Vineland (27 page)

“Subtle,” remarked DL.

“Nuanced,” added Ditzah. “I give it a thumbs-up.”

For somebody who spent as much time as he did with objects so abstract that most people went their whole lives without even hearing about them, Weed pursued a remarkably untidy personal life. Technically separated from his wife, Jinx, sharing custody of Moe and Penny, he was orbited as well by an undetermined number of ex-old ladies and their relatives and kids, who showed up from time to time either in person or by way of certified mail, process servers, or else all together on one of Weed's infamous family weekend get-togethers, when everybody was supposed to wallow in retro-domestic Caring and Warmth, except of course for whoever the latest girlfriend happened to be—left to her own resources, she would usually, after a while, grow dazed with it. The kids ran thumping around, eating nonstop, the adults drank, took drugs, hugged, wept, had insights, marathoning through the night till breakfast, nothing ever resolved, false reconciliation abounding. All very jolly for Weed, naturally, being the one who got to set up and direct these extravaganzas, to preside beaming as two or more pleasant-looking women, in Weed's case often wearing provocative attire and getting physical about it, competed for his attention. Mysteriously, the various ladies kept going for this every time, and the kids loved it. If this was how adults were allowed to act, their own outlook might not be so bad.

Frenesi in fact had gone directly from a sinkful of dishes accumulated during one of these all-night love feasts right on to an early jet to Oklahoma City, where by now she was meeting Brock Vond for regular trysts in the waterbed suite of a motor inn out on South Meridian, by the airport. She hitched a ride up to LAX with Jinx and the kids, to whom she pretended she was headed for the Bay Area. “It was nice of all you guys not to gang up on me.”

“ 'Cause we've all been there,” Jinx's smile unrelaxing.

“He doesn't strike me somehow as . . . real groovy husband material?”

“Oh—he thinks he is. Thinks being married will help anchor him to real life, so he won't go floating off into some other dimension?”

“Do you understand any of this math trip he's on?” After a pause, the two had a short laugh. “He tried once, but after a while he must've forgot I was there, just kept on writing equations and stuff.”

“ ‘From the foregoing, it is intuitively obvious . . . ,'” Jinx doing his voice. “That's how soon I knew it was over. But as you probably found out, once you can stop him talking, he's all business. So, you know, you do kind of hang around.”

“A lot of this is the politics too, Jinx, I hope you dig.”

“Just don't tell me you're in love, OK?”

“Sister, I ain't even in line.”

The kids were giggling in the back. “Funny, huh?”

Giggles. “We're just waitin',” said Moe.

“What for?”

“For one of you to say ‘asshole,'” said Penny.

Flying to Oklahoma was like taking a shuttle to another planet. After a lunch hour of sex, they lay among plastic room-service litter in front of the Tube, which had just announced that the powerboat racing out by the dam at Lake Overholser had been suspended. Voices accompanied by weather maps kept breaking in with updates on a number of storm cells moving out in the landscape, surrounding the city. Ghostly predigital radar images appeared, of gray mother storms giving birth from their right-hand sides to little hook-shaped echoes that grew, and detached, to glide off on their own as murderous young tornadoes. Weather commentators tried to maintain the tradition of wackiness the job is known for, but could not keep out of the proceedings an element of surrender, as if before some first hard intelligence of the advent of an agent of rapture. Outside, from a remote camera, the sky was the underside of a beast, countless gray-black udder shapes crawling in in front of a squall line, behind it something distantly roaring, dangling immense stings veined with lightning, sweeping, destroying. . . . She felt electrically excited—more than his cock, just then, she needed his embrace. Fat chance. He'd been watching it all like a commercial, as if the Beast opposite the city were a coming attraction he had grown overfamiliar with.

What he seemed to want was to talk business. He had drafted, sent up, and was about to have authorized a plan to destabilize and subvert PR
³
with funding from one of the DOJ discretionary lines. “It's a laboratory setup,” Brock argued, “a Marxist ministate, product of mass uprising, we don't want it there and we also don't want to invade—how then to proceed?” His idea was to make enough money available to set them all fighting over who'd get it. It would also, as Brock pitched it, have value as a scale model, to find out how much bringing down a whole country might cost.

