Vineland (34 page)

“Don't suppose there's any chance you could show me, uh—”

DL allowed him a quick but genuine sympathy shrug. “Takes years to learn, and by the time you do, it's no fun anymore.”

They left him beside the road, gazing after. “Thought of this sooner,” DL muttered, “we could've turned the Pentagon into a dove ranch.” No response. Frenesi was in tears, twisted around in her seat, trying not so much to see the marshal as just to look back the way they'd come. DL might've been expecting more of a welcome, but decided she'd wait till later to comment. Just as well.

After the rendezvous with Howie and Sledge she hightailed it over to I-5, blasting on southward to I-80, dropping off the boys at the University Avenue exit, ending up with a monosyllabic and distant Frenesi at last in the not-yet-trendy Mexican fishing village of Quilbasazos, on the Pacific coast, down a brief but challenging few miles of dirt road from the coastal highway. By then they'd switched to a Camaro of uncertain age and color, mainstreaming their ID's, scarves over their heads, driving a little under the limit, a holiday plunge into old Mexico. They woke up at sunset in a dilapidated hotel at the edge of town, hearing marimba music from the cantina across the street, smelling heated garlic, roasting meat, baking cornmeal, suddenly—Frenesi in a brief dimly smiling return—both hungry. Emerging from a courtyard full of hanging flowers and caged birds just at the hour when the lights came on, and ghosts came out, they saw their fun-house shadows taken by the village surfaces drenched in sunset, as sage, apricot, adobe and wine colors were infiltrated with night, and up and down the wandering streets they followed their noses at last to the waterfront, lampglow smeared about each municipal bulb up on the green-painted iron posts, music coming all directions, from radios, accordions, singers unaccompanied, jukeboxes, guitars. Newsvendors with the late editions from the capital ran in and out of bars and cafés repeating the word “
Noticias
” at intervals regular as birdcalls, while the surf kept splashing in at a different rhythm. DL and Frenesi found wood chairs and a table outside a small restaurant where the day's special was a seafood stew heavy on garlic, cumin, and oregano, hot with chiles, crowded with an oceanic anthology of scraps from the fishing that day, a joy to look at not to mention eat, which they did in a hurry, much of it with their hands or using tortillas. As the young women went pigging out, bottles of beer, rice and beans, mangoes, and pineapple slices with powdered cinnamon also showed up, until, just about the time Frenesi was going “Whoo-wee!” and reaching in her bag for a pack of Kools, the owner came out and started putting plastic sheets over the other tables. “
A llover
,” he advised, indicating the sky. They moved inside just as the evening rainstorm came on, sat back in a corner and drank coffee, the first time in neither could remember how long they'd had a chance to relax and talk without interruption from timetables, Red Squads, doorstep fugitives, or movie shots—most of all those framable pieces of the time, which had demanded, when the bookkeeping was done, damn near everything.

Carefully they exchanged updates on their broken collectivity, Krishna stepping away out of the red-orange light from a disabled VW with its battery failing into an unreconnoitered darkness, toward a voice she thought was calling her name . . . Mirage shocked into silence, gone back to Arkansas after giving away all her ephemerides, reference books, worksheets, even her black-light zodiac posters . . . Zipi and Ditzah off boisterously to a bomb-making commune up in central Oregon, calling, “Goodbye to the land of make-believe,” and hollering, “Reality Time!” and “Powder to the People!”

Carefully also, Frenesi raised her eyes to those of her friend. “Looks like those Pisks were right,” her voice so sad that DL couldn't answer. “Feel like we were running around like little kids with toy weapons, like the camera really was some kind of gun, gave us that kind of power. Shit. How could we lose track like that, about what was real? All that time we made ourselves stay on the natch? might as well have been dropping Purple Owsley for all the good it did.” She shook her head, looked down at her knees. “And it wasn't only Weed who got offed, story going around the camp is there were others, and the FBI covered it up? So what difference did we make? Who'd we save? The minute the guns came out, all that art-of-the-cinema handjob was over.”

“News on the street in Berkeley is that Rex has split the country.”

But Frenesi had heard something in her voice. “What else?”

