Vineland

by Thomas Pynchon

  Waiting for them this morning were towaway teammates Vato and Blood, whom they’d met in the parking lot of the Woodbine Motel, late at night, thundering along in low in a Custom Deluxe named Mi Vida Loca, searching for likely units. The boys, when Takeshi and DL had appeared in their headlights, had been “scaling” the cars in this lot, as timber scalers will go through a piece of forest to estimate how many board feet of lumber it contains. Their task would seem to’ve been straightforward—simply choose, for towing away, the highest-priced rides first. But it depended, as either partner would’ve been quick to explain, on the make of high-priced ride—a Rolls Royce owner, for instance, would know how to turn the bothersome chore of redeeming his automobile into a lighthearted adventure, cheerfully paying all the exorbitant fees, some invented on the spot, and throwing in a big tip besides. On the other hand, towing away any Mercedes, even in the short run, was a losing proposition. No Mercedes driver would ever show up at V & B Tow at three in the morning in any mood for fun. Vato and Blood had recently been to a workshop down at a spa in Marin on this very subject, “Interpersonal Programming and the Problem Towee,” in which the point had been made more than once that a Mercedes driver in redeeming his impounded ride shows no better manners than when he drives, trying first thing, in the marque’s tradition of never signaling, an unannounced kick in the balls.

  “Uh-huh,” DL assured Vato, who, impressed with her looks, had been babbling along with no clear idea what he was saying.

  “And sometimes,” Blood now picking it up and directing his remarks to Takeshi, “you know, Doc, some fine units end up in our pound, and the owners never do claim ’m.” He laughed in a make-believe crazy way that Takeshi heard as a kiai, or paralyzing scream just before an assault, but Blood only took him by the head and playfully began to twist it back and forth, like a lemon on a lemon squeezer. “Can’t have somethin’ like that sit around forever,” now in a quieter, strangely intimate tone, “so we price it for quick sale.”

  “ ‘It,’” Takeshi between twists, “you keep saying ‘that’ and ‘it.’ “

  “Say like—I’m talkin’ about a Ferrari, all right?”

  “You talking—about a Ferrari?”

  “Was I getting specific?” He flipped Takeshi’s head away like an empty lemon rind. “Next you be axkin’ me the price.”

  “No offense.”

  “Sounds like the team I bet on last week,” Vato put in.

  “Raight on!” They ran through a Vietnam-style handclasp set to the tune of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), going “Dum, dum, dum,” in harmony, “DAHdahhhh!” slapping a high five, “Dum, dum, dum, daDAHH!” spinning around, slapping palms behind their backs and so forth while Takeshi and DL leaned against the front fenders of the truck, looking on. Vato produced a business card, for which Takeshi by reflex exchanged one of his own, “Allowín you anytime 24 hours to access the V & B Tow Preferred List, which gives a instant update on makes, models, years, conditions, special features.”

  “And say Doc,” Blood added, “we also a little sleepy this time of night. . . .”

  “Sure!” coming out with a handful of “white diamonds.” And the fellows went on with their night’s cruising after accounts towable. But next day they showed up unexpectedly at the Karmology Clinic with some input relating to Vietnam in general and Ortho Bob Dulang in particular, tales of who bought what in the Ton Son Nhut latrine while bats intercepted the legendary oversize mosquitoes, who entered wailing a hot bounded world they might, at the last moment, have recognized, and stoned bat-fishermen cast their hooked lines upward into the dark . . . and who only talked about and who did what to certain officers they all seemed to have in common, and why they had been led into the wrong place, and how many there were when the sun went down and how many when it came up . . . some of it was war stories, some just happy horseshit, and some was the stunned headlong certainty that precedes talking in tongues, though neither Vato nor Blood quite got to that.

  As they came to know one another better, as the boys learned about the Death Touch, the Ninjette Retreat, the Puncutron Machine, the year and a day—and in time the rollover of the partnership for yet another year and a day, and so on—they remained among very few who did not offer DL and Takeshi any free advice, though between themselves the story was an object of lively commentary. Vato wanted it to be a sitcom. Whenever the topic came up, he made a point to laugh about it a lot, trying to fill in for a live studio audience.

