Among the Living (31 page)

The barking stopped.

Rosemary laughed, thinking she’d caused it.

There was silence in the room now, only the whirring of the clocks. The peacoats as one had turned toward her but it was not because of her.

A door had opened behind her, the door beneath the biggest clock, the only one that told the right time.

Angel and Drew came up to stand behind Jimmy.

Los Angeles still existed, the
regular
world, wrapped in its regularity and regulations, laws and principalities. It was just outside, down at street level. A cab on Alameda, street people in doorways, Salvadorans a block over getting off a Greyhound, Japanese tourists lifting food to their mouths in the glass restaurant atop the Otani five blocks away, laughter in The Jonathan Club, Dodger Stadium a half mile away.

The regular world was still out there,
alive.

But this, starting
now,
starting here, was something else.

The first through the door was Boney M, tall, red hair.

Next was a very short man built like a boxer, a prison boxer, a man in his fifties, gang-tattooed, Mexican.

Angel looked at Jimmy.

“You know him?” Jimmy said.

“
Perversito,
” was the answer. Little Evil.

There was a moment when the doorway was empty and then Red Steadman stepped in. He wore a brown suit, white shirt, tie, very chairman of the board. He was a huge man, six-five, barrel-chested and heavy in that way men used to be.

Here was the familiar big man in the back of the Lincoln at the end of the chase in Griffith Park.

He stepped to the front so they could all see him.

He filled his bull chest with air. His blue aura was faded, old, but intense in its own way.

He seemed, in this moment, their king.

Rosemary Danko, still in the witness chair, the only wholly live person in the room, trembled pitifully at the sight of Red Steadman and the others. She knew who they were. Here were her
airplane people,
in the flesh. Or some version of it.

She stepped down off the stand.

She got as far away from them as she could in the room.

Steadman fixed his eyes on Jimmy. Jimmy remembered old man Kirk’s line about his former boss:
He’d definitely tear you a new one if you looked at him wrong.
What unfinished business had cast
him
here? He was such a ruler it was hard to imagine him in a personal way, to picture his family, a naked moment, a love in his life beyond the things he built.

He stared at Jimmy. It was hard not to shake.

“There’s a price for defiance,” Steadman said.

There was an ugly sound from the Sailors.

“Tie their legs,” Steadman ordered.

The closest peacoats seized Jimmy and Angel and Drew.

“Not him,” Steadman said. He meant Drew.

“He’s with us,” Jimmy said. The men were already wrapping duct tape around his ankles, around Angel’s ankles.

“We’ll see,” Steadman said.

It was called
Clocking.
Ropes came out from somewhere and the peacoats threw them over the light fixtures and knotted them and took the ends and threaded them through Jimmy’s and Angel’s ankles.

“Tight, so they won’t get loose,” Steadman said. “Let them spend the night
here.
” It sounded like the worst kind of threat.

They strung them up upside down.

The ghouls now started shoving Jimmy and Angel, hanging that way, until they were swinging from one end of the courtroom to the other, in separate arcs, hung from separate light fixtures.

Drew watched.

Rosemary cowered in the farthest corner.

Jimmy and Angel bent at the waist to keep their heads from dragging on the floor. The peacoats would shove hard each time a man came by until Jimmy and Angel were crashing into the walls.

Jimmy slammed into the big clock over the bench. It fell, shattered, but the scattered pieces kept spinning.

All of them.

As Jimmy and Angel still swung back and forth, the peacoats all turned to watch the dozens of clock faces on the walls as now, slowly, they synchronized, zeroing, going to midnight.

Out the open window, the moon had just turned full, a specific moment none of us could see or sense, but they could.

The room began to empty.

“Take the boy,” Steadman shouted.

Sailors surrounded Drew and dragged him away toward the elevator.

Steadman exited through the door behind the bench with his men and then they were alone in the hollow room, Jimmy and Angel, the pendulums centering.

