Jude offers to get it and the old woman starts to tremble at the sound of her voice.
Don’t worry, I say. I’ll get it.
Jude turns away from the wind and lights a cigarette. I run to the plane and bring back the purse and a leather suitcase that bears faded stickers from more countries than I can count. I give the purse to Marian and slide the suitcase into the backseat. The old man sits crumpled in the passenger seat, his face pale.
Take him straight to the hospital, I say. And be careful.
The car pulls away feebly, and I know she won’t go faster than twenty miles per hour. Maybe a cop will stop her. Jude stands facing me and I ask for a drag of her cigarette. She flicks it away and walks to the plane. I look out at the desert and I remember what it’s like to be alone. After a minute I follow her.
Jude is in the cockpit, her eyes dark behind sunglasses. She is looking over some charts and muttering to herself. I scan the instrument panel and feel a rush of vertigo.
This isn’t like stealing a car, she says. You don’t just cover the plates with mud and disappear on some back road. You go up without a registered flight plan and you get sucked into the tailwind of a passenger jet. You do a Patsy Cline and run into a fucking mountain.
I sit down in the copilot’s chair. What’s the problem?
There’s no problem. Ma and Pa back there were headed for Taos and we will have barely enough fuel to make El Paso. We need to deviate from their flight plan a little, a lot. If we stay below the commercial flight paths and don’t draw attention to ourselves we might be okay. As long as we don’t stumble into a snowstorm.
She speaks without looking at me, spitting her words in a controlled monotone.
I’m glad, I say. I’m glad there’s no problem.
What were you thinking? she says. If you could just be patient I would have had that old man begging us to take the plane. But you pulled your gun and you weren’t going to shoot her. It was written all over your face. And you were a cop. What is the first rule in a hostage situation?
I close my eyes. Don’t point your weapon at anyone unless you are willing to shoot him.
That’s right. And why is that?
Because you have no power. If your bluff is called you lose.
I open my eyes and look at her. The thin white T-shirt is damp with sweat and she might as well be naked. She folds her arms across her chest and a pretty blue vein stands out in her throat.
I cut her husband because I had to do something, she says. It would have been easier and safer to kill them both and bring their bodies along. Then it looks like they went to Taos as planned and no one’s the wiser. But I didn’t kill him. I saved you from making a decision and you looked at me like I was the Wicked Witch.
Jude, I say.
She hits me once in the face and I know she’s holding back. She could probably kill me with two fingers. Her fist is sharp as a stone. After a minute, she lets me hold her.
I don’t want you to look at me that way, she says. Ever again.
The engines cough and roar to life and the propellers become ragged, blurred eyes. Jude runs the twin throttles as far as they will go and the plane trembles as if it will fall apart. I sit beside her, uneasy but strangely happy. I wish I had a mouthful of bubble gum. The plane lunges forward as she releases the brakes, and we roll down the runway in a hammering rush. I can’t take my eyes off Jude. She is as calm as a cat lying half asleep, watching birds bathe themselves out of reach. Her dark lips are slightly parted and the muscles stand out along her arms. Her body is all piano wires and sinew. I hold my breath as the plane leaves the earth and Jude turns to me, her face shining.
twenty-five.
The cell is a soothing, sickening blue.
I meet Lucy when I’m still new with the cops. I’m a fool. I’m living in a rathole apartment with rented furniture. A wide-screen television and a water bed. The kind of shit that you pay nineteen bucks a week for, and as soon as you miss a payment you’re looking at stained gray carpet and balls of hair and chewed fingernails and you’re sleeping on the floor wrapped in a beach towel. I’m a drug dealer.
There are no windows. No sharp edges anywhere. The bed is ordinary but for the locking clamps that hold my hands and feet in place. There is a toilet in the corner. A camera is mounted above me, the lens glowing orange. I can feel the caress of foreign eyes on my flesh, like the tickle of imagined insects.
