by John Shannon
The young man’s brows were furrowed up. “What’s missing?” he said darkly.
Jack Liffey decided to take a flier, anything to keep Billy talking, put him off balance, get through to him. “You’ve read Hamlet, haven’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Hamlet delays and delays and delays, it’s famous, and all that delay is because of what’s inside him, just as you say. Something is working itself out in his character to make him hesitate and have second thoughts and wait too long before he acts.”
The rain roared and a lightning flash caused the TV image to shrink for an instant, then the thunder crashed over them like rage. Somewhere inside, Jack Liffey wondered if he shouldn’t have chosen The Tempest instead of Hamlet.
“Hamlet isn’t alone on stage, Billy. He’s delaying in relation to the people who come up against him, against the king who took his father’s throne, against Polonius, Laertes, his own mother, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern. And all that changes him, too. It’s the conflicts that make the story and make Hamlet what he is. I don’t think your oscillating substrata simply develop out of an internal logic. You’ve got to find a way to combine your idea with all this contact with the outside world.”
The young man stared bleakly at the treatise in his hands, as if it had betrayed him somehow.
“Just the way you’re coming up against me now, and it’s changing you. Can’t you feel it? You’re still you, but you’ve gained something new.”
He clutched the bound essay to his chest protectively. “It all makes sense just the way it is.”
“It doesn’t hurt your ideas, Billy, it makes them bigger and richer. When they’re perfected, they may be recognized as a real advance in philosophy. But I don’t think they’re ready yet.”
He looked up suspiciously. “You’re just buttering me up, trying to buy time.”
“Of course I am. I want time for all of us. I want to be part of perfecting your ideas. I promise we can work this out.”
Billy Gudger looked around, letting his eyes drift from object to object in the room, as if seeing them all in some new way, as if he might have to decide now to purchase or discard them. The object he decided on seemed to be the duct tape, and he tore off a strip and approached Jack Liffey.
“Billy, don’t. Don’t walk away from a chance to develop and perfect your ideas.”
“I have to sleep on it.”
He sealed up Jack Liffey’s mouth again and stalked away through a door that appeared to lead to a bedroom. The TV brayed about great deals on used cars, and Jack Liffey looked at Tien Joubert, whose eyes were wide with some emotion, probably fear. They rubbed shoulders and the rain stroked and caressed the house all over, roof, windows, doors, trying to get in, like something out there with wicked intent that would keep at it until it found a way.
EIGHTEEN
A Duck’s Quack Does Not Echo
She leaned slowly toward him like an antique tower deciding at last to topple and rested her head against his shoulder and he could feel her tremble, just a faint tremor like the passage of a subway train far under the street. It surprised him, she was usually so strong and self-contained. He tried to speak and was reminded of the terrible frustration of the gag, as the TV bellowed and blustered about a wet-dry vacuum that could suck a quart of beer right out of the rug. He glanced at the closed door to the bedroom, but it gave out no information. Now and again, as Tien rubbed her head rhythmically against his shoulder, there was a flash of white light reflecting back off the far wall and several seconds later, a faraway peal of thunder. Seven seconds was a mile, he remembered, the difference between the speeds of light and sound. He begged for a nice close lightning strike, no delay at all, that would take out a transformer and a few blocks of the power grid and shut off the egregious television. If it did, he tried to think of a way he could make some noise, but there didn’t seem to be any way short of lifting the whole sofa off the floor by main force and hurling it through the front door. A newsbreak came on breathlessly, a flustered woman in a plastic raincoat talking about a mudslide somewhere in Silverlake that was taking out a half dozen hillside homes.
He turned his head to look into Tien’s eyes, all glittery and wet with fright. The sight filled him with so much tenderness that he tried to tell her he loved her and he leaned over to rub his forehead against her. He felt her pressing the crown of her head back against him and making small mewling sounds and was astonished at himself when he started to get aroused. She moaned deeper and he let the side of his head slide down until he was rubbing his ear slowly across her breast. The jacket of her suit had come open and at first he just grazed the silk blouse and then he pressed harder so he could feel her breast in a very thin brassiere yielding under his temple, back and forth. It was surprisingly erotic when it was all you could do. He could sense if not quite feel her nipple stiffening against his cheek. He supposed it was like the fleeting glimpse of an ankle to the Victorians, just sufficient when it was all you had, and he felt her pressing back against him, almost crying with shudders of emotion. There were deep animal sounds from the back of her throat and only for an instant did he notice the jangly opening of an episode of Starsky and Hutch.
