Tapping the Source (24 page)

Michelle had sat down on the edge of the bed. She’d crossed her legs and was jiggling one foot, staring at the end of her shoe. “And so how are you going to do it?”

“I’m going to start by taking Hound up on his offer. I’m going down there and see about a board.” He paused. “I don’t know after that.” He stopped and popped one fist against an open palm. “Fucking Hound Adams, man. Why does he want to give me a board?”

“I told you, maybe he likes you.”

“Or maybe he likes you. Or maybe it’s something else. I have this idea that Hound knows damn well I was at the ranch with Preston. It’s like he’s playing some fucking game.”

He watched her for a moment, but she didn’t say anything and he turned and walked to the window. “Maybe Preston was right,” he heard her say. “Maybe you should just leave.” She paused. “I could go with you.”

He shook his head. The trouble was that now, for the first time since he’d climbed onto that damn bus with the old woman yelling at him from the darkness, he was something besides scared. First they’d taken his sister. Now they had fucked up his friend. It was not right that he should be so fucking helpless. And he was not going to leave it at that. He said as much to Michelle. She continued to study her shoe, her face smooth and pale in the sunlight. Finally she looked up at him. “Hard guy,” she said. “Just be careful.”

•   •   •

He went that afternoon. And he found Hound Adams seated on a bench out in front of the shop, talking to a couple of young girls. They were dressed in these one-piece suits with holes and crazy angles in them so you could see a lot of skin. The girls seemed to be doing most of the talking. Ike could see their mouths moving, expressions changing. As he got closer he could hear their laughter. Hound Adams seemed to be finding some amusement in their company. He was smiling and when Ike got close enough, Hound turned the smile on him. He gestured toward the end of the bench, inviting Ike to sit down. Ike sat. “Got a little business to take care of now with my man,” Hound told the girls after introducing them to Ike. The girls scampered away. Ike joined Hound in watching their skinny asses disappear in the heat. When they were gone, Hound looked back at Ike. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

Ike met Hound’s eyes with his own. Hound’s eyes were a deep shade of brown, almost a black. They reminded Ike of those dark polished stones people sold for souvenirs in the desert—agates, they were called. “You said something about a board.”

Hound nodded. The slightly bemused smile seemed to widen almost imperceptibly. He turned a palm toward the open door of the shop, then he rose and went inside. Ike stood and followed.

It was cool in the shop. Frank Baker stood behind the glass counter. He watched them come in without changing expression, then bent to sort through some boxes at his feet. Ike made eye contact but had read nothing there, not even recognition. Now he stood just in back of Hound Adams and slightly to his side as Hound waved toward the rack of new boards. “Take your pick,” Hound told him.

The boards were arranged by length, going from the longer boards, the nose riders and rounded pins, down to the twin fins and knee riders. “Check out the used boards, too, if you like,” he heard Hound say, and he turned to look across the room. He saw almost at once the nose rider he had used at the ranch. It had been cleaned up and leaned against the wall with the other used boards. He thought back to the conversation he had had with Michelle only a short time ago. Cat and mouse with Hound Adams. He looked away quickly, hoping that his face had not lost its composure. He thought about Preston, on his back in that room that smelled of medicine, and his anger held. He went to the rack and pulled a rounded pintail from it. He placed it on the ground and stepped back, sighted down the tail toward the nose, as he’d seen Preston do the day they got the other board. When he bent at the waist to do the sighting, he noticed that Frank Baker had come out from behind his counter and was watching, standing as he had the last time Ike was in the shop, with his arms folded across his chest.

The board was a single fin, pale blue with white pinstriping on the deck. Hound Adams looked at it with him. “It’s a nice stick,” Hound said. “But I think you could go for something a little shorter.” He walked down the rack and pulled out another single fin, also a rounded pin but with wingers. “This board will still give you some stability in the wave, but it won’t be quite as stiff. The blue board is a little bit gunney. But you can try them both, as far as that goes. Take the one you think works the best.”

Ike looked at the price tags taped to the rails. Both boards were well over two hundred dollars. “What about the money?” He was getting very low and soon he would have to find something to do.

“I said we could work something out. It’s up to you, brah. Hard to learn much without a stick.”

“I’m out of work right now,” Ike told him.

“So I’ve heard. The man with the machines. But there are other ways of making a living in this town without having your face stuck in an engine all day long. Look, why don’t you take one of the boards now. Come and surf with us tomorrow, see what you think. Then we can talk payment.”

It seemed to Ike as he stood in the shop, the boards at his feet, that Hound Adams was different than he had seen him before, somehow more businesslike today, less the guru. He looked down at the board Hound had suggested. It was a clean stick, the more expensive of the two, an airbrush job with a deck that went from bright yellow at the nose, through a nicely blended rainbow of colors, to a red tail. He picked it up and tested the weight beneath his arm and it felt like it belonged there. He looked once more toward the rear of the shop, toward the used boards and wet suits, the photographs that he knew hung there but could not see from this angle, and he found himself wondering when the shop had dropped the
Tapping the Source
logo, for the new boards were marked with a sort of squiggly V shape and the words
Light Moves
.

