Minesweeper Read online

  Title Page

  Chapter One: A Graduation

  Chapter Two: Lost and Aimless

  Chapter Three: Dress Blues

  Chapter Four: Small Fish, Big Pond

  Chapter Five: Another Graduation

  Chapter Six: Anchors Aweigh

  Chapter Seven: Sight Unseen

  Chapter Eight: Via Land, Air, and Sea

  Chapter Nine: What the Tide Brought In

  Chapter Ten: Break a Leg

  Chapter Eleven: Lung Capacity

  Chapter Twelve: Mines and Yours

  About the Author

  Copyright

  My name is Fergus Frew Junior. Fergus Senior is dead. He was thirty-four years old in 1943 when he went to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and stayed there. I was twelve. It was the war. The big war. And Dad was bold and brave and ready and willing and able and all that stuff that makes people go googly over what our good guys did to wipe out the bad guys. He was heroic.

  My ma has a theory. I hate it when she has those. She believes that I’m attached to the sea because the sea took my father and I’m trying to take him back.

  Truth is, if there’s any connection between me and Dad and the sea—which there isn’t—then it would be because I hope to give him a good smacking around for failing to keep his head above water when he should have.

  The ocean has been generally better to me than it was to my old man. That’s primarily because I stay on top of it when I need to and go underneath it when I choose to. Mutual respect is what connects the water and me.

  You have to maintain the respect. Otherwise, you are wasted.

  And why my ma’s theory is so stupid: It suggests that I or anybody else can win something back from the sea. No, sirree. A tug-o’-war over my father’s earthly remains with the ocean itself? I miss ya plenty, Dad, but that’s a loser’s game, and you didn’t raise no loser.

  And that is my tribute to my father.

  * * *

  What I most like to do in the salty cold waves is to surf them.

  I am a surfer.

  I don’t, however, care very much for other surfers. It may be unreasonable, but if I had my way, it would be me and the waves and nobody else. It doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. If you’ve got something as awesome as the ocean waves bobbing around, you can’t expect that you’ll be the only one who appreciates them. Awesomeness attracts. Otherwise it wouldn’t be awesomeness.

  Understanding it doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it, though.

  I’ve come to accept that a fine beach with fine surf is going to be loved by lots of people.

  You know who does not love it, though? Ma. Ma hates the ocean and the surfing and all that goes along with it, in the same way that seals must hate orcas. Even though surf life poses no threat to her happiness in the way that orcas do to seals.

  * * *

  “Where are you going, Fergus?” Ma said one day in June 1949. She said it wearily, as tired of this pointless exchange as I was.

  I didn’t even turn. I stood at the front door, having come so close to getting through it without this challenge. I sighed and talked to the door, to Ma. “You know where I’m going. The sun’s out. It’s hot and breezy. Conditions are perfect. My board is strapped onto the back of my truck for Pete’s sake. Do you actually like having this talk? It gets us to the same exact non-place every time, and neither one of us ever seems to understand anything better by the end.”

  I truly didn’t intend to be nasty to her. Every time I did it, I felt sorry. I coulda, shoulda done better, especially this time.

  And yet every time I felt sorry, I failed to say that I was sorry.

  “You are so like your father,” she said.

  This was a theme. A tireless, relentless theme.

  “Good for him,” I said, not for the first time.

  I loved her. I felt bad for her, and I felt pain for her. I was almost certain that she could have said those exact same things about me. So why couldn’t we manage to do better?

  I love to surf. I used to love to do other things, like baseball and basketball and homework. Until I found surfing and it found me. I also love diving and snorkeling, but they’re just offshoots of surfing. In service to surfing. I’ll go underwater only when the overwater isn’t worth the time, because the waves are not happening. You can figure out a lot about how waves behave by studying what’s going on underneath them. The geography and rock formations, the channels between them, sandbars and shelves, they all come into play when shaping a wave. It’s like a moving sculpture, that thing that forms on the surface and then delivers the great, crazy ocean from out there to crash onto the shoreline. There is a whole culture of waves that goes on beneath them. To understand surf you have to understand the unseen bits below. Waves want to be understood. They want somebody like me to pay attention to them.

