Wave Of A Lifetime

“I don’t know, man,” Bo said. “Sometimes I just feel like I’m drifting in open water.”
“That’s because you are drifting in open water, dude,” said Tyler, his grinning teeth as bright white as the surf breaking on the Hawaiian beach. His sandy-blonde hair was a nest of sun-bleached curls. The silver lenses of his shades reflected Bo’s exasperation as clearly as a mirror. “This water’s glassy as fuck today. No gnarly waves at all. The ocean’s taking a breath and holding it, man. We aren’t going to get any good barrels today.”
They both floated on their surfboards, belly-down, arms hanging laxly over the sides. Tyler had been smoking marijuana all morning long. Bo could smell it on him through the salty air of the ocean. He had probably popped a pill, too. Bo was trying to stop taking drugs altogether.
“I don’t know what I want to do,” Bo said. “Dad’s really pestering me to go to Business school, but, damn, I can’t stand those kooks. He keeps threatening to take my allowance away. He thinks he can scare me straight or something.”
“Your dad’s got mucha moola, dude,” Tyler said. “But, yeah, I’d hate to work around a bunch of kooks all day.”
“I was wanting to do something that would let me stay in Hawaii,” Bo said. “The only thing I really like to do is surf, and even that is starting to let me down.”
“Don’t worry, bro,” Tyler said. “There’ll be more waves to ride.”
“Even if there were,” Bo said, sighing, “I don’t think I’d care about them.”
Tyler looked at Bo for a long time, then shrugged. “You sure this isn’t a problem with Rae?”
“What about her?” Bo said.
“She’s going to school, too, isn’t she?”
“She graduated from highschool, so, yeah.”
“What’s she going to study?”
“Marine biology,” Bo said.
“At least she’ll be able to keep on the ocean,” Tyler said. “And studying whales and stuff would be cool…if I could do it from the back of a surfboard.”
Bo laid his face on his surfboard, left-cheek down while his eyes wandered over the landless horizon to the West. “We had an argument last night. She said I wasn’t taking anything seriously anymore.”
“What did she want you to take seriously?” Tyler said, grinning mischievously.
“School,” Bo said. He closed his eyes and sighed. “And our ‘relationship’.”
“Relationship?” Tyler exclaimed, chuckling. “You’re friends with benefits. That is more like an arrangement than a relationship!”
“Yeah, but now she wants something serious. Don’t get me wrong. Rae is a cool chick. I like hanging out with her. I like the sex, too, but she wants me to meet her grandparents.”
“Whoa-ho!” Tyler laughed, grinning and shaking his head as if he had sandfleas in his hair. “Talk about being in the pocket. Her dad is loaded with cash. Hell, if you two marry then neither of you would need to work again, man.”
“Her dad’s a hard-ass,” Bo said. “One of the big Kahunas. He hates that Rae hangs out with me. He thinks I take advantage of her. He’d kill me if he knew I was shagging her three days a week. But I’m only a year older than her, and she knew what she wanted when she started this thing. Still, he gives me the whitewater treatment. Whenever I do go to her house he tries to bog me bad. Always saying shit like he’s going to hurt me. Rae thinks he’s kidding around with me, but he doesn’t play.”
“Oh yeah. He’s actually one of the elders, isn’t he? Like, he belongs to one of the oldest tribes on the island.”
“And her mom is Japanese,” Bo said. “She’s nice and everything, but she’s very traditional. Can you imagine having in-laws that are tribal Hawaiian and old-fashioned Japanese? Man, that’s like surfing over coral!”
Tyler brayed like an ass. “That’d be a cheese-grater for sure, man! Ha!”
“And it’s not like I don’t like Rae,” Bo said. “But sometimes I feel like I don’t have any passion for her, ya know? I don’t have passion for much of anything. To be honest— and you keep this to yourself, man, I mean it— the only reason I have sex with her is because it feels like I’m accomplishing something. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end. It feels like I’m building up to something.”
“Yeah, man,” Tyler said, laughing, “building up to creaming in her face!”
Bo thrashed his hand through the water, splashing Tyler in the face. “You can be a real dick, sometimes, man.”
