Vineland (24 page)

“OK, Vato,” said Vato, “then how about Mexican, take her to Taco Carajo, startín at noon, live strollín mariachis, hot Mexican
antojitas
—”

“Hey maybe you can eat that shit—” The task seemed impossible—every eatery choice carried some risk of offense, and neither wished to call down any Dragon Lady type of curses from the woman who these days held in her exquisite hands every last detail of V & B's finances, including many of interest not only to the IRS but also to organizations that were much less coy about theft. Though they went to elaborate lengths to deny it, Vato and Blood were both afraid of her. In May of '75 they'd found her languishing in Pendleton, along with thousands of others who'd flooded in after the fall of Saigon, but their history went back further, to their wartime association with Gorman (“The Specter”) Flaff's legendary operations in money orders and piasters, into which they had bought at exactly the right moment in the Specter's tangled financial saga to furnish them with the metaphysical edge of seeming to have performed an angelic intervention. In return they gained the superstitious Flaff's confidence, which turned out to include naming them in his will to take over his obligations to Thi Anh Tran.

“Don't remember we ever talked about it, Vato.”

“Nope, we just did it, right?”

“There it is.”

“We owed it to Flaff.”

“Flaff owed it to her.” He'd been springing for her education at one of the Ecoles des Jeunes Filles in Saigon, plus a small allowance check, for reasons there were only rumors about. One story was he'd barbecued her family and felt guilty, but neither part of that sounded much like the old Specter. Few months later, out too close to the wrong woodline, that was it for Gorman. At the base camp a chaplain was holding the letter for Vato and Blood in which the name of Thi Anh Tran first came up. They drank warm Cokes, sat down, Phantoms thundered over the jungle, helicopter blades beat the humid air. Years later, grown up and a certified CPA, there she was in Pendleton, in a 25-person army tent, all processed, just waiting, smoking Kools and listening to AM rock and roll. As a term of their sponsorship, they hired her as their bookkeeper, but soon, recognizing her worth, dealt her in for an equal share of the business. Now she had them both so nervous they'd do anything to avoid upsetting her.

“Say, Blood,” said Blood to Vato, “Vietnamese bitch say she want to talk to you.”

“Uh-oh,” Vato muttered.

“You do somethin' wrong?”

Vato figured it must be that burger and fries he'd put on company plastic. He was in her office for ten minutes, with no sounds of any kind to be heard behind the door. Vato emerged shaking his head. Blood happened to be right there. “Well, uh, how you doin', Blood?”

“That Vietnamese bitch, you know what, she's really somethín,” said Vato.

“You tellin' me? I know that.”

“Yeah this time, she had some pistol, Vato.”

“Pistol. What kind?”

“ChiCom MAC 10.”

“No such thing. She
poinedt
it at you?”

“Who saw it? Did you see it?”

“I didt'n—did you?”

“I
saw
it, Vato.”

After they finally decided to have the birthday luncheon at an upscale soul-food place called Once Upon A Chitlin, the question arose, who was going to ask her? They had to argue for half an hour before agreeing to do it together. But who'd go through first when she called, “Come in”?

“Vietnamese bitch say ‘Come in,'” muttered Blood.

“Well go on ahead,” Vato in a whisper.

“What's 'is ‘go on ahead' shit?”

“Who is it?” called the woman behind the door.

“Us!” hollered the mercurial Vato.

“Shh-
shh
! Who
aksed
you?”

“
She
didt, man—”

The door was opened by Thi Anh Tran, who peered up at the two of them. The ChiCom MAC 10 was nowhere, at least by any casual eye, to be seen. She was wearing a fawn jumpsuit of some loose cotton weave, accessorized in different shades of red—eyeglass frames, scarf, belt, and suede cowgirl boots that might have set her back somewhere in the mid three figures. Red designer barrettes held her hair sleekly back from an articulate brow and temples that often seemed ready to betray more than the shielded eyes ever would.

“She's not so bad,” Vato suggested to Blood later that night, out on the road.

“What do you mean?”

