Heart-shaped box (12 page)

J
ude wasn’t ready until the sky in the east
was beginning to lighten with the first show of false dawn. Then he left Bon in the car and brought Angus inside with him. He trotted up the stairs and into the studio. Georgia was where he’d left her, asleep on the couch, under a white cotton sheet he’d pulled off the bed in the guest room.

“Wake up, darlin’,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

Georgia rolled toward him at his touch. A long strand of black hair was pasted to her sweaty cheek, and her color was bad—cheeks flushed an almost ugly red, while the rest of her skin was bone white. He put the back of his hand against her forehead. Her brow was feverish and damp.

She licked her lips. “Whafuck time is it?”

“Five.”

She glanced around, sat up on her elbows. “What am I doing here?”

“Don’t you know?”

She looked up at him from the bottoms of her eyes. Her chin began to tremble, and then she had to look away. She covered her eyes with one hand.

“Oh, God,” she said.

Angus leaned past Jude and stuck his snout against her throat, under
her jaw, nudging at it, as if telling her to keep her chin up. His great staring eyes were moist with concern.

She jumped when his wet nose kissed her skin, sat the rest of the way up. She gave Angus a startled, disoriented look and laid a hand on his head, between his ears.

“What’s he doing inside?” She glanced at Jude, saw he was dressed, black Doc Martens, ankle-length duster. At almost the same time, she seemed to register the throaty rumble of the Mustang idling in the driveway. It was already packed. “Where are you going?”

“Us,” he said. “South.”

T
he daylight began to fail
when they were just north of Fredericksburg, and that was when Jude saw the dead man’s pickup behind them, following at a distance of perhaps a quarter mile.

Craddock McDermott was at the wheel, although it was hard to make him out clearly in the weak light, beneath the yellow shine of the sky, where the clouds glowed like banked embers. Jude could see he was wearing his fedora again, though, and drove hunched over the wheel, shoulders raised to the level of his ears. He had also put on a pair of round spectacles. The lenses flashed with a weird orange light, beneath the sodium-vapor lamps over I-95, circles of gleaming flame—a visual match for the floods on the brush guard.

Jude got off at the next exit. Georgia asked him why, and he said he was tired. She hadn’t seen the ghost.

“I could drive,” she said.

She had slept most of the afternoon and now sat in the passenger seat with her feet hitched under her and her head resting on her shoulder.

When he didn’t reply, she took an appraising look at his face and said, “Is everything all right?”

“I just want to get off the road before dark.”

Bon stuck her head into the space between the front seats to listen to them talk. She liked to be included in their conversations. Georgia stroked her head, while Bon stared up at Jude with a look of nervous misgiving visible in her chocolate eyes.

They found a Days Inn less than half a mile from the turnpike. Jude sent Georgia to get the room, while he sat in the Mustang with the dogs. He didn’t want to take a chance on being recognized, wasn’t in the mood. He hadn’t been in the mood for about fifteen years.

As soon as Georgia was out of the car, Bon scrambled into her empty seat, curled up in the warm ass print Georgia had left in the leather. As Bon settled her chin on her front paws, she gave Jude a guilty look, waiting for him to yell, to tell her to get in the back with Angus. He didn’t yell. The dogs could do what they wanted.

Not long after they first got on the road, Jude had told Georgia about how the dogs had gone after Craddock. “I’m not sure even the dead man knew that Angus and Bonnie could go at him like that. But I do think Craddock sensed they were some kind of threat, and I think he would’ve been glad to scare us out of the house and away from them, before we figured out how to use the dogs against him.”

At this, Georgia had twisted around in her seat, to reach into the back and dig behind Angus’s ears, leaning far enough into the rear to rub her nose against Bon’s snout. “Who are my little hero dogs? Who is it? Yeah, you are, that’s right,” and so forth, until Jude had started to feel half mad with hearing it.

Georgia came out of the office, a key hooked over one finger, which she wiggled at him before turning and walking around the corner of the building. He followed in the car and parked at an empty spot, in front of a beige door among other beige doors, at the rear of the motel.

She went inside with Angus while Jude walked with Bon along a tangle of scrub woods at the edge of the parking lot. Then he came back and left Bon with Georgia and took Angus for the walk. It was important for neither of them to stray far from the dogs.

These woods, behind the Days Inn, were different from the forest around his farmhouse in Piecliff, New York. They were unmistakably southern woods, smelled of sweet rot and wet moss and red clay, of sulfur and sewage, orchids and motor oil. The atmosphere itself was different, the air denser, warmer, sticky with dampness. Like an armpit. Like Moore’s Corner, where Jude had grown up. Angus snapped at the fireflies, blowing here and there in the ferns, beads of ethereal green light.

