SEVENTEEN
The people of San Francisco didn’t look like they all wanted to die. Of course it was morning and, if the sun wasn’t exactly shining, it was up there somewhere on the far side of the “marine layer.” Jimmy was walking. Marina Green. They didn’t look suicidal. They didn’t look like the creeping cloud of death had o’ertaken them. The people of San Francisco looked like they wanted to play tennis, at least the ones standing at the back of the open hatch of the Porsche Cayenne all in white, in the parking lot of the private waterfront tennis club. They looked like they were thinking ahead to dinner, the ones coming out of the Safeway with a bag of groceries in each arm, a stick of French bread sticking out of one, just like in the movies. They looked like they wanted to go to work, the ones going past him in their cars all fresh and clean in their laundered starched shirts, in their ties, with their suit jackets folded lengthwise at the collar, like a butterfly, and laid over the back of the empty passenger seats beside them.
Die? They looked like they wanted to jog in matching outfits, earbuds in their ears. Then meet for brunch. They looked like they’d just had their teeth bleached and wanted everybody to see ’em. They looked like they wanted to sail the bay in forty-footers, loop around Alcatraz, out and back under the Golden Gate, the kids up front with their legs over the side. They looked like death was the furthest thing from their minds.
An old familiar feeling came over Jimmy, that I’m here all alone feeling. He had his own kind of hope, but he didn’t have it this morning.
When he made it back to where he’d parked the car there was a white flyer tucked under the wiper, white with a rainbow. A free concert on the Panhandle in Golden Gate Park. Three or four bands, food, holistic healers . . . Just like the last thirty-some years hadn’t happened. Over the rainbow, it said: Celebrate Life!
OK!
Midmorning. The Haight was just coming alive. The sun had broken through. Down at the corner on Central, down the hill from Lucy’s, the white-haired, ponytailed man who lived over the wine store with his black-tongued dog was out on the side of his place with a hose, watering a color-coordinated square of flowers around the base of a sapling staked out in the tilted sidewalk. The chow sat on the stoop in another of his old-man poses.
The ponytailed man made a point of not looking up when Jimmy parked the Porsche against the curb halfway up the hill, halfway between the corner and the Victorian apartment.
The nonlook made Jimmy go up to him. Or, rather, down.
“How’s it going?”
“Good morning,” the man said. He kept watering, kept his eyes on the stream as if he had to watch it or it would all go wrong.
“The woman who was staying on the top floor, up at the corner . . .” Jimmy began. The man nodded, nodded in a way that said he knew what Jimmy was going to say next.
“So you know she’s dead?”
The man nodded again. Jimmy got the idea somehow that this one had known more death than most, maybe even more suicides. But he still watered flowers.
“I was looking for the boy,” Jimmy said.
The man shook his head.
“Her brother.”
Nothing.
“You haven’t seen him?”
The man shook his head again.
Jimmy decided to see if he could blow things wide open. “I’m an investigator. From L.A. I followed her here.”
At least now the man looked at him.
“I was supposed to keep her safe, keep an eye on her, anyway.”
“Nothing you could do,” the other said.
Jimmy saw him look up the street. Machine Shop was standing on the corner next to the apartment, on the corner across from the Catholic Home.
Jimmy thanked the man with a wave. The man said No problem with a lift of his head. The rain from the garden hose kept falling on the petunias, which by now must have been screaming for help.
Jimmy climbed back up to the corner. “You got leaves in your hair,” Jimmy said to Machine Shop.
“I slept up there, in the park,” Shop said. Then he heard what he’d said. Slept. “I’ve been sleeping lately. Funny.”
“Why up there? You got a place, right?”
“I thought the kid might have gone up into the park,” Shop said. “You know, when you can’t stand to be around the other person’s stuff . . .”
Jimmy knew.
“Actually, I used to live up in here.”
“In Buena Vista Park?”
“Sometimes,” Shop said. “First Days. First Month.”
