BUT when he found out about Prairie — though he never named her, only smirked "So you've reproduced" at Fre-nesi — something else, something from his nightmares of forced procreation, must have taken over, because later, in what could only be crippled judgment, Brock was to turn and go after the baby and, noticing Zoyd in the way, arrange for his removal too. One mild overcast Saturday nearly a year after Frenesi had moved out, Zoyd and Prairie, returning from a midday stroll down the alley to the Gordita Pier and back, found inside their house who but Hector, posed dramatically in the front room next to the biggest block of pressed marijuana Zoyd had ever seen in his life, too big to have fit through any door yet towering there, mysteriously, a shaggy monolithic slab reaching almost to the ceiling. " 'Scuse me just a second." Finger to his lips, Zoyd went and put his daughter, who'd nodded out in the salt breezes, down on the bed in the other room, and her bottle and her duck nearby, and came back in eyeballing the oversize brick, getting nervous.

"Let me guess — 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968]."

"Try 20,000 Years in Sing Sing [1933]."

Zoyd lounged against the giant slab, needing the support. "Wa'n't even your idea, was it?"

"Somebody over in Westwood really hates your ass, pardner."

Zoyd rolled his eyes slowly toward the room where Prairie slept, waited a beat, then rolled them back. "Know this dude from Justice name of Brock Vond?"

Shrugging, "Maybe seen the name on some DEA 6?"

"I know about him and my ex-old lady, Hector, so don't be embarrassed."

"None of my business, and my policy is, is that I have never went into areas like that, ever, with a subject, Zoyd."

"Admire that, for sure, always have, but where is this li'l gentleman, and why'd he send you out to do the shitwork, huh? Plant the evidence, pop the subject, confiscate the baby, like you're working for the two o' them now, or what?"

"Whoa, trucha, ése, I don't snatch no babies, what's wrong with you?"

"Come on — this isn't just some jive excuse to take away my kid?"

"Hey, man, this ain't even my ticket, all's I'm doín, is a favor, for a friend." And he gave that injured cadence a peculiar emphasis, as if leaving open the meaning of friend.

"Uh-huh, just following orders from above."

"Don't know if you've been keepín up, but with Nixon and shit there's been a couple years of reorganization where I work, lot of old FBN doorkickers done got the blade, colleagues of mine, and I'm lucky I still have any job, OK, even runnín estupidass marriage-counselor errands like this."

"Li'l. . . piece of foam there on your lip, Hector . . . nah, it's OK, I — I know what you're goin' through, Keemosobby."

"Knew you'd understand." He pulled out a chrome referee's whistle and blew on it. "OK, fellas!"

"Hey, the baby." In came stomping half a dozen individuals in black visor caps and windbreakers labeled BNDD, with tape recorders, field investigation kits, two-way radios, a range of side-arms both custom and off the shelf, not to mention cameras, still and movie, with which they took pictures of each other standing beneath the herbaceous polyhedron before starting to wrap it in some dark plastic sheeting.

"Oh Captain, can I at least, please, call up my mother-in-law to help me with the baby?"

"That is called a favor." Grotesquely kittenish. "Favors have to be paid back."

"Inform on my friends. Sure would put me in a squeeze."

"Your child's well-beín against your own virginity as a snitch, oh yes, quite a close decision indeed, I should say." And about then who but Sasha should come bouncing in the door, setting Hector's eyes atwinkle with what a stranger in town might've called innocent mischief.

"Why, you scamp — you called her, didt'n you?"

"Zoyd what have you got yourself into now — oh, my," as she registered the looming block of cannabis, "God? with the little baby in the house, are you sick?"

On cue, Prairie woke up into all the commotion and started to yell, more out of inquiry than distress, and Zoyd and Sasha, both heading for the door at the same time, collided classically and staggered back screaming, "Stupid pothead," and "Meddling bitch," respectively. They then glared at each other till Zoyd finally offered, "Look — you're a old Hollywood babe, been up and down the boulevard a couple times," reaching a cloth diaper out of a cupboard in the bathroom, which by now they'd been jammed together into closer than either would have liked by the increasingly mysterious activities necessary to get Hector's colossal dopechunk out of the house again, "can't you even see this is a setup?" proceeding to the bedroom, followed attentively by Sasha. "They're tryin' to get her away from me. Hi there, Slick, 'member your grandma?" While Sasha talked and played, Zoyd took off Prairie's diaper, got rid of the shit and rinsed off the diaper in the toilet, threw it in with the others along with some Borax in a plastic garbage can that was just about heavy enough to pack up the hill to the laundromat, came back in with a warm cloth and a tube of Desitin, made sure his ex-mother-in-law noticed he was wiping in the right direction, and only about the time he was pinning the new diaper on remembering that he should have paid more attention, cared more for these small and at times even devotional routines he'd been taking for granted, now, with the posse in the parlor, too late, grown so suddenly precious. . . .

Sasha was at the window, sunlight coming through, holding her, Prairie with her arm out pointing in perfect baby articulation of wrist, hand, and fingers toward the thumping and crashing from the other room, making a puzzled face.

"Didn't mean to holler," Sasha muttered.

"Me neither. Hope this won't be a hassle."

"I'd love to take her, it's been a while anyway, so at least that part works out."

" 'Cept for me goin' in the slam, o' course," Zoyd breaking into an episode of surprise cackling, which Prairie enjoyed, beginning to rock in Sasha's arms, stretching her mouth to accommodate a smile she could not yet feel the limits of, making high squeals now and then. "Oh, ya like that, do ya. Yer Da-da's gittin' popped!" He put his finger in his mouth against the inside of his cheek, sucked, and popped it out at her. She gazed, smiling, tongue out. "Uh-huh, well, you'll be seeing a lot of this lady right here, you know her as Grandma —"

"Gah ma!"