“You won't like it.” The anguished scrap of sound borne in to her by this Pacific storm was Inoshiro Sensei, all the way back in Japan, once again screaming, “No, no, idiot, didn't you learn anything?” But she went on. “Rumor you set him up? I got into a couple of encounters over that, matter o' fact.”

“Yeah. They were right. I could have kept it from happening.” Sounding guilty, all right, but a little too readily. DL's phony-baloney sensors went on full alert. Her mouth, alas, should only have been as finely tuned.

She said, “The Prosecutor's name also came up.”

Frenesi put her coffee cup back down. “Alleging some kind of a conspiracy, I'll bet.”

“Well what
is
the story, Frenesi?”

“What do you care?” From there on it got louder. As they talked their hands kept flying out across the table, nearly touching, then drawing back, again and again. Frenesi chain-smoked and DL tried not to feel too hurt or short of breath as each new detail, another blow unanswered, brought them that much closer to a decision that much less in doubt. Soon it had grown too loud for where they remembered they were, so they took it back through the last of the rain, back up the lampless streaming lanes, guided by the smudge of neon on the roof of their hotel. They stayed up the rest of the night, crying separately and together, demanding, pleading, exchanging insults, repeating formulas, getting things wrong on purpose, and more and more wrong as it went on falling to pieces.

“I'm not some pure creature,” Frenesi wanted to cry, “the Film Queen, some no-emotion piece of machinery, everything for the shot, come on, DL . . . please . . . you know what happens when my pussy's runnin' the show, you saw me do stuff he'll
never
see,” and DL, not as angry by then, might've answered, “I
made
you do stuff, bitch,” and Frenesi would have felt a bodylong twinge of clear desire for her already ex-partner, a preview of delicious trouble . . . for DL's body, whose rangy sweetness she loved, now was just as likely to try and hurt, even cripple her, and who knew but what she deserved it . . . worse would be knowing she'd pushed DL into losing it—that fine clean self-command they'd all taken for granted—DL the steady-beating heart of the collective, who could never have made the deal with Brock that Frenesi had—and feeling at the same time mean satisfaction in provoking her out of that saintlike control, yep one more rap she'd have to take. . . . But at last it was mercy she'd have to plead for, reduced to playing helpless, blaming external drug molecules for each of her failures, complicities, and surrenders—as indeed national governments were even then learning to do, with an already devastating impact on any humans who happened to be in their way. “He took me behind the Thorazine curtain, man,” Frenesi with a nasalized little-girl croak then reciting her adventures in the world beyond the temporal veil of a drug well known for its antagonism to memory. They'd started her on 5mg Stelazine plus 50 of Thorazine, injected in ever-increasing doses till they thought she was calmed down enough to take it orally. She learned to spit it out slowly, a sly dribbling. “They hid it in my food, I made myself throw up, so they went back to shots and suppositories. They classified me as a Persistent Drug Evader, but I was just teasing. What happened was . . . I got to like it. Only took a couple of days. I started looking forward to it—I wanted them to come and hold me down, stick needles in me, push things up my ass. Wanted that ritual . . . like they had to keep the two drugs out of the light till the last minute, then they'd mix them together, real quick, and give it to me. Shrinks never figured it out, but the orderlies, the workin' stiffs who actually had to do it all, handle me, hold me still, pull apart the cheeks of my ass, they knew all right, 'cause they were digging it just as much as I was. . . .” She waited, guttering with a small meek defiance, standing at the window and trembling, moonlight from a high angle pouring over her naked back, casting on it shadows of her shoulder blades, like healed stumps of wings ritually amputated once long ago, for some transgression of the Angels' Code.

“It took another day and night,” as DL remembered it, “but it was all just sad human shittiness. We came back over the border at Nogales and I let her off at an exit called Las Suegras, and that was the last time I ever saw her.”

“Well according to my dad,” said Prairie, “that's where they met, was in Las Suegras, the Corvairs had a two-week gig at Phil's Cottonwood Oasis, and it was love at first sight.”

“It usually was,” DL more wistful than snide.

