Vineland (11 page)

“Did it myself, type the name in, comes back ‘No Such File,' all right? You want me to go beat her up, will that help?”

“This serious?”

“Fuckin' A.” Which was about when Justin came wandering in, cartoons having ended and his parents now become the least objectionable programming around here, for half an hour, anyway—and just as well, too, because the last thing either parent needed right now was an argument, or what passed for one with them, a kind of alien-invasion game in which Flash launched complaints of different sizes at different speeds and Frenesi tried to deflect or neutralize them before her own defenses gave way.

“Say, Justintime, how's 'em Transformers, makin' out OK?”

“And how was everything over at Wallace's?”

The kid put on a genial smile, waved, put his hand to his ear like Reagan going, “Say again?” “How about a few questions,” Justin pretending to look around the room, “Mom? You had your hand up?”

“We're just getting you back for all those questions you used to ask us”—Flash adding “Amen!”—“not too long ago.”

“I don't remember that,” trying not to laugh, because in fact he did, and wanted to be teased.

“Must be gettin' old, man,” said Frenesi.

“Nonstop questions nobody could answer,” Flash told him, “like, ‘What is metal?' “

“ ‘How do you know when you're dreaming and when you're not?'” Frenesi recalled, “That was my favorite.”

Frenesi put the pizzas in, and Flash wandered away to eyeball the Tube. A little later, when they were eating, as if out of nowhere, Flash said, “Two possibilities I can see.”

She knew he meant the computer list. One of these two possibilities was that the missing people were dead, or else hiding from whoever wanted them that way, a worst-case scenario that, neither wishing to interrupt the appetite of their son, who scarfed pizza under the same suspension of physical law that allows Dagwood Bumstead to eat sandwiches, would have to go unsaid. But she hazarded another. “Maybe they went the other way, surfaced, went up in the world again?”

“Yep. But why's it happening?”

Justin, pizza slice hovering on route to his face, said, “Maybe they all got their budget lines axed out.”

Flash gave him a quick head-take, as if awakened by a practical joke. “Used to be a kid right here, what happened?”

“What've you been hearing, Justin?”

He shrugged. “Keep tellin' you guys, you should watch MacNeil and Lehrer, there's all this budget stuff goin' on all the time, with President Reagan, and Congress? It's on now, if you're interested. Can I be excused?”

“I'll,” Flash looking over quizzically at Frenesi, “be, uh, right in. . . . Darlin', do you think that could be it? They're droppin' people from the Program, too many mouths to feed?”

“Nothing new.” It was a time-honored way to keep the wards and snitches and special employees at each other's throats, competing for the ever-dwindling imprest funds, kept aware, never overtly, that with the Justice Department in regular contact with what it was still calling “Organized Crime,” the list of names was negotiable, all too negotiable.

“But not on this scale,” Flash waving the printout. “This is a massacre.”

She looked around this place they'd never fully moved into—had they?—so why this sad feeling of imminent goodbye?

“I'll try to cash this down at Gate 7,” she told him, “quick 's I can.” She got out into deep sunset, airport traffic in the distance, downtown beginning to cast a glow, and in Flash's motor-pool Cutlass Supreme headed for the small community known as Gate 7, which had grown up over the years at the edge of the giant invisible base beyond. According to signs along the ancient freeway system, which ran through towering halls of concrete, echoing, full of shadows, there were at least a hundred of these gates, each intended to admit—or reject—a different category of visitor, but nobody knew for sure exactly how many there were. While some stood in isolation, hard to drive to, heavily protected, seldom used, others, like Gate 7, had generated around themselves service areas, homes, and shopping plazas.

