The Orange Curtain (22 page)

“All of a sudden we noticed a seagull flapping on the shingle of pebbles just above the tidepools. It had probably flown into the cliff and broken its wing. The poor bird flapped around in a circle and made a sad little cry over and over when it saw us. It was almost as if it was begging us for help. My father took my shoulders and turned me away. ’Don’t look,’ he said. But of course I did. I peeked and saw him walk over to the bird and go through a little pantomime of indecision for himself, and then he reached down and wrung the bird’s neck. Now, my dad never fished or hunted, never raised a hand to me. I don’t think he ever harmed another creature, except that one time, as far as I know. He saw a duty he had to do and he did it, no matter what it cost him in hurt.”

Jack Liffey wished that the father-son anecdote that had come to mind hadn’t been about killing, but it was too late now. The boy surreptitiously took a tear out of the corner of his eye with a fingertip, or maybe he was just poking at his face. Jack Liffey didn’t want to seem to be looking too close.

“That story doesn’t say everything there is to say about my dad, but it says something about the bedrock of his character. It’s good to have examples like that to let you know when you’re straying off the right path.”

The young man stuck out his jaw as if he was going to tough out some ordeal. “If a thing doesn’t exist for you, you can’t miss it.”

“Oh, I think you probably can. Especially if you have a good imagination. Let’s sit down and talk.”

The compressor switched off and they both stared at the freezer chest in the sudden quiet. Like a summons to a more dangerous fate.

“It’s too late for talk. You understand that, don’t you?”

“People can always talk, as long as it’s not done out of cruelty and they’re trying to understand one another. There’s no harm in it. Come on, we can go in and sit and relax. Tell me what you’re reading; tell me the long-range goals of your studies.”

He could see that the young man was going through some internal struggle, and as long as he could keep stoking that debate, there was a chance he could find himself a chink to exploit. But Jack Liffey was also deeply, coldly frightened, and he wondered if a lunge for the pistol right then might not be the best idea. Any TV detective worth his salt could have done it. But the boy hovered just a little too far away to make success plausible. It wasn’t as if he was dealing with a neophyte in pulling the trigger.

“Go very slowly into the house, but don’t try to get an inch closer to me.”

“Sure.”

Jack Liffey started to back up, and the young man followed slowly into the dining room, where he gestured for Jack Liffey to go into the living room. A shabby sofa with a ribbed bedspread tossed over it faced a TV on a metal rolling cart.

“Sit.”

He did and Billy Gudger turned on the TV and dialed around to a music program and cranked the sound up loud, a crooner on a darkened stage complaining about some unspecified hurt. Then the young man took a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket and tossed them to Jack Liffey.

“Put one side on your ankle.”

They were good Peerless cuffs, cop issue, but just about anyone could go to a law enforcement supply store and buy them. He had a pair himself that he’d never used, still sitting in their box in his desk. He set these aside. “I won’t put these on me, Billy. If I did that, I’d be completely helpless and it would destroy the equality between us. We couldn’t talk the same way. You’d think of me differently.”

“Instructions specify what you’ve got to do! Do it now!” All of a sudden, the young man sputtered and rushed, as if speeding on some drug. He waved his free arm and clutched at imaginary objects in the air. “You got to do what I say, got to got to, you got to! I won’t feel safe to talk if you can jump up at me any time, you got to see that! You just want to trick me and go and make a fool of me!”

He raved on for quite some time, babbling about trust and trickery and people who laughed at other people they thought were indecisive, and Jack Liffey watched the pistol wave around, the young man’s eyes flitting from place to place in the room, never meeting his own. The sudden irrationality was startling and terrifying, but he decided it was not a good idea to back down once he’d made a reasoned stand.

“Billy, you can’t expect me to participate in my own captivity. If you feel you need to handcuff me, you’re going to have to put them on me yourself. You have the power.”

Billy Gudger seemed to run down and pant for a moment, staring at Jack Liffey’s feet. The TV talked about Chevrolet trucks. Like a rock. “Don’t disrespect me.”

“I don’t, Billy, but I need respect, too.”

