“You might say, no bikes back then,” wimple askew, passing Van Meter a bottle of supermarket tequila he’d been using to chase some barbiturate capsules, “but hey—how’d he get around out in the desert? Why do you think they call it Motocross, dude?” and so forth, till drowsiness overtook his thoughts. Van Meter still kept in touch, was happy to fix them up with Zoyd and his scheme, though doubts lingered.
“Sure this is the best way, now, to go about it, Z Dub? All’s they have to do’s kill you to solve their problem, and this could be makin’ it easier.”
“Why I thought I’d bring some backup . . . you saying they might not want to do it now?”
“The Sisters? they don’t give a shit. Their club tattoo says ‘Full of Grace.’ They believe whatever they do, it’s cool with Jesus, including armed insurrection against the government, which, I’m no lawyer, but I think is the technical name for this.”
“I’ll ask Elmhurst.” Zoyd’s lawyer, who’d inherited his father’s practice and role as North Coast attorney for the damned, had taken Zoyd’s case without asking for a fee, prophetically fearing that this civil RICO weapon would be the prosecutorial wave of the future and figuring that he might as well get educated now. It had still been an effort for Zoyd to go in and see him. According to Vato Gomez, one of the heavy-dutiest of Mexican curses goes, “May your life be full of lawyers.” Zoyd had come to consider the “legal system” a swamp, where a man had to be high-flotation indeed not to be sucked down forever into its snake-infested stench. Elmhurst cheerfully admitted that this was the case. “Am I complaining? Do plumbers complain about shit?” Not only did he look like something shoplifted from a toy department, but his tone of voice likewise suggested Saturday morning more than prime time. Zoyd observed the furry hand emerging from the lawyer’s tweed sleeve, resting on a shaggy winter-cowhide briefcase covered with straps and buckles, bought years ago on layaway at some Berkeley leather store. Even the twinkle in this small-sized and potentially crazy attorney’s eye was furry.
“You, uh, look eager,” Zoyd remarked. “Done many of these?”
“The law’s brand-new, the intentions behind it are as old as power. I specialize in abuses of power, I’m good, I’m fast, I enjoy it.”
“My dentist talks like that. This will be fun.” Resisting the impulse to stroke Elmhurst’s head, Zoyd tried to smile.
The burden of proof, Elmhurst explained, would be reversed here—to get his property back, Zoyd would first have to prove his innocence.
“What about ‘innocent till proven guilty’?”
“That was another planet, think they used to call it America, long time ago, before the gutting of the Fourth Amendment. You were automatically guilty the minute they found that marijuana growing on your land.”
“Wait—I wasn’t growin’ nothin’.”
“They say you were. Duly sworn officers of the law, wearing uniforms, packing guns, bound to uphold the Constitution, you think men like that would lie?”
“Glad you’re not charging any money for this. How can we win?”
“Get lucky with the right judge.”
“Sounds like Vegas.”
The lawyer shrugged. “That’s because life is Vegas.”
“Oboy,” Zoyd groaned, “I’ve got worse trouble here than I’ve ever had, and I’m hearing ‘Life is Vegas’?”
Elmhurst’s eyes moistened, and his lips began to tremble. “Y-You mean . . . life isn’t Vegas?”
Making his way back into the Cuke, Zoyd ran smack into Hector, who ID’d him immediately, so much for disguises, and was so eager to announce “I just saw yer ol’ lady, man!” that he missed his mouth with the cigar he was holding, nearly singeing the beard of a logger next to him, which could easily have meant a major detour off his freeway of life. “A-And accordin to my Thanatoid sources, your kid otta be in Shade Creek about now.”
“All I need’s my mother-in-law,” Zoyd bantering, still not absorbing the facts he was hearing.
