Tapping the Source (20 page)

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He had planned, toward the end of the film, to take Michelle directly home, to turn in early and see Barbara the first thing in the morning. They were on their way out of the lobby when Michelle spotted Hound Adams. He was with the blond-haired man Ike had seen just that afternoon, in the shop. Michelle went to them before Ike could stop her, and began to talk. Hound Adams, of course, had dope and Ike soon found himself out on the sidewalk, headed toward the north end of town. They took a route almost identical to the one Hound took the night Ike followed him home from the beach. Before leaving the theater, however, Hound Adams introduced Michelle and Ike to the man he was with and Ike shook hands with Frank Baker.

Hound and Michelle did most of the talking on the way home. Ike had the feeling that Frank was not particularly pleased to have company. He went off to some other part of the house when they got there and Ike did not see him again. Ike and Michelle wound up seated once more on Hound’s living room floor. And once again Ike got the feeling that Hound was coming on to Michelle. He seemed to find reasons for touching her, for putting his hand on her forearm or knee. And Ike felt himself growing angry about it. It was crazy. Only a short while before, he’d been telling himself he would not ask her out again and now he was jealous. It didn’t make sense.

Hound talked about the movie, and about Mexico. “Remember what I told you?” he asked, turning to Ike. “About the desert, how there is an energy there, just as there is an energy in the sea, a rhythm? It’s like surfing can plug you into that rhythm if you learn to let it. But notice I said learn. We’re taught to think with our heads too much of the time. We get out of touch with other areas of perception, other ways of seeing.” He paused for a moment and took a hit off the pipe. “That’s one of the good things about Mexico,” he continued. “A combination of both, the desert and the sea, a blend of rhythms. It always seems strange at first, when I go there from here. It takes me a few days to adjust, two or three; but it’s a necessary adjustment. Mexico is also a great place for doing mushrooms. Have you ever done any?” He looked at both Michelle and Ike, then shifted his weight and smiled. “They have two kinds in this village. Derumba and San Ysidro, those are the names. San Ysidro is the stronger of the two.”

Hound paused for another toke on the pipe and Ike glanced at Michelle. He could see that she was hanging on every word. Hound Adams went on to relate a number of mystical experiences with the powerful San Ysidro. He spoke of the morning he both surfed and watched himself surf, and of the time he looked into the sea through the transparency of his own flesh.

“I want to go,” Michelle said suddenly, interrupting Hound in one of his stories. Hound smiled and leaned forward to place the pipe in the middle of the circle, holding his hair back from his face with one hand as he did so. “You should. And so should you,” he said, looking at Ike. “You can learn things about surfing down there it would take you years to learn up here.”

Ike nodded. Michelle had put her hand on his leg and he could feel the heat of her palm burning through his jeans. He was thinking now about the ranch, about how he had felt up there and how it was like there was some crazy bit of truth in the things Hound Adams said, but that somehow talking about it didn’t seem to work. It was as if Hound was putting on a show for them, and Ike couldn’t help but wonder what Preston would think of it, or even if Hound would say the same kinds of things if he weren’t talking to a couple of kids half his age.

“By the way,” Hound said. “You found your stick yet, Ike?”

Ike said that he hadn’t.

“You remember my offer?”

Ike said that he did, and Hound had launched himself into another description of Mexico when he was cut short by the ringing of a phone. He was gone for several minutes and when he returned, Ike could see right away that something was wrong. Hound was no longer smiling and the skin seemed to be stretched tighter across the bones of his face. He looked suddenly older and harder than he had looked only moments before. “That was Terry Jacobs’s brother,” he said in a flat voice. “Terry just died.”

20

Ike and Michelle stood in the hallway, as they had the night before. It seemed to Ike that the building was spinning slightly, tilting first one way and then the other, the naked bulbs throwing narrow shafts of light into the hot, spinning darkness. His knees felt weak and he could not tell if it was because he was nervous with Michelle or because he could not forget the look on Hound’s face as he announced Terry’s death.

Once again she invited him in, and once again he hesitated. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll come to your room, then. You can’t get away two nights in a row.” She laughed. Her face appeared flushed, perhaps a trifle wild. He noticed a small drop of perspiration near her upper lip. She was standing with one hand on the doorknob, the other on her hip. Her hands were rather large, and strong, like a boy’s, except that the skin was smooth and soft to the touch. He watched her hands because it was easier than meeting her eyes, and he thought about his room, the pile of dirty clothes, the sack of garbage he had forgotten to take out.

“There’s beer in the refrigerator,” she said. “Come on.”

He followed her into the room, which seemed even smaller and stuffier now than it had earlier. Jill was not around.

“You have to sit on the bed,” she told him. “It’s the only comfortable spot.”

