Among the Living

FIVE
Jimmy sat with his eyes closed in a club chair by the window in his tenth-floor suite at the Mark.
For three hours.
There was a bedroom and a sitting room. He was in the bedroom, with the drapes open. When he’d first come back from the Golden Gate, from following Lucy and Les, from looking her right in the eye as she’d walked right back past him on the bridge, he had sat there for a long time and watched the light change, the clouds moving in across the Bay, their quick shadows crossing Alcatraz. Then he’d closed his eyes. Now it was five thirty. The day, which had begun so beautifully, was ending that way. At least for those looking at the sky.
Jimmy opened his eyes. He stood and took off the coat of his suit and laid it across the bed. He looked at the clock. He put on some music, the jazz the black cabby had been listening to, old jazz from a station that broadcast from down on the wharf and used Billie Holiday’s “I Cover the Waterfront” under its station IDs. He walked back to the window. The low air conditioner under the tall picture window blew right at his groin. It would have been funny, worth a joke, a line, if he’d had anybody in the room with him. He found the little door to look in on the AC controls, fiddled with the knobs and buttons, but couldn’t shut it off. You didn’t need AC in San Francisco, and the hotel didn’t have it for years, didn’t have it the last time he was here. The windows used to open, even the tall ones. He felt his anger rise, felt it burn out to the surface from whatever tight, dark spot he usually kept it stuffed into.
“Goddamn it!” he said, slamming the little lid closed.
The machine wasn’t a bit offended, responded only by blowing more cold air at his genitals.
Jimmy snatched up the phone and rang the front desk.
“Yes, Mr. Miles,” a man with a young voice said, a beat sooner than you’d get for a regular room in a regular hotel.
“I can’t turn off the air-conditioning,” Jimmy said, barked, like some I’m-paying-a-thousand-dollars-a-day L.A. type. He heard the way he sounded but blew out the rest of it anyway. “I don’t want it; I don’t need it. I want to open the window. I’m not going to jump. I just want some pure air. I want my goddamn window to open the way it used to open.”
“Yessir. Sorry.”
The wall behind the bed was mirrored. Jimmy got a look at himself on the phone, the clench of his jaw.
He took what they call in childbirth pain-management classes “a cleansing breath.”
“Mr. Miles?”
“Yeah, look, I’m sorry,” he said with his normal voice. “Just tell me how to turn this thing off or send someone up.”
“They’re already on the way, Mr. Miles.”
He hung up. There was a trio of water bottles on a smoked green glass tray on the table beside the bed, the Mark Hopkins label. He opened one and drank it down, standing there. He took a second one to the window, cracked the seal on the bottle.
Any time Jimmy cursed in front of his friend Angel, “took the Lord’s name in vain,” Angel rebuked him. Or thought of it. He should call him. He should have called him already. He hadn’t reported in since he’d stood on the brown hillside west of Cholame. Yesterday morning.
What would he report? Lucy had looked all right when he left her a few hours ago. The brother and sister took a cab from the bridge back to the Haight. Jimmy was in a cab right behind them. He blew past them on Masonic, then had the cabby loop around up by the top notch on the park and came back down. He’d waited up the hill that way, like a jealous lover, like a nervous dad, for twenty or thirty minutes before the cabby shifted in his seat one more time, and Jimmy let him roll on. They were home. They were OK. But something had changed that morning. Jimmy had looked into her eyes, really looked. On the bridge, the boy had reached her in time, and she had put a look on her face that tried to laugh it off, to say that this couldn’t possibly be what it appeared to be, a woman purposefully pacing off the last of her life. Jimmy had the details, if Angel wanted them. Les had made his awkward joke about dropping her Diet Coke and water. “I didn’t know what you’d want,” Jimmy saw him say. And then, as the traffic came back to speed, blasting past them headed north, as life had resumed, Lucy had put her arm in her brother’s, very grown-up, and they had turned and started walking back. Jimmy was against the rail. He set out walking, toward them. So they wouldn’t be suspicious of him. (He couldn’t believe they hadn’t yet made him, with all the close surveillance. But they weren’t criminals. Why would they think anyone would be watching them?) And so, walking toward Marin, with the two of them walking back toward the visitor center, he came face-to-face with Lucille. Up close. Close enough to see into her eyes.
Here’s what changed in that moment: Jimmy wasn’t impatient with her anymore. He no longer doubted the genuineness of her melancholy.
He drained the second bottle of water. Now night was falling. He’d have to go back out there to her, back to the Haight, wait there at the apartment building until she came out. Or went to the roof again. He had to do what he could do. He had to go to work. It was what he did.
