Not likely. How did you burn your hands?
A household accident, he says. It was a stupid, childish thing.
What happened?
Did you ever hurt anyone? he says.
I blink at him. A thousand times.
No, he says. Didn’t you ever hurt an animal or a child, someone that was weak?
Just for fun?
Curiosity, he says.
Oh, I say. You’re ten years old and you find a frog in the woods. He’s too far from the water and the sun is about to cook him. He’s dragging himself through the dust and you know he’s not gonna make it. You could carry him to water and save his life, or you could just sit there and poke him with a stick and watch him bleed for a while. Because it’s more interesting. Is that what you mean?
Yes, he says. Because you don’t feel anything.
The Blister is a strange bird. He crackles and pops with some kind of nervous rage, but he can’t sustain it. He wants to be supercool and dangerous but he’s too self-conscious. His face betrays him readily and his ordinary fears spill around his feet, glittering like gasoline in a puddle.
I stare at him for a long time and he barks, What?
Everyone is afraid of sympathy, I say. Everyone is cruel.
Why would I listen to you? He sneers. You were in an institution.
And children are the worst, aren’t they?
He crashes around, cursing me. I slip the key into the lock easily, sexually. Then crack the lid of the icebox so carefully I might be stealing a peek at a solar eclipse. I expect a rush of liquid smoke, a spill of maggots. But I bend to sniff at the crack in the lid and smell only vinyl.
Five plastic bags of heroin. I guess ten, maybe twelve ounces each. Five tight little pouches, barely two sorry kilos. I stroke one of them as if it were flesh and the plastic is smooth and cool and soft as a young girl’s breast. I bite it open with my teeth and poke my tongue in through the tear. It’s unpleasantly pure and I may have swallowed too much. The spine uncoils lazily and I suffer false impressions of underwater breathing and the bitter taste of melancholy. But the spiral is only temporary and I can soon form words.
Is this a fucking joke?
The Blister glares at me with such pure loathing it’s almost sexy.
The street value of your kidney, he says. An unloved organ, an accessory you never really needed until you found it missing.
This is what you want?
Oh, yes.
I slit the bag open like the belly of a kitten and the Blister howls. I twirl the bag at him, then another. And soon his face and torso and wretched genitals are white. He’s naked and handcuffed and in another lifetime he might be someone’s lover, squealing like a baby and dipped in sugar. I drop the remaining bags into the toilet.
I’m sure they will float, I say.
The Blister is speechless. I stuff his clothing into the icebox and lock it shut.
Don’t you have anything to say?
He shrugs like a sullen child and I release him from the handcuffs. I offer him the fur coat.
Comfort from the rain, I say.
It’s been too long. I’m shivering and my legs are asleep but I feel like I might grow wings. The train will surely pull away any moment and I run through the station grinning and sweating like a maniac. I have to find Jude before the train leaves. I stop and break the glass on a fire alarm and laugh like a kid as the Klaxons start to whoop. The crowd disintegrates and I become terribly calm.
I reboard the train and hurry to the dining car. I see Jude from behind. Her thick black and blond hair like sun and shadow joined. The knots of her spine faintly reptilian through the tiny white T-shirt. Henry and Isabel sit across from her. I walk toward them, slowly. Isabel yawns lazily. Her lips are swollen and she glows with sex. Henry winks at me, twirling a chunk of sausage on his fork. Jude sucks at a piece of ice and looks at me like a stranger. I take her hand and mutter something about borrowing my wife. Isabel chews the edge of her thumb and the color stubbornly clings to her face.
What’s going on? Jude says. You look insane.
I’m fine. I’m fucking great actually. I hold her hand so tightly I might crush it. I smile and say excuse me to a pair of frail old men who are maddeningly slow to get out of our way. I drag Jude behind me until she stops and pulls her hand free and I remember how strong she is.
Did you know that you have two black eyes?
What? I touch my face and I’m surprised to feel the swollen and tender bones around my eyes. The Blister’s face must be a regular sunset.
