Frenesi had absorbed politics all through her childhood, but later, seeing older movies on the Tube with her parents, making for the first time a connection between the far-off images and her real life, it seemed she had misunderstood everything, paying too much attention to the raw emotions, the easy conflicts, when something else, some finer drama the Movies had never considered worth ennobling, had been unfolding all the time. It was a step in her political education. Names listed even in fast-moving credits, meaning nothing to a younger viewer, were enough to provoke from her parents groans of stomach upset, bellows of rage, snorts of contempt, and, in extreme cases, switches of channel. “You think I’m gonna sit and watch this piece of scab garbage?” Or, “You want to see a hot set? Watch when she slams that door—see that? Shook all over? That’s scab carpentry by some scab local the IA set up, that’s what scabs do to production values.” Or, “That asshole? thought he was dead. See that credit there?” getting right up beside the screen to zero in on the offending line, “That fascist fuck,” tapping the glass over the name fiercely, “owes me two years of work, you could’ve gone to college on what that SOB will always owe me.”
Up and down that street, she remembered, television screens had flickered silent blue in the darkness. Strange loud birds, not of the neighborhood, were attracted, some content to perch in the palm trees, keeping silence and an eye out for the rats who lived in the fronds, others flying by close to windows, seeking an angle to sit and view the picture from. When the commercials came on, the birds, with voices otherworldly pure, would sing back at them, sometimes even when none were on. Sasha would be out on the porch long after nightfall, knitting, sitting, talking with Hub or a neighbor, not a freeway within earshot, though the treetop whistling of the mockingbirds covered blocks, reedy, clear, possible for a child to fall asleep right down the middle of. . . .
In the years since she’d departed the surface of everyday civilian life, Frenesi had made it a point, maybe a ritual, whenever business brought her to L.A., to drive out east of La Brea, down into those flatland residential blocks, among the pale smudged chalet-roofed bungalows and barking dogs and lawn mowers, to find the place again, and cruise the block in low the way the FBI had all through her childhood, looking for Sasha but never seeing her, never once in the yard or through a window, till one visit there was new machinery in the carport and a Day-Glo plastic trike and a scatter of toys on the front lawn, and she had to go cash in more favors than she’d been planning to just to find out where her mother had moved—into a small apartment, as it turned out, not far away at all. Why? Had she been holding on to the house as long as she could, hoping Frenesi would come back home, but one day, from the weight of too many years or because she’d found out something fatal about her daughter, had given up at last on her, just given up?
Believing that the rays coming out of the TV screen would act as a broom to sweep the room clear of all spirits, Frenesi now popped the Tube on and checked the listings. There was a rerun of the perennial motorcycle-cop favorite “CHiPs” on in a little while. She felt a rising of blood, a premonitory dampness. Let the grim feminist rave, Frenesi knew there were living women, down in the world, who happened, like herself, to be crazy about uniforms on men, entertained fantasies while on the freeway about the Highway Patrol, and even, as she was planning to do now, enjoyed masturbating to Ponch and Jon reruns on the Tube, and so what? Sasha believed her daughter had “gotten” this uniform fetish from her. It was a strange idea even coming from Sasha, but since her very first Rose Parade up till the present she’d felt in herself a fatality, a helpless turn toward images of authority, especially uniformed men, whether they were athletes live or on the Tube, actors in movies of war through the ages, or maître d’s in restaurants, not to mention waiters and busboys, and she further believed that it could be passed on, as if some Cosmic Fascist had spliced in a DNA sequence requiring this form of seduction and initiation into the dark joys of social control. Long before any friend or enemy had needed to point it out to her, Sasha on her own had arrived at, and been obliged to face, the dismal possibility that all her oppositions, however just and good, to forms of power were really acts of denying that dangerous swoon that came creeping at the edges of her optic lobes every time the troops came marching by, that wetness of attention and perhaps ancestral curse.