  That’s all I wanted to do that day I shut the door on my unhappy mother. I knew she was unhappy. Maybe she had every right to be. Didn’t matter, or at least it didn’t matter enough, as I strode to my truck, hopped in, and pulled out of our driveway.

  I couldn’t hear my mother crying. But I knew that’s what she was doing.

  That was my graduation day.

  I wasn’t a nice guy then. I wasn’t a bad guy, but I had trouble caring. And I wanted to be left alone. So once I got in my truck—which I loved, proving that I wasn’t without feelings altogether—I didn’t look back, didn’t look up to see my mother’s sad face in the window. I got in gear, stared straight ahead, and gunned it for the beach.

  Fifteen minutes later I was climbing out of the truck, inhaling the great Pacific breeze, and unstrapping my board. As I made the transition from biped to motorhead to aqua creature, I paused almost involuntarily to admire the vehicle that made it all possible. It had become a ritual, as significant to the whole exercise as waxing my board or paddling into the waves.

  I bought the big clunky beast with the money I’d made from three summers of lifeguarding. It was a 1932 Plymouth pickup, which at one time must have been some shade of brown but was now almost uniformly rust colored from nose to tail. It had been left to decay for most of its life, which was only a year shorter than mine, and pre-owned three times before I came along. All three owners had been farmers, which would account for the noble wear and tear on the truck. As far as farmers were concerned a patina of rust is not decay, it’s just life.

  And death. Funny, or not so funny, since one of the distinguishing characteristics of the truck was its “suicide doors,” which hinged in the back and were generally considered unsafe. The guy who sold it to me told me that the first owner actually had committed suicide, though not in the Plymouth itself. A pea farmer, he was beaten down by the Great Depression, then opted for the Great Alternative. The truck sat for a few years before his wife unloaded it. The second guy farmed lettuce—which is just a vast waste of agricultural space, if you ask me. He had a stroke. The truck sat again until Farmer Three came along and bought it. He farmed cucumbers, and the less said about them the better. He sold it to me after having it for a couple of years, because he just couldn’t stand to drive around in a “skid mark of a vehicle” anymore.

  I nicknamed the truck Lucky.

  San Onofre is my home beach. It has it all, really: bluffs and cliffs, hiking trails, sandy calm beachfronts, and best of all, a variety of surf spots. And I have a home within my home beach. I love a spot called Trestles, for a number of reasons. First, it was named for the railroad bridge running right alongside it. Trains and beaches, can’t be beat. Second, it has all kinds of geological arrangements under the water, including craggy rock reefs and placid, ever-shifting sand fields. They make the break inscrutable and alive and always new. Every time you surf Trestles, you have to figur
e it out all over again.

  But possibly my favorite aspect of all is that, unlike the other San Onofre beaches, you have to park your vehicle and then haul your board nearly a mile down a nature trail just to reach Trestles, passing under said trestle and through a wetland full of nutty bird-watchers.

  I love bird-watchers. I don’t care much for their hobby, but they bother absolutely nobody while doing it.

  About surfing and surfers, I feel precisely the opposite. Nothing gets in a surfer’s way like other surfers.

  Because of all these conditions, and it being graduation day across the county, I came to the clearing onto Trestles to find I had the place pretty much to myself. This, I have to say, was my paradise.

  I was almost too excited as I started running toward the ocean, my board tucked under my arm. I’d forgotten how much of a strain walking from the car with my board always was. I stumbled, as awkwardly as a fit young man with a board can stumble, fighting the inevitable until I finally fell to the warm ground. Before making it twenty yards into the run, I’d hurtled shoulder-first, bouncing off my own board and leaving a mask of my stupid face in the sand.