Oh, well. I had a little trouble in the bathroom.
She touches my cheek and her hand hangs briefly in the air and I stare at the tip of her finger until I notice a fine white dust on her sharp blue nails. I wait for her to taste it but she doesn’t even blink. She doesn’t glance at the icebox. Where are we going? she says.
I don’t answer and she follows me anyway. I push open the door to our compartment and tell her to get her things. We’re getting off the train, I say.
Oh, no. That’s what she wants. She wants me to run.
I shove my face close to hers. The adrenaline is rushing between us like visible heat.
I’m serious, Jude. Let’s go.
She doesn’t move. Her face is two inches away and all I see are flared nostrils, sharp teeth and cheekbones cut from stone. I wouldn’t want to fight her. But she breathes with me and her face softens, she backs away. She picks up her garment bag and looks around the tiny room. The train begins to rumble.
What’s happened. Who are you running from?
My own personal boogeyman. And yours.
She doesn’t blink. I hope you know what you’re doing, she says.
twenty-three.
I step off the train into razor sunshine as the conductor howls all aboard. The sirens have died away and two or three firemen wander irritably through the station. Jude is behind me. I walk through the thinning crowd, my eyes and ears trying to take in everything. A fat lady hunched over a nickel slot machine, her heavy right hand dipping with strange grace into a cup full of coins and in the same motion feeding a coin into the machine and pulling the handle and dipping into the cup again. A little boy eating a hot dog. His young mother has a body like a tree branch and when she bends over him the front of her dress falls open and I see her small bare breasts and narrow ribs, a flash of silver in her navel and tiny white panties. A man and woman sitting exhausted on a wooden bench. He wears no socks and there is a line of pale skin at his wrist where his watch used to be. His wife has eyes like sand; she is incapable of crying anymore and I wonder how much money they lost. The Blister is nowhere to be seen. I can’t even feel his presence and I suppose he’s already slithered away. Or possibly the cops have grabbed him up. A naked man with three dripping bags of heroin is not something you see every day. Jude takes my hand and squeezes it.
*
There is a line of taxicabs out front. I open the door to the first one and Jude climbs in. The cabbie is a skinny kid with a mustache and he hops out to put our bags into the trunk.
Where can I take you? he says.
I put my arm around him and pull him close. He is soft and smells of peanut butter. I slap one of the Blister’s hundred-dollar bills into his palm.
Don’t blink, I say. But that is Lisa Marie Presley in the backseat and I need to hire a private plane. Maybe you know a small, inconspicuous airport?
The kid grins. We’re there in a half hour, he says.
The cab growls through slow-moving traffic. The city is naked and grim under the morning sun, clogged with too many people. Bits of paper swirl and twist in the air. Jude sits against the cracked vinyl in the backseat, her face to the window. She hasn’t spoken. I rest my hand on her thigh and feel her warmth. I take the Blister’s cell phone from my jacket pocket and flip it open, then take a deep breath and dial. I touch her shoulder and she looks at me. I give her the phone and tell her to ask for Detective Moon. She is put on hold and I take
the phone from her. What are you doing to us? she says.
Hush. I need you to trust me.
Moon comes on the line, his voice heavy with smoke. I hesitate, nervous and shameful. As if I am fifteen and I have wrecked the car. I ran away from home and two days have passed and I’m calling my father to see how bad the damage is. Moon, I say. It’s Phineas Poe.
Do you have a screw loose? he says. I’m going to hang up now.
No, I say. Talk to me, please. Tell me what you have.
I have you, he says. I have you fucking gift-wrapped. All I need to do is find you.
Don’t bother tracing this.
I’m not. I don’t want to look like a bigger fool than I am.
What do you have?
I have smoke and mirrors. I have a fistful of physical evidence that says you raped Eve McBride. Your fingerprints were everywhere. Your hair was in her bed, your blood between her legs. But she swears it wasn’t you and I believe her.
My blood. How do you know it’s mine?
Remember. The lab did everything but stool samples on you after Lucy died. And they save it all for a rainy day.
