Will Baer: Hell's Half Acre

The apartment bore no evidence of the attack, not a drop of blood. But then Jude had always been meticulous about cleaning up a crime scene.

Jude was locked in the bedroom. She refused to come out.

I’m going to take the door off the hinges, I said.

Jude didn’t answer me. I went to the kitchen and came back with a hammer and screwdriver. The apartment was ancient and the hinges on the doors had been painted over probably a dozen times. I was starting to knock the pin loose from the bottom hinge when Jude spoke up. She said in a cold voice that I would be sorry if I did that.

Jude, please. Just come out.

Tomorrow, she said. Maybe tomorrow.

But tomorrow came and went and Jude didn’t come out. She wasn’t starving herself or anything. She was just avoiding me. Now and then I found a bowl in the sink, a spoon.

Okay, I thought.

Jude didn’t want to be seen and she didn’t want to talk. She didn’t want to be loved or touched or comforted. I could have tried. I should have. But guilt is a terrible bedfellow and maybe I was afraid to look at her. I told myself she would come to me when she wanted comfort. I shut myself in the attic room with a laptop and searched the Net for three men who may well not have existed, and for the flipper boy who’d hired them.

Three men.

I searched for just three men, because the black man with shaved skull had unwisely succumbed to Jude’s offer, perhaps thinking he would get a blowjob out of the deal, and untied her hands. Maybe he was just stupid. Maybe he didn’t know how dangerous she was. Whatever the reason, he had complied and Jude had run her hands seductively up his chest as she kissed him, pulling him close. She promptly bit off most of his nose and upper lip, wrenching her jaws so violently that I actually heard the flesh rip from his face. Then she snapped his neck. The two white guys looked at each other and said fuck this, and disappeared like vapor, while Jude was untying her feet. She could have easily killed their crew leader, the one I’d disabled with the toilet lid, but didn’t. She barely looked at him, in fact. She stepped gingerly around the man, almost as if she were afraid of him, and came to me. Maybe she was in a hurry to cut me loose and take me to the hospital. Either way, the chance was lost, because when she returned, he was gone. The white guys had come back for their leader, apparently, because the faceless body of the black dude was gone as well.

Pretty soon I was on a shitload of painkillers and I had started using crystal meth to stay awake and for me it was always too easy to go mad. It was like rolling out of bed. I didn’t speak to Jude for days, maybe weeks, and anyway she never came out of her room. I saw her a few times, though. I saw her reflection in the window, a dusty flash of her in the glass. I saw her behind me on the stairs once, naked and descending like a wraith but when I turned to look for her she wasn’t there. The speed was getting to me and my brain wasn’t right. The phone was long dead but I ripped the cords out of the walls anyway. I removed the bulbs from all the lamps. I carried the screwdriver everywhere I went. I didn’t eat or sleep and before you could say Howdy Doody, I had gone over the wall to crazy land. I was limping around the apartment at night, pouring sweat and muttering.

One morning, the bedroom door was open. I went in to ask Jude if she was hungry but she was gone. The bed was stripped bare and there was a splash of red in the center of the mattress. It wasn’t a lot of blood at all but it scared me. I thought she had killed herself and started looking around for her body. I came out of the bedroom and there she was, sitting at the kitchen table. Jude wore sweatpants and a jean jacket buttoned to the throat even though it was not cold. Her posture was very straight. I sat down across from her and put the screwdriver on the table. I could smell myself and it wasn’t a good smell. I was wearing white pants for some reason, and nothing else. I was hungry and I felt like I was coming back to the world.

Hey, I said.

I just came from the clinic, she said.

Are you okay?

No. I’m pregnant.

Oh. Shit.

Shit, she said.

How pregnant?

Eight weeks. She lit a cigarette and immediately put it out.

Bad for the baby, she muttered. Her hand was trembling and she made a fist. I wanted to say that everything was okay, that we were together and everything was okay but it was almost impossible to conceive of Jude pregnant, Jude a mother, and finally my brain kicked in like a radio that only works on rainy days because rats have been chewing the wires. That blood on the bed was something to worry about yes but there was something else, wasn’t there. But I couldn’t bring myself to say anything.

The attack was exactly eight weeks ago, she said.

And we, I said. We had sex that morning, and the night before. I remember because the phone kept ringing and you threw the portable out the window.

Jude half smiled. That’s right.

We didn’t use a condom, I said.

No, she said. But you withdrew.

And they didn’t, I said. Did they?

Jude sighed. She said that she was tired.

Look, I said. It’s okay. We’re gonna be okay.

Jude shook her head. No, we’re not.

She went to take a nap and when I went to check on her, she said she wanted to be alone. I tried to pull myself together. I got myself cleaned up and went to the grocery store, numbly thinking that she would need things like chicken soup and milk and ice cream and bottled water because even if she was going to get an abortion she would need to eat. I wasn’t too rational. I hadn’t been out of the apartment in almost a month and my vision was still blurry and when I came back to the apartment Jude was gone. She was just gone. I went out and bought a shotgun, and waited as long as I could stand it, maybe a month. I was hoping the men would come back to finish the job. But they never did and I realized Jude was probably hunting them, and maybe she’d already found them, and after a while the silence of the apartment and the springtime stink of the Quarter had driven me half crazy, and I decided Jude wasn’t coming back. I got on a bus and headed back to Denver, where I plunged myself into an altogether different nightmare. But that’s another story.

I’m still sitting in a yellow cab outside the King James Hotel. The driver is waiting for his money. I reach into my pocket and find the wallet I took off the dead man in the alley. I flip it open to find a wad of small bills, maybe ninety bucks. No credit cards. Driver’s licenses from five states. The same blond hair and silvery eyes with five different names, and if the IDs are fakes, they are well crafted. I study his face for half a tick. Thin, intelligent, fierce, hard as the underside of your boot. The Nevada license, expired, is the only one that bears his Christian name, Sugar Jefferson Finch. This was one of the dogs Jude was hunting. This was one of the men who attacked us in New Orleans, one of the savage fucks who raped her, and I saved his life today. I wonder if he was the one who took me down with that hammer, and I feel sick.

Furious and sick.

The dead man in the alley was presumably his kid brother, also known as Shane. Tucked into Sugar’s wallet is a book of matches from the Alamo Hotel, with a phone number scribbled on the inside. Might be a long shot, might be an easy ground ball, hit right at me. The cab’s radio crackles with the dispatcher’s voice, and now my driver turns around to favor me with his gray fleshy face, mottled with a pink rash.

What’s it gonna be, pal? In or out.

You know a place called the Alamo?

The driver grunts. Big drop-off from the James to the Alamo.

That’s cool. Is it far?