Prairie shifted the brush around so the pointed handle was now its business end. “Problem, ma’am?”
All at once, from the stranger’s battered cowhide shoulder bag, which she’d set down right next to Prairie’s earth-toned canvas one, on the tile counter, came a thin piping tune in three-part harmony, all sixteen bars of the theme from “Hawaii Five-O,” which it then kept repeating, potentially forever.
“Excuse me, but would that be one of Takeshi Fumimota’s old business cards in your bag there, by any chance?” the woman meanwhile digging down in her own bag to find and come out with a small silvery unit, still chiming the stop-frame hula dancer, the hundred different shots of the water, Danno looking through the hole in the glass, McGarrett on the building.
“Here—” Prairie handing over her iridescent oblong, “my dad gave me this.”
“Scanner here’s still programmed to pick ’em up, but I thought these old-timers had all been called in by now.” She shut off the music right after the part that goes,
Down in the streets of Honolu-lu,
Just bookin’ folks and bein’ patched through, what a
Lu-wow! . . . Hawa-
Ii Five-Oh!
Putting out her hand, “I’m Darryl Louise Chastain. Me and Takeshi are partners.”
“Name’s Prairie.”
“Just for a minute in the mirror there I thought you were somebody you couldn’t possibly be.”
“Uh-huh, well, I know I’ve seen you before too—whoa, wait a minute, was that DL Chastain, I always thought it meant Disabled List, sure it’s you, you look different, my grandma showed me old snapshots of you. You and my mom.”
“Your mom.” Prairie saw her taking a breath in a controlled and deliberate way she recognized from the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple. “Oh, mercy.” She nodded, faintly smiling, one side of the smile maybe a little higher than the other. “You’re Frenesi’s kid.” She said the name with some effort, as if she hadn’t pronounced it out loud for a while. “Your mom and me . . . we ran together, back in the old days.”
They went outside and found a quiet piece of terrace and Prairie told DL about her mother’s rumored return, and the DEA guy who might be crazy and his movie scheme, and the seizing of her home by a paramilitary force from the Justice Department.
DL looked serious. “And you’re sure that name was Brock Vond.”
“Yep. My dad says that he’s bad shit.”
“He’s both. We still have some unbalanced karma, me and Brock. Now it sounds like you’ve got some too.” She laid the Japanese amulet on the tabletop between them. “Takeshi calls these things giri chits, sorta karmic IOU’s. Takes a lot of speed, gets grandiose, wants to base a world currency system on them, so forth—but if you present one to him, he’s got to honor it. Were you planning on using this?”
“I’m feeling like Dumbo with that feather, I would clutch to anything right now. Why? What can your partner do for me? Can he find my mom?”
Which put DL in a pickle. Years with Takeshi, and she was still finding out what he could do. And couldn’t. If Frenesi really was surfacing, anybody could find her. But with Brock Vond out tearing up the pea patch too, her movements might be less certain. And whatever story DL told this kid must not, maybe could never, be the story she knew. She temporized. “Is, it’s been what, 15 years, just about your lifetime, full of playin’ make-believe, acting on faiths in things that sound crazy now, lying, turning each other in, too much time passed, everybody remembering a different story—”
“And you want to hear mine before you’ll tell me yours.”
“Knew you’d understand.” A liveried waiter passed by with a tray full of champagne in glasses, and Prairie, who didn’t even like beer, and DL, who objected philosophically to all drugs, each took one. “Frenesi Gates,” DL touching her glass to the girl’s, and a chill rode Prairie’s shoulders.
Rising from the distant meadow came the music of the Vomitones, twanging and crashing their way through a suite from Tosca. “Well—my dad and my grandma both tell the same story. I cross-examine ’em, try to trick ’em, but except for picky details and memory loss from dope and so on, either it’s true or they got together long ago and cooked something up, right?” waiting for DL to tell her she was too young to be so paranoid. But DL only smiled back over the rim of the slender glass. “OK—my mom made movies for that Revolution you guys tried to have, she was on the run, warrants out on her, FBI put her pictures in the post office, Zoyd was her cover for a while, and then they had me . . . and we were a family until the feds found out where she was and she had to disappear—go underground.” There was a small defiant tremor in her voice.
