He felt a connection to the boy, however. The boy’s eye had an almost fanatical gleam.
“How old is the boy?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” the woman said. “He won’t speak to me.”
“You been together long?”
“Not long. But I suppose long enough. He seems timid maybe.”
Jude looked long and hard at the boy. The boy stared back at him with an incongruous face—the eyes of a lion in the face of a lamb.
“He’s got a spark in his eye,” Jude said at length. “He’s a little hellion.” Just beneath the surface of his face, a smile loomed.
“He’s no hellion,” the woman said. “I think he’s a good boy. He’s stayed by me the whole time, and he hasn’t given me any trouble. And look at him. He’s just a sweet boy. Poor thing has probably lost his parents, or been abandoned by them. He probably can’t speak for the grief of losing them.”
“He may be a sweet boy now, but you just let him live a little longer, and you’ll see.” He gave an upward thrust of his head. “Every boy got a little hellion in him. If you want to let him grow up to be a man, you gotta recognize that. You gotta let him let it out a little.”
The woman looked at him coolly. He could sense her becoming defensive of the boy. Her defensiveness surprised him. The boy had only been with her a short time and had not even spoken to her.
“You don’t know him,” he said. “You don’t know what it is to be a man.”
Suddenly, he was very tired. He realized that he had not sat for a long time. The night of fighting and little sleep had made him weary, and the adrenaline of first meeting them had worn off. The stress was now exacting a different cost from him.
The defensive look on the woman’s face dissipated, and in its place arose a plastic-like mask of apathy. She said, “Well, he’s just a burden to me. If you want to keep him and raise him up ‘to be a man,’ you’re welcome to him. I can see you don’t want to help me, so I’ll be on my way.” She turned to leave.
“Now wait a minute,” he said, catching her arm.
He was unsure if her movement was a bluff, but by the time the doubt of its genuineness had sprung to his mind, it was too late; he had already acted. He was unsure also whether it was her apathy or her attachment to the boy that was the more genuine. But her statement had cut him, and he held her arm in a strong grip.
“You can stay if you want, I suppose—as long as you know that they come here often, and at random… and that there’s nothing I can do about them. There’s nothing I can do to keep you safe. Do you understand that?”
“Don’t keep me out of pity,” she said, not trying to wrench herself free of his grip but not succumbing to it either. “I don’t want your pity.”
“Stay,” he said firmly. “We’re all in this together. I was—I was wrong to—I was wrong not to offer to have you stay. But mind you—don’t try anything funny. We’re all in this together, but to some people, that means that we’re none of us in it together, and we’re all only in it by ourselves. Now I’m not pitying you. I don’t pity anyone. You can pity yourself. But stay. I want you to stay.”
Slowly, she acquiesced and rotated her body back toward him, reneging to some extent her previous motion. He let go of her arm and then took a step backward in response to the newly established joint tenancy of the room in which they stood. The woman and the boy looked about the room with wandering eyes as though, now that they were officially welcome to inhabit the room, their cognition of it had been altered or increased. It echoed the looks they had given the room at their first entrance, and for some reason, this repetition troubled Jude greatly. Not seeing anywhere to sit with their roving eyes, the woman and the boy simply walked into the middle of the room, to the center of the rug, and stood there without resolution.
Jude wanted to invite them to sit, but the furniture pushed up against the rear entrance did not seem a particularly hospitable proposition, and the hard floor even less inviting. He waved his hand at them and said, “Well, make yourselves at home.”
The woman and the boy did not move.
The man’s stomach suddenly clenched with hunger, and at this, he realized that the boy and the women were probably also hungry. He thought, with a pang of regret, of the storage shed outside. But he had committed himself to the unmanly task of hospitality, and the shed was where the food was.
“Boy, what’s your name?” he said.
The boy did not answer.
“Do you know his name?” he asked.
“No,” said the woman.
“Well, kid, follow me,” he said. “Let’s get us something to eat.”
The boy obligingly left the side of the woman and fell in step beside him as he led the way out of the house.
The sunlight was warm and inviting, and with the boy beside him, it was hard for Jude to remember that even at this time of day the others might appear. It had not been for a long time that they had amassed and attacked in the kind of broad daylight in which they stood right now, but it remained a distinct possibility. He had to remind himself to scan the surroundings for signs of movement. Ironically, the glare of the sunlight made it harder for him to discern what lay at the edge of the dark trees in the distance; the brilliance of the sun and the clear-blue sky reflected off of the field in a stunning green glare that made it seem as though the tree line were farther away from the house than it was. Or maybe the distance that he now gauged was the true one, and it was only the distortion of the thick night that had made him think it was closer than he perceived it to be now.
At the back of the house lay the white doors to the storm cellar. The sunlight played at it as though it wished to bleach it white again, but the stubborn paint reacted by wrinkling and peeling, exposing more of the grey wood underneath. Jude approached it hastily as though he were anxious to confirm its existence by his touch. He laid his hands on it. The paint was faintly warm from the heat of the sun, about the temperature of his own body.
