Among the Living (35 page)

It was wide-screen, like a drive-in.

The air had weathered up, gotten heavy with water. Jimmy suddenly felt a little hollow inside but shook it off. So he waited, behind the wheel. He smoked another cigarette, though he was already getting bored with it. Smoking. He spun the dial, found a good station on the radio. They were playing Zeppelin,
Houses of the Holy
, broadcasting from somewhere down on the waterfront.

Act two, Lucy came in and sat on the edge of a stripped bed in the front bedroom, alone, her hands on her knees. Her worries, her sadness, the
heaviness
had sure enough come round again. Big surprise, it was lying in wait for her four hundred miles north. Jimmy wondered if she had any idea that half the neighborhood could see in, could see her sitting there, if they looked.

The boy came into the bedroom. He looked at her but just stood there in the doorway.

“Say something to her,” Jimmy said. “She’s your sister.”

But the boy just stared at her. Jimmy had decided a ways back down the road that they hadn’t seen each other much lately, were unused to each other. Lucy lifted her head and said something. The boy nodded and left the room.

After a moment, the downstairs front door opened, and he came out onto the sidewalk. By now the night had that horror film look to it, fog hanging around the streetlights, making each of them look like something
alive
wrapped in a gauzy cocoon. She had given him the keys, to lock up the car. Les got behind the wheel and put the key in. He looked for a second like he was going to take it out for a spin. He canted the wheels to the curb. Maybe he knew more about San Francisco than his sister did. He sat there a minute with his hands on the wheel. Jimmy could see through the back window over the seat backs that the radio had come on when he’d unlocked the steering wheel. Maybe the kid liked Zep.

The kid leaned forward over the steering wheel and looked up at the apartment, at the light in the bedroom. He turned the key, and the radio light went out.

After he’d locked up the car again, he stood for a moment on the sidewalk looking down at the sideways traffic on Haight Street, an electric bus clicking by, rolling toward Ashbury, too fast, rocking, just this side of out of control. Les didn’t see it, but the man with the white ponytail was watching him around the edge of the blinds in his second-floor bay window.

The kid went back up.

The overhead light was still on, but she wasn’t in the front bedroom anymore.

“She sent you away,” Jimmy said.

He watched as the boy went looking for her, worry in his manner, too.

Jimmy found her first. There she was, up on the roof, at the edge. Flat, no railing. She was looking out levelly, not up, not down, a look that said she just might take the next step in front of her, whether there was anything there or not.

So it’s going to be
tonight
. . .

Jimmy got out fast, left the car door open.

But then Les came out onto the roof behind his sister.

Jimmy stopped.

When the boy said something, the first thing Lucy did was to take a step back from the edge.

Jimmy couldn’t sleep,
didn’t sleep
, so after he’d checked into a high suite at the Mark Hopkins on Nob Hill, he went back out into the night. He left the Porsche in the hotel garage and took a cab. He went by the house on Central. The lights were still on in the front bedroom, but now the shades were down. There was the blue flare of a television behind the drapes in the living room, and the kitchen was dark.

The cab driver didn’t seem to make anything out of Jimmy telling him to just park at the top of the hill, looking down at the house. Ten minutes passed that way. Ten minutes of nothing. There was jazz on the radio, very low. The fog had settled in even thicker. July and August, Jimmy remembered, were the months when the fog really came in. Nobody told September the season was over. An electric bus blew past down on Haight Street. Jimmy motioned for the cabby, the same black man in his forties who always seemed to be driving the cab in San Francisco, schoolteacher’s black-rim glasses and a Kangol cap, to roll on down the hill. The cabby rolled on down the hill. To the corner.

Jimmy got out, paid him off through the open window, with an extra twenty to really make him wonder what
that
had been about, and set out walking in the direction of Haight and Ashbury. He turned to watch the cab pull away, waiting to see the cabby’s eyes in the rearview mirror, but the cabby never looked back.

It was San Francisco. Maybe he wasn’t that weird here.

