The blast loosened Slatts’s bowels. A jet of warm shit trickled down his thigh. A pillar of unsavory steam rose from the Santa Claus suit. The ground was painted red and pink with bits of his earlobe. The pigeons on the phone lines shrieked with indignation. A moody cloud passed over the sun.
The gods of crime were not smiling on Market Street that afternoon.
DECEPTION OF THE THRUSH BY WILL CHRISTOPHER BAER
The Castro
Jude opened her hand and the panic of blind horses seized her. The washcloth was marked with a bloody knot of red in the shape of a gouged eye. She sat naked on the edge of the bathtub and tried not to hyperventilate. She pushed from her head the uneasy idea that her blood on a white washcloth was the single source of primary color in a strange bathroom yawning black and white around her. She stared at the locked door across from her and counted to ten, and when the horses died away she took stock of her situation.
She was seventeen and it was a school night.
Her left arm was so bruised it looked like it belonged to someone else, the bruise running so deep she was sure she could smell it, as if the blood pooling in there had gone bad. Her legs were cold to the touch, her thighs rippled with goose bumps, and when she pulled her hands from her knees they left marks slow to fade. She wondered if it were true that fingerprints could be dusted from human skin, and made a mental note to look that up.
She had locked herself in this bathroom two minutes ago, not counting a few too rapid heartbeats, and by her estimation she could safely remain another four minutes more. Any longer and he might get suspicious and come to the door to ask in a soft threatening voice if she were all right, and she couldn’t bear that. She needed to exit the bathroom without prompting.
Already it had taken her twenty-two seconds to pee, another thirty-six seconds to run water over the washcloth and bathe herself as instructed, and it sickened her to realize she had been staring at the knot of blood for nearly a minute, trying to organize her thoughts into any linear progression that made sense. She had a sudden overwhelming sense that had there been a window in the room, she would be scrambling with torn fingers for the roof, regardless of the screaming black vertigo in her stomach that said she was tucked away in a corner apartment on the nineteenth floor of a downtown tower with windows that were sealed shut and a sleepy doorman out front, where no one would ever think to look for her.
Nonsense.
The voice in her head was her father’s, and she nearly glanced over her shoulder.
Animal urges, her father said.
Her father had often told her that some predators were comfortable only on familiar ground, and never strayed far from home. These were not the most skilled hunters, he said, but they were unpredictable, and dangerous as hell, because they hunted on impulse. Others followed the prey, shadowing the herd. But the smartest hunters roamed far from home, where the rabbits would not recognize them. He always laughed, telling her this. And he was right. It was more likely that she was still somewhere in the Castro, where she had been pretending to shop earlier in the day, because the man who waited for her on the other side of the bathroom door seemed the sort of predator who hunted near to home. And it didn’t matter. She had to first get outside, then worry about where she was.
The bathtub was long and wide as a coffin.
Jude fought off the childish urge to crawl into the tub and shut her eyes and tell herself that if she couldn’t see him, he would not see her. Her memory was splintered, so much so that she saw the landscape inside her head in the thousand and one reflections of a shattered mirror in the sun, and she had no idea how to sort the images, the sprawl of information. The first shall be last, she thought, and was briefly comforted to seize on something familiar, though she couldn’t remember if that line came from the Book of Matthew or Mark, or what it meant.
The sisters would not be proud if they saw her now, she thought.
Jude was in her senior year at Sacred Heart, a private Catholic school for girls that was so old the halls smelled of raw earth and, according to her father, boasted tuition fees that could only be described as obscene. Jude had once calculated that, taking into account her spotty attendance record and history of expulsions, her education to this point had cost her father in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars per day. She was forever restless and bored to the edge of psychosis by the curriculum, and she had a tendency to get into fights. Two years ago, in a dispute over a borrowed jacket, she had hit a Brazilian girl named Noel much harder than she meant to, damaging the other girl’s larynx. Only the fact that Noel threw the first punch had spared her father an expensive legal headache, but to be safe Jude had taught herself to be invisible ever after, to move through crowds of people without a ripple. She wished that a thousand people had noticed her today, but they hadn’t. Because she had been practicing. She had been a shadow, her hand slipping in and out of their pockets.
She would regret being invisible if she woke up in a box tomorrow.
Jude lived with her parents in Pacific Heights, sixteen blocks from school. And though she left the house promptly at 7:00 each morning, she so rarely arrived at Sacred Heart it was unlikely that anyone would notice if she disappeared for a week. She still wore the uniform most days, because it prevented her mother from getting agitated. When her mother became agitated she tended to go overboard with her medication, a too generous cocktail of amphetamines and painkillers that pushed her into episodes of such extreme paranoia that she once nailed shut the door to her bedroom and burrowed into her walk-in closet with a hammer and small axe and tried to dig a tunnel to a neighboring room that existed only in her head.
Jude wore the uniform because it soothed her mother.
The sight of Jude in the familiar outfit gave her mother the temporary illusion that the inside of her head was in order. And because her mother was a near bottomless source of guilt for her, Jude wore the uniform.
But she would have worn it anyway, because it was so practical.
By the time she entered middle school, Jude had discovered that if she moved her hips just so and let the tiny blue-and-black skirt flutter at her thighs, the men and boys in her immediate vicinity became hushed, compliant. She crossed her legs and sneezed and the man nearest her trembled and handed her a tissue. She crouched on the sidewalk to dig through her purse with her knees pressed together and hair blowing in her mouth and her butt just touching the heels of her black Mary Janes, and even the stoned hustlers and street artists stopped to ask if she were lost. She twisted her white shirttails into a bow that exposed an inch of bare belly and a college boy would buy her a coffee. And if she tugged her socks up over her knees, cab drivers offered her cigarettes and took her wherever she wanted to go.
She would give anything to be in the back of a yellow cab right now. She would ask the driver to take her to the one place that felt like church to her, the ruined baths just up the hill from Ocean Beach. She would close her eyes as they sailed through the sunset, and thank God she wasn’t on her feet, because she was so sore, so raw inside. The soft pink hidden flesh in what her mother perversely referred to as her special prize felt as if it had been flayed with a chunk of glass.
Again she looked at the washcloth, the smear of red against white.
This was not menstrual blood.
Jude had the altered internal clock of a long-distance runner and rarely had a regular period. She ran nearly seventy miles per week through the rain and mist in the Presidio, and trained with weights and worked out every other day with a tae-kwon-do master class, and this regimen combined with birth control pills and the amphetamines she skimmed from her mother’s cave had pretty much cancelled her cycle. This was the blood of trauma, and now it struck her that she would never forgive herself if she left even a drop of it behind.