“But don’t you need to be a better swimmer before you try to surf?” Loomis had a vague memory of the boy’s swimming lessons, which maybe hadn’t gone so well.
“No,” the boy said.
“I really think,” Loomis said, and then he stopped speaking, because the helicopter he’d been hearing, one of those large twin-engine birds that carry troops in and out of combat—a Chinook—had come abreast of them, a quarter mile or so off the beach. Just as Loomis looked up to see it, something coughed or exploded in one of its engines. The helicopter slowed, then swerved, with the slow grace of an airborne leviathan, toward the beach where they stood. In a moment it was directly over them. One of the men in it leaned out of a small opening on its side, frantically waving, but the people on the beach, including Loomis and his son, beaten by the blast from the blades and stung by sand driven up by it, were too shocked and confused to run. The helicopter lurched back out over the water with a tremendous roar and a deafening, rattling whine from the engines. There was another loud pop, and black smoke streamed from the forward engine as the Chinook made its way north again, seeming hobbled. Then it was gone, lost in the glare over the water. A bittersweet burnt-fuel smell hung in the air. Loomis and his son stood there among the others on the beach, speechless. One of two very brown young surfers in board shorts and crewcuts grinned and nodded at the clublike rock in Loomis’s hand.
“Dude, we’re safe,” he said. “You can put down the weapon.” He and the other surfer laughed.
Loomis’s son, looking embarrassed, moved off as if he were with someone else in the crowd, not Loomis.
“Visitation,” Brad Watson, from the April 6 New Yorker.
