Among the Living

THE NEXT


ONE
Would you like a side of Death with that?
It was the Saugus Café, thirty miles north of downtown L.A., off Old 99, the Newhall Road, one of three or four spots claiming to have laid the table for James Dean’s last meal, a slice of apple pie and a glass of milk if the legend had it right, before he drove his Spyder 550 on north over the Grapevine to Cholame and the Y intersection of the 41 and 46 highways where a Cal Poly kid in a black-and-white Ford turned in front of him. The diner was borderline shrine. There were pictures of Dean all along the wall above the long counter, the one from Giant with his arms draped over the rifle across his shoulders like it was the top bar of the cross or something, the other famous one that everybody’s seen, Dean’s hand at his waist, middle finger and thumb curled to touch, index finger pointing off camera. Above the register was one of Dean leaning against the silver Porsche roadster in front of a gas station down in L.A. where he had picked up his mechanic that morning. That fateful morning . . . Isn’t that what they say? The two were on their way to a pro-am race up at Salinas when they bought it, when Mr. D waved the black flag. It was like they always said over the PA out at the old Saugus Speedway on hot Saturday nights, “The most dangerous miles driven tonight will be your trip here and home . . .”
But then again, as the racers like to say, it’s not the going fast that kills you . . . It’s the sudden stop.
The waitress waited. “Would you like a side of beans with that?” she said again.
“What kind of beans?” Jimmy Miles said. The place wasn’t crowded. It was early afternoon. He could play with her a little.
“Ranchero beans,” she said.
“Pot beans,” Jimmy said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Maybe cooked with a little bacon.”
“Uh-huh.”
There was a fly, big and blue and buzzing, the size of a jelly bean, flying in wack circles over the booth, slamming itself into the same spot on the plate glass window every half minute, trying to get out of there but not learning a damn thing from previous experience.
Jimmy knew a thing or two about that.
The waitress snatched it out of the air and snuffed it, dropped it onto the linoleum floor and flipped it under the table with the toe of her waitress shoe all in one seamless little . . . what would you call it? Dance?
“I guess I’d better,” Jimmy said. “And a beer. Whatever you drink.”
“I drink cherry Cokes,” she said.
She was the kind of waitress who didn’t write anything down, and he was the kind of customer who hadn’t needed a menu, so she just tapped the Formica twice with her short, unpainted nails and stepped away.
“And pie,” Jimmy said after her. “Apple. And milk.”
“Why not?” she said without turning.
Jimmy looked out the window, across the street, at the old clapboard train station. It used to be across two lanes; now there were four and clotted with traffic. A hundred years ago, it had been a stagecoach trail. Two hundred, a mission trail, friars and priests. Five hundred, five thousand, and it would be indigenes with leathery feet, breaking the dirt down to dust.
The girl came back from the bathroom. Her eyes were red, but she wasn’t crying anymore. She had a folded brown washroom towel in her hand, too rough to put to your eyes. She was maybe twenty-five, a Latina, but one who’d probably never been south of San Diego. Or maybe even Long Beach. She was wearing a rayon dress, like this was the forties. Or The Postman Always Rings Twice.
She hadn’t looked at Jimmy once since he’d come in, or at anyone else in the place, off on her own trip. As soon as she sat back down in the ban quette, her food came, a tuna melt and a side of fries from what Jimmy could see. She smiled up at the waitress, an open-eyed look that almost asked the woman to sit down and talk about it, femme to femme. Almost. There was a lot of almost in the young woman’s story, from what Jimmy could already see.
“Anything else, hon?” the waitress said to her, like a nurse.
The girl shook her head. When the waitress was gone, the forced smile fell off the girl’s face. She arranged the two plates so it suited her, pushed the ketchup bottle forward an inch, and then picked up half the sandwich and took a bite. A big bite, like a teenager, like a teenager on a date. They usually didn’t eat, not like this, when they were sad or shaken and running like this. She reminded Jimmy of someone, though she didn’t look anything like the other one, a woman out of his past—a face, a pair of eyes, a mouth, a shape still waiting in a room inside him anytime he opened the door. Maybe it was this girl’s appetite. She ate like the date she was on was the tenth date or the twentieth or some number past counting, as if she didn’t have to prove she was “ladylike” anymore. Like she loved you and knew you loved her, had seen her all kinds of ways.
Like that other one.
Or maybe it was just that her dress was soft light blue, like the feeling she brought over you.
She never finished her food, stopped after those first big bites. She bothered the fries another minute, then gave up, pushing the oval plate away so she could put her hands on the table in front of her. She wasn’t married, or at least didn’t wear a ring. She didn’t wave for the bill, didn’t seem in much of a hurry to get back on the road, just sat looking out the window right past Jimmy at her car, a baby-blue ’70s Buick Skylark convertible that had been lowered a bit. A couple of minutes slid by like that, with her looking past Jimmy at the car, then the waitress appeared and pushed the ticket across the table to her. She looked at the slip of paper and took in a breath and slid out of the booth, as if it had been a note from the older woman that said, Honey, you’re just going to have to go on and deal with it.
