Inherent Vice (28 page)

The stylish chanteuse had moved on to Dietz & Schwartz
’
s
“
Alone
Together,
”
and Doc bought himself and Coy cacha
ç
a with beer chasers.
“
I
’
m not asking you to give away secrets. But I think I saw you once on
the tube at a rally for Nixon?
”

“
And your question is, is am I really one of them screamin right-wing
nutcases?
”

“
Somethin like that.
”

“
I wanted to get clean, and I thought I wanted to do something for my country. Stupid as it sounds. These people were the only ones who were offering me that. It looked like an easy call. But what they really
wanted was to control the membership by making us feel like
we’re
never
patriotic enough. My country right or wrong, with Vietnam goin on?
that
’
s just fuckin crazy. Suppose your mom was using smack.
”

“
My, uh
...
”

“
You wouldn
’
t at least say somethin?
”

“
Wait, so the U.S. is, like, somebody
’
s mom you
’
re sayin
...
and she
’
s
strung out on
...
what, exactly?
”

“
On sending kids off to die in jungles for no reason. Something wrong and suicidal that she can
’
t stop.
”

“
And the Viggies wouldn
’
t buy that.
”

“
I never got a chance to bring it up. By then it was too late anyway. I
saw what it was. I saw what I
’
d done.
”

Doc sprang for refills. They sat and listened to the rest of the-girl-who-wasn
’
t-a-hippie-chick
’
s set.

“
Not a bad solo you took back there,
”
Doc said.

Coy shrugged.
“
For a borrowed horn, I guess.
”

“
You still stayin up at Topanga?
”

“
No choice.
”

He waited for Doc to say something, which turned out to be,
“
Bummer.
”

“
Tell me. I
’
m lower than a groupie, fetching weed, opening beers, making sure there
’
s only aqua jelly beans in the big punch bowl in the parlor. But there I go, complaining again.
”

“
I do get the feeling,
”
Doc said tentatively,
“
you
’
d rather be someplace else?
”

“
Back where I was would be nice,
”
with a small break toward the end
that Doc hoped was audible only to
PIs
who make a habit of wallowing in sentiment. The musicians were filtering back to the stand, and next thing Doc knew, Coy was deep into a
complicated head arrangement of
“
Samba do Aviao,
”
as if this was all he had to put between himself and
the way he thought he
’
d fucked up his life.

Doc ended up sticking around till closing time and watched Coy get
ting into the sinister Mercury woodie that had chased Doc down the
canyon the other night. He walked down to the Arizona Palms and had
the All-Nighter Special, then sat through the dawn reading the paper
and waited out the morning rush hour at a window with a downhill view into the smoglight, the traffic reduced to streams of reflective trim, twin
kling ghostly along the nearer boulevards, soon vanishing into brown
bright distance. It wasn
’
t so much Coy he kept cycling back to as Hope,
who believed, with no proof, that her husband hadn
’
t died, and Ame
thyst, who ought to have something more than fading Polaroids to go to
when she got them little-kid blues.

_ELEVEN

WAITING ON DOC
’
S DOORSILL AT WORK WAS A POSTCARD FROM
some island he had never heard of out in the Pacific Ocean, with a lot of vowels in
it’s
name. The cancellation was in French and initialed by a
local postmaster, along with the notation
courier
par lance-coco
which as
close as he could figure from the
Petit Larousse
must mean some kind of catapult mail delivery involving coconut shells, maybe as a way of deal
ing with an unapproachable reef. The message on the card was unsigned,
but he knew it was from Shasta.

“
I wish you could see these waves. Its one more of these places a voice
from somewhere else tells you you have to be. Remember that day with
the Ouija board? I miss those days and I miss you. I wish so many things
could be different
...
Nothing was supposed to happen this way, Doc, I
’
m so sorry.
”

Maybe she was, then again, maybe not. But what about this Ouija board? Doc went stumbling through his city dump of a memory. Oh
...
oh, sure, dimly... it had been during one of those prolonged times of no dope, nobody had any, everybody was desperate and suffering lapses of judgment. People were opening up cold capsules and laboriously sorting the thousands of tiny beads inside by color, in the belief that each color stood for a different belladonna alkaloid, which taken in big enough doses would get them loaded. T
hey were snorting nutmeg,
drinking cocktails of Visine and inexpensive wine, eating packets of
morning-glory seeds despite rumors that the seed companies were coating
them with some chemical that would make you throw up. Anything.

