Vineland (35 page)

“What'd you tell her, Ditzah?”

“Said I'd talk to you. Mind you, this is all in a strange personal code, kind of idiolalia you find in twins, so I don't know if anybody bugging us heard much.”

“First thing, we ought to sweep,” it seemed to DL. “You got a li'l FM radio handy someplace?”

“Here you go. I unscrewed the phone, couldn't find anything, but I assume they've put a Title III intercept.”

DL had the pocket-size radio on and was doing a slow t'ai chi walk through the house, tuning back and forth on the dial, a procedure that would weed out only cheaper, less professional-type bugs, which tended to use the same band of frequencies. But the minute she hit the workroom in back there came a horrendous squeal, obliterating a Madonna single that Prairie had been getting into. They found the unit, clunky even by 1984 standards, definitely low-end, wires showing and so forth—“Almost insulting, isn't it?” Ditzah remarked.

“Typical Brock Vond, f' sure—pure contempt. But this was still too easy to find. They've been using more up around 457, 467 megahertz. So either we were meant to find this or, I don't even like to say it, they've suddenly started deploying so many bugs they ran out of 'em, had to start using the cheap stuff.”

“We're probably just being paranoid,” Ditzah a shade too brightly. “It only begins to assume some nationwide pattern here, right? Tell me I've been watching too much old footage tonight. Tell me this isn't what it looks like.” Prairie saw how they were both breathing, the deliberate way you were told to do when otherwise you might want to panic.

“In the olden days we called it the last roundup,” DL explained. “Liked to scare each other with it, though it was always real enough. The day they'd come and break into your house and put everybody in prison camps. Not fun or sitcom prison camps, more like feedlots where we'd all become official, nonhuman livestock.”

“You've seen camps like this?” At once there seeped into the cheery space a silence like a stain in the light. Ditzah, at her editing table trembling, seemed to turn her body from what DL would say, to present less of a target, but DL only answered evenly.

“Yep, I've seen 'em, your mom was in one, you'll recall, but better than us reminiscing and boring you, go to the library sometime and read about it. Nixon had machinery for mass detention all in place and set to go. Reagan's got it for when he invades Nicaragua. Look it up, check it out.”

Prairie offered, “I didt'n mean, you know—”

“DL,” said Ditzah, quickly gathering what she'd need, “what do we do?”

“Stay out of the way till we figure out what's going on. You got someplace secure for tonight?”

“You'll pull off the road, I'll make a phone call. What about all this film, not to mention my own work?”

“Takeshi could get it tomorrow with the truck.”

Ditzah took her pack and they were out of there, in the Trans-Am of Darkness. “Thought we were all through with this shit.” She sounded plaintive.

“Seems otherwise.”

“Why would he come after us? Is he trying to roll back time? What is it that's so hard for him to live with?”

“Turn on his past like 'at, don't know, Ditzah, sounds too weird even for Brock.”

“Then again, it's the whole Reagan program, isn't it—dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can't you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity—‘I don't like the way it came out, I want it to be my way.' If the President can act like that, why not Brock?”

“You always did look at things more historically. What I just figure is is he's a mean mother fucker, that's a technical term, and a lot of these MMF's as we call 'em tend to be spoilers which if there's somethin' they can't have, or they know they've already lost, why, they'll just go try and destroy as much as they can anyway, till it's over.”

“But what if it keeps going?” inquired Prairie, “what if he hasn't ‘lost'?”

“Oh, Prairie, you must've thought I was talking about your mom. . . . I'll admit, this is a lovelorn cop, OK, the worst kind of adversary 'cause there's no rules, no codes of behavior, all bets are off, gentleman goes on abusing his power and believin' it's all in the name of love, deputy sheriff with a longneck in front of him listenin' to Willie Nelson and struggling to hold in 'em tears, I understand that, but this is something else between men, it's about whoever's runnin' Brock thinking, What can I get him to do for me, what are his limits, and Brock thinking, I did this deed for him, it wasn't so bad, but what'll he ask me to do next? Maybe your mom's only in there to make it look normal and human so the boys can go on discreetly porkin' each other.”

“DL,” Ditzah announced, “have you picked up an attitude.”

“Yeah, I had it figured a little more romantic than that myself, actually,” Prairie said.

“Don't believe me, ask Takeshi—according to him, unless you can call on troops in regimental strength, and the hardware that goes with 'em, best not even think about messing with Brock. Ain't just that he's a monomaniac and a killer, but there's
nothing holding him back.
He's allowed to do anything you can imagine, and worse. Somehow it don't strike me as no Fred and Ginger. I think he's after Frenesi 'cause he's lookin' to use her for some task. Just like he used her to set Weed up, long ago. This is the lowest of the five classes of kunoichi—Yu Jen, or the Fool. Always surprised when she finds out who she's been working for.”

