When he had known her, she’d sported rings in her eyebrows and four apiece in each of her ears, but in the photo they were gone, which made her too-pale face that much more vulnerable. When he looked closely, he could see the marks left by her piercings. She’d given them up, the silver hoops and crosses and ankhs and glittering gems, the studs and fishhooks and rings she had stuck into her skin to make herself look dirty and tough and dangerous and crazy and beautiful. Some of it was true, too. She really had been crazy and beautiful; dangerous, too. Dangerous to herself.
The obituary said nothing about a suicide note. It said nothing about suicide. She had died not three months before her stepfather.
He ran another search. He tapped in “Craddock McDermott, dowsing,” and half a dozen links popped up. He clicked on the topmost result, which brought him to a nine-year-old article in the Tampa Tribune, from their living/arts section. Jude looked at the pictures first—there were two—and stiffened in his chair. It was a while before he could unlock his gaze from those photographs and shift his attention to the text beside them.
The story was titled “Dowsing for the Dead.” The slug line read: 20 years after Vietnam, Capt. Craddock McDermott is ready to lay some ghosts to rest…and raise some others.
The article opened with the story of Roy Hayes, a retired biology professor, who at the age of sixty-nine had learned to fly light planes and who had, one fall morning in 1991, taken an ultralight up over the Everglades to count egrets for an environmental group. At 7:13 A.M. a private strip south of Naples had received a transmission from him.
“I think I’m having a stroke,” Hayes said. “I’m dizzy. I can’t tell how low I am. I need help.”
That was the last anyone had heard from him. A search party, involving more than thirty boats and a hundred men, had not been able to find a trace of either Hayes or his plane. Now, three years after his disappearance and presumed death, his family had taken the extraordinary step of hiring Craddock McDermott, Captain U.S. Army (ret.), to lead a new search for his remains.
“He didn’t go down in the ’Glades,” McDermott states with a confident grin. “The search parties were always looking in the wrong place. The winds that morning carried his plane farther north, over Big Cypress. I put his position less than a mile south of I-75.”
McDermott believes he can pinpoint the site of the crash to an area the size of a square half mile. But he didn’t work out his estimate by consulting meteorological data from the morning of the disappearance, or by examining Dr. Hayes’s final radio transmissions, or by reading eyewitness reports. Instead he dangled a silver pendulum above an outsize map of the region. When the pendulum began to swing rapidly back and forth, over a spot in south Big Cypress, McDermott announced he had found the impact zone.
And when he takes a private search team into the Big Cypress swamp later this week, to look for the downed ultralight, he will not be bringing with him sonar, metal detectors, or hound dogs. His plan for locating the vanished professor is much more simple—and unnerving. He means to appeal to Roy Hayes directly—to call upon the deceased doctor himself to lead the party to his final resting place.
The article shifted to backstory, exploring Craddock’s earliest encounters with the occult. A few lines were spent detailing the more gothic details of his early family life. It touched briefly on his father, the Pentecostal minister with a penchant for snake handling, who had disappeared when Craddock was just a boy. It lingered for a paragraph on his mother, who had twice moved them across the country, after seeing a phantom she called “the walking-backwards man,” a vision that foretold of ill luck. After one such visit from the walking-backwards man, little Craddock and his mother departed an Atlanta apartment complex, not three weeks before the building burned to the ground in an electrical fire.
Then it was 1967, and McDermott was an officer stationed in Vietnam, where he was placed in charge of interrogating the captured elite of the People’s Liberation Army. He found himself assigned to the case of one Nguyen Trung, a chiromancer, who had reportedly learned his fortune-telling arts from Ho Chi Minh’s own brother and who had offered his services to a variety of higher-ups among the Vietcong. To put his prisoner at ease, McDermott asked Trung to help him understand his spiritual beliefs. What followed was a series of extraordinary conversations on the subjects of prophecy, the human soul, and the dead, discussions McDermott said had opened his eyes to the supernatural all around him.
