The Orange Curtain Page 4

  “Sure, thanks. Love it.” He used his other foot to shoo the dog gently away and it yipped in complaint. “Hello, there, Fidel. Are we happy, tonight?”

  “He loves Maeve bein’ here.”

  “It’s mutual, I’m sure.” Just about every evening, he had the same thought at least once—how easily the chihuahua would fit into the microwave. He could see the door closing and the light coming on, the turntable starting up as the tiny brown eyes got much bigger and the mouth opened soundlessly. His own dog, a big incorrigible half coyote, was confined out in the back yard. Loco would have eaten Fidel for a canapé.

  “So how were The Young and the Clueless today?”

  “Restless,” she said in a huff. Normally he was careful not to joke with her like that—she tended to react to his irony as if he were speaking a secret language in order to make fun of her—but Maeve’s appearance had led him to relax a little too much.

  “Sorry. Of course.” Marlena had had a hard life, she had a real core of human decency to her, and sometimes he felt such tenderness for her that he got woozy with it. Other days his own temper would snap out uncontrollably at something untutored she said that he felt reflected back on him somehow. It didn’t make him like himself much, and he hoped time would sort it out.

  “Baker, the tall lady with the sports car that owns the gift shop, and her old boyfriend, the intern, are getting back together,” she explained, as if they were all real people who lived right down the road and came to Sunday barbecues.

  “Great.”

  The front door creaked and the dog yipped and tore out of the kitchen toward Maeve. Jack Liffey looked forward to going out and giving Loco a big hug later.

  “Stop that!” he heard Maeve say sharply, and he pictured the little dog humping away on one of her fuzzy brown shoes.

  A Santa Ana was blowing, scouring the sky with hot dust and filling the dry night air with anxiety. Billy Gudger saw a couple of tall palms lean west and then lurch even farther in a gust. His old VW ran better in damp air, but it never got much of a chance for that. A family from somewhere in the Midwest scurried away from Disneyland toward one of the cheap motels, the father in a flapping sport coat bent forward in the lead with the others towing behind. Other than that, Harbor Boulevard was almost deserted.

  Then he saw one at last standing by a bus stop. Sometimes the cops swept through and drove them all over to Knott or Beach. A willowy black woman in a tight bandeau and scarlet hot pants, it was unmistakable what she was doing there. At least, that’s what he figured, but who could ever tell for sure?

  The third time past, she noticed his beat-up black VW and she met his eyes and winked in a friendly way. Her hair was straightened and her lips were a lurid red. The engine missed a little, the famous VW hesitation, before Billy Gudger could accelerate away. If only he knew what to say, he thought. If only he’d read in a book or seen in a movie exactly what to say to a prostitute when you were hiring her, he might have been able to do it, but he hated doing anything for the first time. There was too much chance you’d get it wrong, be conspicuous, do something they would think ludicrous and have them laugh at you. Some day he’d buy one of those dish microphones and set up a block away and listen for a while and then he’d learn how to do it. Or—he had an inspiration—he could borrow a shotgun mike from the prop room at work without even asking.

  A tumbleweed crossed the road ahead of him in two rolls and one big hop. He wondered where that one’s journey had begun. Its true name was salsola kali, or Russian thistle, a pest that had been introduced into South Dakota by accident in a shipment of animal feed in 1877. The offspring had spread uncontrollably by dumping as many as 200,000 seeds per plant as they rolled. A year earlier, 1876, Japanese kudzu had been imported into the South to grace and shade the verandahs of the old mansions, and before long they’d discovered to their horror that kudzu grew as much as a foot a day until it had ruined millions of acres of cropland.

  Billy Gudger liked the concept of introduced species that flourished, outsiders who wormed their way into niches where they had never been and where they knew they didn’t belong.

  Sweet are the uses of adversity,

  Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,

  wears yet a precious jewel in its head.

  —Shakespeare, As You Like It (1599)

  FOUR

  Go See Wyatt Earp

  Not a soul was out and about when they pulled away from the curb, no cars passing on any of the crossroads ahead, and it felt like they’d fallen through into some post-apocalyptic world.

