Tapping the Source

36

The drive to Milo’s party was not a pleasant one. The moment Ike got his first look at Hound Adams, he could see that Hound had not been getting much sleep lately. He looked coked out, on edge, and he drove that way. Foot to the floor. Gray concrete ribbons unwinding too fast in the early light. They rode in the Sting-Ray. Frank Baker was going up too, delivering some equipment in the van. Hound stuck the boards and wet suits in there as well and they started out together, but Frank was soon left far behind. At one point Michelle said something to Hound about slowing down and he snapped back at her, told her to stay off his case as the tires left skid marks around a long curve. The incident left Ike wondering just how much Michelle really knew about Hound’s habit.

It was still early in the day when they arrived at the small brick house guarding the entrance to the Trax estate. Nothing here to prepare one for the grandeur that lay just beyond: the lush forest that seemed to spring suddenly from the dry hillsides. Huge dark trees. Moss like pale ghosts beneath black limbs. Patches of blue sky, straight up, so you had to crane your neck to see. Sounds of running water. And suddenly, the emergence from the trees. The great circular lawn, stone drive. The huge house with its small Spanish windows, iron-railed balconies, and tiled roofs, patterns of old ivy clinging to the walls, ancient stuff, black with time. And over everything, a silence.

Hound stopped near a fountain and pool. Dark birds, bathing in the water, darted at the sound of the engine, and then returned, their singing mixing with the splash of the fountain, the soft ticking of a hot engine.

They went up a series of stone steps, through a tall wooden door, and into a rose garden. And it was passing through the garden that Ike noticed for the first time, as if the initial impact of the place had been enough to blind him to any imperfections, that the house was in a surprising state of disrepair. The rose garden was spotted with weeds and thick dry grass, among which the few old bushes sprouted a handful of bright petals like points of flame in the sunlight.

They crossed another stone entry and climbed a set of heavily carpeted stairs. They found Milo Trax seated behind a desk, engaged in conversation on the phone. He nodded at them as they entered the room, his small eyes twinkling, but his voice betraying nothing to the party on the other end. Hound led them to a window from which they could admire the view.

They were on the west side of the house here, and looking down through a heavily wooded canyon that Ike realized was the patch of dark vegetation he had once seen from the water, they could see the ocean. A magnificent view, like having the world spread out below them. Green hills. Yellow patches of wild mustard. Distant collision of blues. At his side, Ike could hear Michelle suck in her breath.

“So what do you think?” a voice asked from behind them. Milo Trax had risen from his desk, and was now walking toward the window, the muscles flexing in an odd way in his short thick thighs.

“Beautiful,” Michelle said. “I can’t believe it. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Good,” Milo said, putting a hand on her back. “There’s plenty of time before the party. Look around. Enjoy. Ike, you brought your board?”

Ike said that he had. He looked past Milo and noticed Hound Adams, now standing back, at the side of Milo’s desk, arms folded across his chest, head bowed, face pointed toward the floor, as if he were lost in thought, or asleep on his feet. Ike could not see his face clearly enough to say which.

By midmorning Ike was alone with the waves, Frank having arrived with the boards before disappearing along with Hound Adams somewhere on the grounds. Michelle had stayed at the house to let Milo show her around. She had agreed to meet Ike later, on the beach.

The morning, the surf, could not have been more perfect. A clean swell, three to five feet out of the southwest. Paper-thin walls with long workable faces turned toward the sun. While he surfed, a school of porpoise arrived to join him for a time in the waves, passing in a leisurely fashion, slapping at the water with their bodies, calling to one another with strange sounds. They passed so close he could have reached them in a single stroke. A group of pelicans cruised by in formation, their bodies within inches of the sea. They circled the point and passed him once more, this time just inside the lineup, actually skimming along the faces of the waves, the last bird just ahead of the falling crest so it was like they were surfing, at play on the empty point, and he joined them in the waves, letting jewel-strung faces slip beneath his board, carving lines out of crisp morning glass.

He did not have to rush, to worry about beating anybody back outside, or watch for someone dropping in on him. He could paddle out slowly, take as much pleasure in watching the empty liquid lines as he did in riding them. It was something he had not fully appreciated on his first visit, how surfing was not just about getting rides. It struck him this morning that what he was doing was not separated into different things. Paddling out, catching rides, setting up. Suddenly it was all one act, one fluid series of motions, one motion even. Everything coming together until it was all one thing: the birds, the porpoise, the leaves of seaweed catching sunlight through the water, all one thing and he was one with it. Locked in. Not just tapping the source, but of the source. It must have been what they felt before him, what two young men had felt and given a name to. And he thought of what it must have been like then, beaches like this one scattered up and down the coast like jewels at the edge of the sea. It must have seemed too good to be true, and it must have seemed that it would be that way forever, and yet now it was the wreckage of that dream that lay between them. And he saw too that it was not just Preston and Hound who had lost. He thought of the pier, the crowds fighting for waves, the entire zoo of a town crouched on the sand and what had once passed as hunger and vitality had only a certain desperateness about it now, coked-out fatigue, because they had all lost and it was one great bummer, one long drop with no way back over the top. It was plain now, plainer than it had ever been before, what Preston had wanted him to see here. And he did see it. Preston had been right. There was something here, in this moment, that was worth hanging on to, that was worth building a life around. And he could see it, within reach, if he could only break away now, if he could only go and take Michelle with him.

Michelle was there when he reached the beach, turned on her stomach, eyes closed. He came up through the warm white sand and stopped to watch, quietly, because it looked as if she was asleep.

She wore a white two-piece suit, the top unfastened at the back. Her legs and arms seemed slenderer than he had remembered. Fine golden hairs glistened along the backs of her thighs. Lost moments from Huntington Beach returned to haunt him. Self-pity and desire rose to choke him, like dust on a desert wind. He was dizzy with it. He pulled off his wet suit and lay down beside her.

His body was still cold and damp. Hers was hot, warmed by the sun. She started and then shivered as he pressed against her. She turned to face him, laughing softly. “You’re getting good,” she whispered. “I was watching.” There were small bits of sand stuck to her skin, on the cool white places beneath her breasts where they had been pressed against the towel. He lowered his face and took one of her nipples into his mouth, feeling the tiny grains of sand against his tongue. He moved his mouth across her body, tasting her skin. She arched beneath him and the sun was a fire at his back. He felt her fingers in his hair as he worked the bottom piece of her suit down over her legs and then they were both naked, on the white rectangle of cloth, on the white crescent of sand. He moved his face back toward hers, felt her hand upon him now, guiding him inside, and he felt the heat of her body reaching to swallow him. He came very quickly, and for a long time, shuddering, as if his whole body were emptying itself into hers. He closed his eyes against the ache of it, pressing his face into that sea of light-colored hair, mouth open, lips parted and pressed against her neck, his heart pounding between them. He felt himself still moving a little inside her, still hard, and then he was aware too, for the first time, of a minor distraction, a small sharp pain near his temple as if something was digging at his skin. He opened his eyes and raised his head. Her hair had fallen back, spread in a golden arc across the towel beneath her, and a sudden flash of light caught his eye—a piece of ivory, brilliantly white in the sunlight. The ivory was delicately carved in what looked to be an oriental design—a long slender alligator with jaws running two-thirds the length of its body and holding, now, in a devilish grin, Michelle’s strawberry-blond hair as it had once held the coal-black hair of Ellen Tucker.

37

The sight of it stopped him. He lay still in her, but staring, suddenly aware that her eyes had fixed upon him as well, though they were not turned toward his face but rather toward the tattoo that spread itself across his shoulder, and the expression on her face was something between fascination and horror—much, he imagined, like the expression on his own face.

Though their eyes met, neither of them spoke. And then the spell was broken by the sound of loose rock tumbling somewhere far above them and Ike raised his eyes to see a pair of boards catching sunlight and two figures picking their way down the long, crumbling staircase. Hound Adams and Frank Baker, come to surf the point.

