This went on for a while, jet takeoffs and landings kept interrupting, reception faded in and out. Doc was obliged to dig up more quarters and soon found himself screaming through his teeth like Kirk Douglas in Champion (1949). But they finally worked it out that Adolfo would be there within the half hour with another ride, and Doc was ready for phase two of his plan, which required rapidly smoking some Hawaiian weed rolled into a joint of a certain diameter and bringing the box full of dumpster trash to the counter of Kahuna Airlines, where he bought a ticket for Honolulu on a dubious credit card he’d taken once in lieu of a fee, checked the dummy carton in as baggage, and watched it roll away into what stewardii of his acquaintance had described as a bureaucratic nightmare, hoping it would take the Fang some time to sort out.
“You’re sure it’ll be safe, now.”
“You’ve asked that several times, sir.”
“Call me Larry . . . is it’s only that you guys have the worst reputation in the industry for losing shit, so I’m a little anxious is all.”
“Sir, we can assure you—”
“Oh forget that. What I really need to know about now is the Land of the Pygmies.”
“Excuse me?”
“You have a flight atlas handy? Look it up, ‘Pygmies, Land of the.’”
This being a California airline, with standing instructions to be as accommodating as possible, somebody in a uniform and short haircut soon appeared with a flight atlas and stood leafing through it, growing perplexed and apologetic. “Whichever of these it is, sir, it has no landing facilities.”
“But I, wanna go, to the Land, of the Pygmies!” Doc kept sort of whining.
“But, sir, the Land of the, the Pygmies seems to have no, um, runways?”
“Well then, they’ll just have to build one, won’t they—gimme that—” He seized the PA microphone from behind the desk, as if it were on some shortwave frequency being attentively monitored by Pygmies waiting for a message just like this. “All right, now listen up!” He began barking orders to an imaginary Pygmy construction crew. “Is it a what? of course it’s a Boeing, shorty—got a problem with that?”
Security people began to drift into Doc’s visual perimeter. Supervisorial personnel were hovering in a sort of sick fascination. Customers queued behind Doc found reasons to step out of line and wander away. He unplugged the microphone, set his hat at a jaunty Sinatroid angle, and in a not-totally-embarrassing lounge voice began to work the crowd, singing,
There’s a skyful of hearts,
Broken in two,
Some flyin full fare,
some non-revenue,
All us bit actors
Me him and you,
Playin our parts,
In a skyful of hearts . . .
Up there in first class,
Ten-dollar wine,
Playing canasta,
Doin so fine,
Suddenly, uh-oh,
Here’s ’at No Smokin sign
That’s how it starts,
In a skyful of hearts . . .
[Bridge]
To the roar of the fanjet . . .
You went on your way . . .
I’ll sure miss you, and yet . . .
There ain’t much to say . . .
Now I’m flyin alone
In economy class,
Drinkin the cheap stuff,
Till I’m flat on my ass,
Watchin my torch song
Fall off the charts,
But that’s how it goes
In a skyful of hearts . . .
This tune had in fact been on the radio briefly a couple weeks back, so by the last eight bars there were actually people singing along, some lead, some backup, and stepping in rhythm. Enough witnesses to keep the Fang busy for a while. Doc meanwhile had slowly been making his way toward the exit and now, tossing the mike to the nearest customer, slid away out the door and ran back to find Adolfo behind the wheel of a 442 Olds with the motor idling in the space next to his own car, and on the radio Rocío Dúrcal with her heart about to break.
Doc got in his car, and they pulled out of the lot, drove till they found a reasonably dark street in North Hollywood, and quickly shifted the twenty-kilo inconvenience from Doc’s trunk to the Olds. Doc handed his own keys to Adolfo. “They’ll have this plate number and the car description, all I need’s like an hour or two, try to keep ’em busy as long as you can—”
“I was going to switch after a while with my cousin Antonio ‘Bugs’ Ruiz, who the word ‘peligro’ is not in his phrase book, plus he don’t give a shit,” replied Adolfo.
