Kem Nunn - Tapping the Source

Preston stepped away from the door. The tattooed arm swung down. He lurched back to the refrigerator for a fresh beer. “You’re blowin’ it, Jack. You should’ve left when you had the chance. Now you can get the fuck out of my sight.”

Ike put his hand on the doorknob but did not go out. He felt that maybe he had been wrong again, that something was slipping away from him here.

“Hey. I said split, man. You’d better start movin’ while you still can.”

Ike turned and went out the door, down the walkway and into the alley.

Sleep did not come easily. He kept thinking about what Preston had said, that part about him blowing it. Perhaps he had been blowing it for a long time, not just here, but before, as far back as that night on the flats when Ellen had needed him and he had let some need in himself turn it all around.

What Preston had said to him at the ranch seemed to make more sense now, too. About his sister either being gone or being dead, how either way there was little he could do. He had thought then that he had owed her, but what? Perhaps the price for information was too great, had come to involve too many people besides himself. There was already one man dead, another maimed. And now there was Michelle.

Maybe she would have wound up with Hound Adams anyway; she had, after all, known him before Ike had come along. But that would have happened without Ike’s knowledge. Whatever Preston had to say about it, the fact remained in Ike’s mind that there had been more than one trip to Mexico, more than one girl who had gone and not come back, and what he had promised himself that day with Barbara still held—he would not wait around to see the same thing happen to Michelle. The problem now was how to get her back, or at least how to get her away from Hound Adams. Nothing else seemed to matter anymore. The rest was in the past and he could not change it. Whatever it was that was going to happen with Michelle, though, was still coming down, could still be changed. And maybe that was what he owed his sister, he thought, just that it should not happen again.

He spent the next day looking for her, walking the streets and feeling like a ghost himself, washed out and ill with something besides fatigue. The day passed without results. That evening he went to her door, where Jill informed him—a stupid smirk on her face that he would have liked to remove with the back of his hand—that Michelle was staying with Hound. It was not what he wanted to hear. He went back to his apartment alone. Later he walked downtown and bought a couple of long-sleeved T-shirts. They worked better for hiding his stupid new tattoo.

He woke with a start the next morning, feeling even as he slept that something was wrong. When he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was his surfboard propped against a wall.

“The board was a gift,” Hound told him as their eyes met, “from a friend.”

Ike had been sleeping in one of his new T-shirts and a pair of shorts. He got up now and pulled on a pair of jeans, sat back down on the edge of the bed, still without speaking to Hound.

Hound watched him, still seated on the floor, his legs crossed beneath him, his back against the wall.

Ike rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands. There was something oppressive about Hound’s presence. The prospect of some stupid conversation seemed almost too much to bear. “What do you want?” Ike asked him.

“Brought your stick back, brah. Missed you.”

“I gave it back to you. Remember?”

Hound shrugged. “You’re confused,” he said. “About a lot of things.”

Ike shook his head. “Jesus.”

“You’ve also been acting like a real asshole. You know that?”

“Why did you tell her about the parties?”

“Hey, brah, do me a favor. Don’t lay your guilt trip on me. Why didn’t you tell her? I wasn’t under the impression that there was anything to hide.”

Ike didn’t answer. He was not really in the mood for one of Hound’s lectures. Still, there was something in the question that bothered him.

“No answers? Maybe I can run something down for you. You thought what was going down at the house was wrong, something you had to hide from Michelle. Now all of a sudden you think everybody’s playing games with you. You think I stole your girl, something like that.”

“Didn’t you?”

“I didn’t know she was yours to steal. I think maybe you’re the one who’s playing games.”

Ike looked away, his face feeling suddenly tight and hot.

“Michelle’s a young girl, man, you’ve got to give her some room. Okay. But that’s one thing. The other thing, the bigger thing, is you deciding you had to hide all this other stuff from her, that there was something wrong with it. I would like to know how you reached that conclusion.”

Ike shrugged. He had been around Hound Adams long enough now to pick up on his changes of character. Today Hound was the guru. There would no doubt be a lecture on values, on ways of seeing, a lecture that would surely end in some offer of friendship and reconciliation. That was how the game would be played today.

“Still no answers? Well, think about this: I say people have been filling your head with shit. All your life, and you don’t even know it. You have a family? They all get along? Everything all right?”

Ike did not answer, but he thought about the desert, the old woman hidden away in the house, Gordon at his station. He thought about his mother and the father he had never seen.

“Fucked up, aren’t they? But don’t they still know all about what’s good and evil? And aren’t they always ready to run it all down for you? That’s what my family was like. No communication, everybody so cut off from everybody else they couldn’t even touch each other. But they still knew what was good, and what was bad, what was acceptable behavior. Bullshit. It took me a while, but I soon began to see they had it all turned around. Almost everything they thought was bad turned out to be all right, and what they thought was acceptable turned out in my mind to be evil of the worst kind, the kind of evil that sucks the life out of people without their even knowing it, leaves ’em shells, fucking lifeless zombies.”

Ike had been staring at the floor, braced for the lecture, but he looked up now. There was something in Hound’s voice that made him do it. The morning light was coming through the window and striking Hound Adams full in the face so Ike could get a good look at it, at the crow’s-feet spreading around the eyes, the uneven pigmentation that betrayed the years of exposure to sunlight and water.

“I don’t know about you, little brother,” Hound went on, “but I haven’t seen anything bad at the house. I haven’t seen anyone getting anything other than what they came for. And I’ve seen some people having a good time, blowing off a little steam, maybe breaking down some barriers. Why hasn’t it been the same for you? The guilt you lay on it? But where does the guilt come from? Maybe from those people back home, those zombies you see driving up and down the Coast Highway on the weekends, screaming at their kids? You beginning to see my point? I think maybe you’re letting other people fix your values for you, do your thinking. Not uncommon. Most people go through life that way. I’m trying to get you to start looking at things for yourself. I want—” Hound suddenly stopped talking. It was very abrupt, in the middle of a sentence. He brushed his hands on his pants and stood up. “There anything you want to say?”

Once again Ike had nothing to say, but he was startled that the lecture was ending so quickly. He had known Hound Adams to go on forever, whether anyone was listening to him or not.