The Orange Curtain

by John Shannon

  “What this thing?”

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

  She hugged him. “This like cowboy movie. You not ride away and leave wounded friend for Indians.”

  He pointed down at the handcuffs on their ankles. “Our fate is one.”

  “Ah.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Like some dinner left from other Wednesday.”

  He smiled and took her hand, and they set off uphill to intersect what looked like a deer track that would take them up toward the tower. Barefoot, the climb was no picnic as sharp little granite flakes made them step carefully. As they clambered up the slope, the buzz grew stronger and gained an electrical crackle. Before they got very far, she stopped him.

  “I sorry, Jack, but I got to find a bush and do some business.”

  “Sure.” He pointed to a dense sugarbush. She squatted and he turned away, as far toward decent discretion as he could get, and glanced around the hills vigilantly. The rain seemed to be giving up. A contrail was visible high up in a big break in the cloud and the air had that crystaline sparkle that it did after a rain, the trees along the ridge lines sharp and distinct like models for an untainted world. They had climbed enough that he had a clear view of the fire road the VW had come in on. It was on the opposite slope, and his eye traced it uphill to what must have been the turnout where Billy Gudger had parked. They hadn’t come very far at all in the night.

  “Okay, guy. Happy campers now.”

  He took her hand again and they set off. As long as he kept his offside pace short, they managed a pretty good rhythm, like experts at the three-legged race at a company picnic. Before long they reached the graded service road, which was better underfoot, and then in a few minutes the ridge where the snap-crackling power pylon was rooted on little cement pedestals, behind a chain link fence. Looking down the other side he saw what he hadn’t taken into account. The power lines tended to advance along a straight line, heedless of the terrain, and staying on the service road would force them up and down a roller coaster of ridges. But he had no intention of retracing Billy’s passage in.

  “Follow the yellow brick road,” he said.

  He waited by the dilapidated shed with his binoculars slung around his neck and the pistol tucked into his waist. From here he had a view of the confluence of three canyons that fanned up into the hills, and unless the two of them took some absurdly roundabout path he would certainly intercept them here. A red-tailed hawk circled. Signs and wonders, he thought.

  This was a very bad place, he decided, the temple of some demiurge, perhaps the very thing that was dogging him from within its billowy dark aura. He realized he had brought the car to quite the wrong place the night before without knowing it. And his anger knew no bounds against Mr. Liffey. Betraying him and then running away, purposely misunderstanding everything, depriving him of a mentor who could have helped him reach a new level.

  He saw a lupine blooming purple in the early wet, and he translated in his head:

  Here are fruits, flowers, leaves and branches.

  And here is my heart which beats only for you.

  It was Paul Verlaine, part of Billy Gudger’s covenant with himself to master 19th-century French literature, on the way to reading the French post-structuralists. Just one night before, Billy Gudger remembered that Jack Liffey had rejected his beating heart. In fact, his rage had been so great at the rejection, standing in the cold rain in the night, that he had almost shot himself in the leg as he thrust the pistol back into his belt. It was probably only the ministrations of the toadstone, not yet enfeebled by the demiurge, that had sent the 9mm jacketed round burning down along his thigh and harmlessly into the earth. His last friend, the small freak object in his skull, and not much of a friend at that.

  Everything is wrecked, he had thought last night, fuming and stomping his foot on the muddy road. Abandoned to his own devices, he had no choice but to follow the evil that was woven into the fabric of his life, and it was an unspeakable disappointment because there had been a promise of relief, if only he had been appreciated. He had gone home and lay awake, flip-flopping from a sense of overwhelming need and humiliation, from snatches of tormenting thoughts that bubbled up out of his psyche and repeated themselves over and over in his head, to drum in their laughter and ridicule. They’re going to blame this on sickness. He heard Jack Liffey say that phrase over and over, until he could no longer make out the tone the man had used, and his fears convinced him it had been contempt.

  They’re going to blame this on sickness.

  Lying in his bed, no, her big bed in the main house, his head had filled with grief, then emptied, filled again, until he decided he had to find a way to make this much suffering mean something. He made a conscious effort to think of the kindness Jack Liffey had shown him, the offers of help and companionship, and then he found it in himself to forgive, and he wept for an hour straight. It was love he knew he then felt for Jack Liffey—not romantic love, of course, but the kind called agape, the more common of the two New Testament Greek words for love, the one that was sometimes crudely denoted “brotherly love” but in fact carried the immense weight of the preciousness and worthiness of the one loved. Even thinking it now, his eyes filled with tears at his own virtue in offering Jack Liffey his agape.

