Tapping the Source (4 page)

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It was five hours by bus from the desert to L.A., another one and a half to Huntington Beach. The beers had not been a particularly good idea. He had put them down on an empty stomach and they left him stranded in a place that was neither sleep nor consciousness. There were dreams, but they were all bad and pulling himself out of them was like climbing out of deep holes. And when they finally wore off somewhere in the dizzy neon glare of some bus stop bar and grill on the north side of Los Angeles, he was left with a headache and a knot in his stomach.

Now, his suitcase checked at the bus depot because it was still too early to look for a room, he stood at the rail of the Huntington Beach pier and found it hard to believe that he had actually come. But he had. The concrete beneath his feet was the real thing and beneath that there was an ocean. Twenty-four hours ago he had only been able to imagine what an ocean might look like, might smell like. Now he stood above one and its immensity was breathtaking. Its surface rose and fell under his feet, stretching in three directions like some great liquid desert, and the town behind him, hard, flat, colorless, surprising him in its similarity to some desert town, squatted at the edge of the sea in much the same way that San Arco squatted at the edge of the desert, dwarfed by the immense thing that lay before it.

•   •   •

Hound Adams, Terry Jacobs, Frank Baker. Those were the names the kid had written on the scrap of paper. “They surf the pier,” the kid had said. “In the mornings.” And there were surfers below him now. He watched as they jockeyed for position among the swell lines. He had never guessed that waves were so much like hills, moving hills, of water. And he was fascinated by the way the surfers moved across the faces of the waves, dropping and climbing, shaping their bodies to the shapes of the waves until it was like some dance with the sea. He thought of what the kid had told him, that it would be stupid to come by himself, that he would only get into trouble asking too many questions. So that was all right. He would not ask any. He had come to look at it this way: First of all, it seemed smart to him to assume the worst, to assume that something bad had happened to his sister and that the guys she had gone with wanted to keep it quiet. He also guessed it would be wise to take the kid’s warning seriously: these were not lightweight people.

Given those two assumptions, he did not want to barge into town asking a lot of questions. It had occurred to him that his sister may have made other friends, that finding someone who had known her could prove helpful. But how would he find them? Suppose he mentioned her name to the wrong person? And if there were friends here who could be of help, why would that kid have found it necessary to drive all the way to San Arco looking for Ellen’s badass brother? No. He kept coming back to the idea that his first step was to find out who these guys were without them knowing who he was. Once he had them spotted, had some idea of what they were like, he would have a better idea of how to proceed. And that, the proceeding, would of course be the tricky part. What would happen if he found that the worst was true, that she was dead? Would he go to the cops then? Would he look for revenge? Or would he find that he was helpless? He remembered the way that kid had stared at him in the heat of the gravel lot. Is that the way it would be? He would find out what had happened and then find out there was not a fucking thing he could do about it? The fear of that discovery was like a shadow above him and even the rising sun could not burn it away.

•   •   •

He did not know how long he stood at the rail, somewhat transfixed by the contemplation of both his fear and this new sport below him, but after a while he was aware of the sun’s warmth on his shoulders and of the increased activity around him. He had heard the surfers’ voices, heard them calling to one another, but had not been able to pick out any names; he was too far from them on the boardwalk. At last he turned from the rail and started back in the direction of the town.

The sun was climbing fast now, high above the hard square shapes of the buildings that lined the Coast Highway. And with the coming of the sun any similarities to desert towns he had noted earlier were fast disappearing. For Huntington Beach was waking up and there were people in the streets, lines of cars stacking up behind red lights and crosswalks, and there were skateboards humming on the concrete and gulls crying, and old men feeding pigeons in front of the brick rest rooms. There were guys carrying surfboards, and girls, more girls here than he had ever seen in one place. Girls on roller skates and on foot, a blur of tanned legs and sun-streaked hair, and there were girls younger than himself sitting on the railing at the entrance to the pier, smoking cigarettes, looking bored and tired and washed out in the early light, and when he passed they looked right through him.

It was on the inland side of the highway, headed back toward the depot, that he saw the bikes: a couple of Harleys, an 834 Honda Hardtail. First things he’d seen all morning that made him feel at home. One of the Harleys, in fact, was an old Knuckle in full chop, almost identical to his own. He decided to cross the street for a better look. The bikes were drawn up alongside the curb, engines running, riders straddling oversize valves, talking to a couple of girls. He noted that one of the engines (it sounded like the Knuckle) was missing, and propped himself on the wall of a liquor store to listen.

