Vineland (25 page)

“He still feels rilly bitter,” Vato added, “he blames her for what happened.”

Prairie was hearing this, in her turn, from DL in the sun-filled kitchen of the Kunoichi Retreat. “My mom
killed
a guy?” She was shivering, almost with excitement, but mostly with fear.

“Weed said somebody else had the gun, but he knew that Frenesi set it all up.”

“Why would she? Who was he?”

“We were all sorta runnin' together for a while, down in Trasero, College of the Surf? Weed was a what you'd call campus revolutionary. But there was also a strong rumor he was workin' for the other side.”

“Did you ask him which side he was on? He can tell you now, can't he? got no reason to lie?”

Takeshi snickered. DL said, “Afraid that ain't the way it works . . . but I appreciate it's important to you. It makes a difference what side
she
would have had to be on. . . .”

“You're trying awful hard not to say somethin', DL. First you tell me she's runnin' around on my dad with this federal megacreep, now you say she helped kill a guy? Does everybody know all about this and I'm just the dumb kid they wait to tell last?”

“Take that up with your father and Sasha. Only reason I'm tellin' you's if you put those facts together—”

“They spell Mother?”

“Prairie, she was working for Brock.”

But the kid took no more than a beat and a half before, “Yeah? carried a badge, commission card?”

“She was an independent contractor. They all were, are. . . . That way if she ever got burned, the Man could deny knowledge.”

“Why tell me? who cares?”

“Brock's on your case, figure that's a pretty compelling need to know. Prairie? Come on.”

“OK, but do you mind if I take a second to process it, plus it's now also time for me to go set up for supper? Either of you happen to know what's in the ‘Variety Loaf'?”

DL let her off the hook. “Thought the EPA confiscated all that.”

It was tonight or never as far as Prairie was concerned. All the Variety Loaves, stacked in a distant niche of the freezer, had begun to glow, softly blue-green, like a night-light for the rest of the frozen food, not, as once supposed, safely dead but no, only, queerly, sleeping . . . o-or perhaps only pretending to sleep—gaahhh! Like everybody else in the kitchen, Prairie had a threshold for how long she could spend in that sinister freezer before some more than thermometric chill sent her back out into the less clearly haunted world, pulses thumping.

“OK—I need a crew in there, we're bringin' out all that Variety Loaf, then we'll take a vote if it's safe to eat,” raising her voice, “so be here, be near, or learn the meaning of fear! Ah right! Gerhard, Sister Mary Shirelle, Mrs. Lo Finto, the twins, let's go for the glow, you guys,” and stepping in time to the music on the radio, which happened to be the theme from
Ghostbusters
(1984), off they went. But it wasn't long before a dispute arose as to the morality of disturbing the microenvironment of the freezer. “Bioluminescence is life,” suggested the twins in hasty overlap, “and all life is sacred.”

“Never eat anything that glows,” pronounced Mrs. Lo Finto, an Italian mother who not only couldn't cook but actually suffered clinical kouxinaphobia, or fear of kitchens, her assignment back here being part of her therapy. They stood in the chill of the freezer, under a marginal light bulb, with the Variety Loaf providing a turquoise fill, bickering in parallel, eventually bringing a sample out to the kitchen.

“It does not look so bad in the daylight,” Gerhard pointed out as work slowed and everyone gathered around the enigmatic foodstuff.

“That's 'cause you can't see it glow, dummy.”

“Tradition among the tribes of Central Asia of ingesting luminescent molds as a spiritual practice—”

“But molds have rights too!”

Prairie had a few seconds' glimpse of how dishearteningly long this might go on, how inconclusive, time-wasting, and unspiritual it would all turn out anyway, just as a touch she knew brought her turning to see DL suited up, carrying some gear, in a hurry. It was as if a solemn bell had begun to ring. “Here's your back pack. ‘Me gotta go,' as the Kingsmen always used to say, and you too.”

“But—” the girl gesturing back toward the kitchen, the faces she'd come to know, all the meals yet unplanned, and DL's plain message that it was already old videotape. As they moved outside and down the vined fragrant colonnade, Prairie heard the beat of helicopters, more than one, close overhead, hovering, waiting. What the fuck?

They reentered the main building, running now—deeper, into corridors, down flights of ringing metal stairs. Takeshi joined them outside the Retreat wine cellar, bottles sticking out of at least four suit pockets.

“You're looting?” DL paused to inquire.

“Few random vintages, I was—pressed for time!”

“Undrinkable, of course, theft itself being the main thing with you, right, Takeshi.”

“Check it out, Freckles! Here—'71 Louis Martini,
ne?
A legend! And this one's—some kind of French stuff!”

