by Dan Vining
“Years. Thirty?”
Groner studied Jimmy’s face. Jimmy was chewing on the inside of his cheek.
“So I guess the boy, who looks just like Hesse, is adopted,” Groner continued. “Or he was hers from some previous dead end. I don’t know, maybe Hesse put the kid under a knife to make him look more like ‘Daddy.’ ”
“How did you find out?”
“People were asking about you,” Groner said. “I in turn asked about those people. You go back up the line.”
“When? When did my name come up?”
“For me, the first question about you came a few days ago, just when the girl died. Your Lucy.”
Jimmy waited for the rest.
“But the Jimmy Miles File had already been pulled. He’d made inquiries of others before it got around to me. Or I surely would have alerted you.”
“He.”
“Hesse.”
“When? When did Hesse start asking about me?”
“That’s what I don’t understand,” Groner said. “A month ago. Before you came north. Great gears turn.”
He put a little drama in his voice. “So maybe he’s the mind reader, the prognosticator.”
A minute earlier, a pair of men had walked by the restaurant, and one of them had looked in, looked only at Groner. Jimmy wasn’t sure Groner had noticed.
But Groner noticed now, when the two men came in the front door, shoulder to shoulder, wide enough to block the exit of the businessman.
“I believe you’ll be getting the check,” Groner said, with a little shake in his voice.
Jimmy got up defensively.
“It’s all right,” Groner said, getting to his feet, too. “It’s nice to be noticed.”
“Who do they work for?” Jimmy said.
“Oh, could be any number of people,” Groner said. “These days.”
The men took a step closer, like starting a sentence.
Groner raised his open hands in surrender. He had spotted two more of the same subspecies on the sidewalk out front. And a car.
Jimmy just watched it go down. They hustled Groner out and into the back of the car.
At least it wasn’t Hesse’s big wine-red Mercedes.
Then it became visible . . .
Jimmy stopped the car, driving westbound on Haight. The nouveaux hippies were bopping down the street. He’d just passed them. It was minutes after sunset. Haight at Ashbury.
They were flashing red auras, faint to Jimmy’s eye, but unmistakable.
“Are you seeing that?”
Machine Shop looked back over his shoulder at the hippies. “Uh-huh, red,” he said.
“I never saw it before,” Jimmy said.
“It’s the moon. Or all this meshugas. All this activity.”
“What about the moon?” Jimmy said.
“We’re goin’ into a new moon. Man, you don’t know much, for being a emissary from the south and all. Everybody’s different—San Francisco is different from L.A. You’re blue, we’re red. Blue sometimes but red sometimes, too, when the moon goes into a certain phase. You and me together will make purple. The world’s a rainbow, man.”
“Let’s walk,” Jimmy said.
“You’re the one driving . . .” Shop said.
The two of them had been cruising for hours in fairly aimless loops. Not that Machine Shop was complaining. Jimmy had gone by Shop’s Tenderloin hotel around noon, talked him out of going to work down on the waterfront. Jimmy needed the company, needed someone around him, beside him, someone from the time before everything started doubling back onto itself. A week ago seemed like a long time now.
Angel had never come back to the Mark.
“Maybe I need a night off. Sometimes I wonder if that silver paint is bad for you,” Shop had said as they were getting into the Porsche.
They made the run up across the Golden Gate to Marin. Past the house on Alcatraz Lane out on Tiburon. It was buttoned up, the black shutters closed. Jimmy drove around the circle in the village, then past the marina. The Swan, Queen Mary, was at the dock, a cover over the cockpit now, the mainsail sheathed. The cruise-down-the-coast guys in the Hunter 38 were long gone. Jimmy was beginning to wish he had made friends with them and gone along. Nothing was much simpler than a boat on the ocean, out of sight of land.
