This time what went rolling out, whistling in the dark valleys, chasing the squall lines, impinging upon the sensors of more than one kind of life in the countryside below, wasn’t just the usual “Call of the Thanatoids”—this was long, desolate howling, repeated over and over, impossible for Takeshi and DL, even in their high-tech aerie down south, to ignore. They found Radio Thanatoid on the peculiar band between 6200 and 7000 kilohertz and tuned it in for Prairie, who after a while shook her head sadly. “What are you gonna do about this?”
“We have to respond,” DL said. “Question is, do you want to come with us.”
Well, Prairie wasn’t having much luck here in L.A., though she had managed to hook up again with her old friend Ché, whose grandfolks Dotty and Wade went back into ancient Hollywood history with her own grandparents. But Sasha was out of town, had been since Prairie’d started calling, and according to her message on the answering machine, there was most likely a wiretap on the line too.
Among the first mall rats into Fox Hills, aboriginal as well to the Sherman Oaks Galleria, Prairie and Ché had been known to hitchhike for days to get to malls that often turned out to be only folkloric, false cities of gold. But that was cool, because they got to be together. This time they’d arranged to meet in lower Hollywood at the new Noir Center, loosely based on crime movies from around World War II and after, designed to suggest the famous ironwork of the Bradbury Building downtown, where a few of them had been shot. This was yuppification run to some pitch so desperate that Prairie at least had to hope the whole process was reaching the end of its cycle. She happened to like those old weird-necktie movies in black and white, her grandfolks had worked on some of them, and she personally resented this increasingly dumb attempt to cash in on the pseudoromantic mystique of those particular olden days in this town, having heard enough stories from Hub and Sasha, and Dotty and Wade, to know better than most how corrupted everything had really been from top to bottom, as if the town had been a toxic dump for everything those handsome pictures had left out. Noir Center here had an upscale mineral-water boutique called Bubble Indemnity, plus The Lounge Good Buy patio furniture outlet, The Mall Tease Flacon, which sold perfume and cosmetics, and a New York-style deli, The Lady ’n’ the Lox. Security police wore brown shiny uniform suits with pointed lapels and snap-brim fedoras and did everything by video camera and computer, a far cry from the malls Prairie’d grown up with, when security was not so mean and lean and went in more for normal polyester Safariland uniforms, where the fountains were real and the plants nonplastic and you could always find somebody your age working in the food courts and willing to swap a cheeseburger for a pair of earrings, and there even used to be ice rinks, back when insurance was affordable, she could remember days with Ché, in those older malls, where all they did for hours was watch kids skate. Weird music on the speakers, an echo off the ice. Most of these skaters were girls, some of them wearing incredibly expensive outfits and skates. They swooped, turned, leapt to the beat of canned TV-theme arrangements, booming in the chill, the ice glimmering, the light above the ice green and gray, with white standing columns of condensation. Ché nodding toward one of them once, “Check this out.” She was about their age, pale, slender and serious, her hair tied back with a ribbon, wearing a short white satin number and white kid skates. “Is that white kid,” Ché wondered, “or white kid?” All eyes and legs, like a fawn, she had for a while been flirting, skating up to Prairie and Ché, then turning, flipping her tiny skirt up over her ass and gliding away, elegant little nose in the air.
“Yep,” Prairie muttered, “perfect, ain’t she?”
“Makes you kinda want to mess her up a little, don’t it?”
“Ché, you’re rilly evil?” It didn’t help that inside, Prairie liked to imagine herself as just such a figure of luck and grace, no matter what hair, zit, or weight problems might be accumulating in the nonfantasy world. On the Tube she saw them all the time, these junior-high gymnasts in leotards, teenagers in sitcoms, girls in commercials learning from their moms about how to cook and dress and deal with their dads, all these remote and well-off little cookies going “Mm! this rilly is good!” or the ever-reliable “Thanks, Mom,” Prairie feeling each time this mixture of annoyance and familiarity, knowing like exiled royalty that that’s who she was supposed to be, could even turn herself into through some piece of negligible magic she must’ve known once but in the difficult years marooned down on this out-of-the-way planet had come to have trouble remembering anymore. When she told Ché about it, as she told her everything, her friend’s eyebrows went up in concern.
