Vineland (21 page)

Lookin' for some, Myrna Loy!

 

Well, Lassie's got Roddy McDowall,

Trigger's got, Dale and Roy,

Asta's got William Powell, goin'

“Where th' heck's that, Myrna Loy?”

 

And just think of how Tarzan, would start to how-1,

If he only was hangin' out, with Cheetah and Boy—

I feel like th' alphabet, without a vowel,

Like Flatfoot Floogie, with only one Floy—

 

Guess I'll just, throw in the towel,

Aw I'll never find the, real McCoy,

Just another William Powell,

Lookin' for that Myrna Loy. . . .

 

There was a silence not so much stunned as divided on whether to mow the 'sucker down, and his uke with him, right on the spot, or a little later. In fact, if Takeshi was counting on anything, it may have been the cross-purposes he felt in the air, a suspicion that DL didn't enjoy unquestioning support.

During his song he'd been time-stepping sideways, closer to DL, who had been observing with a mixture of amusement and disgust. As he drew near and she saw his face emerge to her at last as from a faint morning haze, she understood that from the time they had collided in Tokyo, even with her running away, he had desired her. But she could not, in much detail, imagine his sexual motives any better now than then. She shook her head—“You fuckin' crazy?”

“Maybe I came up here,” Takeshi replied, “to do
you
a favor, Freckles!”

“Hold!” Sister Rochelle came stalking into the courtyard to break up the unpromising tête-à-tête. “You,” pointing at Takeshi, “are a fool, whereas you,” turning to DL, “it personally disappoints me to say, aren't even that far along. It should have been obvious to me right from the jump. You deserve each other. Therefore you, Sister Darryl Louise, under pain of the most major sanctions, are commanded to become this fool's devoted little, or in your case big, sidekick and to try and balance your karmic account by working off the great wrong you have done him . . . is there anything you'd like to add on?”

“No sex,” stipulated DL. Takeshi began to squawk. “And when is 'is jail sentence up?” she also wanted to know.

Sister Rochelle figured a year ought to be about right, the same amount of time DL's reckless Needle Finger was to have given Takeshi to live. “Make that a year and a day, and don't look at me like that, you came here seeking a life of sacrifice, DL-san, which reminds me, about your PX bill—”

Light applause from the shaded edges of the courtyard, where in twos and threes curious ninjettes had been pacing, whispering, touching. “And now,” Rochelle nodding to Takeshi, “we'd better see about bringing
you
, back to life. Sister DL, you might want to observe.”

“This—” protested Takeshi, “does she have to be in on it? Hasn't she done enough?”

“Yes as you keep pointing out,” DL snapped. They went inside quarreling, in single file, ninjettes crowding in to look. Birds could once more be heard, but singing now without much spirit, their voices oddly earthbound and afflicted. The trio proceeded to the Retreat Clinic, Sister Rochelle's pride and joy, home of the notorious Puncutron Machine.

“Got to get that chi back flowing the right way, now.”

Takeshi looked around. It was an airy structure, once a barn, redivided into treatment rooms here and there but dominated by the machine, some of whose extensions rose as high as two stories. One of many therapeutic devices sold freely in California at the time, the Puncutron, though not encouraging for many patients to look at, had in the health community its share of intense loyalists. Detractors included the ever-vigilant FDA, one step ahead of whom the Puncutron's producers had so far just managed to keep. It was clear that electricity in unknown amounts was meant to be routed from one of its glittering parts to another until it arrived at any or all of a number of decorative-looking terminals, “or actually,” purred the Ninjette Puncutron Technician who would be using it on Takeshi, “as we like to call them, electrodes.” And what, or rather who, was supposed to complete the circuit? “Oh, no,” Takeshi demurred, “I think not!”

“Consider what your options are,” advised the Head Ninjette, “and behave like an adult.”