“You got a problem?” a voice wanted to know. It was the first time anyone had spoken to him since the waitress had taken his order at the bus stop north of L.A. He blinked into the sunlight, and into the sullen stare of one of the bikers. He peeled himself from the wall and started away. He could hear them laughing behind him. He nearly collided with some old wino in the crosswalk and the man stopped to curse him, holding up traffic, so there were horns blaring and tires squealing by the time he made the curb on the other side of the street, and that was where he caught sight of his reflection in the plate glass windows of the depot. He examined the faded Budweiser T-shirt, the grease-stained jeans, the home-cut crop of brown curls, the hundred and thirty-five pound frame, and he looked even skinnier and more useless than he had imagined. Low Boy, that was what Gordon had called him, and he felt like the runt now. The bikers’ laughter rang in his ears and the voice of the old man had somehow become the voice of the old woman, as if her words had followed him through the night. Then for some damn reason he started thinking of the lines to this song, just one line actually, all he could remember: “Suckers always make mistakes when they’re far away from home.” And it struck him there in the street, sunlight hot, air full of exhaust and noise and a funny haze like fine gray dust settling over everything, that this would be an easy place to screw up in, and he knew once more he would have to be careful.

•   •   •

By midafternoon he had found a place to stay. The room was part of a drab-looking structure called the Sea View apartments, a large square building covered in a sort of turd-brown stucco. The front of the building sat close to the street, separated from it by a sidewalk and a thin rectangle of weedy grass. There was another ragged patch of grass in back, together with a couple of stunted palms and a lone oil well. The oil well sat by itself in a corner of the lot, fenced off in a square of gritty chain link.

Ike’s room was on the west end of the building, upstairs with a view of the oil well and the vacant lot beyond it. If it hadn’t been for the backsides of the buildings along the Coast Highway, the Sea View would have lived up to its name and he could have seen the Pacific Ocean, but the view would have probably run him another hundred a month and he could not have afforded it anyway. He had spent the better part of the day looking at rooms and had absorbed his first lesson in beach economics. Rooms that would have rented for a hundred a month in the desert rented for fifty a week in Huntington Beach, and the Sea View, with its two dimly lit hallways, one above the other, its dirty walls, and its alcoholic landlady in her dirty blue bathrobe, had been the cheapest place he could find. It had not taken him long to see that his money would not go as far as he had hoped.

•   •   •

He had planned to get some sleep that afternoon, but sleep would not come and he wound up sitting on the floor near the pay phone in the upstairs hallway, poring over names in the thick white book. There were a lot of Bakers, Jacobses, and Adamses, but no Terry Jacobs, no Hound Adams. There was one Frank Baker, not in Huntington Beach, however, but in some place called Fountain Valley. He had assumed from what the kid had told him that the people he was looking for lived in Huntington Beach. Still, the kid had not said that, he had said only that they surfed the pier. Shit, he had been stupid not to ask more questions, to stand there like the village idiot while the sun scrambled his brains. And Hound Adams? Hound was certainly some sort of nickname. But there were two H. Adamses listed in the book, and one of them lived in Huntington Beach, on Ocean Ave. He sat for a while eyeing the name, cursing himself for not having asked questions when he had had the chance. At last he copied down the address, found a gas station and a map, then rode the bus to Ocean Avenue; it was something to do. It was several miles inland and the address was across the street from an elementary school. He sat out in front of the school on a cold brick wall, uncertain about what to do next. He figured maybe he would just hang around in front and see what kind of people went in and out. But nobody went in and out for at least two hours, and the sun was getting low and a chilly wind had come up by the time a light went on in one of the windows. Crossing the street for a better look, he could see an old woman against a yellowish background, framed by a set of flowered curtains. It looked as if she was standing over a kitchen sink. It occurred to him that there might of course be other people living there—a son perhaps. But somehow the signs were not encouraging, and for the moment it was getting colder. He turned away from the house and walked back to the corner to wait for a bus.

•   •   •

So ended his first day in Huntington Beach. It was dark by the time he got back to the Sea View apartments. And if the town had come to life with the rising of the sun, then the Sea View apartments had come to life with its setting. The place had been quiet as a morgue when he’d left; now there was apparently some sort of party going on. Many of the doors stood propped open above the stained linoleum floors. A kind of music he was not used to hearing, but what he took to be punk rock, spilled from the guts of the old building and swirled around him as he climbed the stairs. He went straight to his room and closed the door, collapsed on his bed. He had been on the bed for about five minutes, hovering at the edge of sleep, when someone knocked at his door.

He opened it to find two girls standing in the hallway. One was short and dark, with short black hair. The other was tall, athletic-looking. She had strawberry-blond hair that came to her shoulders. It was the dark-haired girl who did the talking. The blonde leaned against a wall and scratched her leg with her foot. They both looked drunk and happy, slightly stupid. They wanted to know if he had any papers. The music was louder now with the door open and he could hear other voices farther down the hall. They looked disappointed when he said no. The dark one sort of stuck her head in his room and looked around. She wanted to know if he was a jarhead or something. He said he wasn’t.

The girls giggled and went away. Ike closed the door behind them and walked into his bathroom. The moonlight was coming through the small rectangular window now, glancing off the porcelain and the silver slab of the mirror so he could still see a dark reflection of himself in the glass. But the reflection was hard to recognize. It seemed to change shape and expression as he watched it until he could not be sure that it was his own and then it came to him that the feeling he got from that dark glass was not unlike the feeling he’d gotten from the overpowering silence of the desert and he turned away from it quickly, heart thumping high and fast, and looked instead down into the yard where a lonesome oil well jerked itself off in the moonlight.

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