Vineland (47 page)

Things work out funny sometimes. His father had sent him up here to Vineland as punishment for a string of venial business errors. But he'd never wanted the Wayvone empire, he wanted to be a comedian, and it turned out that the Cucumber Lounge provided him with just what he'd always dreamed of, a workshop for getting his stand-up routines together. “So the other day I'm eating my wife's pussy, she says—” he waited for a reaction but heard only the air-conditioning and some glassware. “Eating pussy, wow, you know? It's just like the Mafia. . . . Yeah—one slip of the tongue, you're in deep shit!” A couple of teenage boys barked nervously, and Van Meter, tending bar, tried to help out. Nothing worked. Ralph Jr. grew desperate, driven at length to self-inflicted anti-Italian jokes. Finally, having squeezed the crowd for as much rejection as he thought he could handle, he used the unspeakably derogatory “How to Get an Italian Woman Pregnant” for his big punch line, smiled, sweating, and blew kisses as if he'd received an ovation. “Thank you all, thank you, a-a-a-nd now”—a drumroll from Isaiah Two Four—“those maestros of the metallic, direct from a gig at a nudist golf course, where they
barely
escaped with their
balls
, yes let's hear a big Cucumber Lounge welcome, for Billy Barf!. . . and the Vomitones!”

Having learned its audience by now, the band started right off with Billy's own “I'm a Cop,” a three-note blues—

 

Fuck you, mister,

Fuck your sister,

Fuck your brother,

Fuck your mother,

Fuck your pop—

Hey! I'm a cop!

 

Yeah, fuck you, yuppie,

Fuck your puppy,

Fuck your baby,

Fuck your lady,

Yes I can,

Hey! I'm the Man!

 

The crowd, reacting to this as if it were gospel singing, hollered back, clapping and footstomping, “How true!” and “I can relate to that, rilly!”

Zoyd, beard gone and hair shorter, lurking around the back of the room disguised as the Marquis de Sod's idea of an ordinary Joe, including the loan of a necktie from the Marquis's own unfailingly hideous collection, was a little sensitive at the moment on the subject of police, so all he did was nod along with the bass line. Under terms of a new Comprehensive Forfeiture Act that Reagan was about to sign into law any minute now, the government had filed an action in civil court against Zoyd's house and land. He'd been up there a few times just to have a look, getting close enough to hear the sound of his own television set from inside his house. Federal Dobermans, shortly after whose mealtimes Zoyd had soon learned to arrive, lay behind new chain-link boundaries, blood dreams for the moment less urgent. According to the latest rumor, Zoyd's own dog, Desmond, who'd taken off at the first signs of invasion, had been spotted out by Shade Creek, having lately joined up with a pack of dispossessed pot-planters' dogs from Trinity County who were haunting the local pastures and not above ganging innocent cows at their grazing, an offense that could carry a penalty of death by deer rifle. More for Zoyd to be anxious about.

Leaving only a couple of marshals to guard the house, most of Brock's troops had departed after terrorizing the neighborhood for weeks, running up and down the dirt lanes in formation chanting “War-on-drugs! War-on-drugs!” strip-searching folks in public, killing dogs, rabbits, cats, and chickens, pouring herbicide down wells that couldn't remotely be used to irrigate dope crops, and acting, indeed, as several neighbors observed, as if they had invaded some helpless land far away, instead of a short plane ride from San Francisco.

Starting with a small used trailer shaped like a canned ham and a drilled well that he'd had to find a pump for, working by himself or with friends, using lumber found washed up on the beaches, scavenged off the docks, brought home from old barns he helped take down, Zoyd had kept adding on over the years—a room for Prairie, a kitchen, a bathroom, a tree house built among four redwoods that grew down the hill, set level with the loft in the house and connected to it by a rope bridge. A lot of it was nowhere near up to code, especially the plumbing, a sure cause of indigestion, running to many different sizes of pipe, including the prehistoric
⁵
/
₈
-inch, and requiring transition fittings and adapter pieces that could take whole days at swap meets or even at the great Crescent City Dump to find. While he lived in the house, he'd thought of it, when he did, as a set of problems waiting to get serious enough to claim his time. But now—it was like a living thing he loved, whose safety he feared for. He'd begun to have terrifying dreams in which he would come around a curve in the road and find the place in flames, too late to save, the smell of more than wood destroyed and sent forever to ash, to the blackness behind the flames. . . .

