Tapping the Source

17

Mazatlán, San Blas, Puerto Vallarta, Cabo San Lucas. The names had magic in them. They hung in the smoke-filled air like some religious chant. Ike listened. He imagined tropical waters, steaming jungles split by rutted roads where green lizards curled in the shade.

When he opened his eyes, Hound Adams was looking at him. They were seated around a map spread on the living room floor. Michelle was by his side. She had locked her hands around his arm and was resting her chin on his shoulder. Hound Adams had at last thrown his party, and Michelle and Jill had been invited. Michelle had brought Ike. Now it was very late, or very early. Beyond the window Ike could see the sky beginning to lighten.

It had been a noisy party, but by now most of the guests had gone, leaving a small circle of admirers to sit on Hound’s living room floor, around the map upon which he outlined plans for the winter’s surf trip. The winter, like Preston had said.

Terry Jacobs was not at the party. He was still, after nearly a week, in intensive care at the Huntington Beach Community Hospital. The fight, however, had been a prominent topic of conversation during the party, and there seemed to be some confusion as to how it had started. Every story Ike heard was different. The only thing certain was that Preston Marsh was a marked man. Apparently Terry Jacobs had a bad family, some of whom had already arrived in Huntington Beach from the islands. Ike had had them pointed out to him, several hulking strangers in flowered shirts, quiet and dark.

Ike had seen Barbara only once since the night of the fight. She had stopped by briefly one afternoon to let him know Preston was still in jail, that there were still no witnesses to the knifing. Ike had thought then about Hound’s words, what he had said about wanting Preston on the street, and he thought about them again now as he observed one of Terry’s ominous-looking relatives draped over the couch.

He had not seen Morris since the morning after the fight, and he had put off going by the shop. He’d spent most of the week keeping to himself, thinking, watching the oil well, the dead grass, and the small brown birds beneath his window. And then Michelle had come by and invited him to the party.

The party had provided Ike with his first chance to observe Hound Adams at close range, and he had watched as Hound circulated among his guests, greeting some with a soul-brother handshake or an embrace, others with a cool nod. Hound seemed pleased that Michelle had come and more than once Ike had noticed Hound putting his hand on Michelle’s shoulder or back as he passed, or paused to say a few words, and Ike was beginning to believe that maybe Jill and Michelle had been right; Hound did have an eye for Michelle. Also, more than once Ike had looked up to find Hound Adams staring at him. He did not think it was his own paranoia. And now, sitting Indian style above the spread maps, his yellow hair gleaming in the dim light, Hound Adams was staring at him again.

“Todos son hermanos del mar.” Hound was looking at Ike as he spoke. Ike had no idea of what was said. There was a silence and Ike did not know how to fill it, though it seemed to be expected of him. At his side he could feel Michelle pressing against his arm. He could feel the sweat prickling at his neck and down the center of his back. Hound was smiling at him with his mouth, but his eyes were like stones.

Ike grinned back and shrugged, trying to say he did not understand.

Hound laughed. “We are brothers of the sea, no? It is what the people of the village say.” His finger rested on a spot of the map. Ike felt some relief. He looked with great interest at the map.

“It is a small fishing village,” Hound continued. “A beautiful spot.”

When Ike looked up, he found Hound still looking at him. “I hear you’re a surfer,” Hound said. Ike did not know if it was a question.

“I’m just learning.”

“We are all just learning.”

Ike looked into the dark, humorless eyes and he did not get the idea that Hound was joking with him. For a moment, as he had done on the street outside the club, Ike held the stare, studied the face. He had noticed in the course of the evening that it was a face that seemed to vary in age depending upon the distance from which you viewed it. Hound’s hair was more like a boy’s, or a young woman’s, rich, yellow, in places bleached white by the sun. The combination of flashy hair, the tanned skin, the athletic build, gave Hound the appearance of many of the young surf jocks you found around the pier, in the shops along Main. From a distance you might have thought he was in his late teens or early twenties. But when you saw him close up, you noticed other things, the wrinkles that spread around the eyes, the thin white scar above the bridge of the nose, the slightly yellowed teeth. Up close it was not a young man’s face. It was serious and cunning and more than once tonight Ike had felt that he was being toyed with.

“I hear you’ve got a good teacher,” Hound said.

Ike stopped short. The tone of Hound’s voice, like his eyes, gave nothing away. Was this it? Had Hound been baiting him for this? On the couch one of the big Samoans pushed himself upright and pulled the ring on a can of beer. Ike shifted his weight, thinking of a way to reply.

But it was Hound Adams who broke the silence with a short laugh. “That’s all right,” he said. “Everybody needs a teacher. The trick is in choosing the right one.” There was a pause. “Where are you from, Ike?” Hound asked. It was such an abrupt turn in the conversation that Ike felt suddenly off the hook. “The desert…” he began, then let his voice trail away, waving with his hand toward the far side of the room, as if the desert were just beyond the wall. “There is an energy in the desert,” he heard Hound say after a period of silence, “as there is an energy in the sea.”

Later, they stood outside on the wooden porch as the sun rose above the town. Hound had already gotten into his trunks and vest. One of the Samoans was waxing a board in the front yard. After a night of partying they were going down to surf the pier. Ike stood with Michelle at his side. It was funny how he’d gotten used to her being there in the course of the night, funnier still how it made him feel. She had been uncharacteristically quiet, supportive in some important way, and he was both grateful and puzzled at the same time. He was also bone tired and hung over. He did not understand where Hound Adams found the energy to surf.

“Maybe you would like to join us?” Hound asked suddenly, jerking Ike out of the daze he had slipped into. And for a moment Ike was at a loss for words. “I would like to,” he said, “but I can’t.”

“He lost his board,” Michelle put in. “Somebody ripped it off.”

Hound nodded, head slightly cocked, staring once again at Ike. “There are other boards here.”

“I guess not this morning. I’ve got to work in a few hours. But thanks.”

Hound Adams nodded. “Another time,” he said. “Come back, both of you.”

Ike and Michelle were nearly back to the sidewalk when Hound called Ike’s name. Ike stopped and looked back. Hound Adams was standing at the edge of his porch. He looked tall and hard, like one of the columns that supported the roof above the house. “Why don’t you come by the shop,” he said to Ike. “You shouldn’t be without a stick. Maybe we can work something out.”

Ike felt slightly numb as they walked back along the deserted sidewalks. His head still rang with the beer and dope, and the concrete beneath his feet seemed at times to be very far away. He glanced at Michelle and could not help but think how different she seemed to him after the party. It was very puzzling.

The morning was cool, drenched in a rosy light. A few scattered clouds, luminous and metallic, floated like great airships far above them. The sky was turquoise streaked with orange and red. “This sunrise reminds me of the desert,” Ike said.

“I’ve never been to the desert.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“It’s true. My dad left us when I was small. My mother never goes anywhere. I haven’t been anywhere. It was one of the reasons I ran away.”

“Well, imagine the ground as empty as the sky, as full of color.” He stopped and looked at Michelle. They were practically the same height and he looked directly into her eyes. He could see she was paying attention, but he did not go on. He shrugged it off. “It’s best in the spring,” he told her.

“You’re different,” she said. He met her eyes for a moment, then looked away.

“I mean it. You’re not like the other guys around here.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m not from around here.”

“So tell me about the desert.”

He shrugged again. “There’s not that much to tell.”

“What about your school? What were the other kids like?”

He laughed, thinking about the single row of white portable buildings that had served as the school, small tinny rooms so hot there were days when the instructors ran sprinklers on the roof to cool them down. “Most of the kids there were Mexicans,” he said. “But I didn’t make a lot of friends. I don’t know what they were like, to tell you the truth.”

“You didn’t have any friends?”

“My sister. We were friends.”

“Your sister?”

“Yeah.” He hesitated, it always made him uncomfortable talking about it, about his family—if that was what you could call it. “You see, my old lady just dropped my sister and me off one summer and split, left us with her mother and her brother and never came back.”

“What about your father?”

“I never knew him at all.”

She seemed to think about this for a moment. “So it was just you and your sister,” she said. He thought that now she would ask something more, about his sister, but she didn’t. They had been holding hands as they walked and he was aware of her palm, damp and warm against his own. “Maybe we can go there sometime,” she said. “You can show me what it’s like.”

“Maybe,” he said, though he felt funny saying it and was not sure why.

Back at the Sea View apartments, they climbed the stairs and he stood with her in front of her door. The door was open and inside he could see Jill sprawled on the couch, still clothed. Michelle looked in at her roommate then back at Ike. She wrinkled her nose and smiled. “You could come in,” she said. “I have my own corner. Or do you have to go to work?”

Ike stood looking into the small cluttered room. “I lied. I have to go to bed. I’m really tired right now.”

“Will you surf with them sometime?”

He shrugged.

She stood with her back to the door, her hand resting on the knob. He looked at her and he could see she was waiting, that he was expected to do something besides say good night. He would have liked that as well. There was an odd kind of charged moment as her eyes held his in which he might have moved toward her, touched her, but he allowed it to pass, or rather he waited too long so that to have gone to her would have seemed awkward and clumsy. He turned back toward his own door, and then turned to face her again from a safer distance. “Maybe we could do something tomorrow,” he said. “Go to a show or something.”

“Okay,” she said. “Come by after I get home from work.” She waved at him and he waved back.

Once in his room, he sat on the bed and thought back over the evening. As he undressed he kept thinking about those questions Hound Adams had asked him. The questions implied a certain amount of knowledge on Hound’s part, and yet Ike had the impression that he was fishing a bit too. What did Hound Adams know? And what about that offer to come to the shop? It was a tricky proposition, he thought, no matter how you looked at it.

18

Ike did not feel very refreshed when he finally got out of bed. He showered and decided to go for a walk downtown. The shower made him feel better and there was a good breeze off the ocean. He walked by the Curl Theater to check out the movies. He thought maybe Michelle would want to see a surf movie with him. He had never taken a girl out before. It made him feel strange, a little nervous. He still could not get over how different Michelle seemed to him after the party. Jill had been there too and had seemed a lot more like her old self, loud and dumb. But Michelle had been different. He suddenly found himself trying to imagine what it would be like to have a real girl friend—a wife, even. He tried to imagine himself driving a station wagon full of boogie boards and sandy kids down Coast Highway on a Sunday afternoon. He tried, but he couldn’t quite do it. As far as he knew, no one in his family had turned out normal yet and he didn’t see why he should be the first.

The Curl was a crusty-looking old building with peeling paint, bordered on both sides by vacant lots. It ran surf films nearly every week. This week it had one called Standing Room Only. He stood for a while examining the posters before deciding they should go. Then he walked down to the Del Taco, where Michelle worked, to get a Coke.

She seemed surprised to see him. He’d never been there when she was working. She was wearing an orange and brown uniform with a little white name tag pinned over her breast. He hung around the counter for a while, sipping his Coke from a straw and talking to her. When he told her about the movie, she said, “Far out.”

All the time he was talking to her, he kept noticing this other girl, about Michelle’s age, staring at him. She was working the drive-thru window, but she kept looking over at Ike, staring at him like she was trying to decide if she knew him or not. Ike had never seen her before in his life. He met her stare a couple of times and each time she looked away. He would have hung around awhile longer. It was pleasant enough to stand there, talking to Michelle, the wind at his back, but finally some people started to line up behind him and so he said good-bye. “I’ll see you tonight,” she told him. “It will be fun.” Ike walked down the steps to the sidewalk and then turned to look back. Michelle smiled at him through the glass. Behind her, he could see that the girl at the drive-thru was looking at him again.

He made two stops on his way back up Main Street. He stopped first at the travel agency and picked up some maps of Mexico. He wanted to see if he could remember the names and trace out the same lines that Hound Adams had drawn the night before. And then he went on to the Main Street Surf Shop.

He did not see Hound Adams. In fact he did not see anyone and the shop, as it had been on his first visit, was empty and quiet. He pushed his fingers into the pockets of his jeans and walked inside. He was not really certain what he had come to see. He supposed it had something to do with what Barbara had told him, that the shop had once belonged to Preston.

