Among the Living (13 page)

“I’m messed up . . .” the kid said. He stared at the half sphere of the moon through the trees, looking like the blade of a Gothic ax.

“I . . .”

Jimmy now put a tender hand to the side of the boy’s head and spoke into his ear. Anyone close enough to hear would have understood even less by knowing more, would have said later that the words sounded like Latin, like a liturgy from another country or another century. And then that person would have shrugged.

Jean came closer, stopped a few feet away.

“They’re coming,” she said. “There’s a fire station at the top of the hill.”

Jimmy spoke a last line to Drew and then turned him and walked him past Jean, toward the car.

“They’re coming,” Jean said again.

“I know,” Jimmy said to her. “Get in the car.”

Jimmy opened the passenger door, put Drew in the backseat. The siren could be heard now, coming down from Mulholland, howling as it passed through the tunnel.

Jean said, “I don’t understand—”

“They’ll take care of the others,” Jimmy said. “I have to take care of him.”

“Were they—”

“One’s dead, one’s hurt. Get in the car.” Jimmy got behind the wheel and the engine roared up.

Jean got in. She looked at Drew in the seat behind her.

“My head is messed up,” Drew said.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Jimmy said, just eyes in the rearview mirror.

“No, I want the ambulance,” Drew said. “This is wack. I’m not—”

Jimmy turned and fixed him with a look.

“I’ll get you to a doctor.”

There was something in the look or in the words or in Jimmy’s voice that made the kid relent, lean back against the seat. With balled fists, like a little boy, he wiped the blood out of his eyes. He looked at it on his hands as if embarrassed by it.

“I’m messed up,” he said.

Jimmy steered around the wreckage, the Challenger’s tires cracking on the glass frags, and drove on down the hill as the red lights of the ambulance pulsed through the trees above them, behind them.

Jean looked straight ahead through the windshield.

They were in the kitchen. Jimmy stood at the sink drinking a glass of water. Behind him, a pair of hands looped the last two stitches in the cut at the kid’s hairline. Drew, now dressed in a clean shirt and pants, had his eyes open but wasn’t looking at anything.

The doctor daubed at her handiwork, then sorted through her bag for a bandage.

She was Krisha. She had dark brown hair, pulled back, a serious look like a poet in college. She wore a running suit. She’d been running the loop around the Hollywood Reservoir when Jimmy called.

She smiled at Drew.

“All right?”

Drew wouldn’t look at her. Maybe he was imagining her, imagining all of this.

Jimmy had taken Jean home, left her standing in the street with a look on her face that was hard to read, more confusing than confused. She hadn’t asked any questions on the drive back from the scene of the accident, hadn’t said much of anything. Maybe she had put together an explanation for herself that was sufficient for now. Or maybe there wasn’t one, ever, and she knew it. She had stood watching as Jimmy backed down the hill to the next intersection, turned around, drove away.

Jimmy walked the doctor to the door.

“He’s OK,” she said to Jimmy. “I’ll come back in a few days. If his ribs keep hurting, you can bring him in to the clinic after hours. We’ll X-ray.”

“All right.”

“What did he see?” she said.

“I don’t know. Not everything.”

“Are you OK?”

“I wasn’t in it,” Jimmy said. “I was just driving by.”

“I mean, are you OK?” she said.

“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “How about you?”

“I’m keeping busy.”

It was a line they used. They said good-night and Jimmy thanked her. He watched from the open door until she got into her car and drove away down the long driveway.

Jimmy turned.

Drew was standing in the doorway to the dining room.

“You people are messed up,” he said. “This is some weird shit that is happening because—”

In Jimmy’s eyes, the boy glowed with the blue edge, like the Sailor on Sunset Boulevard and the men who’d hauled him to the roof of the Roosevelt, but brighter than them. Vibrant, undeniable, otherworldly.

Drew had stopped in midsentence because now, too, that was the way he saw his host.

Jimmy picked up the blue snowboarder’s cap from the table in the foyer and tossed it to the kid.

“Let’s go for a ride,” he said.

A fog had come in. Down below at least. They were on an overlook off Mulholland, above the city. Jimmy had brought him up here to tell him. They leaned against the hood of the car, the yellow Challenger, pointed out at the sea of white. An ambulance far, far below pushed up La Brea, the light throbbing red under the cloud, looking like a fissure in the surface of the earth.

Drew said, “I don’t know why I’m going along with this bullshit.”

Jimmy knew the answer to that. “Because almost everything in you is telling you it’s true,” he said. “It can’t be, but it is.”

“You’re the same as me?”

“Yeah.”

“When did it happen to you?”

“A long time ago.”

“When?”

