by John Shannon
THE ORANGE CURTAIN
ALSO BY JOHN SHANNON:
THE CONCRETE RIVER
THE CRACKED EARTH
THE POISON SKY
STREETS ON FIRE
CITY OF STRANGERS
TERMINAL ISLAND
DANGEROUS GAMES
THE DARK STREETS
THE DEVILS OF BAKERSFIELD
PALOS VERDES BLUE
ON THE NICKEL
A LITTLE TOO MUCH
CHINESE BEVERLY HILLS
THE ORANGE CURTAIN
First ePublished in 2013 by
MP Publishing
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Copyright © 2000 by John Shannon
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Cover designed by Alison Graihagh Crellin.
eBook ISBN 978-1-84982-321-0
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Ken Meier.
Thanks to Spencer Olin, Martin Schiesl and Vu Pham for sharing their expertise about Orange County with me. Any mistakes or exaggerations are my own.
Vulnerability may have its own private causes, but it often reveals concisely what is wounding and damaging on a much larger scale.
— John Berger
ONE
The Gods Hate the Obvious
When Billy Gudger got home from work, he knew they’d done something to his front door.
It wasn’t the scratch on the little sanskrit plaque there that clued him in, because he’d made that scratch himself when he’d screwed it up directly under the peephole: The gods love the obscure and hate the obvious. He’d had it made up in devanagari writing, that strange alphabet from northern India that looks like Chinese ideograms doing chin-ups under a bar. He was probably the only person within miles who could read it, and even if some scholarly immigrant mailman from India happened upon it, some mailman who’d taught himself not modern Hindi but ancient Sanskrit, even then the reader would not know that the plaque concerned, not just a rather banal Eastern homage to idiosyncrasy, but a thing, eccentric and quite physical, that Billy carried within his head.
Billy couldn’t quite put his finger on what the problem was with the door, but he could always tell. He peered closely at the brass knob and the deadbolt, then leaned very close and studied the brown painted surface in small sections, stopping for a moment only at the scratches where he tended to rest his plastic laundry tub when he unlocked the door coming back in from the big house in front where his mom lived. He never left for even a minute without locking up.
I will pay anything to find her, anything, the voice on the phone had said. Come to my shop please.
I’ll be right there, he’d replied, and he headed straight down the 405 toward Orange County. The last time he remembered being there had been his daughter’s ninth birthday command visit to Disneyland—three, no four, years back. Even then Maeve had seen it as something of a sociological experiment—testing what girls her age were supposed to enjoy.
Jack Liffey wasn’t really a detective, but he did track down missing children, having fallen into the business by accident after he’d lost his aerospace job just as the whole industry was drying up in Southern California. He’d been at the tracking-down for several years now and he was pretty damn good at it. He liked it, too, something about searching for the lost and protecting the innocent—indulging a sentimental bent in him—and it paid more than delivering pizzas, but just barely.
The billboard along the freeway was his first indication he was getting close: THE CALIFORNIA DREAM IS ALIVE, it said. It showed a cheerful white professional man in jogging attire beside a cheerful white professional woman in a sports bra watching a cheerful white professional child tricycling hard down a sylvan pathway. IN MISSION VIEJO.
If you liked a dream, he thought, in which all the people were white, the rough edges were all sanded away, there was no urban center, the stores and restaurants were all national chains, and the carefully platted roads wound just so between mini-malls, identical tract homes, and tame imitations of forest strips. In an earlier and less examined life, he might well have liked it a whole lot, too, secure in his aerospace cubicle with his conscience assuaged by a few rebellious Dilbert cartoons on the walls, at ease with his first wife and daughter. Layoffs, drink, and legal papers had seen to all that. Now he wasn’t sure what he liked any more, though a less random universe and a little relief from the burning in his prostate would have been a pretty good start.
He passed a long chain link fence with wild chaparral behind it. For some reason unkempt young men had lined up shoulder-to-shoulder behind the fence, staring out at the road with dead eyes, like a race of primitives who’d come out of the wild land and were waiting there to rush out and occupy the town once it was abandoned by the higher civilization. It made no sense he could discern. Then there was a nude man wearing only an orange visor who waved gaily to passing cars from the freeway median—it was all just L.A. saying good-bye, he finally realized—and the freeway passed over Coyote Creek as he actually entered Orange County. He had just passed through what L.A. people called the Orange Curtain. He was into terra incognita, and considering the address he’d been given by the Asian voice on the phone, he was heading for a lot more incognita.
Maybe it was just his sixth sense misfiring about the door. He knew he was highly tuned to things other people missed. In the single big room inside, things seemed all right. The green desk under the front window was spread with the books and papers for a calculus problem that was all but solved. He liked to work out his approach and make all the intermediate calculations and then walk away, savoring his mastery, to come back triumphantly later and nail down the final answer.
