Tapping the Source (30 page)

•   •   •

And then it ended: all the shucking and jiving, the fancy footwork. It ended on a Thursday; he would not forget that, the same week in which Preston had returned to Huntington Beach.

He’d gotten up early to surf a small mushy swell out of the west. Hound Adams had not been in the water. Ike surfed for about an hour, then left for home. He liked waking Michelle in the mornings. He liked the way she looked, all sleepy and warm with the morning light coming through the rippling glass. He liked the way she smiled, still half-asleep, when he slipped beneath the covers to let her warm him with her body. Later they would walk down to the coffee shop for breakfast.

He hung his wet suit off the balcony and slipped into jeans and a T-shirt, then walked down the hallway to her room and tried the door. Normally it was unlocked. Thursday morning, however, was different. He heard voices, bare feet on the wooden floor. He was certain that something had gone wrong, and it was becoming difficult to draw a deep breath in the cramped corridor. The first thing he noticed when she opened the door was the strong scent of grass. The first thing he saw was one of Hound Adams’s Mexican shirts draped over one end of the couch. He could not see her bed, but he didn’t have to; he could see her face. She looked slightly flushed, he thought, and very beautiful. Her hair appeared mussed and there was a damp strand curled against her skin near the corner of her mouth. He turned without speaking and walked away. The door closed behind him.

•   •   •

And that was it—the end of everything that had been special between them. He couldn’t sit still. He couldn’t stay in his room. He did not have the desert to walk in, as he had the day his sister had run. He finally put a cold and slimy wet suit on and went back to the beach. The swell, if anything, had gotten worse and he spent the better part of the day scratching for rides in the mushy surf, cursing the waves and anyone reasonably close to his own size who got close enough to crowd him. It was the first time he had ever yelled at anyone in the water. A true local at last.

By late afternoon he was tired and chilled to the point of sickness. He found some guy he knew from the dawn patrol and got him to buy a sixer of Old English 800, the most rotgut stuff he could think of. Then he spent what was left of the afternoon in his room drinking. He waited. He watched the sun go down beyond the buildings that blocked his view of the sea. He waited for the sound of her footsteps in the hall, but they did not come. She should have been home from work by now. Maybe she had not gone. Perhaps she was still with Hound Adams, at his house. Perhaps they were making movies right now.

He was set upon by a nearly uncontrollable compulsion to go there, to find her. All sorts of wanton and perverse acts took shape in his mind. And yet how could he blame her? How could he judge her now when he had been the one who had ruined it? The parties, the movies. He had told himself there was a reason. Was there? Or was it his own selfishness? He should have taken Michelle and run, as far away from Hound Adams as possible, should have given up the charade of looking for his sister, the charade that had become nothing more than a mask for his own lust. Shit, he had stayed because he liked it. The girls, the movies, it was all some sort of crazy ego trip and now he had paid the price. Why was he such a goddamn fuckup? What was wrong with him? Everything had been a lie, his whole stay here. He could see that now. He had simply run away. He had endured the old woman’s hateful stare, the silence of the desert, as long as possible and then he had run. It was just that his sister’s disappearance, the kid’s story, had given him some reason, the necessary push, to do what anyone else with more guts would have done long before. He was twisted in some way, had to be. It was his mother’s blood. He had found a good thing here and a bad thing and he had gone after the bad. Maybe the old woman had called it after all. Maybe he was the one who had been wrong at the ranch—all that stuff about responsibility and guilt. Shit. He had left because he didn’t want to stay without Ellen; responsibility and guilt had nothing to do with it. Maybe the old woman had been right about all of them, his mother a common whore, his sister no better, and him a goddamn degenerate—the whole bad line of them winding down to him. He’d come to Huntington Beach and he’d found a way to get high, to get laid, to make money without working for it. And he’d gotten off on it. But of course he wanted it all; he wanted Michelle, too. And now he was whining and sniveling because it was all going wrong. Jesus. Crying just like the fucking punk he knew in his heart he was.

He thought along these lines, polishing off the last of the malt liquor, occasionally punching out a chair or kicking the wall, the thought of Michelle’s sweet ass in Hound Adams’s bed spreading like some cancer through his system until the room was too small to hold him. He was reaching for the door when he saw the fucking board propped against the wall, and was somewhat surprised that he had not turned his attention to it before now. The fucking board. The fucking hot stick with its tucked-under rails and flashy airbrush job. Looking at it made him sick, and he laughed out loud when he remembered his reasons for going to see Hound Adams about it. Shit. It had been like everything else, a lie. He had wanted the board and had found a way to get it. He snatched it away from the wall and lurched out of the room, bashing the board against the doorjamb, running the pointed nose into the wall in the hallway with enough force to create a tiny explosion of plaster. He didn’t know if the board had gotten bigger or the hallway smaller, but he couldn’t seem to take a step without running into something, and by the time he reached the darkness that waited at the foot of the stairs there were people yelling for quiet and cursing him. He stopped just long enough to yell back, to flip off the whole fucking building, and then he was gone, lurching through the streets of the town, the board tucked beneath his arm, headed for Hound Adams’s house.

30

All sorts of grotesque scenes took shape in his mind as he walked, unspeakable perversions that he might interrupt. But he was not in the mood to consider consequences. He did not bother to knock, but dropped the board on the porch and pushed wildly through the door.

The living room was dark, but he could see light coming from one of the back rooms. And that was where he found them. So many crazy scenes had filled his head getting there that it took a moment for the real scene to sink in. He stopped in the doorway and stood looking at them, the single loudest sound the rush of his own blood in his ears.