In the time it took Frank and Hound to reach the beach, Ike was able to pull his wet suit back on. The black and purple material was still wet and cold and the coldness seemed to reach him at once, to find its way down and into the bones. Michelle had begun to move also, replacing her suit and covering the bottoms with a pair of white shorts. And then they were both dressed, sitting suddenly side by side, in silence, the magic of only moments before lost. The combs. The tattoo. He knew that for a few seconds she had watched him, puzzled by the change that had come over him. But he had not trusted his voice and had remained silent. And while she watched him, he had felt her hand, cool upon his own, but still he had been unable to turn toward her and the hand had slipped away.

He knew now, without looking, that Hound and Frank were nearly upon them, still moving across the sand. “Those combs,” he said finally, his throat tight around the words. “Where did you get them?”

“Milo gave them to me,” she said. “I think they’re pretty.”

There was something defensive and rather distant in her voice, and when he turned to look at her he found that she was staring toward the sea.

“Tide’s dropping,” he heard someone say. “Getting better.”

It was Hound who spoke. Ike nodded. He saw Frank Baker already at the water’s edge. He watched as Frank pushed his board ahead of him, then flattened himself on the deck and began to paddle, quick, efficient strokes that carried him into the sunlight as it danced upon the water.

Michelle rose suddenly at his side and for a moment blocked the sun. He watched her bend to brush some sand from her legs. “I’m going back to the house,” she said. And then, as an afterthought: “You should let him show you around, Ike. I’ve never seen another house like it. There’s a regular movie theater downstairs.” Ike felt that her tone of voice was mechanical and forced, as if she was trying to be conversational for Hound’s sake. He wondered if Hound noticed it as well. He wondered too just how long Hound and Frank had been at the top of the stairs.

He watched Michelle move across the beach, then looked once to see that Hound was watching her too. When she was gone, Hound knelt beside him, smiling, full of energy now, the tired look Ike had noted earlier, in the study, gone, the eyes jerked open, sandblasted clean and flat like two dark stones. There was something funny in that, though, in the way the eyes rested in the face—as if the eyes were brand-new but the face was still tired, the skin still a bit too pale, and too tight across the bones. “Not calling it a morning, brah?” Hound’s voice was flat and even. “See you out there, huh.” Ike felt Hound’s hand on his shoulder.

And then he watched as Hound left him and walked toward the surf. Ike blinked into the light, following a line of white water as it wrapped around the point. When he stood, he found that his knees were weak from the lovemaking. He was still for a moment, watching as Hound broke through the lip of a wave and disappeared on the other side. Then he picked up his own board and followed, though it was more like he was sleepwalking now, like his body was going on its own while his mind continued to work on the combs he had seen in Michelle’s hair. And as he waded into the shallows and felt the stones there, sharp against his feet, he found that he was actually talking out loud, his words spreading and vanishing in the air. “She was here,” he said to no one. “And they have known—known everything all along.” It was an astonishing phrase and he repeated it once more as he began to paddle, as the first line of white water washed over him, as if it were the only thing he knew.

They surfed for another hour. Hound said that the ranch was like Mexico, that there was a different rhythm here, that it took a while to adjust, to match one’s energies to the flow. He said a lot of things, and oddly enough some of them were things that Ike had thought of himself. But they didn’t sound right when spoken. Maybe it was because they were beyond words. Or maybe it was that Hound’s voice was too flat and hollow, just one more rap, so that Ike was reminded of days in Hound’s house—Hound sitting Indian style on the floor, lecturing on some artifact he had found, or some bit of lore, while the people came and went and even dumb little girls stoned on his dope knew it was bullshit. Frank Baker, Ike noted, did not join them but stayed to himself, surfing farther on the inside, and finally Ike himself turned his back on Hound Adams. He left Hound in midsentence and began paddling farther to his left, where he had once sat with Preston Marsh, where he could now be alone to think.

Later they left the water and climbed the stone stairs. They moved in single file, Hound in front with Ike bringing up the rear. The ground turned cool and damp beneath their feet. The scent of flowers drifted down from the gardens.

It was in the first of the terraced gardens that they found Milo Trax and Michelle. Milo was dressed in tennis clothes, his short thick legs propped on a chair. A pair of small wire-rimmed shades hid his eyes. Michelle was dressed in a white summer dress Ike had not seen before. There was a drink on the white wrought-iron table in front of her. Her fingers rested near the glass and she was looking away, into the trees, so he could see her profile, the small straight nose and arched brow he’d always held responsible for her slightly arrogant look. Her hair, he noticed, was pulled back, held in place by the ivory combs. She did not turn to meet his eyes.

“Home from the sea,” Milo said. He smiled beneath the shades and raised the drink in his hand, as if to toast them. “How were the waves?” he asked.

“Good,” Hound said.

Ike said nothing but continued to watch Michelle. Frank Baker did not stop at all but continued walking and quickly disappeared among the trees. Then Ike was aware of someone speaking to him.

“Good that you enjoyed yourself,” Milo was saying. “I’m glad there was surf. Are you ready for some work?”

Ike felt himself nod. He looked for a moment at Michelle and then down and into the small black holes that were Milo’s shades.

“There’s a list in the house,” Milo told him. “Some things I would like done before the guests arrive. There are also some clothes there I would like for you to wear tonight. Hound will show you.” Ike turned and followed Hound up the path.

38

He spent the rest of the afternoon hosing down driveways and patios, raking leaves, and sweeping floors. “Milo’s been in Europe,” Hound explained. “The place needs some work.”

Ike went through the motions, but his mind was still busy with other things. Had Ellen been here, as he had at first supposed? Or had the combs been left someplace else—in the boat, or in Mexico? And why had they been given to Michelle? Was it some bizarre coincidence? Or were they bait? At one point in his work, Ike looked up to see Frank Baker and one of the Samoans from Huntington Beach pushing some boxes on a small truck. They were headed down through the gardens, away from the house and out toward the point. Ike stopped sweeping and rested on his broom. For a moment he thought of following them and he looked back over his shoulder to see if anyone else was around. What he saw was Milo Trax standing on a small balcony, resting against the black iron railing. When Milo saw Ike’s face turn up toward him, he raised a hand. Ike waved back and then resumed his sweeping, pushing his broom beneath the sun-bleached walls, the ancient ivy with its dark leaves and stems thick as branches.

When he was finished in the gardens, he went to Milo’s study and found the clothes that had been placed there for him, a white long-sleeved shirt with ruffles down the front, a black pair of pants, dark socks and shoes. He showered and put on the clothes, which fit him surprisingly well and were fancier than any he had ever owned. Then he stood at the window of Milo’s study and watched the sun set over the ocean. It went down rapidly, beginning as a great red sphere, then breaking and melting into the sea. There was something hypnotic in this movement of light and he was held by it until a knocking at the door disturbed him. He hoped that it would be Michelle. But it was Hound Adams who pushed the door open and walked into the room, then stopped and closed the door behind him. Ike instinctively tightened a hand on the sill.

There were only the pale jukebox colors of a vanishing sunset to light the room and Hound did nothing to alter that. He moved across the carpeted floor toward the window, where he stopped to face Ike. “Not a bad view, is it?” He paused for a moment but did not seem to be waiting for a reply. He seemed rather to be waiting for Ike to turn his head and look once more down across the purple trees, toward the sea and the last blood-red sliver of sun. Ike obliged, watching as Hound spoke. “When Preston and I were in high school, we used to sneak up here and surf,” Hound told him. “I knew about it before Preston. You should have seen his face the first time he saw this place. We camped down there on the hillside, almost the same spot we found the boards, your boards.” Hound paused. Ike waited, watching the last of the sun. “We used to sit down there and talk about places to go, talk about what it would be like to own a place like this. What more is there? Right?” Ike thought about his own first trip to the ranch, his first sight of the empty point. He had thought the same thing.

“It didn’t really take us long to meet Milo,” Hound said. “As it turned out. I’ll tell you how it happened. Preston and I had this escape route all planned out. We’d found a kind of ravine that split the main cliff out near the point, then ran in what was almost a straight line all the way back to the gate and that little dirt road the cowboys use. There was a lot of brush and sage in it and we took the time once to bring up some machetes and clear it out a bit, left it thick down near the beach, though, because we had an idea that maybe the cowboys didn’t know about it.” Ike thought once more about Preston crouching at the foot of the cliff, asking Ike if he could find the truck.