There was a Gap on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. No Starbucks. Yet. But a wannabe Starbucks a few doors down. There was a good crowd. By now it was almost midnight. It took Jimmy a second to remember what day of the week it was. Thursday. The coffee drinkers were mostly professionals, young, not so young. Dressed nice. Good haircuts. In pairs, most of them.

Jimmy got a tea and a madeleine and brought them outside and sat at one of the little white corporate tables. There was only one other smoker, a self-consciously scruffy man in his late twenties, in a rough-weave unbleached wool sweater, off-white, over dark green cords and what they used to call desert boots. Suede. Probably Tommy Hilfiger. He had one leg angled up into the chair. He was smoking a good cigar. With the gold band still on it. Jimmy wanted to put a fist in his face, but only because of how young he was, how apparently happy he was, and because the woman leaning into him looked a little, in the eyes, in the cheekbones, like Mary.

A bus came. Jimmy jumped on it. It was the 43. He rode it out Fell along the Panhandle, halfway to the zoo and the ocean and then back again, back along Oak Street, along Market to the Embarcadero and then Fisherman’s Wharf.

The night was still very alive down along the waterfront, postmidnight, out-of-towners most of them, honeymooners, lovers on lovers’ long weekends, groups of three or four or five or six, more than a few in them in red sweatshirts with somebody’s logo, a convention of somebodys.

And
Sailors
.

That didn’t surprise Jimmy. This is where they’d be. And when. Was that why he’d come down here, looking for his kind? That felt a little pathetic to him. The bus he’d ridden in was one of the last of the night, five or six other passengers and Jimmy. Maybe there’d be another run, one last loop when the bars closed, whenever that was.

Most of the people were at Pier 41, where the red-and-white boats over to Alcatraz docked. The last Alcatraz boat came back at six or seven, but the ticket windows were still open for tomorrow’s runs. It sat out there, Alcatraz, across the night, swathed in the clouds of fog that sat on the Bay. Other nights you’d be able to make it out from here, the lights, even the shape, the edges, but not tonight. Tonight there was only a sweeping light on the highest building, behind the cotton of the fog, and a moon up there somewhere, too, or a piece of one, a dull glow at two o’clock.

There were street entertainers, each with his own little knot of audience. There was a juggler. There was a close-up magician, making things disappear.

There was a man painted silver. Head to toe. In a silver tux and tails, silver spats and silver shoes and a silver top hat that stayed somehow on his silver head. With a boom box. Dancing like a robot.

The Sailors moved among the tourists, bumping into them like pick-pockets, knocking into strangers just for the joy of it, for the harshness of it, with a rough laugh whenever a man from Kansas or a woman from Germany would excuse themselves, though it was the Sailor who had run into the innocent. Same as it ever was. Some of the tourists would check their pockets, to make sure.

But it wasn’t their wallets that had been taken.

A couple of the crab stands were still open. Five bucks got you a red-and-white square paper tray of shredded Dungeness crab with a quarter lemon and a tear of sourdough baguette. Jimmy sat on the stool, close enough to be getting a facial from the stinking steam that came out of the stainless steel box. He’d already shoveled a forkful into his mouth. It was good.

“What do you want?” the teenager working the stand said. It was a Leone Brothers stand. This kid was likely a Leone grandson, maybe great-grandson.

His tone was a little quick. Jimmy waited.

“You look like you want something else.”

“More cocktail sauce, I guess,” Jimmy said.

The kid put an open paper cup of red sauce in front of Jimmy, the kind of little cup they put pills in, in a hospital. “You want horseradish, say it.”

“I do.”

The server spooned an amount of white horseradish that would have been too much for the average person into another paper cup and set it beside the first one.

“That’s the way I eat it,” the boy said.

“You still eat it?”

“Every day.”

“I thought maybe you’d get sick of it.”

“Every day. Ask him.”

“Who?”

The boy looked over Jimmy’s shoulder at a busboy pulling up black rubber mats, hosing off the underneath. The stand was in front of the mother restaurant, closed up at midnight.

