Tapping the Source

45

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

46

It was the beginning of October when he came back to Huntington Beach. Michelle was gone. There had been a letter waiting for him at the Sea View. She had gone to live with her father; he had sent money. Somewhere up north, along the coast. There was the name of a town, an address. He could come, she said, if he wanted to. He folded the letter and slipped it into the hip pocket of his jeans. She was, after all, one of the reasons he had come back. There was also that business of loose ends. He would find Frank Baker and they would talk one last time.

He moved out of the Sea View and took a room in a small motel near the corner of Main and Pacific Coast Highway. It was a newer building than the Sea View, a low white stucco affair with small square rooms done in turquoise and orange. A small kidney-shaped pool remained deserted, sunk forlornly into a barren rectangle of concrete. From a window he could see the highway, and beyond that the beach. The tourist season was over now with schools back in session and though there were still crowds of surfers in the early mornings and evenings, the beach had taken on a different character. It was cleaner and emptier, sometimes almost deserted in the afternoons with a brisk onshore wind kicking across the sand, turning the surf to junk.

He was without a board and he did not bother with a new one. He would surf later, he knew, in other places, but not here. It was just that there was something to be finished here and when it was, he could leave. He would be done with Huntington Beach, as he was done with San Arco. That was where he had gone after the funeral, back to the desert. The way he figured it, no one in his family had ever left that place without running, or taking the time to say good-bye. He wanted to be the first. And so he had gone. He had spoken to Gordon and they had stood in the ever-present heat of the gravel lot and he had told Gordon as much as he knew, the old man taking the news in his customary stoic fashion. And Ike had shaken hands with him, and thanked him, and he had looked, once, across the town toward the house, toward that cool, rotting porch, the great halo of dust-choked ivy, and there had been no reason to go there.

He stayed in San Arco for another couple of days, sleeping in the back of the market, working a few cobwebs out of the Harley, then getting on it and riding it, practicing, up and down the town’s main drag, blowing past the old woman’s house like an empty freight blowing out of King City on a downhill run. And when he figured he’d practiced enough to feel comfortable riding into King City, he went to the market for a pair of scissors and cut the sleeves out of one of those damned long-sleeved T-shirts. He’d put on a good fifteen pounds over the summer, and what with all that paddling and swimming, the weight seemed to have found its way mostly into his arms and shoulders. He still wasn’t what you could call big, but he wasn’t so much the runt anymore either. And then he had gone back outside and he had ridden the Knuckle clear to King City, a new pair of aviator shades giving back the sunlight, and he had walked into Jerry’s shop and told them the bike was for sale, because Jerry had asked him numerous times about selling it, and he had stuck to his price and gotten it and he was finished.

The last look he got of San Arco was from the bus bound for Los Angeles, from the freeway, and from there the place was no more than a reflection—like some bit of glass or metal catching sunlight somewhere far back among the dry hills—and then he had closed his eyes, rested his head back against the seat and remembered the look on Gordon’s face when he’d seen that damn tattoo, and remembered as well how the old men had stared after him, watching him blow past them forever while the tattered sleeves of his T-shirt beat time in the wind.

47

He stayed in the white motel for a week. He spent time on the streets. He even asked around a bit, after Frank Baker. No one had seen him, or at least would not say so to Ike. But the shop was still there, locked and dark. And it was Ike’s guess that Frank would have to deal with it, sooner or later, that he would be back. In the afternoons Ike walked on the beach, long walks from the pier out to the cliffs and the oil wells and back along the edge of the sand where it was wet and steep.

It was strange talking to people. He realized that here, as in the desert, he had not made many friends. Michelle, Preston, Barbara, they had been his friends and they were gone. Even Morris, he had heard, had packed it in and moved inland, all the way to San Bernardino or some such place. And the others, those closer to his own age who he had seen often enough in the water to nod at, did not seem eager for conversation, or even to meet his eye. But then he had, he supposed, been Hound Adams’s boy—at least to them, and so he did not really blame them.

