Tapping the Source

1

Ike Tucker was adjusting the Knuckle’s chain the day the stranger came asking for him. It was a sunny day and the patch of dirt in back of the Texaco was hot beneath his feet. The sun was straight overhead and dancing in the polished metal.

“Got a visitor,” Gordon told him.

Ike put down the wrench and looked at his uncle. Gordon was wearing a greasy pair of coveralls and a Giants baseball cap. He was leaning on a doorjamb and staring across the dirt from the back porch. “Gone deaf on me now too?” he asked. He meant deaf as well as dumb. “I said you got a visitor, somebody wants to talk about Ellen.”

Ike brushed his hands on his pants and went up the step, past Gordon and into the building, which was both a gas station and a small market. He could feel Gordon behind him, tall and round, hard as a stump, following past the shelves of canned goods and the counter where half a dozen old men twisted on their stools to stare after him, and he knew that when he was gone they would still be watching, their sorry faces turned toward the screen doors and the cool sagging porch where the flies found shelter from the heat.

There was a kid waiting for him in the gravel drive that circled the pumps, leaning against the side of a white Camaro. Ike guessed the kid was close to his own age, maybe seventeen, or eighteen. Ike was eighteen. He would be nineteen before the summer ended, but people often took him for being younger. He was not tall, maybe five eight, and skinny. Only a month before, a highway patrolman had stopped him on the way into King City and asked to see his driver’s license. He had not been out of the desert since he was a boy and outsiders generally made him self-conscious. The kid in the drive was an outsider. He wore a pair of pale blue cord jeans and a white shirt. A pair of expensive-looking dark glasses had been pushed back to rest above his brow in a mass of blond curls. There were two surfboards strapped to the roof of the Camaro.

Ike picked a rag off the stack of newspapers by the front door and finished wiping his hands. The stranger had already managed to draw a small crowd. There were a couple of young boys, Hank’s kids from across the street, looking over the car, together with Gordon’s two dogs, a pair of large rust-colored mongrels that had come to sniff the tires. Some of the old men from the counter had followed Ike outside and were lining up on the porch behind him, staring into the heat.

The kid did not look comfortable. He stepped away from the car as Ike came down the steps, Gordon following. “I’m looking for Ellen Tucker’s family,” he said.

“You found it. Here he is, the whole shootin’ match.” It was Gordon who spoke.

Ike could hear a couple of the old men behind him chuckle. Someone else cleared his throat and spat into the gravel lot.

Ike and the kid stared at one another. The kid had a bit of a blond mustache and there was a thin gold chain around his neck. “Ellen said something about a brother.”

“I’m her brother.” Ike still held the rag. He was aware that his palms had begun to sweat. Ellen had been gone for nearly two years now and Ike had not heard from her or seen her since the day she left. It was not the first time she had run away, but she was of age now, a year older than Ike; it had not figured that she would return to San Arco.

The kid stared at Ike as if he was confused about something. “She said that her brother was into bikes, that he owned a chopper.”

Gordon laughed out loud at that. “He’s got a bike,” he said. “Right out there in back; shiniest damn bike in the county.” He paused to chortle at his own joke. “Hasn’t been ridden but once, though. Go on an’ tell him about that one, Low Boy.” He was addressing himself to Ike.

Gordon’s younger brother had a bike shop in King City where Ike worked on the weekends. Ike’s bike was a ’36 Knucklehead he’d put together on his own, from scratch. On his only attempt to ride it, however, he had dumped it in the gravel lot and driven a foot peg halfway through his ankle.

Ike ignored Gordon’s request. He continued to watch the kid, thinking that it was like Ellen to make up some damn story. She never could tell anything straight. Things were too boring that way, she had said. And she was a good storyteller, but then she had always been good at just about everything except staying out of trouble.

“You’re her only brother?” the kid asked, still looking somewhat dismayed. He watched as one of Gordon’s dogs raised a leg to piss on a rear tire, then looked back at Ike.

“I told you he’s the whole shootin’ match,” Gordon said. “If you’ve got something to say about Ellen Tucker, let’s hear it.”

The kid rested his hands on his hips. He stared for a moment back down that stretch of two-lane that led away from town, back toward the interstate. It was the direction Ike had looked the day he saw his sister go, and he stared in that direction now, as if perhaps Ellen Tucker would suddenly materialize out of the dust and sunlight, a suitcase tugging at her arm, and walk back to him from the edge of town.

“Your sister was in Huntington Beach,” the kid said at last, as if he’d just made up his mind about something. “Last summer she went to Mexico. She went down there with some guys from Huntington. The guys came back. Your sister didn’t. I tried to find out what happened.” He paused, looking at Ike. “I couldn’t. What I’m saying is the guys your sister went with are not the type of people you want to fuck around with. I was beginning to pick up some bad vibes.”

“Just what do you mean by bad vibes?” Gordon asked.

The kid paused again but allowed Gordon’s question to go unanswered. “I split,” he said. “I was afraid to wait around any longer, but I knew Ellen had family out here. I’d heard her talk about a brother who was into bikes and I thought…” He let his voice trail off and ended with a shrug of the shoulders.

“Shit.” The word came from Gordon, spat into the dust. “And you thought her big bad brother was going to do something about it. You came to the wrong place, pardner. Maybe you should take your story to the cops.”

The kid shook his head. “Not hardly.” He pulled the shades down over his eyes and turned to get into his car. One of the dogs jumped up, putting its paws on the door, and the kid shooed it down.

Ike left Gordon behind and walked across the gravel to the open window of the car. The heat on his back and shoulders was intense. He stood at the window and found himself reflected in the kid’s shades. “Is that all,” he asked. “Is that all you were going to say?”

The glasses swung away and the kid stared at his dashboard. Then he reached for the glove box and pulled out a scrap of paper. “I was going to give somebody this,” he said. “The names of the guys she went with.” He looked at the scrap for a moment and shook his head, then passed it to Ike. “I guess you may as well have it.”

Ike glanced at the paper. The sunlight made it hard to read. “And how would I find these people?”

“They surf the pier, in the mornings. But look, man, you’d be stupid to go by yourself. I mean, you start asking around and you’re liable to get yourself in trouble. These are not lightweight people, all right? And whatever you do, don’t let that old guy talk you into calling the police. They won’t do shit, and you’ll regret it.” He stopped and Ike could see small lines of perspiration beneath the dark glasses. “Look,” the kid said once more. “I’m sorry. I mean I probably shouldn’t have even come out here. I just thought that from what your sister said…” His voice faded.

“You thought things would be different.”

The kid started his engine. “You’d probably be better off to just wait it out. Maybe she will turn up.”

“Do you think so?”

“Who knows? But unless you can get some real help…” He shrugged again. And then he was gone and Ike was standing in the Camaro’s dust, watching the white shape of the car shrinking against the heat waves. And when there was nothing left but that patch of sunlight and dust, the ever-present mirage that marked the edge of town, he turned and walked back across the gravel to the store.

The old men were all out on the porch now, whispering in the shade and sucking down Budweisers. Gordon caught Ike’s arm as he started past. “I’ve known all along something like this was coming,” he said. “That girl’s been headed for a bad end since she learned how to walk. Shit, the way she lit outta here, hitchhiking, wearing those tight jeans all up her ass. What the hell can you expect? We won’t see her again, boy. Make up your mind to it.”

Gordon released his grip and Ike jerked away. He went through the store and stood on the back porch, looking down into the yard where he and his sister once scratched their names into the ground. They had dug out the letters with sticks and then Ellen had poured gas into the letters and set them on fire and the fire had gotten away from them and burned down Gordon’s pepper tree and scorched the back of the store before it was put out. But his sister had said that it was all right, that her only regret had been that the fire had not taken the store and the rest of the fucking town along with it. He could hear her saying that, like it was yesterday, and when he closed his eyes he could still feel the heat from those flames upon his skin. He went down the steps, into the grease-stained dirt, and began to collect his tools.

2

He told them that night that he was leaving, that he was going to look for Ellen. “What’ll you go on?” Gordon wanted to know. “The Harley?”

They were seated at the kitchen table. Ike listened to Gordon’s laughter, to the incessant rattle of the ancient Sears, Roebuck cooler. The greasy scent of fried chicken circled his head. “Someone should go,” he said.

His grandmother squinted at him over a pair of rhinestone-studded glasses. She was a frail, shrunken woman. She was not well. Each year she seemed to grow smaller. “I don’t know why,” she said, making it plain by the tone of her voice that she thought otherwise. Ike did not meet her eyes. He pushed himself away from the table and retired to his room to count his money.

Nearly seven hundred dollars there, crammed into a rusted coffee can. But what had it been? Three years now of working on bikes, and there had not been many places to spend it. The bookstore in King City, the lone theater that two thirds of the time ran films in Spanish instead of English, the pinball machine Hank had gotten for the Texaco. And lately he had begun giving the old lady something for rent. There would have been a lot more if he had not sunk so much into the Harley. He spread the money on his bed, counting it several times in the dim yellow light. He packed a single suitcase and went out the back way.

It was dark outside now. He walked along that strip of barbed-wire fence that separated the town from the desert. There was country music spilling out a window at Hank’s place together with a wedge of soft yellow light and when he looked past the fence and into the dark shape of the hills, he could smell summer waiting in the desert. One of Gordon’s dogs came out from under the house and followed him to the store.

His plan was to drink a six-pack, get sleepy, and wait for the bus out of King City. He took a six-pack of tall cans, left some money and a note by the register, and went into the backyard. He pulled the canvas tarp off of the Knuckle and sat with his back against the wall of the market, watching the bike gleam in the moonlight. He supposed he could trust Gordon to keep an eye on it until he came back. Christ, he didn’t have the slightest idea of what he was going to do, or how long it would take. He supposed that when someone took your sister you did something about it. He supposed that was what families were for. Ellen’s bad luck was that he was the only family she had.

It was quiet in back of the market, the music out of Hank’s sounding soft and far away. He shut his eyes and waited and he was able to pick out the distant clanking of a freight as it climbed the grade into King City and he thought of the times he and Ellen had sat in this same spot, listening to the same sounds, imagining there was some promise in the sound of those trains, because it was the sound of motion, of going places, and he imagined her sitting with him now, head thrown back against the wall, eyes half-closed, beer can resting on a skinny leg. He thought about how it had always pissed off the old woman that Gordon had let them drink beer, but then most things pissed off the old woman.

As he listened the train sounds grew faint and disappeared and someone shut off the music so there was just the silence, that special kind of silence that comes to the desert, and he knew that if he waited there would come a time, stars fading, slim band of light creeping on the horizon, when the silence would grow until it was unbearable, until it was as if the land itself were about to break it, to give up some secret of its own. He remembered the first time that feeling had come to him. It was summer and he had been sick with a summer cold, feverish and in bed, and he had gotten up somewhere in the middle of the night and gone outside, in bedclothes and sneakers, to stand at the strip of barbed wire that marked the edge of Gordon’s land. He had been hoping for a breeze, but there was none to be had. There was only the emptiness, the black shapes of distant mountains hard against a black sky, and an overpowering stillness that was suddenly like some living thing pressing down upon him, something that belonged to the night and to the land, something to run from. And he had, back into the house, to Ellen’s room instead of his own. But when he had tried to tell her, she had only laughed and said it was his fever, that he was afraid of too many things, afraid of the desert, afraid of the night, afraid of the other boys in King City.

On another occasion she had told him that he would rot in the desert, freeze up here like some rusted engine, like the old woman herself, his nose stuck in a fucking book. And he guessed now that he had always been afraid of that, afraid of staying and yet afraid of going, too, just like he was still afraid of that crazy time of night and a voice he had never heard. Jesus. It was like him to be a chickenshit and her not to be. It was ass-backward that he should be going after her and not the other way around.

He got about half of the six-pack down before quitting, replacing the tarp, and making the walk down the strip of two-lane toward the edge of town, toward that place where he’d seen the white Camaro vanish in the mirage of high noon, where his sister had vanished as well, swallowed by that patch of sunlight and dust and never seen again.

There was no mirage waiting for him that night. There were only the edges of the desert, flat and hard in the moonlight, and the road that was like some asphalt ribbon at his feet, and the sound of his own blood pumping in his ears. And then he was aware of the approaching figure, Gordon, lumbering up the old road, visible for a moment in the last of the town’s two streetlights, then fading into shadow, but his footsteps getting louder until at last he stood alongside his nephew, and the two of them, both half drunk, squinted at one another in the moonlight.

Gordon had a fresh bottle of Jim Beam with him. He pulled it out of his hip pocket and brought it down hard on the heel of his hand, his customary way of cracking the seal.

“So you’re really going.”

Ike nodded.

Gordon nodded too, squinted down his nose at Ike like he wanted a good look at him, then took a drink from the bottle. “Well, maybe it’s time,” he said. “You’re out of school, and you’ve got a trade. Hell, that’s more than I had when I was your age. Kind of figured you might stick with those bikes, though. Jerry says he’s never seen a kid pick up tools the way you have. What do you want me to tell him?”

“I’ll be back.”

Gordon laughed and took another drink. The laughter had a “like hell you will” ring to it. “Last place I saw your old lady was right here. You know that?” Gordon asked, then tore up a bit of dirt with the toe of his boot while Ike shook his head and mentally added his mother to the list of those swallowed by that patch of sunlight. “Yeah. Said she would be back for you kids in the fall. Shit, I took one look at that candy ass she was leavin’ with and knew that was a lie.”

Ike had been five years old that summer. He’d never known his father at all, just some guy his mother had lived with off and on for a couple of years.

“I’m not your old man,” Gordon said. “And I’ve never tried to be, but I’ve given you kids a roof, and it’s still here if you want to come back. But I wouldn’t get my hopes up about that sister of yours. She was wild, Ike, like her old lady. She could’ve gotten herself into anything. You understand? Don’t stick your neck out too far looking for her.”

Ike waited. He was not used to Gordon taking an interest in what he did. There had been a time when that was what he wanted. Now? He guessed maybe that time had passed. Still, Gordon had come. The trouble was, Ike could think of nothing to say. He watched Gordon take another drink, and then looked toward that place where the lights of King City barely managed to put a pale frosting on a piece of desert sky.

As he waited he thought about what Gordon had said, about Ellen being wild, like her old lady had been wild, and he thought about their mother. He could not remember much about her now. There was one picture—what he was certain was the only one of all of them, together. They were seated on the steps of his grandmother’s house, himself on one side, Ellen on the other, Ellen with one stick of an arm bent over their mother’s shoulders, the other raised and extended to give the bird to the camera, all of them squinting into the sun so that it was hard to see their faces. What he mainly remembered about the picture—aside from Ellen flipping off Gordon—was his mother’s hair, thick and black, alive in the sunlight. He seemed to remember that she was given to sitting for long periods of time, brushing it in rhythmic strokes, or arranging it with a pair of combs that were made of ivory and carved into the shapes of long slender alligators. And that summer, before she left, she had given the combs to Ellen—the only things she had ever given either of them, as far as he could remember. The combs had become one of Ellen’s prize possessions, even up until the time she left. And it seemed to him now that she had worn them that day as well, that they had gone with her into the heat waves. He shut his eyes to remember and the beer made him dizzy. He was suddenly sorry that he had begun dredging for memories. It was generally a depressing exercise and he should have known better. Others came now, but he fought them off. He focused his attention on the gravel between his feet and waited for the hum of a Greyhound to fill the silence.

He was still waiting when he became aware that one more person had joined them on the street. Gordon must have noticed as well because he turned once to look back over his shoulder toward that place where the streetlamp began to fail among the oaks. She would not step into the light but remained among the shadows, and there was something about seeing her there, in just that way, that made him think of them all together—his grandmother, his mother, his sister. For there had been times when he had seen both his mother and his sister in the old woman’s face, in the certain way she sometimes turned her head, in the line of her jaw. The likeness was generally very fleeting, like a shadow passing over barren ground. Just what had made it barren—time, sickness—he could not say. He supposed that getting religion had not helped.

She waited until the headlights of the bus were swimming among the stunted branches before coming forward—small and stiff, like she had been whittled out of something hard, like she belonged with the wind-bent trees that had been planted there to mark the edge of town. And her voice, when she raised it, was like a weapon, the jagged edge of a broken bottle. The voice seemed to cut easily through the cool air, the deep drone of the engines. But Ike was not inclined to stay and listen. He moved quickly up the steps and then back along the narrow aisle, sucking down great lungfuls of stale recycled air, avoiding the eyes of the other passengers, some of whom had begun craning their necks for a look at the commotion outside. But it seemed to him as he waited, even as they began to roll away and the lights began to move and darken, that he could still hear her very clearly, and that she was cursing them both, him for going, Gordon for letting him, that she was bearing witness and quoting Scripture. What was it? Something like Leviticus 20:17, perhaps—that being one of her favorites: “And if a man shall take his sister, his father’s daughter, or his mother’s daughter, and see her nakedness, and she see his nakedness; it is a wicked thing; and they shall be cut off in the sight of their people.”

3

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.

4

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.”

It was the cheapest board Ike had yet seen. “All right,” he said, “I’ll take it.”

“All right.” The kid picked up the board and headed for the counter.

Ike stood by the cash register as the kid rang up the sale. He was very much aware of one of the girls staring at him, a kind of half smile on her face. The music was loud. The sunlight was coming through the glass and the open door, burning the side of his face. When the kid had stuffed Ike’s money into a box, he pulled a couple of colored cubes out from under the counter and pushed them at Ike.

“What are these?”

“Wax.”

The girl on the glass made a face. “You gave him Cool Waters,” she said. “I think he needs Sex Wax.”

The other boy chuckled. The kid who had made the sale pulled out a round piece of wax and thumped it down on top of the cubes. “You rub it on the board before you go out,” he said.

Ike nodded. He had remembered seeing surfers wax their boards. He slipped the wax into the pocket of his jeans and picked up the board. “Rip ’em up,” he heard one of the girls say as he went back outside, into the brilliant light. He heard one of the boys laugh, and he had not guessed that buying a board could turn out to be such a humiliating experience. Well, fuck them, he thought; the price had still been good. He adjusted the board beneath his arm and headed up the sidewalk, deciding as he went that the din of traffic was preferable to the music of the shop.