Tyler just grinned through the water dripping down from his face and shades. “Just being honest, bro. Not trying to steal your waves or anything. It’s just that you got a good thing going with her. And, like, you could get your dad’s money and her dad’s money and you could just surf for the rest of your life. Or just coast. Or whatever, man. If I were you I’d be shacking out of my mind. Plank in the ocean and plank on Rae. Ride the waves out to oblivion.” He lifted his hands and made the choka gesture, pinky and thumb extending out while the middle fingers curled in. “That’d be totally gnarly, dude.”
“Do you have to be such a stereotype?” Bo said. But he laughed and then sat up on his surfboard. He glanced back at the shore. There were lots of kooks in the shoals, and a few trying to catch the nonexistent waves. Little grommets hauled their boards ashore, upset at the lull in the ocean. Bo thought for a moment about his future, and nothing looked good.
“You got it going on, dude,” Tyler said. “You shouldn’t be worrying about nothing right now, man. Just marry Rae and call it a day.”
“But her mom will want grandkids,” Bo said. “Hell, my mom will want grandkids. And if we do that then I will have to get a real job. No more wave-riding for me. No more coasting. Just the 9-to-5 grind. Everyday, five to six days a week until I can retire, roll over, and die.” He punched the water.
“Fuck that, man,” Tyler said. “Stay on the pipeline. Kiss the spray. Throw buckets at it all. I bet Rae doesn’t even want kids. I’m telling you, man, it’s not a bad deal.”
Bo opened his mouth to say something else, but then saw something terrifying. Shark fins— fifty of them, at least—all cutting through the water in a helter-skelter, zigzag non-pattern of frenzy.
“Fuck!” Tyler screamed. “Total sketch balls!”
The sharks did not pay attention to Bo and Tyler, even as the two surfers flailed to turn about and flee. Instead, they swam around them and headed toward the island. Even at the distance Bo could see the sharks slam into the shoals, then up onto the shore. It was like a mass-suicide of sharks. But he had never heard of sharks doing anything like that. Maybe, he thought, he could ask Rae about it.
Before he could contemplate it more, however, something struck his feet. He nearly tumbled off his surfboard in fright. He and Tyler both gasped as the schools of fish rushed by, so thick in numbers that they were like a moving landmass beneath the ocean; dense and frenzied as a mosh pit. This massive front of wildly diverse fish clustered around the golden sands while parents, screaming, fled with their children in their arms. Other surfers and kooks staggered frantically out of the water, retreating from the waves of marine life all throwing itself ashore.
And then the water became darker. Large creatures passed beneath Bo and Tyler. They could do nothing but watch as the pods of whales surged beneath them in feverish flight. Stunned to incredulity, the two teenagers watched as the whales stranded themselves with the rest of the creatures, crushing fish and shark alike to escape the ocean.
“What the fuck is going on?” Tyler said.
Bo and Tyler felt the ocean suddenly draw back, pulling them far out to sea as if on a riptide. Bo looked out over the horizon. He saw a white crest, as long as the ocean’s horizon, and knew upon the moment, with an instant dread, that it was coming their way. It was a rogue wave. It may have even been a tsunami. It was difficult to discern at the distance, but it confirmed itself rapidly with the passing of one moment into the next.
“Jesus Christ!” Bo cried. “That’s, like, a hundred foot swell!”
“No way!” Tyler said, gawping. He took off his shades and strained his eyes against the West Pacific as the sun glared along the concussive waters. “Fuck! That’s a monster wave, man.”
The wave was not something Bo or Tyler had any experience with. Bo did not believe they could ride it, and even if they tried he knew there would be no telling where the wave might take them. It might sweep them to the wrong side of the island, where rocks and coral waited with sharp, jagged teeth.
“We gotta’ dive under it,” Bo said.
“Fuck no,” Tyler said. “I’m riding that monster.”
“It’s too damn dangerous, man,” Bo said. “Go under it, or you’ll be just another cracker crushed in the soup.” Bo laughed giddily at his own joke, never having meant to make it.
“You can’t duck-dive everything, man,” Tyler said. “Me, I’m gonna’ face this thing head-on. Deep in the pit. Tickling the chandelier. Riding the pocket. Know what I’m saying?”
“Fuck that,” Bo said. “This isn’t necessary. It’s not worth the ris…”
But Tyler had already started paddling out to meet the large wave. Bo watched him in disbelief, wondering if he would ever see his friend again.
