Craddock was waiting for him with his razor, even in sleep. The blade dangled at the end of its gold chain before the broad face of a Vietnamese man, who was naked save for a white rag belted around his waist, and seated in a stiff-backed chair in a dank concrete room. The Vietnamese’s head had been shaved, and there were shiny pink circles on his scalp, where he’d been burnt by electrodes.
A window looked out on Jude’s rainy front yard. The dogs were right up against the glass, close enough so their breath stained it white with condensation. They were yapping furiously, but they were like dogs on TV, with the volume turned all the way down; Jude heard no sound of them at all.
Jude stood quietly in the corner, hoping he would not be seen. The razor moved back and forth in front of the Vietnamese’s amazed, sweat-beaded face.
“The soup was poisoned,” Craddock said. He was speaking in Vietnamese, but in the way of dreams, Jude understood just what he was saying. “This is the antidote.” Gesturing with his free hand at a massive syringe resting inside a black heart-shaped box. In the box with it was a wide-bladed bowie knife with a Teflon handle. “Save yourself.”
The VC took the syringe and stuck it, without hesitation, into his own neck. The needle was perhaps five inches long. Jude flinched, looked away.
His gaze leaped naturally to the window. The dogs remained just on the other side of the glass, jumping against it, no sound coming from them. Beyond them Georgia sat on one end of a seesaw. A little towheaded girl in bare feet and a pretty flowered dress sat on the other end. Georgia and the girl wore blindfolds, diaphanous black scarves made of some sort of crepelike material. The girl’s pale yellow hair was tied into a loose ponytail. Her expression was an unreadable blank. Although she looked vaguely familiar to Jude, it was still a long-drawn-out moment before it came to him, with a jolt of recognition, that he was looking at Anna, as she had been at nine or ten. Anna and Georgia went up and down.
“I’m going to try to help you,” Craddock was saying, speaking to the prisoner in English now. “You’re in trouble, you hear? But I can help you, and all you need to do is listen close. Don’t think. Just listen to the sound of my voice. It’s almost nightfall. It’s almost time. Nightfall is when we turn on the radio and listen to the radio voice. We do what the radio man says to do. Your head is a radio, and my voice is the only broadcast.”
Jude looked back, and Craddock wasn’t there anymore. In his place, where he had sat, was an old-fashioned radio, the face lit up all in green, and his voice came out of it. “Your only chance to live is to do just as I say. My voice is the only voice you hear.”
Jude felt a chill in his chest, didn’t like where this was going. He came unstuck and in three steps was at the side of the table. He wanted to rid them of Craddock’s voice. Jude grabbed the radio’s power cord, where it was plugged into the wall, and yanked. There was a pop of blue electricity, which stung his hand. He recoiled, throwing the line to the floor. And still the radio chattered on, just as before.
“It’s nightfall. It’s nightfall at last. Now is the time. Do you see the knife in the box? You can pick it up. It’s yours. Take it. Happy birthday to you.”
The VC looked with some curiosity into the heart-shaped box and picked out the bowie knife. He turned it this way and that, so the blade flashed in the light.
Jude moved to look down at the face of the radio. His right hand still throbbed from the jolt it had taken, was clumsy, hard to manipulate. He didn’t see a power button, so he spun the dial, trying to get away from Craddock’s voice. There was a sound Jude at first took for a burst of static, but which in another moment resolved into the steady, atonal hum of a large crowd, a thousand voices chattering all together.
A man with the knowing, streetwise tone of a fifties radio personality said, “Stottlemyre is hypnotizing them today with that twelve-to-six curveball of his, and down goes Tony Conigliaro. You’ve probably heard that you can’t make people do things they don’t want to do when they’ve been hypnotized. But you can see here it just isn’t true, because you can tell that Tony C. sure didn’t want to swing at that last pitch. You can make anyone do any awful thing. You just have to soften them up right. Let me demonstrate what I mean with Johnny Yellowman here. Johnny, the fingers of your right hand are poisonous snakes. Don’t let them bite you!”
