Hell's Half Acre

three.

I’M STARING AT THE BACK OF A CAB DRIVER’S NECK. The thing is, I’m not used to being around people. I have been living on the edge of nowhere too long. I’ve been asleep for years, it feels like. My sunburned hands twitch like birds. I crush them together, force them to be still.

This is heavy traffic and nothing more.

Downtown San Francisco, or thereabout. I don’t know the city well, but it looks to be composed of wrong angles. It’s one of those cities where two streets may run parallel for a few blocks, then cross each other. The streets are not to be trusted. I need to relax. I’m an ordinary passenger in an ordinary yellow cab, waiting in traffic. I’m on my way to a hotel called the King James. Upon arriving in San Francisco, I experienced a rare moment of trouble-shooting cool and called a dozen hotels asking for a guest named Jesse Redd until I got a hit. The receptionist who answered the phone was a young girl named Holly, apparently new on the job, and I had managed to flirt with her just enough to wrangle Jesse Redd’s room number out of her.

The mind wanders, forward and back. Jude was never my girlfriend in any conventional sense of the word. I met her in a hotel bar in Denver almost seven years ago, less than a week before Christmas. I had just been released from a state hospital with my head shaved and my emotional infrastructure rewired. I was an ex-cop but my judgment was poor. I mistook Jude for a prostitute and invited her up to my room. She relieved me of all my cash and didn’t give me so much as a handjob in return. I barely copped a feel before the horse tranq she’d slipped me robbed me of my senses. I woke up some twenty-four hours later in a bathtub full of ice, and one of my kidneys was gone. She’d targeted me before I ever walked out of Fort Logan, having helped herself to my med records and shaky psych profile.

It sounds complicated but it amounts to boy meets girl and girl steals his kidney. Boy wants his kidney back. Boy wants to kill girl. Boy catches up with girl and decides he likes her. He just might love her. And so he doesn’t kill her. He becomes her partner, and pretty soon boy and girl get along like two ducks flying high in a washed blue sky. I called her that sometimes, when I was feeling daffy.

Give us a kiss, I’d say. Give us a kiss, duck.

It annoyed the hell out of her. She reached for sharp objects. And eventually those two ducks fell to earth and I found myself in a world of shit, a world where I didn’t think twice about holding sponge and bucket while she amputated a future senator’s hand. Jude and I were together for just over a year.

I remember the strangest things about her. I remember she played with matches when she was nervous or bored, lighting one after another until she burned her fingers. She favored a black raincoat on cloudy days, and wore nothing under it. She liked to flash me in elevators. She trimmed her pubic hair into a narrow, shadowy wing. She had a tendency to bite but never broke the skin. She was a trained killer but still she was afraid of spiders. She brought me ice cream when I was sick, and she spent a lot of money on fantastic hats. Jude never did anything lightly. She could be washing the dishes, making spaghetti sauce, playing a video game, or painting the bathroom red. Or fighting a guy twice her size. She did everything with the same delirious gum-chewing mania. In the bedroom she was reckless, she was all over the map. The sex was exhausting, hilarious, fragile, and scary. And sometimes, as I closed my eyes at night I wondered if she would kill me in my sleep.

I last saw her in New Orleans. Late morning and Jude was brushing her teeth. Blue around the lips. The drone of pipes and ultraviolet light. Her back against the sink. The shadow of wet hair in the mirror, black with traces of chemical red. One arm dangling, she wore a blue shirt unbuttoned. Thighs and belly bright with oil and sun. Trickle of blood down one knee where she had cut herself shaving. Dead flowers in a teacup on the television behind me. I stood in the doorway, on the threshold. I was holding her suitcase, which I’d found in the living room, in one hand. It felt heavy.

What’s this? I said.

Hazy silence. She turned her head, so I could see the pink scar.

I’m leaving you, she said.

Where will you go? I said.

Don’t follow me, she said.

Why?

Flicker of hurt in her eyes, like moth’s wings.

You, she said. You disappeared long ago.

The yellow cab heaves to a stop. The slow turn of the driver’s face, white and sickly.

Twenty-two fifty, he says.

What?

This is it, man. The King James Hotel.

I turn to the window, my nose against glass. I am still in San Francisco. The mad shamble of downtown humans. Towers of glass and stone and fingernails of sky, blue and white. Long shadows and swirl of dust and trash. The driver begins to cough and choke without stopping. The slushy noise of ruined lungs. He has emphysema and this actually makes me crave a cigarette, maybe two.

Don’t follow me.