“Best forget it, Prair. All looks better ’n it is. Ain’t one of these li’l spoiled brats’d even make it through one night at Juvenile Hall.”
“Just it,” Prairie had pointed out, “nobody’ll ever send her to no Juvenile Hall, she’s gonna live her whole life on the outside.”
“A girl can have fantasies, can’t she?”
“Ooo-wee! No-o-o mercy!” This was their star-and-sidekick routine, going back to when they were little, playing Bionic, Police, or Wonder Woman. A teacher had told Prairie’s class once to write a paragraph on what sports figure they wished they could be. Most girls said something like Chris Evert. Prairie said Brent Musberger. Each time they got together, it suited her to be the one to frame and comment on Ché’s roughhouse engagements with the world, though more than once she’d been called on for muscle, notably during the Great South Coast Plaza Eyeshadow Raid, still being talked about in tones of wounded bewilderment at security seminars nationwide, in which two dozen girls, in black T-shirts and jeans, carrying empty backpacks and riding on roller skates, perfectly acquainted with every inch of the terrain, had come precision whirring and ticking into the giant Plaza just before closing time and departed only moments later with the packs stuffed full of eyeshadows, mascaras, lipsticks, earrings, barrettes, bracelets, pantyhose, and fashion shades, all of which they had turned immediately for cash from an older person named Otis, with a panel truck headed for a swap meet far away. In the lucid high density of action, Prairie saw her friend about to be cornered, between a mall cop and a kid in a plastic smock, hardly older than they were, bought into it young, hollering as if it were his own stuff—with the cop, clear as a movie close-up, unsnapping his holster, oo-oo, look out—“Ché!” Kicking up as much speed as she could, she went zooming in, screaming herself semidemented, paralyzing the pursuit long enough to sail alongside Ché, take her by the wrist, twirl her till they were aimed the right direction, and get rolling with her the hell on out of there. It felt like being bionically speeded up, like Jaime Sommers, barreling through a field of slo-mo opposition, while all through this the background shopping music continued, perky and up-tempo, originally rock and roll but here reformatted into unthreatening wimped-out effluent, tranquilizing onlookers into thinking the juvenile snatch-and-grab mission couldn’t have been what it looked like, so it must be all right to return to closing time, what a relief. The tune coming out of the speakers as the girls all dispersed into the evening happened to be a sprightly oboe-and-string rendition of Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene.”
Whenever Ché and Prairie met, it was by way of zigzag and trick routes, almost like they were having an affair, slipping away from PO’s or caseworkers, or only steps ahead of the bright attentions of Child Protective Services, not to mention, these days, the FBI. Ché arrived at Noir Center all out of breath, dressed in leather, denim, metal, and calico, with a bazooka rocket bag slung over one wide precise shoulder and her hair today Tenaxed up into this amazing feathery crest, in a blond shade soured to citric.
“You’re all gussied up, girl.”
“All for you, my little Prairie Flower.”
Prairie went shivering in with her hands under her friend’s arm, while around them, in the uniform commercial twilight, plastic flowed, ones and zeros seethed, legends of agoramania continued. They stopped at a House of Co
nes, where they eyeballed each other, politely but without mercy, for changes in fat distribution while sucking, with more and less metaphoric attention, on the ice cream in their cones. Back when they were girls, all it ever took was eye contact to topple them into laughter that might go on all day. But Ché’s much-valued smiles today were only tight quick Polaroids of themselves.
It was her mom’s boyfriend again. “At least you have the whole set, you’re not a semiperson,” Prairie used to mumble.