Wonderful. But it wasn’t me.
Maybe. Why don’t you come home and we’ll talk.
No, thanks. I talked to Eve yesterday. She said it wasn’t rape and maybe it was a woman.
He grunts. I’m not her husband and she doesn’t have to sell me any mind games. But she’s asking for some expensive therapy, if you ask me. And if it was a woman, she had a big dick. The rape kit showed massive vaginal damage.
I’m a sucker, a deaf-and-dumb asshole. I wanted to believe her, to spare her.
Do me a favor, I say. Put a car outside her apartment for a few days.
My pleasure, he says.
Thanks. And what else do you have on me.
I have a possible suicide by the name of Winston “Pooh” Jones: white male, age thirty. The funny thing is that he was also a suspect in the McBride rape. And you slept in his bed and ate his last Twinkies that same night. Pooh is then found dead in a motel room, apparently by his own hand. But it looks a lot like murder dressed up as suicide. He used a knife to cut his fucking leg open and bleed himself to death. Meanwhile, he had a perfectly good shotgun in his truck outside, and a lot of blood on the front seat. I’m supposed to think he cut his leg open in the truck, then went up to his room and took a shower? Hair and fibers came up empty; everything was clean as a whistle. Nothing but his own blood and prints.
I’m sorry to hear that.
Of course you are. And one might think that you killed him to shut him up. But it doesn’t matter because those charges are fucking gravy, they’re parsley. My idiot brother could get those thrown out.
I take a breath and look at Jude. I stare at her ear until it becomes the bent and fragile leaf of a dried flower. Her reflection in the window is cut in half and I see her lips. They are moving, just barely. I wonder if she’s singing, if she’s counting cars. I wonder what she did with my kidney. Did she trade it for a box of heroin or did she give it up for a dying boy in Phoenix?
I also found your missing gun, he says. It was in the front seat of a black Ford Mustang.
My brain takes a spin and I see wild horses, their lips white with foam.
Whose car is it? I say.
The missing Rose White, he says. A pediatric surgeon at the same hospital where you recently did time. Dr. White was found in the trunk of her car, shot twice by your gun.
I stare at Jude’s slender throat. I wonder if it will be easier to kill her than to save her.
When, I say. When was she killed?
She was pretty stiff, maybe four days old and we checked her work schedule. She never showed for her shift on the twenty-first.
The first day of winter. The day I woke up in the hospital.
Oh, yeah. Moon is eerily cheerful. The cool weather kept her fresh.
What did she look like?
She was bald, says Moon. Which was a little creepy. Her friends say she usually wore a red wig. And she was naked, but that’s normal. Otherwise she was your typical dead white female.
How did she lose her hair?
What kind of question is that? She had cancer.
Did you get any prints from my gun?
Of course not. But I’m afraid your blood was found in the car.
My blood is everywhere.
Where did you find the car? I say.
1013 Alpine, he says. It was parked in the driveway of a nice little two-bedroom house for sale. The real estate agent called it in.
I stare at the back of my hand. The ink is faded to a spidery blue like the veins beneath my skin but I can still read it. Rose 1013 Alpine 2 P.M. I never made a date with Rose White and she never really existed. She was already dead. Isabel answered the phone that night and she gave me the bogus address. She strapped on a detachable penis and raped Eve while I was looking at the Hobbit house with a lovely room for the baby. Or maybe it was Pooh. He was looking for me, for the heroin. And he found Eve. She was a prize; she was the ring that glows in the dark, buried in a box of Cracker Jack.
It doesn’t matter. Because the wound in my belly was leaking like a sieve.
I was leaving my blood behind me, in the dead woman’s car and Eve’s bed.
Do you have a recent photo of me? I say. You might want to show it to the real estate agent.
Phineas, says Moon. Come home and we’ll work this out.
