Tapping the Source (27 page)

“I said, it’s a nice swell.”

There was no response. The girls continued to look at one another as if it was necessary to confer on what he had said.

“Good waves,” Ike went on, figuring it was too late to stop now. “I mean, it’s pretty big and all.”

Still no one responded to him, and he was beginning to feel that something was terribly wrong. Maybe he only thought he was talking, perhaps he was just staring.

The girls stared back. One of them giggled. Now that they were no longer moving targets but standing in one spot, giving him time to look them over, he was beginning to suspect he had misjudged their ages. The biggest of the group looked to be about twelve. He guessed the skates made them look older, or at least taller.

He was rescued from further embarrassment, however, when some old man came walking toward them from the opposite side of the pier. “Come on, girls,” the man said, “let’s get some food.” He gave Ike a dirty look and the four girls rolled off after him. One of them said good-bye as she was leaving.

Ike slumped against the rail. His heart was still pounding and he’d broken into another sweat. He stood at the rail for some time, letting the breeze cool his face, trying to collect his thoughts, watching the machinery of Huntington Beach as it hummed around him.

At some point he became aware of three girls standing at the railing opposite him. These looked like better candidates right away. They looked young, but they were plainly not with their parents. Two of them, dressed in very tight jeans and skimpy tank tops, were leaning against the rail smoking cigarettes. The third, a redhead, was standing with her profile to Ike. She was dressed in a pair of silky running shorts and a light-colored tube top.

Ike walked across the pier and said hello. He walked toward the redhead and it was to her that he spoke. She was the prettiest of the three. Her hair was very red, a dark, blood red, and her skin was very white. Her lips and nails were red as well. The other two might have been sisters. They were thin with blond hair, but it was a peroxided, brittle-looking shade. The redhead smiled and said hello. The other two smiled at each other, as if they knew exactly what he was up to. Ike moved to one side and put his hand on the rail. They were all looking at him now. “You want to get high?” he asked. He had decided not to beat around the bush.

The girls looked at one another. One of the skinny blondes flipped a cigarette butt over the rail. “Maybe,” the redhead replied. “Where ’bouts?”

“Anywhere. The beach.”

“You got good stuff?”

“Colombian.”

The redhead looked at her friends and raised her eyebrows.

“Why not?” somebody asked.

•   •   •

It was like Hound had said, there was nothing to it. They smoked a J and he told them his brother was a dealer, that there was supposed to be a party going on at the house, later. They huddled on it while Ike stood off to the side, waiting, trying to look bored. They were standing in the sand beneath the pier and he could hear their laughter mixing with the sound the white water made as it wrapped around the pilings. They finally decided to go, and he could hear one of them say, “I think he’s cute,” as they walked toward him from the shadows.

So that’s how it’s done, he thought. He walked beside the redhead, who would have been quite a bit shorter than him without her shoes. The shoes made her nearly as tall as Michelle, made her legs look long and sexy, and he thought of how Michelle’s looked like that all the time, even when she was barefoot. Perhaps it was thinking about Michelle that did it, but suddenly, walking along Coast Highway toward Hound’s street, he was set upon by a great wave of guilt. It washed over him in flashes of hot and cold. The excitement he had felt earlier seemed to have vanished completely, leaving only a gritty, unwholesome clammy feeling in the palms of his hands. What was he doing? He had no real idea of what would happen at Hound’s. He flashed again on the picture he’d seen in the light of the oil rig. What if something bad happened? He flashed on his sister. Somehow the skinny blondes reminded him of her. She was like that. He could see her at the rail of the old pier, a cigarette between her lips, looking wild, an easy pickup. How had she fit into the great machine, the system of supply and demand? A chill ran up his back and spread across his shoulders, and he was finding it difficult to think of anything to say. What if he should run into Michelle or Jill? He wondered if he was running the risk of blowing everything. Would Michelle believe that this was what Hound Adams wanted by way of repayment? But he thought of another thing, too, in terms of repaying Hound, and that was the sight of Hound Adams standing his ground against the bikers in the parking lot, standing between him and Morris. Where did you draw the line when someone had saved your fucking life? Or was that only a rationalization, an excuse for his own lack of conviction?

