Thomas Pynchon

Every dog has his day,

and a good dog

just might have two days.

— Johnny Copeland

VINELAND

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LATER than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof. In his dream these had been carrier pigeons from someplace far across the ocean, landing and taking off again one by one, each bearing a message for him, but none of whom, light pulsing in their wings, he could ever quite get to in time. He understood it to be another deep nudge from forces unseen, almost surely connected with the letter that had come along with his latest mental-disability check, reminding him that unless he did something publicly crazy before a date now less than a week away, he would no longer qualify for benefits. He groaned out of bed. Somewhere down the hill hammers and saws were busy and country music was playing out of somebody's truck radio. Zoyd was out of smokes.

On the table in the kitchen, next to the Count Chocula box, which turned out to be empty, he found a note from Prairie. "Dad, they changed my shift again, so I rode in with Thapsia. You got a call from Channel 86, they said urgent, I said, you try waking him up sometime. Love anyway, Prairie."

"Froot Loops again I guess," he muttered at the note. With enough Nestle's Quik on top, they weren't all that bad, and various ashtrays yielded half a dozen smokable butts. After taking as much time as he could in the bathroom, he finally got around to locating the phone and calling the local TV station to recite to them this year's press release. But — "You'd better check again, Mr. Wheeler. Word we have is that you've been rescheduled." "Check with who, I'm the one's doin' it, ain't I?" "We're all supposed to be at the Cucumber Lounge." "Well I won't, I'll be up at the Log Jam in Del Norte." What was the matter with these people? Zoyd had been planning this for weeks.

Desmond was out on the porch, hanging around his dish, which was always empty because of the blue jays who came screaming down out of the redwoods and carried off the food in it piece by piece. After a while this dog-food diet had begun to give the birds an attitude, some being known to chase cars and pickups for miles down the road and bite anybody who didn't like it. As Zoyd came out, Desmond gave him an inquiring look. "Just dig yourself," shaking his head at the chocolate crumbs on the dog's face, "I know she fed you, Desmond, and I know what she fed you too." Desmond followed him as far as the firewood, tail going back and forth to show no hard feelings, and watched Zoyd backing all the way down to the lane before he turned and got on with his day.

Zoyd headed down to Vineland Mall and rolled around the lot there for a while, smoking up half a joint he'd found in his pocket, before parking the rig and going into More Is Less, a discount store for larger-size women, where he bought a party dress in a number of colors that would look good on television, paying with a check both he and the saleslady shared a premonition would end up taped to this very cash register after failing to clear, and proceeded to the men's room of the Breez-Thru gas station, where he shifted into the dress and with a small hairbrush tried to rat what was on his head and face into a snarl he hoped would register as insane-looking enough for the mental-health folks. Back at the pump he put in five dollars' worth of gas, went in the back seat, got a quart of oil out of the case he kept there, found his spout, punched it in the can, put most of the oil in his engine, except for a little he saved to mix in the can with some gas, and poured this into the tank of an elegant little imported-looking chain saw, about the size of a Mini-Mac, which he then stashed in a canvas beach bag. Prairie's friend Slide came wandering out of the office to have a look.

"Uh-oh, is it that time again already?"

"This year it snuck up on me, hate to think I'm gettin' too old for this."

"Know the feeling," Slide nodded.

"You're fifteen, Slide."

"And seen it all. Whose front window you doin' it to this year?"

"Nobody's. I'm givin' that all up, window jumping's in my past, this year I'm gonna just take this little chain saw into the Log Jam and see what develops from there."

"Um, maybe not, Mr. Wheeler, you been up there lately?"

"Oh I know there's some heavy-duty hombres, badasses, spend all day narrowly escaping death by tree, not too much patience with anything out of the ordinary, but I've got the element of surprise. Don't I?"

"You'll see," weary Slide advised.

He sure would, but only after spending more time out on 101 than his already fragile sense of humor could take, owing to a convoy of out-of-state Winnebagos on some leisurely tour of the redwoods, in among whom, on the two-lane stretches, he was obliged to gear down and put up with a lot of attention, not all friendly. "Gimme a break," he yelled over the engine noise, "it's, uh, a Calvin Klein original!"

"Calvin doesn't cut nothin' bigger than a 14," a girl younger than his daughter screamed at him out her window, "and you ought to be locked up."

It was well into lunchtime when he got to the Log Jam, and he was disappointed to find nobody at all from the media, just a collection of upscale machinery parked in the lot, itself newly blacktopped. These were to be the first of several rude updates. Trying to think cheerful thoughts — like assuming the television crews were only late — Zoyd collected the bag with the saw in it, checked his hair one more time, and went storming into the Log Jam, where right away he noticed that everything, from the cooking to the clientele, smelled different.

Uh-oh. Wasn't there supposed to be some loggers' bar around here someplace? Everybody knew it was high times for the stiffs in the woods — though not for those in the mills, with the Japanese buying up unprocessed logs as fast as the forests could be clear-cut — but even so, the scene in here was peculiar. Dangerous men with coarsened attitudes, especially toward death, were perched around lightly on designer barstools, sipping kiwi mimosas. The jukebox once famous for hundreds of freeway exits up and down the coast for its gigantic country-and-western collection, including half a dozen covers of "So Lonesome I Could Cry," was reformatted to light classical and New Age music that gently peeped at the edges of audibility, slowing, lulling this roomful of choppers and choker setters who now all looked like models in Father's Day ads. One of the larger of these, being among the first to notice Zoyd, had chosen to deal with the situation. He wore sunglasses with stylish frames, a Turnbull & Asser shirt in some pastel plaid, three-figure-price-tag jeans by Mme. Gris, and après-logging shoes of a subdued, but incontestably biue, suede.

"Well good afternoon pretty lady and how fine you're looking, I'm sure in another setting and mood we'd all like to know you as a person with your many fine points and so on like that, but from your fashion message I can tell that you are a sensitive type person who'll appreciate the problem we have here in terms of orientational vibes, if you follow —"

The already confused Zoyd, whose survival instincts may not have been working all the way up to spec, decided to produce the chain saw from his bag. "Buster," he called plaintively to the owner behind the bar, "where's the media?" The implement attracted immediate attention from everyone in the room, not all of it technical curiosity. It was a tailor-made lady's chain saw, "tough enough for timber," as the commercials said, "but petite enough for a purse." The guide bar, handle grips, and housing were faced in genuine mother-of-pearl, and spelled out in rhinestones on the bar, surrounded by sawteeth ready to buzz, was the name of the young woman he'd borrowed it from, which onlookers took to be Zoyd's drag name, cheryl.

"Easy there cowgirl, now things're just fine," the logger stepping back as Zoyd, he hoped demurely, yanked at a silk cord on a dainty starter pulley, and the lady's pearl-handled chain saw spun into action.

"Listen to that li'l honey purr."

"Zoyd, what th' heck you doin' this all the way up here for," Buster deciding it was time to intervene, "no channel's gonna send no crew this far out of town, why are you not down in Eureka or Arcata someplace?"

The logger stared. "This person is known to you?"

"Played together in the old Six Rivers Conference," Buster all smiles, "those were the days, huh Zoyd?"

"Can't hear you," hollered Zoyd, trying to maintain a quickly fading image of dangerousness. He throttled the nacreous pretty saw reluctantly back first to a ladylike bass line and then to silence. Into the echo, "See you did some redecorating."

"If you would've come around last month, you 'n' 'at little saw, could've helped us gut the place."

"Sorry, Buster, guess I did come to the wrong bar, I sure can't saw any of this stuff, not with the money you must've put in ... only reason I'm up here is is 'at the gentrification of South Spooner, Two Street, and other more familiar hellraisin' locales has upped the ante way outa my bracket, these are all folks now who like to sue, and for big bucks, with hotshot PI lawyers up from the City, I so much as blot my nose on one of their designer napkins I'm in deep shit anymore."

"Well, we're no longer as low-rent as people remember us here either Zoyd, in fact since George Lucas and all his crew came and went there's been a real change of consciousness."

"Yep, I noticed . . . say, you want to draw me a, just a lady's-size beer there . . . you know I still haven't even got around to that picture?"

They were talking about Return of the Jedi (1983), parts of which had been filmed in the area and in Buster's view changed life there forever. He put his massive elbows on about the only thing in here that hadn't been replaced, the original bar, carved back at the turn of the century from one giant redwood log. "But underneath, we're still just country fellas."

"From the looks of your parking lot, the country must be Germany."

"You and me Zoyd, we're like Bigfoot. Times go on, we never change, now, you're no bar fighter, I can see the thirst for new experiences, but a man's better off sticking to a specialty, your own basically being transfenestration."

"Mm yes, I could tell," commented another logger, his voice almost inaudible, sidling in and laying a hand on Zoyd's leg.

"Besides which," continued Buster, imperturbable, though his eyes were now fixed on the hand on the leg, "it's become your MO, diving through windows, you start in with other stuff at this late date, forcing the state to replace what's in your computer file with something else, this is not gunno endear you to them, 'Aha, rebellious ain't he?' they'll say, and soon you'll find those checks are gettin' slower, even lost, in the mail and say there Lemay! my good man and good sport, let's have a look at the palm of that hand up here on the bar a minute? 'Cz I'm gonna read your fortune for you, how about that," guiding by strange jovial magnetism a logger's hand that would just as happily have been a fist up off of the leg of by now mentally paralyzed Zoyd, or as the (it seemed) smitten Lemay kept calling him, Cheryl. "You will have a long life," Buster looking Lemay in the face, not the hand, "because of your common sense and grasp on reality. Five bucks."

"Huh?"

"Well — maybe just buy us a round, then. Zoyd here does look a little strange right now, but he's out on governmental business."

"I knew it!" cried Lemay. "Undercover agent!"

"Nut case," confided Zoyd.

"Oh. Well. . . that sounds like interesting work too. ..."

Just then the phone rang, and it was for Zoyd. His partner, Van Meter, was calling from the Cucumber Lounge, a notorious Vineland County roadhouse, in high agitation. "Got six mobile TV units waiting, network up from the City, plus paramedics and a snack truck, all wonderin' where you are."

"Here. You just called me, remember?"

"Aha. Good point. But you were supposed to be jumping through the front window at the Cuke today."

"No! I called everybody and told 'm it was up here. What happened?"

"Somebody said it got rescheduled."

"Shit. I knew someday this act would get bigger than me."

"Better come on back," said Van Meter.

Zoyd hung up, put the saw back in the bag, finished his beer, and made his exit, blowing broad show-biz kisses and reminding everybody to watch the evening news.

*

The Cucumber Lounge property extended back from the disreputable neon roadhouse itself into a few acres of virgin redwood grove. Dwarfed and overshadowed by the towering dim red trees were two dozen motel cabins, with woodstoves, porches, barbecues, waterbeds, and cable TV. During the brief North Coast summers they were for tourists and travelers, but through the rainy remainder of the year, occupants tended to be local, and paying by the week. The woodstoves were good for boiling, frying, even some baking, and some of the cabins had butane burners as well, so that along with woodsmoke and the austere fragrance of the trees, there was an all-day neighborhood smell of cooking in the air.

The lot Zoyd tried to find a parking space in had never been paved, and the local weather had been writing gullies across it for years. Today it was enjoying a visit from the media, plus a task force of cop vehicles, state and county, flashing their lights and playing the "Jeopardy" theme on their sirens. Mobile units, lights, cable, crews everywhere, even a couple of Bay Area stations. Zoyd began to feel nervous. "Maybe I should've found something cheap at Buster's to saw on anyway," he muttered. He finally had to pull around back and park in one of Van Meter's spaces. His old bass player and troublemaking companion had been living here for years, in what he still described as a commune, with an astounding number of current and ex-old ladies, ex-old ladies' boyfriends, children of parent combinations present and absent, plus miscellaneous folks in out of the night. Zoyd had watched television shows about Japan, showing places such as Tokyo where people got into incredibly crowded situations but, because over the course of history they'd all learned to act civil, everybody got along fine despite the congestion. So when Van Meter, a lifetime searcher for meaning, moved into this Cucumber Lounge bungalow, Zoyd had hoped for some Japanese-style serenity as a side effect, but no such luck. Instead of a quiescent solution to all the overpop, the "commune" chose an energetic one — bickering. Unrelenting and high-decibel, it was bickering raised to the level of ceremony, bickering that soon generated its own house newsletter, the Blind-Side Gazette, bickering that could be heard even out on the freeway by the drivers of hurtling eighteen-wheelers, some of whom thought it was radio malfunction, others unquiet ghosts.

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 unfur-rowing 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 thumb-grips.

"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 $ioo, 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 feder-ale'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 Chee-tos 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 Vine-land 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 oP 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 Chee-tos 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 Moon-doggie, 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 six-pack 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. . . .

Zoyd was barely ahead of the white water here, nearly taken under by the surge of demographics and earnings projections the kid was coming up with. Dazedly he realized that at some point his mouth had fallen open and remained so, he didn't know for how long. He shut it too abruptly and clipped his tongue, just as Isaiah arrived at the line, "And it won't cost you a penny."

"Uh-huh. How much will it cost me?"

Isaiah gave him the five-figure California orthodontia, plus full eye contact. Zoyd need only stand ready to cosign for a loan —

Zoyd allowed himself a lengthy and mirthless chuckle. "And who'll be doing the lending?" expecting some address in a distant state, obtained from a matchbook cover. Turned out to be the Bank of Vineland Itself. "You didt'n, uh, threaten 'em, nothin' like 'at?" Zoyd needling the long-shadowed youth.

Isaiah just shrugged and went on, "In consideration, you get all the construction and landscaping work."

"Wait a minute, why don't your parents cosign?"

"Oh. ... I guess 'cause they've always been into, you know, nonviolence?" There was something wistful in the way he said this. It wasn't just that his folks were vegetarians, they also discriminated among vegetables, excluding from their diet everything red, for example, the color of anger. Most bread, having been made by killing yeasts, was taboo. Zoyd, no shrink, nonetheless wondered if the kid wasn't doing unto Prairie what was being done unto him at home, in terms of food craziness.

"And . . . your folks don't know about this yet?"

"Sort of wanted it to be a surprise?"

Zoyd cackled. "Parents love surprises," and he caught Prairie giving him a weird look, like, Oh yeah? here, try this —

Instead, "We were all gonna go camping out for a few days, OK? Basically the band and a couple of other girls?"

Isaiah played with a local heavy-metal band called Billy Barf and the Vomitones, who'd been having trouble lately rinding work.

"Go see Ralph Wayvone, Jr., over at the Cuke," Zoyd advised, "his sister's getting married down the City next weekend, the band suddenly ain't gonna show, and he sounds a little desperate for a replacement."

"Uh ... well maybe I'll do it now, can I use your phone?"

"Think it's in the bathroom, last time I looked."

Alone, he and Prairie happened to get eye contact. She'd never been a squirmer, not even as a baby. Finally she said, "So?"

"He's a OK fella, but no bank's gonna let me cosign no loan, come on."

"You're a local businessman."

"They'll call it gypsy roofer, and I owe too much money all over the place anyhow."

"They love it when you owe money."

"Not like I owe it, Prairie — if the whole project went belly-up, they'd take the house." A point that may even have begun to get through, when Isaiah came running out of the bathroom yelling, "We got the gig! We got it! Awesome! I can't believe it!"

"Me either," Zoyd muttered. "You're going to a full-scale Italian wedding and do what? 'Fascist Toejam's Greatest Hits'?"

"It could need some reconceptualizing," Isaiah admitted. "I, like, implied we were Italian, for one thing."

"Well you might want to learn a few of the tunes, but you'll settle in, try not to worry," chortling to himself as Prairie and Isaiah went out the door, yes always glad to help out, my boy, a crime-family gig, whatever, no no, don't bother to thank me. . . . Zoyd had played a few mob weddings in his career, nothing the kid couldn't handle, and besides the eats would more than make up for any awkward episodes, so it wasn't as if he were running a mean trick on his daughter's boyfriend, whom he was still not 100 percent crazy about, or anything like that. And as a problem to be addressed, Isaiah was more like a vacation from deeper difficulties, chief among which, all of a sudden, was the recrudescence of Hector Zuñiga in Zoyd's life, a topic, as he lit a joint and settled in front of the soundless Tube, that his thoughts unavoidably found their way back to.

IT was a romance over the years at least as persistent as Sylvester and Tweety's. Although Hector may from time to time have wished some cartoon annihilation for Zoyd, he'd understood from early in their acquaintance that Zoyd was the chasee he'd be least likely ever to bag. Not that he credited Zoyd with anything like moral integrity in resisting him. He put it down instead to stubbornness, plus drug abuse, ongoing mental problems, and a timidity, maybe only a lack of imagination, about the correct scale of any deal in life, drug or nondrug. And though not as obsessed these days about turning Zoyd — they'd had that crisis long ago — Hector still, for no reason he could name, liked to keep on popping in every now and then, preferably unannounced. He showed up first in Zoyd's life shortly after Reagan was elected governor of California. Zoyd was living down south then, sharing a house in Gordita Beach with elements of a surf band he'd been playing keyboard in since junior high, the Corvairs, along with friends more and less transient. The house was so old that all of its termite clauses and code violations had been waived, on the theory that the next moderate act of nature would finish it off. But having been put up back during an era of overdesign, it proved to be sturdier than it looked, with its old stucco eaten at to reveal generations of paint jobs in different beach-town pastels, corroded by salt and petrochemical fogs that flowed in the summers onshore up the sand slopes, on up past Sepulveda, often across the then undeveloped fields, to wrap the San Diego Freeway too. Down here, a long screened porch faced out over flights of rooftops descending to the beach. Access from the street was by way of a Dutch door, whose open top half, that long-ago evening, had come to frame Hector under a ragged leather hat with a wide brim, peering through sunglasses, the darkening Pacific in pale-topped crawl below. Out on the street, wedged into most of the front seat of a motor-pool Plymouth, waited Hector's partner in those days, the seriously oversize field agent Melrose Fife. Zoyd, whose luck it happened to've been to answer Hector's knock, stood trying to understand what this individual with the outlaw hat and cop sideburns was talking about.

After a bit, Corvairs lead guitar and vocalist Scott Oof wandered in from the kitchen to join them, leaning on the doorjamb playing with his hair. "Maybe later," Hector greeted him, "you could explain this all to your friend here, 'cause I don't know if I've been gittín through. ..."

"¿Qué?" replied Scott wittily. "No hablo inglés."

"Whoa." Hector's front-door smile tightened up. "Maybe I should get my pardner up here for this. See him, out there in the car? You can't really tell till he stands up, but he is so big, that nobody ever wants to get him out of the car, 'cause once he's out, you dig, he ain't alwayss that easy to git back in?"

"Don't mind Scott," Zoyd hastily, "he's a surfer — so long, Scott — he had a little run-in a few years ago with some, uh, young gentlemen of Mexican origin, so sometimes —"

"In the parking lot at the Taco Bell in Hermosa, yes a memorable series of evenings, much celebrated in the folklore of my people" — this being in the early days of a Ricardo Montalban impersonation that would over the years grow more refined.

"You've come to take revenge?"

"Please. For-give me," Hector producing from an inside pocket, access to which now also afforded a leisurely view of a service .38 in an armpit rig, his federal commission in a fancy tooled flip-open leather case.

"Nobody here's into nothing federal," Zoyd didn't think.

Van Meter, back in those days sporting a profile that mandated at least a stop-and-frisk, ran in frowning. "What's wrong with Scott? he just split out the back."

"What I'm really here about," Hector had been explaining, "is the matter of drugs."

"Thank God!" screamed Van Meter, "it's been weeks, we thought we'd never score again! oh yes, it's a miracle—" Zoyd kicking him frantically — "who sent you, are you the dude that knows Leon?"

The federale showed his teeth, amused. "Subject you refer to is temporarily in custody, though sure to be back before very long in his accustomed spot beneath the Gordita Pier."

"Aaaaaa ...," went Van Meter.

"No, no my man but that is precisely the sort of corroborating detail that we value so highly," snapping, like a magician, a crisp five-dollar bill, half a lid of Mexican commercial in those days, from behind Van Meter's ear. Zoyd rolled his eyes as the bass player grabbed at the money. "And there's always plenty more in our imprest fund for good-quality product. For make-believe bullshit, of course, we pay nothing, and in time we grow annoyed."

That fatal five-spot was not the last Purchase-of-Information disbursement in the neighborhood. In those years there were so many federal narcs in the area that if you were busted in the South Bay you actually stood less chance of its being the local Man than some fed. All the beach towns, plus Torrance, Hawthorne, and greater Walteria, were in on some grandiose pilot project bankrolled with inexhaustible taxpayer millions, appropriate chunks of which were finding their way to antidrug entities up and down every level of governance. Zoyd, to be sure, made a point of never pocketing any of Hector's PI money personally, though he was content to go on eating the groceries, burning the gas, and smoking the pot others obtained with it. Now and then he would get fooled on some minor dope purchase, sweet basil in a heat-sealed bag, a small vial of Bisquick (yep, he'd murmur, still making stupid mistakes and how about yourself?) and he'd feel really tempted, sometimes for days, to turn the dealer in to Hector. But there were always good reasons not to — it would happen that one was a cool person who needed the money, another a distant cousin from the Middle West, or a homicidal maniac who would take revenge, so forth. Each time Zoyd failed to inform on these people, Hector grew furious. "You think you're protectín them? They just gonna fuck you over again." The edge in his voice was frustration, everything about this Gordita assignment was just really fucking frustrating, all these identical-looking beach pads beginning to blend together, resulting in more than enough mistaken addresses, early-morning raids upon the innocent, failures to apprehend fugitives who might have only fled across an alley or down a flight of public steps. The arrangements of hillside levels, alleyways, corners, and rooftops created a Casbah topography that was easy to get lost in quickly, terrain where the skills of the bushwhacker became worth more than any resoluteness of character, an architectural version of the uncertainty, the illusion, that must have overtaken his career for him ever to've been assigned there in the first place.

"Situations back then," Zoyd hammered it on in, these many years later, "relationships, sure got tangled up in that house, with more and also less temporary love partners and sex companions, jealousy and revenge always goin' on, plus substance dealers and their go-betweens, and narcs who thought they were undercover trying to pop them, couple-three politicals fleein' from different jurisdictions, good deal of comin' and goin' 's what it was, not to mention you actin' like it was your own personal snitch Safeway, just drop in, we're open 24 hours."

They were sitting at a table in the rear of the restaurant at Vineland Lanes, Zoyd after a lot of lost sleep having decided to show up after all. He ordered the Health Food Enchilada Special and Hector had the soup of the day, cream of zucchini, and the vegetarian tostada, which upon its arrival he began to take apart piece by piece and reassemble as something else Zoyd could not identify but which seemed to hold meaning for Hector.

"Lookit that, lookit your food, Hector, what have you done?"

"At least I'm not droppín it all over the place, includín my shirt, like I was out in some parkin lot." Yes, a certain emphasis there for sure, and this after their having shared, maybe not many, but still a parking lot or two, even some adventures therein. Zoyd guessed that at some point since their last get-together Hector, as if against a storm approaching over his life's horizon, had begun to bring everything indoors. Stuck out in the field at GS-13 for years because of his attitude, he had sworn — Zoyd thought — he'd go out the gate early before he'd ever be some cagatintas, a bureaucrat who shits ink. But he must have cut some deal, maybe it got too cold for him — time to say goodbye to all those eyeswept parking lots back out under the elements and the laws of chance, and hello GS-14, leaving the world outside the office to folks earlier in their careers, who could appreciate it more. Too bad. For Zoyd, a creature of attitude himself, this long defiance had been Hector's most persuasive selling point.

What the federal computers this morning had not brought to Hector's attention was that the alleys today were scheduled for junior regional semifinals. Kids were in town from all over the northern counties to compete on these intricately mortised masterpiece alleys, dating back to the high tide of the logging business in these parts, when the big houses framed all in redwood had gone up and legendary carpenters had appeared descending from rain-slick stagecoaches, geniuses with wood who could build you anything from a bowling alley to a Carpenter Gothic outhouse. Balls struck pins, pins struck wood, echoes of collision came thundering in from next door along with herds of kids in different bowling jackets, each carrying at least one ball in a bag plus precarious stacks of sodas and food, each squeaking open the screen door between lanes and restaurant, letting it squeak shut into the next kid, who'd squeak it open again. Didn't take many of these repetitions to have an effect on Zoyd's lunch companion, whose eyes were flicking back and forth as he hummed a tune that not till sixteen bars in did Zoyd recognize as "Meet the Flintstones," from the well-known TV cartoon show. Hector finished the tune and looked sourly at Zoyd. "Any of these yours?"

Here it was. OK, "What are you sayin', Hector?"

"You know what I'm sayín, asshole."

Zoyd couldn't see a thing in his eyes. "Who you been talking to?"

"Your wife."

Zoyd began stabbing and restabbing his enchiladas with a fork while Hector waited him out. "Uh, well how's she doing?"

Hector's eyes were moist, and popping out some. "Not too good, li'l buddy."

"Tryin' to tell me what, she's in trouble?"

"You catch on fast for an ol' doper, now try this one, you ever heard of defunding? Maybe you noticed on the news, on the Tube, all these stories about Reaganomics, a-an' cutbacks in the federal budget and stuff?"

"She was on some program? Now she's off it?" They were talking about his ex-wife, Frenesi, years and miles in the past. Why, besides the free lunch, was Zoyd sitting here listening to this? Hector, leaning forward bright-eyed, had begun to show signs of enjoying himself. "Where is she?"

"Well, we had her under Witness Protection."

Not hearing the stress on had right away, "Oh bullshit, Hector, that's for Mob folks trying to be ex-Mob 'thout havin' to die first, since when are you usin' that Mafia meat locker for politicals, thought you just took 'em put 'em in the booby hatch like they do over there in Russia."

"Well, technically it was a different budget line, but still run by the U.S. Marshals, same as with the Mob type of witness."

Man could crush him with just a short tap dance over the computer keys — why was Hector being so unnaturally amiable? All that could possibly be restraining the tough old doorkicker was kindness, unfortunately a trait he was born so short on that nobody living or dead had ever observed it anywhere near him.

"So — she's in with all these Mob snitches, the money disappears, but you still have her file, you can punch her up when you need her —"

"Wrong. Her file is destroyed." The word hung in the wood space, between percussive attacks from next door.

"Why? Thought you guys never destroyed a file, 'th all 'ese little fund, defund, refund games —"

"We don't know why. But it's no game in Washington — chále ése — this ain't tweakín around no more with no short-term maneuvers here, this is a real revolution, not that little fantasy hand-job you people was into, is it's a groundswell, Zoyd, the wave of History, and you can catch it, or scratch it." He eyed Zoyd with a smug look which in view of what he'd been doing to his tostada, over, by now, most of the tabletop, lacked authenticity. "The man who once shot the old Hermosa Pier durín a lightnín storm," Hector shaking his head. "Listen, K mart this week has full-length mirrors on sale, and I'm nobody's charm-school professor, but I'd urge you to get one. Might want to start upgradín your image, li'l buddy."

"Wait a minute, you don't know why her file was destroyed?"

"Is why we're gonna need your help. The money's good."

"Oh, shit. Yah, hah, hah, hah, you lost her's what happened, some idiot back there wiped out the computer file, right? Now you don't even know where she is, and you think I do."

"Not exactly. We think now she's headín back here."

"She wa'n' spoze to Hector, that was never part of the deal. I wondered how long it was gonna take — twelve, thirteen years, not bad, you mind if I call the Guinness Book Hot Line with this, it has to be a world record for fascist regimes keepin' their word."

"Still simmerín away with those same old feelings, I see — figured you'd be mellower by now, maybe some reconciliation with reality, I dunno."

"When the State withers away, Hector."

"Caray, you sixties people, it's amazing. Ah love ya! Go anywhere, it don't matter — hey, Mongolia! Go way out into smalltown Outer Mongolia, ése, there's gonna be some local person about your age come runnín up, two fingers in a V, hollerín, 'What's yer sign, man?' or singín 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' note for note."

"Satellites, everybody hears everything, space is really something, what else?"

The dope cop permitted himself an Eastwood-style mouth-muscle nuance. "Don't be disingenuous, I know you still believe in all that shit. All o' you are still children inside, livín your real life back then. Still waitín for that magic payoff. But no prob, I can live with that. .. and it ain't like you're lazy or afraid to work, either. .. impossible to tell with you, Zoyd. Never could figure out how innocent you thought you were. Sometimes you looked just like a hippie bum musician, for months at a shot, as if you never turned a buck any other way. Rill puzzlín."

"Hector! Bite yer tongue! You tellin' me I — I wasn't innocent, me behavin' like a saint through it all?"

