Vineland (23 page)

This was about the lab and the footprint, of course—a deliberate leak to the
Meteor
and who knew where else. Takeshi tried to be cheerful. “At least they—didn't ID you!”

“You missin' a brain lobe, Takeshi? They're tryin' to smoke us out's what the message is, is that they'll go easy on me if I just turn you, got it, ya sleazy ol' Nip grease-job ya?”

He looked around frantically for the nearest drug, which turned out to be a recently mixed frozen mai tai, left unattended on a nearby table. “Wait a minute!” She grabbed his arm in midlurch. “Nobody drinks 'at shit fer breakfast, that could be a yakuza frappé right there.” Appreciating her concern, Takeshi reached for DL's leg. “On second thought, drink right up, I keep forgetting, suicide used to be your old lifestyle.”

She was referring to what he had a way of calling his “interesting work with airplanes” during World War II. “Though to be frank,” she continued, “I can't imagine you in anybody's air force, let alone the kamikaze, who, I understand from the history books, were fairly picky about who flew for 'em.”

“Lighten up! This'll all be—great advertising!”

“That thick head,” she advised, “could be in some telescopic sight right now.”

He lifted his shades, looking serious. “Getting you in trouble—it was never in my plans, DL-san. Maybe you should start to think—about beaming out of this,
ne?
”

She ran a hand through her hair, gave him a look. “Can't.”

“It's a black hole! It's taken away thirty years of my life! I don't want it—to drag you in!”

“It's my job—I can't back out.”

“Sounds like my—ex-wife!” He looked around, pretending to be crazy. “
Domo komarimashita!
What did I do, get married again and forget about it already?”

“You—” she could not believe this, “loudmouth and fool. Sister Rochelle plus a trained Oriental Medicine Team brought you back from the fuckin'
dead,
you twit, you think they go around doin' that for free? I'm your doctor bill, bright boy, you pay by havin' me in your life day in and day out, the person who once murdered you, OK, attached to you now by bonds of obligation far beyond what you, a disgrace to the folks who invented
giri,
can grasp, it seems.”

Unflinching Takeshi, in what he hoped would not be taken as anything but the sociable gesture he meant it as, had been oscillating his eyeballs back and forth between DL's tits, which happened to be at the same altitude as his face.

“Enjoyin' yourself, aren't you, Takeshi. Mm, I'm happy for ya, you know, yes times like these, makes a gal want to, I don't know, forget all her ninjette vows?”

“Yes, yes?”

“And kill!” A few heads at nearby tables turned expectantly. Though sagging wasn't part of DL's job description, nevertheless how she'd love to just turn to liquid, relax—instead, since she'd been with Takeshi down here, she hadn't been able to sit and get into even the dustless-mirror phase before some other bullshit crisis would have her paged back once again out of the anterooms of clarity, back down the many levels to a malodorous, cheaply lit, nowhere-up-to-code assortment of spaces, one of which always had to include Takeshi or a situation he'd created, while he, guru of karmic adjustment, was out taking care of what he imagined to be business, and whilst she, mistress of invisibility, suffered but would, did, not cry after her lost simplicity—only desired it, as an insomniac might lust for sweet, potent sleep.

They went out of the restaurant and down a long viny arcade, among invisible birds and dew that still lay in the shadows, to their conference room. The little portable sign read
OPEN KARMOLOGY CLINIC, WALK RIGHT IN, NO APPT. NECESSARY.
Takeshi wore a suit and tie, DL a made-to-measure
gi
of raw silk from the Burlington Arcade in Nathan Road, Kowloon. They worked at a long banquet table set on a low platform among giant multicolored plastic houseplants that might've been alien moldmakers' whims, for nobody who saw them could really identify them, and in front of a mural-size map of Vineland County, flanked by U.S. and California flags on flagstands. There was a portable chalkboard, a coffee mess, a mike and amp. Takeshi and DL listened, taped, asked questions, took notes, trying for an image of informal gravity.

