by Brad Watson
“Nothing,” I said.
“Are you drownden him?”
I said the first thing that came to mind.
“I am baptizing,” I said. “I am cleansing his heart.”
It was late afternoon then. I looked back over my shoulder at Maeve. She was half lit by sunlight sifting through the leaves, half in shadow. A mostly naked child in rotten garment.
Underwater, Uncle Sebastian jerked and his eyes came open. I held him harder and waded out to where it was up to my shoulders and the current strong toward the spillway, my heart heavy in the water, the pressure there pressing on it. Behind me, Maeve waded into the shallows.
“I want it, too, Uncle,” she called.
Sebastian’s arms ceased thrashing, and after a minute I let him go. I saw him turning away in the water. Palms of his hands, a glimpse of an eye, the ragged toe of a boot dimpling the surface, all in a slow drifting toward the spillway, and then gone in the murk. Maeve lifted the gauzy nightslip up over her head as she waded in, her pale middle soft and mapped with squiggly brown stretch marks. I pushed against the current trying to reach her before she got in too deep. There was such unspeakable love in me. I was as vile as my uncle, as vile as he claimed.
“Hold still, wait there,” I said at the very moment her head went under as if she’d been yanked from below.
The bottom is slippery, there are uncounted little sinkholes. Out of her surprised little hand, the nightslip floated a ways and sank. I dove down but the water slowed me and I could not reach her. My eyes were open but the water was so muddy I could barely even see my own hands. I kept gasping up and diving down, the sun was sinking into the trees.
She would not show again until dusk, when from the bank I saw her ghost rise from the water and walk into the woods.
The strays tuned up. There was a ringing from the telephone inside the house. It would ring and stop awhile. Ring and then stop. The sheriff’s car rolled its silent flickering way through the trees. Its lights put a flame in all the whispering leaves. There was a hollow taunting shout from up on the ridge but I paid it no mind.
I once heard at dawn the strangest bird, unnatural, like sweet notes sung through an outdoor PA system, some bullhorn perched in a tree in the woods, and I went outside.
It was coming from east of the house, where the tornado would come through. I walked down a trail, looking up. It got louder. I got to where it had to be, it was all around me in the air, but there was nothing in the trees. A pocket of air had picked up a signal, the way a tooth filling will pick up a radio station.
It rang in my blood, it and me the only living things in that patch of woods, all the creatures fled or dug in deep, and I remember that I felt a strange happiness.
Visitation
LOOMIS HAD NEVER BELIEVED THAT LINE ABOUT THE quality of despair being that it was unaware of being despair. He’d been painfully aware of his own despair for most of his life. Most of his troubles had come from attempts to deny the essential hopelessness in his nature. To believe in the viability of nothing, finally, was socially unacceptable, and he had tried to adapt, to pass as a believer, a hoper. He had taken prescription medicine, engaged in periods of vigorous, cleansing exercise, declared his satisfaction with any number of fatuous jobs and foolish relationships. Then one day he’d decided that he should marry, have a child, and he told himself that if one was open-minded these things could lead to a kind of contentment, if not to exuberant happiness. That’s why Loomis was in the fix he was in now.
Ever since he and his wife had separated and she had moved with their son to southern California, he’d flown out every three weeks to visit the boy. He was living the very nightmare he’d suppressed upon deciding to marry and have a child: that it wouldn’t work out, they would split up, and he would be forced to spend long weekends in a motel, taking his son to faux-upscale chain restaurants, cineplexes, and amusement parks.
He usually visited for three to five days and stayed at the same motel, an old motor court that had been bought and remodeled by one of the big franchises. At first the place wasn’t so bad. The continental breakfast offered fresh fruit, and little boxes of name-brand cereals, and batter with which you could make your own waffles on a double waffle iron right there in the lobby. The syrup came in small plastic containers from which you pulled back a foil lid and voilà, it was a pretty good waffle. There was juice and decent coffee. Still, of course, it was depressing, a bleak place in which to do one’s part in raising a child. With its courtyard surrounded by two stories of identical rooms, and excepting the lack of guard towers and the presence of a swimming pool, it followed the same architectural model as a prison.
But Loomis’s son liked it so they continued to stay there even though Loomis would rather have moved on to a better place.
