Hell's Half Acre (35 page)

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.