Maybe Machine Shop was about to tell the rest of his story, after the part about the plug-in radio landing in his bathtub.
But Shop stopped short. “So what are we going to do?”
Jimmy looked up at the apartment. “You sure he’s not up there?”
“I pushed the button. I heard it ringing. I tried last night, this morning. There was one light burning all night, in the hallway. He’s not up there.”
“Well then, let’s break in,” Jimmy said.
There was a way around the back of the apartment building, up a little alleyway where they stored the garbage cans, behind a white latticework shield. They really were fixing up the Haight. Even the alleys looked healthy.
“How many times you done this?” Jimmy said, when they were standing in the middle of the living room.
“I’ve done it. Seeing what’s in the icebox, that’s what creeps me out,” Shop said. “Or a half an apple, on the table.”
“Like the people at Pompeii,” Jimmy said.
“Pompeii. I used to put that shit on my hair,” Shop said, which was another way of saying, Can we talk about something else? He walked off toward the bedroom.
There were two toothbrushes in a Coke glass on the back of the white old-style pedestal porcelain sink. Hygiene, right up to the end. For Lucy, anyway. The boy had left his behind, wherever he’d gone. Jimmy had to find him. He had a special worry for the people left behind. The faucet was dripping, slow, three seconds apart. With the kind of sound that yanks you out of bed at midnight, that a Sailor can hear when nobody else does, day or night, anywhere. Anything like a clock.
Jimmy tightened it down. And then stood there until the last drop formed and fell.
“The Wind Cries Mary,” Shop said behind him.
Jimmy felt like he’d been stuck in the chest.
“What? What did you say?”
Machine Shop held up a square bar coaster. And then, in the other hand, five more, all the same. “Your boy’s been hanging at The Wind Cries Mary, a guitar joint over in the Fillmore. He had these all laid out on a little table beside his bed.”
The Wind Cries Mary. Doesn’t it though.
070
It said “Open @ Eight” on the door of the club, but ten was probably more likely. It was painted purple, a box that had expanded into the windowless box beside it. An expressionistic suggestion of a Fender Stratocaster stretched in broken neon across the face of it, like a poor man’s Hard Rock Café. A marquee spelled out the name of the guitar slinger of the moment, if the moment was ten years ago. Or twenty. One-night stands. A different player for the next three nights. Maybe the place looked better at night.
Jimmy parked at the curb out front, and he and Shop got out. They split up to circle the club and check out the alleyways. They met up again in back. Nothing, though there were a couple of street people living around the trash bins.
“I don’t like to think about him, just being out there somewhere,” Shop said. “It’s not good.”
They were about to get back into the Porsche.
“Wait a minute,” Jimmy said.
He had seen a face, a part of a face. A young face, in the window of a liquor store across the street and down a couple of numbers.
A kid in a hat.
Jimmy crossed between a speeding bus and lagging truck and made it into the liquor store in time to see the form of the kid duck into a hallway in back, between the coolers. (He was wearing a knit hat.) The boy went through a door and slammed it behind him but it banged back open, and Jimmy went after him.
“Hey!” a hard voice said behind him. “What the—”
The kid had run into a storage room. There was another door out, on the back. The room was stacked to the ceiling with cases of booze. The gaps between the towers were more the kid’s size than Jimmy’s size, and the boy threaded the needle, ten feet ahead of his pursuer, and got his hand on the knob of what looked like an exit.
“It’s all right,” Jimmy said. “Wait.”
The exit door opened. Light blew in. Jimmy found his own way through the boxes and ran outside.
He caught the kid in the paved space behind the store.
It was somebody else’s little brother.
“What?” the boy said, that way only fifteen-year-olds can. “What?”
“Sorry,” Jimmy said to the kid.
He didn’t know what to say to the clerk with the shotgun standing in the doorway, the gun held down low and braced against his hip like he knew what it was.
When they all settled down, Jimmy apologized, said he was looking for his brother.
“You forgot what your brother looks like?” the clerk said.