SEVEN
Machine Shop sat on the Market Street streetcar, in one of the side seats, one of the wooden slat benches. For some reason, San Francisco had bought up a half-dozen old New Orleans streetcars, refurbished them, kept the names.
Where was Desire?
Shop had all his gear with him, on the rollie. He was in his paint, fully, freshly silver.
“Look like you’re moving out,” a Chinese man seated across from him said.
“No, jus’ headed toward my destination,” Shop answered.
“You look like robot on vacation.”
“Jus’ making my witness,” Shop said.
Jimmy was on the bench next to the Chinese man. It was an hour before sundown, not an easy time for him generally, the hour when the shadows tended to cross his soul.
But everybody else was happy. The Chinese man and almost everyone else on board were headed to a Giants game, a night game down at the new ballpark, the replacement for Candlestick, with some company’s name crowbarred into its name. The streetcar riders were all decked out in Giants’ shirts and jackets and hats, like the oddest, most overweight, most over-the-hill team imaginable.
It reminded Jimmy what a blue-collar town San Francisco was at its heart. There were plenty of the rich here, on Nob Hill, on Russian Hill, here in the City and over in Marin, on Tiburon, down in Hillsborough, but it was a city stocked with robust working men and women and their families. A union town. A proud town. A cohesive town. A public-transit town. A sweating town.
Going to work, just like Machine Shop.
They reached some stop, and the doors opened, front and back, and everybody else stood.
“Who’re they playing?” Jimmy said to one kid on his way out, a boy eight or nine.
“Asshat Dodgers,” the kid said, and got a laugh from the crowd.
Hey kid, at least in L.A. it’s still just Dodger Stadium.
The streetcar rolled out again, empty except for Shop and Jimmy. Jimmy said, “I didn’t mean you had to actually sit with Lucy last night.”
“Yeah, that wasn’t my plan,” Machine Shop said. “It just happened.”
Machine Shop didn’t offer anything more, until he realized Jimmy was waiting for a report.
“She didn’t come out of her place for a long time,” Shop said. “The boy just played his guitar. I couldn’t hear it, but I play a little myself. I believe he’s good. I used to play, in my previous position.” Shop went down a memory trail for a second. Jimmy waited.
“A light came on in the front bedroom about ten forty-five,” Shop said. “I guess she was sleeping up until then. A few minutes before eleven, she came out. She was dressed up, kinda nice, but she had on a heavy coat, heavier than what she needed really. Had the collar up. Walked down the hill to Haight. She walked right straight to the corner, to the coffee place. She got a coffee, took it outside, sat down. I was watching from across the street, over there where you were later. She was pitiful. I couldn’t stand it, came and sat with her, talked to the girl. She’s just a child herself.”
Shop exercised his lower face vigorously. “Am I cracking?” he asked.
“No, you look fine.”
“I gotta get in character,” Shop said.
“When you came up and sat down,” Jimmy said, “did you get the idea she was meeting somebody?”
Machine Shop didn’t answer for a long beat, staring straight ahead. Then he animated, straightened his spine, pivoted his shiny head robotically, and produced a mechanical sound without moving his lips.
“No,” he said, unblinking.
The streetcar rolled on through the Financial District, empty, cold-looking, the wind stirring through it on a Saturday night, and made the big left turn onto the Embarcadero. I Cover the Waterfront. A Bay sunset cruise ship, out to the Golden Gate and back, was docked at Pier 39; a line of twenty ugly limos waited at the curb nose to tail, new-style prom haulers, stretched Escalades and Excursions. And a Hummer. The last time Jimmy was in San Francisco, the Embarcadero wasn’t a tourist stop. The first time he came to San Francisco, there was still a freeway overhead, running along the curve of the docks and piers. It had been torn down a few years back. The docks had been just docks for all those years before that. Then somebody had gotten the idea tourists would come to the water’s edge if they gussied it up a little. Come down to see where a hundred thousand wives and girlfriends said good-bye to a hundred thousand soldiers and sailors headed off to war. That was the scene in Jimmy’s head as he looked out the streetcar window at the docks and the piers, that high drama, though it was before even his time. A lot of tears shed on these piers.
I cover the waterfront, watching the sea
Will the one I love be coming back to me?
Now it was home to another kind of sailor, off to another kind of war. One of their domains, one of their gathering places here. Every city had its Sailors, if some more than others. Even inland. Kansas City, Chicago. Even Orlando. (Though inland, they still tended to congregate near whatever big water was available.) But the big coastal cities collected the most Sailors, from inland, from all over. From small towns. You didn’t like to be alone. You needed reinforcement, whether you were good or bad. (The new initiates straightway found out there were two ways to go.) Buses brought them every day, trains. They didn’t much like to fly.
