Chapter 15

One more time. Hugh’s stomach heaved. He spewed into the frothy yellow puddle. On the far shore, a small brown foot shoveled sand over the mess.

“Oh, God,” rasped Hugh.

“You’re going to be all right, sir.”

Hugh licked his tongue across the roof of his mouth, gathered the residue of the vomit and coughed it onto the sand. A young man with bright blue eyes and several days’ growth of blond beard straddled Hugh’s torso. On the service road that led to the beach, flashing red lights penetrated the bougainvillea and cactus.

“Best you get checked out,” said the young man. “The paramedics will take you to emergency. Better to be safe than sorry, boss.”

Hugh touched the throbbing lump on his forehead. “Please let me get up,” he said to the young man with lifeguard stenciled on his orange trunks. The young man stepped away as Hugh got to his feet. A dozen beachgoers surrounded him. He pushed through the stubborn spectators.

“Where did the boat go?” asked Hugh, walking to the water’s edge and scanning the horizon. He touched his hand to his chest and winced. A streak the texture and color of ground beef ran diagonally across his left breast. Blood welled at his touch. Two paramedics jogged up and scuffled with him as they attempted to get a blood-pressure cuff around his arm. One shone a penlight into Hugh’s eyes.

Later, Hugh would wonder if he responded at all, for separating him from his inquisitors was that seascape of the Oceanside Beach where his sons had died. Beyond the frozen cresting waves glided a boat. The same boat he had seen moments ago carrying the apparitions of his sons.

Hugh pulled away from the paramedics.

“Did you bring me in?” he asked the blue-eyed lifeguard.

“Only the last ten yards. A swimmer grabbed you.”

“Did you ask—the swimmer?”

The lifeguard’s attention had been drawn elsewhere. Hugh tapped his arm. The lifeguard met his gaze.

“Ask what?”

“About the boat?”

The lifeguard glanced at the paramedic and rolled his eyes. “No, I haven’t had time. I’ll make sure I do that.”

“Which one was it?” Hugh gestured toward the pack.

“I told you he wasn’t a surfer. And he didn’t stick around.”

“Someone had to have seen the boat.”

“You just got slammed by a surfboard. What’s with you and this boat?” asked the lifeguard.

The paramedics spent another ten minutes trying to persuade Hugh to visit emergency, but Hugh refused. Shrugging, the paramedics gave him a sheet listing the warning signs of a concussion and then marched off. The crowd had long dispersed, except the watermelon boy who stood beside him gazing toward the unseen boat.

“What’s your name?” asked Hugh.

“Apollonius,” said the boy.

“Did you see it?”

“The boat, you mean?”

“Yes, the boat that was out there.”

“There were a couple of boats,” said the boy.

“This one was big, really aero—fast-looking.”

“Maybe I saw it.” He shrugged. “I think I did.” The boy’s shy eyes and drawn lip said uncertainty. He had not seen it. Only Hugh had seen it.

“Apollonius,” shouted the boy’s mother, “vete aquí.”

The boy looked toward his blanket, “It’s okay, Mom. He’s my friend.”

The mother frowned and said something to the other woman, who stared at Hugh.

“My mom’s afraid of kidnappers. She thinks they’re everywhere.”

Hugh shivered. He pulled his forearm to his mouth and blew on the goose bumps. “She’s right. A parent can’t be too careful.”

“Do you have children?” asked Apollonius.

“I—I have two boys.”

“How old are they?”

“They’re . . . they would be . . .” He veered from the calculation. “They’re gone.”

“Where did they go?”

Hugh shook his head hopelessly.

“Were they kidnapped?” asked the boy.

He thought the parents paranoid who drilled fear into their children, making them run from every stranger’s smile. How many kidnappers were out there? Plenty, maybe. Children snatched up and hidden in nondescript houses, high-fenced backyards. To satisfy some freak’s pleasure. There were other motives, too, so common as to be considered the price of living in some places. Not pedophiles so much as thugs terrorizing families for ransoms. He had several Mexican children in his classes, sons and daughters of the upper class, who were in the United States because of that real threat.

“Did the boat take them?” asked Apollonius.

Hugh glanced down at the boy. “The boat?”

“I guess,” said Apollonius.

“No, the boat didn’t take them.”

“Who did?’ asked the boy, bristling with concern.

Hugh gestured toward the sea.

Apollonius frowned. “A different boat?”

“No. My sons drowned.”

“Both of them?”

“Yes, both.”

Apollonius dug his foot into the sand. “That’s bad. Do you go see them sometimes?”