  “ ’Pose it ain’t that way,” Blood objected, “maybe it’s one them Movies of the Week where the dude has a incurable disease?”

  “Nah, the way I like it is, is that she tells him everythín but he never checks any of it out to see if it’s true, he just lets ’em all go ahead, fuckín around with needles, electricity, and shit, ’cause why bother, right, he don’t know how much time he’s got left. And she won’t tell him . . . she ain’t in the mood, nobody gets inside ten meters of her. Threaten her with a weapon? What if he fucks up and kills her, then he really has a problem.”

  Takeshi had in fact tried to entertain this upbeat scenario, though it hadn’t entertained him much because he couldn’t help seeing how wishful it was. What if, wild and unreasonable hope, she’d only been putting him on all the time, and this was her eccentric, even weird idea of flirting with him? Most of the time he couldn’t believe she’d really Done It to him, because even this long way down the line he still had trouble believing in his own death. If she’d killed him, why stick around? If she hadn’t, why put him, a complete stranger, through all this? It was driving him toward what, in fairly close to it now, he could detect as some state of literally mindless joy. There was no way he knew of to experience such joy and at the same time keep his mind. He wasn’t sure this might not be her real mission—to make of his life a koan, or unsolvable Zen puzzle, that would send him purring into transcendence.

  As time went by, that is, he did begin to wonder. But could not ask—she would only evade, turn her head away and smile, not in any sinister way but with a child’s secretive semipro glaze, longing—though she only told him years later of how she used it to get her through—for the Retreat, the cloudy ridge, the high dark walls, where she could nest for a while with the others—not crippled sparrows but birds of prey, ragged from the storm, tired from the hunt, in for a little R and R—longing for the mountains, much as she’d once romantically imagined about her old teacher Inoshiro Sensei. This is what he had prepared her for—to inherit his own entanglement in the world, and now, with this perhaps demented Karmology hustle of Takeshi’s, with the past as well, and the crimes behind the world, the thousand bloody arroyos in the hinterlands of time that stretched somberly inland from the honky-tonk coast of Now.

  Vato and Blood were slouched in folding chairs when Takeshi and DL came in to open up shop, both humming back and forth in a strange free-form antiphony, sometimes falling silent, picking up the tune two and a half bars later exactly together, latently menacing, like a bee swarm. It was the famous V & B Tow Company Theme, based on the Disney cartoon anthem” ‘I’m Chip!’—‘I’m Dale!’” sung originally by a chipmunk act that never quite achieved either the charisma or the recognition of Ross Bagdasarian’s trio, Alvin, Simon, and Theodore. In Vietnam, Vato and Blood had worked mostly in the motor pool but now and then had to go out on convoys. In off of what was supposed to be a routine spin through the forests and turned instead into an outstandingly dark and death-laden time, having wandered one afternoon into a cement lounge deep within the Long Binh complex, reeking with attitude, they opened beers and settled in to watch the Tube. Some officer far away had determined that Disney cartoons would be just the right kind of entertainment for them, which was correct, if for the wrong reasons. As other loungers edged nervously away from the boys, suddenly on came Chip ’n’ Dale, and an unmistakable flash of recognition. After listening to the chipmunk duo’s Theme a couple of times, getting the
lyric and tune down, Blood, turning to Vato during a commercial for reenlistment, sang, “I’m Blood,” and Vato immediately piped up, “I’m Vato!” Together, “We just some couple of mu-thuh-fuckkers / Out—” whereupon a disagreement arose, Vato going on with the straight Disney lyric, “Out to have some fun,” while Blood, continuing to depart from it, preferred “Out to kick some ass,” turning immediately to Vato. “What’s ’is ‘have some fun’ shit?”

  “OK, OK, we’ll sing ‘kick some ass,’ no problem.” Singing, “I’m Vato—”

  Still annoyed, “Uh, I’m Blood. . . .”