They were in Ditzah's kitchen, eating microwaved frozen Danish and drinking coffee, when the phone rang, and Ditzah went to answer. Prairie, reentering nonmovie space, felt like the basketball after a Lakers game—alive, resilient, still pressurized with spirit yet with a distinct memory of having been, for a few hours, expertly bounced. Her mom, in front of her own eyes, had stood with a 1,000-watt Mickey-Mole spot on the dead body of a man who had loved her, and the man who'd just killed him, and the gun she'd brought him to do it with. Stood there like the Statue of Liberty, bringer of light, as if it were part of some contract to illuminate, instead of conceal, the deed. With all the footage of Frenesi she'd seen, all the other shots that had come by way of her eye and body, this hard frightening light, this white outpouring, had shown the girl most accurately, least mercifully, her mother's real face.

DL waited for eye contact, but they hadn't managed it by the time Ditzah came back in, looking serious.

“Uh, where's the bathroom?” Prairie heading out of earshot.

“No, maybe you'd better hear this. That was my sister Zipi, back on Long Island.” Where, Prairie calculated, it was well after midnight. Last week, the last time the sisters had talked, Zipi had mentioned Mirage, who kept in touch from Fort Smith, which she had never left after moving back there. Determined to deny all she had learned by way of the stars, to turn back to Earth, to resubmerge in the simple meat suffocation of a family whose driving emotion had always been resentment more than love—she had once actually heard her mother curse the sky for not matching the color of her dress—Mirage had learned instead it was the stars that had chosen her, and her fate after all would be to read them to others. This summer something secret and momentous was turning beneath the visible everyday . . . Pluto, which had been retrograde, was making a station, appearing to pause before going direct again. For most planets this would be a change for the better, but for the ruler of the Land of Death, retrograde was the best it ever got—then, people with power, instead of using it for short-term and sooner or later harmful ends, had a chance, at least, while Pluto soared backward against the ground of stars, to learn mercy and wisdom in applying it. Megalomaniacs suddenly reached out to strangers, asking if they were OK, road dogs rolled belly-up and smiled at mail deliverers, developers gave up plans to rape pieces of countryside, kids who had sprayed
CHOOSE DEATH
on bridge abutments now were seen, often in matching outfits, assisting at religious services. But this summer all that, according to Mirage, was ending. Pluto was about to get back to its ancient underworld and nihilistic ways, also known as Business As Usual.

“Meaning Reagan gets reelected,” Zipi had suggested.

“Meaning we all have to be extra paranoid,” a pale woodwind voice she'd picked up over the years, “because it's squaring each of us in a different way.” Ever since she'd computerized and built a data base, it had been no problem, nostalgically now and then, to progress the charts of everyone in the old 24fps gang, see how their lives were going and, if it was really critical, to try and get in touch. She had first contacted Zipi, in fact, three years before, in the very worst part of a divorce with the sound track, though not the amiability, of a teen slash-'em-up at the drive-in. Mirage had cast Sheldon's chart immediately and found out he was seeing a Virgo somehow connected with his business life, and what do you know, sure enough. “It's a miracle!” screamed the impressed Zipi. “It's the Venus aspect to his midheaven, actually,” Mirage replied. But ever since, she had been Zipi's oracle, even passing along tips on the races at Aqueduct that always earned at least walking-around money, and now here she was with this curious Pluto alert. After two and a half centuries of wandering—though not exile—out in the zodiac, the grim overlord was about to return to Scorpio, its home territory, the sign it ruled jointly with Mars and which, as DL was quick to point out, also happened to be Brock Vond's birth sign. Since early 1980, as if repeatedly running into trouble at the frontier, negotiating with caretaker governments that scarcely recognized him, Pluto had been shifting, direct to retrograde and back again, stuck within a few degrees of the cusp, trying to get out of Libra, creating a heavy intensification, according to Mirage, of his effects, which were hardly benign to begin with.

But Zipi had not called at this hour just to pass along information available at any newsstand. Mirage also reported that Howie, having been afflicted in his Fifth House of fun, had just been popped for cocaine, a substance he'd never used. Trying to phone all the 24fps people she could, Mirage had found that two, possibly three more had dropped out of sight abruptly, leaving no explanation. She was getting scared, and now so was Zipi, and neither knew what they should do.