Vineland (38 page)

Instead of “Just what I need” or “Oh, you,” Sasha greeted him with an uncustomary embrace, sighing, clumsy. “Hi there, Hubbell, we've got trouble.”

“Huh? Not the baby—”

“Frenesi.” Sasha told him what she'd seen. “All I could do was keep her company, but I've got to get some sleep.”

“Where's 'at Zoyd at?”

“He clocked out as soon as the kid was born, probably off on one of the lesser-known planets by now.”

“Don't know if I'm any Dr. Spock.” He gave her a gentlemanly wink and, following close, a pat on the ass as she crept in on aching feet to collect the baby and keep her from Frenesi.

“Mind if I have a look at this kid?” The minute Hub was in range he got a bleary half a smile. “Oh, come on,” he whispered, “I know better 'n that. That's no smile. No. That's no smile.”

Frenesi was curled in her old bed, curtains drawn against the night street. “Hi, Pop.” Well, Jesus, she did look awful . . . almost a different person. . . . Hub's idea of therapy, which he kept trying out on others, was just to sit down and start complaining about his own life. Though he had never known his daughter this defenseless, hurt, grimly he began with a pretty generic tale of woe, not expecting much, but as he went on, sure enough, he could feel her start to calm down. He tried to drone steadily, not cause any reactions plus or minus. It became a monologue he had already recited more than once since the first separation, to seatmates on the bus, to dogs in the yard, to himself in front of the Tube at night. “What it was, 's your mother lost her respect for me. She'd be too honorable to say it, but that was it. She'd think these things all the way through, politically, but I'd only be trying to get out of the day in one piece. I was never the brave Wobbly her father was. Jess stood up, and he was struck down for it, and there was all of American History 101 for her, right there. How the hell was I gonna measure up? I thought I was doing what was necessary for my wife and my baby, freedom didn't come into it the way it did for Sasha, your grandpa understood that taking ‘free' as far as you can usually leads to ‘dead,' but he was never afraid of that, and I was, 'cause they can drop a Brute 450 on you just as easy as a tree. . . .” Not that he hadn't taken a hit or two, beginning the first day he reported to the Warner studio and found out there was a strike on and his “job” was to be one of a thousand IATSE goons hired to break it. Turned out they were looking for a larger, meaner type of individual anyway, but Hub just stood there for a while, bewildered, shaking his head—he'd thought he was fighting World War II to keep just this from happening to the world. Fuck it, he concluded, and went around the corner and across the street and asked if he could join the pickets, even if he wasn't working there, and before he knew it he'd been hit literally with a bolt from the sky, a lag bolt about the size and weight of the bar a steel guitar player uses, which Hub in his time had also been a target of, thrown by one of the IA gents deployed up on the roofs of the sound stages. It knocked him silly but also informed him that he'd made the right choice, though it was Sasha who was to become entangled in the fine details of the politics in the town at the time. The struggle between the IATSE, a creature of organized crime in collusion with the studios, and Herb Sorrell's Conference of Studio Unions, unapologetically liberal, progressive, New Deal, socialist, and thus, in the toxic political situation, “Communist,” had been going on all through the war but now broke into the open in a series of violent strike actions against the studios. All the newspapers pretended it was an organizing dispute between two unions. In fact it was the dark recrudescence of that hard-cased antiunion tradition which had brought the movie business to California in the first place, where it had gone on to enjoy till only recently its free ride on the backs of cheap labor. The minute this was threatened, in came the studio-created scab locals of IATSE and their soldiers, often in battalion strength. And the outcome was foredoomed, because of the blacklist. In one of American misoneism's most notable hours, a complex system of accusation, judgment, and disposition, administered by figures like Roy Brewer of IATSE and Ronald Reagan of the Screen Actors Guild, controlled the working lives of everyone in the industry who'd ever taken a step leftward of registering to vote as a Democrat. For technical people, rehabilitation was straightforward—join the IA, renounce the CSU. But Hub, stubborn, not yet grown out of his wartime patriotism, stuck with the losers till the end—without analysis, but less forgivably naive, he assumed everybody else saw the world as clearly as he did, and so was apt to make remarks out loud that others would either take issue with or else keep silent at, pretending not to differ but later entering a transcript into a dossier someplace. Each time a call wasn't answered or a story got back to him about how somebody had named him to yet another kangaroo jury board, a small hurt look came on his face, suddenly a kid's again, thinking, No, it isn't supposed to be this way. . . .