Jude returned to the room. In the ten minutes it took to pass through Delaware, he had stopped at a Sunoco for gas and thought to buy a half dozen cans of Alpo in the convenience store. It had not occurred to him, however, to buy paper plates. While Georgia used the bathroom, Jude pulled one of the drawers out of the dresser, opened two cans, and slopped them in. He set the drawer on the floor for the dogs. They fell upon it, and the sound of wet slobbering and swallowing, harsh grunts and gasps for air, filled the room.

Georgia came out of the bathroom, stood in the door in faded white panties and a strappy halter that left her midriff bare, all evidence of her Goth self scrubbed away, except for her shiny, black-lacquered toenails. Her right hand was wrapped in a fresh knot of bandage. She looked at the dogs, nose wrinkled in an expression of amused disgust.

“Boy, are we livin’ foul. If housekeepin’ finds out we been feedin’ our dogs from the dresser drawers, we will
not
be invited back to the Fredericksburg Days Inn.” She spoke in cornpone, putting on for his bemusement. She had been dropping
g
’s and drawing out her vowels off and on throughout the afternoon—doing it sometimes for laughs and sometimes, Jude believed, without knowing she was doing it. As if in leaving New York she was also traveling away from the person she’d been there, unconsciously slipping back into the voice and attitudes of who she’d been before: a scrawny Georgia kid who thought it was a laugh to go skinny-dipping with the boys.

“I seen people treat a hotel room worst,” he said. “Worst” instead of “worse.” His own accent, which had become very slight over the years, was thickening up as well. If he wasn’t careful, he would be talking like an extra
from
Hee Haw
by the time they got to South Carolina. It was hard to venture back near the place you’d been bred without settling into the characteristics of the person you’d been there. “My bassist, Dizzy, took a shit in a dresser drawer once, when I wouldn’t get out of the bathroom fast enough.”

Georgia laughed, although he saw her watching him with something close to concern—wondering, maybe, what he was thinking. Dizzy was dead. AIDS. Jerome, who’d played rhythm guitar and keyboards and pretty much everything else, was dead, too, had run his car off the road, 140 miles an hour, hit a tree, and crushed his Porsche like a beer can. Only a handful of people knew that it wasn’t a drunk-driving accident, but that he had done it cold sober, on purpose.

Not long after Jerome cashed out, Kenny said it was time to call it a day, that he wanted to spend some time with his kids. Kenny was tired of nipple rings and black leather pants and pyrotechnics and hotel rooms, had been faking it for a while anyway. That was it for the band. Jude had been a solo act ever since.

Maybe he wasn’t even that anymore. There was his box of demos in the studio at home, almost thirty new songs. But it was a private collection. He had not bothered to play them for anyone. It was just more of the same. What had Kurt Cobain said? Verse chorus verse. Over and over. Jude didn’t care anymore. AIDS got Dizzy, the road got Jerome. Jude didn’t care if there was any more music.

It didn’t make sense to him, the way things had worked out. He had always been the star. The band had been called Jude’s Hammer. He was the one who was supposed to die tragically young. Jerome and Dizzy were meant to live on, so they could tell PG-13 stories about him years later, on a VH1 retrospective—the both of them balding, fat, manicured, at peace with their wealth and their rude, noisy pasts. But then Jude had never been good at sticking to the script.

Jude and Georgia ate sandwiches they’d picked up in the same Delaware gas station where Jude had bought the Alpo. They tasted like the Saran Wrap they’d come wrapped in.

My Chemical Romance was on Conan. They had rings in their lips and eyebrows, their hair done up in spikes, but beneath the white pancake makeup and black lipstick they looked like a collection of chubby kids who had probably been in their high-school marching band a few years earlier. They leaped around, falling into each other, as if the stage beneath them were an electrified plate. They played frantically, pissing themselves with fear. Jude liked them. He wondered which of them would die first.

After, Georgia switched off the lamp by the bed and they lay together in the dark, the dogs curled up on the floor.

“I guess it didn’t get rid of him,” she said. “Burning his suit.” No Daisy Duke accent now.

“It was a good idea, though.”

“No it wasn’t.” Then: “He made me do it, didn’t he?”

Jude didn’t reply.

“What if we can’t figure out how to make him go away?” she asked.

“Get used to smellin’ dog food.”

She laughed, her breath tickling his throat.

She said, “What are we going to do when we get where we’re going?”

“We’re going to talk to the woman who sent me the suit. We’re going to find out if she knows how to get rid of him.”

Cars droned on I-95. Crickets thrummed.

“Are you going to hurt her?”

“I don’t know. I might. How’s your hand?”

“Better,” she said. “How’s yours?”