  “We just some couple of—” at which point Vato maliciously sang “crazy bastards” instead of “motherfuckers.” The two broke off and glared at each other. Over the next few years, as they were getting their business going, this was to keep happening—sometimes they managed to get from one end of the song to the other in perfect agreement, but most of the time they did not. The song became a kind of bulletin board for the partnership, a space on which they could hang these variations to remark on questions of the moment and plans of the day. The night before, for example, out in the truck, Blood had been singing, “End up eatin’ some fast food that you know / Will taste like shit—” referring to an argument that had been going on all week about where to take the third partner at V & B Tow, Thi Anh Tran, to lunch for her birthday, whose date Blood, the company yenta, had found in her folder. Both agreed it would be a nice surprise, but where to eat? Blood ruled out Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Polynesian. “She don’t want to be eatin’ that shit, that’s all she ever ate over there was zat shit, and exspecially not on her birthday, Blood,” said Blood.

  “OK, Vato,” said Vato, “then how about Mexican, take her to Taco Carajo, startín at noon, live strollín mariachis, hot Mexican antojitas—”

  “Hey maybe you can eat that shit—” The task seemed impossible—every eatery choice carried some risk of offense, and neither wished to call down any Dragon Lady type of curses from the woman who these days held in her exquisite hands every last detail of V & B’s finances, including many of interest not only to the IRS but also to organizations that were much less coy about theft. Though they went to elaborate lengths to deny it, Vato and Blood were both afraid of her. In May of ’75 they’d found her languishing in Pendleton, along with thousands of others who’d flooded in after the fall of Saigon, but their history went back further, to their wartime association with Gorman (“The Specter”) Flaff’s legendary operations in money orders and piasters, into which they had bought at exactly the right moment in the Specter’s tangled financial saga to furnish them with the metaphysical edge of seeming to have performed an angelic intervention. In return they gained the superstitious Flaff’s confidence, which turned out to include naming them in his will to take over his obligations to Thi Anh Tran.

  “Don’t remember we ever talked about it, Vato.”

  “Nope, we just did it, right?”

  “There it is.”

  “We owed it to Flaff.”

  “Flaff owed it to her.” He’d been springing for her education at one of the Ecoles des Jeunes Filles in Saigon, plus a small allowance check, for reasons there were only rumors about. One story was he’d barbecued her family and felt guilty, but neither part of that sounded much like the old Specter. Few months later, out too close to the wrong woodline, that was it for Gorman. At the base camp a chaplain was holding the letter for Vato and Blood in which the name of Thi Anh Tran first came up. They drank warm Cokes, sat down, Phantoms thundered over the jungle, helicopter blades beat the humid air. Years later, grown up and a certified CPA, there she was in Pendleton, in a 25-person army tent, all processed, just waiting, smoking Kools and listening to AM rock and roll. As a term of their sponsorship, they hired her as their bookkeeper, but soon, recognizing her worth, dealt her in for an equal share of the business. Now she had them both so nervous they’d do anything to avoid upsetting her.

  “Say, Blood,” said Blood to Vato, “Vietnamese bitch say she want to talk to you.”

  “Uh-oh,” Vato muttered.

  “You do somethin’ wrong?”

  Vato figured it must be that burger and fries he’d put on company plastic. He was in her office for ten minutes, with no sounds of any kind to be heard behind the door. Vato emerged shaking his head. Blood happened to be right there. “Well, uh, how you doin’, Blood?”

  “That Vietnamese bitch, you know what, she’s really somethín,” said Vato.

  “You tellin’ me? I know that.”

  “Yeah this time, she had some pistol, Vato.”

  “Pistol. What kind?”

  “ChiCom MAC 10.”

  “No such thing. She poinedt it at you?”

  “Who saw it? Did you see it?”

  “I didt’n—did you?”

  “I saw it, Vato.”

  After they finally decided to have the birthday luncheon at an upscale soul-food place called Once Upon A Chitlin, the question arose, who was going to ask her? They had to argue for half an hour before agreeing to do it together. But who’d go through first when she called, “Come in”?

  “Vietnamese bitch say ‘Come in,’” muttered Blood.

  “Well go on ahead,” Vato in a whisper.

  “What’s ’is ‘go on ahead’ shit?”

