Among the Living

by Dan Vining

  It had cooled off as soon as they’d rolled over the mountain from Thousand Oaks into Camarillo, Oxnard, and then Ventura. They had the windows down. If you knew what to listen for, what to separate out, you could hear the wind off the ocean, singing, constant, blowing through the dull leaves and the slick red trunks of the manzanita covering the foothills.

  Jimmy dropped it down into second as he steered into the first tight climbing curve. They were in the Mustang. He went in hotter than he could have, the C-force snugging him into the bucket seat. At the first switchback, there was already a hundred-foot drop-off to the rocks below and the very blue water.

  Jean looked over at him for a long moment, as if the look and the time were needed before she said something, but she didn’t say anything, she just studied him. When he’d come to her office just before noon, he’d told her that she should get away, that she should go off to hide someplace. She’d said no. Then he called it something else and she’d said yes. In the end, it turned into this, going north with no set destination, no time frame, the two of them. She’d come straight from the office. She was wearing a suit.

  He was wearing a clean white shirt and a clean white splint over his ring finger on his right hand, the hand resting on the gearshift. He was bruised and butterfly-bandaged, now with two cuts on his head, over his eyes.

  She was still looking at him. Anyone else would have turned to look at her.

  “It’s good to get out of the city,” she said.

  “What do you want me to tell you?” Jimmy said.

  Now he looked over at her.

  He kept surprising her. Being with him meant things moving at odd speeds, sometimes coming out of nowhere, sometimes not coming when they were expected. And only now was she beginning to be able to read his tone. His abruptness meant only that he was ahead of her.

  She could have asked him what she really wanted to know, what she suspected about him, about this, but she didn’t. The answer, if he’d given it, would have brought her all the way into it, into an idea she thought she might not be able to accept. Not yet. Do you ask a question when the answer might be that the world is not what you’ve always thought it to be, that everyone else thinks it to be? That there is something in between what you believed were two absolutes, the two absolutes, that the dead, some of them, are somehow here?

  “What happened after you put me out of the car?”

  “I crashed, went home.” He enjoyed his joke even if she couldn’t.

  The two-l ane road was rising so steeply Jimmy double-clutched and downshifted into first. The engine and the gearbox sang a warm low note. On the shoulder on the opposite lane was the first of the Big Sur hikers, shorts, tanned legs with braided calf muscles, a day pack, a wide floppy hat. He was in his sixties. He carried a gnarled walking stick that came up to his chest and he kept his pace even as the path angled up under him.

  “I came by, where the car was,” Jean said. “My assistant came and got me. We drove on down. I saw your car smashed against the tree. There was a police car there and a tow truck and a man on a horse, but nobody else.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “The men in the two cars came right past me. They must have been there when you crashed.”

  “They pulled me out.”

  “What’d they do?”

  “Dumped me in another part of the park.”

  “Who were they?” she said.

  He looked at her. “It’s probably about another case, something out of the past.”

  He wasn’t going to say anything else about who they were. Jean rolled up her window. It was almost cold.

  She waited a beat.

  “Why didn’t they kill you?” she said.

  Jimmy looked at her. Maybe she was going to ask it. She’d seen Drew walking away from the turned-over Accord. Maybe she’d also seen his bloodied crushed body in the backseat as they drove away on down the hill. Maybe she’d read the papers the next day. That night and afterward she hadn’t asked the right questions.

  And she was afraid, but not as afraid as she should be.

  Why was that?

  She knew more than she was letting on.

  “They were just trying to scare me off,” Jimmy said.

  “Did they?” she asked.

  It was a good question.

  “I think I know enough right now,” he said.

  It was a good answer.

  After a minute, she said, “We seem to take turns trying to talk each other out of this.”

  He didn’t say anything for another five minutes as the road climbed higher and then leveled off, tracing with every turn and switchback the fingers of land that broke off above the ocean.

  That was another way he was different. He could say nothing.

