They took the North Spooner exit and got on River Drive. Once past the lights of Vineland, the river took back its older form, became what for the Yuroks it had always been, a river of ghosts. Everything had a name—fishing and snaring places, acorn grounds, rocks in the river, boulders on the banks, groves and single trees with their own names, springs, pools, meadows, all alive, each with its own spirit. Many of these were what the Yurok people called woge, creatures like humans but smaller, who had been living here when the first humans came. Before the influx, the woge withdrew. Some went away physically, forever, eastward, over the mountains, or nestled all together in giant redwood boats, singing unison chants of dispossession and exile, fading as they were taken further out to sea, desolate even to the ears of the newcomers, lost. Other woge who found it impossible to leave withdrew instead into the features of the landscape, remaining conscious, remembering better times, capable of sorrow and as seasons went on other emotions as well, as the generations of Yuroks sat on them, fished from them, rested in their shade, as they learned to love and grow deeper into the nuances of wind and light as well as the earthquakes and eclipses and the massive winter storms that roared in, one after another, from the Gulf of Alaska.
For the Yuroks, who had always held this river exceptional, to follow it up from the ocean was also to journey through the realm behind the immediate. Fog presences glided in coves, dripping ferns thickened audibly in the gulches, semivisible birds called in nearly human speech, trails without warning would begin to descend into the earth, toward Tsorrek, the world of the dead. Vato and Blood, who as city guys you would think might get creeped out by all this, instead took to it as if returning from some exile of their own. Hippies they talked to said it could be reincarnation—that this coast, this watershed, was sacred and magical, and that the woge were really the porpoises, who had left their world to the humans, whose hands had the same five-finger bone structure as their flippers, OK, and gone beneath the ocean, right off around Patrick’s Point in Humboldt, to wait and see how humans did with the world. And if we started fucking up too bad, added some local informants, they would come back, teach us how to live the right way, save us. . . .
The orchard Vato and Blood were looking for was on the other side of Shade Creek, meaning the usual difficult passage over the ruins of the old WPA bridge, where somehow, mysteriously, at least one lane was always open. Sometimes entire segments vanished overnight, as if floated away downriver on pontoons—detours were always necessary, often with the directions crudely spray-painted onto pieces of wall or old plywood shuttering, in the same bristling typeface as gang graffiti. There were always crews at work, around the clock. Tonight Vato and Blood had to wait while a truck piled high with smashed concrete and corroded iron rod went grinding back and forth by its own routes of beaten earth. Figures in fatigues and sometimes helmets could be seen, always in small groups, maybe Corps of Engineers, nobody was sure. They did not interact with the public, not even as flagmen. Drivers were left to decide how safe it was to proceed. Blood inched the rig forward, past great triangular rents in the pavements, through which, screened by a rough weave of reinforcing rods, they could see the river of midnight blue below. The work had been going on since the ’64 storm, when the Seventh, cresting, had taken part of the bridge. Broken silhouettes had stood against the sky for all the years since.
Having crossed safely at last, they put on all their running lights, popped in the Bernard Herrmann cassette, and proceeded up the Shade Creek Valley road to that driving-through-the-night music from Psycho (1960), till they found the orchard and, with the help of spotlights, a Toyota in the treetops. As they watched, the front door opened and the driver began to get out, causing the car to oscillate wildly, apples to fall.
“Better just take it easy till we can find you a ladder,” Vato called up.
“Won’t matter, I’m a Thanatoid.”
“Our insurance. What about the car?”
“Straight.” By which he meant solid, three-dimensional, and not apt to vanish unaccountably between Shade Creek and the V & B pound, as Thanatoid units—cars returned, for reasons of road karma, from Totality—had been known to do, much to the perplexity of the partners. They found an orchard ladder in a shed, and soon the driver had descended, a stock model late-sixties longhair, power-forward-size but short on humor. “Well I’m a pilgrim,” he identified himself, “who’s taken ten years your time just to get this far. The network has been buzzing, like, ‘for a while’ with stories about this karmic adjuster working out of Shade Creek, who actually gets results? I’ve come to ask him to take my case.”