He was feeling fairly miserable by the time they headed up Hound’s street. Behind him, the two blondes had begun to bitch about somebody’s mother’s boyfriend. One of them had begun a rather lengthy story about how the guy tried to get a look at her when she was in the shower or something. She was talking in this very loud voice and Ike got the idea that it was partly for his benefit. The redhead looked at him once and rolled her eyes. Before they reached the house, though, the subject changed and they all started talking about some party they’d been to the night before. Seems some boys had invited them over for a party, except there wasn’t a party, just a bunch of horny guys sitting around waiting for some chicks to show up. “That’s all those guys do,” one of the girls said. “They just go down to the beach every day and tell a lot of girls there’s a big party at their place. Then when you get there, it’s just them, sitting around, trying to act cool.”

“And it’s not even their house,” someone said. “It’s just a summer rental. They’re from Santa Ana, or some dumb place, I heard them say.”

“And they never have any decent dope,” the redhead added.

Ike was getting a little nervous with this line of conversation. Suppose he got them home and they got scared, or pissed off? What would Hound have to say about that? Would he send him back after Michelle?

•   •   •

The house was dark when they got there. There were just a couple of candles lit in the living room and some music on the stereo, some of the punk sounds Ike heard around the Sea View but had not until now heard at Hound’s. The girls seemed to like the house, though. They could see it wasn’t just some summer rental. “You live here?” the redhead wanted to know. Ike said that he did. Hound and Samoans were not in sight. But the girls did not seem to mind. They didn’t even ask him about the party. The redhead sat on the couch and the other two started looking through the records.

Ike sat next to the redhead. His palms felt cold and damp. He was still having a hard time thinking of anything to say and he’d used the last of his joints. Then Hound came in. He looked much as he’d looked the night of his party, the night Ike met him. He was decked out in a pair of white cotton pants and one of his fancier Mexican shirts. He wore a necklace of beads and there were more beads on the front of his shirt. His hair looked straight and clean and was held in place with an Indian-looking headband. Ike introduced him as his brother. Hound smiled at the girls and seated himself on the floor. He produced a pipe and a match. He told Ike there were some beers in the kitchen. Ike went to get them, and by the time he got back the other two girls were seated on the floor with Hound and the pipe was making the rounds. Ike rejoined the redhead on the couch and started opening the beers.

The pipe was loaded with hash and soon everybody was pretty stoned. Ike was getting wasted in a hurry. He’d skipped dinner and now he was getting his share of hits off the pipe and pouring beer down fast to cool the burning in his throat. The two girls on the floor got up and started dancing and their bodies were like slender flames licking the walls. The redhead reached across Ike once in a while for the pipe or a beer, pressing her breasts against his arm, and pretty soon he was necking with her. At some point, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that one of the Samoans had showed up and had started dancing with the skinny blondes. He noticed, too, that Hound Adams had left the room. He’d already forgotten all the girls’ names. He’d even forgotten the redhead’s name, but he was feeling no pain at the present and the redhead’s top had somehow gotten down around her waist and she was grabbing at his cock, and nothing had ever happened exactly this fast for him before. It was like one minute they were just sitting there, and the next minute they were going after each other like mad and he had forgotten all about Michelle waiting for him at the Sea View apartments.

“Come on,” he said, whispering in the redhead’s ear. He took her by the hand and pulled her off the couch. She left her top on the cushions and followed him into one of the back rooms. It was the room he’d been in earlier that night. The couches were empty now. The girl sat down hard, pulling him with her, but he slipped away and knelt in front of her, began working her shorts down and over her red high-heeled shoes. And in one part of his mind he kept thinking how crazy it was, how a few weeks ago this whole scene would have been inconceivable. But here he was pulling down some girl’s pants without even knowing her name and he was going to fuck her, and he knew, with a rather faint twinge of guilt, that it was Michelle who had taught him how, who had given him the confidence necessary to make this thing work. But there was really not time to think of all that at the moment. It was enough just to know that the two things, what happened with Michelle and whatever this was, were not the same and had nothing to do with each other.

He was back on the couch beside the girl now, his hand between her legs. She was hot and wet, working her ass around on the couch, pushing herself against his fingers, pushing her tongue into his mouth and moaning all at the same time. It was like everything was moving at once, the room in motion around him, hot, dark, panting. A slice of moonlight broke through the window and touched her breast, cutting across the nipple. And then he was aware of the hand on his shoulder. He would later try to remember just how it had happened. For a moment he thought the hand belonged to the girl, but then he knew it did not. He straightened a bit on the couch, the girl still twisting and moaning beside him. He jerked as he saw it was one of the Samoans who had touched him. The man was naked, standing just behind him, on the other side of the couch, then he was moving around it, kneeling on the floor near the girl. He was smiling. Later Ike would remember the whiteness of his teeth in the dark room. It was a confusing moment. He did not even know the Samoan’s name. He watched the muscles flexing in the man’s chest as he seemed to glide in front of them, to sit on the couch on the other side of the girl. The girl now seemed to be waking up to what was going on. The Samoan pulled her toward him so that her body was twisted, the upper half turned toward him, the lower toward Ike.

