Vineland (41 page)

“Yeah, but they can't take what happened, what we found out.”

“Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us distracted, it's what the Tube is for, and though it kills me to say it, it's what rock and roll is becoming—just another way to claim our attention, so that beautiful certainty we had starts to fade, and after a while they have us convinced all over again that we really are going to die. And they've got us again.” It was the way people used to talk.

“I'm not gonna forget,” Zoyd vowed, “fuck 'em. While we had it, we really had some fun.”

“And they never forgave us.” Mucho went to the stereo and put on
The Best of Sam Cooke
, volumes 1 and 2, and then they sat together and listened, both of them this time, to the sermon, one they knew and felt their hearts comforted by, though outside spread the lampless wastes, the unseen paybacks, the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into.

Downtown, in the Greyhound station, Zoyd put Prairie on top of a pinball machine with a psychedelic motif, called Hip Trip, and was able to keep winning free games till the Vineland bus got in from L.A. This baby was a great fan of the game, liked to lie face down on the glass, kick her feet, and squeal at the full sensuous effect, especially when bumpers got into prolonged cycling or when her father got manic with the flippers, plus the gongs and lights and colors always going off. “Enjoy it while you can,” he muttered at his innocent child, “while you're light enough for that glass to hold you.”

Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge represents a transition, in the metaphysics of the region, there to be felt even by travelers unwary as Zoyd. When the busful of northbound hippies first caught sight of it, just at sundown as the fog was pouring in, the towers and cables ascending into pale gold otherworldly billows, you heard a lot of “Wow,” and “Beautiful,” though Zoyd only found it beautiful the way a firearm is, because of the bad dream unreleased inside it, in this case the brute simplicity of height, the finality of what swept below relentlessly out to sea. They rose into the strange gold smothering, visibility down to half a car length, Prairie standing up on the seat gazing out the window. “Headin' for nothin' but trees, fish, and fog, Slick, from here on in,” sniffling,
till your mama comes home
, he wanted to say, but didn't. She looked around at him with a wide smile. “Fiss!”

“Yeah—fog!”

Trees. Zoyd must have dozed off. He woke to rain coming down in sheets, the smell of redwood trees in the rain through the open bus windows, tunnels of unbelievably tall straight red trees whose tops could not be seen pressing in to either side. Prairie had been watching them all the time and in a very quiet voice talking to them as they passed one by one. It seemed now and then as if she were responding to something she was hearing, and in rather a matter-of-fact tone of voice for a baby, too, as if this were a return for her to a world behind the world she had known all along. The storm lashed the night, dead trees on slow log trucks reared up in the high-beams shaggy and glistening, the highway was interrupted by flooding creeks and minor slides that often obliged the bus to creep around inches from the edge of Totality. Aislemates struck up conversations, joints appeared and were lit, guitars came down from overhead racks and harmonicas out of fringe bags, and soon there was a concert that went on all night, a retrospective of the times they'd come through more or less as a generation, the singing of rock and roll, folk, Motown, fifties oldies, and at last, for about an hour just before the watery green sunrise, one guitar and one harmonica, playing the blues.

Zoyd caught up with Van Meter in Eureka, at the corner of 4th and H, as, suddenly disoriented, he observed his '64 Dodge Dart, unmistakably his own short, with the LSD paint job, Day-Glo hubcaps with the eyes on them, nude-with-streamlined-tits hood ornament, and at the wheel a standard-issue Hippie Freak who looked
just like him.
Woo-oo! An unreal moment for everybody, with the driver staring twice as weirdly
right back at Zoyd!
Van Meter meantime was wondering why Zoyd didn't wave hello, taking Zoyd's mental confusion for anger, and decided to just keep going, though by that time Zoyd had recovered and begun to chase Van Meter through the lunch-hour traffic, waving and hollering, only adding to the bass player's anxiety. Zoyd caught up with his car at a red light and got in on the rider's side.

“Don't be pissed!” in a high nervous voice. “It's running great, I just sprang for a whole tank of gas—”

“Thought I was having a out-of-body experience for a second. What's the matter, you look kind of, uh. . . .”

“Hey, I'm cool. Where's that Prairie?”

Zoyd had left her with friends here, had been house hunting all week with no luck, was just about to go pick her up and head back to Vineland.

