She laughed, her breath tickling his throat.
She said, “What are we going to do when we get where we’re going?”
“We’re going to talk to the woman who sent me the suit. We’re going to find out if she knows how to get rid of him.”
Cars droned on I-95. Crickets thrummed.
“Are you going to hurt her?”
“I don’t know. I might. How’s your hand?”
“Better,” she said. “How’s yours?”
“Better,” he said.
He was lying, and he was pretty sure she was, too. She had gone into the bathroom to re-dress the hand when they first got into the room. He had gone in after, to re-dress his, and found her old wraps in the trash. He pulled the loops of gauze out of the wastebasket to inspect them. They stank of infection and antiseptic cream, and they were stained with dried blood and something else, a yellow crust that had to be pus.
As for his own hand, the gouge he’d put in it probably needed stitches. Before leaving the house that morning, he had tugged a first-aid kit out of an upper cabinet in the kitchen and used some Steri-Strips to pull the gash closed, then wound it in white bandages. But the gouge continued to seep, and by the time he took the wraps off, blood was beginning to soak through them. The hole in his left hand bulged open between the Steri-Strips, a red, liquid eye.
“The girl who killed herself,” Georgia began. “The girl this is all about…”
“Anna McDermott.” Her real name now.
“Anna,” Georgia repeated. “Do you know why she killed herself? Was it because you told her to scram?”
“Her sister obviously thinks so. Her stepdaddy, too, I guess, since he’s haunting us.”
“The ghost…can make people do things. Like getting me to burn the suit. Like making Danny hang himself.”
He’d told her about Danny in the car. Georgia had turned her face to the window, and he’d heard her crying softly for a while, making little damp, choked sounds, which evened out after a time into the slow, regular inhalations of sleep. This was the first either of them had mentioned Danny since.
Jude continued, “The dead man, Anna’s stepdaddy, learned hypnotism torturing Charlie in the army and stayed with it after he got out. Liked to call himself a mentalist. In his life he used that chain of his, with the silver razor on the end of it, to put people into trances, but now he’s dead, he don’t need it anymore. Something about when he says things, you just have to do it. All of a sudden, you’re just sitting back, watching him run you here and there. You don’t even feel anything. Your body is a suit of clothes, and he’s the one wearing it, not you.” A dead man’s suit, Jude thought, with a shuddery feeling of revulsion. Then he said, “I don’t know much about him. Anna didn’t like to talk on him. But I know she worked for a while as a palm reader, and she said her stepdaddy was the one who taught her how. He had an interest in the less-understood aspects of the human mind. Like, for example, on the weekends he’d hire himself out as a dowser.”
“Those are people who find water by waving sticks in the air? My grandma hired an old hillbilly with a mouthful of gold teeth to find her a fresh spring after her well went dry. He had a hickory stick.”
“Anna’s stepdaddy, Craddock, didn’t bother with a stick. He just used that pretty razor on a chain he’s got. Pendulums work about as well, I guess. Anyway, the psycho bitch who sent me the suit, Jessica McDermott Price, wanted me to know that her pop had said he’d get even with me after he was dead. So I think the old man had some ideas about how to come back. In other words, he’s not an accidental ghost, if that makes sense. He got the way he is now on purpose.”
A dog yapped somewhere in the distance. Bon lifted her head, gazed thoughtfully in the direction of the door, then lowered her chin back to her forepaws.
“Was she pretty?” Georgia asked.
“Anna? Yeah. Sure. You want to know if she was good in the sack?”
“I’m just asking. You don’t got to be a son of a bitch about it.”
“Well, then. Don’t ask questions you don’t really want to know the answers to. Notice I never inquire about your past lays.”
“Past lays. Goddammit. Is that the way you think of me? The present lay, soon to be the past lay?”
“Christ. Here we go.”
“And I’m not being a snoop. I’m trying to figure this out.”
“How is knowing whether she was pretty going to help you figure anything out about our ghost problem?”
