The Orange Curtain (12 page)

“Which are?”

“I can never remember. Dick probably can.”

His eyes swung back to Dick Bormann, who put the filing box back gingerly, as if he couldn’t stand to have it near him a minute longer. “Well, first you’ve got to understand that planes can’t take off to the west because that would put them in direct conflict with the landing approach to the existing airport, so all the plans are to have them take off only toward the east. Treat loves to point out that you can make a military pilot do anything, take off blindfolded or standing on his head in the cockpit, but civil pilots just will not take risks, it’s a moral obligation. And he says the east takeoff at El Toro violates three basic safety rules of aviation. One, the runway is
up
hill. Pretty steep, I think, as those things go. Two, it’s
with
the prevailing wind instead of into it. Three, it’s more or less right into a mountain range. An F/A-18C with full afterburner can pull a hard bank to avoid the mountain, that’s one thing, but imagine a 747 scraping its underbelly on the live oaks every time it takes off.”

“You sound like an opponent.”

The two of them looked at each other and something private was unsaid. “Everybody’s got a point. John Wayne Airport has only 500 acres and one runway. It’ll be up to its capacity in five years. I’m glad it’s not going to be my decision.”

“What is that smell?” he asked finally, when he was satisfied that it wasn’t coming from one of them.

The young woman grinned. “I’ll show you.”

In a moment she came back in with a large wire cage that held two hamsters, like fat golden mice. “We’re not supposed to have them here, but you won’t snitch on us, will you?”

“Heaven forbid.”

She set the cage down on the unused desk, where it seemed to belong.

“That one’s Basil. And this is Stuart.” She giggled.

“Stuart Ross is the league’s director,” Dick Bormann explained.

“If I had an animal named for my last boss, it would have to be a snake,” Jack Liffey said. “I guess there has to be one hamster wheel at the heart of every big enterprise,”

He tried to get more information out of them about Phuong, but neither of them seemed to know much about her at all, except that she was Vietnamese and very polite and very smart. It was like wearing a big mustache to rob a bank. Nobody ever noticed anything but the mustache.

He was waiting for the elevator in the hall when Debbie Miller slipped out to talk to him.

“Dick doesn’t like to make trouble for people, but you’d better see this.”

She handed him a feature article cut out of a newspaper. There was an inch of yellowed tape on the top as if it had been stuck up on a wall. A photo of a stocky man in a wheelchair was shaking his fist at the sky.

M.V. Residents

Found Anti-Airport

Citizen Panel

“I think it’s the guy who calls. He’s probably harmless.”

“Thanks. I’ll be discreet.”

He settled onto a big ugly concrete stanchion by the curb, the kind of thing government buildings had started putting out to keep suicide trucks loaded with fertilizer and diesel oil from crashing into lobbies. There was probably some branch fed office in the building. The article told of the founding of an emergency committee of homeowners from south county cities like Lake Forest, Mission Viejo, El Toro, and Irvine to stop the airport. They were quoting the wheelchair-bound Marvin B. Resnick because he was quotable and colorful, not necessarily because he had any official position in the group.

“If they won’t listen to our grievances, we ought to get us some SAMS and blast the first airliner to lift off that runway right out of the sky!”

Nice, Marvin, he thought. That kind of talk ought to get you a long way in an upscale suburban neighborhood organization.

The moment she picked him up he’d noticed she was even more bubbly than he remembered, and as she parked next to his forlorn old Concord at the Little Saigon mall, she plucked at his sleeve.

“Wait. Before you go ’way, tell me one thing ’bout me you like.”

“Is this a trick?”

She shook her head, but something was cooking, he could tell.

“I like almost everything about you. The only thing I don’t like is a square inch just below the elbow. I don’t like that.”

She frowned and looked at her elbow, then decided he was kidding. “You joking. Say ‘everything’ is same as say nothing. You got to say one thing, two thing.”

“Okay, I like your energy…your candor, and your happiness. That’s three things. And you’re very beautiful.”