“In Vietnam the ghosts are busy,” McDermott avers. “Nguyen Trung taught me to see them. Once you know how to look for them, you can spot them on every street corner, their eyes marked out and their feet not touching the ground. The living are often known to employ the dead over there. A spirit that believes it has work to do won’t leave our world. It’ll stay until the job is done.
“That was when I first began to believe we were going to lose the war. I saw it happen on the battlefield. When our boys died, their souls would come out of their mouths, like steam from a teakettle, and run for the sky. When the Vietcong died, their spirits remained. Their dead went right on fighting.”
After their sessions had concluded, McDermott lost track of Trung, who disappeared around the time of Tet. As for Professor Hayes, McDermott believed that his final fate would be known soon enough.
“We’ll find him,” McDermott said. “His spirit is unemployed at the moment, but I’ll give him some work. We’re going to ride together—Hayes and I. He’s going to lead me right to his body.”
At this last—We’re going to ride together—Jude felt a chill crawling on the flesh of his arms. But that was not as bad as the peculiar feeling of dread that came over him when he looked at the photographs.
The first was a picture of Craddock leaning against the grill of his smoke-blue pickup. His barefoot stepdaughters—Anna was maybe twelve, Jessica about fifteen—sat on the hood, one to either side of him. It was the first time Jude had ever seen Anna’s older sister, but not the first time he’d ever looked upon Anna as a child—she was just the same as she’d been in his dream, only without the scarf over her eyes.
In the photograph Jessica had her arms around the neck of her smiling, angular stepfather. She was almost as rangy as he was, tall and fit, her skin honey-colored and healthy with tan. But there was something off about her grin—toothy and wide, maybe too wide, too enthusiastic, the sell-sell-sell grin of a frantic real estate salesperson. And there was something off about her eyes, too, which were as bright and black as wet ink, and disconcertingly avid.
Anna sat a little apart from the other two. She was bony, all elbows and knees, and her hair came almost to her waist—a long, golden spill of light. She was also the only one not putting on a smile for the camera. She wasn’t putting on any kind of expression at all. Her face was dazed and expressionless, her eyes unfocused, the eyes of a sleepwalker. Jude recognized it as the expression she wore when she was off in the monochromatic, upside-down world of her depression. He was struck with the troubling idea that she had wandered that world for most of her childhood.
Worst of all, though, was a second, smaller photograph, this one of Captain Craddock McDermott, in fatigues and a sweat-stained fishing hat, M16 slung over one shoulder. He posed with other GIs on hard-packed yellow mud. At his back were palms and standing water; it might’ve been a snapshot of the Everglades, if not for all the soldiers, and their Vietnamese prisoner.
The prisoner stood a little behind Craddock, a solidly built man in a black tunic, with shaved head, broad, handsome features, and the calm eyes of a monk. Jude knew him at first glance as the Vietnamese prisoner he had encountered in his dream. The fingers missing from Trung’s right hand were a dead giveaway. In the grainy, poorly colored photo, the stumps of those fingers had been freshly stitched with black thread.
The same caption that identified this man as Nguyen Trung described the setting as a field hospital in Dong Tam, where Trung had received care for combat-related injuries. That was almost right. Trung
had lopped off his own fingers only because he thought they were about to attack—so it had been combat of a sort. As for what had happened to him, Jude thought he knew. Jude thought it was likely that after Trung had no more to tell Craddock McDermott—about ghosts and the work ghosts did—he’d gone for a ride on the nightroad.
The article did not say if McDermott had ever found Roy Hayes, retired professor and ultralight pilot, but Jude believed he had, although there was no rational reason to think such a thing. To satisfy himself he did another search. Roy Hayes’s remains had been laid to rest five weeks later, and in fact Craddock had not found him—not personally. The water was too deep. A state police scuba team had gone in and pulled him out, in the place where Craddock told them to dive.
Georgia threw open the bathroom door, and Jude quit her browser.
“Whatchu doin’?” she asked.
“Trying to figure out how to check my mail,” he lied. “You want a turn?”