She held the sheet to her chin and stared at him in the dark.
“So she was Florida and I’m Georgia. How many other states has your dick visited?”
“I couldn’t tell you. I don’t have a map somewhere with pins in it. You really want me to make an estimate? While we’re on the subject, why stop with states? I’ve had thirteen world tours, and I always took my cock along with me.”
“You fuckin’ asshole.”
He grinned in his beard. “I know that’s probably shocking, to a virgin such as yourself. Here’s some news for you: I got a past. Fifty-four years of it.”
“Did you love her?”
“You can’t leave it alone, can you?”
“This is important, goddammit.”
“How’s it important?”
She wouldn’t say.
He sat up against the headboard. “For about three weeks.”
“Did she love you?”
He nodded.
“She wrote you letters? After you sent her home?”
“Yeah.”
“Angry letters?”
He didn’t reply at first, considering the question.
“Did you even fuckin’ read ’em, you insensitive shitbird?” There it was again, an unmistakably rural and southern cadence in her voice. Her temper was up, and she’d forgotten herself for a moment. Or maybe it was not a case of forgetting herself, Jude thought, so much as the opposite.
“Yeah, I read ’em,” he said. “I was hunting around for them when the shit blew up in our faces back in New York.”
He was sorry Danny had not found them. He had loved Anna and lived with her and talked with her every day they were together but now understood he had not learned nearly enough about her. He knew so little of the life she’d lived before him—and after.
“You deserve whatever happens to you,” she said. Georgia rolled away from him. “We both deserve it.”
He said, “They weren’t angry. Sometimes they were emotional. And sometimes they were scary, because there was so little emotion in them. In the last one, I remember she said something about how she had things she wanted to talk about, things she was tired of keeping secret. She said she couldn’t stand to be so tired all the time. Which should’ve been a warning sign to me right there. Except she said stuff like that other times, and she never…anyway. I been trying to tell you she wasn’t right. She wasn’t happy.”
“But do you think she still loved you? Even after you put your boot in her ass?”
“I didn’t—” he started, then let out a thin, seething breath. Wouldn’t let himself be baited. “I suppose probably she did.”
Georgia didn’t speak for a long time, her back to him. He studied the curve of her shoulder. At last she said, “I feel bad for her. It’s not a lot of fun, you know.”
“What?”
“Being in love with you. I’ve been with a lot of bad guys who made me feel lousy about myself, Jude, but you’re something special. Because I knew none of them really cared about me, but you do, and you make me feel like your shitty hooker anyway.” She spoke plainly, calmly, without looking at him.
It made him catch his breath a little, what she said, and for an instant he wanted to tell her he was sorry, but he shied from the word. He was out of practice at apologies and loathed explanations. She waited for him to reply, and when he didn’t, she pulled the blanket up to cover her shoulder.
He slid down against the pillow, put his hands behind his head.
“We’ll
be passing through Georgia tomorrow,” she said, still not turning toward him. “I want to stop and see my grandma.”
“Your grandma,” Jude repeated, as if he weren’t sure he’d heard her right.
“Bammy is my favorite person in the world. She bowled a perfect three hundred once.” Georgia said it as if the two things followed each other naturally. Maybe they did.
“You know the trouble we’re in?”
“Yeah. I was vaguely aware.”
“Do you think it’s a good idea to start making detours?”
“I want to see her.”
“How about we stop in on our way back? You two can catch up on old times then. Hell, maybe the two of you could go bowl a couple strings.”
Georgia was a little while in answering. At last she said, “I was feelin’ like I ought to see her now. It’s been on my mind. I don’t think it’s any sure thing we’ll be makin’ the trip back. Do you?”
He pulled his beard, staring at the shape of her under the sheet. He didn’t like the idea of slowing for any reason but felt the need to offer her something, some concession, to make her loathe him a little less. Also, if Georgia had things she wanted to say to someone who loved her, he supposed it made sense not to wait around. Putting off anything that mattered no longer seemed like sensible planning.