“And you used it that night.”

Hound nodded. “Worked like a charm. But I was telling you about the time we met Milo. We’d come up on a big swell and we were in the water, way outside. I mean, the point must have been a good fifteen feet, almost closed out, and we looked up and saw these cowboys up on the hill, watching us. Then we saw them get in a truck and start down. We started talking about what to do. The road down is fairly long, winding as it does, and we figured that if we could pick off a couple of waves and get back in—in a hurry—we could make it into that ravine. The trouble was, it was damn big and the waves were getting hard to make. Big ledgy drops.” He paused here for a moment, as if remembering those drops. Ike worked on imagining them too, on imagining Hound and Preston out there together—like he had seen them in that photograph at the shop.

“Preston was always a shade better than I was,” Hound said. “I didn’t like admitting it at the time. But he was. He was that day, too. He picked off this fucking wave I couldn’t believe. It was getting hard to get into them. Steep faces. You really had to claw. Anyway, Preston got a wave. Finally I saw his head pop up over the lip way on the inside and I knew he had made it. Time was running out and I had to take whatever I could get. I still don’t know if the wave I got was makeable or not but I ate it, right at the top.” He paused and made a slight motion as if to shrug off the memory. “Maybe I just choked,” he said. “Anyway, it was a tough swim back in and it took a long time. When I got back to the beach, there was this pickup and three cowboys waiting for me. One of them had an ax handle. I’d never had any trouble at the ranch, but everybody had heard stories about getting caught there, getting your board stolen and your ass kicked in. I was so tired from the damn swim it was all I could do just to drag my ass out of the water. Preston was nowhere around so I figured he’d made it into the ravine and I would have to take whatever came. I remember I tried getting up and this asshole with the ax handle kicked me back down, caught me in the side of the face with his fucking boot. And then all of a sudden there was Prez. He’d gotten all the way back up to the truck, ditched his board, and come back with a tire iron.” Hound paused to chuckle and once again Ike had that feeling that he’d had only a couple other times, that Hound Adams was not bullshitting him, or playing some role, but just talking, and it seemed to Ike now, that at such moments there was something in Hound one could still like. That in spite of everything else, his obvious treachery and many guises, there was still something there—some shadow perhaps of Preston’s old friend. “He wasn’t the crazy-looking motherfucker he is today,” Hound said. “But he was big, and he was a hell of an athlete. He flattened that guy with the ax handle before the guy knew what hit him. I thought for a few minutes he might even have killed him. He hadn’t, but nobody knew that just then and all of a sudden the other two guys didn’t want any part of either of us. I grabbed the one guy’s stick and together we ran these assholes right off the beach. Then we climbed into their own damn truck and started back. By the time we got back to the gate, though, there was this short, stocky guy in a tennis outfit standing there waiting for us with a double-barreled shotgun laid across his arm and a half-dozen more ranch hands waiting behind him.

“That was how we met Milo Trax. The funny part was, we had impressed him. Seems he’d been watching the whole thing with his field glasses and he was not used to seeing his boys run off like that, but then he was not used to seeing the ranch ridden at fifteen feet either—particularly not the way Preston had ridden it. So he invited us up to his place, his crib, man. Right here. In this room. We sat up here looking down over the point and smoking up some dope that Prez and I had in the truck, and then smoking up some of what Milo kept in the house.” Hound stopped to wave toward the glass. “One thing led to another,” he said. “We left the ranch that night with our own fucking keys. Our keys, Ike. We thought we’d died and gone to heaven.”

Ike turned back to the window. The sun was gone now. A single band of reddish light lay on the horizon, beneath a quickly darkening sky. The trees were dark now too, black and wild against a deep purple sea, and from beneath their branches a light mist had begun to rise. He didn’t know why Hound was telling him all this. There was always a reason. But Ike was tired of Hound’s games, and of his own. “And your sister, Janet,” he said, speaking slowly. “You brought her here too?”

Hound Adams was a moment in replying, as if for once Ike had taken him completely by surprise. “Yes,” he said at last.

“And then to Mexico?”

“Yes.”

“And Ellen Tucker. Did you bring her here too or just to Mexico?” The feeling Ike had as he spoke was not unlike what he’d felt on the highway with Preston—the adrenaline rush of a trip to the edge.

Hound just looked at him but his first slightly stunned expression had begun to shift. There was now the shadow of a smile in his eyes. “I think you’ve got it all wrong, brah,” Hound said. “I didn’t take your sister anywhere, though she may have gone to Mexico on her own. She might be there now.” He smiled and spread his hands.

“And you’ve known all along that she was my sister.”

“No. Not at first. I had heard her mention a brother, but I had gotten the impression that you were older. Then I got a look at you one morning in that cafe. After that I saw you nosing around down on the beach, sticking out like a goddamn sore thumb. Then I saw you at my party. Bad hick vibes. Lots of paranoia. I began to think that Ellen had lied, or exaggerated, or that there was another brother. Those first questions I asked you that night were intuitive, but you were giving me the right answers. Then there was that bit about somebody ripping off your board. I did a little checking up on the nose rider we found at the ranch, finally ran it down to that kid who had sold it to you.” He stopped to laugh. “Preston must have put the fear of God into that kid; he was still sweating the return of the crazed biker.”

“So why didn’t you ever say anything?”

Hound was still smiling—an obnoxious, knowing sort of smile now. “A good game always makes life a little more interesting. I could see that you were playing one. I decided to let you play your hand. But what makes you think I took your sister to Mexico?”

Ike stared back into Hound’s smile, wondering about what to say. Should he mention those combs? Or perhaps the kid in the white Camaro? Cat and mouse one more time. But then he was set upon by the sudden notion that the combs should go unmentioned, at least for the moment. “Someone told us,” he said. “A guy drove out to the desert and told us that Ellen had gone to Mexico with some guys from Huntington Beach, that she had not come back.”

“He said I took her?”

Ike tried to pick his words carefully. “Just that she went, that you might know what happened.”

“Who was he?”

“I don’t know.”

Hound appeared genuinely puzzled for a moment. “I would say you were lied to, brah. I don’t know why. Your sister was on the run, Ike, from the desert, from the people who raised her, from you.” He let that last word hang there for a moment between them, and then went on. “She passed through,” he said. “We had a few laughs.”

“Like you had a few laughs with Janet?” Ike could feel that adrenaline surge building once again, but he didn’t like the way the conversation was going. Hound was simply putting him together, laying down bullshit, as Ike had always known he would. He just wanted to wipe that smile off Hound Adams’s face one more time.

It worked. Hound came a step closer, so that his chest was almost touching Ike’s, but the smile was gone. “You’re pushing it, aren’t you?” he asked. “I don’t know what you think you’re hip to about Janet, and I don’t know who told you, but I’ll tell you something about her, and about your sister. And about Preston, too, as far as that goes. They all chose, man. Their own paths. They chose what they wanted. Your sister could have stayed. I liked her. She chose differently. Janet chose too.”

“And what did she choose?” But even as he was asking he realized that he had not been specific. Janet or Ellen? He waited on Hound.

“She chose to die,” Hound said. His voice was softer now and when it fell away the room was very quiet. “Death because she was afraid of life,” he added. “You see, things got complicated for her that time in Mexico. They were not really that way. Only in her own head.” Hound paused and tapped his temple. “Things were not complicated; they were new, for all of us. It was a voyage of discovery, brah. I mean that. And Janet was there with us. She began very free and loving, but she made the mistake of stopping, of falling back on the thoughts of others. She stopped listening to her own heart.” He shrugged. “And it killed her.” He looked past Ike and into the blackness of the window. “Now maybe you can see more about what I was trying to tell you that day in your room—that business about letting others do your thinking. It’s all in here,” he said, and stabbed at Ike’s chest with his hand, hard enough to be uncomfortable. “You see, most people never make the kind of trip I’m talking about. They never even start out. What they really do is spend their lives hiding from themselves. And because of that—and because they’re the ones who set the standards, it’s a lonely trip, Jack. You’re out there on your own and it can get weird and I’ve seen people flipped out by it. They get halfway, man, and they lose faith. They can’t handle it. Janet couldn’t handle it. Preston sure as hell couldn’t handle it. With Janet the complications began around something as simple as not knowing who the father of her child was.” He stopped and shrugged once more. “But it’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all along. This is your trip, brah. And it’s your choice.”

