Tapping the Source (7 page)

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

“The what?”

“The carburetor.”

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

The others laughed.

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

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

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

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

“I won’t fuck it up.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You ever hear of San Arco?”

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

“I’ve got an uncle with a shop.”

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

Ike shrugged. “I got hit.”

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

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

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

“I’m just trying to learn.”

“On this?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

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

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

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

Ike nodded.

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

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

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

“Fuck it, let’s go.”

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

“Man …”

“I said split.”

“Come on, man, he’s on his ass.”

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

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

“Ike.”

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

•   •   •

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

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

“You must surf a lot,” Ike said.

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

Ike shrugged. “Anytime.”

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

7

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

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

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