Among the Living (55 page)

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.

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.

Sailors never flew, unless drugged and bound and gagged, so Angel came north on the train. The Coast Starlight. Two of his guys had dropped him off at Union Station in downtown L.A. Then it was across through the San Fernando Valley, coming out at Oxnard, then up the coastline on into the Central Valley, sunset about Salinas, in the dining car if you were in the mood, then rolling miles of dark fields, just enough time to think of all the things you should have done differently since ninth grade. The Starlight left SoCal midmorning and made it into Oakland after nine.

When Jimmy drove up out in front of the station, Angel was standing there. The train had gotten in early.

Then they were crossing the Bay Bridge back toward the City.

“How did she get in touch with you?” Jimmy said. It was almost the first thing he said to Angel.

“What do you mean?”

“How did you know she was in trouble?”

“Lucy never got in touch with me,” Angel said. “A friend of hers come to me.”

“And said what?” Jimmy said.

Jimmy’s tone had some accusation in it, but Angel didn’t let himself react to it. He knew what it was, what was behind it. Guilt. Jimmy’s anger at himself. Angel cut people a lot of slack.

“It was one of Lucille’s girlfriends, a girl I didn’t really know but who knew about me,” Angel said.

“Knew what about you?”

Jimmy had two hands gripping the wheel. He noticed them, his hands, as the Porsche rolled under another pole light on the bridge, as the orange light flared in the cockpit and he got a shot of the taut skin across his knuckles.

“I just meant—” Jimmy started.

“I
loved
her,” Angel said, cool and calm. “But where’s that gonna go? She was young. I’m old and a Sailor on top of that. Or, I’m a Sailor and old on top of
that
. You know how that works.” The last was as much a rebuke of Jimmy (and his own past, his own history with women) as Angel would offer in this story. “So I never told her right to her face. I was ‘her friend,’ helping her out when I could, talking to her when some guy did her wrong one way or another. This girl, Mariel, she knew that, the last part, that I cared about Lucy.”

Jimmy stared at the backs of his hands, willing some of the tenseness out of them. He stared until one relented and let itself drop off the wheel onto the leather-wrapped shifter knob.

“I even introduced her to the last guy,” Angel said. “Guy I stripped and cleaned the Skylark for.”

“So what happened, after the other girl came to you?” Jimmy asked. “I’m just trying to start at the beginning.”

“I know what you’re trying to do,” Angel said. He reached to the floor between his knees for his leather gym bag. He unzipped it and took out a pint of Courvoisier. Jimmy had smelled the sweet stink on Angel when he’d embraced him on the concrete in the front of the station in Oakland. Angel never drank at home. Too many of the people around him, the boys and men he was trying to help, had drink and drug problems. Things were confused enough for them. He never offered the bottle to Jimmy. Angel unscrewed the cap and took a sip. “You’re trying to start at the beginning. You’re trying to
find
the beginning.” He had a little edge to his voice. He took a second hit.

“I’m sorry,” Jimmy said. It had a kind of all-purpose quality to it.

They rode in silence for half a minute, crossed Yerba Buena Island in the middle of the two halves of the bridge. It was like a fist of rock in the middle of the Bay.

When they went through the tunnel, there were no cars close around them in the lanes going into San Francisco. The Porsche engine sounded a good rumble.

“Love that tuned exhaust,” Angel said. “L.A. Symphonic.” He screwed the metal cap back on the cognac and dropped it into his bag.

“
Lil’ Bitch,
” Jimmy said. It was what Angel had named the car when it had been reborn in his shop back in L.A. years ago. James Dean’s Porsche 550 Spyder was named
Lil’ Bastard
. Jimmy and Angel never said the name to anybody else.

Out the tunnel, off to the right across the slate water, was Alcatraz. And, dark at its side, Angel Island.

“There’s your island,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah, I wonder if they’d let me camp out,” Angel said.

“I got a room for you,” Jimmy said.

“So after I got the call from Mariel,” Angel said, “I went all crazy-like and drove over there, right then, that night. I took this old piece of shit car of my neighbor’s so Lucy wouldn’t look out the window and know it was me. I parked up the hill a little bit, but I could see everything. She was in her front room. She has this house.” He paused. Jimmy knew Angel was adjusting the tenses in his head.
Has
to
had
. Or trying to.

“It’s all right,” Jimmy said. “I don’t need to know any more.”