Ike waited for Hound to go on, to say more about the choice, but he didn’t. Hound turned away from the window in silence and retreated a few steps into the center of the room. When he turned once more, his voice had taken on a more conversational tone. “You know, Milo likes you,” he said. “And you’ve done all right this summer—with one minor exception that need not be mentioned. You’ve done as well as could be expected. I mean, we’ve worked pretty well together, haven’t we? And I could use someone new around the shop. I don’t mean just working there, I mean really looking after things. I want to travel some more, but I want to know things are in good hands when I’m gone.”

“What about Frank?”

Hound made that shrugging motion once more. His reply was surprising. “Frank’s a loser,” Hound said. “I mean, he’s around. That’s all. Shit. He’s always been around. But you want to know something? Frank Baker doesn’t even have his own key to that damn gate out there. I could swing that for you. I mean it, brah. Your own goddamn key. You could have it all, man.” And he nodded into the blackened window beyond which the forests and ocean were now invisible, so that it seemed to Ike that Hound spoke only of the darkness. “But remember what I told you, brah. You’ll have to choose. Think about it.”

Hound left then. He went out into the hall and left Ike alone in Milo Trax’s study. He left the door ajar and Ike watched a thin shaft of yellow light fall across the carpet to break upon the polished leather of his shoes.

39

Ike walked to Milo’s desk and turned on a lamp. The light made mirrors now of the tall arched panes of glass that faced the sea, and in them Ike could see himself reflected, a stranger in expensive clothes. So what, he thought, if he made that choice right now? What if when Milo returned there were two sets of expensive clothes on the floor of his study? And what if by then Ike and Michelle were already gone? Down to the beach and up through the ravine. There was still some money left in Huntington Beach, enough for bus tickets. By morning they could be on their way to another place. Anywhere. It didn’t really matter. He would tell Preston, and they would keep in touch, and if anything was ever found, Preston would let him know. It would be as Preston had said. He went out of the room and into the hall.

There were noises in the house now that he had not noticed in the room. Someone was playing music in one of the outside patios, and there were voices—Milo’s guests, he supposed. The party had begun.

Most of the voices were indistinct and drifted to him from remote parts of the house. One voice, however, made itself separate and he recognized it as Milo’s. The voice was closer than the others, suddenly almost below him, and he stepped to the railing that lined the balcony to look down.

He was above the stone entry upon which he and Hound and Michelle had stood earlier in the day. There were four men below him now. Hound, Milo, and two other men he had not seen before. One of the men was wide and dark. He stood slightly apart from the others with his hands at his sides. The other man was tall and rather thin, but wiry and tan. He wore white slacks and a blue blazer jacket. Above the jacket, his hair was a very fine shade of gray—nearly silver, beneath the lights of the entry. The two strangers had apparently just arrived and were being escorted into the house by Milo and Hound. They passed almost directly below Ike and Milo’s voice reached him once more, clearly enough to be heard distinctly.

“Yes,” Milo was saying. “I have some men working on it right now. It will be ready.”

The silver-haired man nodded. When he spoke, his voice was softer than Milo’s, and serious. “These people?” he asked. “The real thing?”

“Oh, yes. Some, anyway.”

“And you can handle them?” The men were turning now, moving back beneath the railing and out of Ike’s sight. “I rely heavily upon Hound,” Milo said. “But don’t worry. I think you’ll find it interesting.” The silver-haired man said something else, but Ike was unable to make it out. He remained at the rail a moment longer and was about to leave it when he saw Milo and Hound once again. The two men were walking back across the stone floor beneath him. Milo walked with his hand at Hound’s back. It was held there in an odd way, as if he were guiding Hound across the floor and through the doorway on the other side, and Ike was struck by the gesture. It was the way a man might put his hand on the back of a child, he thought, or a lover.

Ike stepped quickly away from the railing and entered the doorway at the far end of the balcony. It was dark there and he waited a moment for his eyes to adjust. He did not know what to make of the things he had heard. What he found himself thinking about was that final image of Hound and Milo as they passed through the door, Milo’s hand at Hound’s back. It seemed to connect for him to other things—to those letters he’d once seen scratched into the metal partition of a bathroom in Huntington Beach, to what Michelle had told him on the boat, to Hound’s abstinence at his own parties. And he found himself wondering what Hound would have to say about it. Quite a line of bullshit, no doubt—one more stop perhaps on the road to discovery. Or maybe Ike was wrong, maybe it explained nothing.

There was a window open somewhere. He could feel the damp draft on his face. He could smell the sea and a trace of bougainvillaea. There were several doors along the hall. One stood partially open. Ike went to the door and stopped. He whispered. When there was no answer, he pushed it open and walked inside.

The room was large, empty, and dark, though saved from total darkness by a pair of tall French doors that stood open upon a small balcony. The fog seemed to have lifted a bit and the doors emitted a pale light. He could make out a few pieces of furniture—a bed, dresser, a small nightstand, a pair of large chairs. The scent of the gardens was strong in the room. He was about to leave when he noticed what appeared to be a white dress hung against the blackness of the closet. At first glance he thought that the dress was the one he had seen Michelle in that afternoon. But moving closer, he saw it was not. The style was slightly different. And then he noticed a second dress draped over a chair. This dress was white as well, also similar in style to Michelle’s. He held aside the dress that hung in the closet’s doorway. The small space was filled with women’s clothes—or girls’ clothes, because there was something in the general cut and color of the fabrics that suggested youth. Pushing through them, he was aware of the pulse in his hand, of the coolness of the fabrics against his skin.

From the closet he moved to the dresser. There were some toilet articles on top—brushes, a hand mirror. Opening a drawer, he saw that it was filled with jewelry, with bracelets and ornaments for the hair. He moved them about with his fingers, listening to the soft scraping sounds they made upon the wood, suddenly seeing Milo Trax doing the very same thing, standing in this same spot, searching for some trinket and selecting the ivory combs—they were, judging by what he saw here now, the nicest, the most expensive. It had been that simple. The combs had not been given to Michelle to bait him. Hound Adams was probably not even aware of them and Ike had been right not to catch him in his lie. His hunch at least had bought him some time. And yet there was something in that now which struck him as little more than a cruel joke. He had entered the trap, and he could not believe now that he had not seen it before, had not sensed the evil of this place from the beginning. He had, he supposed, always been too sidetracked by other things. On this particular trip he had thought only of the chance to talk to Michelle, to save her from some dread trip to Mexico. Save her. Jesus. There had been no trips to Mexico for Ellen Tucker. Preston had been right: the kid in the white car had lied. Or, Ike thought, perhaps he had only been wrong. But then it really made no difference now. He had been right on the beach: Ellen had been here and this is what there was. A party at the ranch. And the ranch was the end of the line.

40

He left the room as he had found it, lit only by the pale light entering through the glass doors. But it felt more like a tomb now, and as he closed the door after him he felt something go out of him, as if some piece of himself had been left there.

He found another set of steps at the far end of the hall, and a door to the outside. He went through it and felt the cool air, damp and heavy on his face. His face, he thought, was very hot, almost feverish, as he moved through a dark garden, around a corner of the house, and into one of the patios where guests were congregating.

A fair-sized group had already arrived. Some had seated themselves in lawn chairs, others on the ground. Ike stood for a moment at the edge of the patio, searching for Michelle, taking in the scene. The ages of the guests appeared mixed, though most looked to be younger than Milo, closer in fact to Hound’s age, and Ike was reminded of the conversation he’d recently overheard—the silver-haired man’s question about control, Milo’s answer that he depended upon Hound.