Back in his room he used a pair of scissors on one of his two pair of jeans. He cut them off just above the knees and put them on. He picked up his board, which barely fit into the small room, and tried to get a look at himself in the mirror. One thing was certain and that was he didn’t look like many of the other surfers he’d seen around town. His hair was too short, and his body looked white and frail against the dark material of the jeans. He shrugged, swung a towel around his neck, nursed the board out of the room, and headed down the hall.

He was coming down the steps and onto the shabby strip of grass when he nearly bumped into one of the girls who had come to his room looking for papers. It was the tall, athletic-looking one, and the sunlight was dancing off her strawberry-blond hair and her white tank top. He felt somewhat embarrassed, naked, in the brilliant light. He tried to hide as much of himself as possible behind the board.

“You a surfer?” she asked him.

He shrugged. “Trying to learn.” He studied her face for signs of a put-down. Her cheekbones were rather high and wide, her brows delicate and nicely arched. There was something about her face, perhaps it was the arch of the brows, that gave her something of a bored, haughty look. But somehow that expression did not carry over into her eyes, which seemed rather small and bright and looked directly into his own. There was a bit of a smile on her face and he decided that it was not like the smiles on the girls in the shop. He went down the sidewalk and turned to look back. She was still standing in the same spot, watching him. “Have fun,” she called. He smiled at her and started away, headed for Main Street and the Pacific Ocean.

6

The beach was crowded, the sun bright, but the breeze at his back was cool, and as he stood in the wet sand and felt the Pacific Ocean touch his feet for the first time, sending ribbons of coldness up his legs, he began to see why many of the surfers wore wet suits. Still, he did not hesitate. He had this feeling that every person on the beach was watching. He waded into the white water, stepped almost at once into some kind of hole and felt his nuts shrivel as the water rushed past his waist. He pulled himself onto his board and began to paddle.

It didn’t take him long to discover that waves which looked small from the pier got much bigger when you were looking at them from sea level. Getting out was harder than he had expected. For one thing, he kept sliding off the fucking board. He was trying to paddle as he had seen the others do, stroking one arm at a time, but just when he would get himself going in a straight line, a wall of white water would hit him, knock the board sideways, and he would slip off and have to start all over again. His arms and shoulders tired quickly, and when he turned back to the beach to see what kind of progress he was making, it appeared he was no farther out than when he had started.

The point at which the waves rose in smooth hills was growing more elusive by the moment. Still, he kept digging away, his breath coming harder, his strokes becoming weaker. Suddenly, however, the ocean seemed to smooth out, to spread itself in front of him like a huge lake. He dug in for all he was worth and before long he was bobbing with the other surfers in the lineup.

His face tingled from the exertion and his lungs ached. Other surfers sat straddling their boards, looking toward the horizon. Some regarded him with what seemed a quizzical eye. It was amazing how different things were out here compared with what it was like inside. It was peaceful and smooth, the way he had imagined it. A gentle ground swell lifted and lowered them. A pelican flew nearby, skimming the surface of the water. A gull cried above him and the sunlight moved on the water. In the distance he could make out the white flecks of sails and the colors on the distant cliffs of the island.

He tried sitting up and straddling the board the way most of the other surfers were doing. His, however, seemed to tip drastically at the slightest movement. He fell off twice, making loud splashes and drawing looks from those sitting closest to him.

Suddenly, from all along the line of surfers, he began to hear hoots and whistles. He looked outside to see a new group of waves rolling up into long smooth lines. These waves seemed much bigger to him than the others. He struck out for the horizon, paddling now out of fear, afraid the waves would break on top of him, that he would lose his board; he felt too tired out and cold to swim for it. The first wave reached him. He paddled up the face, popped over the crest only to see a second wave even larger than the first rolling toward him. He dug in once more, paddling with arms gone to rubber. To his left and slightly ahead of him another surfer suddenly stopped paddling and swung his board around, pointing it back toward the beach. Ike didn’t know what to do. Not only was he apparently going to be hit by the wave, the other guy was now sliding down the face straight toward him.

At the last second, just as the wave was beginning to lift his board, he tried swinging it around, too. Out of the rush and spray of exploding white water, he heard the other surfer yell. Somehow he’d gotten caught sideways in the top of the wave and he was going over.

He came up gasping for air, his arms flailing about him. He was sure his board had gone into the beach, but when he looked over his shoulder he saw it floating only a few yards behind him. How that had happened was a mystery, but he was greatly relieved and began to swim toward it. As he reached the board he noticed the other surfer paddling toward him, the same guy he’d been caught in the wave with.

Ike clung to the side of his board. Maybe the other guy was checking to see if he was all right. He tried to muster some kind of grin but his face felt cold and numb and then he got a good look at the surfer’s face and realized something was very wrong. He tried to say something, but he never got the chance. He’d no sooner opened his mouth than the guy hit him. The other surfer was lying on the deck of his board, so the punch didn’t have a lot of leverage but it stung anyway. Ike tried to pull himself up on his board, but the guy was punching at him again. One punch landed on Ike’s shoulder, another caught him flush on the ear. Everything seemed to be happening at once. He was disoriented from his spill, the cold water seemed to swim in his head, the other surfer was everywhere. Later, when Ike tried to remember exactly what the guy had looked like, it was all just a blur, a red face, white fists, the pain in his ear. And then a wave rescued him. A wall of white water caught him and swept him toward the beach. The board tipped over again, but he hung on. When he resurfaced, he found himself practically on the beach and the other surfer gone.

He didn’t know how many people were watching him as he trudged out of the shallows; he supposed they all were. He supposed everyone on the beach had seen him make a fool of himself, had seen him get punched out and washed in like a drowned rat. He sat in the wet sand, his back to the beach, his eyes fixed on the horizon where the waves still sparkled in the sunlight. He had certainly blown that, blown it damn near as badly as he’d blown trying to ride the Knuckle. But he was too worn-out even to think much about it. He felt somehow betrayed but was not exactly sure by what.

He sat that way for some time, afraid to turn around, to walk back through the people who may have seen what happened. He tried to get his body to stop shaking. And yet he was afraid to stay there too long. He was worried the guy in the water was going to come in and finish kicking his ass. So finally he got up. He took one more look out to sea, where others glided effortlessly, dropping and climbing on the faces of the small waves, a fraternity whose membership he had been denied.

The board was heavy beneath his arm, but he tried to assume some semblance of dignity as he plodded through the warm sand. At last the board grew too heavy to carry and so he let the nose drop to drag along in the sand behind him, no longer giving a shit about how he looked. And by the time he got to the asphalt near the pier, he had begun to feel like he was going to puke, or pass out; he could not tell which. He sat to rest on a curbstone in the sun, and that was when he saw the bikes for the second time.

He was certain it was the same group of bikes he had seen on his first day in town. There were more of them now, but he recognized the Knuckle, and the engine was still missing. He was sitting only a few yards away from them. The sunlight was blinding as it jumped off chromed forks and sissy bars. He could still feel his pulse in his ear. He dabbed at it with his fingers and found a little blood, but everything was still pretty numb. He didn’t suppose he was hurt very badly.

He had been sitting there for a couple of minutes, his board at his feet, when he began to pick out the voices above the roar of the engines. “I thought you fucking tuned it,” one yelled, and Ike saw the owner of the Knuckle swinging himself off the bike to stand in the parking lot.

“I did tune it, man.”

“Then why is it still fucking up?” the rider wanted to know. He moved around to the side of the bike, away from the others, and Ike got a better look at him. He was big, taller even than Gordon, not so thick perhaps, but wider across the shoulders. And his arms were sure as hell bigger. Biggest damn arms Ike had seen, bigger than any of the guys around Jerry’s shop. And he had more tattoos than anyone around the shop, too. There was a big American eagle tattooed on one shoulder with a coiled snake coming out of it some way and winding its way clear down to his forearm, where it wrapped itself around his wrist like a bracelet. On the other arm there was a man’s head, like maybe the head of a Christ because it wore what looked like a crown of thorns, and there were rays coming out of the thorns and spreading up into his shoulder, where they turned into lizards and birds. And along his forearms and hands, in between the tattoos that had come out of parlors, there were others, what he’d heard Jerry call jailhouse tattoos, the kind you did yourself with a penknife and ink. The guy was dressed in a grimy pair of jeans and had on a set of black broken-down motorcycle boots that looked thick and heavy enough to kick even a Harley to pieces. Up top he wore a faded tan-colored tank top that looked too small and above that he wore a pair of gold-rimmed aviator shades and a red work bandanna tied around his head. His hair was black, combed straight back and long enough to cover a collar, held in place by the bandanna, and there was a diamond stickpin in one ear. Ike could see it catching the light along with the thin gold rims of the shades.

The biker was standing only a few yards away from where Ike sat and when he bent down to take a look at the engine, Ike could see how the dark hair was beginning to recede just a bit above the red cloth. The guy squatted down, peering into the engine, but Ike could tell by the way he moved that he didn’t really know what he was looking for. The other bikers sat on their machines and watched. Suddenly the guy stood up. He did it a bit too fast, though, and wobbled around some so that Ike could see he was fairly well pasted. “God damn it,” he shouted at no one in particular, and Ike could see a couple of the other bikers wearing grins. All of a sudden, though, the guy raised his fist and brought it down on the fuel tank. The blow didn’t look like it had traveled very far, but a good-sized dent appeared in the black-lacquered tank and the smiles Ike had noticed only moments before disappeared. He heard somebody say, “Shit,” and the biker closest to the Knuckle walked his own bike farther away, as if he were expecting some sort of explosion. “God damn it to hell.” The owner of the Knuckle shook his head, swayed a bit, then paced back to the far side of the bike and stood staring down on it, his aviator shades flashing in Ike’s direction, so that for a moment Ike had the feeling that the biker was looking past the bike and staring right at him.

“It’s the carburetor,” Ike said, and was surprised at the sound of his own voice. There followed a moment of silence in which half a dozen shaggy heads swiveled in his direction.

“The what?”

“The carburetor.”

The biker put his hands on his hips and walked back around the bike to get a better look. He sort of turned his face up into the sun and laughed out loud. He pointed at Ike, then looked back toward his friends. “What’s this, Morris, your brother?”

The others laughed.

Ike shifted his butt on the curb. “I can fix it for you if you’ve got a screwdriver.”

The biker just looked at him. He pushed his shades up and over the bandanna so they rested on his hair.

“Shit,” somebody said. “I wouldn’t let him near it.”

The owner of the Knuckle raised his hand. “What if I do have a screwdriver?” he asked. “What are you going to do if you fuck it up?”

“I won’t fuck it up.”

The biker grinned. “Come over here, Morris. Bring your screwdriver and see how it’s done.”

A bulky-looking biker with blond hair walked over and tossed Ike a screwdriver. He tossed him a sullen look, too. “Don’t fuck nothin’,” he said.

Ike left his board at the curb and knelt alongside the big engine, inhaled the familiar hot odors of fuel and metal. It took him about three minutes to adjust the mixture. “There it is,” he said. “And I can take that dent out of the tank for you, too.”

The biker stared at him and Ike could not tell if he was pissed or not. He swung himself up on the bike and roared off down the stretch of asphalt that ran away from the pier. Ike waited with the others. He was feeling better now; he had stopped shaking. He did not look at the other bikers, but stared into the heat waves at the end of the lot and waited for the Knuckle to come back. A few minutes later it returned. Ike listened for the miss but couldn’t pick it out.

“Fuck me in the ass,” the biker yelled above the engine. “It’s runnin’ like a charm. The kid’s a better mechanic than you are, Morris.”

Morris just walked over and got his screwdriver. He spat on the ground dangerously close to Ike’s foot and swaggered back to his bike.

The Knuckle’s owner shut down his engine and got off. “About that dent,” he said, “how much?”

“The bodywork, the paint, the whole shot,” Ike figured quickly. “Fifty bucks.”

The biker looked back at the others. “Not bad.” He turned back to Ike. “You live around here?”

“I’m staying over on Second Street, at the Sea View. It’s at the corner of…”

“That dump? Yeah, I know where it is. Where you from?”

“You ever hear of San Arco?”

“That dump? Yeah, I heard of San Arco. Fucking one-horse desert town in the middle of nothin’. Where’d you learn to work on bikes?”

“I’ve got an uncle with a shop.”

The biker was silent for a moment, then took a couple of steps toward Ike. “What the fuck happened to your ear?”

Ike shrugged. “I got hit.”

“Yeah. Fist city, huh.” The guy bent down for a closer look and Ike suddenly found himself staring into this big square face only about a foot away from his own and he was noticing all sorts of details: the half-dozen small scars scattered above one eyebrow, three-day beard you could see would be dark black like his hair, and thick, if he let it grow, nose a little flat and crooked from being broken too many times. It was a tough face, the kind of face you’d expect to go with those tattooed arms and heavy boots, but there was something else there he had not expected. It was the kind of face you’d expect to hold a set of eyes like black marbles, dead and mean like a snake’s, the kind of eyes that could smoke you on the spot. But the eyes were all wrong somehow, as if they’d lost track of the body they were in. They were this very pale shade of blue, not flat and hard at all, and there was something disconcerting about it. There was something about the expression that went with them that was not quite right either, but he could not put his finger on what it was.

The biker looked from Ike to the surfboard. He knelt beside it and put a hand on the deck. “This is your board?”

Ike said that it was. He could smell the sour scent of whiskey on the guy’s breath, and it seemed to him that as the biker looked over the board a new expression crept into his face, an odd expression, as if he were about to ask something else but changed his mind, and then the expression was gone. “So you’re a pretty hot surfer?” the biker asked.

“I’m just trying to learn.”

“On this?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s a gun, that’s what’s wrong with it. You don’t learn to surf on a gun, it’s like a very specialized board. Shit, you could tackle twenty-foot Sunset on this thing. Where’d you get it?”

Ike pointed across the street. Behind the biker he could sense some of the others starting to get restless. “Come on, Preston,” somebody said. “Let’s split, man.”

Preston ignored them. He stood up and squinted across the street. “That shop next door to Tom’s?”

Ike nodded.

“It figures. The fucking punks.” He raised his hands over his head and shouted toward the highway. “The stinking town is full of fucking punks.”

“Come on, Preston,” one of the bikers said once more. “Let’s split. I told Marv we’d be over there by one.”

“Pisses me off,” Preston said. “Town’s full of fucking jive-ass punks.”

“Fuck it, let’s go.”

Suddenly Preston whirled on the others. “You fuck it, man, you go. I got some business to attend to.”

“Man…”

“I said split.”

“Come on, man, he’s on his ass.”

“Fuck it if I’m on my ass. You go, I’ll meet you over there.”

There were some more words, more grins, a few groans. The bikes circled around in the lot and zoomed off into the highway, the roar of their engines soon lost in the hum of traffic. Preston watched them go, then looked back at Ike. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Ike.”

“Okay, Ike. You did me a favor today. Now I’m gonna do you one.”

About fifteen minutes later Ike was standing on the sidewalk at the intersection of the Coast Highway and Main with a brand-new surfboard tucked under his arm. He wouldn’t quickly forget the feeling he had walking back into that surf shop with Preston by his side. And he wouldn’t quickly forget the expression on the kid’s face when he saw them coming. It was the same kid who had sold Ike the board, only this time he wasn’t grinning. He wasn’t grinning when he saw them come in and he sure as hell wasn’t grinning when they left. What he was doing when they left was picking up all the boards Preston had piled all over the floor in his search for just the right one. That and probably trying to figure out how he would explain to his boss how he had come to sell a two hundred dollar board for fifty.

Back at the Sea View apartments, Preston hung around for a few minutes explaining to Ike why his new board was the kind he wanted to learn on. “See how wide it is. See how it’s wide here in the tail block, too. That gives it stability. This one won’t keep wanting to tip on you like the other one did.”

“You must surf a lot,” Ike said.

“Shit.” Preston stood up and pulled his shades back over his eyes. “Once upon a time,” he said. “No more. I used to surf the pier year round. No leashes, no wet suits. A good winter swell and maybe six guys in the water. Place is a zoo now. Every faggot punk and his brother’s out there and they all want to be hot.” He suddenly turned and sauntered off toward his bike. He swung himself down on the stick and kicked the big engine to life. “What about my fuel tank?” he asked over the noise. “When do you want to do it? I’ll fix it so you can use Morris’s compressor.”

Ike shrugged. “Anytime.”

Preston nodded. “Later,” he said, and spun the Knuckle in a kind of a brodie across what was left of the Sea View’s lawn, chunks of dirt and tiny yellow flowers flying into the air behind him. Ike watched the muscles bulging beneath those jailhouse tattoos, the dark hair and red bandanna rising on the wind, the sunlight on metal. He could hear the engine for a long time after the bike was out of sight. He looked down the street past the short drab buildings and weedy lots, the palm trees just beginning to stir in the wind that had shifted, was no longer offshore but from the sea and carried with it the smell of salt. He walked back to his new board. He knelt beside it as Preston had done, running his fingers along the smoothly rounded rails. It was probably silly, he thought, but there was something about that first board that he sort of missed. This board was flat and round, like a big ice-cream stick. The first had been lean and mean. He had liked that decal, too, the wave with its flaming crest and the words Tapping the Source. He didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, but he liked the way it sounded.

7

The first time Ellen ran away, she was ten years old. She took Ike with her. They started out in the morning with lunches she had packed in brown paper bags, headed in what she guessed was the general direction of San Francisco. They got as far as the ruins of an old glass factory somewhere on the far side of King City. They spent the night among hills of sand and walls of corrugated tin. It was summer and the air was warm. They sat up all night, watching the sky. Ellen talked. Later, when he thought about that night, what he thought about was her voice, how it mixed with the breezes that came at them off the salt flats and stayed with them until the first light. In the morning it was hot early with heat waves swarming among clouds of red dust. Ike was hungry and tired. He followed her out to the road, where the asphalt was so hot it burned right through their shoes. They walked on the shoulder. There was no water and Ike was not sorry when they heard a car slow behind them and turned to see Gordon behind the wheel of his pickup. Ike thought Gordon would be pissed, but he wasn’t. He told them that he would let the old lady give them hell. He even let Ellen sit beside him and steer. He told them there were all kinds of derelicts and drifters apt to spend the night in the glass factory and that they were damn lucky they hadn’t run into any. Ike remembered how Ellen had to tilt her head to see over the dash and how Gordon put his big arm over her shoulders and rested his hand on her leg.

