Among the Living

by Dan Vining

  It was eight or nine at night when the two-car caravan blew in from SoCal. Since it was just past summer, there was still some light in the blue to the west, Bombay-Sapphire-gin-bottle blue. Of course, it was twenty degrees cooler than it had been down south. Just right. The Skylark was five cars ahead of Jimmy, top up now. The top on the Porsche was still down. There was traffic around him, but Jimmy still heard the pop, the click of the Porsche’s lighter and reached for it, turned the orange circle to him and lit another cigarette. He had stopped a ways back and bought a couple of bottles of beer. What was next, torching up a joint? He was enjoying himself a little too much, like that early part of a night (that later turns out bad) when you first taste that first drink in the first place you stop and she for a minute lets down her resistance and looks at you, just in the moment, forgetting for a moment what you both know, that you were both there to talk the other out of or into something.

  So Jimmy was still thinking about her. And they’d never even been to San Francisco together.

  Lucy and Les had come all the way up the Central Valley on the 101, staying at the limit. The sister and brother had talked a little, then had fallen silent, at least from what Jimmy could see ten car lengths back. A bit below San Jose, in the last stretch of farmland, as the sun was dropping, Lucy had pulled into a rest area and gone to the ladies’ room, leaving the boy in the car. She stayed long enough to make Jimmy wonder if she’d fallen back into her gloom. Or something worse. Maybe she’d just made a call from the pay phone. She didn’t seem to have a cell. When she came back to the car, that’s when she’d put up the top. And she drove faster after that. She’d remembered something, something her brother had let her forget for a little while there.

  Jimmy followed the Skylark down off the Bayshore and into the city, the dropping left turn down into the Fillmore, heading west on Fell. For a quick flash, there was the skyline to his right, a clutter of blocks dropped in the foreground.

  Lucy had the use of a third-floor flat in a Victorian in the regentrified Haight, on Central, a block up from Haight Street next to little Buena Vista Park angling up the hill. Jimmy slowed at the corner where she’d turned, saw where she’d parked, halfway up the hill on the right.

  He looped a block and came back on the intersecting side street. There was a lucky parking spot in the dim space between two streetlights. He parked, reached back, and hoisted up the top and snapped it down. It was cool. There was moisture in the air. Imagine that.

  He watched. And waited. She just sat there, motor idling. Then she got something out of the glove compartment, maybe a white envelope, read something off the face of it, and looked over at the number on the corner building, the Victorian. She turned around in the intersection, put the car right in front, the nose pointed downhill now.

  She sat there some more. The boy kept looking over at her.

  A man with a white ponytail, a man in his sixties, came past on the sidewalk across the street, came down the hill from Buena Vista Park walking a dog, a chow with a loose black tongue and a tail curling up and over. The man seemed to Jimmy to make a point of not staring at the new-comers sitting in the Skylark under the circle of streetlight, kept on going down the hill. He lived over the wine shop at the lower corner, at Central and Haight. The chow waited, looking down at the ground like an old man, while his owner unlocked a black lacquered door. The man looked once back up the hill before he went in and the dog followed.

  Across from the corner Victorian was a four-story building, a little too neat, too perfectly painted, with Catholic trappings, a cross on the crown of the roof and a flash of gold here and there. A nun in a blue habit was framed in a tall second-floor window with the white globe of a ceiling light over her head. Two girls played a board game framed in another window a floor above her, teenage girls in light blue smocks . . . What were they called? Shifts. On one girl, the cloth was stretched tight across her belly. Then Jimmy realized the other girl was pregnant, too, from the fullness in her face as much as anything. But not so far along. It was a home for unwed mothers.

  It was a nice neighborhood. The Haight had been a lot wilder and woollier when he’d lived in San Francisco.

  Lucy got out from behind the wheel. She went to the apartment building two doors down the hill on the same side, rang, waited there at the door. The boy got out a beat after she did and stood beside the car, looking up at the navy-gray sky. He looked like he was thinking that it was going to rain, but it was just the way the nights were in San Francisco in September, something else Jimmy remembered afresh. The boy looked over at his sister waiting there at the door, the way she was acting, but he didn’t dwell on it. It was just one more thing he didn’t get.

