Read The Orange Curtain for Free Online Page A

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