Russian Spring (42 page)

The six-lane freeway ran up over the San Bernardino Mountains toward the Los Angeles Basin through more arid empty desert country, at least for the first hour or so, but Bobby felt as if he had suddenly crossed an invisible frontier as soon as they hit it.

The traffic thickened, cars cut in and out aggressively, big heavy-duty long haulers rumbled along in the right-hand lane, many of them carrying ominous-looking loads concealed under khaki and Air Force–blue tarps, highway patrol helicopters buzzed overhead like angry dragonflies, and military aircraft cracked through the air high above at supersonic speed.

About forty minutes out of San Bernardino, the billboards started, and then the endless sprawl of low tract houses, industrial parks surrounded by wire fences, shopping malls surrounded by immense parking lots, and finally a heavy miasma of smog, dirty brown in the distance, sparkly blue-gray up close, washing out the landscape.

“Bienvenidos a Los Angeles!” Eileen drawled.

“This is
LA
already?”

Eileen laughed. “It might as well be. It’s all like this from here on in.”

And it was, only more so. The traffic got thicker and thicker until it was crawling along in stops and starts, and the wide-open western landscape was buried under tract housing, shopping malls, factories, parking lots, billboards, chemical plants, freeway interchanges, apartment blocks, and general unidentifiable industrial bric-a-brac.

And yet, even inside the car, Bobby could sense something new in the air besides the smog, something he had not felt in America before, a kind of manic energy, a sense of feverish motion, mad enterprise, tumbling and churning and smoking toward some unimaginable future in quick-time.

“This sure isn’t like the East,” he muttered.

Eileen laughed. “This is like
Southern California
,” she told him. “It’s not like
anything
. It’s not even on the same
planet
.”

“There’s something in the air, and I don’t mean the—”

“S-M-O-G?” she said. “M-O-N-E-Y!”

“Huh?”

“This is where the money is,” Eileen said. “It’s like someone picked up the country at the corner of Maine, and it all slid downhill to here. While the rest of the US of A was going broke and being bought up by the Peens and the Jappos, the Golden State just got more
golden
.
Still grows everything and ships it everywhere. Still the world capital of show biz. And biotech that the gov never let the foreigners get their hands on. . . .”

She shot him an evil leer. “But most of all what makes Southern California golden is like
war!
” she declared. “Lion’s loot of all the defense money the gov’s been sucking out of the rest of the country’s been shoveled into a tube that comes out
here
ever since good old Ronnie Reagan stopped making cowboy movies! Battlestar America! Edwards! Vandenberg! Penetrator bombers! Tanks! Napalm! Ammo! We crank it all out, and they ship it to Latin America, and they blow it all up, and they come back for more. Oh yeah, the Pentagon is Southern California’s Bright Green Money Machine! This is where all the gringo jingo makes the pockets jangle!”

“That’s horrible . . . ,” Bobby muttered.

“
Tell
me about it! And you haven’t even met
Daddy
yet!”

They finally drove out of the vast industrial sprawl and through downtown Los Angeles, then headed west through more industrial wasteland, turned north at another freeway interchange, and finally came out onto Wilshire Boulevard, smack into the middle of a monstrous traffic jam.

They crept past tall apartment blocks, office towers, indoor shopping malls, and then through the center of downtown Beverly Hills, past plush hotels, car showrooms, luxurious boutiques, and plastically elegant restaurants.

“ ‘The Miracle Mile,’ they call it,” Eileen told him. “It’s a miracle if you can drive a mile in an hour. There’s a subway from downtown under here, but no one would be caught dead in it—earthquakes, you know, we’re still waiting for the Big One to knock all this down, and it can’t come too soon for me.”

Eileen finally turned south off Wilshire, and all at once they were in another world, a relentlessly rectilinear grid of tree-shaded streets, large well-kept houses in phony Spanish, Tudor, Midi, and even medieval styles. There was not a café or a tabac or a market for blocks and blocks, and hardly any people walking on the sidewalks.

“The only reason they have
sidewalks
in Beverly Hills,” Eileen said, as if reading his mind, “is so they’ll have something to
roll up
at nine o’clock at night.”

