Next thing you know it’s dawn—
Forget the creeps and crises,
Crank up ’at neon light—
Full moon in Pisces,
Hell,
it’s Saturday night.
She couldn’t see him from where she was, but Doc waved anyway, clapped and whistled like everybody else, and then kept on with his search for an exit through the back regions of the underlit casino. About the time it occurred to him that Fabian Fazzo might’ve been trying to steer him someplace else, he came around a corner a little too fast and ran into big trouble in brown shoes.
“Oh, shit.” Yes it was Special Agents Borderline and Flatweed again, along with a platoon of other suit-wearers, escorting a figure Doc recognized only too late—probably because he didn’t want to believe it. And because nobody was supposed to see any of this in the first place. The blurred glimpse Doc got was of Mickey in a white suit, wearing much the same look he had in his portrait back at his house in the L.A. hills—that game try at appearing visionary—passing right to left, borne onward, stately, tranquilized, as if being ferried between worlds, or at least bound for a bulletproof car you’d never get to see in through the windows of. Hard to say if they had him in custody or if they were conducting him on what real-estate folks like to call a walk-through.
Doc had stepped back into the shadows, but not fast enough. Agent Flatweed had caught sight of him, and paused. “Little business here, you fellows go ahead, I won’t be long.” While the rest of the detail moved away down the corridor, the federal approached Doc.
“One, at that Mexican place over on West Bonneville, that could have been a coincidence,” he observed pleasantly, pretending to count on his fingers. “All kinds of people come to Las Vegas, don’t they. Two, you show up in this particular casino, and a man begins to wonder. But three, here in a part of the Kismet Lounge even most locals don’t know about, well say now, that puts you somewhat out on the probability curve, and sure merits a closer look.”
“How close is that, you’re already upside my face here.”
“I’d say you’re the one who’s too close.” With his head he indicated Mickey, now almost vanished behind him. “You recognized that subject, didn’t you.”
“Elvis, wasn’t it?”
“You’re making things awkward for us, Mr. Sportello. This curiosity about the Michael Wolfmann matter. Most inappropriate.”
“Mickey? no longer even a active case for me, man, fact, I never even made out a ticket on it, ’cause nobody was payin me.”
“Yet you pursue him all the way to Las Vegas.”
“I’m here looking into totally something else. Happened to drop by the Kismet, that’s about it.”
The federal gave him a long look. “Then you won’t mind my sharing a thought. It’s you hippies. You’re making everybody crazy. We’d always assumed that Michael’s conscience would never be a problem. After all his years of never appearing to have one. Suddenly he decides to change his life and give away millions to an assortment of degenerates—Negroes, longhairs, drifters. Do you know what he said? We have it on tape. ‘I feel as if I’ve awakened from a dream of a crime for which I can never atone, an act I can never go back and choose not to commit. I can’t believe I spent my whole life making people pay for shelter, when it ought to’ve been free. It’s just so obvious.’”
“You memorized all that?”
“Another advantage of a marijuana-free life. You might want to try it.”
“Uh . . . try what, again?”
Agent Borderline came over, an inquisitive look on his wide red face. “Ah, Sportello we meet again and a pleasure as always.”
“I can see how busy you fellows are,” said Doc, “so rather than keep you, I think I’ll just,” breaking into Casey Kasem’s Saturday-morning Shaggy voice, “h’like, fuckin, run?” which he proceeded to do, though with no clear idea of where he was heading. What were they going to do, start shooting? yes well actually . . .
At length, nearly out of breath, he spotted a pair of toilets labeled GEORGE and GEORGETTE, and betting on FBI taboos, ducked into the ladies’, where he found Lark in front of one of the mirrors, retouching her makeup.
“Damn! another one them sexually confused hippies!”
“Waitin for the feds to go mess with somebody else, darlin. Caught your number, by the way. That Dolly Parton better start gettin worried.”
“Well, some of Roy Acuff’s people were in last week and gave it a listen, so you keep your fingers crossed for me.”
“Ordinarily I’d say let’s grab us a quick beer, but—”
Federal hollering in the near distance.
