Uncommon Type: Some Stories

Welcome to Mars

Kirk Ullen was still asleep, in bed, under a quilt and an old Army blanket. As it had been since 2003, when he was five years old, his bedroom was also the back room of the family home, one he shared with the Maytag washer and dryer, an old, chipped, out-of-tune spinet piano, the idle sewing machine his mother had not used since the second Bush administration, and an Olivetti-Underwood electric typewriter that had been rendered inoperable when Kirk spilled a root-beer float into its innards. The room had no heat and was always chilly, even on this early morning in late June. His eyes were rolled up into the back of his head as he dreamed he was still in high school, unable to dial the correct combination for his gym locker. He was on his seventh attempt, turning right, then twice around to the left, then once back to the right, when a flash of lightning made the locker room blindingly white. Then, equally suddenly, came a darkness that encompassed his whole world.

There were more flashes, like sheet lightning, then blackness again—everything white again, then an impenetrable black, over and over. But there was no rumbling thunder, no claps of Thor echoing off the distant canyons.

“Kirk? Kirkwood?” It was his father. Frank Ullen had been snapping the overhead light on and off—his idea of an amusing wake-up signal. “Were you serious last night, kid?” Frank began singing. “Kirkwood, Kirkwood. Give me your answer, do.”

“Wha’?” Kirk croaked.

“About going to Mars? Say no and I’m gone. Say yes and we start your birthday like true Ullen men, brave and free.”

Mars? Kirk’s brain flickered into consciousness and he remembered now. Today was his nineteenth birthday. Last night after dinner he had asked his father if they could surf in the morning like they had the day he turned ten and, again, the morning he turned thirteen. “You bet!” his father said. Conditions at Mars Beach would be good. There was a swell coming from the southwest.

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.

“You haven’t seen this.” Frank was exiting the highway at Deukmejian State Recreation Area. Kirk glanced up from his book. What had been a field was now flattened and surveyed; the little flagged posts were already planted, with a sign advertising the site of a future Big-Box Mart. “Remember when the nearest business was a taco stand back at Canyon Avenue? It’s now a Chisholm Steakhouse.”

“I remember taking a shit in the bushes,” Kirk said.

“Don’t swear around your old man.”

Frank pulled into the lot, parking in an empty slot one row away from the path gate. “Well, whad’ya know,” he said, as always. “Welcome to Mars!”

A collection of shops had evolved on the other side of the highway under low-slung roofs made to look like Mexican adobes. There was a surf gear shop, a recent and ubiquitous Starbucks, a Subway sandwich place, a Circle W convenience store, and the office of a lone insurance agent named Saltonstall, who had set out his shingle there so he could surf when the phone wasn’t ringing. An AutoShoppe/FastLube & Tire franchise was under construction at the south end of the shopping center.

“A lube job while you surf,” Kirk noted. “That’s environmental consumer integration.”

“Here’s your handbasket. Enjoy hell,” Frank said.

The parking lot showed a collection of aged and rugged vehicles—Rancheros and station wagons loaded with tools, owned by construction workers who were grabbing waves before work. There were old vans and self-painted VW Buses owned by surfers sleeping overnight, despite posted ordinances that exclaimed NO CAMPING. When the county sheriffs periodically rousted the surf bums there were always lengthy legal discussions about the difference between “camping overnight” and “waiting for daylight.” Lawyers surfed Mars, too, as did orthodontists and airline pilots, their Audis and BMWs strapped with roof racks for the boards. Moms and wives would be in the water, good surfers and kind people. Fistfights had once been frequent, when the high surf attracted kooks from all over, but this was a weekday and not all the schools were out yet so Kirk knew the crowd would be easygoing and manageable. And the Martians, as they called themselves, had all gotten older, mellower. Except for a couple of asshole lawyers.

“Sweet break this morning, Kirky-bird,” Frank said, eyeing the water from the parking lot. He counted over a dozen surfers already in the water as large waves—the Swell—were shaping in regular intervals outside the lineup. He unlocked the door to the camper. They pulled both boards out, and Frank’s paddle, standing them up against the truck as they yanked on their summer wet suits with the short legs and built-in rash guards.

“Got any wax?” Kirk asked.

“In a drawer in there,” Frank told him. His paddleboard had a mat, so he didn’t need wax anymore but kept some for those who might need some stick for their sticks. Kirk found a cake in a drawer full of junk including short-end rolls of duct tape, old mousetraps, a hot-glue gun but no sticks of glue, boxes of staples, and a set of channel locks that was going to rust in the salt air.

“Hey,” his father said. “Put my phone in the refrigerator, would you?” He handed over his mobile.

“Why the refrigerator?” Kirk asked. The thing had not worked in many years.

