Heart-shaped box (14 page)

“Well,”
she said.
“You’ll always have the dogs.”

He twisted free of her grip, took her by the arms, lifted her to her feet.
“I don’t listen to nothing you say. You’ve told my fortune three times at least, and it comes out a different way every time.”

“I know,”
she said.
“But they’re all true anyway.”

“Why were you sticking yourself with a needle? Why you want to do that?”

“I done it since I was a girl. Sometimes if I stick myself a couple times, I can make the bad thoughts go away. It’s a trick I taught myself to clear my head. Like pinchin’ yourself in a dream. You know. Pain has a way of wakin’ you up. Of remindin’ you who you are.”

Jude knew.

Almost as an afterthought, she added,
“I guess it isn’t workin’ too good anymore.”
He led her out of the pen and back across the barn. She spoke again, said,
“I don’t know what I’m out here for. In my underwear.”

“I don’t either.”

“You ever dated anyone as crazy as me, Jude? Do you hate me? You’ve had a lot of girls. Tell me honest, am I the worst? Who was your worst?”

“Why do you got to ask so many damn questions?”
he wanted to know.

As they went back out into the rain, he opened his black duster and closed it over her thin, shivering body, clasped her against him.

“I’d rather ask questions,”
she said,
“than answer them.”

H
e woke a little after nine with a melody
in his head, something with the feel of an Appalachian hymn. He nudged Bon off the bed—she had climbed up with them in the night—and pushed aside the covers. Jude sat on the edge of the mattress, mentally running over the melody again, trying to identify it, to remember the lyrics. Only it couldn’t be identified, and the lyrics couldn’t be recalled, because it hadn’t existed until he thought it up. It wouldn’t have a name until he gave it one.

Jude rose, slipped across the room and outside, onto the concrete breezeway, still in his boxers. He unlocked the trunk of the Mustang and pulled out a battered guitar case with a ’68 Les Paul in it. He carried it back into the room.

Georgia hadn’t moved. She lay with her face in the pillow, one bone-white arm above the sheets and curled tight against her body. It had been years since he dated anyone with a tan. When you were a Goth, it was important to at least imply the possibility you might burst into flames in direct sunlight.

He let himself into the john. By now Angus and Bon were both trailing him, and he whispered at them to stay. They sank to their bellies
outside the door, staring forlornly in at him, accusing him with their eyes of failing to love them enough.

He wasn’t sure how well he could play with the puncture wound in his left hand. The left did the picking and the right found the chords. He lifted the Les Paul from its case and began to fiddle, bringing it into tune. When he strummed a pick across the strings, it set off a low flare of pain—not bad, almost just an uncomfortable warmth—in the center of his palm. It felt as if a steel wire were sunk deep into the flesh and beginning to heat up. He could play through that, he thought.

When the guitar was in tune, he searched for the proper chords and began to play, reproducing the tune that had been in his head when he woke. Without the amp the guitar was all flat, soft twang, and each chord made a raspy, chiming sound. The song itself might have been a traditional hill-country melody, sounded like something that belonged on a Folkways record or a Library of Congress retrospective of traditional music. Something with a name like “Fixin’ to Dig My Grave.” “Jesus Brung His Chariot.” “Drink to the Devil.”

“ ‘Drink to the Dead,’” he said.

He put the guitar down and went back into the bedroom. There was a small notepad on the night table, and a ballpoint pen. He brought them into the bathroom and wrote down “Drink to the Dead.” Now it had a title. He picked up the guitar and played it again.

The sound of it—the sound of the Ozarks, of gospel—gave him a little prickle of pleasure, which he felt along his forearms and across the back of his neck. A lot of his songs, when they started out, sounded like old music. They arrived on his doorstep, wandering orphans, the lost children of large and venerable musical families. They came to him in the form of Tin Pan Alley sing-alongs, honky-tonk blues, Dust Bowl plaints, lost Chuck Berry riffs. Jude dressed them in black and taught them to scream.

He wished he had his DAT recorder, wanted to get what he had down on tape. Instead he put the guitar aside once more, and scribbled
the chords on the notepad, beneath his title. Then he took up the Les Paul and played the lick again, and again, curious to see where it would take him. Twenty minutes later there were spots of blood showing through the bandage around his left hand, and he had worked out the chorus, which built naturally from the initial hook, a steady, rising, thunderous chorus, a whisper to a shout: an act of violence against the beauty and sweetness of the melody that had come before.

“Who’s that by?” Georgia asked, leaning in through the bathroom door, knuckling the sleep out of her eyes.

“Me.”

“I like that one.”

“It’s okay. Sound even better if this thing was plugged in.”

Her soft black hair floated around her head, had a swirled, airy look to it, and the shadows under her eyes drew his attention to how large they were. She smiled drowsily down at him. He smiled back.