The sea went from glassy to choppy in seconds. Bo waited until he felt the ocean surging beneath him and then he took a deep breath and dove downward, abandoning his board and going down as deep as he could in the darkening ocean. He had trained for years to hold his breath for long periods underwater. It wasn’t so much his lung capacity that was the danger, but the panic of what he was trying to avoid as it rushed above him. He felt the wave pass, pulling him upward with it, but by the time he broke the surface the wave had already tumbled down into its own impact zone. He breathed out the old air and then sucked in some more. He regained his breath just in time to dive again and avoid another wave— somewhat smaller than the first— and repeated this until the waves finally subsided enough that he could ride the smaller ones shoreward. He yelled for Tyler in between each surge.
And then he turned around, looking seaward, fearful that he might see Tyler’s lifeless body drifting in that foamy calm. But instead of seeing Tyler, Bo saw a large shadowy figure on the horizon; a shadowy figure that dwarfed the sun sinking behind it. The shadowy figure was gargantuan in size. Reticulated wings spread from its humanoid back, whereas its face was a writhing tangle of tentacles. Its massive eye looked balefully upon the world and then its body lurched forward, wading through the deep ocean as a child might wade through the shoals. Had Bo not been awash with the briny waters he would have been soaken with sweat. Panicked, he swam shoreward with a frenzied flurry of his arms. A wave of terror carried him without end.

Sharks, whales, fish, dolphins—the beach was strewn with dying sealife that had stranded itself in its wild flight. Their slick, glistening flanks expanded and contracted desperately, but their eyes were empty of anything except instinctive terror. Many more animals had gutted themselves on the reef break. Bo came ashore slowly, gradually navigating the coral on this side of the island. He found Tyler waiting for him. They greeted each other with openmouthed dismay.
“This is some crazy shit, man!” Tyler said. “And one hell of a wave! A wave of a lifetime!”
“Wave?!” Bo cried. “Wave? Didn’t you see that…that…thing coming out of the ocean?!”
“These crazy beasties?” Tyler said, gesturing to all of the sealife dying on the shore. “Course I saw them. Hell, some of them were riding the wave with me. I managed to ride the barrel to the shore before I could hit the impact zone. Was pretty damn gnarly, man.”
“No!” Bo said. He pointed toward where he had seen the shadowy figure sloshing through the ocean. “I’m talking about the monst…”
Whatever it was, the monster was gone, and the sun had set. Dusk flared over the frothy sea. Tyler walked between a Great White Shark and a marlin, then tiptoed gingerly between a humpback whale calf and a Tiger Shark. He grabbed an opah that was the size of a bicycle tire and lifted it up.
“Dude,” he said, “does Rae’s mom know how to make sushi?” He gasped, awestruck by a sudden thought. “Dude. Dude. There’s enough fish here for the whole island to have a luau.”
Bo kept staring out toward the ocean; staring hard to see the creature again while also dreading the sight of it.
Tyler had now exchanged the opah for a Yellowfin tuna that was the size of his leg.
“We could have both, you know?” he said excitedly. “Like, a sushi luau, that way Rae would feel at home. You could propose to her! That’d be…”
“That’s it!” Bo cried suddenly. He stormed up the beach, farther inland. “I’m going to Kansas to be a farmer!”
Tyler followed after him, fumbling with the Yellowfin tuna. “What do you mean, dude?”
“Or a businessman,” he said. “An insurance salesman in Idaho! Or a pig farmer in Kentucky! Anywhere else but here!” he screamed, stomping between the hundreds of animals that had beached themselves there. “Away from the ocean! Away from that thing!”

***

Bo rode that wave of terror all the way to Denver, Colorado. He bought some land and grew pot for his own business. He was known as a savvy businessman that was fair and amicable. His father was proud of him for becoming a businessman, but also resented the fact that he never visited his family in Hawaii. Tyler married Rae, but that marriage lasted only three months and ended in divorce when he happened to see something rising out of the water one day, too. He joined Bo in Denver eventually. Rae married a doctor in Honolulu. Her father, and his tribe, were very pleased and no more gigantic monsters were seen off the coast of Hawaii.