She lay with her hair all messed up, lipstick smeared, arms and legs in a loose sprawl, nipples erect and, to the infrared-sensitive eye, glowing steadily. A peal of thunder from outside fell close enough to send a shuddering fine ache all across her skin. She wanted so to hold him. She had entered a brief time-out in the struggle, from which, if she'd chosen to, she also could have seen most, maybe all the way to the end, of what she could lose for this—OK, there he was, full-length, the whole package—for what? The fucking? Anything else?

On the screen, the weather crew had fallen queerly silent. At first Frenesi wondered if the sound had gone out, but then one of them laughed nervously and the others joined in. It would happen again before suddenly, unannounced, a preacher with a hand mike, in front of a great luminous cross, appeared on the screen in stylishly long sideburns and a leisure suit of some lurid brick-colored synthetic. “Looks like we're in the hands of Jesus again,” he announced. “Someday, with the right man in the White House, there will be a De
part
ment of Jesus, yes and a
Sec
retary of Jesus, and he'll be talking to you all, on a
nationwide hookup
, instead of this old ignoramus from the piney woods. No friends, I'm no expert, wouldn't know a suction vortex if it walked up and said bless you brother—ah but I do know how the men of science measure tornadoes, and that's on what they call the Fujita Intensity Scale. But folks, maybe today that name should be Fu-
Je
sus. . . .”

“Mind if I, uh—” Frenesi reaching and turning off the set.

“Your mathematician doesn't go in for that sort of thing?”

Frenesi put her ears back, and white triangles appeared at the corners of her eyeballs.

“Or does he? Maybe he's one of these servants of the Lord, with a holy mission to defy Caesar?”

“Think I covered that on one of those forms of yours.”

“I read it,” almost breathless, looking like a boy, “I watched all the film footage, too, but I never saw anything about his spirit. That's what I'd like to hear about sometime. I want his spirit, hm? I'm happy to leave his body to you.”

“Oh, I don't know, Brock, he might be just your type.”

He took off his glasses, smiled at her in a way she'd learned to be wary of. “Actually he is, and I'm sorry you had to find out this way. Remember last time, when I told you not to bathe, hm? because I knew you'd be seeing him that night, knew he'd go down on you—didn't he? ate your pussy, hm? of course I know, because he told me. You were coming in his face and he was tasting me all the time.”

Brock's homophobic sense of humor? She tried to remember if that was how it had happened, and couldn't . . . and what did he mean about “wanting” Weed's spirit?

“You're the medium Weed and I use to communicate, that's all, this set of holes, pleasantly framed, this little femme scampering back and forth with scented messages tucked in her little secret places.”

She was too young then to understand what he thought he was offering her, a secret about power in the world. That's what he thought it was. Brock was young then too. She only took it as some parable about his feelings for her, one she didn't exactly understand but covered for with the wide invincible gaze practiced by many sixties children, meaning nearly anything at all, useful in a lot of situations, including ignorance.

Somebody had left a promotional magnum of Grand Cru de Muskogee Demi-Sec, made from a Concord grape variety imported from Arkansas, in a wastebasket full of ice. It had a nearly opaque, deeply purple color bordering on the ultraviolet and a body comparable to that of maple syrup, through which its bubbles, though multitudinous, were obliged to rise slowly and, alas, invisibly. But Brock, an aspiring gentleman, did the gallant thing and managed to choke down his share, even managing to toast Weed once or twice. She gave him the little-girl photofloods, 4800° of daylight blue, and whispered, “It's why you kill each other, isn't it?”

“Who?”

“Men. Because you can't love each other.”

He shook his head slowly. “Missed the point again—you never get beyond that hippie shit, do you.”

“Point I didn't miss,” she finished the thought, “is you prefer to do it by forcing things into each other's bodies.”

“I hope that's a mischievous look.”

“Don't get many of them, do you?”

“It's Atman who's been putting you on this ‘trip,' you're getting too old to be such a smartass on your own.”

