Vineland (48 page)

Prairie, meanwhile, was wandering around gaga. The easiest way for her to see her mother at last would be to show up at the Traverse-Becker reunion. Just be there. “But I don't know if I want to anymore,” she told DL.

“Know the feeling,” DL confessed. They were all sitting in the booth at the Zero Inn that had been DL and Takeshi's Amen Corner ever since the early days of their practice here. There had been redecorating since, and outside talent was getting booked in with some regularity these days, tonight's being a band up from the East Bay called Holocaust Pixels, on a return visit, actually, being chartbusters around Shade Creek with their recent “Like a Meat Loaf.” As if doing a mike check, the bass player leaned in and sang,

 

Like a meat loaf. . . .

 

The accordion player joined him—

 

Like a meat loaf. . . .

 

Then the electric violinist, making it three-part harmony,

 

Like a meat loaf for, your, lunch. . . .

 

As they hovered on the about-to-be-resolved seventh, the place erupted in cheers and tabletop-beerglass percussion, and then the accordionist took the vocal.

 

Like a meat loaf in, a lunch-box,

Like monkeys in, a grave,

We went among the Vietnamese,

Some souls for to save. . . .

Them souls did some scufflin'

Uh them uh monkeys, did too,

‘Twas your bleedin' feedin' time, at the zoo.

 

Clapping and stomping, these Thanatoids tonight were acting rowdier than DL or Takeshi had ever seen them. Were changes in the wind, or was it only a measure of their long corruption by the down-country world, by way of television? The melody was rooted in Appalachia, in a tradition of hymn and testimony, and the beat was almost—well, lively.

 

So we took in, the Mar-ble Moun-tain,

And the Perfume River too,

Sometimes, we found, a bunch of them,

Sometimes, we missed a few,

And most times, the things, we seen, we didt-

‘N want to see much more than once,

Like the graveyard full of meat loaf,

And monkeys for your lunch. . . .

 

Like a meat loaf,

Like a meat loaf,

Like a meat loaf for, your, lunch. . . .

 

Well we followed our dicks [applause] just a couple o' clicks,

Down the trail, by the bor-derline,

Somebody said, it was 'sixty-eight,

Others said 'sixty-nine [cheering],

But sometimes it felt like neither one, and other

Times it felt like both,

With a grave-box for your lunch meat,

Full of good ol' monkey loaf.

 

Ortho Bob stopped by with Weed Atman, both of them acting chirpy for the first time DL could remember. Prairie felt embarrassed, like she ought to be apologizing for her mom or something.

“Well I was almost you,” Weed informed her.

“Oh, I'm sure.” But Weed explained about the after-death state, the Bardo, with its time limits for finding a new body to be born into—seeking out men and women in the act of sex, looking for a just-fertilized egg, slipping to and fro with needful dim others in a space like a bleak smoke-tarnished district of sex shows and porno theaters, looking for the magical exact film frame through which the dispossessed soul might reenter the world.

“Made the basic error,” Weed confessed, “too much still on my mind, couldn't find 'em, time ran out. So I'm here instead.”

“You knew about me?”

“Thought this might be her strange idea of making it right. A life for a life, zero out the account.”

“So if I'm not you, who am I?”

“Makes you think,” Takeshi nodded, “doesn't it?”

“What are you gonna do to my mom?” Prairie wanted to know. Here he was, after all, even in the peculiar formal getup, bordering on the semigross, that he was wearing, still a cell of memory, of refusal to forgive, sailing like a conscious virus through the population, seeking her out.

But Weed only shrugged. “The condition I'm in? not much. As a Thanatoid one's reduced to hanging around monitoring the situation, trying to nudge if you don't think it's moving along fast enough but basically helpless and, if you give in to it, depressed, too.”

“But if I am the payback? If your account
is
zeroed out at last?”

“It'd depend a lot on who you've turned out to be, and the karmic chits
you've
been accumulating.”

“Little complicated.”

“Easier since Takeshi computerized. Still a danger of collapsing into a single issue, turning into your case, obsessed with those who've wronged you, with their continuing exemption from punishment. . . . Sometimes I lose it, sure, go out in the night, malevolent, mean, and I find your mom and mess with her. She cries, she gets into fights with her husband. So what, I figure, it isn't even the interest on what she owes me. But lately I've just been letting her be . . . figuring, maybe forget, but never forgive.