To Ike’s surprise, the girl did not resist but let the Samoan kiss her. She seemed, in fact, to grow even more excited. Ike’s fingers were still inside her and she was still moving on them, harder than before. Then the Samoan was moving again, this time moving the girl as well. Still no word had passed between them, but the man seemed to know just what he wanted. He managed to get the girl on her knees in front of Ike and his hand was on the girl’s neck, pushing her toward Ike’s cock. Ike’s fingers slipped out of her, drying quickly in the dark room. He felt her take him into her mouth and nothing had ever been quite this crazy. It was like his body was on fire, moving on its own, and he could think of nothing else. And then, suddenly, the room was not dark at all, but there was some kind of white strobe light going. Flashes of light pierced his eyes and exited at the base of his skull. And when it was bright, you could see everything. It was like daylight, like one of those electrical storms he had witnessed in the desert. And when it was light, he could see the Samoan only a few feet away from him, fucking the girl from the back, moving behind her in a slow rhythm, his face a mask. And the girl, her red hair flying, going after Ike’s cock until that was the only part of him that was alive and he was going to come and that was all that mattered. He took the sides of her face in his hands, pushing himself into her. And when he came it was like it was from so far inside of himself that his eyeballs ached and his head buzzed. There was a moment when he guessed the buzzing was all in his head, and that was followed by another moment when he knew it was not, that it was coming from somewhere in the room. And then he saw the girl.

He saw her by the light of the strobe, so it was like seeing a series of still photographs. It was the slender brunette he’d seen earlier with Frank Baker. She was in the doorway and there was some sort of movie camera in her hands. The camera made a soft whirring sound. Hound Adams was standing behind the girl, his arms folded across his chest, his blond hair and jewelry coming alive in the white light, vanishing in the darkness.

•   •   •

Ike woke up on the floor. The room was already warm and the sunlight was spilling in a window and forming a pool near his head. The minute his eyes opened, the pain began. His eyes burned and his neck felt like someone had stepped on it. He sat up slowly, trying to keep the room from spinning too rapidly. He blinked hard, bringing back the night, and the first thing he thought about was the redhead getting sick.

They had made more movies, smoked more dope. And then one of the Samoans had come in and started doing cocaine. The girls had all sniffed some with him, taking hits out of a tiny silver spoon. Ike had declined. He had begun mixing gin and tonics and had elected to stay with that. Then at some point, later, an hour or two after the first business with the little spoon, Hound Adams had come back into the room and he and the Samoan had started mixing the cocaine with a few drops of water, filling a teaspoon, getting ready to shoot the stuff, and the redhead had wanted in on it. Ike had been sitting right next to her on the couch as the Samoan pushed the needle into her arm. He’d watched the substance disappear, then watched the syringe fill back up with blood, red like the shade of her nails against her white skin, and then that was gone too, shot back inside as the Samoan booted it. And that was what did it, the boot, that blood rushing back in to send it all on its way. All of a sudden she was out, stiff, frozen, as if someone had just shot a bolt of electricity into her body, and Ike was certain she was dead. He was looking right at her and her skin was whiter than it had been all night, so white it was like chalk, and all he could think of was that he had done it and for a moment he was not even drunk, or stoned, just alone with this terrible knowledge and guilt. And then she was not dead anymore, but staring at him, shaking uncontrollably, and then sick, sick all over everything, the couch, his arm, before they could get her into the bathroom off the hall. Damn, he could close his eyes now and bring back that whole scene: Hound and the Samoan trying to figure out what had happened, Hound Adams suddenly looking more scared there, in his own house, than he had ever looked out on the parking lot, standing up to those bikers who had him outnumbered three to one. And when things had quieted down, and there was just the sound of the girl being sick in the other room, they’d decided someone must have crossed the spoons, given her Hound’s or the Samoan’s instead of the lightweight dose they had made up for her. She’d pulled out of it okay, finally coming out of the bathroom and acting very wired up, still shaking but wired, and that was about the last he could remember, how everybody was wired up except him and how he’d finally crashed on the floor while the rest of them partied around him. And he was there now, the room quiet and warm and smelling still from where the girl had gotten sick. And for some dumb reason, as he was standing up, he remembered her name; it was Debbie. Christ. She had nearly died on top of him and he could just now remember her name.