Heart-shaped box (29 page)

Here we are, you and me. All out of road,
the dead man said. His lips were moving but making no sound, his voice existing only in Jude’s head. The silver buttons on his black suit coat glinted in the darkness.

“Yeah,” Jude said. “The fun had to stop sometime.”

Still full of fight. Isn’t that somethin’?
Craddock placed one gaunt hand on Martin’s ankle and ran it over the sheet and up his leg. Martin’s eyes were closed, but his mouth hung open and breath still came and went in thin, pneumatic whistles.
A thousand miles later, and you’re still singin’ the same song.

Craddock’s hand glided over Martin’s chest. It was something he seemed to be doing almost absentmindedly, did not once look at the old man fighting for his last breaths in the bed beside him.

I never did like your music. Anna used to play it so loud it’d make a normal person’s ears bleed. You know there’s a road between here and hell? I’ve driven it myself. Many times now. And I’ll tell you what, out on that road there’s only one station, and all they play is your music. I guess that’s the devil’s way of gettin’ straight to punishin’ the sinners
. He laughed.

“Leave the girl.”

Oh, no. She’s going to sit right between us while we ride the nightroad. She’s come so far with you already. We can’t leave her behind now.

“I’m telling you Marybeth doesn’t have any part in this.”

But you don’t tell me, son. I tell you. You’re going to choke her to death, and I’m going to watch. Say it. Tell me how it’s going to be.

Jude thought,
I won’t,
but while he was thinking it, he said, “I’m going to choke her. You’re going to watch.”

Now you’re singin’ my kind of music.

Jude thought of the song he’d made up the other day, at the motel in Virginia, how his fingers had known where the right chords were and the feeling of stillness and calm that had come over him as he played them. A sensation of order and control, of the rest of the world being far away, kept back by his own invisible wall of sound. What had Bammy said to him? The dead win when you quit singing. And in his vision Jessica Price had said Anna would sing when she was in a trance, to keep from being made to do things she didn’t want to do, to block out voices she didn’t want to hear.

Get up,
the dead man said.
Stop lazin’ around, now. You have business in the other room. The girl is waitin’.

Jude wasn’t listening to him, though. He was focused intently on the music in his head, hearing it as it would sound when it had been recorded with a band, the soft clash of cymbal and snare, the deep, slow pulse of the bass. The old man was talking at him, but Jude found that when he fixed his mind on his new song, he could ignore him almost completely.

He thought of the radio in the Mustang, the old radio, the one he’d pulled out of the dash and replaced with XM and a DVD-Audio disc player. The original radio had been an AM receiver with a glass face that glowed an unearthly shade of green and lit up the cockpit of the car like the inside of an aquarium. In his imagination Jude could hear his own song playing from it, could hear his own voice crying out the lyrics over the shivery, echo-chamber sound of the guitar. That was on one station.
The old man’s voice was on another, buried beneath it, a faraway, southern, late-night, let’s-hear-it-for-Jesus, talk-all-the-time station, the reception no good, so all that came through was a word or two at a time, the rest lost in waves of static.

Craddock had told him to sit up. It was a moment before Jude realized he hadn’t done it.

Get on your feet, I said
.

Jude started to move—then stopped himself. In his mind he had the driver’s seat cranked back and his feet out the window and it was his song on the radio and the crickets hummed in the warm summer darkness. He was humming himself, and in the next moment he realized it. It was a soft, off-key humming, but recognizable, nonetheless, as the new song.

Do you hear me talkin’ to you, son?
the dead man asked. Jude could tell that was what he said, because he saw his lips moving, his mouth shaping the words very clearly. But in fact Jude could not really hear him at all.

“No,” Jude said.

Craddock’s upper lip drew back in a sneer. He still had one hand on Jude’s father—it had moved up over Martin’s chest and now rested on his neck. The wind roared against the house, and raindrops rapped at the windowpanes. Then the gust abated, and in the hush that followed, Martin Cowzynski whimpered.

Jude had briefly forgotten his father—Jude’s thoughts pinned on the echoing loops of his own imagined song—but the sound drew his gaze. Martin’s eyes were open, wide and staring and horrified. He was gazing up at Craddock. Craddock turned his head toward him, the sneer fading, his gaunt and craggy face composing itself into an expression of quiet thought.