They finally pulled up in the driveway of a truly bizarre house, a small-scale replica of some crazed children’s book illustrator’s concept of an English castle—two stories of phony Tudor white stucco and wood beams crowned with miniature tessellated turrets and parapets, nothing exactly a right angle or in a straight line, and a front door done up as a simulacrum of a raised drawbridge, replete with solid brasswork mimicking the winch and chains.

“Be it ever so humble,” Eileen said, as she rang a doorbell concealed in the brasswork, “there’s no home like
this
.”

Big Ben chimes rang out lugubriously behind the door. A few moments later the door opened, and a middle-aged woman in an asymmetrically cut red-and-green tartan skirt and matching sleeveless blouse appeared in the doorway. Her arms and her face were tanned an even synthetic bronze and her blond hair was conked up into an elaborate crest that looked vaguely like a Roman helmet.

“Eileen!” she cried. “Kissy-kiss!” And she pecked her daughter lightly on the cheeks French-style. “Who’s this?” she said, eyeing Bobby dubiously.

“This is Bobby Reed, a friend of mine from Berkeley, he’s passing through town on the way from visiting his folks back East, and I’m giving him a ride back to school, so I told him it would be okay for him to stay with us until we leave, that’s not like a
problem
, is it?”

“In Tod’s room,” Mrs. Sparrow said rather coldly.

“Oh,
Mommy!
” Eileen moaned. “It’s not as if I were pretending to be a virgin—”

“In Tod’s room!”

“That’s okay, Mrs. Sparrow,” Bobby said quickly. “Your house, your rules.”

“What a nice young man,” Mrs. Sparrow said, giving Bobby a rather plastic-looking dead smile. But she led the two of them into the house, through a foyer, and down into a sunken living room, where a man with a severely squared-off brown crew cut and dressed in a tan sleeveless bush jacket and matching jungle shorts sat on a big leather couch watching a videowall.

“Hi, Daddy, this is Bobby, I’m driving him back to school, and he’s going to stay with us until then,” Eileen said. “Bobby, this is Daddy.”

Mr. Sparrow pried himself off the couch, shook Bobby’s hand with a firm grip. He was tall, broad, athletic-looking except for an incipient paunch, and his soft-featured face, which appeared to have been tanned to match his wife’s, seemed somehow out of place beneath his pseudo-military hairdo.

“Dick Sparrow,” he said by way of greeting. “I’m watching the news, and it’s getting good, don’t mind if we see the end, do you?”

“Oh,
Daddy!
”

“Tawny, why don’t you get us some tequila?” Dick Sparrow said, ignoring Eileen’s protest and reseating himself on the couch. He gave Bobby a manly wink. “Might as well get used to it, right?” he said enigmatically.

Bobby sat down on the far end of the couch from Dick Sparrow, with Eileen between them. On the videowall, an announcer was staring
solemnly into the camera and proclaiming in grave sepulchral tones.

“. . . and given the Mexican government a month to secure the necessary foreign exchange in order to comply, or present an acceptable alternative.”

“Acceptable alternative!” Dick Sparrow cried. “Yeah, right, like five trillion tons of frijoles!”

On the screen, an aircraft carrier was sailing into a dockyard, surrounded by destroyers and hovercruisers, while a big blimp hung with helicopter gunships floated overhead.

“Meanwhile, the redeployed elements of the Pacific fleet have reached San Diego, where, we have learned, they will take on an additional complement of Marines and a brigade from the 82nd Airborne Division. . . . While at El Toro Marine base north of San Diego . . .”

Shots of tanks churning over sand dunes, Marines jumping out of Ospreys, hitting the beaches from landing craft, low-flying tactical support fighters rocketing empty coastline.

“. . . Operation Alamo continues . . .”

“What’s going on?” Bobby exclaimed.

Dick Sparrow eyed him peculiarly.
“What’s going on?”
he said. “Where you been, boy?”

“Uh . . . on the road . . .”

Sparrow shook his head, and returned his attention to the news.
“What’s going on,”
he said, “is that we’re finally going to go in!”

“Go in?”

“Are you for real, boy? We’re finally calling in our markers. The gov’s bought up the Mexican debt at twenty cents on the dollar, paid too much, you ask me, and now the beaners have to cough it up. And if they don’t, which they won’t, seeing as how they don’t even have the cash to pay their own Army, we’ll take Baja as compensation—”

“. . . in Mexico City, the President refused comment, but the Minister of Defense declared that the territorial integrity of Mexico would be defended—”

“With a bunch of old junk!” Dick Sparrow shouted at the screen. “The beaners won’t last a week, you can get six to four in Vegas!”