“Aw, you know, if she did somethín with her hair, maybe wear some clothes that you could see some skin, right?”

Blood, whose amusement quota that month had not so far even been approached, allowed himself a snort and a half a chuckle. “You about to step on your dick once again.”

“Thanks, it's what I get for doín like they tol' me in therapy I'm spoze to, tryín for total honesty with my ol' war buddy an' shit. We been through all this before, you know, I can take it once again.”

“Plenty of times,” Blood agreed.

“Meanín that I never learn, that what you're sayín?”

They were in full quarrel as the truck arrived at the freeway on-ramp. “Watch it Vato, that was a Greyhoun'
bus
right there—”

“Seen it, Blood.”

The radio blurted at them. Vato had it coming out of speakers forward and aft, and Blood, surprised as usual, cringed under the decibels, and the truck wavered in and out of the lane. “Zat got to be so loud?”

Vato reached for the volume just as the radio thundered, “Hello, boys,” in what, at a normal level, might have been an intriguing female voice.

Vato froze. “It's her! The Vietnamese bitch!”

“Vato and Blood, Vato and Blood, where are you, come in, please?”

“Mm, it do sound like her, the one you're thinking of, so why don't you go on ahead, pick up the phone.”

It was an emergency call from up in Shade Creek. Thanatoids. V & B Tow was nearly alone on that stretch of 101 in its willingness to tow away vehicles associated with Thanatoids and, inevitably, Thanatoid stories. Tonight's had gone off the edge of a hillside road and was now in the top of an apple tree in the orchard just below.

“We goín the right way?” Vato pretended to ask his partner.

“You the navigator, you tell me.” So Vato made a big point of getting the county map out of its compartment, shaking it open in crisp percussions.

After a while, “I can't see nothín, what is this?”

“Is nighttime's what it is,” Blood replied, “Jello-O Brain.”

“Hey! I'm gonna put the dome light on, all right?”

“Huh. 'Pose to be readin' that map, so why'n't you just use the map light.”

“It's way under the dash, it throws this little spot of light, which to see anything you got to move the map around a inch at a time, is why, to answer your question, I don' want to use, no map light.”

“Tell you what I don't want, Blood, is to be out in some uncontrolled space with less light on it than the space I'm in, you understand, which if you put that dome light on is what'll happen—”

“Hey! Just tell me—where's the flashlight, all right? I'll use that. Where is it, it ain't here.”

“It's in th' electrical-equipment locker, where it spoze to be.”

“In the back of the truck.”

“It's electric, ain't it?”

This was all recreational bickering. By this time they'd been in business for a couple of years and already learned the roads of Vineland well enough to use in the dark, which now and then they'd been obliged to—the maps were usually just there for props as Vato and Blood went prowling everywhere the suburban lanes, the sand and grass tracks, the gullied-out mud nightmares. They had scrambled over slides, rigged tackle in the trees, winched out lots' worth of vehicles, from early-model toughmonkey Porsches out for a little all-terrain exercise to dapper fishing vans sporting four-color trout murals and CB call letters in glittery stick-on alphanumerics. They had seen things in the forest, and particularly up along Seventh River, whose naming aloud, in certain area taverns, was cause for summary octogenarihexation from the establishment, as well as for less formal sanctions in the parking lot.

They took the North Spooner exit and got on River Drive. Once past the lights of Vineland, the river took back its older form, became what for the Yuroks it had always been, a river of ghosts. Everything had a name—fishing and snaring places, acorn grounds, rocks in the river, boulders on the banks, groves and single trees with their own names, springs, pools, meadows, all alive, each with its own spirit. Many of these were what the Yurok people called
woge
, creatures like humans but smaller, who had been living here when the first humans came. Before the influx, the
woge
withdrew. Some went away physically, forever, eastward, over the mountains, or nestled all together in giant redwood boats, singing unison chants of dispossession and exile, fading as they were taken further out to sea, desolate even to the ears of the newcomers, lost. Other
woge
who found it impossible to leave withdrew instead into the features of the landscape, remaining conscious, remembering better times, capable of sorrow and as seasons went on other emotions as well, as the generations of Yuroks sat on them, fished from them, rested in their shade, as they learned to love and grow deeper into the nuances of wind and light as well as the earthquakes and eclipses and the massive winter storms that roared in, one after another, from the Gulf of Alaska.