He took the 280 south out of the city to Hillsborough, a community of gated homes big enough to look Euro rich. He’d tried to reach Groner all day on the phone, at work and on his cell, but he never answered. He needed another address for Hesse. He pulled into a little branch library and dug into a city directory. There was nothing listed. But there Hesse was, in an old number of the local weekly, a picture in a backyard in a black short-sleeved shirt and tan linen shorts, a fund-raiser for a preschool, though there wasn’t any mention of Little Marc and no pictures of his smiling, supportive wife.
And no mention at all of the undead.
The article didn’t let slip a street address but referred three times to “Butternut Drive” and even “. . . at the end of Butternut Drive . . .” As they cruised by the numbers, single- and double-digit and nothing more, Jimmy asked Machine Shop what he knew about Hesse.
Nothing, it turned out.
“I move around at the bottom,” was the way Shop put it.
They found the house. The circular driveway was clean and clear, right up to the four-car garage. It didn’t look lived in, but that seemed to be the idea with all the homes on Butternut Drive. Show houses.
Machine Shop didn’t ask any questions, not a one all day, seemed content to just be along for the ride. They stopped for lunch at a sawdust-floor burger joint next to Stanford, a bit on down the peninsula, and then came back up on the 101 into the City. With the working stiffs.
They made one last stop, the building downtown where Hesse’s office was. Jimmy stayed in the car at the curb in a loading zone, let Shop ride the elevator up.
“It’s closed, locked,” Shop said when he came back down.
Which didn’t seem exactly right.
Night fell. Jimmy found a place to park on Haight, and he and Shop set out. They walked up one side of Haight Street eight or ten blocks and then crossed and came down the other. It was a midweek night but the tourists were out anyway. Jimmy and Shop came past the nouveaux hippies again, face-on this time. Nobody seemed to be in any hurry to get anywhere. More laid-back than the sixties, actually. The leader, with his Vandyke beard, who had seemed a little hostile to Jimmy before, this time put his hands together and bowed.
“I know you, Brother,” he said self-consciously, stiffly, the way you greet a foreigner with a phrase not your own.
“Right,” Jimmy said. “Hola.”
There was a flash of red from Shakespeare.
The young sisters were in the back of the group.
“Can I talk to him?” the one with the imploring eyes pressed forward and said. Her sister tried to hold her back.
“Of course,” the leader said. “If he is willing.”
“Hi,” Jimmy said to the girl. She looked about fourteen.
There was a stiff moment, and then the hippie leader said, “We’ll dig you later, Babygirl. We’ll be at The ’Choke.”
And he led his merry band away up Haight. Babygirl’s sister looked back at her, not happy.
“I’m going to get a tea,” Machine Shop said, when he picked up that Babygirl was still hanging back, with him there.
“Got any idea what The ’Choke is?” Jimmy said.
“Yeah, down the street. That’s where I’ll be.”
When Shop was gone, the girl leaned against the wall, took refuge beside a rainspout pipe. She said, “He calls me that, Babygirl, or Cry Baby Cry,” she said.
Jimmy was about to say something.
“But my name is Christina,” she said. “Christina Leonidas?”
Everything’s a question. Maybe everybody’s name is a question.
“Are you doing OK?” Jimmy said.
“My dad calls me
Selene,” she said.
“Yeah, I know. He told me.”
He heard a breath, or an unformed word, catch in her throat. The perfect word, that explained everything.
“He’ll be all right,” Jimmy said. “I’m watching him.”
“I thought I saw him the other night.”
Jimmy nodded.
“No, I mean . . . again. Out at the Yards.”
“You mean the Point, Fort Point,” Jimmy corrected.
“No, the Yards. Where we saw you. Down south. I mean, I thought I saw him, but—”
“That’s your sister, right?” Jimmy interrupted. “That’s Melina?”
Christina nodded. Cry Baby Cry nodded.
“She’s . . . different from me,” she said. “She has all these ‘friends.’ I just feel like going home.” She looked at him directly. “I know I can’t, so don’t even.”