“More than I can repay, vato.”
“Tito thinks it’s him that owes you. You guys work it out, don’t bring me in.”
This Oldsmobile didn’t have power steering, and well before he reached the San Diego Freeway, Doc felt like he was back in PE class doing push-ups for Mr. Schiffer. On the bright side, nobody seemed to be following him. Yet. He still had to work out the interesting question, how does one keep twenty kilos of heroin hidden and safe for a short period of time, when vast resources are being mobilized to discover it, repossess it, and exact retribution for ripping it off?
Back in Gordita, looking for someplace to park, he happened to pass Denis’s place, which was still decorated with heaps of soggy plaster and splintered laths and wiring and plastic pipes, like somebody had spilled a giant bowl of fucked-up novelty cereal. And with Denis, Doc knew, living somehow down in the middle of it, bootlegging the power he needed for the fridge and TV and the lava lamp off of the neighbors next door. Until the landlord, who in any case was vacationing down in Baja, could figure out how to collect enough insurance to pay for repairs, nothing was likely to change here. “Psychedelic!” exclaimed Doc. A perfect stash site. It was about this point that he noticed he was wearing only one huarache anymore.
The bars hadn’t closed yet, and Denis didn’t seem to be home. Keeping an ear out for funseekers in the vicinity, Doc brought the carton with the heroin inside it down into the remains of Denis’s living room and hid it behind a section of collapsed ceiling, draping the giant plastic rag of what had been Chico’s water bed over it. Only then did he happen to notice that the carton he’d pulled out of that dumpster in the dark had once held a twenty-five-inch color TV set, a detail he had no cause to think about till next day when he dropped in on Denis about lunchtime and found him sitting, to all appearances serious and attentive, in front of the professionally packaged heroin, now out of its box, and staring at it, as it turned out he’d been doing for some time.
“It said on the box it was a television set,” Denis explained.
“And you couldn’t resist. Didn’t you check first to see if there was something you could plug in?”
“Well I couldn’t find any power cord, man, but I figured it could be some new type of set you didn’t need one?”
“Uh huh and what . . .” why was he pursuing this? “were you watching, when I came in?”
“See, my theory is, is it’s like one of these educational channels? A little slow maybe, but no worse than high school . . .”
“Yes Denis thanks, I will just have a hit off of that if you don’t mind. . . .”
“And dig it, Doc, if you watch long enough . . . see how it begins to sort of . . . change?”
Alarmingly, Doc after a minute or two did find minute modulations of color and light intensity beginning to appear among the tightly taped layers of plastic. He sat down next to Denis, and they passed the roach back and forth, eyes glued to the package. Jade/Ashley showed up with a giant Thermos full of Orange Julius and paper cups and a bag of Cheetos.
“Lunch,” she greeted them, “and color-coordinated, too, and— Whoa, what the fuck is that, it looks like smack.”
“Nah,” sa
id Denis, “I think it’s like a . . . documentary?”
They all sat there in a row, sipping, crunching, and gazing. Finally Doc tore himself away. “I hate to be the bad guy, but I’ve got to do a repo on this?”
“Just till this part’s over?”
“Till we see what happens,” added Jade.
DOC HAD BEEN on the phone with Crocker Fenway, Japonica’s dad, who had called around noon, interrupting a dream Doc was having about the schooner Golden Fang, which had reassumed its old working identity, as well as its real name, Preserved. Somehow the Zen exorcist Coy had told Doc about, the one who’d dezombified the Boards’ mansion up in Topanga, had also been at work on the schooner, clearing away the dark residues of blood and betrayal . . . conducting the unquiet spirits of those who’d been tortured and assassinated aboard her safely to rest. Whatever evil had possessed her was now gone for good.
