her. Jack knows what this means. Nods gravely.
Tory smokes. He looks sidelong at Jack. “Sutton says she got both his balls in her mouth, at the same time.”
This, to Jack, sounds wrong. He wrestles with a mental picture of shy-but-perky Cathy DeLong, varsity football Peppette, vaguely arranged ass-up and head south between the splayed hairy legs of the pothead, Tommy Sutton. “Is that good?” he wonders, aloud.
A geyser of beer spews from Tory’s mouth. He’s laughing. After a worried moment, Jack joins in, slowly convincing himself that he meant it to be funny.
“All right.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
Tory offers Jack the crooked cigarette. Jack accepts, slips it between his dry lips, but doesn’t smoke. His mouth is cotton. Tory swigs the Mickey’s and considers the ocean again.
After what he believes to be a reasonable interval, Jack tries to give the cigarette back. Tory waves it away. “All yours, man.”
“I . . . no, better not. My, you know, mom. If she gets a whiff, on my breath—”
Tory holds up an Oreo. “What do you think these are for? Kills the stink completely.”
In point of fact, Jack thought the cookies were for when Tory got hungry. But he keeps the cigarette. Puffs and puffs and puffs without inhaling, nevertheless beginning to feel kind of tingly and sick. The Mickey’s drained, Tory throws it down into a pile of scrap lumber below, where the jade glass shatters.
“You know what’s on those islands?” Tory is pointing west, into the haze.
“Goats.” Jack did a report on the Channel Islands in fourth grade. “Sheep, sea lions, seals, gulls, fossils.”
Tory looks disappointed. For a moment Jack wonders if Tory wanted to tell him this himself, or did Tory, in fact, believe that there was something else out there?
“But at some point,” Jack continues, “somebody brought all these goats out there, and they let them go wild—” Tory’s bored already, but Jack’s in too deep, he has to finish—“and they just kept breeding and breeding and now there’s thousands of wild goats and nobody knows what to do with them. It’s messed up. Sometimes they let people go out and hunt them and junk.”
Tory shrugs. “Yeah, well I know for a fact there’s frat guys that go out there and, you know, fuck the goats. Part of the initiation.”
Jack’s horror and speculation prevent him (oh Jesus) from processing Tory’s subsequent spare but graphic (goats!) recitation of this apparently long-standing UCSB Greek system sacrament.
“Oh, man,” Jack says, when Tory finishes. “Who told you that?”
“I get things here and there. You know. And what I know, man—well, I know what really goes on. It’s like, they teach you one thing. But what really goes on? Is something else.”
Wind comes through the house like an emotion, filling it with an easy silence, pushing paper scraps around in corners and sifting the sawdust.
“The guys all said you were gonna kill me,” Jack confesses.
“Which guys?”
“You know—some of the guys—” Jack hesitates, sensing a misstep here, accidental betrayal in the making. Will Tory kill them?
“—Christ, they’re such pussies,” Tory says.
Jack’s empty grin, like a lawn jockey’s, cuts cold and meaningless.
“They don’t get it,” Tory is saying, “they’re full of shit. It comes down to one thing and one thing only.”
Jack wonders: What? What one thing?
“You know.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, hey. Girls’ll come, and girls’ll go. But you and me—?” Tory deliberately leaves the sentence hanging there, looking at Jack, without expression, as if the completion of his thought is so obvious as to be unnecessary, as if it’s implicit.
And Jack nods, pretending he knows, fourteen in full, confounded, confirmed, content. He gazes out across the lazy green ramble of the seaside city he has always known to be home.
Out toward a colorless ocean, and the vague, private islands of goats.
b.
Shapes, slender whale-grey phantasms, stumble from the foaming tide.
Surfers.
The roar of a storm-swelled ocean thunders low from the marine layer beyond them.
Black with bits of winter-white flesh, unzipped wet suits, hoods flapping behind them like weird rubber cowls of some long-submerged Benedictine order, the taller of the two young men is hauling his gasping companion to the shallows of Rincon Beach.
Tory and Jack are twenty.
“Little cocksucking Valley shit fucking cut me off!” Tory barks. Jack eases his friend down, then runs back to chase their long boards before they float away.
By the time Jack returns with their sticks, Tory is spitting seawater and blinking the salt and sand out of his eyes. “Goddamn it! They shouldn’t even fucking be out here!”
“He’s a pup. They’re Valley pups. Forget about it.” Jack drags the surfboards beyond the reach of the tide. “You’re welcome, by the way. Thank God for Junior Lifesaving, huh?”
“Never took it.”
Farther up the beach, where clumps of clothes and towels and flip-flops are waiting, Jack strips down the top of his wet suit. Tory glares back at the water. Three more surfers are coming in. Day-Glo stripes on high-fashion wet suits, they’re barely teenagers. Sun-bleached hair. Poolside San Fernando Valley tans, Calabasas or Woodland Hills.
“I’m only saying. Somebody should explain the concept to those guys.”
“There’s a concept?”
“Priority. Do not drop in on another man’s wave. The surfer who is closest to the breaking wave has priority.”
“He was already up.”
“Because he jumped my line.”
“Since when have you ever cared about the rules?”
“Fuck you.”
“Maybe you should’ve let a geek have his ride. Take the next wave. You knew he was gonna bail, Tory.”
“These are my waves.”
“Your
