Loan set the emergency brake to keep the car from rolling onto the railroad tracks going shadowily past the salon’s east side. He had to fight the sensation that this building—the most striking piece of architecture on Hines Street—was itself about to topple over onto the tracks. Lights were on inside the salon—cold white lights. Lone Boy shooed Tuyet and the twins through the front gate, up the steps, through the unlocked doors, and into one of the bright first-floor galleries of the multichambered hall.
Why has Miss Rinehart asked me here? he thought. And why at this hour? But that’s easy. Because at nearly every other hour I either work or sleep. She’s taking care not to be inconsiderate. But what she sacrifices to be kind, she gets all the way back in the area of mysteriousness.
They were in a gallery devoted to Popular Americana. Coca-Cola signs, serving trays, magazine advertisements. Movie posters from six decades. A display case full of belt buckles, some shaped like stock-car racers, some like bucking broncs or jumping trout. One bore the brass legend BORN AGAIN. A rack of baseball bats; a rack of shotguns and rifles; a display of TV Guide covers; a diorama of events—depicted with the aid of tiny, well-dressed dolls—from the presidency of Richard Milrose Nixon.
Triny and Tracy had their noses pressed to the front of this diorama. The ingenious miniatures of the President and other world leaders had entranced them.
Lone Boy looked, too.
Here was a chipper Richard Nixon doll talking with a portly Mao Zedong doll in Beijing. Here was an amiable Nixon hugging a bearish Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow. Here was a dour Harry Kissinger doll presiding at the War Crimes trials of North Vietnamese army officers and communist party shills, all shown in the diorama as hangdog mannequins wearing khaki prison garb. Over here was a sad Jimmy Carter effigy conceding the 1976 presidential election to his opponent. (The Carter figure was an ambiguous sop to the pride of native Georgians.) Over here was the new Shah of Iran receiving from Vice President Westmoreland a delivery of fighter aircraft and tanks, symbolized in the display by tiny metal toys…
“It’s good to see you again, Loan,” a female voice said, and he turned to find himself facing a woman in a black cape, sunglasses, and scarlet riding britches. “It’s good of you to come here after work to see me.” She nodded at Tuyet and the girls. Apparently, she had just come down to them from the wide stairs twisting up to the second floor.
“Miss Rinehart?” Lone Boy was suspicious.
“No recognition? Well, I’m glad you have your doubts.” She took off her sunglasses and put them away. She peeled off her bottom lip, revealing a lip decidedly more familiar. Then she removed her wig, shaking out her own hair, an auburn cascade in contrast to the brunette tidiness of the hairpiece. She dropped the wig on the floor. “I hope I haven’t startled the girls,” she said. “It’s just that I can’t go about this town freely without a few dramatic precautions.” She smiled. “Once an actress, always an actress, I guess. And please call me Miss Grace.”
“I don’t need to be reindoctrinated,” Lone Boy declared.
“We’re just beginning to get ahead,” Tuyet added, and Loan was grateful to her for making this point. Real Americans succeeded, and together he and Tuyet were pushing hard against the remaining barriers confining them to the lower middle class. If he lost his job at Save-Our-Way to be re-Americulturated over several evenings at Fort Benning’s Liberty Center, they’d be losing ground in their daily quest for an inheritable estate.
“That’s what I’m here to talk to you about, Loan.” She turned to Tuyet. “Upstairs you and the kids will find a table laid out with various refreshments. Then you can watch the nonstop showing of Looney Tunes in our screening room. Okay?”
Although Tuyet did not seem anxious to comply, she thanked Miss Grace and took the twins upstairs. After which the actress led Lone Boy into a gallery with modern sofa, a glass coffee table, and dozens of objets d’art— mobiles, he supposed—hanging from the ceiling on wires. Lone Boy sat down, placing on the coffee table the sack that he had inadvertently brought in from his car.
Miss Grace lowered herself into an excruciatingly modern chair a small distance from the sofa. The woman’s famous bottom lip—the pout that had launched a thousand B-52s—looked wan and chafed, but she had hidden it all day under a strip of sculpted rubber.