It was almost five years later when they ran away again. She came to his room one night and he could see right away that something was wrong. She kept walking back and forth at the foot of his bed with her arms folded across her chest, her hands squeezing her arms. He could see the knuckles go white when she squeezed. Then she turned out the lights and sat next to him on the bed. She said she couldn’t tell him in the light. She sat close to him and he could feel her body trembling against his own. In all the time he had known her, he had not seen her cry—that trembling was as close as he’d seen her come. Gordon, she said, had been in her room, drunk and putting his hands on her. Ike could still remember sitting up cold and stiff when she told him that, feeling sick and thinking about that day in the truck, Gordon’s beefy hand on Ellen’s leg. She was almost fifteen the night she came to his room, and men were starting to notice her. Ike had seen that, seen the way they looked at her when they went to town. She had a skinny, almost boyish figure, but her ass was tight and round and when she wore those tight faded jeans and the cowboy boots she had saved for and bought herself—there was just something about her. There was something about the way her hips moved when she walked, and about the way she would toss her head to shake back that thick black hair, or the way she would fix it with the combs, like their mother had once fixed hers.

Gordon had two cars. He owned an old Pontiac coupe and a Dodge truck with a camper shell. Ike and Ellen took the truck because it was what Gordon had taught her to drive. The wind was coming up as they left and soon it was hard to see. They spent the night not far from the glass factory, on the outskirts of another small town at the edge of the flats. They slept beneath the shell on an old mattress Gordon kept in the bed. The truck rocked in the wind and they could hear the sand hitting the truck as it rocked and shuddered in the darkness. There was only one blanket and they pulled it over them, pressed close together against the cold that was riding in the wind. She trembled in his arms and he felt her breath on his neck, heard her whispering, asking if he was afraid. He said that he wasn’t. She held his hand to her chest so he could feel her heart. “It’s going like crazy,” she said. She was wearing jeans and an old flannel shirt and holding his hand against her between the folds of material so that he could feel her heart like it was in the palm of his hand. And he could feel her breast, too, round and firm and so soft and her skin hot and slightly damp as if she were feverish and when he moved his hand he felt the hardness of her nipple pass beneath his fingers. In the blackness he could see the dark shapes of her boots catching a bit of moonlight near the tailgate. And he could feel himself trembling now too, both of them trembling and holding each other, her face pressed close to his and her fingers on the back of his neck and when he inhaled he could taste her breath, could pull it down into his own lungs as if he were taking her into himself. He loved her so much. He kissed her neck and her face. He tried to find her mouth. But then suddenly, as if some current had passed through her body, she stiffened and jerked away. “No,” she said. “Ike, we can’t.” And her voice had a kind of wounded sound to it that he had not heard before. She twisted away from him until she was lying with her face to the metal side of the truck. He didn’t say anything. He covered her with the blanket and then sat shivering at her side, watching her boots and the blackness outside and waiting for the light.

In the morning the wind was still so bad you couldn’t see much. There was sand all across the road and tumbleweeds big as cars passing ghostlike in the sand. He guessed it was one of those weeds that made them crash. They were driving through the town when one hit the glass by Ellen’s head and she jerked the wheel, too hard, sent them jumping over a curb and right into the side of a building. He could still remember the sound those bricks made coming down on the hood, Ellen’s skinny arms fighting the wheel. And he could remember how he felt that morning, lightheaded and numb, so that he was hardly aware of cracking the windshield with his head.

Gordon came for them once more, as he had the other time. Only this time he was in the car and the old lady was riding in the backseat. Ike sat in the car with his grandmother while Gordon and Ellen talked to the sheriff and the store owner and Gordon signed some papers. Later there was some kind of hearing. The ride home was very quiet. The wind dropped away to nothing and it was clear—the way the desert is after a storm, with every bit of color sharp and hard so it hurts your eyes to look. The sky was huge and blue and there were great white drifts of sand left by the wind across the black asphalt of the road. The sand rose in white clouds as they passed through the drifts and then danced on the road like tiny hailstorms behind them.

He remembered Gordon didn’t drink for some time after that. It had all happened during Christmas vacation and when the vacation was over they went back to school. One day on his way home Ike passed the store and saw that Gordon was out front, passing a bottle with some of his friends. He went home and told Ellen. She took him to her room and pulled open a drawer. There was a handgun there. He remembered how the barrel looked long and hard, catching some of the afternoon light that cut through the blinds. “He gave it to me,” Ellen told him. “Said if he ever gave me cause, I should shoot him.” After that sometimes in the afternoons he would hear them practicing out in back of the market, Gordon and Ellen, blowing empty pop bottles into glass splinters that afterward lay glittering in the red dust.

Those were some of the things Ike thought about the week after he met Preston, after Preston had brought the tank by for him to work on, and fixed it so he could work at Morris’s shop. There was something about the way Morris’s compressor popped on and off in the sheet-metal spray booth that reminded him of those gunshots, that made him think of the desert.

He was glad for the work; not only would it bring in a few bucks, it would keep him in touch with Preston. He kept thinking about what that kid had said to him in San Arco, just before he pulled away, that business about finding some real help. He kept thinking Preston would not be a bad guy to have on your side. What he hadn’t counted on with the work was the way it gave him time to think.

He guessed that Gordon had never given Ellen cause to use her gun. And he and Ellen did not talk about that night on the flats. But it was not long afterward that things began to change, and that he began to lose her. She began to see other guys. Not just boys from school, but older guys from King City, guys with cars. The old lady didn’t like it, but she was pretty sick by then so about all she could do was yell at Ellen from that chair she kept out on the porch, tell her she was no better than her mother, a tramp and a common whore, and threaten to send her away, to one of those homes where there had been talk of sending her after she wrecked the truck. The threats did not have much substance, as it was really Gordon who was looking after things now, and footing the bill. Gordon had been married once, Ike had heard, after the war. But then the woman had left him and he had come back to the desert to take over the market and the station. Gordon was a strange guy. He never said a lot about anything, and when Ellen began to run around, he didn’t say much about that, either, but then Ike guessed it would have been hard for him to say too much.

By the time summer came, Ellen was staying out late and keeping all kinds of crazy hours. She was going out a lot with this guy named Ruben who worked at a garage in King City and drove a customized ’56 Mercury. Ike saw them together one afternoon on his way home—he was working then himself, just starting at the shop. They were hanging out in this ball field with a few other people on the outskirts of town. It was the first time he had really seen her with someone else. Ruben had the car pulled up on the grass and Ellen was stretched out near the front fender, leaning against Ruben. Her hair was bright black in the sun. She was wearing a white summer dress with blue stripes and the dress too seemed to shimmer in the hot light. Ike went to a piece of chain link fence and watched them for a long time. Finally Ellen got up and walked across the grass to where he stood. Her hair was loose and there was something a bit wild and flushed about her face. She put her hand up to the fence and their fingers touched through the chain link. He wanted her to come with him, but she wouldn’t do it. She said that she was with her friends, and then her fingers had squeezed his against the cool steel and she had gone back. But he had continued to stand there. He watched until they left. He watched Ellen get into the front seat from the passenger side and then slide way over, turning as she did so to let another couple push the seat forward and climb into the back, and he could see the summer dress riding way up high on her brown thighs.

She often came home late, but that night she didn’t come home at all. It was the first time. And he lay awake in the moonlight, hating them and hating himself for feeling like he did, hating himself for that night on the flats, hating his own twisted jealousy. In the morning she was still not there and he went outside, up that little hill back of Gordon’s yard, and he waited.

Finally he saw a dust cloud moving at the edge of town and then the dark blue of the Mercury, like a huge insect moving in the dust. The car let her out by the store and he knew she was trying to avoid the old lady. She was still wearing the blue and white dress, but she was carrying her shoes. He watched her come around to the back of the house and he could see her bare feet kicking up little clouds of red dust. She didn’t go into the house but went instead to the cellar. She went down the steps and she pulled the door closed behind her—leaving him to stare into the blistered sun-gray wood. He stood and went down the hill after her. He felt like he was drunk, as if the ground were playing tricks beneath his feet. He could feel the sun on his neck, and his throat hot and dry.

The cellar door was unlocked; he opened it and went down, and even now, standing in the ragged back lot behind Morris’s shop, with flattened beer cans and broken bottles winking at him from among the weeds and the smooth metal of Preston’s tank beneath his hand, there was not a single detail of that moment he could not recall: the rush of sunlight upon the stairs, the look on Ellen’s face as she saw him, surprised and at the same time pissed at herself for not locking the damn door behind her, even that pattern of dust caught swirling upon the light.

There was an old workbench down there and a washbasin. Ellen was standing at the basin. Her shoes were on the bench and she was naked except for a bra. She wasn’t tall, but she was slender and her legs looked long and brown except up high where her bathing suit had left a white pattern. Her hair was loose, shining beneath the light of a dim bulb strung above the bench, and the way she was standing made it hang forward to hide her face. She turned once and looked at him for a moment and then went back to what she was doing, which was bending over the sink trying to work some kind of stain out of the dress. Ike didn’t say anything. He was still feeling half drunk and dizzy and kind of sick from sitting too long in the sun. He’d left his shirt on the hill and his shoulders felt hot and raw. The cellar floor was cold beneath his bare feet. Ellen just kept working at the spot, but when he was close enough and she stopped to look at him once more, he could see that her eyes were red and full and that her makeup had run, leaving dark tracks on her cheeks. He wanted to say something but he couldn’t. What he did was just put his arms around her and she dropped the dress and they stood there together, her breasts pushed flat against his bare chest through the flimsy white material, her legs against his. He kissed her forehead and her eyes, even her mouth, but he just wanted to hold her, to squeeze her tight and to tell her—something, words half-forming in his mouth, when, suddenly, it was over and the old lady had found them. She was standing up there at the top of the stairs with the door thrown back and the sunlight rushing in once more—the only consolation being that she had for once been shocked into silence so that all she seemed able to do was to teeter there above them, black and bent before the blueness of the sky.

It was, of course, unbearable for them there after that. Ike had work and school. Ellen had her friends and they did not really see that much of each other. The drifting apart that had begun shortly after that night on the flats continued. Ellen lasted out the winter, but she was gone by summer, by herself this time, and for good. In close to two years he had heard nothing, not until the afternoon that kid came driving into town in his white Camaro with two surfboards strapped to the roof.

Preston stopped by Ike’s apartment at the end of the week to pick up his tank. Ike could hear the heavy boots pounding the stairwell so it felt like the whole place might come down and he knew who it was before he answered the door.

Preston looked like he’d just climbed out of a shower. His hair was still wet and combed back flat against his head. He was dressed in the same grimy-looking tank top and jeans, but the look on his face was different and Ike could see that he was sober. He didn’t say anything to Ike but walked right in and started looking around for his tank. He couldn’t believe Ike’s job. “Jesus,” he kept saying, “it’s beautiful. I mean it, man, you did a hell of a job.” He carried the tank to the window to examine it in the morning light.

Ike watched him standing by the window, admiring the tank, absurdly pleased with himself. In spite of the fact that he knew he did good work, he was not used to praise. Jerry had always taken everything for granted. “You’re a fuckin’ artist,” Preston told him.

Suddenly Preston turned away from the window and looked straight at Ike. The sunlight was coming in behind him, making him look even bigger than usual, and flashing in that little diamond stud he wore in one ear. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Living in this dump? This isn’t your scene, you’re just a kid. Why aren’t you back in the desert working on bikes?”

Ike was surprised by the questions, by the fact that Preston was even interested. For a moment he hesitated. He had planned to tell no one why he was in Huntington Beach. But Preston seemed different to him this morning, more like somebody he could trust, and in the back of his mind there was still that notion of getting help. Maybe now was the time. He walked to the card table and picked up the scrap of paper with the names on it. He handed the paper to Preston, and while Preston looked it over he told him about the kid in the desert, the story of a trip to Mexico, three Huntington Beach surfers who had crossed the border with a girl and come back alone.

Ike was standing only a few feet away from Preston as he spoke and it seemed to him that a certain expression passed over Preston’s face, a kind of dark scowl that was not unlike that shadow of a look Ike had noticed the day Preston saw his old board. “Is this what you were doing in the water?” Preston asked. “Trying to find Hound Adams?”

Ike nodded, thinking it strange that Preston had mentioned only one name.

“Shit.” Preston looked angry about something now. “And what were you going to do when you found these people?”

“I don’t know, really. Hang around, see what I could find out.”

“Hang around with Hound Adams?”

Ike shrugged.

“Man, you’re hurtin’. Look, if you take my advice, you’ll hang it up and split right now. Go back to San Arco and work on bikes. If you don’t do that, at least stay away from the pier. If you want to surf, do it farther north at the cliffs. The pier’s a local spot.”

“But what about Hound Adams?”

Preston handed him the paper. “Like I said, if you’re smart, you’ll go back to your uncle’s shop.”

“It’s my sister,” Ike said. “I’m the only family she’s got.”

“What about your uncle?”

“He doesn’t give a shit, that’s why I came. My uncle just says that she was wild, that if she got into trouble, it was her own fault.”

“Maybe he was right.”

“And maybe he was wrong. I mean, somebody should at least find out.”

Preston just stared at him for a moment. “Yeah. Well, suit yourself, ace, but take my advice about the pier. Stay away from it. You don’t want to meet Hound Adams in the water.” With that, Preston tucked his fuel tank under his arm and started out the door.

Ike followed him into the hall. “Wait a minute,” he said.

Preston turned.

“Hound Adams. Who is he?”

Preston waited in the hall. He looked down the floor toward that bit of sunlight coming up from the staircase and shook his head. Then he looked back at Ike. “That’s your problem, ace. Can you dig it?” Then he was off and stomping down the hallway, down the wooden flight of stairs and into the street.

Ike followed him as far as the top of the stairs. He was torn between running after him and regret that he had even opened his mouth in the first place. It was just that Preston had taken him off guard with those damn questions. He thought back to the line in that song, that business about how suckers always make mistakes when they’re far from home. He felt like the sucker now, the dumb-ass country boy. Shit, where did he get off thinking somebody like Preston was going to want to help him? And now he had put his foot in it. What if Preston and Hound Adams were even friends or something? But then Preston hadn’t acted like they were friends; he had acted like the whole thing pissed him off for some reason. The trouble with Preston was, he was the kind of guy you didn’t want to press. You couldn’t. He was too damn close to the edge all the time. Ike ground his teeth and walked back to his room. He slammed the door behind him and leaned up against it. He shut his eyes and when he squeezed them hard enough, what he saw was a thin pair of dusty legs kicking hot red clouds out of a desert afternoon and it was not likely that he would forget.

8

It got bad again after that, after his conversation with Preston. In a way it was even worse than before. He knew now that Hound Adams was real, that he was around, and that Preston knew who he was. But Preston’s words had revived all of his uncertainties. He had this feeling that whatever move he made next was bound to be the wrong one.

He spent the following day alone in his room and that evening he went out for a walk, thinking that perhaps he would run into Preston, that they could talk. It didn’t happen and he wound up at the very end of the old pier seated with a handful of Mexican fishermen as the night turned cool and damp beneath a heavy mist. The iron rails and painted benches grew wet and the yellow lights that lined the boardwalk drew lines upon their slick surfaces. Still, Ike remained there for some time, staring back toward the highway and the town, which from here had been reduced to a thin band of lights beneath a moonless sky. He kept thinking about Preston, of the way he had grown angry over Ike’s story. He was puzzled by the anger and yet, in an odd way, comforted by it as well. It was perhaps selfish of him to think so, but the anger, it seemed to him, was like some tool just resting there, waiting to be used, if only it could be better understood. And though he could see that doing so would require time, he was against blowing Preston off too soon. The best course, he felt, was to be patient a bit longer. And in the meantime he could continue with his own idea of learning to surf. But he would take Preston’s advice on avoiding the pier, at least until he was better. For the present, he would trust in what Preston had said.

He took some comfort in thinking through these things, in deciding on something. His sister perhaps, or Gordon, might have said he was too cautious, and perhaps he was. It was just that he did not want to blow it from the very beginning.

It was late when he left the pier. He crossed Coast Highway and headed inland on Main. He did not know how late it was but noticed that the bars had closed and the streets were empty. As he neared the intersection of Main and Walnut a lowered Chevy rolled past on chromed rims, its tires making a soft swishing sound on the wet asphalt. He could not see how many people were in the car, as the windows were tinted, but it cruised through the intersection a few yards ahead of him and seemed to slow a bit, as if someone was checking him out. He had been about to turn on Walnut, but that would have put him walking in the same direction as the car and he decided against it, thinking suddenly of Hazel Adams’s warning. He crossed instead behind it and continued up Main, walking quickly with his hands jammed down into the pockets of his jeans.

There was a vacant lot at the top of the next block, and some trees. He waited there a moment in the shadows just to make sure the car was not circling around. It did not appear to be and he was just about to leave when something else caught his eye. There was an alley that ran parallel to Main, just behind the buildings that faced the street, and from his position at the end of the block he could look back across the lot and see down the alley for a fair distance. And that was how he happened to see the bike.

He moved out from beneath the trees and walked slowly along the eastern end of the lot. The bike was a big one, and drawing closer to the mouth of the alley, Ike could see that it was Preston’s Knuckle. Then he saw Preston as well. He was standing at the side of the alley, in what looked to be the beginnings of a driveway, only there was no driveway there, just the back of a building—rough, darkened bricks and a naked bulb maybe ten feet off the ground. The bulb was lit and cast a pale light onto the broken asphalt and gravel beneath it.

