Vineland (8 page)

And then there was the sky—something going on in between air terminals. Zoyd had been hearing rumors since that first Cosmic Pineapple encounter, and then later from coworkers such as Gretchen the make-believe Polynesian cocktail waitress, to whom he had introduced himself with an arpeggiated E flat 7th and some original material that went

 

Whoa! Come 'n' let me roll that

Little grass skirt,

In the Zig Zag, of my em-

Brace!

 

Light on up, with th'

Flame of love, take

The frown right, off o' your face!

 

Put it in a roach clip,

Pass it to and fro,

In between your lips and let th'

Good smoke flow, oh

 

It won't cost much, and

It ain't gonna hurt, just

C'mere with that uh little, grass skirt!

 

— long before the final bars of which she would usually have escaped his clutches, halfhearted, let's face it, to begin with, a social approach, considering the fog of postmarital misjudgment he was groping around in all the time back then, not so hopelessly offensive, anyway, that Gretchen wouldn't allow him points for going to the trouble. They presently had reached a keel even enough for her to start confiding things she'd heard, and after a while things she'd witnessed as well. Aircraft that came alongside and, matching course and speed exactly to those of the jet, hung there, fifty feet away, windowless, almost invisible, sometimes for hours.

“UFO's?”

“Not—” she hesitated, the grass skirt, which was actually polyester, rustling rhythmically, “what
we'd
call a UFO. . . .”

“Well who would?”

“Just that they looked too familiar . . . up from Earth, for sure, not in from . . . out there or nothin'.”

“You ever see who was flyin' 'em?”

Her eyes flickered in every direction they could before she murmured, “I'm not crazy, ask Fiona, ask Inga, we've all seen 'm.”

He played four bars of “Do You Believe in Magic?” and squinted up at her, eyes mostly lingering on the synthetic skirt. “Will I see them, Gretchen?”

“Better hope you don't,” but as she was soon to add, he must not've been hoping hard enough, because on their very next flight out of LAX, about 37,000 feet above the middle of the ocean, the festive jumbo was taken, the way a merchant's ship and cargo might be by pirates, an easy target, an aluminum shell dainty as a robin's egg to the other, which was solid, smaller, of higher mass and speed. As Gretchen had foretold, not exactly a UFO. The captain took what evasive action he could, but the other matched his maneuvers exactly. Finally they stood, side by side above the tropic of Cancer, between them, some twenty meters across, a flow of savage wind, as, slowly, not telescoping out, but assembling itself from small twinkling pieces of truss-work, the other spun across to them a windproof access tunnel, with a cross section like a long teardrop, that locked firmly on to the forward hatch of the Boeing.

In the plane, passengers milled among the resined hatch-cover tables, the plastic tikis and shrubbery, clutching their oversize paper-parasoled drinks, Zoyd attempting to keep up a medley of peppy tunes. Nobody knew what was going on. Arguments started. Through the port-side windows could be observed the burnished seams, the glowing engines of the other. Last sunlight lay in bands at the horizon, and some of the windows had begun to ice up, not in the quiescent way of frost on a kitchen window on Earth, but in a stressed clash of jet-speed geometries.

When the hatch at last sighed open, the intruders entered the flying nightclub with elite-unit grace, automatics ready, faces dim behind high-impact shields, all business. Everyone was ordered to a seat. The captain came on the PA. “This is for our own good. They don't want all of us, just a few. When they get to your seat number, please cooperate, and try not to believe any rumors you hear. And till we get the rest of you where your tickets say you're going, all drinks are on the Kahuna Airlines Contingency Fund!” which brought loud applause but would prove, in the drawn-out litigation attending this incident, to have been an appeal to a fictional entity.

Gretchen dropped by the synthesizer just to take a breather. “This is fun,” Zoyd said. “First time I ever heard the cap'n's voice. If he can sing ‘Tiny Bubbles,' I'm out of a job.”

“Everybody's nervous and drinking. What a bummer. Kahuna Airlines done it again.”

“This doesn't happen on the majors?”

