Among the Living

by Dan Vining

  He found a wedge of shadow, even if it did smell pissy, in the entryway of a storefront next to the Chianti bar. From there he could watch the rest of the play over at the coffee joint. Everyone was still on their marks, Shop and Lucy talking, Pam looking a little put off, stirring her little coffee with a little spoon.

  Then he figured it out. The empty chair across from Pam was meant for Lucy. It was a date. Spoiled by Machine Shop.

  A band of hippies came past Jimmy, six or seven of them, girls and guys. Central casting. Freaky and fun. Hendrix headbands, striped bellbottoms, fruit boots. One even clinked finger cymbals. If Disneyland had a Haight-Ashbury section, hippies like these would stroll past, saying things like “What’s happening, man?” and “Be groovy.”

  The leader wore a fringey vest, a puffy-sleeved shirt, and a sho-nuff Vandyke. His right-hand girl, who wasn’t much older than thirteen, blew Jimmy a kiss. Leader Hippie pulled her back in line. As the troupe moved on, there was a little edge of color to him, but not Sailor blue. Or maybe it was just the streetlight.

  When the retro hippies had cleared the frame, over at the coffee bar the little scene was ending. Lucy was standing now. She said another line or two to Machine Shop, and he said something back to her. She smiled, and it looked like it was over, but then she tipped her head toward him and leaned into him for a hug, more her idea than his was the way Jimmy read it. Shop kept watching her as she walked up the sidewalk in the direction of the apartment. When she turned the corner at Central Avenue, a block and a half away, he left his place by the little round table and started after her. He was going to watch her all the way to her door. On the job.

  Polythene Pam stood up to go.

  People make friends. People run into each other, find out they live a few blocks apart, make a date for coffee and commiseration. It happens all the time.

  Or take a ride over into Marin on a beautiful, sunny day, like this morning . . .

  Maybe he was seeing things that weren’t there. Maybe it was innocent.

  He didn’t think that for a minute.

  Jimmy kept ten cars back. Traffic was light. Last night, he had followed Polythene Pam away from the coffeehouse. She’d split a few minutes after Lucy. She was on foot, too. Pam stayed on one side of Haight Street, and Jimmy tailed her on the other, until she crossed the street in the middle of the block and came across to his side. She took the next right, walked across the wide greenbelt, the Panhandle, the eastern end of Golden Gate Park. There were a few street people out and people who lived in the park, but she never hurried her pace. Or looked back. (Here was another somebody who went through life looking straight ahead. With a purpose.) She turned left on Fell and walked two more short blocks.

  To a black house.

  The house had two-story columns out front and was painted black. There may have been some red trim here and there that didn’t read in the darkness, but the house was black. And black lacquer at that. It shined. Pam opened the iron gate and let herself in the outsized front door.

  So she lived in the Haight. Innocent? Her house looked like a frat house in New Orleans, like a Goth sorority at Tulane.

  Jimmy spent the rest of the night on the street. At dawn, he went home to the Mark for a change of clothes and to pick up the Porsche.

  Maybe it was time to introduce himself to Lucy.

  He made it back to the Haight just in time to watch the Catholic home for unwed mom-ettes come to life. (It didn’t look as if anyone was awake up at Lucy’s. He parked up the hill.) They had those girls up at the crack of dawn, scrubbing the sidewalks out front, watering the plants in the planters, scattering some bread crumbs for the birds who lived in the trees in the park behind them. They washed the windows. All the better to see the bright future ahead. The nun who acted as boss to the detention detail didn’t seem too bad, called all the girls by name, even spoke Spanish to two of them, making them laugh. You never know. They say sometimes you’re entertaining angels unaware.

  There were some signs of life at Lucy’s. Jimmy was this close to getting out of the car, to walking down the hill to the front door at 52 Central, when Pam pulled up.

  Girls’ day out. It was nine, a very civilized hour for an excursion. Pam drove a Land Rover County, dark green, deep dark forest green. She was alone. She parked at the curb, and Lucy came out the front door a second later, a sweatshirt tied around her waist, over sporty pants. Bright, springy, coordinated, Gappy colors. She got in the front seat, and Pam revved the engine and backed up a foot to straighten out the wheels, and away they went. The nun was back in her third-floor window, watching the whole thing with a neutral, preternaturally patient look.