"You behaved about like everybody else, pardner, sorry."

"That bad."

"I won't aks you to grow up, but just sometime, please, aks yourself, OK, 'Who was saved?' That's all, rill easy, 'Who was saved?' "

"Beg pardon?"

"One OD'd on the line at Tommy's waitín for a burger, one got into some words in a parkin lot with the wrong gentleman, one took a tumble in a faraway land, so on, more 'n half of 'em currently on the run, and you so far around the bend you don't even see it, that's what became of your happy household, you'd've done better up against the SWAT team. Just in the privacy of your thotz, Zoyd. As a exercise, li'l kinda Zen meditation. 'Who was saved?' "

"You, Hector."

"Ay se va, go on, break your old compinche's heart. Here I thought you knew everything, it turns out you don't know shit." Grinning — a stretched and terrible face. It was the closest Hector got to feeling sorry for himself, this suggestion he liked to put out that among the fallen, he had fallen further than most, not in distance alone but also in the quality of descent, having begun long ago concentrated and graceful as a sky diver but — the tos-tada procedure was minor evidence — he growing less professional the longer he fell, while his skills as a field man depreciated. He had come, with these falling years, simply to rely on going in, trying to neutralize whoever was there with a repertoire of assault that still ran from stupefy to obliterate, and if they were waiting for him one time and got in the first move, ay muere, too bad. Hector sadly knew this wasn't anywhere near the samurai condition of always being on that perfect edge prepared to die, a feeling he'd known only a few times in his life, long ago. Nowadays, with his old fighting talents lapsed, what looked like simple impulse or will might as easily have been advanced self-hatred. Zoyd, the big idealist, liked to believe that Hector remembered everybody he'd ever shot at, hit, missed, booked, questioned, rousted, double-crossed — that each face was filed in his conscience, and the only way he could live with such a history was to take these chances with his own bad ass, upping the ante as he moved into his late midcareer. This theory at least had kept Zoyd from lying around hatching plots to assassinate Hector, as others had been known to waste hours of potentially productive lives doing. Hector was the kind of desperado whose ideal assassin was himself — he could choose the best method, time, and place and would always have the best motives for it of anyone.

"So, let me guess, I'm spoze to be some early-warning alarm, some invisible beam she can walk through and break, so you get a few minutes' edge but meanwhile I'm the one gets interrupted, or come to think of it, broken, somethin' like that?"

"Not at all. You can go on with your life, such as it is. Nobody runnín you, you don't call in, we don't call unless we need you. All's you got to do's be there, in place — be yourself, as your music teacher probably used to tell you."

Late hit, Zoyd thought, not like him, what's wrong with the li'l fella today, with this edge on everything? "Well sounds like a breeze, and you mean I get paid for it too?"

"Special Employee scale, maybe even a bonus."

"Used to be a twenty, as I recall, limp and warm from some agent's wallet his kid gave him for Christmas. . . ."

"Sure — you'll find today it can be well into the low three figures, Zoyd."

"Wait a minute — bonus? What for?"

"Whatever."

"Can I have a uniform, a badge, a piece?"

"You gonna do it?"

"Bullshit Hector, you givin' me a choice?"

The federale shrugged. "It's a free country. The Lord, as they call him around my office, created all of us, even you, with free will. I think it's weird you don't even want to find out about her."

"You're one sentimental hombre, you meddlin' ol' Cupid ya. Well maybe you can relate to this — it took me a long time even to get to where I am on the whole subject o' her, now you want to post me right back down into it again, but guess what, I don't want to go back 'n' waller in all 'at."

"How about your kid, then?"

"Yes, Hector. What about her? I really need to hear some more federal advice right now about how I should be bringin' up my own kid, we know already how much all you Reaganite folks care about the family unit, just from how much you're always in fuckin' around with it."

"Maybe this ain't gonna work after all."

"It does seem," Zoyd careful, "like that you're spending a lot on one long-ago federal case everybody's forgotten."

"You should see how much. Maybe it goes beyond your ex-old lady, li'l buddy."

"Far, far beyond?"

"I used to worry about you, Zoyd, but I see I can rest easy now the Vaseline of youth has been cleared from your life's lens by the mild detergent solution of time, in its passing. .. ." Hector sat slumped in zomoskepsis, or the contemplation of his soup. "I should charge you my consultancy fee, but I already checked your shoes, so I'll give you this for free." Was he reading strange soup messages? "Your ex-old lady, up till they terminated her budget line, was livín in a underground of the State, not like th' old Weatherpeople or nothín, OK? but a certain kind of world that civilians up on the surface, out in the sun thinkín 'em happy thotz, got no idea it's even there...." Hector was usually too cool to be much of a lapel-grabber, but something in his voice now, had Zoyd been wearing a jacket, might have warned of an attempt. "Nothín like that shit on the Tube, nothín at all... and cold ... colder than you ever want to find out about. . . ."

"That case, I got no problem staying out of the way, 'specially anybody she's been runnin' with, and good luck yourself, pal."

"I don't need that from you, Zoyd, you're just as fucked as you ever were, and you picked up a mean streak too."

"Nothin' meaner than a old hippie that's gone sour, Hector, lot of it around."

"You pussies set yourselves up for it," Hector advised, "don't be complainín this far down the line, it's only business, and we're both gonna make out, all's you do's sit tight while I do the work."

"Hope you don't need a yes or no right away."

"Time is of the essence, you're not the only one I'm tryín to coordinate here." Shook his head sadly. "We been out cruisín different boulevards for years now, did you send one Christmas card, or ask about Debbi, or the kids, or what's been happenín to my consciousness? Maybe I'm Mormon now, how would you know? Maybe Debbi talked me into goín on a retreat one weekend and it changed my life. And maybe you should even be thinkín about your spirit, Zoyd."

"My—"

"Takes a little discipline's all, wouldn't kill you."

"I'm sorry, Hector, how are Debbi and the kids?"

"Zoyd, if only you hadn't been such a asshole all your life, just skippín along through the wildflowers, so forth, thinkín you were so special, that you didt'n have to do what everybody else did. ..."

"Maybe I don't. You think I do?"

"Hey, all right fuckhead, try this — you are goín to have to die? Yeah-heh-heh, remember that? Death! after all them yearss of nonconformist shit, you're gonna end up just like everybody else anyway! ¡Ja, ja! So what was it for? All 'at livín in the hippie dirt, drivín around some piece of garbage ain't even in the blue book no more, passín up some really serious bucks't you could've spent not just on y'rself and your kid but on all your beloved bro and sister hippie fools who could've used it as much as you?"

A waitress approached with the check. Both men — Hector by reflex and Zoyd then startled into it — sprang toward her and collided, and the girl, alarmed, backed away, dropping the document, which then got batted around by the three parties until at last fluttering into a revolving condiment tray, where it ended up half submerged in a big fluffy mound of mayonnaise gone translucent at the edges.

"Check's in the mayo," Zoyd had time to note, when all at once, out past the street door, came a convergence of sirens, purposeful shouting, then heavy boots, all in step, thumping their direction.

"¡Madre de Dios!" an oddly panicked, high-pitched Hector was up and running for the kitchen — luckily, Zoyd noted, having left a twenty on the table — now with a platoon of folks come crashing in after him, what was this, all wearing identical camo jumpsuits and crash helmets with the word NEVER stenciled on. Two stayed by the door, two more went over to check the bowling alley, the rest went running on after Hector into the kitchen, where there was already a lot of screaming and clanging.

Dude in a white lab coat over Pendleton shirt and jeans now came strolling in between the two doorpeople, heading for Zoyd, who beamed insincerely, "Never saw him before."

"Zoyd Wheeler! Hi, caught you on the news last night, fabulous, didn't know you and Hector were acquainted, listen, he hasn't been quite himself, signed in with us for some therapy, and now, frankly.. . ."

"He broke out."

"We'll catch up eventually. But if you have any further contact, you'll give us a call, hmmm?"

"Who are you?"

"Oh. Sorry." He handed Zoyd a card that read, "Dr. Dennis Deeply, M.S.W., Ph.D. / National Endowment for Video Education and Rehabilitation," someplace down north of Santa Barbara, a struck circle around a TV set, above the Latin motto Ex luce ad sanitatem, with a printed phone number crossed out and another ballpointed in. "That's our local number, we're staying at the Vineland Palace till we catch Hector."

"Nice per diem. You guys're federal?"

"Bisectoral, really, private and public, grants, contracts, basically we study and treat Tubal abuse and other video-related disorders."

"A dryin'-out place for Tubefreeks? You mean .. . Hector...." And Zoyd remembered him humming that Flintstone theme to calm himself down, and all those "li'l buddy"s, which as they both knew was what the Skipper always liked to call Gilligan, raising possibilities Zoyd didn't want to think about.

Dr. Deeply shrugged eloquently. "One of the most intractable cases any of us has seen. He's already in the literature. Known in our field as the Brady Buncher, after his deep although not exclusive attachment to that series."

"Oh, yeah, that was ol' Marcia, right, and then the middle one's name was —" till Zoyd noticed the piercing look he was getting.

"Maybe," said Dr. Deeply, "you should give us a call anyway."

"I didn't say I could remember all their names!" Zoyd yelled after him, but he was already halfway out the door, soon to be joined by the others and then, presently, gone, and without having caught Hector, either.

Hector, who it now seemed was some sort of escaped lunatic, was still at large.

ZOYD hit Phantom Ridge Road about an hour later than he wanted because of Elvissa up the hill's blown head gasket, which brought her down at 6:oo a.m. to borrow his rig, for which it had taken Zoyd then a while to scout up a replacement. This turned out to be a Datsun Li'l Hustler pickup, belonging to his neighbor Trent, with a camper shell whose unusual design gave the vehicle some cornering problems. "Long as you don't try it with the tank anywhere between empty and full," Trent suggested, he thought helpfully. But it was actually the camper shell, covered all over with cedar shakes in some doper's idea of imbrication and topped by a pointed shake roof with a stovepipe coming out, that seemed to be the problem. Zoyd very carefully hooked a right and was soon climbing switchbacks up a ridge of as yet unlogged second-growth redwoods, on whose other side lay Phantom Creek. The fog here had burned off early, leaving a light blue haze that began to fade the more distant trees. He was heading for a little farm on the creek road, where he had a sideline in crawfish with a bush vet and his family. They'd go harvest the little 'suckers from up and down Phantom and a couple of adjoining creeks, and Zoyd would bring the good-eating crustaceans back down 101 to a string of restaurants catering to depraved yuppie food preferences, in this case California Cajun, though the critters also got listed here and there as Ecrivisses à la Maison and Vineland Lobster.

RC and Moonpie, real names left back along their by now erased-enough trail since the war, were as happy to see the money as the kids were to be out doing the work — Morning, the biggest, splashing down the middle of the creek, with the others carrying jars and sacks of twenty-penny nails, and fastening a piece of bacon to the bottom of every knee-deep pool they came to. By the time they got back to where they'd started, there'd be frantic invasions of crawdads, all milling around unable to get the bacon loose.

Procedure then was to bring out a minnow bag on a stick, hit the crawdad on the nose with the stick, and catch it, as it jumped, in the bag. Sometimes the kids would even allow their parents to come along and help out.

Zoyd had known the family since the early seventies, having in fact met Moonpie on the night of the day his divorce became final, which also happened to be the night before his very first window jump, in a way both part of the same letter of agreement. He was drinking beers in a longhairs' saloon called the Lost Nugget down on South Spooner in Vineland, looking for a way not to think about Frenesi or the life together that had just officially come to an end with no last-minute reversals, and Moonpie, equally young and lovely back in those days, seemed to Zoyd's crippled receptors just the ticket. That is until RC emerged from the can, with the deep eyes, the mortally cautious bearing, that told of where else he'd been. He slid back to the bar, dropped a hand on Moonpie's shoulder that she pressed for a moment with her cheek, and nodded at Zoyd with a please-don't-piss-me-off look of inquiry. Zoyd, already well into second thoughts anyway, instead spent the rest of that evening, and in fact many other nights down the years to come, not to mention daylight beer breaks, freeway meditations, and toilet-seat reveries, obsessing about his wife — he never would get too comfortable with "ex-wife" — and managing to bum out everybody inside a radius even these days considered respectable.

Zoyd's dream album someday would be an anthology of torch songs for male vocalist, called Not Too Mean to Cry. He had arrived in this recurring fantasy at the point where he'd take advertising space, late at night on the Tube, with a toll-free number flashing over little five-second samples of each tune, not only to sell records but also on the chance that Frenesi, up late some 3:00 a.m. out of some warm Mr. Wonderful's bed, would happen to pop the Tube on, maybe to chase the ghosts away, and there'd be Zoyd, at the keyboard in some outrageous full-color tux, someplace along the Vegas Strip, backed by a full house orchestra, and she'd know, as the titles scrolled by, "Are You Lonesome Tonight," "One for My Baby," "Since I Fell for You," that every one of these disconsolate oldies was all about her.

Frenesi had ridden into his life like a whole gang of outlaws. He felt like a schoolmarm. He was working gypsy construction jobs by day and playing at night with the Corvairs, never anyplace near the surf but inland, for this sun-beat farm country had always welcomed them, beer riders of the valleys having found strange affinities with surfers and their music. Besides a common interest in beer, members of both subcultures, whether up on a board or behind a 409, shared the terrors and ecstasies of the passive, taken rider, as if a car engine held encapsulated something likewise oceanic and mighty — a technowave, belonging to distant others as surf belonged to the sea, bought into by the riders strictly as-is, on the other party's terms. Surfers rode God's ocean, beer riders rode the momentum through the years of the auto industry's will. That death entered into their recreation more than into the surfers' helped shape an attitude, nonetheless, that had brought the Corvairs their share of toilet and parking-lot trauma, police interventions, sudden midnight farewells.

The band played up and down valleys still in those days unknown except to a few real-estate visionaries, little crossroads places where one day houses'd sprawl and the rates of human affliction in all categories zoom. After work, unable to sleep, the Corvairs liked to go out and play motorhead valley roulette in the tule fogs. These white presences, full of blindness and sudden highway death, moved, as if conscious, unpredictably over the landscape. There were few satellite photos back then, so people had only the ground-level view. No clear bounded shape — all at once, there in the road, a critter in a movie, too quick to be true, there it'd be. The idea was to enter the pale wall at a speed meaningfully over the limit, to bet that the white passage held no other vehicles, no curves, no construction, only smooth, level, empty roadway to an indefinite distance — a motorhead variation on a surfer's dream.

Zoyd had grown up in the San Joaquin, ridden with the Bud Warriors and later the Ambassadors, gone on many an immortally lunatic "grudge run," as Dick Dale might say, through the pre-suburban citrus groves and pepper fields, lost a high percentage of his classmates, blank rectangles in the yearbooks, to drunk driving or failed machinery, and would eventually return to the same sunny, often he could swear haunted, landscape to get married, one afternoon on a smooth gold green California hillside, with oak in darker patches, a freeway in the distance, dogs and children playing and running, and the sky, for many of the guests, awriggle with patterns of many colors, some indescribable.

"Frenesi Margaret, Zoyd Herbert, will you, for real, in trouble or in trippiness, promise to remain always on the groovy high known as Love," and so forth, it may have taken hours or been over in half a minute, there were few if any timepieces among those assembled, and nobody seemed restless, this after all being the Mellow Sixties, a slower-moving time, predigital, not yet so cut into pieces, not even by television. It would be easy to remember the day as a soft-focus shot, the kind to be seen on "sensitivity" greeting cards in another few years. Everything in nature, every living being on the hillside that day, strange as it sounded later whenever Zoyd tried to tell about it, was gentle, at peace — the visible world was a sunlit sheep farm. War in Vietnam, murder as an instrument of American politics, black neighborhoods torched to ashes and death, all must have been off on some other planet.

Music was by the Corvairs, these days calling themselves surf-adelic, though the nearest surf at the moment was at Santa Cruz, forty miles away over farm roads and murderous mountain passes, and they had to contend with the traditional beer-rider haughtiness of the area — still, in later years, try as Zoyd might to remember everything at its most negative, truth was there'd been no brawls or barfing or demolition derbies, everybody had got along magically, it was one of the peak parties of his life, folks loved the music, and it went on all night and then the next, right on through the weekend. Pretty soon bikers and biker chicks, playing at villainy, were showing up in full regalia, then a hay wagon jammed full of back-to-nature acidheads from up the valley out on an old-fashioned hayride, and eventually the sheriff, who ended up doing the Stroll, a dance of his own day, with three miniskirted young beauties to a screaming electric arrangement of "Pipeline" and who was kind enough not to go near, let alone investigate, the punch, but did accept a can of Burgie, it being a warm day.

All through it, Frenesi was smiling, serene. Zoyd would be unable to forget her already notorious blue eyes, glowing under a big light straw hat. Little kids ran up, calling her name. She and Zoyd were sitting together on a bench under a fig tree, the band on a break, she was eating a cone of rainbow-patterned fruit ice whose colors miraculously didn't seep together, leaning forward to keep it off her wedding dress, which had also been her mother's and grandmother's. A tortoise cat who kept appearing from nowhere would walk directly under the dripping cone, get hit with ice-cold drops of lime, orange, or grape, meow as if surprised, squirm in the dust, roll her eyes around insanely, run off at top speed, and then after a while amble back to repeat the act.

"Did you notice my cousin Renée? Do you think she's having a good time?" Renée had just broken up with her boyfriend, but undeterred by depression had driven up from L.A. figuring maybe a party was what she needed. Zoyd remembered her, among the roster of his in-law aunts, uncles, and cousins, as a tall florid girl in a minidress that bore the image, from neck to hemline, of Frank Zappa's face, thus linking her in Zoyd's mind somehow with Mount Rushmore.

He smiled, squinting back, like a schoolmarm who still couldn't believe her luck. A breeze had come up and begun to move the leaves of their tree. "Frenesi, do you think that love can save anybody? You do, don't you?" At the time he hadn't learned yet what a stupid question it was. She gazed up at him from just under the brim of the hat. He thought, At least try to remember this, try to keep it someplace secure, just her face now in this light, OK, her eyes quiet like this, her mouth poised to open. . . .

Mean or not, he hadn't cried about it for a long time. The years had kept rolling, like the surf he used to ride, high, calm, wild, windless. But increasingly the day, the necessary day, presenting its demands, had claimed him, till there was only one small bitter amusement he refused to let go of. Now and then, when moon, tides, and planetary magnetism were all in tune, he went venturing out, straight up through the third eye in his forehead, into an extraordinary system of transport whereby he could go gliding right to wherever she was, and incompletely unseen, sensed just enough to be troublesome, he then would haunt her, for as long as he could, enjoying every squeezed-out minute. A vice, for sure, and one he had confessed only to a handful of people, including, it may have turned out unwisely, their daughter, Prairie, this very morning.

"Oh," sitting over a breakfast of Cap'n Crunch and Diet Pepsi, "you mean you dreamed —"

Zoyd shook his head. "I was awake. But out of my body."

She gave him a look that he didn't, so early in the day, attend to the full risk of, telling him she trusted him not to be running some cruel put-on. They'd been known not to share a sense of humor on many topics, her mom in particular. "You go there and — what? You perch somewhere and look, you keep flying around, how's it work?"

"It's like Mr. Sulu laying in coordinates, only different," Zoyd explained.

"Knowin' exactly where you want to go." He nodded, and she felt some unaccustomed bloom of tenderness for this scroungy, usually slow-witted fringe element she'd been assigned, on this planet, for a father. What mattered at the moment was that he knew how to visit Frenesi out in the night, and that could only mean he must feel a need for her as intense as Prairie's own. "Where's it you go, then? Where is she?"

"Keep tryin' to find out. Try to read signs, locate landmarks, anything that'll give a clue, but — well the signs are there on street corners and store windows — but I can't read them."

"It's some other language?"

"Nope, it's in English, but there's something between it and my brain that won't let it through."

Prairie made a sound like a game-show buzzer. "I'm sorry Mr. Wheeler. ..." Let down and suspicious, she drifted away again. "Say hi to 'em up on Phantom Creek, OK?"

He took a left at the row of mailboxes, went strumming over a cattle guard, parked out by the horse barn, and walked in. RC was over in Blue Lake running chores, but Moonpie was around, looking after Lotus, the baby. The crawdads were in an old Victorian bathtub that doubled as a watering trough. Together Zoyd and Moonpie netted them out and weighed them on a seed, feed, and fertilizer scale, and he wrote her a postdated check he'd still have to scramble, this day already so advanced, to cover.

"Somebody at the Nugget the other night," baby on her arm, giving him now a straight, worried look, "askin' about you. RC thought he knew him, but wouldn't tell me anythin'."

"Latino gent, semi-Elvis haircut?"

"Yep. You in some trouble, Zoyd?"

"Moon darlin', when am I out of it? He mention where he was staying, anything like that?"

"Mostly just sat starin' at the Tube in the bar. Some movie on channel 86. He was talkin' to the screen after a while, but I don't think he was loaded or nothin'."

"Rill unhappy dude, is all."

"Wow. Comin' from you. . . ." Seeing Zoyd's odd smile, the baby echoed, "Comin' fum you!"

They transferred the crawdads to tubs of water in the back of the camper, and soon Zoyd was lurching and sloshing back down the road. He noticed Moonpie and Lotus in the rearview mirror, watching him around the curve, till the trees hid them.

So, fucking Hector again. Zoyd had only missed him that night by not showing up at the Lost Nugget, his usual hangout, having chosen instead a booth way in the back of the Steam Donkey, just off the old Plaza in Vineland, a bar that dated well back into the fog of the last century. Van Meter'd put his head in after a while, and they'd sat becoming slowly awash in Lucky Lager, snuffling over the olden times.

"Educated pussy," Zoyd sighed, "don't know why, f' some reason I must've been a easy mark. She was a filmmaker, went to Berkeley, I was working on people's gutters, she rilly freaked when she found out she was pregnant."

It was a long time ago, old as Prairie, who for a while had been a topic of debate. Frenesi was getting free advice both ways. Some told her it was the end of her life as an artist, as a revolutionary, and urged her to get an abortion, not that easy to come by in those days unless you drove south of the border. If you wanted to stay north of it you had to be rich and go through a committee exercise with gynecologists and shrinks. Others pointed out to her what a groovy chance this would be to bring up a child in a politically correct way, though definitions of this varied from reading Trotsky to her at bedtime to including LSD in the formula.

"But what hurts," Zoyd went on, "is how innocent I thought she was. Fuckin' fool. I wanted to wise her up, at the same time protect her from ever knowin' how shitty things could get. Was I stupid."

"You're blaming yourself for the line of work she got into?"

"For not seeing too much. For thinkin' we'd get away with it, thinkin' we'd beat them all."

"Yep, you really fucked up," Van Meter having himself a good chuckle. Their friendship over the years was based in part on each pretending to laugh at the other's hard luck. Zoyd sat there nodding How true, how true. "So worried about Hector you didn't even know the other federal guy was porkin' your wife till she was long gone! What a trip, man!"

"Appreciate the support ol' buddy, but I was still happy to be out of Hector's way back then 'thout gittin' my ass in too major of a sling." But he understood that like all suffering Tubeheads he must have really thought, as he and the baby were making their getaway, that that was it, all over, time to go to commercials and clips of next week's episode. . .. Frenesi might be gone, but there would always be his love for Prairie, burning like a night-light, always nearby, cool and low, but all night long. . . . And Hector, in his actorly literalness and brown-shoe conformity while also being insane, would never trouble his environment again. Damn fool Zoyd. Sent so gaga by those mythical days of high drama that he'd forgotten he and Prairie might actually have to go on living years beyond them.

All the rest of the day it seemed like he was getting funny looks everywhere he went. The swamper at Redwood Bayou, getting the place ready for lunch, disappeared into the back where the phone was as soon as Zoyd came in the door. The waitresses at Le Bûcheron Affamé gathered over in a corner murmuring, casting him slow over-the-shoulder looks it was hard even for him to take as anything but pitying. "Hi ladies, how's the warm duck salad today?" But nobody came forth with much more than mentions of ubiquitous though unnamed Hector. Back on the freeway, Zoyd kept a defensive eye out in all directions, no telling where the Tube-maddened Detox escapee might pop up. At his next stop, Humbolaya, amid stomach-nudging aromas from the Special of the Day, tofu à la étouffée, Zoyd hustled use of the office phone to call Doc Deeply on the direct line in to his wing of the Vineland Palace.

"NEVER," answered the perky female voice on the other end.

"Huh? I didt'n even ask you yet."

Her voice dropped half an octave. "This is about Hector Zu-ñiga — maybe you'd better hold." After a short recorded program of themes from famous TV shows, on came the mellifluous Dr. Deeply.

"Don't want to alarm you, Doc," Zoyd said, "but I think he's stalkin' me."

"You've . .. had these feelings for some time?" In the background, on some stereo, Zoyd could hear Little Charlie and the Nightcats singing "TV Crazy."

"Yeah, in Hector's case fifteen or twenty years. Some guys's in the joint for longer 'n that."

"Look, I can put my people on standby, but I don't think we can protect you around the clock, or anything." About then Chef 'Ti Bruce put his head in the door hollering "You still on?" and seeming anxious to have Zoyd out of there, when formerly it had been their custom to linger over beignets and chicory coffee.

Crawfish business done, Zoyd's next stop was out to the Old Thumb peninsula to Rick & Chick's Born Again, an auto-conversion shop located among log piles and county motor pools. The owners, Humboldt County twins, had found Jesus and their seed money at about the same time, during the fuel panic of the seventies, when, to get a tax break for bringing out the first U.S. passenger diesel, GM took its 5.7-liter V-8 Cadillac engine and, in some haste, converted it. In the season of purchaser disenchantment that followed, engine experts, including Rick and Chick, found they could make on the order of $2,500 per job reconverting these ill-considered mills from diesel back to gasoline again. Soon they'd expanded into bodywork, put in a paint shed, and begun doing more customizing and conversion, eventually becoming a byword up and down the Coast and beyond the Sierras of the automotive second chance.

Standing with the twins as Zoyd pulled up were the legally ambiguous tow-truck team of Eusebio ("Vato") Gomez and Cleveland ("Blood") Bonnifoy, all in a respectful tableau observing a rare, legendary (some believed only folkloric) Edsel Escondido, sort of a beefier Ford Ranchero with a complexity of chrome accents, including around that well-known problem grille, now pitted by years of salt fog, which Vato and Blood had just finished winching to earth from V & B Tow's flagship F350, El Mil Amores. Zoyd wondered what script possibilities were tumbling through the partners' heads. It was some elaborate game of doubles they played with the twins every time they came in here, the basic rule being never to say out loud where the vehicle in — often deep — question had really come from, nor even to suggest that the legal phrase "act of conversion" might here be taking on some additional sense.

Today, inspired by a wave of Bigfoot sightings down in the Mattole, Vato had nearly convinced the skeptical lookalikes that the Escondido had been found abandoned in a clearing, its owners frightened off by Bigfoot, in whose territory the car had then sat, anybody's prize, making its retrieval by the boys, who'd just happened to be out in that part of the brush, an adventure full of perilous grades, narrow escapes, and kick-ass four-wheeling all the way, followed at each turn by the openmouthed Rick and Chick, upon whom at last Blood, usually the closer in these proceedings, laid, "So Bigfoot bein' force majeure, we got the legal salvage rights." Dazed, the twins were nodding at slightly different rates, and another story of twilight reconfiguration, soon to be the talk of the business, was about to get under way.

Zoyd, already jumpy enough from people's reactions to him all day, was not reassured at seeing the gathering break up at his approach into short edgy nods and waves. They were having one of those four-member eyeball permutations that finally nominated Blood as the one to talk to Zoyd.

"This is somethin' about Hector again, right?"

"We heard he was back," Blood said, "but this ain't him, Blood, it's, uh, somebody else. And me and my partner were just wondering if you were planning to sleep on the base tonight?"

Here came another of those deep intestinal pangs. Zoyd knew that long ago in Saigon, Blood had more than once heard this warning from elements of the Vietcong in whose interest it was to keep him alive and in business. "Well shit. If it i'n' Hector, then who is it?"

Vato came over, looking as serious as his running mate. "They're federal, Vato, but it ain' Hector, he's too busy keepín ahead of that posse from the Tubaldetox."

Zoyd suddenly felt like shit. "I better see about my kid." Rick and Chick made mirror-image go-ahead gestures at the phone. "That Jikov 32, that Skoda carburetor you 's lookin' for, it's in my front seat, see what you think."

