Vineland (4 page)

“Satellites, everybody hears everything, space is really something, what else?”

The dope cop permitted himself an Eastwood-style mouth-muscle nuance. “Don't be disingenuous, I know you still believe in all that shit. All o' you are still children inside, livín your real life back then. Still waitín for that magic payoff. But no prob, I can live with that . . . and it ain't like you're lazy or afraid to work, either . . . impossible to tell with you, Zoyd. Never could figure out how innocent you thought you were. Sometimes you looked just like a hippie bum musician, for months at a shot, as if you never turned a buck any other way. Rill puzzlín.”

“Hector! Bite yer tongue! You tellin' me I—I
wasn't
innocent, me behavin' like a saint through it all?”

“You behaved about like everybody else, pardner, sorry.”

“That bad.”

“I won't aks you to grow up, but just sometime, please, aks yourself, OK, ‘Who was saved?' That's all, rill easy, ‘Who was saved?' “

“Beg pardon?”

“One OD'd on the line at Tommy's waitín for a burger, one got into some words in a parkín lot with the wrong gentleman, one took a tumble in a faraway land, so on, more 'n half of 'em currently on the run, and you so far around the bend you don't even see it, that's what became of your happy household, you'd've done better up against the SWAT team. Just in the privacy of your thotz, Zoyd. As a exercise, li'l kinda Zen meditation. ‘Who was saved?' “

“You, Hector.”

“
Ay se va
, go on, break your old
compinche
's heart. Here I thought you knew everything, it turns out you don't know shit.” Grinning—a stretched and terrible face. It was the closest Hector got to feeling sorry for himself, this suggestion he liked to put out that among the fallen, he had fallen further than most, not in distance alone but also in the quality of descent, having begun long ago concentrated and graceful as a sky diver but—the tostada procedure was minor evidence—he growing less professional the longer he fell, while his skills as a field man depreciated. He had come, with these falling years, simply to rely on going in, trying to neutralize whoever was there with a repertoire of assault that still ran from stupefy to obliterate, and if they were waiting for him one time and got in the first move,
ay muere
, too bad. Hector sadly knew this wasn't anywhere near the samurai condition of always being on that perfect edge prepared to die, a feeling he'd known only a few times in his life, long ago. Nowadays, with his old fighting talents lapsed, what looked like simple impulse or will might as easily have been advanced self-hatred. Zoyd, the big idealist, liked to believe that Hector remembered everybody he'd ever shot at, hit, missed, booked, questioned, rousted, double-crossed—that each face was filed in his conscience, and the only way he could live with such a history was to take these chances with his own bad ass, upping the ante as he moved into his late midcareer. This theory at least had kept Zoyd from lying around hatching plots to assassinate Hector, as others had been known to waste hours of potentially productive lives doing. Hector was the kind of desperado whose ideal assassin was himself—he could choose the best method, time, and place and would always have the best motives for it of anyone.

“So, let me guess, I'm spoze to be some early-warning alarm, some invisible beam she can walk through and break, so you get a few minutes' edge but meanwhile I'm the one gets interrupted, or come to think of it, broken, somethin' like that?”

“Not at all. You can go on with your life, such as it is. Nobody runnín you, you don't call in, we don't call unless we need you. All's you got to do's be there, in place—be yourself, as your music teacher probably used to tell you.”

Late hit, Zoyd thought, not like him, what's wrong with the li'l fella today, with this edge on everything? “Well sounds like a breeze, and you mean I get paid for it too?”

“Special Employee scale, maybe even a bonus.”

“Used to be a twenty, as I recall, limp and warm from some agent's wallet his kid gave him for Christmas. . . .”

“Sure—you'll find today it can be well into the low three figures, Zoyd.”

“Wait a minute—bonus? What for?”

“Whatever.”

“Can I have a uniform, a badge, a piece?”

“You gonna do it?”

“Bullshit Hector, you givin' me a choice?”

The federale shrugged. “It's a free country. The Lord, as they call him around my office, created all of us, even you, with free will. I think it's weird you don't even want to find out about her.”

“You're one sentimental hombre, you meddlin' ol' Cupid ya. Well maybe you can relate to this—it took me a long time even to get to where I am on the whole subject o' her, now you want to post me right back down into it again, but guess what, I don't want to go back 'n' waller in all 'at.”

“How about your kid, then?”

“Yes, Hector. What about her? I really need to hear some more federal advice right now about how I should be bringin' up my own kid, we know already how much all you Reaganite folks care about the family unit, just from how much you're always in fuckin' around with it.”

“Maybe this ain't gonna work after all.”

