Among the Living

by Dan Vining

  Hesse then drove west on Geary, through the Richmond District, out to Fourteenth Avenue, where he turned right, headed north. He stayed with it as Fourteenth turned into California 1 in a tunnel of tall old trees, a corridor of mystic greens and almost black browns that kept closing in tighter until it burst open into the Presidio, then onto the Golden Gate. Dr. Hesse was headed home.

  Jimmy stayed right behind the Mercedes on the bridge until he realized how close he was following. It was borderline road rage. He eased off, let a BMW motorcycle and an Accord pulling a U-Haul trailer pass him and then tuck back in, so he had a wall between him and the Mercedes. A cool-down zone was another way to look at it.

  Jimmy had a What am I doing? moment. He hadn’t learned anything so far, nothing except that Marc Hesse was fairly young, fairly good-looking. Rich, clean. A member of society in good standing. Belonging to all the right clubs. Paying rent, fixing heart valves. Buying good art. Friendly when it came to the little people. He’d waved to a pair of nurses coming in as he was leaving the hospital. So what if they only tentatively lifted their hands, as if they didn’t exactly recognize him? It was the thought that counted.

  A wearer of Italian suits.

  A brand-name shopper when it came to cars.

  A neuterer of strays.

  A giver. What else?

  Oh yeah, not sterile.

  Alive, not dead. Living a life with the one woman who had shown Jimmy what love could look like, when it finally came round to you.

  Jimmy yanked the wheel right, took the exit for Sausalito. It was just about the last self-protective instinct he’d have for a good, long time.

  TWENTY

  You know you’ve got it bad when you start lying to your friends. About her. About you. About it. Or just leaving it unsaid, which is another way to lie. Jimmy was on the same bench as before in the little pocket park on the north end of Sausalito, when he had been tailing Lucy and Les Paul four or five days ago. But he wasn’t thinking about them. He was looking, through the trees, past the red-and-white ferry boats, one coming in/one going out, past the sailboats in the marina, across the water to the knob of Tiburon. The tip of it was shaped like a turtle. Maybe that’s what tiburon meant. There was a light chop on the water, a little wind. Sitting there, he was wondering why he hadn’t told Angel straight out about seeing Mary. About the hole seeing her again had pulled him into. Angel knew more of the story of Jimmy and Mary than anybody, knew it from all angles. Start to finish, beginning to end.

  Maybe he’d tell him now. Because Angel was walking across the grass toward him.

  “He’s here somewhere,” Angel said from ten feet out. “We lost him. He came in on the boat.”

  Les Paul.

  “What are you doing here?” Angel said.

  “Just out riding around,” Jimmy said.

  “Come on, let’s go find him.”

  Jimmy didn’t move off the bench. Angel looked at him.

  “Maria, mi Maria, esta aqui,” Jimmy said. Mary, my Mary, is here. He’d gone to Spanish without thinking about it, but it made sense. The Spanish Jimmy knew he learned from Angel, back in those L.A. days.

  “Where?” Angel said.

  “There. Tiburon.” He lifted a finger to point at the arched back of land across the way.

  “That’s bad,” Angel said.

  “She’s married. Has a little boy.”

  “You talked to her?”

  Jimmy shook his head.

  Now Machine Shop was walking toward them across the grass.

  “That’s bad,” Angel said again. “Bad for you, bad for us.”

  “He’s down here,” Shop said. “I found him.”

  Jimmy got up.

  Les was in a bar. And he had a beer in front of him.

  “Doesn’t anybody check IDs in this town?” Jimmy said. They were in the doorway. The bar was open in the front with French doors that slid aside, and open on the back to the water. Heavy, dark, carved curving wood, a stained glass skylight. It was about as Sausalito a bar as there could be. The boy was alone at a round table with his back to them, across the half-filled room. With his beer.

  “Let’s get him,” Angel said.

  “Wait,” Jimmy said.

  There was a drink next to Les’s beer glass. A pretty pink cosmo in a martini glass. Down a sip.

