Vineland
Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Vineland
Thomas Pynchon
The Penguin Press
New York
2012
THE PENGUIN PRESS
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Copyright © Thomas Pynchon, 1990
All rights reserved
Originally published by Little, Brown and Company, 1990
Publisher's Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 978-1-101-59463-6
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For my mother and father
  Every dog has his day,
and a good dog
  just might have two days.
â Johnny Copeland
Vineland
L
ATER 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. Butâ“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 thoughtsâlike assuming the television crews were only lateâZoyd 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 woodsâthough not for those in the mills, with the Japanese buying up unprocessed logs as fast as the forests could be clearcutâbut 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 aprés-logging shoes of a subdued, but incontestably blue, 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 followâ”
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, âAha, 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?”
“Wellâmaybe 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 oneâbickering. 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.