“It does seem,” Zoyd careful, “like that you're spending a lot on one long-ago federal case everybody's forgotten.”

“You should see how much. Maybe it goes beyond your ex-old lady, li'l buddy.”

“Far, far beyond?”

“I used to worry about you, Zoyd, but I see I can rest easy now the Vaseline of youth has been cleared from your life's lens by the mild detergent solution of time, in its passing. . . .” Hector sat slumped in zomoskepsis, or the contemplation of his soup. “I should charge you my consultancy fee, but I already checked your shoes, so I'll give you this for free.” Was he reading strange soup messages? “Your ex-old lady, up till they terminated her budget line, was livín in a underground of the State, not like th' old Weatherpeople or nothín, OK? but a certain kind of world that civilians up on the surface, out in the sun thinkín 'em happy thotz, got no idea it's even there. . . .” Hector was usually too cool to be much of a lapel-grabber, but something in his voice now, had Zoyd been wearing a jacket, might have warned of an attempt. “Nothín like that shit on the Tube, nothín at all . . . and cold . . . colder than you ever want to find out about. . . .”

“That case, I got no problem staying out of the way, 'specially anybody she's been runnin' with, and good luck yourself, pal.”

“I don't need that from you, Zoyd, you're just as fucked as you ever were, and you picked up a mean streak too.”

“Nothin' meaner than a old hippie that's gone sour, Hector, lot of it around.”

“You pussies set yourselves up for it,” Hector advised, “don't be complainín this far down the line, it's only business, and we're both gonna make out, all's you do's sit tight while I do the work.”

“Hope you don't need a yes or no right away.”

“Time is of the essence, you're not the only one I'm tryín to coordinate here.” Shook his head sadly. “We been out cruisín different boulevards for years now, did you send one Christmas card, or ask about Debbi, or the kids, or what's been happenín to my consciousness? Maybe I'm Mormon now, how would you know? Maybe Debbi talked me into goín on a retreat one weekend and it changed my life. And maybe you should even be thinkín about your spirit, Zoyd.”

“My—”

“Takes a little discipline's all, wouldn't kill you.”

“I'm sorry, Hector, how are Debbi and the kids?”

“Zoyd, if only you hadn't been such a asshole all your life, just skippín along through the wildflowers, so forth, thinkín you were so special, that you didt'n have to do what everybody else did. . . .”

“Maybe I don't. You think I do?”

“Hey, all right fuckhead, try this—
you are goín to have to die?
Yeah-heh-heh, remember that? Death! after all them yearss of nonconformist shit, you're gonna end up just like everybody else anyway!
¡Ja, ja!
So what was it for? All 'at livín in the hippie dirt, drivín around some piece of garbage ain't even in the blue book no more, passín up some
really serious bucks
't you could've spent not just on y'rself and your kid but on all your beloved bro and sister hippie fools who could've used it as much as you?”

A waitress approached with the check. Both men—Hector by reflex and Zoyd then startled into it—sprang toward her and collided, and the girl, alarmed, backed away, dropping the document, which then got batted around by the three parties until at last fluttering into a revolving condiment tray, where it ended up half submerged in a big fluffy mound of mayonnaise gone translucent at the edges.

“Check's in the mayo,” Zoyd had time to note, when all at once, out past the street door, came a convergence of sirens, purposeful shouting, then heavy boots, all in step, thumping their direction.

“
¡Madre de Dios!
” an oddly panicked, high-pitched Hector was up and running for the kitchen—luckily, Zoyd noted, having left a twenty on the table—now with a platoon of folks come crashing in after him, what
was
this, all wearing identical camo jumpsuits and crash helmets with the word NEVER stenciled on. Two stayed by the door, two more went over to check the bowling alley, the rest went running on after Hector into the kitchen, where there was already a lot of screaming and clanging.

Dude in a white lab coat over Pendleton shirt and jeans now came strolling in between the two doorpeople, heading for Zoyd, who beamed insincerely, “Never saw him before.”

“Zoyd Wheeler! Hi, caught you on the news last night, fabulous, didn't know you and Hector were acquainted, listen, he hasn't been quite himself, signed in with us for some therapy, and now, frankly. . . .”

“He broke out.”

“We'll catch up eventually. But if you have any further contact, you'll give us a call, hmmm?”

“Who are you?”

“Oh. Sorry.” He handed Zoyd a card that read, “Dr. Dennis Deeply, M.S.W., Ph.D. / National Endowment for Video Education and Rehabilitation,” someplace down north of Santa Barbara, a struck circle around a TV set, above the Latin motto
Ex luce ad sanitatem
, with a printed phone number crossed out and another ballpointed in. “That's our local number, we're staying at the Vineland Palace till we catch Hector.”

