Among the Living

by Dan Vining

  It was the kind of place that could keep a secret.

  The nurse bent over and told Teresa Miles her son was there. She had her eyes closed. Her expression didn’t change.

  It would be polite to say that the movie star still had the same magic in her skin, in the bones of her famous face, but it was gone, or almost gone. She was very white and her skin seemed much too thin, almost like the shell of an insect when the shell is left behind.

  Like a woman who when her only son dies, steps off the roof of a hotel above Sunset, and she is left behind.

  The nurse walked away.

  Jimmy bent over and kissed his mother.

  “I saw a coyote with two pups,” he said.

  She opened her eyes but her expression didn’t change.

  Jimmy sat on the grass next to her chair. A hawk turned circles in the sky over the oasis and then, just as he was noticing the grace of it, dropped onto something unseen in the brush.

  He took the perfume bottle from his pocket.

  “I brought you something,” he said.

  Her hands were in her lap. He put the bottle in her hand. Her fingers tightened around it. Jimmy uncapped it. He touched the glass stopper to her cheek and, under the expanse of our sky, a little more life came back to her eyes.

  THE NEXT

  ONE

  Would you like a side of Death with that?

  It was the Saugus Café, thirty miles north of downtown L.A., off Old 99, the Newhall Road, one of three or four spots claiming to have laid the table for James Dean’s last meal, a slice of apple pie and a glass of milk if the legend had it right, before he drove his Spyder 550 on north over the Grapevine to Cholame and the Y intersection of the 41 and 46 highways where a Cal Poly kid in a black-and-white Ford turned in front of him. The diner was borderline shrine. There were pictures of Dean all along the wall above the long counter, the one from Giant with his arms draped over the rifle across his shoulders like it was the top bar of the cross or something, the other famous one that everybody’s seen, Dean’s hand at his waist, middle finger and thumb curled to touch, index finger pointing off camera. Above the register was one of Dean leaning against the silver Porsche roadster in front of a gas station down in L.A. where he had picked up his mechanic that morning. That fateful morning . . . Isn’t that what they say? The two were on their way to a pro-am race up at Salinas when they bought it, when Mr. D waved the black flag. It was like they always said over the PA out at the old Saugus Speedway on hot Saturday nights, “The most dangerous miles driven tonight will be your trip here and home . . .”

  But then again, as the racers like to say, it’s not the going fast that kills you . . . It’s the sudden stop.

  The waitress waited. “Would you like a side of beans with that?” she said again.

  “What kind of beans?” Jimmy Miles said. The place wasn’t crowded. It was early afternoon. He could play with her a little.

  “Ranchero beans,” she said.

  “Pot beans,” Jimmy said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Maybe cooked with a little bacon.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  There was a fly, big and blue and buzzing, the size of a jelly bean, flying in wack circles over the booth, slamming itself into the same spot on the plate glass window every half minute, trying to get out of there but not learning a damn thing from previous experience.

  Jimmy knew a thing or two about that.

  The waitress snatched it out of the air and snuffed it, dropped it onto the linoleum floor and flipped it under the table with the toe of her waitress shoe all in one seamless little . . . what would you call it? Dance?

  “I guess I’d better,” Jimmy said. “And a beer. Whatever you drink.”

  “I drink cherry Cokes,” she said.

  She was the kind of waitress who didn’t write anything down, and he was the kind of customer who hadn’t needed a menu, so she just tapped the Formica twice with her short, unpainted nails and stepped away.

  “And pie,” Jimmy said after her. “Apple. And milk.”

  “Why not?” she said without turning.

  Jimmy looked out the window, across the street, at the old clapboard train station. It used to be across two lanes; now there were four and clotted with traffic. A hundred years ago, it had been a stagecoach trail. Two hundred, a mission trail, friars and priests. Five hundred, five thousand, and it would be indigenes with leathery feet, breaking the dirt down to dust.