And they'd started off such happy-go-lucky kids, driving down to Hollywood, Sasha at the wheel, Hub with a uke from Hawaii singing “Down Among the Sheltering Palms” to Frenesi the baby between them, wearing one of the crateful of Hawaiian shirts he'd brought back from Pearl, sleeves just the right length for a colorful baby outfit, and easy to wash and hang-dry too. The Hollywood Freeway was brand-new, some evenings they'd go out just for a spin, city lights flowing and checking along chrome stripes and wax jobs, passing back and forth a Benzedrine inhaler nose to nose and singing bop tunes like “Crazeology” and “Klactoveedsedsteen” to each other, switching off sax and trumpet parts. They were living in Wade and Dotty's garage—the L.A. housing shortage had people out in trailers and tents, and on the beach too—spending nights at the Finale Club on South San Pedro in what had been Little Tokyo before the residents were all shipped off to detention camps, and listening to Bird, Miles, Dizzy, and everybody else then on the Coast, under the low metal ceiling among all the boppers, reefers, goatees, and porkpie hats. The world was being born again. The war had decided that, hadn't it? Even Sasha found herself looking at Hub a little gaga for what it seemed he'd done, gone out day after day to fire hoses and tear gas, saps, chains, and pieces of cable, hit, arrested, Sasha up all night bailing him out, working when he could, still trying to apprentice as a gaffer, repairing table lamps and toasters on the side, finding jobs at the margin, beyond the official reach of the anti-communist machine, giving and taking kindnesses, off the books, studying under ancient electricians, masters whose hands, especially about the thumbs, had been blitzed and scarred solid from the years of testing line current and ignoring wattage ratings, who'd saved his life many times over by teaching him how to work with one hand in his pocket so he wouldn't ground himself. “But that was just my problem, according to your mother, I'd always, in some political way that was a bit deep for me, had one hand in my pocket and not out there doing the world's work, implying o' course that if I wasn't greedily counting my spare change over and over, why then I was selfishly enjoying a quiet round of pocket pool, ask your husband what that means, it's sorta technical . . . it wasn't her fault she wanted me purer than I was. And then the other life was happening, the work itself . . . it was just when the Brute was first coming in. Jesus, all those amps. All that light. Nobody told me about the scale of it. After a while I couldn't see that much else. I needed to work with that light. Maybe it was some form of insanity, except that lets me off too easy. Then there was Wade, my ol' canasta partner and picket-line buddy, fighting shoulder to shoulder all those years, one day he went over, and we stayed friends, and finally you saw what'd it matter who'd be taking those dues off the paycheck, Al Speede's people, th' IATSE, whatever. It'd been over for a long time anyway, though we'd had to pretend otherwise, and what was it for, all those sets we lit, those exotic nightclub sets, the hotel rooms with the neon outside, the passenger coaches with the rain against the windows, all of it just shadows, even if it's on safety stock in some air-conditioned vault that's still all it is, I let the world slip away, made my shameful peace, joined the IA, retired soon's I could, sold off my only real fortune—my precious anger—for a lot of got-damn shadows.”

He gazed at the young woman lying face up now, her eyes shut, at first glance a simple fine-featured long-haired beauty, though a closer look would reveal, not so much in the eyes as around her mouth and jaw, a darkness of expression, a held secret Hub knew he wouldn't be asked to share. “Hey there, Young Gaffer?” he whispered, to see if she was asleep. No answer. “Well I'd've called you my Best Girl,” he went on, “but that was always your mother.”

Frenesi's tears would slow and dry, her postpartum lust for death would cool, she would on a day not far off actually find herself liking this infant with the offbeat sense of humor, and she and Sasha would take up, not as before, but maybe no worse than before. But there were still the secrets, Trasero County and Oklahoma secrets. More than any man she had ever wanted for anything, more than a full pardon from some unnamed agency for what she'd done, more than DL in her arms, the State in final rubble, guns silent, tanks and bombs all melted down, more than anything she'd ever wished for over a lifelong childhood of praying to a variety of Santas, Frenesi wanted, would have given up all the rest for, a chance to go back to when she and Sasha had talked hours, nights, with no restraints, everything from penis folklore to Mom, where do we go when we die? Of all her turnings, this turn against Sasha her once-connected self would remain a puzzle she would never quite solve, a mystery beyond any analysis she could bring to it. If her luck held, she'd never have to know. The baby was perfect cover, it made her something else, a mom, that was all, just another mom in the nation of moms, and all she'd ever have to do to be safe was stay inside that particular fate, bring up the kid, grow into some version of Sasha, deal with Zoyd and his footloose band and all the drawbacks there, forget Brock, the siege, Weed Atman's blood, 24fps and the old sweet community, forget whoever she'd been, shoot inoffensive little home movies now and then, speak the right lines, stay within budget, wrap each day, one by one, before she lost the light. Prairie could be her guaranteed salvation, pretending to be Prairie's mom the worst lie, the basest betrayal. By the time she began to see that she might, nonetheless, have gone through with it, Brock Vond had reentered the picture, at the head of a small motorcade of unmarked Buicks, forcing her over near Pico and Fairfax, ordering her up against her car, kicking apart her legs and frisking her himself, and before she knew it there they were in another motel room, after a while her visits to Sasha dropped off and when she made them she came in reeking with Vond sweat, Vond semen—couldn't Sasha
smell
what was going on?—and his erect penis had become the joystick with which, hurtling into the future, she would keep trying to steer among the hazards and obstacles, the swooping monsters and alien projectiles of each game she would come, year by year, to stand before, once again out long after curfew, calls home forgotten, supply of coins dwindling, leaning over the bright display among the back aisles of a forbidden arcade, rows of other players silent, unnoticed, closing time never announced, playing for nothing but the score itself, the row of numbers, a chance of entering her initials among those of other strangers for a brief time, no longer the time the world observed but game time, underground time, time that could take her nowhere outside its own tight and falsely deathless perimeter.

