Vineland (49 page)

As night fell, Hub Gates, who'd brought all his arc lights up here with him along with his old partners Ace and Dmitri, lit up a couple for the kids. He was between jobs but had a gig up in Beaverton, Oregon, in a week. Somehow he'd managed to keep his little business, Lux Unlimited, profitable enough that he ate every day, though where he slept wasn't always up to code. Enough people still responded to the mystery of a powerful beam of light, miles in the distance. He showed his newly met grandson, Justin, how to rock the carbons to get the best beam, and how to keep them trimmed, till Frenesi came by and Justin remembered it was almost prime time.

“Hey there, Young Gaffer.”

“Hi, Pop.” She had dreamed about him the night before, rolling, clanking away from her down a straight old macadam road, out in the country, fields and hills in metallic cloudlight toward the end of the day, aware of exactly how many hours and minutes to dark, how many foot-candles left in the sky, bringing behind him like ducklings a line of lamps, generators, and beam projectors each on its little trailer rig, heading for his next job, the next carnival or auto lot, still wanting nothing but the deadly amps transmogrified to light, the great white-hot death-cold spill and flood and thrust, wherever he had to go, on whatever terms he had to take, to get to keep doing it. She called after him, but he wouldn't turn, only went on at the same laden crawl, answering but denying her his face, “Take care, Young Gaffer. Take care of your dead, or they'll take care of you.”

Hurt, furious, she yelled back, “Yeah, or maybe they're just too busy being dead.” And though she couldn't see it, she could feel the emptiness that came into his face then, and that was when she woke. . . .

Justin found his father and Zoyd in the back of a pickup, watching “Say, Jim,” a half-hour sitcom based on “Star Trek,” in which all the actors were black except for the Communications Officer, a freckled white redhead named Lieutenant O'Hara. Whenever Spock came on the bridge, everybody made Vulcan hand salutes and went around high-threeing. About the time the show ended, Prairie came by, Zoyd and Flash went off looking for beer, and she and Justin settled down, semi-brother and sister, in front of the Eight O'Clock Movie, Pee-wee Herman in
The Robert Musil Story.
It was mostly Pee-wee talking in a foreign accent, or sitting around in front of some pieces of paper with some weird-looking marker pen, and the kids' attention kept wandering to each other. “There's the Movie at Nine,” Justin said, looking in the listings,
“Magnificent Disaster
, TV movie about the '83–'84 NBA playoffs—wasn't that just back in the summer? Pretty quick movie.”

“They've been getting quicker over the years, from what I remember,” Prairie said.

“Hey, Prairie, would you like to baby-sit me sometime?”

She gave him a look. “Some baby. Maybe I'll have to kid-sit you.”

“What's that?”

“Involves some tickling,” Prairie already headed for her new brother's armpits and flanks, and Justin squirming even before they touched.

Out under yellow bulbs at a long weathered table, Zoyd found himself trying to help Flash with the shock of meeting so many in-laws in one place, both men from time to time looking around fearfully, like unarmed visitors in a jungle clearing, as out beyond this particular patch of light Traverses and Beckers went practicing on scales, working on engines, debating, talking back to the Tube, sending up gusts of laughter like ritual smoke cast to an unappeasable wind. A Traverse grandmother somewhere was warning children against the October blackberries of this coast, “They belong to the Devil, any that you eat are his property, and he don't like blackberry thieves—he'll come
after ya.”
Even skeptical adolescents weaved in her voice's spell. “When you see those unhappy souls out by the roadside, back up the lanes, in the ruins of the old farms, wherever the briars grow thick, harvesting berries out in the clouds and rain of October, why just drive by, and don't look back, because you'll know where they've come from, and who their labor belongs to, and where they'll have to go back to at the close of day.” And other grandfolks could be heard arguing the perennial question of whether the United States still lingered in a prefascist twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago, and the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing the same bright-colored shadows. One by one, as other voices joined in, the names began—some shouted, some accompanied by spit, the old reliable names good for hours of contention, stomach distress, and insomnia—Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger, that collection of names and their tragic interweaving that stood not constellated above in any nightwide remotenesses of light, but below, diminished to the last unfaceable American secret, to be pressed, each time deeper, again and again beneath the meanest of random soles, one blackly fermenting leaf on the forest floor that nobody wanted to turn over, because of all that lived, virulent, waiting, just beneath.

