Vineland (14 page)

The file on Frenesi Gates, whose entries had been accumulating over the years, often haphazardly, from far and wide, reminded Prairie of scrapbooks kept by somebody's eccentric hippie uncle. Some was governmental, legal history with the DMV, letterhead memoranda from the FBI enhanced by Magic Marker, but there were also clippings from “underground” newspapers that had closed down long ago, transcripts of Frenesi's radio interviews on KPFK, and a lot of cross-references to something called 24 fps, which Prairie recalled as the name of the film collective DL said she and Frenesi had been in together for a while.

So into it and then on Prairie followed, a girl in a haunted mansion, led room to room, sheet to sheet, by the peripheral whiteness, the earnest whisper, of her mother's ghost. She already knew about how literal computers could be—even spaces between characters mattered. She had wondered if ghosts were only literal in the same way. Could a ghost think for herself, or was she responsive totally to the needs of the still-living, needs like keystrokes entered into her world, lines of sorrow, loss, justice denied? . . . But to be of any use, to be “real,” a ghost would have to be more than only that kind of elaborate pretending. . . .

Prairie found that she could also summon to the screen photographs, some personal, some from papers and magazines, images of her mom, most of the time holding a movie camera, at demonstrations, getting arrested, posing with various dimly recognizable Movement figures of the sixties, beaming a significant look at a cop in riot gear beside a chain-link fence someplace while one hand (Prairie would learn her mother's hands, read each gesture a dozen ways, imagine how they would have moved at other, unphotographed times) appeared to brush with its fingertips the underside of the barrel of his assault rifle. Gross! Her Mom? This girl with the old-fashioned hair and makeup, always wearing either miniskirts or those weird-looking bell-bottoms they had back then? In a few years Prairie would almost be that age, and she had an eerie feeling miniskirts would be back.

She paused at a shot of DL and Frenesi together. They were walking along on what might have been a college campus. In the distance was a pedestrian overpass, where tiny figures could be seen heading both ways, suggesting, at least for a moment, social tranquillity. The women's shadows were long, lapping up over curbs, across grass, between the spokes of cyclists. Catching the late or early sun were palm trees, flights of distant steps, a volleyball court, few if any glass windows. Frenesi's face was turned or turning toward her partner, perhaps her friend, a suspicious or withheld smile seeming to begin. . . . DL was talking. Her lower teeth flashed. It wasn't politics—Prairie could feel in the bright California colors, sharpened up pixel by pixel into deathlessness, the lilt of bodies, the unlined relaxation of faces that didn't have to be put on for each other, liberated from their authorized versions for a free, everyday breath of air. Yeah, Prairie thought at them, go ahead, you guys. Go ahead. . . .

“Who was that boy,” DL was asking, or “that ‘dude,' at the protest rally? With the long hair and love beads, and the joint in his mouth?”

“You mean in the flowered bell-bottoms and the paisley shirt?”

“Right on, sister!”

“Psychedelic!” Slapping hands back and forth. Prairie wondered who'd taken the picture—one of the film collective, the FBI? Before the stained deep crystalline view she fell into a hypnagogic gaze, which the unit promptly sensed, beginning to blink, following this with a sound chip playing the hook from the Everlys' “Wake Up, Little Susie,” over and over. Prairie remembered that she had to be up before sunrise, to prep for breakfast. As she reached toward the power button, she said good night to the machine.

“Why good night yourself, gentle User,” it replied, “and may your sleep be in every way untroubled.”

Back down in the computer library, in storage, quiescent ones and zeros scattered among millions of others, the two women, yet in some definable space, continued on their way across the low-lit campus, persisting, recoverable, friends by the time of this photo for nearly a year, woven together in an intricacy of backs covered, promises made and renegotiated, annoyances put up with, shortcuts worn in, ESP beyond the doubts of either. They would probably have met at some point, though who'd have been willing to bet they'd stick? The turbulence of the times was bringing all kinds of people together into towns like Berkeley, lured, like DL, by promises of action. In those days DL was just cruising up and down 101 looking for girl motorcycle gangs to terrorize, drinking drugstore vodka out of the bottle, hustling guys named Snake for enough double-cross whites to get her to the next population center offering a suitable risk to her safety. The night before she met Frenesi she had chased the entire membership of Tetas y Chetas M.C. northward through the dark farm country around Salinas, vegetables fallen in profusion from the trucks and then squashed and resquashed by traffic all day making the night streaming against her face smell like a giant salad. Finally she ran out of gas and had to let them go. By then she was close enough to Berkeley, and had been hearing enough on the radio, to want to go look in. She couldn't have said, then or later, what she thought she was looking for.

