Kem Nunn - Tapping the Source

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

She pulled him back down beside her. “I guess there weren’t many girls out there in the desert,” she said.

He shook his head. “No.”

“And so you’ve never had a girl friend?”

He hesitated. He could feel the blood in his face and when he closed his eyes it was like the red dust of San Arco lay in back of his lids, making them dry and scratchy. “One,” he said. “There was this one girl. But she moved away.” He could feel her watching him, feel her not believing his story.

“It must have been lonely when she left.”

He nodded again. “Yes,” he said, “it was.” He was looking at the ceiling now and he could not remember feeling this miserable in some time, useless, the way he had felt that first day in town when the bikers laughed at him. Shit. If he couldn’t fuck and couldn’t fight, he didn’t see how he was ever going to amount to anything. He imagined Gordon staring down on him from where the sky should be, his big red face wagging from side to side, then turning to spit in the dust.

Michelle was propped up on one arm now, her jaw resting in her hand. “I guess it was just the opposite for me. I mean, I was like getting it on before I was thirteen.” She seemed to think about that for a moment. “Didn’t you and this girl ever mess around?”

He shrugged. “Once.”

“Once?” He could hear her laugh. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I mean, I’m not making fun of you. But once?”

“She moved away.”

“That’s right. And then it was just you and your sister again. Out there in the middle of all that nothing.

“Well,” she asked him after another pause, “did you like it?”

“What?”

“What you did. With your long-lost love?”

He turned his face to look at her and saw that she was smiling, but it was the way she had smiled at him that day he passed her on the lawn, not snotty but real.

“Maybe you just need some more practice,” she said. “And you know what?”

He said he didn’t.

“I’m not going to let you get out of here until you fuck me.”

She slipped off the mattress and bent to blow out the candle, then straightened to pull her T-shirt up and over her head, to toss it away. And when she stood up to unbutton her pants, there was just the moonlight coming through the ancient glass of the window, finding one side of her face, her breasts that were small and round, and incredibly white where the bathing suit had kept them from the sun, and after she had stepped out of her pants and lay back down beside him, he could have sworn that she looked as pure as any angel in that soft light coming through the glass. He ran his hands along her legs, across the cool places beneath her thighs, and later, when he lay down between them and she guided him inside and he felt the heat of her body and her arms closing around him, he shut his eyes and felt the hot red dust of the desert rising to choke him and he thought that somewhere, out of a musty past, while his body rocked on in the present to some rhythm of its own, he could hear the old woman call his name. And the voice was filled with surprise, with pain and anger.

She slept for a while. Her skin was warm and soft next to his own and it was very nice just to lie there, in the darkness, listening to her breathing beside him. He must have dozed himself, for a time, because he was aware of waking, of having to remind himself that it had really happened, that he was in fact here, her leg thrown out to cover both of his, her breath against his neck, her fingers on his chest. It was a pleasant discovery. He shifted his weight some and she stirred beside him. “Are you awake?” she whispered. He said that he was. She laughed at something. Her fingers slipped down to his stomach.

“Will you do me a favor?” he asked.

“Like what?” He could hear a certain amount of amusement in her voice.

“Like finding out from your friend who it is that I’m supposed to look like.”

“Are you serious?”

He said that he was.

He felt her fingers pressing against him. “You’re a funny boy,” she said. He turned toward her, finding her mouth with his own.

He woke again early. Michelle was still asleep, on her back now, her mouth open, one arm swung up above her head, one breast peeking out of the sheet into the gray light. The contentment he had experienced earlier came back easily and he devoted some time to watching her, and to a study of the room. It was, he decided, one of the strangest rooms he had seen. Half of it was like something you might expect to find in a whorehouse, the other half belonged to a young girl. The closet was a good example, tall and narrow with a series of narrow shelves, one above the other. On one shelf a pair of black fishnet stockings lay piled on top of a catcher’s mitt. On another a pair of red high-heeled shoes sat next to a pair of white tennis shoes with faded initials on the backs. There was a tiny dresser next to the bed that held a small collection of perfume bottles and makeup jars, as well as a picture of a girl’s softball team. Above the dresser there was a photograph of two people getting it on, and beneath the picture were a series of cutout letters that said Sooooo Hot . Near the curtain was a decal that read Chaste Makes Waste .

In a way, she was like the room, a crazy mix. It had made her difficult to judge. She could change quickly. She could seem very young one minute—younger even than her sixteen years—and the next minute she could appear very strong, and more knowledgeable than he had guessed. And it wasn’t just that she was more sexually experienced. It was more than that. It was something deeper. It was what made him feel good about being with her.

He continued to look over the room for some time, to think about the night. Michelle continued to sleep. He tried to imagine what it would be like if this were all there was: sun-baked days in the cool shadows of the pier. Clean lefts. Fine nights in Michelle’s bed. And it seemed to him that for just a moment he achieved that—or something like it. It seemed to him that for an instant he was totally alone with this moment, immersed in it, free of the confusion of the desert. It was a fleeting perception, and when it was gone the contentment of only moments before seemed to vanish as well. What replaced it was an image of Hound Adams’s face—as it had been when he announced Terry’s death. The face seemed to enter with the sunlight through a single narrow window and spread until it had filled the room.

At last Ike slipped from the bed and began to look for his clothes. He shivered above the cold linoleum as he dressed, then went to the sink and washed his face—as quietly as possible, so as not to wake Michelle. When he was done, he came back to look at her once more. She was still asleep, but turned on her side now, leaving her hair spread out behind her, a delicate fan upon the sheet. He would have liked to touch her, to smooth the hair where it curled about her temples with his fingers, but something stopped him. He went instead to the door and let himself out, closing it softly behind him.

It was cold and still dark in the hallway. A draft entered from the stairwell and traveled the length of the building. He stopped at his own room long enough to change shirts and then he was back outside, warming as he walked, on his way to Preston’s duplex. He was thinking hard this morning about that mansion above the point, its connection with the surf shop on Main Street. And Barbara had once mentioned something about a scrapbook. He wanted a look. He walked quickly, his eyes glued to the pale concrete before him, still trying to shake that image of Hound Adams’s face that had destroyed his morning.