Vineland (31 page)

Once, on a rare sleepover with Weed at a motel in Anaheim, she awoke at a deep hour of the night to hear tiny voices that seemed to come from Weed's sleeping face, very high-pitched, with East Coast lowlife accents—“Hey, dat was a renege, you don't get dem points.” “Ya can't meld dat one, Wilbur, ya buried it.” And “Da bidduh goes double bete, let's see da cards,” at least that's what it sounded like—the little voices faded now and then. It wasn't Weed himself—she could hear his breathing, regular and slow, no matter what the voices happened to be saying. “Hey, Wanda! Bring us anudduh six-pack, huh?” “Come on Wesley, feed da kitty!” What was going on? In the air-conditioned hour without a name, she leaned over his face, trying to see lips moving, ventriloquism. . . . She sniffed. Infinitesimal traces of cigar smoke and spilled beer. Abruptly the voices stopped, then broke panicked into an incoherent twittering—they'd seen her, looming in, and then she saw them, just about to shimmer out of paralysis into flight, one moment sitting by Weed's nose, curled at his nostrils, enjoying the breeze in and out, and the next all spooked and streaming down the sides of his face, nearly invisible now against the bedclothes—gaaahhh! was that one of them she
felt?
She rolled out onto the floor, cursing under her breath, put the lights on, and went and inspected every inch of the bed with a ball-peen hammer she happened to have in her purse. Innocent Weed slept on. She found nothing but a colorful smear on the pillow that resolved close up into a scatter of tiny patterned rectangles, each no more than an eighth of an inch long and flimsy—her most careful breath dispersing many of them to invisibility. In the morning they were all gone. It wasn't till years later, on a lunch hour, somewhere inside the rusticated grandiosity of an Indiana court-house—not too far from Brock Vond's old hometown, as a matter of fact—trying to find out, as usual, about a stipend check, that she heard, in human frequencies, the same phrases she'd heard that night, and followed the voices to a judge's chambers, sunny, wood, undusted, where nobody looked up when she put her head in. The game turned out to be pinochle, and she understood then that years ago, in Anaheim, she had seen the famous worms of song, already playing a few preliminary hands on Weed Atman's snout.

Earlier in the day, the next-to-last day, Frenesi and Brock had met in a clifftop suite, under a vaporous and subtropical light falling through high windows, un-Californian light, belonging someplace else where the water table was above the ground and reptiles slipped into the swimming pools at night. They were in one unit of a rambling compound of decrepit, obsessionally Art Deco guest structures, curving walls corroded and flaking on their seaward faces, half-moon windows crossed by thin bars of pitted chrome, queer unusable prisms of space with no access. The prevailing color was blue, a somber ultramarine weather-chipped and scarred everywhere, as if by group assault, in pale graffiti. Just down past the trees was a sand beach, and then the sea.

He wore a pale suit, Frenesi loose bright pants and shirt and round wire-rims with ND-I filters for lenses. This was supposed to be borrowed unofficial space. Neither had offered the other anything liquid—it was among the least of all the civilities allowed to lapse throughout Brock's profession as the Nixonian Reaction continued to penetrate and compromise further what may only in some fading memories ever have been a people's miracle, an army of loving friends, as betrayal became routine, government procedures for it so simple and greased that no one, Frenesi was finding out, no matter how honorable their lives so far, could be considered safely above it, wherever “above” was supposed to be, with money from the CIA, FBI, and others circulating everywhere, leaving the merciless spores of paranoia wherever it flowed, fungoid reminders of its passage. These people had known their children after all, perfectly.

“So it worked,” she reported, “congratulations. Your key log just came loose and floated away. He's got no more credibility, only the fringe folks'll stay with him now.”

Brock only looked back, smug, glittering, what she'd learned to call his upping-the-ante face. “No. Not enough.” Light beat against the sea, landward and through the tall raked windows. “Tell me—hm? How was the mood on campus?”

“It's all coming apart. Suddenly everybody's got a payoff story to tell, total paranoia. Steering Committee is supposed to be meeting down at Rex's tonight. We're going to be filming it. Once we have him on film, whether he lies or whether he confesses, he's done for, it doesn't matter.”

“Just from being on film.” Almost affectionately.

“You'll see.”

