THIRTY-SEVEN
They left the top down all the way, even when they ran through a little rain south of Salinas. The kid had his porkpie hat on. The guitar was covered.
Life was good.
“Where’d you get that hat?” Jimmy said over the wind.
“It was my dad’s,” Les Paul said. “It was in the closet.”
“Where’s he?”
“Down in L.A. someplace.”
The kid wasn’t in any hurry to get home. You could feel it coming from him. Going home felt like a sentence.
Jimmy came off the 101 into the middle of Paso Robles. Angel and Lucy were behind them in the Mercury. Jimmy slowed, let him come up alongside.
“Take the 46,” Jimmy said. Angel nodded and sped ahead.
Jimmy turned off to the right. He knew where the kid lived, a few blocks ahead, a street over from the main drag where the little store was. But he didn’t go there yet.
He drove up into the brown hills a mile off the highway. There was a hundred-year-old oak with free shade underneath it. Jimmy parked.
He popped the rear deck on the Porsche and checked the oil, to have something to do.
“All that stuff you saw, forget it,” he said, his head over the engine. It crackled like a fire.
Les was looking to see if he could see the ocean from here.
“I never been up here,” he said.
“It’s nothing for you to think about the rest of your life,” Jimmy said, standing, closing the hood. “It’s not something a guy needs to know. It’s not even real. A lot of it. They just make stuff up.”
The kid turned. “I don’t want to forget it. I want to use it. In my music.”
It made Jimmy want to cry. Something did.
“What’s your name, anyway?”
“Johnny,” the kid said.
096
Angel had found his own shade tree, at the roadside twist of stainless steel memorializing James Dean. On 46 just before it meets 41. Lucy was just coming out of the little café with a Coke to go.
Jimmy was flying along at a hundred when he came up on them. He pulled it down into fourth and braked just enough to skid into the dirt lot in front of the memorial.
But Angel saw him coming. He already had the door of the Mercury open for Lucy, and she got in, and Angel roared out of there ahead of Jimmy, letting the speed slam the door closed.