Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
Jude took her to Penn Station himself. She’d been at her best all morning—was trying very hard, he knew, to be the person he’d met, not the unhappy person she really was—but whenever he looked at her, he felt that dry sensation of chill in his chest again. Her elfish grins, the way she tucked her hair behind her ears to show her studded little pink earlobes, her latest round of goofy questions, seemed like cold-blooded manipulations and only made him want to get away from her even more.
If she sensed, however, that he was holding her at a distance, she gave no sign, and at Penn Station she stood on tiptoe and put her arms around his neck in a fierce hug—an embrace without any sexual connotations at all.
“We had us some fun, didn’t we?” she asked. Always with her questions.
“Sure,” he said. He could’ve said more—that he’d call her soon, that he wanted her to take better care of herself—but he didn’t have it in him, couldn’t wish her well. When the urge came over him, to be tender, to be compassionate, he heard her stepdaddy’s voice in his head, warm, friendly, persuasive: “I always knew she’d find herself a rock star.”
Anna grinned, as if he had replied with something quite clever, and squeezed his hand. He stayed long enough to watch her board but didn’t remain to see the train depart. It was crowded and loud on the platform, noisy with echoing voices. He felt harried and jostled, and the stink of the place—a smell of hot iron, stale piss, and warm, sweating bodies—oppressed him.
But it wasn’t any better outside, in the rainy fall cool of Manhattan. The sense of being jostled, hemmed in from all sides, remained with him all the way back to the Pierre Hotel, all the way back even to the quiet and emptiness of his suite. He was belligerent, needed to do something with himself, needed to make some ugly noises of his own.
Four hours later he was in just the right place, in Howard Stern’s broadcasting studio, where he insulted and hectored, humiliated Stern’s entourage of slow-witted ass kissers when they were foolish enough to interrupt him, and delivered his fire sermon of perversion and hate, chaos and ridicule. Stern loved him. His people wanted to know when Jude could come back.
He was still in New York City that weekend, and in the same mood, when he agreed to meet some of the guys from Stern’s crew at a Broadway strip club. They were all the same people he had mocked in front of an audience of millions earlier in the week. They didn’t take it personally. Being mocked was their job. They were crazy for him. They thought he had killed.
He ordered a beer he didn’t drink and sat at the end of a runway that appeared to be one long, frosted pane of glass, lit from beneath with soft blue gels. The faces gathered in the shadows around the runway all looked wrong to him, unnatural, unwholesome: the faces of the drowned. His head hurt. When he shut his eyes, he saw the lurid, flashing fireworks show that was prelude to a migraine.
When he opened his eyes, a girl with a knife in one hand sank to her knees in front of him. Her eyes were closed. She folded slowly backward, so the back of her head touched the glass floor, her soft, feathery black hair spread across the runway. She was still on her knees.
She moved the knife down her body, a big-bladed hunting bowie with a wide, serrated edge. She wore a dog collar with silver rings on it, a teddy with laces across the bosom that squeezed her breasts together, black stockings.
When the handle of the knife was between her legs, blade pointing at the ceiling—parody of a penis—she flung it into the air, and her eyes sprang open, and she caught it when it came down and arched her back at the same time, raising her chest to the ceiling like an offering, and sliced the knife downward.
She hacked the black lace down the middle, opening a dark red slash, as if slitting herself from throat to crotch. She rolled and threw off the costume, and beneath she was naked except for the silver rings through her nipples, which swung from her breasts, and a G-string pulled up past her hard hip bones. Her supple, sealskin-smooth torso was crimson with body paint.
AC/DC was playing “If You Want Blood You Got It,” and what turned him on wasn’t her young, athletic body or the way her breasts swung with the hoops of silver through them or how, when she looked right at him, her stare was direct and unafraid.
It was that her lips were moving, just barely. He doubted if anyone else in the whole room besides him even noticed. She was singing to herself, singing along to AC/DC. She knew all the words. It was the sexiest thing he’d seen in months.