"And maybe not so much of me." Following the wisdom of the time, Zoyd, bobbing around among the flotsam of his sunken marriage, had been giving in to the impulse to cry, anytime it came on him, alone or in public, Getting In Touch With His Feelings at top volume, regardless of how it affected onlookers, their own problems, their attitude toward life, their lunch. After hearing enough remarks like "No wonder she left you," "Blow your nose and act like a man," and "Cut your hair while you're at it," he'd come to think of crying as another form of pissing, just as likely at the wrong time and place to get him in trouble, and he learned after a while how to hold it all in till later, till he could safely be taken by the high salt wave, often while some door was still closing, some emergency brake just notched up tight. This time he really had to wait for the rest of the day, grim and clenched, till he'd been handcuffed, led out through an audience of neighbors mostly staring in wonder, or in forms of mental distress such as fear, at the tall prism, now miraculously outside again, secured on a flatbed trailer, ready to be hauled back to whatever spacious Museum of Drug Abuse it had been borrowed from, while Zoyd was put into the back of a taupe Caprice with government plates and taken away up the hill out of Gordita Beach, angling by surface streets southward and eastward, on into less developed neighborhoods full of oil wells and nodding pumps, green fields, horses, power lines, and railroad trestles, pulling in at last to a collection of low sand-colored structures that could have been some junior high school campus, with yellow tile walls and a lot of U.S. Marshals inside, on through strip search, fingerprinting, picture taking, and form typing, the early line for supper — miscellaneous pork pieces, instant mashed potatoes, and red Jell-O — then into the domicile area and a cell of his own, where he waited the noisy cold-lit Tubeless hours till lights out, when he could finally let go, surrender to the flood, mourn the comical small face already turned as he was taken away.. . would she miss him, tottering and peering tomorrow around Sasha's house, with her puzzled frown, going, "Dah Dee?" Zoyd ya fuckin' fool, he addressed himself between spasms, what are you doing, crying yourself to sleep? Likely so. Next thing he knew the overhead cell light was on again and a natty little dude in a sky-blue double-knit safari suit was poised on a folding metal chair, calling, "Wheeler," over and over, like a Doberman at night somewhere the other side of a creek. By the time Zoyd's eyes adjusted to the glare and his pulse to the mid-watch awakening, he had figured out that this was Brock Vond.

"So," Brock nodding in false sociability, looking at Zoyd's face, it seemed to Zoyd, in some prolonged detail as he kept nodding. "So. Would you mind turning your head — no, the other way? Give me a profile. Ah. Hah. Yes now if you could look up at that corner of the ceiling? thanks, and maybe pull back your upper lip?"

"What is this?"

"Want to get an idea of your gnathic index, and that mustache is in the way."

"Oh, w'll hell, why'n't you say so," Zoyd peeling back his lip for Brock. "Want me to cross my eyes, drool, anything like 'at?"

"You're in a sprightly mood for someone looking at the rest of his life in prison. I had hoped for a level of serious and adult conversation, but maybe I was wrong, maybe you've spent too much time in the infant world, hm? gotten more comfortable there, maybe this will have to be simplified for you."

"This has anythin' to do with my former wife, Cap'n, it sure ain't about to be simple."

Brock Vond's nostrils went wide, a vein began to beat next to one eye. "She's not your business anymore. I know how to take care of Frenesi, asshole, understand that?"

Zoyd looked back, eyes swollen, mouth shut, sweating, his hair, not to mention the brain beneath, all matted down. As an average doper of the sixties, the narc's natural prey, he expected from any variety of cop at least the reflexes of a predator, but this went beyond — it was personal, malevolent, too scarily righteous. Why? This was the first time Zoyd had even seen ol' Loverboy here, the great unknown she had come in to Zoyd out of, for a little while, and to which, her choice, he guessed, she'd now returned. Taking care not to provoke the Prosecutor, Zoyd waited on the edge of his rack, holding his head, while Brock got up, metal creaking, and began to pace the room, as if lost in thought. According to Frenesi, Brock had been born under the sign of the Scorpion, the only critter in nature that could sting itself to death with its own tail, reminding Zoyd of self-destructive maniacs he'd ridden with back in his car-club days, beer outlaws speeding well above the limit, dreaming away with these romantic death fantasies, which usually gave them hardons they then joked about all night, bright-eyed, don't-fuck-with-me-sincere country boys with tattoos reading ME 'N' DEATH inside hearts dripping blood, who feared nothing unless it was taking apart a transmission, who might have ended up cops and coaches and selling insurance, soft-spoken as could be, Mister Professional, good grip on the world, but underneath all the time there'd been the onrushing night road, the yellow lines and dashes, the terrible about-to-burst latency just ahead, the hardon, and this Brock here looked like a big-city edition of that same dreamy fatality.

Brock suddenly whipped out some pack of whiteguy smokes, lit up, seemed to recall a subclause of the Gentleman's Code, and held the pack out to Zoyd, though still a little more abruptly than in the true gentleman's perfect mimicry of compassion. Zoyd took a cigarette and a light anyhow.

"Baby's all right? Hm?"

Here at last came those rectal spasms of fear, crashing in on Zoyd one by one. Yes this crazy motherfucker was after his child, what else could it be?

"Going to jail means many things," Brock Vond was pointing out. "You lose your custody. Maybe once in a very great while, because the Bureau of Prisons is not unmerciful, she'll be allowed to visit. Maybe if you're good we'll let you out, under guard, to go to her wedding, hm? Even a sip of champagne at the reception, although that technically would be drug use." He let Zoyd throb a beat or two more and sighed theatrically. "But I have to take a chance, gamble on your character."

"You guys want to adopt Prairie," Zoyd hazarded, "why do this to me, just find a judge."

Brock exhaled smoke impatiently. "How am I even supposed to talk to you people? Maybe you could relate to — like, another planet? Hm? Where not everyone's fate is to produce and bring up children. But some rebel against that, try to run away, hm? get locked into a domestic arrangement as fast as they can — a woman, say, trying to be an average, invisible tract-house mom, anchoring herself to the planet with some innocent hubby, then a baby, to keep from flying away back to who she really is, her responsibilities, hm? Who struggles against her fate."

"So she finds a spaceship," Zoyd continued, "and escapes to our own planet Earth, where folks are allowed to behave the way they want, even have a baby with a lowlife bum who can't afford to buy a house, if that happens to be their trip, without no cops always putting in."

Not the Earth Brock was acquainted with. "But the police of her planet," unperturbed, "who are sworn to protect all their people, cannot allow her to escape what everyone else must accept, hm? So they follow her to Earth. And they bring her back. And she never sees the baby again."

"Yeah, or the father."

"Who makes sure of it."

They'd been smoking up a storm and could see each other only dimly through the nicotine weather, despite the strong light from overhead. Somewhere down the road from this federal facility, carried by the midnight wind from a bikers' bar called Knucklehead Jack's, came live, loud rock and roll, ever-breaking waves of notes in squealing screaming guitar solos that defied any number of rules, that also lifted the blood and reassured the soul of locked-up Zoyd, who now had to reassess the nature of the threat and could still not believe Brock was telling him the terms of an actual deal. Were they plea bargaining? Did Brock really not want Prairie?

