Vineland

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Cruisin’ through, was all. You sure sound paranoid.”

  Frenesi gestured with her burger, trailing drops of separating ketchup and fat, each drop warped by the forces of its flight into swirling micropatterns of red and beige, and—“It’s the Revolution, girl—can’t you feel it?”

  DL narrowed her eyes, wondering, What have we here. She felt like an adult come upon a little kid alone at a dangerous time of day, not yet aware of her mom’s absence. “I could see you were just all revved up,” she told Frenesi, though months later. “I couldn’t help teasin’ you. You were bein’ so—” but let it go, pretending she couldn’t think of the word. It probably wasn’t revolutionary, invoked in those days widely and sometimes lovingly and enjoying a wide range of meaning. Frenesi dreamed of a mysterious people’s oneness, drawing together toward the best chances of light, achieved once or twice that she’d seen in the street, in short, timeless bursts, all paths, human and projectile, true, the people in a single presence, the police likewise simple as a moving blade—and individuals who in meetings might only bore or be pains in the ass here suddenly being seen to transcend, almost beyond will to move smoothly between baton and victim to take the blow instead, to lie down on the tracks as the iron rolled in or look into the gun muzzle and maintain the power of speech—there was no telling, in those days, who might unexpectedly change this way, or when. Some were in it, in fact, secretly for the possibilities of finding just such moments. But DL admitted she was a little less saintly—“Is the asskicking part’s usually what I’m lookin’ for,” watching Frenesi, waiting for disapproval. “But somebody told me it don’t mean much unless I make what they call the correct analysis? and then act on it? Ever hear of that one?”

  Frenesi shrugged. “Heard of it. Maybe I don’t have the patience. I have to trust the way this makes me feel. Feels right, DL. Like we’re really going to change the world this time,” looking back in the same go-ahead-say-something way. But DL was smiling lopsidedly to herself. Backlit by the last of the sun, Frenesi in dazed witness, her face had become possessed by that of a young man, distant, surmised—Moody Chastain, her father. Later, when they got to showing each other pictures of their lives, there he was, same face in silver and dye, confirming the earlier gleaming moment—the halo of fresh-drawn copper, the ghostly young hero who’d come to her rescue, the whoop-de-do that day, Revolution all around them, world-class burgers, jukebox solidarity, as the sun set behind Marin and the scent of DL’s sweat and pussy excitation diffused out of the leather clothing, mixed with motor smells.

  Moody. He’d once been a junior Texas rounder, promoting bad behavior all over the Harlingen, Brownsville, McAllen area. For a while he and a small gang had managed to migrate as far as Mobile Bay, spreading apprehension from Mertz to Magazine, but he was soon back in his native orbit, handing out to all the ladies Dauphin Island orchids kept fresh with the beer in an ice tub in the truckbed and resuming his ways, which included driving fast, discharging firearms inappropriately, and passing around open containers, till a sheriff’s deputy friendly with the family suggested a choice between the Army now or Huntsville later. The war then approaching was never mentioned directly, but, “Well, what’ll I get to shoot?” Moody wanted to know.

  “Any weapon, any caliber.”

  “I mean, who do I get to shoot?”

  “Whoever they tell you. Interesting thing about that, way I see it, you don’t have nearly the legal problems.”

  Sounded good to Moody, who went right down and joined up. He met Norleen while he was at Fort Hood at services in the same narrow wood church they got married in, just before he shipped out. It was about mid-Atlantic, surrounded by nothing that did not refer, finally, to steel, vomiting for days, imagining the horizon outside, the unnatural purity, before he understood how terrified he was. It was the first time in his career he couldn’t climb in the truck and head for some borderline. He felt himself about to go crazy in this deep overcrowded hole, but he hung on, he tried to see through his fear, and when it came it was like finding Jesus—Moody saw, like the comics or Bible illustrations, a succession of scenes showing him the way he had to go, which was to imagine the worst and then himself be worse than that. He must torture the violent, deprive the greedy, give the drunks something to stagger about. He would have to become a Military Policeman, be as bad as he had to be to make it, using everything he knew from those rounder days. And so he did, pulling his first MP duty in London, on and about Shaftesbury Avenue, accessorized in virgin white, known, in military slang in those days, as a “snowdrop.”

