The Orange Curtain

by John Shannon

  After a while he simmered down and examined the neighborhood again. This is the way the rich live, he explained to the Martian. Though really it’s just the new rich, he corrected himself. The old rich from Orange County probably lived up in L.A. somewhere or back East or kept a mailing address at some old hacienda engulfed now by suburban sprawl—though, in fact, they’d moved on to spend much of the year on the French Riviera. These new rich types probably made their money running McDonald’ses or little electronics companies and they hadn’t grown up with boats, but they felt they ought to have them, so they bought one and kept it tied up at the dock and once every six months they got up the nerve to take it out into the bay.

  I don’t know how I’m going to deal with this woman, he went on. But I’m sure you can see that I can’t just leave the girl’s mother out here, not if she knows about me. I’ve got to do something about her, too.

  He imagined, as he did sometimes, that he was a wisp of vapor and he was drifting out the car window and then across the roadway. He drifted up the wide pebbled walk and then curled once around a little tearose bush and made himself thin to slide through the crack between the door and the glass panes beside the door—those are called side lights in architecture, he explained to the Martian. Too bad he couldn’t see so well as a wisp. It could tell him a lot, without risking a thing.

  But he wasn’t a wisp, so he worked out in his mind exactly what he would say when he got to the door. Then he ran through it again and again so he wouldn’t clam up at the last minute. When he was satisfied, he got out and quickly tucked the pistol into the back of his pants under his shirt, the way he saw in movies. He smelled salt air right away, and tar, and he heard a pennant flapping hard in the breeze and then a squawk of birds. He could see a thick shelf of really evil black clouds blowing in from the northwest under the gray high cloud. There would be hard rain soon. The darkness was sneaking up, wherever he looked, and it seemed the stone no longer protected him.

  A toadstone ring (the fossil palatal tooth of a species of Ray) was supposed to protect new-born children and their mothers from the power of the fairies.

  —Wiliam Jones, Finger-Ring Love (1877)

  He walked as quietly as he could up to the door as if, by making no sound, he could change his mind at any moment and turn back without leaving a trace on the world. The doorbell made a strange little five-note musical tune inside the house. He waited a few moments and then pushed it again.

  “Yeah, okay, I come.” He heard a woman’s voice, and he could see a shape moving through the rippled glass. The shape seemed very short. The door came open and a Vietnamese woman, no taller then he was, met his eyes with a directness that surprised him. He’d expected her to be timid. She was wearing a belted trenchcoat but it hung open, as if she’d just thrown it on, and underneath she seemed to be wearing a leotard.

  “Hi, what you want?”

  “I’m a friend of Jack Liffey’s,” he said.

  She cheered up immediately.

  “Good for you.” When he didn’t volunteer anything, she added, “I’m friend, too. You got something for me, huh?”

  He showed her her own business card. “See, he gave me this to come find you.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  She wasn’t saying the right things back to him, and it threw his scripted conversation into turmoil. Her brows darkened when he didn’t add anything. He could feel he was screwing things up, as usual, and he would get to a bad place soon if he didn’t come up with something. The rest of the plan just began to evaporate out of his mind, and he could feel the darkness edging up behind.

  “What you wanna say?”

  “Mr. Liffey, he wants you.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  She didn’t get it. “He wants you to come see him. He has something you need to see in person.”

  “This about Phuong?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Where he at?”

  He didn’t seem to follow, and then he realized she wanted him to tell her where to go. She didn’t realize he was asking her to come with him. Maybe he hadn’t said it right at all. He wasn’t sure. His whole perception had tunneled down to a narrow focus on this pretty Vietnamese Woman standing there impatiently in a trenchcoat. The periphery of his vision had gone fuzzy, and everything he did seemed to be running about ten seconds late.

  “He says I need to take you to see him,” he said.

  “I don’t think so. You tell me where I got to go.”

  “It’s hard to explain. I’ll drive you.”

  “If it gotta be that way, I follow. You come and wait while I get dressed.”

