Vineland (32 page)

“Did Rex forget his bag?” She had a look of concern—a little kid who really worried about other people. Her plump small hand lay fidgeting slowly on the hard object just a hide's breadth away.

“Oh, wow,” Frenesi precisely intercepting, finding the point on the strap to take it by, “I'll give it to him, Penny, thanks,” up onto her shoulder in a smooth single curve while also reaching to adjust the girl's bangs for her, but not so tenderly that Penny didn't pull away after a polite interval and, pushing her hair back off her forehead, run in to join Moe.

Weed, who might have known what was in the bag, had been watching her. By swooping on Penny she had admitted that she knew too. So what. But she was feeling lightheaded. Jinx, in from the kitchen with the Pancho Bandido bottle, looked nervous.

“Um . . . this is it for wine, you guys, I don't even see this where
I
shop unless it's over in the automotive section someplace. . . .” Jinx reported later that they'd stared at her with what looked to her like drug-dilated eyes, Frenesi on her feet in a controlled sway, Weed down in his broken lotus, for seconds that stretched till Frenesi nodded, managed a smile. “Say, Jinx.”

The phone rang. It was DL for Frenesi, reporting in from up on the campus. The coast highway had been sealed off, marine units from Pendleton were moving into position to come up the cliffside, and rolling down from the base just above the campus were armed personnel carriers and a couple of tanks. The California Highway Patrol and the Trasero County sheriff were standing by. “Think I can score us a generator, but I don't know if there'll be any way out, not for much longer. Can you get up here?”

“Soon as we can . . . DL, are you OK?”

“Your boyfriend Weed's name has been coming up a lot. If he's still in town, he might want to think about not being.”

“Yeah, he's—” she was aware then of the shouting from the other room. Rex was back. Rex and Weed, with Jinx putting in.

“Oh, shit.” The last words DL was to hear from her friend for a while. Frenesi hung up and ran in to find Jinx moving the kids briskly out the door and Weed on his feet between them and Rex, who was shaking and white, with the bag over his shoulder and one hand resting on the heavy lump inside. The lights were on and both cameras were running, Ditzah with a battered old Auricon, Howie with the Scoopic.

Both of them turned to her. “Tell him!” Rex was almost in tears. “Tell this asshole we know everything.”

What she would then have to bear with her all her life, what she would only succeed in denying or disguising for brief insomniac minutes here and there, was not only the look on his face—Ditzah took the close-ups while Howie kept further back, framing the three of them—but the way that what he was slowly understanding spread to his body, a long, stunned cringe, a loss of spirit that could almost be seen on the film, even after all the years between then and the screen in Ditzah's house in the Valley . . . some silvery effluent, vacating his image, the real moment of his passing. He had just time enough to say Frenesi's name before the frame went twisting and flying off his face, “Lot of shoving all at once,” Ditzah recalled, “Howie happened to be changing rolls, but Krishna got all the audio—here—”

Rex screaming, “Don't you walk away from me!” the squeak of a screen door, feet and furniture thumping around, the door again, a starter motor shrieking, an engine catching, as Sledge then moved on out into the alley after them and Frenesi tried to find enough cable to get one of the floods on them and Howie got his new roll in and on his way out offered to switch places with Frenesi, who may have hesitated—her camera, her shot—but must have waved him on, because it was Howie, innocent and slow-moving, who emerged into the darkness and, while trying to find the ring to open the aperture, missed the actual moment, although shapes may have moved somewhere in the frame, black on black, like ghosts trying to return to earthly form, but Sledge was right there on them, and the sound of the shot captured by Krishna's tape. Prairie, listening, could hear in its aftermath the slack whisper of the surf against this coast—and when Howie finally got there and Frenesi aimed the light, Weed was on his face with his blood all on the cement, the shirt cloth still burning around the blackly erupted exit, pale flames guttering out, and Rex was staring into the camera, posing, pretending to blow smoke away from the muzzle of the .38. He would not after all be lucky enough to sit under that oak on that dreamed hillside someday with a miraculously saved Weed Atman, in some 1980s world of the future. The camera moved in on his face. “Howie found the zoom,” Ditzah commented. “We realized we were all there in an alley face-to-face with an insane person with a loaded gun.”