She smiled and raised her glass. “You got it, just a ‘medium,' goes in these four holes, comes out this one. Hey, and let's not forget nostrils, huh?”

They lounged around the room, on and off the waterbed, becoming more grapey than drunk, and Brock just wouldn't give the Weed situation a rest. Outside, beyond the dense rubberized drapes, now a solid black rectangle rim-lit with a least glimmer of failed daylight, was the storm, the Event. Just when she thought they were nestled safe in the center of America—here were sounds in the air they couldn't have imagined, roars too deep for any Air Force jets from Tinker, some nonliquid clattering on the roof that could only be insects of a plague. Frenesi went to the window and pulled enough of one drape aside to have a look. At the sight of the black rolling clouds she caught her breath—she'd never seen a sky like this on Earth, not even with the help of LSD. With no warning, everything would pulse hugely with light, and the undersides and edges of the great clouds be hit with electric blue and now and then, all creviced in black, a terrible final red. In the last light out the window, near enough to see, a funnel cloud, its tip not yet touching the earth, swung slowly, deliberating, as if selecting a target below. She pulled the drapes open to allow a swordshape of outside patio light, which had just come on, to fall across the bed, where Brock lay with his forearm over his eyes and his socks on. “You can figure it out, can't you?” he cried over the booming death-drone outside, “you have a smart-assed angle on everything else, why can't you see this one? Your boyfriend is in the way. In our way.” Just quiet enough to register as deferent, sincere.

“Real easy, then—just take me off the case. Chances are he won't even notice.”

“Anyone can deliver me his body,” called Brock Vond across the room, “if that was all I wanted, you'd've been off it long ago.”

There, as her mother used to sing, he said it again.

“Remember handing me all that shit in your office till I agreed to send in a written report? You said then there wouldn't be anything more.”

“But you're right there literally in bed with him—perfect placement. He's the key to it all, the key log, pull him and you break up the structure,” and the logs would disengage, singly and in groups, and continue on their way down the river to the sawmill, to get sawed into lumber, to be built into more America—Weed was the only one innocent enough, without hidden plans, with no ambitions beyond surmounting what the day brought each time around, he just went lurching on happily into his new identity as a man of action, embracing it as only an abstract thinker would, with the heedless enthusiasm of some junior doper discovering a new psychedelic, enjoying the unqualified trust of all who came inside his radius. With him gone and the others scrambling after the greenbacks in Brock's safe, PR
³
would fall apart.

“Never thought you'd try to hustle me like this, Brock.”

“I didn't think you'd ever get into it with Atman, either,” his voice just for the moment stressless, unprotected. “Plans change, I guess. . . .”

She understood as clearly as she could allow herself to what Brock wanted her to do, understood at last, dismally, that she might even do it—not for him, unhappy fucker, but because she had lost just too much control, time was rushing all around her, these were rapids, and as far ahead as she could see it looked like Brock's stretch of the river, another stage, like sex, children, surgery, further into adulthood perilous and real, into the secret that life is soldiering, that soldiering includes death, that those soldiered for, not yet and often never in on the secret, are always, at every age, children. She came and lay next to him, but not touching. The storm held the city down like prey, trying repeatedly to sting it into paralysis. She lay on one elbow, unable to stop gazing at Brock, pretending to herself that it made some difference to him whether or not she and Weed were fucking . . . just as she had to pretend that Brock was not “really” what he looked like to everybody else—namely, the worst kind of self-obsessed collegiate dickhead, projected on into adult format—but that someplace, lost, stupefied, needing her intercession, was the “real” Brock, the endearing adolescent who would allow her to lead him stumbling out into light she imagined as sun plus sky, with an 85 filter in, returning him to the man he should have grown into . . . it could've been about the only way she knew to use the word
love
anymore, its trivializing in those days already well begun, its magic fading, the subject of all that rock and roll, the simple resource we once thought would save us. Yet if there was anything left to believe, she must have in the power even of that weightless, daylit commodity of the sixties to redeem even Brock, amiably, stupidly brutal, fascist Brock.