  Jimmy wished he knew how to do that.

  Once across the GG, the Range Rover passed through the tunnel to Marin, under the rainbow painted on its concrete face. There was a second and a third exit for Sausalito, but Pam kept going.

  The two women talked all the way. They had the windows down, the sunroof back. Pam had that short, chopped-off hairdo for her jet-black hair, so the wind made her look like she was in the stylist’s chair the whole way, getting a new cut blown out. Lucy’s hair was longer, was like a scarf out the window when the currents caught it right. Out in the bright, happy light of Marin County, her hair had all kinds of life to it, looked almost red.

  They took an exit, east, and rolled along across the top limit of the Bay, through an industrial zone, marine industrial, shoulder-to-shoulder mari nas and boat repair bays, all along the curve of the water’s edge. Maybe they were taking a boat out. The roadway was elevated a bit. The city could be seen in the distance, white and silver, with the dark hump of Tiburon in the foreground.

  Here it was. There was a park, a large greenbelt cleared of trees except at either end, an expanse of green that went all the way down to the water, to the big hauled-in rocks and the six-inch waves whitecapped with foam and the detritus of the Bay. The Range Rover came around on the main highway and pulled into the lot.

  From the water, from the south, Tiburon looked like an island at the top of the Bay, but close like this you could see that it was a knob at the end of a peninsula, a knobby knuckle on the end of one of the fingers reaching out into the Bay.

  And on the end of the knuckle was another high-backed island. Belvedere. It was like the rich part of Tiburon, only almost all of it was rich.

  Jimmy drove on past the park and the parking lot, went another half mile or so down to the ferry dock and the phony picturesque “seaport village” of shops and restaurants. There was a roundabout. Jimmy went around about it.

  He came back up and pulled into the lot, parked where he could look out across the expanse of grass, all the way down to the water. He’d had the top down for the ride over. He got out and hoisted it up. He was in the first row of the lot, between two SUVs, hidden, dwarfed. A woman on one side of him was off-loading three boys in turquoise soccer gear, ten or eleven, a Jason and two Seans, and what looked like a hundred pounds of support equipment and a Hammacher Schlemmer collapsible sideline parents’ two-place couch with cup holders for the lattes from the back and side of a Ford Expedition long enough to be a gas line all by itself.

  Jimmy took a book and a warm Red Bull from his cooler over to a picnic table ten feet from the cars.

  Lucy and Pam had spread out a blanket. They sat. Pam had a picnic basket, opened the lid, unpacked something from it. Jimmy thought he saw her looking over at him. Maybe she was more aware than Lucy and Les, more suspicious of the same guy always somehow being around. Maybe she’d realized he’d followed her home last night, to the black house. But he was a hundred yards away from them. Not much for Pam to see. Still, he put his nose in his book. It was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

  Lucy was watching the little kids on the field. Beside “the big field” where the Seans and the Jasons would be playing there was a tiny-tots field lined out with little bitsy goals and four-year-olds. Girls. The Purple Unicorns versus Rainbow Ponies, though they didn’
t defend the goals, and only the dads kept score, so you couldn’t really call it versus. Half of the girls ran around aimlessly while the other half stood and talked. Two held hands. One was lying on her back in the grass, looking at the fat white clouds, opening and closing her legs and clapping the heels of her rubber cleats, like she was making a snow angel.

  Pam put her hand on Lucy’s shoulder as Lucy watched the kids. Jimmy had wondered almost from the start if Lucy was pregnant, if that was what was at the bottom of her unhappiness. But wouldn’t that be too much of a coincidence, with her landing in a borrowed apartment across the way from a home for unwed mothers? Still, he wondered it again, when he saw the way she watched the kids.

  And then along came the other one. Sexy Sadie.

  Probably just another coincidence . . .

