TWO
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.
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.
Girls Gone Wild.
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.
Three other peacoats chased a man down the alleyway between Pier 45 and the back of Alioto’s. Crab Boy jogged after the three new Sailors and the one they chased, but at a pace that said he didn’t mean to catch them, just wanted to be there when they all got to the end, when they caught the man.
The silver man. It was the silver-painted dancer.
The three overtook him and knocked him down and began a beating that scattered a clot of seabirds hunkered down in the shadow of what looked like a warehouse. Crab Boy came up and stood over the beaters, like a supervisor, like the boss’s son who’d been made night shift manager. Not getting his hands dirty. There was an ugly rhythm to it, the way they beat him, taking turns on him, each of them hitting him in the face twice and, at the same time, saying something.
Two words.
Jimmy caught up, jumped right into the middle of it. He seized one Sailor by the back of his blue-black wool coat. (It felt damp, perpetually damp, out in the weather like this.) Jimmy pulled the Sailor away, off the silver man, cast the bigger man aside with a strength that surprised both of them, that even made Jimmy wonder why he was suddenly filled with rage, why he’d gotten into it without a hesitation, without thinking. The other two Sailors didn’t miss a beat, kept pummeling the silver man, saying the same two words that Jimmy still couldn’t make out.
“All right. Cool,” the kid said after a minute. Instead of “Enough” or “Stop.”
The other Sailors stepped off.
“Damn!” the silver man said, still on the ground. Turned out he was black under the paint.
They all caught their breath. Jimmy turned to stare at the crab kid. The other Sailors were walking away.
“You look like you want something,” the kid said to Jimmy’s glare.
Now the kid flashed blue, but not in a way Jimmy had ever seen. A crackling, electric, staticky way, gone as soon as you noticed it.
Jimmy didn’t crack wise back at the boy. He’d only been in town a few hours. It wouldn’t get him anything. The kid turned in his very white Nikes and went back up the alley.
They were back behind the restaurants. The smell suddenly hit Jimmy, with his sinuses opened by the adrenaline coursing through his system. It was like ammonia.
“Damn,” the silver man said again.
Jimmy held out a hand to him, to pull him up.
The silver paint seemed to filter the man’s blue edge, like a gel on a spotlight.
Another Sailor.
His silver top hat had gotten knocked off. He retrieved it, tried to straighten out a crease it had picked up. He stopped to look at it in his hand, as if he’d suddenly realized what an improbable thing he’d become.
“What were they saying, when they were pounding you?” Jimmy asked.
“ ‘Who’s next?’ ” the silver man said in a way that meant that he didn’t understand it, either.