“She keep lemonade in the fridge?”
“Fresh made.”
“Okay,” Jude said. “We’ll stop. Not too long, though, okay? We can be in Florida this time tomorrow if we don’t mess around.”
One of the dogs sighed. Georgia had opened a window to air out the odor of Alpo, the window that looked into the courtyard at the center of the motel. Jude could smell the rust of the chain-link fence and a dash of chlorine, although there was no water in the pool.
Georgia said, “Also, I used to have a Ouija board, once upon a time. When we get to my grandma’s, I want to poke around for it.”
“I already told you. I don’t need to talk to Craddock. I already know what he wants.”
“No,” Georgia said, her voice short with impatience. “I don’t mean so we can talk to him.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“We need it if we’re going to talk to Anna,” Georgia said. “You said she loved you. Maybe she can tell us how to get out of this mess. Maybe she can call him off.”
22
Lake Pontchartrain, huh? I didn’t grow up too far from there. My parents took us campin’ there once. My stepdaddy fished. I can’t remember how he did. You go fishin’ much on Lake Pontchartrain?”
She was always after him with her questions. He could never decide if she listened to the answers or just used the time when he was talking to think of something else to pester him about.
“Do you like to fish? Do you like raw fish? Sushi? I think sushi is disgusting, except when I’m drinkin’, and then I’m in the mood. Repulsion masks attraction. How many times have you been to Tokyo? I hear the food is really nasty—raw squid, raw jellyfish. Everything is raw there. Did they not invent fire in Japan? Have you ever had bad food poisonin’? Sure you have. On tour all the time.
“What’s the hardest you ever puked? You ever puked through your nostrils? You have? That’s the worst.
“But did you fish Lake Pontchartrain much? Did your daddy take you? Isn’t that the prettiest name? Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Pontchartrain, I want to see the rain on Lake Pontchartrain. You know what the most romantic sound in the world is? Rain on a quiet lake. A nice spring rain. When I was a kid, I could put myself into a trance just sittin’ at my window watchin’ the rain. My stepdad used to say he never met anyone as easy to put into a trance as me. What were you like growin’ up? When’d you decide to change your name?
“Do you think I should change my name? You should pick out a new name for me. I want you to call me whatever you want to call me.”
“I already do,” he said.
“That’s right. You do. From now on, my name is Florida. Anna McDermott is dead to me. She’s a dead girl. All gone. I never liked her anyway. I’d rather be Florida. Do you miss Louisiana? Isn’t it funny we only lived four hours apart from each other? We coulda crossed paths. Do you think you and I were ever in the same room, at the same time, and didn’t know it? Probably not, though, right? Because you blew out of Louisiana before I was even born.”
It was either her most endearing habit or her most infuriating. Jude was never sure. Maybe it was both at the same time.
“You ever shut up with the questions?” he asked her the first night they slept together. It was two in the morning, and she’d been interrogating him for an hour. “Were you one of those kids who would drive their momma crazy going, ‘Why is the sky blue? Why doesn’t the earth fall into the sun? What happens to us when we die?’”
“What do you think happens to us when we die?” Anna asked. “You ever seen a ghost? My stepdaddy has. My stepdaddy’s talked to them. He was in Vietnam. He says the whole country is haunted.”
By then he already knew that her stepfather was a dowser as well as a mesmerist, and in business with her older sister, also a hypnotist by trade, the both of them back in Testament, Florida. That was almost the full extent of what he knew about her family. Jude didn’t push for more—not then, not later—was content to know about her what she wanted him to know.
He had met Anna three days before, in New York City. He’d come down to do a guest vocal with Trent Reznor for a movie sound track—easy money—then stuck around to see a show Trent was doing at Roseland. Anna was backstage, a petite girl, violet lipstick, leather pants that creaked when she walked, the rare Goth blonde. She asked if he wanted an egg roll and got it for him and then said, “Is it hard to eat with a beard like that? Do you get food in it?” At him with the questions almost from hello. “Why do you think so many guys, bikers and stuff, grow beards to look threatening? Don’t you think they’d actually work against you in a fight?”
