Tapping the Source (21 page)

•   •   •

He woke again early. Michelle was still asleep, on her back now, her mouth open, one arm swung up above her head, one breast peeking out of the sheet into the gray light. The contentment he had experienced earlier came back easily and he devoted some time to watching her, and to a study of the room. It was, he decided, one of the strangest rooms he had seen. Half of it was like something you might expect to find in a whorehouse, the other half belonged to a young girl. The closet was a good example, tall and narrow with a series of narrow shelves, one above the other. On one shelf a pair of black fishnet stockings lay piled on top of a catcher’s mitt. On another a pair of red high-heeled shoes sat next to a pair of white tennis shoes with faded initials on the backs. There was a tiny dresser next to the bed that held a small collection of perfume bottles and makeup jars, as well as a picture of a girl’s softball team. Above the dresser there was a photograph of two people getting it on, and beneath the picture were a series of cutout letters that said
Sooooo Hot
. Near the curtain was a decal that read
Chaste Makes Waste
.

In a way, she was like the room, a crazy mix. It had made her difficult to judge. She could change quickly. She could seem very young one minute—younger even than her sixteen years—and the next minute she could appear very strong, and more knowledgeable than he had guessed. And it wasn’t just that she was more sexually experienced. It was more than that. It was something deeper. It was what made him feel good about being with her.

He continued to look over the room for some time, to think about the night. Michelle continued to sleep. He tried to imagine what it would be like if this were all there was: sun-baked days in the cool shadows of the pier. Clean lefts. Fine nights in Michelle’s bed. And it seemed to him that for just a moment he achieved that—or something like it. It seemed to him that for an instant he was totally alone with this moment, immersed in it, free of the confusion of the desert. It was a fleeting perception, and when it was gone the contentment of only moments before seemed to vanish as well. What replaced it was an image of Hound Adams’s face—as it had been when he announced Terry’s death. The face seemed to enter with the sunlight through a single narrow window and spread until it had filled the room.

•   •   •

At last Ike slipped from the bed and began to look for his clothes. He shivered above the cold linoleum as he dressed, then went to the sink and washed his face—as quietly as possible, so as not to wake Michelle. When he was done, he came back to look at her once more. She was still asleep, but turned on her side now, leaving her hair spread out behind her, a delicate fan upon the sheet. He would have liked to touch her, to smooth the hair where it curled about her temples with his fingers, but something stopped him. He went instead to the door and let himself out, closing it softly behind him.

It was cold and still dark in the hallway. A draft entered from the stairwell and traveled the length of the building. He stopped at his own room long enough to change shirts and then he was back outside, warming as he walked, on his way to Preston’s duplex. He was thinking hard this morning about that mansion above the point, its connection with the surf shop on Main Street. And Barbara had once mentioned something about a scrapbook. He wanted a look. He walked quickly, his eyes glued to the pale concrete before him, still trying to shake that image of Hound Adams’s face that had destroyed his morning.

•   •   •

Preston’s duplex faced the east and it was bright and warm on the porch when he got there. Barbara did not look good. Her face was pale and somewhat blotched; there were dark circles under her eyes. She did not look particularly pleased to see him, but then she didn’t look pissed about it either. She mainly just looked tired. She invited him in. She was dressed in what he guessed was one of Preston’s flannel shirts. The shirt came down to just above her knees and the sleeves were rolled into big wads above her elbows. He sat in the kitchen while she made coffee. She looked tired and small and there was something about sitting there watching her that made him feel guilty about having come. He thought of his night with Michelle and he wondered if it had ever been that way for Barbara and Preston too.

Barbara had already heard about Terry’s death. He asked her about Preston and she told him that there were still no witnesses. Apparently, Hound Adams had even told the police he did not think Preston had done the knifing, that someone else had been involved and had escaped out the back. She also said that the police had been unable to find a weapon, and that Preston should be out soon. “He may be out already,” she told him, “for all I know.”

“But wouldn’t he have come by here?”

“Not necessarily; he might be at the shop.”

“I’m afraid they just want him on the street,” he said, and he told her about seeing some of Terry’s family. She seemed shocked by the news, as if she hadn’t guessed why no one was talking, and he immediately felt stupid for having mentioned it.

They sat for a while in silence, Ike staring at the scarred linoleum beneath his feet. “Listen,” he said. “One of the reasons I came by this morning was because I wanted to ask you about something.” He looked at her, and she stared back, her elbow resting on the table, a coffee cup in her hand. “You told me once about Hound and Preston having been partners. What do you know about that? I mean, do you know what happened between them?”

She got up and went to a cupboard over the refrigerator. She moved some things around and finally stepped back with a large, beat-up book, a kind of folder with cardboard covers, held together with a dark ribbon. “His scrapbook,” she said. “He cleaned out a bunch of stuff when I moved in here with him and I found this in the trash.” She placed the book on the table in front of Ike. “I don’t know if you’ll find anything in there that interests you, but you’re welcome to look, because I really don’t know anything about what you’re asking. I don’t know what happened, with Hound, with the business. I know they don’t speak to one another now. I’ve been with Preston a couple of times when Hound Adams has showed up, I mean like on the street or something. They go by each other without even looking, like they’re trying to pretend the other one is not there. It’s strange, but I don’t know what it’s about.”

Ike opened the cover and began leafing through the book. “You said Preston wasn’t from around here, that he moved here by himself.”

She nodded. “He grew up someplace back of Long Beach, I believe. At least that’s where his parents live now. His old man’s a minister of some sort, if you can believe that.”

“He tell you that?”

“Not voluntarily. When I moved in with him, he told me his parents were dead. Then one time this old lady called up here asking for him, saying she was his mother. I pestered him about it for a whole day and he finally admitted that his parents were alive. That was when he told me about his father being a minister. I asked him why he had told me they were dead and he just shrugged. You can’t keep asking him about anything or he gets pissed off.”

