The Orange Curtain (27 page)

This meant passing his linked wrists under his foot and hers at the same time, and it nearly dislocated his shoulder to accomplish it. He stopped and gasped for breath for a moment. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath so long during the effort. The rest of the Houdini maneuver was easy. She was so slim that he slid his linked wrists up over both her legs to her hips, and then he hugged the soggy bundle of her and pulled her over on top of him so he could slide his hands up over her pinioned arms and off over her head.

Done it! he exulted, waving his cuffed wrists over his head in elation. His wrists were still linked, and he was still manacled to her leg, but there was a lot he could do now with his hands in front.

“Mr Liffey! You said you wanted to be my friend!” The whine curled forlornly out into the rain, too near for comfort. And like a duck’s quack, he thought meanly, there seemed to be no echo.

He set Tien Joubert back gently on the edge of the streamlet. First he used his hands to find the seams in the duct tape and tear the front of his gag free of his mouth to suck in a wonderful cool breath. For the moment, he left the rest of the tape caught up in his hair and turned to freeing Tien’s hands. Her hands were only bound by tape over the belt of her trenchcoat. The tape gave quickly in the wet, but the knot in the belt was soggy and it took a while with his chilled fingers to work it loose. He got her hands free and then her gag.

“Tien,” he said softly into her ear. “Are you okay?”

He felt the thump of a really large rock striking down nearby, followed by the sounds of a tiny avalance loosed by the rock. A few grains of sand raked his cheek and he figured it was time to push on. She was still limp against him and there was no reply. Laboriously, he tied the belt tight around her waist, the way he’d seen transport belts tied to the elderly in nursing homes. He wormed his linked arms back over her head and down over her shoulders, then by grasping the belt and rising on one knee he could pull her half up against his chest. It was lucky she didn’t weigh much, probably not even 100 pounds.

He leaned into her weight and stood up, tottering a little and awaking a sharp pain in his back that made him gasp. She hung limp in his arms, and he boosted her a little against his chest, as high as he could lift her with the other set of handcuffs tearing at his ankle. Little by little he stepped forward, feeling his way with his bare feet on the stones and sucking mud of the canyon. The chilly water was maybe two inches deep but it was the only guide he had to direction, and he chose to move downstream, which would inevitably be toward civilization. He knew it would probably be the direction Billy Gudger would expect, but he had a horror of moving deeper into the desolate hills, away from even the theoretical possibility of rescue.

His foot slipped on a smooth wet rock, and he caught himself and chanced a glance upward. Apparently the VW lights had been turned off because he couldn’t see a thing, not even a glow where it should have been. He hadn’t heard any more rocks for a while, but the rain was picking up and would cover a lot of sound, including his own. Here and there the stones underfoot were sharp and he had to hunt gingerly with his bare foot before putting his weight down. Progress seemed glacial, and he was forced to stop regularly to rest the best he could while bearing Tien’s weight.

After what seemed an interminable blind progress downhill, the footing seemed to get better, sandy and yielding a bit under foot, almost like a beach. It was such a relief that he got himself moving with too much confidence, and all of a sudden the footing disappeared, just vanished from under him and they fell through space for a second. He cried out involuntarily, regretting his haste, and then they hit in an explosion of splintering twigs. They ended up sprawled side by side on some prickly bush, his arms still locked around her. He rolled a little to look around again and noticed, as the sparkles of false light on his retinas faded away, that above him he could just see the shapes of the darker hills and brush, as if cut out of flat black metal and propped up against the perceptibly lighter charcoal of the cloud cover. Downstream nearby, against a V of sky, there was one hump that was probably a sumac the size of a small car. It would have to do, he thought.

Without attempting to get up again, he crawled and dragged her along the streambed and then the few feet up the near slope. The lowest limbs of the sumac actually touched the ground, and he squirmed and tugged and finally got the two of them in under the leaf cover, raked by the branches. He wedged them there against a substantial trunk. In a moment he would try to do something about making it more comfortable, he thought, but before the moment came, his head tilted back on its own and he fell fast asleep.