“Nice per diem. You guys're federal?”

“Bisectoral, really, private and public, grants, contracts, basically we study and treat Tubal abuse and other video-related disorders.”

“A dryin'-out place for Tubefreeks? You mean . . . Hector. . . .” And Zoyd remembered him humming that Flintstone theme to calm himself down, and all those “li'l buddy”s, which as they both knew was what the Skipper always liked to call Gilligan, raising possibilities Zoyd didn't want to think about.

Dr. Deeply shrugged eloquently. “One of the most intractable cases any of us has seen. He's already in the literature. Known in our field as the Brady Buncher, after his deep although not exclusive attachment to that series.”

“Oh, yeah, that was ol' Marcia, right, and then the middle one's name was—” till Zoyd noticed the piercing look he was getting.

“Maybe,” said Dr. Deeply, “you should give us a call anyway.”

“I didt'n say I could remember
all
their names!” Zoyd yelled after him, but he was already halfway out the door, soon to be joined by the others and then, presently, gone, and without having caught Hector, either.

Hector, who it now seemed was some sort of escaped lunatic, was still at large.

 

Z
OYD hit Phantom Ridge Road about an hour later than he wanted because of Elvissa up the hill's blown head gasket, which brought her down at 6:00
a.m.
to borrow his rig, for which it had taken Zoyd then a while to scout up a replacement. This turned out to be a Datsun Li'l Hustler pickup, belonging to his neighbor Trent, with a camper shell whose unusual design gave the vehicle some cornering problems. “Long as you don't try it with the tank anywhere between empty and full,” Trent suggested, he thought helpfully. But it was actually the camper shell, covered all over with cedar shakes in some doper's idea of imbrication and topped by a pointed shake roof with a stovepipe coming out, that seemed to be the problem.

Zoyd very carefully hooked a right and was soon climbing switchbacks up a ridge of as yet unlogged second-growth redwoods, on whose other side lay Phantom Creek. The fog here had burned off early, leaving a light blue haze that began to fade the more distant trees. He was heading for a little farm on the creek road, where he had a sideline in crawfish with a bush vet and his family. They'd go harvest the little 'suckers from up and down Phantom and a couple of adjoining creeks, and Zoyd would bring the good-eating crustaceans back down 101 to a string of restaurants catering to depraved yuppie food preferences, in this case California Cajun, though the critters also got listed here and there as Ecrivisses á la Maison and Vineland Lobster.

RC and Moonpie, real names left back along their by now erased-enough trail since the war, were as happy to see the money as the kids were to be out doing the work—Morning, the biggest, splashing down the middle of the creek, with the others carrying jars and sacks of twenty-penny nails, and fastening a piece of bacon to the bottom of every knee-deep pool they came to. By the time they got back to where they'd started, there'd be frantic invasions of crawdads, all milling around unable to get the bacon loose. Procedure then was to bring out a minnow bag on a stick, hit the crawdad on the nose with the stick, and catch it, as it jumped, in the bag. Sometimes the kids would even allow their parents to come along and help out.

Zoyd had known the family since the early seventies, having in fact met Moonpie on the night of the day his divorce became final, which also happened to be the night before his very first window jump, in a way both part of the same letter of agreement. He was drinking beers in a longhairs' saloon called the Lost Nugget down on South Spooner in Vineland, looking for a way not to think about Frenesi or the life together that had just officially come to an end with no last-minute reversals, and Moonpie, equally young and lovely back in those days, seemed to Zoyd's crippled receptors just the ticket. That is until RC emerged from the can, with the deep eyes, the mortally cautious bearing, that told of where else he'd been. He slid back to the bar, dropped a hand on Moonpie's shoulder that she pressed for a moment with her cheek, and nodded at Zoyd with a please-don't-piss-me-off look of inquiry. Zoyd, already well into second thoughts anyway, instead spent the rest of that evening, and in fact many other nights down the years to come, not to mention daylight beer breaks, freeway meditations, and toilet-seat reveries, obsessing about his wife—he never would get too comfortable with “ex-wife”—and managing to bum out everybody inside a radius even these days considered respectable.

