Tapping the Source (42 page)

44

The stories began appearing in the papers the next day. Most of them focused on Milo Trax, the fact that he was the only son of a famous Hollywood film maker. They noted his early promise as a film maker in his own right and his subsequent demise, his involvement with drugs and pornography—possibly ritual murder, that being a subject still under investigation—and finally his violent death on the grounds of his father’s estate.

Ike read some of the stories. But the reports on the incident itself never seemed to make the right kind of sense to him. Preston Marsh and Hound Adams were mentioned only in passing. Preston was depicted as some dope-crazed biker, a psychotic Vietnam casualty. The killings, they thought, were drug-related, Preston perhaps the victim of a burn. Ike finally stopped reading them altogether. There was really only one item that interested him, that captured his attention. Hound Adams, it seemed, was survived by a single relative—a sister and father being now deceased—his mother, a Mrs. Hazel Adams of Huntington Beach. He read that notice numerous times. Once he even made the walk back down to Ocean Avenue and sat one more time on the stone wall that bordered the school. It was where he had sat at the beginning of the summer, and that he should be back here now was a kind of mystery to him. It was like a piece of something, some pattern that he could not quite grasp.

He did not see the old woman that day. He watched the faded stucco walls, the neatly trimmed shrubbery, the empty windows, and he imagined her in there, muttering beneath her breath, baking bread for visitors who did not arrive, waiting for phone calls that were not to be. He stayed there until a nearly unbearable sadness descended upon him. Then he rose and left.

PART V

45

They buried what they had been able to find of Preston Marsh on the twenty-fifth day of September. The funeral was held somewhere back of Long Beach in a desolate wasteland he had long ago put behind him. Ike made the trip alone, on a bus. He got off at the appropriate street and walked the remaining blocks to the cemetery. When it was over, he walked back again, boarded another bus and left without ever knowing for sure exactly which town he had been in. The towns all ran together out there, as near as he could tell, a labyrinth of bare stucco homes, train yards, and weedy lots. It was a land of shopping centers and billboards—a place so colorless and bleak that Ike wondered what he had ever found so tiresome about the desert.

It was Barbara who had phoned to tell him about the funeral. She had called the evening he’d come home from Mrs. Adams’s house. Her voice had sounded tinny and very far away over the phone. They had not talked for long. She had been in touch with Preston’s parents, and she thought Ike might want to know. When he asked her if she would come, there had been a pause, and then she had said that she didn’t know. He had looked for her upon reaching the cemetery but had not seen her. He could not say that he was surprised.

•   •   •

The funeral was not held in a church. It was a simple graveside service. Ike felt hot and uncomfortable in a suit he had purchased for twelve dollars in a Huntington Beach thrift store. There was little shade among the flat polished stones and bare grass. The sun was high in a gray sky, the silence occasionally shattered by a passing plane. This seemed to happen at fairly regular intervals, as if the graveyard lay beneath the traffic pattern of some nearby airport.

Ike had wondered about what to expect. There were fewer people than he had imagined. The great popularity Barbara had spoken of, that he had seen evidence of in the magazines, seemed to have faded with time. There were only a few, less than half a dozen, guys who looked to be about Preston’s age, who may have remembered another Preston, the young man who had put these wastelands behind him to carve out a new name for himself in the shadows of the old Huntington Beach pier. There were also a few older people—friends, Ike guessed, of Preston’s parents. The rest of the mourners were bikers, perhaps a dozen of them. Morris was among them and not once that afternoon did he or Ike get around to looking one another in the eye. The bikers had come with their colors flying and their machines sat behind them along the narrow gravel road that skirted the grass, chrome burning and hard to look at in the light of midday.

It was Preston’s father who spoke the words. And the first thing that struck Ike about the man was his voice. It wasn’t a preacher’s voice. At least it bore no resemblance to the voices of the preachers his grandmother used to listen to on the radio, and those were the only preachers he had ever heard. It was just an ordinary voice, and it was a tired voice. He was a big old man, taller even than Preston, though not as thick, but there was a hardness there, and a hardness in his voice, and when Ike looked at him, he could see the son.

