Among the Living

by Dan Vining

  But then there was a man, whom Jimmy hadn’t even seen until just now, who wasn’t naked, right behind the girls, all in black, hidden by the shadows on the ledge until now, who now leaned into the frame and said something into the space between their two heads, something that only took a second.

  Or took half the night, depending on how tuned in you were.

  And, next beat, the girls jumped, hand in hand. Dove . . .

  They were so pretty, so French-seeming, had such beautiful bodies; it was clear the rapt crowd half expected them to arc back up into the air and land on their feet, like Cirque du Soleil. Instead, everybody got to watch as the two crashed into the cement in front of the dock building face-first, shoulders and chests first, one girl somehow slightly ahead of the other and with a sound like hundred-pound sacks of potatoes thrown off a loading dock.

  Nobody stepped closer for a closer look. Nobody had to check to see if they were still alive.

  Jimmy was in the second row, and he didn’t step closer for a closer look, either, but he could smell it over the wet-dog musk of the Bay. It was a smell he knew.

  When he looked up at the top of the facade again, the man in black was gone.

  Crab Boy was behind Jimmy, over a row or two.

  He looked at Jimmy. And smiled. How inappropriate.

  The two Sailors in peacoats and watch caps, Red Boots and the other, didn’t waste any time. They jumped on it, were already on the move, working together, doing this thing, Red Boots shoving people back and the other Sailor getting right in their faces for up-close scrutiny, one person at a time, looking each person in the face.

  It had a name. It was called, prosaically, Looking.

  Then Crab Boy split. Something else had caught his eye, movement out at the edge of the crowd. Somebody chasing somebody.

  Jimmy went after him. After them.

  Three other peacoats chased a man down the alleyway between Pier 45 and the back of Alioto’s. Crab Boy jogged after the three new Sailors and the one they chased, but at a pace that said he didn’t mean to catch them, just wanted to be there when they all got to the end, when they caught the man.

  The silver man. It was the silver-painted dancer.

  The three overtook him and knocked him down and began a beating that scattered a clot of seabirds hunkered down in the shadow of what looked like a warehouse. Crab Boy came up and stood over the beaters, like a supervisor, like the boss’s son who’d been made night shift manager. Not getting his hands dirty. There was an ugly rhythm to it, the way they beat him, taking turns on him, each of them hitting him in the face twice and, at the same time, saying something.

  Two words.

  Jimmy caught up, jumped right into the middle of it. He seized one Sailor by the back of his blue-black wool coat. (It felt damp, perpetually damp, out in the weather like this.) Jimmy pulled the Sailor away, off the silver man, cast the bigger man aside with a strength that surprised both of them, that even made Jimmy wonder why he was suddenly filled with rage, why he’d gotten into it without a hesitation, without thinking. The other two Sailors didn’t miss a beat, kept pummeling the silver man, saying the same two words that Jimmy still couldn’t make out.

  “All right. Cool,” the kid said after a minute. Instead of “Enough” or “Stop.”

  The other Sailors stepped off.

  “Damn!” the silver man said, still on the ground. Turned out he was black under the paint.

  They all caught their breath. Jimmy turned to stare at the crab kid. The other Sailors were walking away.

  “You look like you want something,” the kid said to Jimmy’s glare.

  Now the kid flashed blue, but not in a way Jimmy had ever seen. A crackling, electric, staticky way, gone as soon as you noticed it.

  Jimmy didn’t crack wise back at the boy. He’d only been in town a few hours. It wouldn’t get him anything. The kid turned in his very white Nikes and went back up the alley.

  They were back behind the restaurants. The smell suddenly hit Jimmy, with his sinuses opened by the adrenaline coursing through his system. It was like ammonia.

  “Damn,” the silver man said again.

  Jimmy held out a hand to him, to pull him up.

  The silver paint seemed to filter the man’s blue edge, like a gel on a spotlight.

  Another Sailor.

  His silver top hat had gotten knocked off. He retrieved it, tried to straighten out a crease it had picked up. He stopped to look at it in his hand, as if he’d suddenly realized what an improbable thing he’d become.

  “What were they saying, when they were pounding you?” Jimmy asked.

