Tapping the Source (23 page)

He told her the story as he had once told it to Preston Marsh. He told her about the kid in the white Camaro, the trip to Mexico with Hound Adams. She watched him as he spoke, holding the paper in her hand.

“So far the only person who knows any of this is Preston. I thought he was going to help me.”

“You thought?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know now. I don’t know what he was doing. Preston’s a funny guy. He’s not always easy to talk to. Now I can’t talk to him at all.”

“I don’t think funny is the right word,” she said. After that she was quiet, staring at the floor. “So that’s why you want to know who Marsha thinks you look like, who you remind her of?”

He nodded. “She might know something.”

“But why would your uncle let you come by yourself? You said he was standing right there when the kid told you. Why didn’t he want to do something?”

“Because he thinks Ellen is wild, that whatever happened to her was her own fault. Because he doesn’t give a shit.”

“Does he give a shit about you?”

“I don’t know.”

“He raised you.”

“He figured out a way to get money from the state for it.”

“For real?”

He nodded. “Ellen heard him talking about it once to my grandmother. She told me.”

“Shit.” Michelle shook her head. “That sounds like something my old lady would pull. He sounds like my old lady. She doesn’t give a shit where I am. She thinks I’m wild too. But I’m nothing compared to her. You know what she was doing before I left? She was getting so bad she was trying to put the moves on every guy I brought by the house. When she wasn’t working, she was lying around half naked every day. I came home from school one afternoon and caught her fucking this guy I had been going with. Can you believe that?”

Ike stopped to think about it. He thought back to that day Ellen had told him about Gordon getting the money and how it had made him feel. He wondered if it had been anything like the way Michelle had felt.

“So anyway,” Michelle said. “Forget that. Screw your uncle and my old lady.” She moved closer and leaned against him. “I know one thing,” she said. “I like it that you came; I like it that you’re like that.”

He shifted beneath her arm, wondering just what it was that he was like, because he had, of course, not told her everything about Ellen. “And I will talk to Marsha,” she was saying. “I can ask some other people, too. I’ll help you.” She seemed to be getting almost enthused over the idea.

“And wind up like Preston?”

“But you don’t know that’s what happened. You’re not even sure he was trying to help you.”

“Just don’t go asking around too much. You know what I mean? Go slow.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Yes. Yes.” She let the words out slowly, with her breath, and rested her head back against his shoulder so that her face was close to his own. He raised a hand, letting his fingers slip through her hair, felt her breathing, inhaled the scent of her skin, and suddenly she was whispering once more, telling him once more that she was glad he had come, and that he was different, and that maybe she could help. And before he could protest again, she was saying some crazy thing about how he should get more exercise and how it was unhealthy just to lay around all day. And he was letting her undress him. Then he let her push him back on the bed and get on top, trying to be very still as she moved above him, to see how still he could be, to sink into the mattress as she pushed him deep into her, to watch the square of sunlight on her bare shoulder, to watch the dark spot on her eye, beneath the sleepy half-closed lid, as if she were rocking herself to sleep, all the time thinking about how crazy it was to be making love when there were so many things to think about, when it was so hot. Finally he put his arms around her and pulled her to him. She buried her face in his neck and he arched himself against her and the only sounds were the sounds their bodies made, pressed against each other, wet with sweat, and the squeaking of the old bed.

•   •   •

When they were finished, she rolled away from him and they lay side by side in the heat. They stayed that way for a long time while the light changed and the room took on the dark yellow glow of late afternoon. It was finally Michelle who spoke. “So what are you going to do,” she asked, “after you find your sister? Go back to the desert?”

It seemed strange to hear her voice after the long silence. “I don’t know,” he said. It was odd, but he suddenly realized he had never given that much thought.

“You must want to do something. Work on bikes. Have your own shop.”

“I don’t know. Not that, I guess.”

“Then what?” She was back up on one elbow now, watching him.

He shrugged, thinking now of what Preston had said at the ranch. “Travel maybe. Surf.”

“You like it that much?”

He nodded. “So what about you? What do you want?”

“Traveling would be nice, see things I never have.”

“What then?”

She didn’t answer right away. She moved her shoulders and lay back down beside him. “You won’t laugh?”

“No.”

“I’d like to train horses.”

He was quiet.

“You think that’s dumb?”

“No.”

“My mother thought it was dumb.”

“Do you know anything about them?”

“I can learn. You think I can’t.”

He shook his head.

“You sounded like you think I can’t.”

“No. You can. I think you can. If you want to.”

They were both quiet again after that. Ike watched the light on their bare legs. He felt slightly paralyzed in a pleasant sort of way. The room turned orange, and then a kind of soft rose as the sun moved toward the sea somewhere beyond the window. Michelle left the bed and went to the sink for a drink of water. When she came back, she sat on the edge. Ike watched her profile in the soft red light. “It probably is crazy,” she said.

“What?”

“The horses. That’s supposed to be what all little girls want to do, isn’t it? Dumb.”

He pulled himself up and took her by the shoulder. Something about the way she said it made him mad. “Screw that,” he told her. “You’re young. You can do whatever you fucking well want to.” Saying that, he reminded himself of Preston. It was what Preston had said to him.

•   •   •

By the end of the week it was time to get the stitches pulled and Ike had to leave his room. Michelle was at work and he rode the bus to the hospital by himself. It was the first time all week that he had been out and he expected to find Morris waiting around every corner.