Preston was leaning, his arm out and braced against the wall, talking to another guy. Ike could not see much of what the other guy looked like because Preston was quite a bit bigger and was blocking Ike’s view. All that Ike could really see of the other man was a bright spot of blond hair above Preston’s outstretched arm. Ike got the idea, however, that Preston was doing the talking, the other guy the listening. There was something about the way in which the blond head appeared to be cocked a bit to one side and tilted down, that gave Ike this idea. But he was too far away to hear and he could not take the chance of moving closer, nor did he want to stand for long at the mouth of the alley where either man might turn and see him. There was something in the scene, he thought, that suggested he keep his distance. What was most bothersome, however, was the location of the building behind which they stood. As near as Ike could tell, it was the back of the first surf shop he had gone into that day he’d gotten his board.

The implications of this could of course be interpreted in more than one way and the task of doing so was enough to disturb the peace he had found at the end of the pier. It had him guessing as he moved away from the alley and into the night, and it kept him that way far into the first gray hours of morning. For the present, however, his resolve held and he was up with the dawn, dressed in cutoff jeans and a ragged sweat shirt, a towel slung over his shoulders, his board beneath his arm. A sleepless night behind him, he was headed for the Coast Highway and the beaches north of town.

It was different at the north end of town. There was not the sense of light and movement one got around the pier. From the beach you could not see the highway or the town. There were only the cliffs, which were bare and rocky, capped by the gray squeaking forest of oil wells and by the black oil-spattered earth. It was a landscape of grays and blues, dull browns and yellow ochres, of blackened fire rings and litter. And on every available chunk of rock and concrete there were spray-painted messages, swastikas, Chicano names, for he had been told that the northern beaches were the domain of the inland gangs when the sun went down, gangs out of the landlocked badlands back of Long Beach and Santa Ana. It was a strip of beach the cops did not even bother with at night, and there were grisly tales told by surfers of ghastly early-morning finds. One surfer Ike spoke to claimed to have found a human leg, bloated and discolored, floating in the shallows. But the beaches were empty in the mornings. There were only the painted messages, the litter, the blackened fire rings like stone altars, and Ike made no terrible finds.

He was growing accustomed to a kind of dichotomy he had discovered here, a contradiction between the bleakness of the landscape and the beauty of the sea. There were times when the sea was like the land, flat, barren, the color of concrete. But there were other times when its surface was alive with light, times when the wave faces were like polished stones and the white water seemed on fire with the setting sun. And nowhere was this contradiction more apparent than along the beaches below the cliffs. In spite of the stories he had heard and the evidence of human filth in the sand, he came to love those stretches of beach, empty in the first light, silent except for the sounds of the surf and the cries of the gulls. He went there for the first time the morning after he saw Preston in the alley, and then every other morning for the rest of the week. He took great pleasure in the mornings, in walking along the cliffs, close to the edge, the ocean smooth and glassy beneath, the air still and soft against his face and yet laced with the salty dampness of the sea. But what he found most pleasure in was that certain rush that began as he picked a trail and started down, watching the swell lines as he went, anticipating that first explosion of cold, the first line of white water breaking over him, washing away everything save the moment itself.

The waves beneath the cliffs had a way of breaking far outside. The white water would then roll toward the beach in long, churning lines. There was a point, however, where the white water began to re-form, to swell up into a new wave that would go on to break only yards from shore. It was in this second, inside break that Ike did his practicing. He would paddle out just beyond the shore break, let the wall of white water catch his board, and then try to stand up as the wave was re-forming. He usually fell off shortly after the inside wave had begun to form. His board would shoot straight down the small wave and he would fly off the front, or he would catch a rail trying to turn and slip off the side. Then one morning something happened that was different. Ike got into a wall of white water from a large outside wave. It grabbed his board, sent it skimming across the surface of the water. Ike got to his feet. He was carrying more speed than he was used to, but he found the speed actually made it easier to stand. The wall slowed slightly, began to re-form. Ike leaned into the wave and the board swung easily beneath him. A wall of water rose ahead of him, its face glassy and smooth, streaked with white. He was angling across it. The bumpiness of his rides in the white water was gone; it was smooth, fast. He was riding a wave. The wall rose rapidly, began to pitch out, his inside rail caught and over he went, headfirst into the shore break, his board sailing into the air after him.

He had to swim back into the shore to get his board. But all the time he was swimming, he wanted to stop and shout, to raise his arms over his head and shake his fists. He knew now what the hoots and screams he had heard from the surfers beneath the pier were all about. He had gotten into a wave. He ran through the shallows, kicking up great rooster tails of water with his feet. He didn’t go back out right away. He sat down on the nose of his board in the wet sand and stared out into the lines of white water just now turning a kind of gold in the rising sun and tried to remember every detail of how it had felt.

He thought about it for the rest of the day, going over each sensation as he strolled past the empty lots and scarred palms. Fences formed ahead of him like green walls. He performed imaginary maneuvers of great skill, ducking now and then beneath the lip of an occasional hedge, his hand raised to ward off invisible spray.

He felt like talking to somebody about it and so decided to look for Preston. He still had not seen him since that night in the alley.

He found him at Morris’s shop. Morris was out and Preston was alone in the back lot. He was sitting on the wheel of an old flatbed bike trailer, staring at the alley. His back was turned to the drive and as Ike came up it he could see a sixer of tall cans at Preston’s side.

Preston looked up as Ike came around the fence that separated the drive from the lot. He watched Ike come around the fence and then stared back toward the alley. “Look here,” he said. “It’s Billy the Kid.” Ike passed behind the spray booth and came up to the trailer. He noticed there was already a sixpack’s worth of empties at Preston’s feet. “Thirsty?” Preston asked him, and then tossed him a can without waiting for a reply. Ike caught it and pulled the ring. Beer foamed out white and cold, running down the sides of the can and over his fingers. He took a drink and then looked at Preston. Preston was still watching the alley.

“I took your advice,” Ike told him. “I’ve been going farther north, by the cliffs.”

“My advice was that you leave town.”

Ike took another drink and looked down on that head of Christ that covered Preston’s forearm, at the bloody crown of thorns radiating birds and lizards. He felt the beer burning in his throat. “I got a ride today, man. I mean, a fairly decent one.”

“Yeah?” Preston looked up at him with one eye. He poured the rest of his beer down his throat. He had a way of doing it, of opening his mouth and holding the can about two or three inches away and just pouring it in, like dumping oil into a crank. When he was done, he dropped the can and stomped it with his boot, added it to the pile at his feet and reached for another.

“You were right about that board, it’s a lot more stable.”

Preston just nodded again and sat looking across the lot. Ike stood beside him. He was tempted to say something about seeing Preston in the alley, but he didn’t. It was Preston’s business and Ike did not guess Preston was the type to appreciate prying.

“So you really like it out there,” Preston said at last. He made it more of a statement than a question, but Ike answered anyway. “Yeah, I do. It’s different. I think about it a lot. Like when I’m working, or doing something else, I find myself wondering about conditions, about what the tide’s doing, thinking about what to work on next time I’m out. I need some new stuff. I want to get a wet suit and a leash for my board.”

“Buy a wet suit. Fuck the leash. Learn how to hang on to your board.”

“It’s hard.”

“Come on, man. I thought you were Billy the Kid. I thought you were here to take on Hound Adams. It’s hard,” he added, mimicking Ike but making his voice high and whiny. He looked up at Ike after he said it, sort of one-eyed, like he had before. He was squinting because the sun was in his face, but it looked to Ike like he was grinning some too. “You ready for another beer?”

Ike shook his head. “I still have some.” He took another drink. “Christ,” he heard Preston say. “So what about Hound Adams?” Ike said. He worked at making his voice as conversational as possible. “You known him long?”

“Long enough. I happen to know he never uses a leash.” Preston seemed to find that amusing for some reason. He chuckled and poured some more beer down his throat—what looked to be half the can. “So you’re really gonna hang around. You’re serious about all this shit?”

Ike nodded. He tilted his head back and chugged what was left of his beer. He folded his can and squashed it, tossed it into the pile at Preston’s feet. Preston passed him a fresh one.

“So what’re you going to live on? You gonna get a job?”

“I guess.”

“What?”

Ike shrugged. “Anything.”

“Yeah, well, shit. There’s work. You go to work on bikes in this town and you just might put More Ass here out of business. Course, More Ass might not appreciate it. But then, come to think of it, he’s not too crazy about your ass anyway.”

Ike shrugged once more.

“Tell you what,” Preston told him, but was interrupted before he could say more by the sound of a bike—Morris pulling into the drive. “Here’s his highness now,” Preston said. He stood up and finished his beer, chucked the can and hitched up his dirty jeans. He picked his shades off the trailer and slipped them back on. “Who knows,” he said, and tapped Ike in the chest with the back of his hand. “Maybe I can say something to the treacherous old pig-fucker myself. Put in a good word for you, as it were.” He winked and walked away.

Ike watched him go, sauntering in an exaggerated sort of way over to where Morris was kneeling near his scooter, unwrapping a handful of small parts he had apparently been out for. Ike could hear them talking for a few seconds in muffled tones. Then he could hear Preston’s voice clearly. “I know you got to tear down that Shovel.”

Finally Morris straightened up and wiped his hands. He said something to Preston and then walked over to the fence and spoke to Ike through the chain link. “I’m gonna pull a bike apart next week,” he said. “You interested?”

Ike nodded. “Sure,” he said. “Sure thing.”

Morris just looked at him for a minute, like he was trying to decide if he’d made a mistake or not, then he turned and walked back to his bike. Preston said something else that Ike could not catch and then turned himself and moved to meet Ike coming around the fence.

“Thanks,” Ike said.

Preston held up a hand. “Just don’t turn your back on him,” he said, and then laughed out loud at the prospect of this new partnership.

Ike stood there for a moment, waiting. There was a stiff wind kicking down the drive and when Ike spoke again, it was of the surf. “Be blown out now,” he said.

Preston nodded and as Ike watched him he could see the sky reflected in Preston’s shades. “What you need’s a good point break,” Preston told him. “Some kelp beds out there to cut the chop. Huntington’s not the only place with surf, you know. Shit. You don’t know the kinds of places I’ve seen.” He looked off toward the alley. “Was a time I’d never let a day go by without checking it out.” He stretched and flexed the muscles in his arms—holding the pose like he was waiting for a picture. “Shit, I ought to walk down there with you and have a look,” he said, but made no move to leave the drive. Ike guessed that it was time for him to move on. He did not really want to talk in front of Morris. For the moment he was content to know that Preston was still on his side, that they could talk again. He said good-bye and started toward the street, but Preston called to him and he turned back.

“You won’t tell anybody else what you told me, will you?”

“No. I won’t. I haven’t.”

“Good,” Preston said. “Don’t.”

Ike stood for a moment and waited, to see perhaps if Preston would say more, or decide to walk down to the pier after all, but Preston showed no sign of leaving. He stayed with Morris near the entrance of the shop. Morris had peeled off his shirt and slipped on his spray mask. The mask hung down around his neck and his big hairy gut was hanging out over his belt, twisting the buckle so it pointed at the ground. Preston tapped Morris on the chest with the back of his hand, as he had tapped Ike a short while before. “The kid got his first ride today, Morris. What do you think of that?”

“Right in the shore break,” Ike put in. He was still feeling somewhat elated about the ride.

Morris had already pulled his mask up to his face. He now jerked it back down and glared at Ike across the top of it. “Big fucking deal,” he said.

9

Morris put him to work in the afternoons, leaving his mornings free to surf. They spent the first few days on the Shovel. The work and getting along with Morris required concentration and by nightfall he was beat. He went home tired and slept. He had looked forward to talking some more with Preston, but the week passed and Preston did not come around. Toward the middle of the second week he began to worry once more.

There was more work and he spent his afternoons staring into the oversize valves of Shovelheads and Panheads, laboring over Fat Bob tanks with Morris’s new Badger airbrush, leaving in his wake a rainbow of imron cobwebbing, pearl-silver lace, and candy-blue flames. Mornings were still spent in the water. But he was thinking about time now—two weeks since he’d talked to Preston in his room, a month in town and he still did not even know what Hound Adams, Frank Baker, or Terry Jacobs looked like. He had told Preston he would keep his mouth shut, but now—nothing was happening. It was getting harder to think about the work. He needed another break. And then came the fifth week—twenty-nine days since he’d stood on the gravel at the edge of the road and said good-bye to Gordon. It was the fifth week that brought the swell.

It began with the sound, a distant thunder repeating itself at regular intervals somewhere beyond the hum of the highway, waking him in the night so that he turned for a moment to listen, to wonder, before slipping back into sleep. But in the morning, when the sound was still there, louder than before in the first gray light, he did not have to wonder again. He pulled on his clothes and ran from the room, down the wooden stairs and across the lawn, past the oil well and down the alley, south on Main so he was running toward the ocean and he could see the white water even before he crossed the highway.

The first thing that struck him about the swell was how different it made everything look. He might have been in another town, on a different pier, staring out at a stretch of beach he had never seen before.

The waves did not just rise up out of the ocean in rolling lines, as they normally did. These seemed to come in off the horizon, as if they had marched the whole breadth of the Pacific to pound this stretch of beach. The surface was angry, gray and black, streaked with white. Paddling out appeared an impossibility. The first fifty yards of water looked as if it had been poured from a washing machine. Flecks of foam lay across the wet sand like snowdrifts. As he ran onto the boardwalk, the whole structure seemed to shudder beneath him with each new wave.

He was alone with the swell. Far down the beach he could see the yellow Jeep of the lifeguards. The morning was still and gray, the sun wrapped in a heavy overcast. He walked farther out onto the pier, and that was when he saw them; he wasn’t alone after all. At first he couldn’t believe it; no one could have gotten outside in this kind of surf. He ran farther. He lost track of them, then found them again. There was no doubt about it. He picked out one, then two more, a fourth and a fifth. The size of the swell made them hard to see. At times they disappeared completely behind the waves. He gripped the rail, damp with spray beneath his hands. They were out there, but as yet, he was pretty sure there had been no rides.

He was nearly even with them now and could see them more clearly: six surfers on the south side of the pier. They stayed together, darting about like a school of fish, apparently trying to get themselves set up amid the huge swells. Occasionally one of them would look as if he were going to take off, only to pull back at the last moment, allowing the wave to peak and pour over, to thunder on through the pier and toward the beach unridden.

The surfers seemed to be having a hard time getting themselves in position. Wave after wave passed them, lifted them and hid them, threw curtains of spray twenty feet in the air as it wrapped around the pilings. And each new set seemed to come from farther outside, forcing them to paddle out farther. Ike was wondering if any of them would be able to take off at all when he noticed one surfer paddling again just ahead of a mountain of gray water. He was paddling hard. The board began to rise, lifted on the wave. And suddenly the surfer was on his feet. It was hard to say how high the waves actually were, but the crest of this one was well over the surfer’s head.

The rider sped down the face, drove off the bottom in a powerful turn that sent water spraying in a wide arc from the tail of his board. He drove back up into the face, was nearly covered by a rapidly peeling section. Then he was out of the tunnel, high on the lip, working his board in small rapid turns, racing the wave toward the pier. And then it was over, he had driven through the lip at the last second, just before it met the piling. For a moment Ike lost him in the spray and then he saw him again, flat on his board, paddling hard for the horizon.

By the time the sun had burnt its way through the overcast, there were maybe another half-dozen surfers in the water. They made it outside by staying on the north side of the pier, using the pilings to help shield them from the swell that was moving in from the south. Still, it was risky and Ike saw more than one surfer turned back, more than one board broken on the pilings.

Though few went into the water, many came to watch, and soon the railings were lined with a noisy cheering crowd. The people hooted and cheered for rides. Ike soon found himself cheering along with them. There were cameras set up along the pier now too, a dozen of them, some manned by crews in matching T-shirts that advertised various surf shops and board manufacturers. There were more cameras on the beach, and more spectators, more yellow Jeeps, so that by late morning a kind of circus atmosphere had taken over that strip of the town which huddled about the pier and lined the white strip of sand.

Ike saw the blond-haired surfer, the same he’d seen get the first wave, time and again getting spectacular rides, which drew cheers from the crowd. He had been watching for perhaps an hour when a familiar voice took his attention away from the surf. He turned and found Preston behind him. He was wearing that grimy tank top and the old red bandanna. He looked out of place among the camera crews and surfers who lined the pier. It was a crowd of sun-streaked hair and clean limbs. Preston, with his huge tattooed arms and square upper body, looked more like an extension of the machine gleaming between his legs. The aviator shades were flashing in the sunlight, so that Ike couldn’t see his eyes, but his mouth was bent into a large shit-eating grin, as if there was some joke in progress of which Ike was not aware, of which, perhaps, he was the butt. “Thought I told you to leave town,” Preston said. Ike felt himself grinning back, not sure about what to say, but glad that Preston had shown up. He supposed that since he’d come to Huntington Beach, Preston was the closest thing to a friend he had. Preston knew why he had come, and that created a link between them, at least in Ike’s mind.

“It’s big,” Ike said.

Preston just looked past him at the waves. “First south of the season,” he said. “Takes a day like this to get a wave to yourself anymore; the punks can’t get out.”

“You ever seen it this big before?”

“Sure. Bigger. I’ve surfed it bigger. But it’s a good swell.” Ike was suddenly aware of another sound rising now above the din of the crowd and the thunder of the surf. The tower had apparently spotted Preston and the mechanical voice had begun to whine. “No motorcycles allowed on the pier,” the voice said. “Please turn your bike around and walk it off the pier.” Preston leaned out into the boardwalk and extended his middle finger toward the tower. The voice went on in its tinny fashion: “Please turn your bike around and walk it off the pier.”

Preston just shook his head and began to turn the machine around. The spectators nearest them turned to stare but made sure Preston had plenty of room for the maneuver. “Voice of reason,” Preston said. “I think there’s been one guy in there for about twenty years. It’s always sounded like the same voice to me.”

Ike looked up at the tinted windows high above the boardwalk. He decided to start back himself and get some breakfast. Still, it was difficult to tear himself away from the railing and he turned back once more toward the ocean—in time to see the surfer he’d been watching get still one more wave. The guy was easy to spot. He was tall and blond and while most of the others wore full wet suits, he wore only a swimsuit and a vest. “That one guy’s really good,” Ike said, pointing him out to Preston.

