Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

“No I’m not,” she said, and flashed him a proud and challenging smile. She was, in that instant, so beautiful it was a little heartbreaking—the white of her throat, the hollow in it, the delicate line of her just-visible collarbones. “I figured out what to do. I figured out how to make the ghost go away.”

“How’s that?” Jude asked.

She picked at something with the tongs and then held it up. It was a burning flap of black fabric.

“The suit,” she said. “I burned it.”

16

An hour later it was dusk.Jude sat in the study to watch the last of the light drain out of the sky. He had a guitar in his lap. He needed to think. The two things went together.

He was in a chair, turned to face a window that looked over the barn, the dog pen, and the trees beyond. Jude had it open a crack. The air that came in had a crisp bite to it. He didn’t mind. It wasn’t much warmer in the house, and he needed the fresh air, was grateful for the mid-October perfume of rotten apples and fallen leaves. It was a relief from the reek of exhaust. Even after a shower and a change of clothes, he could still smell it on him.

Jude had his back to the door, and when Georgia came into the room, he saw her in reflection. She had a glass of red wine in each hand. The swaddling of bandages around her thumb forced her to grip one of the glasses awkwardly, and she spilled a little on herself when she sank to her knees beside his chair. She kissed the wine off her skin, then set a glass in front of him, on the amp near his feet.

“He isn’t coming back,” she said. “The dead man. I bet you. Burning the suit got rid of him. Stroke of genius. Besides, that fucking thing had to go. Whoo-ee . I wrapped it in two garbage bags before I brought it downstairs, and I still thought I was going to gag from the stink.”

It was in his mind to say, He wanted you to do it, but he didn’t. It wouldn’t do her any good to hear it, and it was over and done with now.

Georgia narrowed her eyes at him, studying his expression. His doubts must’ve been there in his face, because she said, “You think he’ll be back?” When Jude didn’t reply, she leaned toward him and spoke again, her voice low, urgent. “Then why don’t we go? Get a room in the city and get the hell out of here?”

He considered this, forming his reply slowly, and only with effort. At last he said, “I don’t think it would do any good, just to up and run. He isn’t haunting the house. He’s haunting me.”

That was part of it—but only part. The rest was too hard to put into words. The idea persisted that everything to happen so far had happened for reasons—the dead man’s reasons. That phrase, “psychological operations,” rose to Jude’s mind with a feeling of chill. He wondered again if the ghost wasn’t trying to make him run, and why that would be. Maybe the house, or something in the house, offered Jude an advantage, although, try as he might, he couldn’t figure what.

“You ever think you ought to take off?” Jude asked her.

“You almost died today,” Georgia said. “I don’t know what’s happening to you, but I’m not going anywhere. I don’t think I’m going to let you out of my sight ever again. Besides, your ghost hasn’t done anything to me. I bet he can’t touch me.”

But Jude had watched Craddock whispering in her ear. He had seen the stricken look on Georgia’s face as the dead man held his razor on a chain before her eyes. And he had not forgotten Jessica Price’s voice on the telephone, her lazy, poisonous, redneck drawl: You will not live, and no one who gives you aid or comfort will live.

Craddock could get to Georgia. She needed to go. Jude saw this clearly now—and yet the thought of sending her away, of waking alone in the night and finding the dead man there, standing over him in the dark, made him weak with dread. If she left him, Jude felt she might take what remained of his nerve with her. He did not know if he could bear the night and the quiet without her close—an admission of need that was so stark and unexpected it gave him a brief, bad moment of vertigo. He was a man afraid of heights, watching the ground lunge away beneath him, while the Ferris wheel yanked him helplessly into the sky.

“What about Danny?” Jude said. He thought his own voice sounded strained and unlike him, and he cleared his throat. “Danny thought he was dangerous.”

“What did this ghost do to Danny? Danny saw something, got scared, and ran for his life. Wasn’t like anything got done to him.”

“Just because the ghost didn’t do anything doesn’t mean he can’t. Look at what happened to me this afternoon.”

Georgia nodded at this. She drank the rest of her wine in one swallow, then met his gaze, her eyes bright and searching. “And you swear you didn’t go into that barn to kill yourself? You swear, Jude? Don’t be mad at me for asking. I need to know.”

“Think I’m the type?” he asked.

“Everyone’s the type.”

“Not me.”

“Everyone. I tried to do it. Pills. Bammy found me passed out on the bathroom floor. My lips were blue. I was hardly breathing. Three days after my last day of high school. Afterward my mother and father came to the hospital, and my father said, ‘You couldn’t even do that right.’”

“Cocksucker.”

“Yup. Pretty much.”

“Why’d you want to kill yourself? I hope you had a good reason.”

“Because I’d been having sex with my daddy’s best friend. Since I was thirteen. This forty-year-old guy with a daughter of his own. People found out. His daughter found out. She was my friend. She said I ruined her life. She said I was a whore.” Georgia rolled her glass this way and that in her left hand, watching the glimmer of light move around and around the rim. “Pretty hard to argue with her. He’d give me things, and I’d always take them. Like, he gave me a brand-new sweater once with fifty dollars in the pocket. He said the money was so I could buy shoes to go with it. I let him fuck me for shoe money.”

“Hell. That wasn’t any good reason to kill yourself,” Jude told her. “It was a good reason to kill him.”

She laughed.

“What was his name?”

“George Ruger. He’s a used-car salesman now, in my old hometown. Head of the county Republican steering committee.”

“Next time I get down Georgia way, I’ll stop in and kill the son of a bitch.”

She laughed again.

“Or at least thoroughly stomp his ass into the Georgia clay,” Jude said, and played the opening bars of “Dirty Deeds.”

She lifted his glass of wine off the amp, raised it in a toast to him, and had a sip.

“Do you know what the best thing about you is?” she asked.

“No idea.”

“Nothing grosses you out. I mean, I just told you all that, and you don’t think I’m…I don’t know. Ruined. Hopelessly fucked up.”

“Maybe I do and I just don’t care.”

“You care,” she said. She put a hand on his ankle. “And nothing shocks you.”

He let that pass, did not say he could’ve guessed the suicide attempt, the emotionally cold father, the family friend who molested her, almost from the first moment Jude saw her, wearing a dog collar, her hair hacked into uneven spikes and her mouth painted in white lipstick.

She said, “So what happened to you? Your turn.”

He twitched his ankle out of her grasp.

“I’m not into feel-bad competitions.”

He glanced at the window. Nothing remained of the light except for a faint, reddish bronze flush behind the leafless trees. Jude considered his own semitransparent reflection in the glass, his face long, seamed, gaunt, with a flowing black beard that came almost to his chest. A haggard, grim-visaged ghost.