What she found was Frenesi, who'd been out with her camera and a bagful of bootlegged ECO stock since dawn, finally ending up on Telegraph Avenue filming a skirmish line of paramilitary coming up the street in riot gear, carrying small and she hoped only rubber-bullet-firing rifles. Last time she looked she'd been at the front edge of a crowd who were slowly retreating from the campus, trashing what they could as they went. When the film roll ended and she came up out of the safety of her viewfinder, Frenesi was alone, halfway between the people and the police, with no side street handy to go dodging down. Hmm. Shop doors were all secured with chain, windows shuttered over with heavy plywood. Her next step would've been just to go ahead and change rolls, get some more footage, but to go rooting around in her bag right now could only be taken as a threat by the boys in khaki, who'd come close enough that even above the lingering nose-wrenching ground note of tear gas she could still begin to smell them, the aftershave, the gunmetal in the sun, the new-issue uniforms whose armpits by now were musky with fear. Oh, I need Superman, she prayed, Tarzan on that vine. The basic stone bowelflash had come and gone about the time DL showed up, all in black including helmet and face shield, riding her esteemed and bad red and silver Czech motorcycle, the Che Zed, overdesigned in every part, up onto which she gathered Frenesi out of danger, camera, miniskirt, equipment bags, and all, and carried her away. Skidding among piles of street debris and paper fires, over crumbled auto glass, trying not to hit anybody lying on the pavement, up onto some sidewalk and around the corner at last and down the long hillside to the Bay flashing in the late sun they escaped, in a snarling dreamrush of speed and scent. With her bare thighs Frenesi gripped the leather hips of her benefactor, finding that she'd also pressed her face against the fragrant leather back—she never thought it might be a woman she hugged this way.

Biker rapture, for sure. They sat devouring cheeseburgers, fries, and shakes in a waterfront place full of refugees from the fighting up the hill, all their eyes, including ones that had wept, now lighted from the inside—was it only the overhead fluorescents, some trick of sun and water outside? no . . . too many of these fevered lamps not to have origin across the line somewhere, in a world sprung new, not even defined yet, worth the loss of nearly everything in this one. The jukebox played the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish. DL had taken off the helmet and shaken out her hair, which lit up in the approaching orange sunset like a comet. Frenesi, jittery, starving, and gaga all at once, was still trying to figure it out. “Somebody sent you, right?”

“Cruisin' through, was all. You sure sound paranoid.”

Frenesi gestured with her burger, trailing drops of separating ketchup and fat, each drop warped by the forces of its flight into swirling micropatterns of red and beige, and—“It's the Revolution, girl—can't you feel it?”

DL narrowed her eyes, wondering, What have we here. She felt like an adult come upon a little kid alone at a dangerous time of day, not yet aware of her mom's absence. “I could see you were just all revved up,” she told Frenesi, though months later. “I couldn't help teasin' you. You were bein' so—” but let it go, pretending she couldn't think of the word. It probably wasn't
revolutionary
, invoked in those days widely and sometimes lovingly and enjoying a wide range of meaning. Frenesi dreamed of a mysterious people's oneness, drawing together toward the best chances of light, achieved once or twice that she'd seen in the street, in short, timeless bursts, all paths, human and projectile, true, the people in a single presence, the police likewise simple as a moving blade—and individuals who in meetings might only bore or be pains in the ass here suddenly being seen to transcend, almost beyond will to move smoothly between baton and victim to take the blow instead, to lie down on the tracks as the iron rolled in or look into the gun muzzle and maintain the power of speech—there was no telling, in those days, who might unexpectedly change this way, or when. Some were in it, in fact, secretly for the possibilities of finding just such moments. But DL admitted she was a little less saintly—“Is the asskicking part's usually what I'm lookin' for,” watching Frenesi, waiting for disapproval. “But somebody told me it don't mean much unless I make what they call the correct analysis? and then act on it? Ever hear of that one?”

