Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

“…ude! Jude! Answer me Ju…”

He didn’t want to be bothered, though, was dozy, wanted to be left alone. He cranked the seat back. He folded his hands across his stomach. He breathed deeply.

He had just nodded off when Georgia got him by the arm and hauled him out of the car, dumped him in the dirt. Her voice came in pulses, drifting in and out of audibility.

“…get out of there Jude get the fuck…

…on’t be dead don’t be…

…leeeeeese, please …

…eyes open your fucking …”

He opened his eyes and sat up in one sudden movement, hacking furiously. The barn door was rolled back, and the sunshine poured through it in brilliant, crystalline beams, solid-looking and sharp-edged. The light stabbed at his eyes, and he flinched from it. He inhaled a deep, cold breath, opened his mouth to say something, to let her know he was all right, and his throat filled with bile. He rolled onto all fours and retched in the dirt. Georgia had him by the arm and bent over him while he horked up.

Jude was dizzy. The ground tilted underneath him. When he tried to look outside, the world spun, as if it were a picture painted on the side of a vase, turning on a lathe. The house, the yard, the drive, the sky, streamed by him, and a withering sensation of motion sickness rolled through him, and he upchucked again.

He clutched the ground and waited for the world to stop moving. Not that it ever would. That was one thing you found out when you were stoned, or wasted, or feverish: that the world was always turning and that only a healthy mind could block out the sickening whirl of it. He spat, wiped at his mouth. His stomach muscles were sore and cramped, as if he’d just done a few dozen abdominal crunches, which was, when you thought about it, very close to the truth. He sat up, turned himself to look at the Mustang. It was still running. No one was in it.

The dogs danced around him. Angus leaped into his lap and thrust his cold, damp nose into his face, lapped at Jude’s sour mouth. Jude was too weak to push him away. Bon, always the shy one, gave Jude a worried, sidelong look, then lowered her head to the thin gruel of his vomit and covertly began to gobble it up.

He tried to stand, grabbing Georgia’s wrist, but didn’t have the strength in his legs and instead pulled her down with him, onto her knees. He had a dizzying thought— the dead pull the living down —that spun in his head for a moment and was gone. Georgia trembled. Her face was wet against his neck.

“Jude,” she said. “Jude, I don’t know what’s happening to you.”

He couldn’t find his voice for a minute, didn’t have the air yet. He stared at the black Mustang, shuddering on its suspension, the restrained idling force of the engine shaking the entire chassis.

Georgia continued, “I thought you were dead. When I grabbed your arm, I thought you were dead. Why are you out here with the car running and the barn door shut?”

“No reason.”

“Did I do something? Did I fuck it up?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know,” she said, beginning to cry. “There must be some reason you’re out here to kill yourself.”

He turned on his knees. He found he was still holding one of her thin wrists, and now he took the other. Her nest of black hair floated around her head, bangs in her eyes.

“Something’s wrong, but I wasn’t out here trying to kill myself. I sat in the car to listen to some music and think for a minute, but I didn’t turn the engine on. It turned itself on.”

She wrenched her wrist away. “Stop it.”

“It was the dead man.”

“Stop it. Stop it.”

“The ghost from the hall. I saw him again. He was in the car with me. Either he started the Mustang or I started it without knowing what I was doing, because he wanted me to.”

“Do you know how crazy that sounds? How crazy all of this sounds?”

“If I’m crazy, then Danny is, too. Danny saw him. That’s why he’s gone. Danny couldn’t hack it. He had to go.”

Georgia stared at him, her eyes lucid and bright and fearful behind the soft curl of her bangs. She shook her head in an automatic gesture of denial.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Help me stand.”

She hooked an arm under his armpits and pushed off the floor. His knees were weak springs, all loose bounce and no support. No sooner had he come to his heels than he started to roll forward. He put his hands out to stop his fall and caught himself on the warming hood of the car.

He said, “Shut it off. Get the keys.”

Georgia picked his duster off the ground—it had spilled out of the Mustang with him—and threw it back in the driver’s seat. She coughed, waving her hands at the fog of exhaust, climbed into the car, and shut it off. The silence was sudden and alarming.

Bon pressed herself against Jude’s leg, looking for reassurance. His knees threatened to fold. He drove her aside with his knee, then put his heel to her ass. She yelped and leaped away.

“Fuck off me,” he said.

“Whyn’t you leave her be?” Georgia asked. “The both of them saved your life.”

“How do you figure?”

“Didn’t you hear them? I was coming out to shut them up. They were hysterical.”

He regretted kicking Bon then and looked around to see if she was close enough to put a hand on. She had retreated into the barn, though, and was pacing in the dark, watching him with morose and accusing eyes. He wondered about Angus and glanced around for him. Angus stood in the barn door, his back to them, his tail raised. He was staring steadily down the driveway.

“What does he see?” Georgia asked, an absurd thing to ask. Jude had no idea. He stood bracing himself against the car, too far from the sliding barn door to see out into the yard.

Georgia pushed the keys into the pocket of her black jeans. She had dressed somewhere along the line and wrapped her right thumb in bandages. She slipped past Jude and went to stand next to Angus. She ran her hand over the dog’s spine, glanced down the drive, then back at Jude.

“What is it?” Jude asked.

“Nothing,” she said. She held the right hand against her breastbone and grimaced a little, as if it were paining her. “Do you need help?”

“I’m managing,” he said, and shoved off the Mustang. He was conscious of a building black pressure behind his eyeballs, a deep, slow, booming pain that threatened to become one of the all-time great headaches.

At the big sliding barn doors, he paused, with Angus between himself and Georgia. He peered down the drive of frozen mud, to the open gates of his farm. The skies were clearing. The thick, curdled gray cloud cover was coming apart, and the sun blinked irregularly through the rents.

The dead man, in his black fedora, stared back at him from the side of the state highway. He was there for a moment, when the sun was behind a cloud, so that the road was in shadow. As sunshine fluttered around the edges of a cloud, Craddock flickered away. His head and hands disappeared first, so that only a hollow black suit remained, standing empty. Then the suit disappeared, too. He stammered back into being a moment later, when the sun retreated under cover once more.

He lifted his hat to Jude and bowed, a mocking, oddly southern gesture. The sun came and went and came again, and the dead man flashed like Morse code.

“Jude?” Georgia asked. He realized he and Angus were standing there staring down the drive in just the same way. “There isn’t anything there, is there, Jude?” She didn’t see Craddock.

“No,” he said. “Nothing there.”

The dead man faded back into existence long enough to wink. Then the breeze rose in a soft rush and, high above, the sun broke through for good, at a place where the clouds had been pulled into strings of dirty wool. The light shone strongly on the road, and the dead man was gone.