“Better,” he said.

He was lying, and he was pretty sure she was, too. She had gone into the bathroom to re-dress the hand when they first got into the room. He had gone in after, to re-dress his, and found her old wraps in the trash. He pulled the loops of gauze out of the wastebasket to inspect them. They stank of infection and antiseptic cream, and they were stained with dried blood and something else, a yellow crust that had to be pus.

As for his own hand, the gouge he’d put in it probably needed
stitches. Before leaving the house that morning, he had tugged a first-aid kit out of an upper cabinet in the kitchen and used some Steri-Strips to pull the gash closed, then wound it in white bandages. But the gouge continued to seep, and by the time he took the wraps off, blood was beginning to soak through them. The hole in his left hand bulged open between the Steri-Strips, a red, liquid eye.

“The girl who killed herself,” Georgia began. “The girl this is all about…”

“Anna McDermott.” Her real name now.

“Anna,” Georgia repeated. “Do you know why she killed herself? Was it because you told her to scram?”

“Her sister obviously thinks so. Her stepdaddy, too, I guess, since he’s haunting us.”

“The ghost…can make people do things. Like getting me to burn the suit. Like making Danny hang himself.”

He’d told her about Danny in the car. Georgia had turned her face to the window, and he’d heard her crying softly for a while, making little damp, choked sounds, which evened out after a time into the slow, regular inhalations of sleep. This was the first either of them had mentioned Danny since.

Jude continued, “The dead man, Anna’s stepdaddy, learned hypnotism torturing Charlie in the army and stayed with it after he got out. Liked to call himself a mentalist. In his life he used that chain of his, with the silver razor on the end of it, to put people into trances, but now he’s dead, he don’t need it anymore. Something about when he says things, you just have to do it. All of a sudden, you’re just sitting back, watching him run you here and there. You don’t even feel anything. Your body is a suit of clothes, and he’s the one wearing it, not you.”
A dead man’s suit,
Jude thought, with a shuddery feeling of revulsion. Then he said, “I don’t know much about him. Anna didn’t like to talk on him. But I know she worked for a while as a palm reader, and she said her stepdaddy was the one who taught her how. He had an interest in the less-understood aspects of the human mind. Like, for example, on the weekends he’d hire himself out as a dowser.”

“Those are people who find water by waving sticks in the air? My grandma hired an old hillbilly with a mouthful of gold teeth to find her a fresh spring after her well went dry. He had a hickory stick.”

“Anna’s stepdaddy, Craddock, didn’t bother with a stick. He just used that pretty razor on a chain he’s got. Pendulums work about as well, I guess. Anyway, the psycho bitch who sent me the suit, Jessica McDermott Price, wanted me to know that her pop had said he’d get even with me after he was dead. So I think the old man had some ideas about how to come back. In other words, he’s not an accidental ghost, if that makes sense. He got the way he is now on purpose.”

A dog yapped somewhere in the distance. Bon lifted her head, gazed thoughtfully in the direction of the door, then lowered her chin back to her forepaws.

“Was she pretty?” Georgia asked.

“Anna? Yeah. Sure. You want to know if she was good in the sack?”

“I’m just asking. You don’t got to be a son of a bitch about it.”

“Well, then. Don’t ask questions you don’t really want to know the answers to. Notice I never inquire about your past lays.”

“Past lays. Goddammit. Is that the way you think of me? The present lay, soon to be the past lay?”

“Christ. Here we go.”

“And I’m not being a snoop. I’m trying to figure this out.”

“How is knowing whether she was pretty going to help you figure anything out about our ghost problem?”

She held the sheet to her chin and stared at him in the dark.

“So she was Florida and I’m Georgia. How many other states has your dick visited?”

“I couldn’t tell you. I don’t have a map somewhere with pins in it. You really want me to make an estimate? While we’re on the subject, why stop with states? I’ve had thirteen world tours, and I always took my cock along with me.”

“You fuckin’ asshole.”

He grinned in his beard. “I know that’s probably shocking, to a virgin such as yourself. Here’s some news for you: I got a past. Fifty-four years of it.”

“Did you love her?”

“You can’t leave it alone, can you?”

“This is important, goddammit.”

“How’s it important?”

She wouldn’t say.

He sat up against the headboard. “For about three weeks.”

“Did she love you?”

He nodded.

“She wrote you letters? After you sent her home?”

“Yeah.”

“Angry letters?”

He didn’t reply at first, considering the question.

“Did you even fuckin’ read ’em, you insensitive shitbird?” There it was again, an unmistakably rural and southern cadence in her voice. Her temper was up, and she’d forgotten herself for a moment. Or maybe it was not a case of forgetting herself, Jude thought, so much as the opposite.