Vineland (42 page)

“It was those Thanatoids, of course,” said Claire, “they were just beginning to move into the county then, and if it scared her at all, being up there amid so much human unhappiness, why, she never mentioned it.” Since the end of the war in Vietnam, the Thanatoid population had been growing steeply, so there was always day work out at Thanatoid Village, a shopping and residential complex a few miles further into the hills above Shade Creek. Shape-ups were held in the predawn down by the Vineland courthouse, shadowy brown buses idling in the dark, work and wages posted silently in the windows—some mornings Zoyd had gone down, climbed on, ridden out with other newcomers, all cherry to the labor market up here, former artists or spiritual pilgrims now becoming choker setters, waiters and waitresses, baggers and checkout clerks, tree workers, truckdrivers, and framers, or taking temporary swamping jobs like this, all in the service of others, the ones who did the building, selling, buying and speculating. First thing new hires all found out was that their hair kept getting in the way of work. Some cut it short, some tied it back or slicked it behind their ears in a kind of question-mark shape. Their once-ethereal girlfriends were busing dishes or cocktail-waitressing or attending the muscles of weary loggers over at the Shangri-La Sauna, Vineland County's finest. Some chose to take the noon southbound back home, others kept plugging on, at night school or Vineland Community College or Humboldt State, or going to work for the various federal, state, county, church, and private charitable agencies that were the biggest employers up here next to the timber companies. Many would be the former tripping partners and old flames who came over the years to deal with each other this way across desktops or through computer terminals, as if chosen in secret and sorted into opposing teams. . . .

After a while Zoyd was allowed into the Traverse-Becker annual reunions, as long as he brought Prairie, who at about the age of three or four got sick one Vineland winter, and looked up at him with dull hot eyes, snot crusted on her face, hair in a snarl, and croaked, “Dad? Am I ever gonna get bett-or?” pronouncing it like Mr. Spock, and he had his belated moment of welcome to the planet Earth, in which he knew, dismayingly, that he would, would have to, do anything to keep this dear small life from harm, up to and including Brock Vond, a possibility he wasn't too happy with. But as he watched her then, year by year, among these reunion faces her own was growing more and more to look like, continuing to feel no least premonitory sign of governmental interest from over the horizon beyond the mental-disability checks that arrived faithfully as the moon, he at last began, even out scuffling every day, to relax some, to understand that this had been the place to bring her and himself after all, that for the few years anyway, he must have chosen right for a change, that time they'd come through the slides and storms to put in here, to harbor in Vineland, Vineland the Good.

 

T
HE pasture, just before dawn, saw the first impatient kids already out barefoot in the dew, field dogs thinking about rabbits, house dogs more with running on their minds, cats in off of their night shifts edging, arching and flattening to fit inside the shadows they found. The woodland creatures, predators and prey, while not exactly gazing Bambilike at the intrusions, did remain as aware as they would have to be, moment to moment, that there were sure a lot of Traverses and Beckers in the close neighborhood.

Some had chosen to sleep inside their recreational vehicles, others lay out on mattresses in the beds of pickup trucks, a few had packed on further into the woods, and many had pitched tents in the meadows. Presently, as the light came up and birds started in, clock-radio alarms began to kick on in a thickening radio fugue of rock and roll till dawn, Bible interpretation, telephone voices still complaining about yesterday's news. Behind the mountains that climbed from here inland, morning-glory-blue light grew in the sky. Soon toasters and toaster ovens, wood fires, RV kitchen microwaves, gong-size skillets over propane flames, all working on bacon, links, eggs, flapjacks, waffles, hash browns, French toast, and hush puppies, were sending out branching invisible fractals of smell, reaching all over the place, fat smoke, charring spices, toasted bread, just-made coffee. People who'd slept overnight in the woods began to wander in. Blue jays appeared on foraging patrols, shrieking, bullying, scavenging, seagulls of the redwoods. Radio weather reports called for a real scorcher, even down in Vineland after the fog burned off. Younger cousins looked at the sky and into one another's backpacks. Fishermen set off along the creek bed to see what might be up and feeding, and golfers tried to scheme ways to slip off for a quick eighteen holes down at Las Sombras, a genuine links beside the fog-hung coast of Vineland. The marathon crazy eights game in a battered but shined-up Becker Airstream proceeded ageless as generation begetting generation, like a pot-au-feu of nickels, dimes, chips, greenbacks, and nuggets that might have been simmering continuously here since the times of the Little Gold Rush. Elsewhere in camp there were other games, poker, pinochle, dominoes, dice—but it was the Octomaniacs, as they thought of themselves, who as a crowd carried a more coherent look, as if they ought to be wearing matching T-shirts, while among the assortment of semi-strangers in and out of the other games, talent and judgment might vary by orders of magnitude, causing delays, astonishment, and episodes of consanguineous discombobulation.