Prairie worked at the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple, which a little smugly offered the most wholesome, not to mention the slowest, fast food in the region, a classic example of the California pizza concept at its most misguided. Zoyd was both a certified pizzamaniac and a cheapskate, but not once had he ever hustled Prairie for one nepotistic slice of the Bodhi Dharma product. Its sauce was all but crunchy with fistfuls of herbs only marginally Italian and more appropriate in a cough remedy, the rennetless cheese reminded customers variously of bottled hollandaise or joint compound, and the options were all vegetables rigorously organic, whose high water content saturated, long before it baked through, a stone-ground twelve-grain crust with the lightness and digestibility of a manhole cover.

Zoyd happened to catch Prairie on a meditation break. "You OK over there?"

"Somethin' wrong?"

"Do me a favor, stay till I get there, all right?"

"But Isaiah and the band were coming by to pick me up, we're goin' camping, remember? Sheez, all that shit you smoke, your brain must be like a Etch-A-Sketch."

"Uh huh, don't get alarmed, but we are facing a situation where a quick mouth, even a leading example such as your own, won't be nearly as much use today as a little cooperation. Please."

"Sure this ain't pothead paranoia?"

"Nope and now I think of it could you ask the young gentlemen when they git there to stick around too?"

"Just 'cause they look evil, Dad, doesn't mean they're any good for muscle, if that's what you're thinkin'."

Feeling unprotected on all flanks, Zoyd went speeding in, running lights and ignoring stop signs, to Vineland, where he just made it to the door of the bank at closing time. An entry-level functionary in a suit who was refusing admission to other latecomers saw Zoyd and, for the first time in history, nervously began to unlock the door for him, while inside colleagues at desks could be seen making long arms for the telephone. No, it wasn't pothead paranoia — but neither was Zoyd about to step inside this bank. A security guard sauntered over, unsnapping his hip holster. OK. Zoyd split with a that's-all-folks wave, having luckily parked Trent's rig just around the corner.

Prairie wouldn't be off work for a couple of hours. Zoyd needed cash and also some advice about a quick change of appearance, and both were available from the landscape contractor Zoyd did some lawn and tree work for, Millard Hobbs, a former actor who'd begun as a company logo and ended up as majority owner of what'd been a modest enough lawn-care service its founder, a reader of forbidden books, had named The Marquis de Sod. Originally Millard had only been hired to be in a couple of locally produced late-night TV commercials in which, holding a giant bullwhip, he appeared in knee socks, buckle shoes, cutoff trousers, blouse, and platinum wig, all borrowed from his wife, Blodwen. "Crabgrass won't be'ave?" he inquired in a species of French accent. "Haw, haw! No problem! Zhust call — The Marquis de Sod. .. . 'E'll wheep your lawn into shepp!" Pretty soon the business was booming, expanding into pool and tree service, and so much profit rolling in that Millard one time thought to take a few points instead of the fee up front. People out in the non-Tubal world began mistaking him for the real owner, by then usually off on vacation someplace, and Millard, being an actor, started believing them. Little by little he kept buying in and learning the business, as well as elaborating the scripts of his commercials from those old split 30's during the vampire shift to what were now often five-minute prime-time micromovies, with music and special effects increasingly subbed out to artisans as far away as Marin, in which the Marquis, his wardrobe now upgraded into an authentic eighteenth-century costume, might carry on a dialogue with some substandard lawn while lashing away at it with his bullwhip, each grass blade in extreme close-up being seen to have a face and little mouth, out of which, in thousandfold-echoplexed chorus, would come piping, "More, more! We love eet!" The Marquis, leaning down playfully, "Ah cahn't 'ear you!" Presently the grass would start to sing the company jingle, to a, by then, postdisco arrangement of the Marseillaise —

A lawn savant, who'll lop a tree-ee-uh, Nobody beats Mar-Quis de Sod!

Millard was known for spreading work around generously, and for paying in cash and off the books too. Half the equipment lot today was filled by a flatbed rig from someplace down in the Mojave, whose load was a single giant rock, charred, pitted, streaked with metallic glazes. "Wealthy customer," explained the Marquis, "wants it to look like a meteorite just missed his house."

Zoyd eyed it gloomily. "Askin' for trouble, those folks. Messin' with Fate."

They went on back to the office. Blodwen, hair full of pens and pencils, peeping away at the computer, glared at Zoyd. "Elvissa just called in looking for you, your rig's been impounded." Ah shit, here it was. Elvissa had been in the Vineland Safeway and when she came back out to the lot had found more law enforcement than she'd seen since her old marching days, surrounding the pickup she'd borrowed that morning from Zoyd as if expecting it to pull a weapon on them. Elvissa tried to find out what was going on, but had no luck.

"Listen, Millard, m'man, think I may need a disguise, and soon — can I trouble you for a professional tip or two?"

"What'd you do, Zoyd?" Blodwen wanted to know.

"Innocent till proven guilty, whatever happened to that?"

"All's I'd like to know is will they be after your money," a familiar question around here, the subcontractor accounts collectively having more attachments on them than a vacuum cleaner, "More liens," Zoyd had once suggested, "than the Tower of Pisa," to which Blodwen had answered, "More garnishes than a California burger — spouses, ex-spouses, welfare, the bank, the Lost Nugget, haberdasheries in faraway zip codes, it's what you all get for leading these irregular lives."

"Looks like it's what you get," Zoyd had remarked.

"Is why most of you ringdings keep gettin' paid off the books," she'd advised, making a face Zoyd remembered from teachers in elementary school. She wasn't a bad person, though Zoyd theorized that she'd've been happier if they'd gone to Hollywood. Millard and Blodwen had met in a San Francisco theater group, she doing pretty-girl walk-ons and he thinking about specializing in Brecht — one night in the Haight somebody had some acid, and after careening for a while through the sixties, they alit from their anarcho-psychedelic spin twenty miles up a mud obstacle course referred to as a road only by those who'd never been near it, deep in the Vineland redwoods in a cabin by a stream from whose bed they could hear gold-bearing cobblestones knocking together at night. When the business took off they'd rented a house in town, but had held on to the place in the mountains, where they'd first come back to Earth.

"Little busy just this second," Millard handing Zoyd an envelope with a sum of greenbacks within, "later would be better — say Hon, what's the Eight O'Clock Movie?"

"Um, oh, it's Pat Sajak in The Frank Gorshin Story."

"Say about ten, ten-thirty?"

"Yikes, got to call Trent, he needs his rig."

Trent, a sensitive poet-artist from the City, had moved up north here for his nerves, which at the moment were not at their most tranquil. "Armed personnel carriers," Trent trying to scream and keep his voice down at the same time, "persons in full battle gear stomping through vegetable patches, somebody said they shot Stokely's dog, I'm in here with a thirty-aught-six I don't even know how to load, Zoyd, what's gooeen ahn?"

"Wait, easy pardner, now it sounds like CAMP," meaning the infamous federal-state Campaign Against Marijuana Production, "but it ain't quite the season yet."

"It's you, fucker," Trent blubbering now, "they're usin' your place for a headquarters, everything's thrown out in the yard, they sure must've found your stash by now. . . ."

"Do they know what I'm driving?"

"Not from me."

"Thanks Trent. Don't know when —"

"Don't say it," Trent warned, sniffling, "see you whenever," and hung up.

Zoyd thought his best bet might be to find an RV park someplace and try to blend in. He reserved a space a few miles out of town up Seventh River under a fake name, praying nobody was listening in on this phone. Then, gingerly, proceeded in the cedar-shake eyesore to Bodhi Dharma Pizza, which he could hear tonight before he saw it. All the occupants of the place were chanting, something that, with vibes of trouble to come, he recognized — not the words, which were in Tibetan, but the tune, with its bone-stirring bass, to a powerful and secret spell against invaders and oppressors, heard in particular a bit later in the year at harvest time, when CAMP helicopters gathered in the sky and North California, like other U.S. pot-growing areas, once again rejoined, operationally speaking, the third world.

As Zoyd was about to pull into the lot, the first thing he saw through the front window was Hector standing tensely up on a table, completely surrounded by chanting pizza customers and staff. Zoyd kept driving, found a public phone, and called Doc Deeply at the Vineland Palace. "I don't know how dangerous he is or how long I can stall him, so try to make it soon, OK?"

Back inside Bodhi Dharma Pizza, Hector was furiously on defense, eyes inflamed, haircut askew. "Zoyd! ¡Órale, carnal! Tell these people how much I don' need this shit!"

"Where's my kid, Hector?"

Back in the employees' toilet, as it turned out, where Prairie had locked the door. Zoyd went and stood hollering back and forth with her, trying to keep an eye on Hector at the same time, while the deep chanting continued.

"He says he knows where my mom is." Her voice wary.

"He doesn't know where she is, he was askin' me the other day, now he's tryin' to use you."

"But he said, she told him that — she really wants to see me. ..."

"He's bullshittin' you, Prairie, he's DEA, his business is lying."

"Please," Hector called, "could you do somethín about the glee club here, 'causs it's makín me, I don' know, weird?"

"You're abducting my kid, Hector?"

"She wants to come with me, asshole!"

"That true, Prair?"

The door opened. Big fat tears were rolling down her cheeks, with little swirls of violet eye makeup. "Dad, what is it?"

"He's crazy. He escaped from the Detox."

"You better know how to protect her, Wheeler," the federale getting frantic now. "You better have some resources, you're gonna wish she was with me before too long, ése, I ain't the only stranger in town today."

"Yeah you must mean that army up at my place — tell me Hector, who is that?"

"Anybody less of a fool would know already. It's a Justice Department strike force, they got military backup, and it's beín led by your old pal himself, Brock Vond, remember him? Man who took your ol' lady away from you, hah, cabrón?"

"Well, shit." Zoyd had just assumed all along they were Hector's people, DEA plus their local dope-squad tagalongs. But Brock Vond was a federal prosecutor, a Washington, D.C., heavy and, as Hector had so helpfully recalled, the expediter of most of Zoyd's years of long and sooner or later tearful nights down in places like the Lost Nugget. Why, at this late date, would the man be coming after Zoyd full-scale like this, unless it had something to do with Frenesi, and the old sad story?

"And you might as well forget about goín home, chump, 'cause you got no more home, paperwork's already in the mill to confiscate it under civil RICO, 'causs guess what, Zoyd, they found marijuana? in yer house! Yah, must've been two ounces of the shit, although we're gonna call it tons."

"Dad, what's he talkin' about?"

"They're up 'ere all right, Trooper."

"My diary? My hair stuff, my clothes? Desmond?"

"We'll get 'em all back," as she moved beside him into a one-arm embrace. He believed what he was saying, because he couldn't quite believe the other yet. Trent could've been taking some artistic liberties, right? Hector could be having a Tubal fantasy provoked by watching too many cop shows?

"Then I still need to know," Zoyd addressed the beleaguered narc up on the table, "why Brock Vond and his army is doin' this to me."

As if their chanting had been recitative for Hector's aria, everyone now fell silent and attended. He stood beneath a stained-glass window made in the likeness of an eightfold Pizzic Mandala, in full sunlight a dazzling revelation in scarlet and gold, but at the moment dark, only tweaked now and then by headlights out in the street.

"It ain't that I don' have Hollywood connections. I know Ernie Triggerman. Yeah and Ernie's been waitín years for the big Nostalgia Wave to move along to the sixties, which according to his demographics is the best time most people from back then are ever goín to have in their life — sad for them maybe, but not for the picture business. Our dream, Ernie's and mine, is to locate a legendary observer-participant from those times, Frenesi Gates — your ex-ol' lady, Zoyd, your mom, Prairie — and bring her up out of her mysterious years of underground existence, to make a Film about all those long-ago political wars, the drugs, the sex, the rock an' roll, which th' ultimate message will be that the real threat to America, then and now, is from th' illegal abuse of narcotics?"

Zoyd squinted. "Oh, Hector. . . ."

"I'll show you the figures," Hector raved on, "even with a i% penetration we're oil gonna be rich forever off of this, man!"

"About this 'we,' " Zoyd was wondering, "have you brought Cap'n Vond on board this project yet, you and this Ernie?" Hector was looking down at his shoes. "We didt'n finalize it."

"Y'haven't been in touch with him at all, right?" "Well I don't know who is, ése — nobody's returnín calls." "I don't believe this, you wantin' to be in the world of entertainment, when all along I had you pegged as a real terrorist workin' for the State? When you said cuttin' and shootin' I didt'n know you were talkin' about film. I thought th' only kind of options you cared about were semi- and full automatic. Why, I'm lookin' at Steven Spielberg, here."

"Risking a lifelong career in law enforcement," put in the saintly night manager, who called himself Baba Havabananda, "in the service of the ever-dwindling attention span of an ever more in-fantilized population. A sorry spectacle." "Yah, well you sound like Howard Cosell." "So Brock Vond taking over my place, Hector, that's got nothin' to do with your movie scheme, that correct?" "'Unless . . .," Hector looking almost bashful. Zoyd saw it coming. "Unless he's out looking for her too?" "For," in a low suave croak, "let us say, motives of his own." At which point, finally, in through the doors front and rear of Bodhi Dharma Pizza came the NATO-camouflaged guys and gals of the Tubaldetox goon squad, to bring Hector gently "back to where we can help you," cajoling him through the crowd, who'd begun to chant again. Doc Deeply, grooming his beard, strode over, high-fiving Baba Havabananda on the way. "Can't thank you enough, anything we can do —" "Long as he'll be out of my face for a while." "Don't count on it, we're only minimum-security down there. We can keep him under observation, but if he wants to, he can be back on the street inside of a week."

"I got a contract!" Hector was screaming as they loaded him into the Tubaldetox paddy wagon, which went screeching off just as Isaiah Two Four and his friends came screeching in.

The boy loomed over them, frowning, unfrowning, frowning again as Zoyd and Prairie filled him in and the other Vomitones made dangerous sounds. Finally, "This wedding gig down in the City .. . what if Prairie came with us for a while? Get her out of the area?"

"These are like armed forces, Isaiah, you want that responsibility?"

"I'll protect her," he whispered, looking around to see who was listening.

Prairie was, and getting annoyed. "What is this? Typical males, you're handin' me back and forth like a side of beef?"

"How about pork?" Isaiah, slightly to Zoyd's relief, at least this unwise, now actually trying to poke her playfully in the ribs while she smacked his hand away. Good luck, young fella.

"You already know how to live on the road," Zoyd said. "Do you think you might be safer if you kept movin'?"

She came into his arms. "Dad, our house. . . ." She wasn't crying, fucked if she'd cry. . . .

"Will you stay over with me tonight? Can Isaiah come get you in the morning?"

Hector was right, she admitted later, she had been ready to go with him and find Frenesi. "I love you, Dad. But it's incomplete." They were lying in bunk beds in the back of Trent's eccentric camper, listening to the foghorns down the river.

"You're Tubed out worse 'n Hector if you think your mom and me'll ever get back together."

"You keep saying. But if you were me, wouldn't you do the same?"

He hated questions like that. He wasn't her. She could make him feel so old and tainted. "Maybe what you really want's just to get out of the house."

"Uh-huh?"

Fair enough. "Well good timing, 'cause it looks like there is no house, this li'l Smurfmobile here's it."

"Did you know this was gonna happen? Someday? You did, didt'n you."

Zoyd hrrumphed. "Well — there was supposed to be a deal."

"When?"

"You were still a baby."

"Yeah so is that why you never got married again, was that part of your deal, that I was never supposed to have a mom —"

"Whoa, there, Trooper, who was I gonna hook up with, who were all 'ese ladies kickin' in my door all the time? Thapsia? Elvissa? Don't matter? Just so's you can say you have some mom?"

"But all you ever date is this, sorry but rilly B material, in terms of family skills, girls you pick up when they're out on eating binges at the Arctic Circle Drive-In, girls from these weird after-hours clubs whose whole wardrobe is like totally black, girls who inject cough syrup with biker boyfriends named Aahhrrgghh — in fact lots of them girls I see in school every day? Know what I think?" She'd rolled out of her lower bunk to stand and look him in the face, level. "Is that, deal or no deal, you must have always loved my mom, so much that if it couldt'n be her, it wouldt'n be anybody."

No, that hadn't been part of the deal. The clarity of her gaze made him feel fraudulent and lost. About all he could manage was "Wow. You think I really am crazy, don't ya?"

"No, no —" quickly, her head dropping just for the moment, "Dad, that's exactly the way I feel too, that. . . she's the only one for me." Then shaking back her hair, looking up again, stubborn, sure, out of Frenesi's blue eyes. The moment may have called for him to embrace her, but her remarks, by now familiar, about the role of jailbait in his emotional life warned him that this time he'd better refrain, even now when he most needed some kind of hug himself — only nod instead and try to look competent, call her Trooper, maybe sock her on the shoulder for morale . . . but have to lie there nevertheless, a foot and a half overhead, and let her find and follow her own way to sleep.

In the morning, full of marsh birds, cigarette smoke, and television audio, down the two sand grooves of the access road came the Billy Barf and the Vomitones Official Van, with elaborate nukehappy cyberdeath graphics all over the outside and a ring of welded-together miniature iron skulls for a steering wheel, at which sat Isaiah Two Four. Other dimmer faces bloomed behind the tinted bubble windows. Zoyd had no clear idea of what Prairie might be going into, felt helpless, didn't even know if he'd missed something last night and she was really going away for good. They'd agreed to keep in touch through Sasha Gates, Zoyd's ex-mother-in-law, who lived down in L.A.

"Stay out of that joint, ol' pothead," Prairie said.

"Keep 'em legs together," he replied, "teen bimbo." Somebody put a Fascist Toejam cassette, 300 watts of sonic apocalypse, on to the van stereo, Isaiah gallantly handed Prairie up into the lurid fuchsia padding of this rolling orgy room, where she became indistinct among an unreadable pattern of Vomitones and their girlfriends, and quickly, in an arc unexpectedly graceful, they had all turned outward, tached up, engaged, and like a time machine departing for the future, forever too soon for Zoyd, boomed away up the thin, cloudpressed lane.

* * *

BUT just before she left, Zoyd had slipped Prairie a strange Japanese business card, or as some would call it, amulet, which, leery as always of anything that might mean unfinished business from the olden hippie times, the girl at first had been reluctant even to touch. Zoyd had received it years ago, in return for a favor. At the time he was working a Hawaiian cruise gig for Kahuna Airlines, a non-sked flying out of LAX's East Imperial Terminal, a gig he'd stumbled into in the turbulent last days of his marriage, out on one more desperate attempt, transpacific this time, to save the relationship, as he saw it, or, as she saw it, once again come messing with her privacy, red-eyeing in to Honolulu on a charter flight in an airplane of uncertain make that was not only the flagship but also the entire fleet of a country he had not, till then, heard of. If Frenesi was half expecting him, it was not in the condition he arrived in, taken over by an itch he could no longer control to see how she spent her evenings. "Me, I get through OK," practicing in front of a stained and cracked mirror in the airplane lavatory, whispering in the jet throb and structural creaking, "just worryin' about you, Frenesi," standing there miles above the great ocean making these faces at himself.

At first it had seemed like a terrific idea, a perfect break for them both, at a critical time. Sasha had been there too, to see her off on the flight, she and Zoyd handing the half-asleep Prairie back and forth, arms to arms, like a rehearsal of arrangements to come. It was a rare cooperative moment for the in-laws, in their mutual uneasiness, Sasha never having known really what to make of Zoyd, settling instead for a reflex headshake whenever they met, with an embarrassed laugh that seemed to mean, "You are so inappropriate for my daughter that even you must see it and be as amused as I am — we're adults after all, and we can certainly share a chuckle, can't we Zoyd." But they were to find themselves, amazingly, on the same side of the law after all, which meant no custodial battles ever, for as they both came to learn, no judge would waste the time deciding whose rap sheet was more disreputable — if it was a choice between a lifelong Red grandmother and a dope fiend father, Prairie would end up as a ward of the court, and no question, they had to keep her out of that. Like it or not, they would be forced, now and then anyway, to coordinate their lives.

"Feel like Mildred Pierce's husband, Bert," is how Zoyd described his inner feelings to Frenesi, having located her finally at the gigantic Dark Ocean Hotel, a towering dihedral wailful of 2,048 rooms with identical lanais cantilevered into blue space, all facing the Pacific. Far below, tiny figures rode the curl of the tiny surf, sunned upon the beach, frolicked in tiny glowing aqua pools set in tropical groves of deep green.

From any distance an observer would have noticed, here and there upon the great bent facade, folks on their lanais out taking the breezes, eating room-service banquets, smoking the local can-nabis, fucking in semipublic.

"Appreciate the comparison Zoyd, although as you see I'm alone, yes quite alone, not that there aren't enough good-looking guys around. ..."

"Ain't pickups I'm thinkin' of, or we could've had this li'l get-together long ago."

"Oh? When, exactly?"

"Nah, forget it."

"Wait a minute, you come barging in here —"

"Yeah and on my own ticket too," almost adding, "my mommy didt'n pay for it," but seeing she was expecting it, he let the wave go by uncaught.

In fact what he'd done was check in right next door to her, so that they were standing on adjacent lanais hundreds of feet above sea level having this adult discussion, each holding a can of beer, Frenesi in a bikini and Zoyd in an old pair of baggies — except for the lethal altitude, it could have been year before last, back in Gordita Beach. Above them somewhere another couple were screaming at each other, out of control. Their voices, punctuating, helped to calibrate Zoyd and Frenesi's own, though they could share no smug look meaning, "at least we're not that bad," because they knew better.

Zoyd couldn't help wondering, almost aloud, where Brock Vond, her charismatic little federal boyfriend, might be. Hiding under the bed in her room, copping rays down on the beach at Waikiki? Zoyd didn't want to be disappointed. It was ignorance of U.S. Attorney Vond's whereabouts, after all, a kind of reverse presence, that had helped fetch Zoyd across the Pacific Ocean in a plane whose airworthiness only grew, in memory, more doubtful.

Sasha had been no help either. "You can't bring me into this. I'm not going to fink on my own daughter, am I? Even if I knew anything in the first place, which I don't — why would she tell me?"

"Well — you're her mom."

"You got it."

"OK then, how about Brock Vond, who we both know for what he is, exactly the kind of criminal fascist you've been takin' honest shots at all your life — are you gonna be loyal to somebody like that? All's I'm askin'," dropping into gentler, con-man tones, "is didn't you ever meet him? See him face-to-face?"

Sasha could hear the pleading, close enough to whining to make her careful. This poor sap could too easily settle for any least shadow of pain, seemed to want to suffer every hurtful detail. Dummy. Why waste his time so? He looked old enough to've been through it before, but who knew, maybe this was his maiden voyage into the green seas of jealousy. She might have asked him, but her job these days, it seemed, was just to hold her tongue, keep it sharpened and ready but withheld in a sheath of silence. Doubly frustrating because she was furious as hell with her daughter. Frenesi's involvement with Brock, politically, was appalling enough, but she'd also once again failed to take care of business, and Sasha was as angry as she'd ever been at Frenesi's habit, developed early in life, of repeatedly ankling every situation that it should have been her responsibility to keep with and set straight. Far as Sasha could make out, this eagerness to flee hadn't faded any over the years, with its latest victim being Zoyd.

Who at the moment was pretending to have a look around Honolulu. "So — I don't see Superfuck anyplace, what happened, Steve McGarrett couldn't solve a case, had to call him in on it?"

"Zoyd, better lay off, we don't want any trouble."

That she could have said "we" so easily had him suddenly short of breath, numb, drawing blanks. "Trouble? Me? Hey —" unbuttoning the native shirt he'd bought, flapping his arms, "I'm clean, lady! I ain't gonna shoot some asshole just 'cause he's fuck-in' my wife, 'specially if it's a federal rap," while he really wanted just to double over in a clenched bodyfist right in front of her face ... except that she would only shift away those eyes of blue painted blue, as the Italian oldie goes, shift them away to sea, weather, any prop in visual reach, for deploying that blue whammy was just as good — she knew it — as touching, or taking touch away.

She withdrew into her room, slid the glass door shut, pulled the drapes. He stayed outside, contemplating the airspace between him and the ground. He was almost pissed off enough to do the deed on himself, almost. ... He finished off the beer in his hand and with what he imagined as cold scientific interest dropped the empty can, observing it all the way down, particularly the convergence of its path with that of a pedestrian far below, a surfer carrying a board over his head. Seconds after the beer can hit the board, Zoyd heard the faint clank of impact, as the can meanwhile bounced away into a nearby pool and sank, leaving no proof of its visit but the ding on the board, whose perfect geometry the surfer was now examining closely, with suspicions extending well beyond Earth's orbit.

Back inside his room, first thing Zoyd looked for was a connecting door to Frenesi, but no such luck. He lay on the bed, flipped on the Tube, lit a joint, took out his cock, and imagined her beyond the drywall barriers that could as well have been the years to come, seeing her at least as clearly as he would later, again and again, on the astral night flights he would make to be near and haunt her as best he knew how, seeing her now taking off her bikini, top and bottom, then unhooking her earrings, an act, because of how it revealed her nape, that had never failed to stir Zoyd's heart. She headed for the shower, feeling soiled, no doubt, by her encounter with him. Apprentice ghostly peeper, he went right along, watching the bathing ritual he'd once grown to take for granted, fool, now able only to fine-tune the way the steam came and went around her body, being limited, given his own incorporeal state, to the lightest of physical forms....

As sex fantasies go, this one, especially for vile-minded Zoyd, was pretty bland. More like an ex fantasy. No outfits, accessories, or scenarios beyond this pure interaction of woman, water, soap, steam, and Zoyd's own unseen restlessly throbbing eye, registering it all. Getting accustomed to the only future they would have. What didn't enter into this was that Frenesi had in reality repacked her bags immediately and checked out, so quietly that Zoyd, preoccupied with jerking off, never noticed.

It wasn't till later, when he tried to get flowers delivered to her room, that he learned she was gone. He had to break down, cry, and divulge most of the story before he could get an assistant manager to admit that Frenesi had gone to the airport and had mentioned catching the next flight back to L.A. "Well, shit," said Zoyd.

"You're not going to do anything, mm, weird, are you?"

"How's that?"

"Hawaii is where men from California bring their broken hearts, seeking exotic forms of self-injury not so readily available on the mainland. Some specialize in active volcanoes, others in cliff diving, many go for the classier swimming-out-to-sea option. I can put you onto several travel agents who offer Suicide Fantasy packages, if you're interested."

"Fantasy!" Zoyd was sniffling again. "Who said anythin' about make-believe, dude? Don't you think I'm serious about this?"

" 'Course, of course, but please, just—"

"Only thing that holds me back," Zoyd blowing his nose at length, "is the indignity of lying there all splattered by the pool and in my last few seconds on Earth hearing Jack Lord say, 'Book him, Danno — Suicide One.' "

The assistant manager, long used to this kind of talk, let Zoyd ramble on for a while, then tactfully disengaged. Soon evening had swept in and wrapped the islands. After a short unintended beer nap, Zoyd got up, put a white suit he'd borrowed from Scott Oof on over his Hawaiian shirt, rolled up the cuffs of the pants, which were a little long, left open the jacket, too tight and also too long, giving it a zoot-suit effect, put on shades and a straw hat he'd got at the airport, and hit the street in search of someplace he could sit in on a keyboard instrument, preferably with people he knew. That he was not headed for the airport owed as much to the indecipherability of the fine print on his ticket, a special excursion offer nobody at the airline said they'd ever heard of, as to a strange cheery fatalism that had often, instead of tears, been known, as now, to overwhelm him. Fuck her, he chirped to himself, today's your release date, let ol' Brock have her, let him take her on into that lawyers' world where they can get away with anything and get everything they want, and someday when the little bastard is running for national office, there together on the evening news they'll be, and you can pop a beer and toast the screen and think of that last time up on the balconies, her turning away, sashaying ass in that tiny flowered bikini bottom, hair swinging, the window sliding, no look back....

He bounced slowly from one Honolulu bar to another, allowing himself to trust to the hidden structures of night in a city, to a gift he sometimes thought he had for drifting, if not into intersections of high drama and significant fortune, at least away, most of the time, from danger. At some point he found himself back in the toilet of the Cosmic Pineapple, a then-notorious acid-rock club, conferring with a bass player he'd worked with, who told him about the lounge-piano opening at Kahuna Airlines.

"A gig of death," his friend assured him, "nobody knows how they stay in business, and that's not the only mystery, either." There were unconfirmed reports of incidents high above the planetary surface that no one talked about in any but the most careful euphemisms. The list of passengers who arrived was not always identical to the list of those who'd departed. Something was happening, in between, up there.