Frenesi shrugged. “Heard of it. Maybe I don't have the patience. I have to trust the way this makes me feel. Feels right, DL. Like we're really going to change the world this time,” looking back in the same go-ahead-say-something way. But DL was smiling lopsidedly to herself. Backlit by the last of the sun, Frenesi in dazed witness, her face had become possessed by that of a young man, distant, surmised—Moody Chastain, her father. Later, when they got to showing each other pictures of their lives, there he was, same face in silver and dye, confirming the earlier gleaming moment—the halo of fresh-drawn copper, the ghostly young hero who'd come to her rescue, the whoop-de-do that day, Revolution all around them, world-class burgers, jukebox solidarity, as the sun set behind Marin and the scent of DL's sweat and pussy excitation diffused out of the leather clothing, mixed with motor smells.

Moody. He'd once been a junior Texas rounder, promoting bad behavior all over the Harlingen, Brownsville, McAllen area. For a while he and a small gang had managed to migrate as far as Mobile Bay, spreading apprehension from Mertz to Magazine, but he was soon back in his native orbit, handing out to all the ladies Dauphin Island orchids kept fresh with the beer in an ice tub in the truckbed and resuming his ways, which included driving fast, discharging firearms inappropriately, and passing around open containers, till a sheriff's deputy friendly with the family suggested a choice between the Army now or Huntsville later. The war then approaching was never mentioned directly, but, “Well, what'll I get to shoot?” Moody wanted to know.

“Any weapon, any caliber.”

“I mean,
who
do I get to shoot?”

“Whoever they tell you. Interesting thing about that, way I see it, you don't have nearly the legal problems.”

Sounded good to Moody, who went right down and joined up. He met Norleen while he was at Fort Hood at services in the same narrow wood church they got married in, just before he shipped out. It was about mid-Atlantic, surrounded by nothing that did not refer, finally, to steel, vomiting for days, imagining the horizon outside, the unnatural purity, before he understood how terrified he was. It was the first time in his career he couldn't climb in the truck and head for some borderline. He felt himself about to go crazy in this deep overcrowded hole, but he hung on, he tried to see through his fear, and when it came it was like finding Jesus—Moody saw, like the comics or Bible illustrations, a succession of scenes showing him the way he had to go, which was to imagine the worst and then himself be worse than that. He must torture the violent, deprive the greedy, give the drunks something to stagger about. He would have to become a Military Policeman, be as bad as he had to be to make it, using everything he knew from those rounder days. And so he did, pulling his first MP duty in London, on and about Shaftesbury Avenue, accessorized in virgin white, known, in military slang in those days, as a “snowdrop.”

Darryl Louise was born right after the war, in Leavenworth, Kansas, after Moody, having made it through alive, was assigned to the Disciplinary Barracks there. In the years of war he'd done a lot of shooting, some wounding, a little killing, but despite his love of weaponry, he'd come to see bombs, artillery, even rifles, as too abstract and cold. The peacetime Moody wanted to get more personal now. Though he was already licensed to use life-threatening come-alongs, to crack heads and dislocate shoulders, he didn't really light up till he discovered the judo and jujitsu of the defeated Jap, then enjoying a postwar surge of interest. From then on Moody practiced when he could, wherever he happened to be posted, getting the best of East and West Coast schools of thought, working eventually part-time as an instructor with his own group of students. When DL was five or six she started tagging along with him down to the dojo.

“Could've been my mama thought he was slippin' around. Maybe I was supposed to keep an eye on him.”

“Hmm-mm, I can see why.” The snapshot Frenesi happened to be looking at showed Moody in his full-dress uniform, ribbons and medals and patches and fourragères, holding already oversize eight-month-old DL and grinning in the sunlight. There were palm trees behind them, so it couldn't've been Kansas anymore.