Vineland Read online

  Here came Van Meter now, around the corner of the Cuke, wearing his trademark face, Wounded Righteousness. “Are you ready? We’ll be losin’ the light, fog’s gonna come in any minute, what were you doin’ all the hell the way up to the Log Jam?”

  “No, Van Meter—why is everybody here instead?”

  They went in the back way, Van Meter furrowing and unfurrowing his forehead. “Guess I can tell you now you’re here, is there’s this old buddy of yours, just showed up?”

  Zoyd went sweaty and had one of those gotta-shit throbs of fear. Was it ESP, was he only reacting to something in his friend’s voice? Somehow he knew who it would be. Here when he needed all his concentration for getting through another window, instead he had to worry about this visitor from out of the olden days. Sure enough, it turned out to be Zoyd’s longtime pursuer, DEA field agent Hector Zuñiga, back once again, the erratic federal comet who brought, each visit in to Zoyd’s orbit, new forms of bad luck and baleful influence. This time, though, it had been a while, long enough that Zoyd had begun to hope the man might’ve found other meat and be gone for good. Dream on, Zoyd. Hector stood over by the toilets pretending to play a Zaxxon machine, but in reality waiting to be reintroduced, this honor apparently falling to the manager of the Cuke, Ralph Wayvone, Jr., a remittance man from San Francisco, where his father was a figure of some substance, having grown successful in business areas where transactions are overwhelmingly in the form of cash. Today Ralph Jr. was all dolled up in a Cerruti suit, white shirt with cuff links, touch-them-you-die double-soled shoes from someplace offshore, the works. Like everybody else around here, he looked unusually anxious.

  “Say Ralph, lighten up, it’s me’s gotta do all the work.”

  “Ahhh . . . my sister’s wedding next weekend, the band just canceled, I’m the social coordinator, supposed to find a replacement, right? You know of anybody?”

  “Yeah, maybe . . . you better not fuck up this one Ralph, you know what’ll happen.”

  “Always kidding, huh. Here, let me show you the window you’ll be using. Can I have them get you a drink or anything? Oh by the way Zoyd, here’s an old friend of yours, come all this way to wish you luck.”

  “Uh-huh.” He and Hector exchanged the briefest of thumbgrips.

  “Love your outfit, Wheeler.”

  Zoyd reached, bomb-squad careful, to pat Hector’s stomach. “Look like you been ‘moving the mustache’ there a little, old amigo.”

  “Bigger, not softer, ése. And speaking of lunch, how about tomorrow at Vineland Lanes?”

  “Can’t do it, tryin’ to make the rent and I’m already late.”

  “It’s im-por-tan’,” Hector making a little melody out of it. “Think of it this way. If I can prove to you, that I’m as bad of a desperado as I ever was, will you allow me to spring for your lunch?”

  “As bad as . . .” As what? Why did Zoyd keep going, time after time, for these oily Hectorial setups? The best it had ever turned out for him was uncomfortable. “Hector, we’re too old for this.”

  “After all the smiles, and all the tears—”

  “All right, stop, it’s a deal—you be bad, I come to lunch, but please, I have to jump through this window right now? is it OK, can I have just a few seconds—”

  Production staff murmured into walkie-talkies, technicians could be seen through the fateful window, waving light meters and checking sound levels outside as Zoyd, breathing steady, silently repeated a mantra that Van Meter, claiming it’d cost him $100, had toward the end of his yoga phase last year hustled Zoyd into buying for a twenty that Zoyd hadn’t really enjoyed discretionary use of. At last all was set. Van Meter flashed Mr. Spock’s Vulcan hand salute. “Ready when you are, Z Dubya!”

  Zoyd eyeballed himself in the mirror behind the bar, gave his hair a shake, turned, poised, then screaming ran empty-minded at the window and went crashing through. He knew the instant he hit that something was funny. There was hardly any impact, and it all felt and sounded different, no spring or resonance, no volume, only a sort of fine, dulled splintering.

