Vineland (5 page)

So, fucking Hector again. Zoyd had only missed him that night by not showing up at the Lost Nugget, his usual hangout, having chosen instead a booth way in the back of the Steam Donkey, just off the old Plaza in Vineland, a bar that dated well back into the fog of the last century. Van Meter'd put his head in after a while, and they'd sat becoming slowly awash in Lucky Lager, snuffling over the olden times.

“Educated pussy,” Zoyd sighed, “don't know why, f' some reason I must've been a easy mark. She was a filmmaker, went to Berkeley, I was working on people's gutters, she rilly freaked when she found out she was pregnant.”

It was a long time ago, old as Prairie, who for a while had been a topic of debate. Frenesi was getting free advice both ways. Some told her it was the end of her life as an artist, as a revolutionary, and urged her to get an abortion, not that easy to come by in those days unless you drove south of the border. If you wanted to stay north of it you had to be rich and go through a committee exercise with gynecologists and shrinks. Others pointed out to her what a groovy chance this would be to bring up a child in a politically correct way, though definitions of this varied from reading Trotsky to her at bedtime to including LSD in the formula.

“But what hurts,” Zoyd went on, “is how innocent I thought she was. Fuckin' fool. I wanted to wise her up, at the same time protect her from ever knowin' how shitty things could get. Was I stupid.”

“You're blaming yourself for the line of work she got into?”

“For not seeing too much. For thinkin' we'd get away with it, thinkin' we'd beat them all.”

“Yep, you really fucked up,” Van Meter having himself a good chuckle. Their friendship over the years was based in part on each pretending to laugh at the other's hard luck. Zoyd sat there nodding How true, how true. “So worried about Hector you didn't even know the
other
federal guy was porkin' your wife till she was long gone! What a trip, man!”

“Appreciate the support ol' buddy, but I was still happy to be out of Hector's way back then 'thout gittin' my ass in too major of a sling.” But he understood that like all suffering Tubeheads he must have really thought, as he and the baby were making their getaway, that that was it, all over, time to go to commercials and clips of next week's episode. . . . Frenesi might be gone, but there would always be his love for Prairie, burning like a night-light, always nearby, cool and low, but all night long. . . . And Hector, in his actorly literalness and brown-shoe conformity while also being insane, would never trouble his environment again. Damn fool Zoyd. Sent so gaga by those mythical days of high drama that he'd forgotten he and Prairie might actually have to go on living years beyond them.

All the rest of the day it seemed like he was getting funny looks everywhere he went. The swamper at Redwood Bayou, getting the place ready for lunch, disappeared into the back where the phone was as soon as Zoyd came in the door. The waitresses at Le Bûcheron Affamé gathered over in a corner murmuring, casting him slow over-the-shoulder looks it was hard even for him to take as anything but pitying. “Hi ladies, how's the warm duck salad today?” But nobody came forth with much more than mentions of ubiquitous though unnamed Hector. Back on the freeway, Zoyd kept a defensive eye out in all directions, no telling where the Tube-maddened Detox escapee might pop up. At his next stop, Humbolaya, amid stomach-nudging aromas from the Special of the Day, tofu à la étouffée, Zoyd hustled use of the office phone to call Doc Deeply on the direct line in to his wing of the Vineland Palace.

“NEVER,” answered the perky female voice on the other end.

“Huh? I didt'n even ask you yet.”

Her voice dropped half an octave. “This is about Hector Zuñiga—maybe you'd better hold.” After a short recorded program of themes from famous TV shows, on came the mellifluous Dr. Deeply.

“Don't want to alarm you, Doc,” Zoyd said, “but I think he's stalkin' me.”

“You've . . . had these feelings for some time?” In the background, on some stereo, Zoyd could hear Little Charlie and the Nightcats singing “TV Crazy.”

“Yeah, in Hector's case fifteen or twenty years. Some guys's in the
joint
for longer 'n that.”

“Look, I can put my people on standby, but I don't think we can protect you around the clock, or anything.” About then Chef 'Ti Bruce put his head in the door hollering “You still on?” and seeming anxious to have Zoyd out of there, when formerly it had been their custom to linger over beignets and chicory coffee.