  There was a gas station, a pull-off right after a blind turn. The gas was thirty cents a gallon more than it had been twenty miles behind them but everyone stopped anyway. It was the first place to get out, stretch, and let the full view fill your head. There was a sleek tour bus four shades of purple, with a glass front, top to bottom. Germans. All of them were out of the bus, smoking. Gulls floated overhead, facing out to sea, staying in the same spot by riding the updraft off the cliff face, angled heads watching the tourists below, occasionally calling with a cry that sounded unset tlingly like screeching tires.

  Jimmy topped off the tank and cleaned the windshield. He kept an overnight bag in the back, one in every car. He unzipped it and took out a soft Patagonia shell, a pullover. He put it on. The heat of L.A. was far behind.

  One of the Germans came over to admire the Mustang. He walked around it, careful to keep a respectful distance. He nodded at the hatchback vents high on the rear quarter panel, the “gills,” then went to the front and squatted before the shark’s mouth grill, as if to see what it would look like swallowing you whole.

  He stood up. “Bullitt,” he said.

  Jimmy nodded.

  The man smiled and made an up and down motion with his hand, like a porpoise diving and surfacing in the surf, the “Bullitt” Mustang flying up and over the streets of San Francisco.

  Jimmy nodded. “Ich versuche zu, zu mein Mustang auf dem Boden behalten,” he said. “I try to keep my Mustang on the ground.”

  Jean was in the little store. She took a Martinelli’s sparkling apple juice from the cooler, twisted it open and drank it while she walked the aisles. She picked up a bag of trail mix called “Big Sur Sunshine” and a candy bar, looked through the rack of T-shirts and sweats and found a hooded sweatshirt with a minimum of decoration. She got a few more things and went to the register. On a shelf behind the clerk was a flock of souvenir ceramic seagulls floating over redwood blocks on wire stalks. When the door opened, the draft made them dance.

  Jimmy came in to pay for the gas.

  “Do you want anything?” Jean said.

  Jimmy saw her things on the counter. There was a toothbrush and toothpaste.

  “No.”

  “And the gas,” Jean said to the woman behind the register and handed her a credit card.

  “And this,” Jimmy said. He took an atomic fireball from the bowl on the counter.

  They drove on through the afternoon. Another fifty miles and they passed into the first of the massive trees the drive was also famous for. Orange poppies flashed in bright sunny patches where the road cuts were. A rocky creek ran alongside the road, glimpsed now and then through breaks in the green. The air had that evergreen smell that made the whole day seem like morning. The trees grew taller, closing in on the swath of bright blue overhead.

  Then the light began to change, and quickly.

  Just in time, the road broke back out into the open, to the coastline, and they stopped at the first motel.

  The room was paneled with redwood, diagonal. Jimmy came in alone, left the door open behind him. He tossed the overnight bag onto the bed. He opened the drapes, slid open the sliding glass door. The wing of rooms was on a pad high above the surf, a hundred yards
above the rocks and the water, but the glass door was still grayed with ocean spray. There was an hour or so of daylight left.

  In among the trees, it would already be dark.

  Jimmy cracked the seal on a bottle of water and lay on the bed with his head against the bag. He looked at the redwood ceiling, the redwood beams, the redwood walls. People came here for the big, tall, indomitable redwoods, to literally put their arms around them, put their cheeks against them, and they also wanted their rooms and their restaurants paneled with rough-sawn dead redwood.

  He looked out the open sliding door. There was a patch of grass and a pair of white plastic chairs and then a row of cypresses at the cliff’s edge.

  Cypresses.

  Jean came in. She carried a paper bag, another raid on a gas station store. She emptied it of bottles of juice and sunblock, a bag of sunflower seeds, sweatpants to match her sweatshirt, and a pair of pink canvas shoes she’d never wear at home.

  “Look,” she said. She lifted out a cheap tape player. And a cassette tape. “Reggae.” She said it with an exclamation point.

  Jimmy sat up against the headboard, watched her as she fit the C batteries into the machine and then went to work on the stretch-wrap around the cassette.