“Well soon as I can find your keys, I'll give you your ride and you can run me back up there.”

“In the ignition, I think.”

“Oh. . . .”

They collected Prairie, from a day-care co-op of friends of friends from down south. She was in blue corduroy overalls and greeted Van Meter, her godfather, with squeals and smiles, high-fiving him with two grubby hands. She'd settled right in up here, didn't seem to miss the beach at all, already knew a couple of kids she fought and played with regularly. Soon as they were out on 101 again, she climbed in the back seat and went to sleep.

“A Harbor of Refuge,” as the 1851 survey map called it, “to Vessels that may have suffered on their way North from the strong headwinds that prevail along this coast from May to October,” Vineland Bay, at the mouth of Seventh River, was protected from the sea and its many unsolved mysteries by two spits, Thumb and Old Thumb, and an island out in the bay, called False Thumb. The spits were joined by a bridge, as was the inner of the two, Old Thumb, with the city of Vineland, which curved the length of the harbor's shoreline, both spans being graceful examples of the concrete Art Deco bridges built all over the Northwest by the WPA during the Great Depression. Zoyd, who was driving, came at last up a long forest-lined grade and cresting saw the trees fold away, as there below, swung dizzily into view, came Vineland, all the geometry of the bay neutrally filtered under pre-storm clouds, the crystalline openwork arcs of the pale bridges, a tall power-plant stack whose plume blew straight north, meaning rain on the way, a jet in the sky ascending from Vineland International south of town, the Corps of Engineers marina, with salmon boats, power cruisers, and day sailers all docked together, and spilling uphill from the shoreline a couple of square miles crowded with wood Victorian houses, Quonset sheds, postwar prefab ranch and split-level units, little trailer parks, lumber-baron floridity, New Deal earnestness. And the federal building, jaggedly faceted, obsidian black, standing apart, inside a vast parking lot whose fences were topped with concertina wire. “Don't know, it just landed one night,” Van Meter said, “sitting there in the morning when everybody woke up, folks seem to be gettin' used to it. . . .”

Someday this would be all part of a Eureka–Crescent City–Vineland megalopolis, but for now the primary sea coast, forest, riverbanks and bay were still not much different from what early visitors in Spanish and Russian ships had seen. Along with noting the size and fierceness of the salmon, the fogbound treachery of the coasts, the fishing villages of the Yurok and Tolowa people, log keepers not known for their psychic gifts had remembered to write down, more than once, the sense they had of some invisible boundary, met when approaching from the sea, past the capes of somber evergreen, the stands of redwood with their perfect trunks and cloudy foliage, too high, too red to be literal trees—carrying therefore another intention, which the Indians might have known about but did not share. They could be seen in photographs beginning at about the turn of the century, villagers watching the photographer at work, often posed in native gear before silvery blurred vistas, black tips of seamounts emerging from gray sea fringed in brute-innocent white breakings, basalt cliffs like castle ruins, the massed and breathing redwoods, alive forever, while the light in these pictures could be seen even today in the light of Vineland, the rainy indifference with which it fell on surfaces, the call to attend to territories of the spirit . . . for what else could the antique emulsions have been revealing?

Money had never been found in Sacramento or Washington to bypass 101 around Vineland, so that once into town, the freeway narrowed to two lanes and made a couple of doglegs on and off South Spooner, following unsynchronized traffic lights that drove Van Meter crazy but gave Zoyd a good look at downtown, the Lost Nugget, Country Cantonese, Bodhi Dharma Pizza, the Steam Donkey, before they were back on North Spooner, heading uphill to the bus station, where Zoyd and Prairie were living out of a locker. Van Meter offered to shoehorn them in where he was staying, a commune out past Intemperate Hill. Zoyd figured that with lines waiting on every locker space in the station, he might as well let somebody else move into his. The great northerly migration had caught Vineland flatfooted. The bus station, which took up a whole city block, was acting as a temporary dormitory for those who had nowhere to stay—and there were plenty of these Southland transplants milling everywhere. Zoyd left Prairie with some folks they'd come up with on the bus who'd all got into the habit of looking after each other's kids, and with Van Meter walking slack made a zigzag for the indigo ambience of the Fast Lane Lounge, known for the “harmless liquid” swabbed routinely onto the rims of the bar glasses, making them glow in the ultraviolet frequencies abroad in this room. Some of it was sure to come off on a drinker's mouth. Men usually wiped it away, women either allowed it to diffuse through their lipstick, for which the substance had a strange affinity, until the entire lip area was aglow, or else avoided all contact by drinking through straws, content to admire the glass-rim effect as one might admire an angel-less halo. They sat in front of cold longnecks and Zoyd brought Van Meter up to date.