  She pulled the door open enough to invite him in and then walked away across a blue living room and down a hall. He closed the door and stood and looked around. He could take care of her right there in some way, he could feel the pistol riding so uncomfortably in his back that he wondered why everyone including this woman didn’t know it was there. But he didn’t feel like doing anything at all just then. He had reached a curious stasis. Darkness moaned an invitation to him, and he shut his mind to it.

  The blue of the room seemed oppressive, and he could see right through and out a wall of glass to a patio and the channel beyond. The coming storm was churning up the surface of the water in the channel, and a buoy leaned away from the wind. There was a little Toonerville toy boat tied up at the patio, leaning into the channel in the wind with several bright pennants and the fringe on its top whipping away.

  She came back in a businessy navy blue dress, carrying the trenchcoat.

  “What your name then?”

  “Billy.”

  “Hi, Billy. I’m Tien. But you know that, you got card.”

  She stuck out her hand and it startled him. He shook her hand and felt his own perspiring and clammy. She opened the door, ushering him out. “What you drive?”

  He pointed to his VW and she winced.

  “Beetle no good here. Air cool engine burn up in heat. You got to get you little Honda CRX. That sweet car. I know good place for trade in. You get in your car now and I come.”

  The door shut behind him and the sky rumbled a warning and he felt as if he hadn’t even got a word in edgewise with her. But things seemed to be working out okay, anyway. He started the car and before long the garage door came up and a black Porsche Targa squealed out backwards, like a vastly matured version of his car. She waved as the door was closing and he pulled away.

  The horrible TV rattled on and on, an old cowboy movie now with commercials for dish soap and department store white sales and anthologies of meaningful organ music, but he did his best to shut it out and give his full attention to consideration of Billy Gudger and how to coax the disturbed young man back to earth. He didn’t want to rile him, but he couldn’t just go with the flow of events or he’d end up dumped in the Tustin Hills. He assumed Billy was responsible for Phuong and the other bodies he’d been hearing about. And Billy had warned him himself: Don’t laugh at me. It was chilling to think about.

  Perhaps the young man had been driving Phuong home after the video shoot and made a clumsy pass at her or said something stiff and risible, as he seemed fated to do, only to have her laugh dismissively and send him around the bend. What had the woman in the freezer done to touch him off? Was it his mother? Even the word mother had upset him, and Jack Liffey decided he had to find some way to get the young man to talk about himself.

  Suddenly the TV flickered in the corner of his vision and a flare went off at the windows, and, just as he was trying to figure out if it was a nuclear strike, thunder slammed into the flimsy house like a huge fist. In his excitable state it just about gave him a stroke, and he had to tighten his diaphragm for a moment to try to stop his runaway heart. Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’, he thought, and then realized why he was thinking it, that was the song that had been playing on the TV as the lightning struck, and the tune was back full strength now after the short brownout, the sweet chestnut moaning away as black-and-w
hite cowboy boots strode down the dusty street. High Noon. Just about the only movie he’d ever seen with a hero who’d been scared to death from the first frame to the last and had done his duty anyway. He’d once liked it a lot, this movie full of irony, written by a Communist, but set in a town whose masses were cowardly and wouldn’t come to the aid of their sheriff, and starring a right winger who’d testified against Communists—after playing one ten years earlier in For Whom the Bell Tolls. And then Howard Hawks himself had later said he hated the movie because the sissy sheriff had gone around asking for help, which his favorite individualist icon, John Wayne, would never have done. All of which was pretty irrelevant, but Jack Liffey’s mind was jetting every which way after the lightning blast—to avoid the inescapable fact of his helplessness—and he seemed to have stumbled on a motherlode of irrelevant film lore that he’d stored away.