“Your hero, huh?” Preston asked, and the grin had given way to a slightly crooked smile. A moment passed while Ike looked out to sea then back at Preston. “Just don’t go getting too sweet on him,” Preston said. “He’s your man. And that other guy”—he waved toward a dark figure in a full black wet suit with what looked to be red stripes down the sides, sitting farther to the south and way outside—“there’s another one for you. Terry Jacobs. He’s a Samoan, usually the biggest dude out there.” Preston thumped at the pier with his heavy boots and began to walk the bike away, back down the center of the boardwalk, the people spreading to let him pass.

Ike went after him. Preston didn’t say anything else; he just kept walking the bike through the crowd. When he had gotten down next to the tower he pulled himself up and came down on the stick. The engine didn’t catch and he hauled himself up once more. Ike reached out and grabbed his arm. He grabbed him right on the biceps, on top of that coiled serpent, and it was like grabbing hold of a large pipe. Preston let himself back down and looked at his arm, at Ike’s hand. He did it real slow and Ike released his grip. He stared into Preston’s shades. “Wait a minute,” he said. “You can’t let it go at that.”

Preston just looked at him. “I can’t?”

Ike hesitated. “Well, what about them?” he asked at last.

“What do you mean, what about them? That’s them, ace. Two of them, anyway. What do you want me to do, swim out there and have a word with them?” Preston kicked hard and the big engine jumped to life. Just above them the speakers had begun another order—something about walking the bike off the pier, but the voice was lost in the roar of the engine. A cloud of pale smoke hung in the air and Ike stood in the midst of it, watching Preston.

“Look,” Preston yelled at him. “Let’s get something straight. I’ve been thinking about what you told me. You let me think about it some more. In the meantime, do like I told you, keep your story to yourself. If I come up with anything I think you ought to know, I’ll tell you. But remember something. This is not your scene. Can you dig that? You don’t know what the fuck goes on around here. And one more thing. Don’t ever come runnin’ up and grabbin’ at me like that. I might pinch your fucking head off.” With that he popped the big bike’s clutch and was off, right down the middle of the boardwalk with pipes blasting and chrome bars burning and people scattering in front of him like leaves in a wind.

10

The swell ran through the rest of the week. Each day, however, the sea grew a bit calmer. And as the spectators on the pier went back to the beach and the circus atmosphere began to dissipate, the number of surfers entering the water grew. By the end of the week the waves were down to a consistent and well-shaped six feet and more crowded than Ike had yet seen them. Fistfights were not that uncommon, both in the water and out. Ike went to watch. At first it had been too big for him, and now that he had at last put faces to two of the names on the scrap of paper, he wanted to get a better look. If his surfing had been further along, he might have ventured out near the pier; as it was, he stood on it, watching from above.

The two men Preston had pointed out to him were there each morning: Hound Adams and Terry Jacobs. Hound Adams was tall, lean but well built. And Preston had been right about the Samoan; he was always, it appeared, the biggest dude out there—maybe just a bit shorter than Hound, but with a chest like a refrigerator. They were both excellent surfers, particularly Hound Adams. Terry seemed to surf effortlessly enough, but with none of Hound’s fluid brilliance. His was not a dance with the ocean but a contest of strengths. He could drive through incredible sections of breaking waves, like a fullback pounding through a line, looking simply too heavy and too well planted to be knocked from his board. He was awesome on the beach as well, wearing his hair in a great puffball of an Afro that bounced as he walked.

As a rule they surfed with the first light, with the dawn patrol, as the kid in the desert had told him. But with the swell running they surfed in the evenings as well, so Ike made it a practice to go there after work. He had taken note of the direction they took upon leaving the beach and he had it in mind to follow them. He was certain it was an idea of which Preston would not approve, but then Preston had not been around again since the first day of the swell.

He watched from the pier until the sun slipped into the sea and the lights began to flutter and buzz above the boardwalk, then he turned and walked quickly back to the highway. They usually crossed the street in front of Tom’s and then turned left, moving away toward the north end of town. He waited at Tom’s. When they passed, he fell in behind them.

He stayed too far back to pick up anything of their conversation, but he could see them gesturing and laughing. For a time their bare feet left wet prints across the dirty pavement. In front of the Capri Room the neon lights cast a pink glow on the concrete and flashed in the chrome of the half-dozen choppers that lined the curb. He saw Hound gesture once in the direction of the bikes and heard Terry Jacobs laugh.

People parted in front of them as they passed. They turned right at Del Taco and walked along a dimly lit street. Ike stayed behind them. He could feel his pulse now, up in his throat, a dampness in the palms of his hands. They were the only people on the street besides him. He slowed some and let them stretch their lead.

They went on for another three blocks before turning into the lawn of a two-story house. There was a light on in an upstairs window and it made a yellow circle on the dark grass, caught in the whispering fronds of an old palm that grew in the front yard. Ike could hear them talking again, pulling off wet suits. He had meant to go on by, do his best to look casual, but suddenly he wanted more. The house next door was dark, its lawn black with the shadow of old trees. A thick hedge separated the pieces of property and Ike ducked behind it. And then he was moving along the hedge, ducked down in a kind of crouch, thinking how stupid it would be to get caught. But the house was dark and silent, the windows shaded. Through the hedge he could hear them talking, running a hose. He got to his knees and crawled, found a spot in the hedge where he could see through.

They were stripped to their trunks in the front yard. Hound was hosing down wet suits. As Ike watched another man came out on the porch. He was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. He was shorter than either Hound or the Samoan, rather thin but wiry. He had wavy blond hair that was combed straight back, and looked wet, as if he’d just gotten out of the water. He put his hand to his mouth, taking a toke off something, it appeared, cocking his head a bit when he did, and there was something about that gesture, the angle at which he held his head, perhaps, or the light on his hair, that made Ike think of the alley in back of the shop. He was almost certain that this was the guy he had seen there talking to Preston, and a name formed on his lips. He whispered it to himself.

“You shoulda come back out, brah.” It was Terry who spoke to the man on the porch. The guy shrugged and passed Terry the joint. “Tomorrow,” he said. Terry nodded and went up the steps and into the house. The new man and Hound Adams were left alone in the front yard. The two men were silent for a time. Hound hung the wet suits to dry on a small line that had been run from the porch out to a tree in the yard. It was finally Hound Adams who spoke, and Ike heard his voice clearly for the first time. “It’s a good swell,” Hound said. He had a smooth, even voice. “Should be a good summer. I can feel it. You know what I mean?” The blond man nodded, then sat down on the porch. Hound moved to stand in front of him, taking the joint from him and then passing it back. They continued to talk about the surf, about storms and swells, and how they ran in cycles, and how this was the year. Ike listened. The ground was slightly damp beneath his hand and knees and he could smell the musty green of the old hedge. A car passed on the street, but its lights were too far away to find him. And then he started thinking about something. It was a strange thing to think about, perhaps, but he thought about it anyway. He couldn’t help himself. He started thinking about how good they were, especially Hound, how they knew about these cycles and storms and a distant energy and how they had been alone in the big swell when he had thought no one could’ve gotten out and how Hound Adams had ridden the first wave. He thought back to those names scribbled on a scrap of paper and he wondered for a moment—why did it have to be them?

Someone killed the light in the upstairs window and the patterns of shadow died on the grass. But Ike could still make them out through the hedge: Hound standing up now, the other guy taking the boards beneath the cover of the porch. Hound stood for a moment alone, his hands on his hips, staring into the dark yard, then he turned and went inside. The front door banged shut in the blackness. Ike waited for a few minutes and then straightened up. The knees of his pants had circles of wetness on them and he brushed at them with his hands. He walked slowly back along the hedge and turned on the sidewalk.

There was another light on in the house now, in what looked like the kitchen, and he could see them through the glass: Hound Adams and Terry Jacobs seated at what must have been a table, although it was too low for him to see. They were still bare-chested, their faces turned down, intent on whatever was before them. For a moment Ike flashed back to what he had thought of behind the hedge, but then it was gone and there was just the oddly metallic taste of fear far back in his mouth and throat. As he moved along the sidewalk, passing in front of the house, he turned once more to look. It was a different angle and he could see them even better. The two men were bent slightly forward, their faces hard and chiseled-looking in the yellow light, faces that seemed suddenly both arrogant and cunning; murderers beneath the eaves.

A sudden spasm seemed to pass through him and he moved away, into the darkness of the street. But later, alone in his room, he thought it all through again. He thought, too, of Ellen Tucker. Though there was not a day in which he did not think of her, the work and the swell had managed to fill his mind with other things. But not tonight. Tonight it was all right there, like it had been that second week, working on Preston’s tank. Only now he had seen them, had put faces to the names on that scrap of paper, and he thought again about what the kid had told him—that they were not lightweight people, that unless he could find some real help… And for the first time since he’d come, he found himself fighting in a new way against what Gordon had told him, that part about making up his mind to it, that he would not see her again. He could hear those words now, like the walls were telling him, and he fought against them all night long, until the first gray light was swimming on the cracked plaster ceiling. And it was like finally, somewhere at the edge of a troubled sleep, his eyes hot and scratchy as if he’d been staring into a desert wind, he knew the words were true. He knew it with a terrible certainty, and with a fresh rush of anxiety he thought about that man he’d seen Preston talking to in the alley—the same man he’d seen tonight: Frank Baker. Had to be. And he wondered what they had said to one another that night in the alley, behind the shop.

11

He awoke sometime later to the sound of boots on the stairs. The boots belonged to Preston and he didn’t bother to knock but barged right in and right away Ike could see there was something different about him. He propped himself up on one elbow and rubbed his face with his hand. The main thing that was different, he decided, was the shirt. It was a ridiculous shirt, covered with bright blue pelicans and flying fish, the kind of shirt you would expect to see on some flabby, camera-toting tourist and it was the first time Ike had ever seen Preston dressed in anything besides a dirty tank top. He was still wearing motorcycle boots and greasy jeans, but that shirt made a new man out of him.

But then Ike could see that it was more than the shirt. His face looked clear and sober, the way it had that day he’d come for his tank, and his hair was wet again too, like he’d just showered, and it was combed back flat against his skull. He was rubbing his hands together and pacing back and forth in front of Ike’s bed. “Well, don’t just lay there diddling yourself,” Preston told him, “let’s get some waves.”

Ike hauled himself out of bed and touched his feet to the cold floor. The memory of last night was still with him. He felt washed out in the gray light, hung over, though he’d had nothing to drink. He blinked hard and tried to adjust to Preston’s enthusiasm, which seemed not to mesh well with the rest of the morning but was rather forced and just a bit mechanical. He pinched his nose with his fingers, between his eyes. The room was full of blue pelicans and flying fish.

“Well, come on,” Preston was saying. He had stopped pacing now and was standing at the foot of Ike’s bed. He was standing with his hands on his hips—a stance that reminded Ike of Hound Adams. It was the way Hound Adams had stood on his porch the night before, staring into a dark yard. He thought for a moment about telling Preston about it, but then decided against it. He decided to go along with whatever Preston was up to and see where it led. Besides that, forced or not, it was the most jovial he had ever seen the guy and he hated to put an end to this new mood so soon. He got up and started looking around the room for his cutoffs. Then he remembered he was supposed to help Morris overhaul Moon’s Shovelhead. “I promised Morris I’d help him on another Shovel,” he said.

Preston stared at him, pushed his shades up into his hair. “I thought you wanted to learn how to surf.”

“I do.”

“Then fuck Morris. Let him tear down his own Shovelhead. You wanna be somebody’s nigger for the rest of your life?”

“It’s Moon’s Shovelhead,” Ike said. He seated himself on the edge of his bed to pull on his cutoffs. But he was finally waking up now, and some of Preston’s enthusiasm was beginning to rub off on him. He grinned back up at Preston. “I thought you were retired.”

“Shit. I’ll retire your ass if you don’t make up your mind. I’m gonna get some waves. You wanna come with me or what?”

Ike stood up and buttoned his pants. “Where we going?” he asked.

Preston grinned and pulled his shades back over his eyes. “Where it’s good, ace, where it’s good.”

At the foot of the stairs Ike was surprised to find an old Chevy pickup. The truck was primer gray. There were signs of body work on the front fenders. A homemade camper shell covered the bed and a set of Harley-Davidson wings decorated the window at the back of the camper. Preston lifted the rear door so Ike could slide his board in and that was when Ike saw the other board and the camping equipment. Preston’s board looked old, a little yellowed around the edges, but before sliding his own in on top, Ike noticed the decal on the deck of Preston’s board, a wave within a circle, and the words Tapping the Source.

They drove all morning and Ike didn’t ask any more questions about where they were going. He climbed into the cab beside Preston and they headed north, out through the oil wells, above the cliffs where Ike had caught his first wave. Preston rolled down his window and let the morning air in to whip about their ears. The air was clean and cool and Ike was happy for it. He began to feel really awake now, and to wonder about where they were headed and what Preston was up to, and he thought as well about that board he’d seen in the back. But he didn’t ask any more questions. He watched the road as it rushed toward them, as the first bright rays of sunlight began to pierce the grayness.

They stopped once for coffee at a small doughnut stand on the seaward side of Coast Highway. They stood in back of the stand with Styrofoam cups in their hands and watched the swell lines moving across the ocean far below them. When they were back in the truck, Preston leaned out the window and hooted. “It’s going to be good, ace,” he said, and then leaned over and jabbed at Ike’s knee. Ike felt his leg pop under the blow and even though he knew Preston was just kidding around, it still hurt some. He looked at the coiled serpent running along Preston’s arm, disappearing beneath the sleeve of his crazy shirt, and he couldn’t help but wonder why they were doing this. It still seemed to him that there was something out of sync in Preston’s enthusiasm. He wanted to talk about Hound Adams. He wanted to ask Preston about that blond-haired guy he’d seen him talking to in the alley. But he restrained himself, as he had earlier in his room. He did not want to disturb the delicate balance of the morning. So he kept his mouth shut and stared into the dashboard, where a rusted key swung on a rawhide cord from one of the knobs. He watched the morning as it slipped past them and he began to enjoy himself. This was, now that he thought about it, practically the first time in his life that anyone had ever taken him along on something—aside from all the driving around he had done with his mother when he and Ellen were small, but he figured you couldn’t count that. He thought back to those hunting trips Gordon used to make once in a while, how he had always wanted to go but had always been left behind—Gordon saying he was too young, or too small. He wondered what Gordon would say now, if he could see him riding shotgun in an old pickup with a set of Harley-Davidson wings on the back and a guy like Preston at the wheel. He pulled himself up straight in the seat and rested an arm out the window, like Preston. He guessed maybe he didn’t give a fuck where they were headed or why, at least for the moment. It was still a trip, God damn it. Just kick back and listen to the highway hum.

By noon they were in Santa Barbara. The sun was slanting off red tile roofs and whitewashed walls on a street called South State. There were a lot of Mexicans and winos taking in the sun and hitchhikers sitting Indian style on the green strip of grass that ran along the highway.

Preston found a run-down-looking Mexican cafe where they ate burritos and rice. Preston ordered a pitcher of beer and an old Mexican woman brought two glasses without asking Ike for an ID.

“We’ll kill the afternoon in town,” Preston said. “I don’t want to go in till after dark.”

“After dark?”

“The one thing about this place. The waves are great but it’s all on private property. They’ll shoot your ass if they catch you surfing it.”

Ike felt the beans lumping up in his throat and used a long drink of beer to wash them down. Preston grinned at him and killed the pitcher without bothering to pour it in a glass.

Later they went to a pool hall Preston knew about and then out to a grassy hill with a six-pack to watch the sun slip into the ocean. Finally Preston stood up and brushed his hands off on his pants. He sailed a bottle off the side of the hill. They waited for the sound of breaking glass, but it never came; it was lost somewhere in the breeze and the distant sound of the sea. Preston took off his shades, folded them, and slipped them into the pocket of his shirt. “All right,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

They wound through a series of grassy hills, bouncing along a dirt road that skirted the crests. The moon came up fat and yellow and trailed them among the hilltops. Abruptly they rounded a curve and stopped in front of a long iron gate. Preston snatched the key from the dashboard. Ike could see him wink and for a moment Preston held the key up in front of Ike’s face. “Take a look at a real heirloom,” Preston told him. “There’s been blood spilled over keys like this one. You’re lucky to know a cat who’s still got one.”

“How did you get it?”

Preston jerked at the key and snapped it up in his big fist. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” He jumped outside and Ike could hear him chuckling to himself in the moonlight.

Past the gate, they drove for another ten minutes, then pulled the truck off the road and into a kind of gully where a few sparse trees twisted into the darkness. The grass was tall. It rustled about their hips in a light breeze that smelled of the ocean. “We walk from here,” Preston said.

The night was not particularly cold, but Ike found himself shivering at the back of the truck as Preston unloaded their gear. There were two packs filled with canned goods and bottled water, plus the wet suits and boards. Preston loaded them down and they started off through the high grass. At the road, Ike turned to look back and found that the truck was completely hidden from view.

The night was filled with the songs of insects, the earthy scents of grass and sage, the damp salt smell of the sea. The moon lit the road and threw a silver light upon the blades of grass, the polished rails of the boards. They walked for what seemed to Ike a long time. His arms ached and each felt about a foot longer when they finally put everything down. They rolled the bags out between the roots of some thick trees on the side of a hill. The ground fell away into darkness, more trees. The moon was straight overhead now. In the distance Ike could hear the sound of surf. “Waves,” Preston whispered. “It’s been a long time.” And it was the first thing Ike had heard him say that day that did not sound like part of an act.

In the morning Ike saw that the hillside was higher and steeper than he had guessed in the night. A clump of trees obscured the view directly in front of them, but off to the left the ground dropped away to reveal other hills, great patches of mustard and wild flowers, green grass and dark trees, and below it all, the sea.

The beaches here were different from those Ike had gotten used to. The beaches in Huntington were wide and flat, colors kept to a minimum. Here the scenery was wild, the colors lush, varied. Long lines of hills rolled toward the sea then broke into steep tumbling cliffs, patchworks of reds and browns. Below the cliffs were thin white crescents and rocky points that reached into the Pacific. There were no traffic noises here, no voices. There were only the calls of the birds, the breeze in the grass, and the surf cracking far below them.