“Political family,” Zoyd remarked, “for sure.”

Flash, listening with his face held against changes of expression, nodded, hazarded, “Yep—sounds just like her, don't it?”

They were learning already how to talk about Sasha, and Brock Vond, and even Hector, but neither had any idea how or even if they should be talking, much less blurting anything, about Frenesi. It didn't help that Zoyd saw Flash as a charming psychopath pretending to be sane but given away by nuances—the length and placement of sideburns on the maul-shaped head, a black country Latino accent straight from the joint, a tattoo on his arm of a crossed M16 and AK-47 with the legend “Brothers In Death.” But Flash also had the sound of a man with Frenesi on the brain—crazy to hold long beery seminars on the subject, once begun maybe impossible to stop . . . for some curious short pause, it seemed like they'd exchanged lives, and it was Flash who'd lost her long ago but couldn't forget her, and Zoyd who'd been soldiering along the decade and more, maybe by her side, both would be quick to complain, but never really with her. Zoyd, seeing the need behind the desperado lamps, knew he'd have to be the comforter in this, with the years of her absence to insulate and protect him after all, whereas this unfortunate 'sucker was right down helpless in the middle of it. So, “I was only a opening act,” he reminded Flash, “don't go thinkin' like we ever got to know each other or nothin'.”

“Just so you're not avoiding her on account of me, 's all,” Flash earnestly cranking up the baby blues.

“Oh. Well. Now, see, 's a matter of fact—”

But Isaiah Two Four came by with the latest update on his assault-rifle deal, unrecoverably in the act of falling through, and probably just as well, given the attitude prevailing among the Harleyites since their appearance last week on the Donahue show. Suddenly, with development deals for movies and miniseries, plus T-shirts, collector dolls, lunch boxes, and so forth, the membership had to a nun all been finding themselves too big and busy for anything as small-time as helping Zoyd get his place back anymore.

“Whole problem 'th you folks's generation,” Isaiah opined, “nothing personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it—but you sure didn't understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like th' Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars—it was way too cheap. . . .”

“Well I hope you're wrong,” Zoyd breezed on,” 'cause plan B was to try and get my case on ‘60 Minutes,' or one of them.”

“Soon as they find out about Holytail,” Isaiah said, “you start even looking like a drug figure, there goes your case in court.”

“Sounds like my lawyer.” Elmhurst had strongly urged Zoyd to stay out of Holytail for the duration of this season's CAMP raids against the harvests. Each day now saw new columns of fragrant smoke ascending somewhere above the green Vineland hills to smudge the sky, and on each News at Six Sheriff Willis Chunko gleefully slashing into yet another patch of mature plants with his celebrated gold-handled chain saw, vowing to extinguish the feared herb from the soil of Vineland, as Skip Tromblay and the news team squirmed and cooed. No time for Zoyd to be anywhere near Holytail, much less helping truck out lawn and leaf bags full of newly picked sinsemilla buds or plants hastily pulled up whole, often in midnight games of hide-and-seek with deputies in ruggedized Dodge cruisers propelled by monster Mopars dialed and eager for the chase, rumbling in wet roostertails of dirt and stone chips up and down the old logging roads and over the wood and cable bridges between Holytail and the freeway—but it had been his job for the past couple of weeks nonetheless, trying, like everybody else, to get as much of the crop as possible out before Willis's big barbecue, too little time remaining on the clock, but wordlessly all agreeing fuck the clock, fuck it, play to the end. Out on those runs, speeding after moonset through the smell of the redwoods, with all the lights out, trying to sense among the different patches of darkness where the curves were, and what gear to be in for grades that were nearly impossible to see, bouncing along in a vintage Power Wagon, Zoyd from among somebody's collection of beat-up old 8-tracks usually found himself listening to the Eagles'
Greatest Hits
, in particular “Take It to the Limit,” basically his whole story these days, singing mournfully along, though obliged from time to time to interrupt himself as some new set of headlights appeared—“OK Zoyd, back on defense—” half hoping for a run-in with Brock, knowing by now it was never going to happen in any frontal way, attempting to get back his own small piece of Vineland, but out here at the periphery, in motion, out on one of the roads that had taken him away from his home, and that must lead back. . . .