He raised his beer to her, only to find that it was empty. He had no memory of drinking it. The waitress brought him another a few minutes later. From her he learned that the dancer with the knife was named Morphine and was one of their most popular girls. It cost him a hundred to get her phone number and to find out she’d been dancing for around two years, almost to the day she stepped off the bus from Georgia. It cost him another hundred to get that when she wasn’t stripping, she answered to Marybeth.
27
Jude took the wheel just before they crossed into Georgia. His head hurt, an uncomfortable feeling of pressure on his eyeballs more than anything else. The sensation was aggravated by the southern sunshine glinting off just about everything—fenders, windshields, road signs. If not for his aching head, the sky would’ve been a pleasure, a deep, dark, cloudless blue.
As the Florida state line approached, he was conscious of a mounting anticipation, a nervous tickle in the stomach. Testament was by then perhaps only four hours away. He would be at her house tonight, Jessie Price, née McDermott, sister to Anna, elder stepdaughter to Craddock, and he did not know what he might do when he reached the place.
It had crossed his mind that when he found her, it might end in death for someone. He had thought already that he could kill her for what she’d done, that she was asking for it, but for the first time, now that he was close to facing her, the idea became more than angry speculation.
He’d killed pigs as a boy, had picked up the fall-behinds by the legs and smashed their brains out on the concrete floor of his father’s cutting room. You swung them into the air and then hit the floor with them, silencing them in midsqueal with a sickening and somehow hollow splitting sound, the same noise a watermelon would make if dropped from a great height. He’d shot other hogs with the bolt gun and imagined he was killing his father as he did it.
Jude had made up his mind to do whatever he had to. He just didn’t know what that was yet. And when he thought about it closely, he dreaded learning, was almost as afraid of his own possibilities as he was of the thing coming after him, the thing that had once been Craddock McDermott.
He thought Georgia was dozing, did not know she was awake until she spoke.
“It’s the next exit,” she said in a sand-grain voice.
Her grandmother. Jude had forgotten about her, had forgotten he’d promised to stop.
He followed her instructions, hung a left at the bottom of the off-ramp and took a two-lane state highway through the shabby outskirts of Crickets, Georgia. They rolled by used-car lots, with their thousands of red, white, and blue plastic pennants flapping in the wind, let the flow of traffic carry them into the town itself. They cruised along one edge of the grassy town square, past the courthouse, the town hall, and the eroded brick edifice of the Eagle Theater.
The route to Bammy’s house led them through the green grounds of a small Baptist college. Young men, with ties tucked into their V-neck sweaters, walked beside girls in pleated skirts, with combed, shining hairdos straight out of the old Breck shampoo commercials. Some of the students stared at Jude and Georgia, in the Mustang, the shepherds standing up in the backseat, Bon and Angus breathing steam on the rear windows. A girl, walking beside a taller boy who sported a yellow bow tie, shrank back against her companion as they went past. Bow Tie put a comforting arm around her shoulders. Jude did not flip them off and then drove for a few blocks feeling good about himself, proud of his restraint. His self-control, it was like iron.
Beyond the college they found themselves on a street l
The woman who answered the door was not fat but stocky, built like a defensive tackle, with a broad, dark face, a silky mustache and clever, girlish eyes, a brown shot through with jade. Her flip-flops smacked against the floor. She stared at Jude and Georgia for a beat, while Georgia grinned a shy, awkward grin. Then something in her grandmother’s eyes (Grandmother? How old was she? Sixty? Fifty-five? The disorienting thought crossed Jude’s mind that she might even be younger than himself ) sharpened, as if a lens had been brought into focus, and she screamed and threw open her arms. Georgia fell into them.
“M.B.!” Bammy cried. Then she leaned away from her, and, still holding her by the hips, stared into her face. “What is wrong with you?”
