Tapping the Source (8 page)

In the morning the wind was still so bad you couldn’t see much. There was sand all across the road and tumbleweeds big as cars passing ghostlike in the sand. He guessed it was one of those weeds that made them crash. They were driving through the town when one hit the glass by Ellen’s head and she jerked the wheel, too hard, sent them jumping over a curb and right into the side of a building. He could still remember the sound those bricks made coming down on the hood, Ellen’s skinny arms fighting the wheel. And he could remember how he felt that morning, lightheaded and numb, so that he was hardly aware of cracking the windshield with his head.

Gordon came for them once more, as he had the other time. Only this time he was in the car and the old lady was riding in the backseat. Ike sat in the car with his grandmother while Gordon and Ellen talked to the sheriff and the store owner and Gordon signed some papers. Later there was some kind of hearing. The ride home was very quiet. The wind dropped away to nothing and it was clear—the way the desert is after a storm, with every bit of color sharp and hard so it hurts your eyes to look. The sky was huge and blue and there were great white drifts of sand left by the wind across the black asphalt of the road. The sand rose in white clouds as they passed through the drifts and then danced on the road like tiny hailstorms behind them.

•   •   •

He remembered Gordon didn’t drink for some time after that. It had all happened during Christmas vacation and when the vacation was over they went back to school. One day on his way home Ike passed the store and saw that Gordon was out front, passing a bottle with some of his friends. He went home and told Ellen. She took him to her room and pulled open a drawer. There was a handgun there. He remembered how the barrel looked long and hard, catching some of the afternoon light that cut through the blinds. “He gave it to me,” Ellen told him. “Said if he ever gave me cause, I should shoot him.” After that sometimes in the afternoons he would hear them practicing out in back of the market, Gordon and Ellen, blowing empty pop bottles into glass splinters that afterward lay glittering in the red dust.

•   •   •

Those were some of the things Ike thought about the week after he met Preston, after Preston had brought the tank by for him to work on, and fixed it so he could work at Morris’s shop. There was something about the way Morris’s compressor popped on and off in the sheet-metal spray booth that reminded him of those gunshots, that made him think of the desert.

He was glad for the work; not only would it bring in a few bucks, it would keep him in touch with Preston. He kept thinking about what that kid had said to him in San Arco, just before he pulled away, that business about finding some real help. He kept thinking Preston would not be a bad guy to have on your side. What he hadn’t counted on with the work was the way it gave him time to think.

•   •   •

He guessed that Gordon had never given Ellen cause to use her gun. And he and Ellen did not talk about that night on the flats. But it was not long afterward that things began to change, and that he began to lose her. She began to see other guys. Not just boys from school, but older guys from King City, guys with cars. The old lady didn’t like it, but she was pretty sick by then so about all she could do was yell at Ellen from that chair she kept out on the porch, tell her she was no better than her mother, a tramp and a common whore, and threaten to send her away, to one of those homes where there had been talk of sending her after she wrecked the truck. The threats did not have much substance, as it was really Gordon who was looking after things now, and footing the bill. Gordon had been married once, Ike had heard, after the war. But then the woman had left him and he had come back to the desert to take over the market and the station. Gordon was a strange guy. He never said a lot about anything, and when Ellen began to run around, he didn’t say much about that, either, but then Ike guessed it would have been hard for him to say too much.

By the time summer came, Ellen was staying out late and keeping all kinds of crazy hours. She was going out a lot with this guy named Ruben who worked at a garage in King City and drove a customized ’56 Mercury. Ike saw them together one afternoon on his way home—he was working then himself, just starting at the shop. They were hanging out in this ball field with a few other people on the outskirts of town. It was the first time he had really seen her with someone else. Ruben had the car pulled up on the grass and Ellen was stretched out near the front fender, leaning against Ruben. Her hair was bright black in the sun. She was wearing a white summer dress with blue stripes and the dress too seemed to shimmer in the hot light. Ike went to a piece of chain link fence and watched them for a long time. Finally Ellen got up and walked across the grass to where he stood. Her hair was loose and there was something a bit wild and flushed about her face. She put her hand up to the fence and their fingers touched through the chain link. He wanted her to come with him, but she wouldn’t do it. She said that she was with her friends, and then her fingers had squeezed his against the cool steel and she had gone back. But he had continued to stand there. He watched until they left. He watched Ellen get into the front seat from the passenger side and then slide way over, turning as she did so to let another couple push the seat forward and climb into the back, and he could see the summer dress riding way up high on her brown thighs.