  He had slept two hours before dawn, and awoke refreshed, and now he had to find Jack Liffey and express this feeling for him. It could change everything. The woman was irrelevant. He would not harm her because he knew doing so would be bad for his relationship with Jack Liffey, but he cared neither one way nor the other about her and never had.

  He searched the sopping wet hillside with his binoculars. Nothing yet, but they would come. The toadstone throbbed like a small hard point of purpose at the center of his head, and for the moment, the dark cloud seemed to hold back, bustling and purring now.

  They came over another ridge and he saw below that the power line road intersected a firebreak. The roads came in at an angle, and for some reason he remembered Casey Stengel’s famous declaration, “Whenever you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Indeed, he thought.

  In the crotch of the fork, there was a ramshackle little shanty that had probably once held tools for roadwork, though in his experience you found these little huts in every out-of-the-way area in the West, from deserts to mountain ravines, and you never would figure out their purpose. He considered shouldering in through the corrugated metal door, and wondered if he’d find a tool to pry at the handcuffs, or even something he could use as a weapon. He felt terribly defenseless.

  “I’m so hungry I could eat my arm,” she declared.

  He was so woozy in the head that he actually tried to take her observation seriously. He wondered if those air crash victims in the Andes could have eaten their own non-essential body parts for strength, a finger or a whole hand to get started on their trek, the forearm the next day, then up to the shoulder. Where would the critical point come? A leg—as long as the other was left to hop onward to safety?

  “There are a lot of your body parts I could snack on,” he said, and she took his arm with small warm hands and squeezed.

  He thought he heard a skittering in the brush as they came down toward the shed, probably another coyote or some jackrabbit tucking back into its hole.

  And then Billy Gudger was standing right there in the sun, clasping at his pistol with both hands as if a breeze might come up and pluck it away from him.

  “Shit!” Jack Liffey yelled, and it seemed to startle the young man.

  “Don’t move don’t move don’t move!” Billy Gudger acted bewildered.

  “What you going to want…?” Tien started in with a menacing throb in her voice.

  “Hush,” Jack Liffey said. His mind was back into high gear, pushing the weariness and the cruel disappointment away. “Billy, you don’t want to hurt anybody. We can all work together to find a solution for this.”

  The youn
g man seemed frozen, immobilized by some struggle inside himself.

  “Please don’t let yourself believe that because you did something once, you have to go on doing it,” Jack Liffey said. “Every one of us is better than the worst things we do.” He rememberered someone saying that, perhaps Father Greg Boyle.

  The young man gagged a couple of times and then a word emerged. It sounded like “Agape.”

  Could it possibly have been agape? Jack Liffey knew it was Greek, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember what it meant.

  “It’s okay, Billy. Just be calm.”

  The young man was crying, trembling with it, tears gushing down his cheeks. “I want. Help.”

  “Sure, of course you do. I’ll help you. I’ll stay with you and make sure things work out. I’m a little cold and sore right now. Could we go somewhere more comfortable and talk?”

  Billy Gudger nodded crazily, almost as if his head had taken off on its own and he couldn’t stop it. The young man kept his distance, but motioned them along a spur road. Jack Liffey relaxed a notch inside. If the young man had meant to kill them, the time to do it was passing. As long as they didn’t antagonize him, they had a chance to get back to civilization where a gunshot would be impossible. Tien came along quietly, holding Jack Liffey’s arm like a C-clamp and apparently trusting him to handle things. The black VW was parked just out of sight where the side road stopped dead in a box canyon.

  They were made to swear not to cause trouble and then put into the folded-down back seat again. Billy Gudger was still having trouble talking, and his eyes were red-rimmed and a little crazy.

  The car roared to life and then slowly joggled down out of the hills, and Jack Liffey decided a soothing voice was a good idea so he went on at random about redemption and the transforming power of kindness.

