Judy had been her term of endearment for him since college, and when she
wanted something she still cooed it to him. They had met at Ohio State, he in law
school, she an accounting major. When she teased him then, she sometimes called him
Judy and sometimes Judas because Jude she had only heard in the Beatles’ song her
mother sang along with when it played on her oldies station on those afternoons when
she had not passed out.
Don’t tell me you can’t afford it, Judy Judas, she said if he pled student poverty,
groping deep into both his pockets. I know you’ve got at least thirty pieces of silver,
and I’ll find every last one of them after I get your dick out of the way.
He fell for her at 8:55 on a July morning, the elevator door opening, his shoes cemented
to the marble foyer, the door closing, a giggle echoing down the elevator shaft. Fell for
her Hispanic-Indian beauty, her obsidian eyes overflowing with pools of promise, deep
and dark as midnight, fearless as she passed through life save for being overlooked,
alone, forsaken by God.
Tina, as she was called then, had fled to the Midwest from Fontana, California, a
smoggy town of working-class houses, each painted a differing shade of greasy dogs’
teeth, birthplace of the Hell’s Angels, of which her father remained a redwing member.
Yet despite a childhood where more than one doper dropped dead in their kitchen after
sampling her old man’s product, Tina’s juvenile sheet consisted of a single shoplifting
offense where she had not even been the one performing the pinch, but had her back
to Sonia, picking out a wardrobe in Vogue, as the other girl palmed a pack of Winstons.
Because of her honor-roll grades, the judge gave the girl unsupervised probation,
and Tina was thereafter scrupulous with whom she hung out. She had plans. Plans to
be gone from a mother who downed a fifth of vodka before noon, gone from a meth
mouthed father who snorted as much as he sold. A month after her probation ended,
Tina’s guidance counselor called her into his office and handed her a fat envelope,
postmarked Columbus, Ohio. Before she finished the first paragraph, tears were rolling
down her cheeks, which she could recall happening only once without her having forced
them after a customer squished a sleeping Felix in their driveway under his truck tires.
She never would have applied to Ohio State had her old man not been watching the Big-
Ten playoffs on a Saturday too rainy to be out on his Harley, sitting on the sofa as he
sealed a dime’s worth into Glad baggies, she puzzling her way through Monday’s trig
problems, scratching on a tablet at the kitchen table. She took a stretch break at
halftime and went in to watch the cheerleader routines when the announcer instead
gave a photo tour of the campuses. She sat, a foot away from the screen. The green
foliage and blue skies differed as much from the brown sand and browner air of Fontana
as did Oz from Kansas. After the second half kickoff, she went up to her room and dug
out the Rand-McNally. Columbus was 2500 miles away.
She applied for a scholarship too, but Student Aid regretfully turned her away.
She had sent them no financial information. There was none to send. The three of them
lived off whatever wad rode in her old man’s money clip. Her parents had never
deposited a nickel into a bank account, nor had they ever filed a tax return. Her old man
had no social security number, and her mother could never remember hers. The time
her father needed one to post bond for a cousin, he rode up to Folsom and with two
cartons of cigarettes bought it from a riding buddy pulling consecutive life stretches. He
paid cash for their house and as a joke deeded it into the name of an old beau of her
mother’s who disappeared at the end of their courtship, his identifiable parts dispersed
over noncontiguous counties, no death certificate issued.
So Tina spent her graduation summer muling for her old man, dodging rip-off
artists of limited talent and narcs with less, earning enough from the dopers she
shorted to pay for her first year’s tuition and a Neiman Marcus wardrobe after she got
to Columbus. She left their house on Garcia Street on a Sunday morning in September
wearing a red frock that showed off her brown legs and carrying a backpack that held a
change of underwear and her summer earnings and walked down to the corner Seven-
Eleven. From a payphone she called a cab that carried her to the Ontario International
Airport where with white-lined bills she purchased a one-way ticket.
“Christine,” she said, when the ticket seller asked her name.
She excelled in her classes. She paid for her sophomore year by interning at
Arthur Andersen, one floor above the law firm where Jude clerked. They spoke for the
first time a week after the elevator door shut in his face, eating their Wendy’s lunches
as they sat on a shaded bench beside the fountain facing High Street. She could not
look away from him. She adored his dark good looks, his wicked, unprofaned humor, his
being almost an attorney, the respect he showed her, so unlike the pump-and-dump-
undergraduates always putting their elbows to her chest when they bumped into her at
bars. Each noon she watched out her window until she spotted him sitting on the
bench, their bench. Once she saw him sitting there, rippling in the haze of summer heat,
his eyes not then watery from drink, smiling up at her window though she had yet to
point it out, and she took it as a contract with her world to come. How could she know
it was possible to rush toward disaster the way dreamers rush toward desire?