He drew the key out of his jeans pocket and held it out toward the lock as though it were a wild animal; he treated it gently so as not to tempt it into some wild, unpredictable action. As he was turning the key in the lock, he noticed the boy looking at his tattooed arms.
“My name is Jude,” he said to the boy. “I had it tattooed on my arm when I changed it. Yes, I changed my name. It used to be Tyrone. That was in a previous life.”
The lock clicked and popped open. He was regretful, for a moment, for having let the boy see him open the lock, although the location of the lock and how it worked was no great secret, and the boy seemed to present no threat. For Jude, the opening of the shed had become a private, intimate activity and instinctively he felt defensive. He looked at the boy’s lamb-like face and eyes full of sparks, and perceived both the familiarity and the incomprehensibility that he had noted earlier. He told himself against his initial and probably more sensible instinct that it was safe for the boy to witness the process of the unlocking of the shed. He was also curious to hear some words from the boy; he imagined hopefully that the boy would recognize the intimacy of the opening of the shed, and that it would encourage him to speak. So he opened it. Daylight poured in, cascading onto the stacks of cans and towers of boxes.
“This is what I’ve been living off of,” he said. “It’s a secret, you understand? You don’t tell anybody about it, do you hear?”
He searched the boy for a sign of agreement, or even of understanding, but there was none. The boy only stared at him intently.
“That old bitch in there don’t understand. She ain’t been where I been. She wouldn’t understand. Don’t tell her what’s in here, you understand?”
Again, there was no look of understanding, but only the sparks that seemed to fly from the boy’s eyes into and through him.
He stepped into the shed. Inside, it was cool and dark, an agreeable contrast to the still heat of the sun against the side of the house. The boy made a motion to follow him in, but Jude held
out his hand and said, “No. You stay outside.” He opened up a box and removed some of its contents and then filled it back up with other various cans. As he rummaged through the goods in the shed, he said to the boy:
“When I was kid, I got busted for dropping bricks off a bridge over the freeway. One of the bricks went straight into a window; the driver freaked, swerved, rolled over, and collided with a truck. The driver died. I didn’t go to jail or nothing. The judge ruled that we were just being stupid kids. But my dad, he didn’t let me forget. He would remind me every day I was a killer. He would hit me over the head and shove me around. He didn’t treat me like my brothers and sisters. He did it even when I got older and it got so I couldn’t take it no more. So then I left. I joined a gang—since I was a killer anyway—and the gang became like a new family to me. They treated me with respect. They respected me if I earned it.”
He closed up the box, came back out of the shed and handed it to the boy. “Here,” he said. “You hold this.” He went back in and began to do the same with another box.
“I have killed men,” he went on, “not just the one off the bridge, but other men. I once killed a man with his own knife. He was trying to kill me. He came at me in an alley. Fool was clumsy. I took the knife from him and I stabbed him in the throat.”
He emerged in the sunlight, his head hung down.
“I never lost a fight by myself. Even when there was more than one guy against me—three even. I killed three men by myself. With only a blade.”
The boy offered no evidence of a response, if he had one. The piercing eyes seemed to indicate a further curiosity, however. They presented an insatiable thirst, yet Jude did not know what might satisfy it. They demanded, yet Jude could not interpret nor discern how to meet the demand.
At some length, Jude set his box down on the grass clumped up against the side of the house. With a routine, practiced manner, Jude tenderly closed the doors.
“I done lots of terrible things like that,” Jude added quietly, muttering the words toward the closed cellar doors. “But thank God I been forgiven. That’s all behind me now.”
He replaced the lock over the doors. Some of the withering paint flecked off onto his hand, and he shook it off abruptly. He turned the key in the lock and, just for good measure, pulled at it to test its strength. It held fast.
“Let’s go,” he said.
The two of them retraced their steps around the side of the house to the door. Jude cast a half-glance over his shoulder at the shed, at the lock hanging closed on the latch just before turning the corner. He was mostly satisfied.
With the boy following him, Jude went inside the house to the kitchen with the box of food where he opened it and took out two cans of corned beef hash—one for him, and one for his guests. He turned on the gas, which he had had to connect to a tank of propane next to it since the tank connected to the exterior of the house had been drained. As the skillet heated, he opened the cans with the can opener, and then dumped their contents onto the skillet. The food crackled and sizzled on contact, and he stirred it quickly with a steel spatula.
“Someday this propane gonna run out,” he said. “Then it’ll just have to be eaten cold.”
“What happens when you run out of food?” asked the woman bitterly.
Then you can fuck yourself, thought Jude, although he did not say it; it was not a Christian thing to say, and he did not want to misrepresent himself.
He switched off the gas and brought the hot skillet over, the food still sizzling. He stirred it once more, and as the sizzling subsided, he set the skillet down on a bare area of the wood floor.
“Be careful, it’s hot,” he said.
They ate the morsels of beef and potatoes with their fingers and did not say anything and the skillet kept the food warm until the very end. When they had finished the pieces of food, they wiped the skillet with their fingers and licked the salty fat off of them. Then they sat back, their stomachs satisfied for the moment. The boy looked at the man, and the man at the boy. The woman rose and walked about the room as though with some purpose.