“Um, you guys. . . .”

“Gates are shut,” DL reported, “figure a minute 'n' a half each with a bolt cutter, plus at least three Huey Cobras in the air, FFAR's, grenade launchers, Gatling guns, the works.”

They arrived at the mouth of an oversize freight elevator, scrambled inside, and began to plunge earpoppingly hellward, aged fluorescent bulbs buzzing and flickering till the brakes caught just when it seemed too late, and they boomed to a stop and came out into a tunnel, deep underground, which led them under the creek bed and then slowly uphill for half a mile, where they exited at last into brightly sunlit terrain where they could hear in the distance the invading motor convoy and the blades of the helicopters, merged in an industrious roar that could as well have been another patch of developer condos going up.

They found the Trans-Am under camouflage netting down among some alder and moved out by way of old logging roads, zigzagging toward I-5, Takeshi consulting maps, DL driving, singing

 

Oh, kick out, the jambs, motherfuck-er,

‘Cause here comes, that Stove once again—

You thought I was somethin' in Olathe,

Wait till, you see me in Fort Wayne . . .

 

and Prairie huddled down in back, hanging on, wishing they could wake into something more benevolent and be three different people, only some family in a family car, with no problems that couldn't be solved in half an hour of wisecracks and commercials, on their way to a fun weekend at some beach.

 

T
HEY blasted down to L.A., heading back to the barn only semivisible and near as anybody could tell unobserved, Manuel and his auto alchemy team at Zero Profile Paint & Body of Santa Rosa having come up with a proprietary lacquer of a crystalline microstructure able to vary its index of refraction so that even had there been surveillance, the Trans-Am could easily, except for a few iridescent fringes, have been taken for empty roadway.

If Prairie had been expecting an old-movie private eye's office, seedy and picturesque, she wouldn't be getting it today. The Fumimota suite was located in a basic L.A. business/shopping complex of high-rises that stood on a piece of former movie-studio lot. Space devoted to make-believe had, it was thought, been reclaimed by the serious activities of the World of Reality. A lot of old-time oaters had been lensed here—she'd watched some, Saturday mornings on the Tube—but where stagecoaches had rolled and posses thundered, now stockbrokers whispered romantically about issues and futures into tiny telephone mikes no bigger than M&M's, crowds dressed to impress came and shopped and sat on tile patios eating lunch, deals were made high overhead in legal offices that weren't always legal, sharing these altitudes with city falcons who hunted pigeons in the booming prisms of sun and shadow below.

Prairie still had no idea of what “karmic adjustment” was supposed to be, but for the first time it began to seem plausible to her that Takeshi, if not what he said he was, at least might be more than the nose-twister and eye-poker he appeared. The place was full of computer terminals, facsimile machines, all-band transmitter/receivers, not to mention components scattered all over, printed circuits, laser units, DIP's, disk drives, power supplies, and test equipment—

“Hi-tech Heaven,” her eyes wide.

“That'd be your first mistake,” DL said. “Most of it's just props to make ol' Sleazebrain here look good.”

“Please,” Takeshi waving a palm-sized remote control. “What can we offer you?” In rolled a little robot fridge, with two round video screens side by side, each with an image of a cartoon eye that shifted and blinked from time to time, and a smile-shaped speaker for a mouth, out of which now came a synthesized medley of refrigerator tunes, including “Winter Wonderland,” “Let It Snow,” and “Cold, Cold Heart.” Stopping in front of Prairie, humming and flexing small electric motors, it recited its contents.

“You said ‘designer seltzer,' what's that?”

“Another stage in the marketing philosophy of the mid-1980s,” replied the mobile cooler. “At the moment I have Bill Blass, Azzedine Alaïa, Yves St. Laurent—”

“Fine!” Prairie a little high-pitched, “that'll be, uh—” and
pow
there was the stylish seltzer, stone-cold in its YSL-logo container in the essentially Reagan-era fashion colors of gold and silver. One of the video eyes winked at her, and from the mouth emerged a shiny pink tongue of some soft, wobbling plastic. “Anything else?” the creature inquired in the kind of voice Prairie had come to mistrust even before she could talk.

“Thanks, Raoul,” DL said, “we'll let you know.”

The video eyes closed, and Raoul glided back to its recharge station, playing “I'll See You Again” and “Drink, Drink, Drink.”

“Time machine's in the shop,” Takeshi brightly, “otherwise we'd all—go for a spin!”

“Just had to R-and-R another tachyon chamber,” DL amplified, “exactly a tenth of a second after the warranty ran out, the 'sucker blew, why they call it a ‘time' machine, I guess?”