"I don't worry about Sasha, because she'll never let Frenesi near the baby, not anymore . . . but let me share what worries me about you. Say I were to let you resume your dubious parenting of this child — squalid surroundings, drug abuse, irregular work hours, and undesirable companions, hm? all on the assumption that we understood each other, and then — who knows? she calls up one night, the moon happens to be full, you start talking more and more softly, singing those golden oldies together, hm? next thing you know, there's the three of you, out at the all-night Burger King, dribbling food, having all that fun, the basic triangle, the holy family, all together, heartwarming, hm? they make a commercial, you're all in it, you get famous, and finally that's when it comes to my attention, you see? The point is, somehow I would always find out."

"But if I took my daughter and just —"

Brock shrugged. "Disappeared. We might not find you for a while. Quite a while. You could get married again, have a life?"

"Is this what Frenesi wants?"

"It's what I tell you. I have her power of attorney, she gave me that even before she gave me her body, so don't waste my time here, question pending is do you want to go inside forever, because there's a bed open on the top tier in cellblock D, waiting just for you, your cellmate's name is Leroy, he is a convicted murderer, and next to eating watermelon, his favorite pastime is attempting to insert his oversized member into the anus of the nearest white male, in this case, you. Are you getting any clearer sense of your options here?"

Zoyd wouldn't look him in the face. The son of a bitch wanted an answer out loud. "OK."

"Believe me," Brock with the salesman's instinct for congratulating the customer on his purchase, "she'd have done the same to you."

"Helps a lot, thanks."

"So . . . I'll just get the paperwork started on this. But we'll have to do something about your tone of voice." Brock went to the door and hollered, "Ron?" Bootsteps approached, and Ron, a large athletic U.S. Marshal, unlocked. "Ron, are you cleared for nonjudicial motivation?"

"Sure am, Mr. Vond."

"Hit him," Brock ordered on his way out the door.

"Yes, sir. How many —"

"Oh, once will be plenty," a fading steel echo.

Ron wasted no time, chasing Zoyd to the corner of the cell and hitting him with a blinding solar-plexus punch that sent him down into paralysis and pain, and unable to breathe. Ron stood awhile, as if evaluating the job — Zoyd could presently make out in a blur his motionless boots and, still too desolate even to cry out, waited for a kick. But Ron turned and left, locking up, and shortly after that the lights went off. And Zoyd curled in anguish and looked for his breath, and didn't drift under till just before the count at 5:30 A.M.

Hector showed up right after breakfast, beaming at him over a mustache the maintenance of whose microstructure back then was costing him twenty minutes a day of precious time. "Political office decides they don't need you after all. But even if we call you the mule, you're still lookín at a zip six indeterminate for that half a metric ton in your house, and somebody figured I could be of help. ... You look like shit, by the way."

"Get yourself bounced by Wyatt Earp out there, see how you feel." Zoyd exhaled loudly through his nose, red-eyed, accusative. "Really a fuckin' late hit, man ... all these years I thought you respected me enough not to force me to snitch. Now, what's so fuckin' important, to make you do this?"

A strange trick of the light, no doubt, or else Zoyd was inopportunely hallucinating, but the highlights on each of Hector's eyeballs had vanished, the shine faded to matte surfaces that were now absorbing all light that fell on them. "You know what, I got to start thinkín about lunch. Do we have to keep playín fuck-fuck with this? órale, get you the right judge, dig it! a nice minimum joint, a farm, you can grow vegetables? flowers, you people like flowers, right? All's I need, really Zoyd, is to know the story on this gentleman, a mutual contact I am sure, name of ... Shorty?"

"Christ, Hector," croaking, shaking his head, "only Shorty I ever knew lives out in Hemet now and since his Vietnam days is takin' zero chances, won't even fly on the airplane no more, not too promising for you, outside of a little Darvon he cops off his ol' lady, he ain't even good for a Class III beef far 's I know."

"That's him!" cried Hector, "that's the fucker all right, down in EPT they know him as Shorty the Bad, and it took supersnitch potential like yours to just break this case wi-i-i-ide open! Muy de aquellos, wait'll I tell my boss — you got a future in this business, ése!"

It occurred to Zoyd more belatedly than usual that Hector could all along have been running some exercise in narc humor for his own entertainment. He risked, "Why this thing about popping my cherry, Hector, can't you see I have a kid to look after now, no choice, I had to turn into a straight citizen and go on the natch anymore, no time for these hardened criminal drug dealers I used to hang out with, I'm totally reformed, man."

"Yeah, some natch, chain-smokín pot, acid on weekends, when you gonna cut your hair? Quit playín that shit music, learn a couple nice Agustín Lara tunes? Li'l conjunto? And really start thinkín about gettín married again too, Zoyd. Debbi and me was both each other's second time around, and we could not be happier, palabra."

"Now you tell me about your sister-in-law, the one you always try to fix up with everybody, even those you arrest."

"Naw, she's livín in Oxnard now, married one of los vatos de Chiques. Debbi says it's in their blood, all the women in her family, they can't resist a suave, romantic Latino."

"Sure hope you're keepin' her away from anybody like that."

"Ay muere, give me a break," shaking his head, flinging wide the door of Zoyd's cell, "go on, get out of here."

So that evening around sunset he was at Sasha's, in a fragrant street lined with older palm trees, with a light desert wind blowing in the sounds of late-rush-hour traffic from the choke point miles up Wilshire and suppertime blooming in side windows up and down the long blocks. Prairie was all gussied up in some kind of brand-new toddler outfit, including shoes and hat, that her grandmother had bought for her, in Beverly Hills no doubt, and when she saw Zoyd she hollered, though not exactly in welcome. "Dah Dee no!"

"Say Slick," down on one knee, holding his arms open.

Prairie scooted around behind Sasha and regarded him with her lower jaw pushed forward and her eyes bright. "No!"

"Aw, Prairie."

" 'Ippie bum!"

"You taught her that, I knew it, got your meathooks on her for one day —" But after Brock Vond and his colleagues, this was not the humiliation it might've been in times of peace.

"Zoyd, what happened, you look terrible."

"Oh . . .," creaking up on his feet, "that fuckin' Brock Vond, man. Your daughter can sure pick 'em." He didn't know if he'd share the final routine Brock had put him through. Before he was to be cut quite loose, Zoyd had had to stand between two marshals, one of them his assailant, Ron, unobserved in the afternoon shade, while Brock led out into the parking lot a steadfastly smiling Fren-esi — who'd been somewhere inside all along, in Brock's custody — sun in her hair and face, those bare legs so poised and smooth . . . obliged to watch her go down, the smile held every step of the way, dapper pastel Brock in his custom shades opening the rear door of the car for her, to watch him then seize her hair, how Zoyd had loved that hair, to guide her head below the roofline and into the padded shadows, though not exactly to notice the way her neck was bent, the anticipation, the long erotic baring of nape, as if willingly, for some high-fashion leather collar. . . .

