Kiss Me, Judas

by Will Christopher Baer

  Don’t even think about stabbing me with a fucking pen, he says.

  Jude laughs softly. You have nothing to fear.

  He glances at me. You’re the one who should be afraid.

  I am curiously calm, and I want to tell him that Jude will take care of me, that everything will be fine. But I’m not sure I believe it. Jude pulls a crisp five-dollar bill from her pocket and quickly draws out a map across Lincoln’s long, sad face. She gives the bill to Henry, like a tip.

  thirty-five.

  Half an hour passes and I’m bored silly. Jude says we have maybe twenty miles to go and the road bleeds away from us, an endless black rope. I play with the window, rolling it up and down. I let my hand float and drift in the rush of air. Henry chews his cigar and looks at me with one eye. The other is closed, as if seeing something else. I look away, into the distance, hoping to see a jackrabbit.

  Do they test nuclear weapons out here? I say.

  Go to sleep, says Henry.

  I’m not tired.

  Talk to your girlfriend, then.

  I light two cigarettes and pass one to Jude.

  This is what you wanted, I say. All along.

  No, she says. It was your idea to come to Texas.

  Oh, yeah. And when I’m depressed I go bowling.

  But I stood you up, she says.

  Why?

  It was a stupid idea, she says.

  I whisper, but you had two tickets to El Paso. A cozy sleeper car.

  Jude shows her teeth.

  The other ticket was for that idiot Pooh. He was my entertainment and muscle. And then you drifted back into my life and I was forced to improvise.

  How romantic, says Henry.

  It’s a pile of shit, I say.

  When did you stop believing me? says Jude. When did you start, for that matter?

  Maybe the other ticket was for Isabel, I say.

  Jude laughs. I couldn’t stand Isabel.

  You gave her my gun, I say. Didn’t you?

  Isabel is dead, she says. And she’s still tying you in knots.

  What did you do with my kidney?

  She looks straight through me. It’s in the icebox, isn’t it?

  What did you do with it?

  I gave it to a little black bird, she says. The bird carried it for miles and miles and finally dropped it into the ocean, where a fish ate it. The fish was caught by a young boy, who took it home and gave it to his sister. The sister cleaned the fish and cooked it, and fed it to her family.

  I study the shape of her face, the angle of her neck. She has effortlessly burned herself into my brain. Jerome tried to fuck her somehow. He had mysteriously blown the money on a ridiculous new car and a fur coat while his own brother lay dying. He had poor impulse control and he wanted Isabel’s pet to die. Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care. Black hair streaked with blond and eyes wide apart, hooded and shaped like lemons. They are mongoloid eyes, the devil’s eyes. Jerome tried to pay her with heroin, maybe he refused to pay her at all. Jude was not amused either way. She beat him half to death and disappeared, a box of heroin in one hand and a nearly rotten kidney in the other. A scar at the edge of her mouth and fine white teeth, slightly crooked and sharp. She could have dropped the kidney down a laundry chute or found another buyer but I like to think she walked into that emergency room in Colorado Springs like an angel with snow in her hair. The stone around her neck, the horrible teardrop. It still dangles from a string of silver in a cold hollow of flesh and you had a thousand chances, I say. To cut me open a second time.

  She never answers me. She doesn’t need to.

  The sickness comes on abruptly. It resumes, as if to remind me that I’m still alive. I have a coughing fit that nearly tears me apart. I think my intestines are unraveling. I touch my throat, my face. The skin is damp and cold as the bottom of my shoe. Jude is watching me with alien tenderness.

  I’m okay, I say. I’m like a house on fire.

  She sighs. You don’t look well.

  It’s only loneliness.

  Did you really miss me?

  Yes. I was lost without you.

  You should have run, she says.

  I could use one of those shots, I say.

  I’m sorry, she says. But I’ve misplaced my medical bag.

  Henry mutters. I tossed it into a Dumpster.

  She looks at him. You’re dying to be my friend, aren’t you?

  What happened to you? he says. In the army?