The silly thing is that I’m supposed to be an incompetent drug dealer. Someone who is dumb enough to sell to cops. I have dyed my hair black, to make me look even more pale and sick. But the dye is cheap and my hair just looks green in the light. I have been drinking too much beer and I have a new belly that peeks out from the waistband of my pants. I watch cartoons all day and wait for my telephone to ring. I am a lot like my recently dead friend Pooh.
Two men come to my room; they wear white, silent shoes. Their faces are hidden behind surgical masks, as if I am a carrier, a plague victim. I beg them to show me their faces, to speak. They give me a shot and a handful of pills to swallow. I stare at the thin red wall of my inner eyelid and listen to my skin and I can’t be sure how the medication is affecting me. I can’t remember how I’m supposed to feel. I can’t remember my name. I have never seen my face.
Lucy lives upstairs. Her clothes are torn and don’t really fit her but she’s strangely beautiful. She doesn’t teach ninth-grade math yet. She isn’t dying yet. Her blue jeans are splattered with paint all the time and her hair is shaved to stubble. I think she wants to be an artist. I see her outside sometimes, talking to the squirrels and feeding them brightly colored cereal from her pale, stained hand. On a chilly morning I ask her what the hell she is feeding them and she doesn’t flinch. Her voice is lovely, a whisper that reminds me of blown glass. I notice her ears then, sharp and pointed. She smiles quickly and says it’s Cap’n Crunch. The animals love it.
I am a white male with one identifying mark, a bullet hole scar on my left leg. I stare at the cracked blue ceiling with such intensity that it drips and ripples like a ruined map of the universe. I have no shoes and my feet are pale and shrunken. I am disappearing. They feed me only liquids, and I’m rapidly losing weight. I must have done something terrible but I can remember only these blue walls. There is nothing else and my head is as empty and silent as a church.
Lucy tries to avoid me. I am a rather dirty and pathetic drug seller, after all. There is a narrow black path to my door, trodden by agitated speed freaks and slouching homeless guys and nimble hippie kids and poorly disguised cops. I watch her come and go, and I try to think of reasons I might knock on her door. I need a cup of sugar, an egg. I doubt she even has sugar. I can hear her moving above me when I mute my droning television. Her feet are small and she scurries around like a mouse.
The two men come back with a wheelchair. I am confident that I can walk but they are robotic and unsmiling. They don’t seem to breathe. They lift me from the bed like I’m made of sticks, and I let them strap me into the chair. I’m a child, a ragged doll. They wheel me down a long white hall that glistens so brightly the floor and ceiling melt into one. The hall grows narrow in the distance and I try to become smaller, to pull my head into my body. I close my eyes and wait. I listen but the wheelchair makes no sound.
Lucy stops at my door one morning. She asks if I have any milk. I’m surprised and I mutter something incoherent. The truth is I do have milk. But for some reason I don’t want to admit it. I stare at the floor, at Lucy’s feet. She isn’t wearing shoes and I briefly fall in love with her. But her legs are odd, malformed somehow, and I realize that one of them is writhing like a spider’s egg sac before it bursts and I wonder if I’m taking too many of my own drugs.
Everything is oiled and waxed and padded and there is only silence.
*
Lucy’s pants are not full of spiders. She has a kitten hiding in there. I tell her there are no cats allowed in the building and we both laugh. I’m a known drug dealer, but the
re are no cats allowed. She tells me she found the little guy in a cardboard box with his three dead brothers. Someone didn’t want kittens and didn’t have the energy to kill them. Again she asks if I have milk and stupidly I try to touch her face, to brush away an eyelash. She ducks away like my own shadow and I apologize.
The faint swish of an electronic door: brief and lovely, like the breath of a sparrow. I open my eyes and find myself sealed in a glass box; there’s a row of holes in the glass and I can feel cool air against my face. Behind the glass are pale green walls, the color of leaves with the sun shining through them.
