Tapping the Source (6 page)

It was the cheapest board Ike had yet seen. “All right,” he said, “I’ll take it.”

“All right.” The kid picked up the board and headed for the counter.

Ike stood by the cash register as the kid rang up the sale. He was very much aware of one of the girls staring at him, a kind of half smile on her face. The music was loud. The sunlight was coming through the glass and the open door, burning the side of his face. When the kid had stuffed Ike’s money into a box, he pulled a couple of colored cubes out from under the counter and pushed them at Ike.

“What are these?”

“Wax.”

The girl on the glass made a face. “You gave him Cool Waters,” she said. “I think he needs Sex Wax.”

The other boy chuckled. The kid who had made the sale pulled out a round piece of wax and thumped it down on top of the cubes. “You rub it on the board before you go out,” he said.

Ike nodded. He had remembered seeing surfers wax their boards. He slipped the wax into the pocket of his jeans and picked up the board. “Rip ’em up,” he heard one of the girls say as he went back outside, into the brilliant light. He heard one of the boys laugh, and he had not guessed that buying a board could turn out to be such a humiliating experience. Well, fuck them, he thought; the price had still been good. He adjusted the board beneath his arm and headed up the sidewalk, deciding as he went that the din of traffic was preferable to the music of the shop.

•   •   •

Back in his room he used a pair of scissors on one of his two pair of jeans. He cut them off just above the knees and put them on. He picked up his board, which barely fit into the small room, and tried to get a look at himself in the mirror. One thing was certain and that was he didn’t look like many of the other surfers he’d seen around town. His hair was too short, and his body looked white and frail against the dark material of the jeans. He shrugged, swung a towel around his neck, nursed the board out of the room, and headed down the hall.

He was coming down the steps and onto the shabby strip of grass when he nearly bumped into one of the girls who had come to his room looking for papers. It was the tall, athletic-looking one, and the sunlight was dancing off her strawberry-blond hair and her white tank top. He felt somewhat embarrassed, naked, in the brilliant light. He tried to hide as much of himself as possible behind the board.

“You a surfer?” she asked him.

He shrugged. “Trying to learn.” He studied her face for signs of a put-down. Her cheekbones were rather high and wide, her brows delicate and nicely arched. There was something about her face, perhaps it was the arch of the brows, that gave her something of a bored, haughty look. But somehow that expression did not carry over into her eyes, which seemed rather small and bright and looked directly into his own. There was a bit of a smile on her face and he decided that it was not like the smiles on the girls in the shop. He went down the sidewalk and turned to look back. She was still standing in the same spot, watching him. “Have fun,” she called. He smiled at her and started away, headed for Main Street and the Pacific Ocean.

6

The beach was crowded, the sun bright, but the breeze at his back was cool, and as he stood in the wet sand and felt the Pacific Ocean touch his feet for the first time, sending ribbons of coldness up his legs, he began to see why many of the surfers wore wet suits. Still, he did not hesitate. He had this feeling that every person on the beach was watching. He waded into the white water, stepped almost at once into some kind of hole and felt his nuts shrivel as the water rushed past his waist. He pulled himself onto his board and began to paddle.

It didn’t take him long to discover that waves which looked small from the pier got much bigger when you were looking at them from sea level. Getting out was harder than he had expected. For one thing, he kept sliding off the fucking board. He was trying to paddle as he had seen the others do, stroking one arm at a time, but just when he would get himself going in a straight line, a wall of white water would hit him, knock the board sideways, and he would slip off and have to start all over again. His arms and shoulders tired quickly, and when he turned back to the beach to see what kind of progress he was making, it appeared he was no farther out than when he had started.

The point at which the waves rose in smooth hills was growing more elusive by the moment. Still, he kept digging away, his breath coming harder, his strokes becoming weaker. Suddenly, however, the ocean seemed to smooth out, to spread itself in front of him like a huge lake. He dug in for all he was worth and before long he was bobbing with the other surfers in the lineup.

His face tingled from the exertion and his lungs ached. Other surfers sat straddling their boards, looking toward the horizon. Some regarded him with what seemed a quizzical eye. It was amazing how different things were out here compared with what it was like inside. It was peaceful and smooth, the way he had imagined it. A gentle ground swell lifted and lowered them. A pelican flew nearby, skimming the surface of the water. A gull cried above him and the sunlight moved on the water. In the distance he could make out the white flecks of sails and the colors on the distant cliffs of the island.

He tried sitting up and straddling the board the way most of the other surfers were doing. His, however, seemed to tip drastically at the slightest movement. He fell off twice, making loud splashes and drawing looks from those sitting closest to him.

Suddenly, from all along the line of surfers, he began to hear hoots and whistles. He looked outside to see a new group of waves rolling up into long smooth lines. These waves seemed much bigger to him than the others. He struck out for the horizon, paddling now out of fear, afraid the waves would break on top of him, that he would lose his board; he felt too tired out and cold to swim for it. The first wave reached him. He paddled up the face, popped over the crest only to see a second wave even larger than the first rolling toward him. He dug in once more, paddling with arms gone to rubber. To his left and slightly ahead of him another surfer suddenly stopped paddling and swung his board around, pointing it back toward the beach. Ike didn’t know what to do. Not only was he apparently going to be hit by the wave, the other guy was now sliding down the face straight toward him.

At the last second, just as the wave was beginning to lift his board, he tried swinging it around, too. Out of the rush and spray of exploding white water, he heard the other surfer yell. Somehow he’d gotten caught sideways in the top of the wave and he was going over.