In tennis shoes, he moved silently across the dark rectangle of carpet in the showroom and onto the concrete. It was odd, the silence in the shop, giving him the sensation that any loud noises would be out of place. That feeling was enhanced, he guessed, by the memorabilia on the walls, the trophies and old posters, the faded photographs, some of which had writing across the bottoms of the mattings in which they were framed. He paid closer attention to what was around him now than he had on his first visit and he noticed one thing right away, was surprised in fact that he had not remembered it from his first visit. On the deck of one of the old balsa wood boards that hung suspended from the ceiling, he saw a decal. The ceiling in the shop was high, as if the room had once served another purpose, but he could easily make out the shape of the decal: a flaming wave within a circle. He began to study some of the photographs and he saw that there were other boards in the photographs with the same decal, the logo repeated perhaps a dozen times throughout the pictures.

The shop consisted of two rooms. There was the large room with the carpet and the raised ceiling in front and another smaller room in back where the used boards and wet suits were kept. Ike walked into the back portion of the shop. He smelled the distinctive rubbery odor of the new wet suits, the sharp, rather sweet scent of fresh resin. It was on the wall above the wet suits at the east end of the small room that he found what was to him the most remarkable of the photographs. It was an enlargement done on what looked to be a cheap paper, for the picture had once been in color but was now faded and full of light. The sky was the palest of blues and the color was completely gone from the faces of the people: a middle-aged man, two younger men, and a girl. It took Ike a moment or two to be certain, but certain he was, even before finding the very thin, spidery handwriting that traveled along the photo’s bottom edge: the two young men were Hound Adams and Preston Marsh. They both had short haircuts, were dressed in swimsuits and matching sweat shirts. They stood propped against an old Ford station wagon with wood on the sides and surfboards protruding from the back. The girl was between them, standing on the running board, one arm over Hound’s shoulders, the other over Preston’s. She was a very good-looking girl with fine curved brows, a straight nose, and even teeth, a face that might have been in the movies, and she was smiling, laughing almost. Preston and Hound were smiling.

The middle-aged man did not seem to fit with the others somehow. He was dressed in slacks and a T-shirt. A sport coat hung draped over one arm. His hair was very short and dark, combed straight back, and he wore a pair of small round shades. His mouth was thin, straight, turned up at the corners in what might have been a smile. The writing across the bottom said: Mexico, Labor Day, 1965. Hound, Preston, Janet, Milo.

The shop was still and quiet and Ike stood before the picture for a long time. It was surprising how much alike Hound and Preston seemed then. Preston was nearly a head taller, a bit wider and thicker through the shoulders, but with a leaner look than he had now, built more like Hound. His nose was straighter then too, and with the similar haircuts, the matching sweat shirts, the similarity was striking. But there was something else that kept him before the picture. What was there about it? Perhaps the girl, something about the way she laughed, her hair caught in the wind. For some reason, he imagined the picture had been taken at the end of the day, but not just any day, it had been a good one, and it was the kind of picture that made you wish the people in it were your friends, and having to settle for just looking at it made you feel left out of something and lonesome. That was what he was thinking when a voice jerked him around, asking him if he needed help. The voice came from behind him, and when he turned, he saw that it was the same blond-haired man he had seen Preston talking to in the alley, whom he had noticed that night he followed Hound and Terry, the man he had so far taken to be Frank Baker—though of this he was still not certain.

The man’s words were loud in the silence of the shop and Ike was a moment in replying. “No. No, thanks,” Ike said, “just looking around.”

The man walked into the room and stood just a few steps behind Ike, his arms folded across his chest. He seemed to be looking at the picture as well. Ike spent a few moments pretending to examine the wet suits that hung beneath the photographs, made a remark about the need to save bread, then left the shop. He left the young blond-haired man still standing before the picture.

It was on his way out of the small room that Ike noticed another photograph, one of the man he had just seen—the older dark-haired man. Ike recognized the same thin smile, the small shades. This time the man was alone on an empty stretch of beach. Ike did not take the time to look at the photograph for long, but before he left he was able to read the name written on the mat. The name was Milo Trax.

19

The wind stung his eyes, blowing them dry as he passed the Greyhound bus depot and headed north toward the Sea View apartments. He thought about the man he’d just seen in the photographs. And he thought of the small figure dressed in white that he’d glimpsed from the clearing above the point. The man with the bucks. And it might be interesting, he thought, to talk to Barbara again, to have a look at that scrapbook she had mentioned.

Michelle was waiting for him when he reached his apartment. She was sitting in front of her door, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. She had brought him some food from work. He sat at the card table by a window and ate. Michelle watched.

“Where’s Jill?” he asked, looking for something to say, for a way to get his mind off the surf shop and the ranch.

“Getting her hair done. This girl we met is going to do it for her. Punk.”

He nodded, looking around the room. It was small and cluttered, like his own. The apartment consisted of one room together with a tiny kitchenette and a bathroom. The girls had rigged up a curtain to divide the main room. Jill apparently slept on a large, ragged couch, while Michelle had a mattress on the floor. Some pictures from pornographic magazines had been stuck to the wall over Michelle’s mattress. She noticed him looking at the pictures and smiled. She took a file from the windowsill and began to fiddle with her nails. He saw that her nails had been painted a bright red and all of a sudden she was beginning to seem more like the Michelle he had known before the party. He couldn’t think of a fucking thing to say. A long evening filled with awkward silences was beginning to yawn before him.

“Got any dope?” Michelle wanted to know.

Ike shook his head.

“I’m growing a plant. Want to see it?”

Ike said that he did. He finished eating and got up to rinse his hands at the sink.

Michelle led him past the curtain, to a windowsill near her mattress where several tiny marijuana plants grew in plastic cups. She touched one of the frail green leaves with her finger and laughed. Ike tried to look interested.

There was a rattling at the front door and Ike turned to see Jill walk into the room. She had gotten her hair done, all right. It was shorter than Ike’s. He suspected for a moment that she had driven to San Arco and let his grandmother do it. It looked shorter on one side than on the other and a patch of it had been bleached out to an ugly shade of orange. Michelle said it looked all right, though. The two girls stood in the bathroom inspecting it from all angles in the light of a naked bulb. Jill had heard about a party somewhere and she was hot to go try out her new haircut. “They’re gonna have a live band,” she told them, and Ike could see that Michelle wanted to go too. She looked at him, but he pretended not to notice. Finally she told Jill that they were going to a movie. Jill shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said, but made it plain she considered it a very boring thing to do.

They left the apartments in silence and started for the theater. Ike had the feeling that Michelle was somewhat pissed about missing out on the party. They didn’t hold hands as they had done the night before and he felt slightly awkward walking beside her, unable to think of anything to say, beginning to wonder if she was the one who was different tonight or if it was him. Last night he had been half drunk, and stoned. Perhaps his judgment had been impaired. Or maybe it was like the line in that song—one of the many country songs he had been forced to listen to again and again in back of Gordon’s market—the part about how the girls all get prettier at closing time. It was a depressing thought.

“Marsha says she knows you from someplace,” Michelle said. They were about halfway between the Sea View apartments and the Curl Theater.

“Marsha?”

“She works with me. She was there today, when you came by. She says she’s seen you before.”

Ike thought now of the girl he had seen at the drive-thru window, the one who’d been staring. Somehow, going to the shop had made him forget about her. “I don’t see how,” he said. “Was she ever in San Arco?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. She thinks she knows you from around here.”

“Can’t be.”

“Then you look like somebody. She says she either knows you or you look like somebody.”

“Who?”

“She didn’t say.”

There was a small line at the Curl. Ike and Michelle waited, standing in silence once more. Ike thought about the girl at the taco stand. Michelle walked away from him to look over the posters for coming attractions posted behind the glass frames at the front of the building. Ike wished there were a way he could split right now, go see that girl again, ask her who it was he looked like. And he wanted to see Barbara, too. He began to get nervous standing there, like he was wasting time, like maybe he and Michelle did not belong together anyway and that asking her out had been a mistake.

The funny thing was, the film was so good that after it began he practically forgot about everything. He might have even forgotten he was with Michelle, except that she kept saying things out loud. It was a very annoying habit. In any other theater it would have been even worse, but the Curl was a fairly noisy place anyway, the crowd hooting and cheering for the more spectacular rides. Still, Ike found Michelle’s talking annoying. She acted as if no one had ever taken her to a damn theater before.

Ike didn’t say anything. He kept his mouth shut and watched the screen. He had never seen anything like some of the waves in the film. There was footage from all over the world, places like Australia, New Zealand, Bali. The waves were like those he had seen at the ranch, empty, perfect, and he thought back to that plugged-in feeling he had found there. He recalled the sight of Preston seated above a black sea, arm raised in greeting. A liquid barrel gone amber in the setting sun filled the screen, gone hollow and riderless, blowing spray thirty feet in the air. And there was no way to explain it to someone who didn’t know.

He had planned, toward the end of the film, to take Michelle directly home, to turn in early and see Barbara the first thing in the morning. They were on their way out of the lobby when Michelle spotted Hound Adams. He was with the blond-haired man Ike had seen just that afternoon, in the shop. Michelle went to them before Ike could stop her, and began to talk. Hound Adams, of course, had dope and Ike soon found himself out on the sidewalk, headed toward the north end of town. They took a route almost identical to the one Hound took the night Ike followed him home from the beach. Before leaving the theater, however, Hound Adams introduced Michelle and Ike to the man he was with and Ike shook hands with Frank Baker.

Hound and Michelle did most of the talking on the way home. Ike had the feeling that Frank was not particularly pleased to have company. He went off to some other part of the house when they got there and Ike did not see him again. Ike and Michelle wound up seated once more on Hound’s living room floor. And once again Ike got the feeling that Hound was coming on to Michelle. He seemed to find reasons for touching her, for putting his hand on her forearm or knee. And Ike felt himself growing angry about it. It was crazy. Only a short while before, he’d been telling himself he would not ask her out again and now he was jealous. It didn’t make sense.

Hound talked about the movie, and about Mexico. “Remember what I told you?” he asked, turning to Ike. “About the desert, how there is an energy there, just as there is an energy in the sea, a rhythm? It’s like surfing can plug you into that rhythm if you learn to let it. But notice I said learn. We’re taught to think with our heads too much of the time. We get out of touch with other areas of perception, other ways of seeing.” He paused for a moment and took a hit off the pipe. “That’s one of the good things about Mexico,” he continued. “A combination of both, the desert and the sea, a blend of rhythms. It always seems strange at first, when I go there from here. It takes me a few days to adjust, two or three; but it’s a necessary adjustment. Mexico is also a great place for doing mushrooms. Have you ever done any?” He looked at both Michelle and Ike, then shifted his weight and smiled. “They have two kinds in this village. Derumba and San Ysidro, those are the names. San Ysidro is the stronger of the two.”

Hound paused for another toke on the pipe and Ike glanced at Michelle. He could see that she was hanging on every word. Hound Adams went on to relate a number of mystical experiences with the powerful San Ysidro. He spoke of the morning he both surfed and watched himself surf, and of the time he looked into the sea through the transparency of his own flesh.

“I want to go,” Michelle said suddenly, interrupting Hound in one of his stories. Hound smiled and leaned forward to place the pipe in the middle of the circle, holding his hair back from his face with one hand as he did so. “You should. And so should you,” he said, looking at Ike. “You can learn things about surfing down there it would take you years to learn up here.”

Ike nodded. Michelle had put her hand on his leg and he could feel the heat of her palm burning through his jeans. He was thinking now about the ranch, about how he had felt up there and how it was like there was some crazy bit of truth in the things Hound Adams said, but that somehow talking about it didn’t seem to work. It was as if Hound was putting on a show for them, and Ike couldn’t help but wonder what Preston would think of it, or even if Hound would say the same kinds of things if he weren’t talking to a couple of kids half his age.

“By the way,” Hound said. “You found your stick yet, Ike?”

Ike said that he hadn’t.

“You remember my offer?”

Ike said that he did, and Hound had launched himself into another description of Mexico when he was cut short by the ringing of a phone. He was gone for several minutes and when he returned, Ike could see right away that something was wrong. Hound was no longer smiling and the skin seemed to be stretched tighter across the bones of his face. He looked suddenly older and harder than he had looked only moments before. “That was Terry Jacobs’s brother,” he said in a flat voice. “Terry just died.”

