Frank Ullen had been surprised at the request. His son had not joined him in the water for some time. Mr. College-Kirk was not as willing to brave the elements as he’d been in high school. Frank tried to remember the last time he and his son had surfed together. Two years? Three?
Kirk had to ponder his schedule for the upcoming day, which was hard to do right out of his dreamland fog. Birthday or not, he had to be at his regular summer job, manager of the Magic-Putt PeeWee Golf Course, at 10:00 a.m. What time was it now? 6:15? Okay, this could work. His dad, he knew, had only one job site going, the new minimall on Bluff Boulevard. Yeah, this was doable. The two of them could pound the waves for a good two hours. Or until their shoulders dislocated.
It would be good for the two of them to be back in the water, once again the Submersible Ullen Boys, Princes de la Mer. Kirk’s dad was a carefree man in the water, on his paddleboard in the morning. The hassles of the job and those flare-ups at home were left onshore—all those complicated family moments that came and went, as unpredictable as brushfires. Kirk loved his mom and his sisters as dearly as life itself; the fact that they were such squeaky wheels on such bumpy roads was something he had accepted long, long ago. His dad, the father of the pride, had to work two full-time jobs—provider and peacemaker—with never a day off. It was no wonder the man took to surfing as both his physical tonic and his mental astral-plane therapy. For Kirk to head out with his dad would be a bracing vote of confidence, a manly huddle, a backslapping “we are in this together, you and I” birthday embrace. Name a father and son who didn’t need that.
“Okay,” Kirk said, stretching with a yawn. “I’m comin’.”
“No law against staying under the covers.”
“Let’s do it.”
“You sure?”
“You trying to avoid getting wet yourself?”
“No way, knothead.”
“Then I’ll be your huckleberry.”
“Excellent. Breakfast fit for a long-haul trucker. Twelve minutes.” Frank disappeared, leaving the light on, making his son squint, protectively.
Breakfast was savory perfection, as always. Frank was a master in the morning kitchen; his forte was timing. The kielbasa got to the table hot off the stove top, skillet biscuits were soft and butterable, the coffeepot was eight cups deep (an old Mr. Coffee), and the eggs were never dry, so the yolks were fluid gold. Cooking a dinner was beyond his capabilities, something about having to wait around for a shank to roast or potatoes to boil. No way. Frank Ullen preferred the bang-bang immediacy of a breakfast—cook, serve, eat—and he had made the morning meals fun when the kids were young and the family lived on a schedule, the breakfast conversations as heated (sometimes too heated) and thick as the coffee-laced hot cocoa Frank gave them, starting in third grade. But these days Mom slept so late, she was never seen at breakfast; Kris had escaped to San Diego, where she lived with her boyfriend; and Dora had declared long ago that she would come and go as she pleased, on her own clock. So it was just the men at breakfast, dressed in baggy surf sweats, unshowered, since what was the point if they’d be in the water?
“I’m going to have to make some calls about eight thirty. Business shit,” Frank said, flipping some biscuits onto a plate. “Won’t take too long. I’ll leave the water to you for an hour or so.”
“If you gotta do it, you gotta do it,” Kirk said. As always, he’d brought a book to the table and was already absorbed in it. His father reached over and slid it away from him.
“Architecture in the nineteen twenties?” Frank asked. “Why are you reading this?”
“For the racy parts,” Kirk said, soaking up Polish sausage grease and egg yolk with a biscuit. “The Jazz Age was a building boom until the Depression. Postwar engineering and materials changed every skyline in the world. I find it fascinating.”
“Those exterior-supporting structures made for wedding cake buildings. Everything got smaller the higher you went. You ever been to the upper floors of the Chrysler Building?”
“In New York City?”
“No, Dime Box, Texas.”
“Dad, you raised me, remember? When did you ever take me to New York City to see the upper floors of the Chrysler Building?”
Frank took two travel mugs down from the shelf. “The top of the Chrysler Building is a fekkin rabbit warren.”
The last of the coffee went into the mugs, which Frank placed on the dash of the truck while Kirk pulled his board—all six feet six of it—out of the storage shed. He tossed it into the camper, where Frank’s eleven-and-a-half-foot paddleboard—the Buick—took up most of the room.
Six summers before, the camper was brand-new, purchased for a momentous vacation—a two-thousand-mile loop up the coast to Canada, across the two-lanes of British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, all the way to Regina. The trek was a long-planned Ullen Family Retreat and came off as promised, for the first few hundred miles, anyway. Then Mom started sharing her opinions and insisting on behaviors. She wanted to establish her rules of the road and began giving orders. Thus rang the opening bell, beginning the first of what became many punishing rounds. The verbal jousts became serious disagreements, escalating into full-throated, mean-spirited arguments that had to be won by the mother of the family. Kris, as was her wont, turned her rebelliousness up a few notches. Dora’s righteousness devolved into deep-crevassed silence, punctuated with outbursts so fast, loud, and vitriolic as to be near-Shakespearean. Frank, at the wheel, sipping on his cold coffee or warming Coca-Cola, acted as referee, therapist, fact-checker, and cop, depending on the point made or offense taken. Kirk, as his defensive stance, pulled out book after book, reading like he was a chain-smoker with a carton of menthols. For him, the psychodrama faded into a background din not much different from the wheels of the camper humming across thousands of miles of asphalt.
They argued their way across Canada, continued as they came south through the vast American Prairie, the space so open, so endless it was said to have driven some of the original settlers insane. The Ullen family went certifiably daffy in Nebraska when Kris bought pot from some guy living out of his car at a KOA campground. Mom wanted to call a cop and turn in both the dealer and her own daughter. She went DEF CON ballistic when Dad allowed no such thing by simply packing them all up and driving away, fleeing the scene of the crime. The camper went frosty, like a bitter family Christmas in July; no one talking to anyone while Kirk finished all of William Manchester’s books on Winston Churchill. By the time they turned due west in Tucumcari, New Mexico, everyone wanted off the road, out of that truck, and away from each other. Kris threatened to hop a Greyhound bus the rest of the way home. But Dad insisted they do some camping in the desert, which they did under protest. Kris got high under the stars, Dora went on solo hikes until after dark, and Dad bedded down outside in the tent. Mom slept in the camper, guaranteeing she’d be alone, in peace at last, by locking the door. That was a problem, as it cut off access to the bathroom. Thus ended the last family vacation for the Ullens. The last family anything for the Ullens. The camper stayed bolted onto the King Cab pickup, serving as Frank’s mobile office–surf buggy, one that had not been cleaned or vacuumed in 21,000 miles.
In his youth, Frank Ullen had been a real, shaggy-haired surf bum. Then he grew up, got married, had kids, and started an electrical wiring business that took off. It was only in the past year that he had once again begun to leave the house before anyone else was awake, to make the point break at Mars Beach, a tight right-hander best in a rising three-to-four-foot tide. When Kirk was a kid and a part-time beach rat, father and son would park on the highway shoulder and carry their boards down the well-beaten path to Mars. To young Kirk, hefting his original sponge board, the beach seemed as rocky and far away as the bottom of Valles Marineris on the Red Planet. The Economic Boom Years had drastically altered the place—there were inland luxury apartment complexes built on what had been marshes; and five years ago the state had paved over a square of weeds and dirt, creating a real parking lot for three dollars a car. Mars was no longer free, but it was conveniently accessible; surfers headed left at the sand, regular beachgoers veered to the right, and county lifeguards kept the two apart.