Inherent Vice

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Please . . .”

  “Okay, well anyway now he wants out. I think I can square it with the heat, but there’s this other bunch called Vigilant California. And whoever’s running them, of course.”

  “Oh, the Viggies, yes a fairly contemptible lot, useful in the street but no political sense beyond simple hooliganism. My guess is that they’d prefer he didn’t disclose any confidential information.”

  “Last thing he’d ever do.”

  “Your personal guarantee.”

  “He tries anything, I’ll go after him myself.”

  “Barring surprises, then, I don’t see why some amicable separation shouldn’t be arranged for him. That’s all you wanted? No money, now, you’re sure?”

  “How much money would I have to take from you so I don’t lose your respect?”

  Crocker Fenway chuckled without mirth. “A bit late for that, Mr. Sportello. People like you lose all claim to respect the first time they pay anybody rent.”

  “And when the first landlord decided to stiff the first renter for his security deposit, your whole fucking class lost everybody’s respect.”

  “Ah. So you’re looking for what, a refund? Plus how many years’ interest? That’d be a bookkeeping issue, of course, but I expect we could come up with that.”

  “’Course. Nothin to you, couple hundred bucks, just something to roll up and snort coke through. But see, every time one of you gets greedy like that, the bad-karma level gets jacked up one more little two-hundred-dollar notch. After a while that starts to add up. For years now under everybody’s nose there’s been all this class hatred, slowly building. Where do you think that’s headed?”

  “Sounds like you’ve been talking to His Holiness Mickey Wolfmann. You’ve been out to have a look at Channel View Estates? Some of us moved heaven and earth, mostly earth, to keep that promise of urban blight from happening—one more episode in a struggle that’s been going on for years now—residential owners like me against developers like Brother Wolfmann. People with a decent respect for preserving the environment against high-density tenement scum without the first idea of how to clean up after themselves.”

  “Bullshit, Crocker, it’s about your property values.”

  “It’s about being in place. We—” gesturing around the Visitors’ Bar and its withdrawal into seemingly unbounded shadow, “we’re in place. We’ve been in place forever. Look around. Real estate, water rights, oil, cheap labor—all of that’s ours, it’s always been ours. And you, at the end of the day what are you? one more unit in this swarm of transients who come and go without pause here in the sunny Southland, eager to be bought off with a car of a certain make, model, and year, a blonde in a bikini, thirty seconds on some excuse for a wave—a chili dog, for Christ’s sake.” He shrugged. “We will never run out of you people. The supply is inexhaustible.”

  “And you don’t ever worry,” Doc grinned back cordially, “that someday they’ll all turn into a savage mob screamin around outside the gates of PV, maybe even looking to get in?”

  Shrug. “Then we do what has to be done to keep them out. We’ve been laid siege to by far worse, and we’re still here. Aren’t we.”

  “And thank heaven for that, sir.”

  “Oh. You people do irony, I wasn’t aware.”

  “More like practicality. If you and your friends and lunch companions don’t all remain ‘in place,’ how will average PIs like me ever make a living? We can’t get by on matrimonials and car theft, we need those high-level felony activities you folks are so gifted at.”

  “Yes. Well.” Crocker flicked a glance at his Patek Philippe moonphase. “Actually . . .”

  “Sure. Don’t want to hang you up. Where and when do we do the handoff this time?”

  Easy enough. Parking lot at the May Company shopping mall out at Hawthorne and Artesia, tomorrow evening. Transfer of goods to be made only after verification that certain individuals have been allowed to go their ways unmolested. Future guarantees of personal safety not to be unreasonably withheld.

  “Your reputation as a fixer’s on the line here, Crocker. I may not be as well connected, and for sure not as much into revenge as you folks are, but if you been jivin with me here my good man, I say unto you, best watch your ass.”

  “Revenge,” protested the sensitive tycoon, “me?”

  DOC BROUGHT DENIS along for, well maybe not muscle, but something like that, some kind of protection he hadn’t realized till lately he needed, a boost for his immunity against the shopping plazas of Southern California, for a desire not to desire, at least not what you found in shopping malls.