20

Ike and Michelle stood in the hallway, as they had the night before. It seemed to Ike that the building was spinning slightly, tilting first one way and then the other, the naked bulbs throwing narrow shafts of light into the hot, spinning darkness. His knees felt weak and he could not tell if it was because he was nervous with Michelle or because he could not forget the look on Hound’s face as he announced Terry’s death.

Once again she invited him in, and once again he hesitated. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll come to your room, then. You can’t get away two nights in a row.” She laughed. Her face appeared flushed, perhaps a trifle wild. He noticed a small drop of perspiration near her upper lip. She was standing with one hand on the doorknob, the other on her hip. Her hands were rather large, and strong, like a boy’s, except that the skin was smooth and soft to the touch. He watched her hands because it was easier than meeting her eyes, and he thought about his room, the pile of dirty clothes, the sack of garbage he had forgotten to take out.

“There’s beer in the refrigerator,” she said. “Come on.”

He followed her into the room, which seemed even smaller and stuffier now than it had earlier. Jill was not around.

“You have to sit on the bed,” she told him. “It’s the only comfortable spot.”

He seated himself at one end of the mattress and watched as Michelle went to the refrigerator for the beer. When she returned, she sat the bottles on the floor near his feet. She then walked past him and took a candle from the windowsill. She placed the candle on the floor and lit it, killed the overhead light, and drew the curtain that divided the room. Immediately everything was changed. The room seemed close and hot. The soft yellow flamed jumped in the darkness, creating strange shifting patterns of shadow and light, dancing in the black glass of the window. She sat close beside him so that their shoulders were just touching and he could feel the heat from her body. He drank the beer quickly. It was cold and he could feel it burn all the way down. He put his hand on the bed, just behind her, his arm held straight, and she leaned back against it. He looked into her face, at her small, perfectly shaped mouth, the high cheekbones. She held his eyes with her own and he could see the light of the candle in her eyes, in the small dark spot that was the scar left by the stick. He focused on that dark spot, watched it moving ever so slightly, growing suddenly larger as she leaned toward him, and then her lips were against his. He tasted her breath, her tongue. They lay back together on the mattress and he felt like he was falling. He felt the way he had felt going down the face of that first wave at the ranch. Out of control. It was crazy to think about this being the same girl he had been so annoyed with at the show. He lay beside her, kissing her, her mouth, her neck, her eyelids, and then suddenly it was like the fall was over and he was just there, beside her, freezing up. He lay very still and he could hear her heart, feel his own beating against her arm. A long moment passed before she began to squirm at his side. She took him by the shoulder and rolled him away from her, as if she wanted to get a good look at him from arm’s length. “I’ve never met a boy like you,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“Well…” He paused. “I mean, I know what you want but I don’t think I can.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

She pulled him back down beside her. “I guess there weren’t many girls out there in the desert,” she said.

He shook his head. “No.”

“And so you’ve never had a girl friend?”

He hesitated. He could feel the blood in his face and when he closed his eyes it was like the red dust of San Arco lay in back of his lids, making them dry and scratchy. “One,” he said. “There was this one girl. But she moved away.” He could feel her watching him, feel her not believing his story.

“It must have been lonely when she left.”

He nodded again. “Yes,” he said, “it was.” He was looking at the ceiling now and he could not remember feeling this miserable in some time, useless, the way he had felt that first day in town when the bikers laughed at him. Shit. If he couldn’t fuck and couldn’t fight, he didn’t see how he was ever going to amount to anything. He imagined Gordon staring down on him from where the sky should be, his big red face wagging from side to side, then turning to spit in the dust.

Michelle was propped up on one arm now, her jaw resting in her hand. “I guess it was just the opposite for me. I mean, I was like getting it on before I was thirteen.” She seemed to think about that for a moment. “Didn’t you and this girl ever mess around?”

He shrugged. “Once.”

“Once?” He could hear her laugh. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I mean, I’m not making fun of you. But once?”

“She moved away.”

“That’s right. And then it was just you and your sister again. Out there in the middle of all that nothing.

“Well,” she asked him after another pause, “did you like it?”

“What?”

“What you did. With your long-lost love?”

He turned his face to look at her and saw that she was smiling, but it was the way she had smiled at him that day he passed her on the lawn, not snotty but real.

“Maybe you just need some more practice,” she said. “And you know what?”

He said he didn’t.

“I’m not going to let you get out of here until you fuck me.”

She slipped off the mattress and bent to blow out the candle, then straightened to pull her T-shirt up and over her head, to toss it away. And when she stood up to unbutton her pants, there was just the moonlight coming through the ancient glass of the window, finding one side of her face, her breasts that were small and round, and incredibly white where the bathing suit had kept them from the sun, and after she had stepped out of her pants and lay back down beside him, he could have sworn that she looked as pure as any angel in that soft light coming through the glass. He ran his hands along her legs, across the cool places beneath her thighs, and later, when he lay down between them and she guided him inside and he felt the heat of her body and her arms closing around him, he shut his eyes and felt the hot red dust of the desert rising to choke him and he thought that somewhere, out of a musty past, while his body rocked on in the present to some rhythm of its own, he could hear the old woman call his name. And the voice was filled with surprise, with pain and anger.

21

She slept for a while. Her skin was warm and soft next to his own and it was very nice just to lie there, in the darkness, listening to her breathing beside him. He must have dozed himself, for a time, because he was aware of waking, of having to remind himself that it had really happened, that he was in fact here, her leg thrown out to cover both of his, her breath against his neck, her fingers on his chest. It was a pleasant discovery. He shifted his weight some and she stirred beside him. “Are you awake?” she whispered. He said that he was. She laughed at something. Her fingers slipped down to his stomach.

“Will you do me a favor?” he asked.

“Like what?” He could hear a certain amount of amusement in her voice.

“Like finding out from your friend who it is that I’m supposed to look like.”

“Are you serious?”

He said that he was.

He felt her fingers pressing against him. “You’re a funny boy,” she said. He turned toward her, finding her mouth with his own.

He woke again early. Michelle was still asleep, on her back now, her mouth open, one arm swung up above her head, one breast peeking out of the sheet into the gray light. The contentment he had experienced earlier came back easily and he devoted some time to watching her, and to a study of the room. It was, he decided, one of the strangest rooms he had seen. Half of it was like something you might expect to find in a whorehouse, the other half belonged to a young girl. The closet was a good example, tall and narrow with a series of narrow shelves, one above the other. On one shelf a pair of black fishnet stockings lay piled on top of a catcher’s mitt. On another a pair of red high-heeled shoes sat next to a pair of white tennis shoes with faded initials on the backs. There was a tiny dresser next to the bed that held a small collection of perfume bottles and makeup jars, as well as a picture of a girl’s softball team. Above the dresser there was a photograph of two people getting it on, and beneath the picture were a series of cutout letters that said Sooooo Hot. Near the curtain was a decal that read Chaste Makes Waste.

In a way, she was like the room, a crazy mix. It had made her difficult to judge. She could change quickly. She could seem very young one minute—younger even than her sixteen years—and the next minute she could appear very strong, and more knowledgeable than he had guessed. And it wasn’t just that she was more sexually experienced. It was more than that. It was something deeper. It was what made him feel good about being with her.

He continued to look over the room for some time, to think about the night. Michelle continued to sleep. He tried to imagine what it would be like if this were all there was: sun-baked days in the cool shadows of the pier. Clean lefts. Fine nights in Michelle’s bed. And it seemed to him that for just a moment he achieved that—or something like it. It seemed to him that for an instant he was totally alone with this moment, immersed in it, free of the confusion of the desert. It was a fleeting perception, and when it was gone the contentment of only moments before seemed to vanish as well. What replaced it was an image of Hound Adams’s face—as it had been when he announced Terry’s death. The face seemed to enter with the sunlight through a single narrow window and spread until it had filled the room.

At last Ike slipped from the bed and began to look for his clothes. He shivered above the cold linoleum as he dressed, then went to the sink and washed his face—as quietly as possible, so as not to wake Michelle. When he was done, he came back to look at her once more. She was still asleep, but turned on her side now, leaving her hair spread out behind her, a delicate fan upon the sheet. He would have liked to touch her, to smooth the hair where it curled about her temples with his fingers, but something stopped him. He went instead to the door and let himself out, closing it softly behind him.

It was cold and still dark in the hallway. A draft entered from the stairwell and traveled the length of the building. He stopped at his own room long enough to change shirts and then he was back outside, warming as he walked, on his way to Preston’s duplex. He was thinking hard this morning about that mansion above the point, its connection with the surf shop on Main Street. And Barbara had once mentioned something about a scrapbook. He wanted a look. He walked quickly, his eyes glued to the pale concrete before him, still trying to shake that image of Hound Adams’s face that had destroyed his morning.

Preston’s duplex faced the east and it was bright and warm on the porch when he got there. Barbara did not look good. Her face was pale and somewhat blotched; there were dark circles under her eyes. She did not look particularly pleased to see him, but then she didn’t look pissed about it either. She mainly just looked tired. She invited him in. She was dressed in what he guessed was one of Preston’s flannel shirts. The shirt came down to just above her knees and the sleeves were rolled into big wads above her elbows. He sat in the kitchen while she made coffee. She looked tired and small and there was something about sitting there watching her that made him feel guilty about having come. He thought of his night with Michelle and he wondered if it had ever been that way for Barbara and Preston too.

Barbara had already heard about Terry’s death. He asked her about Preston and she told him that there were still no witnesses. Apparently, Hound Adams had even told the police he did not think Preston had done the knifing, that someone else had been involved and had escaped out the back. She also said that the police had been unable to find a weapon, and that Preston should be out soon. “He may be out already,” she told him, “for all I know.”

“But wouldn’t he have come by here?”

“Not necessarily; he might be at the shop.”

“I’m afraid they just want him on the street,” he said, and he told her about seeing some of Terry’s family. She seemed shocked by the news, as if she hadn’t guessed why no one was talking, and he immediately felt stupid for having mentioned it.

They sat for a while in silence, Ike staring at the scarred linoleum beneath his feet. “Listen,” he said. “One of the reasons I came by this morning was because I wanted to ask you about something.” He looked at her, and she stared back, her elbow resting on the table, a coffee cup in her hand. “You told me once about Hound and Preston having been partners. What do you know about that? I mean, do you know what happened between them?”

She got up and went to a cupboard over the refrigerator. She moved some things around and finally stepped back with a large, beat-up book, a kind of folder with cardboard covers, held together with a dark ribbon. “His scrapbook,” she said. “He cleaned out a bunch of stuff when I moved in here with him and I found this in the trash.” She placed the book on the table in front of Ike. “I don’t know if you’ll find anything in there that interests you, but you’re welcome to look, because I really don’t know anything about what you’re asking. I don’t know what happened, with Hound, with the business. I know they don’t speak to one another now. I’ve been with Preston a couple of times when Hound Adams has showed up, I mean like on the street or something. They go by each other without even looking, like they’re trying to pretend the other one is not there. It’s strange, but I don’t know what it’s about.”

Ike opened the cover and began leafing through the book. “You said Preston wasn’t from around here, that he moved here by himself.”

She nodded. “He grew up someplace back of Long Beach, I believe. At least that’s where his parents live now. His old man’s a minister of some sort, if you can believe that.”

“He tell you that?”

“Not voluntarily. When I moved in with him, he told me his parents were dead. Then one time this old lady called up here asking for him, saying she was his mother. I pestered him about it for a whole day and he finally admitted that his parents were alive. That was when he told me about his father being a minister. I asked him why he had told me they were dead and he just shrugged. You can’t keep asking him about anything or he gets pissed off.”

“I know,” Ike said. There was some interesting stuff in the scrapbook. There were a few old pictures of the shop and he could see that it had once been about half its present size—the brick wall that now separated the showroom from the rest of the building having once served as the storefront. In one photograph the wall was bare, in another it had been painted and bore the shop’s old logo—the wave within the circle and the words Tapping the Source.