Waiting for them this morning were towaway teammates Vato and Blood, whom they'd met in the parking lot of the Woodbine Motel, late at night, thundering along in low in a Custom Deluxe named
Mi Vida Loca
, searching for likely units. The boys, when Takeshi and DL had appeared in their headlights, had been “scaling” the cars in this lot, as timber scalers will go through a piece of forest to estimate how many board feet of lumber it contains. Their task would seem to've been straightforward—simply choose, for towing away, the highest-priced rides first. But it depended, as either partner would've been quick to explain, on the
make
of high-priced ride—a Rolls Royce owner, for instance, would know how to turn the bothersome chore of redeeming his automobile into a lighthearted adventure, cheerfully paying all the exorbitant fees, some invented on the spot, and throwing in a big tip besides. On the other hand, towing away any Mercedes, even in the short run, was a losing proposition. No Mercedes driver would ever show up at V & B Tow at three in the morning in any mood for fun. Vato and Blood had recently been to a workshop down at a spa in Marin on this very subject, “Interpersonal Programming and the Problem Towee,” in which the point had been made more than once that a Mercedes driver in redeeming his impounded ride shows no better manners than when he drives, trying first thing, in the marque's tradition of never signaling, an unannounced kick in the balls.

“Uh-huh,” DL assured Vato, who, impressed with her looks, had been babbling along with no clear idea what he was saying.

“And sometimes,” Blood now picking it up and directing his remarks to Takeshi, “you know, Doc, some fine units end up in our pound, and the owners never do claim 'm.” He laughed in a make-believe crazy way that Takeshi heard as a
kiai
, or paralyzing scream just before an assault, but Blood only took him by the head and playfully began to twist it back and forth, like a lemon on a lemon squeezer. “Can't have somethin' like that sit around forever,” now in a quieter, strangely intimate tone, “so we price it for quick sale.”

“ ‘It,'” Takeshi between twists, “you keep saying ‘that' and ‘it.' “

“Say like—I'm talkin' about a Ferrari, all right?”

“You talking—about a Ferrari?”

“Was I getting specific?” He flipped Takeshi's head away like an empty lemon rind. “Next you be axkin' me the price.”

“No offense.”

“Sounds like the team I bet on last week,” Vato put in.

“Raight on!” They ran through a Vietnam-style handclasp set to the tune of
2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968), going “Dum, dum, dum,” in harmony, “DAHdahhhh!” slapping a high five, “Dum, dum, dum, daDAHH!” spinning around, slapping palms behind their backs and so forth while Takeshi and DL leaned against the front fenders of the truck, looking on. Vato produced a business card, for which Takeshi by reflex exchanged one of his own, “Allowín you anytime 24 hours to access the V & B Tow Preferred List, which gives a instant update on makes, models, years, conditions, special features.”

“And say Doc,” Blood added, “we also a little sleepy this time of night. . . .”

“Sure!” coming out with a handful of “white diamonds.” And the fellows went on with their night's cruising after accounts towable. But next day they showed up unexpectedly at the Karmology Clinic with some input relating to Vietnam in general and Ortho Bob Dulang in particular, tales of who bought what in the Ton Son Nhut latrine while bats intercepted the legendary oversize mosquitoes, who entered wailing a hot bounded world they might, at the last moment, have recognized, and stoned bat-fishermen cast their hooked lines upward into the dark . . . and who only talked about and who did what to certain officers they all seemed to have in common, and why they had been led into the wrong place, and how many there were when the sun went down and how many when it came up . . . some of it was war stories, some just happy horseshit, and some was the stunned headlong certainty that precedes talking in tongues, though neither Vato nor Blood quite got to that.

As they came to know one another better, as the boys learned about the Death Touch, the Ninjette Retreat, the Puncutron Machine, the year and a day—and in time the rollover of the partnership for yet another year and a day, and so on—they remained among very few who did not offer DL and Takeshi any free advice, though between themselves the story was an object of lively commentary. Vato wanted it to be a sitcom. Whenever the topic came up, he made a point to laugh about it a lot, trying to fill in for a live studio audience.

“ 'Pose it ain't that way,” Blood objected, “maybe it's one them Movies of the Week where the dude has a incurable disease?”

“Nah, the way I like it is, is that she tells him everythín but he never checks any of it out to see if it's true, he just lets 'em all go ahead, fuckín around with needles, electricity, and shit, 'cause why bother, right, he don't know how much time he's got left. And she won't tell him . . . she ain't in the mood, nobody gets inside ten meters of her. Threaten her with a weapon? What if he fucks up and kills her, then he really has a problem.”