The old man was dressed in a cheap-looking blue suit. He wore a dark tie and black shoes. His hair was thin and gray, mussed by the occasional gusts of wind that wafted over the hot squares of grass. He held a Bible in one hand. Both arms hung straight at his sides. He faced his ragged flock across the open grave of his son, and near his side the sleek gray casket caught fire, like the bikes on the road. “I feel it is my duty,” the old man said, and his voice cut through the grayness and the heat, “before God, to say some words. I will not judge my son now. Judgment belongs to the One who can read hearts. But I could not stand here today without a word to those of you who have come, his friends.” He stared into the blasted eyes of the mourners, and they stared back, with earrings sparkling and bearded faces pouring sweat, and Ike did not imagine that many of them had stood still for a sermon in quite some time.

“I do not mean to say much,” the old man went on. His hair rose with a fresh breeze and overhead a jet plane rumbled through the sky. He paused, waiting for the noise to subside. “I would only remind you of the words of John: ‘For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.’ Now this is the basis for judgment, that the Light has come into the world but men have loved the darkness.” He looked across the open grave at the Sons of Satan sweating on the grass. “We have been given a choice. I have put life and death before you, the blessing and the malediction.” The old man’s voice wavered for the first time. He bowed his head and stared into the chasm at his feet. Ike squirmed in his suit. The sweat dampened his collar and ran down his back. He was moved with a sudden pity for this old man. Preston had been his only son, and Ike wondered if the old man knew there had been a difference between that son and the ragged flock that stood before him now, if he knew that the wake of destruction left in Preston’s death had not been born of some simpleminded desire to fly in the face of convention, some loser’s desire to rule or ruin. Instead, it was born of a far deeper discontent, of a desire for something more like penance; Preston had worn those colors and tattoos like sackcloth and ashes. And Ike wondered as well if there had not perhaps been more of the father in Preston than either of them had ever known.

The old man spoke the last words with his head down, and the words were harder to hear. “Lord, Thou has been our place of dwelling. Thou has set our iniquities before Thee, our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance. For all our days are passed away in Thy wrath… .” There were other words too, but they were lost in the roar of another jet plane and in the screaming of a flock of crows chased from the trees.

•   •   •

When it was over, no one seemed to know exactly what to do. Preston’s father remained by the open grave. The small crowd stood on the grass, milling about. There was one guy Ike had seen earlier, some guy in his early twenties with a camera case over his shoulder and a camera in his hand, who was sort of standing around by himself and looking a little sheepish about taking pictures. Ike guessed maybe he was from one of the newspapers that had been covering the story. When the old man stopped talking and the skies were silent overhead, Ike could hear the soft click of the camera. There was something embarrassing in that sound and then one of the bikers threw a beer can. It came whistling and spraying foam, flashing momentarily in the sun as it missed the photographer’s head by a foot. Ike watched the young man holster his camera and walk quickly away across the grass. He tried, craning his neck against the itchy collar, to get a better look at the bikers. He had this idea that it was Morris who had thrown the can, but he could not be sure. He liked to think that it was, and had they been on speaking terms, Ike would have thanked him.

He continued to stand there, with the others, sweating and itching, before working up enough nerve to approach Preston’s father. It was something he wanted to do, for Preston. He wanted to tell the old man what he had been thinking, to put it into words. It didn’t work very well, though. It was not an easy thing to say, and he found himself stammering around as the old man looked down on him, a slightly puzzled look in his gray hawk eyes. And later, he wasn’t even sure exactly what he had said, something about how Preston had been different from the others, and something about how Preston had done some good there at the end, had saved a life, maybe two. He wasn’t sure how it came out, or even if he was glad that he had said it. He finally decided that he was. The old man had not spoken. He had stood by, patiently waiting for him to finish, then he had nodded and walked away. The last Ike saw of him, he was walking across the grass, his Bible still in one hand, his arm over the shoulders of a short, gray-haired woman Ike took to be Preston’s mother. There was a stiff breeze just then and Ike could see the old man’s cuffs snap about his ankles, his thin gray hair rise on his head. Ike stood alone near the grave and watched him go. He watched until still one more plane had passed in the sky. This one, however, passed silently, the sound of its distant engines lost in the roar of a dozen chopped hogs coming to life in the silence of the windswept cemetery.