Among the Living (34 page)

“Eagle Rock.”

“Eagle Rock,” Jimmy repeated. “She took a long time to pack the car, like she was waiting for me.”

Nothing whistled down the line for a second or two.

“How does she look?” Angel said.

“Like they all do,” Jimmy said. “One kind of them.”

“Lost.”

“Spooked. Alone. Running,” Jimmy said. “Trying to get from what was to what’s next. Way young to be so hurt. Or maybe I’ve just seen too many of them.”

“Or maybe you’re getting old in the soul,” Angel said.

“It’s about time.”

“She’s good-looking, huh?”

“She’s not a Sailor,” Jimmy said, almost a question.

“No.”

“Tell me who she is to you,” Jimmy said.

“Nobody,” Angel lied. “Just a kid I wish wasn’t so down.”

Lucy in the Skylark stopped in Paso Robles all right, parked on the street, the main street, beside a pay phone. Pas was a pretty little town, out of the way enough to have slept through most of the booster efforts to improve it. There were a lot of Victorian B and Bs, ten thousand oaks, more brown grass hills ringing it. They’d all flush green in another month or so when the rain started. Father Junipero Serra had stopped here, planted the flag a few miles north, Mission San Miguel Archangel.

But nobody was going out by the mission today.

Lucy made a call and then got back behind the wheel and waited.

She seemed a little fidgety. She put the top down, out of nervousness, the way a girl straightens her skirt as the boy is coming back to the car. Or the way girls did when they still wore skirts, when the baby-blue Skylark was new. She kept her eyes straight ahead, except for looking up in the mirror every once in a while.

Jimmy was out of the Porsche, up the street a half block and on the other side. He’d gone into a wood-front store and bought a pack of cigarettes. He hadn’t smoked in ten years. A pack cost what it used to cost to go to the movies. He sat on a bus bench, sat up on the back of it like a hawk on a perch, and pulled the red ribbon and opened the pack. He tapped one out and put it between his fingers and struck the match.

So I’m one of those,
he thought,
a guy a memory makes start smoking again.

The first drag almost took off the top of his head.

A kid came walking up to the Skylark, walking in from a side street, thirteen, fourteen, on the out end of a growth spurt. (He’d probably been three inches shorter at the beginning of summer, when school let out.) He wore a Cake T-shirt and plaid “old man” polyester pants and red Converse lowboys. And a black porkpie hat. He carried a hard-shell guitar case, a Les Paul from the shape and size of it.

Jimmy liked him right away, pretty much everything about him.

Les put the guitar in the backseat before he even really looked at Lucy behind the wheel. He stood there. She got out from behind the wheel to come around to him. He dropped his head and sent his eyes sideways. She was about to hug and kiss him, standing there beside the car, but thought better of it, just smiled a big, real smile and touched the brim of his little hat with a finger and said something that made him pull his head away and pretend to be irritated.

He had a school backpack over his shoulder, his luggage. He threw it into the backseat with the guitar and got in up front. Lucy started the car and said something to him. He nodded. She threw the Skylark into an incautious U-turn and whipped around and came in right in front of Jimmy on the back of the bus bench and stopped. Big as hell.

She pushed it up into park and got out. She walked right past him without even half a look. She was either on to him or unnaturally oblivious.

Jimmy stayed put, ten feet away from the car. Les Paul fiddled with the radio controls, opened the glove box and dug around in it, but nothing seemed to catch his eye. He put his head back against the headrest, like he was half asleep. Or jazzbo cool.

Lucy came out with the goods, unbagged, a plastic bottle of Dr Pepper for the boy and a bag of Flamin’ Cheetos. She had a Diet Coke for herself and a limp length of Red Vines hanging off of her lip. She got back behind the wheel. She snatched one of his Cheetos and popped it in her mouth and started the engine. She seemed, at least for that moment, almost happy. She drove off, still somehow managing never to acknowledge Jimmy’s existence, just as the boy never had.

They were brother and sister.

Les Paul and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

Jimmy had found a CD in the glove box he didn’t remember ever buying, a double disk of Beatles outtakes and song demos from the time of
The White Album
and a few even back to
Sgt. Pepper’s
. It seemed just right for this trip, loose, clean, unpredictable, underproduced, each song stripped down to its essence, sometimes with lyrics that had gotten dropped before the slick, finished versions. Just now, with Paso Robles in the rearview mirror and the Skylark a quarter mile ahead, it was “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” and a new verse . . .

Jimmy sang out loud, riding along in the wind, sang the verses he knew, that everybody knew, and smiled all the way through the new verse, digging it.

There was no wrong way to come into San Francisco. No wrong time of day. No wrong time of year. Here was one place, changed as it was, that didn’t make you wish it was twenty years ago. Or fifty. Or even make you wish that you were that younger version of yourself, before everything happened that had happened, as some places do. As L.A. did.

You were you, now was now.

San Francisco was San Francisco.

