"It is pretty much the only escape," Mark agrees quietly.
There are nods from everyone but J.D. and Magda. DeHaven has slowed the malevolent car a bit further.
J.D. turns, smoking, shaking his fine head, disgusted. "I don't know who of you's more full of what, kid. TV's not political? What about that "Hawaii Five-O" Nola said you two were watching all slack-jawed, so taken in you weren't even blinking?" Hiking an elbow onto the front seat's back to level a centered face and heavy cigar-supporting lip at Sternberg and Nechtr. "You saying there's no politics going on on that show?"
The boys' response is immediate and unanimous and negative.
"Pure entertainment."
"Like a blanket so old it's falling apart. Soothing."
"Like blowing bubbles with your saliva. Mindless. Fun just for the sake of fun."
"Especially in reruns, syndication, that you've seen before," Sternberg says, into it, feeling, feeling disembodied, other, flaccid. "Incredibly comforting. You know just how the universe is going to be for the next hour. Totally secure. Detached but connected. A womb with a view."
Steelritter just cannot believe the naïveté of these cynical kids. He'd trade looks with the older flight attendant in the rearview if D.L.'s slender head weren't in the way. D.L. and DeHaven are watching the odometer finally roll all the way over. It's exciting and gorgeous. There's a slot-machine feel about it, which they share, together, and know they share it. The oil light has settled into a kind of stuttered flicker, which is even more dreadful, if you know your oil.
"I cannot believe these kids today," says J.D. " 'Hawaii Five-O' is not political? We're talking about the same show? The show that ran from '65 to '73? That had helicopter imagery in every episode? Helicopters full of wooden-faced, purposeful white guys in the kinds of business suits capitalism's all about? White guys flying around in helicopters restoring order to this oriental island that can't seem to govern itself, that's overrun with violent and bad and indigenous Orientals? The cop show where all the head guys are white and all their lieutenants are good Orientals in suits, and they all cooperate and co-prosper shooting at the bad Orientals out of helicopters? With this constant reference all the time to a 'Mainland' that seems close to the island and in peril from the island's disorder and in need of what's the word immunization, but which calls Jack Lord's every shot, and justifies all the shooting of natives out of helicopters?"
"Are you trying to draw a Vietnam parallel?" Mark asks.
Disgust and disbelief wrestle for control of J.D.'s big face. "Christ, you poor shitspeck, that show was the most blatant piece of politics ever," he says, imagining just how the Reunion will be, pegging his thick Rothschild, feeling at a crinkling pocket, trying to decide between a petal and a slim Dutch Master.
"He might have an idea there," says Sternberg to Nechtr. "Like those Clint Eastwood Westerns, with the Man with the Gun called back from the Wilderness to save the same threatened Community that out of fear chased him into the Wilderness in the first place?"
"The Deliverer-Hero, with a Weapon, on a Horse?" says Mark.
"The tough but loving tutor who tempers him like fine blue steel? The Bush? Kinobe? Yoda?"
D.L. is utterly silent throughout this exchange, watching the odometer begin slowly to lose its magic. There is a reason for her silence that is in a way parallel to the historical U.S. conflict in Vietnam. For her, Vietnam does not exist except as complicatedly cancelled letters and hissingly connected phone calls, a completely flat-eyed father whom she first met on a tarmac at nine. Who had a hook. Who dropped at automobile backfires (Datsuns never backfire — too little power), who gazed dully and accepting at the mosquito feeding at his one big bicep. Who's long gone, now. Who left a note.
LANCE CORPORAL LYNN-PAUL EBERHARDT'S NOTE, THAT HE LEFT
Dear Void:
The chances of living in the present seem good today.