  Jude rolls down her window and leans out. The wind whips at her hair and I watch the dark and light streaks merge and flail apart. An almost invisible blur, like insect wings. Even when pale and shattered by withdrawals, I am still fascinated by the most meager stimuli.

  Why do you ask? she says.

  I like to know who I’m traveling with.

  Or who you carelessly shove in the trunk of your car.

  Maybe, he says.

  I was in Israel, she says dreamily. During some recent foolishness that never even made the newspapers.

  Oh I love this fucking country, says Henry.

  I close my eyes and Jude’s voice drifts. She was lost in the desert for five weeks, she says. The sand was in her bowels, her blood. But she wasn’t alone. There were two boys with her. Felix was nineteen. He stuttered under pressure but he was fearless in a fight. He was a good Christian and a virgin. Cody was twenty. He was from California and he thought the world was his. He never took his eyes off her. It was so cold at night that the three of them slept together like newborn rats, huddled so close that their breath and skin mingled and became one. Felix soon went mad. He stared at the sun until his eyes were white. Jude had to tie a nylon rope to his wrist and drag him along behind her. Cody was so afraid of dying that he never shut up and he begged her to sleep with him, to have his baby. Then one day he stepped on a land mine and blew himself to bits and Jude was glad. Because she wouldn’t have to listen to him anymore. She wished she had killed him herself. On the twenty-ninth day she killed Felix with a knife, because there wasn’t enough water for both of them. It was like killing a dog, and her heart shrank. Jude came out of the desert, alone and slightly insane. She received a section eight discharge one month later.

  That’s a very good story, says Henry.

  Jude stares at him, a vein turning faintly blue in her left temple.

  *

  Henry examines the map and slows the car, stopping at a dirt road. He stares at it bleakly, and I follow his gaze. The road is gutted with holes, ugly with rocks. The road is a mud slide, a disaster area. The road is uphill. Henry’s car would be ruined and wheezing, bottomed out after twenty yards.

  How long is this road? he says.

  Jude grins at him. Ten miles, perhaps.

  Beautiful, he says. Why didn’t you say we would need a fucking all-terrain vehicle?

  It slipped my mind.

  It’s okay, I say. We can turn around and go back to El Paso, steal a truck and come back. Or we can walk. Personally, I don’t care.

  Nice day, says Jude. Let’s walk.

  Oh, no. This is bullshit, says Henry.

  What? I say.

  This is the end, okay. This is as far as we go. I’m not a lovesick junkie and I’m not a fucking serial killer. I’m the only one thinking straight.

  Jude squints at him, as if he is blurry around the edges.

  Henry, I say.

  Listen, he says. I’m not letting you go up that road with this bitch. Don’t you know she will slaughter you like a goddamn chicken? I can see it in her eyes.

  Poor thing, says Jude. You don’t know me at all.

  I hold my face in my hands, suddenly very tired.

  Phineas, he says. I would rather kill you myself than let you go with her.

  That’s nice of you, I say.

  Or I could drag your sorry ass back to Denver.

  Please, says Jude. This is so dull.

  Shut the fuck up, says Henry.

  Jude leans close to him. Are you going to
do something? Or just talk.

  Henry slaps her with the back of his hand and she rocks back against the passenger door. I could kill him. He yanks the gun out of his jean jacket in an easy, fluid motion. The same gun he killed Isabel with, the gun I refused to hold. He points it at Jude’s face, so close that she could put her lips around it and he may or may not be ready to shoot her. It doesn’t really matter, does it? Because she takes it away from him in a flickering reflex, sudden and reptilian, and before I can make a sound she is on top of him, the gun in his eye and the shot is silenced, as if fired underwater. My hair and clothes are washed in his blood.

  I fall out of the car, numb and nearly paralyzed by the rush of claustrophobia. I walk in circles, fumbling in my pockets for a cigarette. Henry’s blood is in my mouth and I have to sit down.

  He provoked her. He was begging for it. He shot her with an animal tranquilizer and he dumped her in the trunk of his car like a sack of fertilizer. He left her there to choke on dust for a few hours. He was rude to her. He hit her with an open hand and he all but offered her his gun.

