Heart-shaped box (27 page)

Craddock moved to the other window, blocking Jude’s view of the highway, and he ran down that shade as well, plunging Anna’s room into darkness. Nightfall at last.

Jude looked back at Marybeth, her jaw set, one hand on the wheel. The blinker signal flashed repetitively on the dash, and he opened his mouth, to say something, he didn’t know what, something like…

W
hat are you doin’?”
His voice an unfamiliar croak. Marybeth was aiming the Mustang at an exit ramp, had almost reached it. “This ain’t it.”

“I was shakin’ you for about five minutes, and you wouldn’t wake up. I thought you were in a coma or somethin’. There’s a hospital here.”

“Keep going. I’m awake now.”

She swerved back onto the highway at the last moment, and a horn blared behind her.

“How you doin’, Angus?” Jude asked, and peeked back at him.

Jude reached between the seats and touched a paw, and for an instant Angus’s gaze sharpened a little. His jaws moved. His tongue found the back of Jude’s left hand and lapped at his fingers.

“Good boy,” Jude whispered. “Good boy.”

At last he turned away, settled back into his seat. The sock puppet on his right hand wore a red face. He was in dire need of a shot of something to dull the pain, thought he might find it on the radio: Skynyrd or, failing that, the Black Crows. He touched the power button and flipped rapidly from a burst of static to the Doppler pulse of a coded military transmission to Hank Williams III, or maybe just Hank Williams, Jude couldn’t tell because the signal was so faint, and then—

Then the tuner landed on a perfectly clear broadcast: Craddock.

“I never would’ve thought you had so much in the tank, boy.” His voice was genial and close, coming out of the speakers set in the doors. “You don’t have any quit in you. That usually counts for something with me. This ain’t usually, of course. You understand that.” He laughed. “Anyplace will do. You know, most people like to think they don’t know the meaning of the word ‘quit,’ but it isn’t true. Most people, you put them under, put them under deep, maybe help ’em along with some good dope, sink them into a full trance state, and then tell them they’re burnin’ alive? They’ll scream for water till they got no voice left. They’ll do anything to make it stop. Anything you like. That’s just human nature. But some people—children and crazy folks, mostly—you can’t reason with, even when they’re in a trance. Anna was both, God love her. I tried to make her forget about all the things that made her feel so bad. She was a good girl. I hated the way she tore herself up over things—even over you. But I couldn’t ever really make her go all the way blank, even though it would’ve saved her pain. Some people would just rather suffer. No wonder she liked you. You’re the same way. I wanted to deal with you quick. But you had to go and drag this out. And now you got to wonder why. You got to ask yourself. You know, when that dog in the backseat stops breathing, so do you. And it ain’t going to be easy, like it could’ve been. You spent three days livin’ like a dog, and now you have to die like one, and so does that two-dollar bitch next to you—”

Marybeth thumbed the radio off. It came right back on again.

“—you think you could turn my own little girl against me and not have to answer for it—”

Jude lifted his foot and slammed the heel of his Doc Marten into the dash. It hit with a crunch of splintering plastic. Craddock’s voice was instantly lost in a sudden, deafening blast of bass. Jude kicked the radio again, shattering the face. It went silent.

“Remember when I said the dead man didn’t come for talk?” Jude told her. “I take it back. Lately I been thinking that’s all he came for.”

Marybeth didn’t reply. Thirty minutes later Jude spoke again, to tell her to get off at the next exit.

They drove on a two-lane state highway, with southern, semitropical forest growing right up to the sides of the road, leaning over it. They passed a drive-in that had been closed since Jude was a child. The giant movie screen towered over the road, holes torn in it, offering a view of the sky. This evening’s feature was a drifting pall of dirty smoke. They rolled by the New South Motel, long since shut up and being reclaimed by the jungle, windows boarded over. They glided past a filling station, the first place they’d seen that was open. Two deeply sunburned fat men sat out front and watched them go by. They did not smile or wave or acknowledge the passing car in any way, except that one leaned forward and spat in the dirt.

Jude directed her to take a left off the highway, and they followed a road up into the low hills. The afternoon light was strange, a dim, poisonous red, a stormy twilight color. It was the same color Jude saw when he shut his eyes, the color of his headache. It was not close to nightfall but looked it. The bellies of the clouds to the west were dark and threatening. The wind lashed the tops of the palms and shook the Spanish moss that straggled down from low-hanging oak branches.