She made a face. “Bad upbringin is my own theory. I’ll show you the back way out, and best you avail yourself now.”
Doc made his way among smells of newly sawed wood, fresh paint, and joint compound till he reached a fire door and shoved it open, whereupon a recorded voice kicked in at high volume advising him to freeze and wait for the arrival of duly authorized professionals trained to thoroughly dismantle his ass. He stepped out onto a sparsely lit loading dock of time-corroded concrete, down which he could see dark shapes already coming at him on the run.
There was the sound of an engine. Doc looked back over his shoulder, and here rounding the corner at great expenditure of tire tread came Tito’s limousine, with the sunroof open and the top half of Adolfo waving some kind of submachine gun in the air. Doc’s pursuers came to a halt and began to consult about this.
The limo braked next to Doc. “Hop on down!” yelled Tito. Adolfo ducked back inside long enough for Doc to step over onto the roof and slide in through it, then resumed position as Tito tached up and dropped into low, leaving a fragrant set of tracks a block long and a screech that could be heard halfway to Boulder Dam. “Where to, bro?” inquired Tito.
“You’re not gonna believe who I saw,” Doc said.
“Adolfo thinks he saw Dean Martin.”
Adolfo slid back down inside the car. “Not exactly.”
“Well . . .” Tito said, “so like . . . was it Dean Martin, or wasn’t it Dean Martin?”
“See, that’s just it—it was Dean Martin, and it wasn’t Dean Martin.”
“‘And’? Don’t you mean ‘but’?”
Doc must have drifted away. When they let him off back at the motel, Trillium wasn’t there, though her things were. He looked around for a note and couldn’t find one.
He rolled a joint, lit up, and settled in in front of All-Nite Freaky Features, where Godzilligan’s Island, a movie for TV in which the Japanese monster meets the sitcom castaways, was just about to begin. Over the opening credits, Godzilla, out in search of some R&R after his latest urban-demolition binge, stumbles—literally—upon the Island, causing immediate anxiety among the survivors of the Minnow’s historic cruise.
“We just have to stay alive,” as Mary Ann explains it to Ginger, “till the Japanese Self-Defense Forces get on the case, which is usually quicker than you can say ‘kamikaze.’”
“Ka-mi—” Ginger begins, but is drowned out by a skyful of jet-fighter aircraft, which begin to fire rockets at Godzilla, who as usual is no more than mildly inconvenienced. “See?” nods Mary Ann, as the laugh track also explodes in mirth. Unnoticed in the uproar, the Professor has arrived with a peculiar-looking piece of anti-Godzilla weaponry he has been working on, featuring various analog control panels, parabolic antennas, and giant helical glass coils pulsing with an unearthly purple glow, but before he can get to demonstrate it, Gilligan, mistaking the device for the Skipper, falls out of a tree on top of it, narrowly avoiding irradiation and impalement. “I just got it calibrated!” cries the Prof in dismay.
“Maybe it’s still in warranty?” wonders Gilligan.
We get a crane shot from what is supposed to be Godzilla’s point of v
iew. He is looking down at the behavior on the Island, endearingly perplexed as always, scratching his head in a way meant to remind us of Stan Laurel. Fade to commercial.
At some point, Doc must have lost track of the movie, awakening next morning to Henry Kissinger on the Today show going, “Vell, den, ve schould chust bombp dem, schouldn’t ve?”
The National Security Advisor was drowned out by lengthy honking from out in the lot. It was Puck and Trillium in the Camaro, which had been decorated all over with toilet paper in different fashion shades and psychedelic prints, and beer cans and a crudely lettered Just Married sign. It seemed that after a night of nonstop partying, the couple had been down to the county courthouse, obtained the license, headed straight for the Wee Kirk O’ the Heather, and in short order were hitched, Einar acting as best man and deciding himself to elope with another groom-to-be who’d been waiting for a bride with what turned out to be cold feet, as, in fact, he discovered with signs of relief, were his own. For a recessional, Puck and Einar talked the electric organ player into accompanying them on a duet of the Ethel Merman favorite “You’re Not Sick, You’re Just in Love,” from Call Me Madam, though there was the usual awkwardness over who would sing Ethel Merman’s part.
