Vineland (16 page)

“Uh-huh, tell me, sensei, if you're that tight with the Mob, and I'm working for you, does that mean—”

“Our connection is of very old
giri
, lot of details, Japanese names, you'd lose track. The war figures in heavily. But you and I, we're connected only by bonds of master and disciple, free to disconnect at any time. If you could leave your parents' house that lightly, you'll have no trouble leaving me.”

What was this? Guilt? “You want me to go back?”

He cackled and fell into sounding not quite decipherable. “You will go back. Till you do, stick around!”

From then on she was able to devote herself full time to ninjitsu, including the forbidden steps outside its canons taken—it seemed long ago—by the sensei, through which the original purity of ninja intent had been subverted, made cruel and more worldly, bled of spirit, once eternal techniques now only one-shot and disposable, once greater patterns now only a string of encounters, single and multiple, none with any meaning beyond itself. This was what he felt he had to pass on—not the brave hard-won grace of any warrior, but the cheaper brutality of an assassin. When DL finally tumbled, she brought it to his attention.

“Sure,” he told her, “this is for all the rest of us down here with the insects, the ones who don't quite get to make warrior, who with two tenths of a second to decide fail to get it right and live with it the rest of our lives—it's for us drunks, and sneaks, and people who can't feel enough to kill if they have to . . . this is our equalizer, our edge—all we have to share. Because we have ancestors and descendants too—our generations . . . our traditions.”

“But everybody's a hero at least once,” she informed him, “maybe your chance hasn't come up yet.”

“DL-san, you are crazy,” he diagnosed gently, “seeing too many movies, maybe. Those you will be fighting—those you must resist—they are neither samurai nor ninja. They are
sarariman
, incrementalists, who cannot act boldly and feel only contempt for those who can. . . . Only for what I must teach you have they learned respect.”

He taught her the Chinese Three Ways, Dim Ching, Dim Hsuen, and Dim Mak, with its Nine Fatal Blows, as well as the Tenth and Eleventh, which are never spoken of. She learned how to give people heart attacks without even touching them, how to get them to fall from high places, how through the Clouds of Guilt technique to make them commit
seppuku
and think it was their idea—plus a grab bag of strategies excluded from the Kumi-Uchi, or official ninja combat system, such as the Enraged Sparrow, the Hidden Foot, the Nosepicking of Death, and the truly unspeakable
Gojira no Chimpira.
Despite the accelerated schedule, some of the moves Inoshiro Sensei taught DL would only make sense ten years or more from now—requiring that much rigorous practice every day for her even to begin to understand—and until she did understand, she was forbidden to use any of them out in the world.

As days and weeks passed, DL found herself entering into a system of heresies about the human body. In an interview with
Aggro World
years later, she spoke of her time with Inoshiro Sensei as returning to herself, reclaiming her body, “Which they always like to brainwash you about, like they know it better, trying to keep you as spaced away from it as they can. Maybe they think people are easier to control that way.” The schoolroom line was, You'll never know enough about your body to take responsibility for it, so better just hand it over to those who are qualified, doctors and lab technicians and by extension coaches, employers, boys with hardons, so forth—alarmed, not to mention pissed off, DL reached the radical conclusion that her body belonged to herself. That was back when she was still thinking about ninjitsu. After a few years she didn't think so much but would just keep working out every day, finding the time and space, often at high cost, but every day of her life.

As the sensei had predicted, she did go back to Norleen and Moody, at least for a while. There had always been channels between the yakuza and the American military, and so eventually everybody knew where she was and that she was safe. Both parents, for their own reasons, were just as happy to have her out of the house just then, and the only reason DL had to resume her role as dependent minor at all was that the CO's wife found out about him and Norleen and proceeded to make life unquiet till Moody and the family were Stateside again.

A few years later, competing by then, DL heard about the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives at some meet, “You know, the way you do. Hitchhiked up as far as the end of the gravel, did the last few miles on foot. Back then they let anybody who showed up crash here for free. Early days, more idealistic, not so much into money.” She and Prairie were out taking a break, down by the creek. It was a couple of weeks after their arrival, with Prairie by now an old hand in the computer room as well as the kitchen. “Yeah now it's group insurance, pension plans, financial consultant name of Vicki down in L.A. who moves it all around for us, lawyer in Century City, though Amber the paralegal has been taking over most of his work since the indictment.” DL seemed a little on edge. Her partner, Takeshi Fumimota, was due in for some kind of health checkup, they'd arranged to meet here, but he still hadn't shown.

