Among the Living

by Dan Vining

  Westbound on Pico, he looked up in the mirror. Here they were, two heads in a white Ford Escort a quarter mile back. He slowed, let them close the gap. As they drew near, he pulled it down into second, punched it and hung a right.

  They tried to keep up. Three blocks into a neighborhood of pastel Mediterranean houses with tender little yards, they stopped in the middle of the street. They’d lost him. The short one slapped the dash.

  The tall one, who was driving, looked in the mirror.

  The yellow Challenger was right behind them.

  Jimmy pulled around the dinky Escort, looked over as he came alongside, then gunned it, leaving a perfect pair of wide black streaks.

  But they came back and they caught him that night.

  It started on Hollywood Boulevard. They were still in the Escort so for a minute it was still a joke. The traffic was light and Jimmy was a little down and almost glad for the company. He wasn’t going anywhere, he was just out, knocking around in the present, or trying to.

  He let them stay close behind him for a mile or so and then took a quick right.

  Where, it turned out, they wanted him to take a right.

  When he came around the corner, the side street was blocked by a pair of black Chevys, nose to nose.

  And four more Sailors. All of them had the blue edge of light around them, what you’d call halos if they were angels, which they decidedly weren’t. The Escort came in behind Jimmy and closed the backdoor.

  The new men got out of the Chevys and started toward him at the same moment the tall pale man and the one with the bad blond hair got out of the Escort.

  Jimmy turned off the engine. He opened the door, but before he could get out, they pulled him from the Dodge, rough, even though he wasn’t resisting and they knew it.

  Now he resisted. He tried to break away from them but there were too many of them and they were too sure of what they were supposed to do. When Sailors were involved in anything in L.A., it wasn’t personal. They didn’t act alone. A stray single one might throw a foot out to trip you going down the sidewalk of a night, say something sour behind your back, but when three or four came after you, got in your face, it was because they meant something by it. It was because they’d been told to. It was because you were in violation, busted in the part of dark things they ran. Jimmy assumed that it was about the Kantke murders, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe this was about the last one. The last case. Or the one before. Unfinished business. He upset people all the time.

  But not ever Sailors, until now. They dragged him the half block down to the Roosevelt Hotel, nobody saying anything, right into the underground parking. There was an elevator there, and nobody to stop them from going where they wanted to go.

  And then they were all on the roof. Sailors had a thing about roofs. High places, lookouts.

  One of the four new ones was a foot taller than the tall pale man Jimmy had made fun of and weighed twenty pounds less. This one was like a tall stick in a suit, though his suit was a better suit than what the Escort boys wore. He had red hair. He had long, long fingers. He pointed one at Jimmy. And said nothing.

  “I get it,” Jimmy said. “You want me to stop.”

  Two of the other new ones, big ones who wore peacoats and watch caps, took turns pushing Jimmy backwards. There was an ugly rhythm to it, almost like the three of them were dancing across the roof. They slammed him backwards into the base of an iron radio tower left over from what now seemed like a whole other age.

  “You’re the Disco Antidefamation League.”

  One of the big ones hit him in the face.

  Long-F ingers came a few steps closer. On his cue, the two big men yanked Jimmy up off his feet and carried him over to the parapet and stood him up there and turned him around and then leaned him out over the drop, holding him by the back of his black undertaker’s suitcoat like a puppet. A wind blew up the side of the hotel, almost strong enough to hold him up if they let go. Almost.

  Jimmy looked down, way down on the street, the people walking, the tour buses parked in front of the Chinese, a few cruisers out on the wrong night in their perfect lowriders, the lights. He thought of the line, from the Bible, Cast yourself down. But this wasn’t the pinnacle of the temple and he sure wasn’t Christ and Long-Fingers wasn’t exactly Satan.

  “Look down there,” Long-Fingers said. “Can you see them?”

  He didn’t mean the tourists or the cruisers. He meant what was in the shadows, in the alleyways, behind the buildings. Who.

  “Can you see them?”

  “Yeah, I see them,” Jimmy said.

  “You want to walk around forever?” He said it again, the same words, as if he’d been told to say them, this time so loud the people down on the boulevard could have heard him. “You want to walk around forever?”

  There was another kind of Sailor. Walkers. You’ve seen them on your streets, or at least in parts of your town. You’ve thought it was drugs or alcohol and maybe it began there. You’ve wondered why they keep moving, shuffling, how they went dead in the eye, where they could be going, where they sleep, where they go in the daytime. You wonder that, until the light changes, until your husband says something and you go back to your life, or you think of your wife and what’s for dinner in the regular world, leaving them behind, like on the street below the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood.

  “What do you want me not to do?” Jimmy said. “Give me a clue . . .”

  The two big men received another silent signal from the tall bony one and they shoved their charge out over the abyss and then yanked him back, like this was a school bully’s prank.