So why did he have this knot in his gut?
Why was he so full of anger?
There was a knock at the door, a little less subservient sounding than he would have expected. Maybe he hadn’t intimidated the house staff after all.
It was a black man. Tall. Bony. He looked a little like Al Green, standing there, especially when he smiled, with big, perfect teeth.
He was wearing black-and-white suede shoes. With dice on the toes.
“I maybe got something for you,” he said, stepping right on into the room after a quick look down the hallway in one direction. He closed the door behind him. “Little sumpin’ sumpin’.”
Jimmy looked from the shoes back up at his face.
“Machine Shop,” he said.
“How are you, man?”
He looked naked, diminished, out of his silver paint. The face and neck were swollen in places from the beating he’d taken behind Alioto’s, but Shop was dark-skinned, and the bruises would be hard to see. One eye had probably been swollen shut when he awoke that morning. It was still puffy, teary. There was a hematoma in one corner of the white of the eye, like a drop of red ink in a teaspoon of milk.
“I called, but . . .” He stopped. With Machine Shop, it was like there were two people in there, engaged in steady, often heated conversation. The other must have said something. “All right,” Shop said, “I never called. I just came over.”
“How’d you know where to find me?”
“You had matches from the Mark, when you were smoking. You smoke too much, man. The body is a temple.”
“I just quit.”
“Good. You had two packs of matches. You got to the end of one, and you had another pack. So you had to be staying here, not just using a pack of matches somebody gave you. And then I made some calls.”
“Calls.”
“I keep my ear to the anvil,” Shop said.
“Called who?”
“All right,” Machine Shop said, “I didn’t call exactly. I just asked around about you. I have my network. Down on the water. Who you were. I knew where you were from, you told me that. I asked people who knew people. I found out, you know, what you do.”
Jimmy waited.
“You know, that you’re a detective and all. From Down Below.”
“You mean hell?”
“L.A., that’s what I call L.A. It’s one of my trademarks.” He heard another inner rebuke. “All right, that’s what a friend of mine calls it. Los Angeles, Down Below. Or jus’ D.L., short for Down ’Low.”
“D.L. instead of L.A.,” Jimmy said.
“That’s jus’ him,” Machine Shop said. “Look, like I said, I maybe got something for you . . .”
“Tell me what you think you know about me,” Jimmy said, an edge to his voice now.
“That you’re a detective. You look into things for people. But not for the money. You work out of your house. That it has to be something that, you know, touches you in your soul.”
“That it? Is that who I am?”
“That, you know, you’re a Brother. Well, not a brother, but, you know, a . . .”
There was a knock at the door.
“That’s probably him now,” Machine Shop said.
Jimmy reached for the knob, not really hearing the last thing he’d said. “That eye looks bad,” he said. “You know any Sailor doctors?”
“Look, before you—”
Jimmy opened the door.
Two people stood there. One was a very short man, built like a bomb. Brown cuffed trousers, a white short-sleeved shirt, tight over the biceps. Brown wing tips. A full head of straight black hair, oiled, combed back, a once-a-week barbershop haircut.
And a sad, Greek face.
The other guy standing there was a thirty-year-old boy in a Kelly green Mark Hopkins blazer who wondered who the man beside him was.
“Is this him?” the Greek man said to Machine Shop, pointing a finger at Jimmy.
“I said wait,” Machine Shop said. “Downstairs.”
“Mr. Miles?” the hotel boy started.
Jimmy dismissed the boy. “It’s all right,” he said, “I’ll do it myself.”
The green-blazered boy looked at the tiny, strong man and then at the tall black man with the beat-up face.
“You sure?” he said.
“Yeah, thanks,” Jimmy said.
The hotel runner gave Machine Shop and the short Greek man another comprehensive look, as if he might be called upon to testify later, and nodded to Jimmy again and padded away.
So then it was just the three of them.
Jimmy let the Greek man come in, even let him close the door behind him. He didn’t break five feet, but no doubt he could kick both of their asses.
“Have a seat,” Jimmy said to the little guy. The Greek man took a seat.
Jimmy snagged Machine Shop’s eye and tipped his head for him to follow him into the bedroom.
Shop came into the bedroom. Jimmy closed the door. He just looked at Shop, asking the obvious.
“It was his daughters who stepped off last night,” Shop said.
Jimmy didn’t exactly see that coming. People were always showing up with “a friend,” some old grievance they thought Jimmy could fix, something “that should just take a couple hours.” If you were a plumber, after you’d had a burger or hot dog out in the backyard, before the game started, they’d probably ask you if you’d mind taking a quick look under the toilet.