  “Could everybody be in eating lunch at once?” he said.

  “It’s SC against UCLA,” Maeve explained. “It’s on TV.”

  “What, a spelling bee?”

  She smiled. She knew his taunts against sports were wide and frequent but they were not very deep, just a mild fever that had to roll off him whenever the subject came up. “They’re parsing Latin verbs.”

  “Conjugating,” he corrected.

  “You’ve got a real ’tude today.”

  “Whoa. Tude. Twenty-three skidoo,” he said.

  She refused to rise to the bait. “How are you and Marlena doing?” she asked.

  “Pretty good between rounds.” It had turned out to be a terrible night, with Marlena so upset about something that despite trying everything he could think of, including the goofy little vibrator they’d bought, he couldn’t get her to come, which was so unlike her it surprised both of them, but she wouldn’t talk about it. “Which way?”

  “Up the side street there, by the yellow house,” Maeve directed. “Is it me being at the house? Does she mind when I come to visit?”

  “I don’t think so; she seems to like you a lot, but you could ask her what’s eating her if you’re curious. Maybe she’ll tell you.” He parked where she pointed.

  “I will. Men never know how to talk about stuff like that.”

  He wondered what she thought stuff like that was, but she was already cranking the window down and grinning. The house had probably started as one of the Culver elf houses that had been built in the 1930s by bored sceneshop guys from the defunct Willat Movie Studio. There were five or six of them scattered around town with witch eaves and gnome windows and gurgling pools.

  “Gnarly,” he said, but she wasn’t giving him any credit at all for slang.

  The house was basically a bungalow in river-bottom rock, but someone had found a way to insert cacti into all the pointing between the rocks, and the structure now bristled with little flowering beavertails and fat barrels and phallic stalks craning upward from their niches, and spiny cholla and deep green woolly kegs. The yard too had been pared down to dirt and then covered with rock and cacti so it was hard to see how anyone could get to the door. As a final touch, the roof sloped gradually and it too was a rock garden beset with cacti.

  Despite the unconventional exterior, he could see a blue glow through the oddly shaped window and somebody in there was watching the game.

  “I’m not sure it’s weird enough for a full point.”

  “Daddy! I gave you a point for all those plastic palm trees the city put on Venice Boulevard and that’s not very weird at all.”

  “Especially since they’re all gone now. Okay, you win. We’ll go get some lunch if you don’t mind a quick stop at Mike’s first.”

  “Mike Lewis? I thought he lived up in Pasadena.”

  “When Siobhann left, he took an apartment in Mar Vista that’s closer to the architecture school.”

  Mike Lewis was a social historian who’d had a big vogue five years earlier after releasing a book that had tattled on a lot of L.A. power brokers, but had fallen on hard times and was eking out a living teaching part time at art schools while he waited for the next vogue.

  “You’re grumpy today,” she said.

  “Sorry, Punkin. It’s just lack of sleep. I’ll perk up when I get some coffee. I really am happy to be with you.”

  One Gold ring with a la
rge counterfeited Toad stone.

  —The London Gazette (1679)

  “Have one.” Billy held out the juice glass half full of the amber Gallo Cream Sherry she loved. He knew enough to offer only half, because the point was to get her drunk enough to be voluble and then nudge her toward the subject of his father, but if he made the campaign too obvious she’d talk about the stars in Orion or the wisdom of the Tarot just to spite him.

  She squeezed the glass between her fat palms and took a big sip. It was too strong and too sweet to do more than sip, even for her. In the corner of the living room the old TV was murmuring away with some football game. He had no idea why she had it on. She didn’t know football from lacrosse.

  “I’ll bet nobody with the circus ever watched football,” he said, as if idly.

  She squinted suspiciously at him for a moment and then shrugged. “A few of the muscle types did. Circuses always divide into muscle types and art types and the two don’t usually mix much.” She readjusted heavily on the old sofa and grimaced at some memory of pain in her back.