They married the weekend after Jude passed the bar. The next day they packed all
they owned into a four-foot U-Haul and drove the five hours up to Hanna, the town
where Jude had grown up. He began his legal career as a prosecutor in juvenile court,
and she found a job with an accounting firm whose major client was the Dominic
Company, a construction company deep into developing strip malls funded by Teamster
dollars.
Prosecuting mental defectives abused since infancy and often dragged crying from
the courtroom left an acrid taste on Jude’s tongue that Seagram’s could not wash
away. He acquired a few years experience and quit. When Jude opened an office above
the Hanna Bank & Trust, he told Christine it would take time to build a practice. The
past April, he showed her their tax return before she had him sign her name to it and
pointed out their progress. She saw the numbers but not the progress. Not the way
her old man’s wad bulged in his hip pocket. She and Jude both worked, yet they could
not buy a home. While they lived across the street from Hanna Park, it was a one-
bedroom clapboard, painted white so long ago it had faded to the color of parking-lot
snow. They could not start a family, not that she wanted one. She resented life in a do-
nothing-but-go-to-church-on-Sunday-town. While she did not miss the destructive
hedonism she had left behind, she did the excitement that came with it where a night’s
action downstairs was juicier than a season of Dragnet. How many Hanna housewives,
their hair rolled in curlers as they sauntered the aisles of Drotleff’s A & P, searching for
pistachio ice cream, had, on the way to the refrigerator for her school lunch, skipped
over a corpse spread eagle across the floor and head off to catch her bus, stopping
only to turn out the stiff’s pockets and pinch his nose pin if its diamond stud
complimented her earrings?
Jude’s working late, his attending Knights of Columbus meetings to cultivate
clients, made Christine certain he had a woman stashed aside sucking up their money,
notwithstanding the nights she had parked outside his office and saw him at his desk,
his forefinger to his temple. She trusted few women and fewer men. It had been
common when she came home from school to see strangers coming out of her parents’
bedroom. Once she found a man standing on his head in the middle of their kitchen,
naked save his mismatched socks.
“Hi there, sweetie,” he said.
“Hi there, yourself.”
“My name is Cosmo, and I’m a free spirit.”
“You don’t say?”
“What’s yours?”
A dozen times her old man had thrown she and her mother out, and until he
exhausted his supply, they passed from the house of one club crony to another.
Don’t you be letting no sonofabitchinman pin your neck into the dirt, was her mother’s
advice. You always keep a stick at hand, one with rusty-lockjaw-inflicting-spikes
asticking out of it – one that’ll keep him on his knees, begging from you like the dog
God made him to be.
It was advice her mother ignored. If within a week of throwing them out he failed
to sober up, she would step out to Hendron’s or J&R’s or Fibber McGee’s. It took her
no more than an evening in the back seat with a car full of the boys before her old man
would be knocking on their door, clear eyed and holding two bags of groceries and a
bottle of Smirnoff under his arms, smiling a toothless grin as sweet as candy a week
after Easter. She always went back, tears glistening her eyes, no matter his strewing
their clothes across the yard, no matter her cauliflowered nose. No matter. Until one of
the two overdosed, he was all the security her mother would know.
Christine took to heart her mother’s advice, and at the office party last December,
she found her stick. While she waited for Jude to retrieve their coats, Tommy came up
behind and patted her bottom. For once she gave him the time of day. Maybe we should
discuss it over my lunch hour, she said, and smiled when he whispered that what he
had in mind would take more than an hour. Tommy nodded at Jude when he came back
into the room. I ain’t no jackrabbit, honey.
A week after New Year’s when he asked her if she wanted to meet him for drinks,
she asked him where.
“Do you think that’s why Dr. Sullivan killed himself?” Christine said. “Because she
was seeing someone?”
Jude looked out into the darkness. “I don’t know.”
She studied him a moment, fixed him with her black eyes. “I supposed you want
me to believe she told you nothing?”
Jude shook his head.
