Vineland

by Thomas Pynchon

  Just before they left for the airport, step-lively time once again, Justin took her aside. “Is something after us, Mom?” According to his dreams, a nightly news service, the thing pursuing was big and invisible. Would she even let on that she knew about it? “Don’t worry,” she told him, “it doesn’t eat kids,” but didn’t sound that sure. They had both been acting weirder than Justin had ever seen them, flaring up at each other and at him, drinking and smoking too much, appearing and disappearing on no schedule he knew of. The smartest kid Justin ever met, back in kindergarten, had told him to pretend his parents were characters in a television sitcom. “Pretend there’s a frame around ’em like the Tube, pretend they’re a show you’re watching. You can go into it if you want, or you can just watch, and not go into it.” The advice came especially in handy when they got to McCarran International and found some service workers out on strike, and a picket line. “Uh-oh,” said Frenesi. Uh-oh, went Justin to himself. His mom didn’t cross picket lines—she told him someday he’d understand.

  “Darlin’,” Flash advised her, “these folks don’t fly the airplane, all’s they take care of’s the maintenance in the terminal, so just don’t use the toilet or nothin’, OK?”

  “Can’t use the toilet?” Justin said.

  “Fletcher, we can get on the bus, take the plane from someplace else?”

  “Sweetheart—they took the bags already.”

  “No—you go in and get ’em back.”

  His head and neck suddenly forward at an angle she’d learned to connect with meanness on down, “Telling me to do what, now?” his tone and volume enough to bring some pickets out of the line to have a listen, along with a few passengers from the waiting area who were forsaking the daytime dramas on their coin-operated TV sets for this free episode. “You know what it is, it’s your fuckin’ family, tryin’ to keep ’at old union-kid cherry for your daddy.”

  “Don’t you bring Hub into this, motherfucker, not that she would have noticed if you did—”

  “Nothing,” Flash bellowed, “about her, all right? Bitch?”

  Frenesi smiled, inhaling through her nose. “Tell you what,” in a strenuously perky voice, “I’ll cross your picket line if you’ll go and get fucked up your ass, OK? ’N’ then we can talk about busted cherries—unless o’ course there’s something you haven’t told me. . . .”

  Finally a picket coordinator came over. “We took a vote,” she told Frenesi. “Just this once, it’s OK, you can go on through.”

  “Was it close?”

  “Unanimous. You a good child. Enjoy your flight.”

  Justin made a point of sitting between them. He already had the bowl haircut, and it had been a short step for him to learn to get in there and push them apart like Moe separating Larry and Curly, going, “Spread out, spread out!” But by the time they’d reached cruising altitude, the quarrel seemed to’ve been left below. Instead, too late, they’d begun to wonder why, with Brock’s people bivouacked at Vineland International, they were flying in, beyond the fact that Hector had sprung for the tickets, having left them at the Regional Office with Roy Ibble, one of Flash’s old handlers. “Only message was he’d see you all in Vineland,” Roy said, passing Flash a funny look along with the envelope.

  “That’s it, Roy? Nothin’ you might want to tell me, just as a human being? Nothin’ for that brave little guy who once gave you the most important telephone number of your life, maybe turned your whole career around?”

  “I’m as nostalgic as the next fella, Flash, I could go moanin’ over those Nixon Years forever, but most of you old-timers, I hate to say it, you’ve been bumped off the computer to make way for the next generation, all ’em deeply personal li’l ones and zeros got changed to somebody else’s, less electricity than you think, put it across your dick on a good night chances are you wouldn’t even feel it.”

