Apocalypse of Jude

Leaving the bar to the girl beside him, Jude lifts the bar flap and by force of habit thrusts his head into the pool room where he meets Paul’s arched laughing eyes, his chuckle spreading from ear to ear as he converses with three loitering heirs with whom he has now grown close. They are the only ones in the room and a shiver goes down Jude’s spine, rattling his bones.

He retreats quickly not wanting to garner Paul’s gaze too long and enters the kitchen via the side door in the passage way. Feeling safe again, he stares out the back window at figures in the dark gathered lazily around the tree that grows on the far side of the small, but empty parking lot. Jude watches wistfully the ritual of closed fists meeting gently against each other as a burning coal is being passed between them.

“I figure you want your snarf?”

Jude turns quickly to see Paul behind him. There was no hearing him coming, just a cold blast at his back.

“No. It wasn’t that at all. Just looking in you know.”

“Come.”

Paul turns. His footfalls are silent like darkness. He unlocks the door to the small office. Jude follows him in warily, and at a distance. But Paul goes straight and opens a safe inside a cupboard, retrieves a package and then closes it, throwing the package almost flippantly on to the desk.

“That’s the last of your thirty pieces of silver’s worth.”

The sight of the pack itches a gnawing hunger that never leaves Jude now. A last shred of dignity holds him back from just taking it though, and he affects suspicion.

“Why early this month?”

Paul merely chuckles again.

“Come on Jude, I know you’re out. I don’t want to keep you from having a white Christmas do I, and have you lose your nerve when you most need it.”

Though the laugh is light, Jude feels Paul’s black eyes bare in on him.

“Thanks.” It’s a meek voice, squeezed unwillingly of its own authority.

“Good.”

Paul’s smile in now expressionless.

“I’m glad my giving it to you tonight was worth it.”

He moves past Jude and towards the door.

“Lock the door when you are done.”

He leaves. Jude stands frozen to the spot. Paul sticks his head back in the door.

“It has been a pleasure working with you Jude. Take the rest of the night off. My treat. I’ll be waiting for you Christmas Eve, a crowned joker, right? Ave Maria, and all that.”

The wolfish grin abruptly disappears as Paul closes the door and leaves Jude alone in the small cubicle office. Too gripped with craving to give the last step of his betrayal its last moment of remorse, Jude’s shaking hands open the package from its brown paper wrapping and withdraws a solidly packed translucent pack of cocaine. He takes a pen and gashes the plastic, overflow from the contents bursting through. Jude, now sitting behind the desk, carefully with his finger brushes this effluent onto a square memo note, puts it on the desk in front of him and then opens the drawer to his left where he takes out a role of scotch tape, a piece of which he neatly places over the gash in the plastic, finally wrapping the package back into its brown paper. He unfolds his empty wallet from which he draws an old ATM card and a paper note. His fingers nimbly, albeit shakily, cut the crystals into two lines. The powder lifts easily through the rolled note and deposits itself where his gullet meets his airways. He licks his forefinger, the saliva on it picking up errant granules from the desk, and then sticks it back into his mouth to rub his gums. They begin to numb, while inside him, the intensity of grandeur begins. He stuffs the package blatantly under his arm, gets up and leaves the office, locking it behind him. In the kitchen he scrambles around until he finds an innocuous looking supermarket bag into which he drops his package. He passes back into the bar via the passage door, not bothering to stop at the bar, and seeing only Gary being seduced by a forgotten Janice in the dark table by the corner before exiting. As he exits, he turns his head to look in through the glass panes of the veranda door to his left and finds himself looking at Paul leaning against the dark maroon wall, one leg up against it and his head resting. Jude looks away and leaves.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 58