They pulled on trunks and wet suits in the crisp morning air. They knelt on the rocky soil beneath the trees and waxed their boards. The smells of rubber and coconut mixed with the smells of the earth and grass. “We’ll get some morning glass,” Preston told him. “Surf till ten or eleven, then back here for some food and sleep, surf again around sunset.”

They stashed the bags and gear and started down the slope. Ike could see a set of railroad tracks winding through the hills below them at the edge of the sand.

“It’s a ranch,” Preston said, waving at the hills. “The owners don’t like trespassers, but there’s usually no one around except a few of the cowboys that work the place. At least that’s the way it used to be, in the old days.” He looked at Ike and grinned, and it seemed to Ike that some of Preston’s biker traits had fallen away from him this morning. Perhaps it was just that he was wearing a wet suit and carrying a board, but it was suddenly hard to imagine that he was the same wild man Ike had seen punch out a fuel tank. He seemed younger this morning, more like a kid himself as he led Ike down through the tall grass, talking of cowboys and perfect waves. “The cowboys can be unpredictable,” Preston was saying. “Sometimes they won’t do shit and sometimes they will. Had a friend once who lost his board and had to swim in to get it. Turned out there was a bunch of cowboys waiting for him on the beach.” Preston paused. “It was a bad scene,” he said. Ike waited for him to say more but they walked on in silence.

When they had cleared the trees, they stopped and looked down. “Look at that,” Preston told him, and he did: the unmarked crescent of white sand, the rocky point, the perfect liquid lines waiting to be ridden, and he figured that perhaps he knew after all why they had come. He touched Preston’s arm as they started down. “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks for bringing me.” Preston just laughed and led the way, and his laughter rang among the hills.

They entered the water near the middle of the crescent-shaped beach. Ike followed Preston, and when they had pushed through the shore break, Preston angled his board toward the point. Ahead of them the horizon was a straight blue line. The sun sparkled on the water and the water was like glass, smooth and clear so you could look down and see small schools of fish and tendrils of seaweed reaching for the sun. Soon they were paddling over shoulders, the waves lifting and lowering them, and Ike could feel his heart beginning to thump against the deck of his board. He had never paddled out this far or been in waves like these.

At last Preston dug his legs into the water and drew himself up to straddle the board. Ike did the same and together they looked back at the green hills, the white strip of beach. It all seemed very far away. They could see much more of the coastline from here and Ike picked out an area where the vegetation seemed the thickest. The spot was well back into the hills and at first all he noticed was the vegetation. Then he saw the house, not a complete house for most of it was hidden, just a corner of red-tiled roof above a brilliant flash of white. He was about to ask Preston about the house, but Preston spoke first.

“This is what it’s all about,” Preston said. “You know, there used to be places like this all up and down the coast. Surf ’em with your friends. They’re gone now. Fucking developers. People. Fuckers’ll all drown in their own garbage before it’s over, wait and see.” He seemed a little winded from the paddle, as if it was something he had not done in a long time. He swung his arms and rolled his thick neck, then squinted out to sea as the next outside set began to build. Ike forgot about the coastline and began to paddle. It looked to him like they were still too far inside, but Preston called him back: “Just stick with me, hot shot; set up like I tell you to.”

Ike did set up as Preston told him. The set was moving past them now and Preston began paddling hard to the left, paddling closer toward the center of the peaks. Ike paddled after him. As each wave reached them it lifted them high into the air and as it passed there was a fine white spray blown back from the lip and there were rainbows caught in the spray. Suddenly Preston turned to him and shouted: “Your wave, ace. Dig for it.”

Ike swung the board around and began to paddle and almost at once, without time for a second thought, he was in the grip of the wave. He could hear Preston yell behind him. He could hear the wind and a funny kind of swishing sound. He gripped his rails and swung himself up and there he was, at the top, the wave a great moving hill beneath him, and he was amazed at the height, amazed at how different this was from the short, steep faces he had ridden at Huntington. He was dropping and picking up speed. His stomach rose in his chest. The wave face grew steeper, a green wall that went on forever. The board pushed against his feet. There was a feeling of compression, as if he stood on the floor of a speeding elevator. And then it was over. He made a bit of a turn at the bottom, but it was not enough. A rail caught and the board seemed to come to a dead stop. He left the deck as if catapulted, skidded once on his face and stomach before going under and that was when the whole Pacific Ocean came down on top of him. He had no idea of where he was in relation to the surface. His head filled with salt water. He could feel the leash that connected his ankle to his board dragging him beneath the water. He tried to relax, to go limp, but what he kept seeing was the way Preston would find his body, bloated and discolored, half eaten by crabs, caught between the rocks. He began to claw with both hands, to fight for the surface, and suddenly he was there, the sea a mass of swirling white water all around him, the sunlight dancing in the foam, and he was sucking in great lungfuls of air and blinking the salt out of his eyes and marveling at the beauty of the sky.

He floated for some time in the shallows, just outside the shore break, clinging to his board, torn between the fear of hidden cowboys waiting to beat his brains out if he went in, and drowning if he paddled back out. He could see Preston sitting far outside and he guessed maybe it was the fear of Preston that won out. He was afraid of what Preston would think of him if he gave up. He pointed his board toward the horizon and began to paddle.

He watched Preston take a wave and though it seemed at times that there was a little jerkiness to his moves, he rode the wave well, dropping and carving, getting high and fast, and he thought that there must have been a time when Preston was very good, as good perhaps as Hound Adams was now. Preston at last went up and over the shoulder so that he was back outside and waiting when Ike arrived. He took in a mouthful of water as Ike paddled up next to him and squirted it high in the air like some baby whale, laughed and made a face at Ike. “You’ll make it,” he said. “Just remember to turn next time. Lean in up at the top, drive off your back foot.”

They surfed until the sun was overhead and Ike’s arms were so weary he could barely lift them out of the water. But he had begun to catch waves, to paddle for them, make the drop, the turn. He was also beginning to see that the wipeouts wouldn’t kill him, not these waves, not today.

They did as Preston had suggested, surfed until noon then returned to the camp, where they ate canned peaches and drank water, slept in the shade of the trees with the hills and ocean spread out below them. Near sunset they surfed again. The water passed like polished glass beneath their boards. Once Ike turned to see Preston sitting on his board maybe fifty yards away. The sea was dark and all around him slivers of sunlight shimmered and vanished like darting schools of fish. On the horizon, the sun had begun to melt, had gone red above a purple sea. The tide was low and the waves turned crisp black faces toward the shore while trails of mist rose from their feathering lips in fine golden arcs. The arcs rose into the sky, spreading and then falling back into the sea, scattering their light across the surface like shards of flame. There was a cyclical quality in all of this, in the play of light, in the movement of the swell. It was an incredible moment and he felt suddenly that he was plugged into all, was part of it in some organic way. The feeling created an awareness of a new set of possibilities, a new rhythm. He wanted to laugh, or to shout. He put his hand in the air and waved at Preston across the dark expanse. It was a crazy kind of wave—done with the whole arm, his hand swinging at the end of it, full of childish exuberance. And as he watched, Preston raised his own arm and waved back.

12

The sun went down behind them. It was dark as they reached the beach. Ike knelt in the shallows to remove his leash. The water felt warm now, gentle as it slapped against his legs. He could see Preston grinning down at him. Ike wanted to say something, to talk about how he felt, perhaps would have tried, but was silenced quickly by the sound of a truck somewhere on the beach.

“Cowboys,” Preston whispered. They ducked down, stretched out on their stomachs in the black water. First they heard the engine. The sound seemed to come from several directions at once, then they saw the lights. There was a single pickup bouncing along the beach up near the tracks at the base of the cliff. Ike could hear Preston’s breathing at his side. They watched in silence. The truck went by without stopping or turning. When it was gone, they slipped back into the darkness of the hill, and up to their place.

They made a small fire, heated beans and hot dog buns, talked about waves. Preston talked about big days, and hollow perfect days. He spoke of places like Cotton’s Point, Swamies, Lunada Bay, the Huntington pier. He talked about the distant places he had never surfed, the point breaks of Queensland and South Africa, the reefs of New Zealand. He told Ike there were some guys who made a life out of it, traveling, surfing; they surfed places like the ranch all the time; they didn’t bother with crowds.

“What about the pros?” Ike asked, because he had seen lists of contests in the magazines.

“Yeah, the pros travel. That’s one way to do it. But then that’s a whole other scene, too. The thing you’ve got going for you is a trade. You could make a living just about anywhere, move where it’s good, travel. That’s how you get good, anyway, surfing a lot of different spots. Think about it.”

Ike did think about it and it suddenly occurred to him that Preston was not trying to talk him into something, he was trying to talk him out of something. He was trying to talk him out of looking for Ellen. The feeling came on him quickly and was very strong and he sensed that Preston was aware of it too, aware of what he was saying. Ike was quiet and a silence grew up between them.

It was Preston who finally spoke. “We may as well talk about it,” he said, and pulled himself upright. He had been stretched out, propped on one arm. Now he seated himself Indian style and stared into the flames. He acted as if it were a thing requiring great effort. “I’ve thought about what you told me,” he said, speaking slowly, still watching the fire. “And there’s a couple of things that bother me. The first is this kid’s story. He said your sister went to Mexico, with Hound Adams and Frank and Terry, that they went last summer. That right?”

Ike nodded, the smoke drifting into his eyes now and making them water after a day in the sunlight and salt.

“Okay. Maybe. But I’ve been around H.B. for a while and Hound Adams usually makes that kind of trip in the winter, around Christmastime. Locks the shop up, splits for about a month. So why would this kid have it in the summer? It could’ve been there was another trip, but it could have been something else, too. Think about this: I happen to know Hound Adams deals a lot of dope. And he’s not above burning somebody, especially some kid. So suppose that’s what happened. What’s the kid going to do about it? He’s not going to go kick Hound Adams’s ass. Most likely he wouldn’t do shit. But suppose he knew this chick, had heard her talking about her badass brother, and what if the chick split and this kid thinks he sees a way to make some trouble for Hound Adams. You see what I’m driving at?”

Ike thought about it. He thought about the kid making the whole thing up. Preston’s idea sounded pretty shaky to him. “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, wouldn’t this kid think that…”

“Wait a minute, man, wait a minute,” Preston said, getting impatient, talking faster now, like he was going to get himself pissed off again. “You’re missing my point. I’m not saying that’s what happened. How the fuck do I know what happened? What I’m trying to tell you is that there is something screwy about this kid’s story. I say he’s got the date wrong. What I’m trying to tell you is not to believe every damn thing you hear. People will play any number of games with your head. Dig it? Especially in this town.” He jerked his thumb toward the trees, south, in the direction of Huntington Beach. “Everybody’s got a scam. If all you’ve got to go on is this kid’s story—it’s not much.”

“But what if there was another trip? What if the kid was telling the truth?”

“All right, suppose he was. That brings me to a second thing that bothers me. You told me that day in your room that all you were going to do was hang out, see if you could locate Hound Adams, then see if you could get close enough to him to find out something. Well, no offense, ace, but that whole idea sucks. The way I see it, you’ve got two possibilities. Either your sister just moved on, which is very possible, or something bad happened. But suppose the worst. Suppose she’s dead and you find out about it. What are you going to do then? You’re gonna have to have some real evidence to get the cops in on it, and that may be hard to do. I mean, I hate to scare you, but if she really did go to Mexico with these guys…” He paused for a moment and brushed at the side of his face with his thumb. “She could be dead and buried in the middle of some desert, man. No one will ever know. You see what I’m driving at. You may hang out in Huntington Beach, and you may even hear something, but unless you actually find her you’re not going to know. You might hear all kinds of shit, but it would just be stories, rumors, nothing you could ever go to the cops with. I also happen to know that Hound Adams has some big friends, people with bucks, the kind of bucks that can shut people up.” Preston stopped once more and shifted his butt beneath him. Ike could see there was a dark smudge of dirt where he had brushed his face. “The point,” he said, “is that if the worst happened, you’ll probably never know it, and even if you did, there wouldn’t be much you could do. Oh, you could go after him yourself. I mean, hide out on a roof some night and throw a brick through Hound Adams’s head. Probably the best that would get you would be some time in the can.” Preston paused and looked at Ike through the fire. “I been in the can,” he said. “You wouldn’t like it.”

Ike didn’t say anything right away. Preston picked up a stick and began poking the fire with it. “There’s another thing, too,” he said. “One more thing just in case you haven’t thought of it yourself—then I’ll shut up. You said your sister ran away. So if she ran away, how do you even know she would want you out looking for her? It’s a loser, man, all the way around. Either your sister’s out there someplace, on her own, and doesn’t want you along, or she’s dead and there’s damn little you can do about it. I realize it’s a bummer, but that’s the way I see it. And either way, if your sister’s not in Huntington Beach, then what the hell is? I mean, H.B.’s a damn sewer, man, you hang out in it long enough and you might just drown in it.

“You see what I’m trying to tell you? I’m not trying to sound like your old man; I’m just trying to run something down for you.” Preston had managed by this time to catch the end of the stick on fire and he had begun to play with it, seeing how close he could hold his hand to the flame. “Look,” he said, after a few moments of singeing his palm. “The smartest fucking thing you could do would just be to split. You sure as hell don’t have to worry about that job with Morris. Shit, I should never have talked him into it in the first place. I think I was half in the bag that day.” He stopped and made a kind of shrugging motion with one arm. “I’m not going anywhere. You could keep in touch with me; anything turns up, I can let you know. What did you say her name was?”

“Ellen.”

“Ellen.” Preston repeated the name, then tossed the stick back into the fire.

Ike lay back flat on the ground and closed his eyes, feeling the way his sister’s name hung there, in the night air, above the orange flames. What was there beneath the surface of Preston’s words? Preston himself had said that everyone had a scam. So what was his? Why had he taken an interest in Ike? Brought him here? Was it as simple as he had said: Ike had done him a favor and he wanted to return it, that he was simply trying to turn Ike on to something that would get him away from Huntington Beach and off a bum trip? He would have liked to believe that. But it was not that simple for him—even if everything Preston said was true, it was not that simple. He owed something to Ellen. She’d been all he’d had for a long time. And finally, when she’d needed him, he had not really been there—not in the right way. When she’d needed him that night on the flats, he let some other need in himself come between them and it had never been quite the same afterward. Maybe if he’d been different then, things would not have worked out as they had. And maybe that was really why he’d come—not what the old lady had thought, and not even because she was family, but because he’d let her down and he owed her. He could not quit that easily. And yet, for the moment, he was not sure what else to say to Preston. His guilt, he felt, was a private thing.

He lay there for some time without talking, or commenting further on Preston’s offer. He thought again of what he had seen in the alley—Preston talking to the blond-haired surfer. But somehow, bringing that up just now seemed pointless. Preston had stated his position. She’d moved on or she was dead. Either way there was not much he could do. It was, of course, all ground he had been over in his own mind. But it struck him now as particularly depressing, perhaps because he was hearing someone else say it, out loud for the first time. He closed his eyes and he fought to hang on to some of that plugged-in feeling he had gotten back to the beach with, to remember the waves, the rush of smooth faces in the last light, the sense of camaraderie that had grown out of the shared day. He turned his head and watched Preston still seated near the remains of the fire. The reddish light of the embers crept up his tattooed arms and into his face, which was bent down toward the coals. He was not like the other biker types Ike had met around Jerry’s shop. He could be loud and violent, as Ike had seen that first day in the lot, but there was something else there too, something that, like the eyes, did not quite fit with the rest of the disguise, and he found himself wanting to say one more thing. “Why’d you quit?” Ike asked him. “Why don’t you go to some of those places you were telling me about? You still could.”

Preston seemed to think about it for a minute. “I guess it has to do with wanting something to be a certain way,” he said. “And if it can’t be that way, then you don’t want it at all.”

Ike thought about it. He would have liked to ask what had changed it, but he didn’t. He supposed it was not the kind of thing you should ask, that it was private like his guilt.

“It’s just different now,” Preston went on. “I’ve got too many good memories, too many good waves.” He poked at the coals with a fresh stick. Ike watched him, hunched up, squinting into the ashes, and somehow he didn’t get the idea that Preston was thinking back on good times. He looked to Ike more like someone who had lost something and couldn’t see the way to get it back. Maybe he was just tired, but Ike didn’t think that was all there was to it. And then it came to him what there was in the face, in the eyes that did not seem right, what he’d noticed that first day—a kind of desperate quality, almost as if Preston was afraid of something. And maybe that was what was wrong. Fear did not belong in that body any more than the eyes did. But there it was. Or perhaps it was only in Ike’s mind, a product of his overworked imagination, but he did not think so and he suddenly found himself wondering what Preston would think if he tried to tell him about that feeling, that certain time of day when the silence grows too great and it is as if the land itself is about to cry out. And though he did not tell him, because it did not really seem like the kind of thing you could put into words, he did not think that Preston would laugh as Ellen had done. He had this crazy notion that Preston would know. He flattened back out and watched the sky, cut by dark branches above his face. He closed his eyes and saw countless lines of waves moving toward him from a distant horizon and he waited for them to rock him to sleep.

Sometime in the night he woke with a start. He could not say what had disturbed him or how long he had slept. The fire had gone out; the ashes looked cold and dead in the moonlight. Ike sat up in his bag and looked around. Preston’s bag had been unrolled and lay on the ground maybe ten yards away, but Preston was not in it. Ike stared hard into the darkness that surrounded the camp. He listened, but there were only the sounds of the forest, the beating of his own heart. For a moment he felt something like panic rising in his chest. He lay back down, forced his breathing into a regular pattern. He was certain Preston would be back. Perhaps he had only gone to take a leak. He forced his eyes to close and at last he slipped into sleep once more. When he woke again, the sky was gray and Preston was asleep near the circle of ashes.

The second day passed much as the first: surf until late morning, sleep and eat in the afternoon, surf again at sunset. They saw cowboys again, this time from the water, a red pickup truck at the edge of the cliff. They paddled back around the point, out of sight, and waited until the truck had gone.