  The three of them seemed to have coordinated their outfits. Pam was wearing white ankle-length pants and a short pink top. Sexy Sadie wore a sea-green skirt, a full Katharine Hepburn skirt, and a cotton blouse with rolled-up sleeves. The three looked like catalog models, especially when Pam and Lucy stood to greet the third and they all touched each other’s arms and Sadie kissed Pam.

  Jimmy hadn’t seen her arrive, Sadie. There was a white ’57 T-Bird in the parking lot he hadn’t noticed before, but that would be a little too perfect. He was guessing the classic Jag sedan, but it was black and seemed too gloomy for her.

  Maybe she had parachuted in, rappelled from a rescue helicopter, because now the crack two-woman sympathy team really sprang into action. Again. The three settled back onto the blanket and began to talk. Serious as serious gets. The light changed. As if the god of weather were part of the plan, had just been waiting for his cue, the cottony clouds at the same time took on some color, dark enough and sudden enough to make the parents on the sidelines of the game look up at the sky.

  Lucy, on the other hand, was looking down.

  Now she was crying, pulling the sleeve of her sweatshirt over her hand to daub at her eyes.

  Sexy Sadie patted her leg.

  Polythene Pam stroked her hair.

  They were whispering to her, every word hitting some soft, assailable spot.

  Jimmy had a thought, that he was watching a murder in slow motion.

  SEVEN

  Machine Shop sat on the Market Street streetcar, in one of the side seats, one of the wooden slat benches. For some reason, San Francisco had bought up a half-dozen old New Orleans streetcars, refurbished them, kept the names.

  Where was Desire?

  Shop had all his gear with him, on the rollie. He was in his paint, fully, freshly silver.

  “Look like you’re moving out,” a Chinese man seated across from him said.

  “No, jus’ headed toward my destination,” Shop answered.

  “You look like robot on vacation.”

  “Jus’ making my witness,” Shop said.

  Jimmy was on the bench next to the Chinese man. It was an hour before sundown, not an easy time for him generally, the hour when the shadows tended to cross his soul.

  But everybody else was happy. The Chinese man and almost everyone else on board were headed to a Giants game, a night game down at the new ballpark, the replacement for Candlestick, with some company’s name crowbarred into its name. The streetcar riders were all decked out in Giants’ shirts and jackets and hats, like the oddest, most overweight, most over-the-hill team imaginable.

  It reminded Jimmy what a blue-collar town San Francisco was at its heart. There were plenty of the rich here, on Nob Hill, on Russian Hill, here in the City and over in Marin, on Tiburon, down in Hillsborough, but it was a city stocked with robust working men and women and their families. A union town. A proud town. A cohesive town. A public-transit town. A sweating town.

  Going to work, just like Machine Shop.

  They reached some stop, and the doors opened, front and back, and everybody else stood.

  “Who’re they playing?” Jimmy said to one kid on his way out, a boy eight or nine.

  “Asshat Dodgers,” the kid said, and got a laugh from the crowd.

  Hey kid, at least in L.A. it’s still just Dodger Stadium.

  The streetcar rolled out again, empty except for Shop and Jimmy. Jimmy said, “I didn’t mean you had to actually sit with Lucy last night.”

  “Yeah, that wasn’t my plan,” Machine Shop said. “It just happened.”

  Machine Shop didn’t offer anything more, until he realized Jimmy was waiting for a report.

  “She didn’t come out of her place for a long time,” Shop said. “The boy just played his guitar. I couldn’t hear it, but I play a little myself. I believe he’s good. I used to play, in my previous position.” Shop went down a memory trail for a second. Jimmy waited.

  “A light came on in the front bedroom about ten forty-five,” Shop said. “I guess she was sleeping up until then. A few minutes before eleven, she came out. She was dressed up, kinda nice, but she had on a heavy coat, heavier than what she needed really. Had the collar up. Walked down the hill to Haight. She walked right straight to the corner, to the coffee place. She got a coffee, took it outside, sat down. I was watching from across the street, over there where you were later. She was pitiful. I couldn’t stand it, came and sat with her, talked to the girl. She’s just a child herself.”

  Shop exercised his lower face vigorously. “Am I cracking?” he asked.

  “No, you look fine.”

  “I gotta get in character,” Shop said.