“Well,” beaming vacantly,” 'ere's worse places for a desperado to hide out. You understand, every guy up here looks just like we do. You're dern near invisible already. Hey! Where'd you go?” groping around the vicinity of Zoyd's head.

“And it turns out, old Slick's got family up here, don't know 'f I should look 'em up or not.”

“On the one hand, you don't want this turning into your mother-in-law's trip, on the other hand, they might know about someplace to crash, if so don't forget your old pal, a garage, a woodshed, a outhouse, don't matter, 's just me and Chloe.”

“Chloe your dog? Oh yeah, you brought her up?”

“Think she's pregnant. Don't know if it happened here or down south.” But they all turned out to look like their mother, and each then went on to begin a dynasty in Vineland, from among one of whose litters, picked out for the gleam in his eye, was to come Zoyd and Prairie's dog, Desmond. By that time Zoyd had found a piece of land with a drilled well up off Vegetable Road, bought a trailer from a couple headed back to L.A., and was starting to put together a full day's work, piece by piece. Out in the perpetual rains on that coast back then, with a borrowed ladder and rolls of aluminum foil, he cruised middle-class neighborhoods for clogged or leaking gutters, doing quick fixes on the spot, then coming back between storms to make the jobs more permanent. He sold vanloads of plastic raincoats from Taiwan along with car wax and pirated Osmonds tapes at the weekend swap meets at the Bigfoot Drive-In, spent Februaries along with everybody else he knew going around in hip waders in the Humboldt daffodil fields, cutting them green, picking up poison rashes, and then, when the cable television companies showed up in the county, got into skirmishes that included exchanges of gunfire between gangs of rival cable riggers, eager to claim souls for their distant principals, fighting it out house by house, with the Board of Supervisors compelled eventually to partition the county into Cable Zones, which in time became political units in their own right as the Tubal entrepreneurs went extending their webs even where there weren't enough residents per linear mile to pay the rigging cost, they could make that up in town, and besides, they had faith in the future of California real estate. Idealistic flower children looking to live in harmony with the Earth were not the only folks with their eyes on Vineland. Developers in and out of state had also discovered this shoreline in the way of the wind, with its concealed tranquillities and false passages, this surprise fish-trap in the everyday coast. All born to be suburbs, in their opinion, and the sooner the better. It meant work, but too much of it nonunion and bought shamefully cheap. Zoyd's relations with the Traverses he did get in touch with were complicated by his scab activities, though Zoyd would've preferred “independent contractor.” These were old, proud, and strong union people, surviving in one of the world's worst antiunion environments—spool tenders, zooglers, water bucks, and bull punchers, some had fought in the Everett mill wars, others from the Becker side had personally known Joe Hill, and not mourned, and organized, and if they were allowing in over their doorsills from time to time nonunion odd-jobbing Zoyd, it was only out of sympathy for his hair and life-style, which they blamed on his mental disability, and love for their distant relative Prairie, who as a true Traverse would piss on through despite her father's shortcomings just fine. Zoyd didn't get points either for the divorce, though if he had custody and nobody'd seen Frenesi for years, it didn't make her look much better. Sasha's cousin Claire, credited in the family with paranormal abilities, quickly enough read Zoyd, noted the unguttering flame on the torch he carried, and started having him over for supper and to look at old family snapshots, telling what she remembered of young Frenesi the explorer and the reports she'd come back with about rivers that weren't supposed to be where she found them, and of the lights on the far banks, and the many voices, hundreds it seemed, not exactly partying, nor exactly belligerent either. Boulders too heavy for anyone but Bigfoot to lift come thudding all around her in the middle of the night, torrents of summer-run steelhead the size of dogs, glowing more than glittering, abandoned logging sites, boilers and stacks and flange gears looming up out of the blackberries . . . and the strange “lost” town of Shade Creek, supposedly evacuated in a flood of long ago, now unaccountably repopulated with villagers who never seemed to sleep.