“I wasn’t going to say it,” Jimmy said.
“I mean, I know how it is. Sorta.”
“Where are you staying?”
“We were in this apartment place, down in North Beach, with these really nice people, you know . . . Sailors. But then Melina said things were changing, that something big was going to happen now, that we had to move, to be with the right people.”
“So where are you now?”
“With these people, the hippies. But we go back down to the Yards a lot, too. Where the women are, where The Lady is. Sometimes. That’s how I knew about you.”
“The Lady.”
“That’s what she told us to call her. She is so nice. She even let us go to her house.”
Jimmy decided to break the rule.
“Why did you jump off the roof? What was going on that night?”
She flushed red, so bright and so sudden it was as if she’d expelled vaporized blood into the air around her head and shoulders.
“It’s so stupid, I don’t know,” she said. “We were just hanging out with this guy Jeremy. We were just having fun. He knew all about everything. It was fun. I guess we were drinking, but it wasn’t that. Suddenly, we were both so sad. We were like crying and everything. And Jeremy was crying with us.”
“Stay away from him,” Jimmy said.
“Well I know that now,” she said, with a little fight in her voice that made Jimmy want to hold her.
“The Lady knows who I am?” he said.
“Of course,” she said. “I told you . . .”
“You mean from the other night. At the Yards.”
He was remembering that moment when he first saw her, the woman with the short-cropped hair, when he thought she looked like a version of his mother.
“From before that.”
“What did she say about me?”
“Just that you were a good person. Someone who understood stuff. Someone to follow. And that was why you had been brought here.”
“To the Yards?”
“I guess.”
Click. A fragment of light appeared in the angled space between the tops of two buildings across the street, a lamp, a flame, a mirror behind the trees, that hadn’t been there a second ago. And a rustling sound at the same time, though there couldn’t be any real connection. Jimmy followed her eyes to it. It was the moon. What there was of it.
“Do you know what Selene means?” she said. “In Greek?” She didn’t wait for him. “It means moon. When I tell people that now, they think it is so cool.”
He walked her down the street to The ’Choke, a coffeehouse. A coffeehouse for real, not like the Starbucks wannabe. Yesterday’s coffeehouse, not today’s. Jimmy didn’t tarry. Once he saw the hippies, saw Christina’s hard-eyed sister, once he had delivered her back to them safe and sound, he bought a pack of American Spirit smokes and then came back out the front.
And into the shadows across the street.
Machine Shop was already there.
“What are you doing out here?” Jimmy said, lighting up.
“I can’t take too many people inside a place,” Shop said.
“Too bad, since you’re an entertainer,” Jimmy said, his eyes across the street at The ’Choke.
“It’s limited me,” Shop said.
After a few minutes, the group came out en masse. Shakespeare bade the Leonidas sisters adieu, standing there on the sidewalk, kissed his fingertips and then touched each of them on the forehead. The girls got on the first eastbound bus that galloped up. The lights on the bus were bright, and the sisters squinted as they made their way down the aisle to the wide seat across the back. Christina saw Jimmy through the window and waved. Jimmy waved back.
“Youngest Sailors I ever saw,” Machine Shop said. “The two of them.”
“I was seventeen,” Jimmy said and started away.
The remaining hippies, two girls and two guys and their leader, had taken a left, heading away up Ashbury.
Jimmy and Machine Shop followed them, on foot, across Oak to Fell, across the Panhandle.
To the black house, where the band let themselves in.
THIRTY-ONE
“I have to be back before dark,” Mary said.
She drove a car Jimmy hadn’t seen before, a two-seater Mercedes convertible. Early seventies and perfect. Light silver, the color of a knife. The road was in the country, with a nice gentle back and forth to it, through a valley where they grew flowers, mile after mile, color by color, in strict, clean rows. It was like being led by the hand across a color chart. It was like driving through a rainbow, only the colors were harder. Even to the two of them, even in the moment, it felt like a dream. With that same sense that it had to end, and probably abruptly.
