He wondered if this was why he didn’t want to dive into the crashing waves of the Pacific, as he certainly would have when he was younger. His son didn’t want to because, he said, he’d rather surf.
“But you don’t know how to surf,” Loomis said.
“Mom’s going to teach me as soon as she’s good enough at it,” the boy said.
“But don’t you need to be a better swimmer before you try to surf?” Loomis had a vague memory of the boy’s swimming lessons, which maybe hadn’t gone so well.
“No,” the boy said.
“I really think,” Loomis said, and then he stopped speaking, because the helicopter he’d been hearing, one of those large, twin-engined birds that carried troops in and out of combat — a Chinook — had come abreast of them a quarter mile or so off the beach. Just as Loomis looked up to see it, something coughed or exploded in one or both of its engines. The helicopter slowed, then swerved, with the slow grace of an airborne leviathan, toward the beach where they stood. In a moment it was directly over them. One of the men in it leaned out of a small opening on its side, frantically waving, but the people on the beach, including Loomis and his son, beaten by the blast from the blades and stung by sand driven up by it, were too shocked and confused to run. The helicopter lurched back out over the water with a tremendous roar and a deafening, rattling whine from the engines. There was another loud pop, and black smoke streamed from the forward engine as the Chinook made its way north again, seeming hobbled. Then it was gone, lost in the glare over the water. A bittersweet burnt-fuel smell hung in the air. Loomis and his son stood there among the others on the beach, speechless. One of two very brown young surfers in board shorts and crew cuts grinned and nodded at the clublike rock in Loomis’s hand.
“Dude, we’re safe,” he said. “You can put down the weapon.” He and the other surfer laughed.
Loomis’s son, looking embarrassed, moved off as if he were with someone else in the crowd, not Loomis.
THEY STAYED IN CARLSBAD for an early dinner at Pizza Port. The place was crowded with people who’d been at the beach all day, although Loomis recognized no one they’d seen when the helicopter had nearly crashed and killed them all. He’d expected everyone in there to know about it, to be buzzing about it over beer and pizza, amazed, exhilarated. But it was as if it hadn’t happened.
The long rows of picnic tables and booths were filled with young parents and their hyperkinetic children, who kept jumping up to get extra napkins or forks or to climb into the seats of the motorcycle video games. Their parents flung arms after them like inadequate lassos or pursued them and herded them back. The stools along the bar were occupied by young men and women who apparently had no children and who were attentive only to each other and to choosing which of the restaurant’s many microbrews to order. In the corner by the restrooms, the old surfers, regulars here, gathered to talk shop and knock back the stronger beers, the double-hopped and the barley wines. Their graying hair frizzled and tied in ponytails or dreads or chopped in stiff clumps dried by salt and sun. Their faces leather-brown. Gnarled toes jutting from their flip-flops and worn sandals like assortments of dry-roasted cashews, Brazil nuts, ginger roots.
Loomis felt no affinity for any of them. There wasn’t a single person in the entire place with whom he felt a thing in common — other than being, somehow, human. Toward the parents he felt a bitter disdain. On the large TV screens fastened to the restaurant’s brick walls, surfers skimmed down giant waves off Hawaii, Tahiti, Australia.
He gazed at the boy, his son. The boy looked just like his mother. Thick bright orange hair, untamable. Tall, stemlike people with long limbs and that thick hairblossom on top. Loomis had called them his rosebuds. “Roses are red,” his son would respond, delightedly indignant, when he was smaller. “There are orange roses,” Loomis would reply. “Where?” “Well, in Indonesia, I think. Or possibly Brazil.” “No!” his son would shout, breaking down into giggles on the floor. He bought them orange roses on the boy’s birthday that year.
The boy wasn’t so easily amused anymore. He waited glumly for their pizza order to be called out. They’d secured a booth vacated by a smallish family.
“You want a Coke?” Loomis said. The boy nodded absently. “I’ll get you a Coke,” Loomis said.
He got the boy a Coke from the fountain, and ordered a pint of strong pale ale from the bar for himself.
By the time their pizza came, Loomis was on his second ale. He felt much better about all the domestic chaos around them in the restaurant. It was getting on the boy’s nerves, though. As soon as they finished their pizza, he asked Loomis if he could go stand outside and wait for him there.
“I’m almost done,” Loomis said.
“I’d really rather wait outside,” the boy said. He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked away.
“Okay,” Loomis said. “Don’t wander off. Stay where I can see you.”
“I will.”
Loomis sipped his beer and watched as the boy weaved his way through the crowd and out of the restaurant, then began to pace back and forth on the sidewalk. Having to be a parent in this fashion was terrible. He felt indicted by all the other people in this teeming place: by the parents and their smug happiness, by the old surfer dudes, who had the courage of their lack of conviction, and by the young lovers, who were convinced that they would never be part of either of these groups, not the obnoxious parents, not the grizzled losers clinging to youth like tough, crusty barnacles. Certainly they would not be Loomis.
And what did it mean, in any case, that he couldn’t even carry on a conversation with his son? How hard could that be? But Loomis couldn’t seem to do it. To hear him try, you’d think they didn’t know each other at all, that he was a friend of the boy’s father, watching him for the afternoon or something. He started to get up and leave, but first he hesitated, then gulped down the rest of his second beer.
His son stood with hunched shoulders waiting.