He seated himself at one end of the mattress and watched as Michelle went to the refrigerator for the beer. When she returned, she sat the bottles on the floor near his feet. She then walked past him and took a candle from the windowsill. She placed the candle on the floor and lit it, killed the overhead light, and drew the curtain that divided the room. Immediately everything was changed. The room seemed close and hot. The soft yellow flamed jumped in the darkness, creating strange shifting patterns of shadow and light, dancing in the black glass of the window. She sat close beside him so that their shoulders were just touching and he could feel the heat from her body. He drank the beer quickly. It was cold and he could feel it burn all the way down. He put his hand on the bed, just behind her, his arm held straight, and she leaned back against it. He looked into her face, at her small, perfectly shaped mouth, the high cheekbones. She held his eyes with her own and he could see the light of the candle in her eyes, in the small dark spot that was the scar left by the stick. He focused on that dark spot, watched it moving ever so slightly, growing suddenly larger as she leaned toward him, and then her lips were against his. He tasted her breath, her tongue. They lay back together on the mattress and he felt like he was falling. He felt the way he had felt going down the face of that first wave at the ranch. Out of control. It was crazy to think about this being the same girl he had been so annoyed with at the show. He lay beside her, kissing her, her mouth, her neck, her eyelids, and then suddenly it was like the fall was over and he was just there, beside her, freezing up. He lay very still and he could hear her heart, feel his own beating against her arm. A long moment passed before she began to squirm at his side. She took him by the shoulder and rolled him away from her, as if she wanted to get a good look at him from arm’s length. “I’ve never met a boy like you,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“Well …” He paused. “I mean, I know what you want but I don’t think I can.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

She pulled him back down beside her. “I guess there weren’t many girls out there in the desert,” she said.

He shook his head. “No.”

“And so you’ve never had a girl friend?”

He hesitated. He could feel the blood in his face and when he closed his eyes it was like the red dust of San Arco lay in back of his lids, making them dry and scratchy. “One,” he said. “There was this one girl. But she moved away.” He could feel her watching him, feel her not believing his story.

“It must have been lonely when she left.”

He nodded again. “Yes,” he said, “it was.” He was looking at the ceiling now and he could not remember feeling this miserable in some time, useless, the way he had felt that first day in town when the bikers laughed at him. Shit. If he couldn’t fuck and couldn’t fight, he didn’t see how he was ever going to amount to anything. He imagined Gordon staring down on him from where the sky should be, his big red face wagging from side to side, then turning to spit in the dust.

Michelle was propped up on one arm now, her jaw resting in her hand. “I guess it was just the opposite for me. I mean, I was like getting it on before I was thirteen.” She seemed to think about that for a moment. “Didn’t you and this girl ever mess around?”

He shrugged. “Once.”

“Once?” He could hear her laugh. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I mean, I’m not making fun of you. But once?”

“She moved away.”

“That’s right. And then it was just you and your sister again. Out there in the middle of all that nothing.

“Well,” she asked him after another pause, “did you like it?”

“What?”

“What you did. With your long-lost love?”

He turned his face to look at her and saw that she was smiling, but it was the way she had smiled at him that day he passed her on the lawn, not snotty but real.

“Maybe you just need some more practice,” she said. “And you know what?”

He said he didn’t.

“I’m not going to let you get out of here until you fuck me.”

She slipped off the mattress and bent to blow out the candle, then straightened to pull her T-shirt up and over her head, to toss it away. And when she stood up to unbutton her pants, there was just the moonlight coming through the ancient glass of the window, finding one side of her face, her breasts that were small and round, and incredibly white where the bathing suit had kept them from the sun, and after she had stepped out of her pants and lay back down beside him, he could have sworn that she looked as pure as any angel in that soft light coming through the glass. He ran his hands along her legs, across the cool places beneath her thighs, and later, when he lay down between them and she guided him inside and he felt the heat of her body and her arms closing around him, he shut his eyes and felt the hot red dust of the desert rising to choke him and he thought that somewhere, out of a musty past, while his body rocked on in the present to some rhythm of its own, he could hear the old woman call his name. And the voice was filled with surprise, with pain and anger.

21

She slept for a while. Her skin was warm and soft next to his own and it was very nice just to lie there, in the darkness, listening to her breathing beside him. He must have dozed himself, for a time, because he was aware of waking, of having to remind himself that it had really happened, that he was in fact here, her leg thrown out to cover both of his, her breath against his neck, her fingers on his chest. It was a pleasant discovery. He shifted his weight some and she stirred beside him. “Are you awake?” she whispered. He said that he was. She laughed at something. Her fingers slipped down to his stomach.

“Will you do me a favor?” he asked.

“Like what?” He could hear a certain amount of amusement in her voice.

“Like finding out from your friend who it is that I’m supposed to look like.”

“Are you serious?”

He said that he was.

He felt her fingers pressing against him. “You’re a funny boy,” she said. He turned toward her, finding her mouth with his own.