TWENTY-THREE
Angel was standing in the driveway in front of the garages when Jimmy came back from Malibu. It was dark already, the moon through the trees.
“Your Porsche is downtown,” he said before Jimmy got out.
They both knew what all it meant.
Jimmy went in and took a long shower, changed clothes. He sat in the dining room and drank a glass of water. He’d looked at the blue revolver in the desk drawer in the office but closed it without taking it. Who was he going to shoot?
They drove out Sunset in Angel’s pickup. It was a Thursday night but there was traffic, a rattle and hum in the air, people either driving fast or way too slow, sudden screeching U-turns in front of you, cars double-parked, as if everyone was off on his own trip.
Angel went south on Highland.
“Where’d you spend last night?”
Jimmy just shook his head.
“I called, came by,” Angel said.
“I just rode around.”
“Rode around.”
“I ended up out at the beach.”
“A sailor watching the sea.”
“I’m all right,” Jimmy said.
“Good,” Angel said. “We’ll see about tomorrow.”
They came south six more blocks.
The wave was breaking.
Returning . . .
Jimmy looked over as they passed the recording studio. Clover. The past was knocking him on his ass, had been for days now, since Big Sur. Old music kept going through his head. On every other street corner he saw a memory in bright relief, a piece of a scene, in daylight or dark, played at double speed, or half.
There was the razor wire around the roof. They used to go up there, on the roof, smoke and look out over low Hollywood.
He was on the roof with one night at the end of a session and the singer said he’d give Jimmy a ride back to the Chateau Marmont. Jimmy didn’t have a car but in those days you didn’t need one if you looked right, if you were in on the joke, in on the big idea they’d all just that summer discovered. 1969. You stood by the side of the road looking the way you looked and someone would stop and you’d get where you wanted to go, particularly if you didn’t much care where you went.
This night it was .
But they hadn’t gone back to the Chateau Marmont but to three or four houses instead, up in Laurel Canyon and, even though it was four in the morning by then, all the way out to Topanga. There was downstairs cocaine for everybody who came by and upstairs coke for the famous people and their friends, even their new friends. His mother was gone, off on location again. No one was waiting up for him.
The singer came through the room, said some of them were leaving for the desert, to ride horses. And peyote.
Jimmy told him he’d see him tomorrow night at Clover.
He had talked for hours with a girl who’d been to Morocco but he was alone on the deck when the new sun broke over the ridgeline and lit up the head of a royal palm across the canyon, as suddenly as if fire was involved.
Angel drove, low in the seat, his arm on the armrest between them. Now they were down in South Central. Angel wasn’t afraid of any part of L.A. so they were on surface streets. Black men sat on the fenders of cars parked in front of houses with barred windows but nice little yards, one of those TV news neighborhoods where the mothers put their children to bed in the bathtubs some nights in fear of gunfire.
Jimmy dropped his window. Angel reached over and turned off the A.C.
“I used to live down here, block west of Normandie,” Angel said.
There was vague music from multiple sources. Angel drove slowly, out of respect for the people who lived there. The streets were concrete with a bead of black tar in the expansion joints. The truck’s tires thumped rhythmically, like a heartbeat, another kind of music. They slipped past one bungalow, all blue-lit inside, just as the front door came open, letting out an explosion of television laughter. A woman stepped onto the porch and called out something to the men. Two of them had a pit bull spread-legged on the hood of a Buick Regal, slapping it in the face every time it thought to move.
“Her father is a Sailor,” Jimmy said.
He hadn’t said anything since Highland, since Angel had asked him where he spent the night.
“I thought maybe it was headed that way,” Angel said. “How did you find out?”
“I saw him. Palos Verdes. A house his son owns. I saw him kiss a young woman, the daughter of one of The Jolly Girls. She looks just like the mother did then.”
Angel nodded.
It was a Sailor thing, you drove the car you drove then or would like to have driven. You lived in the house you lived in then, if you could. And you tried to find a new version of the girl you loved then.
“How much are you going to tell her?” Angel said.
“Not much. There’s not much I can tell her without telling her everything.”
“Maybe she already knows.”
Jimmy shook his head.
“I don’t think so.”
“He was living here all along, ten miles away? And you think she didn’t know? She just happened to find an investigator who was a Sailor, too?”
Jimmy didn’t answer it. He’d asked himself the question enough. None of it was important to him anymore. None of it would make any difference.
He would just let the wave break.
“How much longer did you think you could wait before you told her what was up with you?”
“Longer,” Jimmy said.
They rode another block. An ice truck came past. Hollywood Ice. Angel turned left on Exposition to head downtown. His rough leather-bound Bible on the dash started to slide sideways.
Angel put a hand on it to stop it.
“I wish I had what you have,” Jimmy said.
“What’s that?”
“Believing that everything is part of the plan.”
“Me or you believing it isn’t what makes it true,” Angel said.
They drove under the Harbor Freeway toward downtown and something else came to Jimmy, something else he should have seen before. That he was the same age as the kid Drew that daybreak in Topanga Canyon, the morning of the last day of his life.
046
The alley was a dead end. Jimmy’s black Porsche sat, top down, dead center in the circle of light an old-fashioned incandescent streetlight threw.
It looked like what it was, bait in a trap.
They got out of the truck. The key was in the ignition. The Porsche was clean. There weren’t even any fingerprints on the glass. It was as if someone had wiped it down just minutes before they arrived.
It was almost eleven o’clock. There were a few homeless people but no Sailors. And this wasn’t where the Walkers lived. Downtown was real Sailor territory, too hardcore for anybody but the strong ones.
Drew had come right down into the middle of the darkest version of the Sailor world.
Or been brought to it.
There was shuffling in the shadows. A man in a peacoat and watch cap. He said nothing and barely looked at Jimmy. He finished his cigarette and dropped it at his feet and stepped back into the deeper darkness without lifting his eyes again.
Jimmy turned to look at Angel, who stood beside his truck.
“Why not?” Jimmy said.