Tawny Sparrow returned with a tray bearing a bottle of tequila, shot glasses, lemon wedges, and a salt shaker.

“. . . while in Strasbourg, the Common European Parliament passed a—”

“Fuck the Peens!” Dick Sparrow shouted. “They mix in, and they’ll eat anti-protons!”

“. . . and in the red-hot National League pennant race, Kazuo Konokawa
hit a three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth to give Miami—”

Dick Sparrow hit a touchpoint on his remote and the screen went dead. He poured out four shots of tequila, licked the top of his hand, poured salt on it, tongued it, gulped down the contents of his little glass, bit into a lemon wedge.

“To Greater California!” he cried.

“Greater California?”

“Daddy’s bought up acres and acres of desert north of Ensenada,” Eileen said.

“You better believe it!” Dick Sparrow declared. “Say, your family got any money, Bobby? I can still get you a deal on a hundred acres only seventy miles from La Paz, but you’ve gotta move fast, I mean, the best stuff’s already long gone, and when our boys move in—”

“Oh, Daddy!”

“Come on, boy, drink up!” Dick Sparrow said, handing Bobby a shot glass, a lemon wedge, and the salt shaker. “To the gallant boys who are about to make us rich! To Greater California! To bigger and better things to come!”

Bobby shrugged, salted his hand, licked it, gulped down the powerful, oily-tasting stuff, and bit into the lemon. The fiery tequila exploded in his gut like a small air-to-ground missile. Nor did he refuse when Dick Sparrow poured another round before dinner. Around here, he had the feeling he was going to need it.

Dinner was a huge salad full of strange tropical fruits, roasted chicken in a weird spicy brown sauce, a wedge of chocolate cake, and more appalling gringo jingo from Dick Sparrow.

After dinner, Tawny Sparrow showed Bobby his room on the upper floor, her son Tod’s old room, the walls still festooned with posters and photos of American military hardware. Then the four of them watched a horrible film called
Freedom’s War
on television—an alternate history shoot-’em-up in which the United States won the Vietnam War with the judicious use of tactical nuclear weapons—while Dick Sparrow continued to blather on about Latin American real estate deals, European perfidy, the coming age of American rebirth, what might ultimately be done to put the Jappos in their place, and the golden future of California.

Finally, after the news, and some talk show where the host pried into the sex lives of the guests with savage abandon, the Sparrows retired, leaving Bobby and Eileen alone in the living room.

“Fuck a Russian duck,” Bobby muttered dazedly.

“Daddy’s
something
, isn’t he?”

“How do you
stand
it?”

Eileen laughed. “I don’t,” she said. “Why do you think I’m going to
Berkeley?
”

“Well, we’re going to be in
LA
for the next three days, so I might as well show you around so you’ll know what you’re
escaping
,” Eileen told him after breakfast. “And I guess we should start with
UCLA
. . . .”

They walked up to Wilshire and took the subway. “Parking there’s just
impossible
unless you’ve got a student sticker,” Eileen told him. “It’s only two stops, so we
probably
won’t get caught in an earthquake.”

They came out right in front of one of the main entrances to the sprawling campus—the idea had been to encourage the student body to use the subway, Eileen told him, but of course, no true Trojan would be caught
dead
commuting to school in anything but his car.

“Trojan?”

“The team’s name. Some ancient Greek jingo, I think. Also a brand of condom, you know, what everyone put on their unclean
pricks
during the Plague Years, just
perfect
, don’t you think?”

UCLA
was an immense sprawl of low buildings and short towers, more like a huge industrial park than Bobby’s vision of a college campus. Pedicabs pedaled by grim-looking middle-aged Mexicans ferried students back and forth between classrooms for a few dollars.

“This place is just so big . . . ,” Bobby said. “Why don’t the students use bicycles to get around?”

“Bicycles!” Eileen exclaimed. “This is Gringo Jingo Land, not the
Third World!
”

They spent the morning wandering around the campus, then had a horrible steam-table lunch at one of the college cafeterias. “An experience
not
to be missed if you still have any thoughts of going here,” Eileen told him.