then up the coastline on into the Central Valley, sunset about Salinas, in the dining car if you were in the mood, then rolling miles of dark fields, just enough time to think of all the things you should have done differently since ninth grade. The Starlight left SoCal midmorning and made it into Oakland after nine.
When Jimmy drove up out in front of the station, Angel was standing there. The train had gotten in early.
Then they were crossing the Bay Bridge back toward the City.
“How did she get in touch with you?” Jimmy said. It was almost the first thing he said to Angel.
“What do you mean?”
“How did you know she was in trouble?”
“Lucy never got in touch with me,” Angel said. “A friend of hers come to me.”
“And said what?” Jimmy said.
Jimmy’s tone had some accusation in it, but Angel didn’t let himself react to it. He knew what it was, what was behind it. Guilt. Jimmy’s anger at himself. Angel cut people a lot of slack.
“It was one of Lucille’s girlfriends, a girl I didn’t really know but who knew about me,” Angel said.
“Knew what about you?”
Jimmy had two hands gripping the wheel. He noticed them, his hands, as the Porsche rolled under another pole light on the bridge, as the orange light flared in the cockpit and he got a shot of the taut skin across his knuckles.
“I just meant—” Jimmy started.
“I loved her,” Angel said, cool and calm. “But where’s that gonna go? She was young. I’m old and a Sailor on top of that. Or, I’m a Sailor and old on top of that. You know how that works.” The last was as much a rebuke of Jimmy (and his own past, his own history with women) as Angel would offer in this story. “So I never told her right to her face. I was ‘her friend,’ helping her out when I could, talking to her when some guy did her wrong one way or another. This girl, Mariel, she knew that, the last part, that I cared about Lucy.”
Jimmy stared at the backs of his hands, willing some of the tenseness out of them. He stared until one relented and let itself drop off the wheel onto the leather-wrapped shifter knob.
“I even introduced her to the last guy,” Angel said. “Guy I stripped and cleaned the Skylark for.”
“So what happened, after the other girl came to you?” Jimmy asked. “I’m just trying to start at the beginning.”
“I know what you’re trying to do,” Angel said. He reached to the floor between his knees for his leather gym bag. He unzipped it and took out a pint of Courvoisier. Jimmy had smelled the sweet stink on Angel when he’d embraced him on the concrete in the front of the station in Oakland. Angel never drank at home. Too many of the people around him, the boys and men he was trying to help, had drink and drug problems. Things were confused enough for them. He never offered the bottle to Jimmy. Angel unscrewed the cap and took a sip. “You’re trying to start at the beginning. You’re trying to find the beginning.” He had a little edge to his voice. He took a second hit.
“I’m sorry,” Jimmy said. It had a kind of all-purpose quality to it.
They rode in silence for half a minute, crossed Yerba Buena Island in the middle of the two halves of the bridge. It was like a fist of rock in the middle of the Bay.
When they went through the tunnel, there were no cars close around them in the lanes going into San Francisco. The Porsche engine sounded a good rumble.
“Love that tuned exhaust,” Angel said. “L.A. Symphonic.” He screwed the metal cap back on the cognac and dropped it into his bag.
“Lil’ Bitch,” Jimmy said. It was what Angel had named the car when it had been reborn in his shop back in L.A. years ago. James Dean’s Porsche 550 Spyder was named Lil’ Bastard. Jimmy and Angel never said the name to anybody else.
Out the tunnel, off to the right across the slate water, was Alcatraz. And, dark at its side, Angel Island.
“There’s your island,” Jimmy said.
“Yeah, I wonder if they’d let me camp out,” Angel said.
“I got a room for you,” Jimmy said.
“So after I got the call from Mariel,” Angel said, “I went all crazy-like and drove over there, right then, that night. I took this old piece of shit car of my neighbor’s