Tapping the Source (5 page)

He wasted one more day staking out the Adams house on Ocean, still thinking that perhaps there were other people living there besides the old woman. There were not. The
H
turned out to stand for Hazel, and Hazel Adams lived alone. Her husband was dead and there was a son in Tulsa and a daughter in Chicago who never called. Ike learned all of this because he happened to be sitting around in front of the elementary school when Mrs. Adams crashed the three-wheel electric cart she drove. She was coming home from the market and rolled the machine trying to get it in the driveway. Ike saw it all and ran across the street to see if he could help. The old woman had escaped unscathed, however, and invited him in for a piece of banana bread. And that was how he learned about her family. Old Mrs. Adams, it seemed, was starved for affection. She spent her days thinking about her lost husband, her daughter who did not call, the son she never saw, baking banana bread for visitors who never came. She spoke of noise and pollution, of blue skies gone the color of coffee grounds, of elementary school children who smoked weed and fornicated beneath the shrubbery in her front yard. She warned Ike against the dangers of hitchhiking along the Coast Highway. A wealth of gruesome facts lay at her fingertips.

There were punk gangs, she said, high on angel dust and strange music waiting in the alleys to catch young girls, and boys like him, force them to carve swastikas into their own arms and legs, or set them on fire. Ike sat and listened. He watched as one more day slipped past him, melting with the sun beyond the dark wood of an antique dining table.

That evening, riding home on the bus, he was struck by a particularly depressing thought: He suddenly saw himself learning nothing. His savings would go for greasy food, a crummy room. His trip to Huntington Beach would turn out to be no more than some grotesque holiday, and in the end the desert would reclaim him. Had to be. He did not fit in here. Like it was not even close, and everything was moving much more slowly, and awkwardly, than he had imagined. This was not San Arco, not even King City.

•   •   •

He discovered a small cafe across the street from the pier, a strange sort of place frequented by both bikers and surfers. Inside, the two groups kept to separate ends of the building, glaring at one another over short white coffee mugs. The cafe made him nervous. He was very much aware of not belonging to either camp, but it was a good place to eavesdrop and the food was cheap. And it was in the cafe that he got his first break.

It was his fifth morning in the town and, as on the other mornings following his bus ride from H. Adams’s house, it had been hard to force himself out of bed, to fight a growing desire to give it up and split, to accept the fact that his coming had been a sham, that the kid in the Camaro had been right. But he had managed it. He had dragged his ass out of bed with the first light, then down to the Coast Highway and the cafe, looking for something, a word, a name, anything. And that was what he found, a name. He had just finished a breakfast of coffee and doughnuts and had gone to the head to take a leak, and that was where it happened, standing at the damn urinal, his dick in his hand, absently reading over the filth scratched into the walls, when two words suddenly jumped out at him. A name: Hound Adams, the letters scratched out of the metal partition that separated the urinal from the sink. There was nothing else, just the name.

Admittedly it was not a lot. But there was still a thin film of sweat on his forehead as he left the cafe and crossed the street. There was something about just seeing that name someplace besides the scrap of paper. It meant there really was a Hound Adams, somewhere. And with that discovery came a fresh idea. It hit him as he walked along the boardwalk, headed out to sea on the pier: What if he could surf? He wouldn’t have to do it well, just enough to hang out in the water. It made sense. He was too far away from things on the pier, and hanging out on the beach in street clothes didn’t work either. He had tried that, tried getting close to certain groups as they came out of the water, but he was too conspicuous, always collecting too many stares if he got too close. But if he could surf? If he was in the water with them, with a board to sit on, the whole shot? Shit yes. It was something to think about.

He thought about it all that morning, watching the small peaks take shape and break, and the more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea, until at last he admitted to himself that there was more to it than just getting closer to the action. There was something in the shape and movement of the waves, something in the polished green faces laced with silver while the moon hung still visible above the town. A person could lose himself there, he guessed, and imagined cool green caverns carved from the hollow of some liquid barrel. The thought seemed to add to the excitement he already felt, and he walked home quickly, with a new attention for the multitude of surf shops that lined the street, the new boards that seemed to him like sticks of colored candy shining behind sheets of plate glass.

•   •   •

He thought about it again that night. He remembered the time he had tried to ride the Knuckle. He remembered lying there in the sunlight, his blood forming a dark pool in the gravel while Gordon went for the pickup. He had not tried anything like it since, but there were no machines here, just the boards and the waves.

It was a long night, filled with half dreams and crazy images while the music of the apartment house shook the walls of his room and the oil well squeaked below him, and at some point he became aware of a new fear creeping among the others, something he had not considered before. It was his fifth night in town and the fear was connected to a new understanding of what giving up would mean, of what it would mean to blow his money, to slink back into San Arco. Because whatever else was here, there was along with it a certain energy that was unlike anything he had felt in the desert. There was a hunger in the air. At night he heard their parties. Girls smiled at him now along the boardwalk, above the sand where couples fucked in the shadows of the pier. And he did not want to leave. He wanted to belong. He thought of his uncle’s store, the busted-out screen door, the music that spilled from the radio and into the gravel lot, one country song after another until it was the same song, as long and tiresome as the wind out of King City and the desolate high places beyond, and he felt suddenly that perhaps he understood something now about that woman Gordon had once seen go, arm in arm with some candy ass, hooked on a promise.