"I just defrosted a pizza, come on in."

Prairie finally came to kiss him hello after all, and then later good night. When she was asleep in the spare room, Zoyd told Sasha about the deal he thought he'd made.

"But you can't really disappear," Sasha said.

Right — which is where the mental-disability arrangement came in. "Just a way for us to know where you are," Hector had explained, "long as you're pickín up those checks, nobody'll bother you — but if you stop for even one time, the alarm goes off and we know you're tryín to skip."

Zoyd looked miserable enough about it for Sasha to lean, sock him in a precise, friendly way on the shoulder, and say, "All that fascist prick wants is to keep Frenesi from seeing her child again. Usual thing, men making arrangements with men about the fates of women. Would you really help keep them apart?"

"I don't think I could. How about you? Brock says you're no problem, you'll never let her near Prairie."

" 'Cause I'm an old push-button lefty, ideology before family, well let him think so, gives us that much more room to breathe. Listen, what about this?" And she told him about Vineland, how they all used to visit in the summers when Frenesi was little and how she'd loved to explore, must have followed every creek on that whole piece of coast as far up into Vineland each time as she could get, disappearing for days on end with a canteen of Kool-Aid and a backpack full of peanut-butter-and-marshmallow sandwiches.

"Seems a lot of folks heading that way lately," Zoyd nodded.

"Well, once a year we still all get together up there, cook out, play poker, carry on, all the Traverses and Beckers, my parents and their relatives. It used to be the high point of Frenesi's year, but she stopped coming after high school. You know, there'd be worse places for you and the ol' bundle to live, have a home, beautiful country, only a short spin up or down 101 from everything, from the Two Street honky-tonks to the eateries of Arcata to the surfing at Shelter Cove, and you'd have a social life, 'cause lately this mass migration of freaks you spoke of, nothing personal, from L.A. north is spilling over into Vineland, so you'd have free baby-sitting too, dope connections, an inexhaustible guitar-player pool?"

"Sounds groovy for sure, but the only jobs are fishing and lumbering, right, and I'm a piano player."

"You might have to live by your wits, then."

"How's the hiding?"

"Half the interior hasn't even been surveyed — plenty of redwoods left to get lost in, ghost towns old and new blocked up behind slides that are generations old and no Corps of Engineers'll ever clear, a whole web of logging roads, fire roads, Indian trails for you to learn. You can hide, all right. So could she, then and now. Which is why, any year now, say even around Becker-Traverse reunion time, who knows, she might show up. Lover-boy's charm has to wear off sometime."

"Didn't notice much of that."

"About the only thing'll get a fascist through's his charm. The newsfolks love it."

"And you think she'll come to Vineland. And Prairie and me'll just happen to be there. . . ." Sure, well where'd he ever have been without fantasies like that to help bridge him across the bad moments when they came? That night on Sasha's phone he talked to Van Meter, who, himself demoralized by Zoyd's arrest, was joining the trek northward, happy to take along Zoyd's car, stereo, albums, and so forth. They agreed to connect soon at one of the phone numbers Van Meter gave him.

With Prairie hanging off him like a monkey in a tree, he waved goodbye to Sasha at the nearest Santa Monica Freeway exit and immediately got picked up by a VW bus painted all over with flowers, ringed planets, R. Crumb-style faces and feet, and less recognizable forms, all headed for the Sacramento Delta country, where flourished a commune, deep in, beyond the shallowest of boat drafts, sanctuary for folks on the run from court orders, process servers and skip tracers, not to mention higher and more dangerous levels of enforcement. This refuge from government happened to be lodged in the heart of a regionwide network of military installations that included nuclear-weapons depots and waste dumps, mothball fleets, submarine bases, ordnance factories, and airfields for all branches of the service, from SAC down to the Marines, whose flying stock, none of it equipped with noise suppressors, roared overhead without letup day and night.

They decided to stay a night or two, though the baby was not crazy about all the racket in the sky. For a while she hollered back but finally went looking for shelter inside Zoyd's perimeter, by then running on the tight side. People came to their door at unexpected hours looking for parties that could easily have been fantasies of the mind. A population of dogs and cats carried on their own often far from domestic dramas likewise without apparent reference to clock time. Sulfurous fogs came and stayed all day, everything smelled like diesel and chemicals, now and then Zoyd'd have to take his shirt off, wring it out, and put it back on again. When the ducks made highball and comeback quacks in intervals between airplane sorties, Prairie at their voices might begin to perk up, but then in over the patchwork rooftops, too loud and sudden, would come throbbing another chorus of national security, and she'd start to cry again, which eventually, more than the mindshattering roar, got Zoyd wondering just how desperate he was. Mosquitoes whined, sweat ran, Prairie kept waking up every couple hours, all the way back to her old baby ways, partygoers bellowed and shrieked, distant muffled explosions ripped the night, the worst stations on the dial played background music, dogs contended in the beaten mud shadows for thirdhand remnants of road kills. In the morning, gonging with insomniac beer and tobacco headache, Zoyd stumbled to the residence of the Commune Elder and gave notice. "How's that?" cupping an ear as an F-4 Phantom came screaming, invisible in the swamp haze. "Said that we're gonna be —" the rest swallowed in a fugue of B-52's.

"F-4 Phantom, I think!" screaming through megaphone hands. "Well thanks, got to be going," Zoyd mouthed without wasting his voice, smiled, waved, tipped his hat and was off hitchhiking with the baby and their effects inside the quarter hour. Prairie, glad to be moving anywhere, fell asleep as soon as they got a ride. They proceeded toward San Francisco, coming to rest at the posh Telegraph Hill town house of Wendell ("Mucho") Maas, a music-business biggie whom Zoyd knew by way of Indolent Records, entering black iron gates to a long Spanish courtyard of flowered tiles, plants with giant leaves, and working fountains, whose splash woke Prairie with that puzzled look on her face. Exotic trees bloomed in the dark and smelled like someplace far away. They both looked around, Prairie bright-eyed. "OK Slick, he must still be payin' the rent." The courtyard led to an entry full of house-plants under a skylight, where up to them came skipping this pure specimen of young Californian womanhood of the period, ironed hair down to the small of her back, perfectly bikini-tanned, forever eighteen, sweetly stoned and surrounded by a patchouli haze with which she'd announced herself by a minute or two. "Hi, I'm Trillium," she whispered, head to one side, "Mucho's friend. Oh, what a cute baby, a little Taurus, yes, isn't she?"

"Um," Zoyd too astonished to recall the date, "how'd you know that?"