“There was some kind of a industry-wide agreement? It would have cost more than Kahuna wanted to spend. The word they all use is ‘insurance.' “

Night fell like the end of a movie. The alcohol flowed torrentially, and soon it was necessary to switch over to a reserve tank of inexpensive vodka, located in the wing. Some passengers fell unconscious, some glazed out, others kicked off their shoes and partied, notwithstanding the grim shielded troopers working slowly, methodically among them. As Zoyd was segueing into the main title theme from
Godzilla, King of the Monsters
(1956), he was distracted by a voice somewhere behind and slightly below him. “What it is, bro! OK if I—sit in?” He saw somebody in a blond hippie haircut, floral bell-bottoms, and tropical shirt, with a dozen or so plastic leis piled up around his face and shoulders, plus some pitch-black goggle-style shades and a straw hat, holding a banjo-ukulele of between-the-wars vintage. The hair turned out to be a wig, borrowed from Gretchen, who had also suggested Zoyd for sanctuary.

“Man's after you, eh,” smoothly, finding a lead sheet with, inevitably, uke diagrams on it. “How about this?”

“Uh-huh!” the strange ukulelist replied. “But it'd be easier—in the key of G!” Ukulele talk, all right, the new sideman proceeding to turn in a respectable rhythm job on the old Hawaiian favorite “Wacky Coconuts,” though when Zoyd took the vocal he got confused enough to have to go back to the tonic and wait.

 

Can't ya hear . . . them . . .

(vumm) Uh Wack-ky Coconuts,

(hm) Uh Wack-ky Coconuts,

Thumpin' in a syn-copated island,

Melodee . . .

Con
-tinuouslee. . . .

 

Yes one by one those

(vum) Wack-ky Coconuts,

(vum) Wack-ky Coconuts,

Fallin' on m' roof like th' beat of some

Jungle drum . . . (mm!)

Vum-vum vum!

 

Why won't those

Ol' Wack-ky Coconuts, find some other place?

Why should I remain in Wack-

Ky Coconuts' embrace? Must be wacky 'bout

 

(vum!) Wack-ky Coconuts,

(vum!) Oh, those loco nuts,

They're the coconuts

For me!

 

The pursuers moved along among the boogeying and the cataplectic, none of them giving the strumming fugitive much of a look, in search, it seemed, of some different profile. Further, Zoyd noticed that every time he hit his highest B flat, the invaders would grab for their radio headsets, as if unable to hear or understand the signal, so he tried to play the note whenever he could, and soon was watching them withdraw in a blank perplexity.

Zoyd's odd visitor, with ritual economy, held out a business card, iridescent plastic, colors shifting around according to cues that couldn't always be sensed.

“My life—looks like you saved it!” The card read,

 

Takeshi Fumimota

ADJUSTMENTS

Phone Book, Many Areas

 

“That's you? Takeshi?”

“Like Lucy and Ethel—if you're ever in a jam!” He played a few bars on the uke. “At the point in your life when you really need this, you will—suddenly remember! that you have this card—and where you have stashed it!”

“Not with my memory.”

“You'll remember.” It was then that he simply faded into the environment, became invisible in what would be a nightlong party that now, with the departure of their visitors, had shifted into high.

“He-e-e-y,” Zoyd spoke to the room, “I heard of job skills like that, but don't know that I'd care to associate with that heavy-duty type of a hombre, nothin' personal understand, that is o' course if you're still someplace you can hear me. Hah?” No reply. The card went into a pocket, then another, into a long sequence of pockets, wallets, envelopes, drawers, and boxes, surviving barrooms, laundromats, doper's forgetfulness, and North Coast winters, till the morning, not knowing if he'd ever see her again, when he suddenly remembered where it was after all the years and gave it to Prairie, as if she were supposed to be the one to have it all along.