Her eyes were leaking again before she reached the door.
Jimmy waited a minute or two and then left a twenty on the table and stepped out into the dust and the truck stink from the highway. The Skylark was already gone out of sight, but it didn’t matter. He knew she wasn’t going anywhere but north. She wasn’t going to turn around and head back to Los Angeles, he knew that. She was hard-running and that meant north and there was really only one way to go.
The sun was bright; the light had a kind of aluminum sheen to it. It had been hot the last few days. Hot and dry. Jimmy reached in and opened the glove box and found a pair of beat-up Ray-Bans. Tortoiseshell, almost red. He had brought the Porsche, the ’64 Cabriolet, the ragtop, and the top was down. It wasn’t the best car for this kind of thing, too showy, too one-of-a-kind, but something had made him pick it. He opened the door and let the wind blow through it a minute, cool off the seats before he got in it. It was September.
Dean died in September, didn’t he?
Because he knew he could catch up to her, Jimmy didn’t get back on the 5, took a right off Newhall Road instead, and drove out past what was left of the old speedway. A little memory jag. There were the wooden stands, red and white, peeling a little but looking permanent. The track was a dead flat third-of-a-mile asphalt oval, a “bullring” racetrack that had started out as a rodeo arena. A subdivision had built up around it now, plain-Jane two-story stucco houses with saplings staked in the yards, blank-faced houses, sand colored, looking like the boxes real houses would come in. The last races had been run ten years ago, but the owners had kept it up, rented out the facility for Sunday morning swap meets. A couple thousand people would come, even driving up from Los Angeles, church for believers in bargains.
But it was empty now, about as empty as empty gets. Where was the tumbleweed blowing through? Jimmy jumped a low chain-link fence on what they called the back chute and walked out to the center. It was paved from one side to the other, cracking and not as black as it used to be but so hot his shoes smacked.
He looked up at the stands, found the row where he used to like to sit. The top row.
Where they used to sit.
It looked bad in the daytime. In the present.
048
So maybe it wasn’t about James Dean after all . . .
The Skylark girl (he’d learn in a minute her name was Lucy, Lucille) had taken the exit off the 5 onto California 46, headed west toward Lost Hills and Paso Robles, and now she blew right by the intersection where Dean had died and then on past the memorial, a granite marker and a bend of stainless steel wrapped around an oak next to a café six miles along at Cholame.
Jimmy didn’t stop either, just hung back a mile. A little two-car caravan traversing central Cal. There was enough rise and fall on the highway to give him a good look down at her every minute or so, to keep her in front of him without her seeing him.
He pulled off after ten or twelve miles of that.
“Did you do the Skylark?”
He was on the shoulder, directly under a whistling cell tower “camouflaged” to look like a spindly evergreen, which was particularly stupid given that this was in the middle of bare brown rolling hills, it the only “tree” for miles. Unless you counted the occasional oil derrick.
But the reception was good.
“I painted it for her,” Angel said. “For her boyfriend, actually. He give it to her.”
“Is he the problem?”
“You really are a detective.”
“So he let her keep it when he left?”
“I guess. She kept it.”
“I don’t know, bud,” Jimmy said, “I might be on his side, taking a man’s car.”
“He’s dead.”
“What’s her name?”
When Angel told him, Jimmy sang, “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille . . .”
“Loose wheel,” Angel said.
Back in the day on those Saturday nights at Saugus Speedway, when one of the old clunker stockers would kick loose a wheel, send it bouncing across the infield, the announcer—Jimmy remembered his name, Virgil Kirkpat rick—would wait a beat and then say the line: “You picked a fin e time to leave me, loose wheel . . .” And the crowd would laugh, like he was Jay Leno.
“I drove on out there,” Jimmy said. “The speedway. Jumped the fence.”
“And it was sad,” Angel said back to him.
“I can take sad,” Jimmy said.
“Not so much as you think,” Angel said.
“She’s headed toward Paso Robles, unless she just wanted to cut over to the 101 or the coast. Any idea why?”
“That’s why I’m paying you the big dollar,” Angel said.
“I haven’t been out of town in a while,” Jimmy said. “It’s nice out here.” A wind had blown over the hill, and the air smelled good, like the inside of a wooden box.
“Where did you pick her up?”
“She was right where you said she’d be, bright and early.”
“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.”
049
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.
Fourteen.
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 . . .
I look from the wings at the play you are staging,
While my guitar gently weeps . . .
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.
050
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.
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.