by John Shannon
“No.”
“I was surprised when you told me, especially since I’d just been talking about her so lightly, but I’m not pleased that I don’t feel more pain. I hardly knew her, I guess.”
“No one can weep for every death. That’s megalomania. Let’s make some more tea for both of us and sit down for a minute.” He wanted to go over the whole afternoon of the video shoot with the young man.
A police siren was passing somewhere nearby and he found his lips forming the sounds weeoo-weeoo-weeoo as if all the noises in the world had to emanate through him. He tapped one foot and his lips formed bang-bang with the tapping. It was an interesting sensation, and a very powerful one. He looked at one of his mother’s steak knives sitting on the counter and thought, Move. Rotate like a compass needle. It budged a little and that was enough to maintain the feeling of power.
“What are you doing out there?” The complaint came shrilly out of the living room, but without pause for an answer, the TV sound came up. Jeopardy, that tinkly music that was like yanking his spine out of his back and flaying it. He would turn that off soon enough.
He had not been able to think up a way to get her to stumble on the circus boxcar in some casual way, so he had gone in the other direction entirely. He was going to make it a surprise, a big deal. He imagined how pleased she would be to be reminded of her life with the circus and her lover.
Billy Gudger had gone to the supermarket and bought boxes of animal crackers, the ones with the animal cage on the front of the box, and he had set them out on the glass cake tray surrounding the railroad coach, as if they had been offloaded and were in process of being set up. The scale was a little wrong but that didn’t matter, because they only added atmosphere to the real centerpiece. He had taken an old plastic toy soldier and cut off the rifle and replaced it in the figure’s hands with a tiny brush and palette he had made out of a toothpick and cardboard, and he had heated and moved the arms so the man appeared to be an artist holding out his tools. Then he had daubed the figure with nail polish to turn the fatigues into a colorful vest. The painter stood before the circus boxcar, eyeing his handiwork, and resting on a small easel made of toothpicks was a card that said Will Detrick, Famed Circus Wagon Painter.
He patted the cracker boxes a little closer together so the big chrome cake cover would fit over the entire diorama.
“What’s a subordinate clause?” he heard and in the host’s braying voice, “That’s correct!” and an eruption of applause.
When he carried the cake tray in he stopped to elbow the TV set off with the push knob. The abrupt end to the music was a delight.
“Hey! Damn you, Billy, I could have got that one. What are you up to? This isn’t my birthday.”
He just kept to his superior smile and set the cake tray on the clutter of women’s magazines on the flimsy coffee table. Her huge bulk was sprawled on the sofa under a knit afghan and he knew she wouldn’t be able to reach the cake tray to take the top off herself without a major rousing so he would stay in control. He could see her curiosity had been stirred, but she wouldn’t admit it.
“They were doing grammar and I know about that, so you don’t have to act all smarty pants.” Despite her words, her eyes were fixed on the cake tray. The floor lamp glared on the chrome cover. “You can’t even button your shirt without getting the buttons wrong. Look at the top button.”
But he wouldn’t be distracted. The anticipation was wonderful. Her awe and delight would be something to behold.
“Okay, come on. If it’s something to eat I want it. Right this minute!”
He smiled and pulled back the sliding latches that held the chrome cover in place.
“Ta-daa,” he said, lifting.
“You do still partake of the telephone?” Jack Liffey asked.
Mark Glassford smiled and nodded. “For now.”
“Could I make a call?”
“Sure. It’s on the wall in the kitchen.”
It was an old wall phone, the first generation of pushbutton phones with no extra buttons or answering machine or flashing lights or food processors.
Tien Joubert answered by repeating her phone number, a nice prudent practice for a woman living alone.
“Your home phone does work after all,” he said. “I want to make my report.”
“No,” she barked. “You come here, report, or I no pay you. Come right now!”
And she hung up to leave him no option.