Some were waking up hungry, bottomless-pit, how-come-it's-not-on-the-table-yet style, while others had only to think of a frying egg to feel nauseated till noon. Some needed to take in columns of print from morning papers that weren't there, others coffee from any container that didn't leak, at least not too fast. Many who woke with eye more than stomach hunger stayed as long as they could in sleeping bags or back in camper shells with portable TV sets bootlegged onto the cable out on the highway by ingenious pole-climbing teenagers. Somewhere beyond earshot was the wash of morning traffic down along the freeway they'd come in on, as the workweek began to roll to another finale, though everybody here had taken off early, sometimes weeks early. While some of the bigger kids were dollying in different-sized refrigerators and running electric lines back to the nearest outlets, luckier ones got drafted to ride on up into Thanatoid Village to help pack in last-minute supplies as well as have a look at what there might be in the way of mall thrills among this community of the insomniac unavenged.

In fact, out of a long memory of strange dawns, this morning in the Shade Creek–Thanatoid Village area would stand forth as an exception. Not only had the entire population actually slept the night before, but they were also now wakening, in reply to a piping, chiming music, synchronized, coming out of wristwatches, timers, and personal computers, engraved long ago, as if for this moment, on sound chips dumped once in an obscure skirmish of the silicon market wars, expedited in fact by Takeshi Fumimota, as part of a settlement with the ever-questionable trading company of Tokkata & Fuji, all playing together now, and in four-part harmony, the opening of J. S. Bach's “Wachet Auf.” And not the usual electronic stuff—this had soul, a quantity these troubled folks could recognize. They blinked, they began to turn, their eyes, often for the first time, sought contact with the eyes of other Thanatoids. This was unprecedented. This was like a class-action lawsuit suddenly resolved after generations in the courts. Who remembered? Say, who didn't? What was a Thanatoid, at the end of the long dread day, but memory? So, to one of the best tunes ever to come out of Europe, even with its timing adapted to the rigors of a disco percussion track able to make the bluest Thanatoid believe, however briefly, in resurrection, they woke, the Thanatoids woke.

This time what went rolling out, whistling in the dark valleys, chasing the squall lines, impinging upon the sensors of more than one kind of life in the countryside below, wasn't just the usual “Call of the Thanatoids”—this was long, desolate howling, repeated over and over, impossible for Takeshi and DL, even in their high-tech aerie down south, to ignore. They found Radio Thanatoid on the peculiar band between 6200 and 7000 kilohertz and tuned it in for Prairie, who after a while shook her head sadly. “What are you gonna do about this?”

“We have to respond,” DL said. “Question is, do you want to come with us.”

Well, Prairie wasn't having much luck here in L.A., though she had managed to hook up again with her old friend Ché, whose grandfolks Dotty and Wade went back into ancient Hollywood history with her own grandparents. But Sasha was out of town, had been since Prairie'd started calling, and according to her message on the answering machine, there was most likely a wiretap on the line too.