"Mucho's Rolodex, I'm supposed to check out everybody." She had taken Prairie, who already had two delighted fistfuls of that long hair. "Mucho's on retreat for the weekend up in Marin? But the place is oil yerz tonight, 'cz I'll be at the Paranoids concert at the Fillmore." She was leading him into one of those high-sixties record-business interiors, to which Prairie reacted with a prolonged, approving sort of "Gaaahhh. .. ." Next week, next year it could all be gone, open to wind, salt fogs, and walk-in visitors, phones unringing on the bare floors, echoes of absquatulation in the air, careers being that volatile in those days, as revolution went blending into commerce. But here was period rock and roll, over audio equipment that likewise expressed, that long-ago year, the highest state of the analog arts all too soon to be eclipsed by digital technology, Trillium dancing to it, and in her arms the baby jumping and jiving. Zoyd put on dark glasses, shook back his hair, snapped his fingers, did a few amiable time steps, looking around the place. Things blinked, swirled, transformed, came and went everywhere. Distraction. Pinball machines, television sets of many makes and sizes that never got turned off, showing all channels then known, stereo piped to every room and space, incense burning, black-light effects throwing deep purple spills, in the main room a giant tent, peaking twenty feet overhead in a pavilion of fabrics in zany colors including invisible except when they stirred or glittered. Views from here out over the City and Bay, especially at night, were psychedelic even if you happened to be on the natch, as Trillium reminded them, heading out the door presently with a busload of costumed young folks who'd all met and enjoyed the baby. "Groovy baby!" "Rilly!"

Prairie slumped singing in her father's arms, a sort of voiced dribbling, contented, soon to nod. They found the kitchen, he put her up on a table, raided the oversize fridge, fed her some boy-senberry yogurt, a lot of it ending up on his shirt, filled bottles with juice and milk, and retired to a guest room across the patio from the kitchen, searched all over the place for any evidence of a guest stash, had to roll and light one of his own before putting Prairie down to sleep with an original and infallible lullaby called

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

Oh — Lawrence,

Of Arabia, with his

Wig, wag, woggledy doo!

In-surance,

In Arabia,

Don't co-ver what, he do. .. .

No! He's out there with his camel,

In the day or night,

Cruisin' in the desert, just

Lookin' for a fight — he don't care 'cause he's

Lawrence,

Of Arabia, with that

Wig, wag, woggledy doo!

With the volume all the way down, Zoyd settled in in front of the Tube, Woody Allen in Young Kissinger, and slowly relaxed, though the absence of marijuana in the place was mystifying. Psy-chedelicized far ahead of his time, Mucho Maas, originally a disk jockey, had decided around 1967, after a divorce remarkable even in that more innocent time for its geniality, to go into record producing. The business was growing unpredictable, and his takeoff was abrupt — soon, styling himself Count Drugula, Mucho was showing up at Indolent, down in the back-street Hollywood flats south of Sunset and east of Vine, in a chauffeured Bentley, wearing joke-store fangs and a black velvet cape from Z & Z, scattering hits of high-quality acid among the fans young and old who gathered daily for his arrival. "Count, Count! Lay some dope on us!" they'd cry. Indolent Records had rapidly become known for its unusual choices of artists and repertoires. Mucho was one of the very first to audition, but not, he was later to add hastily, to call back, fledgling musician Charles Manson. He almost signed Wild Man Fischer, and Tiny Tim too, but others got to them first.

By the standards of those high-riding days of eternal youth, Count Drugula, or Mucho the Munificent, as he also came to be known, figured as a responsible, even sober-sided user of psy-chedelics, but cocaine was another story. It hit him out of nowhere, an unforeseen passion he would in his later unhappiness compare to a clandestine affair with a woman — furtive meetings between his nose and the illicit crystals, sudden ecstatic peaks, surprising negative cash flow, amazing sexual occurrences. Just as he arrived at that crisis point between wild infatuation and long-term commitment, his nose went out on him — blood, snot, something un-arguably green — a nasal breakdown. He did not go into rehab, the resources in those days not yet having achieved the ubiquity they did in later years of national drug hysteria, but instead sought the help of Dr. Hugo Splanchnick, a dedicated and moralistic rhinologist working out of a suite of dust-free upper rooms in Sherman Oaks. "You'll do me a small favor? I have to take some blood—"

"Huh?"

" — only enough for you to dip this pen into here, and sign your name to this short letter of agreement —"

"Says no coke for as long as I live? What if I —"

"That'll be back with the penalty clauses, basically the traditional range of sanctions — fines, imprisonment, death."

"Death? What? For snorting coke?"

"You're trying to kill yourself anyway, what would it matter?"

A throb of pain went through Mucho's nose. "Can I at least get some Novocaine?" pronouncing it "Dovocaide."

"Soon as you sign."

"Doc! This is worse than a producer's loan-out agreement."

An annoyed sigh. "Regretfully, then," flinging open another door leading deeper into the suite, "we must proceed to the next phase, the 'Room of the Bottled Specimens.' " Lurid pink light, from the cheaply acquired meat displays of a failed supermarket, poured forth.

This didn't look promising. "Um, say, maybe I'll sign after all, add thed you'll gimb be the Dovocaide, right?"

"Ah, much much too late, I'm afraid, as I think you've already glimpsed here in Jar Number One, the —" pretending to read the label, " 'Cross Section Through Jazz Musician's Skull'? eh? revealing the structure of this very interesting abscess, come, have a look, I promise," chuckling, "you won't have to eat it."

To the drug-ruffled nap of Mucho's brain it did not seem at all unlikely that some form of life, somewhere, would find the Bottled Specimens not only edible but appetizing as well, and so he refrained from sharing the snoot croaker's merriment.

"Fine, fine — now for the Necrotic Sinus." On it went, Mucho stumbling, eyes oscillating and nose throbbing, through the Wax Museum, the Emergency Room Footage, the Examples in the Freezer, till at length pain, exhaustion, and the beginning of a new head cold drove him to ink, or rather blood, this nose medic's dubious pact. At last he could beam at the paper over a nose hypodermically iced out. What interesting reading material. Ha, ha, ha! What idiot did they think would ever sign this?

But as he would describe it later, often to people who didn't even know him, and at some length, it proved to be a turning point in his life. Reeling out onto Ventura Boulevard, he was nearly run down by a stop-me-search-me VW bus, brightly repainted and full of long-haired young desperados out cruising, who recognized him and began clamoring for acid. But Mucho, with a spaced and born-again look to him, only announced in a robotized oracular voice, "Why brothers, the new trip, the only true trip, is The Natch, and being on it."

"Aw," said the dopers, the speech balloon emerging from their tailpipe as they rolled away.