Mary had called the Mark and told him where to meet her, a corner away from Nob Hill. She told him to take the cable car and where to get off. She had called at eight that morning. Something made him think she’d just dropped her boy off at school. They took the 280 out of town, the same way Jimmy and Machine Shop had headed south the day before, and then along the reservoir lakes, lakes to the right, the moneyed communities to the left. He watched to see if she looked over at Hillsborough, in the direction of Butternut Drive. She didn’t. Another ten miles, and she veered off right onto San Mateo Road, the road up and over the ridge of mountains between the Bay and the peninsula towns and the coast.
“I have to be back before dark.”
She didn’t give a reason. He could come up with three or four on his own, and he didn’t want to think about any of them. He certainly wasn’t going to ask her why. He just looked at her, what the wind was doing to her hair, the shifting light to her eyes.
“I never rode in a car with you, you driving,” he said.
She didn’t say anything.
The fields of flowers ended, and the road came out at Half Moon Bay. It was a Thursday. There wasn’t much traffic, local or otherwise, through the main strip of town. Half Moon had been there awhile, had some character, some Western to it. It also had that nobody-will-know-us-here feel.
They went to the beach, parked, and walked down onto the sand. The waves were gentle. And empty. Pillar Point was to the right, a confusion of sailboat masts and The Breakwater. Even that had an unpeopled look to it.
The two of them had a way of not talking in settings like this, a history of unpregnant silence. Back when they were first together they would go out to the beach at Malibu or Paradise Cove or up into the mountains or out to some alluvial plain in Joshua Tree and just be there, side by side, no pressure to talk, no impulse to frame things with words. It was one of the first pop-up signs that told Jimmy he loved her, when he realized that she didn’t need to say anything, especially in those situations when anything either one of them might have said would probably be weak. Or just wrong.
But he spoke now.
“This is where Mavericks is, right? The big waves.”
She pointed straight out. “In the winter months, December. A half mile out past the point. It’s tow-in surfing. I don’t even know what you can see from here. They go out in boats, on Jet Sk
is. The waves are forty, fifty feet.”
The calm in front of them suddenly seemed like something else that could end abruptly. She took his hand. She looked up the beach in one direction. Someone with a dog was coming, too far away to even tell if it was a man or woman, throwing something to send the dog out ahead.
“Are you afraid of him?” Jimmy said. He meant her husband, Hesse.
She didn’t have a quick answer. Or a defiant one, which surprised him.
She pulled him to her. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. Was that the answer?
“What did he say? When you were arguing?”
“This isn’t about him,” she said. “In the end.”
“Of all the city parks in all the towns in the world, I walk onto yours,” Jimmy said, holding her.
She wasn’t going to let him throw movie lines at her. “L.A. is only a few hundred miles away,” she said. “We would have run into each other again eventually.”
“You knew where I was; I didn’t know where you were.”
“You’re the one who used to talk about Fate all the time,” she said. They still held each other. It didn’t sound as harsh coming out of her mouth as the words would look on a page. Or would seem, remembered. “You were the one who always said that we were meant to be together.”
“We were young.”
“What are we now?” she said.
“Together,” Jimmy said.
He wanted to say one more line. He wanted to ask her why she went into the arms of a Sailor, why she married a Sailor. Was it possible she didn’t know about Hesse? Even he didn’t believe in a Fate that blind. Or blinding.
She seemed to sense how close he was to asking the real question about her husband.
“Come on,” she said. “There’s a motel up the way. I called ahead.”
The man with the dog had reached them. Mary didn’t look his way, but Jimmy did. The man didn’t want their eyes to meet, put all his attention on the dog.
“Rex!” the man yelled and threw the stick again.
Mary was looking up at the sun. Or maybe she was gauging the time left by the position of the faint curl of daylight moon.
They made it back before dark, time to spare. In time.