She looked at her computer for a moment, then shook her head and wrinkled her nose. “No. I don’t have the least interest in going online. Isn’t that funny? Usually you can’t peel me off.”
“Well, see? Running for your life ain’t all bad. Just look at how it’s building character.”
He pulled out the dresser drawer again and slopped another can of Alpo into it.
“Last night the smell of that shit was making me want to gag,” Georgia said. “Strangely, this morning it’s getting me hungry.”
“Come on. There’s a Denny’s up the street. Let’s go for a walk.”
He opened the door, then held out his hand to her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, in her stone-washed black jeans, heavy black boots, and sleeveless black shirt, which hung loose on her slight frame. In the golden beam of sunlight that fell through the door, her skin was so pale and fine it was almost translucent, looked as if it would bruise at the slightest touch.
Jude saw her glance at the dogs. Angus and Bon bent over the drawer, heads together as they went snorkeling in their food. He saw Georgia frown, and he knew what she was thinking, that they’d been safe as long as they kept the dogs close. But then she squinted back at Jude, standing in the light, took his hand, and let him pull her to her feet. The day was bright. Beyond the door the morning waited for them.
He was, for himself, not scared. He still felt under the protection of the new song, felt that in writing it he had drawn a magic circle around the both of them that the dead man could not penetrate. He had driven the ghost away—for a time anyhow.
But as they crossed the parking lot—thoughtlessly holding hands, a thing they never did—he happened to glance back at their hotel room. Angus and Bon stared out through the picture window at them, standing side by side on their hind legs, with their front paws on the glass and their faces wearing identical looks of apprehension.
25
The Denny’s was loud and overcrowded, thick with the smell of bacon fat and burnt coffee and cigarette smoke. The bar, just to the right of the doors, was a designated smoking area. That meant that after five minutes of waiting up front to be seated, you could plan on smelling like an ashtray by the time you were led to your table.
Jude didn’t smoke himself and never had. It was the one self-destructive habit he’d managed to avoid. His father smoked. On errands into town, Jude had always willingly bought him the cheap, long boxes of generics, had done it even without being asked, and they both knew why. Jude would glare at Martin across the kitchen table, while his father lit a cigarette and took his first drag, the tip flaring orange.
“If looks could kill, I’d have cancer already,” Martin said to him one night, without any preamble. He waved a hand, drew a circle in the air with the cigarette, squinting at Jude through the smoke. “I got a tough constitution. You want to kill me off with these, you’re gonna have to wait a while. You really want me dead, there’s easier ways to do it.”
Jude’s mother said nothing, concentrated on shelling peas, face screwed up in an expression of intent study. She might have been a deaf-mute.
Jude—Justin then—did not speak either, simply went on glaring at him. He was not too angry to speak but too shocked, because it was as if his father had read his mind. He’d been staring at the loose, chicken-flesh folds of Martin Cowzynski’s neck with a kind of fury, wanting to will a cancer into it, a lump of black-blossoming cells that would devour his father’s voice, choke his father’s breath. Wanting that with all his heart: a cancer that would make the doctors scoop out his throat, shut him up forever.
The man at the next table had had his throat scooped out and used an electrolarynx to talk, a loud, crackling joy buzzer that he held under his chin to tell the waitress (and everyone else in the room): “YOU GOT AIR-CONDITIONIN’? WELL, TURN IT ON. YOU DON’T BOTHER TO COOK THE FOOD, WHY YOU WANNA FRAH YOUR PAYIN’ CUSTOMERS? JESUS CHRIST. I’M EIGHTY-SEVEN.” This was a fact he felt to be of such overwhelming importance that he said it again after the waitress walked away, repeating himself to his wife, a fantastically obese woman who didn’t look up from her newspaper as he spoke. “I’M EIGHTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD. CHRIST. FRAH US LIKE AIGS.” He looked like the old man from that painting, American Gothic, down to the gray strands of hair combed over his balding dome.
“Wonder what sort of old couple we’d make,” Georgia said.