Though Mucho had relocated since then to the Acid Rock Capital, his dedication to The Natch had only deepened, and he'd begun to be known in some parts of town as a source of rectal discomfort on the subject, not even sparing his old rock and roll buddy Zoyd his thoughts on the evils of drug abuse. Eat at the mission, sit still for the sermon. But Zoyd was ready with a lecture of his own.

"Mucho, what happened, you were the Head of Heads, and not that long ago. This can't be you talking, it must be the fuckin' government, which this is all their trip anyway, 'cause they need to put people in the joint, if they can't do that, what are they? ain't shit, might as well be another show on the Tube. They didn't even start goin' after dope till Prohibition was repealed, suddenly here's all these federal cops lookin' at unemployment, they got to come up with somethin' quick, so Harry J. Anslinger invents the Marijuana Menace, single-handed. Don't believe me ask ol' Hector, remember him? He'll tell you some shit."

Mucho shivered. "Uh-uh, that dude. Thought he'd be off your case by now." Back down south at the Indolent studios, Hector had made a strong impression. Just when it had seemed the Cor-vairs' luck was turning, and they were actually beginning to cut one or two masters, with Mucho himself producing, suddenly heavily hanging out, faithful as a groupie, was the drug agent, silent and glittering at first but all too soon putting in, as if unable not to, not only negotiating lyrics, which was certainly bad enough, but also arguing about notes, which was crazy — "Hey, those are soul licks! surfers ain' spoze to be playín like that, spoze to play Anglo, like do-re-mi, man, Julie Andrews? up in those Alps? with all those white kids?" so forth, causing Scott Oof to start glowering. "Here he is again, your buddy the rock reviewer, pickier 'n ever. How does he like the beat? Is the string track OK?"

"Strings," Hector narrowing his eyes, ominously on defense, "I didt'n hear no strings."

"Now come on cats, let's all be cool," Mucho in his Count Drugula gear trying to emcee, "I'm happy you enjoyin' your backstage look at the world of rock and roll, mah man in the reverse-chic shoes, but the latest in from the beach is, not even the Surfaris are playing white anymore."

"First the shoes," Hector swiveling to inform him, "are my old Stacey Adamses, me entiendes como te digo?"

"Oops. . . ." Mucho was aware of the mystique, all right, and quick to beg forgiveness.

"Aw, it's OK," Hector putting on his face a goofy and dangerous look, as of some old-time pachuco flying high on reefer, a preferred intimidation technique that extended to his suit, which he'd had semi-retailored to suggest a zoot of the 1940s, "but let me tell you, 'causs sometimes I hear records on your label when I'm out, you know, cruisín, so I really want to tell you, man, about my car radio?" He moved closer to Mucho, who'd already read and filed Hector's story by now, and would presently begin to edge away. "Which is kin' of unique 'causs it only gits this one station? KQAS! Kick-Ass 460 on th' AM dial! I got their decal on my car window, you can look at it later if you want. I got their T-shirt too, but I'm not wearín it today. 'S too bad, 's got a good picture on it. 'S what it is, it's this close-up, of a foot, an' a ass? you know? like a freeze-frame, right where the foot is ... ju-u-u-ust makín that firs' contact with th' ass, right?"

"We're running late," Mucho said. "Zoyd, fellas, you're in competent hands, and nice meeting you, whatever your badge number was."

"Tell the ol' neckbiter here how much I'm enjoyín myself," darkly advised the sensitive federale.

"Yes, check the drape of his suit," Zoyd had counseled then, "and exercise caution."

"These federal guys," Mucho, back in real time, was telling Zoyd, "if they're anything like nasal therapists, they're in your life forever. I didn't think you were dealing anymore."

"Me neither. So last week, what happens? He finally tries to set me up." He told Mucho of his brief but educational time in federal custody.

Mucho blinked sympathetically, a little sadly. "I guess it's over. We're on into a new world now, it's the Nixon Years, then it'll be the Reagan Years —"

"OP Raygun? No way he'll ever make president."

"Just please go careful, Zoyd. 'Cause soon they're gonna be coming after everything, not just drugs, but beer, cigarettes, sugar, salt, fat, you name it, anything that could remotely please any of your senses, because they need to control all that. And they will."

"Fat Police?"

"Perfume Police. Tube Police. Music Police. Good Healthy Shit Police. Best to renounce everything now, get a head start."

"Well I still wish it was back then, when you were the Count. Remember how the acid was? Remember that windowpane, down in Laguna that time? God, I knew then, I knew. . . ."

They had a look. "Uh-huh, me too. That you were never going to die. Ha! No wonder the State panicked. How are they supposed to control a population that knows it'll never die? When that was always their last big chip, when they thought they had the power of life and death. But acid gave us the X-ray vision to see through that one, so of course they had to take it away from us."

"Yeah, but they can't take what happened, what we found out."

"Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us distracted, it's what the Tube is for, and though it kills me to say it, it's what rock and roll is becoming — just another way to claim our attention, so that beautiful certainty we had starts to fade, and after a while they have us convinced all over again that we really are going to die. And they've got us again." It was the way people used to talk.

"I'm not gonna forget," Zoyd vowed, "fuck 'em. While we had it, we really had some fun."

"And they never forgave us." Mucho went to the stereo and put on The Best of Sam Cooke, volumes 1 and 2, and then they sat together and listened, both of them this time, to the sermon, one they knew and felt their hearts comforted by, though outside spread the lampless wastes, the unseen paybacks, the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into.

Downtown, in the Greyhound station, Zoyd put Prairie on top of a pinball machine with a psychedelic motif, called Hip Trip, and was able to keep winning free games till the Vineland bus got in from L.A. This baby was a great fan of the game, liked to lie face down on the glass, kick her feet, and squeal at the full sensuous effect, especially when bumpers got into prolonged cycling or when her father got manic with the flippers, plus the gongs and lights and colors always going off. "Enjoy it while you can," he muttered at his innocent child, "while you're light enough for that glass to hold you."

Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge represents a transition, in the metaphysics of the region, there to be felt even by travelers unwary as Zoyd. When the busful of northbound hippies first caught sight of it, just at sundown as the fog was pouring in, the towers and cables ascending into pale gold otherworldly billows, you heard a lot of "Wow," and "Beautiful," though Zoyd only found it beautiful the way a firearm is, because of the bad dream unreleased inside it, in this case the brute simplicity of height, the finality of what swept below relentlessly out to sea. They rose into the strange gold smothering, visibility down to half a car length, Prairie standing up on the seat gazing out the window. "Headin' for nothin' but trees, fish, and fog, Slick, from here on in," sniffling, till your mama comes home, he wanted to say, but didn't. She looked around at him with a wide smile. "Fiss!"