  After obligingly charging at each of the news cameras while making insane faces, and after the police had finished their paperwork, Zoyd caught sight of Hector squatting in front of the destroyed window, among the glittering debris, holding a bright jagged polygon of plate glass. “Time for the bad,” he called, grinning in a nasty way long familiar to Zoyd. “Are you ready?” Like a snake he lunged his head forward and took a giant bite out of the glass. Holyshit, Zoyd frozen, he’s lost it—no, actually now, instead Hector was chewing away, crunching and slobbering, with the same evil grin, going “Mmm-mm!” and “¡Qué rico, qué sabroso!” Van Meter went running after a departing paramedic truck hollering “Corpsman!” but Zoyd had tumbled, he was no media innocent, he read TV Guide and had just remembered an article about stunt windows made of clear sheet candy, which would break but not cut. That’s why this one had felt so funny—young Wayvone had taken out the normal window and put in one of these sugar types. “Euchred again, Hector, thanks.”

  But Hector had already vanished into a large gray sedan with government plates. News-crew stragglers were picking up a few last location shots of the Cuke and its famous rotating sign, which Ralph Jr. was happy to light up early, a huge green neon cucumber with blinking warts, cocked at an angle that approached, within a degree or two, a certain vulgarity. Did Zoyd have to show up next day at the bowling alley? Technically, no. But in the federale’s eyes there’d been a glint that Zoyd could still see, behind the one-way auto glass, even as the nightly fog rolled up over the great berm and on toward 101 and Hector was driven away into it. Zoyd could feel another hustle on the way. Hector had been trying over and over for years to develop him as a resource, and so far—technically—Zoyd had hung on to his virginity. But the li’l fucker would not quit. He kept coming back, each time with a new and more demented plan, and Zoyd knew that one day, just to have some peace, he’d say forget it, and go over. Question was, would it be this time, or one of the next few times? Should he wait for another spin? It was like being on “Wheel of Fortune,” only here there were no genial vibes from any Pat Sajak to find comfort in, no tanned and beautiful Vanna White at the corner of his vision to cheer on the Wheel, to wish him well, to flip over one by one letters of a message he knew he didn’t want to read anyway.

  ZOYD made it home in time to view himself on the Tube, though he had to wait till Prairie finished watching the 4:30 Movie, Pia Zadora in The Clara Bow Story. She fingered the material of the lurid print dress. “Crazy about this, Dad. Fresh, rilly. Can I have it when you’re done? Use it to cover my futon.”

  “Hey, do you ever date logger types, fallers, choker setters, that sort of fellow?”

  “Zoy-oyd. . . .”

  “Don’t get offended, is it’s only that a couple of these guys slipped me their phone number, see? along with bills in different denominations?”

  “What for?”

  He did a take, squinted closely at his daughter. Was this a trick question here? “Let’s see, 1984, that’d make you . . . fourteen?”

  “Nice going, like to try for the car?”

  “Nothin’ personal, jeez.” Zoyd had been removing the large and colorful dress. The girl shied away in mock alarm, covering her mouth and making her eyes round. He was wearing ancient surfer baggies underneath, and a dilapidated Hussong’s T-shirt. “Here you go, it’s all yours, mind if I check myself out on the news?”

  They sat together on the floor in front of the Tube, with a chair-high bag of Cheetos and a sixpack of grapefruit soda from the health-food store, watching baseball highlights, commercials, and weather—no rain again—till it was time for the kissoff story. “Well,” chuckled news anchor Skip Tromblay, “an annual Vineland event was repeated today, as local laughing-academy outpatient Zoyd Wheeler performed his now familiar yearly leap through another area
plate-glass window. This time the lucky establishment was the infamous Cucumber Lounge, seen here in its usual location, just off Highway 101. Alerted by a mystery caller, TV 86 Hot Shot News crews were there to record Wheeler’s deed, which last year was almost featured on ‘Good Morning America.’ “