Takeshi had in fact tried to entertain this upbeat scenario, though it hadn't entertained him much because he couldn't help seeing how wishful it was. What if, wild and unreasonable hope, she'd only been putting him on all the time, and this was her eccentric, even weird idea of flirting with him? Most of the time he couldn't believe she'd really Done It to him, because even this long way down the line he still had trouble believing in his own death. If she'd killed him, why stick around? If she hadn't, why put him, a complete stranger, through all this? It was driving him toward what, in fairly close to it now, he could detect as some state of literally mindless joy. There was no way he knew of to experience such joy and at the same time keep his mind. He wasn't sure this might not be her real mission—to make of his life a koan, or unsolvable Zen puzzle, that would send him purring into transcendence.

As time went by, that is, he did begin to wonder. But could not ask—she would only evade, turn her head away and smile, not in any sinister way but with a child's secretive semipro glaze, longing—though she only told him years later of how she used it to get her through—for the Retreat, the cloudy ridge, the high dark walls, where she could nest for a while with the others—not crippled sparrows but birds of prey, ragged from the storm, tired from the hunt, in for a little R and R—longing for the mountains, much as she'd once romantically imagined about her old teacher Inoshiro Sensei. This is what he had prepared her for—to inherit his own entanglement in the world, and now, with this perhaps demented Karmology hustle of Takeshi's, with the past as well, and the crimes behind the world, the thousand bloody arroyos in the hinterlands of time that stretched somberly inland from the honky-tonk coast of Now.

Vato and Blood were slouched in folding chairs when Takeshi and DL came in to open up shop, both humming back and forth in a strange free-form antiphony, sometimes falling silent, picking up the tune two and a half bars later exactly together, latently menacing, like a bee swarm. It was the famous V & B Tow Company Theme, based on the Disney cartoon anthem” ‘I'm Chip!'—‘I'm Dale!'” sung originally by a chipmunk act that never quite achieved either the charisma or the recognition of Ross Bagdasarian's trio, Alvin, Simon, and Theodore. In Vietnam, Vato and Blood had worked mostly in the motor pool but now and then had to go out on convoys. In off of what was supposed to be a routine spin through the forests and turned instead into an outstandingly dark and death-laden time, having wandered one afternoon into a cement lounge deep within the Long Binh complex, reeking with attitude, they opened beers and settled in to watch the Tube. Some officer far away had determined that Disney cartoons would be just the right kind of entertainment for them, which was correct, if for the wrong reasons. As other loungers edged nervously away from the boys, suddenly on came Chip 'n' Dale, and an unmistakable flash of recognition. After listening to the chipmunk duo's Theme a couple of times, getting the lyric and tune down, Blood, turning to Vato during a commercial for reenlistment, sang, “I'm Blood,” and Vato immediately piped up, “I'm Vato!” Together, “We just some couple of mu-thuh-fuckkers / Out—” whereupon a disagreement arose, Vato going on with the straight Disney lyric, “Out to have some fun,” while Blood, continuing to depart from it, preferred “Out to kick some ass,” turning immediately to Vato. “What's 'is ‘have some fun' shit?”

“OK, OK, we'll sing ‘kick some ass,' no problem.” Singing, “I'm Vato—”

Still annoyed, “Uh, I'm Blood. . . .”

“We just some couple of—” at which point Vato maliciously sang “crazy bastards” instead of “motherfuckers.” The two broke off and glared at each other. Over the next few years, as they were getting their business going, this was to keep happening—sometimes they managed to get from one end of the song to the other in perfect agreement, but most of the time they did not. The song became a kind of bulletin board for the partnership, a space on which they could hang these variations to remark on questions of the moment and plans of the day. The night before, for example, out in the truck, Blood had been singing, “End up eatin' some fast food that you
know
/ Will taste like shit—” referring to an argument that had been going on all week about where to take the third partner at V & B Tow, Thi Anh Tran, to lunch for her birthday, whose date Blood, the company yenta, had found in her folder. Both agreed it would be a nice surprise, but where to eat? Blood ruled out Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Polynesian. “She don't want to be eatin' that shit, that's all she ever ate over there was zat shit, and exspecially not on her birthday, Blood,” said Blood.