On the second afternoon, while Preston slept, Ike explored a section of trail they had passed on their way down to the beach. There was a place where the trail forked, one branch going down, the other up, toward what Ike guessed would be the edge of the cliff overlooking the point. He was not sure that Preston would approve of his looking around, but he did not plan to be gone for long and the trail was not anywhere near where they had seen the truck.

It was a warm afternoon. Insects sang in the brush. A light breeze whispered in the high grass and the hills seemed to move in the wind, to ripple as if they were alive. Wild mustard cut yellow slashes across great fields of green. He moved along the narrow trail, the ground hot against his bare feet where it was smooth and exposed to the sun, cool and damp where it wound beneath the twisted limbs of the squat dark trees that grew in clumps throughout the hills.

The trail did not go on for long and soon, emerging from a thicket of trees, he found himself in a large clearing at the edge of a cliff. He at first stepped into the clearing but then drew back among the trees. There was something unusual here, a sudden feeling that he had violated some private space. He stood in the shade and looked out at the circular patch of smooth hard-packed dirt. In the center of the clearing there was a stone ring. The smooth dirt, the slight rise of the ground, made it seem as if the earth rose here to cut a great half circle out of the sky. The stone ring was blackened with soot and ash. A series of strange symbols had been scratched into the stone and he was reminded of the fire rings beneath the cliffs, the graffiti of the inland gangs. Those rings, however, were made of concrete. This ring was made from individual stones, and as he inspected it more carefully he saw that the stones were held together with mortar, which in spots still had a rough, almost new look to it, as if the ring was of recent construction. Looking farther around the circle, he saw that along the far edge, closest to the cliff and the sea, there was also evidence of some recent digging—some kind of trench, with mounds of dark earth heaped to the side of it.

He stepped into the clearing once more, intent on examining this work in progress. As he did so, however, he happened to look back over his shoulder and discovered that he could once again see the house he’d glimpsed that first morning from the point. It was a better view from here, and he stood looking back at it, listening to the heat moving in the brush, the sound of the surf drifting up from the beaches below. The house was still very far away, but he could see windows and what appeared to be a balcony. And as he watched he became aware of a tiny speck moving on the balcony. A figure dressed in white? Yes, he was certain of it. There was a person there. He ducked quickly back into the trail, hoping he had not been visible to them as well. He waited for a few moments, listening to the surf below him. It was hard to see much from the trail, but he did not want to risk going back into the clearing now. At last he turned and started down, back toward the camp.

Preston was awake when he returned and Ike told him about the clearing. He told him about the house and the tiny figure in white. Preston listened, a scowl on his face, eyes turned toward the ground as he scratched circular lines with a pointed stick. “It’s been a long time since I was here last,” Preston said. “Things have changed. Maybe there are more people around now.”

Ike wondered how smart it was to stay. They had seen ranch hands both days now. There was someone in the house.

“Swell’s still good,” Preston said. “One more day. We’ll give it one more day.”

13

By the end of the third day, Ike felt that they had been there forever. His skin was burned dark and his hair was tangled with salt, streaked almost blond at the ends. His back and shoulders ached from the long paddles, but that plugged-in feeling had not deserted him. He felt alive in a new way, and more confident now than at any time he could remember. He still had occasional doubts about why they had come. Perhaps it was as simple as Preston had said: They had come for the waves.

The third day passed without incident. It was agreed that they would spend one more night, leave in the morning. Ike went to sleep quickly after eating; the last he saw of Preston, he was seated by the fire, a joint held to his lips, his dark hair loose, resting on his shoulders, so that he reminded Ike of certain airbrushed drawings he’d seen on the fuel tanks of bikes, the covers of magazines: the dark scowl beneath the long hair, the heavy tattooed shoulders and arms lit by the orange light of the fire. He looked like a figure out of some remote past, a slayer of dragons.

And once again, as had happened on the first night, Ike woke in the blackness to find that he was alone, the fire dead, Preston’s bag unrolled but empty. This time, however, Ike had the feeling that he had been disturbed, that there had been a sound. He strained his ears against the silence, the distant buzz of insects, the far-off crash of waves. Then he heard it again: the barking of a dog. He pulled himself out of his bag and stood in the center of the small clearing. He was uncertain about what to do. He put on sneakers and stepped to the edge of the camp, staring down the trail that led to the beach, that forked off toward the clearing. Could Preston have gone to check out the clearing for himself? Would it be foolish to leave the camp? A half-moon melted down on one side rested far above the trees. He heard the dog again. It would not take him long to reach the clearing. He had just started down the trail when suddenly there was a new sound: a voice. A man’s voice ripping the night. He began to run.

Somehow the trail seemed longer in the night. The branches often blocked what light there was and in one place he collided with a low branch that jutted across the trail. He turned his face at the last second and caught the blow across his jaw, driving the skin of his cheek into his teeth. The taste of blood crept into his mouth. He paused to rest, his hands on his knees, his head ringing. The voice came again. Was it the same voice? Or had this one come from behind him, cutting him off? He was uncertain. His head ached. He heard the dog again, a first voice and then a second, and suddenly the night seemed full of sounds, of violence. A light flashed somewhere among the trees that lay on the inland side of the trail, a single white spot jumping, appearing and disappearing, someone running. Ike put his head down and began to run once more, running now out of panic, afraid to cut back toward camp, his breath like flame. He ran up a steep section of trail he could not remember and suddenly he was back at the edge of the cliff, the clearing, and Preston was there, but he was not alone.

Preston was nearly facing Ike, the cliff edge at his back. And between Ike and Preston there was another man, a big man with a wide back and a huge head of black hair and there was one crazy moment in which Ike stood there, struck dumb, like a rabbit caught in a light, eyes wide and stupid, as he tried to remember where he had seen that back and hair before, then realizing it was the same back he had followed through the streets of Huntington Beach just three nights ago. And even as he stood there, remembering, making the connection, Terry Jacobs and Preston collided near the center of the empty space. There was a great dull thud, a cursing and groaning as the two men fell to one side. And then they were up, Jacobs bent at the waist, Preston holding him in a kind of headlock, one arm under Terry’s chin, trying to cut off air, the other across the back of his neck, Terry making huge efforts to break the hold. In one such effort he brought Preston completely off the ground, driving him against the stone ring. Preston’s back slapped against the stone with a heaviness that made Ike wince. But Preston did not let go and now Ike could see him pulling, arching his back, forcing that forearm up into Jacob’s throat. He could hear Jacobs gasping and spitting, fighting for air, and then he could hear something else as well: voices, on the trail now below him, and though it looked like Preston might win, it was all happening too slowly. There would not be time.

As far as Ike knew, he had gone completely unnoticed by the men in the clearing. He now ran closer, toward the ring, trying to warn Preston, afraid to shout. He saw Preston turn to him over the great rounded hump of Terry’s back. His face was twisted and there was blood streaked across one side; one eye was badly swollen. “Well, do something, then, God damn it,” Preston hissed at him between clenched teeth. “A rock, anything.” The voices were closer. Ike looked wildly around and that was when he saw the dog. It was on its side near the edge of the cliff, and it was dead. Its mouth hung open, the dark tongue spilling over teeth that were white in the moonlight. Blood lay in a dark pool beneath its skull. The broken piece of a shovel lay nearby. Ike looked at the dog, the shovel. For some ridiculous reason he was afraid to go near the dog. One dead eye watched him in the moonlight. He heard Preston curse him. He heard voices. He heard the sound of surf swept up out of the darkness beyond the cliffs. He saw that there were rocks near the edge of the ring—black charred rocks the size of softballs and larger. He picked one up. It was heavy in his hands. It was the first time in his life that he had tried to hurt someone. Where did you hit him? He raised the rock over his head with both hands and threw it against Terry’s hip. It landed with a soft thud and dropped to the ground. Terry Jacobs grunted and went down on one knee. Suddenly Preston released his grip and stepped to one side. He punched with both hands, fast, one punch landing high on the side of Jacobs’s head, the second behind his ear. Sharp cracking sounds. Terry pitched forward, caught himself against the edge of the ring, but made no effort to pull himself up. He leaned against it, breathing hard, and then Preston was across the clearing, had Ike by one arm and was driving him into the high grass, down through a steep ravine, dancing and sliding, cutting arms and hands on sharp rocks and branches. At last they were on the ground, side by side, flat with the smell of dirt and grass in their faces, and they could hear the voices above them, see a white shaft of light cutting lines out of the night, finding the branches above their heads.

They began to inch their way down, clutching at anything to keep from sliding too fast, to keep from making too much noise. Finally they were on a thin rocky trail and Ike was aware of Preston’s voice in his ear. “Okay,” Preston was saying, and his breath was coming hard. “It’s just like out on the point now. You stick behind me. Do what I tell you. We’ve got to forget about the stuff, understand?” Preston’s face was close to his, the pale eyes held his own. “Do you think you could find the truck again, alone?”

He began to say he didn’t know, but Preston waved him silent. “Forget it,” he said, his voice a quiet hiss in the darkness. “Just stay with me, and stay close.”

Ike could not say how long it took them to reach the truck. They seemed to make good time and the voices grew more distant, were finally lost altogether. The engine kicked over with what seemed like an inordinate amount of noise, but at last they were bouncing along the twisting dirt road, lights out, jumping through unseen potholes, Preston swerving and cursing, his big arms spinning the wheel first one way and then the other, trying to see out of one good eye, checking his rearview mirror. “Damn,” Ike heard him say. “I think I just saw some headlights back there. I think they’re behind us.” He reached down and pulled on the switch. The lights lit up the road and Preston picked up speed, jumping and sliding. Ike banged his knees on the dashboard and poked a hole in what was left of the headlining with his head. He rolled his window down for a better grip on the door and hung on. At last they were on a straight piece of road and Ike heard Preston suck in his breath. Ike squinted through the windshield, across the bouncing hood, and he could see the gate. It was wide open, swung back to one side, and the road was clear. They were through. Another five minutes and they were back on paved road, no one behind them and Preston cursing himself now. “So fucking stupid,” he said. “Fucking stupid. I practically walked right into Jacobs and that fucking dog. Fucking moron stupid.” By dawn they were on the highway and headed home.

14

The drive home had been accomplished in near silence, and Ike stared once again into the drab landscape of Huntington Beach, even flatter and more colorless than he had remembered after a few days at the ranch. Beyond the highway, the Pacific was like a sea of lead in the midday glare. The surf was blown out, thick and gray, and angry with whitecaps churning in the glare.

All the way back he had thought about the fight and tried to figure it. Still, it took him until the outskirts of Huntington Beach to work up enough nerve to say anything about it to Preston. Preston had been in an understandably foul mood on the way back. Ike’s own jaw still hurt from running into that branch and he was certain Preston’s face was hurting much worse than his own. He had offered to drive once, but Preston only shook his head. And now, when Ike asked him about Terry Jacobs, about what he had been doing at the ranch, all Preston had to say was that he didn’t know, and that Ike should not worry his fucking head over it.

“What you’d better start thinking about is getting the fuck out,” Preston told him. They were swerving through midday traffic, too fast, Preston with one hand on the wheel, the other out the window to flip off some guy with a carload of kids who had pulled out in front of them. “I don’t know if Jacobs saw you up there or not. But I can tell you he’s not one to let something like this slide. More shit will hit the fan. Count on it. If Jacobs sees your ass on the street, he’s gonna hang it, ace, and I might not be around to stop him.”

Ike thought back to the fight. He tried to remember if Jacobs had seen him or not. He was pretty sure that he hadn’t. It had been dark and Terry’s head had been down. He said as much to Preston.

“Suit yourself,” Preston said. “It’s your funeral.”

Preston had called the Sea View a dump, but his place did not look much better to Ike. He got his first look at it as Preston pulled up in front of a small set of duplexes. There were two scrubby-looking palms and a beat-up square of grass in front. The two apartments were identical stucco affairs—a sun-bleached shade of turquoise that clashed badly with some sort of large orangeish industrial building that rose up behind them from the other side of a narrow alley.

Ike decided to try one more time. “Just tell me one thing,” he said. “At the ranch. What were you looking for?”

They were parked now, in front of the duplexes. Preston sat with both wrists on top of the wheel. He turned to face Ike and Ike got his first good look at the side of Preston’s head. The sight made him wince. Preston looked dead tired and in a way Ike was sorry he had asked.

“You’re a persistent little motherfucker, aren’t you? I took you to the ranch because I wanted to lay something out for you. That’s it,” he said. He cut the air with his hand. “Anything else is my business. But I’ll tell you this. I don’t know what Terry Jacobs was doing up there. But it’s not that unusual to see people from down here up there. I mean, people sneak in from time to time to surf. They have for a long time. But I don’t know what that big asshole was doing. I got up to take a leak and decided to have a look at that place you told me about. I fucking walked right into him on the trail. Him and that damn dog.” Preston held one arm up now, away from the wheel so Ike could see it, and Ike could see that he had been bitten on the arm. The bite was already looking nasty, swollen and discolored.

“Shit. You should have somebody look at that.”

Preston put the arm down and opened his door. “Look,” he said. “You got a problem. I can dig it. But I told you what I would do. So that’s it, man. You understand?”

Ike waited a moment before replying. He felt dead tired himself and the pain in his jaw was filling the rest of his head. “She’s my sister” was what he finally said.

Preston just looked away and opened his door. “Yeah,” Ike heard him say. “She’s your fuckin’ sister.”

Ike guessed that he was meant to walk back to the Sea View, Preston having done all the driving he was about to for one day. He got out and stood in the lumpy grass, letting the door swing shut behind him. He went to the sidewalk and watched Preston moving away, walking slow and stiff, the way Gordon used to walk sometimes after a bad night. Preston was headed down the skinny concrete walk toward the duplexes, but then he stopped and looked around. His eye was swollen shut and the skin around it seemed to give off a kind of blue light. “Sorry you had to leave your stick,” he said.

Ike shrugged.

Preston’s face seemed to move into a more or less lopsided grin. “Glad you finally came through with that fucking rock,” he said. “I thought for a minute there you were going to go fruit on me.”

“No,” Ike said. “I wouldn’t do that.”

Preston nodded and started away once more. Ike watched him go. He was almost to the door when a slim brown-haired girl Ike had not seen before came out of one of the apartments. She stopped when she saw Preston. Ike was too far away to hear what was said, but he could see that words passed between them. He saw the girl raise her hand to her head. He saw Preston brush past her and then heard the front door slam. It was the same door the girl had come out of. For a moment Ike and the girl stood looking at each other, then Ike turned and headed away. He had not quite reached the corner when he heard someone calling to him. He looked back and saw it was the girl. She was jogging across a corner of the lawn.

He watched her slow to a walk and come toward him. She was not very tall and her thinness made her seem young, but as she drew closer he could see that she was probably in her late twenties. Her hair was straight and fine, and the afternoon breeze lifted it from her shoulders. Ike felt uncomfortable waiting for her; he was certain she would begin asking questions about what had happened.

“You must be Ike,” she said as she reached him.

“Yes.”

“My name’s Barbara.”

Ike nodded. They stood for a moment looking one another over. Her eyes were dark, nearly the same shade of brown as her hair, and he guessed maybe it was the mouth, hard straight line without makeup, that added a certain toughness to her features. Still, she was not unattractive. She put one hand on her hip, as if to catch her breath after the short run, and smiled a bit. She had on a pale blue tank top and he could see her breasts clearly outlined beneath it. He supposed she looked like the kind of girl who “had been around,” as the old lady would have put it.

“Come on,” she said. “Let me give you a ride home. I have to park the truck anyway.”

Ike did not much care whether he had a ride or not. He would have preferred to be alone, but somehow he did not have the energy to refuse. He turned and followed her back toward the truck. She wore a pair of white shorts beneath the blue top. Her legs were thin but shapely and well tanned, dark against the white cloth, legs that reminded him of his sister’s.

“You’re at the Sea View, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Preston’s mentioned you. You did a nice job on his bike.”

Ike climbed back into the truck beside her. It seemed strange seeing her behind the wheel after Preston. Her arms were slender. There was a silver bracelet around one forearm. He noticed she had a funny way of tilting her head up when she drove, as if she were too short to see over the top of the wheel, although she was not.

“Preston says you’re a good mechanic, too,” she said. Ike made an effort to smile; he put his hands on his knees and watched the houses slide by in the sunlight. It was hard to believe that only a few hours before, he had been sitting in this same seat, bouncing along a dirt road, afraid for his life.

It was not until they were parked at the curb in front of Ike’s apartment that Barbara got around to asking what Ike knew she would. “Was it a fight?” she asked.

Ike nodded. He didn’t know what Preston would have wanted him to say.

She shook her head. She sat with both hands on top of the wheel. Ike reached down and unlatched the door. He put one leg outside, one foot on the running board. “I knew it,” she said. “Damn.” She turned to Ike and he could see that she was upset. “You don’t know how that made me feel when he said he was going surfing. I mean, it seemed like a good sign. He hasn’t done anything like that in a long time. I was hoping it would go all right.”

“It did go all right for a while, the first couple of days. It wasn’t Preston’s fault. Some guys jumped us.”

“At the ranch?”

“You know about the ranch?”

“The Trax Ranch. Sure. The place has been there forever. I remember guys going up to surf when I was in school. You had to sneak in or something. I didn’t know people still went, though, until I heard Preston talk about it the other day.” She paused and looked at him. “I was real surprised, I’m not sure how to say this, but it made me curious to get a look at you. I mean, no one has gotten Preston out on a board in a long time. And he seemed hot to go.” She stopped again and shook her head. “I might have known something would fuck it up.”

Ike squirmed at the edge of his seat. He watched a couple of small blackbirds pecking away at the Sea View’s lawn. “It wasn’t his fault,” he said again. He thought about asking her something else about the ranch, but then thought better of it. Perhaps it would be better to wait until he had talked again to Preston.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to keep you.”

Ike stepped out of the truck. He felt that there should be something more to say, but nothing came to mind. “It’s all right,” he said. “And thanks for the ride.”

