Читать книгу That Crazy Perfect Someday - Michael Mazza - Страница 19

12

Everyone in the courtroom can see the word liar in chunky letters on my orange jumpsuit as I’m ushered out in handcuffs by two blocky correctional officers, one trailing behind with a loaded shotgun at the back of my head, the other suggesting in a hard tone that I move it along. My hands are over my ears, trying like heck to kill the gospel choir howling and clapping in the jury box to some righteous song about truth and justice. Stiff in my face is Kimberly Masters’ accusatory finger, her blue Aussie eyes on fire, her words drenched in contempt. Doper, she hisses. No waves for dopers! I turn for one last look. My heart falls when I see my surfboards in the middle of the courtroom, stacked in a bonfire pyramid about to be sent up in flames. The judge, her hair flash-white, shakes the last few drops from a can of gasoline and pulls a cigarette lighter from her gown. “For Christ’s sake!” Jax yells from the gallery. “Not her boards! Don’t torch her boards!” And just as she flicks the lighter and sets them ablaze, I wake up short of breath, my heart going wild.

The waves sucked this morning.

After two hours in Sisyphus (again), I finish out the afternoon with a ninety-minute session of yoga and drive over to Jax’s to say good-bye before Bomb swings by and we hop a shuttle for the airport.

Six o’clock.

Jax is in the backyard in his red satin boxing shorts and a Navy tee soaked through with sweat, popping jabs into a brown leather heavy bag that’s held together with duct tape, its surface worn by a million punches.

He rigged the bag to hang from a ship’s winch arm, which is fixed into a concrete pad in the middle of the yard. This place is in desperate need of a facelift: the surrounding fence has met up with termites, the boxwoods in the planter boxes against the house are brittle brown, the grass has gone yellow, and there’s a mishmash of old yacht parts, used scuba regulators, cans of marine paint, and cardboard boxes stuffed with the Chinese-made pneumatic spear guns he imported with a big scheme to wholesale them to a local Austrian buyer before the guy was crushed to death by a forklift—all of it wasting away in an aluminum shed that’s sure to collapse in the next big earthquake. But I don’t press Jax, because as long as he’s stable, that’s all I care about; and boxing, with its endorphin highs and stress-killing power, is just what he needs to stay steady.

From inside the house I watch Jax rip a left hook into the bag, rattling its mounting chain. He doesn’t see me sneak out the back door or hear me from behind his earbuds, so I scoot to the bag’s opposite side and bob and weave with my dukes up, pretending to be his opponent. He plays along, snapping and feinting, then steps back, stuffs his glove under his arm, and tugs to free his hand. He slips off his other glove, tosses them onto the patio table, and plucks out his earbuds.

“Just came to say good-bye,” I say, my face peekabooing from behind the bag. Jax’s chest heaves. Sweat pours down his face and scorpion arm tattoos. For a man of fifty-six, even with the added weight from drinking, his frame still has the vestiges of a middleweight in training.

“So this is it for a while,” he says, swiping sweat off his brow with his forearm.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll be back in three weeks for a day or two to repack, and then it’s off for another two weeks before the Games begin to the beaches in southwestern France, where we’ll compete.” What I don’t tell him is that the main reason I’m coming home and not heading straight to Paris for the Olympics is that Bomb told me—between the words, fuck, damn, and assholes—that we have to face a USADA review board to see if they have strong enough doping evidence to charge me. I know it’s a total made-up stupid lie, and couldn’t my agent have stalled, taken the full ten days to respond, so I wouldn’t be in this heap of crap? The whole idea sucks the happy right from my face.

“You OK, peanut?”

“Yeah, perfect,” I say, masking my anxiety with a white lie. “Just bummed ’cause I’ll miss you.”

“Ah, hell, little girl. You’ve got work to do. Rip up those Aussie waves. Kill ’em and show ’em who’s who.”

Jax rests his hands on my shoulders. I feel the heat coming through his hand wraps and meet his eyes, which are serious and doting.

“Don’t worry about me,” he says. “I’ll behave.” Somehow I believe him, but just to be sure, I pull my head back to see if he’s wearing his bio-band. Jax lifts his wrist, crisscrossed with a boxer’s hand wrap, his fingers poking through, swelled and red, before I get a word in.

“It’s under here. I’ll wear it, take my meds. Promise. On your mother.”

“Right that, Skipper. I’ll be watching,” I say, waving my phone in his face. “And no drinking.”

Jax drops his hands and holds them out, as if pleading.

“Well, shit on toast,” he says, with humored outrage. “You killed two hundred bucks’ worth of fine Kentucky moonshine.”

I give him the stink eye.

“It’s called tough love.”

“Tough love? Tough shit is more like it. Fine, you win.”

“You and Pac set for Paris 33-O?” I ask. “Flights? Transfers to Hossegor?”

“Affirmative. You think I’d miss you standing on the podium, golden girl?”

And with a cheek peck, I head to the back gate to catch the 7:30 p.m. half-hour hop to L.A. for my 10:00 p.m. to Sydney.