Puck and Doc found a minute to talk. “Congratulations, man, she’s a swell chick.”
Marriage, even in this town, will do strange things to a man. “She can save me.” Nodding wide-eyed as any bus-station runaway.
“Who’s after you, Puck?”
“Nobody,” his eyes almost pleading, though not with Doc necessarily.
“Salvation, see, I’ve got my own hangups with that, ’cause I’m feeling maybe I could have saved Mickey from what happened, whatever that was. Maybe even Glen, too?”
The swastika on Puck’s head began to pulsate. “Ain’t exactly been tiptoein through no tulips about that myself,” he said. “Glen was a fuckup, but we were blood brothers, and that should’ve meant something. But if I would have stayed on that shift? it would’ve happened to me instead.” Which wasn’t saying, exactly, that he’d have sacrificed himself for Glen. He had a look in his eyes now that Doc wasn’t too comfortable with. “And you, you couldn’t have saved nobody.”
“That much of a done deal, you think?”
“You don’t want to be fuckin with this, Mr. Sportello.” The swastika was throbbing furiously now. “Ain’t like this is the Mob. Not even the pretend Mob you people think is the Mob.”
Doc fumbled for a joint. “I’m not following.”
Puck reached Doc’s pack of Kools out of his shirt pocket, lit one, and kept the pack. “These Mormon fucks in the FBI. They keep preachin everything here is wops. Like end of the story, finito, nothin but the wops, get rid of the wops and everything’s comin up roses, as Ethel always sez. Well forget that race shit, man, that’s all just for cover. Howard Hughes, what’s he? Aryan to the bone, right? but who’s he working for? what about the Mob behind the Mob?”
Now, if Puck had been some average California beach-town doper, Doc might have put this down to ordinary paranoia and wished him a happy honeymoon and got back to work. But Puck still wanted to deny he knew anything about anything, and whatever that was at his back, closing in, was even too frightening for silence to do him much good either.
“Here, here’s an easy one,” Doc downshifted. “Did Mickey ever talk about some city he wanted to build someplace out in the desert?”
“Lately, he never did nothing but. Arrepentimiento. Spanish for ‘sorry about that.’ His idea was, anybody could go live there for free, didn’t matter who you were, show up and if there’s a unit open it’s yours, overnight, forever, et cetera et cetera, and so forth as the King of Siam always sez. Here, you got a road map, I’ll show you.”
Trillium came over and slid her hands under one of Puck’s tattooed arms, the one with the skull with the dagger in its eye socket. “We’d better be on our way, my love.”
“You guys can have the car,” Doc said, “which is paid up for another week, and also whatever’s left on the room, consider it my wedding present. Can I have my smokes back?”
Trillium walked Doc out to where Tito was waiting with the limo. “He really is the love of my life, Doc. He needs me.”
“You’ve got my office and home numbers, right?”
“We’ll call, I promise.”
“All the best, Mrs. Beaverton.”
EVENING CAME, TAKING everybody by surprise. Tito drove Adolfo and Inez to the airport, and as he pulled back out onto the highway, he and Doc noticed a car just going in the airport entrance, motor-pool gray, with something unhesitant and unforgiving in its movement that told them who it was there for. Tito ascended to the freeway and headed out into the desert. “Nice town, but let’s lose it.”
Like spacemen in a space ship, they were pressed violently into the seat backs as Tito engaged some classified performance feature, and outside the windows city neon began to lengthen in long spectral blurs, to shift toward blue ahead while in the black distances framed by Tito’s mirror each point of light grew reddish, receded, converged. Tito had Roza Eskenazi tapes playing over the car stereo. “Listen to her, I adore that chick, she was the Bessie Smith of her day, pure soul.” He sang along for a few bars. “Tiátimo meráki, who hasn’t had that, man? a need, so hopeless, so shameless, that nothing nobody can say means shit.” Sounded like more addict talk to Doc, but after he got used to the scales and vocal styling he found himself thinking about Trillium, and wondering what she’d make of these rembetissas of Tito’s and the particular kind of longing they sang about.