"Sounds like just what I'm lookin' for," Zoyd figured, "who do I see?" Turned out to be a 24-hour number in the Yellow Pages, with a display ad whose biggest type read always hiring. Zoyd called them at about 2:30 a.m. and was signed up on the spot for a dawn takeoff to L.A. He had just time enough to get back to the hotel and check out.

Each 747 in the Kahuna Airlines fleet had been gutted and refitted as a huge Hawaiian restaurant and bar, full of hanging island vegetation, nightclub chairs and tables instead of airplane seats, even a miniature waterfall. In-flight movies included Hawaii (1966), The Hawaiians (1970), and Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961), among others. Zoyd was presented with a thick tattered fake book full of Hawaiian tunes, and on the lounge synthesizer, a Japanese make he'd heard of but never played, he found a ukulele option that would provide up to three orchestral sections of eight ukes each. It would take several flights across the Pacific Ocean and back before Zoyd felt easy with this by no means user-friendly instrument. The critter liked to drift off pitch on him, or worse, into that shrillness that sours the stomach, curtails seduction, poisons the careful ambience. Nothing he could find in the dash-one under the seat ever corrected what he more and more took to be conscious decisions by the machine.

Many would be the starry night, transparent dome overhead, subpurple neon outlining the baby-grand synthesizer, that Zoyd's fingers would creep the keys in auto mode while his mind occupied itself with sorrows attending the ongoing self-destruction of his marriage. Layovers in L.A. usually were only long enough for phone calls she didn't return, seldom for visits to Prairie and her grandmother, but never even the sight of Frenesi, who would have already slipped out. On westbound flights, Zoyd's job at the keyboard, like that of the hula dancers, flame eaters, cocktail waitresses, and bartenders, was to keep passengers from thinking about what lay in store for them on the Honolulu end, the luggage misconnected and untraceable, the absent bus links to hotels which had already lost everybody's reservations, the failure of Jack Lord to show up, as promised in the brochure, for photo opportunities. Kahuna's all but unpredictable scheduling produced arrival times lost in midwatch hours when airport security grew eager to play roles with disagreeable subtexts, harassing the single women, sweating the dopers, abusing the elderly and foreign, staring, needling, trying to get something going. Where were the traditional local cuties with the flower leis, one for each deplaning neck? "For you?" the armed, uniformed gents all broke out into high barks of laughter. "At this hour? What for?"

And then there was the sky — something going on in between air terminals. Zoyd had been hearing rumors since that first Cosmic Pineapple encounter, and then later from coworkers such as Gretchen the make-believe Polynesian cocktail waitress, to whom he had introduced himself with an arpeggiated E flat 7th and some original material that went

Whoa! Come 'n' let me roll that

Little grass skirt,

In the Zig Zag, of my em-

Brace!

Light on up, with th'

Flame of love, take

The frown right, off 0' your face!

Put it in a roach clip,

Pass it to and fro,

In between your lips and let th'

Good smoke flow, oh

It won't cost much, and

It ain't gonna hurt, just

C'mere with that uh little, grass skirt!

— long before the final bars of which she would usually have escaped his clutches, halfhearted, let's face it, to begin with, a social approach, considering the fog of postmarital misjudgment he was groping around in all the time back then, not so hopelessly offensive, anyway, that Gretchen wouldn't allow him points for going to the trouble. They presently had reached a keel even enough for her to start confiding things she'd heard, and after a while things she'd witnessed as well. Aircraft that came alongside and, matching course and speed exactly to those of the jet, hung there, fifty feet away, windowless, almost invisible, sometimes for hours. "UFO's?"

"Not—" she hesitated, the grass skirt, which was actually polyester, rustling rhythmically, "what we'd call a UFO. ..."

"Well who would?"

"Just that they looked too familiar ... up from Earth, for sure, not in from . .. out there or nothin'."

"You ever see who was flyin' 'em?"

Her eyes flickered in every direction they could before she murmured, "I'm not crazy, ask Fiona, ask Inga, we've all seen 'm."

He played four bars of "Do You Believe in Magic?" and squinted up at her, eyes mostly lingering on the synthetic skirt. "Will I see them, Gretchen?"

"Better hope you don't," but as she was soon to add, he must not've been hoping hard enough, because on their very next flight out of LAX, about 37,000 feet above the middle of the ocean, the festive jumbo was taken, the way a merchant's ship and cargo might be by pirates, an easy target, an aluminum shell dainty as a robin's egg to the other, which was solid, smaller, of higher mass and speed. As Gretchen had foretold, not exactly a UFO. The captain took what evasive action he could, but the other matched his maneuvers exactly. Finally they stood, side by side above the tropic of Cancer, between them, some twenty meters across, a flow of savage wind, as, slowly, not telescoping out, but assembling itself from small twinkling pieces of truss-work, the other spun across to them a windproof access tunnel, with a cross section like a long teardrop, that locked firmly on to the forward hatch of the Boeing.

In the plane, passengers milled among the resined hatch-cover tables, the plastic tikis and shrubbery, clutching their oversize paper-parasoled drinks, Zoyd attempting to keep up a medley of peppy tunes. Nobody knew what was going on. Arguments started. Through the port-side windows could be observed the burnished seams, the glowing engines of the other. Last sunlight lay in bands at the horizon, and some of the windows had begun to ice up, not in the quiescent way of frost on a kitchen window on Earth, but in a stressed clash of jet-speed geometries.

When the hatch at last sighed open, the intruders entered the flying nightclub with elite-unit grace, automatics ready, faces dim behind high-impact shields, all business. Everyone was ordered to a seat. The captain came on the PA. "This is for our own good. They don't want all of us, just a few. When they get to your seat number, please cooperate, and try not to believe any rumors you hear. And till we get the rest of you where your tickets say you're going, all drinks are on the Kahuna Airlines Contingency Fund!" which brought loud applause but would prove, in the drawn-out litigation attending this incident, to have been an appeal to a fictional entity.

Gretchen dropped by the synthesizer just to take a breather. "This is fun," Zoyd said. "First time I ever heard the cap'n's voice. If he can sing 'Tiny Bubbles,' I'm out of a job."

"Everybody's nervous and drinking. What a bummer. Kahuna Airlines done it again."

"This doesn't happen on the majors?"

"There was some kind of a industry-wide agreement? It would have cost more than Kahuna wanted to spend. The word they all use is 'insurance.' "

Night fell like the end of a movie. The alcohol flowed torren-tially, and soon it was necessary to switch over to a reserve tank of inexpensive vodka, located in the wing. Some passengers fell unconscious, some glazed out, others kicked off their shoes and partied, notwithstanding the grim shielded troopers working slowly, methodically among them. As Zoyd was segueing into the main title theme from Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956), he was distracted by a voice somewhere behind and slightly below him. "What it is, bro! OK if I — sit in?" He saw somebody in a blond hippie haircut, floral bell-bottoms, and tropical shirt, with a dozen or so plastic leis piled up around his face and shoulders, plus some pitch-black goggle-style shades and a straw hat, holding a banjo-ukulele of between-the-wars vintage. The hair turned out to be a wig, borrowed from Gretchen, who had also suggested Zoyd for sanctuary.

"Man's after you, eh," smoothly, finding a lead sheet with, inevitably, uke diagrams on it. "How about this?"

"Uh-huh!" the strange ukulelist replied. "But it'd be easier — in the key of G!" Ukulele talk, all right, the new sideman proceeding to turn in a respectable rhythm job on the old Hawaiian favorite "Wacky Coconuts," though when Zoyd took the vocal he got confused enough to have to go back to the tonic and wait.

Can't ya hear ... them ...

(vumm) Uh Wack-ky Coconuts,

(hm) Uh Wack-ky Coconuts,

Thumpin' in a syn-copated island,

Melodee...

Con-tinuouslee....

Yes one by one those

(vum) Wack-ky Coconuts,

(vum) Wack-ky Coconuts,

Fallin' on m' roof like th' beat of some

Jungle drum . .. (mm!)

Vum-vum vum!

Why won't those

Ol' Wack-ky Coconuts, find some other place?

Why should I remain in Wack-

Ky Coconuts' embrace? Must be wacky 'bout

(vum!) Wack-ky Coconuts,

(vum!) Oh, those loco nuts,

They're the coconuts

For me!

The pursuers moved along among the boogeying and the ca-taplectic, none of them giving the strumming fugitive much of a look, in search, it seemed, of some different profile. Further, Zoyd noticed that every time he hit his highest B flat, the invaders would grab for their radio headsets, as if unable to hear or understand the signal, so he tried to play the note whenever he could, and soon was watching them withdraw in a blank perplexity.

Zoyd's odd visitor, with ritual economy, held out a business card, iridescent plastic, colors shifting around according to cues that couldn't always be sensed.

"My life — looks like you saved it!" The card read,

Takeshi Fumimota

ADJUSTMENTS

Phone Book, Many Areas

"That's you? Takeshi?"

"Like Lucy and Ethel — if you're ever in a jam!" He played a few bars on the uke. "At the point in your life when you really need this, you will — suddenly remember! that you have this card — and where you have stashed it!"

"Not with my memory."

"You'll remember." It was then that he simply faded into the environment, became invisible in what would be a nightlong party that now, with the departure of their visitors, had shifted into high.

"He-e-e-y," Zoyd spoke to the room, "I heard of job skills like that, but don't know that I'd care to associate with that heavy-duty type of a hombre, nothin' personal understand, that is o' course if you're still someplace you can hear me. Hah?" No reply. The card went into a pocket, then another, into a long sequence of pockets, wallets, envelopes, drawers, and boxes, surviving barrooms, laundromats, doper's forgetfulness, and North Coast winters, till the morning, not knowing if he'd ever see her again, when he suddenly remembered where it was after all the years and gave it to Prairie, as if she were supposed to be the one to have it all along.

* * *

HOME between shifts, Frenesi sat with a cup of coffee at a kitchen table in an apartment in the older, downtown section of a pale humid Sun Belt city whose almost-familiar name would soon enough be denied to civilian eyes by federal marker pens, sunlight streaming in unmitigated by tree leaves, feeling herself, like a tune that always finds its home chord again, drawn, taken in, tranquilized by hopeful rearrangements of the past, many of them, like today's, including her unknown daughter, Prairie, last seen as a baby smiling half-toothless at her, trusting her to be back that evening as usual, trying to wiggle out of Zoyd's arms, that last time, and into Frenesi's own. For years, whenever she and Flash moved in anyplace new, in a reflex superstition by now like sprinkling salt and water in every room, her thoughts would go to Prairie, and to where, in each new arrangement, she would sleep — sometimes the baby, sometimes a girl she was free to imagine.

Down the block, circular saws were braying metallically eee-yuh! eee-yuh! among hammerfalls, truck engines, truck stereos, not much of it registering now as Frenesi entertained images of a nubile teen Prairie, looking something like herself, in some California beach pad, wearing centerfold attire and squirming in the embrace of some surf bum with a downy mustache, named Shawn or Erik, among plastic swag lamps, purring audio gear, stained hamburger sacks, and squashed beer cans. But if I saw her on the street someplace, she reminded herself, I wouldn't even know her. . . one more teenage girl, no different from any of the mall rats she saw at work every day out at Southplex, one of four shopping malls, named for points of the compass, that bracketed the city, hundreds of these girls a day, whom she watched on the sly, nervous as a peeper, curious about how they moved and spoke, what they were into — that desperate for any detail, however abstractly Prairie so far away might share it with her generation.

She couldn't talk about much of this to Flash. Not that he "wouldn't understand" — two of his own kids were also somewhere denied him — but there was a level past which his attention began to wander. He might have been crazy enough to think she was somehow trying to rewrite all their history, being known to say things like, "Aw, it was just a judgment call, hon. Say you'd've tried to stay away, could've been even worse," eyebrows up and cocked in a way he knew women read as sincere, "old Brock come after you then no matter where you took her, and —" a sour grin, "ka-pow!"

"Oh, come on," she objected, "not with some little baby."

"Son of a bitch was fairly irate, that first time you tried to split, first time I ever heard your name, in fact. He totally lost it there for about a week." Brock Vond's screams, from the sealed upper floors of the looming federal monolith in Westwood, could be heard down echoing in the tranquillity of the veterans' graveyard as well as out on the freeway above the traffic noise, regardless of the hour. Nobody in that crisis knew what to do with Brock, who clearly needed some R and R over at "Loco Lodge," a Justice Department mental resort in the high desert. But none of the new Nixonian hires in internal affairs could even discover how to process him out there. Finally, after what to some had been far too long, he quieted down enough to pack up on his own one day and head back to D.C., where he was supposed to've been all along, so the paperwork on him just got shredded in California. But it was to be a while yet before reports stopped coming in from lunch counters and saloons, often known to have strictly enforced attitude codes, in unlikely West Coast locales, of disruptions by a, some said "wild-eyed," others "terminally depressed," Brock Vond. Many informants said they'd expected him to take off his clothes and do something unspeakable.

"Well, what a wacko!" commented Frenesi. They were sitting in their new kitchen — light shades of wood, Formica, house-plants, better than some places they'd been in, although the fridge here might have a bum thermostat. She took his hand and tried to catch his eyes. "Just the same, later on, I could have run. Just taken her, taken my baby, and fuckin' run."

"Yep," head stubbornly down, nodding.

"And it really matters, and don't say judgment call either, 'cause this isn't the damn NFL."

"Just tryin' to help." He squeezed her hand. "It sure wa'n't easy for me, you know, Ryan and Crystal... meant me givin' extra handouts on that chow line for the duration, just to find out their new names, way back when."

"Yeah. Great duty." Each sat recalling Brock Vond's reeducation camp, where they'd met. "Do you ever dream about it?"

"Uh-huh. Gets fairly vivid."

"Heard you," she said, "one or two nights," adding, "even all the way across town."

They then had a good mutual look. Her blue eyes and the clear child's brow above had always had power to touch him, he felt it now simultaneously in the heels of his hands, in his lower gums, and in the chi spot between his navel and his cock, a glow, a good-natured turn to stone, some hum warning of possible overflow into words that, if experience was any guide, would get them in trouble.

From Frenesi's side of the table, Flash was an absorber of light, somebody she had to look for to see and work to know, to whom she tithed too much of her energy, especially the times he was "across town," his phrase for out chasing other women. He liked to prowl the shady office complexes in the downtowns of these Sun Belt cities, looking for educated ladies in business suits who craved outlaw leather. No question, a pain in the ass — but alone, she thought, she would perish, too exposed, not resourceful enough. She thought, It's too late, we're locked into this, imagining often a turn of the conversation that would allow her to say, "All those guys — Flash, I knew it hurt you, I hated it, I'm sorry." But he would say, "Promise me you'll never do it again." She'd say, "How can I? Once they find out you're willing to betray somebody you've been to bed with, once you get that specialist's code attached to you, don't have to be glamour beefs like high treason anymore, they can use you the same way for anything, on any scale, all the way down to simple mopery, anytime they want to get some local judge tends to think with his dick, it's your phone that rings around dinnertime, and there goes the frozen lasagna." And he would have no answer, and it would be Frenesi who'd bravely bring up impossibilities. "Fletcher, let's get the hell out of this, on our own, for good ... find a place? Buy it?" Sometimes she even said it out loud. His answer was always not "Let's do that" but "Sure... we could do that...." And soon there'd be only another posting, another defective rental the stipend check would barely cover. Was anybody even looking anymore? Had she ever believed in the federal promises of protection? Some fairytale fleet of unmarked government cars circulating in round-the-clock shifts, watching over them all asleep in their beds, making sure their witnesses would all stay protected forever?

Silence in the place, their son, Justin, asleep in the Tubelight. Prairie, who hadn't ever been there. The philodendron and the parlor palm, wondering what was going on, and Eugene the cat, who probably knew. Frenesi took her hand away from Flash's and they all got back to business, the past, a skip tracer with an obsessional gleam in its eye, and still a step or two behind, appeased for only a little while. Sure, she knew folks who had no problem at all with the past. A lot of it they just didn't remember. Many told her, one way and another, that it was enough for them to get by in real time without diverting precious energy to what, face it, was fifteen or twenty years dead and gone. But for Frenesi the past was on her case forever, the zombie at her back, the enemy no one wanted to see, a mouth wide and dark as the grave.

When the sixties were over, when the hemlines came down and the colors of the clothes went murky and everybody wore makeup that was supposed to look like you had no makeup on, when tatters and patches had had their day and the outlines of the Nixonian Repression were clear enough even for the most gaga of hippie optimists to see, it was then, facing into the deep autumnal wind of what was coming, that she thought, Here, finally — here's my Woodstock, my golden age of rock and roll, my acid adventures, my Revolution. Come into her own at last, street-legal, full-auto qualified, she understood her particular servitude as the freedom, granted to a few, to act outside warrants and charters, to ignore history and the dead, to imagine no future, no yet-to-be-born, to be able simply to go on defining moments only, purely, by the action that filled them. Here was a world of simplicity and certainty no acidhead, no revolutionary anarchist would ever find, a world based on the one and zero of life and death. Minimal, beautiful. The patterns of lives and deaths....

What she hadn't been able to imagine, in the improvident rush of those early days, was that Nixon and his gang would also pass, Hoover die, even charades one day be enacted in which citizens could pretend to apply for and if found worthy read edited versions of their own government dossiers. Watergate and its many spinoffs ended the gilded age for Flash and Frenesi. She remembered him staying home for weeks, watching the hearings all day and then again on the public channel at night, on the floor with his face right up in the Tube, as intense as she ever saw him, all that summer pissing and moaning in front of the twitching little screen. He saw the retrenchment coming, the little or no per diem, the vouchers returned, denied, withdrawn — no more airport Ramada Inn suites, gran turismo-type auto rentals, PX privileges, cafeteria freebies, costume allowances, or, in all but operational emergencies, even collect calls. The personnel changed, the Repression went on, growing wider, deeper, and less visible, regardless of the names in power, office politics far away now determined the couple's posting to new addresses and missions, each another step away from costly pleasures, from boldness of scale, with less reason even to carry a weapon, becoming tangled in an infinite series of increasingly squalid minor sting operations of steadily diminishing scope and return, against targets so powerless compared to those who were setting them up that some other motive, less luminous than that of the national interest, must have been at work. Each time there'd be another script for them to learn, dumber than the last, actual detailed lines they had to practice with each other even though they wouldn't always work together. Flash would disappear for long stretches, he never volunteered where, and sometimes, sure, it could have been other women. Frenesi had run a quick estimate in her mind of how likely, barring a surprise confession, she'd be ever to find out, and decided there was no point worrying. She came to believe it was his way of expressing how he felt about what they had ended up doing with their lives, and who for.

"Tough to admit," she tried once to confide to him, "that those first couple college jobs were as good as it's ever gonna get."

"Another pussy routine," speculated Flash.

"Fletcher—"

"Oh, I'm sorry! I meant 'vagina,' of course!"

One of Flash's big sorrows was that once, not long ago, he'd been as outlaw as they come, grand theft auto, hard and dangerous drugs, small arms and dynamite and epic long hauls by the dark of the moon. But then he got caught, and his little teen wife left him, and the court took his babies away, and Flash was turned, left with no choice but to work his way up on their side of the law, soon finding that nobody trusted him enough to bring him all the way inside any structure of the governance. So there he had to hang, on the outside, part of the decoration, clinging with all the others he ran or was run by, gargoyles living on a sheer vertical facade. He knew they would only let him go where nothing would be damaged if he should turn again. It would mean a twenty- or thirty-year orbit around the lurid neon planet of adolescence — an entire adult career to be spent as a teenager under surveillance, none of whose "family" would ever believe in him.

In his DMV and jail photos, in Christmas Polaroids, in old crowd scenes too low-resolution to see whose face it was, Flash appeared always the same, unsmiling, a lean, prematurely drawn young man, alert and drug-free, with some local stylist's idea of a haircut. Trapped long ago into making believe he always knew what he was doing, he'd found it working so well at the start that soon he was keeping up the act even when there was "nobody else around," as Wilson Pickett might say. His family obligations were clear enough these days, if not always compelling enough, and so, unable to imagine the three of them ever parting, he soldiered through his duties with what looked like cheerful stoicism, except that underneath he remained a flaming and extravagant com-plainer, having learned how to use this aggressively, to negotiate for some of what he wanted from the world. His whammy was indignation — believing he'd been injured, he was able with the force of his belief to convince strangers with no possible connection to the case at hand that they were guilty. Out on the highway, especially, he'd been known to go actively chasing down motorcycle police, forcing them over to the shoulder, jumping out to pick fights. The unfortunate trooper would cower sidesaddle in his bike seat, squirming, thinking, This is crazy, but unable to find the button on his transmitter ... strange.... "Furthermore, just 'cause they let you ride around on this li'l — lookit this piece of shit, I seen mopeds't could shut this 'sucker down, what is this, who makes it, Fisher-Price? Mattel? zis Barbie's Motorbike or some shit?" In some men such querulousness might indicate a soft streak a yard wide, but not in Flash, a vigilante of civil wrongs, settling things with his lethal and large-caliber mouth.

Many in the snitch community approved, being long unhappy with the old informant image of weasel-like furtiveness. "Why should we lurk around like we're ashamed of what we do?" Flash wondered. "Everybody's a squealer. We're in th' Info Revolution here. Anytime you use a credit card you're tellin' the Man more than you meant to. Don't matter if it's big or small, he can use it all."

Frenesi let him rave on. Her childhood and adolescence had been full enough of taps on the phone, cars across the street, name-calling and fights in school. Not exactly a red-diaper baby, she'd grown up more on the fringes of the political struggle in Hollywood back in the fifties, but the first rule was still that you didn't talk about anybody else, especially not about their allegiances. Her mother then had worked as a script reader and her father, Hub Gates, as a gaffer, always under dreamlike turns of blacklist, gray-list, secrets kept and betrayed, grown-ups acting like the worst kind of kids, kids acting like they knew what was going on. As house receptionist, Frenesi'd had to learn to keep straight a whole list of fake names, and who used which to whom. Whatever it was, she hated and feared it, one set of grown-ups bitterly against another, words and names she didn't understand, though she knew when Sasha was between jobs or when Hub was fired off a picture, the two of them looking at each other a lot but not talking that much — a good time, Frenesi learned, to keep out of the way.

Frenesi the baby had come along a little after World War II ended, her name celebrating the record by Artie Shaw that was all over the jukeboxes and airwaves in the last days of the war, when Hub and Sasha were falling in love. Frenesi had a version of how they'd met, an upsweep come partly unpinned, a jaunty angle of sailor hat over eyebrow, jitterbug music, a crowded endless dance floor, palm trees, sunsets, warships in the Bay, smoke in the air, everybody smoking, chewing gum, drinking coffee, some all at the same time. A common awareness, as Frenesi imagined it, no matter whose eyes should meet, of being young and alive in perilous times, and together for a night.

"Oh, Frenesi," her mother would sigh when presented with this costume drama, "if you'd been there, you'd chirp a different tune. Try being a woman who also happens to be political, in the middle of a global war sometime. Especially with all those revved-up gentlemen around. I was one confused cookie."

She'd come down by old 101 from the redwoods to the City, a teenage beauty with the same blue eyes and wolf-whistle legs her daughter would have, out on her own early because of too many mouths to feed at home. Her father, Jess Traverse, trying to organize loggers in Vineland, Humboldt, and Del Norte, had suffered an accident arranged by one Crocker "Bud" Scantling for the Employers' Association, in plain sight of enough people who'd get the message, at a local ball game, where he was playing center field. The tree, one of a stand of old redwoods just beyond the fence, had been cut in advance almost all the way through. Nobody in the stands heard saw strokes, wedges being knocked loose . . . nobody could believe, when it began to register, the slow creaking detachment from the lives around it as the tree began its descent. Voices found at last only reached Jess in time for him to dive out of the way, to save his life but not his mobility, as the redwood fell across his legs, crushing them, driving half of him into the earth. There was then guilt money from the Association — cash in a market bag, left in the car — a small pension, a few insurance checks, but not enough to keep three kids on. They had a local attorney for the damned, sure no George Vandeveer, working on the case, but not hard enough or near enough to Scantling to matter.

Sasha's mother, Eula, was a Becker, from Beaverhead County, Montana, who'd been bounced as a baby upon the knees of family friends known to have shot at as well as personally dropped company finks, styled "inspectors," down mine shafts so deep you might as well say they ran all the way to Hell. Meeting Jess had been blind fate, she wasn't even supposed to be in town that night, ran into some girlfriends who talked her into going down to the IWW hall in Vineland, where they knew some fellows, and the minute Eula walked in, there he was, and as she found out not long after, the real Eula Becker too. "Jess introduced me to my conscience," she liked to say in later years. "He was the gatekeeper to the rest of my life." Wobblies, sneered at by the property owners of Vineland, and even some renters, as I-Won't-Works, were not known as nest builders or great marriage material, but Eula, meeting herself, discovered what she really wanted — the road, his road, his bindlestiff life, his dangerous indenture to an idea, a dream of One Big Union, what Joe Hill was calling "the commonwealth of toil that is to be." Soon she was with him in somber mill towns among logged-off slopes, speaking on the corners of mud streets lined with unpainted shacks and charred redwood snags, no green anywhere, addressing strangers as "class brother," "class sister," getting arrested at free-speech fights, making love in the creekside alders at the May Day picnic, getting used to an idea of "together" that included at least one of them being in jail in any given year. She would remember the first time she was shot at, by Pinkertons in a camp up along the Mad River, more clearly than the birth of her first child, who was Sasha. With Jess's crippling, she arrived at last at the condition of cold, perfected fury she had been growing into, as she now understood, all these years. "Wish I could just pick up my bindle and come along with you," she told Sasha when she left, "there's nothing much for us in this town anymore. All we can do about it now is just stay. Just piss on through. Be here to remind everybody — any time they see a Traverse, or a Becker for that matter, they'll remember that one tree, and who did it, and why. Hell of a lot better 'n a statue in the park."

Sasha left for the City, got work, began sending back what she could. She found a rip-roaring union town, still riding the waves of euphoria from the General Strike of '34. She hung around with stevedores and winch drivers who'd been there to roll ball bearings under the hooves of the policemen's horses. By the time the war came along she'd worked in stores, offices, shipyards, and airplane plants, had soon learned of the effort to organize farm workers in the valleys of California, known as the Inland March, and gone out there for a while to help, living on ditch-banks with Mexican and Filipino immigrants and refugees from the dust bowl, standing midwatch guard against vigilante squads and hired goons from the Associated Farmers, getting herself shot at more than once, writing home about it. "Something, isn't it?" Eula wrote back. Growing up, Frenesi heard stories of those prewar times, the strike at the Stockton cannery, strikes over Ventura sugar beets, Venice lettuce, San Joaquin cotton ... of the anticonscription movement in Berkeley, where, as Sasha was careful to remind her, demonstrations had been going on before Mario Savio was born, not only in Sproul Plaza but against Sproul himself. Somewhere Sasha had also found time to work for Torn Mooney's release, fight the infamous antipicket ordinance, Proposition One, and campaign for Culbert Olson in '38.

"The war changed everything. The deal was, no strikes for the duration. Lot of us thought it was some last desperate capitalist maneuver, a way to get the Nation mobilized under a Leader, no different than Hitler or Stalin. But at the same time, so many of us really loved FDR. I got so distracted I quit working for a while even though there were these incredible jobs everywhere, just 'cause I had to try to think it through. You can imagine how much help I got."

"What about other women?" Frenesi wondered.

"My, what you'd call, sisters in the struggle, ooh no, no, my poor deluded pumpkin, forget that. They were all preoccupied. Having affairs while the husbands were overseas, trying to handle the kids and the mother-in-law, working or just playing too hard to want to talk any politics. No time either for night school, fellow students, teachers sorta thing. So finally when here came your father, in his government-issue uniform, not a tailor-made stitch on him, pant cuffs so high you could see his socks with the extra packs of smokes tucked into 'em —"

"Platters spinning, mellow reed sections," Frenesi would speculate, "I love it! Tell me more!"

"Oh, the joints were jumping those nights. Uniforms all over the place. Wild and rowdy like the Clark Gable movie. Bars that would stay open all day and night, trumpet and saxophone music blasting at you out of doorways, big crowds at the hotel ballrooms ... Anson Weeks and his Orchestra at the Top of the Mark ... all over downtown, these rivers of uniforms and short dresses. I was living on fried donuts and coffee with no cream, finally had to go out looking for work again."