  “Did he have somebody with him before?” Jimmy said.

  “Not when I saw him,” Shop said. “He was just sitting there by himself, looking out at the water.”

  Jimmy saw her, saw somebody. Moving away. The restrooms were in the corner. A flash of white.

  They waited a moment, to let her come back, but she never did.

  “Come on,” Jimmy said, and they started in.

  The boy probably heard Jimmy’s voice. He got some signal, maybe just instinct, and turned.

  He didn’t stop to think. He ran like hell, bolted away from the table so fast and rough it knocked over the beer glass. Ran like an underage teen in a bar.

  They’d say later they’d forgotten how fast a teenage kid can be, how much go a boy has. He went out the back. For a second, Jimmy thought Les had jumped in the water, right into the Bay, but there were sailboats and houseboats moored all along the back sides of the bars and restaurants, and Les Paul leapt from one rocking deck to the next, broad-jumping, scis soring over rails and deck chairs like a middle school record holder. Running for his life is what you’d call it if you saw it.

  He got away from the men. It was never even close.

  Jimmy went back into the bar, straight into the ladies’ room. It was empty.

  Or at least there was nobody in a white dress.

  Other people seemed to take comfort in the circularity of things, how things doubled back, repeated, came round again, but Jimmy hated it, had always hated it, that fact of physics or metaphysics or the cosmos or whatever it was. He wanted something new to happen, something unprecedented, instead of the same old thing recycling itself. And the same people.

  At least that’s what he told himself, sitting there behind the wheel of the Porsche in the parking lot of the waterfront park out on Tiburon.

  Again.

  What he told himself was that he was there because it was where he’d seen the woman in the white dress. But he knew why he was really there.

  He had his own kind of hope. That afternoon, scanning the park, he had too much of it.

  The cosmos made him wait two hours.

  Mary walked across the grass from the parking lot. Today she and the boy had ridden their bikes over, had come in from the south on a bike path, the boy on a terminally cute scaled-down ten-speed, probably titanium, probably a thousand bucks’ worth. The bikes were just left in a rack. Not even locked. Mary walked with a tall coffee in her hand, a stainless steel Thermos cup. The boy had a net sack with his soccer gear thrown over his shoulder. It was a good life. This is what stay-at-home mom meant for the wife and son of a San Francisco cardiologist.

  Mary spread out a blanket, while the boy kicked a ball around. She looked over at the car, the Porsche. The top was up. With the sun sliding down in back of the water behind her, there had to be glare on the windshield. Jimmy knew she couldn’t see in, couldn’t see him. So why did she keep looking over? Did she remember the car? Why did she just stare, stare off at nothing, as if someone was reading an old, familiar story to her?

  The soccer ball rolled over to the blanket, to pull her back from wherever she’d gone, from whatever had taken her away. She threw it back to the kid.

  Jimmy realized he’d made a point of not learning the boy’s name. That night in the newspaper library Groner could have dug it up, on the registry of whatever pricey preschool the boy had gone to, the team list of his little soccer crew, his bike registration. Groner knew it now, had to.

  “What’s his name?” Easy question.

  The boy was kicking the ball and going after it, getting in front of it, playing all of the game in his head. Jimmy remembered the way he us
ed to do the same thing with baseball when he was seven or eight, remembered how he’d throw the ball up and hit it and run the bases, even if they were just his mother’s magazines laid out in the backyard, run until he’d switch sides and go after the ball in the outfield, throw it into the air again and catch it and throw it home.

  He let his mind slip out of gear, let himself pretend that he’d just pulled up, that she was expecting him, that this was one of those moments where you stop yourself. Stop and smell the roses. Where you hold back a second and look at the other out there on the grass, unguarded, waiting for you, and you think, She loves me. Before she sees you and puts on whatever face that calls for.

  Mary was staring at the car again.

  He waited until she looked away again and then started the engine and backed up and drove away.

  But not far enough.

  Today was the day when he was going to meet Mary face-to-face, and he knew it. He just didn’t know where.

