But now, standing by the glass doors that faced Seventh, she could see that the sodium-yellow-stained blackness of the sky had begun to glow a deep blue in the east; white lights shone now in the liquor store across the street—presumably the employees were preparing for the dawn rush—and a couple of the hotel-room windows above the store were luminous amber rectangles. Los Angeles was wearily getting up, she thought, shambling to the bathroom, lip-smacking the false teeth into place, strapping on the prosthetic limbs…
A whisper of cool breeze breathed between the aluminum doorframes into the stale atmosphere of the bus station, and somehow even down here south of Beverly and west of the L.A. River, it carried a scent of newly opened morning glories.
The day, the staring Western day, is born, she thought. Awake, for morning in the bowl of night/ has fired the shot that puts the stars to flight.
She jumped, and then the public-address speakers snapped on to announce another departure.
With a rueful sigh she abandoned the notion that she was dead. Another few cups of vending-machine coffee; and then it would be time to start walking.
LOBSTERS AND crabs had begun crawling out of the Venice Beach surf at dawn.
Under the brightening tangerine and spun-metal sky, the streets were still in dimness, and for a silent few moments at six-thirty a ripple of deeper shadows stepped across the uneven city blocks as the streetlights sensed the approaching day and one by one winked out. NO PARKING signs had kept the curbs of Main and Pacific clear all night, but on the side streets, and in the tiny dirt lots between houses, cars sat parked at whatever crooked angles had let them fit, and motorcycles leaned on their kick-stands right up against walls and fence posts and car fenders.
On the rust-streaked walls of the old buildings, the little iron diamonds of earthquake-reinforcement bolts studded the old stucco. The painted Corinthian columns of the porticoed shop fronts facing Windward Avenue were faded in the half-light, and the littered expanse of the street was empty except for an occasional shapeless figure trudging along or stolidly pushing a trash-filled shopping cart. Occasional early-morning joggers, always flanked by at least one bounding dog, scuffed down the middle of the street toward the open lots facing the narrow lane that was Ocean Front Walk.
The lots were ringed with empty metal-pipe frameworks and cages that would be occupied with vendors’ booths later in the morning, and the only color in the scene now was the vividly shaded and highlighted graffiti that was gradually engulfing the once-red Dumpsters lined up against the building walls.
Out past the stark volleyball poles and the cement bike trails was the open beach, not taking clear footprints now but showing clearly the sharp broken-star prints of bird feet and the crumble-edged footprints of joggers who had been out when the dew had still clung to the sand.
The waves were low and the blue ocean stretched out to the brightening horizon, undimmed by any fog. A jet rising steeply into the sky from LAX to the south was a dark splinter, with a point of white light at the wingtip shining as bright as Venus in the dawn sky. Fishing boats moved past in the middle distance as silently and slowly as the minute hand of a watch, and a fat pelican bobbed on the waves a hundred yards offshore.
And crabs and lobsters were climbing over the sprawled and trailing piles of coppery kelp. Seagulls shouted and glided low over the spectacle, their cries ringing emptily in the chilly air, and sandpipers swiveled their pencil beaks and high-stepped away along the surf edge. A shaggy golden retriever and a Great Dane had stopped to bark at the armored animals who had come clambering and antennae-waving up the sand, and the owners of the dogs stopped to peer and back away. More lobsters and crabs were tumbling up in the low waves, and the ones who had come out first were already up above the flat brown dampness and were floundering in the dry sand. A John Deere tractor had been chugging up the beach from the direction of the pier and the lifeguard headquarters, dragging a leveler across the night-randomized dunes and gullies, but the driver had put the engine into neutral and let the tires drag to a halt when he noticed the leggy exodus.
Then a wave began to mount, out on the face of the water.
It was a green hump against the horizon, rather than a line, more like the bow-swell of an invisible tanker aiming to make landfall here than a wave rolling in to crash indiscriminately along the whole length of the Santa Monica Bay coastline. Only when the pelican was lifted on it, and squawked and spread his wings at his sudden elevation, did the people on the beach look up, and then they hastily moved back up the flat beach toward the gray monolith of the Recreation Center.
The tall green swell grew taller, seeming to gather up all the visible water as it swept silently toward the shore. As the wave crested, and finally began to break apart into spray at the curling top edge and roaringly exhale as it leaned forward against the resistance of the air, a long form was visible rolling inside the solid water—and when the wave boomingly crashed on the sand, surged far up the slope in hissing foam and then was sucked away back to the receding sea, a big steely thing had been left behind on the brown, bubbling sand.
It shifted and settled, and then didn’t move.
It was a fish. That much was agreed upon by the half-dozen people who timidly approached after the thing had lain inert on the sand for a full minute and no further big waves gathered out at sea—but the fish was twenty or thirty feet long and as thick as a thigh-high stack of mattresses, and its body and head were covered with bony plates rather than scales. No one in the knot of spectators could even guess what species it might be. It appeared to be dead, but it looked so like some monster from the pages of an illustrated book on the Cretaceous period that no one approached the thing within twenty feet. Even the dogs stayed away from it, and made do with bounding away to bark busily at the fleeing lobsters and crabs.
For a while, water leaked out of the fish’s blunt face from between its open, armored jaws, but now there was no motion at all to the creature.
An old woman in a parka stared for a while, then backed away from the big and vaguely repulsive spectacle. “I’ll go get someone,” she said querulously. “A lifeguard, or someone.”
“Yeah,” called a young man. “Maybe he can do CPR on it.”
Up the slope, on the dry sand closer to the sidewalks and the handball courts and the sea-facing row of shops and cafes and blocky old apartment buildings, the panicky crabs and lobsters were turning in disoriented circles and waving their claws in the air.
BOOK TWO: GET A LIFE