“Nineteen sixty-seven.”

Drew looked over at him, the youth still in his face.
How could it be?

“How
did it happen to you?”

A solitary car came past on Mulholland.

“People get to tell you that when they want to,” Jimmy said. “I was about your age. A little older.”

“Why were you there, at the wreck?”

“I was just there,” Jimmy said. “I was out driving around.”

“That woman who was with you, is she—”

“No.”

“What would have happened if you weren’t there? If you hadn’t come by.”

He was smart, asked the right questions. Jimmy remembered when
he
had had all the same questions himself, all at once. It was like this was a foreign country and, somehow, here you were, standing in the midst of it.

“You would have walked away,” Jimmy told him. “Into the woods. Wandered around for a while. One of us would have found you or you would have found us. Maybe in a hospital. Maybe a cop, a night watchman.”

“Are we angels?” Drew said.

“No.”

“Ghosts?”

“No.”

“What,
vampires
?” Drew said.

Jimmy looked across at him. “You feel like a vampire?”

Drew said, “No, what I feel like is once I got some blunt down in Hun tington Beach that was messed up and I was stupid for three days. I
saw
myself in that backseat.”

“What you saw was what was left.”

“I don’t get that.”

“Something they can bury.”

Drew looked like he was going to be sick.

“I don’t get that.”

“It’s just the way it is. Something’s left behind and yet you’re here.”

“I don’t get that.”

“I don’t either.”

“What is the blue shit about?”

“It’s how we see each other sometimes,” Jimmy said. “Sometimes it’s there, sometimes it isn’t. It comes and goes.” Suddenly Jimmy was tired, tired of this night, tired of all the times it had been repeated.

“This is bullshit,” Drew said.

“Yeah, you already said that.”

When they came down off the mountain, it was after three. The man in the peacoat and watch cap was back at his post on the corner in front of the turquoise nightclub at Sunset and Crescent Heights, now joined by another Sailor dressed the same. Their eyes tracked the passing Challenger.

Drew looked over. There was the blue flash.

“So they’re the same as us?” Drew said.

“No,” Jimmy said, a little too abruptly.

“What’s the difference? I kinda like the coat—”

“There are two ways to go. That’s the other way.”

Since they’d come down off the mountain, Jimmy had been thinking about himself, not Drew, and he had gone to a dark place inside. Dark and quiet.

By now they were on Santa Monica. Jimmy looked over as he drove past one square, blockish building. Clover. It was closed up tight now, a row of razor wire around the lip of roof showing silver in the streetlight, like a crown of thorns.

Jimmy thought how it
had
been like his church once. In a twisted, dead-end sixties way.

And then he was driving past Chateau Marmont again. It was something they all did.
Returning.

A cop car cruised along beside them. The cops, a shaved head East Islander and a Latina woman, looked them over good but it was mostly the car, the paint job, the clear-coat, the way the reflected lights rolled off the rear deck in perfect
Os
. The two cars, the Challenger and the cop car, stopped side by side at the next corner, at the light.

“Take me home,” Drew said. “I want to go home.” He had a whole different voice suddenly.

“No,” Jimmy said.

“I want to see my mother.”

“No.”

“I’ll get out then. I’ll go to them.” He was talking about the cops next to them.

“I meant you can’t. It won’t do any good,” Jimmy said.

It was a quiet street in a residential neighborhood in the Valley, an area called Studio City. There were large trees and sidewalks, old-style white streetlamps, cats watching from under parked cars, artificial Ohio. Jimmy killed the headlights, slowed to a stop. A half-block ahead, there was a cluster of cars around a house, the only one with all the lights on. A dog in a fenced yard next to the car barked three or four times, then stopped.

With the windows down, you could hear the soft roar of the 101 freeway a half mile north, that sound like the ocean, but nervous. Jimmy opened the glove compartment. There was a bottle of water. He snapped the top and handed it to Drew.

Drew was staring at the house.

“How long?” Jimmy said.

“My whole life,” Drew said. That defiant voice was gone. He was a little brother again.

Jimmy just let the engine idle. The sense of the neighborhood was heavy in the air. The trees leaned over to hold it in. They knew the boy here. Drew had probably learned how to ride a bike on this street. Before that, the joints in the sidewalk had made a beat to sing a song to as his father or mother pushed him in a stroller around the block. Maybe the yard in front of that house had carried a balloon sign, now almost too sentimental to think of, that said, “It’s a boy!”

Now it’s a
dead
boy.

Someone was arriving, a shiny duelie pickup, probably someone who worked at the studios, a gaffer, a grip, a carpenter. They liked duelies. The man got out and rushed toward the house.