  “Lookin’ good, Dad.” On the Tube, Zoyd came blasting out the window, along with the dubbed-in sounds now of real glass breaking. Police cruisers and fire equipment contributed cheery chrome elements. Zoyd watched himself hit the hardpan, roll, come up, and charge the camera, screaming and baring his teeth. Footage of the pro forma booking and release wasn’t included, but in Tubal form he was pleased to see that the dress, Day-Glo orange, near-ultraviolet purple, some acid green, and a little magenta in a retro-Hawaiian parrots-and-hula-girls print, came across as a real attention-getter. Over on one of the San Francisco channels, the videotape was being repeated in slow motion, the million crystal trajectories smooth as fountain-drops, Zoyd in midair with time to rotate into a number of positions he didn’t remember being in, many of which, freeze-framed, could have won photo awards someplace. Next came highlights of his previous attempts, at each step into the past the color and other production values getting worse, and after that a panel including a physics professor, a psychiatrist, and a track-and-field coach live and remote from the Olympics down in L.A. discussing the evolution over the years of Zoyd’s technique, pointing out the useful distinction between the defenestrative personality, which prefers jumping out of windows, and the transfenestrative, which tends to jump through, each reflecting an entirely different psychic subtext, at about which point Zoyd and Prairie began to drift away.

  “Give you a nine point five, Dad, your personal best—too bad the VCR’s busted, we could’ve taped it.”

  “I’m workin’ on it.”

  She looked at him evenly. “We really need a new one.”

  “All I need’s the money, Trooper, I can’t even keep enough groceries in this place.”

  “Oh, no. I know what that means. Fat talk! What am I supposed to do? Isn’t me that’s leaving all these cakes and pies and stuff layin’ around, candy bars in the freezer, Nestle’s Quik instead of sugar, eeoo! What chance have I got?”

  “Hey, all’s I was talkin’ about was money, kid. Who’s been makin’ you crazy with fat talk?”

  The girl’s head on its long smooth neck and vertebrae gave a small precision turn and tilt, as if slipping into an adjustment that would allow her to talk with her father. “Oh . . . maybe one or two remarks lately from the Big I.”

  “Oh great, yes, the well-known punker diet expert—named himself after what again, some robot?”

  “After Isaiah Two Four, a verse in the Bible,” shaking her head I-give-up slowly, “which your friends his hippie-freak parents laid on him in 1967, about converting from war to peace, beating spears into pruning hooks, other idiot peacenik stuff?”

  “Well both of you just better watch ’at shit, ’d it ever occur to you maybe ol’ R2D2’s just cheap, and doesn’t want to buy you any more food than he has to? What’s he doing? What does he let you eat?”

  “Love is strange, Dad, maybe you forgot that.”

  “I know love is strange, known it since 1956, including all those guitar breaks. You’re in love with this individual, well, maybe you forget, I already know him, I can remember all you guys trick or treatin’ not so long ago and let me tell you, any kid who shows up at the door as ‘Jason’ from Friday the 13th [1980], please, take it from an old mental case, he’s in some trouble.”

  Prairie sighed. “Everybody was Jason that year. He’s a classic now, like a Frankenstein, and so what, I don’t see how you could have any kind of a problem with that. Isaiah has always admired you, you know.”

  “What?”

  “For jumping through all those windows. He’s studied every inch of all your videotapes. Says you were nearly speared a couple of times.”

  “Nearly, ah. . . .”

  “Glass falls straight down out of the window frame,” she explained, “in these big sharp spears? heavy enough to go right through ya? Isaiah says all his friends have remarked on how awesomely cool you always look, how unaware of the danger.”

  White and nauseated, he was still able to peer dubiously out of one eye. No point telling her about the fake window today, she looked so sincere, even, unnaturally, admiring, good time to just dummy up. But was it true, was it possible, had he been that close to death or major surgery each previous fun-filled time? How, then, unless he could count on sugar windows from here on in, could he expect to bring in any more revenue this way? Heck—he should have been working for a Joey Chitwood-type thrill show all this time and making some real money.

  “. . . and I think you and Isaiah could even do some business,” Prairie had evidently been saying,” ’cause I know he’d be willing, and all you’d have to do’s keep an open mind.”

  Zoyd didn’t know what she was talking about, but forced himself to think chirpy. “Long as he don’t open it for me,” having then to dodge the athletic shoe, luckily without her foot in it, that came whizzing past his ear.

  “You are judging him by his haircut, his haircut alone,” shaking her finger, trying for something between neighborhood scold and soap-opera Chief of Psychiatric. “You’ve turned into exactly the same kind of father that used to hassle you, back when you were a teen hippie freak.”