Jimmy saw a bright flash of blue around a young woman in a cluster of people at one of the stops. They were street kids, but not too ragged. One boy had a guitar. Even as the streetcar was pulling out again, with that surprising acceleration, Jimmy heard what he was playing, what they were singing, R.E.M., “Losing my religion . . .” Jimmy turned to look back at them, at the girl. Three of them were Sailors, though her blue, the edge of blue around her, was the strongest. So she was the newest, probably, or at least the newest to San Francisco. She had that New look in her eyes. She wore a T-shirt from some Oklahoma barbecue. He hoped that’s where she was from. Oklahoma.
Machine Shop was looking back at her, too, at the cluster of Sailors. He mechanically rotated his head to the forward position again.
Jimmy rotated, too. He pulled the photo out of his pocket, the Leonidas girls beside the ski boat. With two days now past since she’d died, Christina would look different, but not completely different. He wouldn’t have admitted it if someone had asked him, but he was down here to try to find her. There were things to look for. Sometimes the eyes would be the same, if you got up close enough. Jimmy hadn’t known her, never spent any time with her before the dive off the roof. If he had, maybe he’d know her when he saw her. The surest link between the before and the after was gestures, the way you walked, nervous tics, the way you bit your lip, the way you brushed your hair out of your eyes. That was what was left. Maybe you could say that about anybody you remembered.
Jimmy watched Machine Shop do his act for twenty minutes. They’d gotten off two stops after they’d seen the Sailors losing their religion. Shop had been “on” since the Financial District, rolled his rollie down the streetcar steps as a robot, held the doors open for a middle-aged white lady as a robot, moved away as a robot, even sidestepped a cluster of pigeons feeding on a spilled bag of popcorn as a robot. He drew a crowd immediately.
Shop’s act, at least what Jimmy saw, had two aspects: he interfaced with skeptics, and he danced. The interfacing was simple. They tried to make him laugh. Or get mad, in the case of a pair of blocky twenty-something boys, probably in town on liberty from their shitty East Bay jobs. Those two got right in Shop’s face and sneered and said some things, worked in tandem, one on each side of him. In the end, Shop’s answer was a perfectly executed 180-degree pivot.
The dancing was basically a robot on Soul Train or, when the demographic skewed older, American Bandstand. A lot of Ohio Players and Earth Wind & Fire. A little KC & the Sunshine Band, the early years. Jimmy pushed through from the second row and put a twenty in the overturned top hat, up until then empty except for Shop’s own prime-the-pump fiver. A couple of others followed Jimmy’s suggestion. Machine Shop bowed his appreciation in four mechanical stages.
The sun was gone. Here came the night. Jimmy ended up at the crab stand, where he’d gone that first night. Where he’d met the Sailor crab kid who had middle-managed Machine Shop’s beating, apparently for the crime of trying to suggest maybe the twins didn’t have to jump. In Jimmy’s mind, this was Sailor Central. For now anyway.
Crab Boy. There he was in his perfectly white sneakers. The stand was busy, every stool taken, a cloud of steam engulfing the scene. A heat lamp kept the curly fries warm. The light turned the whole steam cloud red. Dante’s Crab Stand. The kid recognized Jimmy, jerked his head up in a noncommittal greeting, but never slowed the pace of slinging that Dungeness into those red-and-white paper boats. A sheet of white wax paper, a handful of crab, a white plastic fork, a tear of sourdough bread, a look up at the customer for a nod or a no, and then a wedge of lemon. Or not.
“Gimme one,” Jimmy said.
“Aye aye, Cap.” There were four orders ahead of him.
“You seen Jeremy?” Jimmy said when a stool came free.
“Who?”
“Jeremy.”
“I don’t know any Jeremy,” the kid said and made the name sound funny. “I just barely know you. Who’s Jeremy?”
Since they were using lines out of movies, Jimmy had one of his own. “Somebody said look him up,” he said.
Crab Boy didn’t say anything for all of a minute while he filled orders, then got to Jimmy’s.
“Where’s your metal nigger friend?” he said.
Jimmy wondered if Crabby was related to the blockhead East Bay boys trying to make Shop crack.
“If he heard you say that, he’d . . . turn the other silver cheek.”
The kid put the crab and a cup of horseradish in front of Jimmy. “You want that wine again?”