The Gate 7 Quik Liquor and Deli, hunkering down among the off- and on-ramps of its exit, was jammed. It was Friday and a shift had just ended, the parking lot was a zoo, so Frenesi had to park along the frontage strip, near an unlit street lamp. Inside the place, men and women in uniforms, civvies, suits, party outfits, and work clothes milled and clamored, holding sixpacks in their teeth, balancing children and monster-size snack bags, reading magazines and tabloids, all, it seemed, looking to get checks cashed. Frenesi queued up under the fluorescent lights, in air-conditioning heavy with car exhaust, and could just make out at the far end of the line two part-time high-school girls, one ringing up purchases, one bagging. Neither, when she got there half an hour later, was authorized to cash her check. “Where's the manager?”

“I'm the acting manager.”

“This is a government check, look, you do this all the time, you cash checks from the base, right?”

“Yah, but this here's no base check.”

“They're in the federal building downtown, their phone number's right on the check, you can call them up.”

“After office hours, ma'am. Yes
sir
, can I he'p you?” The line behind Frenesi had grown longer and less patient. She looked at the girl—a smug mouth, a bad attitude. She wanted to say, kid, better watch 'at shit. But she was about the same age as Prairie would be . . . working at this checkout maybe for the rest of her life, and with Frenesi's days of federal empowerment and one-phone-call conflict resolution years behind her and fading fast, she was no longer in any position to throw her weight around. . . . Humiliated, helpless, she came out sweating into the grayly overborne night, traffic smell, not enough street light, in the air a distant unlocalized rumbling from somewhere deep in the base.

She drove on downtown, being extra careful because she felt like doing harm to somebody, found a liquor store with a big Checks Cashed sign, got the same turndown inside. Running on nerves and anger, she kept on till she reached the next supermarket, and this time she was told to wait while somebody went in back and made a phone call.

It was there, gazing down a long aisle of frozen food, out past the checkout stands, and into the terminal black glow of the front windows, that she found herself entering a moment of undeniable clairvoyance, rare in her life but recognized. She understood that the Reaganomic ax blades were swinging everywhere, that she and Flash were no longer exempt, might easily be abandoned already to the upper world and any unfinished business in it that might now resume . . . as if they'd been kept safe in some time-free zone all these years but now, at the unreadable whim of something in power, must reenter the clockwork of cause and effect. Someplace there would be a real ax, or something just as painful, Jasonic, blade-to-meat final—but at the distance she, Flash, and Justin had by now been brought to, it would all be done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of electronic presence or absence. If patterns of ones and zeros were “like” patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least—an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name—its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world. We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune, And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.

The night manager came back, holding the check as he might a used disposable diaper. “They stopped payment on this.”

“The banks are closed, how'd they do that?”

He spent his work life here explaining reality to the herds of computer-illiterate who crowded in and out of the store. “The computer,” he began gently, once again, “never has to sleep, or even go take a break. It's like it's open 24 hours a day. . . .”

 

T
HE Wayvone estate occupied a dozen hillside acres south of San Francisco, with a view of the Bay, the San Mateo Bridge, and Alameda County through the smog on certain days, though today was not one of them. The house, dating from the 1920s, was in Mediterranean Revival style, presenting to the street a face of single-story modesty while behind it and down the hill for eight levels sprawled a giant villa of smooth white stucco, with round-topped windows and red tile roofs, a belvedere, a couple of verandas, gardens and courtyards, a hillside full of fig and olive trees, apricot, peach, and plum, bougainvillea, mimosa, periwinkle, and, everywhere today, in honor of the bride, pale plantations of jasmine, spilling like bridal lace, which would keep telling nose-tales of paradise all night, long after the last guests had been driven home.

Emerging from a pool the size of a small reservoir in plaid swim trunks from Brooks Brothers, unable even at first glance to be mistaken for any of the white marble statues surrounding it, Ralph Wayvone, Sr., caped himself with a towel stolen not that long ago from the Fairmont, ascended a short flight of steps, and stood looking out over a retaining wall that seemed in the morning fog to mark the edge of a precipice, or of the world. With only a few tree silhouettes, and both the freeways and El Camino Real miraculously silent, for just these moments Ralph Sr., appreciative of peace as anybody, could take another of what he'd come to think of as microvacations on an island of time fragile and precious as any Tahiti or one of them.

