Inherent Vice (51 page)

It didn’t take long for Coy to become aware that the patriots who were
running him were being run themselves by another level of power altogether, which seemed to feel entitled to fuck with the lives of all who weren’t as good or bright as they were, which meant everybody. Coy learned they’d labeled him an “addictive personality,” betting that once committed to snitching for his country, he
would find the life as hard to
kick as heroin, if not harder. Pretty soon they had him hanging around
campuses—university, community college, and high school—and slowly learning to infiltrate antiwar, antidraft, anticapitalist groups of all kinds.
For the first months, he was so busy he didn’t have time to think about
what he’d actually done, or if there was any future in it. One night he was
in Westwood shadowing elements of a group at UCLA called the Bong
Users’ Revolutionary Brigades (BURBs), when he noticed a little girl who
would have been about Amethyst’s age, breathless with excitement in
front of a lighted bookstore window, calling to her mother to come and
look. “Books, Mama! Books!” Coy stood nailed in his tracks, while his
quarry went on with their evening. It was the first time since signing on
with the Viggies that he’d given any thought to the family he had aban
doned for something he must have believed was more important.

In that moment everything was clear—the karmic error of faking his own death, the chances that people he was helping to set up were looking
at deep possibilities including real death, and clearest of all how much he
missed Hope and Amethyst—more, desperately more, than he’d ever
thought he would. With no resources, sympathy or support, Coy all of a
sudden, too late, wanted his old life back.

“And that’s around the time you asked me to look in on them?”

“Yep, that’s how desperate I was.”

“This is it here, right?”

Doc pulled over on the shoulder near the apron of the Boards’ drive
way. “One thing.”

“Uh-oh.”

“The original job offer from Vigilant California—who was it that
called you?”

Coy looked Doc over, as if for the first time. “When I started spying, I used to wonder why people ask the questions they do. Then I began to notice how often they already know the answer but just want to hear it
from another voice, like outside their own head?”

“All right,” Doc said.

“Better go talk to Shasta Fay, I think.”

driving back down
to the coast road, Doc managed to put himself on a full-scale paranoid trip about Shasta, and how she must have been
using, all the time she and Doc were together, maybe since before they’d
met, a devoted junkie taking every chance she could to slip out into the
fine breezy nights and go someplace they’d
’ve
been looking after her out
fit for her so she wouldn’t have to hide it at home from Doc
...
just to be
back for a while among the junkie fellowship, to have a break from this
hopeless stooge of the creditor class she was already planning to split on
and so forth. It took him nearly all the way to Gordita to remember that
once again he was being an asshole. By the time he got back to his place
and reconfigured his hair into something halfway groovy, and set off up
the esplanade to El Porto, with night fallen and the surf invisible, he was back to his old wised-up self, short on optimism, ready to be played for a
patsy again. Normal.

The surf shop downstairs had closed early, but there were lights up in the Saint’s windows, and Doc didn’t have to knock but two or three times before Shasta opened the door and even smiled at him before say
ing hi, c’mon in. She was barelegged in some kind of Mexican shirt, pale
purple with some orange embroidery on it, and had her hair wrapped in a towel, smelling like she did just out of the shower. He knew there was a reason he’d fallen in love with her back then, he kept forgetting it, but now that he half-remembered, he had to grab himself mentally by the
head and execute a quick brainshake before he could trust himself to say
anything.

Shasta introduced him to her dog Mildred and took some time rattling around in the kitchen. Flip had covered most of one living-room wall with an enlarged photo of a gigantic monster wave at Makaha last winter, with a tiny but instantly recognizable Greg Noll cradled in it like a faithful worshipper in the fist of God.

Shasta came in with a six-pack of Coors from the fridge. “You know Mickey’s back,” she said.

“Some rumor, yeah.”

“Oh, he’s back home all right, yep, back home with Sloane and the kids, and so what?
C
’
est la vie
.
’’

“
Que sera sera.
”

“You got it.”

“Have you seen him?”

“How likely is that? These days I’m only an embarrassment.”

“Sure, but maybe if you did something about your hair
...
”

“Fucker.” She reached, undid the towel and threw it at him, shook her hair out—he didn’t want to say violently, exactly, but there was a look in
her eye he remembered, or thought he did. “How’s this?”

He angled his head as if she’d asked a serious question. “Darker than
it was.”

“Back to my old dirty-blond ways. Mickey liked it almost platinum, used to spring for this colorist down on Rodeo Drive?” and Doc knew beyond all doubt that she and Penny had met at that same hair salon, where at least one topic of discussion had been him, and sure enough, “Word’s around that you have this thing about Manson chicks?”

“Y—well, ‘thing,’ guess it depends what you— Are you sure you want
to be doing that?”

She had unbuttoned her shirt and now, looking him in the eye, began
unhurriedly to stroke her nipples. Mildred glanced up in momentary
interest, then, shaking her head slowly side to side, got off the couch and
left the room. “Submissive, brainwashed, horny little teeners,” Shasta continued, “who do exactly what you want before you even know what
that is. You don’t even have to say a word out loud, they get it all by ESP.
Your kind of chick, Doc, that’s the lowdown on you.”

“Hey. You the one’s been stealin my magazines?”

