Hell's Half Acre

by Will Christopher Baer

  Are you okay?

  Uh. I don’t know.

  Don’t try to move, yet.

  I give her a feeble smile and run a fast systems check on the body. The fingers and toes are responding, which bodes well. The ankle is still sore but less noticeable now, what with all the other bruised and broken body parts howling for a little attention. The skull is a bit tender and I allow for the possibility of fluid on the brain. The right arm is numb and sore but unbroken. I can move the fucker, anyway. The face has that tight leather feel that I personally associate with dried blood. That would be from the previously mentioned head wound. I estimate maybe four broken ribs and that’s all for today.

  I’m a peach.

  Jude’s face heaves into view and she looks worried. For her, she looks very worried. Jude is biting her lip and her pupils are so dilated they swallow her eyes and I have a feeling she’s worried about more than just Phineas and his talent for getting the shit kicked out of him. Her nerves look to me to be utterly jangled. She holds up her finger and moves it back and forth and tells me to follow it with my eyes. After a minute she sighs, apparently satisfied.

  What’s up? I say.

  You have a concussion. Don’t go to sleep tonight.

  Okay.

  This is it, she says.

  Huh?

  She hisses at me, please. Please.

  I’m here, baby.

  When you get out, she says. Burn it down.

  Burn it, I say.

  Do you understand?

  Yes.

  Jude nods, and slips away.

  Where am I?

  Molly strokes my forehead. I need you to get up.

  You look pretty, I say. How does it feel to be pretty?

  Phineas, please.

  I know. I need to get up.

  Molly gives me her hand.

  Don’t help me, please.

  I pull myself upright and allow myself a fuzzy look around. This is a room I’ve not yet seen. High, vaulted ceilings with exposed rafters. The hardwood floor. Tall windows and bright morning sun. There is no furniture but a shitty-looking mattress on the floor, with no sheets. Miller sits naked on the mattress, grinning. Jude stands on the other side, unbuttoning her dress, the same sleeveless white dress. Dizzy and I wobble sideways into Molly, who holds me up.

  Help me, I say.

  I’m here, she says.

  I have to talk to Jude, I say. I have to ask her something.

  You can’t, says Molly. Not now.

  Why not?

  Hush…please.

  Where am I?

  This is John’s room, she whispers.

  It’s…nice.

  I’m a son of a bitch, says Miller. You’re a tough cookie, Poe.

  Thanks. What are we doing?

  He shrugs. Just getting ready to shoot a little sex scene.

  The crew is dead, I say. You killed the crew.

  I know, he says. Nasty business, isn’t it.

  Jude is a shadow behind him.

  Nasty, I say. Yes.

  Anyway, he says. Looks like I need you behind the camera today, Poe.

  Lucky, I say. Lucky thing you didn’t kill me.

  Miller nods, staring at me. He touches himself. Behind him, Jude removes a knife from her boot and slips it under the mattress.

  Who is the shadow that walks beside you? I say.

  Miller is still nodding, like he can’t stop.

  What? he says.

  I shake my head. Never mind.

  There is no dialogue, no foreplay. Molly has one camera, I have another. She weaves around the room, drifting close to the bed and then away. I am positioned against the wall on the far side of the room, shooting the wide angle. Molly moves in and out of my shot, but I’m not really paying attention to her. Jude takes off her boots and throws them across the room, sailing high then crashing to the wood floor. Now she lets the white dress fall from her shoulders. Miller sits on the edge of the bed, his lips wet. The dress slips slowly to the floor and she is naked before him. The long brown body that was once mine, and never mine. Molly moves across the room and for a moment my view is obscured. Miller reaches for the prize, dragging Jude roughly down onto the bed. He mashes her mouth with his. Jude groans and pulls at him and in a moment he is on top of her, grunting and trying to get inside and when he finds purchase there is a silence in the room like no other. There is no dialogue, no foreplay.

  Jude makes a sobbing sound and Molly glances back at me, her eyes bright with shame.

  I shake my head. Not yet, not yet.

  Jude raises her head to look at me over Miller’s shoulder, staring at me for a long, dreadful moment. Then closes her eyes as if in prayer.

  Miller thrusts at her like a great hairless pig.