  Jimmy didn’t let them see the fear they wanted to see. But they saw something and the very tall one turned his back and started away, which meant they were finished, that it was finished. The two lifted him down. They didn’t look at Jimmy again, just fell in behind the red-haired one with the long, long fingers.

  EIGHT

  It was late afternoon but the light wasn’t golden, just yellow, as it angled through the high windows of the lab at Jean’s perfume company. It was a longroomwithblack-topped tables and real-life blue flame Bunsen burners. Technicians in white smocks worked over chemical analyzers and beakers of liquids, swirling them, holding them up to the light, making notations, conferring with too-serious looks, like scientists in TV commercials.

  Jimmy sneezed. One of the white coats looked over, annoyed. Jimmy waved his apology.

  Jean stepped toward him from the end of the room.

  They took his car, left hers in the lot. They went first to Ike’s for a drink. It was Jimmy’s hangout, a nouveau-something cave on a Hollywood street called Argyle. The light was blue light from the flying saucer fixtures suspended over the bar. There was a Rockola jukebox and it was playing Marvin Gaye, “Come Get to This,” the dead man’s song still rocking, somehow new again, like the light of a burned-out star just reaching earth. It was early yet.

  The bartender, Scott, brought Jean a cosmopolitan and then set two drinks in front of Jimmy, a martini and a manhattan. The drinks waited, spotlighted, on the bar, like something about to be beamed up into the UFO light fixtures.

  Jimmy picked up the martini, took a sip.

  “Has Krisha been in?”

  Scott shook his head. He looked like he could have been an actor waiting for his break, too, tall enough and still young enough and good-looking in an obvious, immediate way, but Scott didn’t want to act. He hadn’t come to California for its show business.

  “I guess you’re still looking for her.”

  “I just haven’t seen her lately,” Jimmy said.

  Jean wondered who she was, tried not to show it.

  Scott stepped away to talk to a customer at the end of the bar.

  Jean smiled at Jimmy. She didn’t ask him about the case, his work. He wondered why. She had another cosmo and he had another martini and they talked about nothing, about the music and a solitary dancer on the floor.

  And then they got up
to go. She picked up her little purse on the bar. The manhattan was still there, untouched in its perfect circle of light.

  It was almost nine by the time they got to the Long Beach Yacht Club. They’d driven by another place closer to downtown where her car was but the restaurant parking lot was too crowded for Jimmy and he changed his mind and waved to the valet parkers and made a loop through the lot and drove south. There wasn’t any boat traffic in and out of the marina so the lights were left to reflect clean and still on the black water. The club was quiet. The early crowd had finished and left. The late crowd was still drinking somewhere else.

  Jean ordered a steak. The waiter took her menu.

  Jimmy handed him his. “I’d just like a plate of tomatoes,” he said. “Bring it when you bring her steak. And another bottle of water.”

  The waiter nodded and stepped away.

  “I don’t think I know any women who still eat steaks,” Jimmy said.

  “Yeah, I’m strange all right,” Jean said. She was making fun of him. She took a sip of her drink.

  “What happened to your eye?” she said. He had a cut over his right eye from the business with the men on the roof on the Roosevelt Hotel, a little bandage.

  “I got falling down drunk last night,” he said.

  An older couple was shown to the next table. The man held his wife’s chair and she smiled at him as he sat down to her right instead of across from her.

  Jean watched them. She wondered what her parents would look like if they were still alive. What would be left of the young faces in the old pictures? She looked around, the yacht clubbers, the polished brass ship’s fittings, the photos on the walls, the hurricane flags hung over the long bar.

  She wondered how much like her mother she was.

  “Is it all right, being here?” Jimmy said.

  “Of course,” Jean said. “I’m not sentimental . . . and I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “Your parents aren’t in any of the pictures.”

  She wondered if he knew everything she was thinking.

  “You’ve already been here,” she said, not as a question. She moved her drink so the light from the candle floating in the bowl lit it up, made it even prettier.

  “You wanted to know how I worked. This is how I work.”

  “Tell me what that means,” she said.

  “Everything carries its own history with it,” he said. “You do. I do. Objects do. Places. Whatever happened in this room is still here in a way. If you want to see it. If you let yourself see it.”

  He didn’t look away from her. “So there are ghosts,” he said.

  “Are they sentimental?” she said and smiled.

  “Some of them,” he said.

  She didn’t want to talk about ghosts.

  “Have you ever been here before?” he said.

  “There are pictures of me with my parents here.”

  “But you haven’t been here since?”

  She shook her head. “Why would I?”

  “You must have always wondered the things you wonder now, whether he did it, who she really was.”

  “No.”

  “So what makes you want to know now?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, but it wasn’t true.

  Someone dimmed the lights. It was nine o’clock.

  The linen of the tablecloth was so white, the marigolds in the clear vase so bright and perfect. He breathed in her scent. It filled his head. Starting from when they were at Ike’s he was saying more than he usually said, letting her see more. I’m falling for her, he thought, and thought again how good a word for it it was, falling, wherever it led, whatever happened now.

  “What are you wearing?”