  “When I was a child, Billy, I was very lonely like you and I walked along a path that I thought was the path of honor, but all of a sudden one day I came to a fork and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even know the path of life had forks back then. I thought the path I was on was perfectly simple. There was a kind of fierce personal honor that I followed like a pole star, and the only alternative was these fantasies I had of incredible violence. If my honor was violated, I had to obliterate whatever caused it. But then I stumbled on a fork that I didn’t know was there. I started to see another world along this other road where I might be able to love things that weren’t perfect as well as hate the bad. It was a world where things were a lot less simple, but I realized that I shared coming to that place with thinkers all through history and they all found ways to say goodbye to their violent dreams. It’s the fork to growing up, Billy. And I took it.”

  “I’m so tired,” the young man said.

  “That’s because you’ve been holding onto everything by yourself. I’ll take some of your burden now.”

  The young man nodded. “Please. I can’t think any more now. We can talk soon.”

  “That’s fine,” Jack Liffey said. “Remember, I’m with you, whatever you need.”

  Tien rested her head against his chest, and he realized none of them had slept very much that long, long night.

  TWENTY

  Waking from Sleep

  He kept getting the impression that Billy Gudger wanted to apologize for something as he drove, but the apologies aborted themselves, one after another, in chagrined head bobs until Jack Liffey and Tien Joubert found themselves back in the dismal house and ankle-cuffed to the old sleeper sofa again and the TV was on loud to a soap opera, and it was as if the intervening night and morning had never existed, except that all three of them had somehow got muddy and wounded and exhausted. In some curious prudery, Billy draped a knitted afghan over Tien’s shoulders so he wouldn’t have to look at her fluorescent blue brassiere.

  Billy sat down in the overstuffed chair under the flying ducks, and he played with the pistol idly as if it were something else. Jack Liffey knew he had to stay focused and keep his spirits well up to deal with Billy on some very intense level now. If he was going to get a break this time it wouldn’t be a physical opening, but some manner of worming his way through a chink in the young man’s psyche. After all the failing relationships that he had navigated through, Jack Liffey felt he had developed a pretty good ear for the moment-to-moment—the shadings that were revealed as hearts shifted imperceptibly toward danger or away. And he knew that trying too hard, or seeming to, could drag you right back to the thing you feared the most, so he needed as delicate a touch as he could possibly devise, but he was so weary it was hard even to stay awake.

  Billy Gudger stared intently at the floor. Without warning he looked up and spoke with a fierce petulance.

  “You betrayed me and ran away. I don’t know how I could ever trust you again.”

  Jack Liffey was taken aback. Having recently been driven far into the night in order to be murdered, it was hard to readjust to seeing his attempted escape as a kind of betrayal. “Billy, I’m sorry you feel that I failed you. I can understand how that makes you feel. Sometimes it’s best after a bad experience not to try to rebuild things on the same ground, but to start all over again. We need to find a ground to build our friendship on that we both trust.”

  “I just don’t know.” The young man crossed his arms, and from somewhere deep inside himself, Jack Liffey was surprised to find he could muster a sense of empathy for all that deranged loneliness.

  “I know next to nothing about toadstones,” he said. “That’s certainly something you have on me. Could you tell me about them?”

  “I hope you had fun in Santa Royale with your obliging little slut!” a stringy blond woman on the TV proclaimed.

  “It’s a bufonite,” Billy Gudger blurted, as if correcting the diction of the woman on the screen. He halted and glared at Jack Liffey, considering whether he was going to explain the term, but finally gave in and his tone softened. “That’s a kind of bony fossil. I told you. Many of them were just the teeth and palate bones of a fish that stuck together and fossilized that way, but people believed they formed in the heads of toads, I don’t know why. They wore them for good luck and to ward off evil spells. My mom is three parts gypsy and she always had lot of seeing powers, and she told me that most of the toadstones in museums and private collections were just what the scientists thought, fossilized teeth and palate bones, but every once in a while there was a real one that actually had formed in the head of a toad. And not just toads, either. There was a time when I was little when I started slurring words and they thought I had a brain tumor and they did an X-ray. Mom says she saw the X-ray and though there was no tumor, there was very clearly a toadstone, like a calcified kidney stone or something down by the medulla. Maybe it should be called a Billystone.” He chuckled, but the humor collapsed instantly. “Mom said it would protect me always, but it hasn’t done a very good job.”

  “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 it
s 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.