Crawfish business done, Zoyd's next stop was out to the Old Thumb peninsula to Rick & Chick's Born Again, an auto-conversion shop located among log piles and county motor pools. The owners, Humboldt County twins, had found Jesus and their seed money at about the same time, during the fuel panic of the seventies, when, to get a tax break for bringing out the first U.S. passenger diesel, GM took its 5.7-liter V-8 Cadillac engine and, in some haste, converted it. In the season of purchaser disenchantment that followed, engine experts, including Rick and Chick, found they could make on the order of $2,500 per job reconverting these ill-considered mills from diesel back to gasoline again. Soon they'd expanded into bodywork, put in a paint shed, and begun doing more customizing and conversion, eventually becoming a byword up and down the Coast and beyond the Sierras of the automotive second chance.

Standing with the twins as Zoyd pulled up were the legally ambiguous tow-truck team of Eusebio (“Vato”) Gomez and Cleveland (“Blood”) Bonnifoy, all in a respectful tableau observing a rare, legendary (some believed only folkloric) Edsel Escondido, sort of a beefier Ford Ranchero with a complexity of chrome accents, including around that well-known problem grille, now pitted by years of salt fog, which Vato and Blood had just finished winching to earth from V & B Tow's flagship F350,
El Mil Amores.
Zoyd wondered what script possibilities were tumbling through the partners' heads. It was some elaborate game of doubles they played with the twins every time they came in here, the basic rule being never to say out loud where the vehicle in—often deep—question had really come from, nor even to suggest that the legal phrase “act of conversion” might here be taking on some additional sense.

Today, inspired by a wave of Bigfoot sightings down in the Mattole, Vato had nearly convinced the skeptical lookalikes that the Escondido had been found abandoned in a clearing, its owners frightened off by Bigfoot, in whose territory the car had then sat, anybody's prize, making its retrieval by the boys, who'd just happened to be out in that part of the brush, an adventure full of perilous grades, narrow escapes, and kick-ass four-wheeling all the way, followed at each turn by the openmouthed Rick and Chick, upon whom at last Blood, usually the closer in these proceedings, laid, “So Bigfoot bein' force majeure, we got the legal salvage rights.” Dazed, the twins were nodding at slightly different rates, and another story of twilight reconfiguration, soon to be the talk of the business, was about to get under way.

Zoyd, already jumpy enough from people's reactions to him all day, was not reassured at seeing the gathering break up at his approach into short edgy nods and waves. They were having one of those four-member eyeball permutations that finally nominated Blood as the one to talk to Zoyd.

“This is somethin' about Hector again, right?”

“We heard he was back,” Blood said, “but this ain't him, Blood, it's, uh, somebody else. And me and my partner were just wondering if you were planning to sleep on the base tonight?”

Here came another of those deep intestinal pangs. Zoyd knew that long ago in Saigon, Blood had more than once heard this warning from elements of the Vietcong in whose interest it was to keep him alive and in business. “Well shit. If it i'n' Hector, then who is it?”

Vato came over, looking as serious as his running mate. “They're federal, Vato, but it ain' Hector, he's too busy keepín ahead of that posse from the Tubaldetox.”

Zoyd suddenly felt like shit. “I better see about my kid.” Rick and Chick made mirror-image go-ahead gestures at the phone. “That Jikov 32, that Skoda carburetor you 's lookin' for, it's in my front seat, see what you think.”

Prairie worked at the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple, which a little smugly offered the most wholesome, not to mention the slowest, fast food in the region, a classic example of the California pizza concept at its most misguided. Zoyd was both a certified pizzamaniac and a cheapskate, but not once had he ever hustled Prairie for one nepotistic slice of the Bodhi Dharma product. Its sauce was all but crunchy with fistfuls of herbs only marginally Italian and more appropriate in a cough remedy, the rennetless cheese reminded customers variously of bottled hollandaise or joint compound, and the options were all vegetables rigorously organic, whose high water content saturated, long before it baked through, a stone-ground twelve-grain crust with the lightness and digestibility of a manhole cover.

Zoyd happened to catch Prairie on a meditation break. “You OK over there?”

“Somethin' wrong?”

“Do me a favor, stay till I get there, all right?”