Underground. Right. That’s the story DL should have known they’d tell the kid. Underground. Now, how could DL tell her what she knew, and how could she not? “Brock Vond,” very carefully, “had his own grand jury back then. They were all over the place, popping antiwar people, student radicals, getting indictments, including at least one against your mother. There’s no statute of limitations, so it’s still in force.”
Prairie made an I-don’t-get-it face. “You saying he’s still chasing her, 15 years down the line, taxpayers’ money, not enough real criminals around?”
“My best guess from what you tell me is, is that your mom is in some deep shit, Brock’s after her, and if he came and took away your house, then he’s after you too, maybe as a bargaining point against her.” But this was going to be like trying to explain rape to a child and not talk about sex.
“But why?” Yeah. The girl’s eyelids, in the afternoon shade, lay half open as she hung, so filled with innocence, with stupefied daughterly need, on each word, each space between words. But DL only gazed back, as if Prairie was supposed to be figuring things out too. Prairie hated to admit it, but so far what it sounded like was something dangerously personal between Brock Vond and her mother, territory she was as nervous about stepping into as DL appeared to be. Up on the table the other night at Bodhi Dharma Pizza, Hector had been screaming something about Brock Vond “taking away Zoyd’s old lady.” Prairie must have thought he meant making an arrest, forcing her mother to flee, something like that. But then what else?
In the orange sunlight, guests in gowns from the upper reaches of Magnin’s and ruffled shirtfronts, tuxes, and tails, throwing ever longer shadows up the hillside, wandered, grouped and regrouped, ate, drank, smoked, danced, fought, staggered to the mike to do guest vocals with the band. Prairie found her glass empty, and a little bit later, a full one in its place. At some point this older guy showed up, looking a little ragged, kissed DL’s hand, and tried a grab for her ass that she must have been expecting because he never made contact, lurching instead past Prairie and nearly over a low wall onto the buffet table the next level down. “Shondra and the kids look wonderful,” DL remarked as he came slowly back, and she introduced Prairie to their host, Ralph Wayvone. “I don’t want to be the one to piss in the punch bowl,” DL added, “but better you know sooner than later, Prairie here has just had a run-in with your old pinochle partner Brock Vond.”
“Porca miseria.” Ralph had a seat. “Just when I was starting to forget all that. Even thought you might be finally letting go of it. Wrong again, huh?”
“Maybe it won’t let go of me.”
“The past—” darting his eyeballs around. “Shrink says I’m supposed to be leaving it behind. He’s right. Isn’t he?”
“Well, Ralph,” DL drawled, “matter of fact, see, Brock ain’t in the past right now, he’s in the present tense again, badassin’ around up in Vineland County, actin’ like a li’l fuckin’ army o’ occupation.”
“Hey—I got nothing to do with pot growers, all right? You know that. As soon as I saw all this drug hysteria coming, I diversified on out of that whole market. Plus it’s a Republican Justice Department, come on. I’m copacetic with all these pe
ople.”
“Yeah—sometime they might not know how to stop. Anyway, I doubt it’s pot, ’cause it’s still too early in the season. Brock’s not answering his calls, apparently, and nobody knows just what’s goin’ on, except there’s a nut case leading a heavily armed strike force loose in California.”
Ralph Wayvone swayed to his feet, looking glum. He patted DL’s arm a couple of times. “I’ll have ’em get on the computer, make a few phone calls. You be around?”
“Heading up the mountain, got to rendezvous with Takeshi.”
“Say hello.” He headed off into the house. Sunset was coming, and the two women still had a list of things to make up their minds about.
“You think I’m one of these kids on Phil Donahue,” Prairie blurted, “shows up at some woman’s door fifteen years later goin’ ‘Mommy, Mommy!’ Hey. I have my privacy, had to fight for it sometimes, I know what that’s worth, I ain’t about to go bargin’ in on hers.”