“Are you worried?” Prairie, though at heart not a nosy kid, did want to give her the chance to talk, if it would do any good.

“Nahh, the ol' son of Nippon can take care of himself.”

“Uh, so how'd you guys meet?”

“Aauuhhgghh!” First time outside of Saturday-morning cartoons Prairie had ever seen anybody scream with this intensity.

“Gee, thought it was a pretty innocent question. . . .”

 

 

H
OW did we meet,” DL's voice finding some agitated soprano level. “Well! Through Ralph Wayvone, really. I had been spending years and years of my life with these fantasies of taking revenge on Brock Vond. I wanted to kill him—one way or another he'd taken away the lives of people I loved, and I saw nothing wrong with killing him. I was that off-center, it afflicted me, wrecked my judgment.” At first she'd thought Ralph was some kind of groupie. She'd noticed him, among the spectators, always wearing a suit. He finally approached her in a coffee shop in Eugene, where she had been staring dejectedly, apparently for some time, at a plate with four rubber scampi, rushed in fresh from the joke store down the street and covered as completely as possible with tomato sauce. She became aware of Ralph, looming over her food and glaring at it.

“How can you eat that?”

“Just what I ask myself. Anything else?”

Her visitor sat down across the table, clicked open an armored attaché case, and produced a folder with an 8 x 10 of a face she knew, a Fresson-process studio photograph of Brock Vond, looking like he'd just had a buffer run all over him, the high smooth forehead, the cheeks that still hadn't lost all their baby fat, the sleek and pointed ears, small chin, and slim little unbroken nose. This photo was clipped to some stapled pages, where she saw federal seals and stampings. “It's all from the FBI. Perfectly legit.” He glanced at some ultrathin expensive wristwatch. “Look—you want him . . . we want him . . . say yes, both our wishes will come true.”

She'd already checked out the cut and surface texture of Ralph's suit. “Well,” she inquired, “what's ol' Brock up to these days?”

“Same public servant he always was, only bigger. Much, much bigger. He figures he won his war against the lefties, now he sees his future in the war against drugs. Some dear friends of mine are quite naturally upset.”

“And he's too big for them? Please, you've got to be
rilly desperate
, comin' to me.”

“No. You've got the motivation.” At her look, “We know your history, it's all on the computer.”

She thought of the white armored limo at Inoshiro Sensei's house, long ago. “Then you know how personal this is. If you want real ninja product, that could get in the way. . . . I assume you're buying skills and not just feelings here?”

“Buy, sure, but how about give? The one thing you truly want, huh? A good crack at a evil man? I know 'cause I see it in your eyes.”

She didn't exactly shift her eyes away, didn't react much to this lowlife flirtatiousness, either, but there it was—he had her number, and it looked like he'd gotten it from the FBI. What was going on here? Did Ralph have a line into their NCIC computer? If they knew Brock was a target of Ralph's friends, why fail to protect one of their own? Unless of course the unfortunate setupee here was more likely DL herself, attempted assassination of a federal officer, some time in the Bureau of Prisons' mindfucking system perhaps. . . .

Ralph Wayvone, master of telepathic anxieties, tried to be helpful. “They wouldn't need any fancy excuse, Miss Chastain, they just go in, get anybody they want, do the paperwork later—what, you ain't figured that one out yet? I'd known you was such a little kid I'd o' brought yiz a Barbie doll.”

“Yeah but why me? Thought you folks were more into pistols, dirks, car bombs, 'at sort of thing.”

“I have heard,” Ralph almost misty-eyed, “there's this touch that you can put on somebody, so lightly they don't feel it then, but a year later they drop dead, right when you happen to be miles away eating ribs with the Chief of Police.”

“That would be the Vibrating Palm, or Ninja Death Touch.” She went on to explain, in tones carefully free of exasperation, about the procedure, and how serious a matter it was. You didn't, for example, just go around putting it on people you didn't like. It was useless without a long history of training in martial disciplines, took years to master, and when used was a profoundly moral act. But at some point she realized she was also pitching herself to him. So did he. Patting her hand, “You're telling me I don't have to worry.”

“In my time, Mr. Wayvone, I was the best.”