Two cops show up at my door and I can tell they aren’t interested in buying drugs. They close the door behind them and I feel a sudden fever. On my loud, rented television Andy Griffith is telling Opie that it’s really not okay to judge people by the color of their skin. The two cops tell me they know I’m working for Internal Affairs and they want to talk. I’m lucky and they merely beat the shit out of me. They don’t kill me. Four hours later Lucy finds me in the stairwell. Apparently I went to get my mail and I was so tired that I sat down and fell asleep. She’s horrified by my face. It’s okay, I say. I can still walk. She takes me back to my apartment and cleans me up. She disconnects the telephone and tells me I’m out of business for a while. It’s painful to laugh. Lucy turns off the television and tells me a story about a little boy named Edward who choked on a peach. The kitten chases himself in endless circles on my filthy carpet and I smile, watching him.
*
I become aware of a voice, androgynous and without emotion. The voice is like silk and shadow and I might have heard the voice for hours without realizing it. The voice has the texture of unconscious thought and I wonder if I’m dreaming, if the voice is my own. But my own thoughts, faint and muffled as a heartbeat, are distinct from the voice. I am aware of my body; it is separate from me, dead and useless.
Lucy tells me that my hair looks terrible. I don’t want to dye it blond again; it would only look worse. I allow her to shave my head and now we could be brother and sister. She kisses me when I’m distracted and uneasy. I’m washing dishes and worrying about the fucking mess I’ve made of my job when I feel her lips on my cheek. I am easily consumed by her.
The voice tells me that my name is Phineas Poe. I am a policeman living in Denver. I recently suffered a nervous breakdown. I had been in Internal Affairs for six years. My wife is dead, apparently by suicide. Her name was Lucy and we had no children.
The kitten slips out of Lucy’s window one morning and gets himself stuck in the rain gutter. I can hear him yowling up there but I ignore it. I assume he’s hungry and Lucy isn’t fast enough with his food. I’m trying to write out a report. My assignment is over, a failure. I haven’t told Lucy that I’m a cop and I’m not sure what she will say. Then I hear a noise like someone has thrown a suitcase off the roof and Lucy never screams at all. She sits in the grass and tries not to look at her broken leg. The kitten is walking around and around her as if he can reverse time. I take Lucy to the hospital and part of me is glad her leg is broken. She won’t be able to run away from me. In the waiting area I kiss her and tell her I’m a cop. Lucy is relieved. Because you really weren’t a very good drug dealer, she says. The doctor soon puts her back together again and calmly says he wants to talk to her alone. It’s about her blood, he says. There’s something wrong with her blood.
I open my eyes and I am in the blue room again. I study my new identity, wondering if the voice was telling the truth. My name is Phineas Poe. It might as well be.
I am shaking to pieces. But I’m only sleeping and Jude is trying to wake me. It’s black outside the bubble of the cockpit and when I open my eyes, the night sky rushes at me and I’m sure that we are crashing.
Are we crashing? I say.
Jude slaps me. Wake up, please.
I’m awake. Are we crashing?
No, she says. We’re somewhere over Texas.
In the glow of the controls her face is blue and stretched as a skull.
Then why did you wake me?
Because you talk in your sleep. I couldn’t listen to another word.
I touch my cheek to the window. I try to remember what I was dreaming of but there’s only black sky and cold skin. What did I say?
Nothing that made any sense. But it made me very uncomfortable.
I grope for the chain of thoughts that would bring the dream back to me but I can summon only the color blue. I feel a surge of nausea and I slap at the belt buckle. Jude leans over and releases me. I stagger to the back of the plane and vomit into a storage bin. My stomach holds nothing solid and what comes up is like oily water that smells of blood.
Jude calls out to me. When did you last eat anything?
I don’t know.
You need to eat, okay. You look like a corpse. If you get a little protein into your system, you might stop hallucinating all the time.
I can barely stand up and I know she’s right. But starvation isn’t my only problem.
What’s in those shots you keep giving me?
I told you, it’s pharmaceutical Valium. The kind the dentist uses. It’s for the pain.
Then why do I feel like a fucking junkie. I suddenly can’t stop shaking and all I can think about is getting another shot. Jude gets out of her seat and comes toward me.
