Vineland (50 page)

“Hello, Prairie. You know who I am, don't you?”

She pretended to find something in the bag. “This is a buck knife. If you don't—”

“But Prairie, I'm your father. Not Wheeler—me. Your real Dad.”

Nothing that hadn't occurred to her before—still, for half a second, she began to go hollow, before remembering who she was. “But you can't be my father, Mr. Vond,” she objected, “my blood is type A. Yours is Preparation H.”

By the time Brock figured out the complex insult, he was also feeling mixed signals through the cable that held him. Suddenly, some white male far away must have wakened from a dream, and just like that, the clambake was over. The message had just been relayed by radio from field headquarters down at the Vineland airport. Reagan had officially ended the “exercise” known as REX 84, and what had lain silent, undocumented, forever deniable, embedded inside. The convoys were to pack up and return to their motor pools, the mobile prosecution teams to disband, all the TDY's in the task forces to return to their regular commands, including Brock, his authorizations withdrawn, now being winched back up, protesting all the way, bearings and brake pads loudly shrieking, trying to use his remote but overridden by Roscoe at the main controls.

They fought about it through the flight back down to VLX, Roscoe, the career counselor, pointing out the virtues of obedience and patience, and Brock screaming, “Asshole, they're all together, one surgical strike, we can't just let them get away. . . .” He seemed to calm down after landing, but hung around his command helicopter awhile, suddenly produced a service revolver, got in the pilot's seat, and prepared to ascend.

“OK, have it your way, Brock,” Roscoe hollered as the Huey started to rise, too loud for Brock to hear anymore, “but I can't guarantee you Ed Meese is gonna like it!” but by then he was gone, following his penis—what else could it be?—into the night clouds over Vineland.

As, meanwhile, gently, the trees around her, the spruces tall and massive, the alders slenderer, quicker, began, in a stirring of breeze, to dance together, a sight she'd grown up with out her old bedroom window, these particular partners, Prairie was joined in the clearing by a young man so blond and by the standards of her generation foxy-looking that at first she suspected UFO involvement. He had heard the bladebeats and her shouting, and was carrying by its neck an old acoustic guitar with Cyrillic stenciling on it, as if he'd been prepared to use it as a weapon. His name was Alexei, and he was on liberty from a Russian fishing boat that had had to put into Vineland for some emergency repairs to its generator. “You're defecting?” Prairie asked.

He laughed. “Looking for American rock and roll. You know Billy Barf and Vomitones?” Did she. “Very famous in Soviet Union. You know '83 Garage Tapes?”

“Yeah, they put 'em in a big peanut-butter jar, sealed and waterproofed it, dropped it off the Old Thumb jetty into the ocean, you mean—”

“Got much airplay in Vladivostok. I learn all solos of Billy, Meathook too.
Bolshoi metallisti.
Can you take me where they are? I would like to sit in.”

The Movie at Nine, more than the usual basketball epic, was a story of transcendent courage on the part of the gallant but doomed L.A. Lakers, as they struggled under hellish and subhuman conditions at Boston Garden against an unscrupulous foe, hostile referees, and fans whose behavior might have shamed their mothers had their mothers not been right there, screaming epithets, ruining Laker free throws, sloshing beer on their children in moments of high emotion, already. To be fair, the producers had tried their best to make the Celtics look good. Besides Sidney Poitier as K. C. Jones, there was Paul McCartney, in his first acting role, as Kevin McHale, with Sean Penn as Larry Bird. On the Laker side were Lou Gossett, Jr., as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Douglas as Pat Riley, and Jack Nicholson as himself. Vato and Blood, who were watching this down at the garage in Vineland, being both passionate Laker fans, had to find something else to bicker about. “Say Blood,” Blood remarked, aggressively, “some righteous-looking shades Jack's wearing tonight.”

Vato snorted. “You wear them for workín on mufflers, Vato, lookit 'em, they ain' even big enough to cover his eyeballs.”

“What's that you're wearing on your own face, Blood? What do you use them for, messin' with Contras?—Whoo!” both of them distracted for a minute as Lou Gossett, Jr., appeared to execute a perfect skyhook.

It was a slow night, no calls all through the picture, by the harrowing conclusion of which Vato and Blood had used up a box of Man-Size Kleenexes between them. Close to midnight they got a phone call. Vato took it and hung up blinking and shaking his head. “You know who it was, don't you.”

“If it's more heartbreak, Blood, don't tell me.”

“It's Brock Vond, man. In person. His Huey's on the hillside, his ride is in the creek.”

“Time to lock and load, Blood.”

