Hell's Half Acre

epilogue.

THREE MONTHS LATER I’M WATCHING A PINK MOON come up slow as a flower dying over the mountains. I’ve just stepped outside for a smoke, my hands stinking of bleach. The waffle shack has been about as popular today as a dead whore’s bedroom and so I’ve had no dishes to wash. The boss has kept me busy all afternoon with disinfecting the floors, the fat wheezing fuck. I have inhaled so much bleach these past ninety days that on a lazy summer evening such as this I might come to think my soul had been covertly purified. I sit on a rock under a torn awning and stare out at northbound highway 77 shivering with bright cars and trucks on their way up to Waco and beyond. I can almost but not quite see the southbound traffic from this rock, which may be God’s funny way of telling me something. I live in a rented trailer five miles south, in the desert.

The hailstones first come down in bursts, as if the sky is choking. They hit the asphalt and bounce high into the air, stones small as sweet baby peas. I look up and the pink moon is gone. The sky is the color of gunmetal. The traffic noise dies away and I feel relatively safe on my rock. In a minute the sky really opens up. The stones are now the size of goodly marbles and soon the parking lot is white, a lunar expanse. My skin is stinging. I toss my cigarette aside as a new silver Mercedes wobbles slowly into the lot with one flat tire, left rear. The crush of hailstones under the wheel are like gunshots and I find myself flinching, as if I should take cover. The car comes to rest but no one gets out. The hailstorm quits as suddenly as it began. The car just sits there, exhaust puffing from the tailpipe. The windows are tinted and I can’t see the driver. I’m not interested, anyway. I need to get inside before the boss comes out and commences to share profanities in my direction but for some reason I don’t move. I don’t take my eyes off the silver car and now the driver’s door opens and I glimmer a woman’s profile.

For a heartbeat, I think it’s Molly come back to me. And part of me wishes it were. Molly stuck by me in San Francisco like an angel. She stepped between me and the cops, before they started shooting. She held her ground until Sam broke away from his father and ran to her screaming don’t shoot them, don’t shoot. At which point the senator told the cops to stand down. Then in a cool calm very presidential voice, Senator Cody ordered the cops to get everyone to high ground and away from the fire, and said that they would figure this mess out later.

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.

I mumble. Thank you.

You’re welcome, she says. But give me a dollar.

What?

It’s bad luck for a knife to change hands, otherwise.

I give her a crumpled dollar, which she slips into her left boot. Her eyes meet mine and dart away like bright fish behind glass and I wonder if she might be tempted to come home with me. But I have nothing to tempt her with. She rises and moves around to the trunk of the silver car, opens it and retrieves a plain brown box, unmarked, and a fat white envelope. The box looks heavy. She hands me the envelope first, holding it between thumb and finger. The name Phineas Poe is written on the front and I suck in my breath. I recognize the handwriting but I barely look at it. My eyes are on that box.

Merry Christmas, she says.

I stand there, blinking.

Are you going to open it?

Maybe tomorrow.

She shrugs. Whatever sets your world on fire.

Who gave this to you?

She turns to look at the desert, jingling her keys.

I think you know the answer to that.

Yeah. I’m just not sure I believe it.

Do you love her? she says.

I try not to breathe. Excuse me?

Do you love her?

Yeah, I say. I love her.

The woman nods. That’s something, then.

Jude’s sister gives me the box. It weighs maybe six pounds. I want to know how she found me. I want to know where she came from. I want to know if that punctured tire was sweet coincidence or some kind of test or psychological foreplay. I want to know what’s in the box and at the same time, I don’t want to know. I want to know how this package came into her possession but I doubt she would tell me and anyway I recognize the handwriting on the envelope. I just don’t believe it. I watch as she climbs into the silver car and shakes out her hair, a dizzy flash of wildflowers.

The car rolls out of the lot.

I stare at the highway until the car is gone, then walk quickly over to the Dumpster at the edge of the gravel lot and shove the heavy cardboard box into the weeds next to the recycling bins. I slip the knife and envelope under my apron and into the waistband of my jeans and now I hear the crunch of gravel under heavy feet. My employer is behind me, wheezing. I let my face go slack and lifeless. I wet my lips and allow my mouth to fall open before I turn around.

Jack, he says. Ya sad fuckin retard.

Jack, I say. Sad fuckin.

Oh ya beggin to get fired. If ya weren’t handicapped believe I’d kick your ass to the other side of the moon and you could fuck off all day with the moose and the fiddle.

My employer is a mean troll with a weird tendency to invoke mangled Mother Goose when framing an insult. If he sees the envelope, or the box, he will promptly confiscate them both. Which would be a shame because I would probably go ahead and give him the surprise of his life by cutting his throat. He is under the impression that I am retarded and suffer from a vague form of Tourette’s that causes me to repeat everything he says, which irritates the hell out of him but by design prevents him from spewing too much garbage at me. He also believes that my name is Jack, that I live in a group home and that I cannot read or write. I find that it makes life easier, when people think you are simple. They ignore you.

The moose and the fiddle, I say. Fuck off all day.

Two hours later and it’s dark out. The pink moon is gone. I sit in the doorway of my trailer, the fat white envelope unopened in my lap. The box sits beside me, to my right, unopened. On my left, a GI Joe action figure in jungle fatigues stands at attention, plastic M-16 slung low. I have a jelly jar full of whiskey in one hand. Early September and I have the radio tuned to the Diamondbacks game. They’re tearing up the Cubs. I am again staring out at southbound traffic.

If I lift my head just so, I can see the lights of stars. I look at the box, give it a nudge. Bend over it and sniff around the edges. Nothing. The smell of cardboard. I take it in my hands once more, feel the weight of it. Five, maybe six pounds. This is the weight of the average human head. I can open the box, or not. I turn my attention to the envelope. The handwriting is strange and beautiful, at once jagged as broken glass and somehow curved and girlish. My skin feels cold. Like touching metal, or walking into church. The skin remembers. I first laid eyes on this handwriting in a hotel bathtub in Denver almost seven years ago.

This is Jude’s hand, and I know whose head is in the box.

I open the envelope. It contains eleven hundred seven dollars and a one-way plane ticket to Amsterdam, first class. Eleven hundred and seven dollars. Jude has this thing about even numbers being unlucky. Taped inside the envelope is a silver hotel room key, number 9. There is also a photograph of a small boy with blond hair staring bullets at the camera.

Everson Poe, my son.

I stare back at him just as hard, trying with all my might to cross time and dimension to communicate with this tiny severed shadow of myself, this as yet perfect piece of me I’ve never met. In the envelope there is a jagged scrap of paper, thick white linen hotel stationery bearing the crest of the Dead Sea Hotel and an Amsterdam address.

On the back is a note, unsigned.

Come to us.

My name is Phineas Poe and this is how it begins.