  A woman answered Lucy’s bell, came out onto the sidewalk, out under the streetlight, and the two of them talked for a second, the slanted sidewalk forcing them to stand oddly, a little uncertainly. In time the other woman, who was enough older than Lucy to have a little mother in her manner, a little sympathy (or at least judgment, which is a kind of concern), reached into the pocket of the long sweater coat she wore and came out with a key, a loose key, and an index card. She put the key and the card in Lucy’s open palm and looked at her with that look again, the neighbor lady’s own version of the tough-love look the waitress had given Lucy back at the café in Saugus.

  Lucy nodded and thanked her and said something that looked like, “I will.” The boy got his guitar and pack out of the backseat.

  Five halting, unrhythmic tones sounded. Each of the three apartments in the Victorian had its own door at street level, on a marble stoop. Lucy had opened the center door, stepped just inside, the index card in hand, to punch a code into the alarm. There was another, longer tone, the all clear, and Les followed her in, climbed the stairs behind her carrying his gear, as the door closed itself. After a minute, a light came on in the front room on the third floor.

  Jimmy started the Porsche. He pulled forward and turned right, drove up the hill on Central, alongside the Catholic home. He went to the top of the hill, to the park, and turned around and came back down and snugged the car in against the curb. From here he could see straight across into the apartment, from Lucy’s top-floor flat on down. There were closed drapes in the living room, but in the bedroom the blinds were raised. The boy Les was in the kitchen, looking up at the light fixture.

  It was wide-screen, like a drive-in.

  The air had weathered up, gotten heavy with water. Jimmy suddenly felt a little hollow inside but shook it off. So he waited, behind the wheel. He smoked another cigarette, though he was already getting bored with it. Smoking. He spun the dial, found a good station on the radio. They were playing Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy, broadcasting from somewhere down on the waterfront.

  Act two, Lucy came in and sat on the edge of a stripped bed in the front bedroom, alone, her hands on her knees. Her worries, her sadness, the heaviness had sure enough come round again. Big surprise, it was lying in wait for her four hundred miles north. Jimmy wondered if she had any idea that half the neighborhood could see in, could see her sitting there, if they looked.

  The boy came into the bedroom. He looked at her but just stood there in the doorway.

  “Say something to her,” Jimmy said. “She’s your sister.”

  But the boy just stared at her. Jimmy had decided a ways back down the road that they hadn’t seen each other much lately, were unused to each other. Lucy lifted her head and said something. The boy nodded and left the room.

  After a moment, the downstairs front door opened, and he came out onto the sidewalk. By now the night had that horror film look to it, fog hanging around the streetlights, making each of them look like something alive wrapped in a gauzy cocoon. She had given him the keys, to lock up the car. Les got behind the wheel and put the key in. He looked for a second like he was going to take it out for a spin. He canted the wheels to the curb. Maybe he knew more about San Francisco than his sister did. He sat there a minute with his hands on the wheel.
Jimmy could see through the back window over the seat backs that the radio had come on when he’d unlocked the steering wheel. Maybe the kid liked Zep.

  The kid leaned forward over the steering wheel and looked up at the apartment, at the light in the bedroom. He turned the key, and the radio light went out.

  After he’d locked up the car again, he stood for a moment on the sidewalk looking down at the sideways traffic on Haight Street, an electric bus clicking by, rolling toward Ashbury, too fast, rocking, just this side of out of control. Les didn’t see it, but the man with the white ponytail was watching him around the edge of the blinds in his second-floor bay window.

  The kid went back up.

  The overhead light was still on, but she wasn’t in the front bedroom anymore.

  “She sent you away,” Jimmy said.

  He watched as the boy went looking for her, worry in his manner, too.

  Jimmy found her first. There she was, up on the roof, at the edge. Flat, no railing. She was looking out levelly, not up, not down, a look that said she just might take the next step in front of her, whether there was anything there or not.