His eyes snapped open at the jolt of adrenalin. It was as if he’d actually felt the process occur inside him, a squirt of the hormone jetting out of some aperture into the small of his back with a tiny liquid sound and instantly his heart was racing like a kid revving a drag engine. There was enough light just gathering to make out the rich green ovals of the leaves that caged him in. It was remarkable how little light you needed to see all you had to. But the main focus of his mind swiveled quickly to the why of the adrenalin. What had frightened him awake like that? And then he heard a crackle and a faint scraping sound near his feet and he boosted his head so fast he smacked it hard into a sumac limb as thick as his forearm. He was staring straight into the deep brown eyes of a coyote, its bulk showing clearly in a ragged spot of the bush. The beast spooked back a few inches, whimpered once and took a sidestep.

“Shoo, boy,” Jack Liffey said gently, and the animal reared once like the Lone Ranger’s horse and shot away.

His accelerator immediately dropped a notch, and he heard Tien Joubert snoring faintly against his chest and was thankful that she was alive. His arms were still wrapped around her and held there by the handcuffs. Her jacket had been torn to a rag, and the silk blouse wasn’t much better, hanging off one intact sleeve and dangling across him, leaving a blue brassiere tugging awkwardly on her breasts. Her skirt rode up under the grab belt he had tied around her and it was ripped at the side. He discovered he was no clothes mannequin either. His shirt was shredded and both knees of his pants hung open like lolling tongues. Not far away he could hear the gurgle of water, and then, just once, the forlorn warning cries of a bird.

He slid his arms off over Tien’s head, then wriggled his shoulders out of the foliage so he could see up into the clouds that were torn apart to reveal lozenges of deep purple sky. The sun would be up before long. The rain had stopped. The hillside nearby was a lot steeper than his mental picture of it, dotted with sumac and grassy clumps and aloes, plus one big patch of beavertail cactus that it was fortunate the had missed in their erratic downstream progress.

Beyond the nearest ridge there was a farther hill-line that still had scraps of mist clinging to low trees. There were houses on a far ridgeline beyond that, but so far away that they were only the size of matchheads. They had to be miles. He could see the fire trail where they had been driven in, maybe thirty yards up the slope, and there were no vehicles to be seen, especially not a black VW.

Jack Liffey hauled himself back under cover and lay still for a moment, then smoothed the troubled surface of Tien’s forehead.

“Tien, wake up. It’s okay now.”

She didn’t stir, and he shook her shoulder.

“Tien, don’t scare me. Please wake up.”

He shook harder, until one eye came open experimentally in her porcelain face. It was a moment before he saw an intelligence gathering behind the eye. Then she groaned and sat up so quick she hit the same bough he had.

“Oww. This place no good.”

“Shhh. It’s plenty good for cover until we know where Billy is.”

“Billy! You call him
Billy
, like your sister little boy or something!”

“He’s human, but his head is so full of loneliness that it made him sick.”

“You got that, one hundred percent. I’m cold.” Then she nestled against him, and he put his linked arms over her head and shoulders again.

“This is the best I can do right now.”

“It pretty good.”

He had meant just to help warm her but they could both feel him becoming aroused. This is not the time, he thought, but his libido had a mind of its own.

After a few wriggles, she craned her neck back and kissed him passionately. “You one very sweet man,” she said as she slid down and bit one of his nipples softly.

Right consequences follow right thoughts, he thought for some crazy reason. And the opposite—oh, yes, the opposite. After all, they had a right to celebrate being alive.

Her small hands were hard at work on his chinos and then she had them unzipped and his penis was in her squeezing hands. He saw her lick one of her fingers and play with him tenderly in a gentle kind of sex play he’d never seen anyone do before, and then she had pressed his chest down and she was on top of him. She used her hands to help guide him and he slid easily inside her.

“Jack, Jack, you feel so good in me. I want you there forever.”

Afterward, they lay back in the glowing morning as the first sunlight broke through the leaves and dappled them with bright fuzzy ovals, like some omen of providential change written into a soapy film. The fingers of light were actually warm where they touched and caressed in the morning breeze.

