Kem Nunn - Tapping the Source

The shop was still and quiet and Ike stood before the picture for a long time. It was surprising how much alike Hound and Preston seemed then. Preston was nearly a head taller, a bit wider and thicker through the shoulders, but with a leaner look than he had now, built more like Hound. His nose was straighter then too, and with the similar haircuts, the matching sweat shirts, the similarity was striking. But there was something else that kept him before the picture. What was there about it? Perhaps the girl, something about the way she laughed, her hair caught in the wind. For some reason, he imagined the picture had been taken at the end of the day, but not just any day, it had been a good one, and it was the kind of picture that made you wish the people in it were your friends, and having to settle for just looking at it made you feel left out of something and lonesome. That was what he was thinking when a voice jerked him around, asking him if he needed help. The voice came from behind him, and when he turned, he saw that it was the same blond-haired man he had seen Preston talking to in the alley, whom he had noticed that night he followed Hound and Terry, the man he had so far taken to be Frank Baker—though of this he was still not certain.

The man’s words were loud in the silence of the shop and Ike was a moment in replying. “No. No, thanks,” Ike said, “just looking around.”

The man walked into the room and stood just a few steps behind Ike, his arms folded across his chest. He seemed to be looking at the picture as well. Ike spent a few moments pretending to examine the wet suits that hung beneath the photographs, made a remark about the need to save bread, then left the shop. He left the young blond-haired man still standing before the picture.

It was on his way out of the small room that Ike noticed another photograph, one of the man he had just seen—the older dark-haired man. Ike recognized the same thin smile, the small shades. This time the man was alone on an empty stretch of beach. Ike did not take the time to look at the photograph for long, but before he left he was able to read the name written on the mat. The name was Milo Trax.

The wind stung his eyes, blowing them dry as he passed the Greyhound bus depot and headed north toward the Sea View apartments. He thought about the man he’d just seen in the photographs. And he thought of the small figure dressed in white that he’d glimpsed from the clearing above the point. The man with the bucks. And it might be interesting, he thought, to talk to Barbara again, to have a look at that scrapbook she had mentioned.

Michelle was waiting for him when he reached his apartment. She was sitting in front of her door, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. She had brought him some food from work. He sat at the card table by a window and ate. Michelle watched.

“Where’s Jill?” he asked, looking for something to say, for a way to get his mind off the surf shop and the ranch.

“Getting her hair done. This girl we met is going to do it for her. Punk.”

He nodded, looking around the room. It was small and cluttered, like his own. The apartment consisted of one room together with a tiny kitchenette and a bathroom. The girls had rigged up a curtain to divide the main room. Jill apparently slept on a large, ragged couch, while Michelle had a mattress on the floor. Some pictures from pornographic magazines had been stuck to the wall over Michelle’s mattress. She noticed him looking at the pictures and smiled. She took a file from the windowsill and began to fiddle with her nails. He saw that her nails had been painted a bright red and all of a sudden she was beginning to seem more like the Michelle he had known before the party. He couldn’t think of a fucking thing to say. A long evening filled with awkward silences was beginning to yawn before him.

“Got any dope?” Michelle wanted to know.

Ike shook his head.

“I’m growing a plant. Want to see it?”

Ike said that he did. He finished eating and got up to rinse his hands at the sink.

Michelle led him past the curtain, to a windowsill near her mattress where several tiny marijuana plants grew in plastic cups. She touched one of the frail green leaves with her finger and laughed. Ike tried to look interested.

There was a rattling at the front door and Ike turned to see Jill walk into the room. She had gotten her hair done, all right. It was shorter than Ike’s. He suspected for a moment that she had driven to San Arco and let his grandmother do it. It looked shorter on one side than on the other and a patch of it had been bleached out to an ugly shade of orange. Michelle said it looked all right, though. The two girls stood in the bathroom inspecting it from all angles in the light of a naked bulb. Jill had heard about a party somewhere and she was hot to go try out her new haircut. “They’re gonna have a live band,” she told them, and Ike could see that Michelle wanted to go too. She looked at him, but he pretended not to notice. Finally she told Jill that they were going to a movie. Jill shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said, but made it plain she considered it a very boring thing to do.

They left the apartments in silence and started for the theater. Ike had the feeling that Michelle was somewhat pissed about missing out on the party. They didn’t hold hands as they had done the night before and he felt slightly awkward walking beside her, unable to think of anything to say, beginning to wonder if she was the one who was different tonight or if it was him. Last night he had been half drunk, and stoned. Perhaps his judgment had been impaired. Or maybe it was like the line in that song—one of the many country songs he had been forced to listen to again and again in back of Gordon’s market—the part about how the girls all get prettier at closing time. It was a depressing thought.

“Marsha says she knows you from someplace,” Michelle said. They were about halfway between the Sea View apartments and the Curl Theater.

“Marsha?”

“She works with me. She was there today, when you came by. She says she’s seen you before.”

Ike thought now of the girl he had seen at the drive-thru window, the one who’d been staring. Somehow, going to the shop had made him forget about her. “I don’t see how,” he said. “Was she ever in San Arco?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. She thinks she knows you from around here.”

“Can’t be.”

“Then you look like somebody. She says she either knows you or you look like somebody.”

“Who?”

“She didn’t say.”

There was a small line at the Curl. Ike and Michelle waited, standing in silence once more. Ike thought about the girl at the taco stand. Michelle walked away from him to look over the posters for coming attractions posted behind the glass frames at the front of the building. Ike wished there were a way he could split right now, go see that girl again, ask her who it was he looked like. And he wanted to see Barbara, too. He began to get nervous standing there, like he was wasting time, like maybe he and Michelle did not belong together anyway and that asking her out had been a mistake.

The funny thing was, the film was so good that after it began he practically forgot about everything. He might have even forgotten he was with Michelle, except that she kept saying things out loud. It was a very annoying habit. In any other theater it would have been even worse, but the Curl was a fairly noisy place anyway, the crowd hooting and cheering for the more spectacular rides. Still, Ike found Michelle’s talking annoying. She acted as if no one had ever taken her to a damn theater before.

Ike didn’t say anything. He kept his mouth shut and watched the screen. He had never seen anything like some of the waves in the film. There was footage from all over the world, places like Australia, New Zealand, Bali. The waves were like those he had seen at the ranch, empty, perfect, and he thought back to that plugged-in feeling he had found there. He recalled the sight of Preston seated above a black sea, arm raised in greeting. A liquid barrel gone amber in the setting sun filled the screen, gone hollow and riderless, blowing spray thirty feet in the air. And there was no way to explain it to someone who didn’t know.