  She said, “In the gift shop they had tapes of ‘Sounds of the Sea’ and ‘Sounds of the Big Trees.’ Relaxation tapes.” She slotted the cassette into the machine.

  “No Woman No Cry,” she half sang, before it began.

  “It bothered you that I said you weren’t the type who drives around the block to hear a song on the radio,” Jimmy said.

  “I hardly ever think about it,” Jean said.

  She smiled and the music started, a crack of a high hat and then a rolling rhythm. It wasn’t “No Woman No Cry,” but a song that began:

  I don’t want to wait in vain for your love . . .

  But neither of them thought the song was about them, or at least about this. She turned it up and fiddled with the bass.

  From the very first time I rest my eyes on you, my heart says follow

  through . . .

  “I got two rooms,” Jimmy said.

  She didn’t say anything, went into the bathroom and changed into her new sweatpants and cheap pink shoes. When she came out, she smiled at him and walked past him out the sliding door to see if she could see the water.

  She went all the way out to the edge. She turned and looked back at him through the open door, happy.

  She talked him into taking the ragged path zigzagging down the cliff-face to the rocks and the water. It took thirty minutes down, from the warning sign at the top to the sweet little cove and improbable beach below perfectly littered with driftwood, and almost an hour back up, the last half in the dark with Jimmy going ahead and Jean holding his shirttail and laughing.

  They drank a bottle of Liebfraumilch over dinner at the seafood place next to the motel and then another. They took what was left in their glasses out to the cliff’s edge and listened to the wind and the surf far below that they couldn’t see except when the biggest waves blew out white against the rocks.

  Jimmy pulled back the cover on the bed.

  “Can we leave the sliding glass door open?” he asked.

  It was chilly, but she nodded.

  The lights were out. The moonlight lit the walls. He realized what the bias-cut paneling on the walls had reminded him of when he’d first come into the room: recording studios. There was a time when they all had walls that looked like this, diagonal redwood paneling. He’d spent hours in those rooms.

  “People come to look at the trees and then sleep in redwood-paneled rooms,” Jimmy said.

  “And come to the ocean and eat seafood,” Jean said. She was drunker than he was. She put on a funny voice. “ ‘Let’s go someplace beautiful—and eat it!’ ”

  There was a silence. She kissed him. He touched her neck. Her breath in his face was sweet and warm, the last drink of the night.

  “You proceed at your own risk,” she said, laughing too much.

  He was up early, before there was light. He sat in a chair and watched her sleeping. It had been a while since he’d been with a woman. As he watched her, as he listened to her breathe, he felt sorry for himself. It had been a while for that, too.

  He showered. After he shaved, he dried his face and looked at himself in the mirror. The sunblock Jean bought was on the counter, a pink bottle, sunblock for kids, no more tears. He squeezed a white circle of it into his palm, rubbed his hands together, spread it across his forehead, nose and cheeks. The smell of it hit him, summers on the beach or on a sailboat, way back. That smell and the memories it brought with it, the Liebfraumilch last night, Mother’s Milk, the cypresses, this road into Carmel and Monterey—he knew already what the day was going to be about.

  And wished he’d gone south instead of north.

  Two hours later, he was on Point Lobos. There was a thin fog. Jimmy stepped out onto the point. Here the cypresses were gnarled, arthritic, almost bare but still alive, their roots reaching down to find unlikely nourishment in cracks and crevices in the rock. Lace lichen bearded the branches of understory trees. Cypress Cove and Pinnacle Cove were to his right, Bluefish Cove beyond. There were prettier places all around him, where the trees were fuller, where there was more color, but this was where he’d stood with his mother all those years ago.

  He was sixteen. An hour earlier, in the car, after she’d gotten out, as he sat listening to the radio, he’d laid a tab of acid on his tongue.

  “It’s a shame to shoot color,” Teresa Miles had said.