 

 

H
OME between shifts, Frenesi sat with a cup of coffee at a kitchen table in an apartment in the older, downtown section of a pale humid Sun Belt city whose almost-familiar name would soon enough be denied to civilian eyes by federal marker pens, sunlight streaming in unmitigated by tree leaves, feeling herself, like a tune that always finds its home chord again, drawn, taken in, tranquilized by hopeful rearrangements of the past, many of them, like today's, including her unknown daughter, Prairie, last seen as a baby smiling half-toothless at her, trusting her to be back that evening as usual, trying to wiggle out of Zoyd's arms, that last time, and into Frenesi's own. For years, whenever she and Flash moved in anyplace new, in a reflex superstition by now like sprinkling salt and water in every room, her thoughts would go to Prairie, and to where, in each new arrangement, she would sleep—sometimes the baby, sometimes a girl she was free to imagine.

Down the block, circular saws were braying metallically
eee-yuh! eee-yuh!
among hammerfalls, truck engines, truck stereos, not much of it registering now as Frenesi entertained images of a nubile teen Prairie, looking something like herself, in some California beach pad, wearing centerfold attire and squirming in the embrace of some surf bum with a downy mustache, named Shawn or Erik, among plastic swag lamps, purring audio gear, stained hamburger sacks, and squashed beer cans. But if I saw her on the street someplace, she reminded herself, I wouldn't even know her . . . one more teenage girl, no different from any of the mall rats she saw at work every day out at Southplex, one of four shopping malls, named for points of the compass, that bracketed the city, hundreds of these girls a day, whom she watched on the sly, nervous as a peeper, curious about how they moved and spoke, what they were into—that desperate for any detail, however abstractly Prairie so far away might share it with her generation.

She couldn't talk about much of this to Flash. Not that he “wouldn't understand”—two of his own kids were also somewhere denied him—but there was a level past which his attention began to wander. He might have been crazy enough to think she was somehow trying to rewrite all their history, being known to say things like, “Aw, it was just a judgment call, hon. Say you'd've tried to stay away, could've been even worse,” eyebrows up and cocked in a way he knew women read as sincere, “old Brock come after you then no matter where you took her, and—” a sour grin, “ka-pow!”

“Oh, come on,” she objected, “not with some little baby.”

“Son of a bitch was fairly irate, that first time you tried to split, first time I ever heard your name, in fact. He totally lost it there for about a week.” Brock Vond's screams, from the sealed upper floors of the looming federal monolith in Westwood, could be heard down echoing in the tranquillity of the veterans' graveyard as well as out on the freeway above the traffic noise, regardless of the hour. Nobody in that crisis knew what to do with Brock, who clearly needed some R and R over at “Loco Lodge,” a Justice Department mental resort in the high desert. But none of the new Nixonian hires in internal affairs could even discover how to process him out there. Finally, after what to some had been far too long, he quieted down enough to pack up on his own one day and head back to D.C., where he was supposed to've been all along, so the paperwork on him just got shredded in California. But it was to be a while yet before reports stopped coming in from lunch counters and saloons, often known to have strictly enforced attitude codes, in unlikely West Coast locales, of disruptions by a, some said “wild-eyed,” others “terminally depressed,” Brock Vond. Many informants said they'd expected him to take off his clothes and do something unspeakable.

“Well, what a wacko!” commented Frenesi. They were sitting in their new kitchen—light shades of wood, Formica, houseplants, better than some places they'd been in, although the fridge here might have a bum thermostat. She took his hand and tried to catch his eyes. “Just the same, later on, I could have run. Just taken her, taken my baby, and fuckin' run.”

“Yep,” head stubbornly down, nodding.

“And it really matters, and don't say judgment call either, 'cause this isn't the damn NFL.”

“Just tryin' to help.” He squeezed her hand. “It sure wa'n't easy for me, you know, Ryan and Crystal . . . meant me givin' extra handouts on that chow line for the duration, just to find out their new
names
, way back when.”

“Yeah. Great duty.” Each sat recalling Brock Vond's reeducation camp, where they'd met. “Do you ever dream about it?”

“Uh-huh. Gets fairly vivid.”

“Heard you,” she said, “one or two nights,” adding, “even all the way across town.”