But this came at him from an unexpected angle. Had he forgotten about the beautiful naked girls, the dive off of Pier 35 last night, his first night in town? It’s not the going fast that kills you; it’s the sudden stop. He went over to the window. The city was purple all of a sudden, from one edge to the other. It was like a postcard with the color out of whack.
“The twins,” Machine Shop said.
“Yeah, I know. What’s he doing here?”
“He doesn’t know how to deal with it,” Shop said.
“I’m not a counselor,” Jimmy said.
“He has all these questions. I thought of you.”
“Yeah, I’m the answer man,” Jimmy said, with his back still turned.
“He lives across the Bay, El Cerrito,” Machine said. “They were just out of high school. They were younger than they looked. I thought they were from some other country, but they were just girls just out of school, come into the city for, I don’t know, the nightlife. You see a lot of them down there, more than you’d think.”
When Jimmy didn’t say anything, didn’t even seem to hear him, Machine Shop kept on, “He got the call at one-something in the morning. He came over there to the wharf. He was still there when I came back at dawn, like I always do, after I went home and got out of the paint. He was just walking around, standing there at the place where it happened. I hesitated to talk to him, but it was easy to see who he was.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I tried to comfort him. Just that—”
“What did you tell him about me?”
“Just that you were a friend of mine and that you were a detective, that you looked into things.”
“That’s it?” Jimmy said, turning to look at him, a hard question.
“That’s all I said,” Shop said. This time there didn’t seem to be a second voice in his head calling for a correction. After a second, he said, “They still lived at home.”
“You’re playing me,” Jimmy said, looking back down on the bruised city. “Stop it.”
Shop held up his hands. “He just needs—”
“He needs somebody else,” Jimmy turned and said. “I’m not a shrink. I’m not a minister. How am I going to help him? I don’t know shit. I’m not smart. My instincts are lousy. I hear something wise, and I make a joke about it.”
“I understand,” Shop said. “I fully understand.”
“I have something I’m doing already. For a friend of mine. Tell him—”
But then the door opened, and the father stood there. He looked at Jimmy and then at Machine Shop and then back at Jimmy. Maybe he’d heard them through the door.
“He said you were there, too, that you saw it, too,” the short man said. Only now did he let them hear the hint of an accent, a little Greek in the voice to match the shape of his face and the color of his eyes.
“Yes, I did,” Jimmy said. “I’m sorry.”
The man reached into the pocket of his shirt.
“Don’t show me pictures,” Jimmy said, raising a hand against him.
The man pushed the picture back down into his pocket.
That sad Greek face. It could have been half of the comedy/tragedy emblem. There’s no tragedy like Greek tragedy.
“What’s your name?” Jimmy said.
“George Leonidas.”
Jimmy offered his hand. “Jimmy Miles.”
“It means lion. My family’s name.”
“I know,” Jimmy said.
“Why do you know?”
“I’ve been around.” Jimmy was still standing at the window. He turned, took a step closer to the man, a sympathetic step. But what he said was, “I can’t help you.”
Machine Shop lowered his head and closed his eyes, his hands folded in front of him, like an elder standing before the first pew.
“I have to say,” Jimmy said, with that same impossible mix of hard and tender, “there probably isn’t anyone who can help you. What’s happened is awful and wrong and impossible, but you have to take it. And probably alone. This time, it’s your turn.”
“Goddamn,” George Leonidas said. It meant three or four things. Goddamn you was one of them.
Jimmy just stood there in front of him for a long time. Neither man moved, almost as if Jimmy was ready to take a shot to the mouth if that’s what George the Lion needed to do next. But the small man just stood there, eyes on the floor. Jimmy could hear each breath he exhaled over the feathery whisper of the air conditioner.
It could have ended there, but then Leonidas said something, still staring at the muted green carpet in front of him, said it to himself more than to anybody else, or to God, something that flipped it all toward the other world.
“I saw Christina,” George Leonidas said. “And she saw me.”
055
“There is a place, a position, something, a state,” Jimmy said, “between being alive and being dead. Not alive, not dead. In between.”
There it was, for those who like their reveals cold and hard.
They were down in the Tenderloin. In the Porsche. Jimmy had the gray light of the dash on his face, the shining wood-rimmed wheel in his hands. He was riding in third gear with low revs, and the engine was purring. The Porsche was glad to be up out of the hotel garage, out breathing the night air. Jimmy was half lost but wouldn’t admit it. It was a bit after nine, early yet, but the alleyways were already spotted with street people. Early yet, but there would still be a mad yell every once in a while, echoing off the emptied buildings. There wasn’t much other traffic, a cab every once in a while or a lost, slightly spooked tourist or a box truck making a night delivery. Not even any cops. They’d roll in later, when the Tenderloin got its full freak on.