"Yeah — fog!"

Trees. Zoyd must have dozed off. He woke to rain coming down in sheets, the smell of redwood trees in the rain through the open bus windows, tunnels of unbelievably tall straight red trees whose tops could not be seen pressing in to either side. Prairie had been watching them all the time and in a very quiet voice talking to them as they passed one by one. It seemed now and then as if she were responding to something she was hearing, and in rather a matter-of-fact tone of voice for a baby, too, as if this were a return for her to a world behind the world she had known all along. The storm lashed the night, dead trees on slow log trucks reared up in the high-beams shaggy and glistening, the highway was interrupted by flooding creeks and minor slides that often obliged the bus to creep around inches from the edge of Totality. Aislemates struck up conversations, joints appeared and were lit, guitars came down from overhead racks and harmonicas out of fringe bags, and soon there was a concert that went on all night, a retrospective of the times they'd come through more or less as a generation, the singing of rock and roll, folk, Motown, fifties oldies, and at last, for about an hour just before the watery green sunrise, one guitar and one harmonica, playing the blues.

Zoyd caught up with Van Meter in Eureka, at the corner of 4th and H, as, suddenly disoriented, he observed his '64 Dodge Dart, unmistakably his own short, with the LSD paint job, Day-Glo hubcaps with the eyes on them, nude-with-streamlined-tits hood ornament, and at the wheel a standard-issue Hippie Freak who looked just like him. Woo-oo! An unreal moment for everybody, with the driver staring twice as weirdly right back at Zoyd! Van Meter meantime was wondering why Zoyd didn't wave hello, taking Zoyd's mental confusion for anger, and decided to just keep going, though by that time Zoyd had recovered and begun to chase Van Meter through the lunch-hour traffic, waving and hollering, only adding to the bass player's anxiety. Zoyd caught up with his car at a red light and got in on the rider's side.

"Don't be pissed!" in a high nervous voice. "It's running great, I just sprang for a whole tank of gas —"

"Thought I was having a out-of-body experience for a second. What's the matter, you look kind of, uh. . . ."

"Hey, I'm cool. Where's that Prairie?"

Zoyd had left her with friends here, had been house hunting all week with no luck, was just about to go pick her up and head back to Vineland.

"Well soon as I can find your keys, I'll give you your ride and you can run me back up there."

"In the ignition, I think."

"Oh. . . ."

They collected Prairie, from a day-care co-op of friends of friends from down south. She was in blue corduroy overalls and greeted Van Meter, her godfather, with squeals and smiles, high-fiving him with two grubby hands. She'd settled right in up here, didn't seem to miss the beach at all, already knew a couple of kids she fought and played with regularly. Soon as they were out on 101 again, she climbed in the back seat and went to sleep.

"A Harbor of Refuge," as the 1851 survey map called it, "to Vessels that may have suffered on their way North from the strong headwinds that prevail along this coast from May to October," Vineland Bay, at the mouth of Seventh River, was protected from the sea and its many unsolved mysteries by two spits, Thumb and Old Thumb, and an island out in the bay, called False Thumb. The spits were joined by a bridge, as was the inner of the two, Old Thumb, with the city of Vineland, which curved the length of the harbor's shoreline, both spans being graceful examples of the concrete Art Deco bridges built all over the Northwest by the WPA during the Great Depression. Zoyd, who was driving, came at last up a long forest-lined grade and cresting saw the trees fold away, as there below, swung dizzily into view, came Vineland, all the geometry of the bay neutrally filtered under pre-storm clouds, the crystalline openwork arcs of the pale bridges, a tall power-plant stack whose plume blew straight north, meaning rain on the way, a jet in the sky ascending from Vineland International south of town, the Corps of Engineers marina, with salmon boats, power cruisers, and day sailers all docked together, and spilling uphill from the shoreline a couple of square miles crowded with wood Victorian houses, Quonset sheds, postwar prefab ranch and split-level units, little trailer parks, lumber-baron floridity, New Deal earnestness. And the federal building, jaggedly faceted, obsidian black, standing apart, inside a vast parking lot whose fences were topped with concertina wire. "Don't know, it just landed one night," Van Meter said, "sitting there in the morning when everybody woke up, folks seem to be gettin' used to it. . . ."

Someday this would be all part of a Eureka-Crescent City-Vineland megalopolis, but for now the primary sea coast, forest, riverbanks and bay were still not much different from what early visitors in Spanish and Russian ships had seen. Along with noting the size and fierceness of the salmon, the fogbound treachery of the coasts, the fishing villages of the Yurok and Tolowa people, log keepers not known for their psychic gifts had remembered to write down, more than once, the sense they had of some invisible boundary, met when approaching from the sea, past the capes of somber evergreen, the stands of redwood with their perfect trunks and cloudy foliage, too high, too red to be literal trees — carrying therefore another intention, which the Indians might have known about but did not share. They could be seen in photographs beginning at about the turn of the century, villagers watching the photographer at work, often posed in native gear before silvery blurred vistas, black tips of seamounts emerging from gray sea fringed in brute-innocent white breakings, basalt cliffs like castle ruins, the massed and breathing redwoods, alive forever, while the light in these pictures could be seen even today in the light of Vineland, the rainy indifference with which it fell on surfaces, the call to attend to territories of the spirit. . . for what else could the antique emulsions have been revealing?

Money had never been found in Sacramento or Washington to bypass 101 around Vineland, so that once into town, the freeway narrowed to two lanes and made a couple of doglegs on and off South Spooner, following unsynchronized traffic lights that drove Van Meter crazy but gave Zoyd a good look at downtown, the Lost Nugget, Country Cantonese, Bodhi Dharma Pizza, the Steam Donkey, before they were back on North Spooner, heading uphill to the bus station, where Zoyd and Prairie were living out of a locker. Van Meter offered to shoehorn them in where he was staying, a commune out past Intemperate Hill. Zoyd figured that with lines waiting on every locker space in the station, he might as well let somebody else move into his. The great northerly migration had caught Vineland flatfooted. The bus station, which took up a whole city block, was acting as a temporary dormitory for those who had nowhere to stay — and there were plenty of these Southland transplants milling everywhere. Zoyd left Prairie with some folks they'd come up with on the bus who'd all got into the habit of looking after each other's kids, and with Van Meter walking slack made a zigzag for the indigo ambience of the Fast Lane Lounge, known for the "harmless liquid" swabbed routinely onto the rims of the bar glasses, making them glow in the ultraviolet frequencies abroad in this room. Some of it was sure to come off on a drinker's mouth. Men usually wiped it away, women either allowed it to diffuse through their lipstick, for which the substance had a strange affinity, until the entire lip area was aglow, or else avoided all contact by drinking through straws, content to admire the glass-rim effect as one might admire an angel-less halo. They sat in front of cold longnecks and Zoyd brought Van Meter up to date.