At last Jude’s father spoke, his voice a toneless wheeze. “It’s a messenger. It’s a messenger of death.”

The dead man seemed to look back at Jude, the black marks boiling in front of his eyes. Craddock’s lips moved, and for a moment his voice
wavered and came clear, muted but audible beneath the sound of Jude’s private, inner song.

Maybe you can tune me out,
Craddock said.
But he can’t.

Craddock bent over Jude’s father and put his hands on Martin’s face, one on each cheek. Martin’s breath began to hitch and catch, each inhalation short, quick, and panicked. His eyelids fluttered. The dead man leaned forward and placed his mouth over Martin’s.

Jude’s father pressed himself back into his pillow, shoved his heels down into the bed, and pushed, as if he could force himself deeper into the mattress and away from Craddock. He drew a last, desperate breath—and sucked the dead man into him. It happened in an instant and was like watching a magician pull a scarf through his fist to make it disappear. Craddock
crumpled,
a wad of Saran Wrap sucked up into the tube of a vacuum cleaner. His polished black loafers were the last thing to go down Martin’s throat. Martin’s neck seemed, for a moment, to distend and swell—bulging the way a snake will bulge after swallowing a gerbil—but then he gulped Craddock down, and his throat shrank back to its normal, scrawny, loose-fleshed shape.

Jude’s father gagged, coughed, gagged again. His hips came up off the bed, his back arching. Jude could not help it, thought immediately of orgasm. Martin’s eyes strained from their sockets. The tip of his tongue flickered between his teeth.

“Spit it up, Dad,” Jude said.

His father didn’t seem to hear. He sank back into the bed, then bucked again, almost as if someone were sitting on top of him and Martin was trying to throw him off. He made wet, strangled sounds down in his throat. A blue artery stood out in the center of his forehead. His lips stretched back from his teeth in a doglike grimace.

Then he eased gently down onto the mattress once more. His hands, which had been clutching fistfuls of the sheets, slowly opened. His eyes were a vivid, hideous crimson—the blood vessels had erupted, staining the whites red. They stared blankly at the ceiling. Blood stained his teeth.

Jude watched him for movement, straining for some sound of breath. He heard the house settling in the wind. He heard rain spitting against the wall.

With great effort Jude sat up, then turned himself to set his feet on the floor. He had no doubt his father was dead, he who had smashed Jude’s hand in the cellar door and put a single-barreled shotgun to his mother’s breast, who had ruled this farmhouse with his knuckles and belt strap and laughing rages, and whom Jude had often daydreamed of killing himself. It had cost him something, though, to watch Martin die. Jude’s abdomen was sore, as if he had only just vomited again, as if something had been forced out of him, ejected from his body, something he didn’t want to give up. Rage, maybe.

“Dad?” Jude said, knowing no one would answer.

Jude rose to his feet, swaying, light-headed. He took a shuffling, old man’s step forward, put his bandaged left hand on the edge of the night table to support himself. It felt as if his legs might fold beneath him at any moment.

“Dad?” Jude said again.

His father jerked his head toward him and fixed his red, awful, fascinated eyes on Jude.

“Justin,”
he said, his voice a strained whisper. He smiled, a horrifying thing to see upon his gaunt, harrowed face.
“My boy. I’m all right. I’m fine. Come close. C’mon and put your arms around me.”

Jude did not step forward but took a staggering, unsteady step back. For a moment he had no air.

Then his breath returned, and he said, “You aren’t my father.”

Martin’s lips widened to show his poisoned gums and crooked yellow teeth, what were left of them. A teardrop of blood spilled from his left eye, ran in a jagged red line down the crag of his cheekbone. Craddock’s eye had seemed to drip red tears in almost just the same way, in Jude’s vision of Anna’s final night.

He sat up and reached past the bowl of shaving lather. Martin closed
his hand on his old straight razor, the one with the hickory handle. Jude hadn’t known it was there, hadn’t seen it lying behind the white china bowl. Jude took another step away. The backs of his legs struck the edge of his cot, and he sat down on the mattress.