“Steak at Nate’s when you get back,” Jax says as I reach the back gate. I turn, lock my arms out and up over my head, executing a semaphore signal for OK before I blow him a kiss and vamoose.

When I drive up the coastal road past the manicured front yards and mission-style homes to my rental, the vipery face of Nixon’s Ferrari is there to greet me. Behind the sloping windshield, Nixon is all sunglasses and droopy curls. I pull up next to him, front grills in opposite directions, the way cops do on patrol when they want to talk face-to-face. Nixon rolls down his window and smiles. The Ferrari rides so low that I have to talk down to him, my eyes at such an angle that I see a gift in the passenger seat and the skulls and rainbows on his Everything’s Shitty brand T-shirt.

“Didn’t expect to see you here,” I say, caught off guard but also a bit delighted.

“Hope I’m not creeping you out,” he says, his face ringing with apologetic ticks, “but my mobile said you were on your way home. I have something for you, and you said you’d be gone for a while, so . . .”

I thought I turned that app off, I say to myself.

“Is it a problem? I can go, really. I’m sorry.”

“No. It’s totally cool.”

Nixon plucks a small turquoise box off the dash, reaches through his window, and hands it up to me.

“You forgot this,” he says.

I know what’s inside: the itsy-bitsy sterling pineapple charm Penelope gave to the bridesmaids to honor her Hawaii honeymoon.

“Duh,” I say. “I am such a goof. I don’t know how I forgot it—twice. Thank you so much.”

Nixon rests his skinny arm up on the car’s doorsill in the cocky manner of a guy on the make, but he’s too innocent to pull it off with any kind of attitude.

“Sydney, huh?” he says, big and puffed-up.

“Yeah. Have to get an Uber soon.”

Nixon’s apprehensive when I say this, and his arm slips away like he’s putting me out.

“I better run then.”

“No, it’s cool,” I say, “I’ve got another few minutes.”

Nixon reaches across to the passenger seat.

“This is for you,” he says, handing me a thin, gift-wrapped package with birthday balloons and a fat red ribbon.

“But my birthday’s in March.”

“Yeah, sorry. It was the only paper I could find in the house. Hope that’s cool.”

I unravel the ribbon and swipe my finger under the paper to pop the tape.

Even before I flip the book over I can tell it’s used, its pages yellowy at the edges, the back cover dog-eared. I’m both curious and mildly amused that he would give me a secondhand book as a gift. Tiger Force, Ocean Calm: The Healing Secrets of Ki-Kou Chinese Breathing Techniques, the title reads. On the cover is a 1940s-ish woodblock illustration of a tiger sitting on a cliff overlooking the ocean.

“Sorry to go old-school,” Nixon says. “But it’s impossible to get on an e-reader. Not that you need it or anything—but it’s good to consult, you know, on those days when you want an extra edge. It helped me recenter my chi.”

“A lot of people are buying paper books lately,” I say, paging through. “There’s something kind of charming about them, like how the pages feel as they flicker against my thumb.”

When I demonstrate this, pages part, and I find a dried wildflower in the book’s crease, its petals still holding brilliant violets and blues.

“Did this come with it?”

“No,” Nixon says. “That was my idea. It’s a Canterbury Bell. When I was little, my mom, Pen, and I would hike the Anza-Borrego hills and collect them during the spring bloom. We stuck tons in my dad’s law books. They work great because they’re really thick and heavy.”

I know his father is a lawyer, and the thought of it brings me back to my own legal issues, so as Nixon talks, I only half hear him.

“He complains to my mom about them when he wants to reference a case and they fall out onto the floor.”

I catch myself and refocus.

“Well, wow,” I say. “It’s really beautiful.”

“The flower is one I definitely picked. Just so you know.”

“That’s so thoughtful. I mean both the book and the flower.”

“So you like it?”

“Of course,” I say with a big thumbs-up.

Nixon smiles the way a child does after parental praise, his teeth glinting in the sun, and returns the gesture.

“I better let you go. Super luck Down Under. Hope your training goes aces.”

“Thanks. And I’ll be sure to read up on these breathing techniques on the plane—fourteen and a half hours. Oh my God.”

“Just so you know, there’s a rumor that Master Li Tsu Zhang, the book’s author, is going to be on Bobby Flay’s talk show. So learn the techniques now, because the competition could get wind of it, and then . . .”

I smile.

“Thanks for the heads-up.”

The sun is now low, casting skinny shadows across the asphalt from the towering palms. With a push of his fingertip, Nixon fires up his Ferrari and gooses the gas so all its four-hundred-horse sexy squeals above the engine’s throaty growl. He rolls off, his car purring and glimmering like an alien spacecraft, and slips past the mission-style homes. Half a minute later, he reaches the road’s bend and slips away. After he disappears, I realize a couple of things: beneath that mop of curls and spin-the-bottle smile, deep inside his skinny body, there’s a big heart waiting to get out, and if my sixth sense is correct, he’s got a crush going on, which at some point I’ll have to deal with.