And was soon adopted, in a way that may've been sexually, though not otherwise, innocent, by a small band with a steady engagement in the Tenderloin. Every night sailors and soldiers came crowding in to dance with San Francisco girls till the windows got light, to the music of Eddie Enrico and his Hong Kong Hotshots. "That's right, I was the girl vocalist, always could carry a tune, sang the babies to sleep at home and they never complained, 'course when I sang the 'Star-Spangled Banner' at the playoffs my junior year, our chorus teacher, Mrs. Cappy, came over shaking her head real slow — 'Sasha Traverse, you're no Kate Smith!' — but it didn't bother me, I wanted to be Billie Holiday. Not a burning ambition, more of a pleasant daydream. And then out of nowhere this professional, Eddie himself, telling me I could sing ... nope, he wasn't trying to get me into bed, too much trouble already with ex-wives and road girlfriends suddenly showing up in town, etcetera. I trusted his opinion, he'd labored for years in all the big bands — he was back east playing congas with Ramon Raquello the night they interrupted 'La Cumparsita' with the news from Mars. Finally, just about the time the City was starting to boogie-woogie, he got together this band of his own. If he thought I could sing, well, I could. I did. Who'd be listening that close? These folks wanted a good time."

Turned out that as long as she kept her hair washed and stayed on pitch, she was just another instrument, and it could've been just about anybody, happened to be Sasha, high-heeling in to the Full Moon Club that morning looking for a waitress job she'd heard about at another little nightspot the day before. That was her life then, hitting all the nightspots, only it was during the day. The Full Moon wasn't much of a place, but she'd already seen worse. She found the owner working on some plumbing behind the bar, and soon he had her passing him wrenches. One of the Hong Kong Hotshots came groping in, looking for his wallet. Sasha noticed he wasn't Chinese, but neither was anybody else in the band, Chinese references in those days being code for opium products, and the Hotshot personnel coming from Army bands, like the 298th, stationed in the area, or civilians too young or too old to be in the service, so that the little ork combined youthful high spirits, the experience of age, and that cynical professionalism Army bands are widely known for.

"Pardon me," the wallet seeker addressed Sasha, "are you here about the canary gig?"

The what? she wondered, but said, "Sure, what do I look like, the plumber?"

The owner angled his head up between some pipes. "You sing? why'dn't you say so?" The musician, who was Eddie Enrico himself, sat down at the piano, and there Sasha was all of a sudden singing "I'll Remember April," in G. Why'd she pick that? it changed key a hundred times. But this band must have been desperate for a warbler, because Eddie didn't try to make her fuck up, helping her along instead, telegraphing all the chord changes, keeping her gently steered in case she lost track of the melody. When they finished — together — the owner gave her the 0-0. "You got anything a little more, ah, fashionable to wear?"

"Sure. I just wear this when I go looking for waitress jobs. Which would you prefer, my gold lame or the mink strapless?"

"OK, OK, only thinkin' of the boys in uniform." So was Sasha, though Eddie and she were already four very fast bars into "Them There Eyes." She unbuttoned a button on her dress, took off her hat and draped her hair like Veronica Lake over one of them there eyes, and once more they got through together with nothing much going wrong. "I'll ask my wife," the owner said, "maybe she can find somethin' snazzy."

She sang at the Full Moon for the duration. Sometimes the boys and girls, instead of dancing, all came pressing close around the bandstand, and stood there, holding each other, swaying in time to the music. As if they were really listening. At first it made her nervous — why wouldn't they dance? whose idea was this rapt silent swaying? — but then she found it was helping her hear her way around the music. The last spring and summer of the war, San Francisco really began to whoop and holler, as troops came redeploying through town on the way to the Pacific, including Electrician's Mate Third Class Hubbell Gates, who was assigned to a long-hull Sumner-class destroyer brand-new out of the yards, which then steamed across the ocean to Okinawa just in time to get hit, in its first fifteen minutes of action, by a kamikaze, and had to put back into Pearl for refitting. By the time she was ready again, the war was about over, and Hub more than eager for some romance in his life.

"He listened to me," Sasha declared, "that was the amazing fact. He let me do my thinking out loud, first man ever did that." After a while her thoughts started falling into place. The injustices she had seen in the streets and fields, so many, too many times gone unanswered — she began to see them more directly, not as world history or anything too theoretical, but as humans, usually male, living here on the planet, often well within reach, committing these crimes, major and petty, one by one against other living humans. Maybe we all had to submit to History, she figured, maybe not — but refusing to take shit from some named and specified source — well, it might be a different story.

"She thought I was listening," Hub liked to put in at this point, "hell, I would have listened to her read the collected works of — what's his name? Trotsky! Sure, just to have some time with your mother. She thought I was some great political mind, and all's I was thinkin' was the usual sailor-on-liberty thoughts."

"Took me years to find out how completely I'd been fooled," Sasha nodding, mock-serious. "Toughest truth I ever had to face. Your father's never had a political cell in his system."

Smiling, "Will you listen to that? What a woman!"

Not for the first time, Frenesi found she'd been switching her eyes back and forth, as if cutting together reverse shots of two actors. She had already been through a few of these what Hub called "exchanges of views." They ended with everybody screaming and throwing household items, edible and otherwise. She knew her parents liked to proceed backward, into events of the past, in particular the fifties, the anticommunist terror in Hollywood then, the conspiracy of silence up to the present day. Friends of Hub's had sold out friends of Sasha's, and vice versa, and both personally had suffered at the hands of the same son of a bitch more than once. To Sasha the blacklist period, with its complex court dances of fuckers and fuckees, thick with betrayal, destructiveness, cowardice, and lying, seemed only a continuation of the picture business as it had always been carried on, only now in political form. Everyone they knew had made up a different story, to make each of them come out looking better and others worse. "History in this town," Sasha muttered, "is no more worthy of respect than the average movie script, and it comes about in the same way — soon as there's one version of a story, suddenly it's anybody's pigeon. Parties you never heard of get to come in and change it. Characters and deeds get shifted around, heartfelt language gets pounded flat when it isn't just removed forever. By now the Hollywood fifties is this way-over-length, multitude-of-hands rewrite — except there's no sound, of course, nobody talks. It's a silent movie."

Bitter, probably, she had a right to be, but she'd learned to cover it with deliberate cool flippancy learned from watching Bette Davis movies, something Frenesi must have picked up on early because each time she happened to catch one on the Tube, she could often warp back into infant memories of a giant unfocused being holding her up at arms' length and booming lines like, "Well! You ahh — quitethelittlebundle, ahhn't you? Yes!" Laughing, delighted, enfolding her. No point having a sourpuss baby around the house.

Frenesi had absorbed politics all through her childhood, but later, seeing older movies on the Tube with her parents, making for the first time a connection between the far-off images and her real life, it seemed she had misunderstood everything, paying too much attention to the raw emotions, the easy conflicts, when something else, some finer drama the Movies had never considered worth ennobling, had been unfolding all the time. It was a step in her political education. Names listed even in fast-moving credits, meaning nothing to a younger viewer, were enough to provoke from her parents groans of stomach upset, bellows of rage, snorts of contempt, and, in extreme cases, switches of channel. "You think I'm gonna sit and watch this piece of scab garbage?" Or, "You want to see a hot set? Watch when she slams that door — see that? Shook all over? That's scab carpentry by some scab local the IA set up, that's what scabs do to production values." Or, "That asshole? thought he was dead. See that credit there?" getting right up beside the screen to zero in on the offending line, "That fascist fuck," tapping the glass over the name fiercely, "owes me two years of work, you could've gone to college on what that SOB will always owe me."

Up and down that street, she remembered, television screens had flickered silent blue in the darkness. Strange loud birds, not of the neighborhood, were attracted, some content to perch in the palm trees, keeping silence and an eye out for the rats who lived in the fronds, others flying by close to windows, seeking an angle to sit and view the picture from. When the commercials came on, the birds, with voices otherworldly pure, would sing back at them, sometimes even when none were on. Sasha would be out on the porch long after nightfall, knitting, sitting, talking with Hub or a neighbor, not a freeway within earshot, though the treetop whistling of the mockingbirds covered blocks, reedy, clear, possible for a child to fall asleep right down the middle of. ...

In the years since she'd departed the surface of everyday civilian life, Frenesi had made it a point, maybe a ritual, whenever business brought her to L.A., to drive out east of La Brea, down into those flatland residential blocks, among the pale smudged chalet-roofed bungalows and barking dogs and lawn mowers, to find the place again, and cruise the block in low the way the FBI had all through her childhood, looking for Sasha but never seeing her, never once in the yard or through a window, till one visit there was new machinery in the carport and a Day-Glo plastic trike and a scatter of toys on the front lawn, and she had to go cash in more favors than she'd been planning to just to find out where her mother had moved — into a small apartment, as it turned out, not far away at all. Why? Had she been holding on to the house as long as she could, hoping Frenesi would come back home, but one day, from the weight of too many years or because she'd found out something fatal about her daughter, had given up at last on her, just given up?

Believing that the rays coming out of the TV screen would act as a broom to sweep the room clear of all spirits, Frenesi now popped the Tube on and checked the listings. There was a rerun of the perennial motorcycle-cop favorite "CHiPs" on in a little while. She felt a rising of blood, a premonitory dampness. Let the grim feminist rave, Frenesi knew there were living women, down in the world, who happened, like herself, to be crazy about uniforms on men, entertained fantasies while on the freeway about the Highway Patrol, and even, as she was planning to do now, enjoyed masturbating to Ponch and Jon reruns on the Tube, and so what? Sasha believed her daughter had "gotten" this uniform fetish from her. It was a strange idea even coming from Sasha, but since her very first Rose Parade up till the present she'd felt in herself a fatality, a helpless turn toward images of authority, especially uniformed men, whether they were athletes live or on the Tube, actors in movies of war through the ages, or maître d's in restaurants, not to mention waiters and busboys, and she further believed that it could be passed on, as if some Cosmic Fascist had spliced in a DNA sequence requiring this form of seduction and initiation into the dark joys of social control. Long before any friend or enemy had needed to point it out to her, Sasha on her own had arrived at, and been obliged to face, the dismal possibility that all her oppositions, however just and good, to forms of power were really acts of denying that dangerous swoon that came creeping at the edges of her optic lobes every time the troops came marching by, that wetness of attention and perhaps ancestral curse. Just for its political incorrectness alone, Frenesi had at first reacted to Sasha's theory with anger, then after a while had found it only annoying, and nowadays, with the two of them into their second decade of silence, good only for a sad sniffle. She swung the TV set around now, lay down on the sofa, undid her shirt, unzipped her pants, and was set to go when all at once what should occur for her but the primal Tubefreek miracle, in the form of a brisk manly knock at the screen door in the kitchen, and there outside on the landing, through the screen, broken up into little dots like pixels of a video image, only squarer, was this large, handsome U.S. Marshal, in full uniform, hat, service .38, and leather beltwork, with an envelope to deliver. And his partner, waiting down beside the car in the latening sunlight, was twice as cute.

She recognized the envelope right away. It was the stipend check she'd been looking for like a late period since last week. It hadn't been in the mail at all, it was.in this rugged lawman's big leather-gloved hand, which she made a point, nearing the Big Four-Oh these days and still at it, of touching as she took the check.

He raised his sunglasses, smiled. "You haven't been down to th' office yet, have you?" The U.S. Marshal administered and serviced Witness Protection, and in most of her assignments over the years there had been this matter of a courtesy call, as if to the home embassy in each new foreign country.

"We just moved in," putting a stress on "we" to see what would happen.

"Well we haven't seen, uhm," consulting some leather-covered field book, "Fletcher, either."

He'd had one hand up on the doorjamb, leaning and talking, the way boys had to her in high school. She'd remembered to zip her pants on the way to the door, but had only done up a button or two of her shirt, no bra on, of course. She angled her head to look at the time on his tanned wrist, inches from her face. "He ought to be back any minute."

He put the shades back down, chuckled. "How about tomorra, soon after eight a.m. 's you can?" The phone in the other room began to ring. "Maybe that's him now. Maybe calling to say he'll be late, why don't you get it?"

"Nice talking to you. Till tomorrow, I guess."

"I can wait."

She was already halfway to the phone, looked back at him over her shoulder but didn't ask him in. At the same time, there was no way she could order him to leave, was there?

It was Flash, calling from the field office where he worked, but not to say he'd be late, he never did that, just came in when he came in. "Don't git alarmed, but now — you had any visitors today?"

"Marshal just came to deliver the check in person, did seem a little unusual."

"It came? Outstanding! Listen, could you go out, soon 's you can, cash it, honey, for us, please?"

"Flash, what's up?"

"Don't know. Dropped by the terminal room, got talkin' to that Grace, you know, the Mexican one I 's pointin' out to you that time?"

With the big boobs. "Uh-huh."

"Said she wanted me to see somethin' funny. But it wa'n't too funny. Turns out, a lot of people we know — they ain't on the computer anymore. Just — gone."

It was the way he was saying it, with that only semicontrolled Johnny Cash type of catch or tremor she'd learned to tune in on, a 100 percent reliable omen. It meant what he liked to call profound feces, every time. "Well, Justin's due in any minute. Should I be packin' up?"

"Um first git the cash if you could, my sweet thing, and I'll be back there soon 's I can."

"You old snake charmer," as she hung up.

The marshals had split, doggone it, but here, charging up the outside stairs, pipe railings ringing, came Justin, with his friend Wallace, and Wallace's mom, Barbie, gamely puffing along behind. Frenesi grabbed her kid briefly, trailing part of a wet kiss along his bare arm as he flew past with Wallace, on into the alcove he'd made his room.

"Herd o' locusts," Barbie sighed.

Frenesi was standing by at the automatic-drip machine. "Hope you don't mind it this long in the pot."

"Better the longer it sits." Barbie worked part-time at the courthouse, and her husband full-time at the federal building, for different arms of the law, and sometimes she and Frenesi looked after each other's kids, though they lived on opposite sides of town. "You're still on for Monday then, right?"

"Oh, sure," oh sure, "listen, Barb, I hate to ask, but my card keeps getting kicked out of the cash machine, nobody knows nothin' about it, my account's OK, but the bank's closed and I just got this check, um I don't suppose —"

"Last week would've been better, we 'as countin' on a bunch of vouchers to come through, now they tell us, guess what, lost in the computer, surprise."

"Computers," Frenesi began, but then, paranoid, decided not to repeat what she'd heard from Flash. She made up something about the check instead, and while the boys watched cartoons, the women sat in the breeze through the screen door, drank coffee, and told computer horror tales.

"Feel like old-timers grouchin' about the weather," Barbie said. Flash came in just as she and Wallace were heading out.

"Barbie! Oohwee! Let's see!" He took her left hand, twirled her around, then pretended to inspect the hand. "Still married, huh."

"Yep, and J. Edgar Hoover's still dead, Fletcher."

"Bye, Mr. Fletcher!" Wallace hollered.

"Say, Wallace, catch 'at game yesterday? What'd I tell you?"

"Still glad we didn't bet — that was my lunch money."

"Flash?" hollered both women at once. Flash stood out on the landing and watched till they were in the car and pulling away. Still waving, "She act funny at all?"

"No, uh-uh, why?"

"Her old man's some honcho down at the Regional Office, right?"

"Flash, it's a desk job, he's in administrative support."

"Hmm. I seem nervous to you? Oh — the check, 'd you cash it yet? 'Course not — why'm I even asking? My life story here. Well can I please have a look at it?" He squinted, angling it around. "Looks funny. Huh? Don't you think?"

"I'll get on it," she promised, "right after we eat. Now tell me about who isn't on the computer, that's making you so crazy."

He'd brought home a quickly compiled list, all independent contractors like themselves. Frenesi got out a couple of frozen, or with the state the fridge was in actually semithawed, peperoni pizzas, put the oven on to preheat, and made a fast salad while Flash opened beers and read off the names. There were Long Bihn Jail alumni, old grand-jury semipros, collectors of loans and ladies on strings who'd been persuaded to help entrap soon-to-be ex-customers, snitches with photographic memories, virgins to the act of murder, check bouncers, coke snorters, and ass grabbers, each with more than ample reason to seek the shadow of the federal wing, and some, with luck, able to reach its embrace and shelter.

Or so they must have believed. But now, no longer on the computer, how safe could any of them be feeling? "You're sure now," she pressed, "you know for a fact ol' what's-her-name checked it out."

"Did it myself, type the name in, comes back 'No Such File,' all right? You want me to go beat her up, will that help?"

"This serious?"

"Fuckin' A." Which was about when Justin came wandering in, cartoons having ended and his parents now become the least objectionable programming around here, for half an hour, anyway — and just as well, too, because the last thing either parent needed right now was an argument, or what passed for one with them, a kind of alien-invasion game in which Flash launched complaints of different sizes at different speeds and Frenesi tried to deflect or neutralize them before her own defenses gave way.

"Say, Justintime, how's 'em Transformers, makin' out OK?"

"And how was everything over at Wallace's?"

The kid put on a genial smile, waved, put his hand to his ear like Reagan going, "Say again?" "How about a few questions," Justin pretending to look around the room, "Mom? You had your hand up?"

"We're just getting you back for all those questions you used to ask us" — Flash adding "Amen!" — "not too long ago."

"I don't remember that," trying not to laugh, because in fact he did, and wanted to be teased.

"Must be gettin' old, man," said Frenesi.

"Nonstop questions nobody could answer," Flash told him, "like, 'What is metal?' "

" 'How do you know when you're dreaming and when you're not?' " Frenesi recalled, "That was my favorite."

Frenesi put the pizzas in, and Flash wandered away to eyeball the Tube. A little later, when they were eating, as if out of nowhere, Flash said, "Two possibilities I can see."

She knew he meant the computer list. One of these two possibilities was that the missing people were dead, or else hiding from whoever wanted them that way, a worst-case scenario that, neither wishing to interrupt the appetite of their son, who scarfed pizza under the same suspension of physical law that allows Dagwood Bumstead to eat sandwiches, would have to go unsaid. But she hazarded another. "Maybe they went the other way, surfaced, went up in the world again?"

"Yep. But why's it happening?"

Justin, pizza slice hovering on route to his face, said, "Maybe they all got their budget lines axed out."

Flash gave him a quick head-take, as if awakened by a practical joke. "Used to be a kid right here, what happened?"

"What've you been hearing, Justin?"

He shrugged. "Keep tellin' you guys, you should watch MacNeil and Lehrer, there's all this budget stuff goin' on all the time, with President Reagan, and Congress? It's on now, if you're interested. Can I be excused?"

"I'll," Flash looking over quizzically at Frenesi, "be, uh, right in. ... Darlin', do you think that could be it? They're droppin' people from the Program, too many mouths to feed?"

"Nothing new." It was a time-honored way to keep the wards and snitches and special employees at each other's throats, competing for the ever-dwindling imprest funds, kept aware, never overtly, that with the Justice Department in regular contact with what it was still calling "Organized Crime," the list of names was negotiable, all too negotiable.

"But not on this scale," Flash waving the printout. "This is a massacre."

She looked around this place they'd never fully moved into — had they? — so why this sad feeling of imminent goodbye?

"I'll try to cash this down at Gate 7," she told him, "quick 's I can." She got out into deep sunset, airport traffic in the distance, downtown beginning to cast a glow, and in Flash's motor-pool Cutlass Supreme headed for the small community known as Gate 7, which had grown up over the years at the edge of the giant invisible base beyond. According to signs along the ancient freeway system, which ran through towering halls of concrete, echoing, full of shadows, there were at least a hundred of these gates, each intended to admit — or reject — a different category of visitor, but nobody knew for sure exactly how many there were. While some stood in isolation, hard to drive to, heavily protected, seldom used, others, like Gate 7, had generated around themselves service areas, homes, and shopping plazas.

The Gate 7 Quik Liquor and Deli, hunkering down among the off- and on-ramps of its exit, was jammed. It was Friday and a shift had just ended, the parking lot was a zoo, so Frenesi had to park along the frontage strip, near an unlit street lamp. Inside the place, men and women in uniforms, civvies, suits, party outfits, and work clothes milled and clamored, holding sixpacks in their teeth, balancing children and monster-size snack bags, reading magazines and tabloids, all, it seemed, looking to get checks cashed. Frenesi queued up under the fluorescent lights, in air-conditioning heavy with car exhaust, and could just make out at the far end of the line two part-time high-school girls, one ringing up purchases, one bagging. Neither, when she got there half an hour later, was authorized to cash her check. "Where's the manager?"

"I'm the acting manager."

"This is a government check, look, you do this all the time, you cash checks from the base, right?"

"Yah, but this here's no base check."

"They're in the federal building downtown, their phone number's right on the check, you can call them up."

"After office hours, ma'am. Yes sir, can I he'p you?" The line behind Frenesi had grown longer and less patient. She looked at the girl — a smug mouth, a bad attitude. She wanted to say, kid, better watch 'at shit. But she was about the same age as Prairie would be ... working at this checkout maybe for the rest of her life, and with Frenesi's days of federal empowerment and one-phone-call conflict resolution years behind her and fading fast, she was no longer in any position to throw her weight around. ... Humiliated, helpless, she came out sweating into the grayly overborne night, traffic smell, not enough street light, in the air a distant unlocalized rumbling from somewhere deep in the base.

She drove on downtown, being extra careful because she felt like doing harm to somebody, found a liquor store with a big Checks Cashed sign, got the same turndown inside. Running on nerves and anger, she kept on till she reached the next supermarket, and this time she was told to wait while somebody went in back and made a phone call.

It was there, gazing down a long aisle of frozen food, out past the checkout stands, and into the terminal black glow of the front windows, that she found herself entering a moment of undeniable clairvoyance, rare in her life but recognized. She understood that the Reaganomic ax blades were swinging everywhere, that she and Flash were no longer exempt, might easily be abandoned already to the upper world and any unfinished business in it that might now resume ... as if they'd been kept safe in some time-free zone all these years but now, at the unreadable whim of something in power, must reenter the clockwork of cause and effect. Someplace there would be a real ax, or something just as painful, Jasonic, blade-to-meat final — but at the distance she, Flash, and Justin had by now been brought to, it would all be done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of electronic presence or absence. If patterns of ones and zeros were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least — an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name — its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world. We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune, And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.

The night manager came back, holding the check as he might a used disposable diaper. "They stopped payment on this."

"The banks are closed, how'd they do that?"

He spent his work life here explaining reality to the herds of computer-illiterate who crowded in and out of the store. "The computer," he began gently, once again, "never has to sleep, or even go take a break. It's like it's open 24 hours a day. . . ."

* * *

THE Wayvone estate occupied a dozen hillside acres south of San Francisco, with a view of the Bay, the San Mateo Bridge, and Alameda County through the smog on certain days, though today was not one of them. The house, dating from the 1920s, was in Mediterranean Revival style, presenting to the street a face of single-story modesty while behind it and down the hill for eight levels sprawled a giant villa of smooth white stucco, with round-topped windows and red tile roofs, a belvedere, a couple of verandas, gardens and courtyards, a hillside full of fig and olive trees, apricot, peach, and plum, bougainvillea, mimosa, periwinkle, and, everywhere today, in honor of the bride, pale plantations of jasmine, spilling like bridal lace, which would keep telling nose-tales of paradise all night, long after the last guests had been driven home.

Emerging from a pool the size of a small reservoir in plaid swim trunks from Brooks Brothers, unable even at first glance to be mistaken for any of the white marble statues surrounding it, Ralph Wayvone, Sr., caped himself with a towel stolen not that long ago from the Fairmont, ascended a short flight of steps, and stood looking out over a retaining wall that seemed in the morning fog to mark the edge of a precipice, or of the world. With only a few tree silhouettes, and both the freeways and El Camino Real miraculously silent, for just these moments Ralph Sr., appreciative of peace as anybody, could take another of what he'd come to think of as microvacations on an island of time fragile and precious as any Tahiti or one of them.

Registering upon strangers as the kind of executive whose idea of power is a secretary on her knees under his desk, Ralph in fact was more considerate of others than at times was good for him. He liked, and was genuinely attentive to, the platoons of children who always showed up at family gatherings like the one today. The kids picked up on this, appreciated it, and flirted back. Friends he valued for their willingness to talk to him straight said things like, "Your problem, Ralph, is you're not enough of a control freak for the job you're in," or, "You're supposed to allow yourself the illusion that what you do matters, but it don't look like you really give a shit." His shrink told him the same things. What did Ralph know? He looked in mirrors and saw somebody in OK shape for his age, he went and put in his regular time at the spa and the tennis court, had in his mouth some high-ticket dental work, with which he ate carefully and in style. His lovely wife, Shondra, what could he say? His kids — well, there was still time, time would tell. Gelsomina, the baby, was getting married today to a college professor from L.A., of a good family with whom Ralph had done complaint-free and even honorable business. Dominic, "the movie executive," as Ralph liked to call him, had flown in the night before from Indonesia, where he was line producer on a monster movie whose budget required readjusting on an hour-to-hour basis, so he'd been spending a lot of time on the phone, expensive but maybe managing to confuse whoever happened to be tapping it. And Ralph Jr., who was expected someday to take over Ralph Wayvone Enterprises, had driven down for a day off from his duties as manager of the Cucumber Lounge road-house up in Vineland.

"One thing you have to know," Ralph confided to his namesake the day the kid turned eighteen and got his ventunesimo party three years early, at the time a sensible move given the many talents then surfacing in his character for getting into trouble, "before you get too involved, is that we are a wholly-owned subsidiary."

"What's that?" inquired Ralph Jr. In olden times the father might have shrugged, turned without further talk, and gone away to enjoy his despair in private. The two Wayvones were down in the wine cellar, and Ralph could have just left him there, among the bottles. Instead he took the trouble to explain that strictly speaking, the family "owned" nothing. They received an annual operating budget from the corporation that owned them, was all.

"Like the royal family in England, you mean?"

"My firstborn son," Ralph rolling his eyes, "if it helps — please."

"I'd be like — Prince Charles?"

"Testa puntita, do me a favor."

But young Wayvone's anxious face was now smoothed by the sight of a dusty bottle of wine, a 1961 Brunello di Montalcino, put away the year he was born to be drunk this day of transition to adulthood, though his own share of it was to meet the same porcelain fate as the cheaper stuff he went on to drink too much of.

Gelsomina, being a daughter, didn't of course get any bottle. But did he hear her complaining? This wedding today was costing Ralph more than he'd paid for the house. After a full-scale nuptial Mass, the reception feast here would feature lobster, caviar, and tournedos Rossini, along with more down-home fare such as baked ziti and a complicated wedding soup only his sister-in-law Lolli, among her many virtues, knew how to make. The wine would run a full range from homemade red through Cristal champagne, and hundreds of dolled- and duded-up friends, relatives, and business acquaintances would populate the hillside, most of them in a mood to celebrate. The only piece of uncertainty, not a problem really, was the music, with the San Francisco Symphony on tour overseas, the society combo Ralph Sr. had booked originally having run into a little snag in Atlantic City, where their engagement had been involuntarily extended till they made up what they owed the Casino as the result of several foolish wagers, and these last-minute replacements, Gino Baglione and the Paisans, whom Ralph Jr. had hired up north without ever hearing, still an unknown quantity. Well — they had better be excellent, that's all Ralph had to say, or rather think, as the fog now began to lift to reveal not the borderlands of the eternal after all, but only quotidian California again, looking no different than it had when he left.

The band arrived at around midday, after two days of leisurely detours through the wine country, coastal Marin, and Berkeley. They had at last ascended a confusing network of winding streets, putting the last touches to their costuming and makeup, the glossy black, short synthetic wigs, the snappy mint-colored matching suits of Continental cut, the gold jewelry and glue-on mustaches, just before rolling to a stop at the main gate of the exclusive community of Lugares Altos and all being ordered out of the van and subjected each to a discrete bodyfrisk, plus scans for metal objects down to badge size and for electronic devices active and passive. Young Ralph was waiting nervously at the Wayvone parking area, where everybody piled out again. The Vomitone ladies, Prairie included, had likewise made an effort to tone down their extravagance of image, with the help of wigs, clothes, and makeup borrowed from their straighter friends. Billy Barf, whose acquaintance with anything Italian was limited to the deuteragonist of Donkey Kong and a few canned-pasta commercials, insisted on speaking with his imperfect idea of an ethnic accent until Isaiah Two Four, detecting not only its inauthenticity but also its potential for insult, drew the young band eponym aside for a word or two, though Ralph Jr., who had talked Californian all his life, had only taken it for some kind of speech impediment. "You guys have done this before, right?" he kept asking as they off-loaded their instruments, amps, and digital interfaces and proceeded down to a huge airy tent at the edge of a small meadow, where liveried servants bustled everywhere, setting out glassware and napery, hauling tons of shaved ice, high-rent hors d'oeuvres, flowers, and folding chairs, discussing at top volume the fine points of chores they had all performed around here a thousand times already.

"Wedding gigs are our life," Billy assured him.

"Just be cool, OK?" Isaiah murmured.