TWELVE
The Anxious Type
She had a folding workout bench with powder blue barbells up on the rack tucked into the corner of the all-blue living room. And just to complete the surreal scene, a massive cabin cruiser was passing slowly down the yacht channel outside, lit up like a casino on the move. “You wait and sit. I got to finish exercise. You can give report now if you want.”
Tien Joubert was wearing a skimpy stretchy top in some fleshy color that didn’t leave a lot to the imagination.
“Wouldn’t that interfere with the entertainment that’s been laid on?” he said, but she ignored the inconvenient comment as she leaned back and ducked under for her bench presses. There probably wasn’t more than ten pounds of weight on the bar, two very small plastic-coated disks, so she had little trouble manipulating the weights all by herself as she lifted off and began the presses.
“Got to exercise with weight now, they say, protect the bones for us old women.”
“You’ll never age,” he said. “This is a waste of time. You’ll have the body of a twenty-five year old until the earth’s orbit decays and the sun uses up its fuel.”
“Flattery get you everywhere. Five-six-seven.”
Jack Liffey waited, thinking over what he should do about Billy Gudger. He would need to talk to that strange young man once more before telling Frank Vo about him. Perhaps there was some innocent explanation, perhaps he had actually dropped her off somewhere that night, somewhere he could prove. Jack Liffey could just picture the Orange County SWAT vans squealing up to Billy’s house from all directions and men in flak jackets and riot helmets hurling out of the armored blue vans to pound across his lawn, the one in the lead carrying that big black battering ram. He didn’t want to see the kid spooked right up over the high side by those dragons he had guarding the frontiers of his touchy sensibility. If he found himself the least suspicious about the kid’s answers, he’d go straight to Lt. Vo. And it could certainly wait a day. Phuong wasn’t going to be any more dead.
“You got report, Jack Liffey?”
“I’ll trade you. I’ll give you my report if you tell me something about your life in Viet Nam.”
“That long time ago.”
“But it’s an important part of you.”
She was huffing a little. The bench presses may have been laid on for his benefit, but she was really doing them. She stopped and toweled off with a powder blue towel. “All sad story exactly same. I very innocent and very weak. Big strong bad guys come kill everything, take everything. I very hurt and sad but stay innocent. I run away and start over. End of story. Moral: don’t be weak next time.”
“I’ll bet there’s some details that make your story different.”
“You mean, like, before bad guys come, I and my friend Ly play tennis every day at Cirque Sportif in Saigon. Then we put back on silk ao dai and go drink tea on verandah of Continental Palace Hotel and walk through flower market on Nguyen Hue on way home? That stuff some detail, but not instructive at all. Or peasant boys from National Liberation Front ride truck into Saigon, smash in my door and steal my beautiful picture of the dragon who marry the fairy spirit and begin the Vietnamese people way back in the before time? That not instructive either. Come with me.”
She walked down the hall and he had little choice if he wanted to keep talking to her. He saw what Vo meant about Tien getting her way. Before he realized that he’d just followed her into a large bathroom, she had stripped off the exercise leotard and turned to make sure he got a good look as she s
tepped gracefully into a large standup Japanese-style bathtub that was steaming away.
“You can join or sit there, it okay.”
He sat on a little bench with scrolled ends that reminded him somehow of Napoleon.
“Ooooh. Feel good all over.”
“So what sort of detail would be instructive?” he asked.
Her face took on a funny expression. “I leaving Saigon on Huey chopper and I put ten kilo heroin in suitcase and I take heroin to Paris and build whole commercial life on money I make. That instructive. It not true, but it instructive.”
He wasn’t so sure it was untrue, from the quick and confident way it had come to mind. It would explain a lot.
“I wouldn’t really blame you,” he offered. “It was a rough time. And you were on your own.”
“You bet. You want get in? Hot water super-duper on the soft parts of you.”
“No thanks.”
“You report now.”