  “Who is it?” called the woman behind the door.

  “Us!” hollered the mercurial Vato.

  “Shh-shh! Who aksed you?”

  “She didt, man—”

  The door was opened by Thi Anh Tran, who peered up at the two of them. The ChiCom MAC 10 was nowhere, at least by any casual eye, to be seen. She was wearing a fawn jumpsuit of some loose cotton weave, accessorized in different shades of red—eyeglass frames, scarf, belt, and suede cowgirl boots that might have set her back somewhere in the mid three figures. Red designer barrettes held her hair sleekly back from an articulate brow and temples that often seemed ready to betray more than the shielded eyes ever would.

  “She’s not so bad,” Vato suggested to Blood later that night, out on the road.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Aw, you know, if she did somethín with her hair, maybe wear some clothes that you could see some skin, right?”

  Blood, whose amusement quota that month had not so far even been approached, allowed himself a snort and a half a chuckle. “You about to step on your dick once again.”

  “Thanks, it’s what I get for doín like they tol’ me in therapy I’m spoze to, tryín for total honesty with my ol’ war buddy an’ shit. We been through all this before, you know, I can take it once again.”

  “Plenty of times,” Blood agreed.

  “Meanín that I never learn, that what you’re sayín?”

  They were in full quarrel as the truck arrived at the freeway on-ramp. “Watch it Vato, that was a Greyhoun’ bus right there—”

  “Seen it, Blood.”

  The radio blurted at them. Vato had it coming out of speakers forward and aft, and Blood, surprised as usual, cringed under the decibels, and the truck wavered in and out of the lane. “Zat got to be so loud?”

  Vato reached for the volume just as the radio thundered, “Hello, boys,” in what, at a normal level, might have been an intriguing female voice.

  Vato froze. “It’s her! The Vietnamese bitch!”

  “Vato and Blood, Vato and Blood, where are you, come in, please?”

  “Mm, it do sound like her, the one you’re thinking of, so why don’t you go on ahead, pick up the phone.”

  It was an emergency call from up in Shade Creek. Thanatoids. V & B Tow was nearly alone on that stretch of 101 in its willingness to tow away vehicles associated with Thanatoids and, inevitably, Thanatoid stories. Tonight’s had gone off the edge of a hillside road and was now in the top of an apple tree in the orchard ju
st below.

  “We goín the right way?” Vato pretended to ask his partner.

  “You the navigator, you tell me.” So Vato made a big point of getting the county map out of its compartment, shaking it open in crisp percussions.

  After a while, “I can’t see nothín, what is this?”

  “Is nighttime’s what it is,” Blood replied, “Jello-O Brain.”

  “Hey! I’m gonna put the dome light on, all right?”

  “Huh. ’Pose to be readin’ that map, so why’n’t you just use the map light.”

  “It’s way under the dash, it throws this little spot of light, which to see anything you got to move the map around a inch at a time, is why, to answer your question, I don’ want to use, no map light.”

  “Tell you what I don’t want, Blood, is to be out in some uncontrolled space with less light on it than the space I’m in, you understand, which if you put that dome light on is what’ll happen—”

  “Hey! Just tell me—where’s the flashlight, all right? I’ll use that. Where is it, it ain’t here.”

  “It’s in th’ electrical-equipment locker, where it spoze to be.”

  “In the back of the truck.”

  “It’s electric, ain’t it?”

  This was all recreational bickering. By this time they’d been in business for a couple of years and already learned the roads of Vineland well enough to use in the dark, which now and then they’d been obliged to—the maps were usually just there for props as Vato and Blood went prowling everywhere the suburban lanes, the sand and grass tracks, the gullied-out mud nightmares. They had scrambled over slides, rigged tackle in the trees, winched out lots’ worth of vehicles, from early-model toughmonkey Porsches out for a little all-terrain exercise to dapper fishing vans sporting four-color trout murals and CB call letters in glittery stick-on alphanumerics. They had seen things in the forest, and particularly up along Seventh River, whose naming aloud, in certain area taverns, was cause for summary octogenarihexation from the establishment, as well as for less formal sanctions in the parking lot.