  I got up quickly, brushing myself down and looking around desperately for any witnesses. Seagulls came from all over to swoop and squawk and laugh their beaky heads off at me.

  “Fine,” I said, gathering up the board and resuming a more dignified pace toward the waves, “just don’t tell anybody.”

  I slapped down on the water and took my time paddling out. This was a day. I could feel the chilly water on my hands and feet, lapping up over the sides of the board and licking my torso, while at the same time the midday sun warmed my bare back. I had on my long shorts, cut off just below the knees, and by the time I’d gotten out past the break they were sodden. It was a good feeling.

  I was in no rush. Once past the break I hoisted myself onto the board and floated for a bit. I spread my arms wide and looked up into the sky, letting the sunshine melt over me and wash down into the water. There was a nice roll to the surf, though nothing too urgent. I watched the empty beach with satisfaction, like the whole place was mine. Surfers could be a territorial bunch, especially around here, which was one reason I never warmed up to them much. It always seemed beyond stupid to me, to get possessive over something so great and unpossessable as a whole mighty ocean.

  Unless it was like this. Just myself and the swells of salty water. Nobody in sight. Nobody to laugh at me but the seagulls, and they had nobody to tell. I stared, satisfied that the beach was empty of people and would remain that way, which was a blissful state of affairs. A guy could be forgiven for feeling like such a vision belonged to him. You’re not hogging something to yourself if there is nobody else present to hog it from, right?

  It’s when other people show up that everything gets messy.

  With a couple of gentle right-hand strokes through the water, my board reoriented itself seaward and I had turned my back to the land. I drifted my mind across the far horizon, and my mind was quite happy to be there.

  My classmates were probably all lining up at the entrance to the auditorium about now. I felt a pang. I didn’t want to be at graduation, but the pang did not seem to know that.

  Then, Ma’s face. Her voice came skimming to me across the surface of the water just as a big swell came under me, followed by a bigger one still. Her voice was sad, and the swells roiled under me and up through me, and I did not like that.

  I turned my back on the distant horizon and faced inland again. I heard her clearly this time, a sigh, a depleted whoosh of a sound that urged me into paddling before I even knew why.

  The wave knew, though. From an easy paddle I suddenly found myself windmilling into an insistent wave that had snuck up from the middle of the ocean. As it arched like a big watery cat waking from a nap, I found myself whirling away with powerful strokes, then jumping to my feet to join with this feisty nine-foot wave.

  I caught it, caught the leading edge and leaned into it. I was whipping along the ridge of the beautiful thing, this gift from somewhere, and I could just tell as I pushed hard on my back foot that this beast couldn’t throw me if it tried.

  Except that it did. As magically as the great wave had arrived, it produced one enormous buck that tossed me in the air. I hit the water with my chest, then went under.

  I felt my board kick away to my left, just before another, bigger wave came up over the top of the last. I scrambled to get to the surface and had just about cracked it when a fourth unfriendly breaker broke right over my face and shoulders and drove me back under. I went over backward, feeling the salty water force its way into my sinuses before I finally corkscrewed up in time for the last of the waves to deposit me onto the packed sand.

  I sat for a few minutes, wondering where all that had come from. The surf around here is known to be just unpredictable enough for a constant challenge, but it’s not known to be as surly as that.

  The spot where I’d landed was a lucky one, no more than ten yards from a bank of nasty-looking rocks that would have been no fun at all to get acquainted with. I was surprised to find myself there, as I had started in a position relative to the surf that shouldn’t have left me anywhere near this. My board knew better and was just now bobbing to a near stop on a far more accommodating bit of beach nearly forty yards along the water’s edge from me.

  I took the long, slow walk to retrieve it and eased my way back into the face of the rolling waves.

  Again, as I paddled I encountered nothing too rough. In fact, the surf was calm enough that if it didn’t improve, the afternoon would be something of a washout. But I knew this place well enough not to count it out so soon.