  “ ‘Who’s next?’ ” the silver man said in a way that meant that he didn’t understand it, either.

  THREE

  “Machine Shop.”

  “What do your friends call you?” Jimmy asked.

  “Jus’ Shop. Or ’Shine.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m not sensitive.”

  The lights atop the EMT ambulance were still on, a red pulsing sweep projected ten feet tall against the face of the building at Pier 35, where the girls had jumped, making the scene look like a rave. But with nobody there. Raved out. Most of the crowd had dispersed even before the coroner’s van and a couple of news trucks had arrived.

  The fog had descended thicker. Jimmy looked away from the death scene, up toward Coit Tower. It wasn’t foggy there. Clear. Something else he remembered from his days in San Francisco, how the fog moved around, how you’d be talking about it on the phone to someone across town, making jokes about the doom and gloom (if they were new to what everyone here called The City), and the person on the other end would be just as likely to say, “It’s clear here.”

  He and the silver man were on a bench in front of Pier 39, drinking coffee. Jimmy had said he’d buy the street performer a drink, a last drink before the waterfront bars closed, but they were outside drinking coffee instead. Good coffee. Black. Jimmy got the idea that Mr. Machine Shop here was a program drunk. A Twelve-Stepper.

  “Why did they come after you?”

  “I said something,” Machine Shop said.

  “Said what?”

  “I yelled up at them. The girls. ‘Don’t do it! Don’t listen to him!’ ”

  Jimmy noticed his silver hand shaking a little as he brought the cup to his silver lips. The paint was wearing thin. He wondered if it was toxic, what the effects were of putting it on night after night.

  “I shouldn’t say it, but those girls were very sexual.”

  Jimmy nodded.

  “I mean . . .”

  “Yeah, they were beautiful,” Jimmy said. “Very young.”

  “I know I shouldn’t even be thinking that, but—”

  “Did you know them?”

  Machine Shop shook his head.

  “Know anything about them?”

  “I saw them earlier. In the ring.”

  “The ring.”

  “The audience.”

  “Did you know him, the guy who gave them the go?”

  “Never saw him before tonight,” said Shop a little too quickly. “You mean the skinny guy, in the black turtleneck? Maybe wearing a cape?”

  Jimmy waited.

  “OK, yes, I know him,” Shop corrected.

  “Who is he?”

  “I know him. I don’t know his name.” There was another momentary delay. “OK, his name is Jeremy. Jeremy.”

  “He’s a Sailor,” Jimmy said. Not really a question.

  “He’s down in here all the time,” Machine Shop said. He turned and looked for the big clock on the face of the mall of T-shirt shops. It was two forty. “He’s all right.”

  Jimmy waited.

  “I stay out of his way,” Shop finished.

  “Is he a Sailor?”

  “Oh yeah,” Machine Shop said. Then he said the same thing again, another way, a way that meant that the caped man was really a Sailor.

  “Was he with them earlier in the night?”
r />   “Not when I saw them.”

  “How did the girls look then?”

  “All right. Kind of sad in the eyes maybe. They were holding hands then, too. Wore little white silky dresses.”

  “They were twins,” Jimmy said.

  Machine Shop nodded. “Don’t get that every day. Barefoot, too.” You could see him get lost in a thought about them. Then you could see him shake himself out of it. Here was a man trying to do right, be good. To walk the line. What Would Johnny Cash Do? He uncrossed his long legs and stood. “I guess that’d be a real bonus for them,” he said. “Getting two. Twins.”

  Jimmy put that in his pocket, to think on later.

  Machine Shop had retrieved his gear from where he’d stowed it behind a parked car before the trio had chased him down the alleyway. He reached down and snapped out the handle on his roll-away, the wheelie that carried his stuff, a silver-painted boom box and a plastic, silver-painted top hat, for “contributions.”

  “You make any money at this?” Jimmy said, looking up at him, still on the bench.

  “It’s a life,” Machine Shop said.

  Jimmy got the joke. A Sailor joke.

  The trolley was coming up around the curve, up the Embarcadero from Pier 29. The night’s last train.