  She had a Leica on a leather strap around her neck. On her, it looked like jewelry. Her hair had just been cut short and she kept running her fingers through it, what was left of it. She was flying away in a week for a movie. She wore a thin sweater that buttoned up the middle, buttons made of abalone. She had perfect breasts, full for a woman as thin as she was, and always wore French bras that offered them up with a little less self-consciousness than Playtex or Maidenform. It was another thing Jimmy resented about her, the way his friends looked her over when she stepped into the room, and the way she pretended not to notice.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jimmy said. He leaned against a cypress. His mother was out in the open. It was overcast, a world of grays. “It’s going to look like black and white anyway.”

  “No, it won’t,” she said. “It won’t have the drama of black and white!”

  “Drama.” Jimmy repeated her word.

  “Why don’t you play your guitar?” she said. “Get it out of the car. Play me one of your songs.”

  No. Because you asked me to.

  Nothing was happening. Jimmy wondered if the acid was bad, or not acid at all, a trick played on a rich kid in the lot behind The Troubadour.

  But then a rock flared at his feet and then another.

  She brushed his hair out of his eyes. It was 1967. His hair was long, as long as The Beatles’ and The Beatles’ was getting longer with each LP.

  She walked away across the rocks.

  He’d been up all night and she didn’t know it, had come back at four or five from hanging out at Clover. It was the recording studio on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, a low-cost place, one main room and a booth for vocals, the control room, an “artists’ lounge” with a pinball machine, which was just the first skinny room you came into off the dirty street. A singer/songwriter had worked all night on one track. Nobody. Jimmy knew the producer, who was older than sixteen but just a kid, too. It was that time when hits could come out of anyplace, anybody, so almost everyone was cutting tracks and getting paid for it.

  And The Beatles were on Blue Jay Way.

  “Come here!” his mother said, her voice bright and theatrical.

  Below the point, in a small cove that had no name, out past the shore-break where the water rose and fell predictably, gently, four or five sea otters rafted among the swirling canopies of giant kelp, on their backs.

  “See what
they’re doing?”

  They’re beating their chests.

  “They swim down under the kelp and find a perfect flat rock and then a clam or an oyster or even an abalone and then they come back up to the surface and roll over and then pound away on their little rock until the shellfish cracks open and they can eat it.”

  She held his hand, like he was six. “They used to say, until just a few years ago, that what separated Man and the lower animals was that only Man used tools. They don’t say that anymore, but that’s what they taught us in school, probably you, too. But I always knew it was wrong because I knew about this.”

  Tools. Could this get any more stupid?

  She pulled him to her, put their hands behind her back. Her breast was against him. Her perfume had its hands around his throat. He loved her so much and, even now, he felt like she was already gone.

  He let go, pulled away from her.

  “So what do they say separates us now?” Jimmy said.

  “I don’t know,” she had said.

  A cormorant screeched overhead and Jimmy looked over at Jean, a hundred yards away, kneeling next to a rock in her pink canvas shoes.

  Jimmy looked back down at the cove. The selfsame cove.

  Back at the motel, the sign warning guests of the liabilities of the trail down to the beach had said more than, You proceed at your own risk. It also said, with an odd stiffness, as if the owners were Swiss or Austrian, Be advised that the return is more difficult than the descent.

  They went into Carmel for a late lunch. There was more wine. For some reason, Jean was under a cloud and not saying much.

  Jimmy didn’t really know her but he blamed it on Carmel. He’d never liked the town. It was too relaxed, or relaxed for the wrong reasons. There was too much money here, or too much money too far removed from the labor that produced it. Carmel always seemed to him to have too many retired airline captains and their flight attendant wives, too many personal injury lawyers in their forties who’d had a wonderful tragedy walk into the office one day, the kind that meant more than just another Porsche, that meant freedom money. But, as it turned out, here it was only the freedom to fret over the lightness of the pasta or the year of the wine or the elasticity of the skin of the person across the table from you. Most of them didn’t even play golf. They just “lived well” and repeated too often that line about revenge.