Registering upon strangers as the kind of executive whose idea of power is a secretary on her knees under his desk, Ralph in fact was more considerate of others than at times was good for him. He liked, and was genuinely attentive to, the platoons of children who always showed up at family gatherings like the one today. The kids picked up on this, appreciated it, and flirted back. Friends he valued for their willingness to talk to him straight said things like, “Your problem, Ralph, is you're not enough of a control freak for the job you're in,” or, “You're supposed to allow yourself the illusion that what you do matters, but it don't look like you really give a shit.” His shrink told him the same things. What did Ralph know? He looked in mirrors and saw somebody in OK shape for his age, he went and put in his regular time at the spa and the tennis court, had in his mouth some high-ticket dental work, with which he ate carefully and in style. His lovely wife, Shondra, what could he say? His kids—well, there was still time, time would tell. Gelsomina, the baby, was getting married today to a college professor from L.A., of a good family with whom Ralph had done complaint-free and even honorable business. Dominic, “the movie executive,” as Ralph liked to call him, had flown in the night before from Indonesia, where he was line producer on a monster movie whose budget required readjusting on an hour-to-hour basis, so he'd been spending a lot of time on the phone, expensive but maybe managing to confuse whoever happened to be tapping it. And Ralph Jr., who was expected someday to take over Ralph Wayvone Enterprises, had driven down for a day off from his duties as manager of the Cucumber Lounge roadhouse up in Vineland.

“One thing you have to know,” Ralph confided to his namesake the day the kid turned eighteen and got his ventunesimo party three years early, at the time a sensible move given the many talents then surfacing in his character for getting into trouble, “before you get too involved, is that we are a wholly-owned subsidiary.”

“What's that?” inquired Ralph Jr. In olden times the father might have shrugged, turned without further talk, and gone away to enjoy his despair in private. The two Wayvones were down in the wine cellar, and Ralph could have just left him there, among the bottles. Instead he took the trouble to explain that strictly speaking, the family “owned” nothing. They received an annual operating budget from the corporation that owned them, was all.

“Like the royal family in England, you mean?”

“My firstborn son,” Ralph rolling his eyes, “if it helps—please.”

“I'd be like—Prince Charles?”

“
Testa puntita
, do me a favor.”

But young Wayvone's anxious face was now smoothed by the sight of a dusty bottle of wine, a 1961 Brunello di Montalcino, put away the year he was born to be drunk this day of transition to adulthood, though his own share of it was to meet the same porcelain fate as the cheaper stuff he went on to drink too much of.

Gelsomina, being a daughter, didn't of course get any bottle. But did he hear her complaining? This wedding today was costing Ralph more than he'd paid for the house. After a full-scale nuptial Mass, the reception feast here would feature lobster, caviar, and tournedos Rossini, along with more down-home fare such as baked ziti and a complicated wedding soup only his sister-in-law Lolli, among her many virtues, knew how to make. The wine would run a full range from homemade red through Cristal champagne, and hundreds of dolled- and duded-up friends, relatives, and business acquaintances would populate the hillside, most of them in a mood to celebrate. The only piece of uncertainty, not a problem really, was the music, with the San Francisco Symphony on tour overseas, the society combo Ralph Sr. had booked originally having run into a little snag in Atlantic City, where their engagement had been involuntarily extended till they made up what they owed the Casino as the result of several foolish wagers, and these last-minute replacements, Gino Baglione and the Paisans, whom Ralph Jr. had hired up north without ever hearing, still an unknown quantity. Well—they had better be excellent, that's all Ralph had to say, or rather think, as the fog now began to lift to reveal not the borderlands of the eternal after all, but only quotidian California again, looking no different than it had when he left.

