Vineland

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Frenesi Margaret, Zoyd Herbert, will you, for real, in trouble or in trippiness, promise to remain always on the groovy high known as Love,” and so forth, it may have taken hours or been over in half a minute, there were few if any timepieces among those assembled, and nobody seemed restless, this after all being the Mellow Sixties, a slower-moving time, predigital, not yet so cut into pieces, not even by television. It would be easy to remember the day as a soft-focus shot, the kind to be seen on “sensitivity” greeting cards in another few years. Everything in nature, every living being on the hillside that day, strange as it sounded later whenever Zoyd tried to tell about it, was gentle, at peace—the visible world was a sunlit sheep farm. War in Vietnam, murder as an instrument of American politics, black neighborhoods torched to ashes and death, all must have been off on some other planet.

  Music was by the Corvairs, these days calling themselves surfadelic, though the nearest surf at the moment was at Santa Cruz, forty miles away over farm roads and murderous mountain passes, and they had to contend with the traditional beer-rider haughtiness of the area—still, in later years, try as Zoyd might to remember everything at its most negative, truth was there’d been no brawls or barfing or demolition derbies, everybody had got along magically, it was one of the peak parties of his life, folks loved the music, and it went on all night and then the next, right on through the weekend. Pretty soon bikers and biker chicks, playing at villainy, were showing up in full regalia, then a hay wagon jammed full of back-to-nature acidheads from up the valley out on an old-fashioned hayride, and eventually the sheriff, who ended up doing the Stroll, a dance of his own day, with three miniskirted young beauties to a screaming electric arrangement of “Pipeline” and who was kind enough not to go near, let alone investigate, the punch, but did accept a can of Burgie, it being a warm day.

  All through it, Frenesi was smiling, serene. Zoyd would be unable to forget her already notorious blue eyes, glowing under a big light straw hat. Little kids ran up, calling her name. She and Zoyd were sitting together on a bench under a fig tree, the band on a break, she was eating a cone of rainbow-patterned fruit ice whose colors miraculously didn’t seep together, leaning forward to keep it off her wedding dress, which had also been her mother’s and grandmother’s. A tortoise cat who kept appearing from nowhere would walk directly under the dripping cone, get hit with ice-cold drops of lime, orange, or grape, meow as if surprised, squirm in the dust, roll her eyes around insanely, run off at top speed, and then after a while amble back to repeat the act.

  “Did you notice my cousin Renée? Do you think she’s having a good time?” Renée had just broken up with her boyfriend, but undeterred by depression had driven up from L.A. figuring maybe a party was what she needed. Zoyd remembered her, among the roster of his in-law aunts, uncles, and cousins, as a tall florid girl in a minidress that bore the image, from neck to hemline, of Frank Zappa’s face, thus linking her in Zoyd’s mind somehow with Mount Rushmore.

  He smiled, squinting back, like a schoolmarm who still couldn’t believe her luck. A breeze had come up and begun to move the leaves of their tree. “Frenesi, do you think that love can save anybody? You do, don’t you?” At the time he hadn’t learned yet what a stupid question it was. She gazed up at him from just under the brim of the hat. He thought, At least try to remember this, try to keep it someplace secure, just her face now in this light, OK, her eyes quiet like this, her mouth poised to open. . . .

  Mean or not, he hadn’t cried about it for a long time. The years had kept rolling, like the surf he used to ride, high, calm, wild, windless. But increasingly the day, the necessary day, presenting its demands, had claimed him, till there was only one small bitter amusement he refused to let go of. Now and then, when moon, tides, and planetary magnetism were all in tune, he went venturing out, straight up through the third eye in his forehead, into an extraordinary system of transport whereby he could go gliding right to wherever she was, and incompletely unseen, sensed just enough to be troublesome, he then would haunt her, for as long as he could, enjoying every squeezed-out minute. A vice, for sure, and one he had confessed only to a handful of people, including, it may have turned out unwisely, their daughter, Prairie, this very morning.

  “Oh,” sitting over a breakfast of Cap’n Crunch and Diet Pepsi, “you mean you dreamed—”

  Zoyd shook his head. “I was awake. But out of my body.”