It was very simple, really. Michelle was seated on the floor near Hound Adams. One of the Jacobs brothers sat on the couch. Everyone was fully clothed. The room smelled of grass and some kind of incense. Everyone seemed to be looking at him; their faces swam before him in a watery haze. He lurched a few steps into the room, fighting to maintain that singleness of purpose that had driven him through the night.

“Come in,” he heard Hound Adams say. “Sit.”

He looked for a moment at Hound and then at Michelle. He was certain he did not want to sit down. “I want to talk to you,” he said to Michelle. His throat felt very tight and he was able to force out the words only with great difficulty.

Michelle seemed to be floating somewhere in front of him, in that thick haze that filled the room. Her face was blank. He could not tell if she was angry or embarrassed.

“What do you want?”

“We have to talk.”

“We can talk here.”

He saw her look at Hound, then back at him. He wanted to step forward, to pull her to her feet. It was like the whole situation was slipping away from him, like he was drowning in the thick smoke.

“God damn it.” He was aware of his voice being much louder now. “I came here to talk to you. Will you get off your fucking ass or what?”

She didn’t get off her ass. She just kept sitting there, floating there, this slightly blasted expression on her face. It was a terrible expression, the sort that needed to be erased with the toe of one’s shoe. He started toward her with no real idea of what he was going to do when he got there, only that it would be something she deserved. But he never reached her. Hound Adams was up quickly, standing between them. He put a hand on Ike’s shoulder and Ike knocked it away. He was fairly certain that Hound was going to kill him, but the malt liquor had washed away most of his fear; he was determined to go down swinging. Hound, however, only took a step backward, his hands at his side. “Jealousy’s a very negative trip, brah. Think about it.” His voice was calm.

Ike stood still, watching Hound Adams, never hating him more than at this particular moment.

“What is it?” Hound asked. “You want to jump bad? Spill some blood, maybe? We can fix that.” He turned abruptly and stepped to the dresser at the side of the couch, leaving Ike to stand there like he was nailed down, to stare at Michelle, who had turned her face to the wall. Then Hound was back, pushing something into Ike’s hand. It was a gun. The metal was cold against his skin and he looked down at it stupidly. It seemed to be sort of dangling from his hand, as if it were attached in some way and he was not really holding on to it. Suddenly Hound snatched it back from him and pointed it at a wall. The gun went off with a deafening explosion. A new odor hung in the room and Ike’s ears rang with the sound of the blast. Hound put the gun back into his hand. “You’ve got the bullets,” he said, “and you’ve got the gun.”

Ike felt as if he had a high fever, as if nothing in the room was quite real.

“You think you own me,” Michelle said suddenly out of the silence that had come to fill the room. She was looking up at him now, her face twisted with anger. “Boys are so fucking stupid, they think they can own you, that you’re supposed to be their property or something while they do any fucking thing they want to. I know all about your little parties. So why don’t you take a walk, because you don’t own me. Nobody does. Why don’t you go back to the sticks where you belong?”

“You fucking cunt.” He couldn’t keep his voice from shaking now. It was like her words struck too close to home and he wanted to strangle her for them. He called her a fucking whore cunt and she was up on her knees screaming back at him. He didn’t know what they said. If there had been nobody else in the room, he would have fought her. They could have rolled on the floor and clawed at each other’s eyes. At least Hound’s presence spared them that; it was bad enough as it was. His stomach was a knot of pain. The floor spun beneath his feet. He threw the gun at the couch and staggered back through the house, across the wooden porch, and into the night.

•   •   •

There was no relief in sight and no place to go. He stomped through lawns, kicking flowerpots, cursing small yapping dogs. He stumbled down alleys, trash cans tumbling in his wake. People yelled at him: disembodied voices reaching him in the darkness. And he screamed back, his voice going hoarse, losing itself among the run-down buildings.

He finally wound up down by the tattoo parlor on the Coast Highway and a brilliant idea came to him. He suddenly realized why certain people had tattoos all over them. It was because they were fuckups and they knew they were fuckups. He could suddenly see how guys in jails could get into sitting around carving on themselves. They knew they were assholes and they defaced themselves for it. It made perfect sense. He might have gotten into that himself, a little ink, a penknife, but then he figured he probably wouldn’t have the guts to go through with it and it would be disastrous to try and fail. No, he would get one from the shop. He would climb into that chair and it would be all over except for the buzzing of the needle. He’d seen how it worked. You just picked the one you wanted and gave the man your money. He checked his pockets to see how much he had. It would be nice to get a large one, preferably a very stupid one to boot, the larger and stupider, the better. A member of the fuckup club for life and there would be no hiding it.

The shop was stuffy and warm, filled with a peculiar odor, a kind of medicine smell, as if he’d stumbled into some third-rate doctor’s office. He went up to the wall and examined the selection. He finally settled on a set of Harley-Davidson wings. Only in the middle, instead of that little shield and the word
Motorcycles
, this one had a skull and crossbones, and beneath the bones it said
Harley-Fuckin’-Davidson
. There was another one that was even better. It had the same wings, the same skull and crossbones, only on top of the skull there was a naked woman, her legs spread so you could get a good look at her big hairy snatch. But the price on the second tattoo was too steep. He asked the guy if he could pay him some now and the rest later, but the guy said, “No way.” He was an old guy with a bald head and heavily tattooed arms. He stood around chewing a cigar while Ike made his selection, then he sat Ike down, checked once to make sure of the design, and went to work.