She often came home late, but that night she didn’t come home at all. It was the first time. And he lay awake in the moonlight, hating them and hating himself for feeling like he did, hating himself for that night on the flats, hating his own twisted jealousy. In the morning she was still not there and he went outside, up that little hill back of Gordon’s yard, and he waited.

Finally he saw a dust cloud moving at the edge of town and then the dark blue of the Mercury, like a huge insect moving in the dust. The car let her out by the store and he knew she was trying to avoid the old lady. She was still wearing the blue and white dress, but she was carrying her shoes. He watched her come around to the back of the house and he could see her bare feet kicking up little clouds of red dust. She didn’t go into the house but went instead to the cellar. She went down the steps and she pulled the door closed behind her—leaving him to stare into the blistered sun-gray wood. He stood and went down the hill after her. He felt like he was drunk, as if the ground were playing tricks beneath his feet. He could feel the sun on his neck, and his throat hot and dry.

The cellar door was unlocked; he opened it and went down, and even now, standing in the ragged back lot behind Morris’s shop, with flattened beer cans and broken bottles winking at him from among the weeds and the smooth metal of Preston’s tank beneath his hand, there was not a single detail of that moment he could not recall: the rush of sunlight upon the stairs, the look on Ellen’s face as she saw him, surprised and at the same time pissed at herself for not locking the damn door behind her, even that pattern of dust caught swirling upon the light.

There was an old workbench down there and a washbasin. Ellen was standing at the basin. Her shoes were on the bench and she was naked except for a bra. She wasn’t tall, but she was slender and her legs looked long and brown except up high where her bathing suit had left a white pattern. Her hair was loose, shining beneath the light of a dim bulb strung above the bench, and the way she was standing made it hang forward to hide her face. She turned once and looked at him for a moment and then went back to what she was doing, which was bending over the sink trying to work some kind of stain out of the dress. Ike didn’t say anything. He was still feeling half drunk and dizzy and kind of sick from sitting too long in the sun. He’d left his shirt on the hill and his shoulders felt hot and raw. The cellar floor was cold beneath his bare feet. Ellen just kept working at the spot, but when he was close enough and she stopped to look at him once more, he could see that her eyes were red and full and that her makeup had run, leaving dark tracks on her cheeks. He wanted to say something but he couldn’t. What he did was just put his arms around her and she dropped the dress and they stood there together, her breasts pushed flat against his bare chest through the flimsy white material, her legs against his. He kissed her forehead and her eyes, even her mouth, but he just wanted to hold her, to squeeze her tight and to tell her—something, words half-forming in his mouth, when, suddenly, it was over and the old lady had found them. She was standing up there at the top of the stairs with the door thrown back and the sunlight rushing in once more—the only consolation being that she had for once been shocked into silence so that all she seemed able to do was to teeter there above them, black and bent before the blueness of the sky.

It was, of course, unbearable for them there after that. Ike had work and school. Ellen had her friends and they did not really see that much of each other. The drifting apart that had begun shortly after that night on the flats continued. Ellen lasted out the winter, but she was gone by summer, by herself this time, and for good. In close to two years he had heard nothing, not until the afternoon that kid came driving into town in his white Camaro with two surfboards strapped to the roof.

•   •   •

Preston stopped by Ike’s apartment at the end of the week to pick up his tank. Ike could hear the heavy boots pounding the stairwell so it felt like the whole place might come down and he knew who it was before he answered the door.