No one had touched Rosemary. They were going to let her live. When she realized that, she made her own way toward an exit.

As Jimmy and Angel pulled themselves up, grasping at their ropes . . .

The clocks as one recorded a minute lost, a minute after midnight, the beginning of what was called
The Day.

The last day for some of them.

A crab, just a pair of ragged claws, scuttled across the surface of the moon reflected in an oily pool.

Rats scurried over broken glass. The air stank.

You came in this way: There was a pipe, on its side, an immense section of pipe tall enough to walk through standing up—and three peacoats now walked through it—a gateway through the sawgrass that rimmed the last remaining acres of wetlands of Long Beach.

It was after one.

“I hate these last hours,” Jimmy said.

Angel, in spite of himself, felt his own spirit dropping. It was all converging, and it was all about death. He spoke a prayer in his head, the words echoing there as if he’d said them aloud:
Lord, just let me see Your face
. He wanted to be strong. Clear. Sure. The one the others depended upon. They all hated this time, when it came round again,
the blue moon,
for all the pressure, the insecurity it brought, the questions it threw at them. They even hated it for what was at its core, the promise or the
threat
of resolution.

The tide was coming in. Before them was a wasteland of flotsam and jetsam, of abandoned boats, of bleached logs, of weather-battered and sea-battered squares of plywood, of hundreds of big and little chunks of Styrofoam reflecting white in the light of all that moon, looking like bones strewn across a cemetery after a flood.

“There’s a fire up there,” Angel said.

They were closing in on the hull of a rusted tuna boat, big as a gas station, at a wrong angle, listing in a sea of mud and grass. Fire flickered in the broken-out windows.

They were looking for Drew.

“I don’t get this,” Angel said. “Why’d they do this?”

“They just want to mess with us.”

As they slogged forward, they came upon a body floating face down, a peacoat, arms outstretched, the dead man float. Angel lifted him by the collar. He was alive. Angel yanked him out of the muck, holding him by the collar like something foul.

The man coughed his thanks.

“I know you, Brother,” he said, like a punch line.

Angel deposited him in a derelict turquoise speedboat. The man sputtered and then grasped the wheel, as if heading out for a day on the lake.

“
Get me out of here,
” Jimmy said.

A few faces appeared. Fifty or more of them lived down here, who feared the downtown, not Walkers, but who didn’t have it together enough to be of use to the powerful Sailors. Or maybe they were just waiting like everybody else and liked the water, even this brackish swamp. They lived in houses made of boat wreckage, cabins from cruisers stripped of their hulls or shacks of plywood built in where the grass was tallest, to hide them. Some had put a few boats seaworthy enough to cruise out to fish in the dark. Some of them now stood in front of their shacks, watching without much feeling as Jimmy and Angel passed.

They reached the stern of the tuna boat where the fire burned. There were crude steps made out of oil drums stuck into the mud. Jimmy and Angel stepped up them, though the bow of the boat was almost afloat with the rising tide, shifting, moving underfoot.

They crossed the canted deck and went down into the hold. Below, the fire burned in another oil drum, black smoke rising through a rusted out gap in the overhead. The space was empty but there were rough sounds, men’s voices, from the next chamber.

The boat shifted. The oil drum fire slid sideways. Angel danced out of its way.

In that next chamber they found three men beating a kid. Jimmy saw a flash of blue, Drew’s snowboarder’s cap. He pulled away one of the men as Angel slammed another against the bulkhead. The third man struck the kid two more times and then stood up.

The kid said, “OK. All right.”

It was some other kid.

Jimmy yanked him to his feet.

“Where did you get the cap? Where is he?”

“I don’t know, man,” the kid said. “What difference does it make? He was here. Now he’s gone. Who are you?”

Jimmy snatched the snowboarder’s cap off the kid’s head. The boat shifted again. Angel fell against the steel wall. Something crashed down behind them.

“Let’s get out of here,” Angel said.