The book was also filled with shots of Preston, many cut from the pages of surfing magazines, the same dark young man Ike had seen in the photograph at the shop, and he could understand now what Barbara had told him, that everyone used to know who Preston was, and he guessed he could see too why people had been surprised by the way he had changed. Clean limbs and graceful moves. Mr. Southern California. There were no tattoos in the scrapbook. He was about to turn one more page when a name caught his eye. The name appeared in an ad for a surf film, an ad that read: Senior Nationals champ, Preston Marsh, in Wavetrains, a Milo Trax surf film. “This guy,” Ike said, “Milo Trax. Is it the Trax who owns the Trax Ranch?”

Barbara leaned over the table and stared at the name. “I don’t know. I don’t think I ever noticed that before.”

He told her about the photographs in the shop, described Milo Trax as he looked in the pictures. She shrugged. “Doesn’t ring a bell, but then there was a time when a lot of weird people started hanging out around that shop. I mean older guys, city types, people who looked like they were from L.A., not the beach. I remember the place got to have a bad reputation. That was back when a lot of people were just getting into drugs, that was part of it. Hound and Preston supposedly did a lot of dealing then, made a lot of money. Like you would see the two of them riding around town in brand new Porsches and all that. I think Hound’s still into it. He owns a number of houses around here from what I’ve heard, and you don’t make that kind of money running a shop.”

“What about Preston?”

“His money? I don’t know. Pissed it away. I think I told you he was in the service. I remember that surprised a lot of people. I think everybody figured Hound and Preston would be smart enough to get out of it, but I remember standing on the pier one day and hearing some girl say that Preston had gone into the Marines, that he was going to fight and that no one could believe how stupid that was. Then he was gone, and then he came home and that was when I met him and it was like I told you.” She had been talking rather quickly and paused now for a breath, a sip of coffee. Ike continued to stare at the book. “There’s a picture in the shop,” he said. “A picture of Hound and Preston together, and there’s a girl with them. Her name’s Janet.”

“Her name was Janet.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I’m assuming it was Janet Adams. Was she nice-looking?”

He nodded. “Hound’s sister?”

“She’s dead. It happened quite a while ago. I was still in high school at the time and I didn’t know her. But I believe she OD’d or something. I remember it was drug-related and that was supposed to be a big deal.”

Ike was silent for a moment. He found it an oddly disturbing piece of information. He thought back to the photograph at the shop, thinking of the girl’s laughter, her hair caught on a breeze and swept to one side of her face. “Do you know any more about it?”

Barbara shook her head. “No. I didn’t know her. It was a long time ago. I just remember the event, that everyone was so shocked to think that a girl like Janet had been on drugs.” She paused for a moment, looking at the table. “Do you mind if I ask you something?” she asked. “Why are you so interested in all of this?”

Ike closed the book and shrugged. There was a moment in which he considered telling her, but then the moment passed and he had decided against it. “I don’t know,” he said, “I guess I’m just curious. I mean, you’ve talked about how different Preston used to be; haven’t you wondered what made him change?”

She gave him a rather sour look, as if it were a stupid question. “Sure, I’ve wondered about it. But he was gone a long time, two tours in Vietnam. I mean, a lot of people came back from that place changed.”

“I guess I was thinking more about why he went in the first place, why he chucked the business. Maybe it had something to do with Janet Adams. You said he and Hound were into dealing.”

Barbara got up and took the scrapbook from his hands, returned it to the cupboard. When she had closed the door, she leaned back against it, turning to face Ike. “Maybe,” she said, “maybe it did. Six months ago I might have been more interested in thinking about it. Now it all seems beside the point, somehow. If someone doesn’t care about himself, you begin to lose interest after a while.”

Ike pushed himself away from the table and stood up. There was suddenly a lot of things he wanted to think about, and he wanted to be alone. Still, he wished there were something he could say to Barbara. There wasn’t. He said good-bye, told her he would keep in touch, and she let him out the side door.

The sunlight was dancing on the sidewalk and houses seemed to float in the heat waves, like scraps of colored paper. He walked in the general direction of the town, scarcely paying attention to where he was going, thinking about what Barbara had told him. He kept seeing the girl in the photograph, one arm around Hound Adams, the other around Preston, and he was certain she was the key. The death of the girl was what had come between Preston and Hound. And somehow, though he could scarcely put his finger on a reason, he was certain Janet Adams had been the reason for the strange expression that had passed over Preston’s face the day Ike had told him about his sister, shown him the scrap of paper with the names.

He was walking rapidly now, and before he knew it he was already downtown, walking toward Main along some shabby side street, past a collection of weedy lots and stray oil wells, a lone beer bar. He was almost at the entrance of the bar when Morris suddenly stepped out of the doorway and onto the sidewalk. Morris was wearing a trucker’s hat with the bill turned around to the back and a set of wire-rimmed shades. He was wearing his sleeveless Levi jacket and looked to be fairly well crocked. He seemed to sway a bit in the bright light as Ike walked toward him, and there was something distinctly belligerent in the way he blocked the sidewalk, in the half-assed grin back of the matted blond beard. Yet somehow it seemed crazy to turn and run away. He knew Morris. He was being overly paranoid. Ike came a couple of steps closer and said hello.

Morris methodically removed the wire-rimmed shades, folded them with great care, and slipped them into the pocket of his jacket. He put his right fist into his left hand and popped a few knuckles. Ike took a step backward. Morris came after him, grinning broadly now, and swung.

It happened very quickly. Getting out of the way was somehow never even an issue. There was just this fist that dropped out of the heat and the sky went dark. Ike realized that he was suddenly on his back, but for a while nothing hurt. Everything was numb. He knew that there was blood on his face. It was very hard to focus his eyes. It was like he couldn’t decide whether to be knocked out or not. His vision kept getting dark and then light and then dark again. Morris’s big dirty face appeared above him and he was aware of a thick finger aimed at his chest. “I knew you’d fuck up,” Morris said. He grabbed Ike by the front of the T-shirt and it looked like he was going to get hit again. He thought of the concrete behind his head. Then he heard someone else talking to Morris. “I thought you said you could knock him out, chump.”

“Aw, man, I slipped.”

“Bullshit.”

Ike’s vision had begun to clear slightly and he could now see the other figure standing behind Morris: Preston, dressed in the old tank top, the red bandanna wrapped around his head.

“Give me one more, man,” Morris pleaded. “I’ll fracture his fucking skull this time.”

“Fuck it. You lost. You owe me a beer.” Preston turned and went back into the bar. Morris released his hold on Ike’s shirt. “Get the picture, queer bait?” Morris asked.

22

Once back in his room, Ike examined himself in the mirror. He’d bled all over everything. The punch had caught him flush over the right eye and there was a nasty-looking cut close to the brow. It was all puckered open and red with a thin piece of white showing. It made him sick looking at it and he puked in the sink. He packed some ice cubes in a towel and lay down, holding the ice to his head, which had at last begun to throb. He was too disoriented to think very hard. Mainly he felt betrayed and he did not know why. Had Morris said something to Preston about Ike and Barbara? Would Preston believe it if he had? But that was not it. There was something else and he did not know what it was.

He must have gone to sleep, because when he jerked his eyes open again he saw that the sky had turned red beyond the window. The room was dark and stuffy and stank of barf. The ice cubes had melted, soaking his shirt and pillow, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped. When he got up to open the window he nearly fell back down. He clutched at the bed and waited and finally got it done on the second attempt. After that he lurched to the door and opened that too, hoping for some kind of cross-ventilation. Then he lay back down. He lay there for what seemed like a long time, thinking, watching the sky go purple and then black, watching the moths flutter about the naked bulb in the hallway. There was something about that bulb, the whir of moths in the yellow light, the darkness beyond. He was reminded of the desert, of the hard-packed dirt back of Gordon’s, the run-down porch where the nightlight burned a hole out of the darkness, drawing insects from the whole town to ping in the metal shade.

He dozed again, thinking of the desert, and when he opened his eyes it was because Michelle was staring at him. She was standing just inside the doorway, dressed in her uniform. She had her hair pulled back in barrettes and he couldn’t remember seeing her wear it that way before. It made her face seem rounder, not so grown up.

“I got hit,” he said.

She turned on a light and bent down for a closer look, then she went to his dresser and fished around for a clean T-shirt and a pair of jeans. “Put these on,” she said, and tossed them on the bed.

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to get Jill’s car and drive you to the hospital.”

“I don’t have to go to the hospital.”

“Yes, you do, you have to get stitches in that.”

“I don’t need stitches,” he said. He was up on his elbows now, watching her heading out the door. She stopped and looked back at him. “Not if you want a big scar. Don’t argue, okay? My mother’s a nurse.”

“Shit. You can’t drive.”

“I can too. Just get up and get your clothes on. Now.” She closed the door behind her and he could hear her walking down the hall. He sat up on the edge of his bed and pulled off his shirt. He was still sitting there when she came back in. She finished dressing him. He took an absurd pleasure in watching her do it, in looking down on her hands, her arms that were just as big around as his own, perhaps stronger. When she had finished, he stood up and followed her outside.

Jill’s car turned out to be a ’68 Rambler, and Michelle wasn’t too good with a stick shift. It was five or six miles to the hospital and she ground gears all the way. She took him to Huntington Community, the same hospital they’d taken Terry Jacobs to the night of the fight.

The whole process wasn’t as bad as Ike had expected. They sat him on a white table in a brilliantly white room and examined his head. When it had been cleaned and stitched, they gave him a shot and a prescription for some Nembutals.

As he stood at the counter waiting for the prescription, he had a clear view of the corridor that led back toward the entrance to the Emergency Room, and that was where he was when they came in. What he saw first was the ragged blend of grease-stained jeans and T-shirts, and that was enough to sap the strength from the backs of his legs. Because somehow, at once, he knew what had happened. And then he saw Barbara. She was holding a handkerchief to her face. He left the counter and started toward her. He walked down the narrow hallway, past gray doors, beneath fluorescent lights, Michelle pulling at his arm, Barbara looking up to see him, her eyes wide and bloodshot, but her voice flat and calm as she gave him the news: The Samoans had caught Preston at the shop, alone. Morris had been out for parts. Someone passing at the mouth of the alley had apparently seen the commotion and called the police. The phone call had probably saved his life, although there was a head injury, the extent of which was still not known. It had not been in time, however, to save his hands. His hands had been pushed into the lathe and he’d lost all his fingers, everything but the thumbs.

Ike felt numb on the way home. He felt paralyzed in the blackness that surrounded him. Michelle helped him out of the car and up to the room. The drug was working on him now too, and he lay on her bed as the room spun slowly around him. She lay down beside him and he felt her fingers, cool on his forehead. He listened to her telling him it would be okay, telling him how much she liked him. And then it was like it all seemed to come down on him at once. He staggered into her bathroom and shut the door. He stayed there, on his knees, until the light had begun to go gray, puking his guts into the sewers of Huntington Beach, giving the place something to remember him by.

23

Ike Tucker hid in his room for a week. He felt like he was the one who had had his head stove in and his fingers chopped off. He lay on his bed and watched the shadows change shapes on the ceiling. He stood at the window and studied the oil well and the birds through dirty panes of glass. Perhaps if he’d had his board, it would have been different. He missed the mornings in the water, and he thought back bitterly now on the trip to the ranch.

His only visitor was Michelle. She brought him food from work and tried to talk him into going outside. By the middle of the week the weather had turned particularly hot. “Why don’t you go down to the beach?” she asked him. “You could at least cool off.”

Ike shrugged as he stood at the window and watched some neighboring palms, unmoving in the still, hot air.

“You afraid you’ll run into Morris?” She didn’t ask him in a snotty way. Still, the question made him irritable.

“Those guys are assholes,” she said. “Both of them. Morris and Preston.”

“Not Preston.”

“Jesus. What does it take? Why do you want to make a hero out of that guy? He’s just another dumb-ass biker. Can’t you see that?”

“No. I can’t.” He turned away from her to look back into the yard. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“Me? I don’t know what I’m talking about? That’s a good one. Look, I’m sorry he got hurt. But he was standing right there when Morris hit you. You said he was. They were taking bets or something to see if Morris could knock you out.”