“Let's hit it, Vato.”

Brock had been vague over the phone about how he'd started off in a helicopter and ended up in a car. He hadn't been aware of any transition. But it had been an unusual sort of car, almost without compression, unable to get over any but the easiest grades until at last it slowed to a halt and would start no more. And there was the telephone beside the road, and the lighted sign said
DO IT
, so he had picked up, and there was Vato at the other end. He felt in some way detached, unable to focus or, oddly, to remember much before he found himself at the wheel of the failing, unfamiliar car, whose battery now finally went dead as the headlamps dimmed weakly into darkness.

At last he saw the lights in the distance, like running lights of a ship out on the sea . . . there was nothing else in the landscape by now—Brock could scarcely see the road. The F350,
El Mil Amores
, came nearer and louder, and finally stopped for him.

“Hop in, Blood.”

“What about the car?”

“What car?”

Brock looked around but couldn't see the car anywhere. He climbed in next to Blood and they started off along the nearly lightless road. Soon the surface changed to dirt, and trees began to press in on either side. As he drove, Vato told an old Yurok story about a man from Turip, about five miles up the Klamath from the sea, who lost the young woman he loved and pursued her into the country of death. When he found the boat of Illa'a, the one who ferried the dead across the last river, he pulled it out of the water and smashed out the bottom with a stone. And for ten years no one in the world died, because there was no boat to take them across.

“Did he get her back?” Brock wanted to know. No, uh-uh. But he returned to his life in Turip, where everyone thought he'd died, and became famous, and told his story many times. He was always careful to warn against the Ghosts' Trail leading to Tsorrek, the land of death, traveled by so many that it was already chest-deep. Once down under the earth, there would be no way to return. As he stared out the window, Brock realized that around them all this time had been rising a wall of earth each side of the narrowing road, in which tree roots twisted overhead now, and mud, once glistening, had grown darker, till only its smell was present. And soon, ahead, came the sound of the river, echoing, harsh, ceaseless, and beyond it the drumming, the voices, not chanting together but remembering, speculating, arguing, telling tales, uttering curses, singing songs, all the things voices do, but without ever allowing the briefest breath of silence. All these voices, forever.

Across the river Brock could see lights, layer after layer, crookedly ascending, thickly crowded dwellings, heaped one on the other. In the smoking torch- and firelight he saw people dancing. An old woman and an old man approached. The man carried objects in his hands that Brock couldn't make out clearly. Then he began to notice, all around in the gloom, bones, human bones, skulls and skeletons. “What is it?” he asked. “Please.”

“They'll take out your bones,” Vato explained. “The bones have to stay on this side. The rest of you goes over. You look a lot different, and you move funny for a while, but they say you'll adjust. Give these third-worlders a chance, you know, they can be a lotta fun.”

“So long, Brock,” said Blood.

The word was out immediately on the Thanatoid grapevine, causing Takeshi and DL to be summoned back from a midnight raid on a local egg ranch, where Takeshi had been planning to steal a sackful of chicken feed for the high-productivity amphetamines it contained, since, with his intake a little higher than usual this week, he'd run out of
shabu
once again—suddenly his pager went off and two thousand chickens started to squawk and carry on, bell and siren alarms kicked in, and the two culprits had to run for it. Back at the Zero Inn, they found a party going on, a lot of gloating, Weed drinking mango daiquiris and trying on different kinds of hats, Ortho Bob sitting in with the band and also singing, though nothing slower tonight than “Your Cheatin' Heart.”

Takeshi and DL, crankless, took a turn around the dance floor. “The kid—you miss her, I bet!”

“Readin' my mind, T'kesh.”

“Why don't you—go on up there and visit! Ten-minute drive!”

“Yeah—try fifteen years.”

“No more Brock,
ne?
Good opportunity!”

Had it only been, as she'd begun to fear, that many years of what the Buddha calls “passion, enmity, folly”? Suppose that she'd been meant, all the time, to be paying attention to something else entirely? Two or three years ago, in Trans-Am mode, out following an intricate Thanatoid trail from one oilpatch bank account to another, on impulse they'd made a loop through East Texas and into Houston to visit her mother, Norleen, who took DL aside first chance they got and, pretending to help load the dishwasher, started raving about Takeshi, his looks, charm, and sophistication. “It's that glamour job you always wanted,” so unironic that DL was surprised to feel a little wave of tenderness.

“But Mama,” gently, “there is a good chance he's crazy. I know he's got all kinds of people after him, and some others he won't even tell me about. For years now, I've been his accomplice in . . . I don't know what you'd call it, a life of international crime? . . .”