A young girl came up to him one afternoon on the pier. He did not recognize her. She was small and dark, not unattractive in a small washed-out sort of way. She claimed to remember him from some party and she wanted to know if he had any dope. He stared at her for what he guessed was too long a time, forcing from her a rather nervous bit of laughter. When he told her that he didn’t have any dope, however, and that he didn’t know who did, her smile turned cynical and made it plain that she did not believe him. But she didn’t push it—a small favor for which he was grateful. She hugged herself against the wind as if she had noticed it for the first time, then she shrugged and started away. He watched her go, down along the empty boardwalk with the wind at her heels, her thin summer dress whipping about her legs. He stared after her until she was gone, lost in the distant blur of sunlight where the pier joined the town.

One more day passed, and then another. It was toward evening of the second day that he saw Frank Baker. Frank was standing in the parking lot of one of Huntington Beach’s few expensive bars, a large glass and concrete structure that had recently been built near the entrance to the pier. He was standing in the lot talking to two other men. All three were standing near the side of a low-slung yellow sports car.

Ike was on the sidewalk that ran along the edge of the highway, above the parking lots that extended down into the sand, not far from the lot in which Hound Adams had once fought the bikers. There were palm trees along the sidewalk and Ike stood close to one, slightly behind it and down off the curb. He stayed there for what felt like a long time but what in reality was probably not more than four or five minutes. At last he saw the three men shake hands. Two of them got into the car. Frank watched them go and then started away himself, alone and on foot.

Ike followed. He was certain Frank was on his way to the shop, and Frank did not disappoint him. They went up Main Street, made a left at Walnut, and then another right at the alley.

From the mouth of the alley Ike could see Frank’s van at the back of the shop and for a moment he worried that Frank had only parked there for convenience, that he would now just get in and drive away before Ike could reach him, but he did not stop at the truck. He crossed behind it and moved along the right-hand side, toward the rear door of the building.

Ike was in the alley now himself, moving quietly, hugging the backs of the buildings as a fat, pale moon rose in the sky. He listened as Frank moved across the gravel. He could hear the sounds of keys hitting a lock. A yellow wedge of light fanned out from beneath the van and he knew that Frank was inside, alone, and that it was what he had waited for. He moved very quickly now, and in what felt like almost a single step he was there, at the back door, facing Frank Baker for the first time since the ranch.

The shop was almost exactly as he had last seen it. Toward the front he could see that some of the boards had been taken from the wall, that the old brick had gotten a new coat of white paint. But aside from that it was the same and there was an odd, almost eerie quality in that sameness he had not counted on. Most of the old photographs were still on the walls, though a few had been taken down and were now scattered across the top of the glass counter at the main desk. Frank was at the counter, head bent, looking over the photographs, when Ike entered the shop. He jerked at the sound of Ike’s boots on the concrete.

Frank looked a bit thinner than Ike had remembered, and his tan seemed to have faded. Still, he looked fresh and neat in what looked to be a new set of clothes—white cord pants, striped pullover sweater, a pair of softly shining boat shoes. And Ike was suddenly aware of his own appearance—the greasy pair of jeans he had worked on the Harley in, the thick black boots that had been waiting for him in the desert and were now the only ones he had, the dirty T-shirt with missing sleeves. And then there was a week-old beard, and hair down to the collar of his shirt. The boots made him a good inch taller than Frank and he could not help wondering for a moment what Frank must have thought in that first instant his head jerked up from the counter—that perhaps some small version of Preston Marsh had come back to haunt him.

For a moment they just stood there watching each other. Then Frank looked back at the photographs. He was looking at them when he spoke. “You go to the funeral?” he asked. He spoke softly and his voice was only barely audible, even in the silent shop.

Ike said that he had gone.

Frank nodded, still watching the counter. “Crowded?”

“No. His folks. A few bikers.”

Frank looked at him now for the second time. “There was a time when half this town would have been there. His old man say the words?”

Ike said that he had, then he crossed the floor until he was even with the end of the counter. He’d been working on an idea since that moment on the driveway at the ranch when he’d seen Frank in the van, watched him leaving, remembering that it was Frank Baker he’d once seen talking to Preston, before the first trip, before the shit hit the fan. “You set him up,” Ike said. “The first time. You sent him to the ranch and then you told them.”

Frank shook his head, but his eyes stayed on Ike now. “No,” he said. “I didn’t.”

“Bullshit.”