The desk was one of three identical tiny oak desks he’d bought from a used office furniture store in Santa Ana that was liquidating the old post office, and he’d stripped them and bleached the wood and then stained each one a different translucent finish. The red desk on the side wall held a stack of books in French by Paul Baudrillard and Roland Barthes, plus a French-English dictionary and a spiral notebook. A journal in plain yellow paper binding, Analyse structurale et exégèse biblique, was open to an essay by Barthes that contained a number of underlinings.
The third desk, stained blue, held a propped open copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, plus several volumes on modern history and historiography. He just had time to ascertain that the desks were undisturbed when the telephone rang.
“What’s the matter with you?” the sharp voice skirled in his ear. “You know I worry. You’re ten minutes late and you didn’t check in.”
Involuntarily he pictured her—the small pouty mouth, rumpled housecoat, and those legs sprawling across the old sofa, blousing their fat over calf-high support hose. He listened with equanimity and answered promptly.
“I’ll be right over.”
“I don’t know how you got to be so thoughtless. I gave up everything for you. What’s the matter with you?”
“I’ll get us some lunch in a few
minutes. There’s meatloaf left over and I bought some carrots I can glaze before I leave.”
“Be sure to use up the old brown sugar before you open the new one. Hurry up, Billy. I’m hungry.”
He smiled a curiously benign smile as he hung up. He was indeed lucky, even if it wasn’t the toadstone in his head that marked and conditioned his good fortune. There couldn’t be many people with a mother as loving as his.
He lingered over the red desk, fingering the spiral notebook where he was translating a passage: What interests me the most is the abrasive [rubbings?] frictions, the breaks [ruptures?], the discontinuities of readability, the juxtaposition [overlay?] of narrative entities which [somewhat] [can run free] from an explicit logical articulation.
He would sauté the carrots, he thought. Use just a little butter.
“A toadstone—a celebrated amulet. It was sovereign for protecting new born children and their mothers from the power of fairies, and has been repeatedly borrowed from my mother, on account of this virtue.”
—Sir Walter Scott, letter to Joanna Baillie (1812)
Jack Liffey hopped off the freeway at Beach Boulevard and turned north to Bolsa, then east deeper and deeper into a strangely familiar forest of warm colors, uptilted tile roofs, and diacritical marks over the vowels. He had truly entered the somewhere-else, and his forehead began to bead up with sweat. He parked his beat-up old Concord in front of a mall that was all gold and red and dragons, and he felt that strange stirring at the base of his spine that he remembered all too well. As if a bullet was about to penetrate right there. For several years now, an unforeseen premonition of death had been ambushing him out of the blue—a sudden sense as he drove toward an appointment that it was a shame the person he was meeting would sit there waiting for hours and not know he had died on the way. But the present sensation was a little more concrete, tied to real memories, and just to nail it down, a V of four Marine F/A-18 jet fighters came over low, booming all of a sudden on the air.
There was a peculiar impression of safety in the immediate area of his car, maybe just the familiarity of the Concord or a promise of quick getaway, and it was hard to force himself to walk away from the car out into this other world. The first sing-songy voices he heard sent his palms clammy and then the smells—sesame oil, mint and that fermented fish sauce called nuoc mam.
He strolled rigidly through the crowds, past a middle-aged woman in an ao dai and younger ones wearing jeans, young women with beautiful features that were perfectly symmetrical in their small faces, a thin old man in an outsized homburg, teen-agers with their hair cut into extreme fades who offered him the same sleepy contemptuous eyes as the cowboys—pronounced cowboys with a lilt—who’d haunted Tu Do Street a generation earlier, and he thought, If I stick around long enough, I’ll find the guy who stole my watch. It had been done from the back of a motor scooter, snipped right off his wrist as they gunned past with a proficient bite of something like a bolt cutter. It was a mean thought, but he knew damn well that a lot of the refugees who’d come over in the first wave were the same people, by and large, who’d fed off the American troops in Saigon.
He found the East-West Bookstore between the Viet My Bakery and Bao Tram Cosmetics. Paperbacks on shelf after shelf were as brightly colored as the storefronts. There were two dozen newspapers, scores of magazines, even girlie magazines. All the titles were in Vietnamese, except for two wire racks out in the middle of the store with romance novels and self-help books and a few classics. A distinguished looking man in an open-necked blue shirt watched him from the glass counter. His temples were just beginning to gray.
“Ong Minh?” Jack Liffey asked.
The man smiled tightly and Jack Liffey got what he deserved for showing off, a flood of Vietnamese washing back over him.
“Xin loi. I’m sorry. I only remember a few words.”
“It’s not an inflected language,” the man said didactically. He spoke with an almost mincing precision and a strong trace of a British accent. “You cannot make a question by changing your tone. More likely, it will change the meaning completely. You might set out to say, Do you think it will rain? and end up saying, I want to eat your elbows.” His voice shifted gear. “Yes, I am Mr. Minh. Ong Liffey.”