Another Attentive, young, pretty, and more interested in eye contact than is good for the concentration of a proper ninjette, had appeared, carrying a sheaf of forms on a clipboard. She handed Takeshi a ten-page menu of audiotapes, from among which he was supposed to choose something to listen to during his Puncutron session. There were hundreds of selections, each good no doubt for its own set of bodily reactions. . . . Would
The All-Regimental Bagpipes Play Prime Time Favorites
get him through better or worse than
Taiwanese Healthy Brain Aerobics
? Some choices! As he went scanning down the list, the possibility emerging that far from having been scientifically or even carefully selected, these tapes had all in fact been snatched pretty much at random out of the bargain cassette bins at a Thriftimart in one of the more out-of-the-way locations, and indeed, given the skills ninja were famous for, might not even have been paid for at the checkout, the others went on hooking him up to the sinister ebonite and brushed-gold apparatus, each of whose stylish electrodes could be adjusted in at least two degrees of freedom, to contact the body at, on, and occasionally in, particular organs and areas.

“Kind of—erotic, isn't it, Toots?” Takeshi, having disrobed, now trying to chat up the ninjette with the clipboard while pretending to ignore the equally pleasant-looking Ninjette Puncutech who was slowly, and here and there intimately, attaching electrodes.

“You're cute, in an old-movie way,” admitted the flirty-eyed ninjette, “but I need these forms completed, here, and here.”

“What about here—aw, come on, babe, I could be—killed on this thing! Least you folks could do is—grant a man's last wish—”

“Yer wiggleen!” warned the other ninjette, trying to adjust something around his head, “now hold
still.”

“Well here, maybe you'd . . . just want to put your leg. . . mmhh—”

“Oh I can't believe this,” DL fuming, “does he even understand what we're doing for him? Hey scumbag, do you even—”

“Stop,” wearily counseled the Head Ninjette, “all this jabbering, will you. Thanks. Calm? Professionalism?”

“. . . OK, and the Acker Bilk album,” Takeshi had been deciding, “and, let's see,
The Chipmunks Sing Marvin Hamlisch
?”

Hookup complete, Sister Rochelle stood grinning with the main switch in her hand. “Now then my good man, see if this doesn't do a Roto-Rooter job on those ol' meridians, get 'em hummin'!”

Hmmmm, well, yes it did, that is to some extent. In years to come DL would often have occasion to holler at him, “Should've just left you on the Puncutron”—so often, in fact, that it would turn into an endearment. When this session was done, the ninjettes disconnected him and took him on a gurney to a recovery room, unadorned except for flowers and a small black iron Buddha on a shelf. Here, crossed by a beam of sunlight, in the act of reaching up under a regulation ninjette lab coat, Takeshi, as if beneath a spell, dropped voluptuously off to sleep.

He went on an intensive program of Puncutron sessions, herbal therapy, brain-wave recalibrations. Some of these turned out to involve DL. They realized they were being, somehow, tuned to each other. Could be brain waves, could be chi, maybe good old ESP. They would lie hooked up side by side like actors in a brain-transplant movie while the Puncutron vibrated and Takeshi, his musical preferences mysteriously self-revised, now listened through earphones to soul-strumming Tibetan chants. He still had no idea who she was.

One night as he was lying in bed watching a “Bionic Woman” episode, the Head Ninjette came in to turn down the volume and tell Takeshi another kind of bedtime story. “Hey! She was just about to—”

“Jaime Sommers will understand. This is important, so listen up. It takes place in the Garden of Eden. Back then, long ago, there were no men at all. Paradise was female. Eve and her sister, Lilith, were alone in the Garden. A character named Adam was put into the story later, to help make men look more legitimate, but in fact the first man was not Adam—it was the Serpent.”

“I like this story,” said Takeshi, snuggling into his pillow.

“It was sleazy, slippery man,” Rochelle continued, “who invented ‘good' and ‘evil,' where before women had been content to just be. In among the other confidence games they were running on women at the time, men also convinced us that we were the natural administrators of this thing ‘morality' they'd just invented. They dragged us all down into this wreck they'd made of the Creation, all subdivided and labeled, handed us the keys to the church, and headed off toward the dance halls and the honky-tonk saloons.

“Now—behind those jive Oscar Goldman shades you look bright enough to understand that I'm talking about Darryl Louise. For all her personal distance with people, she won't have an easy time out there with you, because she never does, and it might not be out of line if now and then you'd entertain a few kind moments of thought on her behalf.”

Takeshi raised his shades and gave her the eye-to-eye, intrigued by the expression on her face. She could almost have been asking a favor. “My pleasure—but there was more?”

