Kem Nunn - Tapping the Source

“You thought things would be different.”

The kid started his engine. “You’d probably be better off to just wait it out. Maybe she will turn up.”

“Do you think so?”

“Who knows? But unless you can get some real help…” He shrugged again. And then he was gone and Ike was standing in the Camaro’s dust, watching the white shape of the car shrinking against the heat waves. And when there was nothing left but that patch of sunlight and dust, the ever-present mirage that marked the edge of town, he turned and walked back across the gravel to the store.

The old men were all out on the porch now, whispering in the shade and sucking down Budweisers. Gordon caught Ike’s arm as he started past. “I’ve known all along something like this was coming,” he said. “That girl’s been headed for a bad end since she learned how to walk. Shit, the way she lit outta here, hitchhiking, wearing those tight jeans all up her ass. What the hell can you expect? We won’t see her again, boy. Make up your mind to it.”

Gordon released his grip and Ike jerked away. He went through the store and stood on the back porch, looking down into the yard where he and his sister once scratched their names into the ground. They had dug out the letters with sticks and then Ellen had poured gas into the letters and set them on fire and the fire had gotten away from them and burned down Gordon’s pepper tree and scorched the back of the store before it was put out. But his sister had said that it was all right, that her only regret had been that the fire had not taken the store and the rest of the fucking town along with it. He could hear her saying that, like it was yesterday, and when he closed his eyes he could still feel the heat from those flames upon his skin. He went down the steps, into the grease-stained dirt, and began to collect his tools.

He told them that night that he was leaving, that he was going to look for Ellen. “What’ll you go on?” Gordon wanted to know. “The Harley?”

They were seated at the kitchen table. Ike listened to Gordon’s laughter, to the incessant rattle of the ancient Sears, Roebuck cooler. The greasy scent of fried chicken circled his head. “Someone should go,” he said.

His grandmother squinted at him over a pair of rhinestone-studded glasses. She was a frail, shrunken woman. She was not well. Each year she seemed to grow smaller. “I don’t know why,” she said, making it plain by the tone of her voice that she thought otherwise. Ike did not meet her eyes. He pushed himself away from the table and retired to his room to count his money.

Nearly seven hundred dollars there, crammed into a rusted coffee can. But what had it been? Three years now of working on bikes, and there had not been many places to spend it. The bookstore in King City, the lone theater that two thirds of the time ran films in Spanish instead of English, the pinball machine Hank had gotten for the Texaco. And lately he had begun giving the old lady something for rent. There would have been a lot more if he had not sunk so much into the Harley. He spread the money on his bed, counting it several times in the dim yellow light. He packed a single suitcase and went out the back way.

It was dark outside now. He walked along that strip of barbed-wire fence that separated the town from the desert. There was country music spilling out a window at Hank’s place together with a wedge of soft yellow light and when he looked past the fence and into the dark shape of the hills, he could smell summer waiting in the desert. One of Gordon’s dogs came out from under the house and followed him to the store.

His plan was to drink a six-pack, get sleepy, and wait for the bus out of King City. He took a six-pack of tall cans, left some money and a note by the register, and went into the backyard. He pulled the canvas tarp off of the Knuckle and sat with his back against the wall of the market, watching the bike gleam in the moonlight. He supposed he could trust Gordon to keep an eye on it until he came back. Christ, he didn’t have the slightest idea of what he was going to do, or how long it would take. He supposed that when someone took your sister you did something about it. He supposed that was what families were for. Ellen’s bad luck was that he was the only family she had.

It was quiet in back of the market, the music out of Hank’s sounding soft and far away. He shut his eyes and waited and he was able to pick out the distant clanking of a freight as it climbed the grade into King City and he thought of the times he and Ellen had sat in this same spot, listening to the same sounds, imagining there was some promise in the sound of those trains, because it was the sound of motion, of going places, and he imagined her sitting with him now, head thrown back against the wall, eyes half-closed, beer can resting on a skinny leg. He thought about how it had always pissed off the old woman that Gordon had let them drink beer, but then most things pissed off the old woman.

As he listened the train sounds grew faint and disappeared and someone shut off the music so there was just the silence, that special kind of silence that comes to the desert, and he knew that if he waited there would come a time, stars fading, slim band of light creeping on the horizon, when the silence would grow until it was unbearable, until it was as if the land itself were about to break it, to give up some secret of its own. He remembered the first time that feeling had come to him. It was summer and he had been sick with a summer cold, feverish and in bed, and he had gotten up somewhere in the middle of the night and gone outside, in bedclothes and sneakers, to stand at the strip of barbed wire that marked the edge of Gordon’s land. He had been hoping for a breeze, but there was none to be had. There was only the emptiness, the black shapes of distant mountains hard against a black sky, and an overpowering stillness that was suddenly like some living thing pressing down upon him, something that belonged to the night and to the land, something to run from. And he had, back into the house, to Ellen’s room instead of his own. But when he had tried to tell her, she had only laughed and said it was his fever, that he was afraid of too many things, afraid of the desert, afraid of the night, afraid of the other boys in King City.

On another occasion she had told him that he would rot in the desert, freeze up here like some rusted engine, like the old woman herself, his nose stuck in a fucking book. And he guessed now that he had always been afraid of that, afraid of staying and yet afraid of going, too, just like he was still afraid of that crazy time of night and a voice he had never heard. Jesus. It was like him to be a chickenshit and her not to be. It was ass-backward that he should be going after her and not the other way around.

He got about half of the six-pack down before quitting, replacing the tarp, and making the walk down the strip of two-lane toward the edge of town, toward that place where he’d seen the white Camaro vanish in the mirage of high noon, where his sister had vanished as well, swallowed by that patch of sunlight and dust and never seen again.

There was no mirage waiting for him that night. There were only the edges of the desert, flat and hard in the moonlight, and the road that was like some asphalt ribbon at his feet, and the sound of his own blood pumping in his ears. And then he was aware of the approaching figure, Gordon, lumbering up the old road, visible for a moment in the last of the town’s two streetlights, then fading into shadow, but his footsteps getting louder until at last he stood alongside his nephew, and the two of them, both half drunk, squinted at one another in the moonlight.

Gordon had a fresh bottle of Jim Beam with him. He pulled it out of his hip pocket and brought it down hard on the heel of his hand, his customary way of cracking the seal.