But Prairie had been sitting glazy at one of the screens, stroking some keys. “If I wanted to know where she was, say right this second—”

DL shook her head. “I really don't get this. The woman—”

“DL-san—” Takeshi had his eyebrows up.

“Go ahead,” the girl getting to her feet. “She ran out on me. Probably to be with Brock Vond, is the way it looks. I'm the last person she wants to see. I leave anything out?”

“Plenty. Like all your friends in 'em Cobra gunships, who seem at the moment to be part of the package, you get her, you get them too?”

“In fact—” Takeshi pretending to run over to the window and anxiously check the sky, “why are we—even hanging around with this kid? She's dangerous!”

DL reached and looped a length of hair back behind Prairie's ear. “Until you get to see her . . . would you settle for watchin' her? It's the best I can do.”

“You know I have to settle for what I can get,” the girl whispered, keeping her eyes down because she knew DL was on to her and if their eyes met she'd just blow it.

Ditzah Pisk Feldman lived in a Spanish split-level up a pleasant cul-de-sac on the high-rent side of Ventura Boulevard, with pepper trees and jacarandas in the yard and a vintage T-Bird in the carport. She was divorced and solvent, with only about a half-hour commute to work. The girls were with their father for the summer. When DL had known her back in Berkeley, Ditzah and her sister Zipi were going around in battle fatigues with their hair in matching oversize Jewish Afros, spray-painting
SMASH THE STATE
on public walls and keeping plastic explosive in Tupperware containers in the icebox. “Pretending to be film editors,” she told Prairie, “but we were really anarchist bombers.” This evening she looked like your average suburban mom, though what did Prairie know, maybe it was another disguise. Ditzah was drinking sangria and wearing eyeglasses with fashion frames and a muumuu with parrots all over it.

It was just before prime time, with the light outdoors not quite gone, birds loud in the trees above a distant wash of freeway sound, the concrete surf. Ditzah led them across the patio to a workshop in back, with a Movieola machine and 16mm film all over the place, some on reels or cores, some in pieces lying around loose, and some in cans inside steel footlockers, which turned out to be the archives of 24fps, the old guerrilla movie outfit.

Back then they had roved the country together in a loose low-visibility convoy of older midsize sedans, pickups with and without camper shells, an Econoline van for equipment, and a dinged and chromeless but nonetheless kick-ass Sting Ray that served as a high-speed patrol unit, among all of which they kept in touch by CB radio, still then a novelty on the road. They went looking for trouble, they found it, they filmed it, and then quickly got the record of their witness someplace safe. They particularly believed in the ability of close-ups to reveal and devastate. When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. Who could withstand the light? What viewer could believe in the war, the system, the countless lies about American freedom, looking into these mug shots of the bought and sold? Hearing the synchronized voices repeat the same formulas, evasive, affectless, cut off from whatever they had once been by promises of what they would never get to collect on?

“Never?” asked a local TV interviewer once, somewhere back in the San Joaquin.

And here came Frenesi Gates's reverse shot. Prairie felt the two women shift in their seats. Frenesi's eyes, even on the aging ECO stock, took over the frame, a defiance of blue unfadable. “Never,” was her answer, “because too many of us are learning how to pay attention.” Prairie gazed.

“Well, you sound like our own Action News Team.”

“Except that we have less to protect, so we can go after different targets.”

“But. . . doesn't that get dangerous?”

“Mm, in the short run,” Frenesi guessed. “But to see injustices happening and ignore them, as your news team has been ignoring the repression of farm workers here in this county who've been trying to organize—that's more ‘dangerous' in the long run, isn't it?” Aware at each moment of the lens gathering in her own image.

DL, on the other hand, obliged to approach life in 24fps with cold practicality, stayed as far out of camera range as she could. When she talked, it was about tactics and timetables, hardly ever politics, and then only as much as she had to. She made sure the rolling stock was always ready to roll, scouted each new location for rendezvous points and multiple ways out of town, and though preferring to plan their way around cops and cop sympathizers was not above keeping a pry bar handy beneath her driver's seat. If they did get caught it would have to be DL, as unit chief of security, who lingered behind to delay the pursuit.

“That night Sledge drove us right into the middle of a drug bust?” Ditzah cackled, “Me and Zipi smoking shit somebody marinated in DMT, couldn't keep a thought in our heads, we kept wanderin' off and you'd have to go find us—”

“Thought that was the hash in the hot fudge sundaes.”

“No, that was Gallup, the hot fudge. . . .”

“Um,” Prairie pointing at the screen, “who're all these folks?”

