by Dan Vining
She made herself turn and look at it again, or to let him know she wasn’t afraid to.
“What’s it like inside?”
“You’ve never been back?” Jimmy said.
She shook her head. “My business manager pays the gardeners, the electricity.”
“It’s like a museum, like a World’s Fair exhibit from 1977.”
Another chill ran through her.
“A little creepy,” Jimmy said. “So who is the woman?”
“I said I don’t know. I guess a transient. I should sell it, tear it down.”
Jean stared at the dark face of the house for a long moment.
“Are your parents alive?” she said.
The question knocked him off balance.
“No,” he said.
Her eyes were fixed on the house, as if waiting for the front door to open, as if she’d knocked.
“If I could see my mother’s face, at the moment it happened,” she said, “I’d know everything.”
“Or your father’s face,” Jimmy said.
Jean turned her back on the house again. This time he took her hand. He drew her to him, held her like a dancer. The wind came up again and it made the tackle on the mast of the sailboat across the canal clang, like a signal that something should be starting or ending.
She touched his forehead, where he’d been cut, knew somehow that it was part of this, that he had already given up something for her.
After a moment, she said, “I have trouble getting close to people.”
“I don’t know anybody who doesn’t anymore,” Jimmy said. “Maybe my friend Angel.”
“Why is that?” she said. “Do you know?”
“No.”
“We should go,” Jean said.
They were next to the seawall.
“Stand up on the wall,” Jimmy said.
She took his hand and stepped up onto the low wall, like the little girl who had lived in that house and been afraid. She walked along, balancing dramatically, happy again for a second, and when she stepped down she went into his arms and kissed him, both of them out of the reach of the past for another second, even though they were this close to it.
NINE
They pulled up to her apartment. The radio was on low.
“Can we just keep on going?” Jean said.
He looked at her.
“I like this song,” she said.
So that was how they came to drive up through Benedict Canyon to Mulholland and then along the crest of the mountains, the lights spread out first on the right, the Valley, then on the left, Hollywood and West Hollywood. They came all the way out to Bel Air, over the 405, dove right down onto Sepulveda, on through the tunnel. Now the hills were dark, the road winding, and the grid of Valley lights only occasionally flashed through gaps in the trees, or the half-moon.
Jimmy steered right into a wide curve where the two lanes became four, just past the first cluster of houses, moving from one pool of orange streetlight onto another.
The radius of the curve opened and then eased into a left. They had the road to themselves and, it seemed for at least a few more seconds, the night.
The windows were down. “I love that smell,” Jean said.
“Manzanita,” Jimmy said.
They were just another man and a woman, falling. Out on a date on a weeknight, all the time in the world.
“You know how sometimes you forget about it?” Jimmy said.
Angel nodded.
“Then you remember.”
And then there was a kid covered in blood right in the road in front of them. Jean called out a wordless sound like a frightened sleeper. Jimmy saw the boy and braked hard and skidded off the road.
He was sixteen or seventeen, in a bright blue snowboarder’s knit cap. He seemed oddly calm, flat, somewhere else already, gone. The blood was from a cut at his hairline and it was still coming, covering his face and now the neck of his Notre Dame High School T-shirt. He just stood in the middle of the street, oblivious to the threat of traffic, slack, careless, as if the worst thing had already happened.
The white Honda Accord was on its roof on the shoulder in a sparkling bed of broken glass, the wheels still turning. Jimmy and Jean got out and Jimmy walked purposefully toward it, left Jean behind beside the Dodge.
She stepped toward the kid still standing in the road.
“Don’t touch him,” Jimmy turned and said to her, calm. “He’s all right.”
She didn’t understand but she did as she was told. There was something about the way he said it that froze her in place.
“Call,” Jimmy said.
The driver was crushed in the frame of the window, hanging half out of the overturned car. Jimmy knelt, put fingers to the boy’s neck, felt for the carotid. He stood. On the passenger side in the front seat another teenager hung upside down in his shoulder belt, covered in blood, too, but moving, alive.
The bloodied kid still standing in the road came out of his daze. He looked at Jean as she got her phone out of the Dodge. He started to say something, but then shook his head and turned away from her.
He walked stiff-legged toward Jimmy and the Accord.
He saw the boy crushed in the window, the dead driver.
“Whoa. Sean? Shit, man, I hit my head . . .”
He saw the front seat passenger, moving, alive.
“Oh, shit, man, Sean and Calley . . .”
Before Jimmy got to him, the boy knelt in the broken glass to look into the backseat where there was a third body, another face covered in blood.
Jimmy yanked him to his feet.
“What’s your name?”
“I was—”
“What’s your name?” Jimmy said again.
“Drew.”
Jimmy started walking him away from the wreck.
“We were just—” the kid began.
“The driver is dead,” Jimmy said. “The other guy is hurt. An ambulance is coming.”
He wrapped his arms around the teenager as if he was nine years old.
“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 u
p,” 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.
Looking up at the roof again.
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.
“I want to go home.”
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, t
here 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!”
Everything carried its history.
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.
“It’s Terry,” Drew said. “My mother’s—” He didn’t finish it.
The front door of Drew’s house opened, throwing an angle of light onto the lawn, and a man from inside stepped out of the doorway and opened his arms to the man coming up the walk.
The front door closed. Shadows crossed on the drapes.
“You could look in the window,” Jimmy said, “but you don’t want to carry that around with you, seeing them this way. You could walk in, but they wouldn’t know you and it would only add to their pain.”
Drew looked at him. “I look the same. How can that be?”
“They wouldn’t know you. To their eyes you have a different face. It’s something that happens inside their heads, the people you leave behind. They have their boy. They’re going to put him in the ground in a day or two.”
Jimmy could hear the breath catch in Drew’s throat.
“But you’re here, in the flesh,” Jimmy said. “With us. To be this second version of yourself.”