Up on the screen Rex was crying, “It should have been you, Frenesi, fuckin' whore, where are you?” Just behind the light harsh in his face and continuing to pour unwavering, Frenesi was silent. Prairie imagined her standing with nothing but the light between her and Rex and his hatred while he hung, tightening in pain all over, holding the gun but no longer in possession of it. He walked over to Weed's body, went down on one knee, laid the gun beside him. That's when Frenesi killed the light, that's how the shot ended, in a close-up of one of Rex's gleaming eyeballs, with the light she was holding reflected on it round and bright, and in the back-scatter—if Prairie only looked closely enough she would have to see her—Frenesi herself, dark on dark, face in wide-angle distortion, with an expression that might, Prairie admitted, prove unbearable.

The footage following was from up on the campus, the last hours of the People's Republic of Rock and Roll. There wouldn't be any single assault, Attica-style, but instead a scattered nightlong propagation of human chaos, random shooting, tear gas from above, buildings and cars set ablaze, everyone a possible enemy, too much of it in the dark after the electric power, along with the water, got cut off. There was smog but no moon or starlight. Out on a trailer parked in back of the Film Arts building, however, was a Mole-Richardson Series 700 generator, in more or less running order, although once he had some light to work by, Sledge couldn't help reaching into the engine, tweaking the idle and timing and shit. Strangers began to come cautiously in from the darkness. Miles in the distance, from faraway Anaheim Stadium, came the sounds of a Blue Cheer concert. To the 24fps crew it felt like the day after the end of the world, seeing what was there to be taken from the generously funded Film Arts Department, legendary Eclairs whose mere hourly rental would have meant weeks of scuffling, Miller heads, Fastaxes for slow motion, Norwood Binary light meters, at last the high-ticket production of their dreams, and it had to be in this trapped and futureless night.

They lit it on up, with lamps and luminaires, using the fastest film they had, a cache of 7242 from the Film Arts fridge, and a wide-open aperture so there wasn't the depth to it Ditzah would have liked, yet there she, DL, and Prairie sat prehypnotic before the shots of helicopters descending, kids dancing all tuned to the same station on the radio, a ratlike swarm of approaching troops in camouflage and blackface suddenly caught in the beams of arc lamps they proceeded to shoot out as Howie had prophesied, with the camera never pulling back, but standing against whatever came its way and often moving out into it. “She could get herself killed,” Prairie cried.

“Yep,” said Ditzah and DL together.

By morning there were scores of injuries, hundreds of arrests, no reported deaths but a handful of persons unaccounted for. In those days it was still unthinkable that any North American agency would kill its own civilians and then lie about it. So the mystery abided, frozen in time, somewhere beyond youthful absences surely bound to be temporary, yet short of planned atrocity. Taken one by one, after all, given the dropout data and the migratory preferences of the time, each case could be accounted for without appealing to anything more sinister than a desire for safety. At his news conference, Brock Vond referred to it humorously as “rapture.” Fawning, gazing upward at the zipper of his fly, the media toadies present wondered aloud where, in his opinion, if it was OK to ask, Mr. Vond, sir, the missing students might have gotten to. Brock replied, “Why, underground, of course. That's our assumption in this, from all we know about them—that they've gone underground.” Somebody from the radical press must have infiltrated. “You mean they're on the run? Are there warrants out? How come none are listed as federal fugitives?” The reporter was led away by a brace of plainclothes heavies as Brock Vond genially repeated, highlights dancing merrily on his lenses and frames, “Underground, hm? Rapture below. Yes, the gentleman in the suit and tie?”

Earlier, while the newshounds had all been across campus at the main gate, preoccupied with getting shots of coed cuties in miniskirts being handled by troopers in full battle gear in which leather recurred as a motif, none had noticed the small convoy of field-gray trucks, locked shut, unmarked, that had left out the back way without even pausing for the security at the checkpoint. Threading a complex array of ramps, transition lanes, and suspiciously tidy country roads, the trucks eventually pulled up onto the little-known and only confidentially traveled FEER, or Federal Emergency Evacuation Route, which followed the crestline of the Coast Range north in a tenebrous cool light, beneath camouflage netting and weatherproof plastic sheet. It was a dim tunnel that went for hundreds of miles, conceived in the early sixties as a disposable freeway that would only be used, to full capacity, once.