Are you insane? I say. We’re going to crash.
Relax, she says. It’s on autopilot.
She puts her arms around me and hugs me. I feel like I might break.
I never had Valium like that, I say. Never.
Do you want another shot? she says.
Fuck you. Fuck you.
Listen. You have to trust me, okay. I want to take care of you.
You should have cut out my heart.
If you don’t want another shot, I won’t make you. But if you don’t eat, you will die.
What have you done to me? I say. What have you done?
I removed your kidney, she says. It’s a simple procedure.
No, I say. You altered me somehow. You stapled my stomach into a fucking knot. And you left something inside, didn’t you? Something to remember you by.
Do you hear yourself?
I’m dying, Jude.
What? she says. I can’t hear you.
Never mind.
You’re still alive, she says. You have one good kidney.
And if the kidney in the icebox is no good?
Then the buyer is fucked.
No. You could still offer my remaining kidney to Gore.
She doesn’t smile. I never thought of that. But yes.
I hear Lucy laughing and crying in the dark and I wonder why it’s so easy to pretend that my kidney is in the icebox, that I still believe.
Oh, you never thought of it.
Are you stupid? she says. If I wanted to kill you, I would have.
I’m sorry.
It’s okay, she says. I saw a picnic basket in the back. I’m sure that little old lady packed a nice, wholesome dinner. I want you to sit down while I take a look. Okay?
I return to my seat, vaguely uneasy that the pilot’s chair is empty. Jude comes out of the dark with turkey sandwiches, two bananas and a chocolate chip brownie. There’s even a Thermos of sweet coffee. Jude sits down at the controls and examines the instruments. I take small, cautious bites of turkey. I don’t feel immediately better but I don’t throw up either.
We will be there soon, says Jude.
twenty-six.
Jude sets the plane down in a dead wheat field as gently as she might kiss a baby. A mile away, lights crawl along a two-lane road.
How far to El Paso? I say.
Ten miles, twenty. It doesn’t matter.
I look around in the dark. The country is flat as my hand and the city lights are a tiny glow over the horizon. I have had the dry heaves for a half hour now; the turkey sandwich did not sit well and my mouth is full of acid and blood and I am inclined to think it does matter. But Jude is cool and
unconcerned. I despise myself but I would love to push up my sleeve and offer her my naked arm. To close my eyes and wait for the needle. But I don’t want her to know how badly I want it, and I shrug when she asks how I feel.
I watch as she unloads the gear and I realize there’s more than we can carry. Jude opens her massive garment bag and produces a sleek little backpack, purple and gold with an internal frame. She transfers her purse, a few pieces of clothing and toiletries, tools and a number of small, compact items that I can’t identify. She knows what she’s doing, certainly. One thing catches my eye: a fat file folder with leather straps.
*
Jude turns to me. What can you unload? It’s hot where we’re going and we may do some walking.
I shake my head, hefting my duffel bag.
Give it to me, she says.
She unzips it and pokes around.
There’s really nothing in there, I say. A change of clothes. Some disposable razors and a toothbrush.
She holds up a pale blond wig and I nearly swallow my tongue.
That sneaky bitch, I say.
You should be more careful, she says.
Jude.
Well, she says. This is a lot of wasted space.
Before I can say anything she transfers my meager possessions to her backpack, then tosses my empty bag onto the pile. She stands up and looks around. I pick up the green icebox and she grins at me. I’m a fool, I know. But she has a good smile.
Jude moves the discarded things several yards from the plane and makes a neat pile. She holds up Isabel’s wig like a stolen scalp, then takes a book of matches from her pocket. She strikes one and there’s a teardrop of blue and red at her fingertips. I blink and the hair catches fire, the flames coiling greedily around her arm. Jude drops it and patiently blows on the little fire, as if she’s camping.
Let’s go, she says.
I bend to touch the ground and the earth is damp. Not damp enough, perhaps.
Kiss Me, Judas Page 15