He tipped slowly and let his shoulders down until his head lay in her lap. It was impossibly uncomfortable the way his leg was pinioned, but he ignored the pain and let her thighs thrust up against him as he rubbed and rubbed with his chin, welcoming this strange conjunction of eros and fear. After a long while, he felt her tremble and then shudder and at last she gave a muffled cry. When he levered himself back up, he saw tears streaming down her cheeks, and somehow, as she rested her head against his shoulder again, releasing more terror with each sob, it was actually a relief to watch the everyday banality of a plumber swinging out of his truck with a friendly smile to promise rapid service, any day, any time.
Rain was pit-a-patting noisily in a downspout outside as her small head pressed against his chest and then slid down to rest her taped cheek against him. After a moment they could both feel him swelling, and his hips dug slowly against her. He wondered, if they should live through all this, if he would ever forget the incredible progression of foodstuffs that teased him then as she rubbed against his penis, over and over, the split bagel with cream cheese dewy with moisture, the egg-and-steak-and-hash browns breakfast at a chain restaurant, the steaming macaroni and cheese out of a packet, and the broken open chocolate candy bar he had never even heard of, the Groodle-bits, holding huge dusty almonds in its nougat. Seeing so much food reminded him of other appetites and how hungry he was, but not enough to distract him from the steady coercion of her cheek.
I’ll never ever abandon you, he tried to say as emotion swept up through him and something tore open and light burst out of the place where he had torn open. And then they leaned against each other and she was humming a lullaby as the rain swelled and hammered and he did his best to follow along, humming, too, and death was so close and so tragic and so irrevocable that he felt something inside him changing imperceptibly, inch by inch, until he gave up all need to control the way things developed around him and only wanted to live to witness more and more.
In his mother’s huge oversoft bed, he slept fitfully, but without his usual dreams, all those repeating motifs that he knew so well—the tidal flood rising slowly across some familiar town, the misplaced implement that he needed desperately, the circle of faces glaring at some mistake he couldn’t have anticipated. Instead of these, he was being surrounded, approached by a simple cloud of pure darkness. His usual nightmares had always filled him with dread, but their extinction now seemed like an even more dire punishment. The darkness billowed closer, a palpable thing, squid ink on the air. And there was something inside that velvety murk, stirring, just waiting to spring at him.
He must have slept, because he woke with a jolt. It was still night and Billy Gudger stood in front of him, shaking his head darkly.
“It makes me too nervous,” he explained. He
held the pistol a-dangle from his hand, half forgotten.
Jack Liffey wasn’t quite sure what the young man meant, but he had a bad feeling.
“It’s too dangerous here.”
He noticed that his foot was free of the sofa, though it was still cuffed to Tien, and he was barefoot now. He was astonished that Billy Gudger had got his shoes and socks off without waking him.
“Get her up now.” He backed a few feet away while Jack Liffey nudged Tien Joubert awake. Her eyes came open with a start, and there was no recognition there for a moment, just a wild animal at bay, and then he could sense her awareness slowly filling up behind the blank black eyes like a warm liquid, and she made soft noises that could have meant anything.
“Help each other stand up.”
Someone on the TV was giving advice on how to screw in a wall bracket to hold a curtain valance. The rain seemed to have stopped, because all he could hear from outside was the slow metallic drip in the downspout. By leaning forward they both managed to stand up, and Jack Liffey got a glance at an old Rainier Beer clock that said it was 3:45. He noticed that she was barefoot, too. For some reason he wasn’t quite as frightened as he had been, though he had no illusions about what was happening. Jack Liffey was quite focused: their lives were in his hands now and he had to stay absolutely alert for the chance. There might never be an opening, but if there was, it would come and go quickly, and he had to take it without hesitation.