“If you broke into this camper and wanted to steal anything of value, would you look in the busted icebox?”

“You got me there, Pop.” When Kirk opened the door, not only was there the dank smell of years of nonuse but there was also the sight of a small, gift-wrapped box.

“Happy birthday, son,” Frank said. “How old are you again?”

“Nineteen, but you make me feel thirty.” The gift was a waterproof sports watch, a newer model than the watch Frank was wearing, all black and metal, a heavy-duty military chronometer already set to the correct time. Strapping it around his wrist made Kirk feel like he was about to board a military helicopter to go kill bin Laden. “Thanks, Dad. This makes me look cooler than I am. Didn’t think that was possible.”

“Hoopy boofy, Junior.”

As they carried their boards down the path to the beach, Frank said again, “I told you, I’m going to have to make a few calls around eight thirty. I’ll holler at you when I get out of the water.”

“I will salute my recognition.”

Standing in the sands of Mars, they watched a set of waves play out as they attached their board leashes to their ankles with Velcro straps. About a dozen large, well-shaped curlers came along before the surf lessened, allowing Kirk to run into the tide and hop on his board and paddle out, duck-butting through the smaller waves as they broke over him. He’d be lining up just beyond the break with the younger surfers, those who shredded the faces of as many waves as Poseidon sent their way.

As a paddleboarder, Frank sought the larger waves off of Mars, those well outside, beyond the lineup, where along with the other stand-up surfers he’d wait for the larger sets of heavy water, the waves generated by storms in the South Pacific that grew muscular with mileage. Before too long, he easily caught the shoulder of a wave, rising up six feet or so above its floor, riding gracefully in wide turns. As he was the surfer closest to the curl, the wave was rightfully his own, the other Martians peeling off to leave him to it. When the wave closed out, he hopped off his board and held his position in the shallows until the set died. Then he hopped back up, his feet shoulder width apart, dug his paddle into the ocean, and crested each ridge of incoming water until he was outside again.

The air and water were cold, but Kirk was glad he had gotten out of bed. He recognized old Martians like Bert the Elder, Manny Peck, Schultzie, and a lady he called Mrs. Potts—the veteran long boarders. And there were kids around his age, some of the pals he grew up alongside who were now, like him, in college or the workforce. Hal Stein was in graduate school at Cal, Benjamin Wu worked as an aide to a city councilman, “Stats” Magee was studying for his CPA license, and Buckwheat Bob Robertson was, like Kirk, still an undergrad, still living at home.

“Hey! Spock!” Hal Stein called out. “Thought you’d died!”

The five of them waited in a circle between rides, comparing the notes they’d kept since adolescence. Kirk was reminded of just how good Mars had been to him. Living within driving distance of its waves had allowed Kirk access to a world all his own. At Mars, he grew comfortable in the powerful waves of the place. Mars was where, alone, Kirk tested himself and excelled. Onshore, he was a statistic, a tick mark smack in the middle of a bell curve, neither a dropout nor a scholar, not an ace or a deuce. Other than a couple of English teachers, Mrs. Takimashi the school librarian, and the crazy, gorgeous, honey-haired Aurora Burke (before her new stepfather whisked her off to a new family in Kansas City), no one had ever singled Kirk Ullen out as being special. But in the water of Mars, Kirk was master of all he surveyed. He was glad he’d been coming to the place for years and could be there this day as he turned nineteen years old.

After so many rides he had lost count, Kirk was pooped, so he rested in the lineup. When the morning sun came out, he could see the tops of the vans and his dad’s camper in the parking lot, the tile roofs of the shops across the highway, and the rocky, scrub-brush hills beyond. With the blue water against the brightening sky, Mars took on the look of a sepia-toned photograph of some legendary surf locale in Hawaii or Fiji, a color image long since faded to an amber tint, turning green mountains into yellow and brown hills. If Kirk squinted, the Mexican-themed shops became bures on a slip of beach, native huts on an atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Again, Mars became a different world and Kirk was its king.

Sometime later he heard his father calling him from the beach. Frank had laid his board on the sand, planted his paddle like a flag, and was making the hand gesture universally translated as “I am going to make a phone call.”

Kirk saluted his father just as Mrs. Potts screamed, “Outside!” Sure enough, a set was shaping up well offshore, the waves as visible as humps on a washboard, breaking at least fifty yards early, making for dozens of long, aggressive rides. Everyone paddled furiously. Kirk was tired, but he was not about to sit out a great set. He stroked hard and steadily until experience told him to wheel around and paddle toward the beach. He caught the third wave that came his way.

