“Good thing I bought these solid-rubber tires and ditched those fancy-ass Michelins,” Starlitz said with satisfaction.
“Yeah,” Vanna said. Mr. Judy said nothing. She’d given Starlitz a hard time about the tires earlier.
“Shoulda saved money on that fancy fiber-optics kit, and gone for the Plexiglas windows, instead,” Starlitz opined. “The bulletproof option. Just like I said.” Mr. Judy, who’d done the lion’s share of the scrubbing, went to the ladies’ and threw up.
They took 93 south of Twin Falls and across the border to Wells, Nevada. The switch to a smaller highway seemed to stymie their pursuers, but only temporarily. At 80 West just east of Oasis they found the desert highway entirely blocked. A church bus full of protestors in death’s-head masks had physically blocked the road with their black-cloaked bodies. As the van drew nearer, they began chaining themselves together, somewhat hampered by their placards and scythes.
Starlitz rolled down the driver’s-side window, took his hands off the steering-wheel and stuck them both out the window, visibly. Then he hit the accelerator.
The blockaders scattered wildly as the van bore down upon them. The van whacked, bumped, and crunched over chains, scythes, and placards as shrieks of rage and horror dopplered past the open window.
“I think you hit one of them, Leggy,” Vanna gasped.
“Nah,” Starlitz said. “Probably one of those dead-baby dummies.”
“They wouldn’t be carrying real babies with them, would they?” Vanna said.
“In this heat?” Starlitz said.
The bus pursued them at high speed all the way to Wendover, but it grew dark, and they entered some light traffic. Starlitz turned the van’s lights off, and pulled into an access road to the Bonneville Salt Flats. The bus, deceived, roared past them in pursuit of someone else.
They spent the night outside the military chain-link around an Air Force test-range, then drove into Salt Lake City in the morning.
It was Sunday, the Sabbath. Utah’s capital was utterly sepulchral. The streets were as blank and deserted as so many bowling lanes.
The van felt pitifully conspicuous as they drove past blank storefronts and shuttered windows. At length they hid the van on the sheltered grounds of a planetarium and stuffed all the contraband into Mr. Judy’s backpack.
They then hiked uphill to the Utah State Capitol. The great stone edifice was open to the public. There was not a soul inside it. No police, no tourists—no one at all. The only company the three of them had were the Ikegami charged-couple-device security minicams, which were bolted well above the line-of-sight on eight-inch swivel pedestals.
“We’re early,” Mr. Judy said. “Our contact hasn’t shown yet.” She shrugged. “Might as well have a good look at the place.”
“I like this building,” Starlitz announced, gazing around raptly. “This contact of yours must be okay. Setting up a dope-deal here in Boy Scout Central was a way gutsy move.” He closely examined a Howard Chandler Christy reproduction of the Signing of the US Constitution. The gilt-framed tableau of the Founding Fathers had been formally presented to the State of Utah by the Walt Disney Corporation.
The capitol’s rotunda was a sky-blue dome with a massive dangling chandelier. It featured funky-looking ’30s frescos with the unmistakable look of state-supported social-realism. “Advent of Irrigation by Pioneers.” “Driving the Golden Spike.” “General Connor Inaugurates Mining.”
“Listen to this,” Mr. Judy marveled. “It’s a statement by the bureaucrat that commissioned this stuff. This is the greatest opportunity that the artists of this or any other country have ever had to show their metal. He actually says that—‘mettle’! It is a call to them to make good and prove that they have something worth while to say. Yeah, unlike you, you evil little redneck philistine! It is an opportunity to sell themselves to the country and I know they will answer the challenge.” Suddenly she flushed.
“Take it easy,” Starlitz muttered.
“‘Sell themselves to the country,’” Mr. Judy said venomously. “Mother of God…sometimes you forget just how bad it really is in the good ol’ USA.”
Farther down the hall they discovered an extremely campy figurine of an astronaut on a black plastic pedestal. The pedestal was made of O-ring material from Utah-produced Morton Thiokol solid-rocket boosters.
Every other nook or cranny seemed to feature a lurking statue of some fat-cat local businessman: a “world-renowned mining engineer”—a “pioneer in the development of supermarkets.”
