by Dan Vining
It opened onto a ten-foot-square room, a room hewn out of rock. With an arched opening to the right, a tunnel leading away.
In the tunnel there were train tracks and a shiny electrical contact centered overhead. It was small.
OK, I’ll bite, he thought, and started down the tunnel.
He could stand upright but thought to keep his head and hands away from the power line. There were lights on the wall every fifty feet, gaslights refitted with clear incandescent bulbs.
He walked a half mile. It stayed level. It was dry. He would have thought it would be damp, wondered how they did it. He came through a section with a great rumbling nearby, vibrating gear sounds from the other side of the rock. (A cable car barn?) Near the end, there was an intersection with a larger tunnel, this one tiled, a look from another age, a hint of Le Métro. It all seemed automatic, as transportation networks go. There was a light, red/green, at the intersection.
It shined green, so he kept going.
There was a sound behind him. He turned just as an open train car stopped inches away from running him down. It was simple, inelegant, an open box on wheels, eight feet long. A Sailor manned the helm, standing in the rear, like a gondolier. His face wore no expression. Back home, this kind of Sailor was called a Walker. It was a good job for a Walker.
He rode a good distance in the second tunnel, was brought into a room. The tunnel and cart and driver continued on beyond it. He stepped out. The conveyance stayed put.
It was a waiting room. There was a pair of empty wingback chairs.
And three doors.
One opened, saving Jimmy from any test of character or intuition.
It was the dog man. “Here,” he said, “this way,” and held the door open.
Jimmy just put one foot in front of the other.
They came out into a room, a room where everybody had a purpose. People came and went, carrying things. Most of the people Jimmy didn’t recognize, but the hippies were there and some of the women from the Yards. There was an air of imminent departure, the train leaving the station. Another train, another station. Jimmy looked for a clock, but there wasn’t one.
Duncan Groner came through carrying a wooden box, what could have been a case of booze. He came out of one doorway and headed toward another.
“You still here?” Groner said, didn’t wait for an answer.
The woman with the short-cropped hair and that French look was right at the center of things. The Lady. She’d changed her clothes. Now she wore a dark business suit, blue almost to black, with a waist-length jacket, a straight skirt, a white collar, heels. Like a stewardess on the Titanic, if they’d had them.
There was something familiar about the outfit. Then Jimmy remembered the nanny that night on the dock. This was the officers’ version of the suit she wore.
The woman gave Jimmy a pleasant smile.
Christina Leonidas came through. She seemed happy, excited, energized, the way schoolgirls are when they’re working on a project. Putting on a play, a fashion show, a fund-raiser.
“Did you see her yet?” she said. “The Lady?”
“The Lady” was still standing there, maintaining the same smile, standing by. So Jimmy didn’t get it.
“The Queen?” Christina said. “She told us to call her The Lady, or even just Mary, but everyone calls her that, The Queen. Queen Mary,” she said and giggled.
And there was a flash of red, like a wink.
Jimmy’s heart fell through a hundred floors.
“She prefers just Mary,” the woman in the suit said to Christina.
Then she turned to Jimmy. “She’s in the drawing room.”
THIRTY-FIVE
She stood facing him when he came in. The woman in the suit had deposited him on the other side of the door and then clicked away in her heels.
The room was lit up bright, the way a child puts on all the lights when a night turns scary, when questions threaten to overtake everything. There were deep green drapes, a heavy weave, closed across whatever windows there were. Two of the four walls were covered with dark books, floor to ceiling. There wasn’t much furniture, and the wooden floors were bare, polished to a shine that made it look like the two of them, Jimmy and Mary, were standing on water, looking at each other across a gulf.
She stayed where she was.
Jimmy stepped in through the doorway but nothing more. For now.
“I don’t know if you knew or not, but The Man is gone,” Mary said.
“Yeah, I don’t get that,” Jimmy said. “Explain it to me.”
She smoothed out the front of her dress, or dried the palms of her hands on it, if they were damp. She had changed clothes, too, from what she was wearing at The ’Choke, when she was being “consoled,” or he thought she was. Now she was in a gray suit, with a long coat over a long skirt. It was a little odd, high-collared, a little Eva Perón-theatrical.
“There must be other things you want me to explain first,” she said.
“You started with that.” He heard the edge in his voice.
“Help me,” she said.
And suddenly she was Mary again. He almost crossed to her. But he didn’t. He remembered that one of the things that had landed him here, wherever this was, was his predilection for riding to the rescue. Or thinking he could.
“You know, that’s what The Man said to me,” Jimmy said. “Help me. He wanted me to get him on his feet, give him a last look at his dimming empire.”
Mary turned her back on Jimmy and reached into the drapes and found the cord and yanked them open. She had her own anger. It was closer to the surface than either one of them thought.
It was the picture window.
It was the drawing room.
It was the house on Russian Hill.
Jimmy felt stupid for not figuring it out before now.
Still with her back to him, Mary said, “I’ll explain it to you. He’s gone. Crossed over. Released. The special exception for Sailors with years of service. The grace of God. A time and a place. That’s all I know about it. That’s all he knew, all he understood about it. That leaders sometimes are given a gift.”