Just for its political incorrectness alone, Frenesi had at first reacted to Sasha’s theory with anger, then after a while had found it only annoying, and nowadays, with the two of them into their second decade of silence, good only for a sad sniffle. She swung the TV set around now, lay down on the sofa, undid her shirt, unzipped her pants, and was set to go when all at once what should occur for her but the primal Tubefreek miracle, in the form of a brisk manly knock at the screen door in the kitchen, and there outside on the landing, through the screen, broken up into little dots like pixels of a video image, only squarer, was this large, handsome U.S. Marshal, in full uniform, hat, service .38, and leather beltwork, with an envelope to deliver. And his partner, waiting down beside the car in the latening sunlight, was twice as cute.
She recognized the envelope right away. It was the stipend check she’d been looking for like a late period since last week. It hadn’t been in the mail at all, it was in this rugged lawman’s big leather-gloved hand, which she made a point, nearing the Big Four-Oh these days and still at it, of touching as she took the check.
He raised his sunglasses, smiled. “You haven’t been down to th’ office yet, have you?” The U.S. Marshal administered and serviced Witness Protection, and in most of her assignments over the years there had been this matter of a courtesy call, as if to the home embassy in each new foreign country.
“We just moved in,” putting a stress on “we” to see what would happen.
“Well we haven’t seen, uhm,” consulting some leather-covered field book, “Fletcher, either.”
He’d had one hand up on the doorjamb, leaning and talking, the way boys had to her in high school. She’d remembered to zip her pants on the way to the door, but had only done up a button or two of her shirt, no bra on, of course. She angled her head to look at the time on his tanned wrist, inches from her face. “He ought to be back any minute.”
He put the shades back down, chuckled. “How about tomorra, soon after eight A.M. ’s you can?” The phone in the other room began to ring. “Maybe that’s him now. Maybe calling to say he’ll be late, why don’t you get it?”
“Nice talking to you. Till tomorrow, I guess.”
“I can wait.”
She was already halfway to the phone, looked back at him over her shoulder but didn’t ask him in. At the same time, there was no way she could order him to leave, was there?
It was Flash, calling from the field office where he worked, but not to say he’d be late, he never did that, just came in when he came in. “Don’t git alarmed, but now—you had any visitors today?”
“Marshal just came to deliver the check in person, did seem a little unusual.”
“It came? Outstanding! Listen, could you go out, soon ’s you can, cash it, honey, for us, please?”
“Flash, what’s up?”
“Don’t know. Dropped by the terminal room, got talkin’ to that Grace, you know, the Mexican one I ’s pointin’ out to you that time?”
With the big boobs. “Uh-huh.”
“Said she wanted me to see somethin’ funny. But it wa’n’t too funny. Turns out, a lot of people we know—they ain’t on the computer anymore. Just—gone.”
It was the way he was saying it, with that only semicontrolled Johnny Cash type of catch or tremor she’d learned to tune in on, a 100 percent reliable omen. It meant what he liked to call profound feces, every time. “Well, Justin’s due in any minute. Should I be packin’ up?”
“Um first git the cash if you could, my sweet thing, and I’ll be back there soon ’s I can.”
&nb
sp; “You old snake charmer,” as she hung up.
The marshals had split, doggone it, but here, charging up the outside stairs, pipe railings ringing, came Justin, with his friend Wallace, and Wallace’s mom, Barbie, gamely puffing along behind. Frenesi grabbed her kid briefly, trailing part of a wet kiss along his bare arm as he flew past with Wallace, on into the alcove he’d made his room.
“Herd o’ locusts,” Barbie sighed.
Frenesi was standing by at the automatic-drip machine. “Hope you don’t mind it this long in the pot.”
“Better the longer it sits.” Barbie worked part-time at the courthouse, and her husband full-time at the federal building, for different arms of the law, and sometimes she and Frenesi looked after each other’s kids, though they lived on opposite sides of town. “You’re still on for Monday then, right?”