The band arrived at around midday, after two days of leisurely detours through the wine country, coastal Marin, and Berkeley. They had at last ascended a confusing network of winding streets, putting the last touches to their costuming and makeup, the glossy black, short synthetic wigs, the snappy mint-colored matching suits of Continental cut, the gold jewelry and glue-on mustaches, just before rolling to a stop at the main gate of the exclusive community of Lugares Altos and all being ordered out of the van and subjected each to a discrete bodyfrisk, plus scans for metal objects down to badge size and for electronic devices active and passive. Young Ralph was waiting nervously at the Wayvone parking area, where everybody piled out again. The Vomitone ladies, Prairie included, had likewise made an effort to tone down their extravagance of image, with the help of wigs, clothes, and makeup borrowed from their straighter friends. Billy Barf, whose acquaintance with anything Italian was limited to the deuteragonist of Donkey Kong and a few canned-pasta commercials, insisted on speaking with his imperfect idea of an ethnic accent until Isaiah Two Four, detecting not only its inauthenticity but also its potential for insult, drew the young band eponym aside for a word or two, though Ralph Jr., who had talked Californian all his life, had only taken it for some kind of speech impediment. “You guys have done this before, right?” he kept asking as they off-loaded their instruments, amps, and digital interfaces and proceeded down to a huge airy tent at the edge of a small meadow, where liveried servants bustled everywhere, setting out glassware and napery, hauling tons of shaved ice, high-rent hors d'oeuvres, flowers, and folding chairs, discussing at top volume the fine points of chores they had all performed around here a thousand times already.

“Wedding gigs are our life,” Billy assured him.

“Just be cool, OK?” Isaiah murmured.

“Yah, rilly,” cackled Lester, the rhythm guitarist. “You blow this, Bill, we all gonna git wasted.”

They got through the first set on inoffensive pop tunes, rock and roll oldies, even one or two Broadway standards. But during the break, a large emissary with a distinct taper to his head, Ralph Sr.'s trusted lieutenant “Two-Ton” Carmine Torpidini, arrived with a message for Billy. “Mr. Wayvone's compliments, says thank you for the contemporary flavor of the music, which all the young people have enjoyed fabulously. But he wonders if in the upcoming set you might play something the older generations could more readily relate to, something more . . . Italian?”

More than eager to please, the Vomitones led off the set with a medley they'd been practicing of Italian tunes on a common theme of transcendence—a salsa treatment of “More” from
Mondo Cane
(1963), slowing to 3/4 with “Senza Fine,” from
Flight of the Phoenix
(1966), and to wrap it an English-language version, in Billy's nasal tenor, of the favorite “Al Di La,” from any number of television specials.

No one was more surprised than Billy when Two-Ton Carmine appeared once again, this time with hurried breathing, flushed face, a look of excitement, as if he sensed a chance to do some of the untidy work he received his paycheck for. “Mr. Wayvone says he was hoping he wouldn't have to go into too many details with you, but that he was thinking more along the lines of ‘C'e la Luna,' ‘Way Marie'—you know, sing-along stuff, plus maybe a little opera, ‘Cielo e Mar,' right? Mr. Wayvone's brother Vincent, as you know, being a very fine singer. . . .”

“Yah,” Billy now with a slow and blunted sort of comprehension, “uh, well. Sure! I think we have those arrangements—”

“In the van,” muttered Isaiah.

“—in the van,” said Billy Barf. “All I have to do's just—” sliding one arm out of his guitar strap. But Carmine reached over, removed the guitar from Billy's grasp, and began to turn it end over end, so as to twist the strap, now around Billy's neck, tighter and tighter.

“Arrangements.” Carmine laughed, embarrassed and mean.” ‘Way Marie,' what kind of arrangement do you need? You gentlemen are Italian, are you not?”