She slid out of the shirt and down on her knees, and crawled slowly over to where Doc was sitting with an untouched can of beer and a
hardon, and, kneeling, she carefully took off his huaraches and gave each
bare foot a soft kiss. “Now,” she whispered, “what would Charlie do?”

Probably not what Doc would do, whi
ch was find half a joint in his
shirt pocket and light it up. Which he did. “You want some of this?” She
raised her face, and he held the joint to her lips while she inhaled. They smoked in silence till Doc had to put what was left in a little alligator clip he carried with him. “Look, I’m sorry about Mickey, but—”

“Mickey.” She gave Doc a good long look. “Mickey could have taught
all you swingin beach bums a thing or two. He was just so powerful.
Sometimes he could almost make you feel invisible. Fast, brutal, not what
you’d call a considerate lover, an animal, actually, but Sloane adored that about him, and Luz—you could tell, we all did. It’s so nice to be made to
feel invisible that way sometimes ...”

“Yeah, and guys love to hear shit like this.”

“
...
he’d bring me to lunch in Beverly Hills, one big hand all the way around my bare arm, steering me blind down out of those bright
streets into some space where it was dark and cool and you couldn’t smell
any food, only alcohol—they’d all be drinking, tables full of them in a room that
could’ve
been any size, and they all knew Mickey there, they wanted, some of them, to be Mickey.
...
He might as well have been bringing me in on a leash. He kept me in these little microminidresses,
never allowed me to wear anything underneath, just offering me to who
ever wanted to stare. Or grab. Or sometimes he’d fix me up with his friends. And I’d have to do whatever they wanted
...
”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Oh I’m so sorry, Doc, are you getting upset, do you want me to stop?” By now she was draped across his lap, her hands beneath her playing with her pussy, her ass irresistibly presented, her intentions, even to Doc, clear enough. “If my girlfriend had run away to be the bought-and-sold whore of some scumbag developer? I’d just be so angry I don’t know what I’d do. Well, no, I’m even lying about that, I know what I’d do. If I had the faithless little bitch over my lap like this—” Which was about as far as she got. Doc managed to get in no more than a half dozen sincere smacks before her busy hands had them both
coming all over the place. “You fucker!” she cried—not, Doc guessed, at
him—”you bastard
...
”

He only remembered later to look for telltale zombie symptoms, in
case wherever she’d been they’d processed her somehow, the way they’d
done to Mickey, but it seemed like the same old Shasta. Of course, she
still could have made a deal to escape Mickey’s fate, in which case who
was it with, and what was the payback? Before he could ask about any of
that, she was talking, quietly, and he knew he’d better listen.

“I said I was up north with family stuff, but what really happened was, was a couple of apes found me and took me to San Pedro and put me on this boat? and I never knew what their real plans for me were,
because when we got to Maui, I hustled my way off.”

“Some first mate who digs beautiful asses no doubt.”

“Chief cook, actually. Then at Pukalani I ran into Flip hitchhiking,
and he handed me the keys to this place and asked me to house-sit. Why
are you looking so weird all of a sudden?”

“Around the same time that was happening, Vehi Fairfield gave me some acid and while I was tripping I saw you, on that same boat, the
Golden Fang.
I was out in the wind someplace, I don’t know, kept tryin to get on board, kept close as long as I could
...
now it’s you that’s lookin weird.”

“I knew it! I felt something then, and all I could think of was that somehow it might be you. It was so creepy.”

“Must’ve been me, then.”

“No, I mean it felt like ... being haunted? It’s why the first island we got to, I sent you that card.”

“Vehi’s spirit guide said you weren’t on the ship by choice, but that you’d be okay.”

“I wonder if he knew that everybody on board was packing. Officers,
crew, passengers.”

She didn’t exactly ask about it, but Porfirio, the chief cook, had been
happy to explain. “Pirates.”

“Excuse me?” she said.

“The cargoes we carry, senorita, are highly desirable, particularly in the Third World.”

“Think I could borrow something from the ship’s armory to carry with me, just in case?”

“You are a passenger. We will protect you.”

“You’re sure that’s what I am, and not just more desirable cargo.”

“But this is flirting, yes?”

“Yeah, yeah?” Doc said after a while. “So you said
...
”

“I said, ‘Ooh, Porfirio, I hope they’re not planning to sell me to some
horrible Chinese Communist gang of perverts who’ll do all kinds of hor
rible Chinese stuff to me.

Doc found some of Fritz’s Thai weed and lit up. “Yeah,” after offering
her a hit, “and Porfirio said?”

“‘Allow me do it all to you first, se
ñ
orita, with your permission of course, so that you will at least know what to expect.’”

“Uhhuh?”

“Well, you know these sailing ships, all the ropes and chains and pul
leys and hooks and things
...
”

“Okay, that does it—let’s see that cute red ass there.”

“But.
..
Doc.
..
what did I say?” She knelt on the couch, put her face down on a pillow, and presented herself.

“You need a tattoo right here. How about ‘Bad, Bad Girl’?”

She looked back, her eyes slitted and pink. “Figured you’d go more for a marijuana leaf
...
”

“Hmm. Maybe I better—”

“No...”

“What kind of a ChiCom sex slave are you anyhow? You want to just.
..
arch your back—yeah, beautiful, like that
...
”

They started fucking, and it didn’t take very long this time either. A
little later she said, “This doesn’t mean we’re back together.”

“No. No, course not. Can I tell you something anyway?” Sure.