  Darryl Louise was born right after the war, in Leavenworth, Kansas, after Moody, having made it through alive, was assigned to the Disciplinary Barracks there. In the years of war he’d done a lot of shooting, some wounding, a little killing, but despite his love of weaponry, he’d come to see bombs, artillery, even rifles, as too abstract and cold. The peacetime Moody wanted to get more personal now. Though he was already licensed to use life-threatening come-alongs, to crack heads and dislocate shoulders, he didn’t really light up till he discovered the judo and jujitsu of the defeated Jap, then enjoying a postwar surge of interest. From then on Moody practiced when he could, wherever he happened to be posted, getting the best of East and West Coast schools of thought, working eventually part-time as an instructor with his own group of students. When DL was five or six she started tagging along with him down to the dojo.

  “Could’ve been my mama thought he was slippin’ around. Maybe I was supposed to keep an eye on him.”

  “Hmm-mm, I can see why.” The snapshot Frenesi happened to be looking at showed Moody in his full-dress uniform, ribbons and medals and patches and fourragères, holding already oversize eight-month-old DL and grinning in the sunlight. There were palm trees behind them, so it couldn’t’ve been Kansas anymore.

  “Way it looks,” Frenesi said, when they could say things like this comfortably, “is that he went over. A wild kid who ended up being that deputy sheriff.”

  “Uh-huh,” nodding, sparkling, “and guess who he took it out on.” DL had noticed as she got older that her mother, Norleen, was apt to be in and out of their housing unit of the moment on mysterious “chores,” her word for something else that years later DL surmised could have been boyfriends. Among Moody’s problem areas was a practice of bringing home with him emotional elements of his work. The morning after one of their bigger go-rounds, DL started hollering at her mother. “Why’re you puttin’ up with his shit?” But Norleen could only gaze tearfully back, needing to talk, all right, but not to her child, whom she must have thought she was protecting.

  “Wait a minute,” Frenesi broke in, “he beat on your mother?”

  She got that who-the-fuck-are-you stare back. “Never heard of that where you come from?”

  “He ever do it to you?”

  She smiled tightly. “Nope. That was just it.” Nodded, her jaw forward. “The son of a bitch, you see, wouldn’t even work out with me—not even in public at the dojo, not even when we got to be the same size and rank. He would never get into the ring with me.”

  “He knew better.”

  “Oh, I wouldt’n’ve kicked his ass that hard. . . .” She kept a straight face while Frenesi grinned. “I’m serious, you don’t let things like how you feel about your daddy get in the way. Not professional, bad for your spirit.”

  “What about your mom, why did she put up with it?”

  Best Norleen could ever do was “It’s his job,” but DL still didn’t get it. “He loves us, but sometimes he has to be like ’at.” Her face that morning had been swollen, distorted enough to frighten the girl, as if her mother were slowly turning into some other creature, one that might even wish her harm.

  “You mean, they’re tellin’ him to?”

  Norleen answered with one of those sighs DL had by then learned to dread, a beaten saddening surrender of breath. “No, but
they might ’s well be. Just how it is. Men are runnin’ it, they don’t ask us, better learn it now ’cause it doesn’t end when you grow up either, Darryl Louise.”

  “You mean everybody has to—”

  “Ever’body darlin’. Can you reach me that big spoon over there?” But years later, DL on a rare visit, her mother by then divorced and living in Houston, Norleen finally told her, “Why, the man had me scared spitless. What was I supposed to do? I didn’t even know how to shoot any o’ them ol’ stupid guns he kept around. And I’m telling you, you’re lucky you made it ’s far as you did. I know that something—Somebody—was lookin’ out for me.”