The tuna boat was fully afloat though still heeled over onto its side when they came back out onto the deck into the stinking air.

“Maybe they already took him on board,” Jimmy said.

There were people all around the tuna boat now, wading up to their chests some of them, others trying to make use of the wrecked boats that still flo ated. A pregnant woman, full and round in her rags, sat in a Zodiac as a man waded beside her, hand on the gunwale, hauling the boat tenderly, as if she were Mary on the donkey.

They all moved in the same direction across the wetlands.

“What time is it?” Jimmy said.

“
There,
” Angel said. “Your guys.”

Across the watery grasslands, the bad-joke Sailors Lon and Vince slogged through, dragging Drew with them.

They were in water up to their knees and easy to catch.

Jimmy pulled Drew away from Vince, the shorter one, and knocked down Lon, the tall one.

Drew wore a peacoat and watch cap now. Jimmy yanked at the lapel of Drew’s coat.

“They put this on you?”

“We didn’t do nothing,” Vince said.

“He did it,” Lon said.

“They said if I was with them I could go home,” Drew said.

Jimmy dragged him away.

“They lied,” he said.

Lon came back after him. Jimmy grabbed him by the back of the neck and shoved him facedown into the tide and held him there until his legs stopped kicking.

Angel pulled Jimmy’s hand away.

Lon surfaced, sucking in air again.

Vince half thought of coming after Angel. Angel hit him in the face for it, three quick blows, dropping him backwards into the water beside Lon.

“So this is where—” Drew began. It was like he was stoned.

“No,” Jimmy said.

“Come on,” Angel said.

And so Jimmy and Angel and Drew fell in with the others, moving like an arrow, all of them, in the landscape of refuse and nature, men and women, the moon reflected a hundred times in scattered shards of water. A wider, higher view would show their destination five-miles distant across the wetlands and then across the sculpted landscaping and empty parking lots of the Long Beach harbor.

There, lit like a cathedral,
The Queen Mary.

Angel looked at the sky as they moved up the gangway. There was a little breeze. It was cool in that off-the-water way. A few clouds were crossing the moon.

Tonight it almost was blue.

“Beautiful night,” Angel said. He looked at Jimmy. “And it’ll be a good day tomorrow, whatever comes.”

Jimmy nodded, but didn’t look like a believer.

Not everything in the Sailor world had a name but this was called
The Hour.
It came—it was not an hour but a
moment,
a click of the clock—when the blue moon was at its zenith.

It would come tonight at forty-seven minutes after three.

The Hour had a certain formality to it, a ceremonial air, nothing handed down from on high but a man-designed affair which had become this over time. Or so the older Sailors said. They could have been lying or simply had it wrong. Theirs was not a
holy
order. A few Sailors were on the decks, leaning over the railing as people will do, smoking, watching the others. Some strolled the promenade deck, arm in arm. Others were just arriving. Everyone knew not to come too early so they all tended to appear at once, when the hour changed, when the last hour came.

The long iron gangway that during the day carried tourists onto the haunted black and white ship now carried the wetlands people, the people from The Pipe, the moody Sailors from downtown, regular citizens, the powerful from on high and the weakest of the weak.

All but the Walkers, who no longer knew to come, to hope.

As they stepped onto the gangway, some removed their peacoats and watch caps, threw them in a pile as if they’d never need them again. Underneath, some wore period clothes, clothes from their specific time, polyester from the seventies, denim from the sixties, a few ancient Sailors in wool suits who at least looked like they belonged on the
Queen Mary.
Some, like the people from the wetlands, walked in in that stunned, doomed way, but others were treating it like a holiday. Inside there would even be Sailors in festive costume as if putting on some other guise would better prepare them for what was to come.

At the end of the gangway, an officer greeted them, or at least a man in an offic er’s uniform. He nodded to each man or woman as they stepped aboard and checked his watch from time to time, a large gold pocket watch.