Kem Nunn - Tapping the Source

Ike shrugged once more.

“Tell you what,” Preston told him, but was interrupted before he could say more by the sound of a bike—Morris pulling into the drive. “Here’s his highness now,” Preston said. He stood up and finished his beer, chucked the can and hitched up his dirty jeans. He picked his shades off the trailer and slipped them back on. “Who knows,” he said, and tapped Ike in the chest with the back of his hand. “Maybe I can say something to the treacherous old pig-fucker myself. Put in a good word for you, as it were.” He winked and walked away.

Ike watched him go, sauntering in an exaggerated sort of way over to where Morris was kneeling near his scooter, unwrapping a handful of small parts he had apparently been out for. Ike could hear them talking for a few seconds in muffled tones. Then he could hear Preston’s voice clearly. “I know you got to tear down that Shovel.”

Finally Morris straightened up and wiped his hands. He said something to Preston and then walked over to the fence and spoke to Ike through the chain link. “I’m gonna pull a bike apart next week,” he said. “You interested?”

Ike nodded. “Sure,” he said. “Sure thing.”

Morris just looked at him for a minute, like he was trying to decide if he’d made a mistake or not, then he turned and walked back to his bike. Preston said something else that Ike could not catch and then turned himself and moved to meet Ike coming around the fence.

“Thanks,” Ike said.

Preston held up a hand. “Just don’t turn your back on him,” he said, and then laughed out loud at the prospect of this new partnership.

Ike stood there for a moment, waiting. There was a stiff wind kicking down the drive and when Ike spoke again, it was of the surf. “Be blown out now,” he said.

Preston nodded and as Ike watched him he could see the sky reflected in Preston’s shades. “What you need’s a good point break,” Preston told him. “Some kelp beds out there to cut the chop. Huntington’s not the only place with surf, you know. Shit. You don’t know the kinds of places I’ve seen.” He looked off toward the alley. “Was a time I’d never let a day go by without checking it out.” He stretched and flexed the muscles in his arms—holding the pose like he was waiting for a picture. “Shit, I ought to walk down there with you and have a look,” he said, but made no move to leave the drive. Ike guessed that it was time for him to move on. He did not really want to talk in front of Morris. For the moment he was content to know that Preston was still on his side, that they could talk again. He said good-bye and started toward the street, but Preston called to him and he turned back.

“You won’t tell anybody else what you told me, will you?”

“No. I won’t. I haven’t.”

“Good,” Preston said. “Don’t.”

Ike stood for a moment and waited, to see perhaps if Preston would say more, or decide to walk down to the pier after all, but Preston showed no sign of leaving. He stayed with Morris near the entrance of the shop. Morris had peeled off his shirt and slipped on his spray mask. The mask hung down around his neck and his big hairy gut was hanging out over his belt, twisting the buckle so it pointed at the ground. Preston tapped Morris on the chest with the back of his hand, as he had tapped Ike a short while before. “The kid got his first ride today, Morris. What do you think of that?”

“Right in the shore break,” Ike put in. He was still feeling somewhat elated about the ride.

Morris had already pulled his mask up to his face. He now jerked it back down and glared at Ike across the top of it. “Big fucking deal,” he said.

Morris put him to work in the afternoons, leaving his mornings free to surf. They spent the first few days on the Shovel. The work and getting along with Morris required concentration and by nightfall he was beat. He went home tired and slept. He had looked forward to talking some more with Preston, but the week passed and Preston did not come around. Toward the middle of the second week he began to worry once more.

There was more work and he spent his afternoons staring into the oversize valves of Shovelheads and Panheads, laboring over Fat Bob tanks with Morris’s new Badger airbrush, leaving in his wake a rainbow of imron cobwebbing, pearl-silver lace, and candy-blue flames. Mornings were still spent in the water. But he was thinking about time now—two weeks since he’d talked to Preston in his room, a month in town and he still did not even know what Hound Adams, Frank Baker, or Terry Jacobs looked like. He had told Preston he would keep his mouth shut, but now—nothing was happening. It was getting harder to think about the work. He needed another break. And then came the fifth week—twenty-nine days since he’d stood on the gravel at the edge of the road and said good-bye to Gordon. It was the fifth week that brought the swell.

It began with the sound, a distant thunder repeating itself at regular intervals somewhere beyond the hum of the highway, waking him in the night so that he turned for a moment to listen, to wonder, before slipping back into sleep. But in the morning, when the sound was still there, louder than before in the first gray light, he did not have to wonder again. He pulled on his clothes and ran from the room, down the wooden stairs and across the lawn, past the oil well and down the alley, south on Main so he was running toward the ocean and he could see the white water even before he crossed the highway.

The first thing that struck him about the swell was how different it made everything look. He might have been in another town, on a different pier, staring out at a stretch of beach he had never seen before.

The waves did not just rise up out of the ocean in rolling lines, as they normally did. These seemed to come in off the horizon, as if they had marched the whole breadth of the Pacific to pound this stretch of beach. The surface was angry, gray and black, streaked with white. Paddling out appeared an impossibility. The first fifty yards of water looked as if it had been poured from a washing machine. Flecks of foam lay across the wet sand like snowdrifts. As he ran onto the boardwalk, the whole structure seemed to shudder beneath him with each new wave.

He was alone with the swell. Far down the beach he could see the yellow Jeep of the lifeguards. The morning was still and gray, the sun wrapped in a heavy overcast. He walked farther out onto the pier, and that was when he saw them; he wasn’t alone after all. At first he couldn’t believe it; no one could have gotten outside in this kind of surf. He ran farther. He lost track of them, then found them again. There was no doubt about it. He picked out one, then two more, a fourth and a fifth. The size of the swell made them hard to see. At times they disappeared completely behind the waves. He gripped the rail, damp with spray beneath his hands. They were out there, but as yet, he was pretty sure there had been no rides.

He was nearly even with them now and could see them more clearly: six surfers on the south side of the pier. They stayed together, darting about like a school of fish, apparently trying to get themselves set up amid the huge swells. Occasionally one of them would look as if he were going to take off, only to pull back at the last moment, allowing the wave to peak and pour over, to thunder on through the pier and toward the beach unridden.

The surfers seemed to be having a hard time getting themselves in position. Wave after wave passed them, lifted them and hid them, threw curtains of spray twenty feet in the air as it wrapped around the pilings. And each new set seemed to come from farther outside, forcing them to paddle out farther. Ike was wondering if any of them would be able to take off at all when he noticed one surfer paddling again just ahead of a mountain of gray water. He was paddling hard. The board began to rise, lifted on the wave. And suddenly the surfer was on his feet. It was hard to say how high the waves actually were, but the crest of this one was well over the surfer’s head.