  “Huh?” said Denis while they were waiting for the drop and handing a joint back and forth and Doc was trying to explain this. “So why are you giving back that TV set?”

  Doc looked closely at Denis. “It— Denis, it’s not a . . .”

  Denis started giggling. “It’s okay, Doc, I knew it was smack. I know you’re not dealing smack and probably not making any money out of this trip tonight either. But you should be getting something for your trouble.”

  “I’m getting their word they won’t hurt anybody. My friends, my family—me, you, a couple others.”

  “You believe that? Comin from whoever it is handles this kind of weight? Their word?”

  “What, I should only trust good people? man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense. I mean I wouldn’t give odds either way.”

  “Wow, Doc. That’s heavy.” Denis sat there pigging on the joint as usual. “What does that mean?” he said after a while.

  “There they are.”

  The Golden Fang operatives were cleverly disguised tonight as a wholesome blond California family in a ’53 Buick Estate Wagon, the last woodie that ever rolled out of Detroit, a nostalgic advertisement for the sort of suburban consensus that Crocker and his associates prayed for day and night to settle over the Southland, with all non-homeowning infidels sent off to some crowded exile far away, where they could be safely forgotten. The boy was six and already looked like a Marine. His sister, a couple years older, had a possible future in drug abuse but wasn’t saying much, content to sit staring at Doc while focused inside on thoughts of her own he was just as happy not to know about. Mom and Dad were all business.

  Doc got out and opened the trunk. “Need a hand with this?”

  “I’m good.” The dad had on a short-sleeved shirt which revealed, maybe by design, a complete absence of tracks. The mom was a sleek-enough California blonde in a species of tennis dress, smoking some white-chick filter cigarette. The smoke kept getting into one of her eyes, but she didn’t bother to take the cigarette out of her mouth. When hubby had the dope stashed securely in back, she squinted Doc half a smile and held out a flat rectangle of plastic.

  “What’s this?”

  “A credit card,” the daughter piped up from the back seat. “Don’t hippies have them?”

  “I must have meant, why’s your mom handing me this?”

  “It isn’t for you,” said the mom.

  Doc took the object doubtfully. It seemed normal, though issued by a bank he didn’t recognize right away. Then he saw Coy Harlingen’s name on it. The husband watching him out of narrowed eyes. “You’re supposed to tell him, ‘Well done, welcome back to the main herd, safe journeys.’ That’s ‘journeys,’ plural.”

  “Guess I can remember that.” He noticed that Denis was writing it down anyway.

  A minute or two after the Buick drove away toward Hawthorne Boulevard, Doc saw a beat-up El Camino which could only be Bigfoot’s creeping along after them. It sounded different. Bigfoot must’ve put new headers in or something.

  But where was this tail he was on going to take Bigfoot finally? How far in this weird twisted cop karma would he ha
ve to follow the twenty kilos before it led him to what he thought he needed to know? Which would be what again, exactly? Who hired Adrian to kill his partner? What Adrian’s connection might be to Crocker Fenway’s principals? Whether the Golden Fang, which Bigfoot didn’t believe in to begin with, even existed? How smart was any of it, right now for example, without backup, and how safe was Bigfoot likely to be, and for how long?

  “Here,” Denis said after a while, passing a smoldering joint.

  “Bigfoot’s not my brother,” Doc considered when he exhaled, “but he sure needs a keeper.”

  “It ain’t you, Doc.”

  “I know. Too bad, in a way.”

  TWENTY

  WEDGED UNDER THE KITCHEN DOOR WHEN HE GOT BACK WAS an envelope Farley had left, with some enlargements of the film from the shindig at Channel View Estates. There were close-ups of the gunman who’d nailed Glen, but none were readable. It could have been Art Tweedle under the Christmas-card ski mask, it could’ve been anybody. Doc got out his lens and gazed into each image till one by one they began to float apart into little blobs of color. It was as if whatever had happened had reached some kind of limit. It was like finding the gateway to the past unguarded, unforbidden because it didn’t have to be. Built into the act of return finally was this glittering mosaic of doubt. Something like what Sauncho’s colleagues in marine insurance liked to call inherent vice.