“A beer. An Anchor Steam.”
“You’re trying too hard, man,” the kid said.
Jimmy waited him out.
“I’m just dicking around with you,” Crab Boy said. Two more customers were coming up, a couple. “Jeremy’s around somewhere. He usually comes later. What do you want with Jeremy?”
“I have ten grand to give him,” Jimmy said. “Or is it twenty?”
“That’s good,” the kid said. He looked at the newcomer customers, raised his eyebrows, brightened his face a little, his version of, “What’ll you have?” The man held up two fingers to order, but a forefinger and thumb. European.
“Where ya from?” the kid asked. “Deux. Due. Dos.”
“France,” the man said. “Montpellier?”
The kid rattled off three or four lines of French, but it was mostly wrong and more than a little confusing to the French couple. But Crab Boy slung it with feeling. He was already prepping and filling the paper boats.
“Who’s next?” Jimmy said, apropos of nothing.
It took the kid out of his crab-slinging rhythm, but he tried not to show it. “What did you say, sir?”
“Who’s next?” Jimmy said. “C’est qui, le prochain? Wer ist an der Reihe? Chi é prossimo?” he added, for fun.
“Ask Jeremy when you see him,” Crab Boy said after another delay that showed the kid was anxious about answering wrong.
Jimmy got up, surrendered his stool to the French lady. He overtipped the kid, which was a way of insulting him, because Jimmy knew he wasn’t down here on the waterfront to make a living.
He went trolling for Jeremy.
It didn’t make any sense, but he went first to the place where he’d last seen him, the only time he’d seen him, Pier 35. Where the girls had jumped. Tonight, nobody was naked, nobody was dying. But, hey, it was early yet. There was a crowd, gathered around a man with a trained cat act, cats walking a little tightrope, jumping from perch to perch. Then he’d have them walk back and forth across his shoulders to show that they enjoyed it as much as he did. For some reason, the ringmaster narrated the show with a thick French accent, at its thickest when one cat “pretended” not to want to do this tonight, and he had to go to his knees to scold her with a finger in her face. Jimmy turned away when the flaming hoop came out.
“Have you ever smelled burned cat hair?” he said to a girl as he was leaving.
She gave him a smile. He had seen her in the crowd. She was alone, maybe twenty, twenty-one. Or sixteen. A blonde. Pink Juicy knits, top and bottom. Cute sneakers. There was something about her eyes . . .
But she wasn’t a Sailor. She certainly wasn’t Christina Leonidas, unless she’d adjusted to her new state faster than anyone ever before. This girl looked more or less at peace, a place few Sailors ever found.
Jimmy bought a coffee and found a bench where he could sit alone to drink it.
He wasn’t alone for long.
Meet Jeremy.
Suddenly, he was right in front of him, apparently dropped right out of the sky onto the bench across from him. Their knees were almost touching. Jimmy would have wondered if it was a gay attempt at a pickup if he hadn’t recognized him right away, what with the length of long black coat (was it a cape?) thrown over the knee. Jeremy. And here was his “support staff,” close by but not too close, three strong-looking ones ten feet away, sitting on other people’s cars. Make that four. There was Red Boots. Five, Red Boots’s sidekick. Good Lord, they were capes. Half of them wore long black capes. With silky rope ties to wrap them at the neck. New Romantics! One of them was one of the men who’d stood over Machine Shop on night one, punching him in the face.
“What’s that smell?” Jimmy said.
“You’re not in L.A. anymore, Brother,” Jeremy said. Projected. Rumbled. He had an unnaturally deep voice, like a DJ, a DJ gone bad. Unless that’s redundant. It was the kind of deep, dramatic voice that sounded worked on. Probably in front of a mirror. “All the senses can come into play here,” he intoned.
“You know, I’ve noticed that,” Jimmy said. “At home, I can’t smell anything. Here, it’s sea spray and patchouli and steamed crabs and . . . what’s that purple flower, out under the Golden Gate?”
Jeremy’s face was in the light. He wore a black turtleneck over black gabardine slacks. He liked jewelry. Silver. He was an old Sailor. Anyone passing by who didn’t know him, or who didn’t suspect anything about him, who didn’t know who/what he really was, would peg him for early forties. That was another thing about them. It wasn’t that Sailors didn’t age, just that they aged on their own clock and calendar. There wasn’t exactly an answer to how old he was, how old any of them were. You might as well just pick a number out of the air. Sometimes a Sailor looked ninety and had died at thirty and been in this state just ten years. Others times, more likely, a guy would look mid-thirties with fifty or sixty New Years on him. Doing the math didn’t do you much good. This one had probably been a Sailor since the 1950s. Maybe since the 1930s. At least the ’40s. Maybe he’d been down here, this Jeremy, watching the wives and girlfriends saying good-bye in the war. Picture him sidling up to them, insinuating himself into their blues, offering his handkerchief for them to dry their tears. He was a predator. He’d probably be here another hundred years.