A place, a position, a state.
Something. He’d never found a noun for it. And as for the verbs . . . well, the verbs only added more confusion. To the uninitiated anyway.
“I know it makes no sense to you,” Jimmy said. “How could it? You saw their bodies. But then you saw the one of them, up and walking, hours later. Who can understand that?”
George Leonidas was in the passenger seat, one hand on the grip bar on the dash, the way old people will do, or people unused to sports cars. Staring straight ahead, like he was scared. As if what he was wide-eyed about was the speed and the low-slung car. He didn’t say anything.
Jimmy kept up the monologue. It was always a monologue. “They’re called Sailors,” he said, hearing himself pick the pronoun. They. “Not alive, not dead exactly. At least, not gone. Not a ghost, but flesh and blood.” He thought of the mash of meat and blood where the two had impacted. He had seen the bodies, too, and before the sanitation death techs had cleaned things up.
He steered into the first of the real mysteries. “When this happens, when one of . . . them is born, they take on a new face, but, for the first hour or two, if the loved ones are around, the new might resemble the old, if they saw each other. But just for the first hours. Or, other times, it’s not that way at all. It’s not set. Each time is . . . each time.”
His voice was low and steady, undramatic, like the engine of the car, just cruising through wild territory. He heard himself. It was like listening to his voice on a tape recorder. Jimmy Miles Explaining It. He remembered something he hadn’t thought of in years, a ride with his father, when he was ten or eleven, when his father told him he and Jimmy’s mother were divorcing. Middle of the afternoon, picked up from school. The tone was the same, Jimmy realized. The flat tone carrying the earth-rending news. Then it had been that speech that begins, “Sometimes a mother and a father grow apart . . .” Grow apart. Things don’t grow apart. They either grow together, or they die.
The street was one-way. A half block ahead, the light went to yellow, but Jimmy kept on at the same speed. It was full red when he went under.
“Is it only when they kill themselves?”
George Leonidas had spoken.
“A lot of Sailors are suicides,” Jimmy said, “but some were murdered. Some were accidents.”
“I was electrocuted,” Machine Shop said from the back, like another track on the stereo. He was wedged, long leg bones and bony arms and all, into the Porsche’s jump seat, the little fold-down seats meant to hold bags of groceries or maybe a kid or two. His bent head was stuffed up against the leatherette headliner of the ragtop. It made him look like a giant in a very modern fairy tale.
Jimmy looked up at him in the center rearview mirror.
“A woman threw a plug-in radio into the bathtub with me,” Machine Shop said. “I was just taking a bath.” There was another millisecond for the corrective voice. “OK, I was with another lady friend . . .”
“All we know, or think we know,” Jimmy said to Leonidas (and to himself, for the ten thousandth time), “is that it happens when there is some unfinished business. Maybe because there is unfinished business. Nobody knows. You’re here as long as you’re here. Then you move on.”
“Where are you taking me?” George the Lion said.
“Nowhere,” Jimmy said. “We’re just talking.”
He pulled it down into second and took the next right, onto Castro, took it a little faster than he had to.
056
It was Friday night in the Castro. The after-work bar crowd had spilled out onto the street, drinks in hand, some of them. All men, in this block. They’d hang out there for an hour or two, and then the night crowd would start to show. Leonidas, even in his present stricken state, was put off by the scene, men with their arms around each other. He had his window up, but you could still hear the punch-bag sound of the bass speakers in the clubs. Techno and house.
Jimmy took a right, climbed a hill, just like he knew where he was going. There was a park to the right as the road curved around on top of the hill.
Buena Vista Park. So maybe he wasn’t lost after all. He stopped. There, below, was Lucy’s Victorian apartment building, lights in half the top-floor windows.
Les was in the dining room. He had the Les Paul guitar out of its case, had it on his knee where he sat at the head of the long dining table. The table was mahogany, deep red, shiny, with the point of a white lace cover hanging off each end.
So the borrowed apartment belonged to a lady. It would fit with everything else, another woman putting her arms around the waif. Jimmy wondered who she was.
There was a dim light in the front bedroom, Lucy’s room. It said she was there, that she was alive. Like Tinkerbell’s little light.
Jimmy got out of the car. Machine Shop took the opportunity to unpack himself from the jump seat. They stood beside the Porsche, left Leonidas where he was, still gripping the bar, even with the car parked.