“I dream—Thanatoids dream, though not always when we think we do—I'm inside a moving train that exists someplace whether I dream it or not, because I keep going back to it, joining it on its journey. . . . I'm conscious, laid out horizontal on some bed of ice, attended by two companions who keep trying, one stop after another, to find a local coroner willing to perform an autopsy on me and reveal to the world at last my murder, my murderers. . . . I can never make out the faces of these other two, though they come in to sit with me now and then. It's always cold, always night, if there is a daytime maybe I sleep through it, I don't know. Out riding on steel too many years, every jurisdiction we come rolling into well notified in advance, each time men in hats, carrying weapons, standing on the platform, waving us on, who only want to swear they never saw us. In the face of this, the devotion of my two remembrancers, town to town, year after year, is extraordinary. They live on club-car coffee, cigarettes, and snack food, play a lot of bid whist, and argue like theologians over Brock's motives in wanting me, you'd have to say, iced. ‘It was all for love,' says one, and ‘Bullshit,' the other replies, ‘it was political.'. . . ‘A rebel cop, with his own deeply personal agenda.' ‘Only following the orders of a repressive regime based on death.' So forth . . . I hear them late in the rhythmic dark hours, the last of my honor guard, faithful to the last depot, the last turndown.”

Well, “Sounds like DL and Takeshi,” to Prairie.

“Sometimes I think it could be my parents . . . still there, you know, looking out for me, kept going by this belief they always had in some ‘higher justice,' they called it. Their pockets are empty by now, the wind whistles through, their own night rolls on, but they're both as sure as a fixed address, someplace safe and free, that this'll all come out right someday.”

“That case, shouldn't somebody be goin' after that Rex guy, the one who did it?”

“Rex, why? He's only the ceremonial trigger-finger, just a stooge, same as Frenesi. Used to think I was climbing, step by step, right? toward a resolution—first Rex, above him your mother, then Brock Vond, then—but that's when it begins to go dark, and that door at the top I thought I saw isn't there anymore, because the light behind it just went off too.”

He looked so forlorn that by reflex she took his hand. He flinched at her touch, and she was surprised not at the coldness of the hand but at how light it was, nearly weightless. “Would you mind if I. . . came and visited, now and then, you know, at night?”

“I'll keep an eye out for you.” In fact they were soon to become an item around Shade Creek, out to all hours among the milling sleepless of the town, along the smoky indoor promenades lit by shadow-patched fluorescent bulbs, across covered bridges lined with shops and stalls, beneath the many clockfaces beaming from overhead, past Thanatoid dogs lounging in groups, who had learned how to give up wagging their tails and now gestured meaningfully with them instead. Weed would stuff himself with bucket after bucket of popcorn, Prairie would show him secrets of pachinko, seldom if ever would either talk about Frenesi, whom Prairie had managed at last to meet. Unable after all to stay away from the Traverse-Becker wingding, in the course of saying hello again to faces she hadn't seen for a year, she got roped into the traditional nonstop crazy eights game, whose stakes were as low as the atmosphere was meanspirited. Distantly related sleazoids and the occasional megacreep drew from the bottom of the stock, stole from the kitty, signaled confederates in belching and farting codes, and tried to mark decks with nosepickings, their own and others'. So far the two big winners were Prairie and her uncle Pinky, looking sinister in a shapeless Ban-Lon leisure suit that might once long ago have been a brighter shade of pea-green. When Sasha came around to put her head in the Airstream, he was out of diamonds and Prairie was playing them, forcing him to draw. In some doubt as well were the whereabouts of the Mother of Doom, as the spade queen was known in the Octomaniac community. Uncle Pinky thought it was in the stock, but Prairie thought her cousin Jade had it.

“Dimple check!” her grandmother called. Prairie had to ask her to wait until the Mother situation had been resolved, finally risking an eight and calling spades, whereupon at last She emerged, looking mean as ever and obliging Uncle P. to draw five more cards, which, valiantly though he played on, proved to be one card too many.