  I place my camera on the floor and motion for Molly to do the same. She comes across the room as if it’s five miles wide. She goes through the door behind me and her footsteps are brutal whispers falling down the stairs. I stare across the room at the two bodies grinding and rutting on the bare mattress until they become one, until they become a green shadow that is not man or woman.

  Outside. The sky is white. I cross the yard and enter the garage, where I collect a small yellow funnel and one of the plastic red jugs of gasoline. In the kitchen, I gather four empty liquor bottles and line them up along the sink. My head is ringing like a church bell and my peripheral vision is gone. I have a tiny window of daylight in front of me and that’s all I need. I am so fucking calm. My hands don’t shake at all as I fill the bottles with gas. I take off my shirt and rip it into four pieces, which I twist into coiled rags and stuff into the mouths of the bottles. Molly comes through the kitchen, carrying the boy against her chest. Her face is pale and bloodless and when I look at her I see a corpse wrapped in a white sheet, sleeping beneath a window. I wonder how weak she must be. The boy wakes up and turns to look at me, his eyes bright with fever.

  It’s okay, I say. It’s okay, Sam.

  Molly takes him outside and I empty the rest of the gasoline in the kitchen, the hallway. I run through the living room and dining room splashing gasoline behind me and I remember Molly’s monologue about families and the way they smell of furniture polish and dead flowers, of shampoo and dirty boots. They smell of ashtrays and garlic and spilled gin and gasoline.

  Blackbirds slash the air around me. Molly walks up the long driveway with Sam in her arms. He weighs not quite fifty pounds but make no mistake, the boy is heavy, so heavy. One small child is enough to crush you. I stand maybe ninety feet from the house, the Molotov cocktails at my feet. I watch Molly and Sam until I’m satisfied they’re safely away, then pick up the first bottle. I light the rag and let it burn a moment, then heave it through the living room window with a shocking crash of fire and light. I pick up another bottle, grinning like a fool. I light the rag and hurl the second bottle at the kitchen window. There is a gorgeous little explosion this time, showering me with glass.

  I am sorry about the reptiles. They didn’t ask for this. But they have been prepared for the apocalypse since the beginning of time. I throw the third bottle at what I think is the library, the last at an upstairs bathroom window, and already I hear the sirens. Impossible, I think. No one has a response time like that, but maybe we tripped a silent alarm. I turn and see that Molly has nearly made it to the road. The sirens are close and coming closer and I believe old Huck must have gotten his shit together and gone to the cops, or maybe it was the pretty motorcycle girl who turned to smile at me as she passed by with cigarettes that weren’t hers.

  Jude waited for Miller to come, I imagine. She tolerated his breath, his crushing weight, to allow us time to get outside. The stink of his skin. Then she cut his throat with my knife when he came and his body was trembling, defenseless. I imagine she cut out his eyes, then took his hair. And I think it’s possible that she gathered her clothes and went out the window, swinging to the ground like a monkey with wings, but maybe not. Maybe she closed her eyes and curled up beside
him as the bed filled with his blood, her blood. I see it in a wide, overhead shot.

  The sirens are terribly loud and I think of dying angels and now three black and white police cars come down the driveway with blue lights flashing. Molly stops and stands at the mouth of the driveway with the boy in her arms. The first car slides to a stop in a mushroom cloud of dust. Two police officers come out of the white cloud, one male and one female. They are gentle with Molly, as if she might be Sam’s sister, and I am glad for that. I don’t think I could stand it, if they abused Molly. I might just pull the gun and then all would be lost. A third man gets out of the car and for a split second the sun and clouds are perfectly aligned so as to cast him in green shadow and I think this is Death coming for me, but then he steps out of the shadow and I see he’s just a man, a tall blond man with a prosthetic hand.

  The cops are coming toward me now with guns held high. They are screaming at me and I don’t understand the words that fly jagged from their lips but they seem to want me to get on the ground. They don’t look like they want to be so gentle with me. I need to stop them from reaching the house too quickly. I need to give Jude a minute to get away, just a minute could save her. I crouch down and gather fine white dust into my hand as the house of Miller burns furiously behind me. I raise my hands above my head to show that I am not armed and still the cops are screaming.

  Down, get the fuck down.

  I am not armed. I am not armed but I can show you fear in a handful of dust.

  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 awa
y 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.