The Churchgoer Read online

  There’s cute, and then there’s cute. This was definitely cute. She was looking to be irksome, and it irked me.

  “Vegas has one of those, too,” I said, feeling my blood rise unreasonably and not quite finding a way to back it down, “and there’s about ten assholes on this block alone who’d leave their standing game of pocket pool to take you.”

  “I can see your hands.”

  “I hate Vegas,” I said. I lifted my palms from the table, showed them, and went back to work on my burrito. I was going to ignore her now.

  Cass’s voice called out, “Crazy girl hamburger. Crazy girl hamburger.”

  When the hitchhiker came back with her plastic tray, she seemed different for the fourth time already. She moved bouncily. She had an affable air, like she was eating food with an old friend. She was trying to decide who best to be with me. It was manipulative, sure. A means to an end, no doubt. But also revealing of a need, like track marks on a forearm.

  “I’m not trying to be a dick,” she said as she peeled the wrapper from her burger and bit a glob of American cheese from the wax paper. “I’m really not. It’s just been . . . man. A shit day.” She sucked down on her soda and waved her hand at her hamburger. “But this. This looks magical. After a day like today, goddamn. You know, the world is full of shitty people saying shitty things.”

  “That’s as good a description of the world as any,” I said, and meant it. Most people who say things like that implicitly exclude themselves. I didn’t. I wasn’t sure where she’d put herself yet.

  “Really, though. What’s in Seattle? Let me guess, music career?”

  “Now you’re being a dick.”

  “That’s a compliment. You look kind of punk rock.”

  “Punk is a sales pitch. I’m just done with this whole place. California.”

  “What’s the plan up there?”

  “Go plaid. Drink coffee. I don’t know, throw fish or whatever the fuck people anywhere else than here do for day jobs.”

  “You can just say you’re going to art school.”

  She laughed. “Fine. Film school. I’m not in, but I want to go to this place up there. I heard about it from a friend. It sounds amazing.”

  She took a few bites and stared out the window. I could almost see her trying to frame a view of herself standing out there twenty minutes before—establishing shot of young woman skipping town—and the kind of coming-of-age story that might start with.

  “What’s your name?” she asked while she ate.

  “Mark Haines,” I said.

  “I’m Cindy,” she said. “Cindy Liu. No jokes, okay?”

  “Jokes?”

  “You know. Dr. Seuss. How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The cartoon with the music? What can you do.”

  “No jokes,” I said. That antennaed little Who from Whoville flashed through my mind, and then—there was, dimly, a child crying by a cradled telephone. The ruffles on her pajamas. My insides slipped a clutch. I felt something like thirst in my jawbone. An invisible hand reached out from my amygdala and smacked my cortex around.

  There was a little too much rage in my voice when I said, “No matter how you rhyme it, Dr. Seuss was just another rich fuck from La Jolla who stepped out on his wife and didn’t look back after she swallowed a bottleful of barbiturates. His books are garbage, too. Rhyming a generation’s brains into insipidity.”

  Cindy looked a little appalled and a little amused, maybe at the story or maybe at me, I didn’t know. “He wrote books?”

  I must have made a face.

  “Kidding,” she said. “‘Would you, could you, in a box? Could you, would you, with a fox?’ You can’t shake that shit out of your brain if you wanted to. Gets in early and it’s stuck for life.” That backed me off a little, but I could still sense my thoughts feeling around the edges of memories before some shred of self-protective rage chased them off.

  “As far as rhyming goes,” I said, “I’ll start and stop with ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra, just for you.’”

  Cindy smiled thinly. “Good one, Doc.” Maybe she thought she could glimpse an angle in what I’d said, old guy ingratiating himself to young girl with parent issues. But she left it alone, smiled, and then ate the burger in quick, eager bites.

  I looked at the window. It had begun to rain. In the traffic a van packed with bobbing heads rocked on its shock absorbers. You’d think their beach day would be ruined, but now the out-of-towners would have the chance to play in the bubbly brown torrents of run-off where the right mouthful of water could mean diarrhea for a few days, or hep C. The shit stream gave them an excuse to stay out of the ocean, afraid as most people are of that less manageable body of water.