  So it’s going to be tonight . . .

  Jimmy got out fast, left the car door open.

  But then Les came out onto the roof behind his sister.

  Jimmy stopped.

  When the boy said something, the first thing Lucy did was to take a step back from the edge.

  TWO

  Jimmy couldn’t sleep, didn’t sleep, so after he’d checked into a high suite at the Mark Hopkins on Nob Hill, he went back out into the night. He left the Porsche in the hotel garage and took a cab. He went by the house on Central. The lights were still on in the front bedroom, but now the shades were down. There was the blue flare of a television behind the drapes in the living room, and the kitchen was dark.

  The cab driver didn’t seem to make anything out of Jimmy telling him to just park at the top of the hill, looking down at the house. Ten minutes passed that way. Ten minutes of nothing. There was jazz on the radio, very low. The fog had settled in even thicker. July and August, Jimmy remembered, were the months when the fog really came in. Nobody told September the season was over. An electric bus blew past down on Haight Street. Jimmy motioned for the cabby, the same black man in his forties who always seemed to be driving the cab in San Francisco, schoolteacher’s black-rim glasses and a Kangol cap, to roll on down the hill. The cabby rolled on down the hill. To the corner.

  Jimmy got out, paid him off through the open window, with an extra twenty to really make him wonder what that had been about, and set out walking in the direction of Haight and Ashbury. He turned to watch the cab pull away, waiting to see the cabby’s eyes in the rearview mirror, but the cabby never looked back.

  It was San Francisco. Maybe he wasn’t that weird here.

  There was a Gap on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. No Starbucks. Yet. But a wannabe Starbucks a few doors down. There was a good crowd. By now it was almost midnight. It took Jimmy a second to remember what day of the week it was. Thursday. The coffee drinkers were mostly professionals, young, not so young. Dressed nice. Good haircuts. In pairs, most of them.

  Jimmy got a tea and a madeleine and brought them outside and sat at one of the little white corporate tables. There was only one other smoker, a self-consciously scruffy man in his late twenties, in a rough-weave unbleached wool sweater, off-white, over dark green cords and what they used to call desert boots. Suede. Probably Tommy Hilfiger. He had one leg angled up into the chair. He was smoking a good cigar. With the gold band still on it. Jimmy wanted to put a fist in his face, but only because of how young he was, how apparently happy he was, and because the woman leaning into him looked a little, in the eyes, in the cheekbones, like Mary.

  Mary.

  A bus came. Jimmy jumped on it. It was the 43. He rode it out Fell along the Panhandle, halfway to the zoo and the ocean and then back again, back along Oak Street, along Market to the Embarcadero and then Fisherman’s Wharf.

  The night was still very alive down along the waterfront, postmidnight, out-of-towners most of them, honeymooners, lovers on lovers’ long weekends, groups of three or four or five or six, more than a few in them in red sweatshirts with somebody’s logo, a convention of somebodys.

  And Sailors.

  That didn’t surprise Jimmy. This is where they’d be. And when. Was that why he’d come down here, looking for his kind? That felt a little pathetic to him. The bus he’d ridden in was one of the last of the night, five or six other passengers and Jimmy. Maybe there’d be another run, one last loop when the bars closed, whenever that was.

  Most of the people were at Pier 41, where the red-and-white boats over to Alcatraz docked. The last Alcatraz boat came back at six or seven, but the ticket windows were still open for tomorrow’s runs. It sat out there, Alcatraz, across the night, swathed in the clouds of fog that sat on the Bay. Other nights you’d be able to make it out from here, the lights, even the shape, the edges, but not tonight. Tonight there was only a sweeping light on the highest building, behind the cotton of the fog, and a moon up there somewhere, too, or a piece of one, a dull glow at two o’clock.

  There were street entertainers, each with his own little knot of audience. There was a juggler. There was a close-up magician, making things disappear.

  There was a man painted silver. Head to toe. In a silver tux and tails, silver spats and silver shoes and a silver top hat that stayed somehow on his silver head. With a boom box. Dancing like a robot.

