At the very end, when Dizzy was blind and raging with fever and soiling himself almost hourly, he got the idea in his head that Jude was his father. Dizzy wept and said he didn’t want to be gay. He said, “Don’t hate me anymore, Dad, don’t hate me.” And Jude said, “I don’t. I never.” And then Dizzy was gone, and Shannon went right on ordering Jude clothes and thinking about where they should eat lunch.
“Why didn’t you have children with her?” Georgia asked.
“I was worried I’d have too much of my father in me.”
“I doubt you’re anything like him,” she said.
He considered this over a forkful of food. “No. He and I have pretty much exactly the same disposition.”
“What scares me is the idea of having kids and then them finding out the truth about me. Kids always find out. I found out about my folks.”
“What would your kids find out about you?”
“That I dropped out of high school. That when I was thirteen I let a guy turn me into a prostitute. The only job I was ever good at involved taking my clothes off to Mötley Crüe for a roomful of drunks. I tried to kill myself. I been arrested three times. I stole money from my grandma and made her cry. I didn’t brush my teeth for about two years. Am I missing anything?”
“So this is what your kid would find out: No matter what bad thing happens to me, I can talk to my mother, because she’s been through it all. No matter what shitty thing happens to me, I can survive it, because my mom was through worse, and she made it.”
Georgia lifted her head, smiling again, her eyes glittering bright with pleasure and mischief—the kind of eyes Jude had been talking about only a few minutes before.
“You know, Jude,” she said, reaching for her coffee with the fingers of her bandaged hand. The waitress was behind her, leaning forward with the coffeepot to refill Georgia’s mug and not looking at what she was doing, staring instead down at her check pad. Jude saw what was going to happen but couldn’t force the warning out of his throat in time. Georgia went on talking, “Sometimes you’re such a decent guy, I can almost forget what an assh—”
The waitress poured just as Georgia moved her cup and dumped coffee over the bandaged hand. Georgia wailed and yanked the hand back, drawing it tight against her chest, her face twisting in a hurt, sickened grimace. For a moment there was glassy shock in her eyes, a flat and empty shine that made Jude think she might be about to pass out.
Then she was up, clutching the bad hand in her good one. “Want to watch where the fuck you’re pourin’ that, you dumb bitch?” she shouted at the waitress, that accent coming over her again, her voice going country on her.
“Georgia,” Jude said, starting to rise.
She made a face and waved him back to his chair. She thudded the waitress with her shoulder, on her way by her, stalking toward the hall to the bathrooms.
Jude nudged his plate aside. “Guess I’ll take the check when you get a chance.”
“I am so sorry,” the waitress said.
“Accidents happen.”
“I am so sorry,” the waitress repeated. “But that is no reason for her to talk to me that way.”
“She got burnt. I’m surprised you didn’t hear worse.”
The waitress said, “The two of you. I knew what I was serving the moment I laid eyes on you. And I served you just as nice as I’d serve anyone.”
“Oh? You knew what you were serving? What was that?”
“Pair of lowlifes. You look like a drug peddler.”
He laughed.
“And you only got to take one glance at her to know what she is. You payin’ her by the hour?”
He stopped laughing.
“Get me the check,” he said. “And get your fat ass out of my sight.”
She stared at him a moment longer, her mouth screwed up as if she were getting ready to spit, then hurried away without another word.
The people at the tables immediately around him had stopped their conversations to gawk and listen. Jude swept his gaze here and there, staring back at anyone who dared stare at him, and one by one they returned to their food. He was fearless when it came to making eye contact, had looked into too many crowds for too many years to lose a staring contest now.
Finally the only people left watching him were the old man out of American Gothic and his wife, who might’ve been a circus fat lady on her day off. She at least made an effort to be discreet, peeping at Jude from the corners of her eyes while pretending to be interested in the paper spread before her. But the old man just stared, his tea-colored eyes judging and also somehow amused. In one hand he held the electrolarynx to his throat—it hummed faintly—as if he were about to comment. Yet he said nothing.