It was eight or nine at night when the two-car caravan blew in from SoCal. Since it was just past summer, there was still some light in the blue to the west, Bombay-Sapphire-gin-bottle blue. Of course, it was twenty degrees cooler than it had been down south. Just right. The Skylark was five cars ahead of Jimmy, top up now. The top on the Porsche was still down. There was traffic around him, but Jimmy still heard the pop, the click of the Porsche’s lighter and reached for it, turned the orange circle to him and lit another cigarette. He had stopped a ways back and bought a couple of bottles of beer. What was next, torching up a joint? He was enjoying himself a little too much, like that early part of a night (that later turns out bad) when you first taste that first drink in the first place you stop and she for a minute lets down her resistance and looks at you, just in the moment, forgetting for a moment what you both know, that you were both there to talk the other out of or into something.

So Jimmy was still thinking about
her
. And they’d never even been to San Francisco together.

Lucy and Les had come all the way up the Central Valley on the 101, staying at the limit. The sister and brother had talked a little, then had fallen silent, at least from what Jimmy could see ten car lengths back. A bit below San Jose, in the last stretch of farmland, as the sun was dropping, Lucy had pulled into a rest area and gone to the ladies’ room, leaving the boy in the car. She stayed long enough to make Jimmy wonder if she’d fallen back into her gloom. Or something worse. Maybe she’d just made a call from the pay phone. She didn’t seem to have a cell. When she came back to the car, that’s when she’d put up the top. And she drove faster after that. She’d remembered
something
, something her brother had let her forget for a little while there.

Jimmy followed the Skylark down off the Bayshore and into the city, the dropping left turn down into the Fillmore, heading west on Fell. For a quick flash, there was the skyline to his right, a clutter of blocks dropped in the foreground.

Lucy had the use of a third-floor flat in a Victorian in the regentrified Haight, on Central, a block up from Haight Street next to little Buena Vista Park angling up the hill. Jimmy slowed at the corner where she’d turned, saw where she’d parked, halfway up the hill on the right.

He looped a block and came back on the intersecting side street. There was a lucky parking spot in the dim space between two streetlights. He parked, reached back, and hoisted up the top and snapped it down. It was cool. There was
moisture
in the air. Imagine that.

He watched. And waited. She just sat there, motor idling. Then she got something out of the glove compartment, maybe a white envelope, read something off the face of it, and looked over at the number on the corner building, the Victorian. She turned around in the intersection, put the car right in front, the nose pointed downhill now.

She sat there some more. The boy kept looking over at her.

A man with a white ponytail, a man in his sixties, came past on the sidewalk across the street, came down the hill from Buena Vista Park walking a dog, a chow with a loose black tongue and a tail curling up and over. The man seemed to Jimmy to make a point of
not
staring at the new-comers sitting in the Skylark under the circle of streetlight, kept on going down the hill. He lived over the wine shop at the lower corner, at Central and Haight. The chow waited, looking down at the ground like an old man, while his owner unlocked a black lacquered door. The man looked once back up the hill before he went in and the dog followed.

Across from the corner Victorian was a four-story building, a little too neat, too perfectly painted, with Catholic trappings, a cross on the crown of the roof and a flash of gold here and there. A nun in a blue habit was framed in a tall second-floor window with the white globe of a ceiling light over her head. Two girls played a board game framed in another window a floor above her, teenage girls in light blue smocks . . . What were they called?
Shifts.
On one girl, the cloth was stretched tight across her belly. Then Jimmy realized the other girl was pregnant, too, from the fullness in her face as much as anything. But not so far along. It was a home for unwed mothers.

It was a nice neighborhood. The Haight had been a lot wilder and woollier when he’d lived in San Francisco.

Lucy got out from behind the wheel. She went to the apartment building two doors down the hill on the same side, rang, waited there at the door. The boy got out a beat after she did and stood beside the car, looking up at the navy-gray sky. He looked like he was thinking that it was going to rain, but it was just the way the nights were in San Francisco in September, something else Jimmy remembered afresh. The boy looked over at his sister waiting there at the door, the way she was acting, but he didn’t dwell on it. It was just one more thing he didn’t get.

A woman answered Lucy’s bell, came out onto the sidewalk, out under the streetlight, and the two of them talked for a second, the slanted sidewalk forcing them to stand oddly, a little uncertainly. In time the other woman, who was enough older than Lucy to have a little mother in her manner, a little sympathy (or at least
judgment
, which is a kind of concern), reached into the pocket of the long sweater coat she wore and came out with a key, a loose key, and an index card. She put the key and the card in Lucy’s open palm and looked at her with that look again, the neighbor lady’s own version of the tough-love look the waitress had given Lucy back at the café in Saugus.

Lucy nodded and thanked her and said something that looked like, “I will.” The boy got his guitar and pack out of the backseat.

Five halting, unrhythmic tones sounded. Each of the three apartments in the Victorian had its own door at street level, on a marble stoop. Lucy had opened the center door, stepped just inside, the index card in hand, to punch a code into the alarm. There was another, longer tone, the all clear, and Les followed her in, climbed the stairs behind her carrying his gear, as the door closed itself. After a minute, a light came on in the front room on the third floor.

Jimmy started the Porsche. He pulled forward and turned right, drove up the hill on Central, alongside the Catholic home. He went to the top of the hill, to the park, and turned around and came back down and snugged the car in against the curb. From here he could see straight across into the apartment, from Lucy’s top-floor flat on down. There were closed drapes in the living room, but in the bedroom the blinds were raised. The boy Les was in the kitchen, looking up at the light fixture.