Kem Nunn - Tapping the Source

He walked Michelle back to the station and waited with her for still one more bus. They’d spent the night at the Sea View, in her room. She’d taken a long time in the shower before leaving and had put on a simple white blouse and pale green skirt to go home in. The skirt was one of her old ones—something she’d picked up in a thrift store before Ike met her. She didn’t pack a suitcase. Everything else, the newer clothes that Hound had bought for her, her toilet articles, her pictures, the plants, it all stayed. “Junk,” she had said when Ike asked her about it, and had walked through the door without looking back.

Now they sat on a long wooden bench, their backs against a brick wall, their faces turned toward a pale sun. He held her hand, but there was something sad and rather distant, he thought, in her face, and in the silence between them. He could think of things he wanted to say, but he was not sure how to begin, and then Michelle spoke. Her voice was soft and the question was asked in a tentative sort of way, as if she wanted to get the question out but found it difficult. “Ike,” she said. “What do you think would have happened?”

“I don’t know.”

She started to say something else. He could see it in her face, but then she didn’t. He guessed it was going to be something about Ellen. He could see the bus now, waiting at the intersection of Walnut and Main. In a few minutes it would be time for her to leave. “I want to tell you something,” he began. “I’m not sure why. I just want you to know it. That night in your room. After the movie. That was the first time for me.”

She turned and looked at him, the sunlight bright on one side of her face, the other in shadow. “What about your girl in the desert?”

“There wasn’t any. Just Ellen.”

She looked back into the street. “Was Ellen the girl?”

“No. Not the way I told you. You were the first.” He stopped and looked back toward the bus. He was looking into the street as he spoke. “Ellen and I came close once. I think we would have made it together if she hadn’t stopped. I wanted to—or thought I did. I didn’t know what I wanted, actually. It was all mixed up. But I sure as hell used to drive myself crazy thinking about it. Then one day the old lady caught us together in the cellar. Ellen was naked because she was washing out this dress she’d been out all night in with some guy—didn’t want our grandmother to see it, but the old lady thought it was me. She thought we’d been down there fucking our brains out or some damn thing, and for the rest of the time I spent there I kept having to listen to how perverse I was. The funny part was, I never tried to tell her different. You know, I thought it was like that passage in the Bible where Jesus says if somebody keeps on looking at a woman so as to have passion for her—it’s like they have already sinned in their heart. I figured that was the way it was. I’d wanted it and I was guilty as hell.”

Michelle had been watching him as he spoke, without expression. She waited for a moment when he was done. “I went to school for a while with this girl who used to fuck her brother all the time,” she said. “She thought it was a joke. They both did. I mean, they would both tell their friends about it. Like it was supposed to be funny. It seemed a little weird to me at the time, but not really that big a deal. Maybe it would’ve been a big deal if she’d gotten knocked up. Or maybe I was just too dumb to know what to think.” Then she shrugged and looked into the street, but when she looked back at him there was a bit of a smile on her face—the first he’d seen in a long time. “But I can just see you,” she said. “Out there in the desert, driving yourself crazy over something that never even happened.”

“Yeah, well.” He shook his head and let his breath out slowly. “It sure seems like a long time ago right now. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine that it was even me out there—more like it was some other dumb hick.”

“I don’t think you were dumb. You were just raised by assholes, people you couldn’t talk to. I was too.”

“Yeah, that’s part of it. But I think you’ve got to be careful of laying too much off on other people.” The bus was pulling into the lot now, and Ike hurried on. “I do think that some of what happened this summer—all that shit at Hound’s—had something to do with the picture I had of myself when I came. It’s like if someone keeps telling you you’re really fucked up all the time, you finally start buying it. You know what I mean? And then all of a sudden you find out that you really are fucking up and there’s this temptation to say, ‘Yeah, well, fuck it. You think I’m bad? You haven’t seen shit yet, man. Watch my smoke.’ You know what I’m saying?” He paused, looking rather desperately for a way to finish as Michelle watched the bus. “But that’s just part of it, Michelle. I mean, part of me wanted what was happening here. I just wanted it without any responsibility for it. I thought I could slip out from under it by blaming it on other things—that I was raised by jerks, that I was fucked over by my old lady—whatever.” Now that he was started, he was finding it hard to stop.

Michelle stood up. “I have to go, Ike. The bus.”

He stood up with her. He drew a breath and when he spoke again, it was more slowly. “It’s just that I’ve been thinking about this stuff lately. I wanted you to understand.”

“I do,” she said. She put her hand on his arm. “Anybody can blow it.”

He walked with her to the door. Her hair was soft and golden in the sun, lifted slightly on a breeze. Her face seemed paler than he had ever seen it. “It was my fault, too,” she said. “I thought the whole thing with Hound was going to be a real trip. He even told me he was going to let me have a horse and keep it at the ranch, that some of those cowboys would teach me to train it.” She shrugged and then she went up the steps and into the bus. He watched her go. He watched through the dark glass until she had found a seat, until the bus had pulled away, then he walked alone back to the Sea View apartments. His room was cool and dark, the shades still drawn. He slept again, for a long time. And he was not troubled by dreams.

The stories began appearing in the papers the next day. Most of them focused on Milo Trax, the fact that he was the only son of a famous Hollywood film maker. They noted his early promise as a film maker in his own right and his subsequent demise, his involvement with drugs and pornography—possibly ritual murder, that being a subject still under investigation—and finally his violent death on the grounds of his father’s estate.

Ike read some of the stories. But the reports on the incident itself never seemed to make the right kind of sense to him. Preston Marsh and Hound Adams were mentioned only in passing. Preston was depicted as some dope-crazed biker, a psychotic Vietnam casualty. The killings, they thought, were drug-related, Preston perhaps the victim of a burn. Ike finally stopped reading them altogether. There was really only one item that interested him, that captured his attention. Hound Adams, it seemed, was survived by a single relative—a sister and father being now deceased—his mother, a Mrs. Hazel Adams of Huntington Beach. He read that notice numerous times. Once he even made the walk back down to Ocean Avenue and sat one more time on the stone wall that bordered the school. It was where he had sat at the beginning of the summer, and that he should be back here now was a kind of mystery to him. It was like a piece of something, some pattern that he could not quite grasp.

He did not see the old woman that day. He watched the faded stucco walls, the neatly trimmed shrubbery, the empty windows, and he imagined her in there, muttering beneath her breath, baking bread for visitors who did not arrive, waiting for phone calls that were not to be. He stayed there until a nearly unbearable sadness descended upon him. Then he rose and left.