“We last saw each other four years ago, didn’t we? When I gave you your LAC exemption certificate.”
“But I’ve seen you dozens of times since then, Miss Grace. On television. In the movies. I watched the President give you the Freedom Medal, along with Clint Eastwood, Commissioner of Baseball Agnew, country-western troubadour Berle Haggard, and the fine spy novelist E. Howard Hurt. And the sequel to The Green Berets—Going After Ho’s Guys— that you directed and starred in … my God, Miss Grace, I must’ve seen it at least five times!”
The actress stared—embarrassedly?—at the floor and then said, “I knew about the letter that Headquarters LAC/GSE sent out to you, Loan, and I approved it.”
“You approved it? Why? I’m fully Americulturated. I can rap with the coolest, I can—”
“Please, Loan.”
“But I can, miss. I can tell you the averages of all the major league batting champions since 1945. The birthdays of President Nixon’s grandchildren. I can recite from memory Ronald Reagan’s splendid castigation of the discredited liberal media when he took over from Cronkite as anchor on the CBS Evening News. I can tell you all about the inventors of bubble gum, the microwave oven, and the revolutionary process of xerography.”
“Don’t fret yourself about xerography, Loan, and all that other junk is just window dressing. True Americanism is an attitude, a philosophy, a pattern of behavior. Surely, you know that by now.”
“I do know that!” Lone Boy insisted, panicked by Miss Grace’s implacability. “I only learned all that other crap to show you and everyone else how fuckin’ committed I am.”
“You can’t skimp on essentials and expect superficialities to save you.”
“But where have I screwed up?”
“LAC recently had the Internal Revenue Service’s computers give us rundowns on every Americulturated citizen in the Southeast. The computers spat out the names of certificate holders who hadn’t made more money last year then the year before or who seemed to be stuck in dead-end or downscale employment.”
“Am I the only one who’s made no measurable progress?”
“Then you admit that you haven’t.”
That was not what Lone Boy had meant to imply. He backed up. “No, no. In ‘78, when you gave me my exemption certificate, Tuyet and I had just had the twins. Until then we’d been zipping along. Then the medical bills. Also, feverish saving for their college. Now I moonlight at Save-Our-Way after working at Gangway. And so we still have that foreign clunker out front. And so we seem to be walking a treadmill. An illusion, actually. We’re full of hope. We’ll be self-made millionaires in five years, tops. The twins will go to Agnes Scott and become renowned ballerinas or fantastic foreign-policy consultants.”
Pity and impatience from Miss Grace: “Your tax returns and job profiles don’t present so sanguine a picture.”
“But—”
“A barmaid and a bookstore clerk. She takes in sewing in the mornings, and every evening you oversee a place designed to attract holdup men. And you think you’re in J. Pohl Getty territory?”
“We’re making money for day care, we’re fattening our savings, we’re working our asses off.”
“Do you have any investments? Any CDs or municipal bonds? An individual retirement account? What about starting a business—a service enterprise—or your own? Our IRS report says you’ve done none of these things—unless you’ve been so foolish as to fail to record either your investments or your write-offs.”
Why is life so complicated? Lone Boy asked himself. All we’re trying to do is become millionaires. The rest of this gobbledygook is just that—bankers’ and stockbrokers’ lingo. If you can only ge
t rich talking such shit, maybe Tuyet and I really are doomed to lower-middle-class quasi-poverty.
Miss Grace lectured him a while. She said that she had come to see him because he and his wife Tuyet had been among the first thousand refugees from the Hanoi-Haiphong area of North Vietnam to enter the Liberty Americulturation Center at Fort Benning. Before their arrival, the center had processed primarily South Vietnamese nationals and rehabilitable North American dissidents. She had a personal stake in the subsequent free-market performance of every member of that trailblazing class, and, to date, three quarters of those passing out of her program had exalted American capitalism by achieving measurable wealth and/or status. A few hadn’t done well, of course, but they had probably developed slothful habits or a cynical defeatism aggravated by their inability to meet opportunity head on. Loan didn’t fall into these categories, thank God, but it did appear that he had forgotten certain LAC lessons about taking intelligent risks and playing the entrepreneur. He worked hard, but he got nowhere. He saved money, but he didn’t use it to build an investment power base. In many ways, he was like the servant in Jesus’ parable who accepted a gold coin from the nobleman, hid it in a handkerchief, and, when the master returned from his journey, gave this same coin back to him.