Many of the people were dressed simply, in Levi jeans, Mexican pullovers, or Levi jackets. Others, however, were decked out more elaborately in a kind of funky evening dress that seemed to Ike to be more costume than anything else. The clothing seemed to have something to do with how the guests were grouped. A circle of those more simply dressed had been formed upon the concrete floor of the patio, and as Ike turned toward them he saw that Hound Adams was there as well, seated at the center of the group, apparently engaged in some conversation, or debate, with a thickly built bald-headed man Ike had not seen before. Ike was too far away to catch anything of what was being said, but he could see both men moving their heads, occasionally gesturing with their hands. The rest of those seated on the ground seemed to be following the conversation with some interest. And though a few of the more elaborately dressed people had come to stand at the edge of the circle, most of the others were scattered about across the garden, forming smaller groups of their own.

Through an open sliding door Ike caught a glimpse of the two men he’d seen earlier, in the entry with Hound and Milo. He could see a bit of light shining off the taller man’s hair. Whether or not Milo was with them he could not say. Music drifted from the house and across the gardens—damp now in the fog, so that where the light struck the leaves of the plants the leaves looked slick and wet. Ike stood for a moment longer, making certain that Michelle was not among the guests, then he stepped backward, away from the edge of concrete and into the shadows.

He was desperate to find her now. He did not want to go back into the house by way of the patio. He did not want to risk another confrontation with either Hound or Milo, as he still did not know what was expected of him. He was beginning to feel rather foolish in the clothes. They were, he decided, a little like those costumes he’d seen some of the guests in. But there was something else about them as well, something that made him feel he had already compromised himself, that he was Milo’s boy.

It was back near the front of the house, looking for the door he had come out of, that he heard the sound of an engine starting somewhere in the night. He hurried along a narrow walkway and up a ragged flight of stone steps. The steps led up to the great circular lawn and he reached the level of the lawn in time to see a set of headlights moving toward him out of the fog. The headlights turned away from him as the drive curved, and he saw Frank Baker’s yellow van move past him. Frank must have spotted him coming up the steps, because the van slowed a bit as it went by and he could see Frank’s face turned toward him through the glass. They were not separated by much, ten or twelve feet perhaps, but it was still too dark to make out an expression on Frank’s face. There were only the shadows of features, the curly blond hair, slicked back and wet, catching a bit of light—just as it once had in that alley in Huntington Beach the night Ike had seen him talking to Preston Marsh.

The van did not slow to a complete stop. The face turned from the window and it was all gone, nothing left but the red glow of taillights vanishing among the trees and finally just the sound of the engine, growing fainter until it too was swallowed by the forest, by the silence of the ranch.

When he finally found her, she was downstairs in the theater she had spoken of. It was a small theater, but a theater nonetheless. There were perhaps three-dozen seats, a screen, and a small stage. Thick velvet curtains covered the walls, and where the curtains were parted there were various pieces of ornamental plaster, scrollwork, prowling cats and lions’ heads with soft blue light spilling from their jaws. Michelle was alone in the room. She was seated on an aisle down near the front, one leg over the arm of her chair so that the white dress was pushed back on her thigh. There was a drink in one hand, resting on her knee, and when she turned to look up at him her eyes appeared sleepy and slightly out of focus.

“Don’t you like it?” she asked as he knelt beside her. “This room is so great.”

“Michelle, we’ve got to go, now.”

She blinked at him in a slightly drunken fashion. “He told me to wait here. What are you talking about?”

He looked instinctively over one shoulder, back toward the heavy wooden doors at the end of the aisle. “I’m talking about leaving, just the two of us, right now.” He put a hand on her arm. “Look, just trust me, okay? I can explain it to you on the way. Right now we’ve just got to get started.”

She seemed to sink farther back into the seat. “But why…”

“Because something crazy is going on here,” he told her. He was talking quickly now, like he was running out of breath. “Remember how we thought my sister went to Mexico, how that was what the kid told me? Well, I came up here because I was afraid you were going to go. I didn’t want you to. I wanted to talk you out of it, to tell you what I’d learned. But it’s not Mexico, Michelle. Ellen never went to Mexico. They brought her here, to the ranch, and they did something.” He was squeezing her arm now and she tried to jerk it away from him. He held on tighter. Finally she just shouted at him to stop, and so he did. He let go of her arm and she sat there rubbing it.

“Jesus,” she said. “Slow down a minute. Hound knows why you’re here, you know. He knows you’re Ellen’s brother. And I didn’t tell him.”

“He’s known it since that party at his house. I’ve just talked to him.”

“He says that she was in Huntington Beach but that she’s gone, that she was running away and that she didn’t want anyone following her. He says that she didn’t want you following her. But that you don’t handle it very well so you make up things.”

“And you believe that?”

She was still holding her arm, looking down now at the floor. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure what to believe. You were right about one thing. You remember that dress shop Ellen worked in with Marsha? I wanted us to go there but you said it wouldn’t do any good. Well, you were mostly right. The old lady that owns it says she doesn’t know anything about where Ellen went. But she said she left without picking up some money the old lady owed her. She said it’s not that much, but that if I could get an address she would mail it. I was going to tell you but I never got the chance.”

Ike was silent for a moment, thinking about Michelle going to check that out, thinking of what she had told him. “But I just don’t know, Ike,” Michelle was saying now. “You were acting like such a jerk…”

Ike reached up suddenly and tore one of the ivory combs from her hair. She made a small, sharp cry and put one hand to her head. Ike held the comb in front of her face. “Do you see this?” he said. “It was hers, Michelle. It was Ellen’s goddamn comb. Our mother gave these to her. And she wouldn’t have gone off without them. Listen to me. I saw this picture once. Hound had sold it to these guys that buy dope from him. I didn’t get a real good look at it, but it looked like a picture of a chick who’d been all cut up.” He shook his head. “I don’t know exactly how. But all this shit connects. The movies Hound makes, those runaway girls he’s always trying to meet. And that day on the boat. Hound was delivering movies. I think Hound spends the summer making those damn things, then he shows them to Milo. They’re looking for something—the right people, something. And then they come up here. Milo’s summer party. Have you taken a good look at this place? They could pull any kind of shit they wanted to up here and no one would know. All I know is that something bad is coming down, Michelle. Here. Hound was acting very strange—which is not that unusual, but he was trying to lay this trip on me about choosing, about how if I made the right choice I could be his partner or some damn thing. But I don’t want to be his partner, Michelle. I’ve already chosen, and Hound’s not going to like it when he finds out. That’s why we’ve got to leave, both of us, now.”

She was really looking at him at last. He was still not sure that she believed what he was telling her, but there was no more time to talk. He got to his feet and pulled her up with him. Her leg swung down off the seat and her drink hit the floor between them, the glass breaking. “Ike.” She started to say something but did not finish. She was cut short by the soft swish of a swinging door.

“Not leaving?” The words drifted down to them from the back of the room. Ike turned to see Milo Trax and Hound Adams standing at the top of the aisle. Milo held something in his hand, what looked like a roll of film. Standing behind Milo and Hound were the two men Ike had seen before, the tall man with silver hair and his thick, dark friend. “But they make a fine pair, don’t they?” Milo asked. No one answered him.

Ike felt something twisting in his chest. He looked at Michelle. She was still watching him, her eyes wide and clear now. But he had been too late.

The four men came down the aisle. Hound was holding something as well, a dark leather bag. The silver-haired man had his hands pushed into the pockets of the blue blazer jacket. He was smiling. Ike looked at each of the men, then at Hound Adams. Hound met his stare, but his expression did not change—it was in fact a perfect blank and after a moment he looked away, toward the screen and the heavy curtains. And there was something in just that simple movement of the eyes that suggested something, a kind of washing of the hands, perhaps. Hound and Ike had had their little talk. Hound had done what he could; what happened now was between Ike and Milo Trax—or so it seemed.

“I was about to suggest that we do drugs and make a movie,” Milo said. “You ought to be in pictures. And you will, both of you.”

The gray-haired man, Ike noticed, was watching Milo and smiling. “I always wondered how you handled these things,” he said. Hound Adams unzipped the small leather bag and removed a needle and a syringe, also a light-colored cord.

“What is it?” Michelle asked. “Coke?”