  “It doesn’t have a name,” she said.

  “Your own concoction?”

  “Do you like it?” she said.

  “I don’t know if that’s the word,” Jimmy said.

  She smiled again and looked away. Maybe she was falling, too.

  “What is perfume made out of?”

  “Oils, mostly. And alcohol.”

  “How did you get into this?” he said.

  “A woman taught me the business.”

  “How does it work?”

  “The business or the perfume?”

  “Perfume.”

  “The molecules of the scent activate receptors in the nose and the mouth, which excite certain areas of the brain.”

  She drew her drink across the table closer to her, turning it in her fingers. “That’s the simple explanation,” she said, as a way of teasing him.

  “A minute ago,” Jimmy said, “I remembered a day with my mother. On Point Lobos. Carmel and Monterey. Out of nowhere. I thought maybe it was your perfume.”

  “Were there flowers?” Jean said.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know. I remember the cypress trees.” He knew he was telling her more than he should.

  “It’s not supposed to work that way,” she said. “That’s called ‘a headache. ’ It’s when a scent—” She broke off. “How much of this do you really want to know?”

  “More,” he said.

  “A basic, low-quality scent acts directly on the limbic system in the temporal lobe of the brain. It calls up what are called ‘moment memories. ’ It’s better for a scent to be more general. The smell of cotton candy reminds you of a trip to the carnival when you were six. A good perfume reminds you . . .” And here she paused, because she knew how it would sound. “Of being in love.”

  The ghosts in the room leaned closer.

  “Mixing memory and desire . . .” Jimmy said.

  She knew the line, but didn’t remember what it was from. “What is that?”

  “Freshman English. T. S. Eliot,” Jimmy said. “ ‘April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain . . .’ The Wasteland. I read it—and quit school.”

  She laughed. “You just stood up and walked out?”

  “I waited until the end of the day,” he said.

  Even when he lied he was telling her too much.

  They walked along the canal, past the houses. Jean had taken off her shoes. It usually cooled down at night in L.A., particularly on the water, but this night was as warm as the afternoon had been and the canal stank a little. Every once in a while there would be a flash of white over their heads, a gull reeling. Maybe they fed at night. Most of the living rooms were open to the walkway, drapes drawn back, shutters open. People read in chairs or watched TV. They would look up at the movement outside, unconcerned when they saw that it was a young man and a young woman. Some of the houses flew their own bright flags on angled poles, picto graphic statements about the people within, crests and flowers and boats and too many rainbows. One banner brushed across their heads as they walked under it, like a magician’s scarf.

  “When I was a little girl,” Jean said, “I used to wonder what it would be like if your footprints could be seen everywhere you’d ever gone. A path of them. My little footprints would be up and down this walk, I guess. It’s almost too much to bear.”

  They passed three more houses. The wind changed direction suddenly and the temperature dropped ten degrees, a gift.

  Somewhere along the way, she took his hand.

  A rat watched them from under a painted cement mushroom.

  “This is odd,” she said, “letting someone into your life so quickly. You already know things about me no one else knows. And you’re strange.”

  “I think you said that already.”

  “What did you think when you first saw me?”

  “That you were beautiful.”

  He thought better than to tell her his idea about a beautiful woman and a beautiful car, how its time was gone already even as you looked at it.

  At this moment, she seemed very present.

  “That’s what men always say,” she said. “I guess it gets the desired response.”

  “I also thought you
looked sad,” Jimmy said. “In the eyes. Maybe from thinking the same sad thing over and over.”

  He thought she would let go of his hand but she didn’t and they walked on without either of them saying anything. Steps climbed up and over the haunches of a bridge and there was just another short block.

  And then they were in front of 110 Rivo Alto Canal.

  Now Jean let go of his hand and held herself, like the girl on Sunset after she’d kissed Jimmy and felt a chill run through her. The watchful neighbor across the canal was away or asleep and the house of the Abba neighbor was dark, too. They were alone, or at least as alone as Jimmy’s worldview allowed.

  She was about to say something, to fill the silence.

  “There’s a woman living in the back bedroom,” Jimmy said.

  Jean didn’t look away from the house. Even in the dim light he could tell she was trying not to react, or at least not to show it.

  Jimmy said, “I don’t know if she lives there all the time or just comes and goes.”

  Jean turned away from the house.

  “Have any idea who she is?” Jimmy said.

  “No.” Then she said, to try to put a period on it, “It doesn’t matter.”

  Jimmy wasn’t going to let it go. “Gee, it seems like it would,” he said. “Maybe she bought it after—”

  Jean looked at him.

  “I own the house.”

  He really hadn’t thought of that.

  “It sat empty while my father was in prison during the years of appeals. Then it went to my brother Carey and he didn’t want to have anything to do with it and needed the money, so I bought it from him.”

  “Why?”

  “He needed money.”

  “Why did you want it?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I thought the answers were there. Here.”

  “When was this?”

  “When I was at Stanford.”