“Oh, sure,” oh sure, “listen, Barb, I hate to ask, but my card keeps getting kicked out of the cash machine, nobody knows nothin’ about it, my account’s OK, but the bank’s closed and I just got this check, um I don’t suppose—”
“Last week would’ve been better, we ’as countin’ on a bunch of vouchers to come through, now they tell us, guess what, lost in the computer, surprise.”
“Computers,” Frenesi began, but then, paranoid, decided not to repeat what she’d heard from Flash. She made up something about the check instead, and while the boys watched cartoons, the women sat in the breeze through the screen door, drank coffee, and told computer horror tales.
“Feel like old-timers grouchin’ about the weather,” Barbie said. Flash came in just as she and Wallace were heading out.
“Barbie! Oohwee! Let’s see!” He took her left hand, twirled her around, then pretended to inspect the hand. “Still married, huh.”
“Yep, and J. Edgar Hoover’s still dead, Fletcher.”
“Bye, Mr. Fletcher!” Wallace hollered.
“Say, Wallace, catch ’at game yesterday? What’d I tell you?”
“Still glad we didn’t bet—that was my lunch money.”
“Flash?” hollered both women at once. Flash stood out on the landing and watched till they were in the car and pulling away. Still waving, “She act funny at all?”
“No, uh-uh, why?”
“Her old man’s some honcho down at the Regional Office, right?”
“Flash, it’s a desk job, he’s in administrative support.”
“Hmm. I seem nervous to you? Oh—the check, ’d you cash it yet? ’Course not—why’m I even asking? My life story here. Well can I please have a look at it?” He squinted, angling it around. “Looks funny. Huh? Don’t you think?”
“I’ll get on it,” she promised, “right after we eat. Now tell me about who isn’t on the computer, that’s making you so crazy.”
He’d brought home a quickly compiled list, all independent contractors like themselves. Frenesi got out a couple of frozen, or with the state the fridge was in actually semithawed, peperoni pizzas, put the oven on to preheat, and made a fast salad while Flash opened beers and read off the names. There were Long Bihn Jail alumni, old grand-jury semipros, collectors of loans and ladies on strings who’d been persuaded to help entrap soon-to-be ex-customers, snitches with photographic memories, virgins to the act of murder, check bouncers, coke snorters, and ass grabbers, each with more than ample reason to seek the shadow of the federal wing, and some, with luck, able to reach its embrace and shelter.
Or so they must have believed. But now, no longer on the computer, how safe could any of them be feeling? “You’re sure now,” she pressed, “you know for a fact ol’ what’s-her-name checked it out.”
“Did it myself, type the name in, comes back ‘No Such File,’ all right? You want me to go beat her up, will that help?”
“This serious?”
“Fuckin’ A.” Which was about when Justin came wandering in, cartoons having ended and his parents now become the least objectionable programming around here, for half an hour, anyway—and just as well, too, because the last thing either parent needed right now was an argument, or what passed for one with them, a kind of alien-invasion game in which Flash launched complaints of different sizes at different speeds and Frenesi tried to deflect or neutralize them before her own defenses gave way.
“Say, Justintime, how’s ’em Transformers, makin’ out OK?”
“And how was everything over at Wallace’s?”
The kid put on a genial smile, waved, put his hand to his ear like Reagan going, “Say again?” “How about a few questions,” Justin pretending to look around the room, “Mom? You had your hand up?”
“We’re just getting you back for all those questions you used to ask us”—Flash adding “Amen!”—“not too long ago.”
“I don’t remember that,” trying not to laugh, because in fact he did, and wanted to be teased.
“Must be gettin’ old, man,” said Frenesi.
“Nonstop questions nobody could answer,” Flash told him, “like, ‘What is metal?’ “
“ ‘How do you know when you’re dreaming and when you’re not?’” Frenesi recalled, “That was my favorite.”
Frenesi put the pizzas in, and Flash wandered away to eyeball the Tube. A little later, when they were eating, as if out of nowhere, Flash said, “Two possibilities I can see.”
