Vineland (51 page)

That was the story, and nearly all she'd cared to send them back out with at the end of that visit—the year the no-sex clause didn't get rolled over, the first year, as black conifers rose behind them into the cloud cover and gone, that it
didn't
feel like a descent—not really a blessing, though you could tell that the Head Ninjette was interested at least in a scientific way in whether the Baby Eros, that tricky little pud-puller, would give or take away an edge regarding the unrelenting forces that leaned ever after the partners into Time's wind, impassive in pursuit, usually gaining, the faceless predators who'd once boarded Takeshi's airplane in the sky, the ones who'd had the Chipco lab stomped on, who despite every Karmic Adjustment resource brought to bear so far had simply persisted, stone-humorless, beyond cause and effect, rejecting all attempts to bargain or accommodate, following through pools of night where nothing else moved wrongs forgotten by all but the direly possessed, continuing as a body to refuse to be bought off for any but the full price, which they had never named. But at least on the night Brock Vond was taken across the river, the night of no white diamonds or even chicken crank, the foreign magician and his blond tomato assistant, out stealing a couple of innocent hours away from the harsh demands of their Act, with its imitations of defiance, nightly and matinees, of gravity and death, only found themselves slowed to a paranoid dancers' embrace at the unquiet center of the roadhouse party crowd, with scarcely a 'Toid here in fact even noticing them, so many kept pouring in, so much was going on. Radio Thanatoid arrived with a remote crew to beam and bounce the proceedings out to the other pockets of Thanatoia here and there in the country of the living, “Direct, though not necessarily live,” as the announcer put it. A tour bus, perhaps only lost in the night, swept in with a wake of diesel exhaust and waited idling for its passengers, some of whom would discover that they were already Thanatoids without knowing it, and decide not to reboard after all. There were free though small-sized eats for everyone, such as mini-enchiladas and shrimp teriyaki, and well drinks at happy-hour prices. And the band, Holocaust Pixels, found a groove, or attractor, that would've been good for the entire trans-night crossing and beyond, even if Billy Barf and the Vomitones hadn't shown up later to sit in, bringing with them Alexei, who turned out to be a Russian Johnny B. Goode, able even unamplified to outwail both bands at once.

Prairie would hear about this the next day, having seen Alexei only as far as the Vomitone van, when she'd regretfully peeled away to return, terrified but obliged, to the clearing where she'd had her visit from Brock Vond. He had left too suddenly. There should have been more. She lay in her sleeping bag, trembling, face up, with the alder and the Sitka spruce still dancing in the wind, and the stars thickening overhead. “You can come back,” she whispered, waves of cold sweeping over her, trying to gaze steadily into a night that now at any turn could prove unfaceable. “It's OK, rilly. Come on, come in. I don't care. Take me anyplace you want.” But suspecting already that he was no longer available, that the midnight summoning would go safely unanswered, even if she couldn't let go. The small meadow shimmered in the starlight, and her promises grew more extravagant as she drifted into the lucid thin layer of waking dreaming, her flirting more obvious—then she'd wake, alert to some step in the woods, some brief bloom of light in the sky, back and forth for a while between Brock fantasies and the silent darkened silver images all around her, before settling down into sleep, sleeping then unvisited till around dawn, with fog still in the hollows, deer and cows grazing together in the meadow, sun blinding in the cobwebs on the wet grass, a redtail hawk in an updraft soaring above the ridgeline, Sunday morning about to unfold, when Prairie woke to a warm and persistent tongue all over her face. It was Desmond, none other, the spit and image of his grandmother Chloe, roughened by the miles, face full of blue-jay feathers, smiling out of his eyes, wagging his tail, thinking he must be home.