Doug Dorst - The Surf Guru

We sat on the curb in the liquor store parking lot and waited for the mother to come back. The baby slept in Trace’s arms. People walked by and looked at us suspiciously. No one recognized the baby. After a while the store owner banged on the glass and waved us away. I pointed to the baby, trying to explain, but the guy just shook his head and kept waving.

“I knew she wouldn’t come back,” Trace said.

“We should call the cops,” I said.

“No way,” he said. “Are you crazy?”

He was right. Technically, we were fugitives.

“Let’s go to the bar,” he said. “I could use a drink.”

I didn’t have any better ideas. That’s always been a problem for me.

We started walking again. “I wonder what its name is,” Trace said.

“Is it a boy or a girl?”

“Either way, I’m going to call it Mo,” he said.

That wasn’t a good sign. Mo was his ex’s name, short for Maureen. He was still stuck on her, but she was back in New York, shacked up with a guy who made millions riding the bench for the Yankees. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that he could save this baby, that he was meant to save it. “We’re not keeping it,” I said.

“We could,” he said.

“We’re giving it back.” I was waiting for him to say something stupid like this baby needs us . This baby didn’t need us. We were the last thing it needed. It needed anyone but us.

That whole year we’d been riding a crest of failure. In March my girlfriend left me because I threw her shoes out the window, and Mo and Trace broke up not long after, this time for good. It had been Trace’s idea to leave New York for Colorado. “We’ll be river-rafting guides,” he’d said. “You get to help girls into their wetsuits.” We got there and the rivers were nearly dry. Not enough snow that winter, people said. So we bought the van and tried to start a painting business, but we never found any customers who’d pay. It was easy to leave when the court dates started piling up. Alaska was his idea, too, and so far all it had gotten us was stuck. Stuck in a town that wasn’t more than a crosshair of blacktop trained on the desert.

The bar was dark and narrow. Dim red light, like a darkroom. Red vinyl stools and booths. Two pool tables. A jukebox that played songs about trucks. I sat in a booth and told Trace to show the baby to the bartender. He held out his free hand for money. “Drinks,” he said. I took off my sneaker and gave him the ten I’d been keeping for an emergency. It was the last of the money for now, because Trace’s sister would only send us a little at a time. “I have my own juveniles to feed,” she’d say. But usually she came through. She’d wire it in my name because she thought her brother was irresponsible and because she liked me from when I was a kid. Trace and I had grown up together, watched our parents’ marriages blow apart at the same time, stayed close even after one strange summer when my dad was sleeping with his mom. Got closer, maybe.

The baby started to cry. Trace held up the bill and sniffed it. “For fuck’s sake, Phil,” he said. “The money stinks. You got trench foot or something.”

What did he expect? I’d been walking around in a desert for four days without any socks. We’d packed in a hurry.

My head hurt. I leaned against the wall and stretched my legs out on the seat and tried to pretend I was somewhere better.

Earlier that night, Trace and I had gone to the fireworks show, which was held at a football field that looked like it hadn’t been used in years. No goalposts, no scoreboard, just a rectangle of sandy dirt and rocks with patchy scabs of turf. Lots of families sat on blankets out on the field. High school kids sat in the bleachers, and every now and then you’d hear a bottle fall on the gravel below or roll down the metal steps. We sat up on a little hill with some people from the bar. Trace had shot pool with some of them, and they liked us because he’d told them we were outlaws. They called us Butch and Sundance.

We drank and waited. Finally Trace shouted, “When the hell is this going to start?”

A short, bald guy named Roy passed him a bottle of bourbon. “You got somewhere to go, Butch?” Roy said. Everyone laughed. They knew we were stuck.

“They’re waiting for the fog to blow through,” Roy went on.

“It’s not going to blow through,” I said. There was only the faintest breeze.

“It’ll clear up,” Roy said. “We’re not supposed to have fog. We’re not even supposed to have clouds this time of year.” We’d met Roy our first night in town. He walked with a limp, told us he was wounded in Vietnam. Later we heard that Roy had never been farther than Barstow, that he limped because he took some shrapnel in his legs when the transmission in his VW Squareback exploded. So you didn’t know whether to believe this guy when he talked about clouds.

“They should just cancel it,” I said. “What’s the point?”

Roy said, “Son, you don’t cancel the Fourth of July. This is America.”

Then the show started with a loud, crushing thud that I could feel in my stomach and throat. There was the faintest glow of green from inside the clouds. People whistled and clapped, but I couldn’t see why. More fireworks went up. Some were like thunderclaps and war-movie cannons; some were smaller, sharper, like cracks of the bat, a roll on a snare drum, popcorn popping. But it was just noise. Noise, and muted flashes of light just bright enough to remind you of how much you were missing.

“This place is killing me,” I said.

“As shitholes go,” Trace said, “it’s not so bad.”

“We’re supposed to be moving. That’s the whole point. North.”

Trace drank a long swallow. “Well,” he said, “we could steal a car, if you want.” He sat up straight. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that sooner.”

I shook my head. “We don’t need that kind of trouble,” I said. Although looking back, it was probably the best thing we could have done.

He lit a cigarette, nodding, and looked out across the field. “We’ll be in Alaska before you know it,” he said. He passed me the bottle. “Think of all the money we’re going to make. We’ll save up and get our own boat for next year. We’ll get a boat with one of those Viking heads on the front.”

“Boats are expensive,” I said. “I’m pretty sure.”

“I’ll find a way. I always do.”

“We can’t steal one.”

“We’ll get a fixer-upper,” he said. Though neither of us was any good at fixing things. We’d proved that often enough.

Boom boom boom and clouds choking all the sparkles. It was unbearable, but there wasn’t any point in leaving, either.

Around us people were talking. “They’re changing the angle. Shooting lower.” “That’s not safe, is it?” “Keep your head down, then, candypants.” Laughs.

The new angle was no better. Just louder. Now and then I saw pinpoints of colored light leak out of the clouds and shine for an instant before they burned out close to the ground. By the end, the field was a big bowl of smoke. Trace and I would be blowing black snot out of our noses for days.

Trace came back to the booth. Somehow he’d gotten the baby to stop crying. He handed the thing to me and went back to the bar to pick up our drinks. I’d never held a baby before. I froze. It wriggled and kicked inside the towel, but its eyes were open and it stared up at me calmly, like it wanted to learn what fear was by watching me. I just held tight and didn’t move until Trace came back. I made him take it out of my hands. He sat down, cradled the baby in both arms, and sucked on his drink through a straw.

“The bartender doesn’t recognize it,” Trace said. “He said to wait an hour, see if anyone who comes in does. After that, he’ll call the cops.”