The band sat silent, feckless, watching their leader being garrotted. Few Anglos, some Scotch-Irish, one Jewish guy, no actual Italians. “Well, then, how about Catholic?” Carmine went on, punctuating his remarks with sharp yanks on the strap. “Maybe I could let yiz off with ten choruses of ‘Ave Maria' and a Act of Contrition? No? So tell me, while you can, what's goin' on? Didn' Little Ralph say nothin' ta yiz? Hey! Wait a minute! What's this?” In the course of having the head on which it sat shaken back and forth, Billy's “Italian” wig had begun to slide off, revealing his real hairstyle, dyed today a vivid turquoise. “You guys ain't Gino Baglione and the Paisans!” Carmine shook his head, cracked his knuckles. “That's false pretenses, fellas! Don't you know you can end up in small-claims for that?”

Seeing that Billy Barf, enjoying a surrender to panic, had forgotten all about the quick-release clips at the ends of the guitar strap he was being strangled with, Isaiah came over and popped them loose for him, allowing the bandleader to stagger away trying to croak some air back into his lungs. “Actually,” Isaiah began, “I'm a percussion person, my job is to take hard knocks and rude surprises, line 'em up in a row in some way folks can dance to, 's all I do, rilly, but as a connoisseur and from the story your face seems to tell a recipient of some of Life's hard knocks yourself, you can see the present crisis may not be worth emotional investment on the scale you contemplate, not to mention the bruises on Gino aka Billy here's neck, which will have him wearing bandannas for weeks, with crossover implications musically and also generating with numerous ol' ladies hickey suspicions you can well imagine, no, far from bein' a hard knock here, why, it's not even a brushstroke on Life's top cymbal, come on! Eh!”

“Ah,” blurted the oversize gorilla, hypnotized, “yes you're right, kid, and I'm disappointed to say so 'cause I was all set for a multiple confrontation.”

“Good,” Billy Barf somewhere behind an amp, searching frantically for the keys to the van, “you're talking it out, that's good.”

Fortunately Ralph Wayvone's library happened to include a copy of the indispensable
Italian Wedding Fake Book
, by Deleuze & Guattari, which Gelsomina, the bride, to protect her wedding from such possible unlucky omens as blood on the wedding cake, had the presence of mind to slip indoors and bring back out to Billy Barf's attention. Inconveniently by then, Billy, keys in fist, was on his single-minded way up to the parking area, so that the new bride, in her grandmother's wedding gown, was observed to go running after a non-Italian musician with unusual hair—not a breach of decency, according to more traditional-minded elements close to Ralph Wayvone, to be left unavenged. So despite the revival of music, dancing, and good cheer and the salvation of Gelsomina Wayvone's wedding day, this latent threat was enough to paralyze Billy for the rest of the gig, convinced as he now was that a hit order had gone out on him from the highest levels.

“Hey, 'f they want to ice you, Bill, they gonna do it,” advised the Vomitones' bass player, who went by the professional name Meathook. “Best you can do's get you a li'l .22 caliber assault rifle and a full-auto drop-in fer it, when they come for you you can at least take a couple with you.”

“Naw,” disagreed the horn virtuoso 187, who'd named himself after the California Penal Code section for murder, “only wimps depend on machinery, what Bill needs is some close-combat skills, some knife, 'chuks, li'l jeet kune do—”

“Fun time's over, Bill, either leave town or hire some heavy security,” put in Bad, the synthesizerist.

“Isaiah mah man, help me out here,” Billy pleaded.

“On the other hand,” Isaiah said, “they loved ‘Volare.' “

During all this commotion, Prairie was up the hill a level or two, standing semidistraught in front of an ornately framed gold-veined mirror, one of a whole row, in a powder room or ladies' lounge of stupefying tastelessness, having an attack of THO, or Teen Hair Obsession. While the other Vomitonettes were running around with hair color or wigs, all Prairie'd had to do to look straight was brush hers. “Perfect!” tactful Billy had told her, “nobody'll look twice.”