As he was rising up on the apex of water, instinct timed his springing to his feet for the drop into the wave’s trough. This wave was gorgeous, well shaped and smooth faced. And huge. A monster. Kirk kicked out of the trough and climbed up the face, just in front of the curl of white water, a compressed whisper of wind at his back. He jerked left and shot down perpendicular to the arc, pulled right at the bottom, and again sluiced up the face. He topped the very crest, bounced along the rim, then dug once more into the slot, retarding his speed to allow the break to catch up to him. He knelt as low on his board as his physique allowed until water was bending over his head and he occupied the little green room of the curl. Rushing water was on his left, the smooth glass of the surface on his right. He dragged the fingers of his free hand in the wall of green like the fin of a dolphin, a knife in the water.

As ever, the curl closed on him, the water smacked him on the head, and he wiped out, no big deal. Churning in the white water, he relaxed, as he had learned long ago, letting the wave roll beyond him and allow him time to find the surface and fill his lungs. But the ocean is a fickle mistress, Mars indifferent to human effort. Kirk felt his leash go taut in the Velcro around his ankle. In the foam and chaos his board snapped back, nailing him hard in the meat of his calf. The hit had the same blunt force as the blow from the croquet mallet Kris had once taken to him in the backyard, which sent him to the doctor and her to her bedroom. Kirk knew he was done for the day.

He felt for the sandy bottom, knowing the next monster was about to crush him. He lunged up for a breath, sucking in air, seeing seven feet of white water roaring down on him. He ducked under the wave, blindly felt for the Velcro of his leash, and ripped it off his foot so his board would get tossed toward the beach and away from him.

He floated in, no panic despite the pain in his leg. When he made contact with the sand again, he was farther inland and could hop on one foot to get his head above water. The next incoming wave pushed him closer to shore, another did the same, then a few more. He crawled out of the water and onto the beach.

“Fucker,” he said to himself. He sat on the sand, his leg so deeply gashed that white tissue showed along with torn flesh and pulsing blood. He was going to need stitches, sure as shooting. Kirk remembered a day when he was thirteen, when a kid named Blake got hit by his own board and had been pulled unconscious from the water. Blake had been nailed in the jaw and needed months of dental work. This wound was not as serious as that, and Kirk had suffered a few lumps in his time, but this chunk taken out of his leg was worthy of a Purple Heart.

“You okay?” Ben Wu had come out of the water after retrieving Kirk’s loose board. “Oh, shit!” he yelled at the sight of the cut. “You need a ride to the hospital?”

“No. My dad is around. He’ll take me.”

“You sure?”

Kirk stood up. “Yes.” There was pain, and blood was trailing down his lower leg, splattering drops of scarlet in the sand of Mars, but he waved Ben away and said, “I got it. Thanks.”

He took his board and limped on up the path toward the parking lot.

“You’re gonna need, like, forty sutures in that thing,” Ben called out before leaping back into the surf atop his board.

Kirk’s calf was throbbing in time to his heartbeat. He limped up the path, his leash trailing in the sand-covered walkway. More beachgoers had arrived, so the lot was two-thirds filled, but Frank had parked close. Kirk expected to find his dad inside the camper at the table, talking business on his phone with papers spread in front of him. But when he rounded the back of the truck, the camper door was locked and his father was nowhere to be seen.

Kirk stood his board against the door, then sat on the bumper to inspect his leg, which now looked like a kielbasa had exploded. Had the board hit him a bit higher it might have shattered his kneecap. Kirk felt lucky, but the sooner he got to an emergency room the better.

His dad was probably across the highway, in a store grabbing a drink or a protein bar, the key to the camper in the zippered pocket of his wet suit. Kirk didn’t want to hobble across the highway carrying his surfboard, nor did he want to leave it for a thief in the parking lot. He looked around to make sure that no one was observing him, then he stood on the bumper on his nonbleeding leg, shoving the board up onto the camper roof, where it would be out of sight from the ground. The leash hung down, so Kirk knotted it into a messy ball and tossed it up as well. So much for protective measures, he thought, and then headed for the highway.

An overgrown bush provided shade as Kirk waited for an opening in the morning traffic. When a gap showed, he made his move, skip-hopping across the four lanes. He checked the Subway and the Circle W, looking through windows but not seeing his dad. The surf shop would make sense. Maybe he was picking up sunblock. Heavy metal music blared from inside but no one was in the place.

His last and best bet was the Starbucks at the north end of the shops. Coffee drinkers were reading papers and working on laptops at the outside tables and benches. Frank was not one of them, and if anyone bothered to look up at Kirk with his open wound, they didn’t say anything. He entered, expecting to find his dad, roust him off the phone, and set off for the appropriate medical attention. But Starbucks held no Frank.

“Holy shit!” The female barista saw Kirk standing there, bleeding. “Sir? Are you okay?”

“It’s not that bad,” Kirk said. Some customers looked up from their cups and laptops without responding.