  “Is that like original sin?” Doc wondered.

  “It’s what you can’t avoid,” Sauncho said, “stuff marine policies don’t like to cover. Usually applies to cargo—like eggs break—but sometimes it’s also the vessel carrying it. Like why bilges have to be pumped out?”

  “Like the San Andreas Fault,” it occurred to Doc. “Rats living up in the palm trees.”

  “Well,” Sauncho blinked, “maybe if you wrote a marine policy on L.A., considering it, for some closely defined reason, to be a boat . . .”

  “Hey, how about a ark? That’s a boat, right?”

  “Ark insurance?”

  “That big disaster Sortilège is always talking about, way back when Lemuria sank into the Pacific. Some of the people who escaped then are spoze to’ve fled here for safety. Which would make California like, a ark.”

  “Oh, nice refuge. Nice, stable, reliable piece of real estate.”

  Doc made coffee and punched on the tube. Hawaii Five-0 was still on. He waited through the end credits, with the footage of the giant canoe, which he knew Leo liked to watch, and then rang up his parents in the San Joaquin.

  Elmina filled him in on the latest news. “Gilroy got promoted again. He’s regional manager now, they’re sending him to Boise.”

  “They’re all gonna pack up and move to Boise?”

  “No, she’ll be staying here with the kids. And the house.”

  “Uh, huh,” Doc said.

  “Gil sure picked a lulu, that one. Can’t stay away from the bowling alley, out dancing with Mexicans and some of them you can’t tell what they are to all hours and of course we’re always happy to sit our grandbabies but they need their mama, too, don’t you think?”

  “They’re lucky to have you guys, Ma.”

  “I just hope when you get married, you’ll be thinking a little more clearly than Gil was.”

  “I don’t know, I always tended to cut Vernix some slack ’cause of that first husband and all.”

  “Oh, the jailbird. He was just her type. How she ever kept out of Tehachapi herself, I’m sure I don’t know.”

  “Funny, you always sounded like her biggest fan.”

  “Do you see much of that pretty Shasta Fay Hepworth?”

  “Once or twice.” And no harm in adding, “She’s living back at the beach now.”

  “Maybe it’s fate, Larry.”

  “Maybe she needs a break from the picture business, Ma.”

  “Well, you could do worse.” Doc could always tell when his mother was taking a beat on purpose. “And I hope you’ve been staying out of trouble.”

  Leo had been on the extension for a while. “Here we go.”

  “I only meant—”

  “She thinks you’re dealing grass, and she wants to score some, but she’s too embarrassed to ask.”

  “Leo, now, I swear—” Scuffling and thumping sounds could be heard.

  “Should I be callin the riot squad in?”

  “He’s never going to drop this,” Elmina said. “You remember our friend Oriole, who teaches junior high. She confiscated some pot the other day, and we decided we’d try a little.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “Well, there’s this soap that we watch, Another World? but somehow we couldn’t recognize any of the characters, even though we’ve been following them every day, I mean it was still Alice and Rachel and that Ada whom I have never trusted since A Summer Place [1959] and everybody, their faces were the same, but the things they were talking about all meant something different somehow, and meantime I was also having some trouble with the color on the set, and then Oriole brought in chocolate chip cookies and we started eating and couldn’t stop with those, and next thing we knew, Another World had changed into a game show, and then your father came in.”

  “I was hoping there’d be some reefer left, but those two had smoked it all up.”

  “Bummer,” said Doc sympathetically. “It sounds like you’re the one who wants to score, Dad.”

  “Actually,” Leo said, “we were both sort of wondering . . .”

  “Your cousin Scott is coming up next weekend,” Elmina said. “If you could find some, he says he’ll be happy to bring it.”