“We’re here,” he said.

As Marybeth turned into the driveway, the long run-up to the house, the wind gusted with more force than usual and threw a burst of plump, hard raindrops across the windshield. They hit in a sudden, furious rattle, and Jude waited for more, but there was no more.

The house stood at the top of a low rise. Jude had not been here in more than three decades and had not realized until this moment how closely his home in New York resembled the home of his childhood. It was as if he had leaped ten years into the future and returned to New York to find his own farm neglected and disused, fallen to ruin. The great rambling place before him was the gray color of mouse, with a roof of black shingles, many of them crooked or missing, and as they drew
closer, Jude actually saw the wind snag one, strip it loose, and propel the black square away into the sky.

The abandoned chicken coop was visible to one side of the house, and its screen door swung open, then banged shut with a crack like a gunshot. The glass was missing from a window on the first floor, and the wind rattled a sheet of semitransparent plastic stapled into the frame. This had always been their destination, Jude saw now. They had been headed toward this place from the moment they took to the road.

The dirt lane that led to the house ended in a loop. Marybeth followed it around, turning the Mustang to point back the way they’d come, before putting it into park. They were both staring down the drive when the floodlights of Craddock’s truck appeared at the bottom of the hill.

“Oh, God,” Marybeth said, and then she was out of the Mustang, going around the front to Jude’s side.

The pale truck at the foot of the drive seemed to pause for a moment, then began rolling up the hill toward them.

Marybeth jerked his door open. Jude almost fell out. She pulled on his arm.

“Get on your feet. Get in the house.”

“Angus…” he said, glancing into the back at his dog.

Angus’s head rested on his front paws. He stared wearily back at Jude, his eyes red-rimmed and wet.

“He’s dead.”

“No,” Jude said, sure she was mistaken. “How you doin’, boy?”

Angus regarded him mournfully, didn’t move. The wind got into the car, and an empty paper cup scooted around on the floor, rattling softly. The breeze stirred Angus’s fur, brushing it in the wrong direction. Angus paid it no mind.

It didn’t seem possible that Angus could just have died like that, with no fanfare. He’d been alive only a few minutes ago, Jude was convinced of it. Jude stood in the dirt next to the Mustang, sure if he just waited another moment, Angus would move, stretch his front paws, and lift his
head. Then Marybeth was hauling on his arm again, and he didn’t have the strength to resist her, had to stagger along after or risk being toppled.

He fell to his knees a few feet from the front steps. He didn’t know why. He had an arm over Marybeth’s shoulders, and she had one looped around his waist, and she moaned through her clenched lips, dragging him back onto his heels. Behind him he heard the dead man’s pickup rolling to a stop in the turnaround. Gravel crunched under the tires.

Hey, boy,
Craddock called from the open driver’s-side window, and at the door Jude and Marybeth stopped to look back.

The truck idled beside the Mustang. Craddock sat behind the wheel, in his stiff, formal black suit with the silver buttons. His left arm hung out the window. His face was hard to make out through the blue curve of glass.

This your place, son?
Craddock said. He laughed.
How could you ever stand to leave?
He laughed again.

The razor shaped like a crescent moon fell from the hand hanging out the window, and swung from its gleaming chain.

You’re gonna cut her throat. And she’s goin’ to be glad when you do. Just to have it over with. You should’ve stayed away from my little girls, Jude.

Jude turned the doorknob, and Marybeth shouldered it inward, and they crashed through into the dark of the front hall. Marybeth kicked the door shut behind them. Jude threw a last glance out the window beside the door—and the truck was gone. The Mustang stood alone in the drive. Marybeth turned him and shoved him into motion again.

They started down the corridor, side by side, each holding the other up. Her hip caught a side table and overturned it, and it smashed to the floor. A phone that had been sitting on it toppled to the boards, and the receiver flew off the cradle.

At the end of the hall was a doorway, leading into the kitchen, where the lights were on. It was the only source of light they’d seen so far in the entire house. From the outside the windows had been dark, and once
they were in, it was shadows in the front hall and a cavernous gloom waiting at the top of the stairs.