Among the first mall rats into Fox Hills, aboriginal as well to the Sherman Oaks Galleria, Prairie and Ché had been known to hitchhike for days to get to malls that often turned out to be only folkloric, false cities of gold. But that was cool, because they got to be together. This time they'd arranged to meet in lower Hollywood at the new Noir Center, loosely based on crime movies from around World War II and after, designed to suggest the famous ironwork of the Bradbury Building downtown, where a few of them had been shot. This was yuppification run to some pitch so desperate that Prairie at least had to hope the whole process was reaching the end of its cycle. She happened to like those old weird-necktie movies in black and white, her grandfolks had worked on some of them, and she personally resented this increasingly dumb attempt to cash in on the pseudoromantic mystique of those particular olden days in this town, having heard enough stories from Hub and Sasha, and Dotty and Wade, to know better than most how corrupted everything had really been from top to bottom, as if the town had been a toxic dump for everything those handsome pictures had left out. Noir Center here had an upscale mineral-water boutique called Bubble Indemnity, plus The Lounge Good Buy patio furniture outlet, The Mall Tease Flacon, which sold perfume and cosmetics, and a New York-style deli, The Lady 'n' the Lox. Security police wore brown shiny uniform suits with pointed lapels and snap-brim fedoras and did everything by video camera and computer, a far cry from the malls Prairie'd grown up with, when security was not so mean and lean and went in more for normal polyester Safariland uniforms, where the fountains were real and the plants nonplastic and you could always find somebody your age working in the food courts and willing to swap a cheeseburger for a pair of earrings, and there even used to be ice rinks, back when insurance was affordable, she could remember days with Ché, in those older malls, where all they did for hours was watch kids skate. Weird music on the speakers, an echo off the ice. Most of these skaters were girls, some of them wearing incredibly expensive outfits and skates. They swooped, turned, leapt to the beat of canned TV-theme arrangements, booming in the chill, the ice glimmering, the light above the ice green and gray, with white standing columns of condensation. Ché nodding toward one of them once, “Check this out.” She was about their age, pale, slender and serious, her hair tied back with a ribbon, wearing a short white satin number and white kid skates. “Is that white
kid
,” Ché wondered, “or
white
kid?” All eyes and legs, like a fawn, she had for a while been flirting, skating up to Prairie and Ché, then turning, flipping her tiny skirt up over her ass and gliding away, elegant little nose in the air.

“Yep,” Prairie muttered, “perfect, ain't she?”

“Makes you kinda want to mess her up a little, don't it?”

“Ché, you're rilly evil?” It didn't help that inside, Prairie liked to imagine herself as just such a figure of luck and grace, no matter what hair, zit, or weight problems might be accumulating in the nonfantasy world. On the Tube she saw them all the time, these junior-high gymnasts in leotards, teenagers in sitcoms, girls in commercials learning from their moms about how to cook and dress and deal with their dads, all these remote and well-off little cookies going “Mm! this rilly
is
good!” or the ever-reliable “Thanks, Mom,” Prairie feeling each time this mixture of annoyance and familiarity, knowing like exiled royalty that that's who she was supposed to be, could even turn herself into through some piece of negligible magic she must've known once but in the difficult years marooned down on this out-of-the-way planet had come to have trouble remembering anymore. When she told Ché about it, as she told her everything, her friend's eyebrows went up in concern.

“Best forget it, Prair. All looks better 'n it is. Ain't one of these li'l spoiled brats'd even make it through one night at Juvenile Hall.”

“Just it,” Prairie had pointed out, “nobody'll ever send her to no Juvenile Hall, she's gonna live her whole life on the outside.”

“A girl can have fantasies, can't she?”