 

B
UT when he found out about Prairie—though he never named her, only smirked “So you've reproduced” at Frenesi—something else, something from his nightmares of forced procreation, must have taken over, because later, in what could only be crippled judgment, Brock was to turn and go after the baby and, noticing Zoyd in the way, arrange for his removal too. One mild overcast Saturday nearly a year after Frenesi had moved out, Zoyd and Prairie, returning from a midday stroll down the alley to the Gordita Pier and back, found inside their house who but Hector, posed dramatically in the front room next to the biggest block of pressed marijuana Zoyd had ever seen in his life, too big to have fit through any door yet towering there, mysteriously, a shaggy monolithic slab reaching almost to the ceiling.” 'Scuse me just a second.” Finger to his lips, Zoyd went and put his daughter, who'd nodded out in the salt breezes, down on the bed in the other room, and her bottle and her duck nearby, and came back in eyeballing the oversize brick, getting nervous.

“Let me guess—
2001: A Space Odyssey
[1968].”

“Try
20,000 Years in Sing Sing
[1933].”

Zoyd lounged against the giant slab, needing the support. “Wa'n't even your idea, was it?”

“Somebody over in Westwood really hates your ass, pardner.”

Zoyd rolled his eyes slowly toward the room where Prairie slept, waited a beat, then rolled them back. “Know this dude from Justice name of Brock Vond?”

Shrugging, “Maybe seen the name on some DEA 6?”

“I know about him and my ex-old lady, Hector, so don't be embarrassed.”

“None of my business, and my policy is, is that I have never went into areas like that, ever, with a subject, Zoyd.”

“Admire that, for sure, always have, but where is this li'l gentleman, and why'd he send you out to do the shitwork, huh? Plant the evidence, pop the subject, confiscate the baby, like you're working for the two o' them now, or what?”

“Whoa,
trucha, ése
, I don't snatch no babies, what's wrong with you?”

“Come on—this isn't just some jive excuse to take away my kid?”

“Hey, man, this ain't even my ticket, all's I'm doín, is a favor, for a friend.” And he gave that injured cadence a peculiar emphasis, as if leaving open the meaning of
friend.

“Uh-huh, just following orders from above.”

“Don't know if you've been keepín up, but with Nixon and shit there's been a couple years of reorganization where I work, lot of old FBN doorkickers done got the blade, colleagues of mine, and I'm lucky I still have any job, OK, even runnín estupidass marriage-counselor errands like this.”

“Li'l . . . piece of foam there on your lip, Hector . . . nah, it's OK, I—I know what you're goin' through, Keemosobby.”

“Knew you'd understand.” He pulled out a chrome referee's whistle and blew on it. “OK, fellas!”

“Hey, the baby.” In came stomping half a dozen individuals in black visor caps and windbreakers labeled BNDD, with tape recorders, field investigation kits, two-way radios, a range of sidearms both custom and off the shelf, not to mention cameras, still and movie, with which they took pictures of each other standing beneath the herbaceous polyhedron before starting to wrap it in some dark plastic sheeting.

“Oh Captain, can I at least, please, call up my mother-in-law to help me with the baby?”

“That is called a favor.” Grotesquely kittenish. “Favors have to be paid back.”

“Inform on my friends. Sure would put me in a squeeze.”

“Your child's well-beín against your own virginity as a snitch, oh yes, quite a close decision indeed, I should say.” And about then who but Sasha should come bouncing in the door, setting Hector's eyes atwinkle with what a stranger in town might've called innocent mischief.