She beamed. “You got right answer.” And she handed him a small white cardboard box like an award. He had a vision of her going down on one knee and springing a diamond engagement ring on him. He hesitated, but took the box and opened it to find an expensive-looking gold tie clasp with a pale jade stone. He hadn’t worn a tie since the layoffs, and he hadn’t worn a tieclasp on a tie since junior dances in high school. He didn’t know they still made them.

“It’s beautiful, Tien. Very. Is it jade?” He met her eyes and they were gorgeous, the dark surrounded by pure white. The affection in them was quite flattering and he felt her presence buoying him up.

“Number one. Real Asia jade, not the dark jadeite you get lots here.”

“I shouldn’t accept this, but I know it would be insulting not to. Please don’t get me anything else, though.”

“‘Anything else’ mean I see you again?”

He smiled. She was quick. “I have to go home now. I’ll come back tomorrow to look for Phuong some more. Could we meet for lunch?”

“You bet. You call.”

After she’d baroomed off happily in the Mercedes, he found the note on his windshield, the scrawled message aimed inward once again:
Go home, fuck you, dead dead dead
. Spelled right this time, but the punctuation needed work.

He carried the big plastic bag into his room and set it on a corner of the red desk and then pushed aside all the French books to make a clear area. First he took out the blister-wrap card with the track on it. He tore open the plastic bubble and took out one length of railway track, with its little brown ties attached, and threw the rest away. Then he broke into the big orange box labeled Rivarossi. The chatty clerk had kept trying to tell him about the Italian company, reputedly Mafia owned, that it was not nearly as good as the German and Swiss ones, but Billy Gudger just wanted to get his find out of Hobby City and get it home.

He set the vintage railroad boxcar on the track and sat back to study it. It was an HO scale model, about the size of a desk stapler and mostly yellow.
P.T. Barnum Circus
, it said across the top, and the side had a mustachioed face surrounded by a lot of elaborate tracery, plus animals and circus scenes. The clerk was right. The model boxcar wasn’t all that well built and the decoration was just printed onto a card that was glued to the plastic, but it didn’t matter at all. It would do fine.

He would just have to find a way to get his mother to stumble on it so he could study her reactions.

A ring which seemed set with a dull, darke stone a little swelling out, like what we call (tho’ untruly) a toadstone.

—John Evelyn,
Diary
(1645)

At that moment, a line of Orange County Sheriff’s auxiliaries and deputy cadets still in training, plus a few volunteers from the Eagle Scouts and the nearest Neighborhood Watch association in the Tustin Hills, were pacing slowly across the grassy hillside five yards apart looking for clues in the Sagebrush Killer investigation. They had all been warned to wear sturdy boots against snakebite, and they weren’t far at all from where the two victims of the Sagebrush Killer had been found, in fact only one gully away. They’d been at it for several hours and mostly weren’t taking it very seriously. After all, there were a lot of other cases to clear and no one had any idea that there would be a third body so close by.

“Hey, Jack! Man, you look
bad
.”

Marlena’s nephew Rogelio was sitting in the living room with his feet up, gesturing with a Budweiser. Two young Latinos Jack Liffey had never met sat opposite with their own beers, and they were curious about his shiner, too. The TV was going but ignored, a Mexican soccer game.

“This is Paco and that’s Solomon. This is Jack, Marlena’s boyfriend.”

“Hey.”

“
Ce mal
,
esse
?”

“What happened to you, man?”

“About six guys happened to me all at once. A lot of the parts you can’t see hurt, too.”

“No shit, man. You need some help?” One of them was already stirring, as if to roll up his sleeves and fight.

“It’ll be taken care of. Thanks. Mar in?” A beer would be good, he thought. It would also help him bond with the boys, but he’d sworn off and he meant to stay off.

“She’s doing laundry, I think.”

“I’d better touch home base.”

“Take it easy, man.”

Marlena was in the little cramped laundry room, folding underwear out of a wicker basket on top of the dryer. She gave a squeal when she saw his eye and crushed him against her, bubbling and cooing. “Jackie, Jackie, you look so
damaged
!”

“Don’t squeeze too tight. I’m sore a lot of other places, too.”

“Oh,
Jackie
.”

