A bear walked into my surf shop this afternoon.
He was a quarter tonne of alien muscle… and claws, and teeth. I mean, I know who he was, he’d been taking shore leave locally for at least a week and everybody was talking about him, but damn. There he stood sharing the wet dog smell and three rows of alarming serrated teeth with me and my customers. Like a land-shark, which, come to think of it, was the new slang term for his kind.
I closed my mouth, swallowed hard and focused my snark.
“What can I do you for, Mr. Teeth?”
The big guy sort of barked, sort of laughed and the voder around his massive left arm translated his slithery speech into English. “I like that. I think I’ll use that from now on, if you don’t mind?”
“Be my guest, it’s a free… planet.”
“That it is. That it most definitely is,” he agreed and bark-laughed again. It kind of grows on you, like bad booze.
I decided to try again. “What can I and my shop do for you, ah, Mr. Teeth?”
“The name’s Hro’garh,” he (most definitely a ‘he’, by the way) told me, and the voder gave up on the name, or more likely was designed to leave it alone. There were consonants and sibilants and even a glottal stop in there which I for damn sure was not going to touch with my ape voice box. “I came by to commission a surfboard, a custom board, of course.”
“Of course.” As if that was just what I expected when I had my tea this morning with my spam, eggs and rice. Did I forget to mention that he’s a quarter tonne of carnivore? No, I guess I had. “What happened to your board?!”
This was a pretty notorious thing; I’d seen about a dozen news items about the giant alien board, fully five meters long.
“Sadly. It met with misadventure, some local color-”
“Who was stupid enough to-”
“A great white.”
“Oh.” I had not heard about that. A quip about my condolences for the board or the family of the shark danced on my lips but I manfully swallowed it as ill-advised. Quarter tonne of wet dog…
“I can’t make a board like the one you had-”
“I don’t want one like the one I had. No offense, but the master craftsman is hundreds of lightyears and a thousand years ago. I want an original, Earther board. The best you can make.”
Of course, I just had to be the guy… “Why me?! What about-”
“The first person I thought of was you. Are you saying you won’t do it, or can’t?”
“Yes! I mean, of course! I mean…” God help me! “I’ll do it.”
***
“Is it ‘practical’?” Julia, my not so silent partner, asked me from the doorway of the workshop. It was very late and she must have just gotten home from her evening class.
I was modifying three of the blanks I use for surfboards and the jig, too, so it was a legitimate, if loaded, question. The hulking alien menace had gone hours ago but promised to return. I had his ‘digits’, so he told me, and a deposit, which I was currently burning through.
“You’ve heard, then?” I sighed. Of course she had. “Not really; I’ve got my supplier looking into a custom blank, thicker and longer, but it will take a little time. I have to make the board thicker anyway, so I’m making a surfboard sandwich; these two butted together over this one like so-”
“It’ll break.”
“And then I’ll know how not to kludge up a board for a big boy… correction, I’ll know one way not to, anyway.”
“As long as it’s paying- it is paying, right?”
“Yes,” I ground out. “But it’s not about-”
“It suggested you couldn’t make it a board?”
“You keep saying ‘it’. Do you have a problem with his money or with them?”
“I think that they’re trouble. You can’t argue that, can you?!”
“No. But just because a bunch of crazies think that they’re demons, or angels, for that matter-”
“This is all I have left of my Dad, you asshole!”
Woah. We stood there staring at each other. I think Julia was as shocked as me by that outburst.
“Are you kids done beating each other up?”
“Butt out, sister!” I said at the same time Julia said. “Don’t you play peace- Hey, you can’t talk to my...”
Julia is a honeyed blondish red-head, with freckles and grey eyes. She sun-burns a couple times a year when she hasn’t been out in the sun enough, and now she turned beet red, as bad as her worst ever sun-tan.
Michelle and I nodded to each other as she stepped into the workspace, which was getting crowded. Then I hung my head.
“Sorry, ‘Chelle, that wasn’t, I mean...”
“You’re a dumbass and I love you too, Pete.”
Actually, I think she does, after a fashion.
(I need to map out my story, if I even know where it’s going!)
***
I had a lot of people under foot for a few days, word of mouth gets around and I can’t very well drop everything, but I did lean on some not terribly reliable emergency help, surf-bums, really, though people I liked to hang out with anyway. They kept the shop running, yapping away, but I noticed when things got too quiet the next afternoon. I stuck my head out there and saw some suits. Marley gave me the pleading eyes and mumbled something about feds before he, frankly, fled.
“Which of you is Agent Smith and which is Agent Jones?”
“I’m Agent Mike Nakamura, and this is Agent Elizabeth Green. We’re with the FBI, you know, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, not the men-”
“And women!” Agent Green had dimples and a sense of humor. I think I was in love.
Nakamura sighed heavily. “*Not*. The men. Or women. In black.”
"So... you're actually Scully and she's Mulder?"
I think that Mike took an instant dislike to me, but I couldn't quite be sure.
“Perhaps you could just answer a few questions for us, Mr. Boyle, some of our questions, and we can leave you alone? I understand you have a big new rush job going on?”
“Well, I don’t suppose it would hurt to admit that an alien named Hro’garh, one of those big toothy bear types-”
“A Jorth’ar’hrot,” Green said, a statement, not a question, and her pronunciation sounded spot on, as far as I could tell, glottal stops and all.
“God bless you.” I told her, impressed.
“Thank you.” She smiled, tossing the dig right back at me.