The same thought must have gone through Billy Gudger’s mind for he kept his distance, and he’d taken to clutching the pistol against his chest, like a precious toy that might be snatched away by a bully.
“This way.”
He took them through the kitchen, past the baleful freezer chest, and out onto the stoop. The wood was splintery and cold underfoot. The VW had been moved to the driveway, parked at the path that led from the door, and Jack Liffey could hear wind swishing in some huge dangly eucalyptus trees, an old farm windbreak at the side of the lot. The sky was dark and lumpy from horizon to horizon and there was enough moisture in the air for him to feel scattered pricklings, even drops. There was more rain coming. He was alert moment to moment, but there was no opportunity to do anything. Billy Gudger lowered the rear seat and hooked it flat and then forced them to get in and lie down on their faces in an unnatural tangle of limbs.
He heard the door slam and cranked his neck around to see the back of Billy’s head, but they were cramped by the car’s geometry and Tien was between him and the front seat so he could find nothing whatever that he could do with his right leg still fixed to her left and their arms manacled behind their backs. There was a screech like a finger on a blackboard, and another, and he craned up to see that the passenger-side wiper was missing and the metal arm was carving an arc into the windshield glass.
Jack Liffey held his head up as long as he could, watching as the car came out of the drive and turned left, then he let it droop and rest. Tien Joubert was trying to offer him some short message over and over near his ear, four or five words, but he couldn’t make it out no matter how he tried to fit logical words to it. Dum-ditty-dum, ditty-ditty-dum, dum-dum. At the same time there was the screech-screech of the wiper scoring the glass, and then he could hear the rain picking up again on the roof. The young man drove badly, clutching and jamming the shift lever at the wrong shift points and sending the car into little lunges and jolts as it did its best to adjust to his shifts.
Dum-ditty-dum, ditty-ditty-dum, dum-dum.
Billy Gudger turned on the radio, an all-news station offering a cute story about an unauthorized delivery of 45 pizzas to the Orange County central jail, and Tien Joubert gave up on her message. Soon the radio snapped off again. The car rocked to the side in what was probably a gust of wind.
“Local news is so bad,” Billy Gudger offered over his shoulder, as if trying hard to entertain a date. “They should be ashamed.”
He certainly seemed to have compartmented off what he was doing. Jack Liffey wished he could talk to him to try working him around, but there was nothing much he could do with grunts and moans. He scraped his mouth again and again against the rough carpet under him but the tape wouldn’t budge. When he raised his head again, he thought they were heading along Chapman toward the hills and that made him a little sick to his stomach. The very hills where all the bodies had been found, including Phuong’s. He had seen no traffic at all on the shiny streets, and reminded himself it was after 4 A.M. now. A corner with two well-lighted but deserted gas stations and then a few dark businesses petering out to the beginning of the foothills and soon the only light was their own headlights, even that hardly showing up on the wet streets that were reflecting almost all of the light forward. The wiper still screeched on and on in its insane rhythm.
“Did you know that a duck’s quack doesn’t echo?” Billy Gudger informed them. “No one knows why. It’s strange.”
Yes, it was strange, Jack Liffey thought, but he had no free mental capacity for thinking about a duck’s quack. In a few minutes, he craned his neck up again and saw a lighted compound in the distance behind a chain link fence with a lot of earth movers and graders. They were passing over the torn up landscape where the new toll road was coming through, and he realized that they were following exactly the route he had taken to talk to Philip Marlowe. He supposed there was something ironic in that, but thinking about irony wasn’t very fruitful.
The off-side tires hit gravel and Billy Gudger yanked on the wheel to correct. “Oops,” he announced after the car had settled back onto the pavement. “I’m not a very great driver, I guess.”