For the Yuroks, who had always held this river exceptional, to follow it up from the ocean was also to journey through the realm behind the immediate. Fog presences glided in coves, dripping ferns thickened audibly in the gulches, semivisible birds called in nearly human speech, trails without warning would begin to descend into the earth, toward Tsorrek, the world of the dead. Vato and Blood, who as city guys you would think might get creeped out by all this, instead took to it as if returning from some exile of their own. Hippies they talked to said it could be reincarnation—that this coast, this watershed, was sacred and magical, and that the
woge
were really the porpoises, who had left their world to the humans, whose hands had the same five-finger bone structure as their flippers, OK, and gone beneath the ocean, right off around Patrick's Point in Humboldt, to wait and see how humans did with the world. And if we started fucking up too bad, added some local informants, they would come back, teach us how to live the right way, save us. . . .

The orchard Vato and Blood were looking for was on the other side of Shade Creek, meaning the usual difficult passage over the ruins of the old WPA bridge, where somehow, mysteriously, at least one lane was always open. Sometimes entire segments vanished overnight, as if floated away downriver on pontoons—detours were always necessary, often with the directions crudely spray-painted onto pieces of wall or old plywood shuttering, in the same bristling typeface as gang graffiti. There were always crews at work, around the clock. Tonight Vato and Blood had to wait while a truck piled high with smashed concrete and corroded iron rod went grinding back and forth by its own routes of beaten earth. Figures in fatigues and sometimes helmets could be seen, always in small groups, maybe Corps of Engineers, nobody was sure. They did not interact with the public, not even as flagmen. Drivers were left to decide how safe it was to proceed. Blood inched the rig forward, past great triangular rents in the pavements, through which, screened by a rough weave of reinforcing rods, they could see the river of midnight blue below. The work had been going on since the '64 storm, when the Seventh, cresting, had taken part of the bridge. Broken silhouettes had stood against the sky for all the years since.

Having crossed safely at last, they put on all their running lights, popped in the Bernard Herrmann cassette, and proceeded up the Shade Creek Valley road to that driving-through-the-night music from
Psycho
(1960), till they found the orchard and, with the help of spotlights, a Toyota in the treetops. As they watched, the front door opened and the driver began to get out, causing the car to oscillate wildly, apples to fall.

“Better just take it easy till we can find you a ladder,” Vato called up.

“Won't matter, I'm a Thanatoid.”

“Our insurance. What about the car?”

“Straight.” By which he meant solid, three-dimensional, and not apt to vanish unaccountably between Shade Creek and the V & B pound, as Thanatoid units—cars returned, for reasons of road karma, from Totality—had been known to do, much to the perplexity of the partners. They found an orchard ladder in a shed, and soon the driver had descended, a stock model late-sixties longhair, power-forward-size but short on humor. “Well I'm a pilgrim,” he identified himself, “who's taken ten years your time just to get this far. The network has been buzzing, like, ‘for a while' with stories about this karmic adjuster working out of Shade Creek, who actually gets results? I've come to ask him to take my case.”

“We know him, Blood, happy to run you on into town.”

“
Sate
 . . . your friend—he's here someplace?” Takeshi squinting around the conference room.

“No,” Vato sounding a little nervous, “thought we'd better check it out first.”

“What he's having trouble spittin' out,” said Blood, “is you already know him, DL, he was gunned down in a alley at the beach in Trasero County ten years ago?”

She knew. “Ah,” she knew all right, “shit.” So here came the first chickens running point, soon to be squadrons darkening the sky, seeking a Home to Roost in that perhaps by now no longer existed.

“Weed Atman. Well. Poor fuckin' Weed. Guess I should've been wondering when he'd show.”

“Mentioned some old runnin' mate of yours,” Blood said.