They drove through the night, and in the first light they got to the turnoff Puck had shown Doc on the map, and followed a state road to a county road, left the blacktop then for a ranch road of packed dirt, past battered and dangling gates and across dry washes on strumming cattle guards, past yucca and squat little cactuses, desert wildflowers at the roadside, rock outcrops in the distance, dark moving patches out in the alkaline brightness that could have been burros or coyotes or mule deer, or maybe aliens from long-ago landings, for Doc could feel evidence everywhere of ancient visitation.
They came over a ridge, and there, down a long slope into a valley whose river might’ve vanished centuries ago, was Mickey Wolfmann’s dream, his penance for having once charged money for human shelter—Arrepentimiento. Doc and Tito lit a wake-up joint and passed it back and forth. Beyond the project stretched an expanse of desert only marginally developed, here a scatter of concrete structures, there a distant smokestack or two among the scrawls of chaparral. Later Doc and Tito wouldn’t be able to agree on what they’d been looking at. There were several what Riggs Warbling had called zomes, linked by covered walkways. Not perfect hemispheres but pointed at the top. Doc counted six, Tito seven, maybe eight. The terrain between the complex and themselves was also strewn with giant almost-spherical pink rocks, though they could also have been man-made.
“Can we get down there to have a look?” Doc wondered.
“What, in this? We’d break an axle, wipe out the oil pan, some shit. You’d need a four-wheeler. Unless you think we can walk it? You got a hat?”
“I need a hat to walk?”
“Rays, man, dangerous rays.” In the trunk Tito found a couple of gigantic sombreros he’d bought in Glitter Gulch for souvenirs, and he and Doc put them on and set out in the desert breeze for Arrepentimiento.
It took longer than they thought. The zomes ahead, like backdrop art in old sci-fi movies, never seemed to come any closer. It was like feeling your way through dangerous terrain at night, though Doc was conscious of the sun overhead, the star of an alien planet, smaller and more concentrated than it should have been, zapping them relentlessly with hard radiation. Lizards came out from behind the visible world and stood timeless and breathless as rock to watch Doc and Tito.
After a while it began to look more
like an abandoned construction site. Scrap lumber bleaching in the sun, spools of rusted cable, lengths of plastic pipe, snarls of Romex, a wrecked air compressor. Plastic sheeting had blown away in places, revealing the skeleton underneath, struts and connectors, looking sometimes like an openwork soccer ball, sometimes patterns on a cactus, or seashells people bring back from Hawaii.
“Don’t see any padlocks,” said Doc.
“Don’t mean we can just walk in.”
Doc found a door and it opened easily, and he stepped into a soaring shadowy vault.
“All right, you can stop there.”
“Uh-oh,” Doc said.
“Or you can keep on coming, clear on into the next world. Ask me if I give a shit.” It was Riggs Warbling with a couple weeks’ start on a beard and holding a .44 Magnum, a Ruger Blackhawk, cocked and pointing at the middle of Doc’s forehead, its barrel showing little if any wobble, though the same could not be said now for Doc’s voice.
He took off his sombrero, respectfully. “Well, howdy, Riggs! Happened to be in the area, thought I’d take you up on that invite! Remember me? Larry Sportello? Doc? A-and this here’s my friend Tito!”
“Mickey send you?”
“Um, no, as a matter of fact I’ve been trying to find out what happened to Mickey.”
“Jesus. What didn’t happen to him.” Riggs eased the hammer back down, though he still looked plenty agitated. “Come on in.”
Inside was a gigantic refrigerator full of beer and other foodstuffs, a number of slot machines, and a pool table and reclining chairs, and actually, now that Doc thought of it, more space, judging from the outside, than there could possibly be in here. Riggs saw him looking around and read his mind. “Groovy, ain’t it? Kind of a switch on Bucky Fuller, basically—instead of fewer dollars per cubic foot enclosed, this is more cubic feet per dollar.”
Doc’s response normally would’ve been, “Isn’t that the same thing?” But from some nuance in Riggs’s behavior, perhaps the insane stare, or the tight grip he still had on his gleaming black handgun, or the inability to keep his voice from breaking into higher registers, Doc dug how dummying up might be a slightly wiser move.
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