  “Ahem,” Cindy said, being downright polite with a sweet smile. “I wasn’t kidding.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “That whole fa-roo, fa-roo bit.”

  I guess I had been humming. “Oh, sorry,” I said. “Watch out. The unconscious mind at work.”

  We talked idly while Cindy finished up—about the weather, the crowds, how hitchhiking wasn’t what it used to be. She asked me how much better it had been in the 1960s. That stung. I could tell she was still hungry and bought her some french fries. She asked me if I was always this decent.

  “Not always,” I said, then heard how that sounded a little menacing and amended it: “I don’t make a rule of anything beyond being just decent enough.”

  “Decent enough,” she said, “is about as decent as I can handle anyway.”

  I nodded.

  “Well,” she said, bowing her head slightly, “thank you. I appreciate the food. I guess I was hungrier than I expected.” A mannered, almost aristocratic note had entered her voice. Her enunciation shifted a degree to suggest more of an education than she would have owned up to, and her posture became more poised, her neck elongated. It was like watching a musician switch instruments during a single song. I wondered who she was, beneath all these selves she ran scales on. “You’ve done your good deed,” she said. “You’re decent enough for today. Commit your other crimes with a clean conscience.”

  I smiled. She was flirting. It wasn’t often I got flirted with, and it flattered me. It probably had less to do with me and more to do with the food, but I didn’t want to get caught up in that. I found myself looking a little too long at the freckles under her eyes.

  “So,” I said, shuffling out of the booth, “it’s up in the air, but I might be going up to Oregon sometime in the next couple weeks. I could call you if it’s going to happen. Not quite Seattle, but it’d get you closer to the Space Needle than Oceanside.”

  All the willful charm dropped, and she appraised me openly. The look presumed I was despicable, like she knew the different makes and models of despicable and she was cross-referencing my condition—my engine rattles, my dings—with some tragic internal Kelley Blue Book. I saw the tone was wrong. What I’d said was convenient like a lie, persuasive like an untruth.

  Cindy tugged the hoodie from her bag and slipped it on, soda stains and all. “I’ll be around town unless I find a ride sooner. Find me if shit comes together.”

  It was a dismissal, and I felt dismissed. I was back to feeling like someone to be suspicious of, some kind of creep. Her look had made me feel like that, though I wouldn’t hold it against her. It was close enough to the look I gave myself most mornings. Still, I didn’t like it coming from others.

  I threw away our trash, including my untouched cup of guacamole, and we both left Angelo’s.

  Outside the light rain on concrete sounded like the hiss of a punctured tire. I asked Cindy if she was going back out to the corner with her sign.

  “Rain out,” she said. “I’m calling it a day.”

  In the oversized sweater she looked like a girl again. I could feel it in how my body relaxed.

  “Peace, old man,” she said in a way that wasn’t exactly unkind, and
then she walked off down PCH, and I went home. I didn’t think I’d see her again. How wrong I was, like I always am.

  3.

  THE FIRST TIME WAS ABOUT A YEAR LATER. WE HAD TRADED A GOOD OLD boy for a cowboy in the White House, though that hadn’t come to much yet. Otherwise, my life had drifted along, unchanged. That wasn’t true. Time passed by uneasily, a week, a month, another month. What made it uneasy I couldn’t figure out. Nothing had changed. Everything was exactly the same. The waves were different each day, but it was always the usual me paddling the board, and that was as far as my obligations could extend. But something was unsettled, in some minor way, like having the first onset of Parkinson’s manifest as a trembling gallbladder, a deep and obscure interior twitch. I tried not to think about it and was succeeding.

  The summer was in full blush again, the marine layer burned off by seven in the morning, fully cremated by eight, and buried at sea in time for brunch, leaving only heat and anything you could do to escape the heat. It was the only time of the year I surfed later than predawn, despite having to deal with the crowds. It was the only way worth its salt to stay cool. Paying an asshole tax was justified, if only barely.

