Tapping the Source (41 page)

42

Michelle was beginning to come around as they reached the beach, but still unable to walk without support. Ike stayed with her in the black shadows of the cliffs, talking to her, making her keep moving, anything so she would stay awake. At last they undressed, Michelle shedding the remnants of the bloodstained white cloth, and bathed in the cold water. Above them, above the jagged black line of cliffs, they could still see an orange glow on the sky. There were no more voices, however, and no music. The night was very still. They were alone on the beach and there was only the sound of the waves, and then, finally, as if from another world, the distant wail of sirens.

•   •   •

They did not talk about what had happened as they followed the railroad tracks toward town. They talked instead about small things, about how much money it would take to get back, about the length of the walk. Michelle had lost her shoes and Ike let her take his. She was still groggy and was having trouble keeping to the ties. Once she stopped and was sick.

Ike could not say if it was a long walk or a short one. Sometimes it felt as if they had been walking forever, and other times, as if they had just begun. He counted ties, lost count and began again, bare feet thumping against the rough wood, until at last the lights that had begun as a faint glow on the horizon had grown and separated to become the lights of the town.

In a bus depot they went to the bathrooms and tried to make themselves as presentable as possible. Still, Ike wondered what impression they must have made—Michelle wrapped in the black robe he had found for her beneath the cliffs, Ike himself in the soiled black pants and ragged shirt (both sleeves gone now because he figured that looked better than just missing one). He saw people stopping to stare and there was a moment of near panic when he wondered if they would even be let on the bus. In Huntington Beach they might have passed for punks. He had no idea of what they would pass for here but was as polite as possible at the ticket counter, where a fat Mexican woman barely gave him a second glance.

They rode a Greyhound to Los Angeles and transferred to a Freeway Flyer. They were less conspicuous now, Ike thought, in the city. He kept thinking the bus they boarded in Los Angeles was the same one he had ridden the night he had come, the night he had run from the desert. He was not sure why he thought that, being unable to remember the number, but he did. Michelle was able to sleep. Ike could not. He thought about the bus. And he thought about what they should do when they reached Huntington Beach. He pulled Michelle to him and arranged her in such a way that her head rested against his chest. He stroked her hair while she slept.

The bus purred on an empty ribbon. The night slipped past them. Vibrations from the engine spread into his legs, up into the bones of his back, but they did not put him to sleep. He felt stuck in that strange giddy place where sleep would not come, but where he could dream without sleeping, with eyes stuck open, and he dreamed of the desert, of skinny brown legs streaked with dust. He studied the people around him, peering at them from the dream, and he wondered if they were like him, if their lives were as confused. He wondered if there were dark secrets in every heart. He looked around him at their faces, slack-jawed and sleeping, eyes glued shut. He watched an old man in gray work clothes quietly smoking, staring from a window. What did these people know of the world? Did they know that humans still slaughtered animals and drank their blood, performed sacrificial rites on the cliffs overlooking the sea? If they knew, would they care? Or were these faces just clever masks—behind each mask a grinning skull, leering with bloodstained teeth? He shook his head. He was very tired, he thought, and how could he ever know what they were thinking, any of them. He looked at Michelle, her face round and smooth, and he wondered how much she had seen and how much she remembered. All she had told him about, waiting in the bus station, was the rage Milo Trax had flown into after Ike went under in the theater—something about the tattoo, going on about how it was all wrong, and that it spoiled everything, and then they had put her under as well and the last thing she could remember was Milo Trax throwing a canister of film at Hound Adams as Hound turned and walked away. He thought about that for a long time. Had it been the tattoo that kept him at the circle’s edge instead of at its center with Michelle? He turned again to Michelle, watching her as she slept, thinking again of what she had been through, but her face betrayed nothing, was as empty as the others around him, as empty as his own, which stared back at him now from the black mirror of the window. It seemed to hang there, at a funny angle, an image of himself watching him watch himself, an image hung on the night sky, suspended above nothing.

•   •   •

He had a terrible time waking her when they reached Huntington Beach. The bus driver finally came back to see what was going on because they were the last people on the bus and there was another terrible moment of near panic as both he and the driver worked to wake her. At last, however, she began coming around and they were able to get her to her feet.

“What’s she on, man?” the driver wanted to know. He stood back a few feet now, staring at the two of them. Ike said he didn’t know. “Maybe she should see a doctor,” the driver suggested.

“No, it’s okay. She’ll be all right. She’s just real tired.”

The driver squinted at them down his nose. He was a tall wiry guy with a big western buckle on his belt. Ike saw him study his tattoo. Finally he stepped aside and let them pass, but Ike could feel the guy’s eyes burning a hole in his back as they went down the steps. He obviously knew a fuckup when he saw one.

43

It was decided in the morning that Michelle would go back to her mother’s, at least for a while, that she would wait there until some word came from Ike. It was mainly Ike’s decision, but Michelle went along with it. It was funny how that worked. Not long ago he had been ready to run with her, to go anywhere, as long as they were together. But the night had changed that. Maybe it was that now he had a better idea of what he owed to Preston. Or maybe he just did not like loose ends. There had, after all, been three names on the list: Terry Jacobs, Hound Adams, and Frank Baker.