  Flash understood that Roy’s career had included duties such as this, and even still might, but true to his motto, “Whine or Lose,” he started in, in an all but unendurable singsong, “Well, Special Agent Ibble, maybe you’ve been off the street too long, maybe you never knew what it is to have your woman and your little boy out there at the mercy of any numb-nose Class IV offender with a buck knife from a swap meet who thinks his story’s sad enough, after all these years walkin’ point for you, so you could git home on weekends, so you could drive ’at fuckin’ BMDubya, so’s your wife, Mrs. Ibble, could keep fartin’ on silk—‘at’s right, Roy m’man, don’t you give me that irate-husband look, I can read the married-man blues right on your face, so save it, ’cause I’m the victim here, while your happy household continyas to waller in bliss, mine’s as helpless as worms out on the hardpan, waitin’ for that first chicken ’th enough dumb luck to find its way home to roost, and damn ’at irritates the hell outa me, Roy?”

  Roy, in some strange paralysis of will, had slowly been rolling away in his office chair and was now cowering against his credenza, chin trembling. “Please, no more! I’ll tell you what I know. . . .” He even showed Flash the teletype of the burn notice out on him and Frenesi. Nobody, Roy confessed, knew what Brock Vond was up to, beyond some connection with Reagan’s so-called readiness exercise, code-named REX 84—or maybe it was just the election year getting to everybody. “For the moment,” said Special Agent Ibble, “let’s say you never came in here, and furthermore,” impulsively rolling back to punch some phone buttons, “Hello Irma my darling, can you give me the spot figure on the imprest money right now?. . . Couple K, old twenties? OK, tens . . . mm, me too . . . bye.”

  “Roy, I’m overcome, you shouldn’t’ve.”

  “After a certain basketball game tonight, I may wish I hadn’t.”

  “What, you—you guys gamble, w-with federal funds? Holy cow, maybe there is a budget squeeze around here!”

  “We’re nobody’s protégé this administration, State Department hates our ass, NSC thinks we’re scum, if Customs don’t steal it out from under us, Justice and FBI try to either run it or fuck it up, and frankly,” lowering his voice, “notice how cheap coke has been since ’81? However in the world do you account for that?”

  “Roy! Is you’re sayin’ the President himself is duked into some deal? Quit foolin’! Next you’ll be tellin’ me George Bush.”

  Roy kept a prop Bible on his desk, useful when he needed to get along with the born-agains in the Agency. He opened it and pretended to read. “Harken unto me, read thou my lips, for verily I say that wheresoever the CIA putteth in its meathooks upon the world, there also are to be found those substances which God may have created but the U.S. Code hath decided to control. Get me? Now old Bush used to be head of CIA, so you figure it out.”

  Irma showed up with the money, which Flash pretended to count. “And now what was this for again?”

  “For staying so cute all these years,” Irma blowing a kiss as she departed.

  “She said that, I didn’t,” Roy added.

  “What happens when we get in to VLX?” Frenesi wanted to know. Flash was curious himself. From the first he’d had his ideas about why Brock was out like this, just as he’d always known, since the days at PREP when he’d worshipped her from afar as Brock Vond’s Woman, unattainable, that if it ever came to saving her, finally winning her love, it would have to mean facing Brock and taking her away from him. This long progress of postings into what she called Midol America because it always felt like her period, the air-conditioner throbbing, the rare moments of breeze in over the wrecking yards and oil-well pumps, cottonwoods in hazy distance, backyards facing the Santa Fe tracks, had never taken her outside Brock’s long-distance possession—marriage and Justin and the years had brought her no closer to Flash. They had both been content to leave it that way, to go along in a government-defined history without consequences, never imagining it could end, turn out to be only another Reaganite dream on the cheap, some snoozy fantasy
about kindly character actors in FBI suits staked out all night long watching over every poor scraggly sheep in the herd it was their job to run, the destined losers whose only redemption would have to come through their usefulness to the State law-enforcement apparatus, which was calling itself “America,” although somebody must have known better.

  VLX stood south of town in a broad valley just inland from the Seventh River floodplain. Wild hares lived in the grass between the runways, and cows browsed and seagulls scavenged at the far edges. The approach brought the plane lapsing in industrious wheeze across 101, but something about the light, as angles flattened out and the atmosphere thickened, wasn’t right—glare, location, something. Rumors filtered back from the cabin that the air controllers down there sounded like they used to in Vietnam, none of the usual civilians were on the job, and there was heavy traffic on all the military frequencies. They crossed the little harbor and a first evening sprinkling of lights, the steeples, antennas, and power lines, across the freeway and darkening marsh to merge unfelt with solid ground again, and that was how Flash first came, and Frenesi returned, to Vineland.