One day when Doc and Shasta were over at Sortilege
’
s house, she mentioned this Ouija board she had. Doc had a brainflash.
“
Hey! You
think it knows where we can score?
”
Sortilege raised her eyebrows and
shrugged, but waved a go-ahead hand at the board. The usual suspicions then arose, like how could you be sure the other person wasn
’
t deliberately moving the planchette to make it look like some message from beyond, and so on.
“
Easy as pie,
”
Sortilege said,
“
just do it all by yourself.
”
Following her instructions, Doc breathed himself deeply and
carefully into a receptive state, letting the tips of his fingers rest as lightly
as possible on the planchette.
“
Now, make your request, and see what happens.
”

“
Groovy,
”
said Doc.
“
Hey—where can I find some dope, man? a-and,
you know, good shit?
”
The planchette took off like a jackrabbit, spelling out almost faster than Shasta could copy an address down Sunset some
what east of Vermont, and even throwing in a phone number, which
Doc promptly dialed.
“
Howdy, dopers,
”
cooed a female voice,
“
we
’
ve got
whatever you need, and remember—the sooner you get over here, the more there
’
ll be left for you.
”

“
Yeah like whom I talking to? Hello? Hey!
”
Doc looked at the receiver, puzzled.
“
She just hung up.
”

“
Could
’ve
been a recording,
”
said Sortilege.
“
Did you hear what she
was screaming at you?
‘
Stay away! I am a police trap!
’”

“
You want to come along, keep us out of trouble?
”

She looked doubtful.
“
I have to advise you at this point that it might not be anything. See, the problem about Ouija boards—
”

But Doc and Shasta were already out the door and soon rattling up the chuckholed obstacle course known as Rosecrans Boulevard under a cloudless sky, in the sort of perfect daylight you always saw on TV cop shows, unshaded even by the eucalyptus trees that had
recently all
been chopped down. KHJ was playing a Tommy James & the Shondells
marathon. Commercial-free in fact. What could be more auspicious?

Even before they reached the airport, something about the light had
begun to go weird. The sun vanished behind clouds which grew thicker
by the minute. Up in the hills among the oil pumps, the first raindrops
began to fall, and by the time Doc and Shasta got to La Brea they were
in the middle of a sustained cloudburst. This was way too unnatural.
Ahead, someplace over Pasadena, black clouds had gathered, not just
dark gray but midnight black, tar-pit black, hitherto-unreported-circle-
of-Hell black. Lightning bolts had begun to descend across the L.A.
Basin singly and in groups, followed by deep, apocalyptic peals of thunder. Everybody had turned their headlights on, though it was midday.
Water came rushing down the hillsides of Hollywood, sweeping mud,
trees, bushes, and many of the lighter types of vehicle on down into the
flatlands. After hours of detouring for landslides and traffic jams and
accidents, Doc and Shasta finally located the mystically revealed dope
dealers address, which turned out to be an empty lot with a gigantic
excavation in it, between a laundromat and an Orange Julius-plus-car
wash, all of them closed. In the thick mist and lashing rain, you couldn
’
t
even see to the other side of the hole.

“
Hey. I thought there was supposed to be a lot of dope around here.
”

What Sortilege had tried to point out about Ouija boards, as Doc
learned later back at the beach, while wringing out his socks and looking
for a hair dryer, was that concentrated around us are always mischie
vous spirit forces, just past the threshold of human perception, occupying both worlds, and that these critters enjoy nothing better than to
mess with those of us still attached to the thick and sorrowful catalogs of human desire.
“
Sure!
”
was their attitude,
“
you want dope? Here
’
s your
dope, you fucking idiot.
”

Doc and Shasta sat parked by the edge of the empty swamped rect
angle and watched
it’s
edges now and then slide in, and then after a while
things rotated ninety degrees, and it began to look, to Doc at least, like a
doorway, a great wet temple entrance, into someplace else. The rain beat
down on the car roof, lightning and thunder from time to time inter
rupting thoughts of the old namesake river that had once run through
this town, long canalized and tapped dry, and crippled into a public and
anonymous confession of the deadly sin of greed.... He imagined it
filling again, up to
it’s
concrete rim, and then over, all the water that
had not been allowed to flow here for all these years now in unrelenting return, soon beginning to occupy the arroyos and cover the flats, all the
swimming pools in the backyards filling up and overflowing and flooding the lots and streets, all this karmic waterscape connecting together, as the rain went on falling and the land vanished, into a sizable inland
sea that would presently become an extension of the Pacific.

