by Brad Watson
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.
“Ready to go back to the motel?” Loomis said.
The boy nodded. They walked back to the car in silence.
“Did you like your pizza?” Loomis said when they were in the car.
“Sure. It was okay.”
Loomis looked at him for a moment. The boy glanced back with the facial equivalent of a shrug, an impressively diplomatic expression that managed to say both “I’m sorry” and “What do you want?” Loomis sighed. He could think of nothing else to say that wasn’t even more inane.
“All right,” he finally said, and drove them back to the motel.
WHEN THEY ARRIVED, Loomis heard a commotion in the courtyard and they paused near the gate.
The woman who’d been watching the two awful children was there at the pool again, and the two children themselves had returned to the water. But now the group seemed to be accompanied by an older heavyset man, bald on top, graying hair slicked against the sides of his head. He was arguing with a manager while the other guests around the pool pretended to ignore the altercation. The boy and girl paddled about in the water until the man threw up his hands and told them to get out and go to their room. The girl glanced at the boy, but the boy continued to ignore the man until he strode to the edge of the pool and shouted, “Get out! Let them have their filthy pool. Did you piss in it? I hope you pissed in it. Now get out! Go to the room!” The boy removed himself from the pool with a kind of languorous choreography, and walked toward the sliding glass door of one of the downstairs rooms, the little girl following. Just before reaching the door the boy paused, turned his head in the direction of the pool and the other guests there, and hawked and spat onto the concrete pool apron. Loomis said to his son, “Let’s get on up to the room.”
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.
He checked that his son was still sleeping deeply, then poured himself a plastic cup of neat bourbon and went down to the pool to smoke and sit alone for a while in the dark. He walked toward a group of lawn chairs in the shadows beside a stunted palm, but stopped when he realized that he wasn’t alone, that someone was sitting in one of the chairs. The Gypsy woman sat very still, watching him.
“Come, sit,” she said. “Don’t be afraid.”
He was afraid. But the woman was so still, and the look on her face he could now make out in the shadows was one of calm appraisal. Something about this kept him from retreating. She slowly raised a hand and patted the pool chair next to her, and Loomis sat.
For a moment the woman just looked at him, and, unable not to, he looked at her. She was unexpectedly, oddly attractive. Her eyes were indeed very dark, set far apart on her broad face. In this light, her fierce nose was strange and alarming, almost erotic.
“Are you Gypsy?” Loomis blurted, without thinking.
She stared at him a second before smiling and chuckling deep in her throat.
“No, I’m not Gypsy,” she said, her eyes moving quickly from side to side in little shiftings, looking into his. “We are American. My people come from France.”
Loomis said nothing.
“But I can tell you your future,” she said, leaning her head back slightly to look at him down her harrowing nose. “Let me see your hand.” She took Loomis’s wrist and pulled his palm toward her. He didn’t resist. “Have you ever had someone read your palm?”
Loomis shook his head. “I don’t really want to know my future,” he said. “I’m not a very optimistic person.”
“I understand,” the woman said. “You’re unsettled.”
“It’s too dark here to even see my palm,” Loomis said.
“No, there’s enough light,” the woman said. And finally she took her eyes from Loomis’s and looked down at his palm. He felt relieved enough to be released from that gaze to let her continue. And something in him was relieved, too, to have someone else consider his future, someone aside from himself. It couldn’t be worse, after all, than his own predictions.
She hung her head over his palm and traced the lines with a long fingernail, pressed into the fleshy parts. Her thick hair tickled the edges of his hand and wrist. After a moment, much sooner than Loomis would have expected, she spoke.
“It’s not the future you see in a palm,” she said, still studying his. “It’s a person’s nature. From this, of course, one can tell much about a person’s tendencies.” She looked up, still gripping his wrist. “This tells us much about where a life may have been, and where it may go.”
She bent over his palm again, traced one of the lines with the fingernail. “There are many breaks in the heart line here. You are a creature of disappointment. I suspect others in your life disappoint you.” She traced a different line. “You’re a dreamer. You’re an idealist, possibly. Always disappointed by ordinary life, which of course is boring and ugly.” She laughed that soft, deep chuckle again and looked up, startling Loomis anew with the directness of her gaze. “People are so fucking disappointing, eh?” She uttered a seductive grunt that loosened something in his groin.
It was true. No one had ever been good enough for him. Even the members of his immediate family. And especially himself.
“Anger, disappointment,” the woman said. “So common. But it may be they’ve worn you down. The drinking, smoking. No real energy, no passion.” Loomis pulled against her grip just slightly but she held on with strong fingers around his wrist. Then she lowered Loomis’s palm to her broad lap and leaned in closer, speaking more quietly.
“I see you with the little boy—he’s your child?”
Loomis nodded. He felt suddenly alarmed, fearful. He glanced up, and his heart raced when he thought he saw the boy standing on the balcony looking out. It was only the potted plant there. He wanted to dash back to the room but he was rooted to the chair, to the Gypsy with her thin, hard fingers about his wrist.
“This is no vacation, I suspect. It’s terrible, to see your child in this way, in a motel.”
Loomis nodded.
“You’re angry with this child’s mother for forcing you to be here.”
Loomis nodded and tried to swallow. His throat was dry.
“Yet I would venture it was you who left her. For another woman, a beautiful woman, eh, mon frère?” She ran the tip of a nail down one of the lines in his palm. There was a cruel smile on her impossible face. “A woman who once again you believed to be something she was not.” Loomis felt himself drop his chin in some kind of involuntary acquiescence. “She was a dream,” the woman said. “And she has disappeared, poof, like any dream.” He felt suddenly, embarrassingly, close to tears. A tight lump swelled in his throat. “And now you have left her, too, or she has left you, because”—and here the woman paused, shook Loomis’s wrist gently, as if to revive his attention, and indeed he had been drifting in his grief—“because you are a ghost. Walking between two worlds, you know?” She shook his wrist again, harder, and Loomis looked up at her, his vision of her there in the shadows blurred by his tears.
She released his wrist and sat back in her chair, exhaled as if she had been holding her breath, and closed her eyes. As if this excoriation of Loomis’s character had been an obligation, had exhausted her.
They sat there for a minute or two while Loomis waited for the emotion that had surged up in him to recede.
“Twenty dollars,” the woman said then, her eyes still closed. When Loomis said nothing, she opened her eyes. Now her gaze was flat, no longer intense, but she held it on him.
“Twenty dollars,” she said. “For the reading. This is my fee.”
Loomis, feeling as if he’d just been through something physical instead of emotional, his muscles tingling, reached for his wallet, found a twenty-dollar bill, and handed it to her. She took it and rested her hands in her lap.
“Now you should go back up to your room,” she said.
He got up to make his way from the courtyard, and was startled by someone standing in the shadow of the Gypsies’ doorway. Her evil man-child, the boy from the pool, watching him like a forest animal pausing in its night prowling to let him pass. Loomis hurried on up to the room, tried to let himself in with a key card that wouldn’t cooperate. The lock kept flashing red instead of green. Finally the card worked, the green light flickered. He entered and shut the door behind him.