Vineland (43 page)

“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. This 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.

It could have been handled with far fewer personnel, but somebody—DL could guess who—had determined to give the neighbors a show. In front of Ditzah's garage, on the cement, conical black heaps smoked, glowed, flared here and there into visible fire. Metal reels and plastic cores were scattered all over, and besides all the unspooled film burning there was a lot of paper, typed pages mostly, any scraps that temporarily escaped, spinning in eddies from the updraft, sent back into the flames by a sweeping crew. None of those observing the fire seemed to be civilians—the neighbors must have all been scared indoors. She noticed that the windows of the house had all been broken, the car trashed, trees in the yard taken down with chain saws and youthful muscle—she assumed it was the juvies in the buses who'd done all the physical work.

“How about Ditzah?”

“Still with her friends, hiding out. She's OK, but she's scared.”

Well so was Prairie. She had no choice but to stick with these two, and was only marginally reassured by the $135,000 manufacturer's suggested retail price of the ride they took to Vineland, the ultimate four-wheeling rig, a Lamborghini LM002, with a V-12 engine that put out 450 horsepower, custom armed, wired and dialed to the hubcaps. It was like being taken off in a UFO. “Sometimes,” she'd told Ché, “when I get very weird, I go into this alternate-universe idea, and wonder if there isn't a parallel world where she decided to have the abortion, get rid of me, and what's really happening is is that I'm looking for her so I can haunt her like a ghost.” The closer they got to Shade Creek, the more intense this feeling grew. The speakers were all one cross-spectrum massive chord of discontent and longing by the time they reached the WPA bridge and began to thread the complex obstacle course into town.

Takeshi and DL had long been set up in a restored Vicky dating from Little Gold Rush days, when it had been an inn and brothel. They found a crowd of Thanatoids on the porch when they got there, and an atmosphere of civic crisis. CAMP search-and-destroy missions by now were coming over on a daily schedule. Brock Vond and his army, bivouacked down by the Vineland airport, had begun sending long-range patrols up Seventh River and out into some of the creek valleys, including Shade Creek. And now there was a full-size movie crew up here, based out of Vineland but apt to show up just about anyplace, prominent among whom, and already generating notable Thanatoid distress, was this clearly insane Mexican DEA guy, not only dropping but also picking up, dribbling, and scoring three-pointers with the name of Frenesi Gates.

“See?” DL nudged Prairie, whose mouth was ajar and abdomen tingling with fear, “what'd we tell you?”

They'd only missed Hector by about twenty minutes—he was headed for the Vineland nightlife, looking to see who else he could inveigle into his project, driving a muscular '62 Bonneville he'd borrowed, or, OK, commandeered, from his brother-in-law Felipe in South Pasadena. In the back seat, on loud and bright, was a portable Tube, which Hector had angled the rearview mirror at so he could see, for the highway was a lonely place, and a man needed company. He'd stolen the set the last time he'd broken out of the Tubaldetox, this time, he swore, for good. Scientists. What did any of them know? The theory, when Hector was first admitted, had been homeopathic—put him on a retinal diet of scientifically calculated short video clips of what in full dosage would, according to theory, have destroyed his sanity, thus summoning and rallying his mind's own natural defenses. But because of his dangerous demeanor, which the doctors only found out later was his everyday personality, they rushed him into therapy without the full set of workups, and misjudged his dosage. Who could have foreseen that Hector would have such an abnormally sensitive mentality that scarcely an hour of low-toxicity programming a day would be more than enough to jolt it into a desperate craving for more? He crept out of his ward at night to lurk anywhere Tubes might be glowing, to bathe in rays, lap and suck at the flow of image, more out of control than ever before in his life, arranging clandestine meets in the shadows of secluded gazebos and window reveals with dishonest Tubaldetox attendants who would produce from beneath their browns tiny illicit LCD units smuggled from the outside, which they charged exorbitant rent for and came at dawn to take back. After lights out, all the detoxees who could afford to would settle down beneath their blankets with prime-time through-the-air programming, all networks plus the four L.A. independents. By the time Hector ran out of money, the homeopaths were in disgrace and young Doc Deeply, at the head of his phalanx of New Agers all armored in the invincible smugness of their own persuasion, had beamed into power, proclaiming a new policy of letting everybody watch as much as they wanted of whatever they felt like seeing, the aim being Transcendence Through Saturation. For a few weeks, it was like a mob storming a palace. Schedules were abolished, the cafeteria stayed open around the clock, inmates who had OD'd wandered everywhere like zombies in the movies, humming theme songs from favorite shows, doing imitations of TV greats, some of them quite obscure indeed, getting into violent disputes over television trivia. “Amazing,” Dennis Deeply was surprised to find himself thinking out loud, “the place is like a nuthouse.”

After a lifetime of kicking other people around, Hector was suddenly here put down among the administered, judged as impaired, sick, and so, somehow, expendable. Time was he'd have blown people away for frustrating him less than this. What was happening to him? He had to believe that he was different, even as months began to creep by—that his release really was in the pipeline, that he really wouldn't be inside for the rest of his life, here along these ever-lengthening, newly branching corridors, with progressively obsolete wall maps of the traffic system posted beneath lights he knew, though staff never admitted it, were being replaced each time with lower-wattage bulbs. As his program went on and his need for video images only deepened, he gathered a charge of anxiety that one day, as he looked in the mirror, discharged in a timeless crystalline episode in which both man and image understood that the only thing in the pipeline anymore was Hector—heading straight down it with only the one, call it less than one, degree of freedom, and no way to get out. But headed where? What kind of “outside world” could they be rehabilitating him for? “You'll like it, Hector,” they kept assuring him, even when he didn't ask. Every evening before they got to sit down and eat supper, everybody, holding their mess trays, had to sing the house hymn.