He looked like Charlie Watts. But without the happy-go-lucky disposition.
“So it’s true?” Jeremy said.
“What’s that?” Jimmy said.
“That the Sailors of the north have, what you call it, an identifying scent.”
“I think I just meant your cologne,” Jimmy said.
“I heard the scent is rather sweet,” the other said. He was a familiar type among those on the bad side of the Sailor world, pretensions of sophistication, but a thug.
“I shouldn’t have said anything,” Jimmy said.
Over by the cars, Red Boots got a message from somewhere, just like the other night, another Sailor running up. There was action somewhere. It didn’t seem important enough to involve Jeremy, but Red Boots went away with the runner.
A moment later, Jimmy saw Lucy. Lucy and company actually, Lucy and the two women moving through the crowd fifty yards away.
Jimmy looked away quickly. He didn’t need for Jeremy to connect her to him.
“So who is next?” Jimmy said.
It was like Jeremy was ready and waiting for the line. No hesitation. “I was hoping you knew,” he said. “They say you’re a somebody down south.”
“You ever been down south?”
“Man of the north, tried and true, Brother,” he said. He uncrossed his legs and leaned back. He opened his thighs and hustled his balls, rearranging things in that way jocks do. And salesmen, trying to close the deal, man to man.
“What does killing a couple of girls get you?”
Jeremy just took the line like he’d probably take a two-by-four between the eyes. Rock steady. What else you got? That’s what it meant to be an old Sailor. And this was sure enough a salty dog. Jimmy started wondering if maybe he’d been around for the ’06 quake.
“One step forward, two steps back,” Jeremy said. “They’re in a better place, some would say.”
Jimmy had had enough cryptic bullshit to last him awhile. “I believe I’m going to get me some more of that crab,” he said.
But, before Jimmy could split, Jeremy suddenly sat up straight and lifted his nose in the air. One of his Watchers across the way perked up a second later, as if he’d gotten the silent signal, too. Suddenly they were all on their feet, Jeremy’s crew, looking around in every direction. Like hunting dogs.
And then they were gone, all of them.
A second or two later, the background noise changed. A movie sound engineer could explain it, would know all the layers, would know what had built the previous sound, the ambient resonance of the water, the waves against the pilings of the docks, seabirds on top of that, the traffic near and far, and all the ways the crowds were noising, and would know what had changed.
It wasn’t a silence exactly. It was nothing, turned up loud.
Jimmy looked over to the right. Whatever had happened, it was to the east, the Embarcadero.
He found it.
He walked into the back of the crowd. Here was another kind of audience. Jeremy and his men were already there, had already pushed through to the front.
It was a streetcar, stopped dead in its tracks.
It was a body, cleaved into halves.
It was a transit driver standing there with that nothing-I-could-do look.
And that smell in the air, spilled gore.
Jeremy dispatched his men. To Look. It was like the other night, the men circulating through the bands of spectators, staring individuals in the eyes. Looking.
Jimmy moved closer. He couldn’t see if it was a man or a woman, old or young.
Of course he thought, Lucy. When he’d seen her, with Sadie and Pam, they were heading this way. If they were headed anywhere. They were just strolling. Pam had a drink with a straw, something bright red in clear plastic. Sadie had her arm in Lucy’s.
It was a man. Two halves of a man.
Jimmy stepped closer.
The eyes were still open. The upper half was on its side. The lower was on its back. (Had this human being already lost the right to personal pronouns?)
The impact had torn open his pants. He had an erection. Jimmy had heard of it, a final jolt of nerve voltage through the cord, a last rude impulse. A last joke.
“Don’t you have a tarp or something?” Jimmy said to the driver.
The driver shook his head. “You don’t touch ’em. You just wait.”
Then Jimmy saw Lucy in the crowd, across, on the far side of the halved man. She had seen it, and seeing it had changed her face.
But she was moving away, or being moved away, Sadie with her arm around her, Polythene Pam coming along behind them, finishing her drink, cute as a bug.
He went after them, pushed people out of the way to get to them, but they were too far ahead of him.