  “Where you from, man?” Machine Shop said. “I know you ain’t from here. You ain’t even from Oakland.”

  Jimmy told him.

  “You just about the bluest man I ever saw,” the other said. “You so blue sitting there, even a Norm could pick you out . . .”

  Jimmy walked “home.” Through North Beach, up Columbus. It was just a bit after three, and San Francisco was a late town, so he wasn’t alone. Drunks and lovers. And drunk lovers. A cab would come by every thirty seconds. Every other one, the empty ones, would slow to look over at him. He’d just shake his head, headed up that straight, gentle slope. He was wearing a black suit, the black suit he’d had on all day, since six that morning. It was linen, over a white shirt. He turned up the collar. Maybe that would show the cabbies that he meant to be here.

  Did he? Mean to be here? He remembered why he was here. He thought about his friend Angel, thought about Lucy, hoped she was asleep in her borrowed bed over in the Haight.

  Then he went back to thinking about himself.

  He realized he was looking for the U.S. Restaurant. It was gone. The U.S. had been there for fifty years, in a wedge-shaped building, a 24/7 place where bartenders came after their shifts, cooks and waiters, musicians after gigs, pimps and drug dealers, and Rolling Stone writers who counted themselves part of that crowd, somewhere in there. The strom boli-and-cannelloni-for-breakfast crowd.

  But it was gone. Well, not gone, exactly: replaced by a new and improved version of itself four or five doors down. And closed at ten.

  In the next block he found another open-late place. It was almost full. He ordered a glass of red. It came in a water tumbler, just like at the U.S. (So he wasn’t the only sentimental one.) He sat at the bar. Alone.

  Not exactly. Halfway up Columbus, he’d noticed the Sailors on the other side of the street climbing the opposite sidewalk, trying not to look over at him, Red Boots and his sidekick. Now they were here, in the corner in the restaurant, drinking espresso. The bad ones always came in pairs, and the good ones were always alone.

  It was dogging him, had followed him the four hundred miles north from L.A. the same way Lucy’s blues had followed her. It wasn’t just the tails he’d picked up, the foreshadowing of trouble, the suggestion of the last act. What was on his shoulders, weighing him down was the reality of his state, of their state, even the ones he hated, like the murderer in the black cape. It had followed him. It was there every time he looked for it, every time whatever had distracted him away from it stopped distracting him from it. It was as present as the two tails across the room. It was his heartache. Everybody gets a heartache; this was his. It made every day a hole he had to claw his way out of, just to begin again. It was enough to make you dive off a roof, as if that’d fix anything, end anything.

  Had he really thought that phrase, the reality of his state? Funny word for it. More like . . . unreality. More like . . . “death’s other Kingdom.” A little T. S. Eliot for the fans.

  Jimmy drank the last of the red. And only then noticed there was another full glass waiting beside it. Another Chianti.

  He stared at it. The bartender came past.

  “What’s this?” Jimmy said.

  “Somebody bought you a drink,” she said. She was in her forties, with longer hair than most women her age. It was something else San Francisco had, bartenders and waiters who weren’t just doing this while they were waiting to get famous. Or waiting to find someone to pair off with who was. She smiled the nicest, simplest smile. Jimmy had the instantaneous thought that he’d like to curl up in her arms on whatever quilt-covered Victorian bed she had in whatever vanilla candle-scented apartment in whatever working-class neighborhood she and her cat lived in. Or even just lie there and watch her as she pulled down the lacy shades to keep out the morning, while Mr. Kitty walked the infinity sign in and around her ankles.

  “I bet you aren’t working on a screenplay,” he said.

  “Oh no, you’re from L.A.,” she said with mock sadness.

  “What did he look like, my secret admirer?” Jimmy asked, to set her up to correct him, to say She.

  “Can’t tell you,” the bartender said instead. “That would violate the Bartenders’ Code.”

  “A regular?”

  “Never saw him before,” she said. “But then again, I don’t usually work Thursdays.”

  Jimmy turned on his bar stool to follow the bartender’s eyes to an empty table, a table near the Sailors. Just looking in the tails’ direction was enough to spook them. They left their coffees and headed for the door.

