Kem Nunn - Tapping the Source

The biker looked back at the others. “Not bad.” He turned back to Ike. “You live around here?”

“I’m staying over on Second Street, at the Sea View. It’s at the corner of…”

“That dump? Yeah, I know where it is. Where you from?”

“You ever hear of San Arco?”

“That dump? Yeah, I heard of San Arco. Fucking one-horse desert town in the middle of nothin’. Where’d you learn to work on bikes?”

“I’ve got an uncle with a shop.”

The biker was silent for a moment, then took a couple of steps toward Ike. “What the fuck happened to your ear?”

Ike shrugged. “I got hit.”

“Yeah. Fist city, huh.” The guy bent down for a closer look and Ike suddenly found himself staring into this big square face only about a foot away from his own and he was noticing all sorts of details: the half-dozen small scars scattered above one eyebrow, three-day beard you could see would be dark black like his hair, and thick, if he let it grow, nose a little flat and crooked from being broken too many times. It was a tough face, the kind of face you’d expect to go with those tattooed arms and heavy boots, but there was something else there he had not expected. It was the kind of face you’d expect to hold a set of eyes like black marbles, dead and mean like a snake’s, the kind of eyes that could smoke you on the spot. But the eyes were all wrong somehow, as if they’d lost track of the body they were in. They were this very pale shade of blue, not flat and hard at all, and there was something disconcerting about it. There was something about the expression that went with them that was not quite right either, but he could not put his finger on what it was.

The biker looked from Ike to the surfboard. He knelt beside it and put a hand on the deck. “This is your board?”

Ike said that it was. He could smell the sour scent of whiskey on the guy’s breath, and it seemed to him that as the biker looked over the board a new expression crept into his face, an odd expression, as if he were about to ask something else but changed his mind, and then the expression was gone. “So you’re a pretty hot surfer?” the biker asked.

“I’m just trying to learn.”

“On this?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s a gun, that’s what’s wrong with it. You don’t learn to surf on a gun, it’s like a very specialized board. Shit, you could tackle twenty-foot Sunset on this thing. Where’d you get it?”

Ike pointed across the street. Behind the biker he could sense some of the others starting to get restless. “Come on, Preston,” somebody said. “Let’s split, man.”

Preston ignored them. He stood up and squinted across the street. “That shop next door to Tom’s?”

Ike nodded.

“It figures. The fucking punks.” He raised his hands over his head and shouted toward the highway. “The stinking town is full of fucking punks.”

“Come on, Preston,” one of the bikers said once more. “Let’s split. I told Marv we’d be over there by one.”

“Pisses me off,” Preston said. “Town’s full of fucking jive-ass punks.”

“Fuck it, let’s go.”

Suddenly Preston whirled on the others. “You fuck it, man, you go. I got some business to attend to.”

“Man…”

“I said split.”

“Come on, man, he’s on his ass.”

“Fuck it if I’m on my ass. You go, I’ll meet you over there.”

There were some more words, more grins, a few groans. The bikes circled around in the lot and zoomed off into the highway, the roar of their engines soon lost in the hum of traffic. Preston watched them go, then looked back at Ike. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Ike.”

“Okay, Ike. You did me a favor today. Now I’m gonna do you one.”

About fifteen minutes later Ike was standing on the sidewalk at the intersection of the Coast Highway and Main with a brand-new surfboard tucked under his arm. He wouldn’t quickly forget the feeling he had walking back into that surf shop with Preston by his side. And he wouldn’t quickly forget the expression on the kid’s face when he saw them coming. It was the same kid who had sold Ike the board, only this time he wasn’t grinning. He wasn’t grinning when he saw them come in and he sure as hell wasn’t grinning when they left. What he was doing when they left was picking up all the boards Preston had piled all over the floor in his search for just the right one. That and probably trying to figure out how he would explain to his boss how he had come to sell a two hundred dollar board for fifty.

Back at the Sea View apartments, Preston hung around for a few minutes explaining to Ike why his new board was the kind he wanted to learn on. “See how wide it is. See how it’s wide here in the tail block, too. That gives it stability. This one won’t keep wanting to tip on you like the other one did.”

“You must surf a lot,” Ike said.

“Shit.” Preston stood up and pulled his shades back over his eyes. “Once upon a time,” he said. “No more. I used to surf the pier year round. No leashes, no wet suits. A good winter swell and maybe six guys in the water. Place is a zoo now. Every faggot punk and his brother’s out there and they all want to be hot.” He suddenly turned and sauntered off toward his bike. He swung himself down on the stick and kicked the big engine to life. “What about my fuel tank?” he asked over the noise. “When do you want to do it? I’ll fix it so you can use Morris’s compressor.”

Ike shrugged. “Anytime.”

Preston nodded. “Later,” he said, and spun the Knuckle in a kind of a brodie across what was left of the Sea View’s lawn, chunks of dirt and tiny yellow flowers flying into the air behind him. Ike watched the muscles bulging beneath those jailhouse tattoos, the dark hair and red bandanna rising on the wind, the sunlight on metal. He could hear the engine for a long time after the bike was out of sight. He looked down the street past the short drab buildings and weedy lots, the palm trees just beginning to stir in the wind that had shifted, was no longer offshore but from the sea and carried with it the smell of salt. He walked back to his new board. He knelt beside it as Preston had done, running his fingers along the smoothly rounded rails. It was probably silly, he thought, but there was something about that first board that he sort of missed. This board was flat and round, like a big ice-cream stick. The first had been lean and mean. He had liked that decal, too, the wave with its flaming crest and the words Tapping the Source . He didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, but he liked the way it sounded.

The first time Ellen ran away, she was ten years old. She took Ike with her. They started out in the morning with lunches she had packed in brown paper bags, headed in what she guessed was the general direction of San Francisco. They got as far as the ruins of an old glass factory somewhere on the far side of King City. They spent the night among hills of sand and walls of corrugated tin. It was summer and the air was warm. They sat up all night, watching the sky. Ellen talked. Later, when he thought about that night, what he thought about was her voice, how it mixed with the breezes that came at them off the salt flats and stayed with them until the first light. In the morning it was hot early with heat waves swarming among clouds of red dust. Ike was hungry and tired. He followed her out to the road, where the asphalt was so hot it burned right through their shoes. They walked on the shoulder. There was no water and Ike was not sorry when they heard a car slow behind them and turned to see Gordon behind the wheel of his pickup. Ike thought Gordon would be pissed, but he wasn’t. He told them that he would let the old lady give them hell. He even let Ellen sit beside him and steer. He told them there were all kinds of derelicts and drifters apt to spend the night in the glass factory and that they were damn lucky they hadn’t run into any. Ike remembered how Ellen had to tilt her head to see over the dash and how Gordon put his big arm over her shoulders and rested his hand on her leg.