Zoyd's dream album someday would be an anthology of torch songs for male vocalist, called
Not Too Mean to Cry.
He had arrived in this recurring fantasy at the point where he'd take advertising space, late at night on the Tube, with a toll-free number flashing over little five-second samples of each tune, not only to sell records but also on the chance that Frenesi, up late some 3:00
A.M.
out of some warm Mr. Wonderful's bed, would happen to pop the Tube on, maybe to chase the ghosts away, and there'd be Zoyd, at the keyboard in some outrageous full-color tux, someplace along the Vegas Strip, backed by a full house orchestra, and she'd know, as the titles scrolled by, “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” “One for My Baby,” “Since I Fell for You,” that every one of these disconsolate oldies was all about her.

Frenesi had ridden into his life like a whole gang of outlaws. He felt like a schoolmarm. He was working gypsy construction jobs by day and playing at night with the Corvairs, never anyplace near the surf but inland, for this sun-beat farm country had always welcomed them, beer riders of the valleys having found strange affinities with surfers and their music. Besides a common interest in beer, members of both subcultures, whether up on a board or behind a 409, shared the terrors and ecstasies of the passive, taken rider, as if a car engine held encapsulated something likewise oceanic and mighty—a technowave, belonging to distant others as surf belonged to the sea, bought into by the riders strictly as-is, on the other party's terms. Surfers rode God's ocean, beer riders rode the momentum through the years of the auto industry's will. That death entered into their recreation more than into the surfers' helped shape an attitude, nonetheless, that had brought the Corvairs their share of toilet and parking-lot trauma, police interventions, sudden midnight farewells.

The band played up and down valleys still in those days unknown except to a few real-estate visionaries, little crossroads places where one day houses'd sprawl and the rates of human affliction in all categories zoom. After work, unable to sleep, the Corvairs liked to go out and play motorhead valley roulette in the tule fogs. These white presences, full of blindness and sudden highway death, moved, as if conscious, unpredictably over the landscape. There were few satellite photos back then, so people had only the ground-level view. No clear bounded shape—all at once, there in the road, a critter in a movie, too quick to be true, there it'd be. The idea was to enter the pale wall at a speed meaningfully over the limit, to bet that the white passage held no other vehicles, no curves, no construction, only smooth, level, empty roadway to an indefinite distance—a motorhead variation on a surfer's dream.

Zoyd had grown up in the San Joaquin, ridden with the Bud Warriors and later the Ambassadors, gone on many an immortally lunatic “grudge run,” as Dick Dale might say, through the presuburban citrus groves and pepper fields, lost a high percentage of his classmates, blank rectangles in the yearbooks, to drunk driving or failed machinery, and would eventually return to the same sunny, often he could swear haunted, landscape to get married, one afternoon on a smooth gold green California hillside, with oak in darker patches, a freeway in the distance, dogs and children playing and running, and the sky, for many of the guests, awriggle with patterns of many colors, some indescribable.

“Frenesi Margaret, Zoyd Herbert, will you, for real, in trouble or in trippiness, promise to remain always on the groovy high known as Love,” and so forth, it may have taken hours or been over in half a minute, there were few if any timepieces among those assembled, and nobody seemed restless, this after all being the Mellow Sixties, a slower-moving time, predigital, not yet so cut into pieces, not even by television. It would be easy to remember the day as a soft-focus shot, the kind to be seen on “sensitivity” greeting cards in another few years. Everything in nature, every living being on the hillside that day, strange as it sounded later whenever Zoyd tried to tell about it, was gentle, at peace—the visible world was a sunlit sheep farm. War in Vietnam, murder as an instrument of American politics, black neighborhoods torched to ashes and death, all must have been off on some other planet.

Music was by the Corvairs, these days calling themselves surfadelic, though the nearest surf at the moment was at Santa Cruz, forty miles away over farm roads and murderous mountain passes, and they had to contend with the traditional beer-rider haughtiness of the area—still, in later years, try as Zoyd might to remember everything at its most negative, truth was there'd been no brawls or barfing or demolition derbies, everybody had got along magically, it was one of the peak parties of his life, folks loved the music, and it went on all night and then the next, right on through the weekend. Pretty soon bikers and biker chicks, playing at villainy, were showing up in full regalia, then a hay wagon jammed full of back-to-nature acidheads from up the valley out on an old-fashioned hayride, and eventually the sheriff, who ended up doing the Stroll, a dance of his own day, with three miniskirted young beauties to a screaming electric arrangement of “Pipeline” and who was kind enough not to go near, let alone investigate, the punch, but did accept a can of Burgie, it being a warm day.