It was funny that of all things to mention in the limited space of a
coconut-launched postcard Shasta should have picked that day in the
rain. It had stuck with Doc somehow too, even though it came at a point
late in their time together, when she was already halfway out the door
and Doc saw it happening but was letting it happen, and despite it there
they were, presently making out frantically, like kids at the drive-in,
steaming up the windows and getting the seat covers wet. Forgetting for a few minutes how it was all going to develop anyway.

Back at the beach, the rain continued, and every day up in the hills,
another fragment of real estate came sliding down. Insurance salesmen
had Brylcreem running down into their collars, and stewardii found it
impossible even with half-gallon cans of hair spray purchased in duty-free zones far away to maintain their hairdos in anything close to a stylish flip.
The termitic houses of Gordita Beach had all turned to the consistency
of wet sponge, emergency plumbers reached in to squeeze the beams
and joists, thinking of their own winter homes in Palm Springs. People
began to go crazy even while on the natch. Some enthusiast, claiming to be George Harrison of the Beatles, tried to hijack the Goodyear Blimp,
moored at
it’s
winter quarters at the intersection of the Harbor and San
Diego Freeways, and make it fly him to Aspen, Colorado, in the rain.

The rain had a peculiar effect on Sortilege, who was just around then
beginning to get obsessed by Lemuria and
it’s
tragic final days.

“
You were there in a former life,
”
Doc theorized.

“
I dream about it, Doc. I wake up so sure sometimes. Spike feels that
way, too. Maybe
it’s
all this rain, but
we’re
starting to have the same
dreams. We can
’
t find a way to return to Lemuria, so it
’
s returning to us.
Rising up out of the ocean—
‘hi
Leej, hi Spike, long time ain
’
t it
…’”

“
It talked to you guys?
”

“
I don
’
t know. It isn
’
t just a place.
”

doc turned over
Shasta
’
s postcard now and stared at the picture on
the front. It was a photo taken underwater of the ruins of some ancient
city—broken columns and arches and collapsed retaining walls. The
water was supernaturally clear and seemed to emit a vivid blue-green
light. Fish, what Doc guessed you
’
d call tropical, were swimming back and forth. It all seemed familiar. He looked for a photo credit, a copy
right date, a place of origin. Blank. He rolled a joint and lit up and con
sidered. This had to be a message from someplace besides a Pacific island
whose name he couldn
’
t pronounce.

He decided to go back and visit the Ouija-board address, which,
being the site of a classic dope misadventure, had remained permanently
entered in his memory. Denis came along for muscle.

The hole in the ground was gone, and in
it’s
place rose a strangely
futuristic building. From the front it might have been taken at first for
some kind of religious structure, smoothly narrow and conical, like a
church spire only different. Whoever put it up must have had a pretty
comfortable budget to work with, too, because the whole outside had
been covered in gold leaf. Then Doc noticed how this tall pointed shape
was also curved away from the street. He went down the block a little
way and looked back to get a side view, and when he saw how dramatic
the curve was and how sharp the point at the top, he finally tumbled.
Aha! In the old L.A. tradition of architectural whimsy, this structure was supposed to be a six-story-high
golden fang.

“
Denis, I
’
m gonna look around for a while, you want to wait in the car or come in and cover my back or something?
”

“
I was gonna go try and find a pizza,
”
Denis said.

Doc handed him the car keys.
“
And... they did have driver ed at Leuzinger High.
”
bure.

“
And you remember this is a stick, not automatic and so forth.
”

“
I
’
m cool, Doc.
”
And Denis sped off.