot curbs.
They have a shared vision of pavement, of dirt hills frozen into rideable waves. Not Milo’s father teaches them how to frame up curves and face them with spare sheets of masonite. They build plywood ramps and stash them in the bushes of the community center. They make their own playgrounds and slide, bash, jump them into splinters and rubble.
Chris foists punk mix tapes on the others, sends off money orders and xeroxed ‘zines come to his door. Chris in his Arrow shirts and careful buzz cut hair. His delicate fingers. His scarecrow legs in surplus Army chinos with safety-pin pegs.
He pushes along in front of the others, twitching and fast. He pushes away from the others, stops at Los Ositos road to wait for his sister, pops his board nose up, stands with it in the dirt.
“Hurry up!”
Chris and Lucy have made a discovery, have found what the boys have all dimly hoped might exist, and so convened this expedition. To a place as monumental as the den of a yeti, a loch ness, a lost blue bucket of gold flakes. His sister eccentric to the skating, along because she come along. Black hair bobbing around her blue eyeglasses.
Reunited, they walk a little further, then crawl through some brush, single file, to a hole in a fence. Chris has kicked the grape stakes in, one at a time, to ready the entrance. Then he is through, then they all are. The boys before Lucy assemble in numb silence. Surveying the backyard before them, mouths agape.
Under a scattering of live oak leaves, surrounded by forgotten chaise lounges, it reveals itself: a big hole in the ground. A valley choked with sunshine and lavender, olive trees and fishing holes, and Chris has delivered them a derelict patch of sinuous, artificial, suburban squalor. A bowl to throw themselves into. An empty swimming pool.
Butt cans full of sand, scattered between the lounges. Dirty topaz ring around the surface of things. A chaging building of sun warped redwood boards and red trim faded out to the color of old lipstick. The diving board luminous blue, sticking out like a tongue.
The five split up and circulate to the rim of the square pool under separate directions, surveying the flotsam in piety. The deep end of the pool vertical, plunging, stained with the bodies of oak moths. At the bottom, a mucky eye of water, black with dirt and tannin, rimmed with turquoise rings the color of tropical oceans. Lucy standing back, watching the boys, bemused in a hashy cloud, boys with boards moving through the fog of recognition.
The transitions, the curves, are short and tight, but it is all rideable. “It goes,” says Jamison, more a question than a statement. Chris and Not Milo nod their heads in unison.
“How did you find it?”
“I could hear it. We were waiting for my dad, across the street in the truck. The wind was blowing but I could hear the oak leaves.” He nods his chin.
“Oak leaves?”
“I could hear them blowing into the pool. But no water.”
Then it was a matter of leaving a shovel and a rake in his dad’s truck, at the ready for the long sessions he otherwise has spent in boredom and arguing with Lucy. His father there to buy or sell dope and the noise of Chris skating on the street unnecessary attention.
Now he hops out, throws his tools over the fence of the dark, A-frame house, its glass windows pointing north. Hops the short fence by stepping on a planter box. Then bucket and bailing, not hearing his father until his name is called up the street. A hillside of scrubby forest, the houses spaced far apart, and Chris hops the fence again without his tools. His father doesn’t ask, gives him a sidelong glance from the cab of the tuck. Lucy shrugging at him.
It has taken Chris several session to bucket and sweep the skudge out of the drain, his pants rolled up to keep from getting shmeggy. One last group effort, brooming the moisture around and wiping soil with Not MIlo’s sweatshirt. Then sitting on the coping, feet dangling, Not Milo and Jamison drinking stolen wine coolers from Not Milo’s backpack. Chris, the lone adherent to the straight edge and Lucy who knows better than to drink with a pack of boys, random tokes of hash her only inebriation.
They feel some business with the place. They are surveyors on the edge of a grand canyon. Lucy the expedition’s reporter, watching the fifteen year old boys stare down a hole in the ground with the great wisdom her extra year of age imparts. She likes this, to be amongst scruffy boys doing something rather than the preppy girls her own age talking about pop stars. Lucy having made a survey of the bus stop of high school life, it’s boys and girls, and decided to take a sideline. Until she can leave, go to where the boys are worth fooling around over. To where and when the boys are going somewhere.
Jamiosn says, “This is it. This right here,” he bangs his fist on the blue epoxy surface of the diving board, “this is the place.”
He is the first to get after the new danger. He sucks down his Bartles & James, slaps the tail of his board onto the coping, and calls: “HELLO IT’S ME!”
“Let it dry some more,” says Chris. Then when he sees his words have no effect, “You have to name it if you drop in first.”
Before Not Milo can suggest Chris make the first attempt, Jamison drops down the vertical wall. More like he jumps right down it, shouting as his front wheels hit the vert and he commits to the drop. For one long, rushing moment he is golden, falling just right. He is ahead of gravity.
Then he hits the smeary, humus crusted drain and spins completely around, tearing a long gash in his knee as the pool sands him to a stop. His freed board clatters around him, rumbling like falling rocks in the echoey depths.
Not Milo rolls him a California Cooler from the shallow end and Jamison ties up the knee with his shirt. He gets up laughing, his bleached hair flopping around his face. “BAHRG!” he shouts. “That really fucking hurts.” He forgets to name anything.
The others dive down into the shallow side of the square concrete bowl, revolve around the dirty walls, surface to dive again, take passed out naps on the diving board. Lucy drags a lounge cushion to the edge, dangles her feet over, and pulls the camera from her bag.
Chris makes a cartographic study of every transition of the pool. Starting in the small end, grinding his trucks every which way over the coping. Skating in tight little circles on the bottom, popping ollies and practicing entering each transition. It is only when he is sure of himself, sure of the conditions, that he starts into the deep end.
He pushes his board down from the shallows and Not Milo stops in the middle of a joke he is telling Jamison. Chris hits the high wall and circles in a long fluid sweep, pumping up and down the transitions, and then he is airborne. Just a bit off the bulging light in the diving board wall, grabbing the frontside rail of his board and throwing a fist in the air, a determined, posed, ridiculous frown on his face.
No sound of rattling catching him, rising just above the lip of things, everyone watching from the shallows in awe. His fist punching into the sky, his loose shirt flapping behind him. His first flight in the pool is a performance, a song. Loud, fast, short.
He circles back to the shallow end, pops his board up, parks himself on the coping. Lucy looks at him as if she wants to muss his hair. Her brother is breathing hard, trying not to show it, elated. His lips, lifting slowly from the corners, almost form a smile.
Lucy pulls the camera from her lap, leans back to make his face focusable, clicks the shutter. Developing it later in the week in photography class, all it reveals is the moving image of Chris’s left hand, jabbing reflexively past the lens, moving through the frame like a blurry bird.