“You think she'd be that surprised?” Prairie disconsolate.

“I never believed your mom ever sat down and deliberately chose anything. Same time, I always believed in her conscience. There were days when my personal ass was depending on that conscience. You don't just put that on Pause and walk away, sooner or later, when you don't expect it, it comes back on, hollerin' and blarin' at you.”

“I'm not saying some people might not've found him cute back then,” Prairie said, “but knowing what was at stake for all you guys, how could she?”

Ditzah cackled. “Cute!”

“I had enough trouble just accepting that she did it, I never figured out why. Just as well, it could've ate up my life. Maybe it did.” So the bad Ninjamobile swept along on the great Ventura, among Olympic visitors from everywhere who teemed all over the freeway system in midday densities till far into the night, shined-up, screaming black motorcades that could have carried any of several office seekers, cruisers heading for treed and more gently roaring boulevards, huge double and triple trailer rigs that loved to find Volkswagens laboring up grades and go sashaying around them gracefully and at gnat's-ass tolerances, plus flirters, deserters, wimps and pimps, speeding like bullets, grinning like chimps, above the heads of TV watchers, lovers under the overpasses, movies at malls letting out, bright gas-station oases in pure fluorescent spill, canopied beneath the palm trees, soon wrapped, down the corridors of the surface streets, in nocturnal smog, the adobe air, the smell of distant fireworks, the spilled, the broken world.

 

 

W
HEN had Brock ever possessed her? There might have been about a minute and a half, just after the events at College of the Surf, the death of Weed Atman, and the fall of PR3, though he was no longer sure. He remembered a morning drizzle, at first light, at the camp up north, pulling in in a motor-pool Mercedes with his partner, Roscoe, at the wheel, cruising past the cloudbeaten rows of barracks, stopping out on the asphalt, waiting in the cyan glare of the security lights. Officially he was up to have a look at the physical plant and inspect the population of his Political Re-Education Program, or PREP, Brock's own baby, his gamble on a career coup, his thin-ice special, just about to be put in as a rider to what would be the Crime Control Act of 1970 by a not-so-neo fascist congressman from Trasero County, a friend of friends in returning whose several kindnesses this solon had more than once found himself creeping within squinting range of the chain-link perimeters of Allenwood, Pa. But then again—Brock could get excited just thinking about it—suppose the gamble paid off. The law,
his
law, would provide that detainees in civil disturbances could be taken to certain Justice Department reserves and there examined for snitch potential. Those found suitable might then be offered a choice between federal prosecution and federal employment, as independent contractors working undercover for, but not out of, the DOJ's Political Intelligence Office. After undergoing a full training curriculum that included the use of various weapons, they could be transferred—the contracts essentially sold—to the FBI and under that control be infiltrated, often again and again, into college campuses, radical organizations, and other foci of domestic unrest. So that in addition to immunity from the law, another selling point for hiring on would turn out to be this casual granting of the wish implied in the classical postcollegiate Dream of Autumn Return, to one more semester, one more course credit required, another chance to be back in school again—yes, as long as it was paid for in services useful enough to them, the FBI could even put you on the time machine if that's what you wanted, is how heavy those coppers were even back in those days.

Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep—if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching—need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. The hunch he was betting on was that these kid rebels, being halfway there already, would be easy to turn and cheap to develop. They'd only been listening to the wrong music, breathing the wrong smoke, admiring the wrong personalities. They needed some reconditioning.

This morning at PREP, there would be no breakfast call—the mess hall wasn't yet up to speed, so only staff ate regularly, leaving the “guests,” in endless negotiation, to eat as they could . . . as they did. Brock had not come to see that. He'd come for Morning Assembly, Morning Reports. Whether they would wake hungry, however they had slept, warm enough or not against these North Pacific fronts, the reveille on the PA would bring them outside . . . then he would see. What even he knew he'd really come for was the sight of Frenesi
among them
, the long-haired bodies, men who had grown feminine, women who had become small children, flurries of long naked limbs, little girls naked under boyfriends' fringe jackets, eyes turned down, away, never meeting those of their questioners, boys with hair over their shoulders, hair that kept getting in their eyes . . . the sort of mild herd creatures who belonged, who'd feel, let's face it, much more comfortable, behind fences. Children longing for discipline. Frenesi might not—short of torture, anyway—believe that he could ever imprison her. He knew she would try to keep guarded what she thought to be some inner freedom, go on imagining herself secure, still whole . . . but there he'd be, her inescapable witness, watching her in a context she couldn't deny—the rest of them, all she had for human company, as they were. Cold comfort for Brock Vond—though back in the deep leather upholstery, with one eye on the “Today” show and an ear to the tactical frequencies patched to front and rear speakers, breathing the steam of his decaffeinated coffee, he wasn't all that surprised to find himself with a hardon.