The Head Ninjette, using only her eyebrows, shrugged. “Don't commit original sin. Try and let her just be.”

Easy for you to say, lady, he muttered, silently, later, not to her face, in fact leaving, driving away from the Retreat, from that ridge above the fir forest, just beyond the coastal clouds. He was taking DL back down, along the mud ruts to the paved country roads, down to the arterial, to the on-ramp to the Interstate, till she was all the way back inside the Mobility. Speeding down the freeway in a rented Firebird, they both realized it was the first time since the room in Tokyo that they'd been alone together.

She looked over at him. “So this is Victim's Compensation. Shouldn't you be giving me orders?”

He considered this for a while. “Not much I can think of, with that—no-sex clause and all!”

“Hey,” came her speedy reply, “think how I feel about the one year.”

Their first tiff. A while later, “Listen then! Why don't I just—let you out, at the depot of your choice! Buy you a ticket—back to the Retreat!”

She wouldn't look at him, but shook her head no. “Can't.”

“They really won't let you back?”

“I show my face before the year's up, and the sanctions are extreme. Please don't ask what they are.”

“Go ahead—it might give me a cheap thrill!”

“The Ordeal of the Thousand Broadway Show Tunes—”

“Stop,
stop
, changed my mind—”

“The Andrew Lloyd Webber Chamber of—”

“You mean they'd actually—”

“That, and worse.”

They drove for a while in a silence not altogether tranquil, more like a deepening joint depression. Somber forested hills rolled by, and she watched him nervously till suddenly he flipped her a side-wise slice of a grin. “Fun, huh?”

She snorted—not quite a laugh. “Yeah—no sex.”

He began to chuckle. “One year!”

For a few seconds the car drifted between lanes, as if no one was paying attention. “You hungry?” asked DL.

“No appetite—must be this drugstore Methedrine! Wait—here's a nice-looking exit! Look at that glow in the sky!
YOUR MAMA EATS
, how can we resist?”

“You're crazy,” as they came wheeling in, “look at this place, listen to that jukebox, observe the machinery in this parking lot,
oh
no, I have many bitter experiences,
Mis
-ter Fumimota-
san
, with exactly this type of establishment, which has all the signs of t-r-o-u-b-l-e, and we'd best get back on that freeway, right, now.”

“What do I have to worry about? You—you've got to be—my bodyguard!”

“No, uh-uh, you don't get it, a kunoichi's first rule is Try to stay
out
of trouble, both within herself and then in terms of the outside environment? Like what bars and stuff she'll walk into, and as your bodyguard, rilly—”

“OK, OK,” discovering there was no way to go but around the back, where the parking lot was so poorly lit that they did not at once notice several persons reeling around the asphalt with spoons in their noses, and not the elegant little gold models, either, but full-size stainless coffee spoons, taken from this very roadside eatery. “Would help if—you could do something about our—visibility!” Takeshi grunted. “You folks—you're supposed to be good at that!”

“OK, there's a paint and body shop in Santa Rosa? handles a lot of ninja work, they'll do you a camouflage job on this short you can go park and smoke dope on the sheriff's lawn nobody'll see you—you want to ask for Manuel.”

“Thinking about right now, Darryl Louise,” as threading the maze of auto anatomy they rounded yet another corner. It was the first time he'd called her by her name.

“On the other hand,” she suggested, “maybe this is all intentional, maybe we're meant to go in here.”

“Maybe not—sounds like old-time hippie philosophy to me!”

“OK, how about ‘I'll buy'?”

Takeshi zipped into an open space and killed the motor. By the time they got inside
YOUR MAMA EATS
and had a closer look, it was too late to do anything but make mental notes on where the exits were. They sat in a booth of scuffed turquoise plastic and tried to avoid eye contact with everybody, including each other. Turned out that YME was a famous barbecue joint in this area. The windows were painted black, and the counter ran all the way around a huge central pit where different hardwoods glowed and the cooks tended, basted, pulled, or sliced cuts of beef and pork, hot links, and ribs, woodsmoke being drawn out the vents lazily enough that some mixed with the cigar, cigarette, and joint smoke already in the air. Takeshi ordered the Galaxy of Ribs, and DL thought she'd have the Brisket Fantasy, but mainly what they were interested in was coffee.