“But Isaiah and the band were coming by to pick me up, we're goin' camping, remember? Sheez, all that shit you smoke, your brain must be like a Etch-A-Sketch.”

“Uh huh, don't get alarmed, but we are facing a situation where a quick mouth, even a leading example such as your own, won't be nearly as much use today as a little cooperation. Please.”

“Sure this ain't pothead paranoia?”

“Nope and now I think of it could you ask the young gentlemen when they git there to stick around too?”

“Just 'cause they look evil, Dad, doesn't mean they're any good for muscle, if that's what you're thinkin'.”

Feeling unprotected on all flanks, Zoyd went speeding in, running lights and ignoring stop signs, to Vineland, where he just made it to the door of the bank at closing time. An entry-level functionary in a suit who was refusing admission to other late-comers saw Zoyd and, for the first time in history, nervously began to unlock the door for him, while inside colleagues at desks could be seen making long arms for the telephone. No, it wasn't pothead paranoia—but neither was Zoyd about to step inside this bank. A security guard sauntered over, unsnapping his hip holster. OK. Zoyd split with a that's-all-folks wave, having luckily parked Trent's rig just around the corner.

Prairie wouldn't be off work for a couple of hours. Zoyd needed cash and also some advice about a quick change of appearance, and both were available from the landscape contractor Zoyd did some lawn and tree work for, Millard Hobbs, a former actor who'd begun as a company logo and ended up as majority owner of what'd been a modest enough lawn-care service its founder, a reader of forbidden books, had named The Marquis de Sod. Originally Millard had only been hired to be in a couple of locally produced late-night TV commercials in which, holding a giant bullwhip, he appeared in knee socks, buckle shoes, cutoff trousers, blouse, and platinum wig, all borrowed from his wife, Blodwen. “Crabgrass won't be'ave?” he inquired in a species of French accent. “Haw, haw! No
problem!
Zhust call—The Marquis de Sod. . . . 'E'll wheep your lawn into shepp!” Pretty soon the business was booming, expanding into pool and tree service, and so much profit rolling in that Millard one time thought to take a few points instead of the fee up front. People out in the non-Tubal world began mistaking him for the real owner, by then usually off on vacation someplace, and Millard, being an actor, started believing them. Little by little he kept buying in and learning the business, as well as elaborating the scripts of his commercials from those old split 30's during the vampire shift to what were now often five-minute prime-time micromovies, with music and special effects increasingly subbed out to artisans as far away as Marin, in which the Marquis, his wardrobe now upgraded into an authentic eighteenth-century costume, might carry on a dialogue with some substandard lawn while lashing away at it with his bullwhip, each grass blade in extreme close-up being seen to have a face and little mouth, out of which, in thousandfold-echoplexed chorus, would come piping, “More, more! We love eet!” The Marquis, leaning down playfully, “Ah cahn't '
ear
you!” Presently the grass would start to sing the company jingle, to a, by then, postdisco arrangement of the
Marseillaise
—

 

A lawn savant, who'll lop a tree-ee-uh,

Nobody beats Mar-

Quis de Sod!

 

Millard was known for spreading work around generously, and for paying in cash and off the books too. Half the equipment lot today was filled by a flatbed rig from someplace down in the Mojave, whose load was a single giant rock, charred, pitted, streaked with metallic glazes. “Wealthy customer,” explained the Marquis, “wants it to look like a meteorite just missed his house.”

Zoyd eyed it gloomily. “Askin' for trouble, those folks. Messin' with Fate.”

They went on back to the office. Blodwen, hair full of pens and pencils, peeping away at the computer, glared at Zoyd. “Elvissa just called in looking for you, your rig's been impounded.” Ah shit, here it was. Elvissa had been in the Vineland Safeway and when she came back out to the lot had found more law enforcement than she'd seen since her old marching days, surrounding the pickup she'd borrowed that morning from Zoyd as if expecting it to pull a weapon on them. Elvissa tried to find out what was going on, but had no luck.

“Listen, Millard, m'man, think I may need a disguise, and soon—can I trouble you for a professional tip or two?”

“What'd you do, Zoyd?” Blodwen wanted to know.

“Innocent till proven guilty, whatever happened to that?”