Among the Living (59 page)

A shudder went through the room, strong enough to make the boy up top stop playing. It was as if someone had backed a truck into the side of the warehouse.

Jimmy wondered if it was a quake, though it was already over if it was. He looked at Angel. Angel had spread his feet apart, for balance.

Les Paul started playing again, rolling with the punches.

Whitehead turned to an intercom on the wall behind him, a Bakelite and brass device as out of the past as the rest of the furnishings. He depressed a switch and spoke into a conical mouthpiece.

Jimmy realized that what was coming up his legs was not the after-effects of the shake but a low, regular vibration in the floor itself, as if there was a generator in the next room. Whoever’s place this was, you got the idea they were off the Pacific Gas and Electric grid.

Angel leaned in a little closer to Jimmy. “Let’s just see if we can get the kid and go. I don’t get this.”

There was another shudder, the floor shifting under them.

“Sit, please,” Whitehead came closer and said. “You’ll be more comfortable.”

There was a smell, a new scent, heavier than the sickly sweet perfume of the two men, the marker of the Sailors of the north. This was a thicker smell, a pungency that rode a little lower in the air.
Diesel.

In the same moment Jimmy put a name to it, there was a sense of movement. And the floor under their feet became
the deck
, the walls around them
the bulkheads
, the doors
hatches
.

They had cast off.

Les Paul played on.

“I exhausted part of my youth in Los Angeles,” Whitehead began as he stepped toward a wing chair in the center of the room. He sat and crossed his legs at the knee. The nobody who’d ushered them in,
aboard
, crossed to his master’s side with a silver tray, a snifter of something golden. Nothing was offered to Jimmy and Angel.

Jimmy dropped down onto one of the couches, stretched out his arms along the top of the back, right at home. He looked up at the dark recesses of the rumbling chamber.

“Great gears turn,” Jimmy said.

It was sufficient to make Whitehead turn his black eyes toward his impudent guest.

“What does that
mean
, anyway?” Jimmy said, trying to sound like a teenager.

Whitehead ignored the distraction, the question. Angel was still standing.

“Sit, please,” Whitehead said. And then, after the comma, “Mr. Figueroa.”

Angel picked a chair.

The pitch of the vibration changed. Things stilled for a moment; then there was a stronger tremble, and the room’s equilibrium shifted. The rocking was polite.

Whitehead began again, said his first line again, “I exhausted part of my youth in Los Angeles,” with just the hint of irritation at having to repeat it. It made it seem as rehearsed as it was, as thought-out. It made what came next feel like a politician’s stump speech. Too repeated, probably not true. “I had been in the Brotherhood—we still called it that then—two or three years. San Francisco was exhausted for me. Gratefully, I say only temporarily.” He wasn’t drinking his drink, hadn’t even lifted it to his nose to admire, just palmed it like the prop it was.

Jimmy wished he had it. He thought of a line to interject into the proceedings, to throw the other off balance, but decided instead to rear back on the couch, be cool. Let the man empty his bucket.

“I was alone. On the train, of course.” Whitehead looked at Angel. “The Coast
Day
light. Of course, this was before the Coast Starlight, years before.” He waited. When Angel nodded, Whitehead’s eyes released him.

“I remember coming into Union Station at sunset. I remember the sound of it, the echo. I came outside, into that very striking Los Angeles sunset panorama. Spectacular. I was met at the station by a man, an actor whose name you would recognize, who of course was a Sailor, too. I admit I was a little starstruck. I had seen so many of his movies. And not all of them on the late show, I have to admit. He was waiting, parked at the curb in—”

Jimmy held up a finger, pointed at the air. “Jefferson Airplane,” he said. Les Paul was working allusions to a few classics into the set.

Whitehead put some steel in his voice. “I met Red Steadman that trip, that very night, as a matter of fact,” he said.

The name wiped the joke off Jimmy’s face. Walter E. C. “Red” Steadman was the leader of the Sailors to the south. He and Jimmy had had their clashes over the years. The young man and the old man. If they had made any kind of peace, it was an uneasy one.

Whitehead enjoyed the moment. And the next even more. “Of course, I was something of an emissary. Steadman wasn’t receiving
me
, Wayne Whitehead, but rather the one I represented, whose card I carried in my vest pocket.”

He tapped his heart.

And then he spoke the name.

The night, the drama, the episode dutifully had followed the principle of rising action, starting with Black Moses out on the pier parking lot with his rod and his staff, who led them to Jeremy. Then Jeremy led them to Whitehead—and Whitehead, in speech at any rate, to the unnamed famous actor and then, “that very night,” to Steadman, untitled leader of the Southern California Sailors.

And then, by nothing more than the utterance of his name, to the man himself. It was designed to take Jimmy and Angel to the top of the mountain, let them see the view.

And how far there was to fall.

“The Brotherhood—we still called it that then—was a different animal in those days,” Wayne Whitehead continued, his voice now confident, steady, impressive, as if he knew he’d already met the most important of his objectives. “Everyone knew everyone, or at least acted in that spirit. We looked each other in the eye. We
measured
each other. I wouldn’t say we trusted each other, but there was understanding. Cooperation, after a fashion.”

“We just want to get our people out of here,” Jimmy said. “The ones who are still alive. Actually, all we want is the kid up there, Johnny Guitar. We get him and we go home. It’s actually simple.”

“Just the boy?” Whitehead said. “Really?”

He knew about Mary. Jimmy could feel it.

“I’ve been back to Los Angeles many times . . .” Whitehead said, starting down a new line.

Jimmy stood. “How about we all go up top?”

He looked at Jeremy to see if he got the joke: the warehouse building they’d first entered was the selfsame one the Leonidas girls had dived off, Pier 35. Where Lucy had met her end, too.

