Tales of the City 05 - Significant Others

better.”
    Booter grunted at him and kept walking. He wondered where they had kept Jimmy overnight. Was there a morgue in the infirmary? The funeral people had arrived from the city this morning, so Jimmy must’ve stayed somewhere in the Grove, away from his brothers, alone in the dark….
    He crossed the footbridge above the gorge leading down to the beach. Laughter drifted up from the water, but it sounded callous to him, disrespectful of the dead. Didn’t they know what had happened to Jimmy? Didn’t all of Bohemia know?
    Descending the slope to the river, he checked out a canoe at the dock and padded it with one of the thin cotton mattresses they issued for sunbathing. Snug in this waterborne nest, he paddled away from the cruel mirth of the swimmers, intent upon solitude.
    When he was fifty yards or so downriver, he pulled in his paddle and leaned back against the mattress. There was virtually no current, and the sun felt good against his skin. He thought of Wren for a moment, welcoming the comfort she could offer in only a matter of hours.
    He took his flask from his hip pocket and wet his whistle. Where did that come from—wet your whistle? He had heard it all his life without actually stopping to think about it. Jimmy would know, damn him. Why wasn’t he here?
    Jimmy would like this a lot. Jimmy was a real kid in a canoe. Naming all the birds, spinning yarns. He could tell his story about the narrow-gauge railway that ran along the river road in the 1890s … how the old-timers had come to the Grove using public transportation, starting with the Sausalito ferry, then taking the old Northwestern Pacific …
    A huge, hungry-looking creature was patrolling the sky above the canoe. Nothing dead down here, fella. Beat it. It was a predatory bird of some sort, probably an osprey. Or was it a turkey vulture? Jimmy would know….
    But Jimmy wasn’t there, was he? He had marked out his life in encampments, summer to summer, and now he was gone, rocketing down the freeway, stiff as a board, robbed of his finale.
    Just like that, Jimmy, just like that.
    He closed his eyes and let his fingers trail in the water. For some reason, this pose struck him as vaguely Pre-Raphaelite, like that painting of the Lady of Shalott, supine in her boat, drifting off to her death.
    Tennyson. How did it go?
    “And down the river’s dim expanse, / Like some bold seer in a trance, / Seeing all his own mischance,—/ With a glassy countenance / Did she look to Camelot….”
    It was his mother’s favorite poem. He had memorized it four or five years after she died, for an English lit project at Deerfield.
    “And at the closing of the day / She loosed the chain, and down she lay: / The broad stream bore her far away, / The Lady of Shalott.”
    He opened his eyes. The great bird of prey was a dark smudge against the sun. The brightness was too much for him. His eyelids caved in under the weight.
    “And as the boat-head wound along, / The willowy hills and fields among, / They heard her singing her last song, / The Lady of Shalott.”
    Her last song … Mother’s last song … Jimmy’s last song …
    The canoe found the current and swung around as he melted into the mattress and entered a realm of sweet release. His progress down the river was marked only by the vulture, who made several lazy loops in the air and returned to her nest in the forest.

The Honeymoon Period
    M ICHAEL AND THACK HAD DRIVEN OUT TO THE ocean that afternoon. From Cazadero they had followed a crumbly one-lane road which snaked through the dark green twilight of the redwoods before climbing to a mountain meadow the color of bleached hair. There were gnarly oaks here and there, and Wyeth-gray fences staggering down to the sea.
    “Look,” said Michael, pointing to the roadside. “Naked Ladies.”
    Thack blinked his pale lashes once or twice.
    “Those lilies,” Michael explained. “Pink, see? And no leaves. Naked Ladies.”
    “Oh,” said Thack.
    “You don’t have ‘em in Charleston?”
    Thack shrugged. “We might. I’m not good on flowers.”
    “Just houses, huh?”
    “Yep.” He smiled faintly and returned his hand to Michael’s denimed thigh. It had been there for most of the drive, pleasantly warm and already familiar.
    “This was nice of Brian,” Thack said.
    “What?”
    “Giving us time to ourselves.”
    “Oh … well, actually he wanted some time alone himself.” This was true enough, even though it had been Michael who’d broached