ran toward Billy’s truck yelling frantically. “Billy, gimme your knife. Sammy’s caught in some crazy net and it’s gonna drown him or drag him on the rocks. He’s totally snarled. I gotta get back out and cut him lose. Gimme your board. I just broke mine. Where’s your deck knife?”
Billy stepped out from behind his pickup wearing trunks. One leg was a few inches into a wetsuit. He looked out at the next wave bearing down on Sammy, stepped on the wet suit with his free foot and pulled lose in one motion. He opened the truck cab, grabbed fins from under the seat, snatched a deck knife that hung from the rearview mirror and ran.
Glass ran after him. As he scanned the boulders for a way down, he saw the net beginning to nest around a piece of his shattered board that had wedged between boulders. The white water rushed past and for a moment everything stopped as he stared at the wet lines glittering around it like old tinsel clinging to a trashed Christmas tree. His entire body shook violently, as if he had gone hypothermic. He looked up as Billy pulled on his second fin. It suddenly occurred to him that Billy was going without a wet suit. “You can’t go out there. You’ll freeze.”
Billy yelled before he dove. “There’s a car headed this way on the access road. Whoever it is, get them down to the water. I’ll get Sammy lose. There’s rope in the truck. Get it and stay on shore. Honk the horn till you see me headed in with Sammy or till they get here – whoever they are.”
The last of the small waves rolled over Sammy sweeping him closer to the jetty. Three waves he couldn’t escape had wound him to the board in a cocoon of fine filament, but he managed to stay upright with his head above water. The net bound the tail of the board with knots around the fins. As the surge moved past, it swung him like a swamped kayak in a powerful current with nothing but the bow floatation out of the water and the stern tethered to the bottom by an unbreakable anchor chain.
He was only thirty feet away, nothing, the width of a swimming pool, but this was not just water. The cold and the adrenaline pumped him, but Billy had almost no body fat and he was swimming through an exotic soup of clear tentacles that clung to anything that moved. As soon as he hit the water, he realized that his arms were useless. One stroke wound a few lines around his shoulder that he shrugged off easily, but the message was clear – forward progress would be limited to kicking with fins.
Hands stretched in front, above the water, gliding over the invisible mesh beneath him, he could see the next wall of white water coming - not too big, still no set. Sammy was ten feet away when it hit. Billy tried to power up and over hoping to stay clear of the net, but three feet of broken wave had enough power to flip him, roll him and wind him into the web. The deck knife went through the monofilament easily and he was on the surface in seconds, but Sammy was gone. When the board bobbed back up, it was close, but inverted. Billy jerked hard on the board’s nose, spinning the cocoon over and Sammy gasped for air. Without waiting to see the mask of terror attached to Sammy’s face, Billy dove again. The knife unzipped the cocoon with a few hard slashes against the bottom of the board and Billy felt the explosion of freedom above him when Sammy could suddenly move again. He stayed down, cutting away his own entanglement and the trailing web still knotted to the board’s fins. He sensed the panic inches above him as Sammy collected the freed board and spun away for the jetty; and he felt an invisible presence surrounding them – the mindless silence of an amoral killing machine passively awaiting movement.
5:20 AM: North Jetty
Quinn rode out the north jetty road in Sven’s Jeep, sandwiched between two towers of anger. Sven and the Jeep smelled like fish and the other guy just stank. They were both huge and Quinn felt insignificant, squished out of existence. Maybe Rhys had it right; they should have stayed in bed like normal kids. Sven had been OK when he told them, but Lester reminded him of everything bad that happened when their father got too drunk. At first no one would listen except John and Sven, who thought it was hilarious that two kids could land a fifty-pound Chinook off the jetty before the commercial boats had even loaded to go out. John had disappeared and Sven didn’t believe there was a net or a Chinook until he walked out of the Sandbar and saw the dots on the channel. Then he turned mad. He was still mad. No one had talked since they climbed into the Jeep. When they turned up onto the jetty, they could see the trucks parked out at the break.
Lester exploded first. “That’s that meathead hippie’s truck. What the hell is he doing out there? You said you saw two surfers. Now we got two trucks. You need glasses kid?”
Sven didn’t look at Lester. “Lay off the kid.”
“You his mom? This is all bullshit. I don’t know what I’m doing in a fish wagon anyway, it stinks.” He turned his hangover breath on Quinn. “And you’re probably a lying little bastard, cause your lazy old man got a illegal fish and this net shit is all crap.”
Sven kept his visual attention on the concrete, but didn’t conceal his anger. “You said it’s your kid out there. I didn’t ask you to come. You want to walk; you can get out. You want to ride; you can shut it.”
“Pull this shit heap over.”
Sven turned bright red. The Jeep slowed. Quinn knew it was dangerous to talk. He’d heard that tone before, but in the moment of calm before the fight he could hear the steady whine of Billy’s horn. He wanted to say ‘they’re blowing the horn, because something is wrong’, but Sven heard it too and slammed the accelerator down.
“You want to walk, tough guy? Jump.”
When they got to the Billy’s truck, Glass had gathered the rope and was running out the jetty waving wildly for them to follow. Sven parked and ran after him. He was a waterman and one glance at the floats and the netted rocks told him disaster had moved into their bay. He saw Billy disappear under the whitewater and moments later Sammy and his board surface.
Quinn looked out at the lineup as the first wave of the next set began to rise. Thirty yards away, the peak ascended like the apex of a green glass wall. An offshore gust blew a wedge of spray off the transparently thin lip.
Glass watched the peak pitch out and form the empty ellipse that collapsed into a hollow barrel spinning toward them on the channel side with its thundering wall of white water hammering the boulders on the jetty side. He saw black dots stretching across the green face of the wall and a shadow like a log or a dolphin surfing.
5:30 AM: North Jetty
With every stroke Sammy wound his arms back into the web and the nose of the board, slipping under new lines, collected connections. Fifteen feet from the jetty Billy caught up to a frantic windmill whirling uselessly - all progress stalled, all rational thought absent. He had seen the peak come down and the size of the wall about to engulf them and he knew the time to cut loose was gone. He screamed into Sammy’s face to get air, wrapped his arms around him and his board, and filled his lungs. They would take their chances with the rocks.
Six feet of white water struck like a wet slab avalanche moving everything in its path. When it engulfed them, the turbulence wound them together in a new cocoon, drove them to the bottom, and anchored them to the rocks with tendrils that drew taught and cinched the lines surrounding them. The surface was out of reach. Bill cut his arms free and slashed at the back of the board. As soon as the cocoon’s grip loosened, Sammy’s flailing terror began again. Billy slashed at everything that resisted and suddenly Sammy was kicking his face and shoulders, clawing his way to air. The board released and shot upward and stalled. He cut through knotted twists of line and loosened his legs enough to kick for the surface. One fin had stripped away, caught irrevocably in the plastic bramble. Both feet were numb. It was hard to keep his grip on the knife. He got air and turned to find Sammy beyond reach, panicked, thrashing toward the rocks. He gauged the size of the next white wall and took another deep