“Turn around, let me see you,” Jimmy said.
She turned. She let him stare at her. She knew that right now she was two women to him. She was giving him a chance to try to fit one woman onto the other.
“I understand how you feel,” she said.
“Do you?” he said.
She walked to him. Her hand rose to touch his face, but she stopped it on its way.
She said, “I remember standing in some trees in the middle of the night, in the clothes I had been sleeping in. I remember a man telling me, when he finally got around to it, that he was not what he seemed. That he was something that nobody was, that couldn’t be as far as I knew.”
“All right,” Jimmy said.
“I remember six men in a semicircle on a deck, one of them with his face covered with a gray wool scarf, and it a warm night, too.”
“All right, I get it.”
“No, you don’t. You only get part of it, Jimmy.”
She didn’t sound angry anymore.
“We’re even,” he said.
Her face fell. “Is that what you think this is? Something as small and as far away as that?”
The flywheel in his head was spinning so fast it felt like it could come apart. He was trying to see it, how this had happened, how he had come to be in this room. He was making lists in his head, drawing diagrams, schematics. He was trying to piece it together. He was trying to re-create the wiring, get it together to where, when he threw the switch, the circuit completed and the light came on.
The call to Lucy.
The stop in Saugus.
The trip north.
The Beatles in the glove box, the CD he never remembered buying.
The way the fake Lucy looked, dressed, cried. Died.
Mary walked past a table, brushed her fingers across what must have been a switch. All
the lights in the room went out at once.
He couldn’t see anything. He heard her walk away from him, toward the window.
His eyes adjusted. What he saw first was a dull red glow, her shoulders and the reflection of their line in the glass of the window.
Until that moment, he wasn’t sure. Wasn’t sure she was a Sailor. It pressed down on him, the knowledge. The fact of it.
He said, “Is that your house, in the Haight? The black house?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you here, in The Man’s house?” he said. “You seem right at home.”
“For the last six years, I worked with Martin. One of the ones who worked for him, but one of his favorites. He never left this house. Everything came to him.”
“Why did you marry a Sailor?”
“I want you to be with me,” she said, there in the dark.
“Why did you marry a Sailor?” he said again.
“I want us to be together.”
“Why did you marry a Sailor?”
This time, she let the clock in the other room play a little fill. “I didn’t,” she said. “Hesse is just someone I work with. I’m not married.”
Jimmy’s heart dropped another hundred floors.
“I knew me being married would draw you closer,” she said, “not push you away. Would make you want me more. Especially with the kind of man Hesse is.”
“What about your boy? Where’d you get him?”
“He’s mine. Jamie. He’s mine. He’s mine. I’m his mommy, and that’s where we live, Tiburon.”
She found her softest voice. “Come here,” she said.
He stayed where he was. He felt like the pile of sticks The Man was.
“Come here, Jimmy.”
He crossed to her. There, behind her, was the City, the Bay. A ship was leaving, out under the Gate.
“How did you die?” Jimmy said, that question they alone can ask. And usually never do.
“I took pills.”
“You always hated drugs.”
“I know.”
“Why did you do it? What made you? Why did you want to die?”
She took his hand. “To reach you,” she said.
He pulled away his hand. “A girl died, Mary.”
“I know,” she said. “But that wasn’t because of me.”
“It wasn’t?”
“That was part of someone else’s plan,” she said. “I didn’t order it. I wouldn’t have. I had what I wanted. You were here.”
“She was a human being.”
Mary could have stopped then. But she didn’t stop. “Heartbroken girls die every day,” she said.
The low clouds and high fog had cleared altogether. The City, the world, was all spread out before them, like a board game.
“Look at us,” she said. She meant their refle ction in the window, red by blue. Red. Blue. It was like there were four of them.
He was looking past them, at a judging sky.
“I want us to be together,” she said again. “We’ll do everything together.” A sentence for each of the two Marys.
THIRTY-SIX
The last boat over.
Jimmy liked the idea of that. It matched what he was feeling. He was on one of the piers, leaning against the stub of a piling, smoking the last of the American Spirits. He had left Mary in the house on Russian Hill, blew off all of them up there, and the sense of purpose they rode in on. They didn’t have to show him out. He knew the way. He walked over a block and came down to the waterfront on the cable car, on the Hyde Street line, the last run of the night. The car was almost empty, just Jimmy and a Chinese man who looked a hundred years old. It was after two by the time he made it back down to Fisherman’s Wharf. The Sailors had had it to themselves all night and had trashed it good. The tourists were all still instinctively hanging back, waiting in their hotel rooms until this particular unearthly storm passed. Most of the Sailors had already cleared out, made the crossing to Alcatraz. The ones left milling around, asking questions of each other, of anyone who’d half listen, were the lost ones. The uncertain ones. The undecideds. The ones even more conflicted than Jimmy. Walkers, most of them, with the faintest red or blue auras of all.
He watched the coming and going. Whitehead’s strange black ship made four trips over and back just while Jimmy was standing there, taking aboard anybody who wanted a ride over, north or south, friend or foe, before it was too late. The name was on the stern. White Rose.
