by Dan Vining
And somewhere else. In the now.
Jean was out past the shore break. It was afternoon. She pulled hard on a concluding stroke and rolled onto her back with the last of the energy, gliding like a seal.
She watched her hands describing figure eights as she treaded water. The waves, from this far out, seen from behind, looked like hands pushing something away.
She looked skyward. There was a daylight moon, just risen.
White.
A perfect circle.
A communion wafer.
Where did that come from? She hadn’t taken communion in ten years. She thought of the little church in Carmel, that afternoon, the way the candles weighted the air. The Quick and The Dead. That memory led her to another from long ago, a little girl—four?—with her mother in an Episcopal church in Long Beach in a straight wool coat, pink with pink buttons in a style like the one John John Kennedy had worn in the famous picture, and the hat, too, which she held in her hands because her mother was kneeling beside her. Suddenly there was a bird, a brown wren probably, something small and common, flying around the airy vault above the altar. There were a few other children and they began to laugh and Jean began to laugh with them until the adults got up from their knees.
Jean didn’t remember what happened next. How odd that she wouldn’t remember the ending.
A swell lifted her and she saw Jimmy on the beach.
She washed the salt out of her hair over the kitchen sink with a round striped pitcher.
“Have you been all right up here?” Jimmy said.
“I’m fine,” she said.
She squeezed the water out of her hair with a kitchen towel and stepped closer to him.
She kissed him.
He wondered if she could feel the change in him.
He found a blue bottle of vodka in the freezer and poured an inch of it into a green glass and walked with it to the windows that tried to frame the ocean. He stood with his back to her. Far away, almost at the horizon, a sloop was passing, so far out it was flying a spinnaker. He waited. He felt himself going back to his life, back to before, back into himself, from wherever he had been with her. It felt like falling backwards. It felt like a plug being pulled. It hurt and was sad. If he wasn’t a man, he would have howled like a dog.
There was a TV on the countertop, the first of the afternoon news shows, a brushfir e somewhere, tanker helos dropping showers of red water. Jean watched it. The sound was low.
Jimmy still was looking out at the sea.
“One of The Jolly Girls, Vivian Goreck, still lives two doors down from your house,” he said. “With her daughter, Lynne.”
Jean remembered the picture, the four of them at the Yacht Club bar, starched white blouses and round pearlesque earrings the size of quarters.
“I remember her.”
Something had changed in Jean, too, and he felt it. She had decided something. He didn’t know what it was.
“She was pretty.”
“Vivian Goreck bought ten thousand dollars’ worth of Steadman stock in July of 1977, three weeks before the merger of Rath and Steadman. It was worth a hundred grand six months later. Today, it’s two or three million.”
“She’s the one who ties this to the past?”
“One of the ones. Also her daughter. She’s seeing your brother.”
Jean nodded. She accepted it.
He was surprised that she wasn’t surprised.
“My mother was killed because of stock?”
Jimmy told her about Roy Pool and the midnight flight of Vasek Rath and Red Steadman. He told it just the way Pool had told it, Bill Danko and some big shots, a man thought to be dead wearing a disguise, a famous man who’d apparently faked his own death for some reason.
“They needed a pilot too dumb to know what it meant. But Danko wasn’t that dumb, or your mother wasn’t. Danko probably told your mother. I don’t know who she told. After the drunk flying thing, I guess Rath and Steadman knew Danko was a problem.”
“Maybe Vivian and my father were having a thing.”
“Maybe.” It was something he’d thought of, too, something cued by one of Vivian Goreck’s smiles. “Maybe she’s the one who put that half smile on his face,” Jimmy said.
“So who killed my mother and Bill Danko?” Jean said, too coolly.
“Nobody. Somebody in the shadows. Somebody who’s probably dead now, too. Somebody short.”
He kept his eyes on the water.
“So there it is. It’s over. That’s everything there is to know.”
She nodded, whether she believed that lie or not.
“My father had a stroke, a small one,” Jean said. “Half of his face was slightly paralyzed. Carey told me that, when I was at Stanford. I never knew. The jury thought he was smirking at them, too.”
There was always something else to learn.
He still wasn’t looking at her.
“Where is Carey’s house?” she said. “You said he had a house and an apartment.”
“Out on the point. Crown Road. It looks like a ship.”
She went to him. She put her head against his back as he stood at the window.
“I have to go,” he said.
“Why? Where are you going? Stay here.”
Jimmy turned to face her. “I can’t. But you should still stay here,” he said.
She remembered his line, this could all be over soon.
“When are you coming back?” she said.
He told her he’d call her in the morning. She pulled him to her but he was somewhere else already.
“I’ll call you,” he said.
As he walked away, she looked at the television. A shimmering live shot of the daylight moon filled the frame, icy. The newscaster was saying, “Ton ight Southlanders will witness a rare conjunction of folklore and science, a real live ‘blue moon.’ ”
She heard Jimmy’s voice out front, speaking to the guards, Angel’s men.