The VC slammed himself back into his chair, recoiling in shock. His nostrils flared, and his eyes narrowed, with a sudden look of fierce determination. Jude turned, heel squeaking on the floor, to cry out, to tell him to stop, but before he could speak the Vietnamese prisoner whacked the knife down.
His fingers fell from his hand, only they were the heads of snakes, black, glistening. The VC did not scream. His damp, almond-brown face was lit with something like triumph. He lifted the right hand to show the stumps of his fingers, almost proudly, the blood bubbling out of them, down the inside of his arm.
“This grotesque act of self-mutilation has been brought to you courtesy of orange Moxie. If you haven’t tried a Moxie, it’s time to step up to the plate and find out why Mickey Mantle says it’s the bee’s knees. Side retired in order….”
Jude turned, reeled toward the door, tasting vomit in the back of his throat, smelling vomit when he exhaled. At the very periphery of his vision, he could see the window, and the seesaw. It was still going up and down. No one was on it. The dogs lay on their sides, asleep in the grass.
He shoved through the door and banged down two warped steps and into the dusty dooryard behind his father’s farm. His father sat with his back to him, on a rock, sharpening his straight razor with a black strop. The sound of it was like the dead man’s voice, or maybe it was the other way around, Jude no longer knew for sure. A steel tub of water sat in the grass next to Martin Cowzynski, and a black fedora floated in it. That hat in the water was awful. Jude wanted to scream at the sight of it.
The sunshine was intense and direct on his face, a steady glare. He staggered in the heat, swayed back on his heels, and brought a hand up to shield his eyes from the light. Martin drew the blade across the strop, and blood fell from the black leather in fat drops. When Martin scraped the blade forward, the strop whispered “death.” When he jerked the razor back, it made a choked sound like the word “love.” Jude did not slow to speak with his father but kept going on around the back of the house.
“Justin,” Martin called to him, and Jude flicked a sidelong look at him, couldn’t help himself. His father wore a pair of blind man’s sunglasses, round black lenses with silver frames. They gleamed when they caught the sunlight. “You need to get back in bed, boy. You’re burnin’ up. Where do you think you’re goin’ all dressed up like that?”
Jude glanced down and saw he was wearing the dead man’s suit. Without breaking stride he began to pull at the buttons of the coat, undoing them as he reeled forward. But his right hand was numb and clumsy—it felt as if he were the one who had just chopped off his fingers—and the buttons wouldn’t come free. In a few more steps, he gave up. He felt sick, cooking in the Louisiana sun, boiling in his black suit.
“You look like you’re headed to someone’s funeral,” his father said. “You want to watch out. Could be your’n.”
A crow was in the tub of water where the hat had been, and it took off, fanning its wings furiously, throwing spray, as Jude went past it in his stumbling, drunkard’s gait. In another step he was at the side of the Mustang. He fell into it, slammed the door behind him.
Through the windshield the hardpack wavered like an image reflected in water, shimmering through the heat. He was sodden with sweat and gasping for breath in the dead man’s suit, which was too hot, and too black, and too restricting. Something stank, faintly, of char. The heat was worst of all in his right hand. The feeling in the hand couldn’t be described as pain, not anymore. It was, instead, a poisonous weight, swollen not with blood but liquefied ore.
His digital XM radio was gone. In its place was the Mustang’s original, factory-installed AM. When he thumbed it on, his right hand was so hot it melted a blurred thumbprint in the dial.
“If there is one word that can change your life, my friends,” came the voice on the radio, urgent, melodious, unmistakably southern. “If there is just one word, let me tell you, that word is ‘holyeverlastinJesus’!”
Jude rested his hand on the steering wheel. The black plastic immediately began to soften, melting to conform to the shape of his fingers. He watched, dazed, curious. The wheel began to deform, sinking in on itself.
“Yes, if you keep that word in your heart, hold that word to your heart, clasp it to you like you clasp your children, it can save your life, it really can. I believe that. Will you listen to my voice, now? Will you listen only to my voice? Here’s another word that can turn your world upside down and open your eyes to the endless possibilities of the living soul. That word is ‘nightfall.’ Let me say it again. Nightfall. Nightfall at last. The dead pull the living down. We’ll ride the glory road together, hallelujah.”
