Read Online Vineland by Thomas Pynchon - Free Book Online Page A

talk to Zoyd.
    â€œThis is somethin’ about Hector again, right?”
    â€œWe heard he was back,” Blood said, “but this ain’t him, Blood, it’s, uh, somebody else. And me and my partner were just wondering if you were planning to sleep on the base tonight?”
    Here came another of those deep intestinal pangs. Zoyd knew that long ago in Saigon, Blood had more than once heard this warning from elements of the Vietcong in whose interest it was to keep him alive and in business. “Well shit. If it i’n’ Hector, then who is it?”
    Vato came over, looking as serious as his running mate. “They’re federal, Vato, but it ain’ Hector, he’s too busy keepín ahead of that posse from the Tubaldetox.”
    Zoyd suddenly felt like shit. “I better see about my kid.” Rick and Chick made mirror-image go-ahead gestures at the phone. “That Jikov 32, that Skoda carburetor you ’s lookin’ for, it’s in my front seat, see what you think.”
    Prairie worked at the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple, which a little smugly offered the most wholesome, not to mention the slowest, fast food in the region, a classic example of the California pizza concept at its most misguided. Zoyd was both a certified pizzamaniac and a cheapskate, but not once had he ever hustled Prairie for one nepotistic slice of the Bodhi Dharma product. Its sauce was all but crunchy with fistfuls of herbs only marginally Italian and more appropriate in a cough remedy, the rennetless cheese reminded customers variously of bottled hollandaise or joint compound, and the options were all vegetables rigorously organic, whose high water content saturated, long before it baked through, a stone-ground twelve-grain crust with the lightness and digestibility of a manhole cover.
    Zoyd happened to catch Prairie on a meditation break. “You OK over there?”
    â€œSomethin’ wrong?”
    â€œDo me a favor, stay till I get there, all right?”
    â€œBut Isaiah and the band were coming by to pick me up, we’re goin’ camping, remember? Sheez, all that shit you smoke, your brain must be like a Etch-A-Sketch.”
    â€œUh huh, don’t get alarmed, but we are facing a situation where a quick mouth, even a leading example such as your own, won’t be nearly as much use today as a little cooperation. Please.”
    â€œSure this ain’t pothead paranoia?”
    â€œNope and now I think of it could you ask the young gentlemen when they git there to stick around too?”
    â€œJust ’cause they look evil, Dad, doesn’t mean they’re any good for muscle, if that’s what you’re thinkin’.”
    Feeling unprotected on all flanks, Zoyd went speeding in, running lights and ignoring stop signs, to Vineland, where he just made it to the door of the bank at closing time. An entry-level functionary in a suit who was refusing admission to other late-comers saw Zoyd and, for the first time in history, nervously began to unlock the door for him, while inside colleagues at desks could be seen making long arms for the telephone. No, it wasn’t pothead paranoia—but neither was Zoyd about to step inside this bank. A security guard sauntered over, unsnapping his hip holster. OK. Zoyd split with a that’s-all-folks wave, having luckily parked Trent’s rig just around the corner.
    Prairie wouldn’t be off work for a couple of hours. Zoyd needed cash and also some advice about a quick change of appearance, and both were available from the landscape contractor Zoyd did some lawn and tree work for, Millard Hobbs, a former actor who’d begun as a company logo and ended up as majority owner of what’d been a modest enough lawn-care service its founder, a reader of forbidden books, had named The Marquis de Sod. Originally Millard had only been hired to be in a couple of locally produced late-night TV commercials in which, holding a giant