Tapping the Source (22 page)

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

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

“Aw, man, I slipped.”

“Bullshit.”

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

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

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

22

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

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

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

“I got hit,” he said.

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

“Why?”

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

“I don’t have to go to the hospital.”

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

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

“Shit. You can’t drive.”

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

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

•   •   •

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

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

•   •   •

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

23

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

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

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

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

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

“Not Preston.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He calls everybody that.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

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

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