It was a slow pan shot of 24fps as constituted on some long-ago date the two women were unable now to agree on. An incoherent collection of souls, to look at them, a certain number always having drifted in and out—impatient apprentices, old-movie freex, infiltrators and provocateurs of more than one political stripe. But there was a core that never changed, and it included genius film editors Ditzah and Zipi Pisk, who'd grown up in New York City and, except for geographically, never left it. California's only reality for them was to be found in the million ways it failed to be New York. “Magnin's?” Zipi would smile grimly. “OK for a shopping center, somewhere on Long Island perhaps, very nice ladies' toilet of course, but please, this is no major store.” Ditzah was the food kvetch—“Try and get a Danish
anywhere
out here!” They found West Coast people “cold and distant” as invariably as they remembered apartment living in the Big Apple being all “warm and neighborly.”

This amused the others. “Are you kiddeen?” Howie, who took care of the paperwork, would snort. “I visited my sister back there, try to even get eye contact it's yer ass, babe.”

“We are not the ones who have to encapsulate
our
selves inside our cars all the time,” Zipi would point out, “are we? no, and our dogs and cats never have to get sent to shrinks, and
we
certainly do not come up out of the water, fuck somebody right there on the beach then go jogging away without even leaving their phone number,” which had in fact happened to her during the girls' first or introductory weekend on the West Coast, the event, despite its air of the supernatural, having left both sisters with a certain attitude toward the surfing community, of which, because of his xanthocroid looks, they had singled out Howie as typical.

To watch them at work was to enjoy unthinking exhibitions of grace. Zipi edited with her nails and Scotch tape, Ditzah favored teeth and paper clips, and when it got to the Movieola stage, rarely was either sister more than a frame off. They liked to chain-smoke while they worked and to have two or three television sets, tuned to different channels, going at the same time, plus rock and roll, the more acid-oriented the better, on the radio, thus cutting and splicing in an environment you could call rhythmic. When Mirage, the unit astrologer, found out they were both Geminis, she started feeding them daily aspects. They learned to get up at strange hours, and when the Moon was void of course, not to work at all.

Frenesi and the Pisks had taken over what was left of the Death to the Pig Nihilist Film Kollective, based in Berkeley, a doomed attempt to live out the metaphor of movie camera as weapon. The Kollective's assets included camera bodies, lenses, lights and light stands, Movieola, hydraulic camera mount, fridgeful of ECO, and, at first anyway, a rump of the Kollective's more stubborn personnel, who had put some of the language of their old manifesto into 24fps's new one—“A camera is a gun. An image taken is a death performed. Images put together are the substructure of an afterlife and a Judgment. We will be architects of a just Hell for the fascist pig. Death to everything that oinks!”—which for many was going too far, including Mirage, on her feet to insist that pigs are really groovy, in fact far groovier than any humans their name ever gets applied to.

“Say ‘roaches,'” suggested Sledge Poteet.

“Roaches are cool,” protested Howie, who happened to have a joint in his mouth. Krishna, the sound person, put in with a stipulation that all life, even that of roaches, is holy. “Wait a minute,” cried one of the original Death-to-the-Piggers, “that kind of talk invalidates our whole conceptual base, this is about shooting folks here, is it not?”

“Oh yeah? what's your sign, man?” Howie wanted to know.

“Virgo.”

“It figures.”

“Signism!” Mirage screamed. “Howie, that's worse than racism!”

“Worse than sexism,” added the Pisks in unison.

“Ladies, ladies,” boomed Sledge, gesturing with his 'fro pick, while Howie, eyes ablush, held out a smoldering joint of gold Colombian as a token of peace.

“Be groovy, everybody,” advised Frenesi, who wasn't exactly chairing the get-together, only struggling as usual to keep outside the bickering. This outfit was nobody's anarchist fantasy. When DL came aboard, she and Sledge, with whom she shared a fondness for enlightenment through asskicking, immediately became the realist wing of 24fps, counterposed to the often dangerously absent dreamers Mirage and Howie. Frenesi and the Pisks soldiered on in the center, and the task of trying to keep everybody “happy” fell to Krishna. Frenesi would come back with half a dozen rolls of dysrhythmic young Californian women dancing at a rally, Zipi and Ditzah would fly into a rage at the impossibility of getting any of these hippie chicks to do anything on the beat (“It's tzuris I don't need!” “Tzimmes also!”), and it was always Krishna who found the right music, expertly manipulated the tape speed, and seemed to know what the Pisks wanted before they did, quickly getting a reputation in the unit for broad ESP skills. When backs were left uncovered and chores undone, when words got too ambiguous, it was Krishna who led everybody to the bathroom and served as counselor for as long as it took. Without her, Ditzah thought, no telling how much sooner it would all have come apart, exchanging with DL now a look that Prairie didn't miss.