“Wow, look who built this place!” Mr. Judy said, gazing at a bronze plaque. “It was the Utah state governor who had Joe Hill shot by a firing squad! Man, that sure explains a lot…”
“This place is creepin’ me out,” Vanna said, hugging herself. “Let’s go outside and wait on the lawn…”
“No, this place is great!” Starlitz objected. “Six Flags Over Jesus was decorated just like this…Let’s go down in the basement!”
The basement featured a gigantic hand-embroidered silk tapestry: with the purple slope of Mount Fuji, a couple of wooden sailboats and a big cheesy spray of cherry blossoms. It had been presented to the People of Utah by the Japanese American Citizens League—“For Better Americans in a Greater America”—on July 21, 1940.
“Five months before Pearl Harbor,” Mr. Judy said, aghast.
“Musta been mighty reassuring,” Starlitz said slowly. He wandered off.
Mr. Judy stared at the eldritch relic with mingled pity and horror. “I wonder how many of these poor people ended up in relocation camps.”
Vanna silently wiped her eyes on the tail of her shirt.
Starlitz stopped at the end of the hall and looked around the corner to his right. Suddenly he broke into a run.
They found him with his nose pressed to the glass framework around “The Mormon Meteor”—“designed, built and driven by ‘Ab’ Jenkins on the Bonneville Salt Flats.” The 1930s racer, which had topped two hundred miles per hour in its day, sported a 750 hp Curtis Conqueror engine. Streamlined to the point of phallicism, the racer was fire-engine red and twenty-two feet long—except for the huge yellow Flash Gordon fin behind the tiny riveted one-man cockpit.
The two women left Starlitz alone a while, respecting his obsession.
Eventually Mr. Judy came to join him.
“Ab Jenkins,” Starlitz breathed aloud. “‘The only man who has raced an automobile 24 continuous hours without leaving the driver’s seat.’”
Mr. Judy laughed. “Big deal, Leggy. You think this stupid boy-toy’s impressive?” She waved at a set of glass-fronted exhibits. “That cheap-ass tourist art is ten times as weird. And the souvenir shop’s got a sign that says All shoplifters will be cheerfully beaten to a pulp!”
“I wonder if it’s got any fuel in it,” Starlitz said dreamily. “The Firestones still look good—you suppose the points are clean?”
Mr. Judy’s smile faded. “C’mon, Leggy. Snap out of it.”
He turned to her, his eyeballs gone dark as slate. “You don’t get it, do you? You can’t even see it when it’s right in front of you. This is it, Jude. The rest of the crap here is just so much cheesy bullshit, you could see stuff like that in Romania, but this”—he slapped the glass“—this is America, goddamn it!” He took a deep breath. “And I want it.”
“Well, you can’t have the ‘Mormon Meteor.’”
“The hell,” he said. “Look at this glass case. One good swift kick would break it. The cops would never expect anybody to boost this car. And if the engine would turn over, you could drive it right out the capitol door!” Starlitz ran both hands over his filthy hair and shivered. “Sunday night in Mormonville—there’s not a soul in the fuckin’ streets! And the Meteor does 200 miles an hour! By dawn we could have it safely buried under a dune in White Sands, come back whenever we need it…”
“But we don’t need it,” Mr. Judy said. “We’ll never need this!”
He folded his arms. “You did
n’t know you needed the van, either. And I brought you the van, didn’t I?”
“This thing isn’t like the van. The van is useful in the liberation struggle.”
Starlitz was scandalized. “Christ, you don’t know anything about machinery. The way you talk about it, you’d think technology was for what people need!” He took a deep breath. “Look, Jude, trust me on this. This fucker is voodoo. It’s a canopic jar, it’s the Pharaoh’s guts! It’s the Holy Tabernacle, okay? We steal this baby, and the whole goddamn karmic keystone falls out of this place…”
Judy frowned. “Knock it off with the New Age crap, Legs. From you, it sounds really stupid.”
They suddenly heard the echoing chang and whine of electric guitars, a thudding concussion of drums. Somewhere, someone in the Capitol was rocking out.
They hurried back upstairs. As they drew nearer they could hear the high-pitched wail of alien lyrics, cut with a panting electric clarinet and a whomping bassline.