“But Prairie, that would be small shit next to this Brock problem. He’s dangerous.”
“Can’t we find her before he does?” So blatantly longing that DL had to stare down at her feet, like an amateur tap dancer.
“You ought to at least have Takeshi’s input on this. Any reason you can’t come with me?”
She took the amulet Zoyd had given her and moved it inside the perimeter of DL’s scanner unit, and the McGarrett theme piped up again, melody, obbligato, and accompaniment. “I’ll have to trust you.”
“You’ll have to trust yourself. If it feels too weird, don’t, ’s all.”
“Come on and meet Isaiah.”
They found him up in the van with Meathook, snorting a couple of lines just to perk up for what looked like some late-night overtime. “He-e-e-y, there she is!” Isaiah with a wet grin. “Great news, Ralph Jr. just hired us to play at the Cucumber Lounge. Things work out, we could be the house band.”
“So you’ll be heading back to Vineland now?”
He frowned, a huge hand on her shoulder, trying to solve a puzzle. “You’re not gonna come?” He looked over at DL, and Prairie introduced them and told him about the amulet and the Japanese guy who was now obliged to help her. “But I promised your dad—”
“Just tell him what happened with the card he gave me and it’ll be all right. Plus the longer I stick with you guys the more I could get you in trouble. APB’s out on the van, I don’t know. . . .” Isaiah was looking over at DL, eyebrows going like wings trying to pick up some lift. “She’s cool, rilly,” Prairie said.
“You sing?” is what Meathook wanted to know, his upper lip glistening and loose.
“If you’re good boys,” DL beamed, “I’ll sing you the story of my life.” So it was that as a breeze came up to send all the leaves in the landscape flickering, as low-voltage lighting bloomed along the walks and through the trees in citric green and yellow, and as Ralph Wayvone, for whom the gun-moll anthem was a great favorite, danced a kind of fox-trot with his newlywed daughter, DL came sauntering up to the mike in front of the reassembled Vomitones, having with kunoichi deftness removed an Uzi from its owner’s sheath—“Hi, handsome, mind if I borrow this?”—to use as a prop, and, twirling it like a six-gun in a movie, taking time steps and shaking her hair around, sang, to the band’s accompaniment,
Just a floo-zy with-an U-U-zi . . .
Just a girlie, with-a-gun . . .
When I could have been a mo-del,
And I should have been a nu-un. . . .
Oh, just what was it about that
Little Israeli machine? . . .
Play all day in the sand,
Nothin’ gets, jammed, under-
Stand . . . what I mean—
So Mis-ter, you can keep yer len-ses,
And Sis-ter, you can keep yer beads . . .
I’m ridin’ in Mercedes Ben-zes,
I’m takin’ care of all my needs. . . .
I’ll lose my blues, in some Jacuz-zi,
Life’s just a lotta good clean fun,
For a floo-zy with-an U-U-zi,
For a girlie, with-a-gun. . . .
Ralph loved it, screaming, “One more time!” DL tossed the weapon back to the bewildered gunsel, Isaiah slowed the rhythm down and on the final eight bars hit every other beat with a heavy rimshot, an old show-tune tactic American audiences are conditioned to meet with wild applause, which is what happened, along with cries of “Who’s your agent?” and “Are you married?”
Though all the Vomitones were eager to continue, DL, with regrets, left the mike and with Prairie and Isaiah made her way up through the low lights and night awakenings of jasmine to where she’d parked her car, a black ’84 Trans-Am with extra fairings, side pipes, scoops, and coves not on the standard model, plus awesomely important pinstriping by the legendary Ramón of La Habra in several motifs, including explosions and serpents.
“Megabad, rilly,” delighted Isaiah crooned. “What’ll this do?”
“Just cruisin’ or on a good night?”
“Prairie, if I teach you real quick to play drums—?”
She looked up from her seat at him, towering against light smog that only a few stars shone through. “When you see my dad—”
“Sure. We go up and eyeball your house too, if you want.”
“Sorry about it, Stretch Pants.”