The engine gave a little hitch now and then, but that had been a characteristic of the carburetion on his own old VW, too, and a breakdown out here was too much to hope for. Tien Joubert rested against his arm passively, seemingly given up to her fate. In a few minutes there was a real jolt and then the car carried on hammering on its springs and they’d obviously come off onto a dirt road. When Jack Liffey looked he could see nothing at all to the side of the car, so he craned his neck to the front and saw headlights picking out a curving fire trail. The hillsides off the trail were a little less dark than the sky and, for just an instant, he saw the witchy gnarled shape of a live oak.
“I’m sure glad they graded this road recently.”
For quite some time, Jack Liffey could feel the car climbing and descending and winding along the rough road in noisy second gear, and he didn’t let himself think about death. He knew, with their high clearance and so much weight over the drive wheels, VWs were pretty good at bad roads, and he couldn’t count on getting bogged down. All he could do was stay alert to every fact he could gather in, approximately where he was, the sounds, the time—at least 4:15 now—the weather, and the psychological tenor of Billy Gudger. He kept himself hanging on the knife-edge, lit by the searchlight of his intense concentration, waiting for the most minute fault line in their fate.
“Hey, this looks pretty good.”
The car came to a stop with a little gravelly skid, and Billy got out and yanked the seat forward. He backed away, holding the gun on the two of them, the whole strange tableau visible in the dome light.
“Come on out. It’s only drizzling.”
Jack Liffey wondered what on earth they were supposed to think this was all about—a little excursion to study plant life in the hills? But Billy Gudger probably wasn’t thinking rationally just then, and it may have taken his full attention to cordon off whatever was going on in his consciousness. Jack Liffey remembered that passive tense—“something had happened” to Billy Gudger’s mother. Something was almost certainly about to happen to them, too.
He delayed as long as he could, readjusting his leg to make it difficult for Tien to unfold herself, considering what he could do out there in the cold, damp, dangerous world. The headlights were still on, though the engine had stopped, and a gusty breeze was tearing past the car, driving shimmery curtains of drizzle before it. They were parked on a turnout off t
he dirt road, scarred by many tires and broken up by shallow pools of rainwater. It stopped abruptly at a low line-up of weed that seemed to indicate a dropoff into a canyon. It was hard to orient in the darkness.
Then they were both standing beside the car, his feet hurting on the sharp chilly ground, and Billy Gudger, who stood near the edge of the canyon, was watching them like a hawk 20 feet away. If there was going to be a crease in possibility, Jack Liffey knew with an abrupt chill of dread unlike anything he had ever known before, it had to be right about now, and he didn’t see one. Lightning flashed and gave him an instantaneous vision of the surroundings. There was indeed a canyon, and a hillside on the far side of the canyon maybe a hundred yards away, but it was impossible to know how deep the canyon was, or how steep the dropoff was past the weeds, but the rolling hills weren’t rocky and the far side didn’t seem all that steep.
“I want you to see something,” Billy Gudger said and beckoned.
Jack Liffey guided their steps away from the car, closer to the young man than Tien seemed to want, but not close enough to alarm him. He kept between them, and trended slightly toward the young man but turned his eyes to the ground as if all he was interested in was keeping his footing and avoiding sharp stones. A little turn, a misstep, as if avoiding a sharp rock. If only he could yell to her, he thought, but this inability to communicate was just another handicap they were forced to carry.
Surprise was the only thing he had. And if he didn’t get a sliver of opportunity, he would have to make one. At his closest approach to the young man, Jack Liffey hesitated, timing himself, waiting until both he and Tien had their weight just coming off the feet that were bound together, then he let all his fear and rage go and hurled himself all at once at Billy Gudger to butt him sprawling back. Then he turned and threw his body at Tien Joubert so together they fell into the weeds at the edge of the little plateau and he wrenched around and kicked out so they went over the raw edge. He tried to cry out at the freefall into the dark, but he couldn’t, and then they hit the slope and his shoulder and arm were scraped by a giant cheese grater. A gunshot flashed above them and another, echoing and rumbling in the hills like more thunder. They came to rest where the slope leveled off and she was up again even faster than he was and they highstepped further downhill the best they could in utter darkness with their feet lashed together. Their salvation would be if Billy Gudger lacked a flashlight. He’d never get the headlights pointed downhill.