  “Can I get you something?” he offered quickly.

  “Stop it. You’re always making me feel old.”

  “You were one of the art types, I’ll bet.” He settled onto the leather ottoman with the stars and crescent moon embroidered on it.

  “Most of us in the carny end were artistes. We were attached to the Colonel Wills Foster Mid-American Extravaganza and Circus, but we weren’t of it. Even the circus part was a merger of the old Robert E. Wills Traveling Circus and the Colonel Tom Foster Wild West Show and Fierce Animal Exhibition—they just slapped the colonel part up front for the hell of it. The carny started out as a side show to one of the two. It was before my time, almost back to the Chautauqua circuit. Everything was separate checks, the circus was one account and we had to pay our own nut. Hell, I bet you don’t even know where that expression about the nut comes from.”

  He shook his head, even though she’d told him a dozen times.

  “In the real old days the circus would roll into some podunk town and rent a big vacant lot on the edge of the place from some farmer or townie which was big enough that they could throw up all their tents and booths. They’d hold their show a few nights or a week, depending on the population thereabouts, and once in a while, circus people not being your super affluent types, they might not make enough to pay what they promised the farmer and also go on eating that week and they’d fold up their tents and skedaddle in the middle of the night without paying.”

  She took a long sip of the sherry and let a shudder wriggle her shoulders.

  “Oooh. So the small-town sheriffs took to pulling the big nut off the wheel of the biggest circus wagon. Sometimes it was off the circus owner’s live-in, or maybe a wagon with the big cats in it, and if they was to try to abscond without paying up, the wheel would fall off. So when you made enough to pay off the land owner and anybody in town you bought provisions from and actually paid the bills, the sheriff gave you your nut back and said you’d paid your nut.” She looked up proudly and he smiled back in appreciation.

  “That’s good.”

  “The expression comes from way back in the horse days, of course. In my day, the old circus wagons were all gone and everything traveled in semis. Sometimes a sheriff would pull a distributor head out of the engine, but who wants to say you paid your distributor head? That’s no good.”

  He waited a moment while she drifted in some sort of nostalgic reverie. “Did you and the sideshow people travel in a different group from the circus?”

  “I got everything I needed in my old woodie wagon and a little Airstream 16-footer.”

  The TV roared for a moment and she glanced at it, as if something had landed from outer space and then she dismissed it from her world.

  “The carny owner, a gent by name of Cordell Blossom, had this super-long tent with a lot of separate partitions that I rented space in. I usually got set up between Missy Araby, the hootchy-kootchy dancer, who was really Ruthie Benjamin from the Bronx, and Gilly Kwitkin, the glass-eating geek. Damn if Gilly didn’t actually crunch down on bottles and eat them. He had a stomach of iron. Between that hootchy-koo music on Missy’s Victrola and the random crunches on the other side, it could get to be a real devil to concentrate on reading palm.”

  He’d heard all of this a hundred times. She never seemed to remember what she’d told him before and what she hadn’t.

  “Did you ever get to go in the big tent and see the main circus?”

  She looked straight at him and smiled a mean smile. “You mean, did I watch the lion tamer? That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t know what the right answer was, so he didn’t reply. He poured her another half glass of sherry and she accepted it grudgingly, but then swigged it down and hissed for a moment. “Okay, I’ll tell you something you don’t know about him. Just to show your mommy’s got a heart, after all. One of these days you go downtown in L.A. and across from Union Station there’s an old restaurant called Philippe’s. You been there?”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s about a hundred years old and it’s been a place for working folk for most of that time. There’s sawdust on the floor and all that, and once a month a bunch of old retired circus folk meet there for breakfast. It’s a big place on two floors, but you stay on the ground floor and you go out into the big room toward the crappers and you’ll see photos of circus people all over the walls and on all the snugs around the booths. One of those you’ll see a man with his hand on the haunches of a tiger and that’s your daddy. He always said tigers were the bigger challenge because they were more unpredictable than lions.”

  She shook her head in some reminiscence and laughed. “Fucking tigers. What do they know?”