He came up gasping for air, his arms flailing about him. He was sure his board had gone into the beach, but when he looked over his shoulder he saw it floating only a few yards behind him. How that had happened was a mystery, but he was greatly relieved and began to swim toward it. As he reached the board he noticed the other surfer paddling toward him, the same guy he’d been caught in the wave with.

Ike clung to the side of his board. Maybe the other guy was checking to see if he was all right. He tried to muster some kind of grin but his face felt cold and numb and then he got a good look at the surfer’s face and realized something was very wrong. He tried to say something, but he never got the chance. He’d no sooner opened his mouth than the guy hit him. The other surfer was lying on the deck of his board, so the punch didn’t have a lot of leverage but it stung anyway. Ike tried to pull himself up on his board, but the guy was punching at him again. One punch landed on Ike’s shoulder, another caught him flush on the ear. Everything seemed to be happening at once. He was disoriented from his spill, the cold water seemed to swim in his head, the other surfer was everywhere. Later, when Ike tried to remember exactly what the guy had looked like, it was all just a blur, a red face, white fists, the pain in his ear. And then a wave rescued him. A wall of white water caught him and swept him toward the beach. The board tipped over again, but he hung on. When he resurfaced, he found himself practically on the beach and the other surfer gone.

•   •   •

He didn’t know how many people were watching him as he trudged out of the shallows; he supposed they all were. He supposed everyone on the beach had seen him make a fool of himself, had seen him get punched out and washed in like a drowned rat. He sat in the wet sand, his back to the beach, his eyes fixed on the horizon where the waves still sparkled in the sunlight. He had certainly blown that, blown it damn near as badly as he’d blown trying to ride the Knuckle. But he was too worn-out even to think much about it. He felt somehow betrayed but was not exactly sure by what.

He sat that way for some time, afraid to turn around, to walk back through the people who may have seen what happened. He tried to get his body to stop shaking. And yet he was afraid to stay there too long. He was worried the guy in the water was going to come in and finish kicking his ass. So finally he got up. He took one more look out to sea, where others glided effortlessly, dropping and climbing on the faces of the small waves, a fraternity whose membership he had been denied.

The board was heavy beneath his arm, but he tried to assume some semblance of dignity as he plodded through the warm sand. At last the board grew too heavy to carry and so he let the nose drop to drag along in the sand behind him, no longer giving a shit about how he looked. And by the time he got to the asphalt near the pier, he had begun to feel like he was going to puke, or pass out; he could not tell which. He sat to rest on a curbstone in the sun, and that was when he saw the bikes for the second time.

•   •   •

He was certain it was the same group of bikes he had seen on his first day in town. There were more of them now, but he recognized the Knuckle, and the engine was still missing. He was sitting only a few yards away from them. The sunlight was blinding as it jumped off chromed forks and sissy bars. He could still feel his pulse in his ear. He dabbed at it with his fingers and found a little blood, but everything was still pretty numb. He didn’t suppose he was hurt very badly.

He had been sitting there for a couple of minutes, his board at his feet, when he began to pick out the voices above the roar of the engines. “I thought you fucking tuned it,” one yelled, and Ike saw the owner of the Knuckle swinging himself off the bike to stand in the parking lot.

“I did tune it, man.”

“Then why is it still fucking up?” the rider wanted to know. He moved around to the side of the bike, away from the others, and Ike got a better look at him. He was big, taller even than Gordon, not so thick perhaps, but wider across the shoulders. And his arms were sure as hell bigger. Biggest damn arms Ike had seen, bigger than any of the guys around Jerry’s shop. And he had more tattoos than anyone around the shop, too. There was a big American eagle tattooed on one shoulder with a coiled snake coming out of it some way and winding its way clear down to his forearm, where it wrapped itself around his wrist like a bracelet. On the other arm there was a man’s head, like maybe the head of a Christ because it wore what looked like a crown of thorns, and there were rays coming out of the thorns and spreading up into his shoulder, where they turned into lizards and birds. And along his forearms and hands, in between the tattoos that had come out of parlors, there were others, what he’d heard Jerry call jailhouse tattoos, the kind you did yourself with a penknife and ink. The guy was dressed in a grimy pair of jeans and had on a set of black broken-down motorcycle boots that looked thick and heavy enough to kick even a Harley to pieces. Up top he wore a faded tan-colored tank top that looked too small and above that he wore a pair of gold-rimmed aviator shades and a red work bandanna tied around his head. His hair was black, combed straight back and long enough to cover a collar, held in place by the bandanna, and there was a diamond stickpin in one ear. Ike could see it catching the light along with the thin gold rims of the shades.

The biker was standing only a few yards away from where Ike sat and when he bent down to take a look at the engine, Ike could see how the dark hair was beginning to recede just a bit above the red cloth. The guy squatted down, peering into the engine, but Ike could tell by the way he moved that he didn’t really know what he was looking for. The other bikers sat on their machines and watched. Suddenly the guy stood up. He did it a bit too fast, though, and wobbled around some so that Ike could see he was fairly well pasted. “God damn it,” he shouted at no one in particular, and Ike could see a couple of the other bikers wearing grins. All of a sudden, though, the guy raised his fist and brought it down on the fuel tank. The blow didn’t look like it had traveled very far, but a good-sized dent appeared in the black-lacquered tank and the smiles Ike had noticed only moments before disappeared. He heard somebody say, “Shit,” and the biker closest to the Knuckle walked his own bike farther away, as if he were expecting some sort of explosion. “God damn it to hell.” The owner of the Knuckle shook his head, swayed a bit, then paced back to the far side of the bike and stood staring down on it, his aviator shades flashing in Ike’s direction, so that for a moment Ike had the feeling that the biker was looking past the bike and staring right at him.