•   •   •

He walked Michelle back to the station and waited with her for still one more bus. They’d spent the night at the Sea View, in her room. She’d taken a long time in the shower before leaving and had put on a simple white blouse and pale green skirt to go home in. The skirt was one of her old ones—something she’d picked up in a thrift store before Ike met her. She didn’t pack a suitcase. Everything else, the newer clothes that Hound had bought for her, her toilet articles, her pictures, the plants, it all stayed. “Junk,” she had said when Ike asked her about it, and had walked through the door without looking back.

Now they sat on a long wooden bench, their backs against a brick wall, their faces turned toward a pale sun. He held her hand, but there was something sad and rather distant, he thought, in her face, and in the silence between them. He could think of things he wanted to say, but he was not sure how to begin, and then Michelle spoke. Her voice was soft and the question was asked in a tentative sort of way, as if she wanted to get the question out but found it difficult. “Ike,” she said. “What do you think would have happened?”

“I don’t know.”

She started to say something else. He could see it in her face, but then she didn’t. He guessed it was going to be something about Ellen. He could see the bus now, waiting at the intersection of Walnut and Main. In a few minutes it would be time for her to leave. “I want to tell you something,” he began. “I’m not sure why. I just want you to know it. That night in your room. After the movie. That was the first time for me.”

She turned and looked at him, the sunlight bright on one side of her face, the other in shadow. “What about your girl in the desert?”

“There wasn’t any. Just Ellen.”

She looked back into the street. “Was Ellen the girl?”

“No. Not the way I told you. You were the first.” He stopped and looked back toward the bus. He was looking into the street as he spoke. “Ellen and I came close once. I think we would have made it together if she hadn’t stopped. I wanted to—or thought I did. I didn’t know what I wanted, actually. It was all mixed up. But I sure as hell used to drive myself crazy thinking about it. Then one day the old lady caught us together in the cellar. Ellen was naked because she was washing out this dress she’d been out all night in with some guy—didn’t want our grandmother to see it, but the old lady thought it was me. She thought we’d been down there fucking our brains out or some damn thing, and for the rest of the time I spent there I kept having to listen to how perverse I was. The funny part was, I never tried to tell her different. You know, I thought it was like that passage in the Bible where Jesus says if somebody keeps on looking at a woman so as to have passion for her—it’s like they have already sinned in their heart. I figured that was the way it was. I’d wanted it and I was guilty as hell.”

Michelle had been watching him as he spoke, without expression. She waited for a moment when he was done. “I went to school for a while with this girl who used to fuck her brother all the time,” she said. “She thought it was a joke. They both did. I mean, they would both tell their friends about it. Like it was supposed to be funny. It seemed a little weird to me at the time, but not really that big a deal. Maybe it would’ve been a big deal if she’d gotten knocked up. Or maybe I was just too dumb to know what to think.” Then she shrugged and looked into the street, but when she looked back at him there was a bit of a smile on her face—the first he’d seen in a long time. “But I can just see you,” she said. “Out there in the desert, driving yourself crazy over something that never even happened.”

“Yeah, well.” He shook his head and let his breath out slowly. “It sure seems like a long time ago right now. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine that it was even me out there—more like it was some other dumb hick.”

“I don’t think you were dumb. You were just raised by assholes, people you couldn’t talk to. I was too.”

“Yeah, that’s part of it. But I think you’ve got to be careful of laying too much off on other people.” The bus was pulling into the lot now, and Ike hurried on. “I do think that some of what happened this summer—all that shit at Hound’s—had something to do with the picture I had of myself when I came. It’s like if someone keeps telling you you’re really fucked up all the time, you finally start buying it. You know what I mean? And then all of a sudden you find out that you really are fucking up and there’s this temptation to say, ‘Yeah, well, fuck it. You think I’m bad? You haven’t seen shit yet, man. Watch my smoke.’ You know what I’m saying?” He paused, looking rather desperately for a way to finish as Michelle watched the bus. “But that’s just part of it, Michelle. I mean, part of me wanted what was happening here. I just wanted it without any responsibility for it. I thought I could slip out from under it by blaming it on other things—that I was raised by jerks, that I was fucked over by my old lady—whatever.” Now that he was started, he was finding it hard to stop.

Michelle stood up. “I have to go, Ike. The bus.”

He stood up with her. He drew a breath and when he spoke again, it was more slowly. “It’s just that I’ve been thinking about this stuff lately. I wanted you to understand.”

“I do,” she said. She put her hand on his arm. “Anybody can blow it.”

He walked with her to the door. Her hair was soft and golden in the sun, lifted slightly on a breeze. Her face seemed paler than he had ever seen it. “It was my fault, too,” she said. “I thought the whole thing with Hound was going to be a real trip. He even told me he was going to let me have a horse and keep it at the ranch, that some of those cowboys would teach me to train it.” She shrugged and then she went up the steps and into the bus. He watched her go. He watched through the dark glass until she had found a seat, until the bus had pulled away, then he walked alone back to the Sea View apartments. His room was cool and dark, the shades still drawn. He slept again, for a long time. And he was not troubled by dreams.