He wished now he had never told her about seeing Preston at the bar. He just didn’t know what to think. Perhaps there was some element of truth in what she said. Maybe he was warped by all that time in the desert, feeding fantasies with books, wanting a father he had never known, even trying for a time to make one of Gordon. Maybe all that was mixed up in it. Maybe he was even a secret faggot or some damn thing. But that was not the end of it; you couldn’t just write it off to those kinds of things and it was wrong to try. What he knew for certain was that Preston was not just another dumb biker. She was wrong about that. But he did not try to tell her. He stood silently, staring into the still air until she came and stood beside him.

“Why don’t you go downtown and talk to Hound? He told you to. You can get another board.”

“Don’t you understand?” he asked, turning to face her. “He was in on what they did to Preston.”

“No, I don’t understand. He let Morris hit you. He stabbed Hound’s friend. He’s just like all those other asshole bikers. I don’t know why you want to hang around with him instead of Hound. And Hound likes you.”

He let the remark about Preston go this time. “What makes you think Hound likes me?”

“I can tell. For one thing he calls you brother all the time.”

“He calls everybody that.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

Ike watched the oil well below, trying to decide if there was anything to what Michelle had said. She could be a difficult person to talk to sometimes, when she had her mind set on something. But then her stubbornness was connected to her strength, he supposed, and her strength was one of the things about her that he most admired. He thought again of how wrong his first impression of her had been. She was not a mindless chick. She was young. She was on her own. There were a lot of things no one had ever told her. But she thought about things. And she was tough. He had never heard her complain. There was one decent pair of jeans in her closet, one funky dress she had bought at a local thrift store, and yet she had been the one to come up with money for Ike’s medicine when he was too fucked up to pay for it himself, never asking to be paid back. And since he had been laid up he had learned other things that contributed to his admiration of her toughness. He had gotten a glimpse into the kind of shit that a young girl out on her own had to put up with—the sexual harrassment of employers, for instance, jerks who knew they could mess with your head and that nothing would happen, that runaways were not likely to go to the cops. At one job in particular—an all-night doughnut shop—the manager had tried to rape her, had pulled a knife on her and held it between her legs. She had taken the blade with her hand and turned it away, stabbed at his eyes with her nails, and run. She had shown Ike the long white scar across one palm. And sometimes when she told him things like that, he was reminded of Ellen. Especially that business with the knife, grabbing the blade, that sounded like something Ellen might have done. Ellen had been tough too, he thought.

This was running through his mind as he stood at the window and suddenly he wanted Michelle to know about Ellen, about Hound Adams, about why he had come. He turned from his view of the yard and went to the dresser. The sunlight was coming through the window, falling across the battered wood so that the handles on the drawer were hot to the touch. As he slid the drawer open he saw the white scrap of paper with the names on it. He looked back over his shoulder at Michelle. “If I tell you something, can you keep it to yourself? I mean, don’t tell anybody, not Jill, not anyone?” He watched her nod. He took the scrap from the drawer and passed it to her. “It’s about my sister.”

He told her the story as he had once told it to Preston Marsh. He told her about the kid in the white Camaro, the trip to Mexico with Hound Adams. She watched him as he spoke, holding the paper in her hand.

“So far the only person who knows any of this is Preston. I thought he was going to help me.”

“You thought?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know now. I don’t know what he was doing. Preston’s a funny guy. He’s not always easy to talk to. Now I can’t talk to him at all.”

“I don’t think funny is the right word,” she said. After that she was quiet, staring at the floor. “So that’s why you want to know who Marsha thinks you look like, who you remind her of?”

He nodded. “She might know something.”

“But why would your uncle let you come by yourself? You said he was standing right there when the kid told you. Why didn’t he want to do something?”

“Because he thinks Ellen is wild, that whatever happened to her was her own fault. Because he doesn’t give a shit.”

“Does he give a shit about you?”

“I don’t know.”

“He raised you.”

“He figured out a way to get money from the state for it.”

“For real?”

He nodded. “Ellen heard him talking about it once to my grandmother. She told me.”

“Shit.” Michelle shook her head. “That sounds like something my old lady would pull. He sounds like my old lady. She doesn’t give a shit where I am. She thinks I’m wild too. But I’m nothing compared to her. You know what she was doing before I left? She was getting so bad she was trying to put the moves on every guy I brought by the house. When she wasn’t working, she was lying around half naked every day. I came home from school one afternoon and caught her fucking this guy I had been going with. Can you believe that?”

Ike stopped to think about it. He thought back to that day Ellen had told him about Gordon getting the money and how it had made him feel. He wondered if it had been anything like the way Michelle had felt.

“So anyway,” Michelle said. “Forget that. Screw your uncle and my old lady.” She moved closer and leaned against him. “I know one thing,” she said. “I like it that you came; I like it that you’re like that.”

He shifted beneath her arm, wondering just what it was that he was like, because he had, of course, not told her everything about Ellen. “And I will talk to Marsha,” she was saying. “I can ask some other people, too. I’ll help you.” She seemed to be getting almost enthused over the idea.

“And wind up like Preston?”

“But you don’t know that’s what happened. You’re not even sure he was trying to help you.”

“Just don’t go asking around too much. You know what I mean? Go slow.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Yes. Yes.” She let the words out slowly, with her breath, and rested her head back against his shoulder so that her face was close to his own. He raised a hand, letting his fingers slip through her hair, felt her breathing, inhaled the scent of her skin, and suddenly she was whispering once more, telling him once more that she was glad he had come, and that he was different, and that maybe she could help. And before he could protest again, she was saying some crazy thing about how he should get more exercise and how it was unhealthy just to lay around all day. And he was letting her undress him. Then he let her push him back on the bed and get on top, trying to be very still as she moved above him, to see how still he could be, to sink into the mattress as she pushed him deep into her, to watch the square of sunlight on her bare shoulder, to watch the dark spot on her eye, beneath the sleepy half-closed lid, as if she were rocking herself to sleep, all the time thinking about how crazy it was to be making love when there were so many things to think about, when it was so hot. Finally he put his arms around her and pulled her to him. She buried her face in his neck and he arched himself against her and the only sounds were the sounds their bodies made, pressed against each other, wet with sweat, and the squeaking of the old bed.

When they were finished, she rolled away from him and they lay side by side in the heat. They stayed that way for a long time while the light changed and the room took on the dark yellow glow of late afternoon. It was finally Michelle who spoke. “So what are you going to do,” she asked, “after you find your sister? Go back to the desert?”

It seemed strange to hear her voice after the long silence. “I don’t know,” he said. It was odd, but he suddenly realized he had never given that much thought.

“You must want to do something. Work on bikes. Have your own shop.”

“I don’t know. Not that, I guess.”

“Then what?” She was back up on one elbow now, watching him.

He shrugged, thinking now of what Preston had said at the ranch. “Travel maybe. Surf.”

“You like it that much?”

He nodded. “So what about you? What do you want?”

“Traveling would be nice, see things I never have.”

“What then?”

She didn’t answer right away. She moved her shoulders and lay back down beside him. “You won’t laugh?”

“No.”

“I’d like to train horses.”

He was quiet.

“You think that’s dumb?”

“No.”

“My mother thought it was dumb.”

“Do you know anything about them?”

“I can learn. You think I can’t.”

He shook his head.

“You sounded like you think I can’t.”

“No. You can. I think you can. If you want to.”

They were both quiet again after that. Ike watched the light on their bare legs. He felt slightly paralyzed in a pleasant sort of way. The room turned orange, and then a kind of soft rose as the sun moved toward the sea somewhere beyond the window. Michelle left the bed and went to the sink for a drink of water. When she came back, she sat on the edge. Ike watched her profile in the soft red light. “It probably is crazy,” she said.

“What?”

“The horses. That’s supposed to be what all little girls want to do, isn’t it? Dumb.”

He pulled himself up and took her by the shoulder. Something about the way she said it made him mad. “Screw that,” he told her. “You’re young. You can do whatever you fucking well want to.” Saying that, he reminded himself of Preston. It was what Preston had said to him.

By the end of the week it was time to get the stitches pulled and Ike had to leave his room. Michelle was at work and he rode the bus to the hospital by himself. It was the first time all week that he had been out and he expected to find Morris waiting around every corner.

He had planned to see Preston when they were finished with the stitches, but when it was time his nerve failed him. Still, he hung around the hospital, hoping perhaps that it would prove to be only a momentary loss of courage. He went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. The new scar was over his right eye, close to the eyebrow, however, and barely noticeable. He was hoping it would make him look tougher, less like a goddamn pretty boy, which is exactly what his sister had once told him he was. His appearance had changed in other ways, though. His hair was much longer now, thick and wavy, brown but with places that had been streaked nearly blond by the sun. He wore it parted in the middle, and it was long enough to cover his ears. His skin was darker and he thought that he looked a little heavier in the arms and shoulders, like maybe all that paddling was doing him some good. He was still pretty scrawny, there was no getting around that, but he looked better. Or maybe it was just that he looked more like the rest of Huntington Beach, not so much like a hick anymore, and he wondered if Michelle would’ve started liking him if he hadn’t changed, if he hadn’t started looking like every other surfer around the pier. Funny how important those things seemed around here, the necessity to look like something, a punk, a surfer, a biker, anything, so long as it wasn’t a fucking hick.

He stood around in the bathroom for a fairly long time. He kept thinking about Preston, standing in the doorway of that bar, behind Morris. He was not angry about it so much as he was confused. He could not shake the feeling that he was at fault in some way, that he had brought all this upon himself, though he could not think of what it was that he had done. At last he walked outside and down the hall to a nurse’s station.

The nurse at the counter was a fat woman with brittle red hair sticking out from beneath her cap, and Ike found himself thinking about Michelle’s mother as the nurse ran a finger down a list of names, looking for Preston’s. He wondered if this one got her kicks out of boozing and putting the moves on sixteen-year-old dudes. “Two fourteen,” she said without looking at him, and then led him to the end of the hallway, to a cart covered with dressing gowns and surgical masks. There was a heavy gray door there and a small red light on the wall. “You’ll have to put these on before you go in,” she told him. “He has an infection in one of his hands. And you’ll only be able to stay a short time. He’s had surgery, you know. Just the day before yesterday. They had to put a plate in his head.”

Ike put the gown on over his T-shirt and jeans, then the mask and gloves. He felt awkward wearing them. It was hot beneath the mask. The nurse opened the door and he walked into the room. It seemed cooler inside and there was much less light. There were three beds in the room, but two of them were empty. Preston was in the bed farthest from the door. He looked asleep. Ike walked quietly across the room. Preston’s hands were outside the blankets, palms down alongside his body. One hand was lightly bandaged, the other was wrapped in some kind of plastic and there was a plastic tube running out of the bandages toward the floor on the opposite side of the bed.

There was a pale green cap on Preston’s head and there were the white edges of bandages showing beneath the cap. The face was nearly unrecognizable. The skin around both eyes was black and puffy and there were stitch marks across the bridge of his nose. Ike sat down heavily in the stiff green chair nearest the bed. He looked across the body of his friend toward the venetian blinds that covered the window, the faint patterns of light which spread from their edges. The room smelled of medicine, and Ike adjusted the mask. He could feel himself sweating beneath it. When he looked again toward Preston’s face, he saw that Preston’s head was turned some on the pillow now and he seemed to be watching Ike with one eye. The white of the eye was a dark red, so it was hard to see where the white ended and the pupil began. Ike was suddenly afraid that he was going to burst into tears, or be sick on the floor. His throat felt hot and tight. Before he could say anything, though, Preston had turned his face back toward the ceiling.

Ike stood up. He felt the room spinning slowly around him. He took a step forward and put a hand on Preston’s arm. The arm felt thick and hard beneath his palm. The sleeves of Preston’s gown had been rolled up just above the elbows and Ike could see the tattoos going down into the bandages. Preston didn’t say anything and he didn’t turn his head. It was hard to tell if Preston was looking at him or not. Ike squeezed Preston’s arm. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Preston swallowed. He did it like it was something that took a lot of effort. He blinked and Ike could see there was water at the corners of his eyes. He felt his own eyes getting hot and gritty. There was a lump in his throat and he knew that he was not going to say anything more. “I’ll see you,” he mumbled. “I’ll be around.” When he had left the room, he tore off the gloves and mask, wadded them with the gown, and threw the whole mess against a wall. An orderly watched him with a disapproving eye but said nothing. Ike stared back, then stomped off down the hallway, through the heavy doors and into the blinding sun.