“Got something on your mind?” Jude asked, when staring right into the old man’s eyes didn’t embarrass him into minding his own business.
The old man raised his eyebrows, then wagged his head back and forth: No, nothing to say. He lowered his gaze back to his plate with a comic little sniff. He set the electrolarynx down beside the salt and pepper.
Jude was about to look away, when the electrolarynx came to life, vibrating on the table. A loud, toneless, electric voice buzzed forth: “YOU WILL DIE.”
The old man stiffened, sat back in his wheelchair. He stared down at his electrolarynx, bewildered, maybe not really sure it had said anything. The fat lady curled her paper and peered over the top of it at the device, a wondering frown set on a face as smooth and round as the Pillsbury Doughboy’s.
“I AM DEAD,” the electrolarynx buzzed, chattering across the surface of the table like a cheap windup toy. The old man plucked it up between his fingers. It made joy-buzzer sounds from between them. “YOU WILL DIE. WE WILL BE IN THE DEATH HOLE TOGETHER.”
“What’s it doin’?” said the fat woman. “Is it pickin’ up a radio station again?”
The old man shook his head: Don’t know. His gaze rose from the electrolarynx, which now rested in the cup of his palm, to Jude. He peered at Jude through glasses that magnified his astonished eyes. The old man held his hand out, as if offering the device to Jude. It hummed and jittered about.
“YOU WILL KILL HER KILL YOURSELF KILL THE DOGS THE DOGS WON’T SAVE YOU WE’LL RIDE TOGETHER LISTEN NOW LISTEN TO MY VOICE WE WILL RIDE AT NIGHTFALL. YOU DON’T OWN ME. I OWN YOU. I OWN YOU NOW.”
“Peter,” the fat woman said. She was trying to whisper, but her voice choked, and when she forced her next breath up, it came out shrill and wavering. “Make it stop, Peter.”
Peter just sat there holding it out to Jude, as if it were a phone and the call was for him.
Everyone was looking, the room filled with crosscurrents of worried murmuring. Some of the other customers had come up out of their chairs to watch, didn’t want to miss what might happen next.
Jude was up, too, thinking, Georgia. As he rose and started to turn toward the hallway to the restrooms, his gaze swept the picture windows that looked out front. He stopped in midmovement, his gaze catching and holding on what he saw in the parking lot. The dead man’s pickup idled there, waiting close to the front doors, the floodlights on, globes of cold white light. No one sitting in it.
A few of the onlookers were standing around, at tables just behind his, and he had to shove through them to reach the corridor to the bathrooms. Jude found a door that said WOMEN, slammed it in.
Georgia stood at one of the two sinks. She didn’t glance up at the sound of the door banging against the wall. She stared at herself in the mirror, but her eyes were unfocused, not really fixed on anything, and her face wore the wistful, grave expression of a child almost asleep in front of the television.
She cocked her bandaged fist back and drove it into the mirror, hard as she could, no holding back. She pulverized the glass in a fist-size circle, with shatter lines jagging out away from the hole in all directions. An instant later silver spears of mirror fell with a ringing crash, broke musically against the sinks.
A slender, yellow-haired wo
man with a newborn in her arms stood a yard away, beside a changing table that folded out from the wall. She grabbed the baby to her chest and began to scream, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”
Georgia grabbed an eight-inch scythe blade of silver, a gleaming crescent moon, raised it to her throat, and tipped her chin back to gouge into the flesh beneath. Jude broke out of the shock that had held him in the doorway and caught her wrist, twisted it down to her side, then bent it back, until she made a pitiful cry and let go. The mirrored scythe fell to the white tiles and shattered with a pretty clashing sound.
Jude spun her, twisting her arm again, hurting her. She gasped and shut her eyes against tears but let him force her forward, march her to the door. He wasn’t sure why he hurt her, if it was panic or on purpose, because he was angry at her for going off or angry at himself for letting her.