“A mom who watches MTV all day and her boyfriend who transforms into Asshole of the Universe anytime he gets to see a inch of teen skin, family of the year for sure, you want it, I can fix you up with Lucky, no prob, just remember to wear somethin’ short.” And that was back when he was only harassing her, before they’d started fucking. Which when her mom found out about it she never brought up to Lucky’s face, turning on Ché instead and blaming her for everything. “Callin’ me all this shit, sayin’ she wished she never had me . . . ,” keenly watching to see how it went over, but Prairie was all sympathy and calming touch. For years they’d had this ongoing seminar on the topic of Moms, a category to which Ché’s mother, Dwayna, was not much credit. The tension in the house would rise to an explosive level, with Ché coming on to Lucky, whom she couldn’t stand, right in front of her mom just to piss her off, then the uproar would go on all night, with Ché stomping out each time swearing that was it, staying on the loose for weeks, turning for money to more and more desperate shit and the company of some odd young gentlemen, some with runny noses, some with money in their hand, some fresh from the schoolyard and some that played in a band, often in situations hazardous to her health, till the only choice left her was to get popped so Dwayna would come down again and get her out, which she didn’t have to but always did. Hugs and tears at the sergeant’s desk, cries of “My baby” and “I love you, Mom,” Ché would go home, Lucky would leer hello, and the whole cycle would start over, her rap sheet each time picking up new pages.
“Sure is a good thing you’re beautiful,” Prairie, the adoring sidekick, mooned.
“Remember that time over at my grandma Dotty’s, we must’ve been six or something . . . one of those rainy Sundays with a major Monday comin’ up . . . I remember I looked over at you during a commercial, thinking—I’ve known her forever.”
“Six? Took you that long to figure it out.”
They sauntered along companionably as New Age mindbarf came dribbling out of the PA system. “Moms are a mixed blessing,” Ché announced.
“Rilly. But try having that part of your life missing.”
“You’d love it in the joint, Prair, ’cz that’s exactly what the girls are into, ’s that hookin’ up together in threes, one’s the Mommy, one’s the Daddy, and one’s the little child—hard, soft, and helpless. I figure, what’s the difference, bein’ in a family out here, or being in the joint? Is why I’ve got this need to escape all the time, especially now. . . . You remember Lucky’s collection of Elvis decanters, ’member his favorite, with the sour mash in it, that he only brought out for Super Bowl and his birthday? sort of full-color metalflake glaze on it?”
“Don’t tell me—”
“Put it this way—that old Patsy Cline song ‘I Fall to Pieces’? Well, the King just covered it.”
“You told me he used to take it to bed with him, like a stuffed toy.”
“It was a close call, you could see he was torn between coming after me and tryin’ to save that bourbon—last I saw as I was running out he was down tryin’ to suck what he could up off of the floor, had to keep spittin’ out little slivers of Elvis’s head—but he looked up at me, and his face was just full of murder, you know that look?”
Prairie realized she didn’t . . . and then, with a stab of sadness, that Ché did. “So what the fuck,” Ché asked softly, “am I supposed to do? I keep getting these business offers from gentlemen in megastretch limos, and some of ’m I think seriously about.”
The girls had moved along to Macy’s, where Ché, smooth and sweatless, was working through the lingerie department with fingers spider-light while Prairie fronted, blocking her from what store cameras they’d managed to locate, keeping up a dizzy teen monologue, boys, recording stars, girlfriends, girl enemies, grabbing items at random, holding them up going “What do you think?” getting salespeople involved in long exchanges about discontinued styles as Ché blithely went on filching and stashing everything in her size that was black or red or both, so invisibly that not even Prairie after all these years could ever see the exact instant of the crime. Meantime, with a special tool swiped from another store, Ché was deftly unclipping the little plastic alarm devices on the garments and hiding them deep in the other merchandise—all at a fairly easy what Brent Musberger might’ve called level of play, a routine long perfected and usually just for getting warmed up with. But today, instead, they felt already nostalgic, shivery with autumnal chances for separate ways, so that each came to be performing for the other, as a kind of farewell gift, two grizzled pros, one last caper for old times’ sake before moving on. . . .
