by Dan Vining
It was a full page of faces. The dead. The suicides.
“Some friends of yours . . .” Groner said.
Jimmy opened the newspaper standing in the doorway to the suite, and there they were, all the suicides, in clean rows with their names underneath, way too much like a high school yearbook. He’d expected something else, the latest edition of the present maybe, not the past.
What he’d expected was something about Mary. Or her husband.
The accompanying copy was bylined. Duncan Groner apparently had become the go-to guy for self-murder. There wasn’t much “story” to the layout, one long graf in which the reporter laid out the terms: San Francisco proper usually had eight to ten suicide deaths a month. (The Golden Gate had its own segregated stats, two a month since the plain-clothes patrollers had been instated, “blending in” with the despairing.) Since the first of September, all told there’d been forty-eight suicides, successful suicides was the term, bringing to mind dozens more with half-slashed wrists, with only a half bottle of pills to be suctioned out in the ER, jumpers off one-story roofs, shooters firing starter’s pistols at their temples. Groner ended the lead-in with a few sentences of behind-the-scenes stuff, the disclosure that the editors “vociferously debated” the “dangers” of “publicizing” the suicides (of telling the truth, in other words), for fear that the “suggestible” in San Francisco might think the unthinkable, and act on it, join the club. Even if the initiation ceremony was a tad severe.
Faces. Hairstyles, forced smiles. The retoucher’s craft. Lives smoothed out, flattened onto cheap pulp paper, tamed in black and white, gussied up. There was the old lady, the ninety-year-old chorus girl. The young man with AIDS. The German tourist. All the pictures shaved off years, decades in some cases. Now the AIDS man from the hospice was outdoors, resurrected into a brighter yesterday, coastal cliffs behind him, his perfect thick hair wild in the wind up off the water, a white smile on his face that made you wish you could see the cutoff person at his shoulder, the man, Jimmy guessed, who’d gone through the drawer of pictures to pick this one. There were the Greek twins. There they all were.
“What exactly are we looking for?” Angel said.
“New,” Jimmy said. It was a vulgar term.
Some of the Sailors, the more dramatic ones, used the word aboard when they were talking about new Sailors: a new Sailor was “aboard.” New meant “new meat.”
“You don’t think Lucy’s down here, do you?” Angel said. For Angel, the whole thing had more than enough drama on its own, he didn’t go seeking more in language.
Lucy could be down here, Lucy as a Sailor. A lot of them were suicides, successful suicides. The murdered were another contingent, especially among the darkest of the Sailors, the ones who liked the shadows. The rest had died in accidents. But a loose definition of the term. More than a few had been the ill “misdiagnosed” into this state. Before their time.
Everybody had their own unfinished business, even if none of them knew exactly what it was.
Jimmy had only glanced at her picture in the Chron, Lucy’s picture. A portrait from a few years after high school. From Sears? Kmart? Old enough and fuzzy enough almost to be someone else. (He wondered where they’d gotten it. From family in Paso Robles?) He didn’t look at it long because in the picture Lucy looked a little like Mary. Not the hair, but . . . Why hadn’t he seen it before? (Or had he? He’d flashed on something in the café down in Saugus.) More likely, it was some trippy side effect brought on by the acid of his guilt. He was supposed to save Lucy, and Lucy wasn’t saved.
“Did you see the pictures of all of them? In the paper?” Jimmy said. “They had a picture of Lucy.”
Angel shook his head. “I got my own pictures of her.”
The Sailors were blocking the way now. Jimmy thought about a tap on the horn. Maybe in San Francisco they wouldn’t kill you for it.
Then he saw the Sailor right in front of him, across the hood. This one was very tall. He was black, but light-skinned. He had spotted skin, looked particularly African.
And he carried a staff, a wooden rod taller than he was.
Jimmy and Angel looked at each other.
“Let my people go,” Angel said.
But this Moses wasn’t there to part anything, not yet anyway. He just stared at Jimmy and Angel. The other Sailors seemed to press in closer, surround the car. Moses stayed where he was, in front of the hood, one of the Porsche’s chrome sissy bar bumpers against his leg. Against his calf. That was how tall he was.
“I guess this is the valet parking,” Jimmy said, and turned off the engine.
They both opened their doors at the same time, pushing back the men on the side, and got out.
There didn’t seem to be any women Sailors down here. It was a rough-looking crowd.
“They’re going to mess with the car,” Angel said.
“Maybe not,” Jimmy said. “Maybe they’ll cut a couple of out-of-towners some slack.”
“It’s not going to be here when we get back,” Angel said.
The man with the staff had started away. Jimmy and Angel set out after him, figuring that was the plan. Somebody’s plan.
There were hundreds of them down there. Something about the gathering, the whole scene, felt ceremonial. The general agitation in the air, in the San Francisco night, seemed to have found a focal point.
But they were all silent. Like obedient spectators for a play.
