The Orange Curtain Read Free Page A

the wall beside the kid from the noodle shop.
    “Hello, gentlemen. I hope you don’t object to my sitting here with you for a minute or two.”
    Only the boy who was farthest away glanced at him but immediately looked away. If they had been speaking English before, they were into Vietnamese now, sing-songing gently and nonchalantly. There was a big carton of ramen in the flower bed, like something stolen off a truck, and the boy one over from him reached in for a packet which he tore into. The packet had very pink shrimp on it.
    “You look like the people who know what’s actually going down around here.”
    The boy shook the spice packet onto the ground and broke the big block of dried ramen in half with a crackle like stomping a plastic toy. He began chewing off bits of one of the halves. Jack Liffey looked away, watching an old Asian woman in canvas slippers walk up the other side of the street carrying a frayed paper bag in her arms. She reached a bus bench, but instead of sitting she squatted down at the end of the bench to wait.
    “I’m a stranger in these parts,” Jack Liffey offered. He hadn’t expected the humor to work and it didn’t. “But I guess you already figured that out.” The boys spoke a few lilting words to one another, then fell silent again. The silent treatment was probably supposed to worry him and make him nervous, but it didn’t. Sooner or later though he’d have to cut his losses.
    “You see, I’m looking for a missing Vietnamese girl and I thought you might be able to help me.”
    That stilled any fidgeting. Another boy tore into a ramen packet. Actually he found all the testosterone nonchalance rather touching, just boys really, trying to face down a world that probably seemed a lot more hostile to them than he’d ever know. On Tu Do Street he’d been the vulnerable outsider, guarding what he carried against a snatch, but here they were the prey to a big busy Anglo world that by and large probably didn’t give a damn what happened to their self-respect.
    The boy next to him finally turned and met his eyes. “ Diddy mao , big cunt.”
    He knew the Vietnamese words, though he did not know their literal meaning. Anyone who’d been in Saigon for long had heard the GIs telling the peskiest of the pimps and touts to fuck off in no uncertain terms. He imagined if Gandhi had stayed long enough in that corrupting environment, even he might have broken down and used the expression. Right now, coming from a boy who was seven or eight inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter than him, it made him want to laugh, but he didn’t.
    “Minh Trac asked me to find his daughter,” he said equably. “Phuong. Am I pronouncing her name right?”
    The boy looked away again. They seemed to be inhibited by his presence now and didn’t even speak to one another. People were accumulating at the bus stop, including a Latino in an electric wheelchair who kept gunning it a few inches forward and back.
    Far away a police siren whoop-whooped and an armada of seagulls came over low. Finally the bus showed up. He’d never actually watched a kneeling bus do its trick. The front hissed downward as if the whole vehicle were deflating so the wheelchair could roll straight on. Then it pumped itself back up and drove off. The old woman was still squatting at the end of the bench as if waiting for a better bus.
    “My mistake, gentlemen. I thought you might know what’s going on around town.” He got up and started away.
    “Hey, mister.”
    It was the boy from the noodle shop. Jack Liffey waited while some war went on in the boy’s psyche.
    “We like Phuong. Most college girl stuck up, treat us like shit. They walk past with hard feet, bam bam bam, you boys all bums. Not Phuong.”
    His English was not very good for some reason and Jack Liffey guessed he’d come over fairly recently from one of the camps, probably even born in the camps. Maybe that was the only real social distinction between these boys and