“A blue moon—I’ll bet you didn’t know this Trish—a blue moon is two full moons in one month,” the voice-over said. “It only happens once every eight or ten years. It looks like any other moon but this one seems to be bringing with it unusually high tides along our coastline.”
She heard the Mustang start.
“Once in a blue moon . . .” the newscaster said.
TWENTY-THREE
Angel was standing in the driveway in front of the garages when Jimmy came back from Malibu. It was dark already, the moon through the trees.
“Your Porsche is downtown,” he said before Jimmy got out.
They both knew what all it meant.
Jimmy went in and took a long shower, changed clothes. He sat in the dining room and drank a glass of water. He’d looked at the blue revolver in the desk drawer in the office but closed it without taking it. Who was he going to shoot?
They drove out Sunset in Angel’s pickup. It was a Thursday night but there was traffic, a rattle and hum in the air, people either driving fast or way too slow, sudden screeching U-turns in front of you, cars double-parked, as if everyone was off on his own trip.
Angel went south on Highland.
“Where’d you spend last night?”
Jimmy just shook his head.
“I called, came by,” Angel said.
“I just rode around.”
“Rode around.”
“I ended up out at the beach.”
“A sailor watching the sea.”
“I’m all right,” Jimmy said.
“Good,” Angel said. “We’ll see about tomorrow.”
They came south six more blocks.
The wave was breaking.
Returning . . .
Jimmy looked over as they passed the recording studio. Clover. The past was knocking him on his ass, had been for days now, since Big Sur. Old music kept going through his head. On every other street corner he saw a memory in bright relief, a piece of a scene, in daylight or dark, played at double speed, or half.
> There was the razor wire around the roof. They used to go up there, on the roof, smoke and look out over low Hollywood.
He was on the roof with one night at the end of a session and the singer said he’d give Jimmy a ride back to the Chateau Marmont. Jimmy didn’t have a car but in those days you didn’t need one if you looked right, if you were in on the joke, in on the big idea they’d all just that summer discovered. 1969. You stood by the side of the road looking the way you looked and someone would stop and you’d get where you wanted to go, particularly if you didn’t much care where you went.
This night it was .
But they hadn’t gone back to the Chateau Marmont but to three or four houses instead, up in Laurel Canyon and, even though it was four in the morning by then, all the way out to Topanga. There was downstairs cocaine for everybody who came by and upstairs coke for the famous people and their friends, even their new friends. His mother was gone, off on location again. No one was waiting up for him.
The singer came through the room, said some of them were leaving for the desert, to ride horses. And peyote.
Jimmy told him he’d see him tomorrow night at Clover.
He had talked for hours with a girl who’d been to Morocco but he was alone on the deck when the new sun broke over the ridgeline and lit up the head of a royal palm across the canyon, as suddenly as if fire was involved.
Angel drove, low in the seat, his arm on the armrest between them. Now they were down in South Central. Angel wasn’t afraid of any part of L.A. so they were on surface streets. Black men sat on the fenders of cars parked in front of houses with barred windows but nice little yards, one of those TV news neighborhoods where the mothers put their children to bed in the bathtubs some nights in fear of gunfire.
Jimmy dropped his window. Angel reached over and turned off the A.C.
“I used to live down here, block west of Normandie,” Angel said.
There was vague music from multiple sources. Angel drove slowly, out of respect for the people who lived there. The streets were concrete with a bead of black tar in the expansion joints. The truck’s tires thumped rhythmically, like a heartbeat, another kind of music. They slipped past one bungalow, all blue-lit inside, just as the front door came open, letting out an explosion of television laughter. A woman stepped onto the porch and called out something to the men. Two of them had a pit bull spread-legged on the hood of a Buick Regal, slapping it in the face every time it thought to move.
“Her father is a Sailor,” Jimmy said.
He hadn’t said anything since Highland, since Angel had asked him where he spent the night.
“I thought maybe it was headed that way,” Angel said. “How did you find out?”
“I saw him. Palos Verdes. A house his son owns. I saw him kiss a young woman, the daughter of one of The Jolly Girls. She looks just like the mother did then.”
Angel nodded.
It was a Sailor thing, you drove the car you drove then or would like to have driven. You lived in the house you lived in then, if you could. And you tried to find a new version of the girl you loved then.
“How much are you going to tell her?” Angel said.
“Not much. There’s not much I can tell her without telling her everything.”
“Maybe she already knows.”
Jimmy shook his head.
“I don’t think so.”
“He was living here all along, ten miles away? And you think she didn’t know? She just happened to find an investigator who was a Sailor, too?”
Jimmy didn’t answer it. He’d asked himself the question enough. None of it was important to him anymore. None of it would make any difference.
He would just let the wave break.
“How much longer did you think you could wait before you told her what was up with you?”
“Longer,” Jimmy said.
They rode another block. An ice truck came past. Hollywood Ice. Angel turned left on Exposition to head downtown. His rough leather-bound Bible on the dash started to slide sideways.