“Like hell she didn’t.”
next page
wanted something she still cooed it to him. They had met at Ohio State, he in law
school, she an accounting major. When she teased him then, she sometimes called him
Judy and sometimes Judas because Jude she had only heard in the Beatles’ song her
mother sang along with when it played on her oldies station on those afternoons when
she had not passed out.
Don’t tell me you can’t afford it, Judy Judas, she said if he pled student poverty,
groping deep into both his pockets. I know you’ve got at least thirty pieces of silver,
and I’ll find every last one of them after I get your dick out of the way.
He fell for her at 8:55 on a July morning, the elevator door opening, his shoes cemented
to the marble foyer, the door closing, a giggle echoing down the elevator shaft. Fell for
her Hispanic-Indian beauty, her obsidian eyes overflowing with pools of promise, deep
and dark as midnight, fearless as she passed through life save for being overlooked,
alone, forsaken by God.
Tina, as she was called then, had fled to the Midwest from Fontana, California, a
smoggy town of working-class houses, each painted a differing shade of greasy dogs’
teeth, birthplace of the Hell’s Angels, of which her father remained a redwing member.
Yet despite a childhood where more than one doper dropped dead in their kitchen after
sampling her old man’s product, Tina’s juvenile sheet consisted of a single shoplifting
offense where she had not even been the one performing the pinch, but had her back
to Sonia, picking out a wardrobe in Vogue, as the other girl palmed a pack of Winstons.
Because of her honor-roll grades, the judge gave the girl unsupervised probation,
and Tina was thereafter scrupulous with whom she hung out. She had plans. Plans to
be gone from a mother who downed a fifth of vodka before noon, gone from a meth
mouthed father who snorted as much as he sold. A month after her probation ended,
Tina’s guidance counselor called her into his office and handed her a fat envelope,
postmarked Columbus, Ohio. Before she finished the first paragraph, tears were rolling
down her cheeks, which she could recall happening only once without her having forced
them after a customer squished a sleeping Felix in their driveway under his truck tires.
She never would have applied to Ohio State had her old man not been watching the Big-
Ten playoffs on a Saturday too rainy to be out on his Harley, sitting on the sofa as he
sealed a dime’s worth into Glad baggies, she puzzling her way through Monday’s trig
problems, scratching on a tablet at the kitchen table. She took a stretch break at
halftime and went in to watch the cheerleader routines when the announcer instead
gave a photo tour of the campuses. She sat, a foot away from the screen. The green
foliage and blue skies differed as much from the brown sand and browner air of Fontana
as did Oz from Kansas. After the second half kickoff, she went up to her room and dug
out the Rand-McNally. Columbus was 2500 miles away.
She applied for a scholarship too, but Student Aid regretfully turned her away.
She had sent them no financial information. There was none to send. The three of them
lived off whatever wad rode in her old man’s money clip. Her parents had never
deposited a nickel into a bank account, nor had they ever filed a tax return. Her old man
had no social security number, and her mother could never remember hers. The time
her father needed one to post bond for a cousin, he rode up to Folsom and with two
cartons of cigarettes bought it from a riding buddy pulling consecutive life stretches. He
paid cash for their house and as a joke deeded it into the name of an old beau of her
mother’s who disappeared at the end of their courtship, his identifiable parts dispersed
over noncontiguous counties, no death certificate issued.
So Tina spent her graduation summer muling for her old man, dodging rip-off
artists of limited talent and narcs with less, earning enough from the dopers she
shorted to pay for her first year’s tuition and a Neiman Marcus wardrobe after she got
to Columbus. She left their house on Garcia Street on a Sunday morning in September
wearing a red frock that showed off her brown legs and carrying a backpack that held a
change of underwear and her summer earnings and walked down to the corner Seven-
Eleven. From a payphone she called a cab that carried her to the Ontario International
Airport where with white-lined bills she purchased a one-way ticket.
“Christine,” she said, when the ticket seller asked her name.
She excelled in her classes. She paid for her sophomore year by interning at
Arthur Andersen, one floor above the law firm where Jude clerked. They spoke for the
first time a week after the elevator door shut in his face, eating their Wendy’s lunches
as they sat on a shaded bench beside the fountain facing High Street. She could not
look away from him. She adored his dark good looks, his wicked, unprofaned humor, his
being almost an attorney, the respect he showed her, so unlike the pump-and-dump-
undergraduates always putting their elbows to her chest when they bumped into her at
bars. Each noon she watched out her window until she spotted him sitting on the
bench, their bench. Once she saw him sitting there, rippling in the haze of summer heat,
his eyes not then watery from drink, smiling up at her window though she had yet to
point it out, and she took it as a contract with her world to come. How could she know
it was possible to rush toward disaster the way dreamers rush toward desire?
