Vineland (10 page)

“Took me years to find out how completely I'd been fooled,” Sasha nodding, mock-serious. “Toughest truth I ever had to face. Your father's never had a political cell in his system.”

Smiling, “Will you listen to that? What a woman!”

Not for the first time, Frenesi found she'd been switching her eyes back and forth, as if cutting together reverse shots of two actors. She had already been through a few of these what Hub called “exchanges of views.” They ended with everybody screaming and throwing household items, edible and otherwise. She knew her parents liked to proceed backward, into events of the past, in particular the fifties, the anticommunist terror in Hollywood then, the conspiracy of silence up to the present day. Friends of Hub's had sold out friends of Sasha's, and vice versa, and both personally had suffered at the hands of the same son of a bitch more than once. To Sasha the blacklist period, with its complex court dances of fuckers and fuckees, thick with betrayal, destructiveness, cowardice, and lying, seemed only a continuation of the picture business as it had always been carried on, only now in political form. Everyone they knew had made up a different story, to make each of them come out looking better and others worse. “History in this town,” Sasha muttered, “is no more worthy of respect than the average movie script, and it comes about in the same way—soon as there's one version of a story, suddenly it's anybody's pigeon. Parties you never heard of get to come in and change it. Characters and deeds get shifted around, heartfelt language gets pounded flat when it isn't just removed forever. By now the Hollywood fifties is this way-over-length, multitude-of-hands rewrite—except there's no sound, of course, nobody talks. It's a silent movie.”

Bitter, probably, she had a right to be, but she'd learned to cover it with deliberate cool flippancy learned from watching Bette Davis movies, something Frenesi must have picked up on early because each time she happened to catch one on the Tube, she could often warp back into infant memories of a giant unfocused being holding her up at arms' length and booming lines like, “Well! You ahh—quitethelittlebundle, ahhn't you? Yes!” Laughing, delighted, enfolding her. No point having a sourpuss baby around the house.

Frenesi had absorbed politics all through her childhood, but later, seeing older movies on the Tube with her parents, making for the first time a connection between the far-off images and her real life, it seemed she had misunderstood everything, paying too much attention to the raw emotions, the easy conflicts, when something else, some finer drama the Movies had never considered worth ennobling, had been unfolding all the time. It was a step in her political education. Names listed even in fast-moving credits, meaning nothing to a younger viewer, were enough to provoke from her parents groans of stomach upset, bellows of rage, snorts of contempt, and, in extreme cases, switches of channel. “You think I'm gonna sit and watch this piece of scab garbage?” Or, “You want to see a hot set? Watch when she slams that door—see that? Shook all over? That's scab carpentry by some scab local the IA set up, that's what scabs do to production values.” Or, “That asshole? thought he was dead. See that credit there?” getting right up beside the screen to zero in on the offending line, “That fascist fuck,” tapping the glass over the name fiercely, “owes me two years of work, you could've gone to college on what that SOB will always owe me.”

Up and down that street, she remembered, television screens had flickered silent blue in the darkness. Strange loud birds, not of the neighborhood, were attracted, some content to perch in the palm trees, keeping silence and an eye out for the rats who lived in the fronds, others flying by close to windows, seeking an angle to sit and view the picture from. When the commercials came on, the birds, with voices otherworldly pure, would sing back at them, sometimes even when none were on. Sasha would be out on the porch long after nightfall, knitting, sitting, talking with Hub or a neighbor, not a freeway within earshot, though the treetop whistling of the mockingbirds covered blocks, reedy, clear, possible for a child to fall asleep right down the middle of. . . .

In the years since she'd departed the surface of everyday civilian life, Frenesi had made it a point, maybe a ritual, whenever business brought her to L.A., to drive out east of La Brea, down into those flatland residential blocks, among the pale smudged chalet-roofed bungalows and barking dogs and lawn mowers, to find the place again, and cruise the block in low the way the FBI had all through her childhood, looking for Sasha but never seeing her, never once in the yard or through a window, till one visit there was new machinery in the carport and a Day-Glo plastic trike and a scatter of toys on the front lawn, and she had to go cash in more favors than she'd been planning to just to find out where her mother had moved—into a small apartment, as it turned out, not far away at all. Why? Had she been holding on to the house as long as she could, hoping Frenesi would come back home, but one day, from the weight of too many years or because she'd found out something fatal about her daughter, had given up at last on her, just given up?