He told her about visiting the divinity student, and how what the young man had told him meant he had to make another visit to Billy Gudger to find out if he’d given Phuong a ride home, but she didn’t really seem all that interested. She told him she had talked to Minh Trac that afternoon and she had money from him for the work Jack Liffey had already completed, plus the first day’s wages from her.
She got out of the tub, and stood there naked and dripping on the tiles. Her body was remarkably well toned for a woman who was probably in her late 40s, and there was something fascinating about a woman who had no shame at all about her body. He wondered if it was Buddhism.
“Now we make love very nice,” she said.
“I don’t think so.”
“You like me better if I wiggle my eye at you, say, ‘Ooh, Meeester Leeefeeee, you soooo strong?’”
He laughed, and she sat right next to him on the antique bench. Before he knew it, she was fiddling with the top button of his shirt and he tried to stop her, but not very hard.
“I was warned about you,” he said.
“Who said?”
“Lt. Vo said you always get what you want.”
“He absolutely goddam right.”
When he dropped off the freeway at National Boulevard in Culver City, he saw a fire flaring up in the darkness ahead. He slowed as he approached, and he could hear sirens in the distance but none of the fire trucks were there yet and it didn’t look like they were going to be able do much good anyway. A small bungalow was already engulfed and a score of people stood around hurling things into the fire from piles of possessions that appeared to have been moved out of the house earlier. He saw a ladder-back chair silhouetted clearly as it sailed into the blaze, carton after carton of assorted goods, an armload of shirts on hangars. One hefty woman charged the fire with a floor lamp like a lance and hurled it in through a window that was too bright to look at.
A tricycle sailed high but missed and bounced back off the front wall, and to the side he noticed a young man expertly shagging paperback books into the conflagration with a baseball bat. It was remarkable, he thought, how he’d lost much of his curiosity about a scene like this. Only a few years earlier the reason for all this odd behavior would have piqued his interest. But was it reason, he thought, as explanation that interested him, or reason as motive, or reason as cause, or just reason as an ordered, sane way of thinking about the world? None of it tugged at him any longer. Safety was what counted, and he drove on.
He had repeatedly showered Tien’s smell off him, but Marlena still fussed and complained and accused, and for the first time since they had begun living together, she was absolutely right, but he had to fight her and resist and demur just exactly as he always had, despite the guilt and dejection that soured his self-opinion, or she would know for sure. A drink would have been wonderful, he thought, as she followed him from room to room, tugging at his clothes and patting him down as if a foreign pair of panties might fall out of one of his pockets.
“Mar, please. You can’t chain me up in the house. I’m out hunting missing kids.”
“But I’m afraid and you don’t care that I’m afraid,” she wailed.
“What can I do about your fears? Tell me.”
Then she was weeping and before long she was better again, poking in the fridge to find some food for them to eat and making him feel even guiltier. There had always been an adjustment period every time their paths diverged and then ran back together, but it had been getting longer. And the downward spiral of his own ethics wasn’t helping.
While she was cooking, he called Art Castro at home. “Hello there, Arturo. How’s the family?”
“They’re up in Fresno at my mother-in-law’s for a week. She’s got some niece doing her quinceañera, you know, the 15-year-old coming-out thing.”
“Uh-huh. I think I must have missed mine.”
“Boys got a different thing. Don’t you Irish do anything?”
“I don’t think anybody outside South Boston keeps any of that Old Country stuff alive. Except potatoes. My old man had to have potatoes in some form at every meal.”
“Funny, isn’t it? Potatoes is a new world plant but you could live the rest of your life in Mexico and not see one.”
“I couldn’t. I have too much trouble with the language.”
“Yeah, you got to see to that, man. You just got to check the demographics to see you’re living in the far north part of Mexico. They’re reclaiming the place little by little with their feet.”
“Good luck to them. We seem to have screwed it up for them pretty good. Did you find out anything about Marvin Resnik?”