  Once out far enough beyond the break, I settled into floating some more. If nothing else, my tan was going to have a good day today. Which could not be said for all the unfortunates in flat hats stuck in the school auditorium at the same time. It was probably mid-ceremony by now. I was glad not to be putting my mother through that tedium. Proud, even. What a fine son.

  The quiet was getting to me. I felt, then saw, a promising, juicy swell coming to collect me. This time I paddled hard and furious like I was intending to steam into port under Fergus power, rather than surf. But the wave had more moxie than I’d realized, because it caught up to me before I made it to my feet. Recovering with a burst, I hopped into position in time to find myself on the crest of a beauty. I felt like one of those rodeo trick riders, standing on the back of a brute of a galloping runaway horse.

  The wave grabbed me up and took charge, seeming to change its very direction as it whipped me right and left, while slinging me straight forward at the same time. At its maximum height it must have reached twelve feet, but the maximum lasted a blink before somebody yanked the cord. I descended like I was a roasted chicken rushing downstairs in a dumbwaiter. There was a loud plop-slap sound as my board landed flat on the low water at the bottom of the broken wave.

  Then there was nothing. The rush ended so quickly that it left me standing there, floating on my board in calm, shallow water, as if I had not surfed a big, angry wave at all.

  It was a completely strange sensation, standing on the board in the shallows. This was not how a ride ended. You rode it in or more likely you crashed it out. But this? It felt as if the surf had been entirely withdrawn. A carpet yanked from underfoot and rolled away.

  I turned, still standing, out toward the horizon once more. The water all around me, the whole ocean, it seemed, was smooth as a pudding that had set. There was a hint of a ripple emanating from the edges of my board, and lisping liquid sounds came from it.

  I did not care for this.

  I felt like I could hear my mother again. Not words, but her voice. And the kids in my class. Their feet marching up under flowing robes to collect their diplomas, then marching back again surrounded by the smiling faces of everybody important to them. Those sounds were clearer to me than anything I could sense in the real world. Except the wicked seagulls, suddenly consum
ed with buzzing and laughing at me again.

  I jumped off my board, kicking it out from under me and sending it scooting onto the beach. All that, I could hear. I could also hear myself marching, one and two and three and four plop-splashes, launching myself into the air and crashing through the surface of the water.

  Into proper silence.

  In the absence of any decent wave action, the only job worth doing now was to dive and explore and demand some answers.

  Like nature owes me or anybody else answers.

  I dove and started swimming in the direction of the choppiest, rockiest section of the beach. The part where I nearly landed on the rocks. The water was as clear as it gets, so I could see wonderfully well as I neared the stony formations. Nothing unusual appeared, compared to the many times I’d explored this water world in the past. There were highs and lows among the rocks, tunnels, and small caves. There were sections of virgin sand spread like carpet on the ocean floor, and then something more like tiling. Broad, flat stones laid themselves out as neatly as a paved driveway.

  There were currents competing and slipping past one another. Different depths gave you different currents, different temperatures, different pressures. It was one of the most interesting aspects of the surf. Of all the many explorations I had made down here to date, no two were ever remotely alike. But none were ever wasted, either. I didn’t understand it entirely, but every scouting trip I made somehow stamped itself into my brain, which stored all of it into an ever expanding sense of what was under my board when I awaited the wave.

  I swam farther through the rocks, down under the archways. I was just about to enter a cave when, sheesh, I pulled up and jumped back, coming very nearly in nose contact with a good-size—bad-size—eel. I immediately started retreating, whirring away backward like a giant aquatic hummingbird, until I was convinced he wanted nothing more from me than to get away to his private hidey-hole.

  With pleasure. I didn’t normally fear eels or anything else I encountered underwater. As long as I had a little warning, I was fine. One of the many great things about ocean life as I’d found it was that things seemed to run on a live-and-let-live basis when it came to human visitation. Don’t pose a threat, don’t receive a threat is basically how it worked.