Midnight Pier
IT STARTED OFF as a drunken dare. There was a girl involved, too. A rather pretty girl, in fact. The girl had been making bedroom eyes at Cameron from the other end of the bar all night. The more the girl looked at him, the more Cameron would drink, to make it appear as if he had some urgent business that required his attention. But Cameron couldn’t blame the girl, if he were being honest, because he had agreed to jump from Balboa pier on his own accord.
Somehow Cameron and his pals had ended up drinking shots of “Three Wise Men” — some sort of whiskey concoction his buddy Tom had been championing all night. Cameron wasn’t sure how many shots he had let fly down his gullet, but before he knew it, he and Tom and the rest of the boys were slugging each other in the shoulders and lying about which girls they had felt up in high school. Cameron couldn’t tell who exactly was hitting him, but his lips had gone numb and he no longer noticed the hard fists smashing into his biceps.
Later in the evening, there were vague grumblings and then an argument about how cold the ocean water was in January, and how high the top of Balboa pier was from the ocean surface at high tide. Then someone pulled out their phone and confirmed that high tide would be at midnight, right on the button!
Not long after, there was a sloppy walk along the wooden planks of the pier, with Cameron’s rubbery legs leading the charge. All of the boys walked together, like a drunken swarm of noisy, lost bees.
Somehow Cameron had volunteered for the task, or perhaps someone had elected him in mental absentia. Either way, Cameron had managed to crawl over the low wooden railing at the edge of the pier. He stood as erect as British royalty, with the white rubber tips of his Converse confidently pointing straight and true toward the center of the Pacific Ocean.
The moon was full and the water was black. The ocean mist felt like soft wet kisses from the goddess of Atlantis. Cameron felt the wind rushing against his face and ruffling his hair into a terrible mess. His stomach suddenly and without apologies rushed up into his sternum, as if there were an elevator running straight up his core. Cameron had no recollection of jumping from the pier, but when he looked down, a black sheet of water was racing toward his frightened feet so fast that he never even had time to scream.
Cameron hadn’t imagined that he would hit the water so hard, or that he would sink so deep. But what surprised him the most was the intensity of nature’s merciless cold. The water did not surround his body as much as it attacked him with unexplained hostility.
The Three Wise Men were in his belly and they watched over him, though, keeping his skin warm, his muscles loose, and his mind calm. Cameron looked toward shore and the city lights didn’t look so far away. One stroke at a time, and I’ll be back on the sand before I know it.
It wasn’t long before he felt it. Not so much a nudge or a pull, but instead it felt as if the pressure of the entire universe had attached itself to his left calf. The twisting and the shaking soon followed, and even a drunken Cameron knew there could only be one explanation. Fishermen have been spotting great whites from the pier all winter.
Cameron reached down and grabbed hold of the nose of the sea beast, which felt like sandpaper that had been lying in the Mojave desert all summer long. The nose ripped away from Cameron’s hand, only to resume its shaking and nodding. Cameron reached out again, far past the nose, feeling a gelatinous orb at the side of the head of the beast. He pressed with his thumb harder and harder, until he felt a pop, followed by a sensation that his thumb had broken through a water balloon full of vegetable oil. But the one eyed shark kept going, as if it had been training for this moment its whole life. I guess this is it, then.
Without warning, Cameron heard the roar of the water from his right side and under the full moon, a glistening dorsal fin about the size of an American flag came racing toward the sea beast attached to his leg. Faster than a greased up naked mole rat shooting down a water slide, the great white barreled toward Cameron with its jaws wide open, exposing nature’s most cruel and diabolical weapon. The great white didn’t seem to notice Cameron, as it soared right past him, sinking its teeth into the sea beast attached to Cameron’s leg. Oh my God, they’re cannibals!
The sea beast released Cameron’s calf, as if a sharky dentist had told it to open wide. Cameron splashed and kicked the water, to create distance between himself and these two magnificent gladiators of the sea. He watched in awe for a few seconds, as the newcomer great white devoured the sea beast without any tremendous effort. The champion great white, having finished off its foe, slowly circled around Cameron a few times, before the American flag dorsal fin confidently sunk itself back into the sea like a World War II submarine.
One stroke at a time, Cameron made his way to shore. He wanted to just lie on the wet sand for awhile, and take it all in. His buddies approached and circled around him, and no one said a word. Tom stared at Cameron slack-jawed, with his arms hanging at his side, a matching set of wet noodles. Tom took off his belt and cinched it around Cameron’s leg to stop the bleeding.
“It was just a goof, man. We didn’t think you would really jump from the pier.”
Cameron looked up at the sky, appreciating the brightness of the stars and planets, wondering if anyone out there in the universe might be staring back at him through a telescope. He gazed at Tom, managing to produce a pathetic grin and a drunken wink.
“It’s all right man, the Three Wise Men were with me the whole way.”
THE END
Follow THE ENDLESS BLUE for more tales from the sea, by J.S. Lender