  And by then DL was able easily to sit attentive, pressureless, through the Christer commercial that followed, one she’d already heard more than once over the phone. She was finally acknowledging her mother’s soul, one more side benefit of life in the martial arts. The discipline had steered her early enough away from the powerlessness and the sooner or later self-poisoning hatred that had been waiting for her. Somewhere further along, she’d been given to understand, she would discover that all souls, human and otherwise, were different disguises of the same greater being—God at play. She respected Norleen’s love of Jesus even though she’d had her own way to go since she was a girl, even before the Department of Defense, that well-known agent of enlightenment, ever thought of cutting Moody’s orders for Japan.

  This was during the lull between Korea and Vietnam, but the troops on R and R could still keep Moody plenty busy. Norleen was often out, running those chores of hers, so DL was left on her own. She started to ditch the dependents’ school, intending to go look for an instructor in unarmed combat, usually winding up hanging around pachinko parlors and making shady acquaintances, picking up enough of the language to find built into it a whole charm school’s worth of rules for getting along socially over here.

  One day, in the ringing crepitation of millions of steel balls, ingeniously waxed pins, and spheriphagous “tulips,” she grew aware of a gap in the web, a local redirection of interest. She looked around. He was dressed plainly and had the air of a servant. Bowing, precise, he asked, “You eat soba?”

  Bowing back, “You buyin’?”

  His name was Noboru, and he claimed to have the gift of seeing in a person what she was truly destined to be. “Don’t get me wrong!” between slurps, “you have definite shodan potential at the game, but pachinko is not your destiny. I want you to come and meet my teacher.”

  “You’re—some kind of guidance counselor?”

  “Been out searching a long time. The sensei asked me to.”

  “Wait—I’ve been around the circuit enough to know it’s the pupil who’s supposed to go lookin’ for the teacher. What kind of a no-class setup is this here?” But she’d been having no luck on her own, so maybe it was what her Aunt Tulsa liked to call “a message from beyond.”

  Throughout their first interview, Inoshiro Sensei, as feared, kept one hand on DL’s leg while using the other hand to chain-smoke. The pitch was take-it-or-leave-it simple. In her pachinko playing his agent Noboru, with his infallible gift, had detected an advanced ruthlessness of spirit, which the master, going then secretly to observe, had confirmed. DL wondered if being already taller than most Japanese adults, plus her eye-catching head of hair, came into it at all. “There are things I am obliged to pass on. Skills no one owns, but which must be carried forward.”

  “I’m not even Japanese.”

  “One of my major karmic missions this time around is to get outside of Japanese insular craziness, be international assukikaa, ne? Come on,” announced the sensei, “we’re going dancing!”

  “Huh?”

  “See how you move!” They proceeded, DL squinting and frowning, to a water-trade joint around the corner called The Lucky Sea Urchin, where they danced some back-street two-step and DL waved off everything but 7-Up. It wasn’t as if these jokers were accosting her at a real stable time of her life. At the school on the base, girls were given only a sketchy governmental account of puberty and adolescence. DL’s were both turning out to be like vacationing on another planet and losing her traveler’s checks. Not long before this her period, a major obsession by then, had arrived at last, plus lately she felt washed under by these long, sometimes daylong, waves of inattention, everybody looking at her weirdly, especially boys. The sensei had scowlingly little sympathy for any of this, however. In the traditional stories, a few of which DL would come to hear before she left Japan, the apprenticeship is harsh and long, someplace scenic up in the mountains where the student is put to work at menial outdoor tasks, learning patience and obedience, without which she can learn nothing else, and this alone, in some stories, takes years. What DL got from Inoshiro Sensei was more like the modernized crash course. Man here was clearly under some time pressure so heavy she didn’t want to know, having herself decided it was a romantic terminal illness, an older woman someplace. . . . For ancient dark reasons, he could not return to the mountains, probably had killed somebody back there over this woman, and now, while she lay dying far away, he must live penitent, earthbound, down here in the ensnarling city, longing for her and the mist and the wind-shaped trees. . . .