“And do you know what the nobleman said to his servant?” asked Miss Grace.
Lone Boy had heard this passage preached from a Catholic pulpit here in LaGrange—but the end of the parable escaped him.
Miss Grace remembered for him. “He said, ‘To everyone who has, more will be given; but the one who does not have, even the little that he has will be taken away from him.’ ”
My God, Lone Boy thought, does she intend to ship us back to the reunified Republic of Vietnam, along with the twins, to wade about in rice paddies behind fly-bitten seladangs?
Miss Grace said, “No, we don’t intend to take away what you have now, Loan. Good capitalists are kinder than Jesus’ nobleman, and it’s my desire to help you. However, God helps those who help themselves, and so does the American free-enterprise system.”
At this point, Triny and Tracy came squealing down the steps. Each was clutching close a wrinkled ball of pink flesh—circled by a wreath of fur—that Loan could not quite identify. The girls were squealing delightedly, but the creatures pressed against their coats were squeaking in alarm. Tuyet followed the twins wearing a look of bemused exasperation.
“Brezhnev bears?” Lone Boy asked.
Miss Grace nodded.
“I’m calling mine Skinhead,” Triny announced.
“I’m calling mine Piggy,” Tracy told everyone.
“They’re not yours,” Tuyet reminded the girls. “You can’t name what doesn’t belong to you.”
“But they do belong to your daughters,” Miss Grace said. “I bought the ‘bears’ for them today at West Georgia Commons.”
Tuyet said, “The girls are too young to take care of them.”
But Triny and Tracy had found the cavies in a glass box in the screening room, and Miss Grace insisted on giving them not only Skinhead and Piggy but also the aquarium and a supply of guinea-pig food. Once the twins realized that the actress meant them to have the Brezhnev bears, it was impossible to deny the girls. Tuyet, Loan glumly noted, looked nonplussed and put out.
“I couldn’t make them watch the Looney Tunes after they’d seen these things,” she said. “It’s hard to handle a pair of determined little ones all by yourself, Miss Grace.”
“It’s all right. They’re sturdy little animals.”
Lone Boy wondered briefly if Miss Grace meant the twins or the Brezhnev bears. Tuyet acquiesced in the gift—what else could she do?—but, now that the girls had seen their daddy and eaten, took them home to bed. Miss Grace would chauffeur Loan and the Brezhnev bears to their rented house as soon as she had finished talking to him. An hour more, at most.
The galleries cold and echoey about them, Miss Grace told Loan, “It might help if you all changed your names.”
Lone Boy stared in bewilderment at the woman.
“Don’t you see? You’ve resisted Americulturation further than you realize. Le Boi Loan is a Vietnamese name from first syllable to last, and Tuyet, Triny, and Tracy are more of the same. It’s okay to hang on to part of your cultural heritage—”
“Le Thanh Tong was one helluvan emperor, Miss Grace!”
“—but you can’t live in the past. Most successful LAC people chose—somewhere along the line—to adopt an Anglo-Saxon first name.”
“We have made a beginning in that way, Miss Grace. How can you call Triny and Tracy Vietnamese monickers?”
“Oh, come on, Loan. Triny’s a transparent Americanization of Trinh and Tracy’s a similarly transparent version of Trac.”
“But I was born Vietnamese. We’re acknowledging our roots.”
“Yes, but if you insist upon emphasizing your ‘roots’ in these sneaky ways, maybe you should return to them. We have a precedent, you know, and it was remarkably successful.”