“Now you mention it—” To the great delight of Sid Liftoff, who’d known her since their days as regulars at Musso and Frank’s, and a senior gaffer who’d worked with Hub, Sasha had come wheeling into the valet parking at the Vineland Palace in a Cadillac the size of a Winnebago and painted some vivid fingernail-polish color, alighting and sweeping into the lobby a step and a half ahead of her companion, Derek, considerably younger and paler, with a buzz cut that nearly matched the car, an English accent, and a guitar case he was never seen to open, picked up on the highway between here and the Grand Canyon, where she’d parted from her current romantic interest, Tex Wiener, after an epic screaming exchange right at the edge, and on impulse decided to attend that year’s Traverse-Becker get-together up in Vineland, leaving Tex on foot among the still-bouncing echoes of their encounter, which had brought tourist helicopters nudging in for a closer look, distracted ordinarily surefooted mules on the trail below into quick shuffle-ball-changes along the rim of Eternity, proceeded through a sunset that was the closest we get to seeing God’s own jaundiced and bloodshot eyeball, looking back at us without much enthusiasm, then on into the night arena of a parking lot so dangerously tilted that even with your hand brake set and your wheels chocked, your short could still end up a mile straight down, its trade-in value seriously diminished. She’d been fooled, once again, by the uniform, a bright silver custom jumpsuit with racing stripes, flames, and a shoulder patch discreetly reading “Tex Wiener Ecole de Pilotage.”
And perhaps about to be by Derek, a terminal sobriety case who favored leather, metal, Nazoid regalia, and the attitude that went with them, whose longest sentence was “Weww—it’s oow rubbish, i’n’ i’?” The perversity of the attraction made Sasha stretch and shiver, so she had little else on her mind as they went wandering into the Vineland Palace’s Bigfoot Room, where she and her daughter, Frenesi, as guests at the same hotel often do, came face-to-face.
Though Ernie and Sid had done their best in advance to cushion the shock, it was still an instant off the scale, from which neither woman would return to the world she had left. Sasha looked younger than either could remember, and Frenesi glowed like a cheap woodstove. They sat in a Naugahyde booth beside a wall covered in red-and-gold-flocked wallpaper, so unwilling to break eye contact, as if one of them might disappear, that Derek, made weird by such intensity, withdrew to the solitude of the men’s toilet and was never heard from again. “Did they scream?” Hector tried to debrief Sid, “cry, hug? C’mon, Sid.”
Sid grinned with movie avuncularity. “They danced.”
“Yeah, they jitterbugged,” said Ernie.
“The piano player knew a lot of old swing tunes. ‘Polka Dots and Moonbeams,’ ‘In the Mood,’ ‘Moonlight Serenade.’ . . .”
“Huh,” said Hector, “Too bad we can’t use it. But screamín, and confrontations, is much better, actresses love that shit.”
“You’re right, Hector,” Sid and Ernie replied, in harmony.
Early in the morning Sasha dreamed that Frenesi, perhaps under a sorcerer’s spell, was living in a melon patch, as a melon, a smooth golden ellipsoid, on which images of her eyes, dimly, could just be made out. At a certain time each month, just at the full moon, she would be able, by the terms of the spell, to open her eyes and see the moon, the light, the world . . . but each time, in some unexplained despair, would only cast her gaze down and to the side, away, and close her eyes again, and for another cycle she could not be rescued. Her only hope was for Sasha to find her at the exact moment she opened her eyes, and kiss her, and so, after a wait in the fragrant moonlight, it came about, a long, passionate kiss of freedom, a grandmother on her knees in a melon patch, kissing a young pale melon, under a golden pregnant lollapalooza of a moon.
Prairie, meanwhile, was wandering around gaga. The easiest way for her to see her mother at last would be to show up at the Traverse-Becker reunion. Ju
st be there. “But I don’t know if I want to anymore,” she told DL.
“Know the feeling,” DL confessed. They were all sitting in the booth at the Zero Inn that had been DL and Takeshi’s Amen Corner ever since the early days of their practice here. There had been redecorating since, and outside talent was getting booked in with some regularity these days, tonight’s being a band up from the East Bay called Holocaust Pixels, on a return visit, actually, being chartbusters around Shade Creek with their recent “Like a Meat Loaf.” As if doing a mike check, the bass player leaned in and sang,
Like a meat loaf. . . .
The accordion player joined him—
Like a meat loaf. . . .
Then the electric violinist, making it three-part harmony,
Like a meat loaf for, your, lunch. . . .