  Jude comes toward me, the sky crashing behind her and the gun in her left hand. She spreads her arms out wide and she looks pale and ghastly as a vampire.

  I won’t apologize, she says.

  And I haven’t asked you to.

  I go back to the car and, like a robot, open the driver’s door and shove at Henry with both hands to keep him from spilling onto the dirt road and he is so heavy, so warm, and for a moment I think I might collapse under his weight, that he will crush me like a drunken lover and now I hammer at his chest and shoulders with my fists until he falls sideways over the seat and I can slide in next to him and start the car, my foot sharing the gas pedal with his, and I drive as far up the road as I can and finally steer the giant car off the dirt and into a rocky, rainswept gully bounded by cherry trees that may just hide the car from the road and I kill the engine with a sigh, slipping from behind the wheel and without looking at Henry, I grab him by the armpits and struggle to pull him from the car but his foot is lodged somehow and my hands are soaked with sweat and blood and I am screaming, my head pounding when Jude wraps her arms around me from behind and holds me, holds me.

  Minutes or hours later and I relax. She helps me pull Henry from the car and drag him through the dust to a piece of high ground. I am exhausted, destroyed. I sit beneath a deformed little tree and smoke cigarettes while she patiently, silently buries Henry under a mound of rocks that will keep the beasts from his remains, for a day or two.

  thirty-six.

  I walk a dozen or so yards behind her. The only sound is my own

  rattling breath. Jude is shrinking, disappearing ahead.

  In the woods, as before. My hands are unfamiliar. Carrion birds circle overhead and I wait for them to find Lucy. She floats still, on the lake, but I can’t see her for the trees. I don’t think I could bear to look at her ruined face. I am bleeding to death, starving and never happier. I pull strange plants from the earth and devour the roots. Lick and suck the dew from green leaves.

  When I was a child, I believed there was a sun-god. My father told me never to look directly at it, that the sun would punish you.

  Two kids spot me on the ninth day. I wave to them and shout hello, my voice dusty and strange. They run from me. Soon the state police arrive, with dogs. They find me easily, and surround me. They don’t expect me to fight, to strangle one of their beautiful dogs. I cry over the dog and raise my hands. One of the cops is furious, however. He screams at me and puts a single bullet in my leg. They bind my hands and feet and place me in the back of a car. One of them takes pity on me, he pours water over my cracked and blistered face. I talk to them through the iron mesh, telling them that I killed my wife. But they don’t believe me. They deny that a body has been found on the lake.

  My feet drag like stones over dry yellow earth. I stumble and fall and dumbly notice that I’m clutching the green icebox. I can’t let go of it. Jude stops to wait for me.

  I assume you have read The Hobbit?

  Are you kidding, I say. What about it?

  Gollum, she says. The wretched, stinking cave dweller.

  I smile at her. My precious, I say.

  They take me to the station and drop me on the floor of a tiny cell, removing the chains from my feet. No one comes to question me. A silent doctor comes to examine my leg. He smells like stale smoke. There are murmurs through the walls. They have uncovered my identity. I’m a cop from the city, from Internal Affairs. I’m a vulture, a plague dog. They come into the cell and beat me with electrical cords, they laugh and smoke cigarettes. I lose count of days and nights and on a sunny morning I am placed on a special transport bus. I am taken back to the city without ceremony or comment. Lucy’s body is found several days later, and my life comes apart like a love letter in the rain.

  Jude is still up ahead, farther now. She’s running from me.

  They first thought it was murder. Lucy was shot twice and her body mutilated. After further examination, it was decided that the first bullet was self-inflicted. She was then shot once more, and mutilated sometime later. Apparently by her husband.

  The end is near. I can’t go much further. Jude waits for me in a patch of shade, her hands folded like scissors in her lap.

  You have been miles away, says Jude.

  I’m thinking of my wife, I say.

  What do you see?

  I hesitate.