"Yah, rilly," cackled Lester, the rhythm guitarist. "You blow this, Bill, we all gonna git wasted."

They got through the first set on inoffensive pop tunes, rock and roll oldies, even one or two Broadway standards. But during the break, a large emissary with a distinct taper to his head, Ralph Sr.'s trusted lieutenant "Two-Ton" Carmine Torpidini, arrived with a message for Billy. "Mr. Wayvone's compliments, says thank you for the contemporary flavor of the music, which all the young people have enjoyed fabulously. But he wonders if in the upcoming set you might play something the older generations could more readily relate to, something more . .. Italian?"

More than eager to please, the Vomitones led off the set with a medley they'd been practicing of Italian tunes on a common theme of transcendence — a salsa treatment of "More" from Mondo Cane (1963), slowing to ¾ with "Senza Fine," from Flight of the Phoenix (1966), and to wrap it an English-language version, in Billy's nasal tenor, of the favorite "Al Di La," from any number of television specials.

No one was more surprised than Billy when Two-Ton Carmine appeared once again, this time with hurried breathing, flushed face, a look of excitement, as if he sensed a chance to do some of the untidy work he received his paycheck for. "Mr. Wayvone says he was hoping he wouldn't have to go into too many details with you, but that he was thinking more along the lines of 'C'e la Luna,' 'Way Marie' — you know, sing-along stuff, plus maybe a little opera, 'Cielo e Mar,' right? Mr. Wayvone's brother Vincent, as you know, being a very fine singer. . . ."

"Yah," Billy now with a slow and blunted sort of comprehension, "uh, well. Sure! I think we have those arrangements —"

"In the van," muttered Isaiah.

"—in the van," said Billy Barf. "All I have to do's just—" sliding one arm out of his guitar strap. But Carmine reached over, removed the guitar from Billy's grasp, and began to turn it end over end, so as to twist the strap, now around Billy's neck, tighter and tighter.

"Arrangements." Carmine laughed, embarrassed and mean. " 'Way Marie,' what kind of arrangement do you need? You gentlemen are Italian, are you not?"

The band sat silent, feckless, watching their leader being garrotted. Few Anglos, some Scotch-Irish, one Jewish guy, no actual Italians. "Well, then, how about Catholic?" Carmine went on, punctuating his remarks with sharp yanks on the strap. "Maybe I could let yiz off with ten choruses of 'Ave Maria' and a Act of Contrition? No? So tell me, while you can, what's goin' on? Didn' Little Ralph say nothin' ta yiz? Hey! Wait a minute! What's this?" In the course of having the head on which it sat shaken back and forth, Billy's "Italian" wig had begun to slide off, revealing his real hairstyle, dyed today a vivid turquoise. "You guys ain't Gino Baglione and the Paisans!" Carmine shook his head, cracked his knuckles. "That's false pretenses, fellas! Don't you know you can end up in small-claims for that?"

Seeing that Billy Barf, enjoying a surrender to panic, had forgotten all about the quick-release clips at the ends of the guitar strap he was being strangled with, Isaiah came over and popped them loose for him, allowing the bandleader to stagger away trying to croak some air back into his lungs. "Actually," Isaiah began, "I'm a percussion person, my job is to take hard knocks and rude surprises, line 'em up in a row in some way folks can dance to, 's all I do, rilly, but as a connoisseur and from the story your face seems to tell a recipient of some of Life's hard knocks yourself, you can see the present crisis may not be worth emotional investment on the scale you contemplate, not to mention the bruises on Gino aka Billy here's neck, which will have him wearing bandannas for weeks, with crossover implications musically and also generating with numerous ol' ladies hickey suspicions you can well imagine, no, far from bein' a hard knock here, why, it's not even a brushstroke on Life's top cymbal, come on! Eh!"

"Ah," blurted the oversize gorilla, hypnotized, "yes you're right, kid, and I'm disappointed to say so 'cause I was all set for a multiple confrontation."

"Good," Billy Barf somewhere behind an amp, searching frantically for the keys to the van, "you're talking it out, that's good."

Fortunately Ralph Wayvone's library happened to include a copy of the indispensable Italian Wedding Fake Book, by Deleuze & Guattari, which Gelsomina, the bride, to protect her wedding from such possible unlucky omens as blood on the wedding cake, had the presence of mind to slip indoors and bring back out to Billy Barfs attention. Inconveniently by then, Billy, keys in fist, was on his single-minded way up to the parking area, so that the new bride, in her grandmother's wedding gown, was observed to go running after a non-Italian musician with unusual hair — not a breach of decency, according to more traditional-minded elements close to Ralph Wayvone, to be left unavenged. So despite the revival of music, dancing, and good cheer and the salvation of Gelsomina Wayvone's wedding day, this latent threat was enough to paralyze Billy for the rest of the gig, convinced as he now was that a hit order had gone out on him from the highest levels.

"Hey, 'f they want to ice you, Bill, they gonna do it," advised the Vomitories' bass player, who went by the professional name Meathook. "Best you can do's get you a li'l .22 caliber assault rifle and a full-auto drop-in fer it, when they come for you you can at least take a couple with you."

"Naw," disagreed the horn virtuoso 187, who'd named himself after the California Penal Code section for murder, "only wimps depend on machinery, what Bill needs is some close-combat skills, some knife, 'chuks, li'l jeet kune do —"

"Fun time's over, Bill, either leave town or hire some heavy security," put in Bad, the synthesizerist.

"Isaiah mah man, help me out here," Billy pleaded.

"On the other hand," Isaiah said, "they loved 'Volare.' "

During all this commotion, Prairie was up the hill a level or two, standing semidistraught in front of an ornately framed gold-veined mirror, one of a whole row, in a powder room or ladies' lounge of stupefying tastelessness, having an attack of THO, or Teen Hair Obsession. While the other Vomitonettes were running around with hair color or wigs, all Prairie'd had to do to look straight was brush hers. "Perfect!" tactful Billy had told her, "no-body'll look twice."

She stared into her reflection, at the face that had always been half a mystery to her, despite photos of her mother that Zoyd and Sasha had shown her. It was easy to see Zoyd in her face — that turn of chin, slope of eyebrows — but she'd known for a long time how to filter these out, as a way to find the face of her mother in what was left. She started picking again at her hair, with a coral plastic ratting brush a friend had shoplifted for her. Mirrors made her nervous, especially all these, each set over a marble sink with mermaids for tap handles, in a space lit like a bus station, walls covered in gold velvet with a raised heraldic pattern, pink and cream accents everyplace, a fountain in the middle, some scaled-down Roman repro, concealed speakers playing FM stereo locked to some easy-listening frequency in the area, seething quietly, like insect song.

Prairie tried bringing her hair forward in long bangs, brushing the rest down in front of her shoulders, the surest way she knew, her eyes now burning so blue through the fringes and shadows, to creep herself out, no matter what time of the day or night, by imagining that what she saw was her mother's ghost. And that if she looked half a second too long, it would begin to blink while her own eyes stayed open, its lips would start to move, and then speak to her stuff she was sure she'd rather not hear. . ..

Or maybe that you've ached all your life to hear but you're still scared of? the other face seemed to ask, lifting one eyebrow a fraction more than Prairie could feel in her own face. Suddenly, then, behind herself, she saw another reflection, one that might've been there for a while, one, strangely, that she almost knew. She turned quickly, and here was this live solid woman, standing a little too close, tall and fair, wearing a green party dress that might have gone with her hair but not with the way she carried herself, athletic, even warriorlike, watching the girl in a weirdly familiar, defensive way, as if they were about to continue a conversation.

Prairie shifted the brush around so the pointed handle was now its business end. "Problem, ma'am?"

All at once, from the stranger's battered cowhide shoulder bag, which she'd set down right next to Prairie's earth-toned canvas one, on the tile counter, came a thin piping tune in three-part harmony, all sixteen bars of the theme from "Hawaii Five-O," which it then kept repeating, potentially forever.

"Excuse me, but would that be one of Takeshi Fumimota's old business cards in your bag there, by any chance?" the woman meanwhile digging down in her own bag to find and come out with a small silvery unit, still chiming the stop-frame hula dancer, the hundred different shots of the water, Danno looking through the hole in the glass, McGarrett on the building.

"Here —" Prairie handing over her iridescent oblong, "my dad gave me this."

"Scanner here's still programmed to pick 'em up, but I thought these old-timers had all been called in by now." She shut off the music right after the part that goes,

Down in the streets of Honolu-lu, Just bookin' folks and bein' patched through, what a Lu-wow!. . . Hawaii Five-Oh!

Putting out her hand, "I'm Darryl Louise Chastain. Me and Takeshi are partners."

"Name's Prairie."

"Just for a minute in the mirror there I thought you were somebody you couldn't possibly be."

"Uh-huh, well, I know I've seen you before too — whoa, wait a minute, was that DL Chastain, I always thought it meant Disabled List, sure it's you, you look different, my grandma showed me old snapshots of you. You and my mom."

"Your mom." Prairie saw her taking a breath in a controlled and deliberate way she recognized from the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple. "Oh, mercy." She nodded, faintly smiling, one side of the smile maybe a little higher than the other. "You're Frenesi's kid." She said the name with some effort, as if she hadn't pronounced it out loud for a while. "Your mom and me ... we ran together, back in the old days."

They went outside and found a quiet piece of terrace and Prairie told DL about her mother's rumored return, and the DEA guy who might be crazy and his movie scheme, and the seizing of her home by a paramilitary force from the Justice Department.

DL looked serious. "And you're sure that name was Brock Vond."

"Yep. My dad says that he's bad shit."

"He's both. We still have some unbalanced karma, me and Brock. Now it sounds like you've got some too." She laid the Japanese amulet on the tabletop between them. "Takeshi calls these things giri chits, sorta karmic IOU's. Takes a lot of speed, gets grandiose, wants to base a world currency system on them, so forth — but if you present one to him, he's got to honor it. Were you planning on using this?"

"I'm feeling like Dumbo with that feather, I would clutch to anything right now. Why? What can your partner do for me? Can he find my mom?"

Which put DL in a pickle. Years with Takeshi, and she was still finding out what he could do. And couldn't. If Frenesi really was surfacing, anybody could find her. But with Brock Vond out tearing up the pea patch too, her movements might be less certain.

And whatever story DL told this kid must not, maybe could never, be the story she knew. She temporized. "Is, it's been what, 15 years, just about your lifetime, full of playin' make-believe, acting on faiths in things that sound crazy now, lying, turning each other in, too much time passed, everybody remembering a different story —"

"And you want to hear mine before you'll tell me yours."

"Knew you'd understand." A liveried waiter passed by with a tray full of champagne in glasses, and Prairie, who didn't even like beer, and DL, who objected philosophically to all drugs, each took one. "Frenesi Gates," DL touching her glass to the girl's, and a chill rode Prairie's shoulders.

Rising from the distant meadow came the music of the Vom-itones, twanging and crashing their way through a suite from Tosca. "Well — my dad and my grandma both tell the same story. I cross-examine 'em, try to trick 'em, but except for picky details and memory loss from dope and so on, either it's true or they got together long ago and cooked something up, right?" waiting for DL to tell her she was too young to be so paranoid. But DL only smiled back over the rim of the slender glass. "OK — my mom made movies for that Revolution you guys tried to have, she was on the run, warrants out on her, FBI put her pictures in the post office, Zoyd was her cover for a while, and then they had me . .. and we were a family until the feds found out where she was and she had to disappear — go underground." There was a small defiant tremor in her voice.

Underground. Right. That's the story DL should have known they'd tell the kid. Underground. Now, how could DL tell her what she knew, and how could she not? "Brock Vond," very carefully, "had his own grand jury back then. They were all over the place, popping antiwar people, student radicals, getting indictments, including at least one against your mother. There's no statute of limitations, so it's still in force."

Prairie made an I-don't-get-it face. "You saying he's still chasing her, 15 years down the line, taxpayers' money, not enough real criminals around?"

"My best guess from what you tell me is, is that your mom is in some deep shit, Brock's after her, and if he came and took away your house, then he's after you too, maybe as a bargaining point against her." But this was going to be like trying to explain rape to a child and not talk about sex.

"But why?" Yeah. The girl's eyelids, in the afternoon shade, lay half open as she hung, so filled with innocence, with stupefied daughterly need, on each word, each space between words. But DL only gazed back, as if Prairie was supposed to be figuring things out too. Prairie hated to admit it, but so far what it sounded like was something dangerously personal between Brock Vond and her mother, territory she was as nervous about stepping into as DL appeared to be. Up on the table the other night at Bodhi Dharma Pizza, Hector had been screaming something about Brock Vond "taking away Zoyd's old lady." Prairie must have thought he meant making an arrest, forcing her mother to flee, something like that. But then what else?

In the orange sunlight, guests in gowns from the upper reaches of Magnin's and ruffled shirtfronts, tuxes, and tails, throwing ever longer shadows up the hillside, wandered, grouped and regrouped, ate, drank, smoked, danced, fought, staggered to the mike to do guest vocals with the band. Prairie found her glass empty, and a little bit later, a full one in its place. At some point this older guy showed up, looking a little ragged, kissed DL's hand, and tried a grab for her ass that she must have been expecting because he never made contact, lurching instead past Prairie and nearly over a low wall onto the buffet table the next level down. "Shondra and the kids look wonderful," DL remarked as he came slowly back, and she introduced Prairie to their host, Ralph Wayvone. "I don't want to be the one to piss in the punch bowl," DL added, "but better you know sooner than later, Prairie here has just had a run-in with your old pinochle partner Brock Vond."

"Porca miseria." Ralph had a seat. "Just when I was starting to forget all that. Even thought you might be finally letting go of it. Wrong again, huh?"

"Maybe it won't let go of me."

"The past—" darting his eyeballs around. "Shrink says I'm supposed to be leaving it behind. He's right. Isn't he?"

"Well, Ralph," DL drawled, "matter of fact, see, Brock ain't in the past right now, he's in the present tense again, badassin' around up in Vineland County, actin' like a li'l fuckin' army o' occupation."

"Hey — I got nothing to do with pot growers, all right? You know that. As soon as I saw all this drug hysteria coming, I diversified on out of that whole market. Plus it's a Republican Justice Department, come on. I'm copacetic with all these people."

"Yeah — sometime they might not know how to stop. Anyway, I doubt it's pot, 'cause it's still too early in the season. Brock's not answering his calls, apparently, and nobody knows just what's goin' on, except there's a nut case leading a heavily armed strike force loose in California."

Ralph Wayvone swayed to his feet, looking glum. He patted DL's arm a couple of times. "I'll have 'em get on the computer, make a few phone calls. You be around?"

"Heading up the mountain, got to rendezvous with Takeshi."

"Say hello." He headed off into the house. Sunset was coming, and the two women still had a list of things to make up their minds about.

"You think I'm one of these kids on Phil Donahue," Prairie blurted, "shows up at some woman's door fifteen years later goin' 'Mommy, Mommy!' Hey. I have my privacy, had to fight for it sometimes, I know what that's worth, I ain't about to go bargin' in on hers."

"But Prairie, that would be small shit next to this Brock problem. He's dangerous."

"Can't we find her before he does?" So blatantly longing that DL had to stare down at her feet, like an amateur tap dancer.

"You ought to at least have Takeshi's input on this. Any reason you can't come with me?"

She took the amulet Zoyd had given her and moved it inside the perimeter of DL's scanner unit, and the McGarrett theme piped up again, melody, obbligato, and accompaniment. "I'll have to trust you."

"You'll have to trust yourself. If it feels too weird, don't, 's all."

"Come on and meet Isaiah."

They found him up in the van with Meathook, snorting a couple of lines just to perk up for what looked like some late-night overtime. "He-e-e-y, there she is!" Isaiah with a wet grin. "Great news, Ralph Jr. just hired us to play at the Cucumber Lounge. Things work out, we could be the house band."

"So you'll be heading back to Vineland now?"

He frowned, a huge hand on her shoulder, trying to solve a puzzle. "You're not gonna come?" He looked over at DL, and Prairie introduced them and told him about the amulet and the Japanese guy who was now obliged to help her. "But I promised your dad—"

"Just tell him what happened with the card he gave me and it'll be all right. Plus the longer I stick with you guys the more I could get you in trouble. APB's out on the van, I don't know. . . ." Isaiah was looking over at DL, eyebrows going like wings trying to pick up some lift. "She's cool, rilly," Prairie said.

"You sing?" is what Meathook wanted to know, his upper lip glistening and loose.

"If you're good boys," DL beamed, "I'll sing you the story of my life." So it was that as a breeze came up to send all the leaves in the landscape flickering, as low-voltage lighting bloomed along the walks and through the trees in citric green and yellow, and as Ralph Wayvone, for whom the gun-moll anthem was a great favorite, danced a kind of fox-trot with his newlywed daughter, DL came sauntering up to the mike in front of the reassembled Vom-itones, having with kunoichi deftness removed an Uzi from its owner's sheath — "Hi, handsome, mind if I borrow this?" — to use as a prop, and, twirling it like a six-gun in a movie, taking time steps and shaking her hair around, sang, to the band's accompaniment,

Just a floo-zy with-an U-U-zi. . .

Just a girlie, with-a-gun . . .

When I could have been a mo-del,

And I should have been a nu-un.. ..

Oh, just what was it about that

Little Israeli machine?...

Play all day in the sand,

Nothin' gets, jammed, under-

Stand . . . what I mean —

So Mis-ter, you can keep yer len-ses,

And Sis-ter, you can keep yer beads . . .

I'm ridin' in Mercedes Ben-zes,

I'm takin' care of all my needs. . . .

I'll lose my blues, in some Jacuz-zi,

Life's just a lotta good clean fun,

For a floo-zy with-an U-U-zi,

For a girlie, with-a-gun. .. .

Ralph loved it, screaming, "One more time!" DL tossed the weapon back to the bewildered gunsel, Isaiah slowed the rhythm down and on the final eight bars hit every other beat with a heavy rimshot, an old show-tune tactic American audiences are conditioned to meet with wild applause, which is what happened, along with cries of "Who's your agent?" and "Are you married?"

Though all the Vomitones were eager to continue, DL, with regrets, left the mike and with Prairie and Isaiah made her way up through the low lights and night awakenings of jasmine to where she'd parked her car, a black '84 Trans-Am with extra fairings, side pipes, scoops, and coves not on the standard model, plus awesomely important pinstriping by the legendary Ramón of La Habra in several motifs, including explosions and serpents.

"Megabad, rilly," delighted Isaiah crooned. "What'll this do?"

"Just cruisin' or on a good night?"

"Prairie, if I teach you real quick to play drums — ?"

She looked up from her seat at him, towering against light smog that only a few stars shone through. "When you see my dad —"

"Sure. We go up and eyeball your house too, if you want."

"Sorry about it, Stretch Pants."

"Be all right again soon." He knelt to kiss her goodbye through the window. "Only a couple more commercials, just hold on, Prair."

DL allowed the youngsters another beat and then hit the ignition, producing a menacing yet musical exhaust that sent Isaiah Two Four into head-clutching ecstasy. The Trans-Am backed, turned, and, to the stately Neo-glasspack wind chorale, combustion shaped to music, varying as she shifted gears, departed, the sound diminishing down the long maze of switchbacks, pausing for the gate, resuming the melody, blending finally into the ground hum of freeway traffic far below.

* * *

DESCRIBED in Aggro World as "a sort of Esalen Institute for lady asskickers," the mountainside retreat of the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives stood on a promontory dappled in light and dark California greens above a small valley, only a couple of ridgelines from the SP tracks, final ascent being over dirt roads vexing enough to those who arrived in times of mud, and so deeply rutted when the season was dry that many an unwary seeker was brought to a high-centered pause out in this oil painting of a landscape, wheels spinning in empty air, creatures of the hillside only just interrupting grazing or predation to notice. Originally, in the days of the missions, built to house Las Hermanas de Nuestra Señora de los Pepinares — one of those ladies' auxiliaries that kept springing up around the Jesuits in seventeenth-century Spain, never recognized by Rome nor even by the Society, but persisting with grace and stamina there in California for hundreds of years — the place had acquired extensions and outbuildings, got wired and rewired, plumbed and replumbed, until a series of bad investments had forced what was left of the sodality to put it up for rent and disperse to cheaper housing, though they continued to market the world-famous cucumber brandy bearing their name.

By the 1960s the kunoichi, looking for some cash flow themselves, had begun to edge into the self-improvement business, not quite begun to boom as it would in a few more years, offering, eventually, fantasy marathons for devotees of the Orient, group rates on Kiddie Ninja Weekends, help for rejected disciples of Zen ("No bamboo sticks — ever!" promised the ads in Psychology Today) and other Eastern methods. Men of a certain age in safari outfits and military haircuts and quite often the grip of a merciless nostalgia could always be counted on to show up with ogling in mind, expecting some chorus line of Asian dewdrops. Imagine their surprise at the first day's orientation session, when the Sisters, all wearing ninja gear and unpromisingly distant expressions, filed onstage one by one. Not only were most of them non-Asian, many were actually black, a-and Mexican too! What went on?

"There it is," DL said, "check it out." They had rounded a curve, and under the bright moon the forest fell away and the land went sloping down in pastures and then thickets of alder to where a creek rushed and fell, and up beyond that, high on the other side, there stood the Retreat. Steep walls weather-stained over old whitewash did not so much tower above the rolling, breaking terrain as almost readably reflect it, as if they shone at all their different angles like great coarse mirrors, beneath ancient tile roofs gone darkening and corroded under the elements, with windows recessed into shadow and seeming to bear no relation to any set of levels that might be inside. As they got closer, Prairie saw archways, a bell tower, an interpenetration with the tall lime surfaces of cypresses, pepper trees, a fruit orchard . . . nothing looked especially creepy to her. She was a California kid, and she trusted in vegetation. What was creepy, the heart of creep-out, lay back down the road behind her, in, but not limited to, the person, hard and nearly invisible, like quartz, of her pursuer, Brock Vond.

DL was known at the gates outer and inner, getting long looks Prairie couldn't interpret. By the time they got up to the reception building, there was a welcoming committee standing in the lamp-lined drive, all in black gi, headed by a tall, fit, scholarly-looking woman named Sister Rochelle, who turned out to be Senior Attentive, or mother superior of the place. "DL-san," she greeted her longtime disciple and antagonist. "What new mischief now?" DL bowed and introduced Prairie, at whom Sister Rochelle had been gazing as if she knew her but was pretending for some reason that she didn't. They entered a small tiled courtyard with a fountain. Owls called and swooped. Women lay naked in the moonlight. Others, all in black, stood together in the gallery shadows. "Any interest from law enforcement here?" inquired Sister Rochelle.

DL's line should've been something like, "Oh, you working for them now?" delivered emphatically, but she only waited quietly in what Prairie would learn was the standard Attentive's Posture, her eyes lowered, her lip zipped.

"So will the sheriff break down the gate right away, do you think, or wait till Monday morning? This ain't The Hunchback of Notre Dame here, and even if she's not some kind of escapee, there's the Ninjette Oath you took, clause Eight, you'll recall, section B? 'To allow residence to no one who cannot take responsibility for both her input and her output.' "

"Like earn what you eat, secure what you shit, been doin' it for years," Prairie said, "what else?" Not in the first place the sort of kid to take stuff personally, getting ESP messages that around here it might not even be considered cool, she had been tending to the line of her spine and quietly meeting the woman's neutral but energetic gaze. "Well then maybe you have some kind of work-study program here, list of courses, price schedule, maybe pick something cheap, be a live-in student, work off the fees?" detaching from their eye contact long enough to look around, as if for chores that needed doing, trying to wish some deal into being.

The Head Ninjette seemed interested. "Can you cook?"

"Some. You mean you don't have a cook?"

"Worse. A lot of people who think they're cooks but are clinically deluded. We're notorious here for having the worst food in the seminar-providing community. And we're looking at another herd next weekend, and we try different staff combinations, but nothing works. The karmic invariance is, is we're paying for high discipline in the Sisterhood with a zoo in the kitchen. Come on, you'll see."

Out in the evening, she led Prairie and DL around a few corners and down a long trellised walkway toward the rear of the main building. Suppertime was over and some postprandial critique now vehemently in progress. People huddled, intimidated, by the back entrance, out which came an amazing racket, giant metal mixing bowls gonging and crashing around on the flagstone floors, voices screaming, for background the local 24-hour "New Age" music station, gushing into the environment billows of audio treacle. Inside, something ruined was still smoldering on the back of a stove. Folks stood around next to pots that would need scouring. There lay throughout the deep old kitchen a depressing odor of stale animal fat and disinfectant. The chef who was supposed tonight to have been in charge crouched with his head in an oven, weeping bitterly.

"Hi guys," caroled Sister Rochelle, "what y'all doin'?"

Holding their nightly self-criticism hour, of course, in which everybody got to trash the chef of the day personally for the failure of his or her menu, as well as plan more of the same for tomorrow.

"I did what I had to," the chef blubbered, iron and muffled, "I was true to the food."

One of the stoveside loungers looked over. "What are you calling 'food,' Gerhard? That meal tonight wasn't food."

"What you cook's stomach trouble with fat on it," fiercely added a lady holding a meat cleaver, with which she struck a nearby chopping block for emphasis.

"Even your Jell-O salads have scum on them," put in a stylish young man in a couturier chef's toque from Bullock's Wilshire.

"Please, enough," whimpered Gerhard.

"Total honesty," people reminded him. This meanspirited exercise, thought to be therapeutic, was part of everyone's assignment back here to what Gerhard called "indefinite culinary penance."

"Isn't that kidnapping?" Prairie would wonder later.

No — they had all signed instruments of indenture, releases, had all arrived somewhere in their lives where they needed to sign. They spoke of scullery duty as a decoding of individual patterns of not-eating, seeing thereby beyond dishes, pots, and pans each uniquely soiled, beyond accidents of personality to a level where you are not what you eat but how. ... At first Prairie had no time to appreciate many of these spiritual dimensions, because she was running her ass off nonstop. The penitents in the kitchen, weird-eyed as colonists on some galactic outpost, greeted her arrival as a major event. As it turned out, none of them could fix anything even they liked to eat. Some here had grown indifferent to food, others actively to hate it. Nevertheless, new recipes were seized on like advanced technology from beyond the local star system. After checking out the vegetable patch, the orchards, the walk-in freezers and pantries of the Retreat, wondering if she was violating some Prime Directive, Prairie taught them Spinach Casserole. And it proved to be just the ticket to get these folks going again as a team.

"What were you going to serve them?" she couldn't help asking. "Dip," chirped a Mill Valley real-estate agent. "Smores,"  chuckled a Milpitas scoutmaster, "with maple syrup."

"New England Boiled Dinner," replied an ex-institutional inmate with a shudder.

The secret to Spinach Casserole was the UBI, or Universal Binding Ingredient, cream of mushroom soup, whose presence in rows of giant cans there in the ninjette storerooms came as no surprise. Deep in the refrigerators were also to be scavenged many kinds of pieces of cheese, not to mention cases full of the more traditional Velveeta and Cheez Whiz, nor was spinach a problem, with countless blocks of it occupying their own wing of the freezer. So next day the classic recipe was the vegetarian entrée du jour at supper. For the meat eaters, a number of giant baloneys were set to roasting whole on spits, to be turned and attentively basted with a grape-jelly glaze by once-quarrelsome kitchen staff while others made croutons from old bread, bustling about while the spinach thawed, singing along with the radio, which someone had mercifully re-tuned to a rock and roll station.

DL popped her head in in the late afternoon and looked around. "Just what I thought — a teenage charismatic." "Not me," Prairie shrugged, "it's 'ese recipes." "Um, and those purple things, on the rotisserie?" "Just somethin' out of the TV section. What's up?" "Sister Rochelle wonders if you have a minute." Prairie went along watchfully, at her own tempo, making a point of inspecting a few assembled casseroles as well as checking the baloney spin rate before leaving the kitchen, reminding herself of a cat. Upstairs, in the Ninjette Coffee Lounge, the Head Ninjette, with a mug of coffee in her hand, slowly emerged, as they conversed, from invisibility. It seemed to the girl that this must be a magical gift. She learned later that Rochelle had memorized, in this room, all the shadows and how they changed, the cover, the exact spaces between things ... had come to know the room so completely that she could impersonate it, in its full transparency and emptiness.

"Could I learn to do that?"

"Takes a serious attention span." A look sideways. "Then the question of why should you want to?" Her voice was even, with a slow hoarseness suggesting alcohol and cigarettes. Prairie also thought she heard some distant country notes that Rochelle was suppressing on purpose, in favor of something more invisible.

Prairie shrugged. "Seems like it could come in handy."