As they hovered on the about-to-be-resolved seventh, the place erupted in cheers and tabletop-beerglass percussion, and then the accordionist took the vocal.
Like a meat loaf in, a lunch-box,
Like monkeys in, a grave,
We went among the Vietnamese,
Some souls for to save. . . .
Them souls did some scufflin’
Uh them uh monkeys, did too,
‘Twas your bleedin’ feedin’ time, at the zoo.
Clapping and stomping, these Thanatoids tonight were acting rowdier than DL or Takeshi had ever seen them. Were changes in the wind, or was it only a measure of their long corruption by the down-country world, by way of television? The melody was rooted in Appalachia, in a tradition of hymn and testimony, and the beat was almost—well, lively.
So we took in, the Mar-ble Moun-tain,
And the Perfume River too,
Sometimes, we found, a bunch of them,
Sometimes, we missed a few,
And most times, the things, we seen, we didt-
‘N want to see much more than once,
Like the graveyard full of meat loaf,
And monkeys for your lunch. . . .
Like a meat loaf,
Like a meat loaf,
Like a meat loaf for, your, lunch. . . .
Well we followed our dicks [applause] just a couple o’ clicks,
Down the trail, by the bor-derline,
Somebody said, it was ’sixty-eight,
Others said ’sixty-nine [cheering],
But sometimes it felt like neither one, and other
Times it felt like both,
With a grave-box for your lunch meat,
Full of good ol’ monkey loaf.
Ortho Bob stopped by with Weed Atman, both of them acting chirpy for the first time DL could remember. Prairie felt embarrassed, like she ought to be apologizing for her mom or something.
“Well I was almost you,” Weed informed her.
“Oh, I’m sure.” But Weed explained about the after-death state, the Bardo, with its time limits for finding a new body to be born into—seeking out men and women in the act of sex, looking for a just-fertilized egg, slipping to and fro with needful dim others in a space like a bleak smoke-tarnished district of sex shows and porno theaters, looking for the magical exact film frame through which the dispossessed soul might reenter the world.
“Made the basic error,” Weed confessed, “too much still on my mind, couldn’t find ’em, time ran out. So I’m here instead.”
“You knew about me?”
“Thought this might be her strange idea of making it right. A life for a life, zero out the account.”
“So if I’m not you, who am I?”
“Makes you think,” Takeshi nodded, “doesn’t it?”
“What are you gonna do to my mom?” Prairie wanted to know. Here he was, after all, even in the peculiar formal getup, bordering on the semigross, that he was wearing, still a cell of memory, of refusal to forgive, sailing like a conscious virus through the population, seeking her out.
But Weed only shrugged. “The condition I’m in? not much. As a Thanatoid one’s reduced to hanging around monitoring the situation, trying to nudge if you don’t think it’s moving along fast enough but basically helpless and, if you give in to it, depressed, too.”
“But if I am the payback? If your account is zeroed out at last?”
“It’d depend a lot on who you’ve turned out to be, and the karmic chits you’ve been accumulating.”
“Little complicated.”
“Easier since Takeshi computerized. Still a danger of collapsing into a single issue, turning into your case, obsessed with those who’ve wronged you, with their continuing exemption from punishment. . . . Sometimes I lose it, sure, go out in the night, malevolent, mean, and I find your mom and mess with her. She cries, she gets into fights with her husband. So what, I figure, it isn’t even the interest on what she owes me. But lately I’ve just been letting her be . . . figuring, maybe forget, but never forgive.