“See them?”

“At the cemetery.”

Hugh shook his head. “I—we didn’t get to bury them. Their bodies were never found.”

“So maybe they’re not really dead.”

Hugh couldn’t respond.

“Maybe the boat did take them,” said the boy.

“Maybe,” said Hugh softly. He gazed at the ocean, searched for the boat that was merely a memory. One hundred yards out, a horizontal black bar unfolded across a length of sea; a parallel rule appeared along the water’s edge. Page three. In the hospital room, someone had handed him the newspaper with the story. The roiling sea, the fragile surfers, the sleek yacht. “Page three,” the gift-giver had said.

Page three . . .

Who had been that messenger? The nurse Miranda? No, not her.

“Appolonius, ven a comer su bocadillo.”

“Well, see you later. Sorry about your sons.”

“Apollonius—the man who pulled me out of the ocean . . .”

“You mean the lifeguard?”

“No. There was another man. Surfer—no, swimmer.”

“Oh, yeah. I saw him.”

“What did he look like?”

“Pretty tall, like you. Skinny. Tattooed like crazy.”

“What kind of tattoos?”

“He had this cool tiger on his back.”

The boy’s mother called out again.

“Later,” said Apollonius.

Hugh returned to his towel. A half mile away a party boat crawled north, a huge catamaran swiftly gliding across its wake. The boat at Oceanside wasn’t a sailboat, but a cabin cruiser or a speedboat. There was something futuristic about it, almost fantastic. Of course, the boat he had seen today could simply be the same model as the one he had seen at Oceanside. There were probably hundreds of them. Or was it just a memory? A memory on which he had imposed his lost sons. Hugh scooped up a handful of sand. The sand rippled as a buried bee broke the surface.

A young woman walked by, glancing at the stunned bee and then at Hugh’s forehead. He had forgotten about the wound. His forehead throbbed, wanted ice.

Perhaps his sons had gotten dragged into the boat’s propeller. He had read how large objects could become lodged against a hull, stay there for hundreds of miles. Or perhaps tangled in kelp, and the kelp caught on the propeller. There were nets, too. It would explain why the bodies were never found. But in his vision today, his sons were pointing at the hull—to tell him what? That their deaths were a measure more complicated than he supposed?

At the crossing, where he stopped to wipe off his feet and put on his sandals, an old primed Camaro was parked on the roadside with its hood up. A man was leaning over the engine and smoking a cigarette. He wore baggy, low-slung jeans, aviator sunglasses and a wrinkled dress shirt, sleeves stained with grease marks. He glanced at Hugh, who nodded to him as he sat on the guardrail. As Hugh wiped the sand from between his toes, he looked at the man’s profile. He had a firm jaw, broad, protruding cheekbones and long straight black hair. His lips were fine, but his nose bent and blunt as if it had been broken a few times. He turned and smiled at Hugh. He could have been of South Korean descent or Japanese. He looked something like his sons would have looked if they had reached their midthirties. Something else though. Not just a resemblance to his sons in an imagined future, but also a resemblance to someone in the past.

“How you feeling?” asked the man.

“Yeah, better. You saw what happened?”

“You almost bought it.”

“Were you the one who pulled me out?”

“I look like someone who goes in for that hero shit?”

Hugh slipped on his sandals and stood up. The man set a chrome cover over the air filter. He held up a chrome nut and said, “Call this a wing nut. You know why? Because it has little wings on it.” He drew the nut in an arc above his head. “Butterfly, same kind of word. Like butter flying.” He grinned. “Back to your nest, little bird.” He screwed it down and turned back to Hugh, wiping his hands on a rag, though his fingers appeared spotless. The Camaro’s engine compartment was in cherry condition.

“Hey, you got your light,” the man said, pointing to the highway.

Hugh glanced back at the blinking walk sign. “Thanks—what’s your name?”

The man seemed to give it a moment’s thought. He smiled. “Jason.”

“Hugh.”

“Cool.”

“You happen to live in Studio City?” asked Hugh.

“You’re going to miss that light, boss.”

As Hugh reached the north side of the intersection he looked back to see the young man getting into his car. He’d taken off the shirt. His back and arms were covered with the full-body tattoos that the Japanese call iridenzi. In the center of his back was a tiger.

“Hey, Jason,” shouted Hugh, but the Camaro’s owner had started his engine and gone like Speed Racer.

Hugh stared after the vanished car. Hugh was sure that he had encountered him before. If he could remember the context, he would remember the young man, but the context eluded him.