38
Boland gets on the phone.
“Good news,” he says. “Leonard is putting the hard case on an airplane. Looks like he’s deploying.”
“You sure it’s him?”
“He meets Hennessy’s description of the guy who trashed him,” Boland answers.
That is good news, Crowe thinks.
Very good news.
Well, not for Leonard.
39
Ben doesn’t see the car that follows him out of John Wayne-Orange County Airport and stays behind him all the way to Laguna.
Why should he?
That isn’t his world, he’s bummed about Chon leaving, and then O drops this bombshell:
“I threw myself at him.”
“Who?”
“Chon.”
Boom.
He’s not jealous-jealousy isn’t in Ben’s makeup-but Chon and O?
It’s huge.
But Ben is cool. Ben is always cool. “And?”
“I bounced off.”
The Wall of Chon.
“Oh.”
“Rejected. Spurned. Un requited.”
“You never hear about ‘requited love,’” Ben says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.
“ I don’t, anyway.”
“Pouting doesn’t look good on you.”
“Really?” O says. “Because I thought it did.”
A few seconds later she says, “I hate this fucking war.”
She was fourteen, watching TV that morning, stalling going to school when she saw what she thought was cheesy CGI come across the screen.
An airliner. A building.
It didn’t seem real and still doesn’t.
But Chon was already in the service by then.
A fact for which she blames herself.
Ben knows what she’s thinking.
“Don’t,” he says.
“Can’t help it.”
She can’t because she doesn’t know
It isn’t her fault
It goes back
Generations.
Laguna Beach, California 1967
Said I’m going down to Yasgur’s farm,
Going to join in a rock-and-roll band…
40
John McAlister rolls his skateboard down Ocean Avenue, then puts the board under his arm and walks along Main Beach up to the Taco Bell, because sometimes guys get their food, then go into the men’s room and leave their tacos on the table.
The tacos and Johnny are both gone when they come out.
Dig young Johnny Mac.
Tall for his fourteen years, wide shoulders, long brown hair that looks like it was cut with hedge clippers. Your classic grem-T-shirt and board shorts, huaraches, shell necklace.
When he makes it up to Taco Bell there’s a crowd standing around.
Big guy with long blond hair is buying food for everybody, handing out tacos and those little plastic packets of hot sauce to a bunch of surfers, hippies, homeless drug casualties, runaways, and those skinny girls with headbands and long straight hair who all look alike to John.
The guy looks like some kind of SoCal surfer version of a sea god. John wouldn’t know Neptune or Poseidon from Scooby-Doo, but he recognizes the look of local royalty-the deep tan, the sun-bleached hair, the ropy muscles of a guy who can spend all day every day surfing and who has money anyway.
Not a surf bum, a surf god.
Now this god looks down on him with a friendly smile and warm blue eyes and asks, “You want a taco?”
“I don’t have any money,” John answers.
“You don’t need money,” the guy answers, his face breaking into a grin. “ I have money.”
“Okay,” John says.
He’s hungry.
Guy hands him two tacos and a packet of hot sauce.
“Thanks,” John says.
“I’m Doc.”
John doesn’t say anything.
“You have a name?” Doc asks.
“John.”
“Hi, John,” Doc says. “Peace.”
Then Doc moves along, handing out tacos like fishes and loaves. Like Jesus, except Jesus walked on water and Doc rides on it.
John takes his tacos before Doc changes his mind or anyone there makes him as the kid who filches food off tables, goes out into the parking lot, and sits down at the curb beside a girl who looks like she’s nineteen or twenty.
She’s carefully picking the beef out of her taco and laying it on the curb.
“The cow is sacred to the Hindus,” she says to John.