Believing that the rays coming out of the TV screen would act as a broom to sweep the room clear of all spirits, Frenesi now popped the Tube on and checked the listings. There was a rerun of the perennial motorcycle-cop favorite “CHiPs” on in a little while. She felt a rising of blood, a premonitory dampness. Let the grim feminist rave, Frenesi knew there were living women, down in the world, who happened, like herself, to be crazy about uniforms on men, entertained fantasies while on the freeway about the Highway Patrol, and even, as she was planning to do now, enjoyed masturbating to Ponch and Jon reruns on the Tube, and so what? Sasha believed her daughter had “gotten” this uniform fetish from her. It was a strange idea even coming from Sasha, but since her very first Rose Parade up till the present she'd felt in herself a fatality, a helpless turn toward images of authority, especially uniformed men, whether they were athletes live or on the Tube, actors in movies of war through the ages, or maître d's in restaurants, not to mention waiters and busboys, and she further believed that it could be passed on, as if some Cosmic Fascist had spliced in a DNA sequence requiring this form of seduction and initiation into the dark joys of social control. Long before any friend or enemy had needed to point it out to her, Sasha on her own had arrived at, and been obliged to face, the dismal possibility that all her oppositions, however just and good, to forms of power were really acts of denying that dangerous swoon that came creeping at the edges of her optic lobes every time the troops came marching by, that wetness of attention and perhaps ancestral curse.

Just for its political incorrectness alone, Frenesi had at first reacted to Sasha's theory with anger, then after a while had found it only annoying, and nowadays, with the two of them into their second decade of silence, good only for a sad sniffle. She swung the TV set around now, lay down on the sofa, undid her shirt, unzipped her pants, and was set to go when all at once what should occur for her but the primal Tubefreek miracle, in the form of a brisk manly knock at the screen door in the kitchen, and there outside on the landing, through the screen, broken up into little dots like pixels of a video image, only squarer, was this large, handsome U.S. Marshal, in full uniform, hat, service .38, and leather beltwork, with an envelope to deliver. And his partner, waiting down beside the car in the latening sunlight, was
twice
as cute.

She recognized the envelope right away. It was the stipend check she'd been looking for like a late period since last week. It hadn't been in the mail at all, it was in this rugged lawman's big leather-gloved hand, which she made a point, nearing the Big Four-Oh these days and still at it, of touching as she took the check.

He raised his sunglasses, smiled. “You haven't been down to th' office yet, have you?” The U.S. Marshal administered and serviced Witness Protection, and in most of her assignments over the years there had been this matter of a courtesy call, as if to the home embassy in each new foreign country.

“We just moved in,” putting a stress on “we” to see what would happen.

“Well
we
haven't seen, uhm,” consulting some leather-covered field book, “Fletcher, either.”

He'd had one hand up on the doorjamb, leaning and talking, the way boys had to her in high school. She'd remembered to zip her pants on the way to the door, but had only done up a button or two of her shirt, no bra on, of course. She angled her head to look at the time on his tanned wrist, inches from her face. “He ought to be back any minute.”

He put the shades back down, chuckled. “How about tomorra, soon after eight
A.M.
's you can?” The phone in the other room began to ring. “Maybe that's him now. Maybe calling to say he'll be late, why don't you get it?”

“Nice talking to you. Till tomorrow, I guess.”

“I can wait.”

She was already halfway to the phone, looked back at him over her shoulder but didn't ask him in. At the same time, there was no way she could order him to leave, was there?

It was Flash, calling from the field office where he worked, but not to say he'd be late, he never did that, just came in when he came in. “Don't git alarmed, but now—you had any visitors today?”

“Marshal just came to deliver the check in person, did seem a little unusual.”

