Among the Living (40 page)

“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.

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.

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.

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.’ ”

What Jimmy didn’t tell George Leonidas was the most important thing, that last night someone else was on the roof with his girls, someone to whisper a word in their pretty ears, another sort of Sailor. What he didn’t tell Leonidas was that there were two kinds of Sailors, two ways to respond to this impossible thing.

It wasn’t exactly a fashionable idea these days, but some were Good and some were Bad.

What was that one’s name? Jacob. Jason. Jamie.
Jeremy
. Machine Shop had offered up the name when his conscience had prompted him, when the other inside him had cleared its throat.
Jeremy.
There’s a villain for you. A skinny kid in a black North Beach beatnik’s turtleneck. And cape. A Jeremy.