“Be all right again soon.” He knelt to kiss her goodbye through the window. “Only a couple more commercials, just hold on, Prair.”
DL allowed the youngsters another beat and then hit the ignition, producing a menacing yet musical exhaust that sent Isaiah Two Four into head-clutching ecstasy. The Trans-Am backed, turned, and, to the stately Neo-glasspack wind chorale, combustion shaped to music, varying as she shifted gears, departed, the sound diminishing down the long maze of switchbacks, pausing for the gate, resuming the melody, blending finally into the ground hum of freeway traffic far below.
DESCRIBED in Aggro World as “a sort of Esalen Institute for lady asskickers,” the mountainside retreat of the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives stood on a promontory dappled in light and dark California greens above a small valley, only a couple of ridgelines from the SP tracks, final ascent being over dirt roads vexing enough to those who arrived in times of mud, and so deeply rutted when the season was dry that many an unwary seeker was brought to a high-centered pause out in this oil painting of a landscape, wheels spinning in empty air, creatures of the hillside only just interrupting grazing or predation to notice. Originally, in the days of the missions, built to house Las Hermanas de Nuestra Señora de los Pepinares—one of those ladies’ auxiliaries that kept springing up around the Jesuits in seventeenth-century Spain, never recognized by Rome nor even by the Society, but persisting with grace and stamina there in California for hundreds of years—the place had acquired extensions and outbuildings, got wired and rewired, plumbed and replumbed, until a series of bad investments had forced what was left of the sodality to put it up for rent and disperse to cheaper housing, though they continued to market the world-famous cucumber brandy bearing their name.
By the 1960s the kunoichi, looking for some cash flow themselves, had begun to edge into the self-improvement business, not quite begun to boom as it would in a few more years, offering, eventually, fantasy marathons for devotees of the Orient, group rates on Kiddie Ninja Weekends, help for rejected disciples of Zen (“No bamboo sticks—ever!” promised the ads in Psychology Today) and other Eastern methods. Men of a certain age in safari outfits and military haircuts and quite often the grip of a merciless nostalgia could always be counted on to show up with ogling in mind, expecting some chorus line of Asian dewdrops. Imagine their surprise at the first day’s orientation session, when the Sisters, all wearing ninja gear and unpromisingly distant expressions, filed onstage one by one. Not only were most of them non-Asian, m
any were actually black, a-and Mexican too! What went on?
“There it is,” DL said, “check it out.” They had rounded a curve, and under the bright moon the forest fell away and the land went sloping down in pastures and then thickets of alder to where a creek rushed and fell, and up beyond that, high on the other side, there stood the Retreat. Steep walls weather-stained over old whitewash did not so much tower above the rolling, breaking terrain as almost readably reflect it, as if they shone at all their different angles like great coarse mirrors, beneath ancient tile roofs gone darkening and corroded under the elements, with windows recessed into shadow and seeming to bear no relation to any set of levels that might be inside. As they got closer, Prairie saw archways, a bell tower, an interpenetration with the tall lime surfaces of cypresses, pepper trees, a fruit orchard . . . nothing looked especially creepy to her. She was a California kid, and she trusted in vegetation. What was creepy, the heart of creep-out, lay back down the road behind her, in, but not limited to, the person, hard and nearly invisible, like quartz, of her pursuer, Brock Vond.
DL was known at the gates outer and inner, getting long looks Prairie couldn’t interpret. By the time they got up to the reception building, there was a welcoming committee standing in the lamplined drive, all in black gi, headed by a tall, fit, scholarly-looking woman named Sister Rochelle, who turned out to be Senior Attentive, or mother superior of the place. “DL-san,” she greeted her longtime disciple and antagonist. “What new mischief now?” DL bowed and introduced Prairie, at whom Sister Rochelle had been gazing as if she knew her but was pretending for some reason that she didn’t. They entered a small tiled courtyard with a fountain. Owls called and swooped. Women lay naked in the moonlight. Others, all in black, stood together in the gallery shadows. “Any interest from law enforcement here?” inquired Sister Rochelle.
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