Black Cake(11)

“But your pa,” Bunny said. “What if he doesn’t agree?”

“I’ll think about that later,” Covey said.

Three afternoons a week, Covey pulled through the waves, pulled through her fear of sharks, pulled against lactic acid, and breathed in gulps of her future as a champion. Three afternoons a week, Bunny smeared grease on her face, pulled through the jellyfish stings, and studied a map of the island’s big harbor. Because wherever Covey went, Bunny wanted to follow.





Covey and

Gibbs





In those days, there were boys who would hack into the hulls of discarded fishing boats, shape them into flat boards, and ride the waves. Some of them went body boarding and surfing on pieces of refrigerator foam. They’d trim the polyurethane and laminate it with resin and fiberglass. They would laugh as they jumped off their boards and ran back to the sand. By the time factory-made surfboards came to Covey’s hometown, she was ready to try her luck at the sport.

Covey turned out to be a natural. She didn’t have a surfboard of her own, but Gibbs Grant did. Covey had just turned sixteen when Gibbs joined the swim club. He was one of the older boys, but fairly new in town. His family had moved to be near relatives after a mining company bought his father’s land. Covey had heard about the Grant boy but when she first saw him step out of the changing room and into the pool area, she was sure that their paths had never crossed. She was certain of it because she would have noticed if they had.

Covey had reached that age where the boys had stopped pulling at her hair. She had reached that stage where boys whispered as she walked by, hissed at her from cars, stood too close to her at parties, embarrassed her, repelled her, and sometimes, made her daydream. But none of them had done what this new boy did when he walked into the club that day.

As Gibbs moved toward the border of the pool, Covey took one look at him and felt as if this boy, looking right back at her with those eyes of his, had just shot out his arm and given her a push, sending her falling, falling, falling backward into the deep end.

Later, he said, “I see why dem call you Dolphin.”

“Oh, yes?” Covey said.

“You’re fast.”

She shrugged and looked down at her feet. As usual, her toes were puckered from all that time in the water. She pretended to find this interesting.

“The boys say you’ve been swimming out in the bay.”

“Yeah, Bunny and I.”

“Just you two?”

“Mostly just us, but not always.”

“You think I could come out there and swim with you sometime?”

“If you’re good enough,” Covey said, smiling up at him.

“I’m good enough,” Gibbs said, grinning.

Gibbs joined them in the bay the very next week. One day he brought a surfboard. Covey wanted to try it immediately but Bunny scrunched up her nose. It was this interest in surfing that gave Gibbs and Covey their first excuse to see each other without their swim club friends, or their schoolmates, or the inquisitive eyes of their parents.

The first time Covey and Gibbs followed a path down through the brush and into the cove where the surfers went, they found a trio of Rasta men on the beach. The oldest of them waded into the water and the next thing Covey knew, he was up on the board, a thing to behold, his graying dreads flying as he came up the face of a wave and cut back in the other direction.

When it was Covey’s turn to use Gibbs’s board, the men stared openly at her, following her as she crossed the narrow band of sand, pushed her way into the breakers, and hoisted her trunk onto the board. For the rest of her life, Covey would remember the feeling that came over her the first time she stood up on the surfboard. She would remember hearing Gibbs whoop before she fell and wondering if the elation of that moment was only from the surfing or if it was from knowing, too, that Gibbs was there, watching her.

Covey would remember, too, her sense of satisfaction when, the next time they saw the surfing Rastas, the older men merely dipped their chins in greeting, then carried on with what they were doing.

Covey hadn’t said anything to Bunny about going surfing with Gibbs. She would have to say something eventually and Bunny would say Oh, yes? and smile, but Covey knew that Bunny would be jealous. She sensed it from the way Bunny eyed Gibbs whenever she thought Covey wasn’t looking. She knew from the way Bunny touched Covey’s face as she helped Covey adjust her swim cap, from the way she rested her head in Covey’s lap when they lolled on the beach after swimming, waiting for the sun to bake their suits dry. She didn’t want Bunny to feel bad. Bunny was her best friend. For Covey, this meant everything. But for Bunny, it wasn’t quite enough.

“Boss!” Gibbs shouted when Covey came running out of the waves after standing up that first time.

“You have a true talent, Dolphin Girl,” Gibbs said later, as they sat on a towel with a pineapple that Gibbs had bought from a higgler woman.

“Oh, what are you doing?” Covey said.

“What?” said Gibbs. He was holding the pineapple on his thigh with one hand and digging into the side of the fruit with a knife.

“You trying to kill that pineapple? What are you cutting it that way for? Here, pass that to me.” Covey took the pineapple and set it, crown up, on the towel. “And you say you come from the country? I don’t believe it.”