The Surf Guru

by Doug Dorst

  “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.”

  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?”<
br />
  “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.”

  “Of course I don’t mean that about you,” Trace said. “I don’t know you. Or how you feel about mitts.”

  She turned to me. “How about you? Is there a woman in your life?” I watched her nose winking at me.

  “There was,” I said. “It didn’t work out.” I had been with Katie a whole year, and then one night, no warning, she told me it was over. You want me to be just like Mo, she said. Well, I’m not Mo. It’s not fair and I’m sick of it. She may have been right. It’s just that Mo was a lot more likable. I told her so, and she threw her shoes at me, and I threw them out the window. One got stuck in a tree. It was still there when Trace and I left town.

  The woman leaned back in her chair and undid her ponytail. Her hair fell in loose rings past her shoulders. “How old are you?” she asked. “Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight?”

  “Twenty-three,” I said. It occurred
to me that my life was bleeding out of me even faster than I’d thought.

  “I have a kid,” the woman said. “He’s eighteen.” She sipped her drink. “He went to jail this week.”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “Joyride. Took a car from the lot at the gas station.”

  “That’s all?” I said.

  “That bastard Duffy pressed charges.”

  “That bastard Duffy has our van,” Trace said.

  “We broke down,” I explained. “We’re waiting for him to fix it.”

  “He’s a bastard,” she said.

  It would turn out that she was right. Duffy was a bastard. The next morning he would tell me and Trace our transmission was shot and he wanted sixteen hundred to replace it. We’d say we couldn’t pay that much, so he’d offer us a trade: the van straight up for a ’79 Bonneville with no muffler and bad brakes and power windows that wouldn’t go down. We’d take it so we could get out of town in a hurry.

  Behind me I heard a pool ball smack on the floor and roll away. The baby started to cry, but Trace jiggled it and it stopped. Spit bubbled from its mouth. The woman finished her drink. I watched her neck as she swallowed. The skin around it looked a little loose, baggy. I’d never noticed that on anyone before.

  “He didn’t even steal anything good,” she said. “Just an old Beetle, all rusted to shit. You’d think the boy would have some taste, at least.”

  “He’s lucky to be alive,” Trace said. “The transmission could have exploded.”

  She looked down at the floor. “The judge said I was a bad mother,” she said.

  “That’s terrible,” I said. “What’d he have to say that for?” He could have been right, for all I knew, but still.

  She set her glass down on the table, hard. “I’m a good mother,” she said. “A damn good mother.” Her eyes got wet. It was like she’d been waiting a long time to say this, waiting to find someone who might believe her.