Actually he was enjoying the respite from her corrosive jealousy. And he was trying not to enjoy the irony that the respite came just as she should have been cranking it up. He hoped none of Tien’s perfume had stayed on him.

“You see a doctor?”

“It’s not necessary. Just bruises and this eye. If they’d had another few minutes to work on me, it might have been worse.”

After he explained it all four or five times and she had calmed down, he helped her finish the underwear and then the sheets, taking the corners and walking toward her with a kiss at each big fold.

“You’re not going back there, are you?”

“This won’t happen again. Don’t worry.”

“I don’t want you in no danger,
querido
. You’re too precious to me just like you are. All this stuff is precious.” She was pressing softly through four layers of sheet against his penis and testicles. “Is it all okay?”

“A kiss will make everything better.”

She smiled. “I’ll kiss you everywhere you feel bad, and everywhere you feel good, too.”

“Then I won’t have to make up my mind which is which.”

While she made dinner, he opened a ginger ale and sat with the boys watching the soccer. As much as he hated sports, it didn’t matter very much that he didn’t even know where Pachuca and Iguala were and he couldn’t follow the frenetic commentary. The game was just a long tormented ballet in which men ran around on grass, leaped straight into the air and jumped in front of each other without ever accomplishing much of anything. A pretty good metaphor for life, after all, he thought, though in general he felt life didn’t really need a metaphor.

“So why don’t they just pick the ball up and throw it?” he asked disingenuously. “It’d be a lot easier.”

Rogelio knew he liked to tease.

“
Esse
!”

“Man, it’s not supposed to be
easy
. That’s the whole point.”

“Then tie their legs together. Make it harder. Wouldn’t that be more interesting?”

“How come in American football they don’t just carry guns and shoot each other, eh?”

“Hey, Paco, they
did
last weekend at the Coliseum.”

“Oh, man, I forgot.”

They all laughed and Paco made a pantomime of shooting one finger of each hand at the players on TV. “Oh, man, full combat soccer. That would be so rad.”

“Rogelio, how’s your computer course?” Jack Liffey knew he had enrolled in a computer repair class he’d found on the back of a matchbook.

“It was too hard,” he complained. “And they wanted a lot of money off me right away to buy stuff.”

“I was afraid of that. You could try the JC up the hill.”

“Maybe.” It was a pretty vague maybe and Jack Liffey wondered if he could think of a way to draw the young man into something that would interest him and give him a future. He liked Rogelio’s cheerfulness, his readiness to assist anybody who needed help, his ability to apply himself when the spirit moved him, and a kind of bedrock decency in him that it would be very hard to overrate.

Jack Liffey looked through the archway at Marlena in her frilly apron, bending forward to peer into a big pot. He liked the way the dark skirt stretched taut across her bottom, and he was overwhelmed all of a sudden with a wave of tenderness that felt so strangely like loss that he had to get up right then and hug her to make sure she was really there.

They found quite a few things they could do in bed in between his bruises without him wincing too badly, and then he was so exhausted he thought he’d sleep forever, but he woke at half past 3, wide-eyed and jangled. There had been a dream of some sort, in a strange city with a lot of urgent obligations he had to see to and he kept forgetting where he’d parked the car. He watched her sleep for a long time, as if he’d never seen her before, then he spooned against her and ran his hand under the nightshirt to cup one of her large breasts. She made a few satisfied breathing sounds and wriggled once against him. That wasn’t much help sending him back to sleep.

After a while he got up and sat in the kitchen. The yard was still dark out the window set into the back door, and doves were cooing and gurgling somewhere. He stood at the window and watched a pickup truck with the lights out accelerate down the alley, up to no good. Rogelio had left an old automobile tire mounted on a wheel right in the center of the yard, and he wondered once again about that peculiar trait. When something no longer had an immediate use for Rogelio, it went out of existence. Jack Liffey found screwdrivers in the sink, empty beer bottles in the bookcase and, once, a half-eaten cocoanut inside the washing machine that Rogelio had just cleared out. He wondered if it was just a hyperactive sense of focus that moved on to its next object too quickly. Jack Liffey got up abruptly and rescued the note that he’d tossed in the trash under the sink:
Go home, fuck you, dead dead dead
.