“Maybe we should do this tomorrow,” Angel said.
“This isn’t something we’re doing,” Jimmy said. Now the San Francisco Sailors were moving the two outsiders along. Jimmy and Angel were just going with the flow. There wasn’t any resisting, no use. It felt inevitable, whatever it was.
Jimmy lost sight of the tall African.
One of the grimmest-looking Sailors got right in Jimmy’s face. “We fell away,” he hissed at Jimmy. Or at least that’s what Jimmy thought he said.
Jimmy tried to get past him. The man said his line again.
This time Jimmy heard it right. “We follow Wayne,” the man was saying.
The others around him joined in. “We follow Wayne . . .”
“Good for you,” Angel said. “I follow Jesus.”
A brutish Sailor shoved him. Angel shoved back. “Step off.”
“We serve the Russian!” one of the few women said defiantly.
“Look,” Jimmy said.
Just in time. The tall black man with the staff was waiting next to a door in the front of one of the waterfront warehouses. Jimmy and Angel and their escorts had crossed two hundred yards of pavement. The Sailors had closed in behind them. Wherever the Porsche was, it was swallowed up.
The door on the front of the warehouse was closed.
Jimmy walked to it. He expected it to open. It didn’t.
“Knock,” Moses said.
Jimmy went along with the gag.
Even before the door opened, Jimmy and Angel heard it. Wailing, spacey guitar. Live. They’d found Les Paul.
He played real good.
TWENTY-TWO
Through the doorway, there was a corridor. There was a nobody dressed all in black. They followed him. There was nothing on the walls, nothing on the floor. After a few yards, another door, with a raised threshold, like a hatch, like the mouth of a trap. From here on, the walls seemed cold, slippery. Not that Jimmy or Angel were reaching out to touch them. Everything from the door on in was painted black. Or, if not black, some deep red.
The crying guitar got louder.
They stepped over another threshold and found themselves in a space three levels high, a single room a hundred feet from end to end. They still couldn’t spot Les, but the sound had a location now, the far end of the big, hollow room. The chamber was lit by gaslights positioned along the side, flamboyant brass curves, feminine shapes, clear glass globes. And real flame, not some electric update. Now they could see that the walls were metal. Iron or steel. There didn’t seem to be any windows, but
there were drapes, red velvet, to match what furniture there was, preposterous curvy Victorian divans and claw-foot mahogany tables atop thick rugs, like the great rooms halfway down the coast at San Simeon or, farther down, in Hollywood, in Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu. Somebody had a flair for the dramatic.
The room was a great jam room. Some combination of the slick walls and the baffles created by the yards of pleated velvet made the guitar notes swoop around the room like a special-effects ghost. Like the ghost of Jimi himself, because what the boy was playing was soaring and free-form. A sound to match, to fill the plush void of the space.
“There,” Angel said.
Lucy’s baby brother was on a second-level landing, behind an iron railing, beside a lowboy Fender amp with a red-glowing jewel light on its face. He had his eyes open as he played but wasn’t looking at anything, certainly not at them. Jimmy realized he had never gotten the kid’s real name. The kid had on his black porkpie hat from that first day up in Paso Robles. He still looked fourteen, even if he sounded ninety-nine.
Then they weren’t alone anymore.
It was Jeremy. Cape-wearing Jeremy. All-in-black Jeremy, who whispered in your ear and told you to jump.
He came in from offstage, stage right, walked with an ivory-headed cane, looking, in that setting, like a turn-of-the-century opium dealer who pimped on the side. But without the happy-go-lucky disposition.
But it turned out this wasn’t his play, Jeremy’s. He was just a supporting character. He greeted Jimmy, “met” Angel, which meant he saw him and nodded in his direction. Les reached the end of his jam, let the last of it sustain for twenty or thirty seconds, then killed it off with a last strike at the strings.
“Cool,” Jeremy said.
The kid started sketching out something else, heading off elsewhere, a new set of chords and changes.
Everyone seemed to know what they were doing there, everyone except Jimmy and Angel.
Someone else was coming, footsteps on the hard floor. Was the floor metal, too?
“Whitehead,” MC Jeremy said to Jimmy and Angel a second before the man himself appeared.
Whitehead.
He looked to be in his sixties, thin but with weight to him. The skin on his face was tight and smooth, his hair silver, buzz-cut. His eyes were pure black at the center, at least looked so here, on this stage. He wore a suit that fell the way expensive suits fall, a politician’s suit, the color of coal, black or blue, depending on where the light was. He seemed to hesitate under one of the flickering gas wall lamps, his hands folded in front of him, as if to let Jimmy and Angel get the full effect. Jimmy knew the type, the kind of man who liked to think a person would remember forever the first time he saw him. The tip of his third finger on his right hand was gone, from the knuckle out. He wore an onyx ring, to draw attention to it.
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 Daylight. 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.