24

“You were right about Marsha,” Michelle told him. It was still midday. He had been home from the hospital for about an hour. “She says you look like this girl she worked with at a dress shop. She says the girl’s name was Ellen. I asked her if she knew anything about where Ellen might be. She said no. She said she’d heard Ellen left town. But I was thinking, maybe we could go by the dress shop, talk to the…”

“Forget the dress shop.”

She stopped and looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean fuck it. So we go to the dress shop and the owner says, ‘Oh, yeah, Ellen Tucker. She doesn’t work here anymore. I think she left town.’ So big fucking deal. Nobody knows anything, Michelle. Nobody knows any more than I do. That’s why that kid drove all the way to the desert looking for Ellen’s family, because he couldn’t find anything out either, and he lived here. You see what I mean? It’s Hound Adams. Hound Adams and Frank Baker. The only way I’m ever going to find out anything is to get close enough to hear it from them. Everything else is a waste of time.”

Michelle had sat down on the edge of the bed. She’d crossed her legs and was jiggling one foot, staring at the end of her shoe. “And so how are you going to do it?”

“I’m going to start by taking Hound up on his offer. I’m going down there and see about a board.” He paused. “I don’t know after that.” He stopped and popped one fist against an open palm. “Fucking Hound Adams, man. Why does he want to give me a board?”

“I told you, maybe he likes you.”

“Or maybe he likes you. Or maybe it’s something else. I have this idea that Hound knows damn well I was at the ranch with Preston. It’s like he’s playing some fucking game.”

He watched her for a moment, but she didn’t say anything and he turned and walked to the window. “Maybe Preston was right,” he heard her say. “Maybe you should just leave.” She paused. “I could go with you.”

He shook his head. The trouble was that now, for the first time since he’d climbed onto that damn bus with the old woman yelling at him from the darkness, he was something besides scared. First they’d taken his sister. Now they had fucked up his friend. It was not right that he should be so fucking helpless. And he was not going to leave it at that. He said as much to Michelle. She continued to study her shoe, her face smooth and pale in the sunlight. Finally she looked up at him. “Hard guy,” she said. “Just be careful.”

He went that afternoon. And he found Hound Adams seated on a bench out in front of the shop, talking to a couple of young girls. They were dressed in these one-piece suits with holes and crazy angles in them so you could see a lot of skin. The girls seemed to be doing most of the talking. Ike could see their mouths moving, expressions changing. As he got closer he could hear their laughter. Hound Adams seemed to be finding some amusement in their company. He was smiling and when Ike got close enough, Hound turned the smile on him. He gestured toward the end of the bench, inviting Ike to sit down. Ike sat. “Got a little business to take care of now with my man,” Hound told the girls after introducing them to Ike. The girls scampered away. Ike joined Hound in watching their skinny asses disappear in the heat. When they were gone, Hound looked back at Ike. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

Ike met Hound’s eyes with his own. Hound’s eyes were a deep shade of brown, almost a black. They reminded Ike of those dark polished stones people sold for souvenirs in the desert—agates, they were called. “You said something about a board.”

Hound nodded. The slightly bemused smile seemed to widen almost imperceptibly. He turned a palm toward the open door of the shop, then he rose and went inside. Ike stood and followed.

It was cool in the shop. Frank Baker stood behind the glass counter. He watched them come in without changing expression, then bent to sort through some boxes at his feet. Ike made eye contact but had read nothing there, not even recognition. Now he stood just in back of Hound Adams and slightly to his side as Hound waved toward the rack of new boards. “Take your pick,” Hound told him.

The boards were arranged by length, going from the longer boards, the nose riders and rounded pins, down to the twin fins and knee riders. “Check out the used boards, too, if you like,” he heard Hound say, and he turned to look across the room. He saw almost at once the nose rider he had used at the ranch. It had been cleaned up and leaned against the wall with the other used boards. He thought back to the conversation he had had with Michelle only a short time ago. Cat and mouse with Hound Adams. He looked away quickly, hoping that his face had not lost its composure. He thought about Preston, on his back in that room that smelled of medicine, and his anger held. He went to the rack and pulled a rounded pintail from it. He placed it on the ground and stepped back, sighted down the tail toward the nose, as he’d seen Preston do the day they got the other board. When he bent at the waist to do the sighting, he noticed that Frank Baker had come out from behind his counter and was watching, standing as he had the last time Ike was in the shop, with his arms folded across his chest.

The board was a single fin, pale blue with white pinstriping on the deck. Hound Adams looked at it with him. “It’s a nice stick,” Hound said. “But I think you could go for something a little shorter.” He walked down the rack and pulled out another single fin, also a rounded pin but with wingers. “This board will still give you some stability in the wave, but it won’t be quite as stiff. The blue board is a little bit gunney. But you can try them both, as far as that goes. Take the one you think works the best.”

Ike looked at the price tags taped to the rails. Both boards were well over two hundred dollars. “What about the money?” He was getting very low and soon he would have to find something to do.

“I said we could work something out. It’s up to you, brah. Hard to learn much without a stick.”

“I’m out of work right now,” Ike told him.

“So I’ve heard. The man with the machines. But there are other ways of making a living in this town without having your face stuck in an engine all day long. Look, why don’t you take one of the boards now. Come and surf with us tomorrow, see what you think. Then we can talk payment.”

It seemed to Ike as he stood in the shop, the boards at his feet, that Hound Adams was different than he had seen him before, somehow more businesslike today, less the guru. He looked down at the board Hound had suggested. It was a clean stick, the more expensive of the two, an airbrush job with a deck that went from bright yellow at the nose, through a nicely blended rainbow of colors, to a red tail. He picked it up and tested the weight beneath his arm and it felt like it belonged there. He looked once more toward the rear of the shop, toward the used boards and wet suits, the photographs that he knew hung there but could not see from this angle, and he found himself wondering when the shop had dropped the Tapping the Source logo, for the new boards were marked with a sort of squiggly V shape and the words Light Moves.

Ike carried the board to the front of the shop. He was aware of both Frank and Hound watching him. “So let’s see you out there with it, brah. Tomorrow. We’ll get some waves together.” It was Hound who spoke and he was grinning broadly now. He walked Ike to the door and raised a hand in farewell. Ike held up his own free hand as he stepped out onto the sidewalk. He looked past Hound, into the shop, and he could see that Frank Baker was still at the counter, his arms still folded. Frank, Ike noticed, was not smiling.

When Ike reached the Sea View, Michelle had already left for work and the room was empty. He wondered if she would see Marsha today, and if they would talk. And he wondered if he had been right in telling her. But it was done now. And something else was done as well. He had taken the board from Hound Adams. It had begun. He placed the board on his bed and walked around the room, examining it from all angles. It was definitely, with the exception of a big chopped hog waiting for him in the desert, the flashiest thing he had ever owned.

25

Ike was up early the following morning. He passed through the streets of downtown Huntington Beach, his board under his arm, walking to meet the dawn patrol, to surf with them for the first time. Above the Golden Bear and the Wax Factory the beginnings of a sunrise spread into the sky. Thin strips of blue fused with yellow. Hard lines of color against the gray. And he found the sunrise repeated in every thrift-store window, in the dark plate glass of every parked car, until all of Main Street was alive with it.

As he walked he listened to the crack of waves beyond the highway, tried to guess size and swell direction by the sound, counted out the intervals between reports. He passed the Club Tahiti, the wide gaping alleys, at last the highway itself. He paused for a moment at the top of the concrete steps, staring down across the empty reaches of sand, and the rush, as always, was there. It came with his first glimpse of swell lines running from the horizon, the collision of sea and sky, the great pure source against whose edge the town was nothing but a speck, a tiny soiled mark on the face of eternity.

The swell, which had been light and out of the west for the past few days, had given way in the night to a much stronger swell out of the southwest. The waves were overhead, bigger than anything he had surfed at Huntington. He watched them as he came down the steps. He could see the dawn patrol already out, jockeying for position near the pier. The waves were not that much bigger than those he’d surfed with Preston on the first day at the ranch, but it was a different kind of surf. The ranch waves had come off a point. There had been long shoulders and a path to the outside. But this was day one of a strong swell. The waves came in long, pumping lines. Hollow grinders that hit like trucks. He was still without a wet suit and he shivered as he knelt in the wet sand to fasten his leash. He guessed he was ready for it, but he was wrong.

He made his first mistake that morning before even getting in the water. For some strange reason he would later be unable to recall, he crossed beneath the pier and entered the water on the south side, about fifty yards down the beach, having failed to calculate the power with which the swell was pushing from that direction. After about fifteen minutes of hard paddling he was still not outside but getting dangerously close to the pilings. The old pier, for which he had developed a certain affection, was suddenly an ominous presence. He was close enough to see the hairline cracks, the pigeon shit and moss—and the sound of the white water sweeping back through the concrete corridor formed by the pilings was like a barrage of cannon fire.

Far above him he could see the impassive faces of half a dozen fishermen watching his progress. The dawn patrol was still a good thirty yards beyond him and he was profoundly aware of being stuck in this thing alone. And it was just about at that point that he saw what he had been dreading, a full-on clean-up set moving off the horizon and there was no way he was going to make it. He kept his arms going for the simple reason that he didn’t know what else to do, but there was no feeling left in his hands. Caught among the pilings, bound to his board by his leash. He could see it all now. They would have to send him back to San Arco in a shoe box.

He was almost beneath the pier when the first wave of the set reached him. He started up the face, watched the lip curling above him as a concrete column rose at his side. He swung out wildly with his left arm and, with his right arm braced against the deck of his board, actually used the piling to push himself through the lip. And then he was down, in the trough between waves still being sucked backward by the first wave, but for the first time that morning doing the right thing and paddling like mad for the north side of the pier, hoping to make it through before the next wave hit him. And he did, barely. He popped out on the north side just in time to get caught in the lip of the second wave and sucked over the falls, driven down with such force he felt like his balls had been kicked up inside him, but he had escaped the pier.

The wave held him down for a long time, and when he finally did resurface, still caught in the white water, moving north and toward the beach, he’d managed to lose most of his enthusiasm for this particular swell. He was back on the beach, seated on the nose of his board, when he caught sight of Hound Adams walking toward him out of the water. Hound was dressed in a pair of blue trunks and the dark vest Ike had never seen him surf without.

Hound put his board down next to Ike’s and sat with him. “Chew you up and spit you out?” he asked.

“I guess.”

“You started out on the wrong side of the pier, brah. Let’s rest a minute, then we’ll go out together. I’ll show you the way.”

Ike came close to refusing the invitation, but it was a little like having Preston waiting for him after that first wave at the ranch. At last they stood and Ike followed Hound back to the water’s edge. “It’s a state of mind,” Hound told him as the white water reached their feet. “These waves demand a certain commitment. Once you’ve picked a wave, don’t let yourself think about anything else, don’t doubt what you can do. Paddle as hard and fast as you can. You’ll get into the wave faster and with more control. Don’t hold back. Be part of it. Understand?”

Ike nodded and followed Hound into the water. The sun was just coming up behind them now, charging the sky with a fine yellow light that seemed to hang above the sand in a golden mist. Above the water, tiny rainbows appeared in the spray blown back from the lips of the waves, and beneath the pier there was an incredible play of light and shadow, a seemingly infinite progression of blues and greens shot through with the rays of the sun.

It was easier getting out this time. Ike stuck in Hound’s tracks. They stayed on the north side of the pier—maybe ten yards out, their boards angled toward it at forty-five degrees—and soon Ike was back outside, moving with the rest of the pack, no longer a part of the crowd on the pier, but among the dancers.

Ever since that first day, when the other surfer had punched him, Ike had followed Preston’s advice and avoided the pier. But he had stood on it and watched the others often enough. Things were hectic and competitive among the crowds below the pier, surfers always moving, jockeying for position, shouting. And now he was with them, trying to stay on the outside edge so as not to get caught inside. He was able to spot a number of surfers he recognized, Frank Baker and one of the Samoans among them.

Along with the crowded conditions at the pier, however, there was a certain pecking order. He had noticed it before: there might be forty people in the water, but you would still see the same dozen picking up the best waves. Part of that had to do with judgment and skill; part of it had to do with intimidation. And one of the things Ike noticed that morning was that even though there were other younger surfers who were just as good, no one got any more waves than Hound Adams.