“Do I eat crab?” the kid asked.

“Every day,” the busboy said.

From twenty feet away, a Sailor was watching them, watching the dumb little play, the tourist getting stroked by the Welcome to San Francisco Committee. This one, this Sailor, sat on the closed lid of a Dumpster, a blond man who’d been a bit overinflu enced by Billy Idol, a little too pretty, lips too full in that pouty Billy Idol way. He wore what a lot of them wore, the ones with that certain attitude, the navy peacoat and watch cap. This one also wore black straight-leg 505s, pegged skintight, and pointy-toed fairy boots like The Beatles used to wear.

Only
red
.

“I know you, Brother,” he mouthed to Jimmy. There was just a hint of blue around him, as if he were wrapped in another kind of fog. And he had that look, that Sailor sneer.

Why were they always so sour?

“Nice night for a white wedding,” Jimmy said back at him, across the twenty feet between them.

The crab kid gave Jimmy a funny look.

Then everything started to speed up. Another Sailor came over to Red Boots with an
it’s-happening-now
look on his face, and Red Boots jumped off the Dumpster. He didn’t even look over at Jimmy as he went past. On a mission. None of it surprised Jimmy or made him wonder where they were headed. They were always scurrying around with sudden purpose, this kind, this time of night, like junkies energized by the rumored arrival of dope.

What did surprise Jimmy was that the crab kid was a Sailor, too. When the first two passed, the second Sailor caught the kid’s eye, motioned with his head. The crab boy fell in step with them, abandoned his post at the stand. The trio headed off across the last hundred yards between restaurant row and the waterfront, leaving Jimmy to wonder if he was losing his sense of things, getting slow. He’d missed it. There was nothing about the kid that made him think this one was a Sailor. No lost look in the eye, no flare of blue. No fatalism. No bitterness.

He wondered something else, if the kid had read
him
.

Jimmy went after them, took his little twist-off split of Napa Chardon nay and what was left of the crab with him.

The drama was at Pier 35, one of the old World War II-era buildings, with its big, flat, blank face.

A matched pair of perfectly naked girls was on the lip of the two-story facade of the building. Black-haired, with cute helmet haircuts, turned under just below the ears, bangs straight across just above the eyes. They looked a little French, a little Godard. They were holding hands.

They had a good-sized crowd of their own, five or six banks of people standing before them in concentric half circles, heads back, smiling, entertained.

But then there was a man, whom Jimmy hadn’t even seen until just now, who
wasn’t
naked, right behind the girls, all in black, hidden by the shadows on the ledge until now, who now leaned into the frame and said something into the space between their two heads, something that only took a second.

Or took half the night, depending on how tuned in you were.

And, next beat, the girls jumped, hand in hand. Dove . . .

They were so pretty, so
French
-seeming, had such beautiful bodies; it was clear the rapt crowd half expected them to arc back up into the air and land on their feet, like Cirque du Soleil. Instead, everybody got to watch as the two crashed into the cement in front of the dock building face-first, shoulders and chests first, one girl somehow slightly ahead of the other and with a sound like hundred-pound sacks of potatoes thrown off a loading dock.

Nobody stepped closer for a closer look. Nobody had to check to see if they were still alive.

Jimmy was in the second row, and he didn’t step closer for a closer look, either, but he could
smell
it over the wet-dog musk of the Bay. It was a smell he knew.

When he looked up at the top of the facade again, the man in black was gone.

Crab Boy was behind Jimmy, over a row or two.

He looked at Jimmy. And
smiled
. How inappropriate.

The two Sailors in peacoats and watch caps, Red Boots and the other, didn’t waste any time. They jumped on it, were already on the move, working together, doing this thing, Red Boots shoving people back and the other Sailor getting right in their faces for up-close scrutiny, one person at a time, looking each person in the face.

It had a name. It was called, prosaically,
Looking
.

Then Crab Boy split. Something else had caught his eye, movement out at the edge of the crowd. Somebody chasing somebody.

Jimmy went after him. After them.