an exit ramp, had almost reached it. “This ain’t it.”
“I was shakin’ you for about five minutes, and you wouldn’t wake up. I thought you were in a coma or somethin’. There’s a hospital here.”
“Keep going. I’m awake now.”
She swerved back onto the highway at the last moment, and a horn blared behind her.
“How you doin’, Angus?” Jude asked, and peeked back at him.
Jude reached between the seats and touched a paw, and for an instant Angus’s gaze sharpened a little. His jaws moved. His tongue found the back of Jude’s left hand and lapped at his fingers.
“Good boy,” Jude whispered. “Good boy.”
At last he turned away, settled back into his seat. The sock puppet on his right hand wore a red face. He was in dire need of a shot of something to dull the pain, thought he might find it on the radio: Skynyrd or, failing that, the Black Crows. He touched the power button and flipped rapidly from a burst of static to the Doppler pulse of a coded military transmission to Hank Williams III, or maybe just Hank Williams, Jude couldn’t tell because the signal was so faint, and then—
Then the tuner landed on a perfectly clear broadcast: Craddock.
“I never would’ve thought you had so much in the tank, boy.” His voice was genial and close, coming out of the speakers set in the doors. “You don’t have any quit in you. That usually counts for something with me. This ain’t usually, of course. You understand that.” He laughed. “Anyplace will do. You know, most people like to think they don’t know the meaning of the word ‘quit,’ but it isn’t true. Most people, you put them under, put them under deep, maybe help ’em along with some good dope, sink them into a full trance state, and then tell them they’re burnin’ alive? They’ll scream for water till they got no voice left. They’ll do anything to make it stop. Anything you like. That’s just human nature. But some people—children and crazy folks, mostly—you can’t reason with, even when they’re in a trance. Anna was both, God love her. I tried to make her forget about all the things that made her feel so bad. She was a good girl. I hated the way she tore herself up over things—even over you. But I couldn’t ever really make her go all the way blank, even though it would’ve saved her pain. Some people would just rather suffer. No wonder she liked you. You’re the same way. I wanted to deal with you quick. But you had to go and drag this out. And now you got to wonder why. You got to ask yourself. You know, when that dog in the backseat stops breathing, so do you. And it ain’t going to be easy, like it could’ve been. You spent three days livin’ like a dog, and now you have to die like one, and so does that two-dollar bitch next to you—”
Marybeth thumbed the radio off. It came right back on again.
“—you think you could turn my own little girl against me and not have to answer for it—”
Jude lifted his foot and slammed the heel of his Doc Marten into the dash. It hit with a crunch of splintering plastic. Craddock’s voice was instantly lost in a sudden, deafening blast of bass. Jude kicked the radio again, shattering the face. It went silent.
“Remember when I said the dead man didn’t come for talk?” Jude told her. “I take it back. Lately I been thinking that’s all he came for.”
Marybeth didn’t reply. Thirty minutes later Jude spoke again, to tell her to get off at the next exit.
They drove on a two-lane state highway, with southern, semitropical forest growing right up to the sides of the road, leaning over it. They passed a drive-in that had been closed since Jude was a child. The giant movie screen towered over the road, holes torn in it, offering a view of the sky. This evening’s feature was a drifting pall of dirty smoke. They rolled by the New South Motel, long since shut up and being reclaimed by the jungle, windows boarded over. They glided past a filling station, the first place they’d seen that was open. Two deeply sunburned fat men sat out front and watched them go by. They did not smile or wave or acknowledge the passing car in any way, except that one leaned forward and spat in the dirt.
Jude directed her to take a left off the highway, and they followed a road up into the low hills. The afternoon light was strange, a dim, poisonous red, a stormy twilight color. It was the same color Jude saw when he shut his eyes, the color of his headache. It was not close to nightfall but looked it. The bellies of the clouds to the west were dark and threatening. The wind lashed the tops of the palms and shook the Spanish moss that straggled down from low-hanging oak branches.
“We’re here,” he said.
As Marybeth turned into the driveway, the long run-up to the house, the wind gusted with more force than usual and threw a burst of plump, hard raindrops across the windshield. They hit in a sudden, furious rattle, and Jude waited for more, but there was no more.
The house stood at the top of a low rise. Jude had not been here in more than three decades and had not realized until this moment how closely his home in New York resembled the home of his childhood. It was as if he had leaped ten years into the future and returned to New York to find his own farm neglected and disused, fallen to ruin. The great rambling place before him was the gray color of mouse, with a roof of black shingles, many of them crooked or missing, and as they drew closer, Jude actually saw the wind snag one, strip it loose, and propel the black square away into the sky.
The abandoned chicken coop was visible to one side of the house, and its screen door swung open, then banged shut with a crack like a gunshot. The glass was missing from a window on the first floor, and the wind rattled a sheet of semitransparent plastic stapled into the frame. This had always been their destination, Jude saw now. They had been headed toward this place from the moment they took to the road.
The dirt lane that led to the house ended in a loop. Marybeth followed it around, turning the Mustang to point back the way they’d come, before putting it into park. They were both staring down the drive when the floodlights of Craddock’s truck appeared at the bottom of the hill.
“Oh, God,” Marybeth said, and then she was out of the Mustang, going around the front to Jude’s side.
The pale truck at the foot of the drive seemed to pause for a moment, then began rolling up the hill toward them.
Marybeth jerked his door open. Jude almost fell out. She pulled on his arm.
“Get on your feet. Get in the house.”
“Angus…” he said, glancing into the back at his dog.
Angus’s head rested on his front paws. He stared wearily back at Jude, his eyes red-rimmed and wet.
“He’s dead.”
“No,” Jude said, sure she was mistaken. “How you doin’, boy?”
Angus regarded him mournfully, didn’t move. The wind got into the car, and an empty paper cup scooted around on the floor, rattling softly. The breeze stirred Angus’s fur, brushing it in the wrong direction. Angus paid it no mind.
It didn’t seem possible that Angus could just have died like that, with no fanfare. He’d been alive only a few minutes ago, Jude was convinced of it. Jude stood in the dirt next to the Mustang, sure if he just waited another moment, Angus would move, stretch his front paws, and lift his head. Then Marybeth was hauling on his arm again, and he didn’t have the strength to resist her, had to stagger along after or risk being toppled.
He fell to his knees a few feet from the front steps. He didn’t know why. He had an arm over Marybeth’s shoulders, and she had one looped around his waist, and she moaned through her clenched lips, dragging him back onto his heels. Behind him he heard the dead man’s pickup rolling to a stop in the turnaround. Gravel crunched under the tires.
The truck idled beside the Mustang. Craddock sat behind the wheel, in his stiff, formal black suit with the silver buttons. His left arm hung out the window. His face was hard to make out through the blue curve of glass.
The razor shaped like a crescent moon fell from the hand hanging out the window, and swung from its gleaming chain.
Jude turned the doorknob, and Marybeth shouldered it inward, and they crashed through into the dark of the front hall. Marybeth kicked the door shut behind them. Jude threw a last glance out the window beside the door—
