The Orange Curtain (29 page)

“Did you look at the X-ray?”

He shook his head. “I was afraid to.”

“Afraid you’d see it or afraid you wouldn’t?”

“Either way, it would be out of my control. Who wants to know something you can’t control?”

“Can you always control things? Isn’t it better sometimes to sit back and let things take their own course?”

“Oh, no. What if things went the wrong way and they didn’t work out at all? What if something made you look stupid or people laughed at you?”

That’s the human condition in a nutshell, Jack Liffey thought.

“You were sleeping with our own
therapist
!” a man on TV brayed.

“Didn’t anybody every tell you about the little bird?”

“What bird?”

Tien Joubert stirred, watching his performance intently.

“If you catch a little bird in your hands, you can feel its heart beating against your palms, but you can never make it do what you want it to do. It’s too delicate and frightened and too willful, and if you try to make it do something, you’ll end up breaking its tiny bones and killing it. All you can do is let it fly in the room and patiently wait until it lands on your shoulder. You give it what it needs and slowly you become its friend.”

Billy Gudger’s eyes had gotten their nervous look again, flitting to strange corners of the room, as if looking for the little bird on the wing.

“But sometimes the bird chooses to land somewhere else again and again, and you have to accept that, too. You just have to wait.”

“That sounds like the lie people always tell you to get their own way. I’m so tired of talking.”

“Giving people the freedom to be themselves is what friendship is about. It opens your heart and makes you bigger inside. I want us both to be able to be who we are.”

“I don’t
know
.” His eyes finally came to rest on the smashed-open cellular phone in the middle of the floor. “Too-Tired Billy,” he said, as if selecting his own Homeric epithet.

The night of sleeplessness and emotional pandemonium was getting to them all.

“Don’t go off half-cocked,” a voice blurted from the television. “At least wait until you’re full-cocked.”

“I can’t think right now.”

“I’ll be your friend, Billy. You don’t have to try to force me.”

The young man’s head rolled to one side and the pistol fell between his thighs and he was fast asleep. Jack Liffey gauged the distance across the room and knew it was hopeless to get that far with his leg manacled to the heavy sofa. And even with the two of them on the floor, straining together, they would never be able to budge the heavy sleeper-sofa.

While he was still inspecting alternatives in his head, the sofa heaved and Tien Joubert was abruptly on her knees on the hooked rug, then stretching out full length until her fingertips reached the smashed cell phone and dragged it toward her. The broken dial pad trailed jerkily on the rug, drawn on by a skein of fine wires. She punched at the dial pad after she gathered it in, but couldn’t get a light to come on. Then she hit what he thought was probably redial on the body of the phone itself and though he could hear nothing, he saw her attention rivet to the telephone. She pressed it to her ear, waited a half minute and began speaking rapidly in Vietnamese. She rattled on for a couple of minutes and then hit another button and pushed the phone back where it had been.

She clung to the afghan and slithered back onto the sofa to nestle against him. 

“Did you get through?”

“Only place I could call. Last number I call yesterday was Thang Le and the
Quan Sats
. Part of peace treaty I not tell you about, secret stuff just like Paris, I offer them work in import business.”

“You got them on the line just now?”

“I get their machine.”

“What did you tell their machine?”

“I say this crazy roundeye guy, he keep big bars of gold bullion in his freezer. They can come and get it like picking daisy from baby.”

Jack Liffey let his head loll back against the sofa. “Oh, Lord. Did you have some reason for picking the freezer?”

He could feel her shrug. “I see it when he drag me through room there. I just think of it.”

He laughed ruefully to himself for a moment. It was too ghastly and farcical a picture, a half dozen Quan Sats invading the house in their black jump suits and balaclavas, waving little spray guns as they hurled up the lid of the freezer chest to see the rump of Billy Gudger’s very dead mother.

He watched Billy Gudger slumped in the chair opposite, his mouth open and drooling a little, the pistol fallen between his legs and pointing straight back at his own private parts, really nothing more than a vulnerable and broken child who had never had much of a chance in the world. He wondered if he had an obligation to wake the young man and warn him about the danger heading his way. He had offered to be his friend, and this would certainly be the final betrayal. Some friend, he thought. On the other hand, it would end their ordeal in an instant if the
Quan Sats
came in quickly and quietly. After all, he had a peace treaty with them.