Roscoe knew that this
A.M.
visit was confidential. So far, officially, with the enabling and money bills still making their way through Congress, this place didn't even exist. He could tell how nervous Brock was—the rearview mirror was full of furtive gestures. Here they were, him and the Hotshot, in DOJ transportation, on DOJ time, playing out one more of young Vond's confusing power-and-sex games, which he would have denied if Roscoe'd been fool enough to bring it up. Roscoe sure 's heck wouldn't be here himself if his time were his own, which it hadn't been since that fateful four in the morning the Internals had shown up all Kevlar and Plexiglas, and blacked gunmetal at the ready. “Fellas!” he tried to protest thickly through the last mouthful of free L.A. cheeseburger deluxe he would know for a while. “Jeez I know I'm bad but—” He wanted to quote the Shangri-Las and point out, “But I'm not evil,” but had inhaled a piece of burger roll and started to cough instead.

Since he'd been with Brock, Roscoe had come to see himself not as sidekick so much as Cagey Old Pro, passing on all kinds of useful lore if the pup would ever bother to listen. These birds in this facility here, for instance—“Don't know,” he'd muttered, “you've been out there on the line, seen these kids close up—some of 'em's in it for real, all right, and they're tough cookies, long hair and all. Never turn 'em—never trust 'em if you did.”

“They'll get remanded someplace else—we always knew what to do with them. I'm counting on that other 90%, amateurs, consumers, short attention spans, out there for the thrills, pick up a chick, score some dope, nothing political. Out in the mainstream, Roscoe, that's where we fish.”

No point in pursuing it when Brock could always shut him up by finding a way to remind Roscoe how much he would forever owe, but also because he'd let himself believe that young Vond was profound enough to interpret his silences, some of them eloquent as lectures. Brock, for his part, valued Roscoe's silences, all right, and the more of them the better. They were part of his conception of the perfect underling, whom he imagined as a sort of less voluble Tonto. And to the extent that he tried not to bother the Prosecutor with details of how, often semimiraculously, he got things done, it may also have been how Roscoe imagined it. Who, after all, besides teaching him every Indian piece of know-how, had saved the Lone Ranger's life?

Yet not even that ultimate favor had wiped out his debt to Brock, who once, exactly when it had swung the most weight, had intervened for him. The payback was to be in units of unconditional loyalty, including but not limited to lifesaving, one shift after another till retirement, with the question of his pension still up in the air, and with lawyers on both sides looking into it. Not only had he literally saved Brock's life, but more than once this job he knew he was lucky to have as well, making this unhappy phase of his own career out of covering the backside of Vond's. In that memorable dope-field shoot-out, Brock had followed Roscoe dumb and terrified as a recruit obeying his sergeant, through the dense resin smell, as a great nation pursued its war on a botanical species, rounds whinging and burring hotly by through shade leaves, breaking stems, knocking seeds out of
colas
, Brock following every move of Roscoe's stuck like a shadow, till they made it to the chopper and rose so swiftly, like a prayer to God, like a pigeon to the sky—“Roscoe,” Brock Vond was babbling, “I owe you, oh boy do I, the very biggest one, the Big L itself, and maybe I don't always know when I do, but this time I swear—” Roscoe still breathing too hard to ask him to put it in writing. When he did speak, wheezing, it was to holler over the beat of the blades, “Feel like we been in a Movie of the Week!”

In the clarity of that crisis, at least, the Prosecutor had nailed it. He really didn't know always how much, or even when, he owed anybody. In their first days together Roscoe, mighty annoyed, had taken it for such snot-nosed ingratitude that he nearly decided to hell with it, he'd put in his papers and go find some security-consultant hustle, far from our nation's capital—who needed this? Only after more scrutiny did he find out how dirt-ignorant his boss actually remained, on quite a number of occasions, of real-world steps being taken on his behalf. It wasn't that Vond was following any moral code of his own, though he might have wanted it to look that way—but Roscoe recognized it as simple, massively protective insulation. Some things in life had just never touched this customer, he would never have to think about them—which could only give the kid an edge, but maybe not begin to account for Brock's supernatural luck, the aura that everybody, winners and losers, picked up, which Roscoe swore under oath he'd observed during that pot-plantation run-in as a pure white light surrounding Brock entirely, which Roscoe believed would keep him, then and after, immune to gunfire. Who had been sticking close to whom, that fragrant morning long ago?