  “Sure. Just do me a favor, you guys?”

  Elmina reached down the miles of phone line to take his cheek in a pinch and wobble it back and forth once or twice. “Best of the bunch! Anything, Larry.”

  “Not when you’re baby-sitting, okay?”

  “’Course not,” growled Leo. “Ain’t like that we’re dope fiends.”

  NEXT MORNING THE fire bell went off, and it was Sauncho. “Thought you might want to be in on this. Had a tip the Golden Fang put in last night at San Pedro, and there’s been activity all night long, and this time it looks like a quick turnaround. Los federales are making shadow-and- intercept noises. The firm’s runabout is down at the Marina and if you drive fast, you can make it here in time.”

  “In time to stop you from something crazy, you mean?”

  “Oh and you might want to wear some Sperry Topsiders instead of that one huarache?”

  Traffic cooperated, and Doc found Sauncho at Linus’s Tavern drinking a Tequila Zombie, but he didn’t even have time to get one himself before the phone behind the bar rang. “For you, honey,” Mercy the bartender passing the phone to Sauncho, who nodded once, then twice, then, moving faster than Doc had ever seen him, threw a twenty on the bar and ran out the door.

  By the time Doc caught up with him, Sauncho was down on the pier casting off lines from a little fiberglass inboard-outboard belonging to Hardy, Gridley & Chatfield. Sauncho had the motor going and had begun easing away from the berth in a haze of blue exhaust when Doc just managed to stagger aboard.

  “What am I doing on this Clorox bottle again?”

  “You get to be the mate.”

  “Like Gilligan? That makes you . . . wait a minute . . . the Skipper?”

  They steered south. Gordita Beach emerged from the haze, gently flaking away in the salt breezes, the ramshackle town in a spill of weather-beaten colors, like paint chips at some out-of-the-way hardware store, and the hillside up to Dunecrest, which Doc had always thought of, especially after nights of excess, as steep, a grade everybody sooner or later wiped their clutch trying to get up and out of town on, looking from out here strangely flat, hardly there at all.

  The waves were pretty g
ood today for this stretch of the coast. Offshore winds had slackened enough to bring some surfers out, and they waited in a line, bobbing up and down, like Easter Island in reverse, it had always seemed to Doc.

  Through Sauncho’s old binoculars he observed a CHP motorcycle cop chasing a longhaired kid along the beach, in and out of folks trying to catch some midday rays. The cop was in full motorcycle gear—boots, helmet, uniform—and carrying assorted weaponry, and the kid was barefoot and lightly dressed, and in his element. He fled like a gazelle, while the cop lumbered behind, struggling through the sand.

  Doc flashed how this was the time machine and he was seeing Bigfoot Bjornsen at the outset of his career as a young cop in Gordita. Bigfoot had always hated it here and couldn’t wait to get away. “This place has been cursed from the jump,” he told anybody who’d listen. “Indians lived here long ago, they had a drug cult, smoked toloache which is jimsonweed, gave themselves hallucinations, deluded themselves they were visiting other realities—why, come to think of it, not unlike the hippie freaks of our present day. Their graveyards were sacred portals of access to the spirit world, not to be misused. And Gordita Beach is built right on top of one.”

  From watching Saturday-night horror movies, Doc understood that building on top of an Indian graveyard was the worst kind of bad karma, though developers, being of evil character, didn’t care where they built as long as the lots were level and easy to get to. It wouldn’t have surprised Doc at all to learn that Mickey Wolfmann had committed this desecration himself more than once, calling down curse after curse on his already miserable soul.

  They were hard to see and hard to catch hold of, these Indian spirits. You plodded along in pursuit, maybe only wanting to apologize, and they flew like the wind, and waited their moment. . . .

  “What’re you looking at?” Sauncho said.

  “Where I live.”

  They rounded Palos Verdes Point, and there in the distance, out from San Pedro with all her staysails and jibs set, blooming like a cubist rose, came the schooner. The look on Sauncho’s face was of pure unrequited love.