When the set ended, Zoyd headed outdoors with Isaiah Two Four, Van Meter ducking out from under the bar to join them. They went out in back to Van Meter's place and stood on the porch smoking, with the usual full-scale kvetchathon proceeding spiritedly inside. “Briefly,” Zoyd addressed the high-rise drummer, “Van Meter has some folks lined up, now what we need is something they can express themselves with, preferably with a full-automatic option.”

“There's this bunch of little Finnish knockoffs of a AK that shoot .22's I know I can get a price on, but somebody'll have to do the kit conversions besides going down to Contra Costa and pickin' 'm up. . . .”

“The Sisters have their headquarters in Walnut Creek,” Van Meter twinkled, “so no prob.” He referred to the Harleyite Order, a male motorcycle club who for tax purposes had been reconstituted as a group of nuns. Van Meter had run across them in the course of his quest after the transcendent, and been immediately surprised and impressed by the spirituality they all seemed to radiate. Taking as their text the well-known graffito “If they won't let Harleys into Heaven, we'll ride them straight to Hell,” the Sisters pursued lives of exceptional, though antinomian, purity. They went on as before with all the drug and alcohol abuse, violence symbolic and real, sexual practices upon which Mrs. Grundy has been known to frown, and an unqualified hatred of authority at all levels, but with every act now transfigured, the vital difference being Jesus, the First Biker, according to Sister Vince, the Order's theologian.

“You might say, no bikes back then,” wimple askew, passing Van Meter a bottle of supermarket tequila he'd been using to chase some barbiturate capsules, “but hey—how'd he get around out in the desert? Why do you think they call it Moto
cross
, dude?” and so forth, till drowsiness overtook his thoughts. Van Meter still kept in touch, was happy to fix them up with Zoyd and his scheme, though doubts lingered.

“Sure this is the best way, now, to go about it, Z Dub? All's they have to do's kill you to solve
their
problem, and this could be makin' it easier.”

“Why I thought I'd bring some backup . . . you saying they might not want to do it now?”

“The Sisters? they don't give a shit. Their club tattoo says ‘Full of Grace.' They believe whatever they do, it's cool with Jesus, including armed insurrection against the government, which, I'm no lawyer, but I think is the technical name for this.”

“I'll ask Elmhurst.” Zoyd's lawyer, who'd inherited his father's practice and role as North Coast attorney for the damned, had taken Zoyd's case without asking for a fee, prophetically fearing that this civil RICO weapon would be the prosecutorial wave of the future and figuring that he might as well get educated now. It had still been an effort for Zoyd to go in and see him. According to Vato Gomez, one of the heavy-dutiest of Mexican curses goes, “May your life be full of lawyers.” Zoyd had come to consider the “legal system” a swamp, where a man had to be high-flotation indeed not to be sucked down forever into its snake-infested stench. Elmhurst cheerfully admitted that this was the case. “Am I complaining? Do plumbers complain about shit?” Not only did he look like something shoplifted from a toy department, but his tone of voice likewise suggested Saturday morning more than prime time. Zoyd observed the furry hand emerging from the lawyer's tweed sleeve, resting on a shaggy winter-cowhide briefcase covered with straps and buckles, bought years ago on layaway at some Berkeley leather store. Even the twinkle in this small-sized and potentially crazy attorney's
eye
was furry.

“You, uh, look eager,” Zoyd remarked. “Done many of these?”

“The law's brand-new, the intentions behind it are as old as power. I specialize in abuses of power, I'm good, I'm fast, I enjoy it.”

“My dentist talks like that. This will be fun.” Resisting the impulse to stroke Elmhurst's head, Zoyd tried to smile.

The burden of proof, Elmhurst explained, would be reversed here—to get his property back, Zoyd would first have to prove his innocence.

“What about ‘innocent till proven guilty'?”

“That was another planet, think they used to call it America, long time ago, before the gutting of the Fourth Amendment. You were automatically guilty the minute they found that marijuana growing on your land.”

“Wait—I wasn't growin' nothin'.”

“They say you were. Duly sworn officers of the law, wearing uniforms, packing guns, bound to uphold the Constitution, you think men like that would lie?”

“Glad you're not charging any money for this. How can we win?”

“Get lucky with the right judge.”

“Sounds like Vegas.”

The lawyer shrugged. “That's because life is Vegas.”