  I was threading my way through a pack of skaters, chain-smoking and catcalling from where the ramp from the pier came down to beach level, when Cindy called out from behind one of the pylons.

  “Hey, old man,” she said, grinning. “Did you ever go to Oregon?”

  Being addressed in public—in any way, really—was out of the ordinary. I felt caged, seen. But I gave a wave, walked over anyway, not wanting to look rattled by a greeting, and told her no—still thinking about going, someday.

  “Ah, that’s too bad,” she said. By then I was a few feet from her. She looked rougher than at Angelo’s. The white V-neck had dirt patches up the back. Her hair was greasy. There was a new tattoo on her left shoulder, but the parts that emerged from her sleeve just looked like a splotch of spilled ink. I could have sworn there was a bruise on her forehead, painted over by concealer.

  “What about Seattle? Too much grunge and coffee have you running back south?”

  She smirked. “Seems like you and I both have a problem with follow-through. I’m ready to get the fuck out of here, though. For real this time.”

  I nodded. This time was different—that old line.

  “It’s nice,” she said, pointing to the board I held under one arm. “Always rode a single-fin?”

  “No,” I said. I turned the green board over to look at the eight-inch fin on the tail. “But I like the feel of it. Slow and steady.”

  “Take me out.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “In the water,” she said, scoffing at my confusion. “I used to know dudes who wanted me to watch them surf, but no one’s ever given me a lesson, and I’ve got jack shit going on today.”

  “What happened to getting out of town?”

  “I’m working on it, but everyone needs a day off.” To go by looks, I would say it was more something else that was working on her. But it didn’t cost me anything to say yes. That’s what I told myself at the time.

  She changed into a bathing suit—she kept it in that backpack—and came back. It wasn’t much of a surf lesson: a half hour of her paddling face-first into white water, getting knocked off the board, scrambling back on, not catching waves. She called it off, obviously frustrated with the way the ocean continually surprised her, catching her from unsuspected angles, welling up when it seemed there was a moment of calm.

  We went to the shore and I took the board from her. She looked lanky in the bikini she said she’d picked up for cheap from the tourist-trap gift shop, and she shivered as the water evaporated off her skin, rubbed red on the elbows, thighs, and belly from the friction of the wax.

  “You did good,” I said. “It was a good start.”

  “It was a good nothing,” she said. “I know enough ways to get hassled already. I don’t need another one as a hobby.”

  I tried to explain that it takes a long time to learn, that with a sport like running, if you run for two hours you’re running for two hours, but a two-hour surf session might only mean actually riding waves for ten minutes, and that’s if you know what you’re doing. It didn’t matter. She was done. Not unappreciative but more interested in warming up on the sand than getting into the ocean again. Everything I said made me feel like a burnout turned Little League coach. I didn’t need that, as close to bone as it was, so I went back out.

  The surf was small, but the sun was bright, the sky so blue it edged into ultraviolet. In the last few weeks the water had warmed that crucial degree or two. No wetsuit needed, and the feel of floating on my longboard a hundred feet from the pier, wearing only trunks, registered in a new way. I was aware of the salt water evaporating on my shoulders, the bead of it forming, then running from my hair down the right side of my nose and into my mouth, the vapor of sea becoming air rising up all around me to become clouds—clouds that travel the skies, that would form storms whose wind would send waves from distant corners of the Pacific to break where I floated. Sometimes a good water temperature can get you thinking like that. The last time it had happened to me, I was fourteen and preoccupied with asking God’s forgiveness for what I’d been doing to the socks.