“I know,” Ike said. There was some interesting stuff in the scrapbook. There were a few old pictures of the shop and he could see that it had once been about half its present size—the brick wall that now separated the showroom from the rest of the building having once served as the storefront. In one photograph the wall was bare, in another it had been painted and bore the shop’s old logo—the wave within the circle and the words
Tapping the Source
.

The book was also filled with shots of Preston, many cut from the pages of surfing magazines, the same dark young man Ike had seen in the photograph at the shop, and he could understand now what Barbara had told him, that everyone used to know who Preston was, and he guessed he could see too why people had been surprised by the way he had changed. Clean limbs and graceful moves. Mr. Southern California. There were no tattoos in the scrapbook. He was about to turn one more page when a name caught his eye. The name appeared in an ad for a surf film, an ad that read:
Senior Nationals champ, Preston Marsh, in
Wavetrains,
a Milo Trax surf film
. “This guy,” Ike said, “Milo Trax. Is it the Trax who owns the Trax Ranch?”

Barbara leaned over the table and stared at the name. “I don’t know. I don’t think I ever noticed that before.”

He told her about the photographs in the shop, described Milo Trax as he looked in the pictures. She shrugged. “Doesn’t ring a bell, but then there was a time when a lot of weird people started hanging out around that shop. I mean older guys, city types, people who looked like they were from L.A., not the beach. I remember the place got to have a bad reputation. That was back when a lot of people were just getting into drugs, that was part of it. Hound and Preston supposedly did a lot of dealing then, made a lot of money. Like you would see the two of them riding around town in brand new Porsches and all that. I think Hound’s still into it. He owns a number of houses around here from what I’ve heard, and you don’t make that kind of money running a shop.”

“What about Preston?”

“His money? I don’t know. Pissed it away. I think I told you he was in the service. I remember that surprised a lot of people. I think everybody figured Hound and Preston would be smart enough to get out of it, but I remember standing on the pier one day and hearing some girl say that Preston had gone into the Marines, that he was going to fight and that no one could believe how stupid that was. Then he was gone, and then he came home and that was when I met him and it was like I told you.” She had been talking rather quickly and paused now for a breath, a sip of coffee. Ike continued to stare at the book. “There’s a picture in the shop,” he said. “A picture of Hound and Preston together, and there’s a girl with them. Her name’s Janet.”

“Her name
was
Janet.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I’m assuming it was Janet Adams. Was she nice-looking?”

He nodded. “Hound’s sister?”

“She’s dead. It happened quite a while ago. I was still in high school at the time and I didn’t know her. But I believe she OD’d or something. I remember it was drug-related and that was supposed to be a big deal.”

Ike was silent for a moment. He found it an oddly disturbing piece of information. He thought back to the photograph at the shop, thinking of the girl’s laughter, her hair caught on a breeze and swept to one side of her face. “Do you know any more about it?”

Barbara shook her head. “No. I didn’t know her. It was a long time ago. I just remember the event, that everyone was so shocked to think that a girl like Janet had been on drugs.” She paused for a moment, looking at the table. “Do you mind if I ask you something?” she asked. “Why are you so interested in all of this?”

Ike closed the book and shrugged. There was a moment in which he considered telling her, but then the moment passed and he had decided against it. “I don’t know,” he said, “I guess I’m just curious. I mean, you’ve talked about how different Preston used to be; haven’t you wondered what made him change?”

She gave him a rather sour look, as if it were a stupid question. “Sure, I’ve wondered about it. But he was gone a long time, two tours in Vietnam. I mean, a lot of people came back from that place changed.”

“I guess I was thinking more about why he went in the first place, why he chucked the business. Maybe it had something to do with Janet Adams. You said he and Hound were into dealing.”

Barbara got up and took the scrapbook from his hands, returned it to the cupboard. When she had closed the door, she leaned back against it, turning to face Ike. “Maybe,” she said, “maybe it did. Six months ago I might have been more interested in thinking about it. Now it all seems beside the point, somehow. If someone doesn’t care about himself, you begin to lose interest after a while.”

Ike pushed himself away from the table and stood up. There was suddenly a lot of things he wanted to think about, and he wanted to be alone. Still, he wished there were something he could say to Barbara. There wasn’t. He said good-bye, told her he would keep in touch, and she let him out the side door.

•   •   •

The sunlight was dancing on the sidewalk and houses seemed to float in the heat waves, like scraps of colored paper. He walked in the general direction of the town, scarcely paying attention to where he was going, thinking about what Barbara had told him. He kept seeing the girl in the photograph, one arm around Hound Adams, the other around Preston, and he was certain she was the key. The death of the girl was what had come between Preston and Hound. And somehow, though he could scarcely put his finger on a reason, he was certain Janet Adams had been the reason for the strange expression that had passed over Preston’s face the day Ike had told him about his sister, shown him the scrap of paper with the names.

He was walking rapidly now, and before he knew it he was already downtown, walking toward Main along some shabby side street, past a collection of weedy lots and stray oil wells, a lone beer bar. He was almost at the entrance of the bar when Morris suddenly stepped out of the doorway and onto the sidewalk. Morris was wearing a trucker’s hat with the bill turned around to the back and a set of wire-rimmed shades. He was wearing his sleeveless Levi jacket and looked to be fairly well crocked. He seemed to sway a bit in the bright light as Ike walked toward him, and there was something distinctly belligerent in the way he blocked the sidewalk, in the half-assed grin back of the matted blond beard. Yet somehow it seemed crazy to turn and run away. He knew Morris. He was being overly paranoid. Ike came a couple of steps closer and said hello.