"Common sense and hard work's all it is. Only the first of many kunoichi disillusionments — right, DL? — is finding that the knowledge won't come down all at once in any big transcendent moment."

"But Zen folks, like where I work, say —"

"Oh, that happens. But not around here. Here it's always out at the margins, using the millimeters and little tenths of a second, you understand, scuffling and scraping for everything we get."

"So don't get into it unless you mean it?"

"Well you ought to see how many gaga little twits we get up here, 'specially your age group, nothing personal, looking for secret powers on the cheap. Thinking we'll take 'em through the spiritual car wash, soap away all that road dirt, git 'em buffed up all cherry again, come out th' other end everybody hangin' around the Orange Julius next door go 'Wow!' 's what they think, like we'll keep 'em awake all weekend, maybe around dawn on Sunday they'll start hallucinating, have a mental adventure they can mistake for improvement in their life, and who knows? Or they get us mixed up with nuns or ballet?"

The girl made a point of looking at her watch, a multicolored plastic model from a Vineland swap meet. "Givin' those baloneys fifteen minutes a pound, think 'at's about right?"

DL smirked. "Not goin' for it, Rochelle-awe."

The Senior Attentive shifted gear. "Prairie, we subscribe to some outside data services here, but we also maintain our own library of computer files, including a good-size one on your mother."

Where Prairie had been, "your mother" in that tone of voice usually meant trouble, and she wasn't sure if this woman, who looked sort of middle-class, knew how it sounded. But Prairie was shaking with the need to find out anything she could, the way some girls she knew got about boys, his family's name in the phone book, anything. "Would it," slowly (should she bow?), "be OK if—"

"How about after supper?"

"Ohm mah way, as my Grampa the gaffer always sez." Not a minute too soon, she returned to find a number of casseroles beginning to redline, baloney glazes to decompose. Pretending to be setting an example, Prairie slid over to one of the work counters, wrestled a hot baloney into place, quickly sharpened a knife, and began to carve the object into steaming, purple-rimmed slices, which she arranged attractively on a serving platter, generously spooning more shiny grape liquid over the top, to be carried in and set on one of the mess-hall tables, where eaters would serve themselves — except for the people in assertiveness programs, of course, who sat over at their own table and each got a separate plate with the food already on it.

From the mess hall next door an ambiguous murmuring, part hunger, part apprehension, had grown in volume. Prairie grabbed a kettle of institutional tomato soup, carried it on in, and for the next couple of hours she also schlepped racks of newly washed cups and dishes in and bused dirty dishes out, cleaned off tabletops, poured coffee, going from one set of chores to another as they arose, sensing partial vacuums and flowing there to fill them, unable to help noticing that people were taking seconds on the Spinach Casserole, and the baloney too. Later she scrubbed out pots and pans and helped put stuff away and swab down the stone floor of the kitchen and scullery. By the time she got upstairs to the Ninjette Terminal Center and found out how to log on, the midsummer sunset had come and gone and the sounds of an evening koto workshop mixed with the good-nights of courtyard birds.

The file on Frenesi Gates, whose entries had been accumulating over the years, often haphazardly, from far and wide, reminded Prairie of scrapbooks kept by somebody's eccentric hippie uncle. Some was governmental, legal history with the DMV, letterhead memoranda from the FBI enhanced by Magic Marker, but there were also clippings from "underground" newspapers that had closed down long ago, transcripts of Frenesi's radio interviews on KPFK, and a lot of cross-references to something called 24fps, which Prairie recalled as the name of the film collective DL said she and Frenesi had been in together for a while.

So into it and then on Prairie followed, a girl in a haunted mansion, led room to room, sheet to sheet, by the peripheral whiteness, the earnest whisper, of her mother's ghost. She already knew about how literal computers could be — even spaces between characters mattered. She had wondered if ghosts were only literal in the same way. Could a ghost think for herself, or was she responsive totally to the needs of the still-living, needs like keystrokes entered into her world, lines of sorrow, loss, justice denied? . . . But to be of any use, to be "real," a ghost would have to be more than only that kind of elaborate pretending. . . .

Prairie found that she could also summon to the screen photographs, some personal, some from papers and magazines, images of her mom, most of the time holding a movie camera, at demonstrations, getting arrested, posing with various dimly recognizable Movement figures of the sixties, beaming a significant look at a cop in riot gear beside a chain-link fence someplace while one hand (Prairie would learn her mother's hands, read each gesture a dozen ways, imagine how they would have moved at other, unphotographed times) appeared to brush with its fingertips the underside of the barrel of his assault rifle. Gross! Her Mom? This girl with the old-fashioned hair and makeup, always wearing either miniskirts or those weird-looking bell-bottoms they had back then? In a few years Prairie would almost be that age, and she had an eerie feeling miniskirts would be back.

She paused at a shot of DL and Frenesi together. They were walking along on what might have been a college campus. In the distance was a pedestrian overpass, where tiny figures could be seen heading both ways, suggesting, at least for a moment, social tranquillity. The women's shadows were long, lapping up over curbs, across grass, between the spokes of cyclists. Catching the late or early sun were palm trees, flights of distant steps, a volleyball court, few if any glass windows. Frenesi's face was turned or turning toward her partner, perhaps her friend, a suspicious or withheld smile seeming to begin. . . . DL was talking. Her lower teeth flashed. It wasn't politics — Prairie could feel in the bright California colors, sharpened up pixel by pixel into deathlessness, the lilt of bodies, the unlined relaxation of faces that didn't have to be put on for each other, liberated from their authorized versions for a free, everyday breath of air. Yeah, Prairie thought at them, go ahead, you guys. Go ahead....

"Who was that boy," DL was asking, or "that 'dude,' at the protest rally? With the long hair and love beads, and the joint in his mouth?"

"You mean in the flowered bell-bottoms and the paisley shirt?"

"Right on, sister!"

"Psychedelic!" Slapping hands back and forth. Prairie wondered who'd taken the picture — one of the film collective, the FBI? Before the stained deep crystalline view she fell into a hyp-nagogic gaze, which the unit promptly sensed, beginning to blink, following this with a sound chip playing the hook from the Everlys' "Wake Up, Little Susie," over and over. Prairie remembered that she had to be up before sunrise, to prep for breakfast. As she reached toward the power button, she said good night to the machine.

"Why good night yourself, gentle User," it replied, "and may your sleep be in every way untroubled."

Back down in the computer library, in storage, quiescent ones and zeros scattered among millions of others, the two women, yet in some definable space, continued on their way across the low-lit campus, persisting, recoverable, friends by the time of this photo for nearly a year, woven together in an intricacy of backs covered, promises made and renegotiated, annoyances put up with, shortcuts worn in, ESP beyond the doubts of either. They would probably have met at some point, though who'd have been willing to bet they'd stick? The turbulence of the times was bringing all kinds of people together into towns like Berkeley, lured, like DL, by promises of action. In those days DL was just cruising up and down 101 looking for girl motorcycle gangs to terrorize, drinking drugstore vodka out of the bottle, hustling guys named Snake for enough double-cross whites to get her to the next population center offering a suitable risk to her safety. The night before she met Frenesi she had chased the entire membership of Tetas y Chetas M.C. northward through the dark farm country around Salinas, vegetables fallen in profusion from the trucks and then squashed and resquashed by traffic all day making the night streaming against her face smell like a giant salad. Finally she ran out of gas and had to let them go. By then she was close enough to Berkeley, and had been hearing enough on the radio, to want to go look in. She couldn't have said, then or later, what she thought she was looking for.

What she found was Frenesi, who'd been out with her camera and a bagful of bootlegged ECO stock since dawn, finally ending up on Telegraph Avenue filming a skirmish line of paramilitary coming up the street in riot gear, carrying small and she hoped only rubber-bullet-firing rifles. Last time she looked she'd been at the front edge of a crowd who were slowly retreating from the campus, trashing what they could as they went. When the film roll ended and she came up out of the safety of her viewfinder, Frenesi was alone, halfway between the people and the police, with no side street handy to go dodging down. Hmm. Shop doors were all secured with chain, windows shuttered over with heavy plywood. Her next step would've been just to go ahead and change rolls, get some more footage, but to go rooting around in her bag right now could only be taken as a threat by the boys in khaki, who'd come close enough that even above the lingering nose-wrenching ground note of tear gas she could still begin to smell them, the aftershave, the gunmetal in the sun, the new-issue uniforms whose armpits by now were musky with fear. Oh, I need Superman, she prayed, Tarzan on that vine. The basic stone bowelflash had come and gone about the time DL showed up, all in black including helmet and face shield, riding her esteemed and bad red and silver Czech motorcycle, the Che Zed, overdesigned in every part, up onto which she gathered Frenesi out of danger, camera, miniskirt, equipment bags, and all, and carried her away. Skidding among piles of street debris and paper fires, over crumbled auto glass, trying not to hit anybody lying on the pavement, up onto some sidewalk and around the corner at last and down the long hillside to the Bay flashing in the late sun they escaped, in a snarling dreamrush of speed and scent. With her bare thighs Frenesi gripped the leather hips of her benefactor, finding that she'd also pressed her face against the fragrant leather back — she never thought it might be a woman she hugged this way.

Biker rapture, for sure. They sat devouring cheeseburgers, fries, and shakes in a waterfront place full of refugees from the fighting up the hill, all their eyes, including ones that had wept, now lighted from the inside — was it only the overhead fluorescents, some trick of sun and water outside? no ... too many of these fevered lamps not to have origin across the line somewhere, in a world sprung new, not even defined yet, worth the loss of nearly everything in this one. The jukebox played the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish. DL had taken off the helmet and shaken out her hair, which lit up in the approaching orange sunset like a comet. Frenesi, jittery, starving, and gaga all at once, was still trying to figure it out. "Somebody sent you, right?"

"Cruisin' through, was all. You sure sound paranoid."

Frenesi gestured with her burger, trailing drops of separating ketchup and fat, each drop warped by the forces of its flight into swirling micropatterns of red and beige, and — "It's the Revolution, girl — can't you feel it?"

DL narrowed her eyes, wondering, What have we here. She felt like an adult come upon a little kid alone at a dangerous time of day, not yet aware of her mom's absence. "I could see you were just all revved up," she told Frenesi, though months later. "I couldn't help teasin' you. You were bein' so —" but let it go, pretending she couldn't think of the word. It probably wasn't revolutionary, invoked in those days widely and sometimes lovingly and enjoying a wide range of meaning. Frenesi dreamed of a mysterious people's oneness, drawing together toward the best chances of light, achieved once or twice that she'd seen in the street, in short, timeless bursts, all paths, human and projectile, true, the people in a single presence, the police likewise simple as a moving blade — and individuals who in meetings might only bore or be pains in the ass here suddenly being seen to transcend, almost beyond will to move smoothly between baton and victim to take the blow instead, to lie down on the tracks as the iron rolled in or look into the gun muzzle and maintain the power of speech — there was no telling, in those days, who might unexpectedly change this way, or when. Some were in it, in fact, secretly for the possibilities of finding just such moments. But DL admitted she was a little less saintly— "Is the asskicking part's usually what I'm lookin' for," watching Frenesi, waiting for disapproval. "But somebody told me it don't mean much unless I make what they call the correct analysis? and then act on it? Ever hear of that one?"

Frenesi shrugged. "Heard of it. Maybe I don't have the patience. I have to trust the way this makes me feel. Feels right, DL. Like we're really going to change the world this time," looking back in the same go-ahead-say-something way. But DL was smiling lopsidedly to herself. Backlit by the last of the sun, Frenesi in dazed witness, her face had become possessed by that of a young man, distant, surmised — Moody Chastain, her father. Later, when they got to showing each other pictures of their lives, there he was, same face in silver and dye, confirming the earlier gleaming moment — the halo of fresh-drawn copper, the ghostly young hero who'd come to her rescue, the whoop-de-do that day, Revolution all around them, world-class burgers, jukebox solidarity, as the sun set behind Marin and the scent of DL's sweat and pussy excitation diffused out of the leather clothing, mixed with motor smells.

Moody. He'd once been a junior Texas rounder, promoting bad behavior all over the Harlingen, Brownsville, McAllen area. For a while he and a small gang had managed to migrate as far as Mobile Bay, spreading apprehension from Mertz to Magazine, but he was soon back in his native orbit, handing out to all the ladies Dauphin Island orchids kept fresh with the beer in an ice tub in the truckbed and resuming his ways, which included driving fast, discharging firearms inappropriately, and passing around open containers, till a sheriff's deputy friendly with the family suggested a choice between the Army now or Huntsville later. The war then approaching was never mentioned directly, but, "Well, what'lí I get to shoot?" Moody wanted to know.

"Any weapon, any caliber."

"I mean, who do I get to shoot?"

"Whoever they tell you. Interesting thing about that, way I see it, you don't have nearly the legal problems."

Sounded good to Moody, who went right down and joined up. He met Norleen while he was at Fort Hood at services in the same narrow wood church they got married in, just before he shipped out. It was about mid-Atlantic, surrounded by nothing that did not refer, finally, to steel, vomiting for days, imagining the horizon outside, the unnatural purity, before he understood how terrified he was. It was the first time in his career he couldn't climb in the truck and head for some borderline. He felt himself about to go crazy in this deep overcrowded hole, but he hung on, he tried to see through his fear, and when it came it was like finding Jesus — Moody saw, like the comics or Bible illustrations, a succession of scenes showing him the way he had to go, which was to imagine the worst and then himself be worse than that. He must torture the violent, deprive the greedy, give the drunks something to stagger about. He would have to become a Military Policeman, be as bad as he had to be to make it, using everything he knew from those rounder days. And so he did, pulling his first MP duty in London, on and about Shaftesbury Avenue, accessorized in virgin white, known, in military slang in those days, as a "snowdrop."

Darryl Louise was born right after the war, in Leavenworth, Kansas, after Moody, having made it through alive, was assigned to the Disciplinary Barracks there. In the years of war he'd done a lot of shooting, some wounding, a little killing, but despite his love of weaponry, he'd come to see bombs, artillery, even rifles, as too abstract and cold. The peacetime Moody wanted to get more personal now. Though he was already licensed to use life-threatening come-alongs, to crack heads and dislocate shoulders, he didn't really light up till he discovered the judo and jujitsu of the defeated Jap, then enjoying a postwar surge of interest. From then on Moody practiced when he could, wherever he happened to be posted, getting the best of East and West Coast schools of thought, working eventually part-time as an instructor with his own group of students. When DL was five or six she started tagging along with him down to the dojo.

"Could've been my mama thought he was slippin' around. Maybe I was supposed to keep an eye on him."

"Hmm-mm, I can see why." The snapshot Frenesi happened to be looking at showed Moody in his full-dress uniform, ribbons and medals and patches and fourragères, holding already oversize eight-month-old DL and grinning in the sunlight. There were palm trees behind them, so it couldn't've been Kansas anymore.

"Way it looks," Frenesi said, when they could say things like this comfortably, "is that he went over. A wild kid who ended up being that deputy sheriff."

"Uh-huh," nodding, sparkling, "and guess who he took it out on." DL had noticed as she got older that her mother, Norleen, was apt to be in and out of their housing unit of the moment on mysterious "chores," her word for something else that years later DL surmised could have been boyfriends. Among Moody's problem areas was a practice of bringing home with him emotional elements of his work. The morning after one of their bigger go-rounds, DL started hollering at her mother. "Why're you puttin' up with his shit?" But Norleen could only gaze tearfully back, needing to talk, all right, but not to her child, whom she must have thought she was protecting.

"Wait a minute," Frenesi broke in, "he beat on your mother?"

She got that who-the-fuck-are-you stare back. "Never heard of that where you come from?"

"He ever do it to you?"

She smiled tightly. "Nope. That was just it." Nodded, her jaw forward. "The son of a bitch, you see, wouldn't even work out with me — not even in public at the dojo, not even when we got to be the same size and rank. He would never get into the ring with me."

"He knew better."

"Oh, I wouldt'n've kicked his ass that hard. . . ." She kept a straight face while Frenesi grinned. "I'm serious, you don't let things like how you feel about your daddy get in the way. Not professional, bad for your spirit."

"What about your mom, why did she put up with it?"

Best Norleen could ever do was "It's his job," but DL still didn't get it. "He loves us, but sometimes he has to be like 'at." Her face that morning had been swollen, distorted enough to frighten the girl, as if her mother were slowly turning into some other creature, one that might even wish her harm.

"You mean, they're tellin' him to?"

Norleen answered with one of those sighs DL had by then learned to dread, a beaten saddening surrender of breath. "No, but they might's well be. Just how it is. Men are runnin' it, they don't ask us, better learn it now 'cause it doesn't end when you grow up either, Darryl Louise."

"You mean everybody has to —"

"Ever'body darlin'. Can you reach me that big spoon over there?" But years later, DL on a rare visit, her mother by then divorced and living in Houston, Norleen finally told her, "Why, the man had me scared spitless. What was I supposed to do? I didn't even know how to shoot any o' them ol' stupid guns he kept around. And I'm telling you, you're lucky you made it's far as you did. I know that something — Somebody — was lookin' out for me."

And by then DL was able easily to sit attentive, pressureless, through the Christer commercial that followed, one she'd already heard more than once over the phone. She was finally acknowledging her mother's soul, one more side benefit of life in the martial arts. The discipline had steered her early enough away from the powerlessness and the sooner or later self-poisoning hatred that had been waiting for her. Somewhere further along, she'd been given to understand, she would discover that all souls, human and otherwise, were different disguises of the same greater being — God at play. She respected Norleen's love of Jesus even though she'd had her own way to go since she was a girl, even before the Department of Defense, that well-known agent of enlightenment, ever thought of cutting Moody's orders for Japan.

This was during the lull between Korea and Vietnam, but the troops on R and R could still keep Moody plenty busy. Norleen was often out, running those chores of hers, so DL was left on her own. She started to ditch the dependents' school, intending to go look for an instructor in unarmed combat, usually winding up hanging around pachinko parlors and making shady acquaintances, picking up enough of the language to find built into it a whole charm school's worth of rules for getting along socially over here.

One day, in the ringing crepitation of millions of steel balls, ingeniously waxed pins, and spheriphagous "tulips," she grew aware of a gap in the web, a local redirection of interest. She looked around. He was dressed plainly and had the air of a servant. Bowing, precise, he asked, "You eat soba?"

Bowing back, "You buyin'?"

His name was Noboru, and he claimed to have the gift of seeing in a person what she was truly destined to be. "Don't get me wrong!" between slurps, "you have definite shodan potential at the game, but pachinko is not your destiny. I want you to come and meet my teacher."

"You're — some kind of guidance counselor?"

"Been out searching a long time. The sensei asked me to."

"Wait — I've been around the circuit enough to know it's the pupil who's supposed to go lookin' for the teacher. What kind of a no-class setup is this here?" But she'd been having no luck on her own, so maybe it was what her Aunt Tulsa liked to call "a message from beyond."

Throughout their first interview, Inoshiro Sensei, as feared, kept one hand on DL's leg while using the other hand to chain-smoke. The pitch was take-it-or-leave-it simple. In her pachinko playing his agent Noboru, with his infallible gift, had detected an advanced ruthlessness of spirit, which the master, going then secretly to observe, had confirmed. DL wondered if being already taller than most Japanese adults, plus her eye-catching head of hair, came into it at all. "There are things I am obliged to pass on. Skills no one owns, but which must be carried forward."

"I'm not even Japanese."

"One of my major karmic missions this time around is to get outside of Japanese insular craziness, be international assukikaa, ne? Come on," announced the sensei, "we're going dancing!"

"Huh?"

"See how you move!" They proceeded, DL squinting and frowning, to a water-trade joint around the corner called The Lucky Sea Urchin, where they danced some back-street two-step and DL waved off everything but 7-Up. It wasn't as if these jokers were accosting her at a real stable time of her life. At the school on the base, girls were given only a sketchy governmental account of puberty and adolescence. DL's were both turning out to be like vacationing on another planet and losing her traveler's checks. Not long before this her period, a major obsession by then, had arrived at last, plus lately she felt washed under by these long, sometimes daylong, waves of inattention, everybody looking at her weirdly, especially boys. The sensei had scowlingly little sympathy for any of this, however. In the traditional stories, a few of which DL would come to hear before she left Japan, the apprenticeship is harsh and long, someplace scenic up in the mountains where the student is put to work at menial outdoor tasks, learning patience and obedience, without which she can learn nothing else, and this alone, in some stories, takes years. What DL got from Inoshiro Sensei was more like the modernized crash course. Man here was clearly under some time pressure so heavy she didn't want to know, having herself decided it was a romantic terminal illness, an older woman someplace.. . . For ancient dark reasons, he could not return to the mountains, probably had killed somebody back there over this woman, and now, while she lay dying far away, he must live penitent, earthbound, down here in the ensnarling city, longing for her and the mist and the wind-shaped trees....

The sensei ran DL all over the map on incomprehensible, some would say pointless, fool errands. He blindfolded her with tape and dark glasses and took her on the Yamanote Line, riding around for hours switching subways, at last unsealing her eyes, handing her a stone of a certain shape and weight, and leaving her well lost, with instructions to get back to his house before nightfall, using only the stone. He gave her messages she didn't understand to take to people she didn't know, at addresses harshly drilled in, that would turn out either not to exist or to be something else, like a pachinko parlor. He also enrolled her in a small dojo nearby run by a former disciple. She would put in half her time on traditional forms and exercises, then slip outside, around the corner and down the alley, to a rendezvous more felonious than illicit.

Meantime, all her school ditching had become a problem at home. The truancy squad was now in her face as part of a daily routine. Moody ignored it till they finally came to bother him at work, in front of other men, including officers, not the best way to send him home with a smile on his lips. For a week and a half he would already be screaming as he came up the front path, silencing birds, sending neighbor dogs, cats, and children fleeing indoors, and it would go on, out the screened windows and across the neat little yards, on through suppertime, prime time, and beyond, blunt, embittered, what the sensei would have called lacking in style. Norleen as usual kept silent, trying to stay out of the way, though sometimes on impulse she was known to actually bring them coffee right in the very fierce middle of it. And as usual Moody made no least move upon his daughter, who might by now, far as he knew, be able to do him some real harm. To tell the truth, these days, pushing twenty years in the service, he was starting to kick back some, working a regular daytime shift for a couple years now, manipulating paper that only represented the adrenaline and guts of what he used to do, putting in less and less time at gym, track, pool, or dojo, content to sit behind his increasing embonpoint with a personalized coffee mug wired permanently to his right index finger and shoot the shit with numberless cronies from head-bashing days who dropped by all the time. He'd lost his old enthusiasm for unarmed combat, and DL found no way, reasonable or at the top of her voice, to get him to see where her own love of the discipline was taking her. She did tell them both, trying to sound dutiful, about the dojo, but not about Inoshiro Sensei, having sworn to keep silent and already feeling the depressing weight of Moody's suspicions. "I ever find you 'th one 'nem little slant-eyed jerkoffs," as he expressed it, "he gets killed, and you get a Clorox douche, you understand me?" DL hated with all her heart to say so, but she did.

Another message from beyond, no doubt. She saw a pattern. He was settling for spoiling, snarling, aiming his belly at her like a great smooth bomb snout and calling her Trash, Gook-lover, and, mystifyingly, Communist too. Norleen nibbled her lip and from under her lashes sent sorrowing looks that said, Why keep getting him worked up, he'll take it out on me. "I was just sadistic enough," DL admitted, years later, to herself and then to Norleen's face, "so mad at you for all 'at knucklin' under, that sure I provoked him. Also I 's wonderin' what it would take to get you to fight him back."

Norleen shrugged. The central air-conditioning pursued its dark slow pulsing, traffic breathed along the freeways, trees outside just managed to stir in the moist subtropical air. " 'Course you knew all the while I was seeing Captain Lanier. . .."

"What? Mama, his CO?" Well no, she sure hadn't known till now, how would she?

"He paid for the divorce, too."

DL shook her head, bewildered. "No shit?"

Norleen, born-again, mannerly and all, laughed like a girl with a garden hose in her hand. "No shit."

And DL guessed that Moody'd known about it all along, too. The Captain would have kept him reminded. Men had ways. She'd been living her childhood in a swamp full of intrigue, where, below, invisible sleek things without names kept brushing past, barely felt sliding across her skin, everybody pretending the surface was all there was. Till one day she had a moment. There just came flowing over her the certainty that only when she was away from them, learning to fight, did she feel any good. The sensei, for all his lechery, high-speed frenzies, temperamental snits and low-tolerance ways, had become a refuge from what lay breathing invisible somewhere back in the geometric sprawl of yards and fences and dumpsters of Dependents' Housing, more than ready to rise from its crouch and take her over. So instead of waiting for something dramatic enough to give her an excuse, which could be too dangerous, DL one day when they both happened to be out of the house just filled a small army bag with what she needed, turned much of the fridge's contents into sandwiches and packed them in a big number 66 market bag, stole a bottle of PX Chivas Regal for the sensei, and without any last look in at her room, went AWOL.

When she arrived at the sensei's house, she found most of the alley filled by a white Lincoln Continental whose ample dimensions had been beefed up further with armor plating, radar, gun pods, and command turrets. Nearby a detachment of smirking crew-cut young fellows in black suits and shirts, white neckties, black shades, posed and sauntered. She knew enough to keep out of the way, hunker down, wrap her hair in a scarf, wait in a shadow till she saw an elderly man in a suit and homburg hat come out the door with Inoshiro Sensei. They bowed, then clasped hands in a way not fully visible. The visitor was hustled by his kobun into the car, which then was carefully backed out of its tight squeeze. Pedestrian traffic resumed as if after a rainstorm, one more view of Edo.

Inside, DL found the place littered with foam plastic sake containers. They'd been sending out for it all day. Noboru was unconscious, but DL thought the sensei had a grip on himself. She asked him, respectfully, for asylum. He seemed amused. "Do you know who was just here?"

"Yakuza."

"You're too young for such things, Blondie!"

" 'Even a crying baby dummies up when she hears the name Yamaguchi-gumi,' " she recited in Japanese.

Sympathetic but leering, he reached for her. Mistake, sensei. She was immediately in a Vanishing Stance, surfaces loaded, ready to let him have it in any variety of ways, all depending on him. "Relax! Only testing you!"

"Uh-huh, tell me, sensei, if you're that tight with the Mob, and I'm working for you, does that mean —"

"Our connection is of very old giri, lot of details, Japanese names, you'd lose track. The war figures in heavily. But you and I, we're connected only by bonds of master and disciple, free to disconnect at any time. If you could leave your parents' house that lightly, you'll have no trouble leaving me."

What was this? Guilt? "You want me to go back?"

He cackled and fell into sounding not quite decipherable. "You will go back. Till you do, stick around!"

From then on she was able to devote herself full time to ninjitsu, including the forbidden steps outside its canons taken — it seemed long ago — by the sensei, through which the original purity of ninja intent had been subverted, made cruel and more worldly, bled of spirit, once eternal techniques now only one-shot and disposable, once greater patterns now only a string of encounters, single and multiple, none with any meaning beyond itself. This was what he felt he had to pass on — not the brave hard-won grace of any warrior, but the cheaper brutality of an assassin. When DL finally tumbled, she brought it to his attention.

"Sure," he told her, "this is for all the rest of us down here with the insects, the ones who don't quite get to make warrior, who with two tenths of a second to decide fail to get it right and live with it the rest of our lives — it's for us drunks, and sneaks, and people who can't feel enough to kill if they have to ... this is our equalizer, our edge — all we have to share. Because we have ancestors and descendants too — our generations . . . our traditions."

"But everybody's a hero at least once," she informed him, "maybe your chance hasn't come up yet."

"DL-san, you are crazy," he diagnosed gently, "seeing too many movies, maybe. Those you will be fighting — those you must resist — they are neither samurai nor ninja. They are sarariman, incrementalists, who cannot act boldly and feel only contempt for those who can. . . . Only for what I must teach you have they learned respect."

He taught her the Chinese Three Ways, Dim Ching, Dim Hsuen, and Dim Mak, with its Nine Fatal Blows, as well as the Tenth and Eleventh, which are never spoken of. She learned how to give people heart attacks without even touching them, how to get them to fall from high places, how through the Clouds of Guilt technique to make them commit seppuku and think it was their idea — plus a grab bag of strategies excluded from the Kumi-Uchi, or official ninja combat system, such as the Enraged Sparrow, the Hidden Foot, the Nosepicking of Death, and the truly unspeakable Gojira no Chimpira. Despite the accelerated schedule, some of the moves Inoshiro Sensei taught DL would only make sense ten years or more from now — requiring that much rigorous practice every day for her even to begin to understand — and until she did understand, she was forbidden to use any of them out in the world.