“She was sitting right in the front window, where I could see her, like a picture in a frame,” Angel said. “Like she was waiting for me. But, of course, she was waiting for this guy. To come back. Or just, I don’t know, waiting for things to get better again for her.”

“Yeah, I saw that look,” Jimmy said.

“She just sat there.”

“So when was that?”

“The night before she left. To come up here. Last week. The Skylark was parked out front of her house, and I was on the other side of the street. She shouldn’t have left it out like that, where people could see it.”

“You talk to the boyfriend?” Jimmy said.

“The dead don’t talk,” Angel said. Then he said, the way he always did, one of his jokes, “Oh, yeah, I forgot, sometimes they do.”

“He was a gangbanger?”

“Yeah. But he was just out with his sister, down in San Diego, leaving SeaWorld, in the parking lot, when they hit him. Friend of mine down in Diego said it was another gang.”

“When was that?”

“I don’t know, sometime. A week before she left to come up here.”

“She was waiting for him to come back to her. But he was already dead, and she knew it.”

“Well, you know how that is, don’t you? Holding out hope.”

“You didn’t go to him before? To find out what the problem was between them, what broke them up?”

“Never thought of it. I guess, inside, I was glad about it. That they broke up.” Angel looked at Jimmy. “So I feel it, too,” he said. “Responsible. Guilty. Like I could have done something. Should have.” He looked out at the lights of the City to the right flashing through the bars of the railing, the curve of the waterfront, the Embarcadero. “And that don’t make any more sense than
you
feeling the same thing.”

Jimmy wondered if Angel knew he was looking at where it had happened.

“What about her brother?” Angel said.

“He’s out there somewhere. I don’t know where.”

“I didn’t know she had a brother, until you told me,” Angel said. “She never talked about him.”

Jimmy told him about The Wind Cries Mary.

“So we find him,” Angel said. “Bring him in, get him home.”

Jimmy had gotten Angel a room next door to his at the Mark.

“I’d rather sleep in a ten-dollar-a-night place, down around Market,” Angel said, standing in the middle of the room with Jimmy and a bellhop.

“You gotta get out more, bud,” Jimmy said. “The ten-dollar-a-night places are forty now.”

“
Sixty
, I believe, sir,” the bellman said.

“I was going to say
five
,” Angel said and tossed his leather bag on the turned-down bed. And Jimmy tipped the boy.

By then it was eleven thirty. They came downstairs again. They’d left the Porsche in front of the hotel.

“I guess you can’t do
that
down in the Tenderloin,” Angel said.

They went across town to The Wind Cries Mary. It was about all they had to run with when it came to finding Les Paul. (Finding him and then getting out of San Francisco, while they still could?) He wasn’t there. They sat through the second half of a set by a doodling jazz player who played too many notes. For Jimmy’s ear, anyway. There were three or four
other
Les Pauls there. They were hanging around the front when Jimmy and Angel pulled up, kids fifteen or sixteen, a couple of them with guitars in cases. And it was a school night, too. The doorman seemed to have been hired for the flat look on his face and the size of his biceps, especially when his arms were folded across his chest. But at least one kid had made it in. He stood in the back next to the door in and out of the kitchen. The mesmerized look on the boy’s face made Jimmy think maybe he was missing something when it came to the jazzbo onstage with the fat hollow body. But none of the boys was
their
Les Paul.

The star of the night came on, a black player with a scarred Strat that looked like it had already been on the road ten years by the time Hendrix was joining the army. And the player was older than his guitar. Jimmy wondered what the man looked like in daylight, out front under the stage light. Maybe he never saw daylight. He was out there with just a bass player and a drummer, both white. The bass player was in his twenties, the drummer a chewed-up-and-spat-out rocker with dyed black hair, maybe a wig. The band played almost nothing, just stood back, literally, figuratively, while the man went where he went. For most of an hour, an idiot in the crowd called out the name of a song,
the
song, the one the Rolling Stones had “discovered” and covered and hit with. And everybody else before the Stones and after. When the player finally got to it, the idiot shouted,
“Hoo!”
for a half minute until Jimmy threw a wadded napkin at the back of his head and told him to shut up.

The guitar player managed an impossible thing: he somehow went back to the original ache, the initiating heartbreak behind the song, however many years ago it was. His guitar had a baby picture laminated onto the front of it. The mother of his new baby couldn’t even have been born when the
other
she broke his heart, but the way he played and sang, the wound sounded fresh, still sore to the touch.