  She gave him a look that he didn’t, so early in the day, attend to the full risk of, telling him she trusted him not to be running some cruel put-on. They’d been known not to share a sense of humor on many topics, her mom in particular. “You go there and—what? You perch somewhere and look, you keep flying around, how’s it work?”

  “It’s like Mr. Sulu laying in coordinates, only different,” Zoyd explained.

  “Knowin’ exactly where you want to go.” He nodded, and she felt some unaccustomed bloom of tenderness for this scroungy, usually slow-witted fringe element she’d been assigned, on this planet, for a father. What mattered at the moment was that he knew how to visit Frenesi out in the night, and that could only mean he must feel a need for her as intense as Prairie’s own. “Where’s it you go, then? Where is she?”

  “Keep tryin’ to find out. Try to read signs, locate landmarks, anything that’ll give a clue, but—well the signs are there on street corners and store windows—but I can’t read them.”

  “It’s some other language?”

  “Nope, it’s in English, but there’s something between it and my brain that won’t let it through.”

  Prairie made a sound like a game-show buzzer. “I’m sorry Mr. Wheeler. . . .” Let down and suspicious, she drifted away again. “Say hi to ’em up on Phantom Creek, OK?”

  He took a left at the row of mailboxes, went strumming over a cattle guard, parked out by the horse barn, and walked in. RC was over in Blue Lake running chores, but Moonpie was around, looking after Lotus, the baby. The crawdads were in an old Victorian bathtub that doubled as a watering trough. Together Zoyd and Moonpie netted them out and weighed them on a seed, feed, and fertilizer scale, and he wrote her a postdated check he’d still have to scramble, this day already so advanced, to cover.

  “Somebody at the Nugget the other night,” baby on her arm, giving him now a straight, worried look, “askin’ about you. RC thought he knew him, but wouldn’t tell me anythin’.”

  “Latino gent, semi-Elvis haircut?”

  “Yep. You in some trouble, Zoyd?”

  “Moon darlin’, when am I out of it? He mention where he was staying, anything like that?”

  “Mostly just sat starin’ at the Tube in the bar. Some movie on channel 86. He was talkin’ to the screen after a while, but I don’t think he was loaded or nothin’.”

  “Rill unhappy dude, is all.”

  “Wow. Comin’ from you. . . .” Seeing Zoyd’s odd smile, the baby echoed, “Comin’ fum you!”

  They transferred the crawdads to tubs of water in the back of the camper, and soon Zoyd was lurching and sloshing back down the road. He noticed Moonpie and Lotus in the rearview mirror, watching him around the curve, till the trees hid them.

  So, fucking Hector again. Zoyd had only missed him that night by not showing up at the Lost Nugget, his usual hangout, having chosen instead a booth way in the back of the Steam Donkey, just off the old Plaza in Vineland, a bar that dated well back into the fog of the last century. Van Meter’d put his head in after a while, and they’d sat becoming slowly awash in Lucky Lager, snuffling over the olden times.

  “Educated pussy,” Zoyd sighed, “don’t know why, f’ some reason I must’ve been a easy mark. She was a filmmaker, went to Berkeley, I was working on people’s gutters, she rilly freaked when she found out she was pregnant.”

  It was a long time ago, old as Prairie, who for a while had been a topic of debate. Frenesi was getting free advice both ways. Some
told her it was the end of her life as an artist, as a revolutionary, and urged her to get an abortion, not that easy to come by in those days unless you drove south of the border. If you wanted to stay north of it you had to be rich and go through a committee exercise with gynecologists and shrinks. Others pointed out to her what a groovy chance this would be to bring up a child in a politically correct way, though definitions of this varied from reading Trotsky to her at bedtime to including LSD in the formula.

  “But what hurts,” Zoyd went on, “is how innocent I thought she was. Fuckin’ fool. I wanted to wise her up, at the same time protect her from ever knowin’ how shitty things could get. Was I stupid.”

  “You’re blaming yourself for the line of work she got into?”

  “For not seeing too much. For thinkin’ we’d get away with it, thinkin’ we’d beat them all.”