Then his father was up, the sheet slithering off him. He moved more quickly than Jude expected, like a lizard, frozen in place one moment, then lurching forward, almost too quick for the eye to follow. He was naked, except for a pair of stained white boxers. His breasts were little trembling sacks of flab, furred with curling, snow-white hairs. Martin stepped forward, planted his heel on the heart-shaped box, crushed it flat.

“Come here, son,”
his father said, in Craddock’s voice.
“Daddy’s going to show you how to shave.”

And he snapped his wrist, and the razor flipped out of the handle, a mirror in which Jude was briefly able to see his own astonished face.

Martin lunged at Jude, slashing at him with the straight razor, but Jude stuck out his foot, jammed it between the old man’s ankles. At the same time, he pitched himself to the side with an energy he didn’t know he had in him. Martin fell forward, and Jude felt the razor whicker through his shirt and the biceps beneath, with what seemed no resistance at all. Jude rolled over the rusted steel bar at the foot of his cot and crashed to the floor.

The room was almost silent except for their harsh gasps for breath and the shrieking of the wind under the eaves. His father scrambled to the end of the bed and leaped over the side—spry for a man who had suffered multiple strokes and not left his bed in three months. By then Jude was crawling backward, out the door.

He made it halfway down the hall, as far as the screen door that looked into the pigpen. The hogs crowded against it, jostling for the best view of the action. Their squeals of excitement drew his attention for a moment, and when he looked back, Martin was standing over him.

His father dropped onto him. He cocked his arm back to slash the razor across Jude’s face. Jude forgot himself and drove his bandaged right
hand up into his father’s chin, hard enough to snap the old man’s head back. Jude screamed. A white-hot charge of pain stabbed through his ruined hand and raced up into his forearm, a sensation like an electrical pulse traveling right through the bone, withering in its intensity.

He caught his father flush and drove him into the screen door. Martin hit it with a splintering crunch and the tinny sound of springs snapping free. The lower screen tore clean out, and Martin fell through it. The pigs scattered. There were no steps below the door, and Martin dropped two feet, out of sight, hitting the ground with a dry thud.

The world wavered, darkened, almost disappeared.
No,
Jude thought,
no no no.
He struggled back toward consciousness, like a man pulled deep underwater, churning toward the surface before he ran out of breath.

The world brightened again, a drop of light that widened and spread, blurred gray ghost shapes appearing before him, then coming gradually into focus. The hall was still. Pigs grunted outside. An ill sweat cooled on Jude’s face.

He rested awhile, ears ringing. His hand ringing, too. When he was ready, he used his heels to push himself across the floor to the wall, then used the wall to work his way up into a sitting position. He rested again.

At last he shoved his way to his feet, sliding his back up the wall. He peered out the wreck of the screen door but still could not see his father. He had to be lying against the side of the house.

Jude swayed away from the wall, sagging toward the screen door. He grabbed the frame to keep from falling into the pigpen himself. His legs trembled furiously. He leaned forward to see if Martin was on the ground with a broken neck, and at that moment his father stood up and reached through the screen and grabbed for his leg.

Jude cried out, kicking at Martin’s hand and recoiling instinctively. Then he was a man losing his balance on a sheet of black ice, pinwheeling his arms foolishly, sailing back down the hall and into the kitchen, where he fell yet again.

Martin pulled himself up through the torn screen. He crawled
toward Jude, made his way to him on all fours, until he was right on top of him. Martin’s hand rose, then fell, a glittering silver spark falling with it. Jude brought up his left arm, and the straight razor struck his forearm, scraping bone. Blood leaped into the air. More blood.

The palm of Jude’s left hand was bandaged, but the fingers were free, sticking out of the gauze as if it were a glove with the fingers snipped off. His father lifted the razor in the air to strike again, but before he could bring it down, Jude stuck his fingers in Martin’s glimmering red eyes. The old man cried out, twisting his head back, trying to get free of his son’s hand. The razor blade waved in front of Jude’s face without touching skin. Jude forced his father’s head back, and back, baring his scrawny throat, wondering if he could push hard enough to break the cocksucker’s spine.