Four young Japanese women with broad-brimmed felt hats and snarled dreadlocks were slouching against the wall of the Utah State Capitol rotunda, clustered around a monster Sony boom box. The women wore short stiff paisley skirts, tattered net stockings, a great deal of eye-makeup, and elaborate, near-psychedelic pearl-buttoned cowboy shirts. They were nodding, foot-tapping, chainsmoking and tapping ashes into a Nikon lens-cap.
Mr. Judy gave them the password. The Japanese women smiled brightly, without bothering to get up. One of them turned off their howling tape, and made introductions. Their names were Sachiho, Ako, Sayoko and Hukie. They were an all-girl heavy-metal rockband from Tokyo called “’90s Girl”—Nineties Gyaru.
Sachiho, the ’90s Girl among the foursome with the most tenacious grasp on English, tried to get the skinny across to Vanna and Judy. The latest DC from ’90s Girl had topped out at 200,000 units, which was major commercial action in Tokyo pop circles, but peanuts compared to the legendary American pop market. ’90s Girl, who nourished a blazing determination to become the o-goruden bando—great golden band—of Nipponese hard-rock, were determined to break the US through dogged club-touring. A college-circuit alternative radio network based in Georgia had reluctantly agreed to get them some American gigs.
The band members of ’90s Girl had already spent plenty of vacation-time slumming in Manhattan, skindiving in Guam, and skiing in Utah, so they figured they had the Yankee scene aced. Any serious commercial analysis of the American rock scene made it obvious that most of the wannabe acts in America were supporting themselves with narcotics trafficking. This was the real nature of the American rock’n’roll competitive advantage.
The Tokyo-based management of ’90s Girl had therefore made a careful market-study of American drug-consumption patterns and concluded that RU-486 was the hot and coming commodity. RU-486 was nonaddictive, didn’t show up on the user, and it was not yet controlled by Yankee mafia, Jamaican dope-posses, or heavily armed Colombians. The profit potential was bright, the consumers relatively non-violent, and the penalties for distribution still confused.
’90s Girl planned to sell the capsules through a network of metal-chick cult-fans in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina, with a final big blow-out in Brooklyn if they had any dope left when they finished their tour.
“This management of yours,” Mr. Judy said. “The people doing all this market analysis. They’re, not men, are they?”
“Oh no,” said Sachiho. “Never, never.”
“Great.” Mr. Judy handed over her backpack. ’90s Girl began stuffing dope into their camera cases.
Footsteps approached.
The assorted smugglers glanced around wildly for an escape route. There was none. The pro-life forces had deployed themselves with cunning skill. Enemies blocked each of the rotunda exits, in groups of six.
Their leader muscled his way to the fore. “Caught you red-handed!” he announced gleefully in the sullen silence. “You’ll hand that contraband over now, if you please.”
“Forget it,” Mr. Judy said.
“You’re not leaving this building with that wicked poison in your possession,” the leader assured her. “We won’t allow it.”
Mr. Judy glared at him. “What’re you gonna do, Mr. Nonviolence? Preach us to death?”
“That won’t be necessary,” he said grimly, veins protruding on the sides of his throat. “If you resist us violently, then we’ll mace you with pepper-spray. We’ll superglue your bodies to the floor of the Capitol, and leave you there soaked in bottled blood, with placards around your necks, fully describing your awful crimes.” Two of the nonviolent thugs began vigorously shaking aerosol cans.
“You Salvation?” Starlitz asked. He slipped his hand inside his photographer’s vest.
“Some people call me that,” the leader said. He was tall and clear-eyed and clean-shaven. He had a large nose and close-set eyes and wore a blue denim shirt and brown sans-a-belt slacks. He looked completely undistinguished. He looked like the kind of guy who might own a bowling alley. The only remarkable quality about Salvation was that he clearly meant every word he said.
“You might as well forget about that gun, sir,” he said. “You can’t massacre all of us, and we’re not afraid to die in the service of humanity. And in any case, we’re videotaping this entire encounter. If you murder us, you’ll surely pay a terrible price.” He clapped his hand on the shoulder of a companion with a videocam.
The guy with the minicam spoke up in an anxious whisper, which the odd acoustics of the rotunda carried perfectly. “Uh, Salvation…something’s gone wrong with the camera…”
“How’d you know we were here?” Mr. Judy demanded.
