Kem Nunn - Tapping the Source

When he was finished in the gardens, he went to Milo’s study and found the clothes that had been placed there for him, a white long-sleeved shirt with ruffles down the front, a black pair of pants, dark socks and shoes. He showered and put on the clothes, which fit him surprisingly well and were fancier than any he had ever owned. Then he stood at the window of Milo’s study and watched the sun set over the ocean. It went down rapidly, beginning as a great red sphere, then breaking and melting into the sea. There was something hypnotic in this movement of light and he was held by it until a knocking at the door disturbed him. He hoped that it would be Michelle. But it was Hound Adams who pushed the door open and walked into the room, then stopped and closed the door behind him. Ike instinctively tightened a hand on the sill.

There were only the pale jukebox colors of a vanishing sunset to light the room and Hound did nothing to alter that. He moved across the carpeted floor toward the window, where he stopped to face Ike. “Not a bad view, is it?” He paused for a moment but did not seem to be waiting for a reply. He seemed rather to be waiting for Ike to turn his head and look once more down across the purple trees, toward the sea and the last blood-red sliver of sun. Ike obliged, watching as Hound spoke. “When Preston and I were in high school, we used to sneak up here and surf,” Hound told him. “I knew about it before Preston. You should have seen his face the first time he saw this place. We camped down there on the hillside, almost the same spot we found the boards, your boards.” Hound paused. Ike waited, watching the last of the sun. “We used to sit down there and talk about places to go, talk about what it would be like to own a place like this. What more is there? Right?” Ike thought about his own first trip to the ranch, his first sight of the empty point. He had thought the same thing.

“It didn’t really take us long to meet Milo,” Hound said. “As it turned out. I’ll tell you how it happened. Preston and I had this escape route all planned out. We’d found a kind of ravine that split the main cliff out near the point, then ran in what was almost a straight line all the way back to the gate and that little dirt road the cowboys use. There was a lot of brush and sage in it and we took the time once to bring up some machetes and clear it out a bit, left it thick down near the beach, though, because we had an idea that maybe the cowboys didn’t know about it.” Ike thought once more about Preston crouching at the foot of the cliff, asking Ike if he could find the truck.

“And you used it that night.”

Hound nodded. “Worked like a charm. But I was telling you about the time we met Milo. We’d come up on a big swell and we were in the water, way outside. I mean, the point must have been a good fifteen feet, almost closed out, and we looked up and saw these cowboys up on the hill, watching us. Then we saw them get in a truck and start down. We started talking about what to do. The road down is fairly long, winding as it does, and we figured that if we could pick off a couple of waves and get back in—in a hurry—we could make it into that ravine. The trouble was, it was damn big and the waves were getting hard to make. Big ledgy drops.” He paused here for a moment, as if remembering those drops. Ike worked on imagining them too, on imagining Hound and Preston out there together—like he had seen them in that photograph at the shop.

“Preston was always a shade better than I was,” Hound said. “I didn’t like admitting it at the time. But he was. He was that day, too. He picked off this fucking wave I couldn’t believe. It was getting hard to get into them. Steep faces. You really had to claw. Anyway, Preston got a wave. Finally I saw his head pop up over the lip way on the inside and I knew he had made it. Time was running out and I had to take whatever I could get. I still don’t know if the wave I got was makeable or not but I ate it, right at the top.” He paused and made a slight motion as if to shrug off the memory. “Maybe I just choked,” he said. “Anyway, it was a tough swim back in and it took a long time. When I got back to the beach, there was this pickup and three cowboys waiting for me. One of them had an ax handle. I’d never had any trouble at the ranch, but everybody had heard stories about getting caught there, getting your board stolen and your ass kicked in. I was so tired from the damn swim it was all I could do just to drag my ass out of the water. Preston was nowhere around so I figured he’d made it into the ravine and I would have to take whatever came. I remember I tried getting up and this asshole with the ax handle kicked me back down, caught me in the side of the face with his fucking boot. And then all of a sudden there was Prez. He’d gotten all the way back up to the truck, ditched his board, and come back with a tire iron.” Hound paused to chuckle and once again Ike had that feeling that he’d had only a couple other times, that Hound Adams was not bullshitting him, or playing some role, but just talking, and it seemed to Ike now, that at such moments there was something in Hound one could still like. That in spite of everything else, his obvious treachery and many guises, there was still something there—some shadow perhaps of Preston’s old friend. “He wasn’t the crazy-looking motherfucker he is today,” Hound said. “But he was big, and he was a hell of an athlete. He flattened that guy with the ax handle before the guy knew what hit him. I thought for a few minutes he might even have killed him. He hadn’t, but nobody knew that just then and all of a sudden the other two guys didn’t want any part of either of us. I grabbed the one guy’s stick and together we ran these assholes right off the beach. Then we climbed into their own damn truck and started back. By the time we got back to the gate, though, there was this short, stocky guy in a tennis outfit standing there waiting for us with a double-barreled shotgun laid across his arm and a half-dozen more ranch hands waiting behind him.

“That was how we met Milo Trax. The funny part was, we had impressed him. Seems he’d been watching the whole thing with his field glasses and he was not used to seeing his boys run off like that, but then he was not used to seeing the ranch ridden at fifteen feet either—particularly not the way Preston had ridden it. So he invited us up to his place, his crib, man. Right here. In this room. We sat up here looking down over the point and smoking up some dope that Prez and I had in the truck, and then smoking up some of what Milo kept in the house.” Hound stopped to wave toward the glass. “One thing led to another,” he said. “We left the ranch that night with our own fucking keys. Our keys, Ike. We thought we’d died and gone to heaven.”

Ike turned back to the window. The sun was gone now. A single band of reddish light lay on the horizon, beneath a quickly darkening sky. The trees were dark now too, black and wild against a deep purple sea, and from beneath their branches a light mist had begun to rise. He didn’t know why Hound was telling him all this. There was always a reason. But Ike was tired of Hound’s games, and of his own. “And your sister, Janet,” he said, speaking slowly. “You brought her here too?”

Hound Adams was a moment in replying, as if for once Ike had taken him completely by surprise. “Yes,” he said at last.

“And then to Mexico?”

“Yes.”

“And Ellen Tucker. Did you bring her here too or just to Mexico?” The feeling Ike had as he spoke was not unlike what he’d felt on the highway with Preston—the adrenaline rush of a trip to the edge.

Hound just looked at him but his first slightly stunned expression had begun to shift. There was now the shadow of a smile in his eyes. “I think you’ve got it all wrong, brah,” Hound said. “I didn’t take your sister anywhere, though she may have gone to Mexico on her own. She might be there now.” He smiled and spread his hands.