“No.” And then he told her, carefully, in detail often crude enough to make her afraid, of Weed's visits to downtown San Diego for “therapy sessions,” Brock called them—“Too much math, too many abstract ideas, so we gave him some reality, just enough, to counteract that, no worse than going to the dentist. Till after a while he could begin to see our side.”

“Then it was true—he was working for you.”

“Against you, hm? Your lies about him turned out to be truth?” Not nearly as shocked as he wanted her to be, Frenesi saw that if Weed had been fooling her, then so had Brock, by keeping it from her. The Boys. Absorbed by this line of thought, she hadn't even seen when Brock brought it out, but all at once there it was, perfectly in focus, complexly highlighted, mythical, latent and solid at the same time—a terminally opaque, property-room Smith, a Chief's Special, withheld from crucibles and collectors for missions just like this.

“Brock—”

“It's only a prop.”

She looked carefully around the front. “It's loaded.”

“When these little left-wing kiddie games come apart, things often turn dangerous.”

“And you're thinking of my safety, Brock how sweet, but come on, it's only rock and roll.”

His eyes were brimming with gelatinous tears, and his voice was higher in pitch. “Sooner or later the gun comes out.”

“I don't believe that.”

“Because you never had the gun . . . but I always did.”

“I wouldn't know how to use it.”

He laughed, an obnoxious retro-collegiate whinny. “It's all right. I only want you to get it to Rex.”

“Rex?”

“He doesn't know it's from me, don't worry, he's still ‘pure,' I know distinctions like that are important to you. I just want it there, in place, part of the household, hm?”

“I can't bring a gun in the house.”

“But you can bring a camera. Can't you see, the two separate worlds—one always includes a camera somewhere, and the other always includes a gun, one is make-believe, one is real? What if this is some branch point in your life, where you'll have to choose between worlds?”

“So either I pussy out or become a courier of death, wow, this is some swell choice you're giving me.” Who
was
this jerk?

“Don't you even want to touch it? Just to know what it feels like?”

“Hard and maybe a little greasy, by the looks of it.”

“But you still don't really know, hm? And you're frightened, but at the same time . . . a little curious. How heavy is it? What'll happen if I touch it there, or there. . . .”

“Let go of me, Brock,” her bare legs struggling, flashing in the blurred sunlight as he brought her hand to rest upon the firearm. And then waited until he felt in her hand probable acquiescence, then took his hand away. And hers remained. “And,” eyes lowered, “I'm supposed to walk up to Rex and just—is there like a message that goes with it or anything?”

“As long as it's physically his.”

Men had it so simple. When it wasn't about Sticking It In, it was about Having The Gun, a variation that allowed them to Stick It In from a distance. The details of how and when, day by working day, made up their real world. Bleak, to be sure, but a lot more simplified, and who couldn't use some simplification, what brought seekers into deserts, fishermen to streams, men to war, a seductive promise. She would have hated to admit how much of this came down to Brock's penis, straightforwardly erect, just to pick a random example.

Her impulse was to deny his simple formula, to imagine that with the gun in the house, the 24-frame-per-second truth she still believed in would find some new, more intense level of truth, is what she was telling herself. Light this little 'sucker here about eight to one, soften the specular highlights, start in on a tight close-up . . . draw back, incorporating the lovely, deadly thing in the master shot of tonight's gathering, transfiguring the frame, returning at last to the invisible presences and unavoidable terms of which all she had up till now lit and made visible had been only the ghosts. . . .

Turned, and turning—the light from the sea, the rights and wrongs she'd picked up from Hub and Sasha, the tides of need that Brock, her inconstant moon, brought and took . . . he would have everything, the little fucker would get it all his way, because from then on, though they would still now and then pretend, both knew she had nothing more to negotiate with. He would not even spare her from the first thing she had sworn to him she'd never do—at some point she had to go up in front of his grand jury, in a city, days distant, where trolley cars ran beneath grimy black webbing that stretched in all directions, all converging in a desert-yellow plaza downtown, the cars painted yellow a shade sunnier than the pavement and trimmed in some tepid green—messenger cables, hangers, and trolley wires sprung from brackets on wood poles trembled and sang and cast shadows of intricate frogwork as sparks went crackling, nearly invisible in the day's glare. She was guided indoors, through low plasterboard corridors, with no way to see who else was sharing the subdivided building. The grand jury already knew her story. The testimony took days but was all pro forma. She tried to watch the white male faces, though without seeming too bold—to imagine them as they might have looked on film, these substantial and good citizens. Each morning she went in to them wrecked, breakfast having been two or three time-bomb tranquilizers and some instant coffee, on top of the previous night's drug combo, which had not exactly worn off by reveille. She woke in bedsheets smelling of vinegar, motel sheets at very first morning light, cold seeping through the inches of space beneath the metal door, another shape in the dark by the other bed, the smell of a cigarette, long minutes of knowing she was there but not who she was.