Lone Boy heard the blood beating in his temples. The precedent to which she referred was the wholesale relocation of major segments of the black population of the United States to sub-Saharan Africa, nations such as Nigeria, Liberia, Kenya, Senegambia, etc. Parts of this huge exodus had occurred voluntarily, but many relocatees had loudly protested their expulsion and some of the nations accepting them had done so only out of fear. A Defense Department spokesman had publicly announced that the strategy of bombing North Vietnam’s irrigation dikes during the late unpleasantness with that (former) country was one that had workable, albeit top-secret, counterparts for other potential battlefronts. Further, an assistant secretary in the State Department had declared that uncooperative governments would surely undergo reevaluations of both their trade status and their eligibility for US foreign-aid programs. Blacks had not completely disappeared from the United States, of course, but they were distributed across the country so as to achieve—in the words of the chairman of the Urban Affairs Council—“a benign demographic picturesqueness.”
“I don’t mean to threaten you,” Miss Grace said. “But you and yours are resisting—subtly—complete Americulturation.”
Angrily, Lone Boy shook his head. “That’s a crock. Look here, Miss Grace.” From the paper sack on the coffee table, he extracted the May issue of Daredevil. “I’m a fan and a collector. I’d’ve never been either one if I were old-style Vietnamese. And look at this, too.” He pulled a floppy cellophane bag of popcorn from the sack. “One of my favorite snacks. I eat it every chance I get. I drink Lite beer from Miller or Coca-Cola when I eat, and if there’s a Hawks game or a tennis match on the tube, I watch it while I’m chowing down. During the commercials I’ve already memorized, I may even re-go through my comics. How American may I get? Before Le Boi Loan, you ought to reindoctrinate Peter Rose!”
Miss Grace was smiling. “It does seem that you’ve learned a charming American feistiness.”
“Damn straight.”
They sat for a time in silence. Then Grace Rinehart said, “Do you know the young man who works in the Happy Puppy Pet Emporium?”
Lone Boy, crossing his arms, leaned into the sofa back. She’s switching directions, he thought, trying to cross me up.
“Calvin Pickford,” he replied cautiously. “Didn’t you buy your Brezhnev bears from him?”
“I did. It’s my opinion—based on our single meeting today—that he’s a closet dissident. What do you think?”
“I don’t know. He’s an okay guy. Weird taste in books.”
“Weird how, Loan?”
“Oh, you know, a Philip K. Dick freak. That guy’s death shook him up. Cal came into Gangway today and ordered a whole set of Dick in paperback.” Lone Boy halted. There was more he could say, but he wondered if he should. But to prove his loyalty, to prove he didn’t need to be reindoctrinated, maybe he could—maybe he’d better— proffer the actress an informational tidbit. “He told me he had copies of, uh, ‘Dickian opus
es’ that some people would kill to get hold of, Miss Grace. Bragging, probably.”
“Not necessarily.”
Lone Boy felt cold; he shuddered and rubbed his upper arms.
“He may be telling the truth. Why don’t you find out?”
“Ma’am?”
“Please, not ‘ma’am’—‘miss’.” She shifted in her chair and tossed one wing of her cape across her body. “If you’ll keep an eye on this Calvin Pickford for a month or two, I’ll temporarily suspend the order to report for reindoctrination. If you can determine that he really has illegal copies of some unpublished Dick novels, and if you bring them to me, I give you my solemn word that you’ll never receive another such order again, no matter how long you live or how modest your annual income. Understand?”
“Bring them to you? Steal them?”
“They’d have to be samizdat publications, Loan. It violates the amended Bill of Rights to possess any kind of literature in that proscribed form. QED, you wouldn’t be stealing—you’d be impounding the material for evidence.”
“Evidence for what?”
“Prosecution in federal court.”
My God, Lone Boy reflected, that’s heavy stuff. And all the poor dude’s doing these days is working in a pet shop.
“Is this Calvin Pickford person a friend of yours?”
“No,” Loan hurriedly said. “Usually, I only see him when he comes in to browse, every coupla days or so.”
“He trusts you?”
“Trust doesn’t have anything to do with us. Our relationship, I mean. He probably thinks I’m a lousy bookstore clerk. But we don’t have any major gripes against each other. He does his stuff and I do mine.”
“And will some of the ‘stuff’ that you do include, from now on, keeping an eye on Mr. Pickford?”
“Okay,” Lone Boy managed.
“And trying to lay your hands on these seditious photocopies?”
Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas Page 11