It was toward sunset, after some rain, the dark lid of clouds rolled back a few fingers’ widths from the horizon, revealing a strip so clear and luminous that even homebound traffic out on the freeway was slowing down for it. Sauncho and Doc were out on the beach. Last apricot light flooded landward and brought their shadows uphill, past the lifeguard towers, into terraces of bougainvillea, rhododendrons, and ice plant.
Sauncho was giving a kind of courtroom summary, as if he’d just been handling a case. “. . . yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to have the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever. May we trust that this blessed ship is bound for some better shore, some undrowned Lemuria, risen and redeemed, where the American fate, mercifully, failed to transpire . . .”
From the beach Doc and Sauncho saw her, or thought they saw her, heading out to sea, all sails glowing and spread. Doc wanted to believe that Coy, Hope, and Amethyst were somehow on board, bound for safety. At the rail, waving. He almost saw them. Sauncho was not so sure. They began to bicker about it.
At which point Crocker had fire-gonged Doc back into another petroleum-scented day at the beach. “Not me,” Doc croaked into the receiver.
“Sure been a long time!” the Prince of Palos Verdes way, way too chirpy for this time of the morning.
“Just a second while I see about a pulse here,” Doc rolling off the couch and staggering into the kitchen. He wandered in small loops, trying to remember what he was supposed to be doing, somehow got water on to boil and instant coffee in a cup, and after a while also remembered that the phone was off the hook. “Howdy. And your name was . . .”
Crocker reintroduced himself. “Some people I know have lost something, and there’s a theory developing that you might know where it is.”
Doc drank half a cup of coffee, scalded his mouth, and finally said, “You wouldn’t also happen to be one of the principals in this, man.”
“Not that it’s any of your business, Mr. Sportello, but over the years I’ve become known in this town as something of a fixer. My problem today is that you may be holding in gratuitous bailment an item whose owners wish to reclaim possession, and if this can be arranged quickly enough, there will be no penalties attached.”
“Like, I won’t get wasted or nothing.”
“Luckily for you, that’s a sanction they prefer to exercise only against their own. Given the sorts of business they engage in, without absolute trust in one’s associates all may too swiftly revert to anarchy. Outsiders like yourself tend to get the benefit of the doubt, and you in turn may trust their word without any hesitation.”
“Groovy. Want to meet at the same old place?”
“A parking lot in Lomita? Think not. Too much like your turf. It’s probably been replaced with something else by now anyway. Why don’t we meet this evening at my club, the Portolá.” He gave an address near Elysian Park.
“I bet there’s a dress code,” Doc said.
“Jacket and tie if possible.”
NINETEEN
ON THE WAY OVER, DOC KEPT AN EYE ON THE REARVIEW MIRROR for inquisitive El Caminos or Impalas. One of many basic things he had failed to learn about Bigfoot was what kind of motor pool he had access to. About the time he reached the Alvarado exit, it occurred to him to start worrying about helicopters, too.
Crocker Fenway’s club was housed in a Moorish Revival mansion dating from the Doheny-McAdoo era. In a room off the lobby where they sent Doc to cool his heels was a mural depicting the arrival of the Portolá expedition in 1769 at a bend of the river near what became downtown L.A. Pretty close to here, in fact. The pictorial style reminded Doc of labels on fruit and vegetable crates when he was a kid. Lots of color, atmosphere, attention to detail. The view was northward, toward the mountains, which nowadays people at the beach managed to see only once or twice a year from the freeway when the smog blew away, but which here, through the air of those early days, were still intensely visible, snow-topped and crystal-edged. A long string of pack mules wound into the green distance along the banks of the river, which was shaded by cottonwoods, willows, and alders. Everybody in the scene looked like a movie star. Some were on horseback, packing muskets and lances and wearing leather armor. On the face of one of them—maybe Portolá himself? there was an expression of wonder, like, What’s this, what unsuspected paradise? Did God with his finger trace out and bless this perfect little valley, intending it only for us? Doc must have got lost then for a while in the panorama, because he was startled by a voice behind him.
“An art lover.”