They then had a good mutual look. Her blue eyes and the clear child's brow above had always had power to touch him, he felt it now simultaneously in the heels of his hands, in his lower gums, and in the chi spot between his navel and his cock, a glow, a good-natured turn to stone, some hum warning of possible overflow into words that, if experience was any guide, would get them in trouble.

From Frenesi's side of the table, Flash was an absorber of light, somebody she had to look for to see and work to know, to whom she tithed too much of her energy, especially the times he was “across town,” his phrase for out chasing other women. He liked to prowl the shady office complexes in the downtowns of these Sun Belt cities, looking for educated ladies in business suits who craved outlaw leather. No question, a pain in the ass—but alone, she thought, she would perish, too exposed, not resourceful enough. She thought, It's too late, we're locked into this, imagining often a turn of the conversation that would allow her to say, “All those guys—Flash, I knew it hurt you, I hated it, I'm sorry.” But he would say, “Promise me you'll never do it again.” She'd say, “How can I? Once they find out you're willing to betray somebody you've been to bed with, once you get that specialist's code attached to you, don't have to be glamour beefs like high treason anymore, they can use you the same way for anything, on any scale, all the way down to simple mopery, anytime they want to get some local judge tends to think with his dick, it's your phone that rings around dinnertime, and there goes the frozen lasagna.” And he would have no answer, and it would be Frenesi who'd bravely bring up impossibilities. “Fletcher, let's get the hell out of this, on our own, for good . . . find a place? Buy it?” Sometimes she even said it out loud. His answer was always not “Let's do that” but “Sure . . . we could do that. . . .” And soon there'd be only another posting, another defective rental the stipend check would barely cover. Was anybody even looking anymore? Had she ever believed in the federal promises of protection? Some fairytale fleet of unmarked government cars circulating in round-the-clock shifts, watching over them all asleep in their beds, making sure their witnesses would all stay protected forever?

Silence in the place, their son, Justin, asleep in the Tubelight. Prairie, who hadn't ever been there. The philodendron and the parlor palm, wondering what was going on, and Eugene the cat, who probably knew. Frenesi took her hand away from Flash's and they all got back to business, the past, a skip tracer with an obsessional gleam in its eye, and still a step or two behind, appeased for only a little while. Sure, she knew folks who had no problem at all with the past. A lot of it they just didn't remember. Many told her, one way and another, that it was enough for them to get by in real time without diverting precious energy to what, face it, was fifteen or twenty years dead and gone. But for Frenesi the past was on her case forever, the zombie at her back, the enemy no one wanted to see, a mouth wide and dark as the grave.

When the sixties were over, when the hemlines came down and the colors of the clothes went murky and everybody wore makeup that was supposed to look like you had no makeup on, when tatters and patches had had their day and the outlines of the Nixonian Repression were clear enough even for the most gaga of hippie optimists to see, it was then, facing into the deep autumnal wind of what was coming, that she thought, Here, finally—here's my Woodstock, my golden age of rock and roll, my acid adventures, my Revolution. Come into her own at last, street-legal, full-auto qualified, she understood her particular servitude as the freedom, granted to a few, to act outside warrants and charters, to ignore history and the dead, to imagine no future, no yet-to-be-born, to be able simply to go on defining moments only, purely, by the action that filled them. Here was a world of simplicity and certainty no acidhead, no revolutionary anarchist would ever find, a world based on the one and zero of life and death. Minimal, beautiful. The patterns of lives and deaths. . . .

