Will Baer - Hell's Half Acre

By then, the fire trucks had arrived.

I was in agreement with the senator, amputee geek or no. I wanted Sam and Molly away from that house. I allowed myself to be handcuffed and was deposited into the back of a black and white.

And at the police station, the interrogation came on pretty hardcore, but Molly swore on a stack of bibles that I’d had nothing to do with Miller or the kidnapping, that I was just an ex-cop who came out of nowhere and rescued her and the kid. She never breathed a word about Jude’s involvement, and there was no breaking her of her story. And apparently Sam told his father pretty much the same thing, because the senator called in a pack of family favors and made all charges against me go away like he was blowing dust from his prosthetic fingers.

Make a wish, boy.

The woman who gets out of the Mercedes is sure as hell not Molly. She’s a stranger but she looks so much like Jude that I think God must be fucking with me. Dark sunglasses and a scarf the color of spilled red wine around her neck. Tangled brown and gold hair. She wears a black T-shirt, a white jacket, and brown corduroys. Dark honey skin like Jude’s with the same butterfly glow that just gets deeper in the sun. I see her in flashes, splinters. Jude’s mouth. Jude’s perfect ass, curved like a peach. But she is not Jude. She’s an improbable echo, a body double. The woman walks around the car, cursing. She never glances my way. I watch as she removes jack and tire iron from the trunk. She handles them reluctantly, as if she’s never changed a tire before, and soon she drops the tools. They crash to the ground and again I flinch. The hailstones are melting and the parking lot has taken on a lovely apocalyptic glow that makes me want to puke. The woman drags the spare tire from the trunk, then crouches beside the car and fumbles incompetently with the jack. I want to help her but something tells me to hold my ground. This scene is just a little too perfect for my taste and the woman in distress is therefore bad voodoo. If she were another amputee then I would have a hell of a story for the Internet. I don’t have Internet access, however. And the woman appears to have all of her natural limbs. Thirty seconds wriggle past and now this woman who is not Jude turns to look at me.

Hey, she says.

I don’t like people in sunglasses. I turn my head and spit. The woman frowns and promptly removes the sunglasses. Devastating. She turns back to the car and I watch for as long as I can stand it, then start walking toward her. It could be that two guys are going to hop out of the car and whack me on the head but what’s the difference. I have nothing to steal. I walk across the parking lot to crouch beside her. I expect her to smell like expensive rainwater and fairy dust but all I can smell is bleach. I can smell nothing but my own disinfected skin and now the woman peers at me, grinning.

I’m hopeless with tools, she says.

I can see that.

She wears a silver and turquoise bracelet on her wrist and her left hand is covered in fine white scars, as if she got it tangled in a spider’s web. The scars are beautiful as hell and I try not to stare at them. I have seen scars like that once before, when I was living on the psych ward at Fort Logan. There was a schizophrenic old guy called Sweet William who was a little claustrophobic and didn’t like to be inside and the story behind those scars was that he once put both fists through a car windshield and maybe this strange woman is claustrophobic, maybe not. I reach for the tools and busy myself with the jack and pretty soon she moves away to give me some breathing room. I twist loose the lug nuts and spin the tire iron like a windmill, then slowly crank the silver car from the ground. The silence is heavy in my head. I glance over at the woman, who stands with her back to me, staring out at the desert with her hands on her hips. I wonder if she sees the same perfect wasteland that I see and now the jack slips and I rip two inches of perfectly good skin from the back of my hand.

Fuck, I say.

She glances at me and maybe it’s my imagination but her eyes seem to flash at the sight of blood. She doesn’t say a word. She slowly pulls the scarf from around her neck and gives it to me, then turns back to the desert. I suck on my hand a moment, staring. Her hair falls light as pale wildflowers just above her shoulders in back. I turn away and wrap my hand in her bandana and five minutes later, I’m finished with the tire. I toss the flat tire and tools into the trunk and light another cigarette. It’s a miracle my boss has not shown himself and I think he must be camped out in the toilet with some very depressing porn. He tends to favor those magazines that promise sweet pubescent virgins but ultimately feature a lot of sad, fucked-up looking runaways with bad skin. The woman stands with her back to me and I don’t know if she’s contemplating the human condition or wondering how long it will take to get where she’s going or praying or what, and intellectually speaking, I know it’s unlikely but somewhere in the marrow I know this woman is Jude’s sister, the one reputed to be in Toronto.

It’s beautiful out here, she says.

I take a breath. It’s like living on God’s asshole.

She turns. Are you a religious man?

Lately, yes.

Flash of a smile and she nods.

Where are you going? I say.

Here, she says.

I cast a crooked eye at the diner.

Why? I say.

I’m looking for you.

I scratch my head. The woman must be joking because no one knows I’m out here, no one. I barely exist, legally.

Your name is Phineas Poe, she says. Is that right?

I don’t mean to be nasty, I say. But what do you want?

Are you Phineas Poe? she says.

Yes.

The ex-cop?

The dishwasher, I say.

Whatever, she says. I have a package for you.

A package?

She smiles. It’s just a small thing.

How small?

Well, she says. It’s bigger than a loaf of bread.

I stare as she leans into the car and retrieves a black knapsack, then begins to dig through it, muttering softly to herself as if she’s lost her keys. A wild strand of hair drifts between her lips as the breeze picks up and she blows it away impatiently. I get nervous when she drops the knapsack and the contents tumble onto the wet asphalt. Two packs of cigarettes and lipstick and pink chewing gum and handcuffs and a roll of electrician’s tape and a screwdriver and a tin of Tiger Balm and a knife in a black nylon sheath and a pack of condoms and one pair of pink and white polka dot panties. There is a moment of pure, almost visible silence before she takes an exasperated breath and releases a short, violent, imaginative string of profanity and her voice has a Southern edge to it that I hadn’t noticed before.

Oh my, she says. This is so fucking elegant.

She is so obviously Jude’s sister that I feel like I might explode, but I don’t want to spook her. I am tempted to tell her that nothing embarrasses me but I don’t completely trust myself not to spit out something foolish or creepy so I go the safe route and say nothing. I crouch down beside her and together we gather her things. I pull the knife from its sheath and it’s a tanto, a Japanese fighting knife. It isn’t my knife, but it looks like mine. I test the edge and the narrow blade is sharp enough to skin a horse.

She smiles. Easy with that.

Beautiful knife, I say.

Take it, she says.

What do you mean?

She shrugs. I don’t know. I’m trying to say thank you, for the tire.

I feel very strange and it’s been a while but I think what I’m feeling is shy, or something along those lines. As if I’m seventeen and the new girl in town just smiled at me and my skull turned to rubber because I don’t know what to say. I stare at her and her eyes are impossibly blue, with yellow and orange around the edges. Her eyes are the color of the sky gone to rust.