“We’re going to have to send her to a convalescent home, you know that,” a man on television ranted.

“You think it will work?” Jack Liffey asked.

“Gold bars? Oh, yeah, sure. Those guys big on gold bars—like chocolate chip cookie for starve little boy.” She seemed to notice his torn Penney’s shirt. “You know, this shirt you got here really sucks. I mean even before it get torn and all. I get you really good shirt like from Rodeo Drive for thirty bucks.”

He smiled and she sighed and lost interest in the shirt. Her head sagged against him and she dozed off.

He lay back feeling her regular tiny breathing against his shoulder, like some delicate forest creature. The contact and his own weariness led him to picture other women who had slept against him and how it had made him feel. One night, not long after Maeve was born, Kathy had fallen asleep in exhaustion right in the middle of intercourse and he had stayed inside her for the longest time, noticing her milk-engorged breasts and her new stretch marks, a little chagrinned by the nod-off
in
flagrante delicto
but full of tenderness for her bone-weariness and then finally chuckling at the absurdity of it all and losing his erection all at once. He didn’t let himself think about Kathy much, not in tender moments like that, because she’d been so important to him once, and his jobless rages and drinking and his failure as a father had been so painful.

And he recalled Lori Bright—a fading movie star, older than he was, who had crossed his path once like an express train out of hell—and he remembered the time she had fallen off into a little sniff sleep, toking some downer, after working overtime to prove her sexual prowess with a number of little steel studs and a wicker box, and then all at once she had started snoring away like a buzz saw on the silk sheets. In the abstract that raucous snore should have broken all the glamour illusions, but he’d found that nothing at all could do that. Once you’d grown up watching a face on a fifty-foot screen, it rooted itself so firmly in your daydreams that reality never had a prayer.

Marlena, too, had once dropped off to sleep in his lap after drinking too much rough red wine. Then she had gone to great lengths to make it up to him. Remembering that long exhausting inexpressibly tender morning, Jack Liffey fell asleep, too.

It was an unearthly screeching, like an owl caught in a trap, that awoke Jack Liffey and the first thing he saw was a big plastic bottle of dish detergent on the TV and he didn’t see how dish detergent could have made that noise. Then he saw a Vietnamese man in a black jump suit hovering over Billy Gudger who had been thoroughly taped to his own chair with his own duct tape, like a fly in a spider web, his arms completely hidden under a skein of grey tape.

Billy’s cheek seemed to be bleeding down his chin and beads of slow blood dribbled onto his shirt. The Vietnamese brandished a supermarket box cutter in front of Billy, like a treat he was withholding from a pet.

“Where gold at, fucker?”

Tien Joubert was sitting bolt awake, too, and for the longest time Jack Liffey felt quite detached from the scene, as if watching it through a pane of armored glass.

Another black-clad Vietnamese hove into the room and though he had a ski mask on, it was unmistakably Thang Le. Thang Le took in the scene and spoke quickly to Tien.

“He say they open freezer and find only fat frozen woman.”

“That’s Billy’s mom.”

Tien looked startled. “He kill his own mother?”

“It looks like it. I think it was probably half an accident, and half a kind of reflex that takes him over when people laugh at him. He’s a pretty troubled kid.”

“Well, fuck him.” She spoke fast to Thang Le.

“What did you say?”

“I tell him he must have move gold last night when we asleep.”

“Tien, don’t do this!”

“I say, fuck this bad boy. He was going kill us. He kill Phuong, he kill his own
mother
. Let him feel scare a little.”

“It’s not right. Stop them.”

There was another hopeless screech of pain and terror and Jack Liffey was glad the other Vietnamese had moved in front so he couldn’t see what was going on.

“There’s no gold!” Jack Liffey shouted. “Tien said that to get you here. There’s
no
gold. I swear it!” He wasn’t sure how much English they knew.

They turned the TV up a notch as a hopeless wail banged around the small room.

It was distinguished by the name of the reptile, and called the Toad-Stone, Bufonites, Capaudine, Krottenstien; but all its fancied power vanished on the discovery of its being nothing but the fossil tooth of the Sea-Wolf.