“Jude,” she said, in a tone of almost unbearable, erotic tenderness.

“Yeah?”

“You think you could get your ass out of the bathroom, so I could pee?”

When she shut the door, he dropped his guitar case on the bed and stood in the dimness of the room, listening to the muffled sound of the world beyond the drawn shades: the drone of traffic on the highway, a car door slamming, a vacuum cleaner humming in the room directly above. It came to him then that the ghost was gone.

Ever since the suit had arrived at his house in its black heart-shaped box, he had sensed the dead man lingering close to him. Even when Jude couldn’t see him, he was conscious of his presence, felt it almost as a barometric weight, a kind of pressure and electricity in the air, such as precedes a thunderstorm. He had existed in that atmosphere of dreadful waiting for days, a continuous crackle of tension that made it difficult to taste his food or find his way into sleep. Now, though, it had lifted. He had somehow forgotten the ghost while he’d been writing the new
song—and the ghost had somehow forgotten him, or at least not been able to intrude into Jude’s thoughts, into Jude’s surroundings.

He walked Angus, took his time. Jude was in short sleeves and jeans, and the sun felt good on the back of his neck. The smell of the morning—the pall of exhaust over I-95, the swamp lilies in the brush, the hot tarmac—got his blood going, made him want to be on the road, to be driving somewhere, anywhere. He felt good: an unfamiliar sensation. Maybe he was randy, thought about the pleasant tousle of Georgia’s hair and her sleep-puffy eyes and lithe white legs. He was hungry, wanted eggs, a chicken-fried steak. Angus chased a groundhog into waist-high grass, then stood at the edge of the trees, yapping happily at it. Jude went back to give Bon a turn to stretch her legs and heard the shower.

He let himself in the bathroom. The room was steamy, the air hot and close. He undressed, slipped in around the curtain, and climbed into the tub.

Georgia jumped when his knuckles brushed her back, twisted her head to look at him over her shoulder. She had a black butterfly tattooed on her left shoulder and a black heart on her hip. She turned toward him, and he put his hand over the heart.

She pressed her damp, springy body against his, and they kissed. He leaned into her, over her, and to balance herself, Georgia put her right hand against the wall—then inhaled, a sharp, thin sound of pain, and pulled the hand back as if she had burned it.

Georgia tried to lower her hand to her side, but he caught her wrist and lifted it. The thumb was inflamed and red, and when he touched it lightly, he could feel the sick heat trapped inside it. The palm, around the ball of the thumb, was also reddened and swollen. On the inside of the thumb was the white sore, glittering with fresh pus.

“What are we going to do about this thing?” he asked.

“It’s fine. I’m putting antiseptic cream on it.”

“This isn’t fine. We ought to run you to the emergency room.”

“I’m not going to sit in some emergency room for three hours to have someone look at the place I poked myself with a pin.”

“You don’t know what stuck you. Don’t forget what you were handling when this happened to you.”

“I haven’t forgotten. I just don’t believe that any doctor is going to make it better. Not really.”

“You think it’s going to get better on its own?”

“I think it’ll be all right—if we make the dead man go away. If we get him off our backs, I think we’ll
both
be all right,” she said. “Whatever’s wrong with my hand, it’s part of this whole thing. But you know that, don’t you?”

He didn’t know anything, but he had notions, and he was not happy to hear they matched her own. He bowed his head, considering, wiped at the spray on his face. At last he said, “When Anna was at her worst, she’d poke herself in the thumb with a needle. To clear her head, she told me. I don’t know. Maybe it’s nothing. It just makes me uneasy, you getting stuck like she used to stick herself.”

“Well. It doesn’t worry me. Actually, that almost makes me feel better about it.” Her good hand moved across his chest as she spoke, her fingers exploring a landscape of muscle beginning to lose definition and skin going slack with age, and all of it overgrown with a mat of curling silver hairs.

“It does?”

“Sure. It’s something else her and I got in common. Besides you. I never met her, and I don’t hardly know anything about her, but I feel connected to her somehow. I’m not afraid of that, you know.”

“I’m glad it’s not bothering you. I wish I could say the same. Speaking for myself, I don’t much like thinking about it.”

“So don’t,” she said, leaning into him and pushing her tongue into his mouth to shut him up.

J
ude took Bon for her overdue walk
while Georgia busied herself in the bathroom, dressing and rebandaging her hand and putting in her studs. He knew she might be occupied for twenty minutes, so he stopped by the car and pulled her laptop out of the trunk. Georgia didn’t even know they had it with them. He’d packed it automatically, without thinking, because Georgia took it with her wherever she went and used it to stay in touch with a gaggle of geographically far-flung friends by way of e-mail and instant message. And she dribbled away countless hours browsing message boards, blogs, concert info, and vampire porn (which would’ve been hilarious if it weren’t so depressing). But once they were on the road, Jude had forgotten they had the laptop with them, and Georgia had never asked about it, so it had spent the night in the trunk.