“What the doctor ordered,” Milo answered. He was looking at Ike now. “Right?” he asked.

Ike didn’t answer. He looked at Milo and then he turned and looked at Hound Adams. He did it very deliberately. He turned his shoulder to Milo and his friends and he waited until Hound raised his eyes from the works in his hands. When he did, his face was still without expression—as if Ike were a perfect stranger. But Ike knew better. He knew what he was going to say; he only hoped that he could say it without his voice cracking. His heart was beating heavily, making it hard to breathe. “We don’t want it,” he said. “Neither of us. And no more movies.” He watched Hound Adams. “And we’re going to leave. Now.” He knew, of course, that it was not true, but it was something he wanted to say—for the record or some damn thing. He even reached behind him with one hand, as if to take Michelle’s, as if the two of them were going to step out into the aisle and go home.

Somewhere at his side, Ike heard Milo making a soft clicking sound with his mouth. He thought that Milo was shaking his head a bit too, sadly, from side to side, but he was not sure; he didn’t want to take his eyes off Hound. And Hound’s expression was starting to change just a bit now, or so it seemed to Ike; he was beginning to look rather tired again, as he had in Milo’s study. He was still not looking at Ike, however. He was very carefully putting his works back in the bag, and then setting the bag on the chair in front of Ike and Michelle. Then he looked up and for a moment their eyes met. And then Hound hit him.

He hit him so fast and hard that for a moment Ike was not even sure where he had been hit, only that something was very wrong, that he had lost his voice and that he was drowning. He was on his knees when Hound took possession of his arm, pinning it between his own bicep and upper body while Milo bent to roll Ike’s sleeve. Ike watched Milo—eyes fixed on the needle, mouth pursed in a disapproving fashion. He watched the cord go around his arm, and then he watched the needle slip under the skin. He was not sure what to expect. He waited for a rush but it did not come. There was instead a kind of gradual blurring, a slowing down, a slipping into darkness. The experience was not unlike the time the doctor put him out in King City to work on his leg. And somewhere, going down, he thought he heard Michelle scream and he tried to pull himself back, but it was no use. He was definitely going, going under. He could still see their faces, though—Hound and Milo peering down on him from this great height, cheek to cheek almost, it appeared to Ike, like a pair of surgeons about to lose a patient. Something funny, though, about those faces—Milo’s all pinched and dark, his little mouth puckered up like a hole in something. A spoiled child about to throw a tantrum. And given the power-lifter’s body that went with the face, Ike was able to take a certain comfort in his distance from it. Hound didn’t look angry. He looked something else, worried perhaps, or maybe even scared. But Ike was puzzled, in a curious and detached sort of way, that he should be the object of such concern. And then, and it was the last detail he would remember, he saw that they were not really looking into his face, but rather at his shoulder, at the tattoo that had come snaking out from beneath his rolled-up sleeve. And then Milo reached down—small thick fingers like pegs of iron, cold on Ike’s skin, and tore away the rest of the shirt so that they might have a look at the whole thing. And apparently they could not dig it. Imagine that. Ike smiled into Milo’s pouting mouth. He smiled into Hound Adams’s fear. Harley-Fuckin’-Davidson. The faces went away.

41

He thought there was a movie, though it might have been a dream. When he opened his eyes for the first time after getting the drug, the first thing he saw was fire. One fire was almost directly in front of him, others at either side, and there were more lights above the flames—different, white holes burning out of the night, hurting his eyes. And music, a kind of dull rhythmic drumming like the beat of his own heart and above that a thin, reedy wail. It was too much, really, to take in all at once. He felt sick and disoriented, lost amid the motion and noise—everything pulsing and swaying in time to that slow heartbeat rhythm. He closed his eyes once more and a light breeze kissed his face. The smoke of the fires hung on the breeze and burned behind his closed lids. Also on the breeze were the scents of brush and sage together with the damp rotting odor of a distant shoreline—and then something else as well, the heavy scent of incense rising with the smoke, growing quickly, heavier and sweeter, until it had blotted out all the others and clung to the night in an overpowering way. He felt on the verge of nausea and he opened his eyes.

There was a pole near each fire and from each pole an animal hung butchered. Above the fire nearest him he could make out light-colored fur matted with blood, black jaws and white teeth, a dark tongue. There was more blood on the pole. He looked away. He was seeing more now, taking more in, but it was like he was doing it all in slow motion—in time to that strange slow beat through the odd mix of lights, the smoke and incense. There was also the growing awareness of a dull ache beginning somewhere at the base of his skull, of an incredible weakness in his limbs. He saw that he was seated on the ground and that others were seated around him and that together they formed a great circle. Inside the circle formed by the people there was another circle of stones, and in the center of that circle there was the great stone ring with the flat rock in the middle and he realized for the first time where he was—that place at the edge of the cliff from which he had first glimpsed the house, the spot in which Preston had fought Terry Jacobs, and he remembered there had been a dead animal that night, too—white teeth and black tongue. Dead eyes.

The fires, and he could now see that there were four, burned at what might have been the four points of the compass—one at the edge of the circle nearest the sea, another at the edge closest to the forest, the remaining two at equal distance in between. He also saw that lines had been drawn in the earth. The lines led out, away from the center, connecting the stonework in the middle to the four fires that were between the ring of people and the ring of stones. The lines appeared to have been scratched into the ground, then spattered with blood.

Beyond the ring of people, of which Ike himself was a part, he could just make out the dim shapes of what appeared to be more figures—these, however, wore dark robes and hoods and it was hard to tell how many there were because they blended easily with the night. In places the fire lit patches of flesh—bare chests and faces like his own, but many others had blackened their skin with a dark paste. He looked for the source of the music; it did not seem to be coming from anyone he could see, but rather from the forest, as if the whole place had been wired for sound. At the far side of the clearing there appeared to be some kind of structure to which the brilliant white lights were attached, but the lights made it hard to look in that direction and he could not see much. Nor could he see anything of Milo Trax or Hound Adams. It was at this point, however, that he saw Michelle.

She was carried into the clearing by one of the robed and hooded figures. It must have been a man who carried her because the figure was tall and thick beneath the robes and strong enough to hold Michelle easily away from his chest in his arms. The man passed through the various circles until he stood at the center and there he stopped to place her upon that rectangle of rock that marked the very center of the rings. He placed her on her back and she was immediately bathed in a direct flood of light.

The figure who had brought her now stood at her feet and removed his hood and Ike saw that it was the bald man he had earlier seen talking to Hound Adams in the garden. It was hard to guess the man’s age. His head was ringed by a fringe of light-colored hair, but whether the hair was blond or gray, Ike could not say. The man’s face appeared smooth and unlined as he stood silently and stared into the trees and music before him. Michelle did not move. She was still clothed in the white dress. After remaining motionless for several seconds, the man suddenly bent forward and with one swift movement ripped the dress apart, letting the white material fall back upon either side of the stone. The stone’s surface was slightly convex, so that as Michelle lay upon it her legs curved down and her head was thrown back, her body thrust forward into the night. She was naked now and with the blackness of the rock beneath her, the blackness of the sky above, her body, with arms stretched back as if to reach for the ground beneath her head, and breasts pulled flat, was like some slender white arc. There was something terribly beautiful in it, Ike thought, and something that made his bones numb with horror. He couldn’t take his eyes from her. He thought of her on the beach—sun-warm skin, hot beneath his fingers.

Someone now passed the man a large ceramic container and he began to anoint her, spattering what appeared to be the blood of the butchered animals upon her, mostly down the center of her body, until at last he tilted the container and emptied it upon her genitals. Still she did not move. The man placed the container on the ground and bent his face between her legs.

Ike was set upon by a cold flood of nausea. He wanted to move and yet the waves of sickness were like hot lead—like his body was shot through with it, too heavy to budge. He leaned forward, trying to gather himself for some action, to rise, to move toward her, but a hand came from somewhere behind him and pushed him back down. “Watch it,” a voice said, and he recognized the voice as Hound Adams’s. He thought of that photograph he had once glimpsed on the cliffs of Huntington Beach. Had it been the blood of animals in the picture, or the blood of the girl herself? Who were these people and how far would they go?