He had planned to see Preston when they were finished with the stitches, but when it was time his nerve failed him. Still, he hung around the hospital, hoping perhaps that it would prove to be only a momentary loss of courage. He went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. The new scar was over his right eye, close to the eyebrow, however, and barely noticeable. He was hoping it would make him look tougher, less like a goddamn pretty boy, which is exactly what his sister had once told him he was. His appearance had changed in other ways, though. His hair was much longer now, thick and wavy, brown but with places that had been streaked nearly blond by the sun. He wore it parted in the middle, and it was long enough to cover his ears. His skin was darker and he thought that he looked a little heavier in the arms and shoulders, like maybe all that paddling was doing him some good. He was still pretty scrawny, there was no getting around that, but he looked better. Or maybe it was just that he looked more like the rest of Huntington Beach, not so much like a hick anymore, and he wondered if Michelle would’ve started liking him if he hadn’t changed, if he hadn’t started looking like every other surfer around the pier. Funny how important those things seemed around here, the necessity to look like something, a punk, a surfer, a biker, anything, so long as it wasn’t a fucking hick.

He stood around in the bathroom for a fairly long time. He kept thinking about Preston, standing in the doorway of that bar, behind Morris. He was not angry about it so much as he was confused. He could not shake the feeling that he was at fault in some way, that he had brought all this upon himself, though he could not think of what it was that he had done. At last he walked outside and down the hall to a nurse’s station.

The nurse at the counter was a fat woman with brittle red hair sticking out from beneath her cap, and Ike found himself thinking about Michelle’s mother as the nurse ran a finger down a list of names, looking for Preston’s. He wondered if this one got her kicks out of boozing and putting the moves on sixteen-year-old dudes. “Two fourteen,” she said without looking at him, and then led him to the end of the hallway, to a cart covered with dressing gowns and surgical masks. There was a heavy gray door there and a small red light on the wall. “You’ll have to put these on before you go in,” she told him. “He has an infection in one of his hands. And you’ll only be able to stay a short time. He’s had surgery, you know. Just the day before yesterday. They had to put a plate in his head.”

Ike put the gown on over his T-shirt and jeans, then the mask and gloves. He felt awkward wearing them. It was hot beneath the mask. The nurse opened the door and he walked into the room. It seemed cooler inside and there was much less light. There were three beds in the room, but two of them were empty. Preston was in the bed farthest from the door. He looked asleep. Ike walked quietly across the room. Preston’s hands were outside the blankets, palms down alongside his body. One hand was lightly bandaged, the other was wrapped in some kind of plastic and there was a plastic tube running out of the bandages toward the floor on the opposite side of the bed.

There was a pale green cap on Preston’s head and there were the white edges of bandages showing beneath the cap. The face was nearly unrecognizable. The skin around both eyes was black and puffy and there were stitch marks across the bridge of his nose. Ike sat down heavily in the stiff green chair nearest the bed. He looked across the body of his friend toward the venetian blinds that covered the window, the faint patterns of light which spread from their edges. The room smelled of medicine, and Ike adjusted the mask. He could feel himself sweating beneath it. When he looked again toward Preston’s face, he saw that Preston’s head was turned some on the pillow now and he seemed to be watching Ike with one eye. The white of the eye was a dark red, so it was hard to see where the white ended and the pupil began. Ike was suddenly afraid that he was going to burst into tears, or be sick on the floor. His throat felt hot and tight. Before he could say anything, though, Preston had turned his face back toward the ceiling.

Ike stood up. He felt the room spinning slowly around him. He took a step forward and put a hand on Preston’s arm. The arm felt thick and hard beneath his palm. The sleeves of Preston’s gown had been rolled up just above the elbows and Ike could see the tattoos going down into the bandages. Preston didn’t say anything and he didn’t turn his head. It was hard to tell if Preston was looking at him or not. Ike squeezed Preston’s arm. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Preston swallowed. He did it like it was something that took a lot of effort. He blinked and Ike could see there was water at the corners of his eyes. He felt his own eyes getting hot and gritty. There was a lump in his throat and he knew that he was not going to say anything more. “I’ll see you,” he mumbled. “I’ll be around.” When he had left the room, he tore off the gloves and mask, wadded them with the gown, and threw the whole mess against a wall. An orderly watched him with a disapproving eye but said nothing. Ike stared back, then stomped off down the hallway, through the heavy doors and into the blinding sun.

24

“You were right about Marsha,” Michelle told him. It was still midday. He had been home from the hospital for about an hour. “She says you look like this girl she worked with at a dress shop. She says the girl’s name was Ellen. I asked her if she knew anything about where Ellen might be. She said no. She said she’d heard Ellen left town. But I was thinking, maybe we could go by the dress shop, talk to the …”

“Forget the dress shop.”

She stopped and looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean fuck it. So we go to the dress shop and the owner says, ‘Oh, yeah, Ellen Tucker. She doesn’t work here anymore. I think she left town.’ So big fucking deal. Nobody knows anything, Michelle. Nobody knows any more than I do. That’s why that kid drove all the way to the desert looking for Ellen’s family, because he couldn’t find anything out either, and he lived here. You see what I mean? It’s Hound Adams. Hound Adams and Frank Baker. The only way I’m ever going to find out anything is to get close enough to hear it from them. Everything else is a waste of time.”