“Get a little fresh air, see the city lights? Maybe we’re cruising past Alcatraz. Angel gets seasick, I’m just telling you.”

“I was there in Los Angeles for the murders, in the nineties,” the host said, bringing it all back home.

It wiped another smile off Jimmy’s face.

“And, of course, the aftermath,” Whitehead said. “That was the last time, actually. And the first time I heard
your
name.”

Jimmy was still standing.

“I’m nobody,” he said.

“Those who know you best say otherwise,” Whitehead said.

There was a bump. They’d arrived back at the mooring, back at the wharf. The little play was over. At least the first act.

The nobody Sailor made ready, stepping over to open the hatch.

Whitehead stayed in his chair. He made a little church out of his hands, looked at them over his nine fingertips.

They weren’t back at the waterfront, or at least not Fisherman’s Wharf. When they went through the last door, they were somewhere else, stepping out of another warehouse building with its back against another pier. There were ships all around, but it was dark,
past
dark. The ships looked to be old navy ships being stripped for salvage and old freighters, some of them navy gray, too, some black, some rust red, all dead-seeming, under a blurred navy gray half moon.

“Where are we?” Angel said.

“Go ask Alice,” Jimmy said.

Then
they
started to emerge. Forms, shadows coalescing into human forms. People. There were scores of them, coming in from all quarters. A show of strength. Or
need
, because they all had looks of expectation on their faces. Anticipation, hope, fear. Waiting.

Jimmy and Angel had left Whitehead and Jeremy behind them in the hold of the ship, had just followed the nobody out.

But now Whitehead was standing right behind Jimmy, seeing what he saw.

“They know who you are,” he said, just loudly enough for Jimmy to hear. “You have a reputation.”

There began a reverberation coming up from the gathered, a vibration like the engine on the boat, low and indistinct. They were saying something over and again. It was like the noise they call for from a crowd of extras in a movie, vague mumbling that sounds like a hundred conversations but is really only a few words repeated. The same words. With the crowd of them, it was oddly melodious.

It got clearer as they synced up. “We follow Wayne . . .”

Whitehead stepped around Jimmy and waded into their midst.

Jeremy had come out from the ship, too, with his long cape draped over his arm. Now he came forward and, hoping at least some in the crowd were watching
him
, unfurled it and let it fall over his shoulders. These San Franciscans liked their Romanticism, if that’s what it was. Jeremy stood with his hands on his hips but still looked like what he was, a sidekick, a right-hand man.

Jimmy was watching Whitehead and his congregation. “Funny, I wouldn’t take him for a people person,” he said to Jeremy, who seemed to like the line.

“Thought maybe you’d want to know: The Greek girls, what’s left of them, are down here,” Jeremy said.

“They’re both Sailors?”

“Double down, I say,” Jeremy said. “Whenever you can.”

Now it was Jimmy who went into the crowd, into the wake closing behind Whitehead.

“Where are you going?” Angel called after him.

Jimmy kept going and didn’t answer his friend.

Jeremy turned and grinned at Angel, a look Angel didn’t get at all.

Two girls were holding hands. It was a start.

Jimmy found them down by the piers, walking apart from the others. One of them kept looking over her shoulder at him. She smiled, in fact. The girls wore matching clothes, long blue dresses out of some cheap goods. It looked rough to the skin and the color uneven, as if hand-dyed. It made Jimmy think of cult clothes, pretty hippie girls on a commune, flowers in their hair but a dreary, frightened servitude in their hearts, following the master. (The trick was to not want to be the master.)

“Wait,” Jimmy said when the one turned to look at him again.

She waited, held back her sister.

When he got closer, he saw how young they were. With Sailors the new form matched the old, at least in age and usually in size. From a distance, or in a photograph, one might pass for his or her former self, except to the eyes of a close loved one, to whom the new person always looked like a stranger.

It wasn’t a logical thing. The Sailor way was a ball of mystery, surrounded by a hundred miles of fog. There was a famous fog in the Central Valley, starting south of Bakersfield on Old 99 when you came up from L.A., Thule fog, so thick it looked like dishwater. Whenever Jimmy drove through it, or up to it (you couldn’t drive through it at its worst), he thought,
This is what it’s like to be a Sailor.
A sailor at the wheel of his boat.

“Hi,” the girls said together. They weren’t twins in this domain, but they looked alike.

“Hi,” Jimmy said.

They seemed so trusting, so open. Unafraid, now that they had each other. They also seemed to know who he was. He wondered why, what they’d been told about him.

They were
New
. It was all over them. Jimmy had already decided they probably weren’t the Greek girls, the reborn Leonidas twins. He just had a feeling about them. The fog. He was about to ask them, gently, about themselves, when they just smiled again, or at least the one of them did, and they walked away.

Down the rabbit hole again
. . .

Jimmy followed them into a room in an old military building, World War II-era, wooden, with brown linoleum floors. One of those buildings built fast, when the world was coming apart on two fronts. It had a ten-foot ceiling, exposed rafters, all very intentional. There were windows along both sides, but they were covered with blackout cloths, just like in the war. It was an officers’ mess, with a long table.

An odd one, because the table was set with candelabra and a tablecloth. And a meal on silver serving plates.

The chairs were filled with women. The two sisters were seated on either side of a woman who looked a little French, with short-cropped hair. They stopped talking and eating when he stepped in, then went back to it. They were different ages, but there was something in their faces, all of the women, something about their pale skin, that made Jimmy think of the Procol Harum line about the sixteen vestal virgins leaving for the coast. (And, although his eyes were open, they might just as well have been closed.) It was a little like a scene from a dream, like a memory of an event that never took place.