  Thunder rumbled far away, and he brought himself back to the smelly sofa in the cluttered bungalow on the edge of the Orange County hills, and to the handcuffs that chafed his wrists. His current predicament didn’t seem to have much to do with the rest of his life, neither the former-condo, now-office in Culver City, nor the pleasant house he shared with Marlena in Mar Vista, nor his sweet and thoughtful daughter who was, he hoped, home with her mother doing math homework, nor his lost job, nor anything else from his wasted and squandered past. According to Billy Gudger’s theories, his wretched present position had to be contained in some way in the fact of his existence. Some plan in his DNA so vast that if he had access to it all, he could deduce where each of his atoms was going to be ten years from now, his whole life spinning out of this painstaking internal blueprint. But he knew perfectly well that doctrine led to the most absurd of megalomanias, with even the butterflies in Sibera taking just the right tacks in their flight plan so as not to disturb Jack Liffey’s certain course to his ordained fate 10,000 miles away.

  It was all nonsense, of course. You never could know enough, even a god couldn’t, and every atom banged into other atoms and went reeling. So in the end, everything in the world was arbitrary, everything was gratuitous, the deranged bungalow, the handcuffs, whether or not he found a way to outtalk a near insane young man who had all the social skills of a water buffalo. His fate was an existential crapshoot. It was terrifying, even nauseating, but there it was.

  He finally decided that his best bet was to go back to the role of kindly but officious uncle, offering a guiding hand with just enough edge of criticism to give him room to maneuver. Then in a lull in the TV sound, over the steady beat of the rain, he heard the single whoop of a Porsche engine being shut down by somebody who’d been told about clearing the carburetor, and he had a terrible feeling that Billy Gudger had lured Tien Joubert into his nightmare world. He’d seen a Porsche in her garage.

  He thought he heard a scuffling on the walk in front and the door came open. Immediately Jack Liffey started bouncing and hammering his feet and made as much noise as he could through the duct tape. She had good instincts of self-preservation. She fled at once, crying for help, and Billy Gudger grabbed for his gun and slammed the door as he took off after her. He must have corralled her toward the back, because there was the sound of another struggle out on the service porch and she cried out in pain. Jack Liffey cursed the racket of the rain and the television because she was certainly doing her best to attract attention.

  “I not go nowhere with you!” he heard out of the kitchen. And she was so agitated that she flooded the house with Vietnamese for a few moments, and then French, as if hunting for the language that would work the trick.

  “Shut up shut up shut up!”

  “You the bad guy that hurt Phuong? You got to be ashame!”

  Then there was the sound of a blow and something falling and she whimpered. The TV was ominously rolling the tail credits of the film, and then Billy Gudger backed into the room, dragging Tien Joubert along the floor by the collar of the trenchcoat she wore. There was a cut on her cheek and forehead, but even dazed, she was trashing a little as he tugged her along. The young man dumped her in the middle of the floor beside the ottoman and strode across the room to press the barrel of his pistol into Jack Liffey’s temple.

  “Shut up or I’ll goof him right now! I mean it!”

  She looked over and subsided into a moan of defeat, as the rain flailed at the windows. Jack Liffey noticed that her purse had fallen onto the floor beside the ottoman and he filed the fact away for reference. A gaggle of lifeguards in red suits were running toward the camera as rock music pounded out of the TV.

  “Don’t disrespect me!” Billy Gudger shouted at no one in particular, rather like King Kong looking back at a building he had just punitively stomped.

  He checked the bleeding of her forehead and seemed to dismiss it. It didn’t look serious from where Jack Liffey sat either. Then he tied her hands behind her with the belt off the trenchcoat, picked her up easily and tossed her on the free end of the sofa. She wore a navy blue skirt that bunched awkwardly, and she looked over at Jack Liffey.

  “This guy in bad way, I think.”

  “Shut up!”

  It took a while to find the right key on his key loop and then he unlocked the cuff that bound Jack Liffey’s ankle to the metal frame of the sleeper-sofa. He yanked and fussed and Jack Liffey considered trying to give him a big kick but rejected it. The angle wasn’t right to get up any steam, and now he had to worry about the young man taking out his anger on Tien, too. In a moment he found his ankle manacled again, apparently attached to hers, and apparently the links on the cuffs passed around something because his ankle was held even tighter than before.