That seemed to startle him and he glanced up directly into Jack Liffey’s eyes. Something seemed to be whirling around right behind the young man’s eyes, changing the frame of mind they imparted from moment to moment.

“Lie on your stomach. Right there.”

Jack Liffey nodded and slid forward on the sofa cushion, then went to his knees on the floor. He let himself down on the carpet that smelled of smoke and cat and fried fish. He wondered where the cat was, if it had been one of the first victims. The young man approached him cautiously and pressed the barrel of the pistol against the back of Jack Liffey’s neck.

Jack Liffey’s shoulders and arms went tense, and he couldn’t help clamping his eyes shut as if that might ward off a shot. His body went cold from head to toe as the barrel of the pistol dug a little and he hoped he hadn’t made a terrible mistake. Then he felt the cuff go on his right ankle. The other half of the handcuffs clanged on something metal.

“Put your hands together back here, I mean it.”

Jack Liffey brought his hands up behind his back and felt the gun barrel withdraw, and a second pair of handcuffs snapped into place around his wrists. He tried to remember if any of the serial killings had had ligature marks around the wrists, but he hadn’t paid much attention.

Some whitebread soul singer on TV was moaning about being loved and left, and Billy put a hand under his armpit and helped him back onto the couch. It was uncomfortable with his arms behind his back but he wriggled into a position that wasn’t too bad. So much for refusing to submit to the handcuffs.

Billy erected the fallen lamp and kicked the glass to one side. He slid over a big leather ottoman that was expelling a wad of stuffing through a torn seam and sat facing Jack Liffey, but he still carried the pistol, which he waved about when he gestured. The young man was a little too animated for Jack Liffey’s taste, as if he was heading off on some manic jag now. He wondered if it was a result of getting a taste of power over someone. That probably wouldn’t be a good sign.

“Mr. Liffey,” he said with a portentous frown, “do you always tell the truth?”

“I don’t think anybody tells the truth in all situations.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well…Nobody pulls a badly hurt five-year-old girl out of a car wreck and tells her that her mother just died. There are degrees of inconvenience in every situation. Personal and otherwise, and you balance them the best you can.”

“Or you go chicken. Like facing somebody determined who’s got a gun?”

Jack Liffey shrugged. “It’s different for everybody. Some people don’t fear death. I do.” He thought of Philip Marlowe’s conceit about the depressed who feared boredom more than death. Billy Gudger looked more like the anxious type. Or, more likely, the kid spun on another axis altogether, his sensibility wooshing off along some tangent into left field.

“Maybe some people fear embarrassment or humiliation even more than death.”

The young man’s eyes clouded, as if Jack Liffey had hit a nerve. “What do you think makes somebody go bad?” he blurted. “I want you to tell me the truth.”

“You’re talking about the idea of evil, aren’t you? I think that’s a big sloppy word that’s almost meaningless. It falsifies the world.” He wondered if this was the safest approach to take. The young man was obviously troubled by the idea of evil, probably felt he’d crossed the line himself. It was likely that Billy Gudger had spun off into some freemasonry of his own imagination, and it might be safer just to acknowledge whatever fuzzy metaphysical nonsense he came up with. Jack Liffey realized that he’d been sucked into a terrible realm where every thought and every assertion might just have dire consequences, and the intensity of it all was already exhausting him.

“You don’t believe in evil?”

“I don’t know,” he said, trying for an attitude that he could nudge off in a new direction if necessary. “Usually, when you look close at what people mean by the word, it turns into something like short-sightedness, or selfishness or ignorance of the consequences. Even a misunderstanding. Going to Viet Nam wasn’t a very good idea for America, but the way it happened was far too complicated just to call it evil.”

“What about something just one person does? Sometimes, it’s really simple.” Billy Gudger leaned toward him like a professor who already knew the answer.

“Do you mean things that boil up out of the unconscious?”

“Hurting a child, for example.”

“I think it’s a pathology, something is broken and hurt down in the psyche. It’s not theology. But what is it you want to tell me? You’re trembling with it.”

The young man pressed his hands together on the pistol, and brought it down on his knee to steady it, as if his tremor had given away a secret.