She nodded. “Maybe you can get him to go surfing again,” she said. “It would be nice to see him get interested in something besides his bike. He used to be hot, you know.”

“He’s still pretty good, I was watching him at the ranch.”

“Yeah, but I mean really good. He used to win contests. He used to own that surf shop on Main Street. He ever tell you that?”

“No, he didn’t.”

She shrugged. “He wouldn’t. He never tells anybody anything. But he did own the shop, he and Hound Adams.”

Ike blinked back into the cab of the truck. He felt a little like he did that first day he hit town, as if the sunlight were going right through him, as if he were in danger of disappearing. “Preston and Hound Adams?” He repeated the names slowly, wanting to make sure he had heard correctly. Apparently Preston had not told her why he was in town, or about the scrap of paper with the names on it.

“The first of the local surf heros,” she said. “Come by sometime and I’ll show you his scrapbook.” She stopped to look at him. “But listen, I know you’re beat. Just come by, okay?” She pushed in the clutch and put the truck in gear.

“Okay,” he said. “I will.” He stood at the curb and watched her drive away. Going up the stairs was hard work. Once back in his room, he lay down on the bed, but he couldn’t stop thinking about what Barbara had said, and when he closed his eyes he was back at the ranch, the weight of that rock pulling at his hands, wondering all over again what it had been about.

15

Three days later he still did not know what it was about and he had seen nothing of Preston. It was late afternoon, hot but with a good breeze coming off the ocean. Ike was sitting on the porch of the Sea View and talking to the two girls, the short brunette and the tall blonde who had once come to his room looking for papers. Their names were Jill and Michelle, and now that Ike had grown his hair out and went surfing with the likes of Preston, he assumed that he looked less like a jarhead and was consequently a more acceptable person to be seen talking to. Conversation with Michelle and Jill was a little thin, however. They mainly seemed interested in meeting cute guys and scoring dope. Ike suspected they were sharing a brain. Still, he was mildly intrigued by Michelle, the blonde he had spoken to that day he bought the board. For one thing, she had these very long sexy legs, and he liked how she smiled at him, always meeting his eyes with her own. Her eyes were green, flecked with yellow, and there was a dark mark on one eye which she told him had come from getting hit with a stick when she was small. But of even more interest to Ike was the fact that both Jill and Michelle knew Hound Adams, or at least knew who he was. They knew, for instance, that he was a dealer. They also knew where he lived. They were both runaways, in town, as it turned out, only a few weeks longer than Ike himself, but they seemed to have gotten around. They had in fact already been to one party at Hound Adams’s house, where they were fairly certain Hound had given Michelle the eye. It was a source of endless speculation between them and they seemed to thrive on an audience. Ike was more than happy to oblige. He had learned more about Hound Adams from Jill and Michelle in only a few minutes of casual conversation than he had learned from Preston after days of prying. And with them it had all been accidental; he had just happened to be standing there when Jill mentioned the name. The ease with which the rest had come about was fairly mind-boggling. And there was even now the fair chance that when Hound Adams gave his next party, Jill and Michelle would be invited, that Ike might come as well. He was determined to go if he got the chance. And so that was what he was doing the afternoon of the fight, providing an audience for Jill and Michelle, and fishing for more information.

He heard Preston’s truck before he actually saw it. He heard the gears grinding and the tires sliding. He looked up to find it skidding to a stop in front of the Sea View. Then it lurched forward a little bit; the engine died, and Barbara got out. She came running toward him across the grass. She looked white and scared. “Preston’s been in a fight,” she said. “Downtown.” She sounded out of breath. “I didn’t want to go down by myself.

“Morris called,” she said as they got back into the truck. “He’s been in a fight with a knife or something and the cops are there already.” She was halfway crying and Ike was afraid she was going to run into something. She blew the stop sign at Main and finally parked out in front of some beer bar called the Club Tahiti.

There was a crowd on the sidewalk. Two police cars sat in the street and in the distance they could hear the growing wail of a siren. Barbara jumped out of the truck and ran into the crowd. Ike followed. He felt scared and useless. For a moment he lost sight of Barbara. When he spotted her, she had pushed her way through most of the crowd and was standing near the door, where a cop had grabbed her by the arm. Ike pushed his way to her and managed to get her other arm. The cop was telling her she had to stay outside. “It’s all right,” Ike said. He tried to say it loud so the cop would hear him too. He put his arm around Barbara’s shoulders. The cop let go and turned back toward the door. Ike could feel her trembling against him.

Later he would remember being aware of a lot of things at once. He was aware of his own legs shaking beneath him, of the sour feeling at the pit of his stomach, of the feeling of dread, and yet at the same time he was acutely aware of Barbara at his side, of the cool smoothness of her thigh as she pressed against him, of the scent of her hair. And then there was more commotion from inside and suddenly he could see Preston’s head. There was a helmeted cop on either side of him and they all seemed to jostle one another as they came through the doors. Ike could see Preston’s face was bleeding again around his still discolored eye. He had on his tank top and jeans, but the shades were gone. His hands were cuffed behind him. Ike and Barbara were pushed aside as the small group exited the bar. Preston passed within a few feet of them, but he did not turn his head; his eyes seemed pointed straight ahead and slightly skyward. Ike did not know if he’d seen them or not.

The siren was piercing now and was mixed with the squeal of tires as an ambulance pulled up into the middle of Main Street. The sun dipped behind the buildings. The breeze picked up and there was a patch of late afternoon fog rolling up the sidewalks from the ocean. The crowd had swollen, though Ike and Barbara were in the front now, part of the semicircle at the door. A couple of medics pushed past them into the bar. For a moment the door stood open, but it was too dark to see much inside. The cool stale odors of spilt beer and tobacco drifted outside. Ike was able to make out the colored lights of a jukebox, the corner of a pool table, a number of dark figures scurrying about, and then the door closed in their faces. It was a heavy wooden door, scarred and beaten. A small sign up near the top said NO ONE UNDER 21 ALLOWED.

For a while nothing happened. Ike could hear the crowd milling and murmuring around him. He could feel Barbara still trembling at his side. He did not know why they were still standing there, really. He’d looked once out toward the street, but Preston was lost somewhere on the other side of the crowd. He’d seen the red light of a police car start off down Main, however, and suspected they had already taken Preston away. But it was hard to move back through the crowd and so they waited with the others. Behind them he could hear more cops working to disperse the people. The crowd was mainly kids off the street, people on their way home from the beaches, a few bikers. People stood around holding beach towels and canvas backrests. Many were barefoot and bare-chested. Ike and Barbara were beginning to move back when the door swung open once more. This time it stayed open and people began to come outside. The first person through the door was Morris. He had a cop on one arm and looked at Ike and Barbara once, shook his head as if to say it was bad, and then moved away. Next came the medics. They were bent low and moving quickly. Between them was a stretcher and suspended over it Ike could see a bottle of liquid. The hum of the crowd picked up and people pushed back for a look and the cops shouted for them to clear a path. A cop pushed Ike in the chest, shoving him back into the crowd as the stretcher flashed by, but he’d seen enough to know who it was. He’d seen the great black puffball of Terry Jacobs’s head as it made a fierce contrast with the whiteness of the sheets and the coats of the medics, and they were gone, and the cops were breaking up the crowd and all around him Ike could pick up bits and pieces of conversation. “He’s cut bad, man…” someone said, and Ike looked back once more toward the still open door. Several more people walked outside and among them Ike recognized another face: sharp straight lines cut out of rock. Straight nose and mouth. Eyes set deep and a bit too close together, dark and quick, blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, stretching that tanned skin, pulling it over the bones until it was too tight somehow. And he was tall, too, so the face was above most of the others around it, not as tall as Preston, and not as wide, but lean the way a good light heavyweight is lean.

Hound Adams stood framed for a moment in the doorway and then stepped onto the sidewalk. Several people at once seemed to be trying to talk to him, but he was ignoring them, staring past them into the crowd after his friend. Ike could not make out what they were saying. He still had Barbara at his side. He was holding her hand and knew without looking that she was weeping. Suddenly one of Hound’s friends started away from him and Ike saw Hound’s hand reach out to grab the guy by the arm. His words were harsh and clear. “Keep your motherfucking mouth shut,” he said. “I want his ass on the street.” Ike could not hear much more. “But he jumped bad on him,” someone said, and Hound called for quiet. Ike strained to get closer, to hear more. He could feel Barbara pulling at his arm and then it was like he was aware of someone looking at him and he turned his head.

Hound Adams was standing with his back to the dirty brick wall. The fog was sweeping up through the streets and above them the purple letters of the Club Tahiti had begun to buzz. For a moment their eyes met; Ike met Hound Adams’s stare with his own. But it was only for an instant, and it was Ike who looked away, back into the crowded street.

16

Barbara did not want to go home, and she did not want to be alone. On the way back to the Sea View they picked up a six-pack of beer. The drank it seated on the floor of Ike’s room, their backs against the bed. Actually Barbara drank most of it. Ike had two beers and Barbara drank the other four. “You know the funny thing,” she said. “When I first moved in with Preston, I thought I was without hope; I mean, my life was pretty screwed up then. But I’m not. That’s what I’ve learned, living with Preston. Preston is without hope. I’m not. It took a while, but I’m beginning to understand that.”

Ike felt that he should respond but was not sure about what to say. “You said you’ve been with him just over a year?”

“Almost two.”

“But you’ve known him longer?”

“Not known him. I knew who he was. This town was different back when he and Hound owned the shop. I mean, everything was smaller. There was only one high school; everybody knew everybody else. I think I was in the seventh grade when Preston moved to Huntington, but I used to spend a lot of time at the beach. Most people who hung out around the beach knew who Hound and Preston were.”

Ike took a drink of beer and stared at a slice of moonlight on the glass.

“I remember the day he won that big contest, the nationals or whatever it was. I remember standing on the pier and watching. It’s strange to think back to that now. I haven’t thought of it in a long time. But I didn’t meet Preston until recently, maybe two years ago.” She stopped. “You don’t have to listen to this,” she said. “I can shut up.”

“No. I’m interested.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Ike watched her take another drink and then rest the bottle on her knee. “I haven’t drunk this much beer in a while,” she told him. “Not since the night I met Preston, maybe.” She seemed to find that amusing in a sad sort of way and smiled at the floor. “We met in a bar, that place that’s the punk club now. I can’t even remember what it was called then, the Beachcomber or something. I had just gotten out of the hospital and wasn’t supposed to be drinking, though; I remember that. I’d gotten pregnant that summer and it turned out to be a tubular pregnancy. I almost died. They wound up having to take everything out. Everything.” She said it in a flat voice, the bottle resting on her bare leg, the moonlight finding one side of her face. Ike had not turned on any lights; the room seemed better in the dark.

“Anyway,” she continued. “That was where I was at the summer Preston came home. I’d just done two years at a local J.C. I had been planning to apply to this photography school up north, and all of a sudden it was like everything was over. I mean, I just couldn’t see the point anymore. Then Preston showed up. He’d been gone for years. First the war, then jail. He came back like he is now. That’s the only way you have ever seen him, so it probably doesn’t mean that much to you, but nobody else could believe it. He was a different person, completely.” She paused and took a drink of beer.

“But I guess I saw us as having something in common,” she said. “At least that was how I felt at the beginning, like the whole thing was without hope.” She stopped for a moment and looked at Ike. “But that wasn’t it really, now that I’ve had time to think, to be with him. I mean, I don’t know if I can say it very well, but what was really going on was that I was looking at Preston and I was seeing this tragic figure, but I was seeing something else, too; I was still seeing that young guy on the beach holding a big silver trophy over his head, and somehow I was still trying to be the girl on the pier. That might sound stupid, but the thing is, I was working at something. I was really believing that if Preston and I loved each other we could help each other, we could get back some of what had been lost, both of us. But what I’ve begun to see in the last year is that I’m the only one working at it.” She stopped. “Preston doesn’t care,” she said slowly. “About anything. So maybe you can see why I was surprised when he started talking about taking this kid he had met up to the ranch. I mean, he acted like he really wanted to do it. I don’t know.” She stopped again and shook her head.

“What do you know about the ranch?”

“Nothing. Just what I told you in the truck.” Ike was staring at the wall, but he could feel her turning her face to look at him. “Do you think this, tonight, had something to do with what happened up there?”

Ike didn’t answer right away. For some reason, he was reluctant to tell her. He supposed, however, that she would find it out on her own sooner or later. Perhaps it was better that she hear it from him. It had all come to seem clear enough. Barbara had told him that Preston and Hound had been partners. Preston had told him that Hound Adams had friends with bucks. Certainly whoever owned the ranch had money. And Preston had not had to break down any fences—he’d had his own fucking key. It seemed plain that Preston once had free access to the ranch, and that now he was no longer welcome there. When he and Jacobs had run into each other, they’d fought over it. And that was how it had started. This afternoon, at the Club Tahiti, they’d met again, and they had ended it. As for Preston’s willingness to risk it—to take Ike there, he had evidently miscalculated. It was just as he’d said to Ike that day Ike had seen the figure in white from the clearing, he had not expected so many people to be around. Ike worked his way through these ideas now, with Barbara. She looked away from him as he spoke. When he was finished, she sat with her eyes closed, her forehead on the heel of her hand. “Assholes” was what she finally said.

They both sat in silence for some time after that, until Barbara said she had to use the head. Ike watched her cross the room. When she came back, she asked him if he was ready to go to sleep. He shrugged. “Whatever you want,” he said. She put a hand on his arm. “It’s okay,” she told him. “And thanks.”

It was a strange night. Ike let Barbara have the bed. He slept on the floor below it, but he slept fitfully, waking time and again to think that she had spoken to him, that she was awake. But each time he sat up to look, he found her asleep. And at last he slept himself, soundly, he supposed, because when he woke he found her already dressed and poking through the cupboard above what passed for his kitchen sink. “No coffee?” she asked.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Come home with me and I’ll make us some.”

Though he did not much care for coffee, he said okay. It seemed like the right thing to do. He pulled on his shirt and they went down the steps. There was a heavy overcast outside. The air was cool and smelled of the sea. It felt earlier than he had first thought and on the drive to her house they passed only a couple of cars.

When they got to the duplexes, the first thing he noticed was Morris’s bike standing at the curb. Morris was just coming down the walkway as they pulled up and got out of the truck. Ike thought that Morris stared at him for a moment with some surprise, then he looked back at Barbara. “The only thing they got him on now is drunk and disorderly,” Morris said. “They want him on the knifing, but nobody seems to be talking. I didn’t see it myself. I was at the other end of the bar. Frank and Hound were right there, but they ain’t said a word to the pigs.” He shook his shaggy head. “I don’t know,” he said. He looked tired and hung over. The sun was starting to burn through the overcast and it was starting to turn sticky. Ike could see the lines of sweat making trails across Morris’s big greasy face. There was a moment of slightly awkward silence. “I was going to make some coffee,” Barbara said. “Do you want any, Morris?”

Morris shook his head. “Just come by to let you know what was goin’ on,” he said. “Just thought you might be interested.” Ike thought he noticed a slightly sarcastic tone in Morris’s voice and he was beginning to get the idea that Morris thought there was something funny about Ike and Barbara being together at this time of day. Morris stood for a moment longer, then turned and swaggered off in the direction of his bike. Ike watched him go, then walked the rest of the way to Barbara’s door. But all of a sudden he just felt too funny being there. He didn’t want to go inside. “I think I’ll skip it this time,” he said. “I should check with Morris, see if he needs any help at the shop.”

She shrugged. “Okay,” she said. “But thanks. I needed to be around someone last night, somebody I could trust.” Then she went inside and closed the door.

He ran back down the sidewalk to see if he could catch up with Morris. He was too late; Morris was already pulling away as Ike reached the street. Ike suddenly felt very grimy and tired, as if he hadn’t slept at all. He decided to skip the shop and walked instead back to the Sea View apartments. The mailman was just leaving as Ike got there and Ike found that there was a letter in his box. It was the first piece of mail he had gotten and it was from San Arco. He carried it up to his room and read it seated by the window. The letter was from Gordon. Ike recognized the big, familiar scrawl right away. Gordon had apparently written a couple of letters, one to Washington, D.C., and the other to the American embassy in Mexico. Apparently there were no records of an Ellen Tucker having been found, either dead or in jail. Gordon wasn’t sure what this meant, but he said he figured Ike might want to know. That was it; Gordon not being much for small talk. Near the bottom of the page he told Ike to take care of himself.

Ike read the letter several times. When he was done, he folded it, slipped it back into the torn envelope and placed it near the scrap of paper with the three names on it. After that he walked to the window and rested his fingertips against the glass. He looked toward the ugly line of buildings that hid the sea and he imagined her here, in this town, walking the streets he walked now, seeing the same things, and thinking… what? He might have guessed that once. Because they were so alike then. It had been in fact one of their games—guessing what the other was thinking. Only it was somehow more than guessing, it was knowing and it was a special thing. He thought, as he had so many times before, how things had changed after that night on the flats. And how, when she’d left for the last time without bothering to say good-bye, he had by chance come to the front of the market and seen her go, in broad daylight, a ragged suitcase at the end of one arm, sun-bleached denims and red boots wading into those ribbons of dust and heat while he’d stood there on Gordon’s sagging porch, scared shitless of the loneliness to come.

He stood for a long time by the window, his fingers against the glass until the glass had gone warm and moist beneath them. He was struck by a sense of something he could not quite articulate. But it was connected to the way he had once felt in the desert, with Ellen, that he had helped to set something in motion—a chain of events he was linked to but unable to control. And it was like that again now, he thought, here, and he knew that Gordon’s letter had changed nothing, that he would not do as Preston had asked. He was reminded of those desert windstorms, a whirlwind kicked across the desert floor, only he could not say if the storm was outside himself, pulling him in, or inside himself driving him forward, just that he was locked in and that there was suddenly something more at stake here than his search for his sister. He could see that now for the first time. It was not only Ellen Tucker he pursued. It was himself as well. He stared out the window, across the small yard toward the ragged skyline of Huntington Beach, hearing once more in the dark recesses of his own mind the high electric whine of those neon letters above the Club Tahiti. And he saw again that dark stare he had been unable to meet.