“It came? Outstanding! Listen, could you go out, soon 's you can, cash it, honey, for us, please?”

“Flash, what's up?”

“Don't know. Dropped by the terminal room, got talkin' to that Grace, you know, the Mexican one I 's pointin' out to you that time?”

With the big boobs. “Uh-huh.”

“Said she wanted me to see somethin' funny. But it wa'n't too funny. Turns out, a lot of people we know—they ain't on the computer anymore. Just—gone.”

It was the way he was saying it, with that only semicontrolled Johnny Cash type of catch or tremor she'd learned to tune in on, a 100 percent reliable omen. It meant what he liked to call profound feces, every time. “Well, Justin's due in any minute. Should I be packin' up?”

“Um first git the cash if you could, my sweet thing, and I'll be back there soon 's I can.”

“You old snake charmer,” as she hung up.

The marshals had split, doggone it, but here, charging up the outside stairs, pipe railings ringing, came Justin, with his friend Wallace, and Wallace's mom, Barbie, gamely puffing along behind. Frenesi grabbed her kid briefly, trailing part of a wet kiss along his bare arm as he flew past with Wallace, on into the alcove he'd made his room.

“Herd o' locusts,” Barbie sighed.

Frenesi was standing by at the automatic-drip machine. “Hope you don't mind it this long in the pot.”

“Better the longer it sits.” Barbie worked part-time at the courthouse, and her husband full-time at the federal building, for different arms of the law, and sometimes she and Frenesi looked after each other's kids, though they lived on opposite sides of town. “You're still on for Monday then, right?”

“Oh, sure,” oh sure, “listen, Barb, I hate to ask, but my card keeps getting kicked out of the cash machine, nobody knows nothin' about it, my account's OK, but the bank's closed and I just got this check, um I don't suppose—”

“Last week would've been better, we 'as countin' on a bunch of vouchers to come through, now they tell us, guess what, lost in the computer, surprise.”

“Computers,” Frenesi began, but then, paranoid, decided not to repeat what she'd heard from Flash. She made up something about the check instead, and while the boys watched cartoons, the women sat in the breeze through the screen door, drank coffee, and told computer horror tales.

“Feel like old-timers grouchin' about the weather,” Barbie said. Flash came in just as she and Wallace were heading out.

“Barbie! Oohwee! Let's see!” He took her left hand, twirled her around, then pretended to inspect the hand. “Still married, huh.”

“Yep, and J. Edgar Hoover's still dead, Fletcher.”

“Bye, Mr. Fletcher!” Wallace hollered.

“Say, Wallace, catch 'at game yesterday? What'd I tell you?”

“Still glad we didn't bet—that was my lunch money.”

“Flash?” hollered both women at once. Flash stood out on the landing and watched till they were in the car and pulling away. Still waving, “She act funny at all?”

“No, uh-uh, why?”

“Her old man's some honcho down at the Regional Office, right?”

“Flash, it's a desk job, he's in administrative support.”

“Hmm. I seem nervous to you? Oh—the check, 'd you cash it yet? 'Course not—why'm I even asking? My life story here. Well can I please have a look at it?” He squinted, angling it around. “Looks funny. Huh? Don't you think?”

“I'll get on it,” she promised, “right after we eat. Now tell me about who isn't on the computer, that's making you so crazy.”

He'd brought home a quickly compiled list, all independent contractors like themselves. Frenesi got out a couple of frozen, or with the state the fridge was in actually semithawed, peperoni pizzas, put the oven on to preheat, and made a fast salad while Flash opened beers and read off the names. There were Long Bihn Jail alumni, old grand-jury semipros, collectors of loans and ladies on strings who'd been persuaded to help entrap soon-to-be ex-customers, snitches with photographic memories, virgins to the act of murder, check bouncers, coke snorters, and ass grabbers, each with more than ample reason to seek the shadow of the federal wing, and some, with luck, able to reach its embrace and shelter.

Or so they must have believed. But now, no longer on the computer, how safe could any of them be feeling? “You're sure now,” she pressed, “you know for a fact ol' what's-her-name checked it out.”