Kem Nunn - Tapping the Source

As for Hound Adams, he was just about the last person Ike saw before going over the edge. He had his back to Ike, and to the sea. He was facing the rifle fire with his feet slightly spread, his hands at his sides, and Ike was reminded of that day in the lot when Hound had faced the bikers, when he had saved Ike’s ass. It was the last Ike saw of him. Hound Adams and that dark-haired guy with the gun—they were the only two not wild with fear, and he often wondered at how it must have ended, the final scene. Had Hound Adams and Preston Marsh at last faced each other there in the clearing? Had there been that one strung-out moment of silence while the invisible surf pounded below them, the last heartbeat of a dream gone bad? “What do you do when a thing is rotten?” Preston had once asked him, and Ike had not answered but Preston had, and was answering still as one final explosion rocked the cliffs above them, sending down showers of dirt and rock, so that it was necessary to stop, to cover up and wait it out. And then back down, toward the beach on legs like rubber, sucking breath gone to flame, moving the way he had often moved in dreams, and there were times, slipping and sliding in the dirt and brush, when he was certain it was a dream, or at least some twisted, drug-induced hallucination from which, in the end, he would awake.

Michelle was beginning to come around as they reached the beach, but still unable to walk without support. Ike stayed with her in the black shadows of the cliffs, talking to her, making her keep moving, anything so she would stay awake. At last they undressed, Michelle shedding the remnants of the bloodstained white cloth, and bathed in the cold water. Above them, above the jagged black line of cliffs, they could still see an orange glow on the sky. There were no more voices, however, and no music. The night was very still. They were alone on the beach and there was only the sound of the waves, and then, finally, as if from another world, the distant wail of sirens.

They did not talk about what had happened as they followed the railroad tracks toward town. They talked instead about small things, about how much money it would take to get back, about the length of the walk. Michelle had lost her shoes and Ike let her take his. She was still groggy and was having trouble keeping to the ties. Once she stopped and was sick.

Ike could not say if it was a long walk or a short one. Sometimes it felt as if they had been walking forever, and other times, as if they had just begun. He counted ties, lost count and began again, bare feet thumping against the rough wood, until at last the lights that had begun as a faint glow on the horizon had grown and separated to become the lights of the town.

In a bus depot they went to the bathrooms and tried to make themselves as presentable as possible. Still, Ike wondered what impression they must have made—Michelle wrapped in the black robe he had found for her beneath the cliffs, Ike himself in the soiled black pants and ragged shirt (both sleeves gone now because he figured that looked better than just missing one). He saw people stopping to stare and there was a moment of near panic when he wondered if they would even be let on the bus. In Huntington Beach they might have passed for punks. He had no idea of what they would pass for here but was as polite as possible at the ticket counter, where a fat Mexican woman barely gave him a second glance.

They rode a Greyhound to Los Angeles and transferred to a Freeway Flyer. They were less conspicuous now, Ike thought, in the city. He kept thinking the bus they boarded in Los Angeles was the same one he had ridden the night he had come, the night he had run from the desert. He was not sure why he thought that, being unable to remember the number, but he did. Michelle was able to sleep. Ike could not. He thought about the bus. And he thought about what they should do when they reached Huntington Beach. He pulled Michelle to him and arranged her in such a way that her head rested against his chest. He stroked her hair while she slept.

The bus purred on an empty ribbon. The night slipped past them. Vibrations from the engine spread into his legs, up into the bones of his back, but they did not put him to sleep. He felt stuck in that strange giddy place where sleep would not come, but where he could dream without sleeping, with eyes stuck open, and he dreamed of the desert, of skinny brown legs streaked with dust. He studied the people around him, peering at them from the dream, and he wondered if they were like him, if their lives were as confused. He wondered if there were dark secrets in every heart. He looked around him at their faces, slack-jawed and sleeping, eyes glued shut. He watched an old man in gray work clothes quietly smoking, staring from a window. What did these people know of the world? Did they know that humans still slaughtered animals and drank their blood, performed sacrificial rites on the cliffs overlooking the sea? If they knew, would they care? Or were these faces just clever masks—behind each mask a grinning skull, leering with bloodstained teeth? He shook his head. He was very tired, he thought, and how could he ever know what they were thinking, any of them. He looked at Michelle, her face round and smooth, and he wondered how much she had seen and how much she remembered. All she had told him about, waiting in the bus station, was the rage Milo Trax had flown into after Ike went under in the theater—something about the tattoo, going on about how it was all wrong, and that it spoiled everything, and then they had put her under as well and the last thing she could remember was Milo Trax throwing a canister of film at Hound Adams as Hound turned and walked away. He thought about that for a long time. Had it been the tattoo that kept him at the circle’s edge instead of at its center with Michelle? He turned again to Michelle, watching her as she slept, thinking again of what she had been through, but her face betrayed nothing, was as empty as the others around him, as empty as his own, which stared back at him now from the black mirror of the window. It seemed to hang there, at a funny angle, an image of himself watching him watch himself, an image hung on the night sky, suspended above nothing.

He had a terrible time waking her when they reached Huntington Beach. The bus driver finally came back to see what was going on because they were the last people on the bus and there was another terrible moment of near panic as both he and the driver worked to wake her. At last, however, she began coming around and they were able to get her to her feet.

“What’s she on, man?” the driver wanted to know. He stood back a few feet now, staring at the two of them. Ike said he didn’t know. “Maybe she should see a doctor,” the driver suggested.

“No, it’s okay. She’ll be all right. She’s just real tired.”

The driver squinted at them down his nose. He was a tall wiry guy with a big western buckle on his belt. Ike saw him study his tattoo. Finally he stepped aside and let them pass, but Ike could feel the guy’s eyes burning a hole in his back as they went down the steps. He obviously knew a fuckup when he saw one.

It was decided in the morning that Michelle would go back to her mother’s, at least for a while, that she would wait there until some word came from Ike. It was mainly Ike’s decision, but Michelle went along with it. It was funny how that worked. Not long ago he had been ready to run with her, to go anywhere, as long as they were together. But the night had changed that. Maybe it was that now he had a better idea of what he owed to Preston. Or maybe he just did not like loose ends. There had, after all, been three names on the list: Terry Jacobs, Hound Adams, and Frank Baker.