She put a palm to Georgia’s forehead. Georgia twisted from her touch. Bammy saw her bandaged hand next, caught her by the wrist, gave it a speculative look. Then she let go of the hand—almost flung it away.
“You strung out? Christ. You smell like a dog.”
“No, Bammy. I swear to God, I am not on no drugs right now. I smell like a dog because I’ve had dogs climbin’ all over me for most of two days. Why do you always got to think the worst damn thing?” The process that had begun almost a thousand miles before, when they started traveling south, seemed to have completed itself, so that everything Georgia said sounded country now.
Only had her accent really started reasserting itself once they were on the road? Or had she started slipping into it even earlier? Jude thought maybe he’d been hearing the redneck in her voice going all the way back to the day she stuck herself with the nonexistent pin in the dead man’s suit. Her verbal transformation disconcerted and unsettled him. When she talked that way—Why do you always got to think the worst damn thing?—she sounded like Anna.
Bon squeezed into the gap between Jude and Georgia and looked hopefully up at Bammy. The long pink ribbon of Bon’s tongue hung out, spit plopping from it. In the green rectangle of the yard, Angus tracked this way and that, whuffing his nose at the flowers growing around the picket fence.
Bammy looked first at Jude’s Doc Martens, then up to his scraggly black beard, taking in scrapes, the dirt, the bandage wrapped around his left hand.
“You the rock star?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You both look like you been in a fight. Was it with each other?”
“No, Bammy,” Georgia said.
“That’s cute, with the matchin’ bandages on your hands. Is that some kind of romantic thing? Did you two brand each other as a sign of your affection? In my day we used to trade class rings.”
“No, Bammy. We’re fine. We were drivin’ through on our way to Florida, and I said we should stop. I wanted you to meet Jude.”
“You should’ve called. I would’ve started dinner.”
“We can’t stay. We got to get to Florida tonight.”
“You don’t got to get anywhere except bed. Or maybe the hospital.”
“I’m fine.”
“The hell. You’re the furthest thing from fine I’ve ever laid eyes on.” She plucked at a strand of black hair stuck to Georgia’s damp cheek. “You’re covered in sweat. I know sick when I see it.”
“I’m just boiled, is all. I spent the last eight hours trapped inside that car with those ugly dogs and bad air-conditionin’. Are you going to move your wide ass out of the way, or are you going to make me climb back into that car and drive some more?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“What’s the holdup?”
“I’m tryin’ to figure what the chances are you two are here to slaughter me for the money in my purse and take it to buy OxyContin. Everyone is on it these days. There’s kids in junior high prostitutin’ themselves for it. I learned about it on the news this morning.”
“Lucky for you we aren’t in junior high.”
Bammy seemed about to reply, but then her gaze flicked past Jude’s elbow, fixed on something in the yard.
He glanced back to see what. Angus was in a squat, body contracted as if his torso contained an accordion, the shiny black fur of his back humped up into folds, and he was dropping shit after shit into the grass.
“I’ll clean up. Sorry about that,” Jude said.
“I’m not,” Georgia said. “You take a good look, Bammy. If I don’t see a toilet in the next minute or two, that’s gonna be me.”
Bammy lowered her heavily mascaraed eyelids and stepped out of the way. “Come on in, then. I don’t want the neighbors seein’ you standin’ around out here anyway. They’ll think I’m startin’ my own chapter of the Hells Angels.”
28
When they had been introduced, formally, Jude found out her name was Mrs. Fordham, which is what he called her from then on. He could not call her Bammy; paradoxically, he could not really think of her as Mrs. Fordham. Bammy she was, whatever he called her.
Bammy said, “Let’s put the dogs out back where they can run.”
Georgia and Jude traded a look. They were all of them in the kitchen then. Bon was under the kitchen table. Angus had lifted his head to sniff at the counter, where there were brownies on a plate under green Saran Wrap.
