Brad Watson - Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

Another guest, a lanky young woman whom Loomis had seen beside the pool earlier, walked past them on her way to the parking lot. “Watch out for them Gypsies,” she muttered.

“Gypsies?” the boy said.

The woman laughed as she rounded the corner. “Don’t let ’em get you,” she said.

“I don’t know,” Loomis said when she’d gone. “I guess they do seem a little like Gypsies.”

“What the hell is a Gypsy, anyway?”

Loomis stopped and stared at his son. “Does ‘Uncle Bob’ teach you to talk that way?”

The boy shrugged and looked away, annoyed.

In the room, his son pressed him again, and he told him that Gypsies were originally from some part of India, he wasn’t sure which, and that they were ostracized, nobody wanted them. They became wanderers, wandering around Europe. They were poor. People accused them of stealing. “They had a reputation for stealing people’s children, I think.”

He meant this to be a kind of joke, or at least lighthearted, but when he saw the expression on the boy’s face he regretted it and quickly added, “They didn’t, really.”

It didn’t work. For the next hour, the boy asked him questions about Gypsies and kidnapping. Every few minutes or so he hopped from the bed to the sliding glass door and pulled the curtain aside to peek down across the courtyard at the Gypsies’ room. Loomis had decided to concede they were Gypsies, whether they really were or not. He made himself a stiff nightcap and stepped out onto the balcony to smoke, although he peeked through the curtains before going out, to make sure the coast was clear.

THE NEXT MORNING, Sunday, Loomis rose before his son and went down to the lobby for coffee. He stepped out into the empty courtyard to drink it in the morning air, and when he looked into the pool he saw a large dead rat on its side at the bottom. The rat looked peacefully dead, with its eyes closed and its front paws curled at its chest as if it were begging. Loomis took another sip of his coffee and went back into the lobby. The night clerk was still on duty, studying something on the computer monitor behind the desk. She only cut her eyes at Loomis, and when she saw he was going to approach her she met his gaze steadily in that same way, without turning her head.

“I believe you have an unregistered guest at the bottom of your pool,” Loomis said.

He got a second cup of coffee, a plastic cup of juice, and a couple of refrigerator-cold bagels (the waffle iron and fresh fruit had disappeared a couple of visits earlier) and took them back to the room. He and his son ate there, then Loomis decided to get them away from the motel for the day. The boy could always be counted on to want a day trip to San Diego. He loved to ride the red trolleys there, and tolerated Loomis’s interest in the museums, sometimes.

They took the commuter train down, rode the trolley to the Mexican border, turned around, and came back. They ate lunch at a famous old diner near downtown, then took a bus to Balboa Park and spent the afternoon in the Air & Space Museum, the Natural History Museum, and at a small, disappointing model railroad exhibit. Then they took the train back up the coast.

As they got out of the car at the motel, an old brown van, plain and blocky as a loaf of bread, careened around the far corner of the lot, pulled up next to Loomis, roared up to them, and stopped. The driver was the older man who’d been at the pool. He leaned toward Loomis and said through the open passenger window, “Can you give me twenty dollars? They’re going to kick us out of this stinking motel.”

Loomis felt a surge of hostile indignation. What, did he have a big sign on his chest telling everyone what a loser he was?

“I don’t have it,” he said.

“Come on!” the man shouted. “Just twenty bucks!”

Loomis saw his son standing beside the passenger door of the rental car, frightened.

“No,” he said. He was ready to punch the old man now.

“Son of a bitch!” the man shouted, and gunned the van away, swerving onto the street toward downtown and the beach.

The boy gestured for Loomis to hurry over and unlock the car door, and as soon as he did the boy got back into the passenger seat. When Loomis sat down behind the wheel, the boy hit the lock button. He cut his eyes toward where the van had disappeared up the hill on the avenue.

“Was he trying to rob us?” he said.

“No. He wanted me to give him twenty dollars.”

The boy was breathing hard and looking straight out the windshield, close to tears.

“It’s okay,” Loomis said. “He’s gone.”

“Pop, no offense”—and the boy actually reached over and patted Loomis on the forearm, as if to comfort him—“but I think I want to sleep at home tonight.”

Loomis was so astonished by the way his son had touched him on the arm that he was close to tears himself.

“It’ll be okay,” he said. “Really. We’re safe here, and I’ll protect you.”

“I know, Pop, but I really think I want to go home.”

Loomis tried to keep the obvious pleading note from his voice. If this happened, if he couldn’t even keep his son around and reasonably satisfied to be with him for a weekend, what was he at all anymore? And (he couldn’t help but think) what would the boy’s mother make of it, how much worse would he then look in her eyes?

“Please,” he said to the boy. “Just come on up to the room for a while, and we’ll talk about it again, and if you still want to go home later on I’ll take you, I promise.”

The boy thought about it and agreed, and began to calm down a little. They went up to the room, past the courtyard, which was blessedly clear of ridiculous Gypsies and other guests. Loomis got a bucket of ice for his bourbon, ordered Chinese, and they lay together on Loomis’s bed, eating and watching television, and didn’t talk about the Gypsies, and after a while, exhausted, they both fell asleep.

WHEN THE ALCOHOL woke him at 3 a.m., he was awash in a sense of gloom and dread. He found the remote, turned down the sound on the TV. His son was sleeping, mouth open, a lock of his bright orange hair across his face.

Loomis eased himself off the bed, sat on the other one, and watched him breathe. He recalled the days when his life with the boy’s mother had seemed happy, and the boy had been small, and they would put him to bed in his room, where they had built shelves for his toy trains and stuffed animals and the books from which Loomis would read to him at bedtime. He remembered the constant battle in his heart, those days. How he was drawn into this construction of conventional happiness, how he felt that he loved this child more than he had ever loved anyone in his entire life, how all of this was possible, this life, how he might actually be able to do it. And yet whenever he had felt this he was always aware of the other, more deeply seated part of his nature that wanted to run away in fear. That believed it was not possible after all, that it could only end in catastrophe, that anything this sweet and heartbreaking must indeed one day collapse into shattered pieces. He had struggled to free himself, one way or another, from what seemed a horrible limbo of anticipation. He had run away, in his fashion. And yet nothing had ever caused him to feel anything more like despair than what he felt just now, in this moment, looking at his beautiful child asleep on the motel bed in the light of the cheap lamp, with the incessant dull roar of cars on I-5 just the other side of the hedge, a slashing river of what seemed nothing but desperate travel from point A to point B, from which one mad dasher or another would simply disappear, blink out in a flicker of light, at ragged but regular intervals, with no more ceremony or consideration than that.