  About twelve people were out: a few middle-aged men, an old woman, the rest teenagers. Looking south through the pylons, I could see the swarms of people who came to Oceanside in the summertime to turn the beach into the longest ashtray in the world. Cop cars bracketed the backside of the crumbling beachfront amphitheater. Dirty fires stoked with nonflammable substances sent up gray smoke signals. There were a thousand little shadowy bodies wading into the ocean, looking like a colony of misguided ants floating in a cluster at the edge of a puddle. On the sky-blue tower, a couple lifeguards in red swimsuits compared tan lines and tips for easy body-hair removal. Usually I stayed away except for dawn sessions to avoid the rankling presence of all these people, but they didn’t bother me as much today. Instead of calling them the garbage of humanity, I thought of them only as stupid assholes, which was some kind of improvement.

  Soon the crowd in the water changed. The teenagers headed to shore to eat burritos and catch seagulls in beach towels and throw fireworks at the rec center and cruise for girls who might fall for the insouciant, rat-haired surfer style. The usual things. They were replaced by a group of men in their thirties. It was like watching a time-lapse video. These guys were all heavy to near-obese, all too tan for their own good. A couple had some bastardized version of dreadlocks: short, thin ones sticking out in odd directions or tied up vertically in a style Pebbles Flintstone would have admired. One had a massive afro and was paddling carefully, trying to avoid having to duck-dive under a wave, probably not wanting to have to hit the salon for another perm. I knew the type: white guys who lived three to a room, some in the small pink houses between the pier and South Jetty, fancied themselves free spirits, drank too much beer, smoked too much pot, spoke too loudly, and surfed too poorly. They weren’t the worst company, but I wouldn’t hurt for losing it. After a half hour of watching them try to stand up on waves they hadn’t caught, I was enjoying myself more.

  One of them paddled out near me. He had a shaved head and a tattoo arching across his beer gut that read BARREL. He kept smiling in my direction. After five minutes of this flirtation, I smiled back. “Nice day.”

  The guy grinned and nodded.

  I scratched my head. “I wish the waves had a little more push, but it’s hard to beat trunkable water.”

  The guy raised his eyebrows like I’d said something profound and kept grinning and staring.

  “Sorry, my mistake,” I said. “You must be deaf, right? How about sign language?” I made a peace sign with my left hand and a special kind of bird with my right. A little flash of anger was all I ever needed. There’s a kind of clarity to feeling that way. Maybe I wasn’t touching some Eternal All anymore, or seeing the world in a grain of sand and a bead
of salt water, but in the moment this felt better. I was feeling my limitations, and his limitations, and rubbing up against humankind’s ability to make life an ineluctably large pain in the ass for others—the sad, gorillan mass of this humanity hurtling toward an unsatisfying and unceremonious end. But the guy was implacable. He just kept smiling. It baffled me into feeling a little less on edge.

  Then he muttered something and started paddling in. “Later, man!” he called back.

  I looked toward the beach and saw his friends all standing around in ankle-deep water. Then I noticed someone standing next to Cindy. It was one of the people from their group, the skinny one with the bleached orange, misshapen ’fro that made his entire head look like a goiter on a person from a National Geographic. He stood over Cindy, close to her. He was holding his shortboard and rocking a little, side to side. She was turned over partway and held her shirt, which she must have been lying on, up to her chest. She didn’t look happy to be talking to him.

  But then he walked away. Cindy watched until he was gone. A minute or two later, she lay down again. I tried to let it go and keep surfing, but the next wave I caught I rode all the way to the shore.

  I walked up the beach to where she was lying on her stomach, reading. Sand clung to the upturned soles of her bare feet. Her hair had dried stiff and mussy, bits of salty white rime visible on the black of it. She looked like she was absorbed in what she was reading. I waited a full five minutes without her noticing, and the page didn’t turn.

  “I’m heading out,” I said, too loudly.

  The muscles in her back twitched. She turned over, not bothering to hold up the shirt, and gave me a hard stare. “You scared me.”

  I pretended to laugh, but I was watching her carefully. “Sorry.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I was ready ages ago.” It sounded like something my grandmother would have said, and I almost called her on it. She started throwing things into her backpack hurriedly. I glanced at the title of the book she was reading and was surprised to see Jane Eyre. I’d have guessed High Times, or Plath.