Kem Nunn - Tapping the Source

It was almost five years later when they ran away again. She came to his room one night and he could see right away that something was wrong. She kept walking back and forth at the foot of his bed with her arms folded across her chest, her hands squeezing her arms. He could see the knuckles go white when she squeezed. Then she turned out the lights and sat next to him on the bed. She said she couldn’t tell him in the light. She sat close to him and he could feel her body trembling against his own. In all the time he had known her, he had not seen her cry—that trembling was as close as he’d seen her come. Gordon, she said, had been in her room, drunk and putting his hands on her. Ike could still remember sitting up cold and stiff when she told him that, feeling sick and thinking about that day in the truck, Gordon’s beefy hand on Ellen’s leg. She was almost fifteen the night she came to his room, and men were starting to notice her. Ike had seen that, seen the way they looked at her when they went to town. She had a skinny, almost boyish figure, but her ass was tight and round and when she wore those tight faded jeans and the cowboy boots she had saved for and bought herself—there was just something about her. There was something about the way her hips moved when she walked, and about the way she would toss her head to shake back that thick black hair, or the way she would fix it with the combs, like their mother had once fixed hers.

Gordon had two cars. He owned an old Pontiac coupe and a Dodge truck with a camper shell. Ike and Ellen took the truck because it was what Gordon had taught her to drive. The wind was coming up as they left and soon it was hard to see. They spent the night not far from the glass factory, on the outskirts of another small town at the edge of the flats. They slept beneath the shell on an old mattress Gordon kept in the bed. The truck rocked in the wind and they could hear the sand hitting the truck as it rocked and shuddered in the darkness. There was only one blanket and they pulled it over them, pressed close together against the cold that was riding in the wind. She trembled in his arms and he felt her breath on his neck, heard her whispering, asking if he was afraid. He said that he wasn’t. She held his hand to her chest so he could feel her heart. “It’s going like crazy,” she said. She was wearing jeans and an old flannel shirt and holding his hand against her between the folds of material so that he could feel her heart like it was in the palm of his hand. And he could feel her breast, too, round and firm and so soft and her skin hot and slightly damp as if she were feverish and when he moved his hand he felt the hardness of her nipple pass beneath his fingers. In the blackness he could see the dark shapes of her boots catching a bit of moonlight near the tailgate. And he could feel himself trembling now too, both of them trembling and holding each other, her face pressed close to his and her fingers on the back of his neck and when he inhaled he could taste her breath, could pull it down into his own lungs as if he were taking her into himself. He loved her so much. He kissed her neck and her face. He tried to find her mouth. But then suddenly, as if some current had passed through her body, she stiffened and jerked away. “No,” she said. “Ike, we can’t.” And her voice had a kind of wounded sound to it that he had not heard before. She twisted away from him until she was lying with her face to the metal side of the truck. He didn’t say anything. He covered her with the blanket and then sat shivering at her side, watching her boots and the blackness outside and waiting for the light.

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.