  The girl came back from the bathroom. Her eyes were red, but she wasn’t crying anymore. She had a folded brown washroom towel in her hand, too rough to put to your eyes. She was maybe twenty-five, a Latina, but one who’d probably never been south of San Diego. Or maybe even Long Beach. She was wearing a rayon dress, like this was the forties. Or The Postman Always Rings Twice.

  She hadn’t looked at Jimmy once since he’d come in, or at anyone else in the place, off on her own trip. As soon as she sat back down in the ban quette, her food came, a tuna melt and a side of fries from what Jimmy could see. She smiled up at the waitress, an open-eyed look that almost asked the woman to sit down and talk about it, femme to femme. Almost. There was a lot of almost in the young woman’s story, from what Jimmy could already see.

  “Anything else, hon?” the waitress said to her, like a nurse.

  The girl shook her head. When the waitress was gone, the forced smile fell off the girl’s face. She arranged the two plates so it suited her, pushed the ketchup bottle forward an inch, and then picked up half the sandwich and took a bite. A big bite, like a teenager, like a teenager on a date. They usually didn’t eat, not like this, when they were sad or shaken and running like this. She reminded Jimmy of someone, though she didn’t look anything like the other one, a woman out of his past—a face, a pair of eyes, a mouth, a shape still waiting in a room inside him anytime he opened the door. Maybe it was this girl’s appetite. She ate like the date she was on was the tenth date or the twentieth or some number past counting, as if she didn’t have to prove she was “ladylike” anymore. Like she loved you and knew you loved her, had seen her all kinds of ways.

  Like that other one.

  Or maybe it was just that her dress was soft light blue, like the feeling she brought over you.

  She never finished her food, stopped after those first big bites. She bothered the fries another minute, then gave up, pushing the oval plate away so she could put her hands on the table in front of her. She wasn’t married, or at least didn’t wear a ring. She didn’t wave for the bill, didn’t seem in much of a hurry to get back on the road, just sat looking out the window right past Jimmy at her car, a baby-blue ’70s Buick Skylark convertible that had been lowered a bit. A couple of minutes slid by like that, with her looking past Jimmy at the car, then the waitress appeared and pushed the ticket across the table to her. She looked at the slip of paper and took in a breath and slid out of the booth, as if it had been a note from the older woman that said, Honey, you’re just going to have to go on and deal with it.

  Her eyes were leaking again before she reached the door.

  Jimmy waited a minute or two and then left a twenty on the table and stepped out into the dust and the truck stink from the highway. The Skylark was already gone out of sight, but it didn’t matter. He knew she wasn’t going anywhere but north. She wasn’t going to turn around and head back to Los Angeles, he knew that. She was hard-running and that meant north and there was really only one way to go.

  The sun was bright; the light had a kind of aluminum sheen to it. It had been hot the last few days. Hot and dry. Jimmy reached in and opened the glove box and found a pair of beat-up Ray-Bans. Tortoiseshell, almost red. He had brought the Porsche, the ’64 Cabriolet, the ragtop, and the top was down. It wasn’t the best car for this kind of thing, too showy, too one-of-a-kind, but something had made him pick it. He opened the door and let the wind blow through it a minute, cool off the seats before he got in it. It was September.

  Dean died in September, didn’t he?


  Because he knew he could catch up to her, Jimmy didn’t get back on the 5, took a right off Newhall Road instead, and drove out past what was left of the old speedway. A little memory jag. There were the wooden stands, red and white, peeling a little but looking permanent. The track was a dead flat third-of-a-mile asphalt oval, a “bullring” racetrack that had started out as a rodeo arena. A subdivision had built up around it now, plain-Jane two-story stucco houses with saplings staked in the yards, blank-faced houses, sand colored, looking like the boxes real houses would come in. The last races had been run ten years ago, but the owners had kept it up, rented out the facility for Sunday morning swap meets. A couple thousand people would come, even driving up from Los Angeles, church for believers in bargains.

