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 pro............