“I remember,” he said, instead of “So they tell me,” but she didn't catch it. He'd heard about her in fact years before on the YakMaf grapevine, early dojo rumors, something extraordinary said to be happening at a certain regional elimination meet. So he'd driven across the Mojave all night one night to see her in action. From a dank cement arena her hair had blazed at him like the halo of an angel of mischief. In the Rolodex of Ralph's memory, young DL would be flagged that brightly. He was actually then to follow her for a time, meet to meet through the South and West, along a circuit of grim, early ex-Nam faces, motels always miles from the venue and down the wrong freeway, shoptalk, drinking, possession of weapons, T-shirts featuring skulls, snakes, and dangerous transportation. Ralph never thought of the look on his face as the helpless stare of an older man through a schoolyard fence, but as more the alert beaming of a micromanager. And sometimes he was right. In DL's case, the time he'd invested had yielded him a file he knew he'd make use of one day, and so it had come to pass.

He'd presented DL, however, with a crisis. She knew she'd been slowly poisoning her spirit, drifting further into her obsession with Brock Vond. Here was Ralph, promising resolution and release. What was she complaining about? Only that acts, deeply moral and otherwise, had consequences—only the workings of karma. One unfelt touch to the correct piece of Vond anatomy could commit her to a major redirection of her life. There was no question that she'd ever be free of Ralph. A girl did one Death Touch job and right away people started getting ideas. Whatever she chose to do would get her in trouble. She promised to give him her decision at dinner the next evening, and then she got the hell out of town, leaving the last of Ralph's tails near Drain, Oregon, beside a late-model Oldsmobile with steam pouring from beneath its hood.

She had to switch cars again before she got to L.A., then took the bus out to a bank branch on mid-Wilshire where she had once providentially stashed a packet of documents that would now give her a choice among identities, paid cash on Western Avenue for a '66 Plymouth Fury, bought a wig at a place across the street, went into a certain ladies' gas-station toilet on Olympic legendary in the dopers' community, and emerged a different, less noticeable person. The car radio, tuned to KFWB, was playing the Doors' “People Are Strange (When You're a Stranger)” as she injected herself into the slow lane of the eastbound freeway and settled in, hating to let any of it go, Banning, the dinosaurs, the Palm Springs turnoff, Indio, across the Mojave, to be redreamed in colors pale but intense, with unnaturally fine sand blowing in plumes across the sun, baby-blue shadows in the folds of the dunes, a pinkish sky—holding on, letting go, redreaming each night stop the less easterly places she'd been in all day, coming slowly unstuck, leaving for the United States, trying not to get emotional but still hanging on the rearview mirror's single tale of recedings and vanishing points as we hang on looks our lovers give.

On inertial navigation, knowing she'd know what she was looking for when she found it, DL didn't stop till the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, which she first beheld around midday in a stunning onslaught of smog and traffic. By this time she was used to the car and its unorthodox push-button shifting, having made the analysis “stick shift = penis” and speculating that a push-button automatic might at least appear more clitorally ladylike, or, as DL might've put it, regressive, if there'd been anybody anymore to talk to, which of course there wasn't. She took a little apartment and found a job at a vacuum cleaner parts distributor's, typing and filing.

Columbus must have promised a life that some residual self, somewhere in the stifling dark, had wanted always. “Superman could change back into Clark Kent,” she had once confided to Frenesi, “don't underestimate it. Workin' at the
Daily Planet
was the Man o' Steel's Hawaiian vacation, his Saturday night in town, his marijuana and his opium smoke, and oh what I wouldn't give. . . .” An evening newspaper . . . anyplace back in the Midwest . . . she would leave work around press time, make a beeline for some walk-down lounge, near enough to the paper that she could feel vibrations from the presses through the wood of the bar. Drink rye, wipe her glasses on her tie, leave her hat on indoors, gossip in the dim light with the other regulars. In the winter it would already be dark outside the windows. The polished shoes would pick up highlights as the street lamps got brighter . . . she wouldn't be waiting for anybody or for anything to happen, because she'd only be Clark Kent. Lois Lane might not give her the time of day anymore, but that'd be OK, she'd be dating somebody from the secretarial pool. They'd go out for dinner sometimes to this cozy Neapolitan joint down by some lakefront, where the Mussels Posillipo couldn't be beat. “So instead of being able to fly everyplace,” her friend had replied, “you'd have to climb into some car you're still making payments on, drive on out, you, Clark Kent, to the scene of some disaster, blood, corpses, flies, teen technicians wandering around stoned, eyewitnesses in shock. . . . Superman never has to get involved with any of that. Why should anybody want to be only mortal? Better to stay an angel, angel.” DL, more generous in those days, only thought her friend had missed the point.