He arrived in San Diego for his April visit, picked up the rental car, and drove north up I-5. Traffic wasn’t bad except where it always was, between Del Mar and Carlsbad. Of course, it was never “good.” Their motel sat right next to the 5, and the roar and rush of it never stopped. You could step out onto the balcony at three in the morning and it’d be just as roaring and rushing with traffic as it had been six hours before.
This was to be one of his briefer visits. He’d been to a job interview the day before, Thursday, and had another on Tuesday. He wanted to make the most of the weekend, which meant doing very little besides just being with his son. Although he wasn’t very good at that. Generally, he sought distractions from his ineptitude as a father. He stopped at a liquor store and bought a bottle of bourbon, and tucked it into his travel bag before driving up the hill to the house where his wife and son lived. The house was owned by a retired Marine friend of his wife’s family. His wife and son lived rent-free in the basement apartment.
When Loomis arrived, the ex-Marine was on his hands and knees in the flower bed, pulling weeds. He glared sideways at Loomis for a moment and muttered something, his face a mask of disgust. He was a widower who clearly hated Loomis and refused to speak to him. Loomis was unsettled that someone he’d never even been introduced to could hate him so much.
His son came to the door of the apartment by himself, as usual. Loomis peered past the boy into the little apartment, which was bright and sunny for a basement (only in California, he thought). But, as usual, there was no sign of his estranged wife. She had conspired with some part of her nature to become invisible. Loomis hadn’t laid eyes on her in nearly a year. She called out from somewhere in another room, “’Bye! I love you! See you on Monday!” “Okay, love you, too,” the boy said, and trudged after Loomis, dragging his backpack of homework and a change of clothes. “’Bye, Uncle Bob,” the boy said to the ex-Marine. Uncle Bob! The ex-Marine stood up, gave the boy a small salute, and he and the boy exchanged high-fives.
After Loomis checked in at the motel, they went straight to their room and watched television for a while. Lately his son had been watching cartoons made in the Japanese anime style. Loomis thought the animation was wooden and amateurish. He didn’t get it at all. The characters were drawn as angularly as origami, which he supposed was appropriate and maybe even intentional, if the influence was Japanese. But it seemed irredeemably foreign. His son sat propped against several pillows, harboring such a shy but mischievous grin that Loomis had to indulge him.
He made a drink and stepped out onto the balcony to smoke a cigarette. Down by the pool, a woman with long, thick black hair—it was stiffly unkempt, like a madwoman’s in a movie—sat in a deck chair with her back to Loomis, watching two children play in the water. The little girl was nine or ten and the boy was older, maybe fourteen. The boy teased the girl by splashing her face with water, and when she protested in a shrill voice he leapt over and dunked her head. She came up gasping and began to cry. Loomis was astonished that the woman, who he assumed to be the children’s mother, displayed no reaction. Was she asleep?
The motel had declined steadily in the few months Loomis had been staying there, like a moderately stable person
drifting and sinking into the lassitude of depression. Loomis wanted to help, find some way to speak to the managers and the other employees, to say, “Buck up, don’t just let things go all to hell,” but he felt powerless against his own inclinations.
He lit a second cigarette to go with the rest of his drink. A few other people walked up and positioned themselves around the pool’s apron, but none got into the water with the two quarreling children. There was something feral about them, anyone could see. The woman with the wild black hair continued to sit in her pool chair as if asleep or drugged. The boy’s teasing of the girl had become steadily rougher, and the girl was sobbing now. Still, the presumptive mother did nothing. Someone went in to complain. One of the managers came out and spoke to the woman, who immediately but without getting up from her deck chair shouted to the boy, “All right, God damn it!” The boy, smirking, climbed from the pool, leaving the girl standing in waist-deep water, sobbing and rubbing her eyes with her fists. The woman stood up then and walked toward the boy. There was something off about her clothes, burnt-orange Bermuda shorts and a men’s lavender oxford shirt. And they didn’t seem to fit right. The boy, like a wary stray dog, watched her approach. She snatched a lock of his wet black hair, pulled his face to hers, and said something, gave his head a shake and let him go. The boy went over to the pool and spoke to the girl. “Come on,” he said. “No,” the girl said, still crying. “You let him help you!” the woman shouted then, startling the girl into letting the boy take her hand. Loomis was fascinated, a little bit horrified.
