Joe Hill: Heart-Shaped Box

“ ‘My stepfather was a lifelong spiritualist, and I believe he is only here to teach my daughter that death is not the end. But she is eleven and needs a normal life and to sleep in her own room, not in mine. The only thing I can think is to try and find Pop another home, and the world is full of people who want to believe in the afterlife. Well, I have your proof right here.

“ ‘I will “sell” my stepfather’s ghost to the highest bidder. Of course a soul cannot really be sold, but I believe he will come to your home and abide with you if you put out the welcome mat. As I said, when he died, he was with us temporarily and had no place to call his own, so I am sure he would go to where he was wanted. Do not think this is a stunt or a practical joke and that I will take your money and send you nothing. The winning bidder will have something solid to show for their investment. I will send you his Sunday suit. I believe if his spirit is attached to anything, it has to be that.

“ ‘It is a very nice old-fashioned suit made by Great Western Tailoring. It has a fine silver pinstripe,’ blah-blah, ‘satin lining,’ blah-blah….” Danny stopped reading and pointed at the screen. “Check out the measurements, Chief. It’s just your size. High bid is eighty bucks. If you want to own a ghost, looks like he could be yours for a hundred.”

“Let’s buy it,” Jude said.

“Seriously? Put in a bid for a hundred dollars?”

Jude narrowed his eyes, peering at something on the screen, just below the item description, a button that said YOURS NOW: $1,000. And beneath that: Click to Buy and End Auction Immediately! He put his finger on it, tapping the glass.

“Let’s just make it a grand and seal the deal,” he said.

Danny rotated in his chair. He grinned and raised his eyebrows. Danny had high, arched, Jack Nicholson eyebrows, which he used to great effect. Maybe he expected an explanation, but Jude wasn’t sure he could’ve explained, even to himself, why it seemed reasonable to pay a thousand dollars for an old suit that probably wasn’t worth a fifth of that. Later he thought it might be good publicity: Judas Coyne buys a poltergeist . The fans ate up stories like that. But that was later. Right then, in the moment, he just knew he wanted to be the one who bought the ghost.

Jude started on, thinking he would head upstairs to see if Georgia was dressed yet. He had told her to put on her clothes half an hour ago but expected to find her still in bed. He had the sense she planned to stay there until she got the fight she was looking for. She’d be sitting in her underwear, carefully painting her toenails black. Or she’d have her laptop open, surfing Goth accessories, looking for the perfect stud to poke through her tongue, like she needed any more goddam…And then the thought of surfing the Web caused Jude to hold up, wondering something. He glanced back at Danny.

“How’d you come across that anyway?” he asked, nodding at the computer.

“We got an e-mail about it.”

“From who?”

“From the auction site. They sent us an e-mail that said ‘We notice you’ve bought items like this before and thought you’d be interested.’”

“We’ve bought items like this before?”

“Occult items, I assume.”

“I’ve never bought anything off that site.”

“Maybe you did and just don’t remember. Maybe I bought something for you.”

Jude said, “Fuckin’ acid. I had a good memory once. I was in the chess club in junior high.”

“You were? That’s a hell of a thought.”

“What? The idea that I was in the chess club?”

“I guess. It seems so…geeky.”

“Yeah. But I used severed fingers for pieces.”

Danny laughed—a little too hard, convulsing himself and wiping imaginary tears from the corners of his eyes. The sycophantic little suck-ass.

2

The suit came early Saturday morning.Jude was up and outside with the dogs.

Angus lunged as soon as the UPS truck ground to a halt, and the leash was yanked out of Jude’s hand. Angus leaped against the side of the parked truck, spit flying, paws scuffling furiously against the driver’s-side door. The driver remained behind the wheel, peering down at him with the calm but intent expression of a doctor considering a new strain of Ebola through a microscope. Jude caught the leash and pulled on it, harder than he meant to. Angus sprawled on his side in the dirt, then twisted and sprang back up, snarling. By now Bon was in on the act, straining at the end of her leash, which Jude held in his other hand, and yapping with a shrillness that hurt his head.

Because it was too far to haul them all the way back to the barn and their pen, Jude dragged them across the yard and up to the front porch, both of them fighting him the whole time. He shoveled them in through the front door and slammed it behind them. Immediately they set to flinging themselves against it, barking hysterically. The door shuddered as they slammed into it. Fucking dogs.

Jude shuffled back down into the driveway, and reached the UPS truck just as the rear door slid open with a steely clatter. The deliveryman stood inside. He hopped down, holding a long, flat box under his arm.

“Ozzy Osbourne has Pomeranians,” the UPS guy said. “I saw them on TV. Cute little dogs like house cats. You ever think about getting a couple cute little dogs like that?”

Jude took the box without a word and went inside.

He brought the box through the house and into the kitchen. He put it on the counter and poured coffee. Jude was an early riser by instinct and conditioning. When he was on the road, or recording, he had become accustomed to rolling into bed at five in the morning and sleeping through most of the daylight hours, but staying up all night had never come naturally. On the road he would wake at four in the afternoon, bad-tempered and headachy, confused about where the time had gone. Everyone he knew would seem to him clever impostors, unfeeling aliens wearing rubber skin and the faces of friends. It took a liberal quantity of alcohol to make them seem like themselves again.

Only it had been three years since he’d last gone on tour. He didn’t have much interest in drinking when he was home, and was ready for bed most nights by nine. At the age of fifty-four, he had settled back into the rhythms that had guided him since his name was Justin Cowzynski and he was a boy on his father’s hog farm. The illiterate son of a bitch would have dragged him out of bed by the hair if he’d found him in it when the sun came up. It was a childhood of mud, barking dogs, barbed wire, dilapidated farm buildings, squealing pigs with their flaking skin and squashed-in faces, and little human contact, beyond a mother who sat most of the day at the kitchen table wearing the slack, staring aspect of someone who had been lobotomized, and his father, who ruled their acres of pig shit and ruin with his angry laughter and his fists.

So Jude had been up for several hours already but had not eaten breakfast yet, and he was frying bacon when Georgia wandered into the kitchen. She was dressed only in a pair of black panties, her arms folded across her small, white, pierced breasts, her black hair floating around her head in a soft, tangly nest. Her name wasn’t really Georgia. It wasn’t Morphine either, although she had stripped under that name for two years. Her name was Marybeth Kimball, a handle so simple, so plain, she’d laughed when she first told him, as if it embarrassed her.

Jude had worked his way through a collection of Goth girlfriends who stripped, or told fortunes, or stripped and told fortunes, pretty girls who wore ankhs and black fingernail polish, and whom he always called by their state of origin, a habit few of them cared for, because they didn’t like to be reminded of the person they were trying to erase with all their living-dead makeup. She was twenty-three.