“We know him, Blood, happy to run you on into town.”
“Sate . . . your friend—he’s here someplace?” Takeshi squinting around the conference room.
“No,” Vato sounding a little nervous, “thought we’d better check it out first.”
“What he’s having trouble spittin’ out,” said Blood, “is you already know him, DL, he was gunned down in a alley at the beach in Trasero County ten years ago?”
She knew. “Ah,” she knew all right, “shit.” So here came the first chickens running point, soon to be squadrons darkening the sky, seeking a Home to Roost in that perhaps by now no longer existed.
“Weed Atman. Well. Poor fuckin’ Weed. Guess I should’ve been wondering when he’d show.”
“Mentioned some old runnin’ mate of yours,” Blood said.
“He still feels rilly bitter,” Vato added, “he blames her for what happened.”
Prairie was hearing this, in her turn, from DL in the sun-filled kitchen of the Kunoichi Retreat. “My mom killed a guy?” She was shivering, almost with excitement, but mostly with fear.
“Weed said somebody else had the gun, but he knew that Frenesi set it all up.”
“Why would she? Who was he?”
“We were all sorta runnin’ together for a while, down in Trasero, College of the Surf? Weed was a what you’d call campus revolutionary. But there was also a strong rumor he was workin’ for the other side.”
“Did you ask him which side he was on? He can tell you now, can’t he? got no reason to lie?”
Takeshi snickered. DL said, “Afraid that ain’t the way it works . . . but I appreciate it’s important to you. It makes a difference what side she would have had to be on. . . .”
“You’re trying awful hard not to say somethin’, DL. First you tell me she’s runnin’ around on my dad with this federal megacreep, now you say she helped kill a guy? Does everybody know all about this and I’m just the dumb kid they wait to tell last?”
“Take that up with your father and Sasha. Only reason I’m tellin’ you’s if you put those facts together—”
“They spell Mother?”
“Prairie, she was working for Brock.”
But the kid took no more than a beat and a half before, “Yeah? carried a badge, commission card?”
“She was an independent contractor. They all were, are. . . . That way if she ever got burned, the Man could deny knowledge.”
“Why tell me? who cares?”
“Brock’s on your case, figure that’s a pretty compelling need to know. Prairie? Come on.”
“OK, but do you mind if I take a second to process it, plus it’s now also time for me to go set up for supper? Either of you happen to know what’s in the ‘Variety Loaf’?”
DL let her off the hook. “Thought the EPA confiscated all that.”
It was tonight or never as far as Prairie was concerned. All the Variety Loaves, stacked in a distant niche of the freezer, had begun to glow, softly blue-green, like a night-light for the rest of the frozen food, not, as once supposed, safely dead but no, only, queerly, sleeping . . . o-or perhaps only pretending to sleep—gaahhh! Like everybody else in the kitchen, Prairie had a threshold for how long she could spend in that sinister freezer before some
more than thermometric chill sent her back out into the less clearly haunted world, pulses thumping.
“OK—I need a crew in there, we’re bringin’ out all that Variety Loaf, then we’ll take a vote if it’s safe to eat,” raising her voice, “so be here, be near, or learn the meaning of fear! Ah right! Gerhard, Sister Mary Shirelle, Mrs. Lo Finto, the twins, let’s go for the glow, you guys,” and stepping in time to the music on the radio, which happened to be the theme from Ghostbusters (1984), off they went. But it wasn’t long before a dispute arose as to the morality of disturbing the microenvironment of the freezer. “Bioluminescence is life,” suggested the twins in hasty overlap, “and all life is sacred.”
“Never eat anything that glows,” pronounced Mrs. Lo Finto, an Italian mother who not only couldn’t cook but actually suffered clinical kouxinaphobia, or fear of kitchens, her assignment back here being part of her therapy. They stood in the chill of the freezer, under a marginal light bulb, with the Variety Loaf providing a turquoise fill, bickering in parallel, eventually bringing a sample out to the kitchen.