  “What’s your name?” Jimmy said, looking back.

  It was Angelina.

  He looked across the bar at her and recited . . .

  Those who have crossed

  With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom

  Remember us—if at all—not as lost

  Violent souls, but only

  As the hollow men

  The stuffed men.

  “What do you think of that, Angelina?” he said after he’d uttered the lines.

  “I think it’s the Chianti talking,” she said.

  He said, “No, if it was the Chianti talking, it would be . . .

  Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

  mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

  ché la diritta via era smarrita . . .

  “OK, I admit it,” she said. “I bought you the drink.”

  Jimmy knew it wasn’t true but appreciated the flirtation. “Dante’s Inferno,” he said. “Chicks always dig it.”

  He stood. The second glass of wine was untouched, catching the light.

  The bartender looked sorry to see him go. “Aren’t you going to drink it? Maybe she’s coming back.”

  “Chianti makes me sentimental,” Jimmy said. “I’ve had enough. Next thing you know, I’ll be quoting poetry . . .”

  On his way out, Jimmy went by the empty table. Where his admirer had been? A table in the corner. There was only an empty glass.

  And, improbably, a scent still hanging in the air, the scent of a woman.

  He stood outside, looked up Columbus, the rise up the hill, a bigger hill to the right and the Financial District to the left, the point of the TransAmerica Pyramid piercing the lifting fog.

  A bit more of the Dante he’d rattled off inside found its way into his mouth. Standing there looking up Columbus, he translated it . . .

  So did my soul, that still was fleeting onward,

  Turn itself back to re-behold the pass

  Which never yet a living person left . . .

  His new best friends were waiting in the shadows across the street. Jimmy set out to walk the rest of the way back to the Mark Hopkins, up and over another
hill, Nob Hill, which took up most of two hours and what remained of the night, and left Red Boots and the other Sailor thoroughly winded.

  He decided not to think about the dead girls. And he didn’t.

  FOUR

  The morning broke eternal, bright, and fair.

  Or so it looked to Jimmy. He was on the open top deck of the red-and-white ferry that crossed the Bay from Pier 41 to Sausalito. He’d gone back to the hotel to change, to shower, to go from the black linen suit he’d worn yesterday to another linen suit, this one the color of the little spoon of cream on the Irish coffee at the Buena Vista. A cream-colored suit over a black shirt, like today was going to be the opposite of last night. As if, as the kids say.

  But it was a beautiful day; a few clouds pushed all the way back over to Oakland. Tiburon was in front of them, Alcatraz sliding by to the left. On the Rock, another red-and-white boat off-loaded the 10:10 crowd as the first-run-of-the-day people queued up for the trip back across to San Francisco. (Did they still call it that, “the Rock,” after the movie, after the wrestler who’d named himself after the movie and then become a movie star?) Jimmy could hear the voices of the kids on the Alcatraz dock, loud, vacation loud.

  Down below him a deck, Lucy almost looked caught up in the new morning thing herself. She sat out in the open in the middle of the first row of fib erglass benches, ten feet back from the splash zone, the V of the bow. She’d made a friend, a white-haired lady in a spiffy blue-and-white Nautica windbreaker, a happy lady, a talker. Lucy said a few words in reply now and then and nodded every few seconds. Women liked her, Lucy. Jimmy wondered why, what it was that was in her eyes or the shape of her mouth or the way she held herself that made women like her. And want to help her. He hadn’t really looked her in the eye. Up close. Maybe it’d move him, too.

  The boy Jimmy was calling Les Paul for the shape of his guitar case came out onto the deck with two hot chocolates in his hands and a frosted, sprinkled donut stuck in his mouth. It was a little cool out here on the water, but he was wearing just a T-shirt. He handed off one of the cocoas to his sister and sat a few places away on the end of the bench, so as not to intrude in the back-and-forth between the women. He sat there and went to work on his donut, eating the way kids do, taking a bite and then looking at the thing, studying it while he chewed. He looked over at Lucy and the Nautica lady. Jimmy got the sense that the boy knew his sister was hurting, off balance, and that he didn’t much relish the role of helpmate, was glad for some help.