“A blowhard of the first water. But he’s harmless, and yeah, he never leaves that house. But never. They had a mudslide and flood in the big el niño storm season couple years ago and when the fire department cleared people out, he held them off with a shotgun and they finally made him sign a waiver to stay put. Hope that’s what you wanted to hear.”
“I was just eliminating him as a suspect, as the cops say.”
“Suspect? Man, you sound like a real detective.”
“I scare myself sometimes. Thanks, Art.”
The old man with a big paunch framed by fluorescent orange suspenders stopped his push-mower and mopped his brow next door. Probably hurrying to get his grass taken care of before the rain struck. Dark clouds were creeping their way, and a whiff of moisture was on the southerly wind. Jack Liffey stepped up to the picket fence alongside the driveway. “Excuse me, could you tell me if Billy Gudger lives here?”
“If that shop doesn’t fix my power mower soon, I’m going to nuke them. He lives in that place in back. You a bill collector?”
“Would you expect that with Billy?”
“It’s none of my beeswax, mister.”
He went back to mowing and Jack Liffey found the cottage at the end of the driveway. It had probably once been a detached garage but had been rebuilt into a stand-alone apartment. At MediaPros they’d told him Billy Gudger had called in sick again, and he finally wheedled the home address out of the gangly writer. The old black VW that Mark Glassford had described was parked at the curb out front, in the shadow of a tall neon Palm Reader sign that almost overhung the street.
He knocked at the cottage door and waited. The place was so small you could tell any occupant would either come in ten seconds or not at all. A little brass plaque right under the peephole said, This room not to be occupied by more then 110 persons. Fullerton F.D. Somebody’s idea of a joke, but it didn’t seem the kind of humor that would emanate from the Billy Gudger he remembered. The curtain was open a crack and after a minute, he peered in. It was hard to tell for certain in the murk, but the single room was so small that anybody in there would have to be hiding in a corner of the bathroom where the door was open, or under the single bed.
Back in front he rang the bell on the big house. He could hear the ringing inside, a sort of hapless hollow plea that echoed through the house as if it would never be honored. There were no answering mov
ements. One window beside the door had gauze curtains. Shielding his eyes, he could see a big old console television that was turned off, and what looked like a cake tray sitting on top of it. The tray was empty.
Under the big red hand out front, it said, Palmistry, Bibliomancy, Tarot. Genuine Rom wisdom. Se habla Espagnol. It didn’t say anything about invisibility or out-of-body travel, but it was possible Sonya Gudger had her own car and they had both gone off somewhere in it. He looked for the gardener, but he had abandoned his mower and gone inside. Jack Liffey went back and knocked once more, and then decided to kill some time and come back later.
His breathing finally began to slow down. Billy Gudger stood with his back to the front door, frightened all of a sudden by the weight of the pistol in his hand. It was heavier than it should have been, as if each time he used it, it grew in mass by sucking in the souls that it set loose. He could imagine the swap occurring—the bullet zinging out and the soul compacting down and swooshing back to hurl itself down the barrel and then snug into the vacated space in the clip. It was just physics. Equal and opposite reaction. Conservation of momentum.
He had watched Jack Liffey walk up the driveway, talk briefly to Ed Jamgochian, then knock at his own door in back. The man had even bent to read the brass Sanskrit plaque. But when he saw Jack Liffey bend again to peer in the window, his hair had stood on end and a piece of ice settled against his spine. If he did the same at the service porch of the big house, there would be trouble. Billy Gudger had got her as far as the service porch last night, but then he had no idea what was next. There was no way he could get her great bulk into his car by himself.
He kept wanting to go find his mother and ask her advice on what to do next, but of course that wasn’t possible any more. Something had happened to her. His mind had trouble fixing on what it was. He looked at the old brocade sofa and saw the reddish brown stain on it and realized he would have to do something about that, too. There was way too much to do in this room and he’d been immobilized most of the night by having to deal with other rooms, clearing out of the fridge all of the food that could spoil and moving clothes out of the bedroom.
