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Chevrolette managed to mollify even Lindsay by borrowing his "skimmer" and holding it coyly in front of their faces, as if to conceal a furtive kiss, while the frolicsome Darby Suckling, without whose spirited "clowning" no group snapshot would have been complete, threatened the pair with a baseball bat and a comical expression meant to convey his ingenuous notion of jealous rage.

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"Chevrolette managed to mollify even Lindsay by borrowing his "skimmer" and holding it coyly in front of their faces, as if to conceal a furtive kiss"
"Well, I guess if an attractive woman is going to flirt with me, I can forget about this man selling his daughter into an almost certainly loveless future marriage with a boy I think of as a despicable and lazy human being" is something Lindsay probably thought being that it's the same thought any teenaged virgin boy would have had. An attractive woman suddenly flirting with you can make you forget even the most immediate and over-the-top human rights violations! "I can't believe those police are beating those protest . . . did Sherry just playfully touch my leg and rub her boob on my arm?!"

"the frolicsome Darby Suckling, without whose spirited "clowning" no group snapshot would have been complete"
Wait until the joy and wonder of life has been sucked completely out of Darby Suckling and we'll see how great group photographs become! We all know, especially with somebody like Lindsay hanging about sucking the joy out of everything like marrow from a bone, that Lindsay's frolicsome attitude isn't going to hold up too long into his teen years. Group photos will quickly go from everybody laughing at Darby "clowning" around to everybody looking awkward and slightly scared of the scowling teenager with the dark eyeliner, ripped jacket, fingerless leather gloves, and the uncombed jet-black dyed hair. You might be thinking, "Hey, Grunion Guy, don't you think Chick Counterfly would be a more obvious peer who will cause this turn in Darby's personality?" and I say, "Did you not grow up around adults, you traitor?!" Your peers and friends definitely have say in the things you like or the fashion you wear but they're never the ones who destroy your sense of wonder and joy for living! That's on the fucking adults in the room!

"threatened the pair with a baseball bat"
I guess Darby carries a baseball bat around with him like Harley Quinn?

Not pictured (or, you know, described) Randolph looking stupefied, Chick eyeballing Dahlia, and Miles Blundell falling on his face.

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 The boys, fascinated as always with modern sciences such as the photographic, were of course happy to comply.

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Me complying in '77 or '78.

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 "—I could go age fifteen, I guess," Merle went on, twinkling directly at Lindsay Noseworth strangling with indignation, "but you'd have to pay in gold, and come fetch her on your own ticket. . . . But say now would you mind if I got a snap of you all in front of this Trouvé-screw unit over here?"

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Oh boy! Don't I have egg all over my face! I lambasted Lindsay Noseworth for not understanding Merle's joke about getting his daughter smashed on corn liquor and here I've been bamboozled into thinking Merle was serious about selling his daughter into sex slavery! Of course he's just being crude and crass and inappropriate for the chuckles! And also to make Lindsay's head explode, something Chick Counterfly would readily assist in. Boy do I feel like an ass! Mostly because Pynchon turned me into Lindsay Noseworth! My, my, that Pynchon is a clever guy!
    But still . . . Pynchon presents the idea here because it's a thing which part of society was okay with and part of society was fighting against to make the world better for as many people as possible. Lindsay, being a lover of rules, at least seems to be a lover of rules for the betterment of society, even if he sometimes interprets "the betterment of society" in fairly shallow ways (like being against profanity). The only reason Lindsay can bristle and get angry at these comments is if this kind of attitude is fairly common among the masses. If people didn't treat their young daughters like chattel, Lindsay would quite obviously understand this as a joke. The "joke" here is less "ha ha, I'm treating my five year old girl in a wholly inappropriate and disgusting way" and more "ha ha look at that uptight jackass squirm while we say despicable things about my daughter!" Maybe some people can't appreciate the difference between those two intents. But I can!

"Trouvé-screw"
"Trouvé" is French for "found." So I don't know what this unit is supposed to look like. I guess like one of those drill units. It probably just looked like Leonardo's original design.

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 "Seems a little long to wait, don't it?" leered Chick Counterfly.

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Great! Now I have to defend a character I was really liking when he acts like a disgusting pervert! Thanks a lot, Pynchon! I suppose it's no different than in Gravity's Rainbow when you've (probably) been cheering Slothrop on in his travails and then suddenly he begins fucking Bianca. When Slothrop first sees her, she's costumed up to seem like a girl of 11 or 12 and Slothrop believes that's her age when he fucks her. So even realizing Bianca is about 17 based on other factors in the plot's timeline, Slothrop still believes she's an absolute child (as opposed to a mere child which isn't any greater defense!).

But here's the thing: I don't believe Pynchon wants a reader to defend these kinds of actions. I think Pynchon just wants to say something like, "Look. The 1940s were a fucked up time. Have you seen the way people wrote about young starlets?! It's fucking disgusting! And I'm writing Gravity's Rainbow in the late 60s/early 70s which really hasn't gotten much better about the fetishizing of child and teenaged girls. Now look at it. Feel whatever you're going to feel but there it is. It's an equivalent scene to Brigadier Pudding eating shit or Pointsman fantasizing about abusing women. What do you want? All cherry blossoms and prancing kittens?"

Also that was me defending Pynchon and not what Pynchon probably actually wanted to say. Perhaps Pynchon is a gross pervert! How am I supposed to know?! But I doubt it. Just like I doubt Vladimir Nabokov was a gross pervert for writing Lolita. But he could have been, I suppose! But it's not what I'm saying, Mr. Libel Laws!

Now in Against the Day, he's taking a moment again to portray the power dynamics in old fashioned gender roles (while also, because this book was published in 2006, commenting on the way those power dynamics have shifted (if only barely, at times!) in the modern era). Here we see that a father treats his daughter not only like property but like property whose sole purpose is to provide another man with some kind of sexual pleasure. And we have a male's response that sixteen is an awful long time to wait for this cutie. It's fucking disgusting.

Unless Chick was just commenting on how long waiting for a delivery by rail takes! Then, um, never mind!

Man, I really sound like Lindsay now, don't I?! Refusing to simply laugh at the ribald humor!