Iron speakers up on stripped fir poles crashed alive with the national anthem. Brock got out of the car and stood, not at attention but leaning one elbow on the car roof, watching as one by one the detainees began to appear out on the assembly ground. They only came as close as they had to to make sure Brock wasn't bringing something to eat—then they withdrew into small clusters at the margins of the asphalt, speaking together, at this distance inaudible.

Brock scanned face after face, registering stigmata, a parade of receding foreheads, theromorphic ears, and alarmingly sloped Frankfurt Horizontals. He was a devotee of the thinking of pioneer criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1836–1909), who'd believed that the brains of criminals were short on lobes that controlled civilized values like morality and respect for the law, tending indeed to resemble animal more than human brains, and thus caused the crania that housed them to develop differently, which included the way their faces would turn out looking. Abnormally large eye sockets, prognathism, frontal submicrocephaly, Darwinian Tipped Ear, you name it, Lombroso had a list that went on, and skull data to back him up. By Brock's time the theory had lapsed into a quaint, undeniably racist spinoff from nineteenth-century phrenology, crude in method and long superseded, although it seemed reasonable to Brock. What really got his attention was the Lombrosian concept of “misoneism.” Radicals, militants, revolutionaries, however they styled themselves, all sinned against this deep organic human principle, which Lombroso had named after the Greek for “hatred of anything new.” It operated as a feedback device to keep societies coming along safely, coherently. Any sudden attempt to change things would be answered by an immediate misoneistic backlash, not only from the State but from the people themselves—Nixon's election in '68 seeming to Brock a perfect example of this.

Lombroso had divided all revolutionists into five groups, geniuses, enthusiasts, fools, rogues, and followers, which in Brock's experience about covered it, except for the unforeseen sixth, the one without a label Brock was waiting for, who at last came striding toward him now through the drizzle, a few pounds thinner, her hair full of snarls, barelegged, her camera taken away, no weapon of witness but her eyes. She stopped a few feet from him, he stared at the glistening of her thighs, as he moved closer she shivered, tried to cross her arms, hug herself into an invisible shawl or the memory of one she used to wear . . . but he was too close. He reached with one finger to lift her chin, force her to look at him. They faced each other in light from which all red was missing. She looked in his eyes, then at his penis—yep erect all right, creating pleats in the front of the pale federal trousers.

“Been thinking about you too,” her voice ragged from a pack and a half of jailhouse smokes a day.

Smart mouth. One day he would order her down on her knees in front of all these cryptically staring children, put a pistol to her head, and give her something to do with her smart mouth. Each time he daydreamed about this, the pistol would reappear, as an essential term. But now, as his heartbeat picked up a little, he gave career advice instead. “How do you like our campus?” He waved around going mine-all-mine. “Full athletic program, chaplain's office with a minister, a priest,
and
a rabbi, maybe even a few rock concerts.”

She started to laugh, coughed a while instead. “Your taste in music? It's outlawed by the Geneva convention. Not a selling point, Cap'n.”

“Did you think we were negotiating?”

“I thought we were flirting, Brock. Guess it's one more disappointment I'll have to live with.” She caught herself watching his cock again, then saw he was grinning at her, amorously, he must've thought. “The commandant here has my number. Don't delay, operators are standing by.” He brought away his finger with a flip that sent her chin a half inch higher.

She breathed through her nose and glared at him. The politically correct answer would have been “When your mother stops giving head to stray dogs.” Later she would think of others she might have used. But just then, when it could have still made a difference, she said nothing at all, only stood, head up, watching the old heartbreaker's ass till he'd taken it back inside the Germanic sedan. She had a vivid, half-second hallucination of Brock in the Oklahoma stormlight, the hard blued body, the unforgiving shore against which, on breaking waves whose power she felt but would never understand she had ridden, would ride, again and again. . . .

Roscoe started up the car. Watching the bedraggled girl in the stained miniskirt, he hit the gas pedal to make the engine sing in a rising, suggestive phrase. “Don't blow my effect here,” Brock Vond leaning forward from the back, more than a little annoyed, “OK? All I need right now is one of your old-time comedy routines, to undo all the work I just did out there. Trying to destabilize the subject, not serenade her.”