“Why, you scamp—you called her, didt'n you?”

“Zoyd what have you got yourself into now—oh, my,” as she registered the looming block of cannabis, “God? with the little
baby
in the house, are you sick?”

On cue, Prairie woke up into all the commotion and started to yell, more out of inquiry than distress, and Zoyd and Sasha, both heading for the door at the same time, collided classically and staggered back screaming, “Stupid pothead,” and “Meddling bitch,” respectively. They then glared at each other till Zoyd finally offered, “Look—you're a old Hollywood babe, been up and down the boulevard a couple times,” reaching a cloth diaper out of a cupboard in the bathroom, which by now they'd been jammed together into closer than either would have liked by the increasingly mysterious activities necessary to get Hector's colossal dopechunk out of the house again, “can't you even see this is a setup?” proceeding to the bedroom, followed attentively by Sasha. “They're tryin' to get her away from me. Hi there, Slick, 'member your grandma?” While Sasha talked and played, Zoyd took off Prairie's diaper, got rid of the shit and rinsed off the diaper in the toilet, threw it in with the others along with some Borax in a plastic garbage can that was just about heavy enough to pack up the hill to the laundromat, came back in with a warm cloth and a tube of Desitin, made sure his ex-mother-in-law noticed he was wiping in the right direction, and only about the time he was pinning the new diaper on remembering that he should have paid more attention, cared more for these small and at times even devotional routines he'd been taking for granted, now, with the posse in the parlor, too late, grown so suddenly precious. . . .

Sasha was at the window, sunlight coming through, holding her, Prairie with her arm out pointing in perfect baby articulation of wrist, hand, and fingers toward the thumping and crashing from the other room, making a puzzled face.

“Didn't mean to holler,” Sasha muttered.

“Me neither. Hope this won't be a hassle.”

“I'd love to take her, it's been a while anyway, so at least that part works out.”

“ 'Cept for me goin' in the slam, o' course,” Zoyd breaking into an episode of surprise cackling, which Prairie enjoyed, beginning to rock in Sasha's arms, stretching her mouth to accommodate a smile she could not yet feel the limits of, making high squeals now and then. “Oh, ya like that, do ya. Yer Da-da's gittin' popped!” He put his finger in his mouth against the inside of his cheek, sucked, and popped it out at her. She gazed, smiling, tongue out. “Uh-huh, well, you'll be seeing a lot of this lady right here, you know her as Grandma—”

“Gah ma!”

“And maybe not so much of me.” Following the wisdom of the time, Zoyd, bobbing around among the flotsam of his sunken marriage, had been giving in to the impulse to cry, anytime it came on him, alone or in public, Getting In Touch With His Feelings at top volume, regardless of how it affected onlookers, their own problems, their attitude toward life, their lunch. After hearing enough remarks like “No wonder she left you,” “Blow your nose and act like a man,” and “Cut your hair while you're at it,” he'd come to think of crying as another form of pissing, just as likely at the wrong time and place to get him in trouble, and he learned after a while how to hold it all in till later, till he could safely be taken by the high salt wave, often while some door was still closing, some emergency brake just notched up tight. This time he really had to wait for the rest of the day, grim and clenched, till he'd been handcuffed, led out through an audience of neighbors mostly staring in wonder, or in forms of mental distress such as fear, at the tall prism, now miraculously outside again, secured on a flatbed trailer, ready to be hauled back to whatever spacious Museum of Drug Abuse it had been borrowed from, while Zoyd was put into the back of a taupe Caprice with government plates and taken away up the hill out of Gordita Beach, angling by surface streets southward and eastward, on into less developed neighborhoods full of oil wells and nodding pumps, green fields, horses, power lines, and railroad trestles, pulling in at last to a collection of low sand-colored structures that could have been some junior high school campus, with yellow tile walls and a lot of U.S. Marshals inside, on through strip search, fingerprinting, picture taking, and form typing, the early line for supper—miscellaneous pork pieces, instant mashed potatoes, and red Jell-O—then into the domicile area and a cell of his own, where he waited the noisy cold-lit Tubeless hours till lights out, when he could finally let go, surrender to the flood, mourn the comical small face already turned as he was taken away . . . would she miss him, tottering and peering tomorrow around Sasha's house, with her puzzled frown, going, “Dah Dee?” Zoyd ya fuckin' fool, he addressed himself between spasms, what are you doing, crying yourself to sleep? Likely so. Next thing he knew the overhead cell light was on again and a natty little dude in a sky-blue double-knit safari suit was poised on a folding metal chair, calling, “Wheeler,” over and over, like a Doberman at night somewhere the other side of a creek. By the time Zoyd's eyes adjusted to the glare and his pulse to the midwatch awakening, he had figured out that this was Brock Vond.