Angel put a hand on it to stop it.
“I wish I had what you have,” Jimmy said.
“What’s that?”
“Believing that everything is part of the plan.”
“Me or you believing it isn’t what makes it true,” Angel said.
They drove under the Harbor Freeway toward downtown and something else came to Jimmy, something else he should have seen before. That he was the same age as the kid Drew that daybreak in Topanga Canyon, the morning of the last day of his life.
The alley was a dead end. Jimmy’s black Porsche sat, top down, dead center in the circle of light an old-fashioned incandescent streetlight threw.
It looked like what it was, bait in a trap.
They got out of the truck. The key was in the ignition. The Porsche was clean. There weren’t even any fingerprints on the glass. It was as if someone had wiped it down just minutes before they arrived.
It was almost eleven o’clock. There were a few homeless people but no Sailors. And this wasn’t where the Walkers lived. Downtown was real Sailor territory, too hardcore for anybody but the strong ones.
Drew had come right down into the middle of the darkest version of the Sailor world.
Or been brought to it.
There was shuffling in the shadows. A man in a peacoat and watch cap. He said nothing and barely looked at Jimmy. He finished his cigarette and dropped it at his feet and stepped back into the deeper darkness without lifting his eyes again.
Jimmy turned to look at Angel, who stood beside his truck.
“Why not?” Jimmy said.
TWENTY-FOUR
“Hello, sweetheart,” Jack Kantke said.
The wind off the water stirred the flame-vine over the door. The night air was cool. He stood in the doorway in a white short-sleeve shirt over black beltless slacks and black oxfords. There was a cigarette in his hand. The smoke curled up his arm.
He had aged. But not enough.
“Hello,” Jean said.
“Come in.”
The view through the floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room was of the ocean crossed by the light of the full moon. The large room was sparsely furnished with a nautical theme. There was a loud ticking from an unseen clock.
And a real live Jolly Girl stood in the middle of the room. Or so it seemed. The hair, the eyes, the heels, the sawed off pants they used to call Capri. Lynn Goreck smiled politely at Jean, her hands clasped in front of her.
Jean sat in a chair.
Her father sat across from her.
Lynne leaned on the arm of Jack Kantke’s chair, her hand on his shoulder, a possessive.
“Would you like anything?” he said.
Jean shook her head.
“Could you get me some water,” he said to Lynne.
The girl gave him a flip look and stepped away.
Jean couldn’t stop staring at her father.
“You saw me someplace, didn’t you?” he said.
She realized for the first time that he was very moved at seeing her. He looked as if he was about to cry.
“A year ago,” Jean said. “I was down at Balboa Island. I saw Carey. I thought he was still living in Arizona. I followed him. I was about to go up to him—”
“And you saw me.”
Lynne came back with a glass of water, no ice. She set it down on the arm of his chair. Kantke looked at her, a look meant to send her away. She turned and left the room.
“She’s Vivian’s daughter?” Jean said when she was gone.
Kantke nodded.
“I’ve been waiting for you to come see me,” he said.
“So Vivian knows? About you?”
He shook his head. “She wouldn’t understand,” he said. “She thinks Lynne is involved with your brother. Vivian’s never seen me.” Kantke looked over at the doorway Lynne had stepped through. “I’ve found people of your generation more accepting of something like this,” he said.
<
br /> He smiled that half smile.
“Or maybe she just thinks I’m insane.”
The ticking continued. Kantke looked at the source, a large ship’s clock on the wall, then back at Jean.
“I didn’t kill your mother,” he said.
They both listened to the clock. Jean didn’t let him off, offered nothing to help him.
“You look so much like her,” he said and it caught in his throat. “It’s not easy, seeing you.”
She said nothing.
He stood, stood over her for a moment. He seemed as tall, for a moment, as a father seems to a child.
“I don’t know what your investigator has told you . . .”
She waited.
He stepped over to the windows, walked toward his reflection, considering it from head to toe. It would not have surprised Jean if he had walked through the glass into the night, leaving the reflection to come forward to speak to her.
He stopped at the glass.
“How’d you find a detective who was a Sailor?”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s what we call ourselves.”
“How long have you known I had someone looking into this?”
The way he smiled—she could see his face in the glass—made her wonder what powers he might have, how much he knew, what he could do, what they could do.
“I saw him on the bluff, yesterday, watching the house,” he said.
“How did you know that he was—”
“We can spot each other. What has he told you?”
“Not very much. Nothing about this.”
“How could he, once he was in love with you?”
He still looked out at the water, like Jimmy in Malibu.
“Maybe you should explain it to me.”
He took a cigarette from one pocket and a gold lighter from the other and lit it.
“Death,” he said, with the tone of voice fathers use to explain things to their children, “doesn’t end everything. Not always. Sometimes something is unfinished in a life and this happens. Someone is left behind until the unfinished thing is finished.”