Frank shrugged. “Maybe you’re just lucky to be alive, Jack. Maybe you should leave it at that.” He moved as if he was going to step away from the counter, but Ike moved with him, blocking his path.

“You’re a fucking liar,” Ike said. And he could feel his throat tighten around the words, and the blood going hot in his face.

For a moment Frank’s eyes flashed with anger, but then the anger was gone and he was looking the way Ike had found him—more tired than angry, and beaten in a way Ike had not seen him before. So maybe that was why Ike was surprised when Frank hit him. He’d come ready to fight, if that was what it came down to, but somehow he had expected a different buildup. As it was, Frank just took about one-half step to his side and hooked hard with his left hand. It was a solid punch, but then Ike had been hit a good deal harder since coming to Huntington Beach. He rolled away from it, felt the counter at his back, and came off swinging, head down, rushing wildly in the way Gordon had tried to teach him not to. But it was like he was letting go of something, frustration, anger—something he had held inside of himself too long. He felt himself land solidly on his own, a blow that sent shock waves and slender ribbons of pain from his hand up into his shoulder. But he continued to charge, getting lower, taking another good shot on the back of the head and a knee in the face, but managing to grab the leg and to come up with it, hard, and in a twisting motion that was enough to throw the other man off-balance and into the wall. He could hear Frank’s back and head slap the freshly painted brick. But he didn’t slow down, he went right after him, digging to the body now, beneath the ribs, and he could hear Frank fighting for wind.

They moved together along the wall, Ike punching, Frank alternately trying to punch and then to hold. At last they stumbled into a rack of wet suits and went down together, their feet tangled in the debris. Ike managed to keep his man turned, however, to come down hard on top of him, and when they landed he could feel Frank lose what was left of his wind. Ike rolled away. He kicked his legs free of the suits and then sat back on his haunches, his hands on his thighs. It had all happened more quickly than he had expected—short but intense. And yet there had been a kind of release in that intensity. Now he waited to see if Frank wanted it to go on.

Frank stayed on the floor a moment longer, then rolled away in the opposite direction, finally winding up in a seated position, his arms out behind him. The funny thing was, he still didn’t look angry. He brought one hand up to his face and touched his lip, which was cut and beginning to swell. “Shit, you’re still a fucking punk,” he said. He was breathing hard, talking in short bursts. “And yeah, I told him some things about the ranch.” He paused for breath, shaking his head. “But I didn’t set him up. I didn’t know he was going up there until after it happened.” He stopped and spit some blood on the floor.

Ike was still breathing hard himself. He leaned forward now, on his knees in the fine gray dust that covered the floor, his hands still on his legs. “So what did you tell him?”

“Come on, man. What the fuck is this? You’re trying to tell me you don’t know? You were with him, the way I heard it.”

“Just tell me what you told Preston.”

“Shit.” Frank shook his head once more. “Let’s just say Preston and I traded stories. He showed up one night, out there, in the alley.” He nodded toward the back of the shop. “Christ, I hadn’t talked to the guy in years. Scared the shit out of me, if you want to know. He claimed he was trying to find out something about this chick, Ellen, and he wanted to trade stories with me. What happened to Ellen in exchange for his version of what happened to Janet Adams.”

Ike was silent for a moment. “But you were with them,” he said. “You told me that. You took the damn picture. Remember.”

“The day before I split.” He paused, watching Ike, and Ike could see that he was trying to decide on something. He turned his head and looked at the far wall of the shop and when he looked back at Ike there was a slightly altered expression on his face, as if he had thought it over and made up his mind.

“I was the youngest,” Frank said. “Younger than Hound or Preston, a year younger than Janet. I never did dig Milo. The trip began to get weird. Just kinky sort of stuff. And drugs. I got scared and split. I pretended to get this phone call from home. Preston knew I hadn’t, but he went along with it, even told them that he was onshore with me when I got the call. I tried later to get Janet to come with me. She stayed. I came back and waited. I saw them come back without her.” He paused. “You didn’t know her,” he said. “She was something special. I never did know what really happened. I mean, I’d heard Hound’s version. But somehow I always knew Preston’s would be different, if he talked. After the trip he’d just packed it in, joined the Marines, and split.”