But he would never know for sure. For whatever Milo Trax had planned for his summer’s party that night, he had not planned the sudden rumble that shook the ground, a kind of dull thunder that seemed to begin somewhere beneath them and then rose, bringing to the night a fresh reddish glow that spread on the sky high above the light of the fires. Ike was aware of the hand leaving his shoulder, of Hound Adams stepping past him and into the clearing. Hound was not dressed in any dark robes, but rather in a pair of white cotton pants and a white Mexican pullover, and he stood now in sharp contrast to the dark figures around him. And then from the opposite side of the circle, Ike saw Milo Trax entering the clearing as well. And if it was true that Hound, in his white pants and pullover, might have stood in contrast to the figures in black, it was also true that the very contrast of black and white might have been taken for some part of the scene. Milo, however, was dressed in a pair of blue shorts and a wildly colored Hawaiian shirt. There was a skipper’s hat turned backward on his head and even in the darkness he still wore the small wire-rimmed shades.

The man who had been kneeling before Michelle had raised his head and was looking about him, first at Hound then at Milo, his face smeared now with the dark liquid. His robes had fallen open and Ike could see for the first time a necklace of skulls upon his chest and the flash of something metallic at his waist. Others were beginning to stir as well, looking toward the woods where the music had stopped.

It was an odd moment—like a frozen frame. Ike kept expecting some movement, but it did not come. Milo, Hound, the man nearest Michelle, all of them seemed locked in place, waiting. And then Milo reached to his face and pulled off the shades. He held them for a moment in his hand and then threw them to the ground in a gesture of disgust. He turned a bit and said something over his shoulder. It sounded like: “No, it’s not part of it.” And Ike saw that he was speaking to the silver-haired man in the blazer jacket. The man was barely visible, just at the edge of the clearing, beneath the white lights.

Milo looked back toward his house, toward the thunder that had given way to a distant crackling, and Ike saw for the first time that he was holding a small stick in his hand—something like a riding crop. He banged it against his leg, and then he did an odd thing with it. He held it up and shook it toward the trees, almost as if he could change things with it, Ike thought, as if it were a magic wand. And there was something almost comical in the gesture, in the absurd figure cut by Milo Trax—his squat, powerful body, his garish shirt, his little stick. But then the moment was past and the scene had begun to dissolve.

It took a moment for Ike to connect the sharp cracking sounds from the forest with what was happening to Milo. One second he was standing there in the clearing, arm upraised, the next he was on his back in the dirt, and then over on one side and there were holes in his chest—black, ugly places where the shirt was wet and stuck to the flesh—and there was this odd sound, something Ike knew he would not quickly forget, as if the holes were sucking air and blowing back a dark mist. But that moment of silence, in which the strange sound was audible, was short-lived—for suddenly it was not quiet at all, and it was not still. The adrenaline rush of pure fear had finally found the collective nerve and the night was one great circus of motion and sound, of panic and death. And if those hooded figures had come to practice some satanic ritual, or to invoke some devil, then it must have seemed, at least to a few of those demented minds, sailing on whatever twisted combinations of unnatural highs they’d been able to manage, that they had succeeded. For there must have been those who thought the half-naked giant descending upon them from the trees, his body a labyrinth of dark symbols, his hands filled with flame, was Lucifer himself.

It was all mixed up after that. There were people tearing hoods from their heads, looking for a way out. Some ran blindly into the night and disappeared at the cliff’s edge. Screams were drowned in the clatter of automatic rifle fire. The main thing Ike would remember later was the incredible effort it took to move, to force himself to his hands and knees, to crawl to where Michelle still lay, her hands over her face now, weeping, and to drag her with him. It took all of his strength and there was little time for other things. But he took with him a collage of images: faces twisted, blurred in flight or frozen in death, of Preston himself, bare-chested, dark pants and beret, wires crisscrossing his chest, like he was plugged into something, the dark box beneath one arm, automatic weapon spitting flame, an odd detail connected to that: Preston’s hand not fixed right somehow where one would think the trigger should be, but out a bit to the side. Suicide shifter against the palm of his hand, firing as Ike had told him to shift. There was more—bits and pieces that would not come back to him for some time: like the silver-haired man’s dark friend standing near the stone ring and firing a pistol. He was holding the thing with both hands and aiming it toward the trees. The gun made a funny popping sound, as if he were firing off caps. And there on the ground, at the feet of the man with the gun, was the man who had brought Michelle, close enough still to the stone ring that Ike realized he must have had to practically crawl over him to get to her, and yet had not seen him until later, until he was ready to try for the beach. The man was no longer bald—there was nothing there at all, the whole top half of his head having been blown away. He was flat out, on his back but with his legs bent back under him at an impossible angle. His robes had fallen open and Ike could see clearly what he’d only glimpsed before—that flash of metal at the man’s waist. It was a long dagger, the handle ornately carved, and gleaming still in the brilliant white light.

As for Hound Adams, he was just about the last person Ike saw before going over the edge. He had his back to Ike, and to the sea. He was facing the rifle fire with his feet slightly spread, his hands at his sides, and Ike was reminded of that day in the lot when Hound had faced the bikers, when he had saved Ike’s ass. It was the last Ike saw of him. Hound Adams and that dark-haired guy with the gun—they were the only two not wild with fear, and he often wondered at how it must have ended, the final scene. Had Hound Adams and Preston Marsh at last faced each other there in the clearing? Had there been that one strung-out moment of silence while the invisible surf pounded below them, the last heartbeat of a dream gone bad? “What do you do when a thing is rotten?” Preston had once asked him, and Ike had not answered but Preston had, and was answering still as one final explosion rocked the cliffs above them, sending down showers of dirt and rock, so that it was necessary to stop, to cover up and wait it out. And then back down, toward the beach on legs like rubber, sucking breath gone to flame, moving the way he had often moved in dreams, and there were times, slipping and sliding in the dirt and brush, when he was certain it was a dream, or at least some twisted, drug-induced hallucination from which, in the end, he would awake.

42

Michelle was beginning to come around as they reached the beach, but still unable to walk without support. Ike stayed with her in the black shadows of the cliffs, talking to her, making her keep moving, anything so she would stay awake. At last they undressed, Michelle shedding the remnants of the bloodstained white cloth, and bathed in the cold water. Above them, above the jagged black line of cliffs, they could still see an orange glow on the sky. There were no more voices, however, and no music. The night was very still. They were alone on the beach and there was only the sound of the waves, and then, finally, as if from another world, the distant wail of sirens.

They did not talk about what had happened as they followed the railroad tracks toward town. They talked instead about small things, about how much money it would take to get back, about the length of the walk. Michelle had lost her shoes and Ike let her take his. She was still groggy and was having trouble keeping to the ties. Once she stopped and was sick.

Ike could not say if it was a long walk or a short one. Sometimes it felt as if they had been walking forever, and other times, as if they had just begun. He counted ties, lost count and began again, bare feet thumping against the rough wood, until at last the lights that had begun as a faint glow on the horizon had grown and separated to become the lights of the town.

In a bus depot they went to the bathrooms and tried to make themselves as presentable as possible. Still, Ike wondered what impression they must have made—Michelle wrapped in the black robe he had found for her beneath the cliffs, Ike himself in the soiled black pants and ragged shirt (both sleeves gone now because he figured that looked better than just missing one). He saw people stopping to stare and there was a moment of near panic when he wondered if they would even be let on the bus. In Huntington Beach they might have passed for punks. He had no idea of what they would pass for here but was as polite as possible at the ticket counter, where a fat Mexican woman barely gave him a second glance.

They rode a Greyhound to Los Angeles and transferred to a Freeway Flyer. They were less conspicuous now, Ike thought, in the city. He kept thinking the bus they boarded in Los Angeles was the same one he had ridden the night he had come, the night he had run from the desert. He was not sure why he thought that, being unable to remember the number, but he did. Michelle was able to sleep. Ike could not. He thought about the bus. And he thought about what they should do when they reached Huntington Beach. He pulled Michelle to him and arranged her in such a way that her head rested against his chest. He stroked her hair while she slept.

