Hell's Half Acre

by Will Christopher Baer

  Which one? I said.

  She shrugged. The handsome one.

  That narrows it down.

  She poured a glass of wine. As I recall, there were only two I would have called handsome. This one looked like an ex-quarterback.

  Did he recognize you?

  I think so, yeah. But what difference could it make?

  And I had to agree. It was a funny coincidence but one that seemed not to matter. We weren’t going to bother the guy, and it seemed unlikely that he would bother us.

  Two days later, four men wearing masks entered our rented French Quarter flat. Jude had gone down to the market to buy limes and salt. She wanted to make margaritas. I was taking a bubble bath, of all things. I was thumbing through a Rolling Stone magazine and smoking a cigarette. I remember the ashes fell into the bubbles like little black snowflakes. I heard the front door open. I heard footsteps that weren’t Jude’s. Voices, low and dangerous. We didn’t have any guns in the apartment, having ditched our gear before flying into Miami, and we hadn’t gotten around to picking up new shit. I got out of the bath, wrapped a towel around my waist. There wasn’t much in the bathroom that could pass for a weapon but the lid of the toilet tank. I picked it up and eased the bathroom door open. I could see two of them, lean fuckers in black masks, with their backs to me. One of them had pushed his mask up over his forehead and was sniffing a pink thong of Jude’s that had been laying on the coffee table since the night before. I swung the heavy tank lid like a baseball bat and hammered the panty sniffer in the small of the spine hard enough to break it. He went down and I thought okay, he’s done. I caught a sideways flash of dark hair and bright eyes, but I was in a hurry and didn’t really study his face. I dropped the tank lid as his partner spun around roaring at me, and I swung what I thought was a pretty nasty punch at his throat, a shot that never hit its target. Instead I felt what I took to be the heavy talons of a massive bird sink into my back, above the shoulder blade, and I went down like a sack of bones. At which point they commenced to kicking me in the head with their boots, and were still kicking me when Jude came home.

  I was barely conscious by then, with a fast-seeping hematoma on the brain so profound the doctors later told me it ought to have killed me. I was also bleeding pretty good from the wound in my back, which as it turned out came not from a giant bird, but from the claw end of a hammer. The guy had sunk it in me about as deep as it would go. Anyway, I was dead to the world when Jude returned. I didn’t see anything for a while. And when I started to come out of it, my vision and awareness coming back in splintered flashes, I was strapped into a chair. I reckon they figured they would have plenty of time to kill me later.

  Jude was tied to the bed, her clothes bloody and torn to ribbons. I still don’t know how they got the drop on her. And yes, there were three of them, as my guy was down for the count with what I hoped was a shattered tailbone, but I had seen Jude take on three guys at once on more than one occasion. The average hired muscle stood no chance against her, weapons notwithstanding. Jude had been in the Army, special forces. She had spent two years training with an Israeli death squad and she could throttle a mountain lion in a fair fight. But somehow these humps took her down.

  She would barely talk about it, later.

  They were pros, she said. They were very fast, and very good.

  I pieced it together from what she didn’t say, and what little I could remember. The way I figured it, the guy I nailed with the tank lid was the crew leader, and since he was down, the others decided to have some fun with Jude before they killed her. They took off their masks and arrogantly allowed her to see their faces. Two of them were feral white guys with dirty blond hair, thin hard guys built like welterweights who could have been brothers. The other was a silent, muscular black man with shaved head. They tied her facedown on the bed and tortured her, and they took their sweet time about it. They sniffed out that she had a thing for knives, so they cut her. They cut up her feet. They opened up her left arm. They made shallow cuts on her back that I think were meant to look like wings, and they gave her that long curved wound that Rabbit and Steve described, that begins above her eye and wraps halfway around her head.

  Then one of the white guys backed off, lit a cigarette. He waved his hand like he was bored with this shit. And his buddy then did the worst thing I could imagine, he did something worse to Jude than just rape her. He knelt on the floor like he was receiving the sacrament and went down on her. He took his sweet time about it, then took off his pants and fucked her proper, grunting as he did so. Jude was silent throughout. She just lay there on her belly, eyes streaming with blood and tears, glittering like two pieces of glass on the beach. When he was finished, his buddy stepped in to have a go. I struggled in my chair, hopeless, slipping in and out of consciousness. These men had come there to kill us, no mistake. You don’t rape and torture somebody like that unless you mean to kill them. And even with a concussion it wasn’t hard to glimmer that they were hired to erase us and thereby protect the identity of the man Jude saw downtown, the one she said looked like an aging quarterback.

  Shudder and sigh, five years later.

  I was crouched on a rented bed in a shitty motel with a bottle of rum between my knees, and that quarterback was on television, giving a speech. I wondered how his people had spun the story of that prosthetic hand. A wild tale of Mexican banditos, perhaps, a story so wild it had to be true. He had rescued a servant girl from certain death and lost his hand in the process. The brave, sympathetic hero. The shy, handsome California boy who would be king. A story that would start to stink fast if there were even murmurs about amputation as a sexual kick. The Codys had been a proud California family since the gold rush days, boasting a long line of congressmen, state reps, and two governors. And according to the CNN commentator, this MacDonald Cody was now on the short list to be running mate to the Democratic frontrunner for president. Good god, I thought. No wonder they had come for us in New Orleans. And as the camera panned the crowd for reaction shots, I saw her for just a second.

  Jude.

  She wore rose-colored wraparound sunglasses and a stylish white designer suit. The jacket was cropped short and the pants rode just a little low on her hips. She looked like a very expensive prostitute or runway model who had borrowed or stolen a trendy lawyer’s clothes for the day. She was watching the handsome senator with the cool detachment of a spider, and just as the camera paused to linger on her she seemed to feel it like the sun on her skin and she turned away.

  The next morning, I headed for the nearby Denny’s to get a bite and some coffee while I waited for the next Greyhound north. I took a stab and asked my waitress if she had ever known a girl named Maggie, who used to work at the Painted Lady.

  Sure, she said. I know Maggie. She went up to San Francisco after the Lady burned down, got a job at some little bar. She sent me a couple postcards.

  That’s nice. Do you remember the name of the bar?

  The waitress grinned. It was called Mao’s, like the Chinese dictator. I remember because I used to love those Andy Warhol paintings.

  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 actual
ly 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.