But for Ike it was a tough session, a morning of freight-train lefts, of clawing over the top into waves that only closed out and snuffed him. Perhaps it was, like Hound said, a state of mind. It was also hard work and so Ike did not give it much thought when, at one point, he noticed the spot of brightness, which he identified as sunlight on chrome, moving along the highway. And later, as the spot grew and contracted so that it was possible to see that it was not one large object but a number of smaller ones, he was not watching at all; nor did he see them make the turn off the highway and into the lot beneath the pier. It was not, in fact, until Hound had officially called it a morning and Ike was following him back through the sand that he noticed the bikes, and in particular the low-slung Panhead he recognized as belonging to Morris.

Hound and one of the Jacobs brothers were a few steps ahead of Ike as they came out of the sand and into the lot, the point at which Ike identified the bike. It was a bad moment, and Ike was aware of a sinking sensation spreading through his tired body. He called to Hound, but even as Hound was turning to look back the bikers made their move. It was Morris and three other bikers Ike did not recognize. Ike figured they probably wanted the Samoan the worst, but he was definitely caught in the middle.

There was a brick rest room near the center of the lot and the bikers had been waiting behind it. They came around now, two from each side, and they were coming fast. Chains and wrenches appeared out of nowhere, grabbing scattered bits of sunlight. A surfboard hit the pavement with the crunching sound Fiberglas makes when it shatters. Ike thought that it was the Samoan’s board that fell, but for some reason it was hard to tell. He was trying to see everything at once, to consider all possibilities. He took a few steps backward but did not run. The strength seemed to have left his legs. It was the way he had felt earlier, in the water, clawing his way over the face of that first outside set, staring into the stone jaws of the old pier. For a moment it was hard to register exactly what was happening. There was just all this movement: a blur of grease-stained jeans and tattooed flesh, black boots digging sparks out of the pavement, sunlight on metal. And then the action seemed to arrange itself into two separate battles, one on each side of him.

It was the bikers’ play and they had called it two on one, going after Hound and Jacobs first, saving Ike for last. To Ike’s left, Hound Adams moved so quickly it was hard to see what was happening, but he seemed to have turned and his board was in the air spinning rail over rail, as if he’d flipped it at the two bikers coming toward him. One biker sidestepped the board, the other knocked it to the ground and then stumbled over it. And it seemed that just as one biker stumbled, Hound crouched and made a move to his left, as if to run. The other biker went for the move, digging bootheels into the lot, spreading arms as if to block an escape. But Hound was not trying to run. He came out of the crouch, moved a half step forward and spun around, catching the biker coming in with a vicious roundhouse kick to the head. Ike saw the biker’s jaw go slack, saw him drop to one knee, his mouth dripping blood as he stared into the pavement with a slightly puzzled expression on his face.

To Ike’s right, however, the big Samoan was in trouble. He had dropped his board and then, in an effort to set up for the biker’s charge, had brought his foot down on the rail and thrown himself off-balance. And Morris had picked up on the slip. He had caught the Samoan with his legs spread, fighting for balance, and kicked him solidly in the groin. Jacobs gasped for air, then went down hard, landing on his shoulder, and instantly the two bikers were on top of him. Someone wrapped a bicycle chain around his head and two pairs of heavy black boots went to work on his rib cage.

Ike himself stumbled backward, though no one had touched him, and banged his board into a parked car. Suddenly there were people running across the lot, fishermen, tourists, a few surfers, everyone coming to watch. Ike clung to his board as if it were going to save him, banged it again into the car. The lot was a place of fear and confusion, dozens of people running from all directions, pigeons scattering and rising like leaves on a wind. Somewhere there was a siren, the red flash of a passing Jeep. But Hound Adams was alone now, circling, kicking, trying desperately to hold three bikers at bay. There had been a moment, earlier, with one biker stumbling, one down, when Hound could have run, but he had stayed and he was now all that stood between Ike and the chromed wrench in Morris’s hand.

The bikers, however (and Ike would think of this only later), had been stupid to make their play so close to the pier, in full view of the lifeguard towers. Perhaps they had thought to make it fast, not counting on Hound Adams to slow them down. Or perhaps they had not thought at all. At any rate, there were suddenly black-and-whites skidding across the lot and helmeted cops coming out of the woodwork.

The bikers made no attempt to fight their way out, and suddenly, as suddenly as it had begun, the whole thing was over. It could not have lasted more than a couple of minutes. Ike found himself standing beside Hound Adams as the bikers were spread-eagled over the hoods of the two cars.

Jacobs, though able to get up under his own power, had been taken away in an ambulance, and Ike and Hound now stood alone on the sidewalk that ran above the parking lots. “Stupid,” Hound said. “Very stupid. And those are his friends.” Hound was not looking at Ike but gazing out at the sea. The strange part was that Ike knew exactly whom Hound was talking about, and he found it strange as well that there was a note of disappointment in Hound’s voice, almost the way one would talk about a family member who had gone bad. Hound shook his head and continued to squint out to sea. The delicate lighting of dawn was gone now. The horizon was a straight blue line, the sun high and bright above the water. “The guy used to kill me,” Hound said. “He was so fucking innovative, but he never knew what he was doing. Like he had a way of making bottom turns when it was big; he would switch rails, roll to his outside rail a split second before setting the inside edge. It was a way of getting more curve, more projection out of the turn. I picked it out of some films once and mentioned it to him. He didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. He just did it, by instinct or something. I don’t think the guy ever knew how good he really was. And he threw it all away, man, chucked the whole thing. Now he’s got friends like Morris.” By this point, Ike was not certain if Hound Adams was talking to him or to himself. The only thing he was certain of was that it was the first time he had listened to Hound Adams and not gotten the idea that Hound was playing a part or putting him on; it was like he was just talking. The first honest words Ike had heard him say, and they were about Preston.

26

Later that afternoon, Ike sat on the steps of the Sea View apartments, watching the sun dip behind the buildings that lined the highway, waiting for Michelle to come home from work. All day long he had thought about what had happened at the beach, trying not to imagine what might have happened had Hound not slowed the bikers down, had the cops not come when they did.

He was still there when Michelle came home. He followed her to her room while she changed clothes and tended her plants. He told her about the fight, about the way Hound Adams had stood his ground against the bikers.

“Maybe you were wrong about him,” she said.

“I don’t know. He saved my ass today, though. He could have split. There was this moment when he could have run, but he didn’t. He stayed. I know that much.”

“I told you, he likes you.”

“Why?”

“Have you ever thought about just asking him?”

“It crossed my mind.”

“And?”

“Not yet.” He went to the mattress and sat on it. “He wants me to come by tonight,” he told her. “He says he wants to see me about something, working off that board, I suppose.”

“Take me.”

“I don’t know. I think maybe I should go alone.” Michelle had been changing clothes. He watched her pull a faded pair of jeans up over that white triangle of skin that was the mark of her bathing suit on her bare ass, and suddenly what he wanted to do was stay with her. He was certain he didn’t want to take her with him, have to watch Hound Adams giving her the eye.

She sat down beside him. “Come on,” she said. “I want to go.”

“Shit, you just want to get high.”

She fell back on the mattress, letting herself bounce. “So what’s wrong with that? At least Hound’s always got good dope.”

“I just think I should go alone, that’s all.”

“You just don’t want to take me to Hound’s,” she said, “because you’re jealous.”

“Shit.” He got up and went to the window. He hated it when she sounded like a goddamn little kid. He looked back at her spread out on the bed, propped up now on her elbows, hair resting on her shoulders; he wanted to walk over and slap the smile off her face. And one of the reasons he wanted to was because he knew that she was right. He was jealous. Hound Adams was too slick. If he wanted to put the moves on some chick, he was going to make it work. He looked away from her and into the dark glass of the window. Then Michelle was up and standing beside him, her voice softer. “You don’t have to be jealous,” she said. “I know he likes me. I can tell, but I know what he wants. It’s too easy to get hung up on guys like that.”

He wished she would shut up. It was crazy how it went. Sometimes he felt so close to her, like they were so much alike, and other times it was as if they didn’t even speak the same language.

“I mean, I’ve had boyfriends like that and…”

“All right, all right.” He didn’t feel like hearing her get started about all her past boyfriends.

“Why does that make you so mad? You know I’ve had lots of boyfriends. It’s just because we grew up in different kinds of places. You think it means I don’t like you?”

She was still beside him and he put his arm around her shoulders. “No. Look, I’m not mad, but I just don’t think you should come with me tonight, okay? I didn’t mean to make such a big deal out of it.”

She turned back to her bed and sat down. “You never ate anything,” she said.

“I’ll get something later.”

“Come by, okay?”

“Okay, if it’s not too late.”

“Come by anyway.”

He stood in the doorway looking at her. She was still on the bed, sitting up straight with her arms out behind her. With her long arms and legs all tanned and her sun-streaked hair, her tank top and cutoff jeans, she looked just like all those girls he saw every day around the pier, sitting on the railings, walking with their transistor radios, but she wasn’t just like them; for him she was special, and that could never change.

The house on Fifth Street was dark. He almost turned and left, thinking he was too late, thinking too about Michelle and wanting very much to go back to her. But he figured he should not leave without at least knocking.

To his surprise the door was opened almost at once by a slender brown-haired girl he had not seen before. She let him in without a word and led him to a back room where Frank Baker, Hound Adams, and two of the Jacobs brothers sat on sagging couches, passing a pipe. Ike looked for the brother who had been beaten but did not see him. He stood in the doorway, feeling out of place, awkward.

“Enter,” Hound said. “Sit.”

Ike took a place on the floor and waited.

They finished what was in the pipe. No one offered any to Ike and he kept quiet, feeling more uncomfortable by the moment.

“How’s Michelle?” Hound asked him.

He heard one of the Jacobses chuckle. “Okay.”

“Just okay?”

“He means on a scale of one to ten,” Frank said. There was another soft chuckle. The dark-haired girl smiled.

Hound Adams stood up. He was wearing turquoise jewelry and a heavy Mexican shirt. “Let’s you and I go for a ride,” he said. He was looking at Ike.

He led him across the back lawn toward the alley and a small wooden garage. The moon was a sliver high above them. The night was windless and still. There was a StingRay convertible parked in the garage. Ike waited in the alley while Hound started the car and backed it out, then he closed the garage door and got inside.

They cut through the dark residential streets, down to the Coast Highway, then north toward the cliffs and oil wells. The lights of the town were far behind them when Hound swung the car around in a U-turn and parked it on the sea side of the highway. They were among the oil fields here, somewhere above the beaches Ike had seen only during the day, the domain of the inland gangs.

It was quiet in the car, a little stuffy. Ike cracked his window a bit. He could hear the sound of the surf, an occasional bit of music caught on some draft and carried among the oil rigs from the beaches below. Once in a while he could hear voices. He thought of the blackened fire rings he had seen by day, and wondered what they must be like by night, alive with flames. They waited in the car. Hound was silent, checking his watch. Ike could feel the sweat on his back, on the palms of his hands. The air that crept in from the partially open window was tainted with the odors of the fields, the heavy scent of some obnoxious gas. Hound reached across Ike and opened the glove box. Something solid slid across some papers and thumped against the metal of the lid. And in the flicker of light from the box, Ike could see that it was a handgun. Hound said nothing. He picked the gun up and slipped it into the large pocket on the front of his shirt, then snapped the lid closed.

After what seemed a very long time, Ike was aware of movement on the beach side of the car. There were several figures there, moving among the oil rigs and pieces of chain link fence.

“Come on,” Hound said, “let’s go.”

Hound reached behind his seat as they got out of the car and grabbed a large paper bag. The doors slammed shut and they walked toward the edge of the cliffs. There was a handful of people there, among the shadows. Ike counted six, all dressed in white T-shirts and dark pants.

When they had moved closer, he could see that it was a group of boys—maybe high school age, or younger—and that they were Mexicans. They were spread out in a loose half circle. As Hound and Ike reached them they turned and moved closer to the edge of the cliffs. Ike and Hound followed, across a set of railroad tracks and then back behind one of the rigs. They were hidden from the road here, near a ravine that split the cliffs and revealed a section of beach below. Looking down, Ike could see a fire, couples dancing in the orange light, and beyond it, the white lines of breaking waves moving across a black sea.

