Kem Nunn - Tapping the Source

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.

It got bad again after that, after his conversation with Preston. In a way it was even worse than before. He knew now that Hound Adams was real, that he was around, and that Preston knew who he was. But Preston’s words had revived all of his uncertainties. He had this feeling that whatever move he made next was bound to be the wrong one.

He spent the following day alone in his room and that evening he went out for a walk, thinking that perhaps he would run into Preston, that they could talk. It didn’t happen and he wound up at the very end of the old pier seated with a handful of Mexican fishermen as the night turned cool and damp beneath a heavy mist. The iron rails and painted benches grew wet and the yellow lights that lined the boardwalk drew lines upon their slick surfaces. Still, Ike remained there for some time, staring back toward the highway and the town, which from here had been reduced to a thin band of lights beneath a moonless sky. He kept thinking about Preston, of the way he had grown angry over Ike’s story. He was puzzled by the anger and yet, in an odd way, comforted by it as well. It was perhaps selfish of him to think so, but the anger, it seemed to him, was like some tool just resting there, waiting to be used, if only it could be better understood. And though he could see that doing so would require time, he was against blowing Preston off too soon. The best course, he felt, was to be patient a bit longer. And in the meantime he could continue with his own idea of learning to surf. But he would take Preston’s advice on avoiding the pier, at least until he was better. For the present, he would trust in what Preston had said.

He took some comfort in thinking through these things, in deciding on something. His sister perhaps, or Gordon, might have said he was too cautious, and perhaps he was. It was just that he did not want to blow it from the very beginning.

It was late when he left the pier. He crossed Coast Highway and headed inland on Main. He did not know how late it was but noticed that the bars had closed and the streets were empty. As he neared the intersection of Main and Walnut a lowered Chevy rolled past on chromed rims, its tires making a soft swishing sound on the wet asphalt. He could not see how many people were in the car, as the windows were tinted, but it cruised through the intersection a few yards ahead of him and seemed to slow a bit, as if someone was checking him out. He had been about to turn on Walnut, but that would have put him walking in the same direction as the car and he decided against it, thinking suddenly of Hazel Adams’s warning. He crossed instead behind it and continued up Main, walking quickly with his hands jammed down into the pockets of his jeans.

There was a vacant lot at the top of the next block, and some trees. He waited there a moment in the shadows just to make sure the car was not circling around. It did not appear to be and he was just about to leave when something else caught his eye. There was an alley that ran parallel to Main, just behind the buildings that faced the street, and from his position at the end of the block he could look back across the lot and see down the alley for a fair distance. And that was how he happened to see the bike.

He moved out from beneath the trees and walked slowly along the eastern end of the lot. The bike was a big one, and drawing closer to the mouth of the alley, Ike could see that it was Preston’s Knuckle. Then he saw Preston as well. He was standing at the side of the alley, in what looked to be the beginnings of a driveway, only there was no driveway there, just the back of a building—rough, darkened bricks and a naked bulb maybe ten feet off the ground. The bulb was lit and cast a pale light onto the broken asphalt and gravel beneath it.

Preston was leaning, his arm out and braced against the wall, talking to another guy. Ike could not see much of what the other guy looked like because Preston was quite a bit bigger and was blocking Ike’s view. All that Ike could really see of the other man was a bright spot of blond hair above Preston’s outstretched arm. Ike got the idea, however, that Preston was doing the talking, the other guy the listening. There was something about the way in which the blond head appeared to be cocked a bit to one side and tilted down, that gave Ike this idea. But he was too far away to hear and he could not take the chance of moving closer, nor did he want to stand for long at the mouth of the alley where either man might turn and see him. There was something in the scene, he thought, that suggested he keep his distance. What was most bothersome, however, was the location of the building behind which they stood. As near as Ike could tell, it was the back of the first surf shop he had gone into that day he’d gotten his board.

The implications of this could of course be interpreted in more than one way and the task of doing so was enough to disturb the peace he had found at the end of the pier. It had him guessing as he moved away from the alley and into the night, and it kept him that way far into the first gray hours of morning. For the present, however, his resolve held and he was up with the dawn, dressed in cutoff jeans and a ragged sweat shirt, a towel slung over his shoulders, his board beneath his arm. A sleepless night behind him, he was headed for the Coast Highway and the beaches north of town.

It was different at the north end of town. There was not the sense of light and movement one got around the pier. From the beach you could not see the highway or the town. There were only the cliffs, which were bare and rocky, capped by the gray squeaking forest of oil wells and by the black oil-spattered earth. It was a landscape of grays and blues, dull browns and yellow ochres, of blackened fire rings and litter. And on every available chunk of rock and concrete there were spray-painted messages, swastikas, Chicano names, for he had been told that the northern beaches were the domain of the inland gangs when the sun went down, gangs out of the landlocked badlands back of Long Beach and Santa Ana. It was a strip of beach the cops did not even bother with at night, and there were grisly tales told by surfers of ghastly early-morning finds. One surfer Ike spoke to claimed to have found a human leg, bloated and discolored, floating in the shallows. But the beaches were empty in the mornings. There were only the painted messages, the litter, the blackened fire rings like stone altars, and Ike made no terrible finds.