  The sensei ran DL all over the map on incomprehensible, some would say pointless, fool errands. He blindfolded her with tape and dark glasses and took her on the Yamanote Line, riding around for hours switching subways, at last unsealing her eyes, handing her a stone of a certain shape and weight, and leaving her well lost, with instructions to get back to his house before nightfall, using only the stone. He gave her messages she didn’t understand to take to people she didn’t know, at addresses harshly drilled in, that would turn out either not to exist or to be something else, like a pachinko parlor. He also enrolled her in a small dojo nearby run by a former disciple. She would put in half her time on traditional forms and exercises, then slip outside, around the corner and down the alley, to a rendezvous more felonious than illicit.

  Meantime, all her school ditching had become a problem at home. The truancy squad was now in her face as part of a daily routine. Moody ignored it till they finally came to bother him at work, in front of other men, including officers, not the best way to send him home with a smile on his lips. For a week and a half he would already be screaming as he came up the front path, silencing birds, sending neighbor dogs, cats, and children fleeing indoors, and it would go on, out the screened windows and across the neat little yards, on through suppertime, prime time, and beyond, blunt, embittered, what the sensei would have called lacking in style. Norleen as usual kept silent, trying to stay out of the way, though sometimes on impulse she was known to actually bring them coffee right in the very fierce middle of it. And as usual Moody made no least move upon his daughter, who might by now, far as he knew, be able to do him some real harm. To tell the truth, these days, pushing twenty years in the service, he was starting to kick back some, working a regular daytime shift for a couple years now, manipulating paper that only represented the adrenaline and guts of what he used to do, putting in less and less time at gym, track, pool, or dojo, content to sit behind his increasing embonpoint with a personalized coffee mug wired permanently to his right index finger and shoot the shit with numberless cronies from head-bashing days who dropped by all the time. He’d lost his old enthusiasm for unarmed combat, and DL found no way, reasonable or at the top of her voice, to get him to see where her own love of the discipline was taking her. She did tell them both, trying to sound dutiful, about the dojo, but not about Inoshiro Sensei, having sworn to keep silent and already feeling the depressing weight of Moody’s suspicions. “I ever find you ’th one ’nem little slant-eyed jerkoffs,” as he expressed it, “he gets killed, and you get a Clorox douche, you understand me?” DL hated with all her heart to say so, but she did.

  Another message from beyond, no doubt. She saw a pattern. He was settling for spoiling, snarling, aiming his bell
y at her like a great smooth bomb snout and calling her Trash, Gook-lover, and, mystifyingly, Communist too. Norleen nibbled her lip and from under her lashes sent sorrowing looks that said, Why keep getting him worked up, he’ll take it out on me. “I was just sadistic enough,” DL admitted, years later, to herself and then to Norleen’s face, “so mad at you for all ’at knucklin’ under, that sure I provoked him. Also I ’s wonderin’ what it would take to get you to fight him back.”

  Norleen shrugged. The central air-conditioning pursued its dark slow pulsing, traffic breathed along the freeways, trees outside just managed to stir in the moist subtropical air.” ’Course you knew all the while I was seeing Captain Lanier. . . .”

  “What? Mama, his CO?” Well no, she sure hadn’t known till now, how would she?

  “He paid for the divorce, too.”

  DL shook her head, bewildered. “No shit?”

  Norleen, born-again, mannerly and all, laughed like a girl with a garden hose in her hand. “No shit.”

  And DL guessed that Moody’d known about it all along, too. The Captain would have kept him reminded. Men had ways. She’d been living her childhood in a swamp full of intrigue, where, below, invisible sleek things without names kept brushing past, barely felt sliding across her skin, everybody pretending the surface was all there was. Till one day she had a moment. There just came flowing over her the certainty that only when she was away from them, learning to fight, did she feel any good. The sensei, for all his lechery, high-speed frenzies, temperamental snits and low-tolerance ways, had become a refuge from what lay breathing invisible somewhere back in the geometric sprawl of yards and fences and dumpsters of Dependents’ Housing, more than ready to rise from its crouch and take her over. So instead of waiting for something dramatic enough to give her an excuse, which could be too dangerous, DL one day when they both happened to be out of the house just filled a small army bag with what she needed, turned much of the fridge’s contents into sandwiches and packed them in a big number 66 market bag, stole a bottle of PX Chivas Regal for the sensei, and without any last look in at her room, went AWOL.