Turning back toward her chair, the woman looked up to where he stood on the balcony. She had an astonishing face, broad and long, divided by a great, curved nose, dominated by a pair of large, dark, sunken eyes that seemed blackened by blows or some terrible history. Such a face, along with her immense, thick mane of black hair, made her look like a troll. Except that she was not ugly. She looked more like a witch, the cruel mockery of beauty and seduction. The oxford shirt was mostly unbuttoned, nearly spilling out a pair of full, loose, mottled-brown breasts.
“What are you looking at!” she shouted, very loudly from deep in her chest. Loomis stepped back from the balcony railing. The woman’s angry glare changed to something like shrewd assessment and then dismissal. She shooed her two children into one of the downstairs rooms.
After taking another minute to finish his drink and smoke a third cigarette, to calm down, Loomis went back inside and closed the sliding glass door behind him.
His son was on the bed, grinning, watching something on television called “Code Lyoko.” It looked very Japanese, even though the boy had informed him it was made in France. Loomis tried to watch it with him for a while, but got restless. He wanted a second, and maybe stronger, drink.
“Hey,” he said. “How about I just get some burgers and bring them back to the room?”
The boy glanced at him and said, “That’d be okay.”
Loomis got a sack of hamburgers from McDonald’s, some fries, a Coke. He made a second drink, then a third, while his son ate and watched television. They went to bed early.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Saturday, they drove to the long, wide beach at Carlsbad. Carlsbad was far too cool, but what could you do? Also, the hip little surf shop where the boy’s mother worked during the week was in Carlsbad. He’d forgotten that for a moment. He was having a hard time keeping her in his mind. Her invisibility strategy was beginning to work on him. He wasn’t sure at all anymore just who she was or ever had been. When they’d met she wore business attire, like everyone else he knew. What did she wear now, just a swimsuit? Did she get up and go around in a bikini all day? She didn’t really have the body for that at age thirty-nine, did she?
“What does your mom wear to work?” he asked.
The boy gave him a look that would have been ironic if he’d been a less compassionate child.
“Clothes?” the boy said.
“Okay,” Loomis said. “Like a swimsuit? Does she go to work in a swimsuit?”
The boy stared at him for a moment.
“Are you okay?” the boy said.
Loomis was taken aback by the question.
“Me?” he said.
They walked along the beach, neither going into the water. Loomis enjoyed collecting rocks. The stones on the beach here were astounding. He marveled at one that resembled an ancient war club. The handle fit perfectly into his palm. From somewhere over the water, a few miles south, they could hear the stuttering thud of a large helicopter’s blades. Most likely a military craft from the Marine base farther north.
Maybe he wasn’t okay. Loomis had been to five therapists since separating from his wife: one psychiatrist, one psychologist, three counselors. The psychiatrist had tried him on Paxil, Zoloft, and Wellbutrin for depression, and then lorazepam for anxiety. Only the lorazepam had helped, but with that he’d overslept too often and lost his job. The psychologist, once she learned that Loomis was drinking almost half a bottle of booze every night, became fixated on getting him to join AA and seemed to forget altogether that he was there to figure out whether he indeed no longer loved his wife. And why he had cheated on her. Why he had left her for another woman when the truth was he had no faith that the new relationship would work out any better than the old one. The first counselor seemed sensible, but Loomis made the mistake of visiting her together with his wife, and when she suggested maybe their marriage was indeed kaput his wife had walked out. The second counselor was actually his wife’s counselor, and Loomis thought she was an idiot. Loomis suspected that his wife liked the second counselor because she did nothing but nod and sympathize and give them brochures. He suspected that his wife simply didn’t want to move out of their house, which she liked far more than Loomis did, and which possibly she liked more than she liked Loomis. When she realized divorce was inevitable, she shifted gears, remembered she wanted to surf, and sold the house before Loomis was even aware it was on the market, so he had to sign. Then it was Loomis who mourned the loss of the house, which he realized had been pretty comfortable after all. He visited the third counselor with his girlfriend, who seemed constantly angry that his divorce hadn’t yet come through. He and the girlfriend both gave up on that counselor because he seemed terrified of them for some reason they couldn’t fathom. Loomis was coming to the conclusion that he couldn’t fathom anything; the word seemed appropriate to him, because most of the time he felt like he was drowning and couldn’t find the bottom or the surface of this body of murky water he had fallen, or dived, into.
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.