“We must be nuts,” he said. “Making love like ferrets.”

“Yeah, sure. I got to tell you something now, Mr. Jack Liffey.”

“That sounds serious.” He rolled a little to watch her. She put her brassiere back on, tugged the scrap of blouse over one shoulder and rubbed her hands together to exorcise a little chill. Her eyes were fixed on his chest instead of his face.

“This not so easy.”

“I won’t eat you up.”

“We do that, too, in a little bit,” she said, misunderstanding. “I got to tell you something now. I lie. I never went to no Sorbonne for no business course. I learn business things in noodle stall and shoe stall and dresses shop in the Petit Saigon in Marseilles. I keep numbers and inventory and things in my head.” She poked her forehead with a finger. “And I learn business another way earlier. Uh-huh. I learn very tough way.”

She had apparently reached the sticking point. There was something that was trying hard but it was caught sideways in her throat and just wouldn’t tear loose.

“Oh. Oh…oh.”

“It’s okay, Tien.” He squeezed her arm.

“Back in Viet Nam. I was bar girl, Tu Do Street, Jack. I was never no general wife. I was from poor family in little village and ran away and…”

She was crying, a few tears trickling along her cheek.

“I great big whore, my lovely lovely Jack. Sit in many laps, guys I don’t like very much. Fuck-fuck many GIs.”

“Tien, I’ve always known that.” It wasn’t strictly true, but he’d guessed. She had such a bad case of bar-girl English, and there had always been something a little too streetwise about her. “In your soul, you’re a beautiful, stubborn, resourceful princess, pure as new snow.”

She wailed once at that, and he had to put his hand over her mouth to shush her, and then she was sobbing and bucking against him with the anguish of memories that he would probably never be able to appreciate. It was a long time before her paroxysm of memory subsided, and he lay holding her on the rocky slope listening to wind and water and a faint buzz that was beginning to arouse his curiosity.

“You know what I was and you still want me?”

“As much as ever,” he said, aware of what a hedge it was. There was a practical world beyond their sheltering bush, with another woman in it and even an ex-wife and a daughter, and if they ever managed to survive Billy Gudger, he had no idea how that could all be reconciled. “If anything gets in the way, it won’t be your past.”

“I love you, Mr. Jack. You too too super.”

“I love you, too, Miss Tien Nguyen Joubert.”

She rubbed her forehead against his jaw. “Anybody tell you your pronunciation really
really
bad.”

“Only people who know.”

Then she wailed once again, the emotion dropping down abruptly out of the blue, and he had to cover her mouth.

When she finally cried herself out, he realized they had better try to get to civilization.

“To tell the truth, I’m a little afraid to crawl out of this hiding place, but we can’t live here forever.”

“Yes, we can,” she said. “I keep house for you here. We put TV over there and stove there, and I show you how to cook
pho
just right.”

The feeling of safety in the place was evaporating rapidly in the daylight, and fear came down the hillside from the fire road and touched him with its cool breath.

“Billy said he’d be back with the dawn, and I don’t know how far I got us before we passed out here. Probably only a couple hundred yards.”

He put his head out again, almost blinded by the glare as the sun streamed down through a good-sized break in the cloud. Facing in the downstream direction, toward then world, he could see faraway dark clouds still pouring out their slanting mists, and even a fragment of a rainbow.

No more rain but fire next time, he thought. There weren’t even the faint sounds of traffic, just a subtle buzz that turned out to be a high tension tower that he hadn’t noticed before. He decided to make for the tower. They always had cleared dirt trails alongside them for service and it would take him away from that other, more dangerous road.

“Let’s get moving.”

They scrambled out of the shelter, linked legs yanking awkwardly against each other. When he unfolded his limbs to stand up, he realized just how sore he was, in almost every joint and muscle, but he hoped things would improve once they got moving. She dusted drying mud off her legs and what remained of her clothing, and for the first time she noticed the belt he had tied around her waist.

“What this thing?”

“I think they call it a gait belt. It helped me carry you.”