“It does not look so bad in the daylight,” Gerhard pointed out as work slowed and everyone gathered around the enigmatic foodstuff.
“That’s ’cause you can’t see it glow, dummy.”
“Tradition among the tribes of Central Asia of ingesting luminescent molds as a spiritual practice—”
“But molds have rights too!”
Prairie had a few seconds’ glimpse of how dishearteningly long this might go on, how inconclusive, time-wasting, and unspiritual it would all turn out anyway, just as a touch she knew brought her turning to see DL suited up, carrying some gear, in a hurry. It was as if a solemn bell had begun to ring. “Here’s your back pack. ‘Me gotta go,’ as the Kingsmen always used to say, and you too.”
“But—” the girl gesturing back toward the kitchen, the faces she’d come to know, all the meals yet unplanned, and DL’s plain message that it was already old videotape. As they moved outside and down the vined fragrant colonnade, Prairie heard the beat of helicopters, more than one, close overhead, hovering, waiting. What the fuck?
They reentered the main building, running now—deeper, into corridors, down flights of ringing metal stairs. Takeshi joined them outside the Retreat wine cellar, bottles sticking out of at least four suit pockets.
“You’re looting?” DL paused to inquire.
“Few random vintages, I was—pressed for time!”
“Undrinkable, of course, theft itself being the main thing with you, right, Takeshi.”
“Check it out, Freckles! Here—’71 Louis Martini, ne? A legend! And this one’s—some kind of French stuff!”
“Um, you guys. . . .”
“Gates are shut,” DL reported, “figure a minute ’n’ a half each with a bolt cutter, plus at least three Huey Cobras in the air, FFAR’s, grenade launchers, Gatling guns, the works.”
They arrived at the mouth of an oversize freight elevator, scrambled inside, and began to plunge earpoppingly hellward, aged fluorescent bulbs buzzing and flickering till the brakes caught just when it seemed too late, and they boomed to a stop and came out into a tunnel, deep underground, which led them under the creek bed and then slowly uphill for half a mile, where they exited at last into brightly sunlit terrain where they could hear in the distance the invading motor convoy and the blades of the helicopters, merged in an industrious roar that could as well have been another patch of developer condos going up.
They found the Trans-Am under camouflage netting down among some alder and moved out by way of old logging roads, zigzagging toward I-5, Takeshi consulting maps, DL driving, singing
Oh, kick out, the jambs, motherfuck-er,
‘Cause here comes, that Stove once again—
You thought I was somethin’ in Olathe,
Wait till, you see me in Fort Wayne . . .
and Prairie huddled down in back, hanging on, wishing they could wake into something more benevolent and be three different people, only some family in a family car, with no problems that couldn’t be solved in half an hour of wisecracks and commercials, on their way to a fun weekend at some beach.
THEY blasted down to L.A., heading back to the barn only semivisible and near as anybody could tell unobserved, Manuel and his auto alchemy team at Zero Profile Paint & Body of Santa Rosa having come up with a proprietary lacquer of a crystalline microstructure able to vary its index of refraction so that even had there been surveillance, the Trans-Am could easily, except for a few iridescent fringes, have been taken for empty roadway.
If Prairie had been expecting an old-movie private eye’s office, seedy and picturesque, she wouldn’t be getting it today. The Fumimota suite was located in a basic L.A. business/shopping complex of high-rises that stood on a piece of former movie-studio lot. Space devoted to make-believe had, it was thought, been reclaimed by the serious activities of the World of Reality. A lot of old-time oaters had been lensed here—she’d watched some, Saturday mornings on the Tube—but where stagecoaches had rolled and posses thundered, now stockbrokers whispered romantically about issues and futures into tiny telephone mikes no bigger than M&M’s, crowds dressed to impress came and shopped and sat on tile patios eating lunch, deals were made high overhead in legal offices that weren’t always legal, sharing these altitudes with city falcons who hunted pigeons in the booming prisms of sun and shadow below.