The dead man was in the hall outside the bathroom. Jude didn’t register him until he’d already walked past him, and then a shudder rolled through him, left him on legs that wouldn’t stop trembling. Craddock had tipped his black hat at them on their way by.
Georgia could barely hold herself up. Jude shifted his grip to her upper arm, supporting her, as he rammed her across the dining room. The fat lady and the old man had their heads together.
“…WASN’T NO RADIO STATION…”
“Weirdos. Weirdos playing a prank.”
“SHADDAP, HERE THEY COME.”
Others stared, jumped to get out of the way. The waitress who only a minute before had accused Jude of being a drug peddler and Georgia of being his whore stood by the front counter talking to the manager, a little man with pens in his shirt pocket and the sad eyes of a basset hound. She pointed at them as they crossed the room.
Jude slowed at his table long enough to throw down a pair of twenties. As they went by the manager, the little man lifted his head to regard them with his tragic gaze but did not say anything. The waitress went on sputtering in his ear.
“Jude,” Georgia said when they went through the first set of doors. “You’re hurting me.”
He relaxed his grip on her upper arm, saw that his fingers had left waxy white marks in her already pale flesh. They thumped through the second set of doors and were outside.
“Are we safe?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “But we will be soon. The ghost has a healthy fear of them dogs.”
They walked quickly past Craddock’s empty and idling pickup truck. The passenger-side window was rolled down about a third of the way. The radio was on inside. One of the AM right-wingers was talking, in a smooth, confident, almost arrogant voice.
“…it feels good to embrace those core American values, and it feels good to see the right people win an election, even if the other side is going to say it wasn’t fair, and it feels good to see more and more people returning to the politics of common Christian good sense,” said the deep, dulcet voice. “But you know what would feel even better? To choke that bitch standing next to you, choke that bitch, then step into the road in front of a semi, lay down for it, lay down and…”
Then they were past, the voice out of earshot.
“We’re going to lose this thing,” Georgia said.
“No we aren’t. Come on. It isn’t a hundred yards back to the hotel.”
“If he doesn’t get us now, he’s going to get us later. He told me. He said I might as well kill myself and get it over, and I was going to. I couldn’t help myself.”
“I know. That’s what he does.”
They started along the highway, right at the edge of the gravel breakdown lane, with the long stalks of sawgrass whipping at Jude’s jeans.
Georgia said, “My hand feels sick.”
He stopped, lifted it for a look. It wasn’t bleeding, either from punching the mirror or from lifting up the curved blade of glass. The thick, muffling pads of the bandage had protected her skin. Still, even through the wraps he could feel an unwholesome heat pouring off it, and he wondered if she had broken a bone.
“I bet. You hit the mirror pretty hard. You’re lucky you aren’t all hacked up.” Nudging her forward, getting them moving again.
“It’s beating like a heart. Going whump-whump-whump.” She spat, spat again.
Between them and the motel was an overpass, a stone train trestle, the tunnel beneath narrow and dark. There was no sidewalk, no room even for the breakdown lane at the sides of the road. Water dripped from the stone ceiling.
“Come on,” he said.
The overpass was a black frame, boxed around a picture of the Days Inn. Jude’s eyes were fixed on the motel. He could see the Mustang. He could see their room.
They did not slow as they passed into the tunnel, which stank of stagnant water, weeds, urine.
“Wait,” Georgia said.
She turned, doubled over, and gagged, bringing up her eggs, lumps of half-digested toast, and orange juice.
He held her left arm with one hand, pulled her hair back from her face with the other. It made him edgy, standing there in the bad-smelling dark, waiting for her to finish.
“Jude,” she said.
“Come on,” he said, tugging at her arm.
“Wait—”
“Come on.”
She wiped her mouth, with the bottom of her shirt. She remained bent over. “I think—”
He heard the truck before he saw it, heard the engine revving behind him, a furious growl of sound, rising to a roar. Headlights dashed up the wall of rough stone blocks. Jude had time to glance back and saw the dead man’s pickup rushing at them, Craddock grinning behind the wheel and the floodlights two circles of blinding light, holes burned right into the world. Smoke boiled off the tires.