The bus purred on an empty ribbon. The night slipped past them. Vibrations from the engine spread into his legs, up into the bones of his back, but they did not put him to sleep. He felt stuck in that strange giddy place where sleep would not come, but where he could dream without sleeping, with eyes stuck open, and he dreamed of the desert, of skinny brown legs streaked with dust. He studied the people around him, peering at them from the dream, and he wondered if they were like him, if their lives were as confused. He wondered if there were dark secrets in every heart. He looked around him at their faces, slack-jawed and sleeping, eyes glued shut. He watched an old man in gray work clothes quietly smoking, staring from a window. What did these people know of the world? Did they know that humans still slaughtered animals and drank their blood, performed sacrificial rites on the cliffs overlooking the sea? If they knew, would they care? Or were these faces just clever masks—behind each mask a grinning skull, leering with bloodstained teeth? He shook his head. He was very tired, he thought, and how could he ever know what they were thinking, any of them. He looked at Michelle, her face round and smooth, and he wondered how much she had seen and how much she remembered. All she had told him about, waiting in the bus station, was the rage Milo Trax had flown into after Ike went under in the theater—something about the tattoo, going on about how it was all wrong, and that it spoiled everything, and then they had put her under as well and the last thing she could remember was Milo Trax throwing a canister of film at Hound Adams as Hound turned and walked away. He thought about that for a long time. Had it been the tattoo that kept him at the circle’s edge instead of at its center with Michelle? He turned again to Michelle, watching her as she slept, thinking again of what she had been through, but her face betrayed nothing, was as empty as the others around him, as empty as his own, which stared back at him now from the black mirror of the window. It seemed to hang there, at a funny angle, an image of himself watching him watch himself, an image hung on the night sky, suspended above nothing.

He had a terrible time waking her when they reached Huntington Beach. The bus driver finally came back to see what was going on because they were the last people on the bus and there was another terrible moment of near panic as both he and the driver worked to wake her. At last, however, she began coming around and they were able to get her to her feet.

“What’s she on, man?” the driver wanted to know. He stood back a few feet now, staring at the two of them. Ike said he didn’t know. “Maybe she should see a doctor,” the driver suggested.

“No, it’s okay. She’ll be all right. She’s just real tired.”

The driver squinted at them down his nose. He was a tall wiry guy with a big western buckle on his belt. Ike saw him study his tattoo. Finally he stepped aside and let them pass, but Ike could feel the guy’s eyes burning a hole in his back as they went down the steps. He obviously knew a fuckup when he saw one.

43

It was decided in the morning that Michelle would go back to her mother’s, at least for a while, that she would wait there until some word came from Ike. It was mainly Ike’s decision, but Michelle went along with it. It was funny how that worked. Not long ago he had been ready to run with her, to go anywhere, as long as they were together. But the night had changed that. Maybe it was that now he had a better idea of what he owed to Preston. Or maybe he just did not like loose ends. There had, after all, been three names on the list: Terry Jacobs, Hound Adams, and Frank Baker.

He walked Michelle back to the station and waited with her for still one more bus. They’d spent the night at the Sea View, in her room. She’d taken a long time in the shower before leaving and had put on a simple white blouse and pale green skirt to go home in. The skirt was one of her old ones—something she’d picked up in a thrift store before Ike met her. She didn’t pack a suitcase. Everything else, the newer clothes that Hound had bought for her, her toilet articles, her pictures, the plants, it all stayed. “Junk,” she had said when Ike asked her about it, and had walked through the door without looking back.

Now they sat on a long wooden bench, their backs against a brick wall, their faces turned toward a pale sun. He held her hand, but there was something sad and rather distant, he thought, in her face, and in the silence between them. He could think of things he wanted to say, but he was not sure how to begin, and then Michelle spoke. Her voice was soft and the question was asked in a tentative sort of way, as if she wanted to get the question out but found it difficult. “Ike,” she said. “What do you think would have happened?”

“I don’t know.”

She started to say something else. He could see it in her face, but then she didn’t. He guessed it was going to be something about Ellen. He could see the bus now, waiting at the intersection of Walnut and Main. In a few minutes it would be time for her to leave. “I want to tell you something,” he began. “I’m not sure why. I just want you to know it. That night in your room. After the movie. That was the first time for me.”

She turned and looked at him, the sunlight bright on one side of her face, the other in shadow. “What about your girl in the desert?”

“There wasn’t any. Just Ellen.”

She looked back into the street. “Was Ellen the girl?”

“No. Not the way I told you. You were the first.” He stopped and looked back toward the bus. He was looking into the street as he spoke. “Ellen and I came close once. I think we would have made it together if she hadn’t stopped. I wanted to—or thought I did. I didn’t know what I wanted, actually. It was all mixed up. But I sure as hell used to drive myself crazy thinking about it. Then one day the old lady caught us together in the cellar. Ellen was naked because she was washing out this dress she’d been out all night in with some guy—didn’t want our grandmother to see it, but the old lady thought it was me. She thought we’d been down there fucking our brains out or some damn thing, and for the rest of the time I spent there I kept having to listen to how perverse I was. The funny part was, I never tried to tell her different. You know, I thought it was like that passage in the Bible where Jesus says if somebody keeps on looking at a woman so as to have passion for her—it’s like they have already sinned in their heart. I figured that was the way it was. I’d wanted it and I was guilty as hell.”

Michelle had been watching him as he spoke, without expression. She waited for a moment when he was done. “I went to school for a while with this girl who used to fuck her brother all the time,” she said. “She thought it was a joke. They both did. I mean, they would both tell their friends about it. Like it was supposed to be funny. It seemed a little weird to me at the time, but not really that big a deal. Maybe it would’ve been a big deal if she’d gotten knocked up. Or maybe I was just too dumb to know what to think.” Then she shrugged and looked into the street, but when she looked back at him there was a bit of a smile on her face—the first he’d seen in a long time. “But I can just see you,” she said. “Out there in the desert, driving yourself crazy over something that never even happened.”

“Yeah, well.” He shook his head and let his breath out slowly. “It sure seems like a long time ago right now. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine that it was even me out there—more like it was some other dumb hick.”

“I don’t think you were dumb. You were just raised by assholes, people you couldn’t talk to. I was too.”

“Yeah, that’s part of it. But I think you’ve got to be careful of laying too much off on other people.” The bus was pulling into the lot now, and Ike hurried on. “I do think that some of what happened this summer—all that shit at Hound’s—had something to do with the picture I had of myself when I came. It’s like if someone keeps telling you you’re really fucked up all the time, you finally start buying it. You know what I mean? And then all of a sudden you find out that you really are fucking up and there’s this temptation to say, ‘Yeah, well, fuck it. You think I’m bad? You haven’t seen shit yet, man. Watch my smoke.’ You know what I’m saying?” He paused, looking rather desperately for a way to finish as Michelle watched the bus. “But that’s just part of it, Michelle. I mean, part of me wanted what was happening here. I just wanted it without any responsibility for it. I thought I could slip out from under it by blaming it on other things—that I was raised by jerks, that I was fucked over by my old lady—whatever.” Now that he was started, he was finding it hard to stop.

Michelle stood up. “I have to go, Ike. The bus.”

He stood up with her. He drew a breath and when he spoke again, it was more slowly. “It’s just that I’ve been thinking about this stuff lately. I wanted you to understand.”

“I do,” she said. She put her hand on his arm. “Anybody can blow it.”

He walked with her to the door. Her hair was soft and golden in the sun, lifted slightly on a breeze. Her face seemed paler than he had ever seen it. “It was my fault, too,” she said. “I thought the whole thing with Hound was going to be a real trip. He even told me he was going to let me have a horse and keep it at the ranch, that some of those cowboys would teach me to train it.” She shrugged and then she went up the steps and into the bus. He watched her go. He watched through the dark glass until she had found a seat, until the bus had pulled away, then he walked alone back to the Sea View apartments. His room was cool and dark, the shades still drawn. He slept again, for a long time. And he was not troubled by dreams.

44

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

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

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