  The airport had been turned into a staging area, with military vehicles everywhere. Each deplaning passenger was being stopped, briefly questioned while an operator at the keyboard entered names and numbers, and then either waved on through or sent to a bullpen area to wait.

  “Think that fuckin’ Hector set us up?” it had occurred to Flash.

  “Maybe not. Check this out.” There he was, and a full film crew too, lights, a Panaflex, and some hand-held Arris. He sauntered on up to Flash, Frenesi, and Justin and escorted them out of line and through the terminal, ignoring stenciled directions taped to doors and columns, waving his badge and a newly acquired business smile at any security they met, and soon had them all checked in at the Vineland Palace, courtesy of Triglyph Productions, Inc., for the duration of the shoot. Frenesi just kept shaking her head. “That Hector. He’s like me when I was twenty, maybe even more of an ingenue than that, he really believes he’s immune. That Panaflex is his shield. He’s bought in. He’s another Sid Liftoff already.” It wasn’t till room service showed up with the cheeseburgers and fries and hot fudge sundaes and carafes of Hefty Burgundy that she began to admit maybe Hector hadn’t been bullshitting and maybe there really was a picture. “Don’t worry about him, Mom,” Justin told her, “he’s the real thing, all right.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Can tell by the way he watches television.” The two of them had gone off to watch Twi-Nite Theatre, which tonight featured John Ritter in The Bryant Gumbel Story, and soon they were deep into a discussion of Tubal nuances that could have gone on all night, but Hector had to run up to the Cucumber Lounge to catch Billy Barf and the Vomitones, who might, if they’d work cheap enough, do some of the music for the movie. He didn’t get to the Cuke quite in time to miss Ralph Wayvone, Jr., in a glossy green suit accented with sequins, who was cracking jokes into the mike to warm this crowd, who in Ralph’s opinion needed it, up.

  Things work out funny sometimes. His father had sent him up here to Vineland as punishment for a string of venial business errors. But he’d never wanted the Wayvone empire, he wanted to be a comedian, and it turned out that the Cucumber Lounge provided him with just what he’d always dreamed of, a workshop for getting his stand-up routines together. “So the other day I’m eating my wife’s pussy, she says—” he waited for a reaction but heard only the air-conditioning and some glassware. “Eating pussy, wow, you know? It’s just like the Mafia. . . . Yeah—one slip of the tongue, you’re in deep shit!” A couple of teenage boys barked nervously, and Van Meter, tending bar, tried to help out. Nothing worked. Ralph Jr. grew desperate, driven at length to self-inflicted anti-Italian jokes. Finally, having squeezed the crowd for as much rejection as he thought he could handle, he used the unspeakably derogatory “How to Get an Italian Woman Pregnant” for his big punch line, smiled, sweating, and blew kisses as if he’d received an ovation. “Thank you all, thank you, a-a-a-nd now”—a drumroll from Isaiah Two Four—“those maestros of the metallic, direct from a gig at a nudist golf course, where they barely escaped with their balls, yes let’s hear a big Cucumber Lounge welcome, for Billy Barf!. . . and the Vomitones!”

  Having learned its audience by now, the band started right off with Billy’s own “I’m a Cop,” a three-note blues—

  Fuck you, mister,

  Fuck your sister,

  Fuck your brother,

  Fuck your mother,

  Fuck your pop—

  Hey! I’m a cop!

  Yeah, fuck you, yuppie,

  Fuck your puppy,

  Fuck your baby,

  Fuck your lady,

  Yes I can,

  Hey! I’m the Man!

  The crowd, reacting to this as if it were gospel singing, hollered back, clapping and footstomping, “How true!” and “I can relate to that, rilly!”