Outside the trailer with Sasha was a woman about forty, who had been a girl in a movie, and behind its cameras and lights, heavier than Prairie expected, sun damage in her face here and there, hair much shorter and to the cognizant eye drastically in need of styling mousse, though how Prairie could bring the subject up wasn't clear to her.

Sasha, still giddy with her own daughter's return, tried to clown them through it. “Commere lemme check those dimples, yes
there
, they
are
, and
let
yer
grand,
-ma
check
, for
lint
, she's
just
, the
cute
, -est
lit
- tle
thing!”
—returning her relentlessly to babyhood, squeezing her cheeks together and her mouth up into a circle, pushing one way then the other.

“Hnof ikh, Angh-ah!”

“My
own
adorable
grand
child,” slinging the girl's head gently away at last. “I want you to sing the ‘Gilligan's Island' theme for your mother,” she commanded.

“Grandma!”

“First time she ever noticed the Tube, remember, Frenesi? A tiny thing, less than four months old—‘Gilligan's Island' was on, Prairie, and your eyes may've been a little unfocused yet, but you sat there, so serious, and watched the whole thing—”

“
Stop
, I-don't-want-to-hear-this—”

“— after that, whenever the show came on, you'd smile and gurgle and rock back and forth, so cute, like you wanted to climb inside the television set, and right onto that
Island
—”

“Please—” She looked to Frenesi for help, but her mother looked as bewildered as she felt.

“You could sing the lyrics before you were three,
all of
'
em!
in this little babbling voice, with little gestures, the lightning bolt—‘Boom!' you'd go—‘If not for the courage of the fearless crew . . . ,' swinging those chubby fists back and forth, modulating each time around, just like a little lounge vocalist.”

“All right all right!” cried Prairie. “I'll sing it.” She looked around. “Does it have to be out in public like this?”

“It's OK,” said Frenesi, “I think it's her way of trying to help.” She grabbed Sasha, pretending to shake her back to sanity.

“Rilly. Sorry, Grandma.” The girl followed them to a beer and soda cooler beneath an oak tree, where they would sit and hang out for hours, spinning and catching strands of memory, perilously reconnecting—as all around them the profusion of aunts, uncles, cousins, and cousins' kids and so on, themselves each with a story weirder than the last, creatively improved over the years, came and went, waving corncobs in the air, dribbling soda on their shirts, swaying or dancing to the music of Billy Barf and the Vomitones, while the fragrance of barbecue smoke came drifting down from the pits where Traverse and Becker men stood in a line, a dozen of them, in matching white chef's hats, behind fires smoking with dripped fat, tending great cuts of beef executed by assault rifle and chain-sawed on the spot in some raid off a steep pasture between here and Montana, beside some moonless dirt road, dressed out, wrapped, ready for the fire. A squad of kids stood by with squirt bottles full of secret marinades and sauces, which they shot from time to time as the meat went turning, and the magical coatings clung, flowed, fell, smoked, rose, seared. Soon Traverses and Beckers were filling up the benches at the long redwood tables, as the potato salad and bean casseroles and fried chicken started to appear, along with pasta dishes and grilled tofu contributed by younger elements, and the eating, which would continue into the night, got under way with some earnestness. It was the heart of this gathering meant to honor the bond between Eula Becker and Jess Traverse, that lay beneath, defined, and made sense of them all, distributed from Marin to Seattle, Coos Bay to downtown Butte, choker setters and choppers, dynamiters of fish, shingle weavers and street-corner spellbinders, old and beaten at, young and brand-new, they all kept an eye on the head of the table, where Jess and Eula sat together, each year smaller and more transparent, waiting for Jess's annual reading of a passage from Emerson he'd found and memorized years ago, quoted in a jailhouse copy of
The Varieties of Religious Experience
, by William James. Frail as the fog of Vineland, in his carrying, pure voice, Jess reminded them,” ‘Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil.'” He had a way of delivering it that always got them going, and Eula wouldn't take her eyes off him. “And if you don't believe Ralph Waldo Emerson,” added Jess, “ask Crocker ‘Bud' Scantling,” the head of the Lumber Association whose life of impunity for arranging to drop the tree on Jess had ended abruptly down on 101 not far from here when he'd driven his week-old BMW into an oncoming chip truck at a combined speed of about 150. It'd been a few years now, but Jess still found it entertaining.