“Ooo-wee! No-o-o mercy!” This was their star-and-sidekick routine, going back to when they were little, playing Bionic, Police, or Wonder Woman. A teacher had told Prairie's class once to write a paragraph on what sports figure they wished they could be. Most girls said something like Chris Evert. Prairie said Brent Musberger. Each time they got together, it suited her to be the one to frame and comment on Ché's roughhouse engagements with the world, though more than once she'd been called on for muscle, notably during the Great South Coast Plaza Eyeshadow Raid, still being talked about in tones of wounded bewilderment at security seminars nationwide, in which two dozen girls, in black T-shirts and jeans, carrying empty backpacks and riding on roller skates, perfectly acquainted with every inch of the terrain, had come precision whirring and ticking into the giant Plaza just before closing time and departed only moments later with the packs stuffed full of eyeshadows, mascaras, lipsticks, earrings, barrettes, bracelets, pantyhose, and fashion shades, all of which they had turned immediately for cash from an older person named Otis, with a panel truck headed for a swap meet far away. In the lucid high density of action, Prairie saw her friend about to be cornered, between a mall cop and a kid in a plastic smock, hardly older than they were, bought into it young, hollering as if it were his own stuff—with the cop, clear as a movie close-up, unsnapping his holster, oo-oo, look out—“Ché!” Kicking up as much speed as she could, she went zooming in, screaming herself semidemented, paralyzing the pursuit long enough to sail alongside Ché, take her by the wrist, twirl her till they were aimed the right direction, and get rolling with her the hell on out of there. It felt like being bionically speeded up, like Jaime Sommers, barreling through a field of slo-mo opposition, while all through this the background shopping music continued, perky and up-tempo, originally rock and roll but here reformatted into unthreatening wimped-out effluent, tranquilizing onlookers into thinking the juvenile snatch-and-grab mission couldn't have been what it looked like, so it must be all right to return to closing time, what a relief. The tune coming out of the speakers as the girls all dispersed into the evening happened to be a sprightly oboe-and-string rendition of Chuck Berry's “Maybellene.”

Whenever Ché and Prairie met, it was by way of zigzag and trick routes, almost like they were having an affair, slipping away from PO's or caseworkers, or only steps ahead of the bright attentions of Child Protective Services, not to mention, these days, the FBI. Ché arrived at Noir Center all out of breath, dressed in leather, denim, metal, and calico, with a bazooka rocket bag slung over one wide precise shoulder and her hair today Tenaxed up into this amazing feathery crest, in a blond shade soured to citric.

“You're all gussied up, girl.”

“All for you, my little Prairie Flower.”

Prairie went shivering in with her hands under her friend's arm, while around them, in the uniform commercial twilight, plastic flowed, ones and zeros seethed, legends of agoramania continued. They stopped at a House of Cones, where they eyeballed each other, politely but without mercy, for changes in fat distribution while sucking, with more and less metaphoric attention, on the ice cream in their cones. Back when they were girls, all it ever took was eye contact to topple them into laughter that might go on all day. But Ché's much-valued smiles today were only tight quick Polaroids of themselves.

It was her mom's boyfriend again. “At least you have the whole set, you're not a semiperson,” Prairie used to mumble.

“A mom who watches MTV all day and her boyfriend who transforms into Asshole of the Universe anytime he gets to see a inch of teen skin, family of the year for sure, you want it, I can fix you up with Lucky, no prob, just remember to wear somethin' short.” And that was back when he was only harassing her, before they'd started fucking. Which when her mom found out about it she never brought up to Lucky's face, turning on Ché instead and blaming her for everything. “Callin' me all this shit, sayin' she wished she never had me . . . ,” keenly watching to see how it went over, but Prairie was all sympathy and calming touch. For years they'd had this ongoing seminar on the topic of Moms, a category to which Ché's mother, Dwayna, was not much credit. The tension in the house would rise to an explosive level, with Ché coming on to Lucky, whom she couldn't stand, right in front of her mom just to piss her off, then the uproar would go on all night, with Ché stomping out each time swearing that was it, staying on the loose for weeks, turning for money to more and more desperate shit and the company of some odd young gentlemen, some with runny noses, some with money in their hand, some fresh from the schoolyard and some that played in a band, often in situations hazardous to her health, till the only choice left her was to get popped so Dwayna would come down again and get her out, which she didn't have to but always did. Hugs and tears at the sergeant's desk, cries of “My baby” and “I love you, Mom,” Ché would go home, Lucky would leer hello, and the whole cycle would start over, her rap sheet each time picking up new pages.