Ike carried the board to the front of the shop. He was aware of both Frank and Hound watching him. “So let’s see you out there with it, brah. Tomorrow. We’ll get some waves together.” It was Hound who spoke and he was grinning broadly now. He walked Ike to the door and raised a hand in farewell. Ike held up his own free hand as he stepped out onto the sidewalk. He looked past Hound, into the shop, and he could see that Frank Baker was still at the counter, his arms still folded. Frank, Ike noticed, was not smiling.

•   •   •

When Ike reached the Sea View, Michelle had already left for work and the room was empty. He wondered if she would see Marsha today, and if they would talk. And he wondered if he had been right in telling her. But it was done now. And something else was done as well. He had taken the board from Hound Adams. It had begun. He placed the board on his bed and walked around the room, examining it from all angles. It was definitely, with the exception of a big chopped hog waiting for him in the desert, the flashiest thing he had ever owned.

25

Ike was up early the following morning. He passed through the streets of downtown Huntington Beach, his board under his arm, walking to meet the dawn patrol, to surf with them for the first time. Above the Golden Bear and the Wax Factory the beginnings of a sunrise spread into the sky. Thin strips of blue fused with yellow. Hard lines of color against the gray. And he found the sunrise repeated in every thrift-store window, in the dark plate glass of every parked car, until all of Main Street was alive with it.

As he walked he listened to the crack of waves beyond the highway, tried to guess size and swell direction by the sound, counted out the intervals between reports. He passed the Club Tahiti, the wide gaping alleys, at last the highway itself. He paused for a moment at the top of the concrete steps, staring down across the empty reaches of sand, and the rush, as always, was there. It came with his first glimpse of swell lines running from the horizon, the collision of sea and sky, the great pure source against whose edge the town was nothing but a speck, a tiny soiled mark on the face of eternity.

•   •   •

The swell, which had been light and out of the west for the past few days, had given way in the night to a much stronger swell out of the southwest. The waves were overhead, bigger than anything he had surfed at Huntington. He watched them as he came down the steps. He could see the dawn patrol already out, jockeying for position near the pier. The waves were not that much bigger than those he’d surfed with Preston on the first day at the ranch, but it was a different kind of surf. The ranch waves had come off a point. There had been long shoulders and a path to the outside. But this was day one of a strong swell. The waves came in long, pumping lines. Hollow grinders that hit like trucks. He was still without a wet suit and he shivered as he knelt in the wet sand to fasten his leash. He guessed he was ready for it, but he was wrong.

He made his first mistake that morning before even getting in the water. For some strange reason he would later be unable to recall, he crossed beneath the pier and entered the water on the south side, about fifty yards down the beach, having failed to calculate the power with which the swell was pushing from that direction. After about fifteen minutes of hard paddling he was still not outside but getting dangerously close to the pilings. The old pier, for which he had developed a certain affection, was suddenly an ominous presence. He was close enough to see the hairline cracks, the pigeon shit and moss—and the sound of the white water sweeping back through the concrete corridor formed by the pilings was like a barrage of cannon fire.

Far above him he could see the impassive faces of half a dozen fishermen watching his progress. The dawn patrol was still a good thirty yards beyond him and he was profoundly aware of being stuck in this thing alone. And it was just about at that point that he saw what he had been dreading, a full-on clean-up set moving off the horizon and there was no way he was going to make it. He kept his arms going for the simple reason that he didn’t know what else to do, but there was no feeling left in his hands. Caught among the pilings, bound to his board by his leash. He could see it all now. They would have to send him back to San Arco in a shoe box.

He was almost beneath the pier when the first wave of the set reached him. He started up the face, watched the lip curling above him as a concrete column rose at his side. He swung out wildly with his left arm and, with his right arm braced against the deck of his board, actually used the piling to push himself through the lip. And then he was down, in the trough between waves still being sucked backward by the first wave, but for the first time that morning doing the right thing and paddling like mad for the north side of the pier, hoping to make it through before the next wave hit him. And he did, barely. He popped out on the north side just in time to get caught in the lip of the second wave and sucked over the falls, driven down with such force he felt like his balls had been kicked up inside him, but he had escaped the pier.

•   •   •

The wave held him down for a long time, and when he finally did resurface, still caught in the white water, moving north and toward the beach, he’d managed to lose most of his enthusiasm for this particular swell. He was back on the beach, seated on the nose of his board, when he caught sight of Hound Adams walking toward him out of the water. Hound was dressed in a pair of blue trunks and the dark vest Ike had never seen him surf without.

Hound put his board down next to Ike’s and sat with him. “Chew you up and spit you out?” he asked.

“I guess.”

“You started out on the wrong side of the pier, brah. Let’s rest a minute, then we’ll go out together. I’ll show you the way.”

Ike came close to refusing the invitation, but it was a little like having Preston waiting for him after that first wave at the ranch. At last they stood and Ike followed Hound back to the water’s edge. “It’s a state of mind,” Hound told him as the white water reached their feet. “These waves demand a certain commitment. Once you’ve picked a wave, don’t let yourself think about anything else, don’t doubt what you can do. Paddle as hard and fast as you can. You’ll get into the wave faster and with more control. Don’t hold back. Be part of it. Understand?”

Ike nodded and followed Hound into the water. The sun was just coming up behind them now, charging the sky with a fine yellow light that seemed to hang above the sand in a golden mist. Above the water, tiny rainbows appeared in the spray blown back from the lips of the waves, and beneath the pier there was an incredible play of light and shadow, a seemingly infinite progression of blues and greens shot through with the rays of the sun.