The Orange Curtain (25 page)

“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.”

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.

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.