  Then Billy Gudger taped Tien’s mouth shut, looping the duct tape around the back of her head, and he used some more over the belt that bound her hands, just to be sure. He sat on the ottoman and sighed and looked at the two of them for some time, hands on his knees, as if considering what to do next. It was probably a good sign that they were still alive, and they weren’t out in the hills somewhere. He and Tien glanced at each other and the best he could do in greeting was to raise his eyebrows, whatever that might mean to her, and lean his shoulder against hers.

  When he glanced up, Billy Gudger was standing up going through Tien’s navy blue handbag. He took out a cell-phone and dropped it to the floor where he tromped on it again and again until the plastic plate that carried the dial buttons broke off and wires spilled out. Next he lifted out her keys, with a little cylinder of pepper spray attached. Too bad she hadn’t had it in her hand when she stepped in the door and needed it, he thought, but you never did. His own .45 automatic was home inside a hollowed out Oxford Companion to English Literature.

  Billy Gudger sprayed a little pepper into the air experimentally, and screwed up his nose at it. Pens and pencils, makeup and lipsticks, a Palm Pilot and a little box of Tic-tacs. He made a heap of it, upended the rest of the handbag’s contents into the heap, and then kicked it all aside, studying the mess like a miner watching for gold flakes to rise out of the sifting.

  Finally Billy Gudger picked up his treatise and hunted through it, flipping pages rapidly. Apparently he found what he wanted and nodded to himself. Then he took out a Swiss Army knife and locked open the main blade. Jack Liffey winced when it approached, but the boy carefully cut a slit in the tape between Jack Liffey’s lips. He forced his lips as far apart as he could during the sawing and just managed to avoid the blade. He sucked, breathing in through his mouth which he could now open to a half inch pucker.

  “I want you to listen to this part about the individual recapitulating the evolution of the race, and don’t give me any ad hominem crap about my mother.”

  Loving but severe uncle, Jack Liffey thought. “Look Billy, if I’m going to get this situation straightened out, you’ve got to stop shutting down when people ask about your family.” It didn’t help that the duct tape only let him open his lips a half inch and made him speak in a tiny voice as if he had just sucked on a lemon. He was careful not
to say “mother,” though. “Asking about your family means people care about you. I don’t just want to hear your philosophy. I want to know about your friends and your pets and how you felt about school and what games you liked and the places you’ve visited.”

  The young man rocked back a little, as if struck. “That’s all subjective crap.”

  “Of course it is. We’re all made up of subjective crap. Don’t you want to know my subjective crap? I want to know where you went on your last vacation. I want to know your favorite movies, and what schools you went to.”

  He stuck out his chin. “My favorite movie was Silence of the Lambs.”

  That gave Jack Liffey a little chill, rising from the small of his back. “I don’t believe you. You aren’t like that at all.”

  “He was smarter than everybody.”

  “Hannibal Lecter didn’t have a heart, and you do. This woman here is a very bright, strong, resourceful person. She has rescued herself from a bad situation in life more than once. You don’t want to make the world worse by hurting someone like her or me. Let’s find a way to save everybody here. So we can all be friends. It’s not too late.”

  Billy Gudger sniggered. “Yes, it is. You know it is.”

  Jack Liffey shook his head. “No, they’re going to blame this on sickness. Even if they’re wrong, that’s what they’ll say, you know that, so the worst that can happen is you’re going to end up in Vacaville. We can all visit there. You can read books. You can write. We can exchange critiques. I can look at your writing in comfort and then we can both read other writers and talk about them.” He rolled on desperately. “I think you’re missing some things in your philosophy, but I have to think it over in peace to figure it out. I don’t mean you’re wrong, but you’ve only got part of the truth, and you need to bounce your work off other people to refine it. A lot of people, not just me. Every philosopher has to do that. I can find people I respect to read what you’ve written and tell you what they think.”