The space was too small to contain the dogs. The front hallway had been too small for them, too. When Angus and Bon came running down it, they had struck a side table, rattling the china on top of it, and reeled into walls, thudding them hard enough to knock pictures askew.
When Jude looked at Bammy again, she was frowning. She’d seen the glance that had passed between Jude and Georgia and knew it meant something, but not what.
Georgia spoke first. “Aw, Bammy, we can’t put them out in a strange place. They’ll get into your garden.”
Bon clouted aside a few chairs to squirm out from under the table. One fell over with a sharp bang. Georgia leaped toward her, caught her by the collar.
“I’ll take her,” Georgia said. “Is it all right if I run through the shower? I need to wash and maybe lie down. She can stay with me, where she won’t get into trouble.”
Angus put his paws up on the counter to get his snout closer to the brownies.
“Angus,” Jude said. “Get your ass over here.”
Bammy had cold chicken and slaw in the fridge. Also homemade lemonade, as promised, in a sweating glass pitcher. When Georgia went up the back stairs, Bammy fixed Jude a plate. He sat with it. Angus flopped at his feet.
From his place at the kitchen table, Jude had a view of the backyard. A mossy rope hung from the branch of a tall old walnut. The tire that had been attached to it once was long gone. Beyond the back fence was an alley, unevenly floored in old bricks.
Bammy poured herself a lemonade and leaned with her bottom against the kitchen counter. The windowsill behind her was crowded with bowling trophies. Her sleeves were rolled up to show forearms as hairy as his.
“I never heard the romantic story of how you two met.”
“We were both in Central Park,” he said. “Picking daisies. We got to talking and decided to have a picnic together.”
“It was either that or you met in some perverted fetish club.”
“Come to think of it, it might’ve been a perverted fetish club.”
“You’re eating like you never seen food before.”
“We overlooked lunch.”
“What’s your hurry? What’s happenin’ in Florida you’re in such a rush to get to? Some friends of yours havin’ an orgy you don’t want to miss?”
“You make this slaw yourself?”
“You bet.”
“It’s good.”
“You want the recipe?”
The kitchen was quiet except for the scrape of his fork on the plate and the thud of the dog’s tail on the floor. Bammy stared at him
At last, to fill in the silence, Jude said, “Marybeth calls you Bammy. Why’s that?”
“Short for my first name,” Bammy said. “Alabama. M.B.’s called me that since she was wetting her didies.”
A dry mouthful of cold chicken lodged partway down Jude’s windpipe. He coughed and thumped his chest and blinked at watering eyes. His ears burned.
“Really,” he said, when his throat was clear. “This may be out of left field, but you ever go to one of my shows? Like, did you maybe see me on a twin bill with AC/DC in 1979?”
“Not likely. I didn’t care for that kind of music even when I was young. Buncha gorillas stompin’ around the stage, shoutin’ swearwords and screamin’ their throats out. I might’ve caught you if you were openin’ for the Bay City Rollers. Why?”
Jude wiped at the fresh sweat on his forehead, his insides all queer with relief. “I knew an Alabama once. Don’t worry about it.”
“How’d the two of you both get so beat up? You got scrapes on your scrapes.”
“We were in Virginia, and we walked to Denny’s from our motel. On the way back, we were nearly run down.”
“You sure about the ‘nearly’ part?”
“Going under a train trestle. Fella ran his Jeep right into the stone wall. Bashed his face a good one on his windshield, too.”
“How’d he make out?”
“All right, I guess.”
“Was he drunk?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“What happened when the cops got there?”
“We didn’t stay to talk to them.”
“You didn’t stay—” she started, then stopped and threw the rest of her lemonade into the sink, wiped her mouth with the back of her forearm. Her lips were puckered, as if her last swallow of lemonade had been more sour than she liked.
“You are in some hurry,” she said.
“A mite.”
“Son,” she said, “just how much trouble are the two of you in?”