As he remembered it, they had moved back to the desert, to his grandmother’s house, because his mother had gotten sick and needed a place to rest. What he could recall now of that time before San Arco was not much, a more or less shapeless set of memories connected to numerous apartments and cheap motels. Gordon had once told him that she had been trying to sell real estate or some damn thing. He didn’t know; but he knew they had lived out of a car for a while there, a beat-up old station wagon. What he remembered the most was the waiting. In the car. In countless offices. In the homes of strangers. In his mind the places they waited all had certain things in common. They were invariably hot and stuffy; they smelled. The odor had something to do with butt-choked ashtrays and air conditioning. It was Ellen who made the waiting bearable. She had always been there with him, had kept him entertained with games of her own invention, with stunts designed to annoy whatever adult was around to keep an eye on them. She was good that way. The waiting, he thought, had been easier for her. But later, the desert had been harder. He could still see her pacing up and down that hot dusty yard in back of the market like some caged cat and saying things like she hoped the woman was dead, that the dude had dumped her and that she had at last drunk herself to death in some foul room—this after they realized she was not coming back. Ellen had never forgiven their mother for that. She had never forgiven her for San Arco. “Of all the damn places,” she used to say. “Of all the fucking one-horse dead-end suckass places to be stuck.”

As for himself, the desert had been easier, he thought, at least in the beginning. In regard to his mother, however, his feelings were not so easy to sort out. There had been at first something like plain astonishment at the magnitude of her betrayal—an astonishment so large that somehow hatred did not enter in. Later there was a kind of embarrassment, a vague notion that some flaw in his own character had somehow made that betrayal possible in the first place. He was not certain what the flaw was, but he was sure others saw it, that for them his mother’s leaving was less of a mystery. He had never known much about that candy ass Gordon had spoken of, or where they had gone in that new convertible, but he guessed he could see now, in the darkness of this room, with this new place throbbing around him, how going back could be like dying. It was the first time he had seen it that way; and from that angle, the betrayal was somehow not so huge.

5

It was hot and sticky when he opened his eyes. He sat up in bed and immediately began to think of reasons for putting off his decision to buy a board. Then he took a look around the room. The place was a mess. His clothes stank. It was like the grotesque holiday he had imagined was taking shape around him, and the new fear swept back over him, blotting out everything else.

•   •   •

He was not sure how much a used board would cost. He slipped four twenties into his pocket and left the room.

It was a hot day, smell of summer in the air, sky clear, ocean flat and blue. In the distance he could make out the white cliffs of the island someone told him was twenty-six miles away. The wind was light, slightly offshore, standing up the waves, which were small and clean, like jewels in the sunlight.

The town was full of surf shops. Surf shops, thrift stores, and beer bars, in fact, seemed the principal enterprises of downtown Huntington Beach. He hung around the windows of half a dozen shops before picking one and going inside. The shop was quiet. The walls were covered with various kinds of surfing memorabilia: old wooden surfboards, trophies, photographs. There was a kid out front wiping down the new boards with a rag. Apart from the kid and Ike, the place seemed deserted. The kid ignored him and finally he drifted back outside and into another shop closer to the highway.

The second shop was filled with the same kind of music that he heard around the hotel: a hard, frantic sort of sound that was so different from anything he had ever heard in the desert. There were no memorabilia in this shop. The walls were covered with posters of punk bands. There was a pale blue board covered with small red swastikas hanging at the back of the shop. Near the front was a counter. There were a couple of young girls in very small bathing suits sitting up on the glass top and a couple of boys sitting behind it. They all looked at Ike as he walked in, but no one said anything. They all looked alike to Ike: sunburned noses, tanned bodies, sun-streaked hair. He went to the back of the shop and began looking over the used boards. Pretty soon one of the kids he had seen behind the counter walked up to him.

“Lookin’ for a board?” the kid asked.

“Something I can learn on,” Ike told him.

The kid nodded. He was wearing a thin string of white shells around his neck. He turned and headed down the rack, stopped and pulled out a board, laid it on the floor. Ike followed.

The kid knelt beside the board, tilted it up on one edge. “I can make you a good deal on this one.”

Ike looked at the board. The board looked like it had once been white, but was now a kind of yellow. It was long and thin, pointed at both ends. The kid stood up. “How do you like it?”

Ike knelt beside the board as the kid had done and tried to pretend he knew what he was looking for. Around him the frantic beat of the music filled the shop. He was aware of one of the girls dancing near the plate glass, her small tight ass wiggling beneath a bikini bottom. “This would be good to learn on?”

“Sure, man. This is a hot stick. And I can make you a good deal on it. You got cash?”

Ike nodded.

“Fifty bucks,” the kid said. “It’s yours.”

Ike ran his fingers along the side of the board. On the deck there was a small decal: a silhouette of a wave within a circle—the wave’s crest turning to flame—and beneath it, the words
Tapping the Source
. Ike looked up at the kid. The kid looked fairly bored with it all. He was staring back toward the front of the shop, watching the girl. “Fifty bucks,” he said again without looking at Ike. “You won’t find a better deal than that.”