Tapping the Source (15 page)

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

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

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

•   •   •

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

14

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

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

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

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

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

•   •   •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ike shrugged.

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

“No,” Ike said. “I wouldn’t do that.”

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

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

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

“Yes.”

“My name’s Barbara.”

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

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

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

“You’re at the Sea View, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“At the ranch?”

“You know about the ranch?”