He blinked a couple-three times, turned and saw it was Crocker, looking what they call tanned and fit, and as if somebody had just run a floor buffer all over his face.
“It’s sure some picture,” Doc nodded.
“Never noticed it really. Why don’t we go up to the visitors’ bar. Nice suit, by the way.”
Nicer than Crocker knew. Doc had found it at the big MGM sell-off not long ago, having headed for it unerringly among the thousands of racks of more humdrum movie outfits that filled one of the soundstages. It was calling to him. A note pinned to it said that John Garfield had worn it in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and it turned out to fit Doc perfectly, but not wishing to compromise what mojo might still be active among its threads, Doc saw no point in telling Crocker any of this. He’d worn the Liberace necktie as well, which Crocker kept looking at but seemed unable to comment on.
Not Doc’s kind of bar, really. Full of fake-Mission furniture and so much somber wood you couldn’t see what you were sitting on or drinking off of. Some jungle-print upholstery, not to mention more colored lights, would have livened things up.
“Here’s to peaceful resolution,” Crocker raising a squat glassful of a West Highland malt made exclusively for the Portolá and angling it toward Doc’s rum and Coke.
A subtle reference, no doubt, to recent events out on Gummo Marx Way. Doc beamed insincerely. “So . . . how’s the family?”
“If you mean Mrs. Fenway, I remain as devoted to her as I was the day she came down the aisle at St. John’s Episcopal Church looking like the Gross National Product. If you mean my lovely daughter Japonica, on whom I hope you are not idiot enough ever to have considered laying so much as a finger, why, she’s fine. Fine. In fact, it’s only because of her, and our own small transaction a few years ago, that I am even cutting you as much slack as I am now.”
“Ever so grateful, sir.” He waited till Crocker was about to swallow some Scotch and said, “By the way—did you ever run into a dentist named Rudy Blatnoyd?”
With as little choking and sputtering as possible, Crocker replied, “The son of a bitch who until recently was corrupting my daughter, yes I do seem to recall the name, perished in a trampoline accident or something, didn’t he?”
<
br /> “The LAPD’s not so sure it was an accident.”
“And you’re wondering if I did it. What possible motive would I have? Just because the man preyed on an emotionally vulnerable child, tore her from the embrace of a loving family, forced her to engage in sexual practices that might appall even a sophisticate like yourself—does that mean I’d have any reason to see his miserable pedophile career come to an end? What a vindictive person you must imagine me.”
“You know . . . I did suspect he was fucking his receptionist,” Doc in his most innocent voice, “but I mean, what dentist doesn’t, it’s some oath they all have to take in dentist school, and anyhow that’s a long way from strange and weird sex. Isn’t it?”
“How about when he forced my little girl to listen to original cast albums of Broadway musicals while he had his way with her? The tastelessly decorated resort hotel rooms he took her to during endodontist conventions? the wallpaper! the lamps! And I won’t even get into his secret collection of vintage snoods—”
“Yeah but . . . Japonica’s legal age now, isn’t she?”
“In a father’s eyes, they’re always too young.” Doc took a quick glance at Crocker’s eyes but didn’t see much fatherly emotion. What he did see made him thankful he’d decided not to smoke too much on the way over.
“To the matter at hand—those I represent are prepared to offer you a generous compensation package for the safe return of their property.”
“Groovy. Suppose it didn’t even have to be in the form of, like, money?”
Crocker for the first time appeared to be taken aback. “Well . . . money would be a lot easier.”
“I’ve been more concerned about the safety of some people.”
“Oh . . . people . . . Well, that would depend, I suppose, on how much of a threat they represent to my principals.”
“I’m thinking about those who are close to me in my life, but there’s also this saxophone player named Coy Harlingen, who’s been working undercover for different antisubversive outfits, including the LAPD? He’s come to feel lately that he made the wrong career choice. It lost him his family and his freedom. Like you, he has an only daughter—”
Inherent Vice Page 36