Preston looked like he’d just climbed out of a shower. His hair was still wet and combed back flat against his head. He was dressed in the same grimy-looking tank top and jeans, but the look on his face was different and Ike could see that he was sober. He didn’t say anything to Ike but walked right in and started looking around for his tank. He couldn’t believe Ike’s job. “Jesus,” he kept saying, “it’s beautiful. I mean it, man, you did a hell of a job.” He carried the tank to the window to examine it in the morning light.

Ike watched him standing by the window, admiring the tank, absurdly pleased with himself. In spite of the fact that he knew he did good work, he was not used to praise. Jerry had always taken everything for granted. “You’re a fuckin’ artist,” Preston told him.

Suddenly Preston turned away from the window and looked straight at Ike. The sunlight was coming in behind him, making him look even bigger than usual, and flashing in that little diamond stud he wore in one ear. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Living in this dump? This isn’t your scene, you’re just a kid. Why aren’t you back in the desert working on bikes?”

Ike was surprised by the questions, by the fact that Preston was even interested. For a moment he hesitated. He had planned to tell no one why he was in Huntington Beach. But Preston seemed different to him this morning, more like somebody he could trust, and in the back of his mind there was still that notion of getting help. Maybe now was the time. He walked to the card table and picked up the scrap of paper with the names on it. He handed the paper to Preston, and while Preston looked it over he told him about the kid in the desert, the story of a trip to Mexico, three Huntington Beach surfers who had crossed the border with a girl and come back alone.

Ike was standing only a few feet away from Preston as he spoke and it seemed to him that a certain expression passed over Preston’s face, a kind of dark scowl that was not unlike that shadow of a look Ike had noticed the day Preston saw his old board. “Is this what you were doing in the water?” Preston asked. “Trying to find Hound Adams?”

Ike nodded, thinking it strange that Preston had mentioned only one name.

“Shit.” Preston looked angry about something now. “And what were you going to do when you found these people?”

“I don’t know, really. Hang around, see what I could find out.”

“Hang around with Hound Adams?”

Ike shrugged.

“Man, you’re hurtin’. Look, if you take my advice, you’ll hang it up and split right now. Go back to San Arco and work on bikes. If you don’t do that, at least stay away from the pier. If you want to surf, do it farther north at the cliffs. The pier’s a local spot.”

“But what about Hound Adams?”

Preston handed him the paper. “Like I said, if you’re smart, you’ll go back to your uncle’s shop.”

“It’s my sister,” Ike said. “I’m the only family she’s got.”

“What about your uncle?”

“He doesn’t give a shit, that’s why I came. My uncle just says that she was wild, that if she got into trouble, it was her own fault.”

“Maybe he was right.”

“And maybe he was wrong. I mean, somebody should at least find out.”

Preston just stared at him for a moment. “Yeah. Well, suit yourself, ace, but take my advice about the pier. Stay away from it. You don’t want to meet Hound Adams in the water.” With that, Preston tucked his fuel tank under his arm and started out the door.

Ike followed him into the hall. “Wait a minute,” he said.

Preston turned.

“Hound Adams. Who is he?”

Preston waited in the hall. He looked down the floor toward that bit of sunlight coming up from the staircase and shook his head. Then he looked back at Ike. “That’s your problem, ace. Can you dig it?” Then he was off and stomping down the hallway, down the wooden flight of stairs and into the street.

Ike followed him as far as the top of the stairs. He was torn between running after him and regret that he had even opened his mouth in the first place. It was just that Preston had taken him off guard with those damn questions. He thought back to the line in that song, that business about how suckers always make mistakes when they’re far from home. He felt like the sucker now, the dumb-ass country boy. Shit, where did he get off thinking somebody like Preston was going to want to help him? And now he had put his foot in it. What if Preston and Hound Adams were even friends or something? But then Preston hadn’t acted like they were friends; he had acted like the whole thing pissed him off for some reason. The trouble with Preston was, he was the kind of guy you didn’t want to press. You couldn’t. He was too damn close to the edge all the time. Ike ground his teeth and walked back to his room. He slammed the door behind him and leaned up against it. He shut his eyes and when he squeezed them hard enough, what he saw was a thin pair of dusty legs kicking hot red clouds out of a desert afternoon and it was not likely that he would forget.