Doug Dorst - The Surf Guru

Trace held the baby up to his face and smiled. He rubbed noses with it. If Mo could have seen him like this, she’d never have left him. But it made me nervous.

“Seriously, did you steal it?” I asked.

“Call it by its name,” he said. “Call it Mo.” He unwrapped the beach towel. Underneath it the baby had on an old, faded green sleeper. On the chest was a cartoon duckling in a rain hat and boots, smiling. A happy, happy duck.

I ran my hand across the tabletop, which was gouged with years of drunken attempts to leave a mark on the world. “Think about this,” I said. “If we kept it, who would watch it while we were working?”

“Mo could. Big Mo, I mean.”

“I don’t think Mo is going to move to Alaska,” I said.

“She might,” he said. The baby slapped at Trace’s glass, but missed. Trace moved the glass away. “Or Little Mo could come on the boat with us,” he said. “Little Mo’s a good-luck charm. I can feel it. Fish will swarm around our boat.”

“Fish don’t swarm,” I said. “They school.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Exactly,” I said. “The point is, we have to find the mother.”

We were almost done with our drinks when Roy the shrapnel guy limped over with a pitcher of beer. He put it on the table. “My treat,” he said. “To make up for the shitty fireworks. You picked the wrong year to get stuck here.” Roy had been pretty nice to us. The other night he’d bought us a scratch-off lottery ticket, but it lost.

“Thanks,” I said. You could smell the fireworks smoke on him. I guess it was on all of us.

He knelt down in front of Trace and the baby as best he could, with his gimp legs and all. The baby gurgled and waved its arms in happy little ovals. “And what have we here?” Roy said.

“It’s a baby,” I said. “You know whose it is?”

“No,” Roy said, but he didn’t look at me. He kept his eyes on Trace and the baby. “Is it a boy or a girl?”

“We don’t know,” Trace said.

“There’s an easy way to find out,” Roy said.

“Good point,” Trace said. “We should check.” He moved his drink out of the way and laid the baby on the table.

“Don’t,” I said. “Not in the middle of the goddamned bar.”

“What’s the difference?” Roy said.

“It’s no big deal, Phil,” Trace said. “We ought to know.”

“It’s not right,” I said. I thought the kid deserved better. “Don’t do it, Trace,” I said, in the voice I used when he took things too far.

Trace picked the baby up. He knew I only challenged him when I meant it. Someone called Roy’s name for the next game of pool. “The little guy looks just like you,” Roy said to Trace. With his thumb and index finger, he tickled the baby’s chin. Then he tickled Trace’s, which was thick with stubble. “Tell Sundance to lighten up,” he said. He shot me a look and walked over to the pool table.

“He’s hitting on you,” I said.

Trace shrugged. “I know,” he said. “It keeps the drinks coming, though.” He smiled a smile that said he was in control, he’d take care of everything, he’d save the day all by himself.

I knew he wasn’t happy, though. I knew it bothered him that Mo was probably in bed with her utility infielder, happy and horny after a Yankee win and post-game fireworks in a starry sky over the stadium, while Trace was dead broke and stuck in the desert with Roy chucking his chin. So I wasn’t surprised when, once the beer was gone, Trace went quiet and his droopy eye sagged almost all the way closed and he started looking around the place like he couldn’t believe his life had come to this. And I wasn’t surprised, either, when he laid the baby on the table and went to the pay phone to call big Mo.

The baby waved its arms up and down like a drunk piano player, tiny fingers pattering on the table. I kept my hand on its legs so it wouldn’t roll over and fall. My father once told me that when I was little I’d fallen off a picnic table and hit my head on the cement patio. “Your mother was supposed to be watching you,” he said. “It’s her fault you’re a fuckup.” He said this the day before Trace and I saw him necking with a teenaged girl in the parking lot behind the bank.

The jukebox was too loud for me to hear what Trace was saying, but in the space between records I thought I heard him say something ridiculous like We can be a family . Then Patsy Cline started wailing and Trace was smashing the receiver against the phone, which answered with cheerful pings. People looked over, then looked away. “At least do it on the beat,” the bartender shouted, like he’d seen it a hundred times. Trace wound up and gave the receiver one more whack, then threw it down and left it to twist and swing. He came back to the table. I assumed she’d hung up on him, so I didn’t ask.

“She wouldn’t listen to me,” he said. His face looked red, but it might have been the lights.

“Was the Yankee there?”

“Pinch-hitting sonofabitch.”

“He’s no star,” I agreed.

“She didn’t believe me about the baby.”

“You could have held it up to the phone.”

“This baby’s pretty quiet,” he said.

“You’re right,” I said. “I wonder if something’s wrong with it.”

Trace picked up the baby, cradled it. He seemed to relax. “You have to support its head, see?” he said to me. “It doesn’t have neck muscles yet.”

We needed more to drink, so Trace left to find Roy. I made him take the baby with him, to show it around. Right after he got up, a woman sitting at the bar turned on her stool and looked at me. I’d seen her in the bar before, and she’d been on the hill at the fireworks show, but I hadn’t talked to her. She was forty, forty-five, thin, a redhead halfway to gray. She wore jeans and a faded black shirt with the top two or three buttons open and the sleeves rolled up. She walked over, pulled up a chair to the end of the booth, and sat down.

“I hear your name is Sundance,” she said.

“It’s Phil,” I said.

She didn’t offer her name, and I didn’t ask. “I hear you’re running from the law,” she said. She had a long, thin nose that twitched when she talked.

“Not really,” I said. “I don’t think they’re chasing us. We just have bench warrants. In Colorado.”

She asked what we had done, so I told her. I told her about Trace’s DUIs and Resisting Arrests and how he missed a court date because we were up all night drinking with two girls from the community college who, it turned out, were both hot for him. And about how I popped the bail bondsman’s guy with a two-by-four when he broke into our apartment a few days later. I didn’t know they were allowed to break in. No one teaches you things like that until it’s too late.

Trace came back to the table, balancing the baby and a full pitcher. A trail of beer wet the floor behind him.

“Whose beautiful baby is this?” the woman asked. She touched its nose, said something like wugga-wugga-woo , and the baby made a noise that might have been a cough or a laugh.

“It’s mine,” Trace said. He sounded almost like he believed it.

“Four months?” she guessed.

“Three,” he said, not missing a beat. “Little Mo’s developing faster than most.”

“Where’s the mother?” she asked.

“New York.”

“That’s far away,” she said.

“The mother,” he said, “is a coldhearted, lying, cheating, mitt-chasing bitch.” Trace looked pretty drunk. I figured if he was, I must be, too.

“Some men think we all are,” she said. I could tell she didn’t like him at all. She looked at the baby like she felt sorry for it.

“I don’t think he means that about you,” I said. “Or about her.”