“Pleased to meet you.” The man shook hands with that unnerving limp grip Asians used.
“Let me close up here and buy you a cup of coffee.”
“Thanks.”
Minh Trac did something beneath the counter, locked up the register and led him along the lane of mini-mall shops into the covered mall proper where Asian pop music was blaring away, a cover of some American tune he vaguely recognized. The white plastic bucket chairs from a pho shop spilled out into the atrium, facing a record shop, a dress emporium and a gridded-shut jewelry store. A group of middle-aged women with shopping bags sat and laughed and gossiped, and toward the back a number of sullen male teens in flattops eyed the world resentfully. There were no Anglo faces anywhere.
They sat at a table out in the mall atrium and a woman in fluorescent blue pedal pushers appeared instantly, bobbed a little, and spoke softly with Minh Trac before gliding away.
“So you were in Viet Nam, Mr. Liffey.”
“I was stationed in Thailand, but I went to Saigon several times for R and R.”
He raised an eyebrow. “The traffic was usually in the other direction.”
“I was sent all that way because of a war,” Jack Liffey explained. “I figured I ought to see what it was about.”
“Are you one of those Americans who feel it wasn’t worth the candle?”
Jack Liffey considered for a moment. It wasn’t hard to guess the politics of anyone in Little Saigon but he wasn’t about to sign onto a doomed exile crusade, even for conversational purposes. “Every country is worth it,” he said. “I think what people mean when they say that is more complicated. It was a civil war and America was a big clumsy oaf who did more harm than good, and it probably couldn’t have been any other way.”
The café au lait arrived, with a lot more milk than he liked, but he could go that far for politeness’ sake. The waitress gave Jack Liffey a curious look before leaving again. The boys at the back asked her something as she passed and she shook her head.
“I agree with you, Mr. Liffey, but not many people here in Little Saigon would do. Actually, that is an understatement.”
“Yeah, I get it. Most political exiles are a bit sensitive.” He stirred a spoonful of sugar into the fat cup and sipped at it. “Worth the candle. Your idiom seems very British.”
“I learned in a language school run by British, and I taught English at a lycée in Saigon. That fact alone made it necessary for me to evacuate as soon as I could. In the days after a victory there isn’t a lot of subtle discrimination among the victors. The children who drove the tanks into Saigon in 1975 seemed to feel if you knew about something you must have supported it. In fact, I had opposed the government. I was advisor for a student newspaper that was regularly shut down by the censors, but I was put into a reeducation camp for over a year. We survived on cassava and singing communist songs.”
“Are you bitter?”
“Not really. There was so much injustice and pain—for centuries—that my meagre share was nothing. And we have become quite happy here. My wife and I bore a daughter as soon as we got out of the tents down at Camp Pendleton and I am very proud of her. My daughter was valedictorian at Westminster High School, and she just completed a university degree at Irvine.”
“And she’s disappeared?”
He nodded and fell silent.
“You know, I’d be hopeless asking questions in your community. Completely useless.”
“I know that. She isn’t in our community. I would know.”
It was amazing what parents didn’t know, Jack Liffey thought, but he didn’t offer the opinion. “How do you know she’s gone?”
“She is a good daughter and even though she has her own flat she comes every day to see us
. She stopped coming a week ago and she has not been home either. Her landlord checked inside at my insistence. Bread on the counter was turning to mold.”
“Did you tell the police?”
“Yes.”
“Are the police here inclined to help people in your community?”
He gave a small shrug with his hands. “As little as possible. They have set up a Vietnamese…branch, in response to gang extortions and home invasions, but they are not very effective.”
There was some sort of ruckus at the back of the noodle shop, and one of the boys in black threw something on the table and strode out. He brushed hard against Jack Liffey’s chair, cursing once, and Minh Trac watched the boy depart with a strained composure. The boy had a checkerboard shaved into the short sides of his flattop.
“Gang kids?” Jack Liffey asked.
Minh Trac nodded. “Phuong had absolutely nothing to do with gang boys.”
“That’s her name?”
“Minh Phuong to her mother. Phuong Minh now. Most of her generation have reversed the order of their names and put the family name last, the way Westerners do. A lot of them even choose American names. Tommy and Johnny and Cheryl. They want to be Americans.”
“Doesn’t Phuong mean phoenix?” Jack Liffey asked.
Minh Trac was mildly surprised. “You might say that.”
He remembered it from Graham Greene. It was the name of the embittered journalist’s mistress in The Quiet American, and he also remembered for some reason that Greene had added, But nothing these days is fabulous and nothing rises from its ashes. “Did she have a job?”
Something about the question seemed to disturb the man, but Jack Liffey knew better than to try to read motives across cultures. “She was going to go back to get an advanced degree, but in the meantime she has done several odd jobs.”
“What’s her field?”
“Business. We’ve become a very practical people. Will you agree at least to look for her in the wider community?”