They married the weekend after Jude passed the bar. The next day they packed all
they owned into a four-foot U-Haul and drove the five hours up to Hanna, the town
where Jude had grown up. He began his legal career as a prosecutor in juvenile court,
and she found a job with an accounting firm whose major client was the Dominic
Company, a construction company deep into developing strip malls funded by Teamster
dollars.
Prosecuting mental defectives abused since infancy and often dragged crying from
the courtroom left an acrid taste on Jude’s tongue that Seagram’s could not wash
away. He acquired a few years experience and quit. When Jude opened an office above
the Hanna Bank & Trust, he told Christine it would take time to build a practice. The
past April, he showed her their tax return before she had him sign her name to it and
pointed out their progress. She saw the numbers but not the progress. Not the way
her old man’s wad bulged in his hip pocket. She and Jude both worked, yet they could
not buy a home. While they lived across the street from Hanna Park, it was a one-
bedroom clapboard, painted white so long ago it had faded to the color of parking-lot
snow. They could not start a family, not that she wanted one. She resented life in a do-
nothing-but-go-to-church-on-Sunday-town. While she did not miss the destructive
hedonism she had left behind, she did the excitement that came with it where a night’s
action downstairs was juicier than a season of Dragnet. How many Hanna housewives,
their hair rolled in curlers as they sauntered the aisles of Drotleff’s A & P, searching for
pistachio ice cream, had, on the way to the refrigerator for her school lunch, skipped
over a corpse spread eagle across the floor and head off to catch her bus, stopping
only to turn out the stiff’s pockets and pinch his nose pin if its diamond stud
complimented her earrings?
Jude’s working late, his attending Knights of Columbus meetings to cultivate
clients, made Christine certain he had a woman stashed aside sucking up their money,
notwithstanding the nights she had parked outside his office and saw him at his desk,
his forefinger to his temple. She trusted few women and fewer men. It had been
common when she came home from school to see strangers coming out of her parents’
bedroom. Once she found a man standing on his head in the middle of their kitchen,
naked save his mismatched socks.
“Hi there, sweetie,” he said.
“Hi there, yourself.”
“My name is Cosmo, and I’m a free spirit.”
“You don’t say?”
“What’s yours?”
A dozen times her old man had thrown she and her mother out, and until he
exhausted his supply, they passed from the house of one club crony to another.
Don’t you be letting no sonofabitchinman pin your neck into the dirt, was her mother’s
advice. You always keep a stick at hand, one with rusty-lockjaw-inflicting-spikes
asticking out of it – one that’ll keep him on his knees, begging from you like the dog
God made him to be.
It was advice her mother ignored. If within a week of throwing them out he failed
to sober up, she would step out to Hendron’s or J&R’s or Fibber McGee’s. It took her
no more than an evening in the back seat with a car full of the boys before her old man
would be knocking on their door, clear eyed and holding two bags of groceries and a
bottle of Smirnoff under his arms, smiling a toothless grin as sweet as candy a week
after Easter. She always went back, tears glistening her eyes, no matter his strewing
their clothes across the yard, no matter her cauliflowered nose. No matter. Until one of
the two overdosed, he was all the security her mother would know.
Christine took to heart her mother’s advice, and at the office party last December,
she found her stick. While she waited for Jude to retrieve their coats, Tommy came up
behind and patted her bottom. For once she gave him the time of day. Maybe we should
discuss it over my lunch hour, she said, and smiled when he whispered that what he
had in mind would take more than an hour. Tommy nodded at Jude when he came back
into the room. I ain’t no jackrabbit, honey.
A week after New Year’s when he asked her if she wanted to meet him for drinks,
she asked him where.
“Do you think that’s why Dr. Sullivan killed himself?” Christine said. “Because she
was seeing someone?”
Jude looked out into the darkness. “I don’t know.”
She studied him a moment, fixed him with her black eyes. “I supposed you want
me to believe she told you nothing?”
Jude shook his head.
“Like hell she didn’t.”
next page