  “Yep, you really fucked up,” Van Meter having himself a good chuckle. Their friendship over the years was based in part on each pretending to laugh at the other’s hard luck. Zoyd sat there nodding How true, how true. “So worried about Hector you didn’t even know the other federal guy was porkin’ your wife till she was long gone! What a trip, man!”

  “Appreciate the support ol’ buddy, but I was still happy to be out of Hector’s way back then ’thout gittin’ my ass in too major of a sling.” But he understood that like all suffering Tubeheads he must have really thought, as he and the baby were making their getaway, that that was it, all over, time to go to commercials and clips of next week’s episode. . . . Frenesi might be gone, but there would always be his love for Prairie, burning like a night-light, always nearby, cool and low, but all night long. . . . And Hector, in his actorly literalness and brown-shoe conformity while also being insane, would never trouble his environment again. Damn fool Zoyd. Sent so gaga by those mythical days of high drama that he’d forgotten he and Prairie might actually have to go on living years beyond them.

  All the rest of the day it seemed like he was getting funny looks everywhere he went. The swamper at Redwood Bayou, getting the place ready for lunch, disappeared into the back where the phone was as soon as Zoyd came in the door. The waitresses at Le Bûcheron Affamé gathered over in a corner murmuring, casting him slow over-the-shoulder looks it was hard even for him to take as anything but pitying. “Hi ladies, how’s the warm duck salad today?” But nobody came forth with much more than mentions of ubiquitous though unnamed Hector. Back on the freeway, Zoyd kept a defensive eye out in all directions, no telling where the Tube-maddened Detox escapee might pop up. At his next stop, Humbolaya, amid stomach-nudging aromas from the Special of the Day, tofu à la étouffée, Zoyd hustled use of the office phone to call Doc Deeply on the direct line in to his wing of the Vineland Palace.

  “NEVER,” answered the perky female voice on the other end.

  “Huh? I didt’n even ask you yet.”

  Her voice dropped half an octave. “This is about Hector Zuñiga—maybe you’d better hold.” After a short recorded program of themes from famous TV shows, on came the mellifluous Dr. Deeply.

  “Don’t want to alarm you, Doc,” Zoyd said, “but I think he’s stalkin’ me.”

  “You’ve . . . had these feelings for some time?” In the background, on some stereo, Zoyd could hear Little Charlie and the Nightcats singing “TV Crazy.”

  “Yeah, in Hector’s case fifteen or twenty years. Some guys’s in the joint for longer ’n that.”

  “Look, I can put my people on standby, but I don’t think we can protect you around the clock, or anything.” About then Chef ’Ti Bruce put his head in the door hollering “You still on?” and seeming anxious to have Zoyd out of there, when formerly it had been their custom to linger over beignets and chicory coffee.

  Crawfish business done, Zoyd’s next stop was out to the Old Thumb peninsula to Rick & Chick’s Born Again, an auto-conversion shop located among log piles and county motor pools. The owners, Humboldt County twins, had found Jesus and their seed money at about the same time, during the fuel panic of the seventies, when, to get a tax break for bringing out the first U.S. passenger diesel, GM took its 5.7-liter V-8 Cadillac engine and, in some haste, converted it. In the season of purchaser disenchantment that followed, engine experts, including Rick and Chick, found they could make on the order of $2,500 per job reconverting these ill-considered mills from diesel back to gasoline again. Soon they’d expanded into bodywork, put in a paint shed, and begun doing more customizing and conversion, eventually becoming a byword up and down the Coast and beyond the Sierras of the automotive second chance.

  Standing with the twins as Zoyd pulled up were the legally ambiguous tow-truck team of Eusebio (“Vato”) Gomez and Cleveland (“Blood”) Bonnifoy, all in a respectful tableau observing a rare, legendary (some believed only folkloric) Edsel Escondido, sort of a beefier Ford Ranchero with a complexity of chrome accents, including around that well-known problem grille, now pitted by years of salt fog, which Vato and Blood had just finished winching to earth from V & B Tow’s flagship F350, El Mil Amores. Zoyd wondered what script possibilities were tumbling through the partners’ heads. It was some elaborate game of doubles they played with the twins every time they came in here, the basic rule being never to say out loud where the vehicle in—often deep—question had really come from, nor even to suggest that the legal phrase “act of conversion” might here be taking on some additional sense.

