to ska under a string of chili pepper lights hung in a grapefruit tree, its trunk painted white. Somebody on the steps recognized Jimmy as he came down around the side of the house and threw him a beer.

Angel Figueroa huddled at a picnic table with a skinny kid. Angel was in his forties, muscular, “cut,” clear-eyed, un-tattooed. He wore starched wide-leg jeans, stiff as cardboard, and a white T-shirt, a look they called California Penal. He spoke Spanish to the kid, fervent. The kid looked at the ground, nodding. In Angel’s lap was an open Bible with a homemade leather cover.

Angel looked up.

“Ask Jimmy,” Angel said. “Jimmy knows all about Jesus but he won’t accept the grace either.”

Jimmy nodded hello to the kid, who looked embarrassed.

“I’ve been working on Jimmy Miles for years,” Angel said. “Ask him. I don’t go away. Jesus don’t go away, I don’t go away.”

The kid’s name was Luis.

“This is Luis.”

Jimmy nodded at the kid again.

“Gimme some money,” Angel said to Jimmy.

Jimmy dug in his pocket and took out a folded sheaf of bills. He handed it all to Angel.

Angel peeled off two fives and gave them to the kid. “Go ask that chica over there why she’s been looking over here at you,” Angel said. There was a pretty girl on the steps, drinking a Coke, as young as the hooker on Sunset. “Take her up to Tommy’s. We all run out of food. Take my truck.”

Luis went away to talk to the girl.

“I’m trying to get him in an Art Magnet,” Angel said to Jimmy.

Angel shook Jimmy’s hand and pulled him down onto the bench beside him.

“Tell me something good.”

“I made the run to Tecate the other night,” Jimmy said.

“You shoulda called.”

“Stopped at that little fish fry place.”

“I was probably busy.”

“Next time,” Jimmy said, to hit the ball back over the net.

“Yeah, next time.”

Angel stood and put his arm around him. “I got something sweet to show you.”

In the garage, a half dozen young men dressed like Angel and with beers in their hands gazed reverently upon a chopped and lowered ’56 Mercury, a work in progress ground down to shiny steel.

Angel came in singing, “Baby loves a Mercury, crazy ’bout a Mercury . . .” He snatched a handkerchief out of the back pocket of one of the men, mimicked wiping off the hood. The men laughed. Maybe it was a joke about working in a car wash. Jimmy liked the people Angel drew to him, kids struggling to stay in school and men in their twenties and thirties and even forties struggling to stay in or out of any number of things. They looked like killers, but they weren’t.

“What’s the mill?” Jimmy said and ran a hand along the smooth fender.

“You don’t want to know,” Angel said.

Jimmy reached into the downturned mouth of the chrome grill and found the latch and opened the hood. There was no chrome on the engine. It was functionality writ large, wedged in its space like an iron fist.

The men stepped closer. Nobody said anything.

“A 427,” Angel said. “Holman-Moody built it for Freddie Lorenzen in ’66. Come by in the daytime, I’ll light it up for you. It doesn’t have very good manners.”

One of the kids repeated the last in Spanish for the man next to him.

Jimmy lowered the hood, pushed gently until the latch clicked.

“You all right?” Angel said. “You seem a little down.”

Jimmy didn’t answer. He stared at the bare metal curve of the car, old and new at the same time.

“Come on,” Angel said. “Say it out loud.”

“You know how sometimes you forget about it?” Jimmy said.

Angel nodded.

“And then you remember.”

“What happened?”

“A girl kissed me on the cheek,” Jimmy said. “And she knew.”

“What girl?”

“Girl on Sunset. A hooker. Jumped in my car.”

Angel waited a minute and then he said, “They see a lot of dark shit. They get tuned in to it.”

“Maybe she saw what’s really there. You ever think about that?”

“Not about you,” Angel said.

A few hours later, the moon had set, the women were gone, the men were lifting weights. Angel stood over the bench press spotting a fearsome man grinding out a last rep. Jimmy was up on the deck. The Hollywood Freeway was a half mile away and the traffic, even late, threw up a sound like the ocean. When you first heard it, it was exciting in a way, the sound of energy, of motion, of intention. But, like the kids out wild on Sunset, ten seconds later