  Zoyd, beard gone and hair shorter, lurking around the back of the room disguised as the Marquis de Sod’s idea of an ordinary Joe, including the loan of a necktie from the Marquis’s own unfailingly hideous collection, was a little sensitive at the moment on the subject of police, so all he did was nod along with the bass line. Under terms of a new Comprehensive Forfeiture Act that Reagan was about to sign into law any minute now, the government had filed an action in civil court against Zoyd’s house and land. He’d been up there a few times just to have a look, getting close enough to hear the sound of his own television set from inside his house. Federal Dobermans, shortly after whose mealtimes Zoyd had soon learned to arrive, lay behind new chain-link boundaries, blood dreams for the moment less urgent. According to the latest rumor, Zoyd’s own dog, Desmond, who’d taken off at the first signs of invasion, had been spotted out by Shade Creek, having lately joined up with a pack of dispossessed pot-planters’ dogs from Trinity County who were haunting the local pastures and not above ganging innocent cows at their grazing, an offense that could carry a penalty of death by deer rifle. More for Zoyd to be anxious about.

  Leaving only a couple of marshals to guard the house, most of Brock’s troops had departed after terrorizing the neighborhood for weeks, running up and down the dirt lanes in formation chanting “War-on-drugs! War-on-drugs!” strip-searching folks in public, killing dogs, rabbits, cats, and chickens, pouring herbicide down wells that couldn’t remotely be used to irrigate dope crops, and acting, indeed, as several neighbors observed, as if they had invaded some helpless land far away, instead of a short plane ride from San Francisco.

  Starting with a small used trailer shaped like a canned ham and a drilled well that he’d had to find a pump for, working by himself or with friends, using lumber found washed up on the beaches, scavenged off the docks, brought home from old barns he helped take down, Zoyd had kept adding on over the years—a room for Prairie, a kitchen, a bathroom, a tree house built among four redwoods that grew down the hill, set level with the loft in the house and connected to it by a rope bridge. A lot of it was nowhere near up to code, especially the plumbing, a sure cause of indigestion, running to many different sizes of pipe, including the prehistoric 5/8-inch, and requiring transition fittings and adapter pieces that could take whole days at swap meets or even at the great Crescent City Dump to find. While he lived in the house, he’d thought of it, when he did, as a set of problems waiting to get serious enough to claim his time. But now—it was like a living thing he loved, whose safety he feared for. He’d begun to have terrifying dreams in which he would come around a curve in the road and find the place in flames, too late to save, the smell of more than wood destroyed and sent forever to ash, to the blackness behind the flames. . . .

  When the set ended, Zoyd headed outdoors with Isaiah Two Four, Van Meter ducking out from under the bar to join them. They went out in back to Van Meter’s place and stood on the porch smoking, with the usual fu
ll-scale kvetchathon proceeding spiritedly inside. “Briefly,” Zoyd addressed the high-rise drummer, “Van Meter has some folks lined up, now what we need is something they can express themselves with, preferably with a full-automatic option.”

  “There’s this bunch of little Finnish knockoffs of a AK that shoot .22’s I know I can get a price on, but somebody’ll have to do the kit conversions besides going down to Contra Costa and pickin’ ’m up. . . .”

  “The Sisters have their headquarters in Walnut Creek,” Van Meter twinkled, “so no prob.” He referred to the Harleyite Order, a male motorcycle club who for tax purposes had been reconstituted as a group of nuns. Van Meter had run across them in the course of his quest after the transcendent, and been immediately surprised and impressed by the spirituality they all seemed to radiate. Taking as their text the well-known graffito “If they won’t let Harleys into Heaven, we’ll ride them straight to Hell,” the Sisters pursued lives of exceptional, though antinomian, purity. They went on as before with all the drug and alcohol abuse, violence symbolic and real, sexual practices upon which Mrs. Grundy has been known to frown, and an unqualified hatred of authority at all levels, but with every act now transfigured, the vital difference being Jesus, the First Biker, according to Sister Vince, the Order’s theologian.