“Should I call 911?” the barista asked.

“I’ve got a ride to the clinic. My dad,” Kirk said. “Has a Frank been in, ordering a Venti drip with a shot of mocha?”

“A Frank?” The woman thought a second. “A lady ordered a Venti drip with a shot of mocha a while ago with a decaf soy latte. But not a Frank.” Kirk turned to go back outside. “We have a first aid kit.”

Kirk scanned the parking lot again and the walkway of the shops but still did not see his father. On the off chance there were tables on the other side of Starbucks, he eased his way to the corner but found no tables, and no Frank, just parking spaces under eucalyptus trees.

A single car, a Mercedes, was parked on the other side of a thick trunk of one of the trees. Kirk could see only the front end and a bit of windshield. Starbucks cups, two of them, were sitting on the dash. From the passenger seat, a man’s hand reached out for what Kirk knew to be a Venti drip with a shot of mocha because he recognized the black band of his father’s military-style chronometer, a watch just like the one Kirk now wore on his own wrist. The windows of the Mercedes were rolled down, allowing Kirk to hear the lilt of a woman’s laughter along with his father’s amused cackle.

Kirk didn’t feel his leg anymore, no pain at all, as he edged closer to the tree, able to see that much more of the car, as well as the face of a woman with long black hair and a smile aimed at his father. Frank was facing the woman, so Kirk saw only the back of his head. He heard his father say, “I better get back,” but his father didn’t move. Kirk knew from the relaxed, quiet tone that his dad wasn’t going anywhere.

Kirk slowly backed off around the tree to the corner, then around to the door of the Starbucks. He went back inside.

On the wall opposite the entrance, windows spread over three small tables that looked out onto empty parking spaces in the shade of the eucalyptus trees.

Kirk went to the windows and craned his neck. He saw the woman with long black hair, her arm resting across Frank’s shoulder, her fingers playing in his sea-salted hair. His father was swirling his drip mocha in its cup. He was sitting on a beach towel that covered the passenger seat as though his wet suit had not already dried. The woman with the long black hair said something and laughed again. His father laughed, too, in a way Kirk rarely saw him laugh, with his teeth showing, his head raised back, and his eyes squinting, a silent movie, the dialogue muted by the window of Starbucks. Kirk heard only the tapping of fingers on laptop keyboards and the commerce of premium coffee drinks.

“Why don’t you take a seat?” It was the barista again, named Celia according to her tag. She had a metal first aid kit. “I can put on some kind of bandage, at least.”

Kirk did sit. Celia wrapped his leg in gauze, the white staining red immediately. A glance back out to the shade of the eucalyptus tree showed the woman with the long black hair leaning forward, her mouth open, her head tilted in the body language known universally as a prelude to a desired kiss. His father leaned in toward her.

Recrossing the highway was a blur, but Kirk did think to retrieve his board from the roof of the camper. He walked back down the path to Mars. The surf line was still crowded with riders, the high tide about to turn in the hours-long recession to the low-water mark. Beside his father’s board and planted paddle, Kirk sat in the sand, his mouth dry, his eyes unfocused, his ears deaf to the roar and rush of the waves. He looked at the bloodied bandage on his calf, remembering that he had been cut deeply by his own surfboard, but it had happened—when? Weeks ago.

He slowly ripped the tape from around his leg, then unwrapped the scarlet-stained gauze, kneading the sticky heap into his fist. He dug a hole in the sand, a deep hole, then put the snarl of trash in the bottom and covered it up again. The wound immediately began to bleed, but Kirk ignored that, as well as the swelling and the pain. He sat, confused, suddenly ill, feeling like he was going to cry. But he didn’t. Whenever his father returned he would find his son recovering from a surf accident, waiting for him to finish his business calls so they could go get forty stitches, at least.

No one came by him, neither up out of the water nor down the path from the parking lot. Kirk sat, alone, dragging his fingers in the sand like a small rake for who knows how long. He wished he had a book to read.

“What the fuck?” Frank was striding across the sand, his eyes wide at the sight of his son with such a gash. “What happened to your leg?”

“My own board,” Kirk told him.

“Jesus!” Frank knelt in the sand, inspecting the wound. “Must have made you say ouch.”

“I did say ouch,” Kirk told him.

“Wounded in the line of battle,” Frank said.

“Helluva birthday present,” Kirk told him.

Frank laughed, like any father would when his only son takes a hit and shakes it off with a stoic humor. “Let’s get you to the clinic, get that cleaned out, you sewn up.” Frank gathered his board and paddle. “You’re gonna have one sexy scar.”

“Sexy as hell,” Kirk told him.

Kirk followed his father up the path, away from the surfline, leaving Mars for the last time and forever.