Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

“This grotesque act of self-mutilation has been brought to you courtesy of orange Moxie. If you haven’t tried a Moxie, it’s time to step up to the plate and find out why Mickey Mantle says it’s the bee’s knees. Side retired in order….”

Jude turned, reeled toward the door, tasting vomit in the back of his throat, smelling vomit when he exhaled. At the very periphery of his vision, he could see the window, and the seesaw. It was still going up and down. No one was on it. The dogs lay on their sides, asleep in the grass.

He shoved through the door and banged down two warped steps and into the dusty dooryard behind his father’s farm. His father sat with his back to him, on a rock, sharpening his straight razor with a black strop. The sound of it was like the dead man’s voice, or maybe it was the other way around, Jude no longer knew for sure. A steel tub of water sat in the grass next to Martin Cowzynski, and a black fedora floated in it. That hat in the water was awful. Jude wanted to scream at the sight of it.

The sunshine was intense and direct on his face, a steady glare. He staggered in the heat, swayed back on his heels, and brought a hand up to shield his eyes from the light. Martin drew the blade across the strop, and blood fell from the black leather in fat drops. When Martin scraped the blade forward, the strop whispered “death.” When he jerked the razor back, it made a choked sound like the word “love.” Jude did not slow to speak with his father but kept going on around the back of the house.

“Justin,” Martin called to him, and Jude flicked a sidelong look at him, couldn’t help himself. His father wore a pair of blind man’s sunglasses, round black lenses with silver frames. They gleamed when they caught the sunlight. “You need to get back in bed, boy. You’re burnin’ up. Where do you think you’re goin’ all dressed up like that?”

Jude glanced down and saw he was wearing the dead man’s suit. Without breaking stride he began to pull at the buttons of the coat, undoing them as he reeled forward. But his right hand was numb and clumsy—it felt as if he were the one who had just chopped off his fingers—and the buttons wouldn’t come free. In a few more steps, he gave up. He felt sick, cooking in the Louisiana sun, boiling in his black suit.

“You look like you’re headed to someone’s funeral,” his father said. “You want to watch out. Could be your’n.”

A crow was in the tub of water where the hat had been, and it took off, fanning its wings furiously, throwing spray, as Jude went past it in his stumbling, drunkard’s gait. In another step he was at the side of the Mustang. He fell into it, slammed the door behind him.

Through the windshield the hardpack wavered like an image reflected in water, shimmering through the heat. He was sodden with sweat and gasping for breath in the dead man’s suit, which was too hot, and too black, and too restricting. Something stank, faintly, of char. The heat was worst of all in his right hand. The feeling in the hand couldn’t be described as pain, not anymore. It was, instead, a poisonous weight, swollen not with blood but liquefied ore.

His digital XM radio was gone. In its place was the Mustang’s original, factory-installed AM. When he thumbed it on, his right hand was so hot it melted a blurred thumbprint in the dial.

“If there is one word that can change your life, my friends,” came the voice on the radio, urgent, melodious, unmistakably southern. “If there is just one word, let me tell you, that word is ‘holyeverlastinJesus’!”

Jude rested his hand on the steering wheel. The black plastic immediately began to soften, melting to conform to the shape of his fingers. He watched, dazed, curious. The wheel began to deform, sinking in on itself.

“Yes, if you keep that word in your heart, hold that word to your heart, clasp it to you like you clasp your children, it can save your life, it really can. I believe that. Will you listen to my voice, now? Will you listen only to my voice? Here’s another word that can turn your world upside down and open your eyes to the endless possibilities of the living soul. That word is ‘nightfall.’ Let me say it again. Nightfall. Nightfall at last. The dead pull the living down. We’ll ride the glory road together, hallelujah.”

Jude took his hand off the wheel and put it on the seat next to him, which began to smoke. He picked the hand up and shook it, but now the smoke was coming out of his sleeve, from the inside of the dead man’s jacket. The car was on the road, a long, straight stretch of blacktop, punching through southern jungle, trees strangled in creepers, brush choking the spaces in between. The asphalt was warped and distorted in the distance, through the shimmering, climbing waves of heat.

The reception on the radio fizzed in and out, and sometimes he could hear a snatch of something else, music overlapping the radio preacher, who wasn’t really a preacher at all but Craddock using someone else’s voice. The song sounded plaintive and archaic, like something off a Folkways record, mournful and sweet at the same time, a single ringing guitar played in a minor key. Jude thought, without sense, He can talk, but he can’t sing .

The smell in the car was worse now, the smell of wool beginning to sizzle and burn. Jude was beginning to burn. The smoke was coming out both his sleeves now and from under his collar. He clenched his teeth and began to scream. He had always known he would go out this way: on fire. He had always known that rage was flammable, dangerous to store under pressure, where he had kept it his whole life. The Mustang rushed along the unending back roads, black smoke boiling from under the hood, out the windows, so he could hardly see through the fog of it. His eyes stung, blurred, ran with tears. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need to see where he was going. He put the pedal down.

Jude lurched awake, a feeling of unwholesome warmth in his face. He was turned on his side, lying on his right arm, and when he sat up, he couldn’t feel the hand. Even awake he could still smell the reek of something burning, an odor like singed hair. He looked down, half expecting to find himself dressed in the dead man’s suit, as in his dream. But no; he was still in his tatty old bathrobe.

The suit. The key was the suit. All he had to do was sell it again, the suit and the ghost both. It was so obvious he didn’t know why it had taken so long for the idea to occur to him. Someone would want it; maybe lots of people would want it. He’d seen fans kick, spit, bite, and claw over drumsticks that had been thrown into the crowd. He thought they would want a ghost, straight from the home of Judas Coyne, even more. Some hapless asshole would take it off his hands, and the ghost would have to leave. What happened to the buyer after that didn’t much trouble Jude’s conscience. His own survival, and Georgia’s, was a matter that concerned him above all others.

He stood, swaying, flexed his right hand. The circulation was coming back into it, accompanied by a sensation of icy prickling. It was going to hurt like a bitch.

The light was different, had shifted to the other side of the room, pale and weak as it came through the lace curtains. It was hard to say how long he’d been asleep.

The smell, that stink of something burning, lured him down the darkened front hall, through the kitchen, and into the pantry. The door to the backyard patio was open. Georgia was out there, looking miserably cold, in a black denim jacket and a Ramones T-shirt that left the smooth, white curve of her midriff exposed. She had a pair of tongs in her left hand. Her breath steamed in the cold air.

“Whatever you’re cooking, you’re fuckin’ it up,” he said, waving his hand at all the smoke.