  He drove into the village of Tiburon, the little loop of shops and restaurants at the end of the road that went out to the top of the peninsula, by Belvedere, out at the water. He parked in plain sight, lending a hand to Fate. He didn’t put any money in the parking meter, whatever that meant.

  He drank a beer, out on the deck behind a place. There were hardly any men anywhere, just pretty women, most of them young. Married. In tennis clothes, in white jeans. Drinking white wine. There was an imposing view, the ferry docks, the expanse of water, Alcatraz and Angel Island, the cityscape behind, all with an impossible depth of field.

  He’d ditched Angel and Machine Shop back in Sausalito. He thought of all the things he should be doing. He thought of the weight of what he knew was coming next.

  But not enough.

  “Are you ready for another?” a voice said.

  The waitress looked like one of the Tiburon wives, minus the BMW X-5 and the tennis togs and the portfolio. And the cardiologist.

  “I don’t know,” Jimmy answered honestly. His glass was still half full. Or was it half empty?

  He drained it before the next wave of sarcasm rolled in.

  “Let go, let God,” Angel was always saying.

  Surrender to the Force, Luke.

  “Any port in a storm,” Jimmy said aloud as he walked up the street in the village toward the Porsche, with the second beer in him, with the edge off. Everything was a little soft-focus.

  Give up, that’ll make it happen. Things happen when you stop trying to make them happen.

  Just do it.

  “So that’s what I want,” Jimmy said to himself, stepped from word to word with a rhythm that matched his footfalls on the sidewalk. “Another man’s wife. A little boy’s mother. Amen.”

  “Jimmy,” Mary said.

  She was sitting on the steps in front of a shop right beside the nose of the Porsche, the Porsche with the parking ticket flapping in the breeze. The shop was closed. It was a place that sold pillows, all of them shades of yellow, from what you could see in the window. It had a cute name.

  She stood.

  He meant to be prepared with an opening line. He knew he’d remember it, whatever he said, whether she did or not. He knew he’d probably regret it, whatever it was.

  She was more self-assured. Or maybe it was that it was her town.

  “You always wanted us to come to San Francisco,” she said. “I never knew why.”

  “And we never did,” he said.

  Are you ready for another?

  “It’s a kinder place than L.A.,” Jimmy said. “Maybe that was it. I knew you’d like it. But, you know, back then I thought and did a lot of things for no reason at all.”

  She sat back down on the steps, straightening the skirt of her dress, pulling it tight across her backside just as she sat. All the women were wearing skirts and dresses. Maybe it was just San Francisco. Or they were dressed the way he liked because it was his fantasy. In her skirt, on the blanket in the park, Mary had looked like Lucy. Or like the girl in foreground in the Wyeth painting, Christina’s World, with her legs stretched out to the side. Mary used to like that painting, had a print of it on her wall, the one everyone liked, but that didn’t diminish it for her. Jimmy wondered if she remembered how they used to talk about whether she was crippled or not.

  He sat beside her. She’d left him space. They were tucked away, with a low hedge on either side of them. Out of view, he thought.

  “You still have your car,” she said.

  “You saw me, in the park,” Jimmy said.

  “Yeah. I mean, I didn’t know it was you.”

  “You always did like the car more than me.”

  “That’s not true,” she said. It made him remember something about her, something she did, turning back a smart-ass answer with directness. By being straight.

  She was still looking at the car in front of them and not at him. There wasn’t much traffic, but she turned her face aside or looked down whenever a car did pass. She didn’t want to be seen. She couldn’t. She wasn’t going to sit there forever, he knew that. He knew she was thinking of something besides him.

  “You saw my little boy,” she said.

  Don’t say his name, Jimmy thought.

  She didn’t.

  He realized that she’d taken the boy home before she came looking for him. She’d changed her shoes, left her bicycle somewhere. Was her car close by? Had she walked back into the village? Did she have a nanny? Had she taken the boy somewhere else?