The boys had money for Hound. Hound gave them the bag. Ike was surprised at how young these guys looked, not at all like the people he had imagined. Somebody had a pipe going. It was passed to Ike and he took a hit, passed it on to Hound Adams. “Hound,” one of the boys said. “Tony wants to know can you get more of those pictures, the good ones, man, like this.” He flashed a picture toward Hound and Ike. There was a chorus of laughter from the circle. They were squatting in the light of a rig, but still it was hard for Ike to make much of the photograph. He could see that it was some kind of porno shot. He’d seen a set of spread thighs, a dark patch of hair. Hound nodded. “Sure thing, you got the bread.”

“You should give them to us free, man, bonus for your customers.” There was more laughter.

“Nothing’s free,” Hound told them. Ike was still thinking about the vanished photograph. What was there? A splash of color across the skin, red like blood? He would have liked another look, but the picture was gone and Hound was standing up to leave. The boys got up too, and soon they were out of sight, vanishing among the shadows of the trail that led through the ravine, back to the beaches. Ike brushed at the knees of his pants, tried to recall a single face from among the group and realized he could not. He could only remember the voices, the white flashes of shirts, and the splashes of light on the black pointed shoes.

When they were back in the car, Hound passed Ike the roll of bills. “Count it,” he said. He leaned over and put his handgun back into the glove box as Ike counted the money.

“Not bad for a night’s work?”

Ike agreed.

“Now it’s your turn.”

They drove back toward town with Ike wondering what Hound had meant, back toward the cluster of light that marked the intersection of Main Street and Coast Highway, toward the long, graceful line of light that was the Huntington Beach pier stretching into the Pacific.

They cruised slowly by the pier entrance on their first run, then looped around to come back from the other direction. This time Hound made a left turn off the highway and pulled into one of the long rectangular parking lots beneath the pier, the same lot in which he had fought the bikers. When they had parked, he killed the engine and turned to face Ike, his hand resting on the console between the seats. “How’d that board work for you today?” he asked.

“Okay. I’d like to try it in some easier waves.”

“End of the swell.”

Ike nodded.

“You’ve got potential,” Hound told him. “You stayed out there today. Surfing is as much a mental activity as it is a physical one.” Hound paused and Ike stared across the hood toward the dark stretch of beach. “I brought you with me tonight,” Hound said, “because I wanted you to see some things. There’s an idea I want you to think about.” Hound paused again and Ike looked at him for a moment, finding something disconcerting about the intensity with which Hound Adams seemed to be studying him. “You work on engines,” Hound said. “That requires a certain skill, and a certain knowledge. You have to have an understanding of the various systems that make up the engine, how the systems work together. Basically, what you have to understand first are the principles upon which the thing operates, so that it, like surfing, like everything else, is mental as well as physical. There is always this problem of understanding certain underlying principles. Am I right? Are you following me?”

Ike nodded. He was staring back toward the dark beach now, wondering where this new flight of Hound’s would lead, how it might connect with the new surfboard he had assumed he was to begin paying for tonight.

“Well, look around you,” Hound continued, “I told you there were other ways of making a living around here besides working on bikes. I might have said there are other sorts of machines you can work on, because you can work on this town just like it was an engine. You can make it work for you, make it do what you want it to. And you don’t have to get greasy doing it. You don’t have to get shoved around by some Neanderthal like Morris. What you do have to do is get a grasp on the underlying principles upon which the machine operates.” Hound paused again, waited a moment, and then went on. “Now you’ve seen one principle in operation tonight. A very simple one: supply and demand. I had what those greasers out by the oil wells wanted. I know what they want and I know how to get it. All they know is what they want. They’re in the dark about everything else. They’ll bust their asses at some job all day long, always at the mercy of the machine. Now admittedly those guys are at the bottom of a certain process, but the principles apply all the way to the top. That principle of supply and demand is always around. You lose a board and want another. I can give you one. I can give you your pick, in fact, but now you can do something for me.”

Hound opened the console between the seats and produced a small plastic bag containing perhaps half a dozen joints. “What you can do tonight,” Hound said, “is hang around the pier for a while and find some young girls who want to party.”

Ike stared stupidly at the plastic bag. It was somehow a request that did not make much sense. He had never guessed that Hound Adams wanted for girls to party with, and he did not think that was the case now.

Hound seemed to tap into what he was thinking. “The Samoans like young tail.” He smiled. “Not an uncommon like. So I could buy it. I could also get girls I already know. But then neither of those possibilities strikes me as being very interesting right now. There is a constant turnover of girls in this town, and I like meeting new ones. It has become another aspect of the machine I’ve learned how to use, and I can use someone like you, some good-looking young guy who can meet chicks with no problem.”

Ike continued to stare at the joints. A thin line of perspiration moved along one temple. For the first time since arriving in Huntington Beach, he felt that he was really close to something, something more than anyone had yet told him, perhaps more than anyone knew. The prospect seemed to hang there before him in an almost palpable way.

“Is something the matter?” Hound asked.

“No, I…” Ike was suddenly sweating profusely. “I don’t know if I can.”

“Nonsense. Let me run something down for you. I’ve given you the board. It’s yours. I don’t want it back. Giving it back would mean nothing to me. The board is just an object. What we’re talking about is the spirit behind the giving. Now, I’m asking you for something, a very simple thing, but it’s a beginning. Find some girls, bring them to the house. If you can’t make that work, maybe you can go get Michelle and her friend. The thing is not to come back alone. But you’re making a big thing out of it. It’s simple, really. Find a few chicks, do a number with them, tell them you know where there’s a party. There’s nothing to it.” Hound Adams put his hand on Ike’s knee. “See you at the house, brah.”

27

Ike stood in the parking lot and watched the taillights of Hound’s Sting-Ray vanish into the night, acutely aware of the weight in his shirt pocket. As he began walking slowly toward the pier it seemed to him that he’d reached a moment of decision. He could either do as Hound Adams asked, or he could leave town. There was no in-between now. And yet, wasn’t that what he wanted, to get next to Hound Adams, to find out what went on, to find something that could be used against him? Damn. He let his breath out slowly between his teeth as he walked. The strange thing was, that somehow, played off against all of his anxiety, against the slightly gritty feeling that he had been put up to some unwholesome task, there was a part of him that had not gone unmoved by Hound’s vision of the town as some great organic machine one might learn to make work to one’s own advantage. And there was something else, too, a kind of crazy curiosity about himself. Here he was, Ike Tucker, some hick out of nowhere walking around on the edge of the Pacific Ocean with a pocketful of dope on a mission to deliver girls to some party. There was something about that that was both terrifying and at the same time wildly exhilarating.

He mounted the concrete steps that led to the pier. The boardwalk was crowded: people on skates, couples strolling arm in arm, suntanned young punks leaning on the rails. Music spilled from the fish-and-chips joint at the pier entrance and from a number of transistor radios. Across the highway, the town was a string of light set against the blackness of the sky.

He turned up the pier, walking now out to sea. He felt drunk, but he was not, still a bit high maybe from the dope he had smoked at the oil rig. But it was a different feeling, almost like something in him had snapped and set him free, though free from what he could not say. He did not feel the boardwalk beneath his feet. He felt instead the blood pumping in his arms, in the palms of his hands. Two girls glided past him on skates and he racked his brain for an opening line. He spotted a group of four girls. These were on skates as well and like him were headed toward the dark end of the pier. He fell in behind them. They stopped at a place where the pier widened out, and began leaning over the rail to watch some surfers below them.

Ike walked up and stood beside them. His heart was beating with such force, he was surprised they could not hear it. “Nice swell,” he said. This statement seemed to bring all conversation to a halt and all four girls turned to look at him, then at one another. Finally one of them said, “What?”

“I said, it’s a nice swell.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Anywhere. The beach.”

“You got good stuff?”

“Colombian.”

The redhead looked at her friends and raised her eyebrows.

“Why not?” somebody asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He found them in the living room, Debbie and the two skinny blondes, all three seated on a couch beneath a huge Indian rug hung on the wall with a quotation from the Book of Changes pinned to the middle of it. They still looked slightly wired, staring at him out of blasted eyes while the smell of breakfast drifted back into the room. The scent made him sick.

He walked past the girls without speaking and into the kitchen. The slender brunette was scrambling eggs. “Rise and shine,” she said. Ike ignored her. He had in mind going out the back way and slipping out the gate in the side yard.

There was a large screened-in porch off the kitchen, which had to be crossed to get to the yard. But as Ike came out into the porch he saw that Hound Adams was seated on the grass outside the door. He was seated Indian style, his face to the sun, his back to the house, and Frank Baker was standing over him. Neither of them had seen Ike and he stopped in the center of the porch. For a moment he thought that they were talking, but then he saw that it was Frank Baker who was doing the talking, that Hound was just sitting, staring into the yard, and that Frank was angry. “You’re fucking blowing it, man,” Ike heard him say. “Letting that chick shoot coke. I mean, things are gettin’ too loose around here. You know? I thought you said you could keep Terry’s family in line.”

Frank was dressed in a pair of trunks, and behind him, Ike could see a couple of boards lying in the yard. Frank was standing close to Hound, almost bending over him. His arms were held out, away from his body, with the palms turned up, so that the sun was hitting him in the chest and on the white palms of his hands.

When Hound spoke, his voice was quiet and Ike had to strain to hear. It sounded like only one word, like later, or something like it. He could not be sure.

Frank shook his head and it seemed to Ike that he was about to speak again when he looked up and saw Ike on the porch. He turned away then, walked back into the yard to pick up his board. He passed Hound Adams without another word, but stopped as he reached the gate at the fence. He was nearly even with Ike now, slightly shorter due to the elevation of the porch, and he looked up into Ike’s face as he reached for the latch. “You get that board paid for last night?” he asked.

The question took Ike by surprise. Frank seemed to be waiting for an answer. He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Frank laughed when he said that, a short, barking laugh that ended as quickly as it had begun. “Might take a long time to pay for a board like that one.” He went out through the fence, leaving the gate open behind him.

When Ike looked back toward the yard, he saw that Hound was standing now, that he also was dressed in trunks. He was again amazed, as he had been after Hound’s first party, that Hound was able to find the energy to surf after a night like the last one.

Ike stepped out of the porch, into the light. He studied Hound’s face for signs of anger, some response to what Frank had said. But his face was empty. He was only squinting against the light as he looked at Ike. “Where’s your stick?”

Ike had felt something go out of him with Frank’s words about the board, about how it might take a long time to pay it off. He was not sure how many more nights like the last one he had in him.

Hound shook his head. “You spend energy where you don’t have to, brah. We’ll have to talk about that sometime.” Then he went out the gate, leaving Ike alone on the concrete step.

Ike went out through the yard. He stood for a moment watching Hound Adams moving away from him, toward the beach, then he turned and headed for home. The longer he was awake, the worse he felt. For one thing, the longer he was awake the more he remembered, and the more he remembered the more he wanted to forget what had gone on, but he couldn’t forget and it was like some vicious circle in his head. And when he thought that all the while Michelle had been waiting, hot waves of guilt swept over him. And yet, somewhere in the midst of all that guilt and disgust, there was this other feeling that was in some way connected to that curiosity about himself he had felt earlier, a dark sense of satisfaction lurking in the gritty morning, a sense of awe almost, at what he had done, him, Low Boy, picking up girls in the heart of surf city and fucking their brains out in the heat of a California night. He had done that. It was like finding some new power suddenly at one’s disposal. It was strange. One minute he felt incredibly guilty and the next he felt this crazy elation. It was enough to complicate an already serious hangover and he paused to retch behind a bush at the corner of Fifth and Rose.

The sun was climbing fast by the time he reached the Sea View, heating up the streets, and the machinery of the town was heating up as well, moving into high gear now, the boomer gear, greased with hash oil and cocoa butter, hotwired with cocaine, chugging to some New Wave anthem, and his heart was beating time, hammering erratically as he reached his room and stepped inside. What he knew for certain, leaning against his doorjamb, staring into the shabby room, was that he was not the same person who had stood there the night before.