  “When you came up and sat down,” Jimmy said, “did you get the idea she was meeting somebody?”

  Machine Shop didn’t answer for a long beat, staring straight ahead. Then he animated, straightened his spine, pivoted his shiny head robotically, and produced a mechanical sound without moving his lips.

  “No,” he said, unblinking.

  The streetcar rolled on through the Financial District, empty, cold-looking, the wind stirring through it on a Saturday night, and made the big left turn onto the Embarcadero. I Cover the Waterfront. A Bay sunset cruise ship, out to the Golden Gate and back, was docked at Pier 39; a line of twenty ugly limos waited at the curb nose to tail, new-style prom haulers, stretched Escalades and Excursions. And a Hummer. The last time Jimmy was in San Francisco, the Embarcadero wasn’t a tourist stop. The first time he came to San Francisco, there was still a freeway overhead, running along the curve of the docks and piers. It had been torn down a few years back. The docks had been just docks for all those years before that. Then somebody had gotten the idea tourists would come to the water’s edge if they gussied it up a little. Come down to see where a hundred thousand wives and girlfriends said good-bye to a hundred thousand soldiers and sailors headed off to war. That was the scene in Jimmy’s head as he looked out the streetcar window at the docks and the piers, that high drama, though it was before even his time. A lot of tears shed on these piers.

  I cover the waterfront, watching the sea

  Will the one I love be coming back to me?

  Now it was home to another kind of sailor, off to another kind of war. One of their domains, one of their gathering places here. Every city had its Sailors, if some more than others. Even inland. Kansas City, Chicago. Even Orlando. (Though inland, they still tended to congregate near whatever big water was available.) But the big coastal cities collected the most Sailors, from inland, from all over. From small towns. You didn’t like to be alone. You needed reinforcement, whether you were good or bad. (The new initiates straightway found out there were two ways to go.) Buses brought them every day, trains. They didn’t much like to fly.

  Jimmy saw a bright flash of blue around a young woman in a cluster of people at one of the stops. They were street kids, but not too ragged. One boy had a guitar. Even as the streetcar was pulling out again, with that surprising acceleration, Jimmy heard what he was playing, what they were singing, R.E.M., “Losing my religion . . .” Jimmy turned to look back at them, at the girl. Three of them were Sailors, though her blue, the edge of blue
around her, was the strongest. So she was the newest, probably, or at least the newest to San Francisco. She had that New look in her eyes. She wore a T-shirt from some Oklahoma barbecue. He hoped that’s where she was from. Oklahoma.

  Machine Shop was looking back at her, too, at the cluster of Sailors. He mechanically rotated his head to the forward position again.

  Jimmy rotated, too. He pulled the photo out of his pocket, the Leonidas girls beside the ski boat. With two days now past since she’d died, Christina would look different, but not completely different. He wouldn’t have admitted it if someone had asked him, but he was down here to try to find her. There were things to look for. Sometimes the eyes would be the same, if you got up close enough. Jimmy hadn’t known her, never spent any time with her before the dive off the roof. If he had, maybe he’d know her when he saw her. The surest link between the before and the after was gestures, the way you walked, nervous tics, the way you bit your lip, the way you brushed your hair out of your eyes. That was what was left. Maybe you could say that about anybody you remembered.

  Jimmy watched Machine Shop do his act for twenty minutes. They’d gotten off two stops after they’d seen the Sailors losing their religion. Shop had been “on” since the Financial District, rolled his rollie down the streetcar steps as a robot, held the doors open for a middle-aged white lady as a robot, moved away as a robot, even sidestepped a cluster of pigeons feeding on a spilled bag of popcorn as a robot. He drew a crowd immediately.

  Shop’s act, at least what Jimmy saw, had two aspects: he interfaced with skeptics, and he danced. The interfacing was simple. They tried to make him laugh. Or get mad, in the case of a pair of blocky twenty-something boys, probably in town on liberty from their shitty East Bay jobs. Those two got right in Shop’s face and sneered and said some things, worked in tandem, one on each side of him. In the end, Shop’s answer was a perfectly executed 180-degree pivot.