But every other night lately he was visited by the dream of the burning house. Each time it became clearer to him that his house, after twelve years together from scratch, was asking him to torch it, as the only way left to release it from its captivity. Having glided out to visit between trunks of the trees, the dogs sensing him, getting up to prowl anxiously below, Zoyd would soundlessly enter and haunt, finding nothing inside anymore of himself or Prairie, only stripped and vacuumed spaces, public or hired security shift after shift, and the dogs who came and scratched at the sills just around sunrise.

“You know,” Flash suggested, “easiest thing might just be to go find the son of a bitch and cancel his series for him, ever think about that?”

An intriguing suggestion that they were just about to get into when Prairie came by from hustling Justin into his sleeping bag, carrying her own, on the way out to the woods to be alone for a while. “Feeling totally familied out,” she told Zoyd, “nothin' personal, o' course.” She had a long look at him, and after having just spent hours with Frenesi's face, found it easier now to make out, past the quaquaversal beard and smudged eyeglass lenses, as clearly as she ever would in Zoyd her own not-yet-come-to-terms-with face. A day would come when she'd ask, “Didn't you ever worry that you might not be my father? That maybe it was Weed, or Brock?” This time, in his arms.

“Nope. What I was more afraid of was, 's 'at I might belong to Brock.”

Now all he dared was, “How's your mother?”

“Well, I think I make her nervous,” Prairie said. “She's lookin' for anger, but she's not gettin' it from me.”

“She makin'
you
nervous?”

“Oh . . . it's like meeting a celebrity. I'm OK, rilly. And I can see why you guys married her.”

“Why?” asked Zoyd and Flash, quickly and together.

“You're adults, you're supposed to know.”

“Give us a hint?” Zoyd pleaded. But she was already on her way, on into the trees till she reached a piece of the woods that she'd never seen, a small clearing inside a grove of Sitka spruce and alder, where she spread her bag and, enjoying the solitude, must've drifted off to sleep. The beat of helicopter blades directly overhead woke her. As she stared, down out of it, hooked by harness and cable to the mother ship above, came Brock Vond, who looked just like he had on film. For about a week Brock, whom his colleagues were calling “Death From Slightly Above,” had been out traveling in a tight formation of three dead-black Huey slicks, up and down the terrain of Vineland nap-of-the-earth style, liable to pop up suddenly over a peaceful ridgeline or come screaming down the road after an innocent motorist, inside one meter of the exhaust pipe, Brock, in flak jacket and Vietnam boots, posing in the gun door with a flamethrower on his hip, as steep hillsides, thick with redwoods, the somber evergreen punctuated with bright flares of autumn yellow, went wheeling by just below, as the rotor blades tore ragged the tall columns of fog that rose from the valleys.

But at the moment here, Brock was linked by remote control to the motor of the Huey's hoist, able to lower himself to within centimeters of the girl's terrified body, where she could stare into the dim face, backlit by the helicopter lights. The original plan, as he'd recapped for Roscoe, who'd frankly had more recaps on this than Mark C. Bloome, had been to go in, cross-plot the subject, come down vertical, grab her, and winch back up and out—“The key is rapture. Into the sky, and the world knows her no more.”

Roscoe in his time had done a heckuva lot worse than abduct kids. He imagined himself grown oversize, beastlike, scuffling along beside a more human-faced Brock Vond. “Her tits, Master—”

“Nice firm adolescent tits, Roscoe, tits like juicy apples.”

She lay paralyzed in her childhood sleeping bag with the duck decoys on the lining and saw that even in the shadows his skin glowed unusually white. For a second it seemed he might hold her in some serpent hypnosis. But she came fully awake and yelled in his face, “Get the fuck out of here!”