But Ike was having a hard time concentrating on Frank’s story at the moment. There was something else, some long, slow tremor of recognition snaking through his consciousness. Suddenly he knew why Preston had looked so strange the first time Ike had repeated what the kid in the white Camaro had told him, and why Preston had never believed the kid’s story, and why, too, he had gone to Frank Baker. It was not just, as Ike had once believed, that the two stories were similar. It was that they were the same.

“It was your story,” Ike said. For a moment Frank looked puzzled. Then he smiled. His swollen lip made the smile a crooked one. “Preston came to you because he wanted to know why some kid in the desert was telling your story.”

Frank touched his lip once more. “Funny how that worked out, isn’t it? But it wasn’t really my story. It just came out sounding that way.”

“And the kid?”

Frank shrugged. “He had the hots for that sister of yours. When she split for a weekend with Hound and didn’t come back, he got upset. Hound told him the chick had split on her own, that the subject was closed. He didn’t buy it, finally got this wild hair up his ass to go get Ellen’s brother. I was the one who told him they went to Mexico. I also told him that what he was thinking about was dumb, but that if he went through with it, he’d better plan on staying gone for a while.”

“You told him?”

Frank spread his hands. “What could I do? The asshole was my brother.”

“But he said you were one of the ones she went with.”

“Like I said, he’s an asshole. He was also in love. Know what I mean? He thought I was putting him off like everyone else.”

“But why your name and not Milo’s?”

“Jesus, don’t you see? He didn’t know a fucking thing about Milo Trax, or the ranch, or anything else. He was better off that way. Let him think it was Terry and Hound, me even. Let him go get Ellen’s brother. Who gives a shit? Hound could have handled that.”

Okay, Ike thought, but they had come full circle, back to what Frank had told Preston. Still, there was a dull ache in his stomach when he asked again what Frank had known about Ellen.

Frank met his stare. “You were there,” he said.

“Just tell me what you told him.”

“I told him there were graves at the ranch.”

“Graves.” Ike repeated the word slowly, his voice scarcely above a whisper.

“Rumors,” Frank said, but he suddenly seemed angry now for the first time. “Who knows what to believe about that shit. I didn’t know for sure what was going on up there and I didn’t want to know. I’d just heard things.”

“Like?”

“Like Milo having gotten in with some cult—rich fuckers, people into some very weird shit who were willing to lay down bread for the use of his land. Milo didn’t have that much left, you know. He’d done some time. He’d pissed away most of his old man’s money.”

“What about the movies?”

“Hound’s?” Frank shrugged. “Hound made those things around the house to sell to the greasers, but he had his eye out, too, looking for people he could turn Milo and his friends on to, as near as I could tell.”

“But Milo was filming that shit at the ranch, too.”

“I told you, man, I wouldn’t know about that. I wouldn’t want to. Maybe it was just something his friends could use to get their rocks off with between sessions. Or maybe he’d found some twisted buyer for them. Who knows? It’s over now.”

Ike was silent for a moment. “And you told Preston.”

“Yeah,” Frank said. “I told him.” And there was something defensive in the way he said it. “I told the asshole and I laid it on thick, and it wasn’t because I was scared—not really—and it wasn’t even because I wanted to know about Janet. I just wanted him to hear it, man. I wanted him to know.” He stopped and shook his head and when he spoke again there was a note of urgency in his voice Ike had not heard before. “I was here,” Frank said. “In the beginning,” and he pointed at the concrete beneath them, a quick, jabbing motion. “Those two guys had something, man. Not just bread. A goddamn lifestyle—that was what it was about then. And those two dumb fuckers had it. They didn’t need Milo Trax. But they blew it, and no one knew that any better than Preston. Shit, he could never handle what happened to Janet. I wanted him to see just how far it had gone. I didn’t tell him because I wanted to set him up. I told him because he deserved to hear it. I wasn’t even sure if he was going to believe me.” Frank paused. “But then, that was before I heard his version of Mexico.”

Ike waited. He wondered if he would have to ask about that, too, but Frank was talking now; he was letting it out. “He said Milo killed some cunt down there. Some Mexican whore he’d gotten down on the beach with them. They were all stoned and Milo just pulled out this blade and did it, before anyone even knew what was happening. Janet saw it. She OD’d that same night.” Frank stopped. “But then he never did tell you any of this shit, did he? So tell me something. What the fuck did you think you were doing at the ranch when you went up there with him?”