  “What else do you remember about him?”

  She drank off the rest of the sherry and wouldn’t accept more.

  “What do I remember?” she said pugnaciously. “Your daddy never knew this, you little punk, and I guess I have to teach you, too. The difference between me and an idiot is I’m not an idiot.”

  “What was his first name?” he asked.

  “Mister,” she said. “That’s enough for a lifetime.”

  A young brown-skinned woman with a single black pigtail opened the door with an Exacto knife in her hand. She was startlingly beautiful in jeans and a blue work shirt, and she had a turquoise belt buckle the size of a toaster.

  “Yeah?” she challenged.

  “I’m sorry. I thought this was Mike Lewis’ place.”

  “Mike!” she yelled and she opened wide and walked away.

  A pinch hitter for Siobhann, he thought. He guessed she was a student. Soon, Mike showed up in a shorty bathrobe with a fat book in his hand.

  “Jack! Maeve! How engaging. I want you to meet my friend Anna Cochise Preciado. She’s almost one hundred percent Chiracahua Apache.” He craned his neck but she’d left the short hallway, and he shrugged. “Anon.”

  They came in off the runway balcony. It was a 1950s stucco apartment building with all the doors off a landing like a motel, and a spiky carriage lamp like a big exploded insect above the half-sunk garage. It was a real comedown from his place on the Arroyo in Pasadena.

  Anna Cochise Preciado was kneeling in the living room in the midst of a dozen cardboard and balsawood models of buildings, and he introduced them. She was at the architecture school, about to graduate, and she already had a commission to work on a school auditorium in San Carlos on the Rez. Maeve took to her immediately and squatted down to ask about the maquettes she was working on.

  Even here the TV was on faintly, with a cheerleader dancing and kicking.

  “You into football, Mike?”

  “In a way. You realize American football is by far the best spectator sport in the world. Unlike soccer, it stops and starts so you can match your strategy against the coaches’, like watching a war and second-guessing Patton. Every series builds up dramatically to succ
ess or failure. And it’s a decisive game. No penalty kick-offs to decide 1-to-1 games. The best team on that day wins.”

  “In some cultures I suppose that would all be considered normal. Can we go for a walk, Mike?”

  “Sure.” He threw on jogging pants and they left Maeve chit-chatting happily with Anna Cochise Preciado and strolled out into the neighborhood. Mar Vista was a no-man’s-land between Venice and Culver City, with no real center and no identity other than as another tattered corner of L.A. where poor whites and poor Latinos shared their fears of an uncertain future. Toppled tricycles and shaggy aloes lined their path as a familiar gloom emanated off Mike Lewis.

  “How’s the thing with Siobhann?”

  “The ‘thing’ is probably fine, but we’re not so hot. I guess you can tell I’m not counting on her coming back soon. Anna’s great but she won’t be here very long.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged. “That’s life in the big city. And Marlena?”

  “The jury’s still out, but I didn’t come to talk about that. I’ve got a job down in Orange County. New job—I always need an edge, it’s what I count on. Your work on L.A. has always helped me sort out which one’s the big dog and which one’s going to go hide under the porch.”

  Mike Lewis sidestepped a buzzing radio controlled racecar that a little boy was aiming at their feet and he smiled. “That’s so like you, Jack, reduce all social history to dick-waving contests. Watch out, kid.”

  The toy car spun around nimbly and headed away.

  “Orange County,” Jack Liffey said. “All I know about it is it’s a big white-flight bedroom for L.A.”

  “All you know about it is wrong. It may have started that way after the war but it graduated a long time ago. I might even write about it one of these days because it’s become a really fascinating new social formation. It’s not a city in the old sense and it’s not a suburb, either. People have been trying to make up names for it like ‘technoburb,’ and ‘edge city’ for ages, but most of the names are off-base. There are maybe 20 of these strange entities scattered around the country, all outside the bigger cities, like Suffolk County in New York, Oakland outside Detroit, Broward in Florida and Silicon Valley up north.”