She looked at the walls as had been the fashion when there were things to look at on walls where people lived, and she stopped when there was a thing to look at—the golden cross. Her expression toward it was the same plastic apathy as before.
“This yours?” she said to him in a voice so low that he wondered for a moment if he had misheard her saying something different to herself.
Jude stood and walked toward her. “It came with the house,” he said, but not wanting to misrepresent himself, he added, “It was in a dresser drawer; I hung it there. The Bible is mine.”
The woman sniffed—or was it a scoff?
Jude felt himself stiffening again, searching inside himself for that iron willpower on which he would have to stand as he engaged the woman.
“You don’t have to agree with it,” he said, his voice firm. “You just have to respect it.”
More quickly than he expected, the woman retorted, “Why should I respect what is wrong? You can delude yourself if you want—I won’t challenge you—but I don’t have to respect you or what you do.”
Jude held out his black, tattooed arms. “You see this?” he said.
She looked down at them, saying nothing, only waiting.
“This is my name. My name is Jude. I changed it when I became a Christian. My name was Tyrone, and I was a bad man. I trafficked drugs, and I killed many men.” He took a step toward her, still brandishing his muscly arms. “Do you know anything about being bad, and then repenting and doing good? When you can say that you been through what I been through, then you can judge. But until then, you’d do best to keep your mouth shut.”
She looked up from his arms into his face. Her brows were firmly set, demonstrating something of acquiescence, but not shame or submission.
“You best respect what you don’t understand,” Jude said.
The woman said nothing.
Jude continued, “You know nothing about what it means to be a man—what it takes to become one.”
“You’re right, I don’t know anything about being a man, or what it takes to be one,” said the woman. “And if you need to invent a God to help you get there, I suppose there’s nothing I can say about it. But look at yourself—you call yourself a man, a grown man, and you’re still hanging onto fairy tales to help you get through.”
“Fairy tales…” Rage welled up within him. He felt his face flush, his ears tingle. If she had been a man, he might have punched her.
“Look around you—if there is a God, he clearly doesn’t care what happens to us. How can you continue to believe after all that’s happened?”
Jude fumed. He felt his will harden again, into iron, into lead.
She continued, “A real man would be able to face the facts—a real man would be able to get along on his own.”
Jude suddenly gripped her arms with his thick hands. He looked sternly in her face and breathed, “But I have gotten along on my own, and don’t you see, that’s the glory of it? I believe in him and I have trusted in him, and he has provided for me. He’s made me who I am and what I am… Through him, we are more than conquerors. Like I said, you better shut your mouth about things you don’t know nothing about, if you know what’s good for you.”
She was unaffected and stared back into his face.
“You can’t even keep us safe,” she said.
He let go of her, throwing his open hands up and coughing in disgust, and he turned away from her. The sun had crossed the sky and the afternoon light shone in thin beams through the cracks in the boards, lighting and warming the stuffy air of the house. The golden cross on the wall seemed almost hidden on the far wall where he now looked.
Then he realized that the boy was not in the room.
“Where’s the boy?” he asked.
“How should I know?” she asked. “He’s not mine.”
Jude took two quick, heavy steps across the wooden flo
or and opened the front door, letting in the white afternoon light.
He looked around the sides of the house, first to the right, then to the left. He did not see the boy. He walked briskly around the perimeter, rounding the corner where the cellar lay. And there was the boy—and the cellar doors open, the boy standing there looking in with the same lack of expression he had worn since his arrival.
At the sight of it, an acute shock struck Jude and overcame him. His throat constricted and his heart beat as though it would burst out of his chest.
“Boy!” Jude shouted. “Boy!”
He ran to the cellar, and pushed the boy to the ground. He threw the doors closed, and quickly fastened the metal padlock.
“What the hell were you doing? Didn’t I tell you—?”
The boy had gotten up and was standing still, staring at Jude with his cold, blue eyes.
“What were you doing?” Jude demanded, his voice raised and his arm in the air.
The boy did not speak. Jude was fairly certain then that the boy could speak, but that he only refused to—that the boy was distrustful, that he was biding his time. It was as though his lack of speech was itself a form of speech, and it came across sinister and intimidating.
“Get in the house,” Jude growled. He moved toward the boy, ready to physically compel him to follow the order, but the boy had already complied and was walking to the house as though nothing had happened. Jude followed him. Their feet treaded quietly on the weedy growth that surrounded the house.
Once they were both inside, Jude addressed both of them.
“Look,” he said. “Look now. You two got to get out. I been here by myself because I don’t trust nobody. Now, I let you in out of the goodness of my heart, I gave you food and shelter for a little bit, but now you got to get out.”
“Why, what’s he done?” said the woman.
“He—” Jude hesitated, but he was too upset to formulate some story other than what had actually happened. “He busted into the shed where I keep all my goods, and after I told him specifically not to do it.”
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