Ike was suddenly feeling very beat-up. His head was starting to feel swollen and slightly misshapen. “Surfing,” he said. The word had an odd ring to it in the emptiness of the shop.

“Surfing? You mean you two actually surfed up there? Preston surfed?”

“It was the end of that good swell. He never said a damn thing about any graves. He said he wanted to show me what it could be like. He wanted to talk me out of hanging around Huntington Beach.”

Frank shook his head once more. He tested his bad lip with his finger. “What it could be like, huh? Tapping the old source. Was that it?” But he went on before Ike could reply. “Yeah, well, that’s cool. It’s cool. But you want to know what’s funny about it, about all of that tapping-the-source shit? It wasn’t either Hound or Preston who thought that one up. It was Janet. And it was dope. That was the only source she had in mind, brother. Righteous grass, shrooms, pure cocaine. Some good shit. And with Milo pulling the strings, a goddamn endless supply and they were plugged into it. See, Hound and Preston had started out on their own, just a little business on the side—running a little grass back across the border in their cars. It was Milo who turned it into a big operation. And it was Janet who coined the phrase. Tapping the Source. Hound and Preston could dig it. They could see how people would take it and how it would be this in-joke. They only used it on the boards for about a year. Then Janet died and Preston split and I guess even Hound didn’t think it was so funny after that.” He paused for a moment, then went on, his voice a bit softer. “Don’t kid yourself, man. Hound may have been full of horseshit, but he knew they’d blown it too. I don’t care what he said. They both knew. They just went crazy in different ways.”

They stared at each other in silence for what seemed like a long time after that. It didn’t seem to Ike that there was much left to say. What he kept thinking about was Hound Adams working his way up that damn ravine to open the gate for Preston Marsh. “So how did Preston know about Milo’s party?” Ike asked at last. “Did you tell him about that, too?”

Frank smiled. “I sent him an invitation.”

“And that’s why you split?”

Frank’s lip finally came apart on him and began to bleed. He did nothing to stop it and the blood colored his smile. “I told you, man. I always split. But that night, I had a hunch.”

48

He didn’t know how long they stayed in the shop—only that he had this feeling there was something between them, that they had been a part of something that had ended, and that when this, the talking, was ended too, it would be over and it would not be spoken of by either of them in just the same way again. And in a funny sort of way, he had the idea that Frank felt it too. He hadn’t beaten anything out of him. It had all been there, waiting to come out for a long time. It had just been hard stuff to let go of. Somehow the fight had been part of the letting go. And who was there besides Ike to tell it to?

It was finally Frank who pulled himself off the floor. He made a rather halfhearted attempt at brushing some of the dirt from his pants, then he walked to the register and picked up one of the photographs that lay there. He held it up and Ike saw that it was the shot of Hound, Preston, and Janet. “New owners are coming in tomorrow,” Frank told him. “Fucking punks from down the street. I didn’t want them to have it.”

“What about all the others?”

Frank shrugged. “Ghosts,” he said. “If there’s anything in here you want, take it. Just lock the door on your way out.”

Ike was standing now, moving his legs to work out the cramps. He spoke to Frank once more as Frank moved past him, toward the door. “Will you tell anyone else, about the graves?”

“I don’t know. Cop considerations aside, and that doesn’t really mean shit to me anymore, I’m not sure people really want to know that kind of stuff. Your sister might be up there. Do you want to know?”

“I don’t know.”

“There you are.” He went to the door and stopped. “See you around?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Got any plans?”

“Not really, just leaving.”

Frank nodded. “What I should have done,” he said. “A long time ago.” He moved his shoulders. “Time flies.” He turned his back to Ike and went out into the alley. Ike could hear the door slam shut on the van. He could hear the engine turn over and at last fade into the night. Then he was alone in the empty shop, with just the occasional sound of a passing car, and in the distance, the muted crack of the surf.