Yrs.,
From D.L., Mark Nechtr knows only that Lieutenant Colonel Eber-hardt is long gone to unknown locales. Never pressed her for details that clearly pained her. Actually, D.L. had started to tell her first and only lover all about it, that night, that time they'd gone (protected) to bed. But Mark, postcoital, had fallen asleep. She's never forgiven him for it. Will never. She was forced to do the whole rehearsed dialogue mono-, playing both parts, Ophelia-like: the only time in her life she's laughed so hard she had to bite her arm to stop:
"My Daddy's long gone. He's whacked. Looned. Zoned. Where all rooms are white and all shoes noiseless. My father has left the planet.
"Well as long as he waves, occasionally.
"I think the only thing he waves at is his food.
"Well, as long as it doesn't wave back. .
"I think that's why he waves in the first place."
Took her exclusively to ruined amusements. Liked boarded windows and walks chocked with crabgrass. Read her Moby-Dick at ten. One sitting. Whale trivia and all. Told her to call him Lynn.
Bought her a forest-green classic 70s fashion outfit she's had altered and cleaned so often it's lime. Told her she was loved. Would sit only with his back to walls.
He's never once asked for painful personal details, Mark. He'll take what you give him and just nod. He sees and won't cross uninvited this unbroken center-line between your business and his. Keeps his own counsel. Never ever presses. It's one reason he's so universally loved. Plus it's why, within a year after the time when the little miracle should appear but won't, she's going to scald him in his sleep. Bad business. But assault or defense? You decide.
This has, yes, been a digression. But if it's irrelevant, then ours is that part of town you want to make sure you drive through quick, windows sealed and doors locked tight, oil thoroughly checked, and nothing fishy in the dash.
Great lover, though, Mark. Healthy fucker. Energy right out the bazoo. Can fuck her into a sleep only the Dalmanated usually know. Tireless. Hard or flaccid at will. Comes only when he wants, like a cat. D.L. thinks she knows: it's the fried roses the tactful old klepto gives the pupils he's decided to gather to his arbitrary wing. The hors d'oeuvres her psychic pukes at the thought of. Healthily evil. Marries desire and fear into a kind of privately passionate virtuosity.
Mark has kind of a problem with the roses now, she thinks. She sees him getting dependent. They don't talk about it, Mark keeps his own counsel, but the problem with the flowers, she thinks, is what, ironically, keeps him from producing the way he wants.
D.L. simply refuses to eat beauty. It's defilement. A kind of blasphemy for atheists. Aesthetic Murder-One. D.L.'s got some desires, but says no thanks to eating what stands outside you, red and eternal, shouting that it's not food. She won't do it. Not even to be a better postmodernist. This makes her kind of heroic, in a tight-assed, grad-school way. Old fashioned, ironically. She does like the word virtue. Honor is even a noun to her, sometimes.
"I thought you knew Jack Lord personally," she says, seeing through DeHaven's windshield what looks like imperfect tint. They are thunderheads. "Yet but now here you are, talking down his show. So why represent LordAloft?"
"I never talk down, Missy. And I do know Jack." J.D. flicks the dice with a finger while DeHaven keeps his arm on the gearshift, between J.D. and the stuttered red oil light, his face under the happy face grim. The oil light's red stutters when the car jounces. The sound of the gravel is unendurable.
"But Jack is a complex man," says J.D. Steelritter. "I've known at least three different historical Jack Lords, since I've been in this business. That was the first Jack Lord, up over paradise in a helicopter, firing blanks at underpaid natives. Then there was a retired, artsy-fartsy, politically correct-type Jack Lord, back in the Seventies, who sculpted free-form and did gratis spots for Easter Seals. The new present Jack Lord doesn't fuck around. He's a businessman. A professional pilot and franchiser. A kind of ideal Yuppie with start-up capital and entrepreneurial drive and more balls than are presently in this whole entire rotten car, which by the way did or didn't I say to step on it, shitspeck. And don't think I don't see that oil light. Quit with the elbow in my face. Screw the oil light. I don't trust homemade instrumentation. Go. You've got till noon. Our shadows get short, I want these folks to be reveling."