“We’re monitoring the Capitol’s security cameras,” Salvation said triumphantly, gesturing at an overhead surveillance unit. “You’re not the only people in the world who can hack computers, you know!” He took a deep breath. “You’re not the only people who can sing We Shall Overcome. You’re not the only ones who can raise consciousness, and hold sit-ins, and block streets!” He laughed harshly. “You thought you were the Revolution. You thought you were the New Age. Well, ladies, we are the change. We’re the Revolution now!”
Suddenly, and without warning, a great buzzing voice echoed down the hall behind him. “Up against the wall!” It was the cry of a police bullhorn.
A squad of heavily armed Secret Service agents burst headlong into the rotunda, in a flying wedge, Salvation’s little knot of pro-lifers scattered and fell like bowling pins.
At the sight of the charging federal agents, Vanna, Mr. Judy, and Starlitz each sat down immediately, almost reflexively, tucking their laced hands behind their heads. The four members of ’90s Girl sat up a little straighter, and watched bemused.
The feds surged through the rotunda like red-dogging linebackers. The pro-lifers blocking the other exits panicked and started to flee headlong, but were tackled and fell thrashing.
A redheaded woman in jeans and a blue-and-yellow Secret Service windbreaker danced into the rotunda, and lifted her bullhorn again. “The building’s surrounded by federal agents!” she bellowed electronically. “I advise you dumb bastards to surrender peacefully!”
Her yell tore through the echoing rotunda like God shouting through a tin drum. The pro-lifers, stunned, went limp and nonresisting. She lowered her bullhorn and smiled at the sight of them, then nudged a nearby agent. “Read ’em their Miranda rights, Ehrlichman.”
The fed, methodically bending over groups of his captured prey, began reading aloud from a laminated index card. The pro-lifers grunted in anguish as they were seized with cunning Secret Service judo-holds, then trussed like turkeys with whip-thin lengths of plastic handcuff.
The woman with the bullhorn approached the assorted smugglers, stopping by their Sony boom box. “Jane O’Houlihan, Utah Attorney General’s office,” she announced crisply, exhibiting a brass badge.
Mr. Judy looked up brightly. “How do you do, Ms. O’Houlihan? I think you’d better take i
t easy on these Japanese nationals. They’re tourists, and don’t have anything to do with this.”
“How fuckin’ stupid do you think I am?” O’Houlihan said. She sighed aloud. “You’re sure lucky these pro-life dorks are wanted on a Kansas warrant for aggravated vandalism. Otherwise you and me would all be goin’ downtown.”
“You don’t need to do that,” Vanna told her timidly, wide-eyed.
O’Houlihan glared at them. “I’d bust you clowns in a hot second, only it would complicate my prosecution to bring you jerks into the picture… Besides, these dipshits just hacked a State Police video installation. They screwed it up, too, the cameras have been malfin’ like crazy all morning… That’s a Section 1030 federal computer-intrusion offense! They’re gonna break rocks!”
“It’s certainly good to know that a sister is fully in charge of this situation,” Mr. Judy said, tentatively lifting her hands from the nape of her neck. “These right-wing vigilantes are a menace to all women’s civil rights.”
“Sister me no sisterhood,” O’Houlihan said, deftly prodding Mr. Judy with one Adidas-clad foot. “I didn’t see you worthless New Age libbies lifting one damn finger to help me when I was busting check-forgers in the county attorney’s office.”
“We don’t even live around here,” Vanna protested. “We’re from Ore—I mean, we’re from another state.”
“Yeah? Well, welcome to Utah, the Beehive State. Next time stay the fuck out of my jurisdiction.”
A Secret Service agent clomped over. His sleeveless Kevlar flak jacket now hung loose, its Velcro tabs dangling. He looked very tough indeed. He looked as if he could bite bricks in half. “Any problem here, Janie?”
O’Houlihan smiled at him winningly. “None at all, Bob. These are just small-time losers…Besides, there seems to be an international angle.” Sachiho, Ako, Hukie and Sayoko looked up impassively, their mascaraed eyes gone blank with sullen global-teenager Bohemianism.
“International, huh?” Bob muttered, gazing at the girl-group as if they’d just arrived via saucer from Venus. “That would let the Bureau in…” Bob adjusted his Ray-Bans. “Okay, Janie, if you say so, I guess they walk. But be sure and upload their dossiers to Washington.”
Ascendancies Page 38