  He was looking at the side of her face. This close, he could see how changed she was. She had aged a little but not much, a little around the eyes. But she had changed in other ways. He wondered if he would have recognized her right away if he’d seen her up close first, instead of across the park. Maybe she’d had some plastic surgery done. She was married to a doctor, after all.

  “You look good,” he said.

  She let her hand touch his, the edge of it. It was as much as he’d get, but it was her touch, unchanged. It was just enough to mess him up good.

  A clot of clouds went over the sun. She stood, brushed off the back of her skirt, as if she’d been sitting in a pile of leaves.

  She was about to say something when Jimmy said, “It’s still so strong.”

  It was the only line he spoke all afternoon that he didn’t rethink later, that was naked and true.

  Even if it didn’t stop her from walking away.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Turn the page, things change.

  Since the day of the ten suicides, spread all over the city, a dark meanness had rolled into town, a jittery Now what? that everyone felt. Ten plus Lucy. They were back down on the waterfront, Jimmy and Angel, coming around the Embarcadero in the Porsche. If he was home in L.A., Jimmy would know how to describe it, that dark sense hanging over everything. And how to duck it. In Los Angeles it would manifest itself in freeway gunplay, “cutoff shootings,” boys on overpasses blowing out windshields with fist-size nuts stolen from job sites. It’d be the dry winds they called Santa Anas, ushering in “homicide summer,” “earthquake weather,” baseball bat attacks at kids’ games in the parks. It’d be fistfig hts at gas stations, gang dustups at Magic Mountain.

  Here it had its own style. You felt it in the waves of nervous energy that came off the knots of men standing around the piers. Each cluster of Sailors, out here almost all of them men, would turn and look at the Porsche as it rolled past. Put a fire in a barrel in the middle of them and it’d look like the old newsreels of the Depression. Waiting for something to happen, for whatever was next, wanting it, even if everybody knew it would probably be worse.

  “Man, look at this,” Jimmy said.

  “It’s been getting strange back home, too,” Angel said. “Everybody’s got the jitterbugs.”

  Jimmy hadn’t thought about L.A. in a while, not the L.A. of the present. And he’d stopped wanting to run there. He wanted to be here now.

  “Who was the last one Lucy talked to?” Angel said. They were
driving through a corridor of waterfront Sailors now, waiting for them to part like herd animals on a Land Rover safari. The men opened a path. They seemed to be a polite lot, for beasts. Almost intentional. It was after two in the morning. Another hour or two, they’d have the world to themselves.

  “Did you try to find out?” Angel pressed when Jimmy didn’t say anything.

  “No.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  Jimmy felt like he was in the dean of boys’ office. Or a cop station.

  Then he remembered. “Down here,” he said. “The night of one of the suicides. A guy stepped in front of a streetcar.”

  “Did you ever talk to her, face-to-face?”

  “No.”

  “Machine Shop said he talked to her, had a cup with her one night.”

  “I was across the street,” Jimmy said defensively.

  “He said she was a real talker,” Angel said. “Baring her soul.” He was quiet for a minute. “She was never that way with me, just said something when it needed to be said, not even then most of the time. She was real sweet.”

  What do you want me to say? Jimmy was thinking.

  The Sailors were packed in tight around the car now. And not so fast to move out of the way. Angel saw where they were. Pier 35, where Lucy had died.

  “I don’t need to see it,” Angel said.

  “Shop called, thought he saw Les Paul down here. With the woman in the white dress.”

  “She was with Lucy, the last time you saw her?”

  “Yeah. And another woman. Short black hair.”

  Les Paul. Sexy Sadie. Polythene Pam. The Leonidas girls. Truth was, Jimmy was looking for everybody.

  Anybody except Mary.

  Turn the page, you got another day. Whether you wanted one or not. Duncan Groner had had his own way of bringing Jimmy back to the case, of pressing his fingers down on the fiery Braille again, of dragging him back across the bridge from Marin to San Francisco.

  “Page A-6,” Groner had said, a wake-up call at the hotel, though Jimmy had never turned toward the bed that night. “The Chronicle, All the News That’s Fit for Fools.”