  But it was empty now, about as empty as empty gets. Where was the tumbleweed blowing through? Jimmy jumped a low chain-link fence on what they called the back chute and walked out to the center. It was paved from one side to the other, cracking and not as black as it used to be but so hot his shoes smacked.

  He looked up at the stands, found the row where he used to like to sit. The top row.

  Where they used to sit.

  It looked bad in the daytime. In the present.

  So maybe it wasn’t about James Dean after all . . .

  The Skylark girl (he’d learn in a minute her name was Lucy, Lucille) had taken the exit off the 5 onto California 46, headed west toward Lost Hills and Paso Robles, and now she blew right by the intersection where Dean had died and then on past the memorial, a granite marker and a bend of stainless steel wrapped around an oak next to a café six miles along at Cholame.

  Jimmy didn’t stop either, just hung back a mile. A little two-car caravan traversing central Cal. There was enough rise and fall on the highway to give him a good look down at her every minute or so, to keep her in front of him without her seeing him.

  He pulled off after ten or twelve miles of that.

  “Did you do the Skylark?”

  He was on the shoulder, directly under a whistling cell tower “camouflaged” to look like a spindly evergreen, which was particularly stupid given that this was in the middle of bare brown rolling hills, it the only “tree” for miles. Unless you counted the occasional oil derrick.

  But the reception was good.

  “I painted it for her,” Angel said. “For her boyfriend, actually. He give it to her.”

  “Is he the problem?”

  “You really are a detective.”

  “So he let her keep it when he left?”

  “I guess. She kept it.”

  “I don’t know, bud,” Jimmy said, “I might be on his side, taking a man’s car.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “What’s her name?”

  When Angel told him, Jimmy sang, “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille . . .”

  “Loose wheel,” Angel said.

  Back in the day on those Saturday nights at Saugus Speedway, when one of the old clunker stockers would kick loose a wheel, send it bouncing across the infield, the announcer—Jimmy remembered his name, Virgil Kirkpat rick—would wait a beat and then say the line: “You picked a fin e time to leave me, loose wheel . . .” And the crowd would laugh, like he was Jay Leno.

  “I drove on out there,” Jimmy said. “The speedway. Jumped the fence.”

  “And it was sad,” Angel said back to him.

  “I can take sad,” Jimmy said.

  “Not so much as you think,” Angel said.

  “She’s headed toward Paso Robles, unless she just wanted to cut over to the 101 or the coast. Any idea why?”

  “That’s why I’m paying you the big dollar,” Angel said.

  “I haven’t been out of town in a while,” Jimmy said. “It’s nice out here.” A wind had blown over the hill, and the air smelled good, like the inside of a wooden box.

  “Where did you pick her up?”

  “She was right where you said she’d be, bright and early.”

  “Eagle Rock.”

  “Eagle Rock,” Jimmy repeated. “She took a long time to pack the car, like she was waiting for me.”

  Nothing whistled down the line for a second or two.

  “How does she look?” Angel said.

  “Like they all do,” Jimmy said. “One kind of them.”

  “Lost.”

  “Spooked. Alone. Running,” Jimmy said. “Trying to get from what was to what’s next. Way young to be so hurt. Or maybe I’ve just seen too many of them.”

  “Or maybe you’re getting old in the soul,” Angel said.

  “It’s about time.”

  “She’s good-looking, huh?”

  “She’s not a Sailor,” Jimmy said, almost a question.

  “No.”

  “Tell me who she is to you,” Jimmy said.

  “Nobody,” Angel lied. “Just a kid I wish wasn’t so down.”

  Lucy in the Skylark stopped in Paso Robles all right, parked on the street, the main street, beside a pay phone. Pas was a pretty little town, out of the way enough to have slept through most of the booster efforts to improve it. There were a lot of Victorian B and Bs, ten thousand oaks, more brown grass hills ringing it. They’d all flush green in another month or so when the rain started. Father Junipero Serra had stopped here, planted the flag a few miles north, Mission San Miguel Archangel.