Jude got an arm under Georgia and pitched himself forward, carrying her with him and out the far end of the tunnel.
The smoke-blue Chevy slammed into the wall behind him with a shattering crash of steel smashing against stone. It was a great clap of noise that stunned Jude’s eardrums, set them ringing. He and Georgia fell onto wet gravel, clear of the tunnel now. They rolled away from the side of the road, tumbled down the brush, and landed in dew-damp ferns. Georgia cried out, clipped him in the left eye with a bony elbow. He put a hand down into something squishy, the cool unpleasantness of swamp muck.
He lifted himself up, breathing raggedly. Jude looked back. It wasn’t the dead man’s old Chevy that had hit the wall but an olive Jeep, the kind that was open to the sky, with a roll bar in the back. A black man with close-cropped, steel-wool hair sat behind the steering wheel, holding his forehead. The windshield was fractured in a network of connected rings where his skull had hit it. The whole front driver’s side of the Jeep had been gouged down to the frame, steel twisted up and back in smoking, torn pieces.
“What happened?” Georgia asked, her voice faint and tinny, hard to make out over the droning in his ears.
“The ghost. He missed.”
“Are you sure?”
“That it was the ghost?”
“That he missed.”
He came to his feet, his legs unsteady, knees threatening to give. He took her wrist, helped her up. The whining in his eardrums was already beginning to clear. From a long way off, he could hear his dogs, barking hysterically, barking mad.
26
Heaping their bags into the back of the Mustang, Jude became aware of a slow, deep throb in his left hand, different from the dull ache that had persisted since he stabbed himself there yesterday. When he looked down, he saw that his bandage was coming unraveled and was soaked through with fresh blood.
Georgia drove while he sat in the passenger seat, with the first-aid kit that had accompanied them from New York open in his lap. He undid the wet, tacky dressings and dropped them on the floor at his feet. The Steri-Strips he’d applied to the wound the day before had peeled away, and the puncture gaped again, glistening, obscene. He had torn it open getting out of the way of Craddock’s truck.
“What are you going to do about that hand?” Geor
gia asked, shooting him an anxious look before turning her gaze back to the road.
“Same thing you’re doing about yours,” he said. “Nothing.”
He began to clumsily apply fresh Steri-Strips to the wound. It felt as if he were putting a cigarette out on his palm. When he’d closed the tear as best he could, he wrapped the hand with clean gauze.
“You’re bleeding from the head, too,” she said. “Did you know that?”
“Little scrape. Don’t worry about it.”
“What happens next time? Next time we wind up somewhere without the dogs to look out for us?”
“I don’t know.”
“It was a public place. We should’ve been safe in a public place. People all around, and it was bright daylight, and he went and come at us anyway. How are we supposed to fight somethin’ like him?”
He said, “I don’t know. If I knew what to do, I’d be doing it already, Florida. You and your questions. Lay off a minute, why don’t you?”
They drove on. It was only when he heard the choked sound of her weeping—she was struggling to do it in silence—that he realized he’d called her Florida, when he had meant to say Georgia. It was her questions that had done it, one after another, that and her accent, those Daughter of the Confederacy inflections that had steadily been creeping into her voice the last couple days.
The sound of Georgia trying not to cry was somehow worse than if she wept openly. If she would just go ahead and cry, he could say something to her, but as it was, he felt it necessary to let her be miserable in private and pretend he hadn’t noticed. Jude sank low in the passenger seat and turned his face toward the window.
The sun was a steady glare through the windshield, and a little south of Richmond he fell into a disgusted, heat-stunned trance. He tried to think what he knew about the dead man who pursued them, what Anna had told him about her stepfather when they were together. But it was hard to think, too much effort—he was sore, and there was all that sun in his face and Georgia making quiet, wretched noises behind the steering wheel—and anyway he was sure Anna hadn’t said much.