“The Lord gives us these difficulties to be overcome, Darryl Louise, it's just called gettin' on with your life. Why, anyone at all can see how he needs you, and adores you, and my gracious—he looks just like a Jap Robert Redford! I think the one that's crazy's you.”

DL couldn't quite bring herself, then or later, to tell her mother, who did keep asking, any of the details of how they'd met—no Japanese whorehouses or Vibrating Palms—nor of his resurrection by Puncutron Machine, nor their yearly visits back to the Retreat of the Kunoichi Attentives to be checked out and to roll over the partnership agreement—none of that. She understood that if she ever started to tell the tale, why sooner or later the matter of the no-sex clause would emerge and Norleen's kindly dreaming be perhaps fatally contradicted, only earning DL her mother's contempt. Why get into it? But that turned out to be the year she and Takeshi finally renegotiated the no-sex clause, and DL found out what she'd been missing those other years. “Whooee!” is how she expressed it.

“Oriental love magic!” Takeshi wiggling his eyeglasses, which he had not removed, at her languidly, “right?”

Hmm, not exactly, but intense enough to make her curious. “Takeshi, I didn't know you felt like this. . . . I didn't know
I
felt like this. What's going on?” Even after the clause change, it had taken them days' travel, back on I-40 again, to get around to this, and if she hadn't been so off-balance she probably wouldn't be asking. They were in a penthouse suite high over Amarillo, up in the eternal wind, with the sun just set into otherworld transparencies of yellow and ultraviolet, and other neon-sign colors coming on below across the boundless twilit high plain, and she was watching him now with newly cleansed attention, her light-bearing hair, against the simplicity out the window, a fractal halo of complications that might go on forever . . . one of those moments men are always being urged to respond to with care and sensitivity.

But Takeshi was cackling, “You—should have been there the first time, Toots—you wouldn't have to ask!” Far from ever being offended, Takeshi continued to find it amusing that she'd been so focused on murdering Brock that night in Tokyo that she'd completely missed the sex part. And according to Sister Rochelle, that Brock obsession, appearing like a cop cruiser in the dark sooner or later down every roadway her life took, had also been afflicting DL's spirit, acting as a major obstacle, this time around, to fulfilling her true karmic project.

“Which is?” DL had had the boldness to inquire.

“Oh, the usual journey from point A to point B. But what if this disagreeable little gent was never any destination at all, only the means of transport, maybe only some ticket, one the conductor even forgot to punch?” Another koan to drive DL crazier, just what she needed.

As for Takeshi, the Head Ninjette had managed to corner him while he was on the Puncutron Machine, all hooked up with no escape, and while an inkjet printer moved along the meridians of his naked skin, laying down trigger-point labels in different colors, adding reference numbers and Chinese ideograms, and a Senior Ninjette Puncutech stood by with an ivory fescue, noting and commenting to a small bevy of teen novices, all in white
gi
with trainee armbands, Sister Rochelle, as so often in the past, now socked Takeshi with another of her allegories, this time about Hell. “When the Earth was still a paradise, long long ago, two great empires, Hell and Heaven, battled for its possession. Hell won, and Heaven withdrew to an appropriate distance. Soon citizens of the Lower Realm were flocking up to visit Occupied Earth on group excursion fares, swarming in their asbestos touring cars and RV's all over the landscape, looking for cheap-labor bargains in the shops, taking pictures of each other in a blue and green ambience that didn't register on any film you could buy down in Hell—till the novelty wore off, and the visitors began to realize that Earth was just like home, same traffic conditions, unpleasant food, deteriorating environment, and so forth. Why leave home only to find a second-rate version of what they were trying to escape? So the tourist business began to dwindle, and then the Empire was calling back first its administrators and soon even its troops, as if drawing inward, closer to its own chthonian fires. After a while, the tunnel entrances began to grow over, blur, and disappear behind poison oak and berry bushes, get covered by landslides, silted up in floods, till only a few lone individuals—children, neighborhood idiots—now and then would stumble on one, out in a deserted place, but dare inside only as far as the first turnings and loss of outdoor light. And then all the gateways to Hell were finally lost to sight, surviving only in local tales handed down the generations, sad recitals that asked why the visitors never came anymore, and if they would again, stories as congested and dark as UFO stories are ethereal and luminous. And always shamefaced, with an air not of UFO elation but of guilt, at having somehow not been good enough for them, the folks who lived in Hell. So, over time, Hell became a storied place of sin and penitence, and we forgot that its original promise was never punishment but reunion, with the true, long-forgotten metropolis of Earth Unredeemed.”