Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

Georgia came out of the bathroom, stood in the door in faded white panties and a strappy halter that left her midriff bare, all evidence of her Goth self scrubbed away, except for her shiny, black-lacquered toenails. Her right hand was wrapped in a fresh knot of bandage. She looked at the dogs, nose wrinkled in an expression of amused disgust.

“Boy, are we livin’ foul. If housekeepin’ finds out we been feedin’ our dogs from the dresser drawers, we will not be invited back to the Fredericksburg Days Inn.” She spoke in cornpone, putting on for his bemusement. She had been dropping g ’s and drawing out her vowels off and on throughout the afternoon—doing it sometimes for laughs and sometimes, Jude believed, without knowing she was doing it. As if in leaving New York she was also traveling away from the person she’d been there, unconsciously slipping back into the voice and attitudes of who she’d been before: a scrawny Georgia kid who thought it was a laugh to go skinny-dipping with the boys.

“I seen people treat a hotel room worst,” he said. “Worst” instead of “worse.” His own accent, which had become very slight over the years, was thickening up as well. If he wasn’t careful, he would be talking like an extra from Hee Haw by the time they got to South Carolina. It was hard to venture back near the place you’d been bred without settling into the characteristics of the person you’d been there. “My bassist, Dizzy, took a shit in a dresser drawer once, when I wouldn’t get out of the bathroom fast enough.”

Georgia laughed, although he saw her watching him with something close to concern—wondering, maybe, what he was thinking. Dizzy was dead. AIDS. Jerome, who’d played rhythm guitar and keyboards and pretty much everything else, was dead, too, had run his car off the road, 140 miles an hour, hit a tree, and crushed his Porsche like a beer can. Only a handful of people knew that it wasn’t a drunk-driving accident, but that he had done it cold sober, on purpose.

Not long after Jerome cashed out, Kenny said it was time to call it a day, that he wanted to spend some time with his kids. Kenny was tired of nipple rings and black leather pants and pyrotechnics and hotel rooms, had been faking it for a while anyway. That was it for the band. Jude had been a solo act ever since.

Maybe he wasn’t even that anymore. There was his box of demos in the studio at home, almost thirty new songs. But it was a private collection. He had not bothered to play them for anyone. It was just more of the same. What had Kurt Cobain said? Verse chorus verse. Over and over. Jude didn’t care anymore. AIDS got Dizzy, the road got Jerome. Jude didn’t care if there was any more music.

It didn’t make sense to him, the way things had worked out. He had always been the star. The band had been called Jude’s Hammer. He was the one who was supposed to die tragically young. Jerome and Dizzy were meant to live on, so they could tell PG-13 stories about him years later, on a VH1 retrospective—the both of them balding, fat, manicured, at peace with their wealth and their rude, noisy pasts. But then Jude had never been good at sticking to the script.

Jude and Georgia ate sandwiches they’d picked up in the same Delaware gas station where Jude had bought the Alpo. They tasted like the Saran Wrap they’d come wrapped in.

My Chemical Romance was on Conan. They had rings in their lips and eyebrows, their hair done up in spikes, but beneath the white pancake makeup and black lipstick they looked like a collection of chubby kids who had probably been in their high-school marching band a few years earlier. They leaped around, falling into each other, as if the stage beneath them were an electrified plate. They played frantically, pissing themselves with fear. Jude liked them. He wondered which of them would die first.

After, Georgia switched off the lamp by the bed and they lay together in the dark, the dogs curled up on the floor.

“I guess it didn’t get rid of him,” she said. “Burning his suit.” No Daisy Duke accent now.

“It was a good idea, though.”

“No it wasn’t.” Then: “He made me do it, didn’t he?”

Jude didn’t reply.

“What if we can’t figure out how to make him go away?” she asked.

“Get used to smellin’ dog food.”

She laughed, her breath tickling his throat.

She said, “What are we going to do when we get where we’re going?”

“We’re going to talk to the woman who sent me the suit. We’re going to find out if she knows how to get rid of him.”

Cars droned on I-95. Crickets thrummed.

“Are you going to hurt her?”

“I don’t know. I might. How’s your hand?”

“Better,” she said. “How’s yours?”

“Better,” he said.

He was lying, and he was pretty sure she was, too. She had gone into the bathroom to re-dress the hand when they first got into the room. He had gone in after, to re-dress his, and found her old wraps in the trash. He pulled the loops of gauze out of the wastebasket to inspect them. They stank of infection and antiseptic cream, and they were stained with dried blood and something else, a yellow crust that had to be pus.

As for his own hand, the gouge he’d put in it probably needed stitches. Before leaving the house that morning, he had tugged a first-aid kit out of an upper cabinet in the kitchen and used some Steri-Strips to pull the gash closed, then wound it in white bandages. But the gouge continued to seep, and by the time he took the wraps off, blood was beginning to soak through them. The hole in his left hand bulged open between the Steri-Strips, a red, liquid eye.

“The girl who killed herself,” Georgia began. “The girl this is all about…”

“Anna McDermott.” Her real name now.

“Anna,” Georgia repeated. “Do you know why she killed herself? Was it because you told her to scram?”

“Her sister obviously thinks so. Her stepdaddy, too, I guess, since he’s haunting us.”

“The ghost…can make people do things. Like getting me to burn the suit. Like making Danny hang himself.”

He’d told her about Danny in the car. Georgia had turned her face to the window, and he’d heard her crying softly for a while, making little damp, choked sounds, which evened out after a time into the slow, regular inhalations of sleep. This was the first either of them had mentioned Danny since.

Jude continued, “The dead man, Anna’s stepdaddy, learned hypnotism torturing Charlie in the army and stayed with it after he got out. Liked to call himself a mentalist. In his life he used that chain of his, with the silver razor on the end of it, to put people into trances, but now he’s dead, he don’t need it anymore. Something about when he says things, you just have to do it. All of a sudden, you’re just sitting back, watching him run you here and there. You don’t even feel anything. Your body is a suit of clothes, and he’s the one wearing it, not you.” A dead man’s suit, Jude thought, with a shuddery feeling of revulsion. Then he said, “I don’t know much about him. Anna didn’t like to talk on him. But I know she worked for a while as a palm reader, and she said her stepdaddy was the one who taught her how. He had an interest in the less-understood aspects of the human mind. Like, for example, on the weekends he’d hire himself out as a dowser.”

“Those are people who find water by waving sticks in the air? My grandma hired an old hillbilly with a mouthful of gold teeth to find her a fresh spring after her well went dry. He had a hickory stick.”

“Anna’s stepdaddy, Craddock, didn’t bother with a stick. He just used that pretty razor on a chain he’s got. Pendulums work about as well, I guess. Anyway, the psycho bitch who sent me the suit, Jessica McDermott Price, wanted me to know that her pop had said he’d get even with me after he was dead. So I think the old man had some ideas about how to come back. In other words, he’s not an accidental ghost, if that makes sense. He got the way he is now on purpose.”