The Burning Ground by Adam O'Riordan

Author:Adam O'Riordan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Wave-Riding Giants

McCauley watched as the boy’s father carried him the last two hundred yards out to the ocean. He was a tall child, or should have been, but his legs had wasted away and were floppy and white and in their translucence made him think of two wilted sticks of spargel. For a minute he watched as the boy’s father held him there, cradling him in the breakers, the surf from the Pacific foaming up around him, as if the force of all that water might do something for those ruined limbs. McCauley hadn’t been out to the beach or the boardwalk the recreation room overlooked since he fractured his pelvis last year. A girl in her teens on a skateboard pulled by two toy terriers had knocked him down at the corner of Paloma Avenue. He heard the hiss of her acrylic wheels on the concrete, and had a sense of something approaching at speed. He was turning when she had collided with him, her shoulder slamming against his ribs, sending him falling awkwardly backward. It was a closed fracture under a dark plum bruise that curled around from his hip to the top of his buttocks. But there was limited bleeding, the doctors told him, and the butterfly-shaped group of bones had stayed in place.

In the past he enjoyed walking among the crowds on the boardwalk as the evening came on. The tourists and their families, the groups of sunburned bums and drifters on the concrete benches with their out-of-tune guitars, the Latino kids with their muscular Staffs and Pits outside the tattoo parlors, hot in their dark jeans; it had been a salve to the welling loneliness in the years since Dolores died. And although there was a notice in the recreation room advising all residents to remain in the building after dark, he liked the boardwalk best just as the light was fading.

Instead he now had a pair of binoculars heavy as a candlepin bowling ball, like the ones they had used on the convoys, except that this pair had Kriegsmarine stamped on them. One of the caregivers, Vanessa, plump under her white nurse’s shift, got them for him from an antique show up at Big Bear Lake where her boyfriend, Carlos, had taken her one weekend last April. To tourists walking past on the boardwalk, McCauley must have seemed a benign, spectral figure behind the window six feet above them. He would offer a wave if a child riding on their father’s shoulders caught sight of him. In the Senior Housing Facility where he lived for the past eight years, there was a cold-cuts buffet each Wednesday, uniform slices of ice-cream-pink meat marbled with white fat laid out on trestle tables, and tepid melon Jell-O every Friday. In the recreation room, where he spent most of his time, there was a small library donated to by the daughter of a former resident who owned a surplus bookstore in Santa Fe. It included a set of

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