Prairie still had no idea of what “karmic adjustment” was supposed to be, but for the first time it began to seem plausible to her that Takeshi, if not what he said he was, at least might be more than the nose-twister and eye-poker he appeared. The place was full of computer terminals, facsimile machines, all-band transmitter/receivers, not to mention components scattered all over, printed circuits, laser units, DIP’s, disk drives, power supplies, and test equipment—
“Hi-tech Heaven,” her eyes wide.
“That’d be your first mistake,” DL said. “Most of it’s just props to make ol’ Sleazebrain here look good.”
“Please,” Takeshi waving a palm-sized remote control. “What can we offer you?” In rolled a little robot fridge, with two round video screens side by side, each with an image of a cartoon eye that shifted and blinked from time to time, and a smile-shaped speaker for a mouth, out of which now came a synthesized medley of refrigerator tunes, including “Winter Wonderland,” “Let It Snow,” and “Cold, Cold Heart.” Stopping in front of Prairie, humming and flexing small electric motors, it recited its contents.
“You said ‘designer seltzer,’ what’s that?”
“Another stage in the marketing philosophy of the mid-1980s,” replied the mobile cooler. “At the moment I have Bill Blass, Azzedine Alaïa, Yves St. Laurent—”
“Fine!” Prairie a little high-pitched, “that’ll be, uh—” and pow there was the stylish seltzer, stone-cold in its YSL-logo container in the essentially Reagan-era fashion colors of gold and silver. One of the video eyes winked at her, and from the mouth emerged a shiny pink tongue of some soft, wobbling plastic. “Anything else?” the creature inquired in the kind of voice Prairie had come to mistrust even before she could talk.
“Thanks, Raoul,” DL said, “we’ll let you know.”
The video eyes closed, and Raoul glided back to its recharge station, playing “I’ll See You Again” and “Drink, Drink, Drink.”
“Time machine’s in the shop,” Takeshi brightly, “otherwise we’d all—go for a spin!”
“Just had to R-and-R another tachyon chamber,” DL amplified, “exactly a tenth of a second after the warranty ran out, the ’sucker blew, why they call it a ‘time’ machine, I guess?”
But Prairie had been sitting glazy at one of the screens, stroking some keys. “If I wanted to know where she was, say right this second—”
DL shook her head. “I really don’t get this. The woman—”
“DL-san—” Takeshi had his eyebrows up.
“Go ahead,” the girl getting to her feet. “She ran out on me. Probably to be with Brock Vond, is the way it looks. I’m the last person she wants to see. I leave anything out?”
“Plenty. Like all your friends in ’em Cobra gunships, who seem at the moment to be part of the package, you get her, you get them too?”
“In fact—” Takeshi pretending to run over to the window and anxiously check the sky, “why are we—even hanging around with this kid? She’s dangerous!”
DL reached and looped a length of hair back behind Prairie’s ear. “Until you get to see her . . . would you settle for watchin’ her? It’s the best I can do.”
“You know I have to settle for what I can get,” the girl whispered, keeping her eyes down because she knew DL was on to her and if their eyes met she’d just blow it.
Ditzah Pisk Feldman lived in a Spanish split-level up a pleasant cul-de-sac on the high-rent side of Ventura Boulevard, with pepper trees and jacarandas in the yard and a vintage T-Bird in the carport. She was divorced and solvent, with only about a half-hour commute to work. The girls were with their father for the summer. When DL had known her back in Berkeley, Ditzah and her sister Zipi were going around in battle fatigues with their hair in matching oversize Jewish Afros, spray-painting SMASH THE STATE on public walls and keeping plastic explosive in Tupperware containers in the icebox. “Pretending to be film editors,” she told Prairie, “but we were really anarchist bombers.” This evening she looked like your average suburban mom, though what did Prairie know, maybe it was another disguise. Ditzah was drinking sangria and wearing eyeglasses with fashion frames and a muumuu with parrots all over it.
Vineland Page 22