I laugh like a chump and Jude glances at me, then away. Lucy faked her death and she’s having a lot of fun with me. She killed this Rose White with my gun and now she’s setting me up as a killer, a rapist. She couldn’t do this alone; her heart isn’t hard enough and she wouldn’t know how. She would need help and she would get it with melting black eyes and the voice of a dove, with the promise of velvet panties. Moon could have helped her. It would be easy for him. Moon’s voice has become static and I think, satellites are crashing and my blood is everywhere. I’m the stranger. I drop the Blister’s phone out the window and turn to watch it shatter. I feel sick and I want to hit someone, to crush a familiar face.
Lucy is alive, I say. She’s killing people and Henry has my wedding ring. He stole my identity and she’s going to kill him next.
It’s not possible, Jude says. Your wife is dead, okay?
My stomach churns with dread and nausea. Nothing is what it seems.
twenty-four.
I lean and whisper sickly to Jude. Do you know how to fly?
She shrugs. Of course.
The cab turns down a narrow gravel road. Ahead I can see a half dozen hangars in a scattered semicircle. Two small planes sit on the runway. A car is parked beside one of them, and a man and woman move back and forth in the skeletal shadow of the plane. I tell the cabbie to park alongside their car. He leaves the engine running and jumps out to open the door for Jude. He bobs his head, clutching her hand.
It’s a real pleasure, Miss Presley.
Jude frowns and I step between them. He lets go of her hand.
What’s your name, kid? I say.
Bobby. My name is Robert but no one calls me that.
That’s fine. Bobby, I want to thank you.
He looks nervous. What for?
For a smooth ride. For a cab that didn’t smell like fried eggs. And for your professional attitude, of course. I give him another hundred. And I hope you can keep a secret. Miss Presley is a private person.
He shakes his head. Don’t you worry. I’m like a priest. Nothing leaves the backseat.
Interesting analogy, says Jude.
Bobby backs away from her. No problem, he says.
He drives away and Jude turns to me, squinting. That little secret will last five minutes.
I know. But it made his day and sometimes confusion is better than nothing.
Well, she says. I assume you have a plan.
Not really. I lift the green icebox. But I’m feeling lucky.
The plane is an old twin-engine, blue a
nd white. It has shining black propellers and I think it will be a miracle if it ever gets off the ground. The man and woman watch as we walk toward them. They appear to be in their sixties and they look friendly enough. The woman wears a yellow pantsuit and a white hat. The man wears madras shorts and a golf shirt. He holds a wrench in one hand. They might be Elvis fans but they aren’t as stupid as Bobby. And I don’t think they need our money.
Morning to you, the man says.
I bend over to tie my shoes and remove my gun from the ankle holster.
That’s a beautiful little plane, says Jude. She drops her bag to the tarmac.
Thank you. What can I do for you?
Let us borrow it, I say.
His eyes flicker. Don’t be ridiculous, young man.
I feel terrible but I bring the gun up and point it at his wife. She puts one hand to her throat. I know I’m not going to shoot her and I’m afraid the man knows it too. Jude is ten or fifteen feet away from him but she is so quick. It isn’t natural. She is like a water bug, a skipping stone. I blink and she is swinging the stinger at him, a tight backhand slash like a blurred raindrop, a magician’s veil. The man cries out and drops the wrench and his arm is pouring blood.
I help the lady to the car. She says her name is Marian. She hangs on to my arm and she doesn’t weigh more than eighty pounds. I open the driver’s side door and place her on the seat as if she might shatter. Her legs aren’t nearly long enough to reach the pedals. I adjust the seat for her and she clutches at the wheel. I’m afraid she’s going to faint. There’s a bottle of warm water in the backseat and I make her take small swallows.
I’m very sorry, I say. I wasn’t going to shoot you.
She looks at me with glazed, milky eyes.
You don’t look like a nice boy, she says.
Jude brings the man over to the car. He walks unsteadily, leaning on her. She has bandaged his arm but it’s already showing blood. She hands me the car keys and I lean in to start the engine. It’s not a stick shift, at least. I think they might make it to the hospital.
My purse is on the plane, says Marian. It has my driver’s license.
Kiss Me, Judas Page 14