  But nobody was going out by the mission today.

  Lucy made a call and then got back behind the wheel and waited.

  She seemed a little fidgety. She put the top down, out of nervousness, the way a girl straightens her skirt as the boy is coming back to the car. Or the way girls did when they still wore skirts, when the baby-blue Skylark was new. She kept her eyes straight ahead, except for looking up in the mirror every once in a while.

  Jimmy was out of the Porsche, up the street a half block and on the other side. He’d gone into a wood-front store and bought a pack of cigarettes. He hadn’t smoked in ten years. A pack cost what it used to cost to go to the movies. He sat on a bus bench, sat up on the back of it like a hawk on a perch, and pulled the red ribbon and opened the pack. He tapped one out and put it between his fingers and struck the match.

  So I’m one of those, he thought, a guy a memory makes start smoking again.

  The first drag almost took off the top of his head.

  A kid came walking up to the Skylark, walking in from a side street, thirteen, fourteen, on the out end of a growth spurt. (He’d probably been three inches shorter at the beginning of summer, when school let out.) He wore a Cake T-shirt and plaid “old man” polyester pants and red Converse lowboys. And a black porkpie hat. He carried a hard-shell guitar case, a Les Paul from the shape and size of it.

  Jimmy liked him right away, pretty much everything about him.

  Les put the guitar in the backseat before he even really looked at Lucy behind the wheel. He stood there. She got out from behind the wheel to come around to him. He dropped his head and sent his eyes sideways. She was about to hug and kiss him, standing there beside the car, but thought better of it, just smiled a big, real smile and touched the brim of his little hat with a finger and said something that made him pull his head away and pretend to be irritated.

  Fourteen.

  He had a school backpack over his shoulder, his luggage. He threw it into the backseat with the guitar and got in up front. Lucy started the car and said something to him. He nodded. She threw the Skylark into an incautious U-turn and whipped around and came in right in front of Jimmy on the back of the bus bench and stopped. Big as hell.

  She pushed it up into park and got out. She walked right past him without even half a look. She was either on to him or unnaturally oblivious.

  Jimmy stayed put, ten feet away from the car. Les Paul fiddled with the radio controls, opened the glove box and dug around in it, but nothing seemed to catch his eye. He put his head back against the headrest, like he was half asleep. Or jazzbo cool.

  Lucy came out with the goods, unb
agged, a plastic bottle of Dr Pepper for the boy and a bag of Flamin’ Cheetos. She had a Diet Coke for herself and a limp length of Red Vines hanging off of her lip. She got back behind the wheel. She snatched one of his Cheetos and popped it in her mouth and started the engine. She seemed, at least for that moment, almost happy. She drove off, still somehow managing never to acknowledge Jimmy’s existence, just as the boy never had.

  They were brother and sister.

  Les Paul and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

  Jimmy had found a CD in the glove box he didn’t remember ever buying, a double disk of Beatles outtakes and song demos from the time of The White Album and a few even back to Sgt. Pepper’s. It seemed just right for this trip, loose, clean, unpredictable, underproduced, each song stripped down to its essence, sometimes with lyrics that had gotten dropped before the slick, finished versions. Just now, with Paso Robles in the rearview mirror and the Skylark a quarter mile ahead, it was “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” and a new verse . . .

  I look from the wings at the play you are staging,

  While my guitar gently weeps . . .

  Jimmy sang out loud, riding along in the wind, sang the verses he knew, that everybody knew, and smiled all the way through the new verse, digging it.

  There was no wrong way to come into San Francisco. No wrong time of day. No wrong time of year. Here was one place, changed as it was, that didn’t make you wish it was twenty years ago. Or fifty. Or even make you wish that you were that younger version of yourself, before everything happened that had happened, as some places do. As L.A. did.

  You were you, now was now.

  San Francisco was San Francisco.