Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales (5 page)

Win Woodhead was politically ambitious, but he rightly reckoned his disdainfulness made him unelectable, so he decided to get Van appointed to the National Safety Council. It appealed to Van’s idealism, and was a natural promotion from his statistical tasks at the Acquittable. Win presented Van to President Miles Phaeton Torque, who recognized Van’s niceness as a flavor missing from the spice rack of his staff. Van got the job, and quickly made headlines when he refused to attend the President’s second inaugural gala on the grounds that the energy required for the First Lady’s float was excessive. The subsequent blackout of the East Coast confirmed his concern, and the tabloids were soon filled with pictures of Van personally changing citizens’ fuses or putting poisons out of reach of children.

In Hollywood, Carlotta’s distracted search for her stepsister impaired her performance in her second film,
Centrifugal Force
, which by the laws of criticism was bound to disappoint anyway. She did learn that Julienne had worked for a time as a clothes-check girl in a wild nightspot, and one day recognized her as the poster girl for an X-rated movie called
Will Wanda Never Cease?
Tracking her from these clues, she found out that Julienne had renamed herself Comet and joined a sex cult living in a bankrupt vineyard in the Sonoma Valley. This was a time when
cults were in blossom. Carlotta borrowed Nestor’s luxuriously refitted pickup truck and drove north.

Once on the vineyard property, Carlotta was captured by the dimwitted gardener, whom Carlotta recognized to her fright as Shep Woodhead, drug-addled, sunburned, and brainwashed to boot. He had dropped out of sight the previous year, and his family had felt looking for him might be too intrusive. He had come to California, since the picnic table called America is on a slant, and everything loose rolls there. His job was to pick up the empty liquor bottles, used syringes, and soiled lingerie that littered the grounds, and he was the only man in the cult besides its leader, the polygamous Pan the Man. Carlotta was further thrown when she was brought by torchlight before the commanding figure of Pan the Man, and he was the runaway Cliff Burns. After a stint as a biker and stuntman, he had discovered his charisma’s uses, and had set up his own community, which people pointed out later showed he was presidential material. Julienne was indeed there. She, too, loved Cliff, but was forgotten among dozens of his followers.

As always, Carlotta was thrilled by Cliff, but she knew there could be no trustworthy romantic alliance with him. Still, she was dizzied when he took her hand and walked her through the lush but untended arbors. The moonlight made his totalitarian idyll seem more benign, and she lost her reasoning in the leafy maze of the dark vineyard. Somehow she succumbed to his immediacy a second time, again under stars scattered like loose change on God’s night table. Instead of fireworks, this time Cliff spiced his excitement
by making love to her on the highway just beyond the gate. Luckily, no traffic passed while they were briefly forgetting their safety rules.

Afterwards, Carlotta’s feelings were mixed, so mixed that they were about to spill. In the American tradition, there was a competing cult at the next bankrupt vineyard down the road, a group called the Dionysians, an order of deranged pockmarked men who were supposed to be ecstatic from alcohol but still seemed to brood over neighbor Cliff’s success with women. As it happened, man was landing on the moon for the first time that night, and the Dionysians had hallucinated the need to appease the moon with a female sacrifice. Two of its members, the two most able to walk, saw Carlotta in the road and seized her. They didn’t see Cliff, though. He carried a gun in the bathrobe he wore, and shot both men dead before they could drag Carlotta more than a few yards. She was unharmed, but her left cheek had been slashed with a knife. Even though man landed on the moon that night, the attack was still a major news story.

Cliff was hailed as the rugged landowner who had saved a movie star’s life. Since his cult was all women, it was depicted by the press as a nest of pacific earth children, whereas the Dionysians weren’t just drunk and deranged, they were pockmarked. It was roundly concluded that no deliberation would be necessary to declare Cliff not guilty of manslaughter. Shep’s parents, who had finally tried but grown tired of looking for him, reclaimed him promptly, and enrolled him at Lilly Willow, a patrician old rehabilitation center.
The public thrilled to Carlotta’s escape from death, and warmed to the fact that she had found her lost sister at last. Julienne, upstaged at her own rediscovery, despondently retreated to Vertigo Park to dispose of her mother’s and imaginary father’s belongings. Cliff was sought by numerous clubs, employers, and advertisers who wanted to borrow his presence to defend the right to bear arms or to endorse a spark plug. It all sounded too much like school, though, and he did nothing, instead taking off in Nestor’s fancy truck for days at a time, returning only to descend on Carlotta some dusk, a craggy Cupid surprising Psyche.

Carlotta’s publicized suffering made her exempt from ever receiving bad reviews again. Her scar gave her superficial depth, and overlooking it gave her public a smug sense of broad-mindedness. Her next film,
Blood Pressure
, again written for her by Nestor, presented her as a helpless call girl who refuses to entrap a liberal politician for the greedy colleagues who fear him. The apparent corruption of President Torque’s administration made the government a convenient villain for even the lightest entertainments. Nestor preserved her image by making this the call girl’s first job, and people began to refer to her as Our Charlotte.

CHAPTER EIGHT
 

Two more Walker sons died in Vietnam, but these deaths were surprising, because the war there had been over for several years. Van’s investigation showed that the costly Ace of Spades helicopters in which both had crashed were carelessly manufactured by Woodhead Paper and Aircraft, the source of Shep and Win’s trust fund. A nervous stockholder, President Torque promoted Van to National Safety Adviser and called for full disclosure. Win continued to manage Van, indifferent to any potential distress the investigation might cause his family. Soon people were jokingly threatening to have each other investigated by Van Walker, and Win also convinced him to write a very thin book called
Why Not Answers?
which commendably, if vaguely and briefly, called for a return to idealism. It was a bestseller, and the National Council of Mothers declared Van their official choice for son-in-law.

Carlotta, meanwhile, was increasingly unnerved by Cliff’s irregular midnight appearances at her house, and debated whether or not to demand his phone number and address. Although he resisted all employment, Cliff did agree to appear in a stage show produced by Nestor. He said he felt guilty about stealing Nestor’s truck. It was an improvised monolog, in which Cliff sat and drank a fifth of bourbon, urinated real urine, and fired a real gun at impulsive
intervals. No rehearsal was needed, and after leading a cult, Cliff had acquired a taste for commandeering a crowd. The production, called
Manolog
, was a sensation in a small Los Angeles theater. Electrified by a drunken handsome man shooting out lights over their heads, people saw him as a free-living hero, a maverick unfettered by speechifying and special interests. The fact that he never injured anyone intentionally made him seem friendly, and his arbitrary pronouncements suggested a mystic cowboy. Cliff frequently missed performances, which was seen as integrity, and the defiant slap titillated even the stood-up audience. As time went by, however, Cliff became more dependable, and even seemed to look forward to showtime. This confused Carlotta. She wanted to see it as a sign of his socialization, but queasily guessed he was becoming a demagogue. Worse, he was still unpredictable in his visits to her, although he showed up at the theater right on schedule. She phoned Julienne occasionally, hoping to strengthen their bond by sharing her worries, but Julienne tended to insist that a nervous breakdown was what Carlotta needed. Finally, Carlotta gave Cliff an ultimatum—to give her his phone number, and to phone before arriving. He looked at her with cold disappointment, said he thought she knew better than to corral him, and walked out. When he failed to make the next hundred performances of
Manolog
, his audiences concluded that he had disappeared again. They respected his vanishing, though, as if it were duty and not dereliction.

CHAPTER NINE