Jude didn’t bring his own computer—he didn’t have one. Danny had handled his e-mail and all the rest of his online obligations. Jude was aware that he belonged to an increasingly small segment of the society, those who could not quite fathom the allure of the digital age. Jude did not want to be wired. He had spent four years wired on coke, a period of time in which everything seemed hyperaccelerated, as in one of those time-lapse movies, where a whole day and night pass in just a few
seconds, traffic reduced to lurid streaks of light, people transformed into blurred mannequins rushing jerkily here and there. Those four years now felt more like four bad, crazy, sleepless days to him—days that had begun with a New Year’s Eve hangover and ended at crowded, smoky Christmas parties where he found himself surrounded by strangers trying to touch him and shrieking with inhuman laughter. He did not ever want to be wired again.

He had tried to explain the way he felt to Danny once, about compulsive behavior and time rushing too fast and the Internet and drugs. Danny had only lifted one of his slender, mobile eyebrows and stared at him in smirking confusion. Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same.

Now, though, he was in the mood to score. He lugged her laptop back to the room, plugged in, and went online. He didn’t make any attempt to access his e-mail account. In truth, he wasn’t sure
how
to access his e-mail. Danny had a program all set up to reel in Jude’s messages from the Net, but Jude couldn’t have said how to get at that information from someone else’s computer. He knew how to Google a name, however, and he Googled Anna’s.

Her obituary was short, half the length her father’s had been. Jude was able to read it in a glance, which was all it merited. It was her photograph that caught his attention and gave him a brief hollow sensation in the pit of his stomach. He guessed it had been taken close to the end of her life. She was glancing blankly into the camera, some strands of pale hair blown across a face that was gaunt, her cheeks sunken hollows beneath her cheekbones.

When he had known her, she’d sported rings in her eyebrows and four apiece in each of her ears, but in the photo they were gone, which
made her too-pale face that much more vulnerable. When he looked closely, he could see the marks left by her piercings. She’d given them up, the silver hoops and crosses and ankhs and glittering gems, the studs and fishhooks and rings she had stuck into her skin to make herself look dirty and tough and dangerous and crazy and beautiful. Some of it was true, too. She really had been crazy and beautiful; dangerous, too. Dangerous to herself.

The obituary said nothing about a suicide note. It said nothing about suicide. She had died not three months before her stepfather.

He ran another search. He tapped in “Craddock McDermott, dowsing,” and half a dozen links popped up. He clicked on the topmost result, which brought him to a nine-year-old article in the
Tampa Tribune
, from their living/arts section. Jude looked at the pictures first—there were two—and stiffened in his chair. It was a while before he could unlock his gaze from those photographs and shift his attention to the text beside them.

The story was titled “Dowsing for the Dead.” The slug line read:
20 years after Vietnam, Capt. Craddock McDermott is ready to lay some ghosts to rest…and raise some others.

The article opened with the story of Roy Hayes, a retired biology professor, who at the age of sixty-nine had learned to fly light planes and who had, one fall morning in 1991, taken an ultralight up over the Everglades to count egrets for an environmental group. At 7:13
A.M.
a private strip south of Naples had received a transmission from him.

That was the last anyone had heard from him. A search party, involving more than thirty boats and a hundred men, had not been able to find a trace of either Hayes or his plane. Now, three years after his disappearance
and presumed death, his family had taken the extraordinary step of hiring Craddock McDermott, Captain U.S. Army (ret.), to lead a new search for his remains.

The article shifted to backstory, exploring Craddock’s earliest encounters with the occult. A few lines were spent detailing the more gothic details of his early family life. It touched briefly on his father, the Pentecostal minister with a penchant for snake handling, who had disappeared when Craddock was just a boy. It lingered for a paragraph on his mother, who had twice moved them across the country, after seeing a phantom she called “the walking-backwards man,” a vision that foretold of ill luck. After one such visit from the walking-backwards man, little Craddock and his mother departed an Atlanta apartment complex,
not three weeks before the building burned to the ground in an electrical fire.

Then it was 1967, and McDermott was an officer stationed in Vietnam, where he was placed in charge of interrogating the captured elite of the People’s Liberation Army. He found himself assigned to the case of one Nguyen Trung, a chiromancer, who had reportedly learned his fortune-telling arts from Ho Chi Minh’s own brother and who had offered his services to a variety of higher-ups among the Vietcong. To put his prisoner at ease, McDermott asked Trung to help him understand his spiritual beliefs. What followed was a series of extraordinary conversations on the subjects of prophecy, the human soul, and the dead, discussions McDermott said had opened his eyes to the supernatural all around him.