As days and weeks passed, DL found herself entering into a system of heresies about the human body. In an interview with Aggro World years later, she spoke of her time with Inoshiro Sensei as returning to herself, reclaiming her body, "Which they always like to brainwash you about, like they know it better, trying to keep you as spaced away from it as they can. Maybe they think people are easier to control that way." The schoolroom line was, You'll never know enough about your body to take responsibility for it, so better just hand it over to those who are qualified, doctors and lab technicians and by extension coaches, employers, boys with hardons, so forth — alarmed, not to mention pissed off, DL reached the radical conclusion that her body belonged to herself. That was back when she was still thinking about ninjitsu. After a few years she didn't think so much but would just keep working out every day, finding the time and space, often at high cost, but every day of her life.

As the sensei had predicted, she did go back to Norleen and Moody, at least for a while. There had always been channels between the yakuza and the American military, and so eventually everybody knew where she was and that she was safe. Both parents, for their own reasons, were just as happy to have her out of the house just then, and the only reason DL had to resume her role as dependent minor at all was that the CO's wife found out about him and Norleen and proceeded to make life unquiet till Moody and the family were Stateside again.

A few years later, competing by then, DL heard about the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives at some meet, "You know, the way you do. Hitchhiked up as far as the end of the gravel, did the last few miles on foot. Back then they let anybody who showed up crash here for free. Early days, more idealistic, not so much into money." She and Prairie were out taking a break, down by the creek. It was a couple of weeks after their arrival, with Prairie by now an old hand in the computer room as well as the kitchen. "Yeah now it's group insurance, pension plans, financial consultant name of Vicki down in L.A. who moves it all around for us, lawyer in Century City, though Amber the paralegal has been taking over most of his work since the indictment." DL seemed a little on edge. Her partner, Takeshi Fumimota, was due in for some kind of health checkup, they'd arranged to meet here, but he still hadn't shown.

"Are you worried?" Prairie, though at heart not a nosy kid, did want to give her the chance to talk, if it would do any good.

"Nahh, the ol' son of Nippon can take care of himself."

"Uh, so how'd you guys meet?"

"Aauuhhgghh!" First time outside of Saturday-morning cartoons Prairie had ever seen anybody scream with this intensity.

"Gee, thought it was a pretty innocent question. . . ."

* * *

HOW did we meet," DL's voice finding some agitated soprano   level.   "Well!   Through   Ralph  Wayvone, really. I had been spending years and years of my life with these fantasies of taking revenge on Brock Vond. I wanted to kill him — one way or another he'd taken away the lives of people I loved, and I saw nothing wrong with killing him. I was that off-center, it afflicted me, wrecked my judgment." At first she'd thought Ralph was some kind of groupie. She'd noticed him, among the spectators, always wearing a suit. He finally approached her in a coffee shop in Eugene, where she had been staring dejectedly, apparently for some time, at a plate with four rubber scampi, rushed in fresh from the joke store down the street and covered as completely as possible with tomato sauce. She became aware of Ralph, looming over her food and glaring at it. "How can you eat that?" "Just what I ask myself. Anything else?" Her visitor sat down across the table, clicked open an armored attache case, and produced a folder with an 8 x 10 of a face she knew, a Fresson-process studio photograph of Brock Vond, looking like he'd just had a buffer run all over him, the high smooth forehead, the cheeks that still hadn't lost all their baby fat, the sleek and pointed ears, small chin, and slim little unbroken nose. This photo was clipped to some stapled pages, where she saw federal seals and stampings. "It's all from the FBI. Perfectly legit." He glanced at some ultrathin expensive wristwatch. "Look — you want him . . . we want him . . . say yes, both our wishes will come true."

She'd already checked out the cut and surface texture of Ralph's suit. "Well," she inquired, "what's ol' Brock up to these days?"

"Same public servant he always was, only bigger. Much, much bigger. He figures he won his war against the lefties, now he sees his future in the war against drugs. Some dear friends of mine are quite naturally upset."

"And he's too big for them? Please, you've got to be rilly desperate, comin' to me."

"No. You've got the motivation." At her look, "We know your history, it's all on the computer."

She thought of the white armored limo at Inoshiro Sensei's house, long ago. "Then you know how personal this is. If you want real ninja product, that could get in the way. ... I assume you're buying skills and not just feelings here?"

"Buy, sure, but how about give? The one thing you truly want, huh? A good crack at a evil man? I know 'cause I see it in your eyes."

She didn't exactly shift her eyes away, didn't react much to this lowlife flirtatiousness, either, but there it was — he had her number, and it looked like he'd gotten it from the FBI. What was going on here? Did Ralph have a line into their NCIC computer? If they knew Brock was a target of Ralph's friends, why fail to protect one of their own? Unless of course the unfortunate setupee here was more likely DL herself, attempted assassination of a federal officer, some time in the Bureau of Prisons' mindfucking system perhaps. . . .

Ralph Wayvone, master of telepathic anxieties, tried to be helpful. "They wouldn't need any fancy excuse, Miss Chastain, they just go in, get anybody they want, do the paperwork later — what, you ain't figured that one out yet? I'd known you was such a little kid I'd o' brought yiz a Barbie doll."

"Yeah but why me? Thought you folks were more into pistols, dirks, car bombs, 'at sort of thing."

"I have heard," Ralph almost misty-eyed, "there's this touch that you can put on somebody, so lightly they don't feel it then, but a year later they drop dead, right when you happen to be miles away eating ribs with the Chief of Police."

"That would be the Vibrating Palm, or Ninja Death Touch." She went on to explain, in tones carefully free of exasperation, about the procedure, and how serious a matter it was. You didn't, for example, just go around putting it on people you didn't like. It was useless without a long history of training in martial disciplines, took years to master, and when used was a profoundly moral act. But at some point she realized she was also pitching herself to him. So did he. Patting her hand, "You're telling me I don't have to worry."

"In my time, Mr. Wayvone, I was the best."

"I remember," he said, instead of "So they tell me," but she didn't catch it. He'd heard about her in fact years before on the YakMaf grapevine, early dojo rumors, something extraordinary said to be happening at a certain regional elimination meet. So he'd driven across the Mojave all night one night to see her in action. From a dank cement arena her hair had blazed at him like the halo of an angel of mischief. In the Rolodex of Ralph's memory, young DL would be flagged that brightly. He was actually then to follow her for a time, meet to meet through the South and West, along a circuit of grim, early ex-Nam faces, motels always miles from the venue and down the wrong freeway, shoptalk, drinking, possession of weapons, T-shirts featuring skulls, snakes, and dangerous transportation. Ralph never thought of the look on his face as the helpless stare of an older man through a schoolyard fence, but as more the alert beaming of a micromanager. And sometimes he was right. In DL's case, the time he'd invested had yielded him a file he knew he'd make use of one day, and so it had come to pass.

He'd presented DL, however, with a crisis. She knew she'd been slowly poisoning her spirit, drifting further into her obsession with Brock Vond. Here was Ralph, promising resolution and release. What was she complaining about? Only that acts, deeply moral and otherwise, had consequences — only the workings of karma. One unfelt touch to the correct piece of Vond anatomy could commit her to a major redirection of her life. There was no question that she'd ever be free of Ralph. A girl did one Death Touch job and right away people started getting ideas. Whatever she chose to do would get her in trouble. She promised to give him her decision at dinner the next evening, and then she got the hell out of town, leaving the last of Ralph's tails near Drain, Oregon, beside a late-model Oldsmobile with steam pouring from beneath its hood.

She had to switch cars again before she got to L.A., then took the bus out to a bank branch on mid-Wilshire where she had once providentially stashed a packet of documents that would now give her a choice among identities, paid cash on Western Avenue for a '66 Plymouth Fury, bought a wig at a place across the street, went into a certain ladies' gas-station toilet on Olympic legendary in the dopers' community, and emerged a different, less noticeable person. The car radio, tuned to KFWB, was playing the Doors' "People Are Strange (When You're a Stranger)" as she injected herself into the slow lane of the eastbound freeway and settled in, hating to let any of it go, Banning, the dinosaurs, the Palm Springs turnoff, Indio, across the Mojave, to be redreamed in colors pale but intense, with unnaturally fine sand blowing in plumes across the sun, baby-blue shadows in the folds of the dunes, a pinkish sky — holding on, letting go, redreaming each night stop the less easterly places she'd been in all day, coming slowly unstuck, leaving for the United States, trying not to get emotional but still hanging on the rearview mirror's single tale of recedings and vanishing points as we hang on looks our lovers give.

On inertial navigation, knowing she'd know what she was looking for when she found it, DL didn't stop till the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, which she first beheld around midday in a stunning onslaught of smog and traffic. By this time she was used to the car and its unorthodox push-button shifting, having made the analysis "stick shift — penis" and speculating that a push-button automatic might at least appear more clitorally ladylike, or, as DL might've put it, regressive, if there'd been anybody anymore to talk to, which of course there wasn't. She took a little apartment and found a job at a vacuum cleaner parts distributor's, typing and filing.

Columbus must have promised a life that some residual self, somewhere in the stifling dark, had wanted always. "Superman could change back into Clark Kent," she had once confided to Frenesi, "don't underestimate it. Workin' at the Daily Planet was the Man o' Steel's Hawaiian vacation, his Saturday night in town, his marijuana and his opium smoke, and oh what I wouldn't give. ..." An evening newspaper . . . anyplace back in the Midwest . . . she would leave work around press time, make a beeline for some walk-down lounge, near enough to the paper that she could feel vibrations from the presses through the wood of the bar. Drink rye, wipe her glasses on her tie, leave her hat on indoors, gossip in the dim light with the other regulars. In the winter it would already be dark outside the windows. The polished shoes would pick up highlights as the street lamps got brighter ... she wouldn't be waiting for anybody or for anything to happen, because she'd only be Clark Kent. Lois Lane might not give her the time of day anymore, but that'd be OK, she'd be dating somebody from the secretarial pool. They'd go out for dinner sometimes to this cozy Neapolitan joint down by some lakefront, where the Mussels Posillipo couldn't be beat. "So instead of being able to fly everyplace," her friend had replied, "you'd have to climb into some car you're still making payments on, drive on out, you, Clark Kent, to the scene of some disaster, blood, corpses, flies, teen technicians wandering around stoned, eyewitnesses in shock. . . . Superman never has to get involved with any of that. Why should anybody want to be only mortal? Better to stay an angel, angel." DL, more generous in those days, only thought her friend had missed the point.

In Columbus she spent days in shopping centers, Ninja Steno, assembling an invisibility wardrobe — murky woolens, dim pastels, flat shoes with matching purses, beige hose, white underwear, surprised how little of a chore it was — the blandest of accessories would call out to her from shop windows, the misses' sections of discount stores were acres of abundance waiting to be picked through. She had by now grown into a relationship with the Plymouth, named her Felicia, bought her a new stereo, was washing her at least twice per workweek plus again on weekends, when she also waxed the vehicle. She swam and did t'ai chi and continued to practice the exercises she had learned in Japan. She grew used to her disguised image in the mirror, the short haircut with the rodent-brown rinse, the freckles subdued under foundation, the eye makeup she'd never have worn before, slowly becoming her alias, a small-town spinster pursuing a perfectly diminished life, a minor belle gone to weeds and gophers before her time.

So that when they came and kidnapped her in the Pizza Hut parking lot and took her back to Japan, she wasn't sure right away that being sold into white slavery would turn out to be at all beneficial as a career step. They took her with a matter-of-factness that made her feel like an amateur. Her little car was left alone in its space, sometimes, across miles and years, to call out to her in a puzzled voice, asking why she hadn't come back. She fought, but whoever it was had sent experts that specialized in not damaging young women. The story she heard eventually was that a certain client would pay a fee in the hefty-to-whopping range for an American blonde with advanced asskicking skills. "No telling what's going to turn men on," whispered her bunkmate Lobelia as they waited in a hotel in Ueno to be brought to auction, " 'specially the ones we're gonna meet."

Dense transport and travel clamored all day, all night long. The rickety hotel, almost a disposable building, was pressed shuddering between the Yamanote Line and Expressway 1. The girls ate yaki-tori from the carts on Showa and were permitted out, in supervised groups, only to shop at the pitches under the tracks. Some of these girls, the market being what it was, were boys, of whom DL's friend Lobelia was among the most glamorous. "Wow," she had introduced herself, "are you a mess," launching then unbidden into a verbal hair-to-toenails makeover for DL, who at some point ducked her head, murmuring, "Guess I should be writing some of this down."

Lobelia paused and blinked. "Sugar, I'm trying to help. Think about it — you'll be up there on the block, how are you gonna feel if all they sell you for's a dollar ninety-eight?"

"Pretty cheap."

"Exactly, which is why I'm saying you need the purple liner, and at least three different eyeshadows, trust me, I know what these customers like, and right now honey, I don't mean to be cruel, but —"

So when the big night came, DL went to her purchasers wearing a painting of yet another face she could hardly recognize as one of hers. The room seethed with odors of drinking, smoke, cologne. Koto and samisen music came from hidden speakers. Hostesses tiptoed, knelt, fetched, and poured. Outside, wind was beating on sheet metal, city traffic circulated in humid fricatives, neon colors, some of them unknown outside Tokyo, turned the streets to a high-gloss display of transgression and desire. But in here, light-tight behind rubberized drapes, the auction room kept its colors to itself, with a crew of moonlighting studio gaffers beaming merciful salmons and pinks at the girls in their eye-catching outfits, each chosen earlier from a giant walk-in, in fact drive-in, closet filled with every kind of getup any customer who'd passed through here'd ever found erotic, schoolgirl uniforms tonight being the big favorite, some enhancing an already youthful look, others worn for the less forthright nuances that make grown women in juvenile attire so widely irresistible, much attention being paid of course to details like school crests, belt styles, underwear, and pleats, for any all-but-invisible discrepancy here could easily wreck a sale. "Girl, you have never seen picky," as Lobelia put it, "till you've been in one of these Jap meat shows."

Though a few women had come to bid, the audience was nearly all male. The auctioneer was a popular television comedian. Older gentlemen with fingertip deficiencies could be noted circulating in the crowd, attentive as geishas, although to other signals. Prospective buyers chatted softly, paged through catalogues, scribbled on notepads. Out in the bar a baseball game was on, Central League playoffs, and a few guests had lingered till the traditional 8:56, when the transmission from the ballpark was abruptly cut off, in the middle of a double play, in fact. In commotion, voicing their displeasure, the last stragglers entered the room in a cloud of ambiguous smoke, the heavy jade-inlaid doors swung shut and were locked, the houselights were dimmed, the music track segued to romantic disco, the comic took the mike, and the auction was on.

Each girl had a number pinned to her outfit. When it was called, she had to step into a spotlight and do a basic tits-and-ass or beauty-pageant turn. The girl just before DL came from a high valley in northern Thailand, bartered as part of a heroin deal, dolled up tonight in black chiffon and mink eyelashes, about to enter a world where she would never again meet anyone who had ever heard of the place she'd been born in and taken from. She was sold for a million yen and slipped from kinder theatrical lighting down into the dark to join her new owner, feeling something warm but unyielding, like padded steel, slide around her neck, around one wrist... no one spoke to her. No one would, for days.

DL, remembering beauty-contest interviews back on the childhood Tube, thought Just relax and have fun, picked up the beat, and stepped out into the warm fall of light to let everybody have a look. The minute she appeared she could hear altered breathing and interjections in a number of tongues, but was oddly aware herself only of one electrician, poised silent near a small fill light. . . just out of her field of vision, his smoky and blurred presence more real to her than any bidder in the room, any future master. . . . How could that be? Relax, have fun. She smiled even with her eyes, Lobelia's eyes, alert now at nipples and clitoris, the price being bid upward deliriously. Suddenly she heard a new voice. Others may have recognized it too. There were no more bids. The hammer fell, she left the light, blind for an instant, adrift on treacherous runway in high heels, but then feeling the hand take her arm firmly as shackles and steer her instead off into the wings. . . .

When she could see, moving quickly into the chill of outdoors, into an alley where a long American automobile waited, she turned to have a look at her purchaser. Shades, black and white outfit, inches shorter but — she already knew by touch — faster and better. "Relax, lady," he warbled pleasantly. "I'm only the agent here." He opened a rear door. In a slither of tulle, she ducked and curled, alone, into the back seat. The man disappeared up front, doors latched solidly, and off she was driven into neon confusion. Waiting for her on the seat were fresh flowers — orchids. She lifted her chin. As a girl she had missed every single dance, including school proms, and this happened in fact to be her very first orchid corsage in her life.

Tonight's blind date turned out to be none other than Ralph Wayvone, who had a suite at the Imperial. They eyed each other across a spacious sitting room. She'd slid off her shoes first thing and now flexed her toes in the deep carpet. "You're pissed off, huh," she ventured.

Ralph was pouring champagne. He turned, holding the two glasses, and DL noticed changes in his packaging. His suit fit like Cary Grant's, he appeared to have shaved sometime in the last hour, and he was wearing a pink tropical blossom in his lapel. He still smelled, however, like the far end of a men's toiletries section in a drugstore, and his haircut had been performed by someone who must have been trying to give up smoking.

A lightning storm had appeared far out at sea and now, behind them out the window, was advancing on the city, taking brightly crazed shots all along the horizon. Somewhere in here a stereo began to play a stack of albums from the fifties, all in that sweet intense mainstream wherein the tenor drowns of love, or, as it is known elsewhere, male adolescence.

"Couldint believe it was you," handing her the fluteful of champagne, beaded in the humid night, his voice slow, almost dazed. She twirled for him, as she had just before he'd bought her, and drank champagne.

"You sure paid a lot."

"Annual event, goes in a pension fund."

"Oh — you only pretended to buy me."

"Not exactly. Let's say you're here till you can get away again."

"You still want Brock Vond."

"Now more than ever." He had his lower lip out, trying to look sinned against.

"Please — I just needed a vacation from my life. You never heard of that?"

"Should I be reprimanding my intelligence people? Are they giving me faulty data on you? It don't sound to me like you're really all that hungry to get this little fuck. Like you've —" she was expecting "lost your nerve," but he thoughtfully went for "changed your attitude," instead.

She met his look. "Long as you're here in town, why not talk to some talent scouts, I'm not the only one knows 'is particular Oriental trick, you know."

"But you are the one who can execute." Tony Bennett had been singing "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams." Ralph touched her bare arm lightly. "Darryl Louise, think of who you are — mentioned in Black Belt before you were ten, the Soldier of Fortune interview, that centerfold in Aggro World, almost made runner-up in the Dangerous Teen Miss pageant in '63. . . ."

"Best I could do was Miss Animosity, why are you bringing up my rap sheet here?"

"All that great gift — you wanted to just escape it? Spend the rest of your life typin' up invoices and dodging the customer-service reps? I could cry."

"Could you. And would I have to deal with that?"

"Ahh, you cold cookie. ... I can take ya, but I'll never break ya." He put down his glass, held his arms open. "Come on, Black Belt. Dance with an old gentleman."

Ralph had shifted — she could feel it — into a fifties time warp, and DL, once in his arms, found, surprised, that she could now think about her situation clearly for the first time since the Pizza Hut. Even putting champagne and orchids aside, here was the first human in her lifetime of running away who'd ever taken the trouble to come after her, not to mention publicly buy her, however much in play, for the sticker price of a Lamborghini plus options. How could a girl not be impressed? And as lagniappe she'd get the chance to ice detestable Brock Vond once and for all.

They drifted across the neutral carpeting, crooners crooned, and the storm came sweeping on. He was careful, mouth close to her ear, to speak only during instrumental breaks. "You might even get to like working for us. Our benefits package is the best in the field. You get to veto any assignment, we don't ask for weekly quotas, but we do run a cash-flow assessment on each of you quarterly. . . ."

"What's this, then, your leisure outfit, where's 'em gold chains, 'at endangered-species hat?"

"Ufa, mi tratt' a pesci in faccia — my dear Miss Chastain, who'd ever try to run a lady such as you, with your independent ideas plus all those lethal talents, do I look that stupid?"

Well, the problem of course was that he didn't look quite stupid enough. Had a certain luminous shade of skin not balanced out the wrong-length sideburns, the tightly rationed smile not likewise made up for the no-eye-contact eyes, why she'd most likely've passed on the venture and had to arrive at other, less hopeful arrangements. But it came about, after a night and a day of jack-hammer sex, amphetamines, champagne, and Chaliapin Steaks ordered up from Les Saisons, that she was sped by Lincoln limo, semen drying on her stockings and one earring lost forever, through rainglare and wet streets to the notorious Haru no Depaato, or Department Store of Spring, installed in a room of her own, and handed a large clutch purse stuffed full of yen, for transitional expenses till she went officially on the payroll.

"Your other clients," Ralph trying to be helpful, "they'll just be there for your cover, right?"

"Ralph, wow, I — I feel better already." In fact, she did, not because of the clients, who were no worse than expected, but because she was finally back getting some dojo time in, stretching, striking, working out with 'chuks and eagle catchers, meditating, finding inside herself the way back to shelter she'd wondered more than once if she'd lost for good. Outside the establishment, in the street, to keep herself in the mood, she paid special attention to car collisions, ambulances in a hurry, even bowls of severed shrimp heads in the noodle shops, as she and Ralph Wayvone went nailing down the scenario for Brock's assassination.

"He'll be flying in for a two-week international prosecutors' symposium, staying at the Hilton. We have a schedule of his free time, unless he's also one of those mischievous lads who like to play hooky. You'll wait, you'll live by his schedule — sooner or later he'll show up, he's a regular here whenever he's passing through."

"But he'll ID me, he'll remember."

"Not the way you'll be."

Uh-huh, the way she'd be ... of all the jacking around she was getting, that makeover would prove to be the real shocker. Soon as the Depaato beautician staff got to work, the minute they brought out the wig she was to wear, dyed and styled precisely, she knew. And when she saw it on, a shivering crept all over her skin, as she looked at her own face on Frenesi's head. "Mr. Brock Vond," the girls assured her, "likes American girl, looking just this way, always the same," the little sixties outfits, the lurid makeup of the time. . . . But I'll have to wear shades, she thought, he'll see my own pale eyes and it won't work, surely he'll want hers, those fluorescent blue eyes of Frenesi's. . .. And so he would, but that was all taken care of too — when the time came, DL would be wearing tinted contact lenses.

"I knew it!" Prairie exploded. "My mother and this creep, and you better tell me how serious, DL —"

"Serious."

"So my dad and my grandma've been lyin' to me all the time? They told me she was on the side of the people — how could she've ever gone near somebody like this Brock guy?"

"I never could figure it either, kid. He was everything we were supposed to be against." But the shock had been different for DL — it was in finding out that he loved Frenesi but did not possess her, and was driven to fetishism in faraway countries as his only outlet, helpless to change — obsessed, though it gagged her to admit it, as DL. And Ralph, the fucker, must have known the whole story all along. Was he getting off on this? What kind of a sense of humor was that, anyway? Sometimes, waiting in her room, she'd wonder if this was all supposed to be some penance, to sit, caught inside the image of one she'd loved, been betrayed by, just sit. . . . Was it a koan she was meant to consider in depth, or was she finally lost in a great edge-to-edge delusion, having only read about Frenesi Gates once in some dentist's waiting room or standing in line at the checkout, whereupon something had just snapped and she'd gone on to make up the whole thing? And was now not in any Japanese whorehouse waiting to kill Brock Vond at all, but safely within a mental institution Stateside, humored, kindly allowed to dress up as the figure of her unhappy fantasies? For company while she waited she left the Tube on with the sound off. Images went rolling in and out of the frame as she sat, quiescent, sometimes teasing herself with these what-is-reality exercises, but keeping always balanced, right on that line, attentively breathing herself through the turn of the hours, the rise and fall of the five elements and the body organs governed, the combinations, the dance of husband-wife and mother-son laws. Today, of course, you can pick up a dedicated hand-held Ninja Death Touch calculator in any drugstore, which will track, compute, and project for you quick as a wink, but back then DL had only her memory to rely on and what she'd learned from Inoshiro Sensei, obliged early, she and her brain, to enter a system of eternal repayment humming along with or without her existence. Sensei called it "the art of the dark meridians," warning her repeatedly about the timing. "Perfect blow to the correct alarm point, but at the wrong time — might as well stay home — watch a Run Run Shaw movie!" She asked if she could visit him. They said no.

Meanwhile, Takeshi Fumimota was in and out of Tokyo for reasons of business connected with the mysterious obliteration of a research complex belonging to the shadowy world conglomerate Chipco. About a week after Brock Vond's arrival, Takeshi was standing at the edge of a gigantic animal footprint which only the day before had been a laboratory. From an insurance point of view, the place was totaled, though free of fatalities, the event having occurred precisely during an evacuation drill. Strange!

Looking through the dark morning drizzle, Takeshi couldn't even see over to the other side of the foot-shaped crater. From up here on the rim, about all he could make out were the yellow headlamps of the tech squads moving far below, taking samples of everything, every last splinter, for testing. Here and there edges of the footprint had begun to slide in.

As Takeshi made his way cautiously down, he found a network of plastic duckboards and temporary traffic lights already in place. Traffic was heavy. He paused at a turnout, poured himself another cup from his coffee thermos, and took another amphetamine capsule. "It's going to take a while," he chuckled aloud, drawing a stare or two, "to get to the bottom of this!" Another strange element, as his former mentor Professor Wawazume, eccentric CEO of Wawazume Life & Non-Life, had reminded him over the phone last night, was that recently Chipco had wanted a floater written in on an inland marine policy, against "damage from any and all forms of animal life." The demolished complex was located on a lightly traveled piece of coastline, and Chipco could certainly argue that something had come up out of the surf, put one foot in the sand for leverage, and stomped on the lab with the other.

Since it had happened at low tide, any second print on the beach would have got washed away when the tide came back in. "Clearly reptilian," the Professor had summed up, "or possibly the work of a — disgruntled environmentalist!" Takeshi, by the time he got to see it from the air, didn't want to rule out another secular possibility — a professional job. There were some fancy blasters around, studio special-effects people, Yank veterans of Vietnam, few yakuza maybe — Takeshi knew most of the boys and girls, though it wasn't always easy to keep track, and the work could get pretty sophisticated. Size 20,000 here could be an artifact from heel to claw-tip.

Having begun well inside the corporate embrace of Wawazume Life & Non-Life, high above the violet radiance of the city, through ghostly Marunouchi dusks he had dreamed of disengagement and freedom, of working as a ronin, or samurai without a master, out free-lancing in a dangerous world. By the time his life brought him here, down in the reeking beast-print, the hazy red, green, and yellow lights and striped barricades, the struggling in the mud and rain after a mystery that might at the end be only as simple as greed, become at least independent, though Professor Wawazume still kept sending a lot of business his way, no more corporate pin on his suit lapel, only the buttonhole unadorned, lordless, his one fixed address now a cubicle in outer Ueno he shared rent on, containing an armored file cabinet, a telephone, and the signed, framed photo of himself the Professor had given him when he left to go out on his own (an enlarged paparazzo shot, the Professor looking even more goofy than usual, lurching after a noted beauty in gold lame, flip hairdo, and two-centimeter eyelashes outside a bar in Shinjuku, a lucent string of drool begun to descend from one corner of his mouth), Takeshi had already long been a nomad in the sky's desert, continuing to depart in kerosene fumes to seek another connection in another Pacific port, to nod to faces he had last seen coming out of the Yat Fat Building in Des Vœux Road, to check the body of the stewardess and what he could see out the window of the body of the airplane, and at last, when they began to lift, to commend himself to the gods of the sky. But despite his millions of passenger miles, he could never recall being in their domain, instead only groaning, laboring along, just above the webs of power lines, almost sharing expressway space, making unnumbered short hops between local airfields, places Takeshi had never heard of, invisible under industrial smoke and traffic exhaust, kept away from all promises of wild blue yonder.

He had arrived now at the bottom of the strange crater, far below sea level, after long detours and a sense of time forever lost. . . . Tech-squad people he'd tried to talk to had all, so far, been evasive. I knew it! he realized. I haven't been buying enough drinks! The rain clouds had settled in. Looking up, Takeshi could no longer see the rim he'd descended from. A group of Techs nearby had started shouting angrily at each other, their headlamp beams swooping and crossing. Takeshi recognized his acquaintance Minoru, a government bomb-squad expert. Not a genius, exactly, more like an idiot savant with X-ray vision. When the discussion moved on, Minoru remained, gazing at something cupped in his hands.

"Pretty strange today, Minoru-san!" "Strange! Here, look at this!" Familiar. "Eastern bloc, ne?"

"

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