—Thomas Pennant,
British Zoology
(1776)

The darkness was so close now, billowing around his shoulders. The sudden pain. Those voices gabbling and crying out. Was one of them Mr. Liffey? The horrible razor thing came closer again and he felt a searing burn in his forehead. He yelled and tugged at his arms but they were held fast. Gold gold, somebody kept asking about gold. Was it an Asian voice? It came from a thickening in the darkness that had finally come very close indeed.

“Mr. Liffey, help me!”

The fire reached his shoulder, coming into him suddenly out of the murk. He could barely see. It wasn’t fair. No one would come to his side. Abandoned just as he was going to reach out. But he knew he had done something terrible and now he had to be punished. Another gathering of the darkness swept around him like dark wings, blotting out the room. Fire entered his knee, his chest.

“Ma!” he keened. “
Ma
!”

“Tien, stop them. I’ll never sleep with you again if you let them do this. I mean it!”

Tien Joubert turned and hissed once at Jack Liffey, like an enraged cat, and then she spoke rapidly in Vietnamese and the two home-invaders looked at her. “Guys, no gold here. Big trick. Sorry. I make it up to you later. You only place I could call on broke phone.”

Thang Le glared at her for a while. Then he picked up Billy’s own pistol and in perfectly clear English asked, “Did this piece of garbage kill Phuong?”

“Yes,” Tien said.

Thang Le pressed the pistol against Billy Gudger’s forehead.

“Mr. Liffey,” Billy Gudger cried out. “I want you to have my toadstone!”

The pistol went off with a sickening wet burst in the room, and the Vietnamese raiders were gone in a blink.

Jack Liffey glanced only once and knew it was not a sight that would ever leave him.

“What’s toadstone?” Tien asked.

“Just a superstition.” It would have transgressed some scruple to explain it to her now.

The cops were slow in getting there, even after the gunshot and the screams, and over the rest of the day Jack Liffey felt as if he was writing the same story over and over from scratch, writing it and then having it ripped away from him. There were the Tustin Cops, then a man and woman from the Orange County Sheriff’s, luckily not Margin, and then two hard-bitten men in dark suits and permanent scowls from the F.B.I. The one fact they both withheld was the identity of the
Quan Sats
. They had no idea how the housebreakers had got there, perhaps they had followed Tien’s fancy Porsche, or they suspected there were valuables in the house for some other reason. Nobody believed them but everybody knew about Vietnamese home invasions and the reluctance to name names. It wasn’t until six in the evening that they got out of the Tustin Police Station on Camino.

“Come home with me,” Tien said. “I sorry they killed the guy. I make it all up to you like the bee’s knees.”

He’d been dreading this, but her indifference in the face of Billy’s pain did make it a bit easier. “I live with someone, Tien. I can’t get around that.”

“I make you happy in bed. You know it.”

“There are things that don’t work between Marlena and me and things that do, and I owe it to her to give it an extra shot to try to make it work.”

“I got stuff I ain’t even show you yet in bed. I even arrange you have some young stuff on the side if you want. I make you rich, get you good shirt and pants, not this junk.”

“Marlena’s a good woman with a heart as big as little Saigon. You’d like her. I can’t just tip her out with the old newspapers.”

“I say I give Rolex and Jag, but I know that make you mad.” She took a deep breath. This was not the first disappointment in her life and it certainly wasn’t even a very big one compared to some of the others. “If bad stuff with this Marleta get bigger than good stuff, you come back to me any time, Mr. Jack.”

“Thanks for the offer,” he said. “You’re worth a lot, too.”

The vast beds of toad-stone or lava in many parts of this country.
—
Charles Darwin,
Philosophical Transactions
(1784)

“This feels kind of dumb,” Rogelio said. “You wanna go some place?”

“Let’s stay a bit and see who comes out alive,” Maeve said. She had just bicycled all they way up PCH to Mar Vista to see her father and tell him she’d got an A on her physics test, the one subject that was her brick wall, and she had been informed in an urgent whisper that her dad had just come home a half hour before her. Rogelio had had a big grimace on his kindly face and he had hustled her out the side door without much explanation while a lot of yelling was going on inside in two voices.