Tapping the Source (37 page)

“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.”