What she hadn't been able to imagine, in the improvident rush of those early days, was that Nixon and his gang would also pass, Hoover die, even charades one day be enacted in which citizens could pretend to apply for and if found worthy read edited versions of their own government dossiers. Watergate and its many spinoffs ended the gilded age for Flash and Frenesi. She remembered him staying home for weeks, watching the hearings all day and then again on the public channel at night, on the floor with his face right up in the Tube, as intense as she ever saw him, all that summer pissing and moaning in front of the twitching little screen. He saw the retrenchment coming, the little or no per diem, the vouchers returned, denied, withdrawn—no more airport Ramada Inn suites, gran turismo-type auto rentals, PX privileges, cafeteria freebies, costume allowances, or, in all but operational emergencies, even collect calls. The personnel changed, the Repression went on, growing wider, deeper, and less visible, regardless of the names in power, office politics far away now determined the couple's posting to new addresses and missions, each another step away from costly pleasures, from boldness of scale, with less reason even to carry a weapon, becoming tangled in an infinite series of increasingly squalid minor sting operations of steadily diminishing scope and return, against targets so powerless compared to those who were setting them up that some other motive, less luminous than that of the national interest, must have been at work. Each time there'd be another script for them to learn, dumber than the last, actual detailed lines they had to practice with each other even though they wouldn't always work together. Flash would disappear for long stretches, he never volunteered where, and sometimes, sure, it could have been other women. Frenesi had run a quick estimate in her mind of how likely, barring a surprise confession, she'd be ever to find out, and decided there was no point worrying. She came to believe it was his way of expressing how he felt about what they had ended up doing with their lives, and who for.

“Tough to admit,” she tried once to confide to him, “that those first couple college jobs were as good as it's ever gonna get.”

“Another pussy routine,” speculated Flash.

“Fletcher—”

“Oh,
I'm
sorry! I meant ‘vagina,' of course!”

One of Flash's big sorrows was that once, not long ago, he'd been as outlaw as they come, grand theft auto, hard and dangerous drugs, small arms and dynamite and epic long hauls by the dark of the moon. But then he got caught, and his little teen wife left him, and the court took his babies away, and Flash was turned, left with no choice but to work his way up on their side of the law, soon finding that nobody trusted him enough to bring him all the way inside any structure of the governance. So there he had to hang, on the outside, part of the decoration, clinging with all the others he ran or was run by, gargoyles living on a sheer vertical facade. He knew they would only let him go where nothing would be damaged if he should turn again. It would mean a twenty- or thirty-year orbit around the lurid neon planet of adolescence—an entire adult career to be spent as a teenager under surveillance, none of whose “family” would ever believe in him.

In his DMV and jail photos, in Christmas Polaroids, in old crowd scenes too low-resolution to see whose face it was, Flash appeared always the same, unsmiling, a lean, prematurely drawn young man, alert and drug-free, with some local stylist's idea of a haircut. Trapped long ago into making believe he always knew what he was doing, he'd found it working so well at the start that soon he was keeping up the act even when there was “nobody else around,” as Wilson Pickett might say. His family obligations were clear enough these days, if not always compelling enough, and so, unable to imagine the three of them ever parting, he soldiered through his duties with what looked like cheerful stoicism, except that underneath he remained a flaming and extravagant complainer, having learned how to use this aggressively, to negotiate for some of what he wanted from the world. His whammy was indignation—believing he'd been injured, he was able with the force of his belief to convince strangers with no possible connection to the case at hand that they were guilty. Out on the highway, especially, he'd been known to go actively chasing down motorcycle police, forcing them over to the shoulder, jumping out to pick fights. The unfortunate trooper would cower sidesaddle in his bike seat, squirming, thinking, This is crazy, but unable to find the button on his transmitter . . . strange. . . . “Furthermore, just 'cause they let you ride around on this li'l—lookit this piece of shit, I seen mopeds't could shut this 'sucker down, what
is
this, who
makes
it, Fisher-Price? Mattel? zis Barbie's Motorbike or some shit?” In some men such querulousness might indicate a soft streak a yard wide, but not in Flash, a vigilante of civil wrongs, settling things with his lethal and large-caliber mouth.

Many in the snitch community approved, being long unhappy with the old informant image of weasel-like furtiveness. “Why should we lurk around like we're ashamed of what we do?” Flash wondered. “Everybody's a squealer. We're in th' Info Revolution here. Anytime you use a credit card you're tellin' the Man more than you meant to. Don't matter if it's big or small, he can use it all.”