Kem Nunn - Tapping the Source

It was a long night, filled with half dreams and crazy images while the music of the apartment house shook the walls of his room and the oil well squeaked below him, and at some point he became aware of a new fear creeping among the others, something he had not considered before. It was his fifth night in town and the fear was connected to a new understanding of what giving up would mean, of what it would mean to blow his money, to slink back into San Arco. Because whatever else was here, there was along with it a certain energy that was unlike anything he had felt in the desert. There was a hunger in the air. At night he heard their parties. Girls smiled at him now along the boardwalk, above the sand where couples fucked in the shadows of the pier. And he did not want to leave. He wanted to belong. He thought of his uncle’s store, the busted-out screen door, the music that spilled from the radio and into the gravel lot, one country song after another until it was the same song, as long and tiresome as the wind out of King City and the desolate high places beyond, and he felt suddenly that perhaps he understood something now about that woman Gordon had once seen go, arm in arm with some candy ass, hooked on a promise.

As he remembered it, they had moved back to the desert, to his grandmother’s house, because his mother had gotten sick and needed a place to rest. What he could recall now of that time before San Arco was not much, a more or less shapeless set of memories connected to numerous apartments and cheap motels. Gordon had once told him that she had been trying to sell real estate or some damn thing. He didn’t know; but he knew they had lived out of a car for a while there, a beat-up old station wagon. What he remembered the most was the waiting. In the car. In countless offices. In the homes of strangers. In his mind the places they waited all had certain things in common. They were invariably hot and stuffy; they smelled. The odor had something to do with butt-choked ashtrays and air conditioning. It was Ellen who made the waiting bearable. She had always been there with him, had kept him entertained with games of her own invention, with stunts designed to annoy whatever adult was around to keep an eye on them. She was good that way. The waiting, he thought, had been easier for her. But later, the desert had been harder. He could still see her pacing up and down that hot dusty yard in back of the market like some caged cat and saying things like she hoped the woman was dead, that the dude had dumped her and that she had at last drunk herself to death in some foul room—this after they realized she was not coming back. Ellen had never forgiven their mother for that. She had never forgiven her for San Arco. “Of all the damn places,” she used to say. “Of all the fucking one-horse dead-end suckass places to be stuck.”

As for himself, the desert had been easier, he thought, at least in the beginning. In regard to his mother, however, his feelings were not so easy to sort out. There had been at first something like plain astonishment at the magnitude of her betrayal—an astonishment so large that somehow hatred did not enter in. Later there was a kind of embarrassment, a vague notion that some flaw in his own character had somehow made that betrayal possible in the first place. He was not certain what the flaw was, but he was sure others saw it, that for them his mother’s leaving was less of a mystery. He had never known much about that candy ass Gordon had spoken of, or where they had gone in that new convertible, but he guessed he could see now, in the darkness of this room, with this new place throbbing around him, how going back could be like dying. It was the first time he had seen it that way; and from that angle, the betrayal was somehow not so huge.

It was hot and sticky when he opened his eyes. He sat up in bed and immediately began to think of reasons for putting off his decision to buy a board. Then he took a look around the room. The place was a mess. His clothes stank. It was like the grotesque holiday he had imagined was taking shape around him, and the new fear swept back over him, blotting out everything else.

He was not sure how much a used board would cost. He slipped four twenties into his pocket and left the room.

It was a hot day, smell of summer in the air, sky clear, ocean flat and blue. In the distance he could make out the white cliffs of the island someone told him was twenty-six miles away. The wind was light, slightly offshore, standing up the waves, which were small and clean, like jewels in the sunlight.

The town was full of surf shops. Surf shops, thrift stores, and beer bars, in fact, seemed the principal enterprises of downtown Huntington Beach. He hung around the windows of half a dozen shops before picking one and going inside. The shop was quiet. The walls were covered with various kinds of surfing memorabilia: old wooden surfboards, trophies, photographs. There was a kid out front wiping down the new boards with a rag. Apart from the kid and Ike, the place seemed deserted. The kid ignored him and finally he drifted back outside and into another shop closer to the highway.

The second shop was filled with the same kind of music that he heard around the hotel: a hard, frantic sort of sound that was so different from anything he had ever heard in the desert. There were no memorabilia in this shop. The walls were covered with posters of punk bands. There was a pale blue board covered with small red swastikas hanging at the back of the shop. Near the front was a counter. There were a couple of young girls in very small bathing suits sitting up on the glass top and a couple of boys sitting behind it. They all looked at Ike as he walked in, but no one said anything. They all looked alike to Ike: sunburned noses, tanned bodies, sun-streaked hair. He went to the back of the shop and began looking over the used boards. Pretty soon one of the kids he had seen behind the counter walked up to him.

“Lookin’ for a board?” the kid asked.

“Something I can learn on,” Ike told him.

The kid nodded. He was wearing a thin string of white shells around his neck. He turned and headed down the rack, stopped and pulled out a board, laid it on the floor. Ike followed.

The kid knelt beside the board, tilted it up on one edge. “I can make you a good deal on this one.”

Ike looked at the board. The board looked like it had once been white, but was now a kind of yellow. It was long and thin, pointed at both ends. The kid stood up. “How do you like it?”

Ike knelt beside the board as the kid had done and tried to pretend he knew what he was looking for. Around him the frantic beat of the music filled the shop. He was aware of one of the girls dancing near the plate glass, her small tight ass wiggling beneath a bikini bottom. “This would be good to learn on?”

“Sure, man. This is a hot stick. And I can make you a good deal on it. You got cash?”

Ike nodded.

“Fifty bucks,” the kid said. “It’s yours.”

Ike ran his fingers along the side of the board. On the deck there was a small decal: a silhouette of a wave within a circle—the wave’s crest turning to flame—and beneath it, the words Tapping the Source . Ike looked up at the kid. The kid looked fairly bored with it all. He was staring back toward the front of the shop, watching the girl. “Fifty bucks,” he said again without looking at Ike. “You won’t find a better deal than that.”

It was the cheapest board Ike had yet seen. “All right,” he said, “I’ll take it.”

“All right.” The kid picked up the board and headed for the counter.

Ike stood by the cash register as the kid rang up the sale. He was very much aware of one of the girls staring at him, a kind of half smile on her face. The music was loud. The sunlight was coming through the glass and the open door, burning the side of his face. When the kid had stuffed Ike’s money into a box, he pulled a couple of colored cubes out from under the counter and pushed them at Ike.