Kem Nunn - Tapping the Source

It was finally Frank who pulled himself off the floor. He made a rather halfhearted attempt at brushing some of the dirt from his pants, then he walked to the register and picked up one of the photographs that lay there. He held it up and Ike saw that it was the shot of Hound, Preston, and Janet. “New owners are coming in tomorrow,” Frank told him. “Fucking punks from down the street. I didn’t want them to have it.”

“What about all the others?”

Frank shrugged. “Ghosts,” he said. “If there’s anything in here you want, take it. Just lock the door on your way out.”

Ike was standing now, moving his legs to work out the cramps. He spoke to Frank once more as Frank moved past him, toward the door. “Will you tell anyone else, about the graves?”

“I don’t know. Cop considerations aside, and that doesn’t really mean shit to me anymore, I’m not sure people really want to know that kind of stuff. Your sister might be up there. Do you want to know?”

“I don’t know.”

“There you are.” He went to the door and stopped. “See you around?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Got any plans?”

“Not really, just leaving.”

Frank nodded. “What I should have done,” he said. “A long time ago.” He moved his shoulders. “Time flies.” He turned his back to Ike and went out into the alley. Ike could hear the door slam shut on the van. He could hear the engine turn over and at last fade into the night. Then he was alone in the empty shop, with just the occasional sound of a passing car, and in the distance, the muted crack of the surf.

He stayed there for a long time, walking and thinking, looking over the memorabilia that still graced the walls. The boards he and Preston had used at the ranch were still in the racks. He pulled them out and placed them on the floor. Funny how he had thought you could be done with a thing, with the desert, with Huntington Beach. He thought about those green hills above the point, as silent as the desert at first light. He thought about Frank Baker, hanging on for so long. Perhaps there was more he should have asked. But in the end, he supposed, he knew enough.

In a way, he would have liked to take one of the boards. In another way, it seemed right not to. He wound up deciding on a single item—the photograph he had often admired of Preston Marsh carving his backside bottom turn from the dark face of a large Huntington Beach wall. As he lifted the picture from the counter, however, he noticed another picture just beneath it, one that he had seen before but that he had never paid particular attention to. It was a photograph of a wave, riderless and dark. The most interesting aspect of the picture was the way the sunlight had been caught in the lip and how it seemed to hang there, to spread and light up the fine white mist that rose along the top of the wave. What caught his attention just now was that the frame which held the photograph was coming apart and that a bit of the cardboard backing had begun to slide out and that between the backing and the picture there was another piece of paper. He tucked the photograph of Preston beneath his arm and worked the slip of paper—which was yellowed and frail—out from behind the print.

There was writing on the paper, writing and a series of small sketches done in black ink. There was something rather elegant and decidedly feminine, he thought, about the work, and then he realized with a quickening of the heart that certainly the work was hers. And he saw her as she had been that day in Mexico, her arms over their shoulders, her fine pale hair riding a wind, and he remembered how that picture had made him feel the first time he saw it, how having to settle for just looking at it had made him feel lonesome and left out of something. And he saw suddenly how it was all there, in that picture, all of it. The promise. The rush. And he guessed he could see how Frank Baker had hung around so long, how there had just been nowhere else to go. And it seemed to him, in the silence of the shop, that a ghostlike wind rattled the alley door, a wind not from the sea, but one that was both hot and dry, laced with sand and blown from across the salt flats of San Arco. And there were names in the wind. Janet Adams. Ellen Tucker. And how many more in between? In his mind’s eye he saw the cool green hills of the ranch as they broke and spilled into the Pacific, folding their secret in the earth. The yellowed paper trembled slightly between his fingers as he studied her drawings—the small thumbnail sketches of waves that became increasingly more stylized as they moved across the page, ending at last with the looping silhouette of a wave enclosed in a circle, the wave’s crest turning to flame.

He was going to take the paper with him but then on a sudden impulse began looking for matches. He found a book in the drawer by the register. He held the frail yellow sheet as it burned, holding it above the glass counter until the flames reached his fingers. What was left of it burned on the glass until there was only a crumpled bit of ash and when he blew on it, it broke and fell to the floor. Then he took the photograph of Preston and went into the alley.

He must have stayed in the shop much longer than he had imagined, for as he reached the mouth of the alley he saw that the streets were black and empty and spoke in their silent way of that hour just before the first light. Far away, at the dark end of Main Street, he could still see the yellow pinpoints of light that marked the pier. The rest of the town had shut down. Even the purple neon above the Club Tahiti looked dark and cold against the sky. It was a strange moment, and yet familiar, dominated by an overpowering stillness and shot through with the scent of the sea where before there had been the scent of the desert, and then he could see what it was, how it was working up to that special time, building toward a silence so complete the ground itself would have to break it, to speak in some secret voice of a secret thing. Or perhaps it had already done so, he thought, many times over, had given up its secret time and again, but people had forgotten how to listen. And for the first time he was not inclined to run. Because that secret was what there was, he thought. And the pursuit of it was all that mattered.

He tucked the picture beneath his arm and walked back down the alley once more, entered the shop one last time. He remembered the shop’s original design from the pictures he’d seen in Barbara’s scrapbook, how the brick wall now separating the two rooms had once been the front of the building, and he remembered what had been painted there. He found some cubes of colored wax beneath the counter and he went to work on the white brick, wondering how many layers of paint separated him from the original, knowing that his was not as polished as hers had been, but working it out anyway for himself, in his own crude style—giving the new owners something to think about. He had to bear down hard to get the line he wanted and his hand trembled with the effort. He drew a rough circle and within it the outline of a hollow, pitching wave, its crest on fire, and beneath it the words: Tapping the Source .