“Oboy,” Zoyd groaned, “I've got worse trouble here than I've ever had, and I'm hearing ‘Life is Vegas'?”

Elmhurst's eyes moistened, and his lips began to tremble. “Y-You mean . . . life
isn't
Vegas?”

Making his way back into the Cuke, Zoyd ran smack into Hector, who ID'd him immediately, so much for disguises, and was so eager to announce “I just saw yer ol' lady, man!” that he missed his mouth with the cigar he was holding, nearly singeing the beard of a logger next to him, which could easily have meant a major detour off his freeway of life. “A-And accordin to my Thanatoid sources, your kid otta be in Shade Creek about now.”

“All I need's my mother-in-law,” Zoyd bantering, still not absorbing the facts he was hearing.

“Now you mention it—” To the great delight of Sid Liftoff, who'd known her since their days as regulars at Musso and Frank's, and a senior gaffer who'd worked with Hub, Sasha had come wheeling into the valet parking at the Vineland Palace in a Cadillac the size of a Winnebago and painted some vivid fingernail-polish color, alighting and sweeping into the lobby a step and a half ahead of her companion, Derek, considerably younger and paler, with a buzz cut that nearly matched the car, an English accent, and a guitar case he was never seen to open, picked up on the highway between here and the Grand Canyon, where she'd parted from her current romantic interest, Tex Wiener, after an epic screaming exchange right at the edge, and on impulse decided to attend that year's Traverse-Becker get-together up in Vineland, leaving Tex on foot among the still-bouncing echoes of their encounter, which had brought tourist helicopters nudging in for a closer look, distracted ordinarily surefooted mules on the trail below into quick shuffle-ball-changes along the rim of Eternity, proceeded through a sunset that was the closest we get to seeing God's own jaundiced and bloodshot eyeball, looking back at us without much enthusiasm, then on into the night arena of a parking lot so dangerously tilted that even with your hand brake set and your wheels chocked, your short could still end up a mile straight down, its trade-in value seriously diminished. She'd been fooled, once again, by the uniform, a bright silver custom jumpsuit with racing stripes, flames, and a shoulder patch discreetly reading “Tex Wiener Ecole de Pilotage.”

And perhaps about to be by Derek, a terminal sobriety case who favored leather, metal, Nazoid regalia, and the attitude that went with them, whose longest sentence was “Weww—it's oow rubbish, i'n' i'?” The perversity of the attraction made Sasha stretch and shiver, so she had little else on her mind as they went wandering into the Vineland Palace's Bigfoot Room, where she and her daughter, Frenesi, as guests at the same hotel often do, came face-to-face.

Though Ernie and Sid had done their best in advance to cushion the shock, it was still an instant off the scale, from which neither woman would return to the world she had left. Sasha looked younger than either could remember, and Frenesi glowed like a cheap woodstove. They sat in a Naugahyde booth beside a wall covered in red-and-gold-flocked wallpaper, so unwilling to break eye contact, as if one of them might disappear, that Derek, made weird by such intensity, withdrew to the solitude of the men's toilet and was never heard from again. “Did they scream?” Hector tried to debrief Sid, “cry, hug? C'mon, Sid.”

Sid grinned with movie avuncularity. “They danced.”

“Yeah, they jitterbugged,” said Ernie.

“The piano player knew a lot of old swing tunes. ‘Polka Dots and Moonbeams,' ‘In the Mood,' ‘Moonlight Serenade.' . . .”

“Huh,” said Hector, “Too bad we can't use it. But screamín, and confrontations, is much better, actresses love that shit.”

“You're right, Hector,” Sid and Ernie replied, in harmony.

Early in the morning Sasha dreamed that Frenesi, perhaps under a sorcerer's spell, was living in a melon patch, as a melon, a smooth golden ellipsoid, on which images of her eyes, dimly, could just be made out. At a certain time each month, just at the full moon, she would be able, by the terms of the spell, to open her eyes and see the moon, the light, the world . . . but each time, in some unexplained despair, would only cast her gaze down and to the side, away, and close her eyes again, and for another cycle she could not be rescued. Her only hope was for Sasha to find her at the exact moment she opened her eyes, and kiss her, and so, after a wait in the fragrant moonlight, it came about, a long, passionate kiss of freedom, a grandmother on her knees in a melon patch, kissing a young pale melon, under a golden pregnant lollapalooza of a moon.