  “Sure I was at least as heavy duty of a menace to the public as your boyfriend is today, but never did any of us in my generation show up late at night at somebody’s door in no hockey mask, carryin’ around all these lethal blades, even somethin’ looked like a pruning hook? and you’re telling me we can do business? What business, summer-camp renovation?” He started throwing Cheetos at her, scattering vividly orange crumbs all over.

  “He’s got a good idea, if only you’d listen, Pop.”

  “Pop this.” Zoyd ate a Chee-to he’d been planning to throw. “Of course I can listen, I hope I can still do that, what kind of uptight father do you take me for, why, he might even turn out to be a fine young man despite all the evidence, look at Moondoggie, for example, in Gidget [1959], after all. . . .”

  “Isaiah!” hollered the girl, “let’s move it mah man, no telling how long he’s even gonna be in this good of a mood,” and out of another dimension, where he’d been waiting in orbit, emerged Isaiah Two Four, who today, Zoyd noticed, had his long Mohawk colored a vibrant acid green, except at the tips, where some magenta shade was airbrushed on. Now these happened to be Zoyd’s two all-time favorite colors, and Prairie, who had given him enough T-shirts and ashtrays in the quaint sixties combo, knew it. Was this some weird effort to be nice?

  Isaiah, in their greeting, wanted to slap and dap, having always somehow believed that Zoyd had seen combat in Vietnam. Some of this was bush-vet and jailyard moves Zoyd recognized, some was private choreography he couldn’t keep up with, though he tried, Isaiah throughout humming Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” “Hey, so, Mr. Wheeler,” Isaiah at last, “how you doing?”

  “What’s this ‘Mr. Wheeler,’ what happened to ‘You lunch meat, ’sucker’?” this line having climaxed their last get-together, when, from a temperate discussion of musical differences, feelings had swiftly escalated into the rejection, on quite a broad scale, of most of one another’s values.

  “Well then, sir,” replied the NBA-sized violence enthusiast who might or might not be fucking his daughter, “I must’ve meant ‘lunch meat’ only in terms of our joint strange fate as mortal sandwich, equally exposed to the jaws of destiny, and from that perspective what’s it matter, rilly, that you don’t care for the musical statements of Septic Tank or Fascist Toejam?” jiveassing so obvious that Zoyd had no choice but to thaw.

  “By the same token, I could easily overlook as trivial your spirited advocacy of the Uzi as a means of resolving many of our social
problems.”

  “That’s gracious of you, sir.”

  “Eats, you guys,” Prairie coming in with a gallon of guacamole and a giant-size sack of tortilla chips, Zoyd wondering if soon there ought not to appear as well, aha there it was—a cold sixpack of Dos Equis, ah right! Popping one open, beaming, he observed once again in his daughter the sly, not yet professionally developed gift of staging a hustle, something she must surely have got from him, and he felt himself begin to glow, unless it was the guacamole, in which she’d gone a little heavy tonight on the commercial salsa.

  Zoyd’s reference to the Uzi submachine gun, “Badass of the Desert,” as it is known in its native Israel, had been appropriate. Isaiah’s business idea was to set up first one, eventually a chain, of violence centers, each on the scale, perhaps, of a small theme park, including automatic-weapon firing ranges, paramilitary fantasy adventures, gift shops and food courts, and video game rooms for the kids, for Isaiah envisioned a family clientele. Also part of the concept were a standardized floor plan and logo, for franchising purposes. Isaiah sat at the cable-spool table, making diagrams with tortilla chips and pitching his dreams—“Third World Thrills,” a jungle obstacle course where you got to swing on ropes, fall into the water, blast away at surprise pop-up targets shaped like indigenous guerrilla elements . . . “Scum of the City,” which would allow the visitor to wipe from the world images of assorted urban undesirables, including Pimps, Perverts, Dope Dealers, and Muggers, all carefully multiracial so as to offend everybody, in an environment of dark alleys, lurid neon, and piped-in saxophone music . . . and for the aggro connoisseur, “Hit List,” in which you could customize a lineup of videotapes of the personalities in public life you hated most, shown one apiece on the screens of old used TV sets bought up at junkyard prices and sent past you by conveyor belt, like ducks at the carnival, so your pleasure at blowing away these jabbering, posturing likenesses would be enhanced by all the imploding picture tubes. . . .