Soon as she was old enough to see out the windshield, Ché had learned to drive, didn’t give a shit really about ever being street-legal, not even if she lived to be that old, which it was part of her bad young image to doubt. Times she liked to flirt, times she was out to hurt, it depended. On the freeway she liked to cruise at around 80, weaving and tailgating to maintain her speed. “We are children of the freeway,” she sang, fingertips on the wheel, boot on the gas,
We are daughters of the road,
And we’ve got some miles to cover,
‘Fore we’ve finally shot our load—
If you see us in your mirror,
Better clear a couple lanes,
‘Cause we’re daughters of the freeway,
And speedin’s in our veins. . . .
None of the cars she drove were hers, but usually hustled off boys she knew, or sometimes borrowed via slim jim and hot-wire from strangers. When she couldn’t get her hands on a car, she’d hitch a ride and try to talk the driver into letting her take the wheel. She could get anywhere in Southern California as fast as wheels could move. Sasha called her the Red Car, after the old interurban trolley system.
When they got someplace secure—which turned out to be the apartment of Ché’s friend Fleur, east of La Brea and down in the flats—Ché shook from the rocket bag and from under her shirt this amazing fluffed volume of underwear.
“What, no aqua?” Prairie said.
“Aqua’s what they give their wives, honey,” Ché told her. “Black and red,” twirling from a short-nailed finger a pair of lace bikinis in that combination, “is what they like to see on a bad girl.”
“Night and blood,” amplified Fleur, who’d recently begun working as a professional out of her apartment and was trying to talk Ché into joining the string she was on, “it’s like they ’s programmed for it or somethin’—oh, hey, nice, Ché, do you mind?”
“ ’Course not,” Ché in the middle of sliding into a short see-through number herself.
Prairie watched them playing centerfold and thought, strangely, of Zoyd, her dad, and how much he would have enjoyed the display. “Not exactly a innocent teen fashion message here,” she commented.
“It never has worked on Ché,” said Fleur. “Put her in anything pink or white,” fingerslash across her throat, “her street plausibility’s all shot to hell.”
“While on the other hand you, my dear,” Ché flinging at Prairie something almost weightless in those colors, “belong inside this item, stolen expressly for you.” Which turned out to be an intricate silk teddy full of lace, ribbons, ruffles, bows, which it took awhile for Prairie, blushing and protesting, to be persuaded to try on. Whenever Ché got this way with her, courtly, using her eyelashes, it put her into this weird warm daze for minutes at a time. Thi
s one lasted till she’d resumed her street uniform, sweatshirt, jeans, and running shoes, and was standing outside on the steps, gazing up at Ché framed in the doorway, twilight coming down in a great blurred stain, and hard lemon light in the room behind her . . . Prairie felt like it was steps of a boat landing and that one of them was setting off on a dangerous cruise across darkened seas, and that it could be a long time, this time, till they saw each other again.
“Hope you find your mom,” pretending it was coke that was making her sniffle. “Do somethin’ about your hair.”
Prairie got back to Takeshi’s office and found the place in upheaval. They’d just got back from what was left of Ditzah Pisk’s house. Ditzah’s anxiety about the safety of the 24fps archives had turned out to be prophetic after all. Both DL and Takeshi had sensed exits away that something was up, when they came upon a loose formation of midsize, neutral-colored, dingless and clean Chevs, each with exactly four Anglo males of like description inside, and little octagoned E’s, for “Exempt,” on their license plates. Ascending into Ditzah’s neighborhood, they began to hear hill-warped traffic on the scanner, up around Justice Department frequencies. Before long there was a police roadblock, so Takeshi parked farther downhill while DL switched herself on Inpo mode and disappeared into the landscape. Inside the perimeter she met, coming the other way, a Youth Authority bus with bars on the windows, the kind that usually carried brushcutting crews or firecamp swampers, jammed with restless, sweating Juvenile Hall badasses all whooping and hollering like a school team bus after a victory. She smelled something like burning plastic but not quite, stronger, more bitter as she drew close, and smoke from burning gasoline.
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