In Columbus she spent days in shopping centers, Ninja Steno, assembling an invisibility wardrobe—murky woolens, dim pastels, flat shoes with matching purses, beige hose, white underwear, surprised how little of a chore it was—the blandest of accessories would call out to her from shop windows, the misses' sections of discount stores were acres of abundance waiting to be picked through. She had by now grown into a relationship with the Plymouth, named her Felicia, bought her a new stereo, was washing her at least twice per workweek plus again on weekends, when she also waxed the vehicle. She swam and did t'ai chi and continued to practice the exercises she had learned in Japan. She grew used to her disguised image in the mirror, the short haircut with the rodent-brown rinse, the freckles subdued under foundation, the eye makeup she'd never have worn before, slowly becoming her alias, a small-town spinster pursuing a perfectly diminished life, a minor belle gone to weeds and gophers before her time.

So that when they came and kidnapped her in the Pizza Hut parking lot and took her back to Japan, she wasn't sure right away that being sold into white slavery would turn out to be at all beneficial as a career step. They took her with a matter-of-factness that made her feel like an amateur. Her little car was left alone in its space, sometimes, across miles and years, to call out to her in a puzzled voice, asking why she hadn't come back. She fought, but whoever it was had sent experts that specialized in not damaging young women. The story she heard eventually was that a certain client would pay a fee in the hefty-to-whopping range for an American blonde with advanced asskicking skills. “No telling what's going to turn men on,” whispered her bunkmate Lobelia as they waited in a hotel in Ueno to be brought to auction,” 'specially the ones we're gonna meet.”

Dense transport and travel clamored all day, all night long. The rickety hotel, almost a disposable building, was pressed shuddering between the Yamanote Line and Expressway I. The girls ate yakitori from the carts on Showa and were permitted out, in supervised groups, only to shop at the pitches under the tracks. Some of these girls, the market being what it was, were boys, of whom DL's friend Lobelia was among the most glamorous. “Wow,” she had introduced herself, “are you a mess,” launching then unbidden into a verbal hair-to-toenails makeover for DL, who at some point ducked her head, murmuring, “Guess I should be writing some of this down.”

Lobelia paused and blinked. “Sugar, I'm trying to help. Think about it—you'll be up there on the block, how are you gonna feel if all they sell you for's a dollar ninety-eight?”

“Pretty cheap.”

“Exactly, which is why I'm saying you need the purple liner, and at
least
three different eyeshadows, trust me, I know what these customers like, and right now honey, I don't mean to be cruel, but—”

So when the big night came, DL went to her purchasers wearing a painting of yet another face she could hardly recognize as one of hers. The room seethed with odors of drinking, smoke, cologne. Koto and samisen music came from hidden speakers. Hostesses tiptoed, knelt, fetched, and poured. Outside, wind was beating on sheet metal, city traffic circulated in humid fricatives, neon colors, some of them unknown outside Tokyo, turned the streets to a high-gloss display of transgression and desire. But in here, light-tight behind rubberized drapes, the auction room kept its colors to itself, with a crew of moonlighting studio gaffers beaming merciful salmons and pinks at the girls in their eye-catching outfits, each chosen earlier from a giant walk-in, in fact drive-in, closet filled with every kind of getup any customer who'd passed through here'd ever found erotic, schoolgirl uniforms tonight being the big favorite, some enhancing an already youthful look, others worn for the less forthright nuances that make grown women in juvenile attire so widely irresistible, much attention being paid of course to details like school crests, belt styles, underwear, and pleats, for any all-but-invisible discrepancy here could easily wreck a sale. “Girl, you have never seen picky,” as Lobelia put it, “till you've been in one of these Jap meat shows.”

Though a few women had come to bid, the audience was nearly all male. The auctioneer was a popular television comedian. Older gentlemen with fingertip deficiencies could be noted circulating in the crowd, attentive as geishas, although to other signals. Prospective buyers chatted softly, paged through catalogues, scribbled on notepads. Out in the bar a baseball game was on, Central League playoffs, and a few guests had lingered till the traditional 8:56, when the transmission from the ballpark was abruptly cut off, in the middle of a double play, in fact. In commotion, voicing their displeasure, the last stragglers entered the room in a cloud of ambiguous smoke, the heavy jade-inlaid doors swung shut and were locked, the houselights were dimmed, the music track segued to romantic disco, the comic took the mike, and the auction was on.