MR. VOND
: How would you characterize the subject's behavior in this final period?

MISS GATES
: The last—

MR. VOND
: The last few days of his life.

MISS GATES
: More and more . . . unstable. By then, all he wanted was out—but he felt he was trapped.

MR. VOND
: Did he seem to you to be . . . in the control of anyone else? Acting on orders, anything like that?

MISS GATES
: He thought he was being coerced. He kept saying that they were “forcing” him.

MR. VOND
: And who did you understand “they” to be?

MISS GATES
: I thought he meant—I don't know, the people.

Not an answer the jury wanted, but for Brock they let it pass. Nor a question that mattered to Frenesi. She had trouble understanding what they wanted. Maybe only her appearance before them, nothing else. Nobody attempted to trace the path of the gun. It was almost a supernatural term in the story—a creature that appears only so that the deed will be done, and then vanishes. No sign-out form, no log entries, no ballistics tests or serial numbers. But around suppertime that next-to-last day, there it was inside Rex's fringed cowhide bag. Rex was supposed to be out someplace, and for the first time in anyone's memory, the bag had not gone with him. Instead it sat, with its suggestive protuberance, lounging on the Indian-print sofa like a guest who has come to stay.

Weed was wearing sandals with argyle socks, a departure from the hip that Frenesi had just begun to find endearing, and drinking one after the other spritzers of a fortified demographic wine, analogous to Night Train or Annie Green Springs, but targeted to the barrio, known as Pancho Bandido. He sat on the floor, in an awkward lotus he would never perfect, elbows on knees, head in hands. “Only a little more aggravation,” he greeted Frenesi, “and you know what?”

“Well, maybe you can relax,” is how the transcript of the surveillance tape had her talking, “because your troubles are at an end, and you are out of it now.”

He raised his head slowly to look at her. She had never seen his eyes like this. “They sent you to tell me something, what was it.” Who, again, did she understand this “they” to be?

Not everybody in 24fps had shown up. Something was going on up on campus, a rally or assembly, and DL was there with the Arri and Zipi with a wind-up Bolex to see what would develop. There had been no posters or announcements or indeed anyplace left for communication to come from, only the gathering, in falling dark and confusion without limit, around the fountain in the Plaza where PR
³
ers in their youth had frolicked stoned and nude. Now, with the black rearing silhouette of the Nixon Monument against the sunset, bullhorns with failing batteries quacking invisibly, suddenly no one recognized anyone's face, and each was isolated in a sea of strangers. A common feeling, reported in interviews later, was of a clear break just ahead with everything they'd known. Some said “end,” others “transition,” but they could all feel it approaching, something about how the smog was pressing from the sky, unmistakable as the waiting before some eclipse in earthquake weather.

Down in the beach house, Sledge Poteet, shades clamped on and hair picked into a black spherical bush, was holding booms and running cable for Krishna, while Howie, eyelids, from what he'd been inhaling, painted upper and lower in fluorescent rose liner, rigged lights and reloaded cameras for Frenesi, with Ditzah running around doing everything else. Frenesi was crouched beside Weed. “This will be your best chance, your most sympathetic forum, all you have to do is tell how it happened, how you think it
could
have happened, no one is judging you, Weed, the camera's only a machine . . . ,” and so forth, movie sincerity. Howie kept kicking them, Frenesi would start to film, Weed would change his mind, Howie'd kill them again. This happened a few times. At some point Jinx showed up with Moe and Penny, giving Frenesi the ritual Searching Look. Moe headed for the Tube and Penny started for the kitchen but paused a moment by the Indian sofa.