the front doors, the floodlights on, globes of cold white light. No one sitting in it.
A few of the onlookers were standing around, at tables just behind his, and he had to shove through them to reach the corridor to the bathrooms. Jude found a door that said WOMEN, slammed it in.
Georgia stood at one of the two sinks. She didn’t glance up at the sound of the door banging against the wall. She stared at herself in the mirror, but her eyes were unfocused, not really fixed on anything, and her face wore the wistful, grave expression of a child almost asleep in front of the television.
She cocked her bandaged fist back and drove it into the mirror, hard as she could, no holding back. She pulverized the glass in a fist-size circle, with shatter lines jagging out away from the hole in all directions. An instant later silver spears of mirror fell with a ringing crash, broke musically against the sinks.
A slender, yellow-haired woman with a newborn in her arms stood a yard away, beside a changing table that folded out from the wall. She grabbed the baby to her chest and began to scream, “Oh, my God! Oh, my
Georgia grabbed an eight-inch scythe blade of silver, a gleaming crescent moon, raised it to her throat, and tipped her chin back to gouge into the flesh beneath. Jude broke out of the shock that had held him in the doorway and caught her wrist, twisted it down to her side, then bent it back, until she made a pitiful cry and let go. The mirrored scythe fell to the white tiles and shattered with a pretty clashing sound.
Jude spun her, twisting her arm again, hurting her. She gasped and shut her eyes against tears but let him force her forward, march her to the door. He wasn’t sure why he hurt her, if it was panic or on purpose, because he was angry at her for going off or angry at himself for letting her.
The dead man was in the hall outside the bathroom. Jude didn’t register him until he’d already walked past him, and then a shudder rolled through him, left him on legs that wouldn’t stop trembling. Craddock had tipped his black hat at them on their way by.
Georgia could barely hold herself up. Jude shifted his grip to her upper arm, supporting her, as he rammed her across the dining room. The fat lady and the old man had their heads together.
“…WASN’T NO RADIO STATION…”
“Weirdos. Weirdos playing a prank.”
“SHADDAP, HERE THEY COME.”
Others stared, jumped to get out of the way. The waitress who only a minute before had accused Jude of being a drug peddler and Georgia of being his whore stood by the front counter talking to the manager, a little man with pens in his shirt pocket and the sad eyes of a basset hound. She pointed at them as they crossed the room.
Jude slowed at his table long enough to throw down a pair of twenties. As they went by the manager, the little man lifted his head to regard them with his tragic gaze but did not say anything. The waitress went on sputtering in his ear.
“Jude,” Georgia said when they went through the first set of doors. “You’re hurting me.”
He relaxed his grip on her upper arm, saw that his fingers had left waxy white marks in her already pale flesh. They thumped through the second set of doors and were outside.
“Are we safe?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “But we will be soon. The ghost has a healthy fear of them dogs.”
They walked quickly past Craddock’s empty and idling pickup truck. The passenger-side window was rolled down about a third of the way. The radio was on inside. One of the AM right-wingers was talking, in a smooth, confident, almost arrogant voice.
“…it feels good to embrace those core American values, and it feels good to see the right people win an election, even if the other side is going to say it wasn’t fair, and it feels good to see more and more people returning to the politics of common Christian good sense,” said the deep, dulcet voice. “But you know what would feel even better? To choke that bitch standing next to you, choke that bitch, then step into the road in front of a semi, lay down for it, lay down and…”
Then they were past, the voice out of earshot.
“We’re going to lose this thing,” Georgia said.
“No we aren’t. Come on. It isn’t a hundred yards back to the hotel.”
“If he doesn’t get us now, he’s going to get us later. He told me. He said I might as well kill myself and get it over, and I was going to. I couldn’t help myself.”
“I know. That’s what he does.”
They started along the highway, right at the edge of the gravel breakdown lane, with the long stalks of sawgrass whipping at Jude’s jeans.
Georgia said, “My hand feels sick.”
He stopped, lifted it for a look. It wasn’t bleeding, either from punching the mirror or from lifting up the curved blade of glass. The thick, muffling pads of the bandage had protected her skin. Still, even through the wraps he could feel an unwholesome heat pouring off it, and he wondered if she had broken a bone.
“I bet. You hit the mirror pretty hard. You’re lucky you aren’t all hacked up.” Nudging her forward, getting them moving again.
“It’s beating like a heart. Going
Between them and the motel was an overpass, a stone train trestle, the tunnel beneath narrow and dark. There was no sidewalk, no room even for the breakdown lane at the sides of the road. Water dripped from the stone ceiling.
“Come on,” he said.
The overpass was a black frame, boxed around a picture of the Days Inn. Jude’s eyes were fixed on the motel. He could see the Mustang. He could see their room.
They did not slow as they passed into the tunnel, which stank of stagnant water, weeds, urine.
“Wait,” Georgia said.
She turned, doubled over, and gagged, bringing up her eggs, lumps of half-digested toast, and orange juice.
He held her left arm with one hand, pulled her hair back from her face with the other. It made him edgy, standing there in the bad-smelling dark, waiting for her to finish.
“Jude,” she said.
“Come on,” he said, tugging at her arm.
“Wait—”
“Come on.”
She wiped her mouth, with the bottom of her shirt. She remained bent over. “I think—”
He heard the truck before he saw it, heard the engine revving behind him, a furious growl of sound, rising to a roar. Headlights dashed up the wall of rough stone blocks. Jude had time to glance back and saw the dead man’s pickup rushing at them, Craddock grinning behind the wheel and the floodlights two circles of blinding light, holes burned right into the world. Smoke boiled off the tires.
Jude got an arm under Georgia and pitched himself forward, carrying her with him and out the far end of the tunnel.
The smoke-blue Chevy slammed into the wall behind him with a shattering crash of steel smashing against stone. It was a great clap of noise that stunned Jude’s eardrums, set them ringing. He and Georgia fell onto wet gravel, clear of the tunnel now. They rolled away from the side of the road, tumbled down the brush, and landed in dew-damp ferns. Georgia cried out, clipped him in the left eye with a bony elbow. He put a hand down into something squishy, the cool unpleasantness of swamp muck.
He lifted himself up, breathing raggedly. Jude looked back. It wasn’t the dead man’s old Chevy that had hit the wall but an olive Jeep, the kind that was open to the sky, with a roll bar in the back. A black man with close- cropped, steel-wool hair sat behind the steering wheel, holding his forehead. The windshield was fractured in a network of connected rings where his skull had hit it. The whole front driver’s side of the Jeep had been gouged down to the frame, steel twisted up and back in smoking, torn pieces.
“What happened?” Georgia asked, her voice faint and tinny, hard to make out over the droning in his ears.
“The ghost. He missed.”