An old woman, in a pastel flower-print blouse, appeared in the kitchen doorway. Her hair was a white frizz, and her spectacles magnified her blue, amazed eyes to appear almost comically large. Jude knew Arlene Wade at a glance, although he could not have said how long it had been since he’d last seen her. Whenever it had been, she’d always been just as she was now—scrawny, perpetually startled-looking, old.

“What is this business?” she called out. Her right hand reached up to curl around the cross that hung at her throat. She stepped back as they reached the doorway to let them by. “My God, Justin. What in the name of Mary and Joseph happened to you?”

The kitchen was yellow. Yellow linoleum, yellow tile countertops, yellow-and-white-check curtains, daisy-patterned plates drying in the basket next to the sink, and as Jude took it all in, he heard that song in his head, the one that had been such a smash for Coldplay a few years before, the one about how everything was all yellow.

He was surprised, given the way the house looked from the outside, to find the kitchen so full of lively color, so well kept up. It had never been this cozy when he’d been a child. The kitchen was where his mother had spent most of her time, watching daytime TV in a stupor while she peeled potatoes or washed beans. Her mood of numb, emotional exhaustion had drained the color from the room and made it a place where it seemed important to speak in quiet voices, if at all, a private and unhappy space that you could no more run through than you could make a ruckus in a funeral parlor.

But his mother was thirty years dead, and the kitchen was Arlene Wade’s now. She had lived in the house for more than a year and very likely passed most of her waking hours in this room, which she’d warmed with the everyday business of being herself, an old woman with friends to talk to on the phone, pies to bake for relatives, a dying man to care for. In fact, it was a little
too
cozy. Jude felt dizzy at the warmth of it, at the
suddenly close air. Marybeth turned him toward the kitchen table. He felt a bony claw sink into his right arm, Arlene grabbing his biceps, and was surprised at the rigid strength in her fingers.

“You got a sock on your hand,” she said.

“He got one of his fingers taken off,” Marybeth said.

“What are you doing here, then?” Arlene asked. “Shoulda drove him to the hospital.”

Jude fell into a chair. Curiously, even sitting still, he felt as if he were still moving, the walls of the room sliding slowly past him, the chair gliding forward like a car in a theme-park amusement:
Mr. Jude’s Wild Ride.
Marybeth sank into a chair next to him, her knees bumping his. She was shivering. Her face was oiled in sweat, and her hair had gone crazy, was snarled and twisted. Strands stuck to her temples, to the sweat on the sides of her face, to the back of her neck.

“Where are your dogs?” Marybeth asked.

Arlene began to untie the sock wound around Jude’s wrist, peering down her nose at it through the magnifying lenses of her glasses. If she found this question bizarre or startling, she showed no sign of it. She was intent on the work of her hands.

“My dog is over there,” she said, nodding at one corner of the room. “And as you can see, he’s quite protective of me. He’s a fierce old boy. Don’t want to cross him.”

Jude and Marybeth looked to the corner. A fat old rottweiler sat on a dog pillow in a wicker basket. He was too big for it, and his pink, hairless ass hung over the side. He weakly lifted his head, regarded them through rheumy, bloodshot eyes, then lowered his head again and sighed softly.

“Is that what happened to this hand?” Arlene asked. “Were you bit by a dog, Justin?”

“What happened to my father’s shepherds?” Jude asked.

“He hasn’t been up to takin’ care of a dog for a while now. I sent Clinton and Rather off to live with the Jeffery family.” Then she had the sock off his hand and drew a sharp breath when she saw the bandage beneath.
It was soaked—saturated—with blood. “Are you in some kinda stupid race with your daddy to see who can die first?” She set his hand on the table without unwrapping the bandages to see more. Then she glanced at Jude’s bandaged left hand. “You missin’ any parts off that one?”

“No. That one I just gouged real good.”

“I’ll get you the ambulance,” Arlene said. She had lived in the South her whole life and she pronounced the word
amble-lance.

She picked up the phone on the kitchen wall. It made a noisy, repetitive blatting at her, and she jerked her ear away from the receiver, then hung up.

“You crashed my phone off the hook in the hall,” she said, and disappeared into the front of the house to right it.