After their sessions had concluded, McDermott lost track of Trung, who disappeared around the time of Tet. As for Professor Hayes, McDermott believed that his final fate would be known soon enough.

At this last—
We’re going to ride together
—Jude felt a chill crawling on the flesh of his arms. But that was not as bad as the peculiar feeling of dread that came over him when he looked at the photographs.

The first was a picture of Craddock leaning against the grill of his smoke-blue pickup. His barefoot stepdaughters—Anna was maybe twelve, Jessica about fifteen—sat on the hood, one to either side of him. It was the first time Jude had ever seen Anna’s older sister, but not the first time he’d ever looked upon Anna as a child—she was just the same as she’d been in his dream, only without the scarf over her eyes.

In the photograph Jessica had her arms around the neck of her smiling, angular stepfather. She was almost as rangy as he was, tall and fit, her skin honey-colored and healthy with tan. But there was something off about her grin—toothy and wide, maybe too wide, too enthusiastic, the
sell-sell-sell
grin of a frantic real estate salesperson. And there was something off about her eyes, too, which were as bright and black as wet ink, and disconcertingly avid.

Anna sat a little apart from the other two. She was bony, all elbows and knees, and her hair came almost to her waist—a long, golden spill of light. She was also the only one not putting on a smile for the camera. She wasn’t putting on any kind of expression at all. Her face was dazed and expressionless, her eyes unfocused, the eyes of a sleepwalker. Jude recognized it as the expression she wore when she was off in the monochromatic, upside-down world of her depression. He was struck with the troubling idea that she had wandered that world for most of her childhood.

Worst of all, though, was a second, smaller photograph, this one of Captain Craddock McDermott, in fatigues and a sweat-stained fishing hat, M16 slung over one shoulder. He posed with other GIs on hard-packed yellow mud. At his back were palms and standing water; it might’ve been a snapshot of the Everglades, if not for all the soldiers, and their Vietnamese prisoner.

The prisoner stood a little behind Craddock, a solidly built man in a
black tunic, with shaved head, broad, handsome features, and the calm eyes of a monk. Jude knew him at first glance as the Vietnamese prisoner he had encountered in his dream. The fingers missing from Trung’s right hand were a dead giveaway. In the grainy, poorly colored photo, the stumps of those fingers had been freshly stitched with black thread.

The same caption that identified this man as Nguyen Trung described the setting as a field hospital in Dong Tam, where Trung had received care for combat-related injuries. That was almost right. Trung had lopped off his own fingers only because he thought they were about to attack—so it had been combat of a sort. As for what had happened to him, Jude thought he knew. Jude thought it was likely that after Trung had no more to tell Craddock McDermott—about ghosts and the work ghosts did—he’d gone for a ride on the nightroad.

The article did not say if McDermott had ever found Roy Hayes, retired professor and ultralight pilot, but Jude believed he had, although there was no rational reason to think such a thing. To satisfy himself he did another search. Roy Hayes’s remains had been laid to rest five weeks later, and in fact Craddock had not found him—not personally. The water was too deep. A state police scuba team had gone in and pulled him out, in the place where Craddock told them to dive.

Georgia threw open the bathroom door, and Jude quit her browser.

“Whatchu doin’?” she asked.

“Trying to figure out how to check my mail,” he lied. “You want a turn?”

She looked at her computer for a moment, then shook her head and wrinkled her nose. “No. I don’t have the least interest in going online. Isn’t that funny? Usually you can’t peel me off.”

“Well, see? Running for your life ain’t all bad. Just look at how it’s building character.”

He pulled out the dresser drawer again and slopped another can of Alpo into it.

“Last night the smell of that shit was making me want to gag,” Georgia said. “Strangely, this morning it’s getting me hungry.”

“Come on. There’s a Denny’s up the street. Let’s go for a walk.”

He opened the door, then held out his hand to her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, in her stone-washed black jeans, heavy black boots, and sleeveless black shirt, which hung loose on her slight frame. In the golden beam of sunlight that fell through the door, her skin was so pale and fine it was almost translucent, looked as if it would bruise at the slightest touch.

Jude saw her glance at the dogs. Angus and Bon bent over the drawer, heads together as they went snorkeling in their food. He saw Georgia frown, and he knew what she was thinking, that they’d been safe as long as they kept the dogs close. But then she squinted back at Jude, standing in the light, took his hand, and let him pull her to her feet. The day was bright. Beyond the door the morning waited for them.

He was, for himself, not scared. He still felt under the protection of the new song, felt that in writing it he had drawn a magic circle around the both of them that the dead man could not penetrate. He had driven the ghost away—for a time anyhow.