“We were in Germany too,” his friend Charlie Miller told him at school when Joe mentioned it. But Germany was a place he did not know; older people described it to him, a foreign country outside the fence of another base. After two years there all he knew of it was the weather—the cold weather especially. Weather and smells, they were the differences in places. Fort Bliss, a few summer months, was hot, with the sting of dust. The Presidio was chilly, with the clamminess of damp grass, but on weekends his father took him down the coast to Half Moon Bay. His father sat and smoked; Joe watched with longing the boys crouched on boards, looking small and fearless and buoyant in the big waves.

“How do they do that?”

“Do what?”

“That.”

“Surfers,” his father said, exhaling cigarette smoke.

His father was a soldier, and it always seemed as though his mind was on bigger things; and if Joe asked too many questions his father would shout at him.

In Hawaii his mother clung to him, because his father was so often away, in training, on maneuvers, in school, getting ready, he said—for what?

But one day at the beach, with his father seeing surfers offshore, Joe said, “I want to learn how to do that.”

“You can do it,” his father said. “But first be the best swimmer you can be.”

After that they swam together in the pool at the officers’ club, and in the waves in the sea at Fort DeRussy.

But when his father was away, his mother held on to him and said, “The ocean is dangerous.”

He saw she was right: the waves were high and thick, and they deafened him when they swept into him, submerging him and knocking him over.

He came to see a pattern at home. When his father spent days with him, swimming or trying to teach him tennis, being hearty, he understood that it meant his father would soon be going away. Then he’d be left with his fretful mother, her warnings about swimming and sharks and sunburn. She didn’t play tennis and often drank too much and became weepy.

So his father’s attention to him made him apprehensive: the outings and ice cream were a prelude to abandonment and to the serious talk before bedtime, calling him by name and saying he’d have to grow up fast.

“Listen, Joe. You’ll have to be the man of the house now.” His father smelled of cigarettes; his words were smoky and sour. “But don’t worry—I’ll write letters, and I’ll call when I can.”

He left but seldom called, and his letters were to Sharkey’s mother, who said that his frequent absences were a sign of his importance. “He’s an officer. Do you see how the soldiers salute us?”