Craddock told them to dive.
Georgia threw open the bathroom door, and Jude quit her browser.
“Whatchu doin’?” she asked.
“Trying to figure out how to check my mail,” he lied. “You want a turn?”
She looked at her computer for a moment, then shook her head and wrinkled her nose. “No. I don’t have the least interest in going online. Isn’t that funny? Usually you can’t peel me off.”
“Well, see? Running for your life ain’t all bad. Just look at how it’s building character.”
He pulled out the dresser drawer again and slopped another can of Alpo into it.
“Last night the smell of that shit was making me want to gag,” Georgia said. “Strangely, this morning it’s getting me hungry.”
“Come on. There’s a Denny’s up the street. Let’s go for a walk.”
He opened the door, then held out his hand to her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, in her stone- washed black jeans, heavy black boots, and sleeveless black shirt, which hung loose on her slight frame. In the golden beam of sunlight that fell through the door, her skin was so pale and fine it was almost translucent, looked as if it would bruise at the slightest touch.
Jude saw her glance at the dogs. Angus and Bon bent over the drawer, heads together as they went snorkeling in their food. He saw Georgia frown, and he knew what she was thinking, that they’d been safe as long as they kept the dogs close. But then she squinted back at Jude, standing in the light, took his hand, and let him pull her to her feet. The day was bright. Beyond the door the morning waited for them.
He was, for himself, not scared. He still felt under the protection of the new song, felt that in writing it he had drawn a magic circle around the both of them that the dead man could not penetrate. He had driven the ghost away—for a time anyhow.
But as they crossed the parking lot—thoughtlessly holding hands, a thing they never did—he happened to glance back at their hotel room. Angus and Bon stared out through the picture window at them, standing side by side on their hind legs, with their front paws on the glass and their faces wearing identical looks of apprehension.
25
The Denny’s was loud and overcrowded, thick with the smell of bacon fat and burnt coffee and cigarette smoke. The bar, just to the right of the doors, was a designated smoking area. That meant that after five minutes of waiting up front to be seated, you could plan on smelling like an ashtray by the time you were led to your table.
Jude didn’t smoke himself and never had. It was the one self-destructive habit he’d managed to avoid. His father smoked. On errands into town, Jude had always willingly bought him the cheap, long boxes of generics, had done it even without being asked, and they both knew why. Jude would glare at Martin across the kitchen table, while his father lit a cigarette and took his first drag, the tip flaring orange.
“If looks could kill, I’d have cancer already,” Martin said to him one night, without any preamble. He waved a hand, drew a circle in the air with the cigarette, squinting at Jude through the smoke. “I got a tough constitution. You want to kill me off with these, you’re gonna have to wait a while. You really want me dead, there’s easier ways to do it.”
Jude’s mother said nothing, concentrated on shelling peas, face screwed up in an expression of intent study. She might have been a deaf-mute.
Jude—Justin then—did not speak either, simply went on glaring at him. He was not too angry to speak but too shocked, because it was as if his father had read his mind. He’d been staring at the loose, chicken-flesh folds of Martin Cowzynski’s neck with a kind of fury, wanting to will a cancer into it, a lump of black-blossoming cells that would devour his father’s voice, choke his father’s breath. Wanting that with all his heart: a cancer that would make the doctors scoop out his throat, shut him up forever.
The man at the next table had had his throat scooped out and used an electrolarynx to talk, a loud, crackling joy buzzer that he held under his chin to tell the waitress (and everyone else in the room): “YOU GOT AIR- CONDITIONIN’? WELL, TURN IT ON. YOU DON’T BOTHER TO COOK THE FOOD, WHY YOU WANNA FRAH YOUR PAYIN’ CUSTOMERS? JESUS CHRIST. I’M EIGHTY-SEVEN.” This was a fact he felt to be of such overwhelming importance that he said it again after the waitress walked away, repeating himself to his wife, a fantastically obese woman who didn’t look up from her newspaper as he spoke. “I’M EIGHTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD. CHRIST. FRAH US LIKE AIGS.” He looked like the old man from that painting,
“Wonder what sort of old couple we’d make,” Georgia said.
“Well. I’d still be hairy. It would just be white hair. And it would probably be growing in tufts out of all the wrong places. My ears. My nose. Big, crazy hairs sticking out of my eyebrows. Basically like Santa, gone horribly fuckin’ wrong.”
She scooped a hand under her breasts. “The fat in these is going to drain steadily into my ass. I got a sweet tooth, so probably my teeth will fall out on me. On the bright side, I’ll be able to pop out my dentures for toothless, old-lady blow jobs.”
He touched her chin, lifted her face toward his. He studied her high cheekbones and the eyes in deep, bruised hollows, eyes that watched with a wry amusement that did not quite mask her desire to meet with his approval.
“You got a good face,” he said. “You got good eyes. You’ll be all right. With old ladies it’s all about the eyes. You want to be an old lady with lively eyes, so it looks like you’re always thinking of something funny. Like you’re looking for trouble.”
He drew his hand away. She peered down into her coffee, smiling, flattered into an uncharacteristic shyness.
“Sounds like you’re talking about my grandma Bammy,” she said. “You’ll love her. We could be there by lunch.”
“Sure.”
“My grandma looks like the friendliest, most harmless old thing. Oh, but she likes tormenting people. I was living with her by the time I was in the eighth grade. I’d have my boyfriend Jimmy Elliott over—to play Yahtzee, I said, but really we were sneaking wine. Bammy would leave a half-full bottle of red in her fridge most days, leftover from dinner the night before. And she knew what we were doing, and one day she switched purple ink for the booze and left it for us. Jimmy let me take the first slug. I got a mouthful and went and coughed it all down myself. When she came home, I still had a big purple ring on my mouth, purple stains all down my jaw, purple tongue. It didn’t come out for a week either. I expected Bammy to paddle me good, but she just thought it was funny.”
The waitress came for their order. When she was gone, Georgia said, “What was it like being married, Jude?”
“Peaceful.”
“Why did you divorce her?”
“I didn’t. She divorced me.”
“She catch you in bed with the state of Alaska or something?”
“No. I didn’t cheat—well, not too often. And she didn’t take it personal.”
“She didn’t? Are you for real? If we were married and you helped yourself to a piece, I’d throw the first thing came to hand at you. And the second. I wouldn’t drive you to the hospital either. Let you bleed.” She paused, bent over her mug, then said, “So what did it?”
“It would be hard to explain.”
“Because I’m too stupid?”
“No,” he said. “More like I’m not smart enough to explain it to myself, let alone anyone else. For a long time, I wanted to work at being a husband. Then I didn’t. And when I didn’t anymore—she just knew it. Maybe I made sure she knew it.” And as he said it, Jude was thinking how he’d started staying up late, waiting for her to get tired and go to bed without him. He’d slip in later, after she was asleep, so there was no chance of making love. Or how he would sometimes start playing guitar, picking at a tune, in the middle of her telling him something—playing right over her talk. Remembering how he’d held on to the snuff movie instead of throwing it away. How he’d left it out