He stayed there for a long time, walking and thinking, looking over the memorabilia that still graced the walls. The boards he and Preston had used at the ranch were still in the racks. He pulled them out and placed them on the floor. Funny how he had thought you could be done with a thing, with the desert, with Huntington Beach. He thought about those green hills above the point, as silent as the desert at first light. He thought about Frank Baker, hanging on for so long. Perhaps there was more he should have asked. But in the end, he supposed, he knew enough.

In a way, he would have liked to take one of the boards. In another way, it seemed right not to. He wound up deciding on a single item—the photograph he had often admired of Preston Marsh carving his backside bottom turn from the dark face of a large Huntington Beach wall. As he lifted the picture from the counter, however, he noticed another picture just beneath it, one that he had seen before but that he had never paid particular attention to. It was a photograph of a wave, riderless and dark. The most interesting aspect of the picture was the way the sunlight had been caught in the lip and how it seemed to hang there, to spread and light up the fine white mist that rose along the top of the wave. What caught his attention just now was that the frame which held the photograph was coming apart and that a bit of the cardboard backing had begun to slide out and that between the backing and the picture there was another piece of paper. He tucked the photograph of Preston beneath his arm and worked the slip of paper—which was yellowed and frail—out from behind the print.

There was writing on the paper, writing and a series of small sketches done in black ink. There was something rather elegant and decidedly feminine, he thought, about the work, and then he realized with a quickening of the heart that certainly the work was hers. And he saw her as she had been that day in Mexico, her arms over their shoulders, her fine pale hair riding a wind, and he remembered how that picture had made him feel the first time he saw it, how having to settle for just looking at it had made him feel lonesome and left out of something. And he saw suddenly how it was all there, in that picture, all of it. The promise. The rush. And he guessed he could see how Frank Baker had hung around so long, how there had just been nowhere else to go. And it seemed to him, in the silence of the shop, that a ghostlike wind rattled the alley door, a wind not from the sea, but one that was both hot and dry, laced with sand and blown from across the salt flats of San Arco. And there were names in the wind. Janet Adams. Ellen Tucker. And how many more in between? In his mind’s eye he saw the cool green hills of the ranch as they broke and spilled into the Pacific, folding their secret in the earth. The yellowed paper trembled slightly between his fingers as he studied her drawings—the small thumbnail sketches of waves that became increasingly more stylized as they moved across the page, ending at last with the looping silhouette of a wave enclosed in a circle, the wave’s crest turning to flame.

He was going to take the paper with him but then on a sudden impulse began looking for matches. He found a book in the drawer by the register. He held the frail yellow sheet as it burned, holding it above the glass counter until the flames reached his fingers. What was left of it burned on the glass until there was only a crumpled bit of ash and when he blew on it, it broke and fell to the floor. Then he took the photograph of Preston and went into the alley.

He must have stayed in the shop much longer than he had imagined, for as he reached the mouth of the alley he saw that the streets were black and empty and spoke in their silent way of that hour just before the first light. Far away, at the dark end of Main Street, he could still see the yellow pinpoints of light that marked the pier. The rest of the town had shut down. Even the purple neon above the Club Tahiti looked dark and cold against the sky. It was a strange moment, and yet familiar, dominated by an overpowering stillness and shot through with the scent of the sea where before there had been the scent of the desert, and then he could see what it was, how it was working up to that special time, building toward a silence so complete the ground itself would have to break it, to speak in some secret voice of a secret thing. Or perhaps it had already done so, he thought, many times over, had given up its secret time and again, but people had forgotten how to listen. And for the first time he was not inclined to run. Because that secret was what there was, he thought. And the pursuit of it was all that mattered.

He tucked the picture beneath his arm and walked back down the alley once more, entered the shop one last time. He remembered the shop’s original design from the pictures he’d seen in Barbara’s scrapbook, how the brick wall now separating the two rooms had once been the front of the building, and he remembered what had been painted there. He found some cubes of colored wax beneath the counter and he went to work on the white brick, wondering how many layers of paint separated him from the original, knowing that his was not as polished as hers had been, but working it out anyway for himself, in his own crude style—giving the new owners something to think about. He had to bear down hard to get the line he wanted and his hand trembled with the effort. He drew a rough circle and within it the outline of a hollow, pitching wave, its crest on fire, and beneath it the words: Tapping the Source.