The convoy's destination lay hours to the north, in a wet and secluded valley that had been the site of an old Air Force fog-dispersal experiment and later, before the apocalyptic grandeur of Kennedy-era strategic “thinking” found itself bogged, nukeless, in the quotidian horrors of Vietnam, intended as a holding area able to house up to half a million urban evacuees in the event of, well, say, some urban evacuation. A few dozen housing units, like model homes at the edge of newly subdivided acreage, had been put up just to give visitors a feel for the concept—all standard-issue Corps of Engineers jobs, some of them apartments meant for families, as the word was understood back then, some barracks for detached men, women, boys, and girls whose families might still be “temporarily unaccounted for.” There was a mess hall, toilet and shower facilities, pool and Ping-Pong tables, a movie projector, softball diamond, basketball court. Water ran everywhere, redwoods and Sitka spruce went towering in ragged silhouette up to the ridgetops and over, and behind them, most of the year, gray regiments of cloud marched in from the coast.

DL in the meantime had come straggling back to Berkeley, to the workshop off San Pablo, with Howie and Sledge, either loyal to the end or just in shock, walking slack for her, and found they were just about all that was left of 24fps. DL by then was so crazy that half the time she didn't know who was there and who wasn't. This along with a chiming, way inside her ears, and a light that glowed at the edges of everything, both clearly signals to stand by, message follows.

It took them a while just to find out where Frenesi had gone. There'd been reports in from people who'd seen her taken off in the convoy, some of whom had tried to follow, only to come each time to a peculiar network of transition roads where no matter which combinations they used they were unable to gain access. But they had heard and glimpsed, somewhere in the terrain above them, the old FEER freeway, defects here and there in its camouflage, gray columns and guardrails, ruins from Camelot. Maps were available up and down the street, few agreeing, none getting too specific about what was inside the ragged polygon at the end of the classified freeway, labeled only “National Security Reservation.”

DL and the boys took the flagship of the 24fps motor pool, a '57 Chevy Nomad with a four-wheel-drive option, raised up a couple of feet and equipped with big high-flotation tires, crash bars, and winches fore and aft. About the time they got onto the Richmond–San Rafael bridge, rain began to fall, and they hit San Rafael at prematurely dark and vaporous rush hour, all eight or ten lanes full of exhaust plumes drooping like tails of some listless herd. DL was driving, her bright hair confined in a loosely knit olive snood, plowing on ahead through the wet shift's-end dusk, sitting upright in serene metered fury, holding centered and in focus the image of the enemy, Brock Vond, and of the woman he had kidnapped—for Frenesi could not have gone willingly, no, this asshole of a cop had wanted her, so he'd decided he'd just take her and assumed nobody would do anything about it. Well, Brock, excuse me, Captain, but guess what.

Street estimates in Berkeley about the population of the camp in the mountains ran on the order of ten to a hundred, depending how the different sources felt seeing their nightmares about the Nixon regime coming true. Howie and Sledge were skeptical about proceeding this way on other people's guesswork. They peered at the maps, each with that enigmatic blank in the middle, like the outline of a state in a geography test, belonging to something called “the U.S.,” but not the one they knew. “It's a hundred miles around, DL. If they see us coming, they have all the time in the world to take her and stash her someplace else.”

“They won't see me.” If Frenesi's realm was light, DL's was the dark. Most of those in 24fps had seen, or not seen, her pass without effort through areas infested with cops and cop weapons, rescuing along the way brothers and sisters and the vehicles they'd ridden in in, and come out the other side asking what's for lunch, with the blazing beacon of her hair, which the Man was never quite able to see, no more messed up than when she'd gone in. Sledge and Howie both believed in her invisibility, the same way in those days it was possible to believe in acid, or the imminence of revolution, or the disciplines, passive and active, of the East.