Fear Nothing

could better hear the slow surf breaking along the bay shore, although the sound was less a rumble than a lulling hushaby.
        From out at the point, a cry as eerie as the call of a loon carved this deepening silence. An answering cry, equally sharp and chilling, arose from the dunes nearer the house.
        I was reminded of those old Western movies in which the Indians call to one another in the night, imitating birds and coyotes, to coordinate their moves immediately before attacking the circled wagons of the homesteaders.
        Bobby fired the shotgun into a nearby mound of sand, startling me so much that I nearly blew an aortic valve.
        When echoes of the crash rebounded from the bay and receded again, when the last reverberations were absorbed by the vast pillow of fog in the west, I said, “Why'd you do that?”
        Instead of answering me at once, Bobby chambered another shell and listened to the night.
        I remembered Pinn firing the handgun into the ceiling of the church basement to punctuate the threat that he had leveled against Father Tom Eliot.
        Finally, when no more loon-like cries arose, Bobby said, almost as if talking to himself, “Probably isn't necessary, but once in a while it doesn't hurt to float the idea of buckshot past them.”
        “Who? Who are you warning off?”
        I had known him to be mysterious in the past, but never quite so enigmatic as this.
        The dunes continued to command his attention, and another minute of mental hang time passed before Bobby suddenly looked at me as if he had forgotten that I was standing beside him. “Let's go inside. You scrub off the bad Denzel Washington disguise, and I'll slam together some killer tacos.”
        I knew better than to press the issue any further. He was being mysterious either to stoke my curiosity and enhance his treasured reputation for weirdness or because he had good reason to keep this secret even from me. In either case, he was in that special Bobby place, where he's as inaccessible as if he were on his board, halfway through a tube radical, in an insanely hollow wave.
        As I followed him into the house, I was still aware of being watched. The attention of the unknown observer prickled my back, like hermit-crab tracks on a surf-smoothed beach. Before closing the front door, I scanned the night once more, but our visitors remained well hidden.
        

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        The bathroom is large and luxurious: an absolute-black granite floor, matching countertops, handsome teak cabinetry, and acres of beveled-edge mirrors. The huge shower stall can accommodate four people, which makes it ideal for dog grooming.
        Corky Collins-who built Bobby's fine house long before Bobby's birth - was an unpretentious guy, but he indulged in amenities. Like the four-person, marble-lined spa in the corner diagonally across the room from the shower. Maybe Corky - whose name had been Toshiro Tagawa before he changed it - fantasized about orgies with three beach girls or maybe he just liked to be totally, awesomely clean.
        As a young man, fresh out of law school in 1941, at the age of only twenty-one, Toshiro had been interred in Manzanar, the camp where loyal Japanese Americans remained imprisoned throughout World War II. Following the war, angered and humiliated, he became an activist, committed to securing justice for the oppressed. After five years, he lost faith in the possibility of equal justice and also came to believe that most of the oppressed, given a chance, would become enthusiastic oppressors in their own right.
        He switched to personal-injury law. Because his learning curve was as steep as the huge monoliths macking in from a South Pacific typhoon, he rapidly became the most successful personal-injury attorney in the San Francisco area.
        In another four years, having banked some serious cash, he walked away from his law practice. In 1956, at the age of thirty-six, he built this house on the southern horn of Moonlight Bay, bringing in underground power, water, and phone lines at considerable expense. With a dry sense of humor that prevented his cynicism from becoming bitterness, Toshiro Tagawa legally changed his name to Corky Collins on the day he moved into the cottage, and he dedicated every day of the rest of his life to the beach and the ocean.
        He grew surf bumps on the tops of his toes and feet, below his kneecaps, and on his