Vineland by Thomas Pynchon Read Free Book Online Page A

shrugged eloquently. “One of the most intractable cases any of us has seen. He’s already in the literature. Known in our field as the Brady Buncher, after his deep although not exclusive attachment to that series.”
    â€œOh, yeah, that was ol’ Marcia, right, and then the middle one’s name was—” till Zoyd noticed the piercing look he was getting.
    â€œMaybe,” said Dr. Deeply, “you should give us a call anyway.”
    â€œI didt’n say I could remember
all
their names!” Zoyd yelled after him, but he was already halfway out the door, soon to be joined by the others and then, presently, gone, and without having caught Hector, either.
    Hector, who it now seemed was some sort of escaped lunatic, was still at large.
    Â 

Z OYD hit Phantom Ridge Road about an hour later than he wanted because of Elvissa up the hill’s blown head gasket, which brought her down at 6:00 a.m. to borrow his rig, for which it had taken Zoyd then a while to scout up a replacement. This turned out to be a Datsun Li’l Hustler pickup, belonging to his neighbor Trent, with a camper shell whose unusual design gave the vehicle some cornering problems. “Long as you don’t try it with the tank anywhere between empty and full,” Trent suggested, he thought helpfully. But it was actually the camper shell, covered all over with cedar shakes in some doper’s idea of imbrication and topped by a pointed shake roof with a stovepipe coming out, that seemed to be the problem.
    Zoyd very carefully hooked a right and was soon climbing switchbacks up a ridge of as yet unlogged second-growth redwoods, on whose other side lay Phantom Creek. The fog here had burned off early, leaving a light blue haze that began to fade the more distant trees. He was heading for a little farm on the creek road, where he had a sideline in crawfish with a bush vet and his family. They’d go harvest the little ’suckers from up and down Phantom and a couple of adjoining creeks, and Zoyd would bring the good-eating crustaceans back down 101 to a string of restaurants catering to depraved yuppie food preferences, in this case California Cajun, though the critters also got listed here and there as Ecrivisses á la Maison and Vineland Lobster.
    RC and Moonpie, real names left back along their by now erased-enough trail since the war, were as happy to see the money as the kids were to be out doing the work—Morning, the biggest, splashing down the middle of the creek, with the others carrying jars and sacks of twenty-penny nails, and fastening a piece of bacon to the bottom of every knee-deep pool they came to. By the time they got back to where they’d started, there’d be frantic invasions of crawdads, all milling around unable to get the bacon loose. Procedure then was to bring out a minnow bag on a stick, hit the crawdad on the nose with the stick, and catch it, as it jumped, in the bag. Sometimes the kids would even allow their parents to come along and help out.
    Zoyd had known the family since the early seventies, having in fact met Moonpie on the night of the day his divorce became final, which also happened to be the night before his very first window jump, in a way both part of the same letter of agreement. He was drinking beers in a longhairs’ saloon called the Lost Nugget down on South Spooner in Vineland, looking for a way not to think about Frenesi or the life together that had just officially come to an end with no last-minute reversals, and Moonpie, equally young and lovely back in those days, seemed to Zoyd’s crippled receptors just the ticket. That is until RC emerged from the can, with the deep eyes, the mortally cautious bearing, that told of where else he’d been. He slid back to the bar, dropped a hand on Moonpie’s shoulder that she pressed for a moment with her cheek, and nodded at Zoyd with a please-don’t-piss-me-off look of inquiry. Zoyd, already