“I appreciate you doing this,” Machine Shop said. “Saying the words. I never been any good at that.”
“I was mostly just talking to myself,” Jimmy said.
“I hear you. If there’s ever anything I can—”
Jimmy cut him off with, “There’s a woman in that apartment. That’s her brother, in the dining room. Her name is Lucille. Lucy. I don’t know what his name is. I call him Les. I need you to watch them, while I’m with him.”
“I should be at work,” Shop said.
“I have money.”
“I don’t do it just for the money,” Shop said. “It’s my witness, in its own way.”
“Her name is Lucy,” Jimmy said and opened the car door. He went to his pocket and took out a fold of bills. He gave a couple hundred to Machine.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Don’t let her kill herself,” Jimmy said.
057
Then they were out of the car, walking, Jimmy and George Leonidas, down on the waterfront. It was the happening part of the night, crowds of tourists, even locals, enjoying the seafood joints and the street dancers and the jugglers and each other. It was Friday night.
“Here,” George said, pointing to a corner of one of the parking lots between the trolley tracks and the docks. “This is where I saw her, my Christina. There were no people then, or only three or four. Not all this.”
“What time was it?”
“Four o’clock.”
“Was she alone?”
“There were two others, a man and a woman. Away from her, but watching her.”
“What do you mean, they were watching her?”
“Like I was watching her, like she was mine. Like she belonged with me. They were watching her like that, too.”
“What did she look like?”
George Leonidas’s hand went toward the pocket over his heart again.
“I meant the one you saw,” Jimmy said.
The Greek father took the picture from his pocket anyway. He gave it to Jimmy. “Christina is on the right. She would always be on the right, Melina on the left. She looked like herself.”
Jimmy looked at the picture: He expected a yearbook picture, maybe the officers of the high school Greek Club. Or an all-dressed-up-for-the-prom picture: full, frilly dresses, a pair of dorky boys in tuxes between the gorgeous twins. What he got instead was a shot of the teens in one-piece swimsuits, Speedos, one black, one silver, standing with water skis beside the stern of a low-slung powerboat on the shore of some big-acre reservoir somewhere inland, brown hills in the background. Maybe Bethany, looking down on Altamont. The name of the boat was Zorba. Their black hair wasn’t wigs. It was real. They wore it longer and looser in the picture. And wet and ropey. The sun was dropping.
“I saw Christina,” the father said. “I saw her.”
His hands had tightened into fists. At his side. As if he was clutching an iron bar in each one.
Jimmy handed back the picture. It hurt to look at the girls.
“You said she saw you. What did she do?” he asked. “Did she say anything to you?”
The sad Greek face tightened up, especially around the eyes. It was as if someone had sprayed something corrosive at his face.
“What did she say?”
George Leonidas took one of those clenched fists and punched Jimmy right in the face. Just like that.
Jimmy took it. It snapped his head back and knocked him onto his heels, but he took it, and all the surprise that came with it. George the Lion stepped a step nearer, closed up the distance the head shot had knocked between them. Only a second had passed. As Jimmy was bringing a hand up to his jaw, where the first of the pain was pushing its way out past the stunned surface and into the bone at the same time, the little man hit him again. In the face again, in the same place.
This time, Jimmy fell away, as if he’d been “slain in the spirit” on some cable TV evangelist’s stage. George came after him, punching him twice in the belly, dull thudding hits that, even as Jimmy fell onto his back, made him think, Old World. He was getting an old-world beating, an hon orable, manly, controlled beating, though the man landing the blows had completely lost it.
They weren’t in the most crowded area, but there were people nearby, and they turned to look with the sound of the first couple of hits and whatever sounds Jimmy had made. They stepped closer, the witnesses, but there wasn’t any cheering or joviality, the way there is in bad movies. They were seeing it for what it was, a bloody shock.
Leonidas couldn’t stop himself.
Jimmy just took it. He barely lifted his hands in defense. He tried to get to his feet, managed only to get to his knees.
Leonidas hesitated. Jimmy’s let-me-have-it manner broke the heated spell the Greek was under. He dropped his fists back down to his sides, like he was letting go of something, almost like he was throwing away something with both hands.
Jimmy touched his cheek with the back of his hand. It came away with blood smeared across it. But his mouth wasn’t cut, and his eyes still worked. And he knew he didn’t hurt any more than the other did.
“I don’t understand,” George Leonidas said. And said it all.
But he had something else for Jimmy. “That’s what she said to me. ‘Daddy, I don’t understand.’ ”