Bittersweet, yes. Pale with sorrow and heartbreak and soft light. Also complete and utter bullshit. That tender farewell bathroom scene is a load of something stinky, it’s bad fiction. The other version, the truthful one, has me living for weeks in the attic above our rented flat in the Quarter. I was busy talking to myself and slowly going bugshit crazy. I was a busy little toad. I was plotting the murder of three men whose proper names I didn’t even know, whose whereabouts were impossible to say. I barely knew what they looked like and I was so far from finding them they might as well have been living on the other side of the sun.

Thoughts of revenge will eat the brain away sure as cancer.

I should have just been happy we were alive. It was a small miracle, really. Four men had entered our apartment. One of them lay crippled on the floor, groaning. The two white guys had raped my woman, savagely. They had finished in under an hour, and now they lounged about, smoking cigarettes. One of them was raiding our liquor cabinet, the other had flopped down on the sofa to watch TV. The black dude was taking off his pants, stopping to fold them carefully. These guys were taking too long, and being very stupid, and I knew that a window was opening. I just wasn’t sure how to climb through that window. I kept blacking out, which scared the shit out of me, because dimly I was aware that I was sporting a serious concussion, and I could feel the blood seeping inside my skull. Each time I blacked out could be my last. And I was tied down so securely, I could barely wiggle my fucking toes. I hoped Jude had an idea about that window. The black man put aside his pants. He rubbed his gleaming skull for luck and lowered himself onto the bed.

Jude opened her eyes. She managed to smile.

Let me use my hands, she said. It will be so much nicer for you.

I was in the hospital for a week. My doctor told me I would have blurred vision for a while. He said that the bleeding around my brain had stopped, that scar tissue would soon form, and that I would likely have headaches the rest of my life. Otherwise, I would recover. He asked if I could identify my attackers, did I want to file a police report. I declined. I asked about Jude, but he shook his head. He knew nothing about the woman who brought me to the ER, only that she had paid my medical tab in full. I went home in a taxi.

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?

The Alamo is strictly Section Eight. Peeling paint and the stink of mildew and a humming death vibe. The lobby is a narrow brown tomb, the walls painted the color of shit. I hate to generalize, but if I was looking to kill myself in a cheap coldwater garret where none of my neighbors are gonna say boo, this is the place. The receptionist is a guy watching TV behind a chickenwire cage. The house rates are scrawled on a blackboard behind his head, which is shaved smooth as my ass and covered in fine, intricate tattoos. I step up to the cage and the guy growls at me, jerks his fascinating skull at the blackboard. I glance at the board just long enough to register the notion that a bed in this shithole may be rented by the hour for the kingly ransom of ten dollars.

I’m not interested in a room, I say.

You a cop?

I’m looking for a buddy of mine, Sugar Finch.

The skull gives me a long look, and apparently decides I am just unsavory enough to indeed be pals with a piece of shit like this Sugar Finch.

He’s in room 39, third floor.

You know if he’s in?

Think I saw him, yeah.

Don’t buzz him, okay. I want to surprise him.

Buzz him? Shit man, you think we got phones in the rooms?

I take the gummy wet stairs up to the third floor, my steps echoing soft. The fire door opens onto a long windowless hallway with rancid gray carpet and gray walls streaked with water damage. The air is funky in the Alamo. I cruise silent down the hall and find the door marked 39, keep going. Communal toilet at the opposite end, which accounts for some of the funk. I retrace my steps to the fire door. On the wall to my left is a fuse box. I flip it open and take out my knife; what I aim to do deserves the cover of darkness.

I shove my knife into the control panel and twist. The hall lights blink once, and go black. It’s just like being inside my head. Dark, with lingering echoes and the faint stink of mildew. I touch one hand to the wall and stealth-walk along to 39. Trouble is I’m not much of a killer. The fact is, I’ve never killed anybody, not on purpose. I’ve wanted to, plenty of times, but always stopped short. It’s just not part of my wiring. Now I’m in a dark hallway, maybe twenty-five feet from one of the men who raped Jude, and I don’t quite know what I’m going to do. I may suffer mind-ripping headaches all the time, and with them apocalyptic visions, but I can’t discern the future.

The best I can imagine is disappearing into the shadows along the wall. In a minute, Sugar Finch will come out of the room nervous and freaked by the power failure. It would be the easiest thing in the world to sweep his legs out from under him, to fall like a cat onto his chest, to slash open his throat before he even cries out. Easy as cake to imagine, damn near impossible to see myself doing it. Now the door to 39 opens cool as a whisper and I fade against the wall.