  Today, inspired by a wave of Bigfoot sightings down in the Mattole, Vato had nearly convinced the skeptical lookalikes that the Escondido had been found abandoned in a clearing, its owners frightened off by Bigfoot, in whose territory the car had then sat, anybody’s prize, making its retrieval by the boys, who’d just happened to be out in that part of the brush, an adventure full of perilous grades, narrow escapes, and kick-ass four-wheeling all the way, followed at each turn by the openmouthed Rick and Chick, upon whom at last Blood, usually the closer in these proceedings, laid, “So Bigfoot bein’ force majeure, we got the legal salvage rights.” Dazed, the twins were nodding at slightly different rates, and another story of twilight reconfiguration, soon to be the talk of the business, was about to get under way.

  Zoyd, already jumpy enough from people’s reactions to him all day, was not reassured at seeing the gathering break up at his approach into short edgy nods and waves. They were having one of those four-member eyeball permutations that finally nominated Blood as the one to talk to Zoyd.

  “This is somethin’ about Hector again, right?”

  “We heard he was back,” Blood said, “but this ain’t him, Blood, it’s, uh, somebody else. And me and my partner were just wondering if you were planning to sleep on the base tonight?”

  Here came another of those deep intestinal pangs. Zoyd knew that long ago in Saigon, Blood had more than once heard this warning from elements of the Vietcong in whose interest it was to keep him alive and in business. “Well shit. If it i’n’ Hector, then who is it?”

  Vato came over, looking as serious as his running mate. “They’re federal, Vato, but it ain’ Hector, he’s too busy keepín ahead of that posse from the Tubaldetox.”

  Zoyd suddenly felt like shit. “I better see about my kid.” Rick and Chick made mirror-image go-ahead gestures at the phone. “That Jikov 32, that Skoda carburetor you ’s lookin’ for, it’s in my front seat, see what you think.”

  Prairie worked at the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple, which a little smugly offered the most wholesome, not to mention the slowest, fast food in the region, a classic example of the California pizza concept at its most misguided. Zoyd was both a certified pizzamaniac and a cheapskate, but not once had he ever hustled Prairie for one nepotistic slice of the Bodhi Dharma product. Its sauce was all but crunchy with fistfuls of herbs only marginally Italian and more appropriate in a cough remedy, the rennetless cheese reminded customers variously of bottled hollandaise or joint compound, and the options were all
vegetables rigorously organic, whose high water content saturated, long before it baked through, a stone-ground twelve-grain crust with the lightness and digestibility of a manhole cover.

  Zoyd happened to catch Prairie on a meditation break. “You OK over there?”

  “Somethin’ wrong?”

  “Do me a favor, stay till I get there, all right?”

  “But Isaiah and the band were coming by to pick me up, we’re goin’ camping, remember? Sheez, all that shit you smoke, your brain must be like a Etch-A-Sketch.”

  “Uh huh, don’t get alarmed, but we are facing a situation where a quick mouth, even a leading example such as your own, won’t be nearly as much use today as a little cooperation. Please.”

  “Sure this ain’t pothead paranoia?”

  “Nope and now I think of it could you ask the young gentlemen when they git there to stick around too?”

  “Just ’cause they look evil, Dad, doesn’t mean they’re any good for muscle, if that’s what you’re thinkin’.”

  Feeling unprotected on all flanks, Zoyd went speeding in, running lights and ignoring stop signs, to Vineland, where he just made it to the door of the bank at closing time. An entry-level functionary in a suit who was refusing admission to other late-comers saw Zoyd and, for the first time in history, nervously began to unlock the door for him, while inside colleagues at desks could be seen making long arms for the telephone. No, it wasn’t pothead paranoia—but neither was Zoyd about to step inside this bank. A security guard sauntered over, unsnapping his hip holster. OK. Zoyd split with a that’s-all-folks wave, having luckily parked Trent’s rig just around the corner.