“So,” Brock nodding in false sociability, looking at Zoyd's face, it seemed to Zoyd, in some prolonged detail as he kept nodding. “So. Would you mind turning your head—no, the other way? Give me a profile. Ah. Hah. Yes now if you could look up at that corner of the ceiling? thanks, and maybe pull back your upper lip?”

“What is this?”

“Want to get an idea of your gnathic index, and that mustache is in the way.”

“Oh, w'll hell, why'n't you say so,” Zoyd peeling back his lip for Brock. “Want me to cross my eyes, drool, anything like 'at?”

“You're in a sprightly mood for someone looking at the rest of his life in prison. I had hoped for a level of serious and adult conversation, but maybe I was wrong, maybe you've spent too much time in the infant world, hm? gotten more comfortable there, maybe this will have to be simplified for you.”

“This has anythin' to do with my former wife, Cap'n, it sure ain't about to be simple.”

Brock Vond's nostrils went wide, a vein began to beat next to one eye. “She's not your business anymore. I know how to take care of Frenesi, asshole, understand that?”

Zoyd looked back, eyes swollen, mouth shut, sweating, his hair, not to mention the brain beneath, all matted down. As an average doper of the sixties, the narc's natural prey, he expected from any variety of cop at least the reflexes of a predator, but this went beyond—it was personal, malevolent, too scarily righteous. Why? This was the first time Zoyd had even seen ol' Loverboy here, the great unknown she had come in to Zoyd out of, for a little while, and to which, her choice, he guessed, she'd now returned. Taking care not to provoke the Prosecutor, Zoyd waited on the edge of his rack, holding his head, while Brock got up, metal creaking, and began to pace the room, as if lost in thought. According to Frenesi, Brock had been born under the sign of the Scorpion, the only critter in nature that could sting itself to death with its own tail, reminding Zoyd of self-destructive maniacs he'd ridden with back in his car-club days, beer outlaws speeding well above the limit, dreaming away with these romantic death fantasies, which usually gave them hardons they then joked about all night, bright-eyed, don't-fuck-with-me-sincere country boys with tattoos reading
ME 'N' DEATH
inside hearts dripping blood, who feared nothing unless it was taking apart a transmission, who might have ended up cops and coaches and selling insurance, soft-spoken as could be, Mister Professional, good grip on the world, but underneath all the time there'd been the onrushing night road, the yellow lines and dashes, the terrible about-to-burst latency just ahead, the hardon, and this Brock here looked like a big-city edition of that same dreamy fatality.

Brock suddenly whipped out some pack of whiteguy smokes, lit up, seemed to recall a subclause of the Gentleman's Code, and held the pack out to Zoyd, though still a little more abruptly than in the true gentleman's perfect mimicry of compassion. Zoyd took a cigarette and a light anyhow.

“Baby's all right? Hm?”

Here at last came those rectal spasms of fear, crashing in on Zoyd one by one. Yes this crazy motherfucker was after his child, what else could it be?

“Going to jail means many things,” Brock Vond was pointing out. “You lose your custody. Maybe once in a very great while, because the Bureau of Prisons is not unmerciful, she'll be allowed to visit. Maybe if you're good we'll let you out, under guard, to go to her wedding, hm? Even a sip of champagne at the reception, although that technically would be drug use.” He let Zoyd throb a beat or two more and sighed theatrically. “But I have to take a chance, gamble on your character.”

“You guys want to adopt Prairie,” Zoyd hazarded, “why do this to me, just find a judge.”

Brock exhaled smoke impatiently. “How am I even supposed to talk to you people? Maybe you could relate to—like, another planet? Hm? Where not everyone's fate is to produce and bring up children. But some rebel against that, try to run away, hm? get locked into a domestic arrangement as fast as they can—a woman, say, trying to be an average, invisible tract-house mom, anchoring herself to the planet with some innocent hubby, then a baby, to keep from flying away back to who she really is, her responsibilities, hm? Who struggles against her fate.”

“So she finds a spaceship,” Zoyd continued, “and escapes to our own planet Earth, where folks are allowed to behave the way they want, even have a baby with a lowlife bum who can't afford to buy a house, if that happens to be their trip, without no cops always putting in.”

Not the Earth Brock was acquainted with. “But the police of her planet,” unperturbed, “who are sworn to protect all their people, cannot allow her to escape what everyone else must accept, hm? So they follow her to Earth. And they bring her back. And she never sees the baby again.”