He turned and looked at Alcatraz, the turtle shape of it, the sweep of the light. In Time. Wasn’t that the name of the painting in Hesse’s office? The sailboat making it into port just ahead of the black storm, just in time. If Hesse was a doctor.
How could you hope to be with someone if you started with a lie? With a host of lies, interlaced, one feeding off another after a while. As soon as he thought it, he heard Mary’s answer: You started with a lie. You started us with a lie. She was right, he had lied to her from the first minute. The first word he spoke to her was probably a lie.
He remembered it. “Let’s hear your clever first line,” she had said, on the sidewalk on Sunset Strip.
“I don’t have one,” he had said. I . . . I was a lie. He didn’t exist, not in the way she knew.
“I don’t have a clever last line, either,” he had said. At least that wasn’t a lie.
He threw away the tailings of the cigarette and got on board the black ship. Jimmy was the only passenger, the last of the night to go over.
Alcatraz.
Every city, every society of Sailors had its place. The Place. When they met all together, for whatever ceremonial necessities, they met there. In L.A., it was aboard the Queen Mary. Here, it was Alcatraz. There were always enough Sailors in high places in any city to give their brothers and sisters some space. To facilitate. Sailor cops and Sailor firemen would be there to direct Norms away, to declare the glare of lights or the cars or the lines of people filing into a public place hours past midnight “nothing” or “a private party.”
Sailors covered the island. As the black ship angled in to bump against the dock, Jimmy saw them. Everywhere. The hundreds, the overflow from the main gathering inside the prison. Whoever was in charge had sure enough fired up the place with blazing lights. It was so bright, so alive, there were bound to be calls in the morning to the Chronicle. Groner would probably take them.
The local Sailors still thought Jimmy was somebody. As he came off the ship, they stepped out of his way, cleared a path across the dock and up the Z of the ramp, to the big prison buildings on the cap of the rock.
Up top, there was really only one big building. It was two or three hundred feet long, two-thirds as wide, tall, with thick walls angling in. Like a fort. Like a prison. Like a structure used to test bombs. The walls were a cream color in the daytime, and peeling under the almost constant salt wind, but at night they just looked gray. There were support buildings down the slope and out on the point, but they didn’t matter, just the big building. There was a concrete and grass yard in front, the front facing San Francisco, and another, all concrete, on the back corner, facing Tiburon.
The light of the lighthouse swept around like a scythe.
Jimmy ducked it, went through the crowd and inside.
They called the main cell block Broadway. It was two tiers high, “oft-photographed.” The factions of Sailors had divvied up the space the way they’d divided up the parking lots over at the Wharf. But most of them seemed to be thinking outside the box. Any box. Half were drunk, the other half high, high either from pills or pot (or acid, this being San Francisco), or just from the unsettling mix of order and chaos. Like a prison.
Or maybe it was the cold that had them jumping. It was freezing. Beyond the main cell block was the cafeteria, tables long ago ripped out, but not the clunky apparatus in the ceiling where they could spray out gas in the old days, “to quell a disturbance.” Some of them spilled over into that.
On the back wall of the main cel
l block was the gunrail, a balcony of sorts on the dividing wall. One end of it was against a high, barred window. A man was posted there, looking out the window, looking up at the sky. At intervals, he would broadcast a number. And then repeat it. Wherever he’d started with it, he was down, or up, to thirteen.
Jimmy heard a few more repetitions of his Christian name.
Sailor men and women dressed for occasions like this, usually arch versions of whatever they wore living. Whatever that was. The parade down to the docks hours past midnight must have been a sight for any insomniac Kansans peeking around the hotel curtains. There were men in bowlers, men in stevedore caps, men in those slanted knit caps union organizers fancy. Men in oversized Vietnam cammies. Among the women, there were festive Mae Wests and Marilyns and Jackie O.’s. And too many hippie chicks, who probably still had daddies out there somewhere wondering what had happened. A couple walked around wearing real Mae Wests, inflated life vests, glow sticks glowing. Most of the Sailors wore black arm-bands, but it wasn’t a grim scene. What it felt like was a nightclub, a disco minus the music, a meat market in some urban deconstructed space with a cynical name like Regrets. And a rope to keep the wrong ones out.
None of the principals were in sight, not on the floor. There was probably a VIP lounge somewhere.
Security wasn’t perfect. A few Norms made it in. There was Les Paul, walking around wide-eyed, with his guitar case and his stingy-brim hat, with a bottle of beer in his hand.
Jimmy saw Angel. Angel had spotted Les Paul, too. He made it over to the kid even before Jimmy did.
“What are you doing here?” Jimmy said to Les.
“He thought it would be interesting,” Angel said. “Maybe he’ll write a paper about it for school.”
“There’s a boat out there, you should go get on it,” Jimmy said to the boy. “You don’t need to see this.”
Les Paul put the beer on the floor and started away.
“I talked to him for a long time,” Angel said. “I explained it. Sort of. You know how it is.”
“She was his sister? For real?”