“
You
just think there’s no such thing as evil because you live in a world where nothing
really
bad has ever happened to you. You were protected from it. You’ve never
done
something and had to look at yourself different. It’s easy to go on for years and years just acting the way you know is normal and then one day something you do turns out to be contrary. You didn’t make any decision, not really. You sort of sneezed. You just did something you never did before and it gives you a…feeling inside, like something’s really new.”

His jaw was fiercely set. “And you do it again, and maybe again, and you get used to it. You’re not different, but you see yourself in a new way. There’s this snap in your head, and you say, ‘Hey, I’m
bad
. I’m not good after all.’”

“Some people call that guilt.”

Billy Gudger shook his head. “You can actually enjoy it. It sets you free.”

Billy Gudger must have punched the TV to an oldies channel because Jack Liffey heard, and then saw, a young Richard Widmark emit his gruesome hyena cackle. Hee-hee-hee. Widmark was Tommy Udo in his first movie,
Kiss of Death
, and before long, in one of the most famous acts of pure cruelty on film, he was going to push an old lady in a wheelchair down the staircase and voice that terrible psychopath’s giggle again. He had read somewhere that two generations of street hoodlums in the roughest townships of South Africa had modeled themselves on Tommy Udo. This was not something he wanted to watch while he was handcuffed and helpless.

“Sit forward!” Billy Gudger snapped and then yanked Jack Liffey’s wallet out of his back pocket. He went through it, looking closely at all the business cards and tattered old notes with phone numbers and things to buy at the store. Jack Liffey had set this punitive expedition off himself, experimenting a little with the technique of offering friendship and encouragement and then suddenly withholding it, which hadn’t turned out to be a very good idea. Billy had fumed for a minute, like a spurned lover, and then he’d got a bit frantic, probably egged on by the noise level. The TV was on loud enough to cover any shouts for help, and racket like that could make anyone edgy.

Something in his newfound sense of power seemed to crank up the deep-seated mania the young man carried around inside him. He started tearing up the cards from the wallet with overlarge gestures, like a self-conscious act of sacrilege.

“I thought we were friends, Billy.”

The young man stopped and puffed for a moment like a fighter between rounds. “Don’t bullshit.”

“I’m not. I want to talk with you. Can you explain what you were saying about alternation.”

“You really want to know?”

“Of course. It sounded interesting.”

“Okay, don’t
fuck
with me.” The profanity had an odd character in his mouth, almost as if the word were so foreign to him he had to use it in italics.

Billy Gudger threw the wallet ostentatiously against the wall, stuffed his pistol down into his trousers, and abruptly went out to the kitchen. Jack Liffey heard the back door open and considered letting out a hearty shout, but decided it probably wouldn’t help much over the bombast of 1940s movie music. He settled for scooting forward on the sofa to try to work out what his ankle was cuffed to. The chenille bedspread on the sofa draped onto the floor, making a little tent at the three-link chain of the handcuff at his ankle. He yanked his foot a few times, and the cuff clanged metallically, seeming to be attached to something pretty solid. He guessed from the lumpiness under him that he was cuffed to the bedframe of a pull-out sleeper.

Then he tipped himself forward until he went off onto the floor. He wanted to see how much mobility he had with his arms cuffed behind him and one leg pinioned. It was no easy matter getting back onto the sofa. He wriggled and repositioned himself and he finally got an elbow up to give himself leverage. In the last heave with arms and legs together, he wrenched some muscle in his hip that hurt like a bastard. He wasn’t sure what good any of that did him, but accumulating information seemed to be the only recourse he had at the moment.

Billy Gudger sprinted up the driveway to his cottage and fumbled a bit with the key as he opened up. He wondered if there were any way at all to rescue this situation from all the bad karma that had developed. He knew he wanted to have Mr. Liffey on his side, and, except for a moment here and there of perverse obstinacy, the man seemed genuinely to like him. As long as he was in complete control, he could afford to give it a little longer period of test. Even if something bad had to happen in the end, he could say he’d done his best to work things out. You couldn’t do more than that. If only Mr. Liffey did his best, too, maybe together they could find a way to come out into the clear.