All through it, Frenesi was smiling, serene. Zoyd would be unable to forget her already notorious blue eyes, glowing under a big light straw hat. Little kids ran up, calling her name. She and Zoyd were sitting together on a bench under a fig tree, the band on a break, she was eating a cone of rainbow-patterned fruit ice whose colors miraculously didn't seep together, leaning forward to keep it off her wedding dress, which had also been her mother's and grandmother's. A tortoise cat who kept appearing from nowhere would walk directly under the dripping cone, get hit with ice-cold drops of lime, orange, or grape, meow as if surprised, squirm in the dust, roll her eyes around insanely, run off at top speed, and then after a while amble back to repeat the act.

“Did you notice my cousin Renée? Do you think she's having a good time?” Renée had just broken up with her boyfriend, but undeterred by depression had driven up from L.A. figuring maybe a party was what she needed. Zoyd remembered her, among the roster of his in-law aunts, uncles, and cousins, as a tall florid girl in a minidress that bore the image, from neck to hemline, of Frank Zappa's face, thus linking her in Zoyd's mind somehow with Mount Rushmore.

He smiled, squinting back, like a schoolmarm who still couldn't believe her luck. A breeze had come up and begun to move the leaves of their tree. “Frenesi, do you think that love can save anybody? You do, don't you?” At the time he hadn't learned yet what a stupid question it was. She gazed up at him from just under the brim of the hat. He thought, At least try to remember this, try to keep it someplace secure, just her face now in this light, OK, her eyes quiet like this, her mouth poised to open. . . .

Mean or not, he hadn't cried about it for a long time. The years had kept rolling, like the surf he used to ride, high, calm, wild, windless. But increasingly the day, the necessary day, presenting its demands, had claimed him, till there was only one small bitter amusement he refused to let go of. Now and then, when moon, tides, and planetary magnetism were all in tune, he went venturing out, straight up through the third eye in his forehead, into an extraordinary system of transport whereby he could go gliding right to wherever she was, and incompletely unseen, sensed just enough to be troublesome, he then would haunt her, for as long as he could, enjoying every squeezed-out minute. A vice, for sure, and one he had confessed only to a handful of people, including, it may have turned out unwisely, their daughter, Prairie, this very morning.

“Oh,” sitting over a breakfast of Cap'n Crunch and Diet Pepsi, “you mean you
dreamed
—”

Zoyd shook his head. “I was awake. But out of my body.”

She gave him a look that he didn't, so early in the day, attend to the full risk of, telling him she trusted him not to be running some cruel put-on. They'd been known not to share a sense of humor on many topics, her mom in particular. “You go there and—what? You perch somewhere and look, you keep flying around, how's it work?”

“It's like Mr. Sulu laying in coordinates, only different,” Zoyd explained.

“Knowin' exactly where you want to go.” He nodded, and she felt some unaccustomed bloom of tenderness for this scroungy, usually slow-witted fringe element she'd been assigned, on this planet, for a father. What mattered at the moment was that he knew how to visit Frenesi out in the night, and that could only mean he must feel a need for her as intense as Prairie's own. “Where's it you go, then? Where is she?”

“Keep tryin' to find out. Try to read signs, locate landmarks, anything that'll give a clue, but—well the signs are there on street corners and store windows—but I can't read them.”

“It's some other language?”

“Nope, it's in English, but there's something between it and my brain that won't let it through.”

Prairie made a sound like a game-show buzzer. “
I'm
sorry Mr. Wheeler. . . .” Let down and suspicious, she drifted away again. “Say hi to 'em up on Phantom Creek, OK?”

He took a left at the row of mailboxes, went strumming over a cattle guard, parked out by the horse barn, and walked in. RC was over in Blue Lake running chores, but Moonpie was around, looking after Lotus, the baby. The crawdads were in an old Victorian bathtub that doubled as a watering trough. Together Zoyd and Moonpie netted them out and weighed them on a seed, feed, and fertilizer scale, and he wrote her a postdated check he'd still have to scramble, this day already so advanced, to cover.

“Somebody at the Nugget the other night,” baby on her arm, giving him now a straight, worried look, “askin' about you. RC thought he knew him, but wouldn't tell me anythin'.”

“Latino gent, semi-Elvis haircut?”

“Yep. You in some trouble, Zoyd?”

“Moon darlin', when am I out of it? He mention where he was staying, anything like that?”

“Mostly just sat starin' at the Tube in the bar. Some movie on channel 86. He was talkin' to the screen after a while, but I don't think he was loaded or nothin'.”

“Rill unhappy dude, is all.”

“Wow. Comin' from you. . . .” Seeing Zoyd's odd smile, the baby echoed, “Comin' fum
you!
”

They transferred the crawdads to tubs of water in the back of the camper, and soon Zoyd was lurching and sloshing back down the road. He noticed Moonpie and Lotus in the rearview mirror, watching him around the curve, till the trees hid them.