"Well," beaming vacantly, " 'ere's worse places for a desperado to hide out. You understand, every guy up here looks just like we do. You're dern near invisible already. Hey! Where'd you go?" groping around the vicinity of Zoyd's head.

"And it turns out, old Slick's got family up here, don't know 'f I should look 'em up or not."

"On the one hand, you don't want this turning into your mother-in-law's trip, on the other hand, they might know about someplace to crash, if so don't forget your old pal, a garage, a woodshed, a outhouse, don't matter, 's just me and Chloe." "Chloe your dog? Oh yeah, you brought her up?" "Think she's pregnant. Don't know if it happened here or down south." But they all turned out to look like their mother, and each then went on to begin a dynasty in Vineland, from among one of whose litters, picked out for the gleam in his eye, was to come Zoyd and Prairie's dog, Desmond. By that time Zoyd had found a piece of land with a drilled well up off Vegetable Road, bought a trailer from a couple headed back to L.A., and was starting to put together a full day's work, piece by piece. Out in the perpetual rains on that coast back then, with a borrowed ladder and rolls of aluminum foil, he cruised middle-class neighborhoods for clogged or leaking gutters, doing quick fixes on the spot, then coming back between storms to make the jobs more permanent. He sold vanloads of plastic raincoats from Taiwan along with car wax and pirated Osmonds tapes at the weekend swap meets at the Bigfoot Drive-in, spent Februaries along with everybody else he knew going around in hip waders in the Humboldt daffodil fields, cutting them green, picking up poison rashes, and then, when the cable television companies showed up in the county, got into skirmishes that included exchanges of gunfire between gangs of rival cable riggers, eager to claim souls for their distant principals, fighting it out house by house, with the Board of Supervisors compelled eventually to partition the county into Cable Zones, which in time became political units in their own right as the Tubal entrepreneurs went extending their webs even where there weren't enough residents per linear mile to pay the rigging cost, they could make that up in town, and besides, they had faith in the future of California real estate. Idealistic flower children looking to live in harmony with the Earth were not the only folks with their eyes on Vineland. Developers in and out of state had also discovered this shoreline in the way of the wind, with its concealed tranquillities and false passages, this surprise fish-trap in the everyday coast. All born to be suburbs, in their opinion, and the sooner the better. It meant work, but too much of it nonunion and bought shamefully cheap. Zoyd's relations with the Traverses he did get in touch with were complicated by his scab activities, though Zoyd would've preferred "independent contractor." These were old, proud, and strong union people, surviving in one of the world's worst antiunion environments — spool tenders, zooglers, water bucks, and bull punchers, some had fought in the Everett mill wars, others from the Becker side had personally known Joe Hill, and not mourned, and organized, and if they were allowing in over their doorsills from time to time nonunion odd-jobbing Zoyd, it was only out of sympathy for his hair and life-style, which they blamed on his mental disability, and love for their distant relative Prairie, who as a true Traverse would piss on through despite her father's shortcomings just fine. Zoyd didn't get points either for the divorce, though if he had custody and nobody'd seen Frenesi for years, it didn't make her look much better. Sasha's cousin Claire, credited in the family with paranormal abilities, quickly enough read Zoyd, noted the unguttering flame on the torch he carried, and started having him over for supper and to look at old family snapshots, telling what she remembered of young Frenesi the explorer and the reports she'd come back with about rivers that weren't supposed to be where she found them, and of the lights on the far banks, and the many voices, hundreds it seemed, not exactly partying, nor exactly belligerent either. Boulders too heavy for anyone but Bigfoot to lift come thudding all around her in the middle of the night, torrents of summer-run steelhead the size of dogs, glowing more than glittering, abandoned logging sites, boilers and stacks and flange gears looming up out of the blackberries. . . and the strange "lost" town of Shade Creek, supposedly evacuated in a flood of long ago, now unaccountably repopulated with villagers who never seemed to sleep.

"It was those Thanatoids, of course," said Claire, "they were just beginning to move into the county then, and if it scared her at all, being up there amid so much human unhappiness, why, she never mentioned it." Since the end of the war in Vietnam, the Thanatoid population had been growing steeply, so there was always day work out at Thanatoid Village, a shopping and residential complex a few miles further into the hills above Shade Creek. Shape-ups were held in the predawn down by the Vineland courthouse, shadowy brown buses idling in the dark, work and wages posted silently in the windows — some mornings Zoyd had gone down, climbed on, ridden out with other newcomers, all cherry to the labor market up here, former artists or spiritual pilgrims now becoming choker setters, waiters and waitresses, baggers and checkout clerks, tree workers, truckdrivers, and framers, or taking temporary swamping jobs like this, all in the service of others, the ones who did the building, selling, buying and speculating. First thing new hires all found our was that their hair kept getting in the way of work. Some cut it short, some tied it back or slicked it behind their ears in a kind of question-mark shape. Their once-ethereal girlfriends were busing dishes or cocktail-waitressing or attending the muscles of weary loggers over at the Shangri-La Sauna, Vineland County's finest. Some chose to take the noon southbound back home, others kept plugging on, at night school or Vineland Community College or Humboldt State, or going to work for the various federal, state, county, church, and private charitable agencies that were the biggest employers up here next to the timber companies. Many would be the former tripping partners and old flames who came over the years to deal with each other this way across desktops or through computer terminals, as if chosen in secret and sorted into opposing teams. . ..

After a while Zoyd was allowed into the Traverse-Becker annual reunions, as long as he brought Prairie, who at about the age of three or four got sick one Vineland winter, and looked up at him with dull hot eyes, snot crusted on her face, hair in a snarl, and croaked, "Dad? Am I ever gonna get bett-or?" pronouncing it like Mr. Spock, and he had his belated moment of welcome to the planet Earth, in which he knew, dismayingly, that he would, would have to, do anything to keep this dear small life from harm, up to and including Brock Vond, a possibility he wasn't too happy with. But as he watched her then, year by year, among these reunion faces her own was growing more and more to look like, continuing to feel no least premonitory sign of governmental interest from over the horizon beyond the mental-disability checks that arrived faithfully as the moon, he at last began, even out scuffling every day, to relax some, to understand that this had been the place to bring her and himself after all, that for the few years anyway, he must have chosen right for a change, that time they'd come through the slides and storms to put in here, to harbor in Vineland, Vineland the Good.