  The Sailors moved among the tourists, bumping into them like pick-pockets, knocking into strangers just for the joy of it, for the harshness of it, with a rough laugh whenever a man from Kansas or a woman from Germany would excuse themselves, though it was the Sailor who had run into the innocent. Same as it ever was. Some of the tourists would check their pockets, to make sure.

  But it wasn’t their wallets that had been taken.

  A couple of the crab stands were still open. Five bucks got you a red-and-white square paper tray of shredded Dungeness crab with a quarter lemon and a tear of sourdough baguette. Jimmy sat on the stool, close enough to be getting a facial from the stinking steam that came out of the stainless steel box. He’d already shoveled a forkful into his mouth. It was good.

  “What do you want?” the teenager working the stand said. It was a Leone Brothers stand. This kid was likely a Leone grandson, maybe great-grandson.

  His tone was a little quick. Jimmy waited.

  “You look like you want something else.”

  “More cocktail sauce, I guess,” Jimmy said.

  The kid put an open paper cup of red sauce in front of Jimmy, the kind of little cup they put pills in, in a hospital. “You want horseradish, say it.”

  “I do.”

  The server spooned an amount of white horseradish that would have been too much for the average person into another paper cup and set it beside the first one.

  “That’s the way I eat it,” the boy said.

  “You still eat it?”

  “Every day.”

  “I thought maybe you’d get sick of it.”

  “Every day. Ask him.”

  “Who?”

  The boy looked over Jimmy’s shoulder at a busboy pulling up black rubber mats, hosing off the underneath. The stand was in front of the mother restaurant, closed up at midnight.

  “Do I eat crab?” the kid asked.

  “Every day,” the busboy said.

  From twenty feet away, a Sailor was watching them, watching the dumb little play, the tourist getting stroked by the Welcome to San Francisco Committee. This one, this Sailor, sat on the closed lid of a Dumpster, a blond man who’d been a bit overinflu enced by Billy Idol, a little too pretty, lips too full in that pouty Billy Idol way. He wore what a lot of them wore, the ones with that certain attitude, the navy peacoat and watch cap. This one also wore black straight-leg 505s, pegged skintight, and pointy-toed fairy boots like The Beatles used to wear.


  Only red.

  “I know you, Brother,” he mouthed to Jimmy. There was just a hint of blue around him, as if he were wrapped in another kind of fog. And he had that look, that Sailor sneer.

  Why were they always so sour?

  “Nice night for a white wedding,” Jimmy said back at him, across the twenty feet between them.

  The crab kid gave Jimmy a funny look.

  Then everything started to speed up. Another Sailor came over to Red Boots with an it’s-happening-now look on his face, and Red Boots jumped off the Dumpster. He didn’t even look over at Jimmy as he went past. On a mission. None of it surprised Jimmy or made him wonder where they were headed. They were always scurrying around with sudden purpose, this kind, this time of night, like junkies energized by the rumored arrival of dope.

  What did surprise Jimmy was that the crab kid was a Sailor, too. When the first two passed, the second Sailor caught the kid’s eye, motioned with his head. The crab boy fell in step with them, abandoned his post at the stand. The trio headed off across the last hundred yards between restaurant row and the waterfront, leaving Jimmy to wonder if he was losing his sense of things, getting slow. He’d missed it. There was nothing about the kid that made him think this one was a Sailor. No lost look in the eye, no flare of blue. No fatalism. No bitterness.

  He wondered something else, if the kid had read him.

  Jimmy went after them, took his little twist-off split of Napa Chardon nay and what was left of the crab with him.

  The drama was at Pier 35, one of the old World War II-era buildings, with its big, flat, blank face.

  A matched pair of perfectly naked girls was on the lip of the two-story facade of the building. Black-haired, with cute helmet haircuts, turned under just below the ears, bangs straight across just above the eyes. They looked a little French, a little Godard. They were holding hands.

  Girls Gone Wild.

  They had a good-sized crowd of their own, five or six banks of people standing before them in concentric half circles, heads back, smiling, entertained.