“I dream—Thanatoids dream, though not always when we think we do—I’m inside a moving train that exists someplace whether I dream it or not, because I keep going back to it, joining it on its journey. . . . I’m conscious, laid out horizontal on some bed of ice, attended by two companions who keep trying, one stop after another, to find a local coroner willing to perform an autopsy on me and reveal to the world at last my murder, my murderers. . . . I can never make out the faces of these other two, though they come in to sit with me now and then. It’s always cold, always night, if there is a daytime maybe I sleep through it, I don’t know. Out riding on steel too many years, every jurisdiction we come rolling into well notified in advance, each time men in hats, carrying weapons, standing on the platform, waving us on, who only want to swear they never saw us. In the face of this, the devotion of my two remembrancers, town to town, year after year, is extraordinary. They live on club-car coffee, cigarettes, and snack food, play a lot of bid whist, and argue like theologians over Brock’s motives in wanting me, you’d have to say, iced. ‘It was all for love,’ says one, and ‘Bullshit,’ the other replies, ‘it was political.’. . . ‘A rebel cop, with his own deeply personal agenda.’ ‘Only following the orders of a repressive regime based on death.’ So forth . . . I hear them late in the rhythmic dark hours, the last of my honor guard, faithful to the last depot, the last turndown.”
Well, “Sounds like DL and Takeshi,” to Prairie.
“Sometimes I think it could be my parents . . . still there, you know, looking out for me, kept going by this belief they always had in some ‘higher justice,’ they called it. Their pockets are empty by now, the wind whistles through, their own night rolls on, but they’re both as sure as a fixed address, someplace safe and free, that this’ll all come out right someday.”
“That case, shouldn’t somebody be goin’ after that Rex guy, the one who did it?”
“Rex, why? He’s only the ceremonial trigger-finger, just a stooge, same as Frenesi. Used to think I was climbing, step by step, right? toward a resolution—first Rex, above him your mother, then Brock Vond, then—but that’s when it begins to go dark, and that door at the top I thought I saw isn’t there anymore, because the light behind it just went off too.”
He looked so forlorn that by reflex she took his hand. He flinched at her touch, and she was surprised not at the coldness of the hand but at how light it was, nearly weightless. “Would you mind if I. . . came and visited, now and then, you know, at night?”
“I’ll keep an eye out for you.” In fact they were soon to become an item around Shade Creek, out to all hours among the milling sleepless of the town, along the smoky indoor promenades lit by shadow-patched fluorescent bulbs, across covered bridges lined with shops and stalls, beneath the many clockfaces beaming from overhead, past Thanatoid dogs lounging in groups, who had learned how to give up wagging their tails and now gestured meaningfully with them instead. Weed would
stuff himself with bucket after bucket of popcorn, Prairie would show him secrets of pachinko, seldom if ever would either talk about Frenesi, whom Prairie had managed at last to meet. Unable after all to stay away from the Traverse-Becker wingding, in the course of saying hello again to faces she hadn’t seen for a year, she got roped into the traditional nonstop crazy eights game, whose stakes were as low as the atmosphere was meanspirited. Distantly related sleazoids and the occasional megacreep drew from the bottom of the stock, stole from the kitty, signaled confederates in belching and farting codes, and tried to mark decks with nosepickings, their own and others’. So far the two big winners were Prairie and her uncle Pinky, looking sinister in a shapeless Ban-Lon leisure suit that might once long ago have been a brighter shade of pea-green. When Sasha came around to put her head in the Airstream, he was out of diamonds and Prairie was playing them, forcing him to draw. In some doubt as well were the whereabouts of the Mother of Doom, as the spade queen was known in the Octomaniac community. Uncle Pinky thought it was in the stock, but Prairie thought her cousin Jade had it.
“Dimple check!” her grandmother called. Prairie had to ask her to wait until the Mother situation had been resolved, finally risking an eight and calling spades, whereupon at last She emerged, looking mean as ever and obliging Uncle P. to draw five more cards, which, valiantly though he played on, proved to be one card too many.
Outside the trailer with Sasha was a woman about forty, who had been a girl in a movie, and behind its cameras and lights, heavier than Prairie expected, sun damage in her face here and there, hair much shorter and to the cognizant eye drastically in need of styling mousse, though how Prairie could bring the subject up wasn’t clear to her.
Sasha, still giddy with her own daughter’s return, tried to clown them through it. “Commere lemme check those dimples, yes there, they are, and let yer grand, -ma check, for lint, she’s just, the cute, -est lit- tle thing!”—returning her relentlessly to babyhood, squeezing her cheeks together and her mouth up into a circle, pushing one way then the other.
Vineland Page 42