  In your mind, says Jude. Is she alive or dead?

  She’s asleep.

  I don’t believe you, says Jude.

  Why should you? I say.

  A butterfly flicks past my face. I try to follow its flight but my eyes are numb. My reflexes are gone. I take a breath and listen to my body. There is pain, abstract and gray. Infinite, barely noticed. There is euphoria, like the buzzing of a disconnected telephone. Drugs would have little effect on me now.

  I wish I had known her, says Jude.

  The butterfly returns and I smile with unfamiliar muscles.

  Why, I say.

  She shrugs. We might have been friends.

  I don’t think so.

  Jude lights a cigarette.

  Other women aren’t safe from you, I say.

  Jude doesn’t blink. She disappears. She becomes the color of stone, of dust. Her tongue flicks at the air and I tell myself not to be sorry. I extend two fingers and she gives me the cigarette.

  How did Lucy die? says Jude.

  I take a long rotten breath and I see everything so clearly.

  She shot herself with my gun and it was one of those freakish, terrible things. The bullet should have punched through her skull and into her brain but it didn’t, it skated around her head like she was made of ice and tore off her left ear and she was shocked to be alive. The pain must have been incredible and she couldn’t hold the gun. She asked me to finish her and I took the gun from her too slowly and I was afraid. I hesitated and by the time I could bring myself to shoot her she was already dead. I couldn’t help her.

  Jude is sorry, she’s so sorry. But of course she is. Her heart would have to be made of sun-bleached bone to listen to that story and shrug.

  I sat in the boat with Lucy for hours. Finally I shot her once in the face and swam away.

  Do you smell something dreadful? says Jude.

  I shrug. Cherry blossoms and cow manure.

  Jude looks around. It smells of death, she says.

  I walk a few feet from the road and find the body of a dead dog. He’s a big puppy, a black mongrel. He was shot recently and dragged himself there. Maybe he was stealing somebody’s chickens, maybe not. This is cattle country. A strange dog might be shot merely for stepping on somebody’s land.

  Let’s keep moving, says Jude.

  Wait a minute, I say.

  I pull out my knife and bend over the dead dog, holding my breath. His body is soft and pliable, rigor mortis a mere memory. I roll him over onto his back; his paws are limp and I scratch
as his chest briefly. Blackflies crawl listlessly through his fur, but he might be sleeping. I stroke his ears and tell myself he was a good dog. He was no thief. I slip the tanto into his belly, just above his genitals.

  The smell is awful.

  My eyes burn and I can barely see. I wipe at them furiously, then relax.

  I look down at the poor dog’s spilling bowels and tell myself I’m dissecting a frog in the ninth grade. I have gym class next period, and the new girl from Virginia has an ass like a peach. Her gym shorts are too little and when she sweats they tend to get caught up in her sweet little crack. She plucks them out so daintily, so carelessly that I fall in love with her every day.

  Sink my hands into the dog’s open belly, startled by the heat.

  Push through the organs until I find a slippery, purplish lump of tissue the size of my fist. It could be liver or kidney or bladder, I can’t be sure. But it doesn’t matter and I cut it loose without difficulty. It seems so small, maybe three or four ounces. I hold it in the palm of my hand like a raw chicken breast, an aborted fetus.

  I wrap it carefully in a shred of my shirt and tell Jude to hand me the icebox.

  She gives me a long, shivering dark look. But she brings it to me.

  I unlock it and throw the Blister’s clothes onto the skeletal rosebush. They hang there like a vagrant’s laundry. I place the small, bloody package in the icebox and close the lid.

  How long have you known? she says.

  Irrelevant, I say.

  But you stayed with me.

  The air swirls with dust. It’s strange, because there is no wind at all.

  Why? she says.

  I’ve had three or four good chances to kill you.

  And you had at least one chance to run.

  Oh, I tried to run. I did. I was a wreck without you.

  Jude gives a false laugh and drops Henry’s gun in the dust. She removes the little stinger, the dentist’s tool, from the slim waistband of her panties. I stare at it and she shrugs.