Kem Nunn - Tapping the Source

Ike continued to stare at the joints. A thin line of perspiration moved along one temple. For the first time since arriving in Huntington Beach, he felt that he was really close to something, something more than anyone had yet told him, perhaps more than anyone knew. The prospect seemed to hang there before him in an almost palpable way.

“Is something the matter?” Hound asked.

“No, I…” Ike was suddenly sweating profusely. “I don’t know if I can.”

“Nonsense. Let me run something down for you. I’ve given you the board. It’s yours. I don’t want it back. Giving it back would mean nothing to me. The board is just an object. What we’re talking about is the spirit behind the giving. Now, I’m asking you for something, a very simple thing, but it’s a beginning. Find some girls, bring them to the house. If you can’t make that work, maybe you can go get Michelle and her friend. The thing is not to come back alone. But you’re making a big thing out of it. It’s simple, really. Find a few chicks, do a number with them, tell them you know where there’s a party. There’s nothing to it.” Hound Adams put his hand on Ike’s knee. “See you at the house, brah.”

Ike stood in the parking lot and watched the taillights of Hound’s Sting-Ray vanish into the night, acutely aware of the weight in his shirt pocket. As he began walking slowly toward the pier it seemed to him that he’d reached a moment of decision. He could either do as Hound Adams asked, or he could leave town. There was no in-between now. And yet, wasn’t that what he wanted, to get next to Hound Adams, to find out what went on, to find something that could be used against him? Damn. He let his breath out slowly between his teeth as he walked. The strange thing was, that somehow, played off against all of his anxiety, against the slightly gritty feeling that he had been put up to some unwholesome task, there was a part of him that had not gone unmoved by Hound’s vision of the town as some great organic machine one might learn to make work to one’s own advantage. And there was something else, too, a kind of crazy curiosity about himself. Here he was, Ike Tucker, some hick out of nowhere walking around on the edge of the Pacific Ocean with a pocketful of dope on a mission to deliver girls to some party. There was something about that that was both terrifying and at the same time wildly exhilarating.

He mounted the concrete steps that led to the pier. The boardwalk was crowded: people on skates, couples strolling arm in arm, suntanned young punks leaning on the rails. Music spilled from the fish-and-chips joint at the pier entrance and from a number of transistor radios. Across the highway, the town was a string of light set against the blackness of the sky.

He turned up the pier, walking now out to sea. He felt drunk, but he was not, still a bit high maybe from the dope he had smoked at the oil rig. But it was a different feeling, almost like something in him had snapped and set him free, though free from what he could not say. He did not feel the boardwalk beneath his feet. He felt instead the blood pumping in his arms, in the palms of his hands. Two girls glided past him on skates and he racked his brain for an opening line. He spotted a group of four girls. These were on skates as well and like him were headed toward the dark end of the pier. He fell in behind them. They stopped at a place where the pier widened out, and began leaning over the rail to watch some surfers below them.

Ike walked up and stood beside them. His heart was beating with such force, he was surprised they could not hear it. “Nice swell,” he said. This statement seemed to bring all conversation to a halt and all four girls turned to look at him, then at one another. Finally one of them said, “What?”

“I said, it’s a nice swell.”

There was no response. The girls continued to look at one another as if it was necessary to confer on what he had said.

“Good waves,” Ike went on, figuring it was too late to stop now. “I mean, it’s pretty big and all.”

Still no one responded to him, and he was beginning to feel that something was terribly wrong. Maybe he only thought he was talking, perhaps he was just staring.

The girls stared back. One of them giggled. Now that they were no longer moving targets but standing in one spot, giving him time to look them over, he was beginning to suspect he had misjudged their ages. The biggest of the group looked to be about twelve. He guessed the skates made them look older, or at least taller.

He was rescued from further embarrassment, however, when some old man came walking toward them from the opposite side of the pier. “Come on, girls,” the man said, “let’s get some food.” He gave Ike a dirty look and the four girls rolled off after him. One of them said good-bye as she was leaving.

Ike slumped against the rail. His heart was still pounding and he’d broken into another sweat. He stood at the rail for some time, letting the breeze cool his face, trying to collect his thoughts, watching the machinery of Huntington Beach as it hummed around him.

At some point he became aware of three girls standing at the railing opposite him. These looked like better candidates right away. They looked young, but they were plainly not with their parents. Two of them, dressed in very tight jeans and skimpy tank tops, were leaning against the rail smoking cigarettes. The third, a redhead, was standing with her profile to Ike. She was dressed in a pair of silky running shorts and a light-colored tube top.

Ike walked across the pier and said hello. He walked toward the redhead and it was to her that he spoke. She was the prettiest of the three. Her hair was very red, a dark, blood red, and her skin was very white. Her lips and nails were red as well. The other two might have been sisters. They were thin with blond hair, but it was a peroxided, brittle-looking shade. The redhead smiled and said hello. The other two smiled at each other, as if they knew exactly what he was up to. Ike moved to one side and put his hand on the rail. They were all looking at him now. “You want to get high?” he asked. He had decided not to beat around the bush.

The girls looked at one another. One of the skinny blondes flipped a cigarette butt over the rail. “Maybe,” the redhead replied. “Where ’bouts?”

“Anywhere. The beach.”

“You got good stuff?”

“Colombian.”

The redhead looked at her friends and raised her eyebrows.

“Why not?” somebody asked.

It was like Hound had said, there was nothing to it. They smoked a J and he told them his brother was a dealer, that there was supposed to be a party going on at the house, later. They huddled on it while Ike stood off to the side, waiting, trying to look bored. They were standing in the sand beneath the pier and he could hear their laughter mixing with the sound the white water made as it wrapped around the pilings. They finally decided to go, and he could hear one of them say, “I think he’s cute,” as they walked toward him from the shadows.

So that’s how it’s done, he thought. He walked beside the redhead, who would have been quite a bit shorter than him without her shoes. The shoes made her nearly as tall as Michelle, made her legs look long and sexy, and he thought of how Michelle’s looked like that all the time, even when she was barefoot. Perhaps it was thinking about Michelle that did it, but suddenly, walking along Coast Highway toward Hound’s street, he was set upon by a great wave of guilt. It washed over him in flashes of hot and cold. The excitement he had felt earlier seemed to have vanished completely, leaving only a gritty, unwholesome clammy feeling in the palms of his hands. What was he doing? He had no real idea of what would happen at Hound’s. He flashed again on the picture he’d seen in the light of the oil rig. What if something bad happened? He flashed on his sister. Somehow the skinny blondes reminded him of her. She was like that. He could see her at the rail of the old pier, a cigarette between her lips, looking wild, an easy pickup. How had she fit into the great machine, the system of supply and demand? A chill ran up his back and spread across his shoulders, and he was finding it difficult to think of anything to say. What if he should run into Michelle or Jill? He wondered if he was running the risk of blowing everything. Would Michelle believe that this was what Hound Adams wanted by way of repayment? But he thought of another thing, too, in terms of repaying Hound, and that was the sight of Hound Adams standing his ground against the bikers in the parking lot, standing between him and Morris. Where did you draw the line when someone had saved your fucking life? Or was that only a rationalization, an excuse for his own lack of conviction?