“Well. I’d still be hairy. It would just be white hair. And it would probably be growing in tufts out of all the wrong places. My ears. My nose. Big, crazy hairs sticking out of my eyebrows. Basically like Santa, gone horribly fuckin’ wrong.”
She scooped a hand under her breasts. “The fat in these is going to drain steadily into my ass. I got a sweet tooth, so probably my teeth will fall out on me. On the bright side, I’ll be able to pop out my dentures for toothless, old-lady blow jobs.”
He touched her chin, lifted her face toward his. He studied her high cheekbones and the eyes in deep, bruised hollows, eyes that watched with a wry amusement that did not quite mask her desire to meet with his approval.
“You got a good face,” he said. “You got good eyes. You’ll be all right. With old ladies it’s all about the eyes. You want to be an old lady with lively eyes, so it looks like you’re always thinking of something funny. Like you’re looking for trouble.”
He drew his hand away. She peered down into her coffee, smiling, flattered into an uncharacteristic shyness.
“Sounds like you’re talking about my grandma Bammy,” she said. “You’ll love her. We could be there by lunch.”
“Sure.”
“My grandma looks like the friendliest, most harmless old thing. Oh, but she likes tormenting people. I was living with her by the time I was in the eighth grade. I’d have my boyfriend Jimmy Elliott over—to play Yahtzee, I said, but really we were sneaking wine. Bammy would leave a half-full bottle of red in her fridge most days, leftover from dinner the night before. And she knew what we were doing, and one day she switched purple ink for the booze and left it for us. Jimmy let me take the first slug. I got a mouthful and went and coughed it all down myself. When she came home, I still had a big purple ring on my mouth, purple stains all down my jaw, purple tongue. It didn’t come out for a week either. I expected Bammy to paddle me good, but she just thought it was funny.”
The waitress came for their order. When she was gone, Georgia said, “What was it like being married, Jude?”
“Peaceful.”
“Why did you divorce her?”
“I didn’t. She divorced me.”
“She catch you in bed with the state of Alaska or something?”
“No. I didn’t cheat—well, not too often. And she didn’t take it personal.”
“She didn’t? Are you for real? If we were married and you helped yourself to a piece, I’d throw the first thing came to hand at you. And the second. I wouldn’t drive you to the hospital either. Let you bleed.” She paused, bent over her mug, then said, “So what did it?”
“It would be hard to ex
plain.”
“Because I’m too stupid?”
“No,” he said. “More like I’m not smart enough to explain it to myself, let alone anyone else. For a long time, I wanted to work at being a husband. Then I didn’t. And when I didn’t anymore—she just knew it. Maybe I made sure she knew it.” And as he said it, Jude was thinking how he’d started staying up late, waiting for her to get tired and go to bed without him. He’d slip in later, after she was asleep, so there was no chance of making love. Or how he would sometimes start playing guitar, picking at a tune, in the middle of her telling him something—playing right over her talk. Remembering how he’d held on to the snuff movie instead of throwing it away. How he’d left it out where she could find it—where he supposed he knew she would find it.
“That doesn’t make sense. Just all of a sudden, you didn’t feel like making the effort? That doesn’t seem like you. You aren’t the type to give up on things for no reason.”
It wasn’t for no reason, but what reason there was defied articulation, could not be put into words in a way that made sense. He had bought his wife the farmhouse, bought it for both of them. He bought Shannon one Mercedes, then another, a big sedan and a convertible. They took weekends, sometimes, in Cannes, and flew there on a private jet where they were served jumbo shrimp and lobster tail on ice. And then Dizzy died—died as badly and painfully as a person could die—and Jerome killed himself, and still Shannon would come into Jude’s studio and say, “I’m worried about you. Let’s go to Hawaii” or “I bought you a leather jacket—try it on,” and he would begin to strum at his guitar, hating the chirp of her voice and playing over it, hating the thought of spending more money, of owning another jacket, of going on another trip. But mostly just hating the contented, milk-fed look of her face, her fat fingers with all their rings, the cool look of concern in her eyes.