She knew he meant the computer list. One of these two possibilities was that the missing people were dead, or else hiding from whoever wanted them that way, a worst-case scenario that, neither wishing to interrupt the appetite of their son, who scarfed pizza under the same suspension of physical law that allows Dagwood Bumstead to eat sandwiches, would have to go unsaid. But she hazarded another. “Maybe they went the other way, surfaced, went up in the world again?”
“Yep. But why’s it happening?”
Justin, pizza slice hovering on route to his face, said, “Maybe they all got their budget lines axed out.”
Flash gave him a quick head-take, as if awakened by a practical joke. “Used to be a kid right here, what happened?”
“What’ve you been hearing, Justin?”
He shrugged. “Keep tellin’ you guys, you should watch MacNeil and Lehrer, there’s all this budget stuff goin’ on all the time, with President Reagan, and Congress? It’s on now, if you’re interested. Can I be excused?”
“I’ll,” Flash looking over quizzically at Frenesi, “be, uh, right in. . . . Darlin’, do you think that could be it? They’re droppin’ people from the Program, too many mouths to feed?”
“Nothing new.” It was a time-honored way to keep the wards and snitches and special employees at each other’s throats, competing for the ever-dwindling imprest funds, kept aware, never overtly, that with the Justice Department in regular contact with what it was still calling “Organized Crime,” the list of names was negotiable, all too negotiable.
“But not on this scale,” Flash waving the printout. “This is a massacre.”
She looked around this place they’d never fully moved into—had they?—so why this sad feeling of imminent goodbye?
“I’ll try to cash this down at Gate 7,” she told him, “quick ’s I can.” She got out into deep sunset, airport traffic in the distance, downtown beginning to cast a glow, and in Flash’s motor-pool Cutlass Supreme headed for the small community known as Gate 7, which had grown up over the years at the edge of the giant invisible base beyond. According to signs along the ancient freeway system, which ran through towering halls of concrete, echoing, full of shadows, there were at least a hundred of these gates, each intended to admit—or reject—a different category of visitor, but nobody knew for sure exactly how many there were. While some stood in isolation, hard to drive to, heavily protected, seldom used, others, like Gate 7, had generated around themselves service areas, homes, and shopping plazas.
The Gate 7 Qu
ik Liquor and Deli, hunkering down among the off- and on-ramps of its exit, was jammed. It was Friday and a shift had just ended, the parking lot was a zoo, so Frenesi had to park along the frontage strip, near an unlit street lamp. Inside the place, men and women in uniforms, civvies, suits, party outfits, and work clothes milled and clamored, holding sixpacks in their teeth, balancing children and monster-size snack bags, reading magazines and tabloids, all, it seemed, looking to get checks cashed. Frenesi queued up under the fluorescent lights, in air-conditioning heavy with car exhaust, and could just make out at the far end of the line two part-time high-school girls, one ringing up purchases, one bagging. Neither, when she got there half an hour later, was authorized to cash her check. “Where’s the manager?”
“I’m the acting manager.”
“This is a government check, look, you do this all the time, you cash checks from the base, right?”
“Yah, but this here’s no base check.”
“They’re in the federal building downtown, their phone number’s right on the check, you can call them up.”
“After office hours, ma’am. Yes sir, can I he’p you?” The line behind Frenesi had grown longer and less patient. She looked at the girl—a smug mouth, a bad attitude. She wanted to say, kid, better watch ’at shit. But she was about the same age as Prairie would be . . . working at this checkout maybe for the rest of her life, and with Frenesi’s days of federal empowerment and one-phone-call conflict resolution years behind her and fading fast, she was no longer in any position to throw her weight around. . . . Humiliated, helpless, she came out sweating into the grayly overborne night, traffic smell, not enough street light, in the air a distant unlocalized rumbling from somewhere deep in the base.
She drove on downtown, being extra careful because she felt like doing harm to somebody, found a liquor store with a big Checks Cashed sign, got the same turndown inside. Running on nerves and anger, she kept on till she reached the next supermarket, and this time she was told to wait while somebody went in back and made a phone call.
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