“How would a beard work against you in a fight?” he asked.
She grabbed his beard in one fist and yanked at it. He bent forward, felt a tearing pain in the lower half of his face, ground his teeth, choked on an angry cry. She let go, continued, “Like if I was ever in a fight with a bearded man, that’s the first thing I’d do. ZZ Top would be pushovers. I could take all three of them myself, little itty-bitty me. Course, those guys are stuck, they can’t shave. If they ever shaved, no one would know who they were. I kind of guess you’re in the same boat, now I think about it. It’s who you are. That beard gave me bad dreams as a little girl, when I used to watch you in videos. Hey! You know, you could be completely anonymous without your beard. You ever think of that? Instant vacation from the pressures of celebrity. Plus, it’s a liability in combat. Reasons to shave.”
“My face was a liability to getting laid,” he said. “If my beard gave you bad dreams, you should see me without it. You’d probably never sleep again.”
“So it’s a disguise. An act of concealment. Like your name.”
“What about my name?”
“That isn’t your real name. Judas Coyne. It’s a pun.” She leaned toward him. “Name like that, are you from a nutty Christian family? I bet. My stepdaddy says the Bible is all bunk. He was raised Pentecostal, but he wound up a spiritualist, which is how he raised us. He’s got a pendulum—he can hang it over you and ask you questions and tell if you’re lying by the way it swings back and forth. He can read your aura with it, too. My aura is black as sin. How about yours? Want me to read your palm? Palm reading is nothing. Easiest trick in the book.”
She told his fortune three times. The first time she was kneeling naked in bed beside him, a gleaming line of sweat showing in the crease between her breasts. She was flushed, still breathing hard from their exertions. She took his palm, moved her fingertips across it, inspecting it closely.
“Look at this lifeline,” Anna said. “This thing goes on for miles. I guess you live forever. I wouldn’t want to live forever myself. How old is t
oo old? Maybe it’s metaphorical. Like your music is forever, some malarkey along those lines. Palm reading ain’t no exact science.”
And then once, not long after he finished rebuilding the Mustang, they had gone for a drive into the hills overlooking the Hudson. They wound up parked at a boat ramp, staring out at the river, the water flecked with diamond scales beneath a high, faded-blue sky. Fluffy white clouds, thousands of feet high, crowded the horizon. Jude had meant to drive Anna to an appointment with a psychiatrist—Danny had set it up—but she’d dissuaded him, said it was too nice a day to spend it in a doctor’s office.
They sat there, windows down, music low, and she picked up his hand, lying on the seat between them. She was having one of her good days. They’d been coming less and less often.
“You love again after me,” she said. “You get another chance to be happy. I don’t know if you’ll let yourself take it. I kind of think not. Why don’t you want to be happy?”
“What do you mean, after you?” he asked. Then he said, “I’m happy now.”
“No you aren’t. You’re still angry.”
“With who?”
“Yourself,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing. “Like it’s your fault Jerome and Dizzy died. Like anyone could’ve saved them from themselves. You’re still real pissed with your daddy, too. For what he did to your mother. For what he did to your hand.”
This last statement stole his breath. “What are you talking about? How do you know about what he did to my hand?”
She flicked her gaze toward him: an amused, cunning look. “I’m starin’ at it right now, aren’t I?” She turned his hand over, moved her thumb across his scarred knuckles. “You don’t have to be psychic or anything. You just have to have sensitive fingers. I can feel where the bones healed. What’d he hit this hand with to smash it? A sledgehammer? They healed real bad.”
“The basement door. I took off one weekend to play a show in New Orleans. A battle-of-the-bands thing. I was fifteen. Helped myself to a hundred bucks’ bus fare out of the family cash box. I figured it wouldn’t be like stealing, ’cause we’d win the contest. Five-hundred-dollar cash prize. Pay it all back with interest.”