Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

Then they were past, the voice out of earshot.

“We’re going to lose this thing,” Georgia said.

“No we aren’t. Come on. It isn’t a hundred yards back to the hotel.”

“If he doesn’t get us now, he’s going to get us later. He told me. He said I might as well kill myself and get it over, and I was going to. I couldn’t help myself.”

“I know. That’s what he does.”

They started along the highway, right at the edge of the gravel breakdown lane, with the long stalks of sawgrass whipping at Jude’s jeans.

Georgia said, “My hand feels sick.”

He stopped, lifted it for a look. It wasn’t bleeding, either from punching the mirror or from lifting up the curved blade of glass. The thick, muffling pads of the bandage had protected her skin. Still, even through the wraps he could feel an unwholesome heat pouring off it, and he wondered if she had broken a bone.

“I bet. You hit the mirror pretty hard. You’re lucky you aren’t all hacked up.” Nudging her forward, getting them moving again.

“It’s beating like a heart. Going whump-whump-whump. ” She spat, spat again.

Between them and the motel was an overpass, a stone train trestle, the tunnel beneath narrow and dark. There was no sidewalk, no room even for the breakdown lane at the sides of the road. Water dripped from the stone ceiling.

“Come on,” he said.

The overpass was a black frame, boxed around a picture of the Days Inn. Jude’s eyes were fixed on the motel. He could see the Mustang. He could see their room.

They did not slow as they passed into the tunnel, which stank of stagnant water, weeds, urine.

“Wait,” Georgia said.

She turned, doubled over, and gagged, bringing up her eggs, lumps of half-digested toast, and orange juice.

He held her left arm with one hand, pulled her hair back from her face with the other. It made him edgy, standing there in the bad-smelling dark, waiting for her to finish.

“Jude,” she said.

“Come on,” he said, tugging at her arm.

“Wait—”

“Come on.”

She wiped her mouth, with the bottom of her shirt. She remained bent over. “I think—”

He heard the truck before he saw it, heard the engine revving behind him, a furious growl of sound, rising to a roar. Headlights dashed up the wall of rough stone blocks. Jude had time to glance back and saw the dead man’s pickup rushing at them, Craddock grinning behind the wheel and the floodlights two circles of blinding light, holes burned right into the world. Smoke boiled off the tires.

Jude got an arm under Georgia and pitched himself forward, carrying her with him and out the far end of the tunnel.

The smoke-blue Chevy slammed into the wall behind him with a shattering crash of steel smashing against stone. It was a great clap of noise that stunned Jude’s eardrums, set them ringing. He and Georgia fell onto wet gravel, clear of the tunnel now. They rolled away from the side of the road, tumbled down the brush, and landed in dew-damp ferns. Georgia cried out, clipped him in the left eye with a bony elbow. He put a hand down into something squishy, the cool unpleasantness of swamp muck.

He lifted himself up, breathing raggedly. Jude looked back. It wasn’t the dead man’s old Chevy that had hit the wall but an olive Jeep, the kind that was open to the sky, with a roll bar in the back. A black man with close-cropped, steel-wool hair sat behind the steering wheel, holding his forehead. The windshield was fractured in a network of connected rings where his skull had hit it. The whole front driver’s side of the Jeep had been gouged down to the frame, steel twisted up and back in smoking, torn pieces.

“What happened?” Georgia asked, her voice faint and tinny, hard to make out over the droning in his ears.

“The ghost. He missed.”

“Are you sure?”

“That it was the ghost?”

“That he missed.”

He came to his feet, his legs unsteady, knees threatening to give. He took her wrist, helped her up. The whining in his eardrums was already beginning to clear. From a long way off, he could hear his dogs, barking hysterically, barking mad.

26

Heaping their bags into the backof the Mustang, Jude became aware of a slow, deep throb in his left hand, different from the dull ache that had persisted since he stabbed himself there yesterday. When he looked down, he saw that his bandage was coming unraveled and was soaked through with fresh blood.

Georgia drove while he sat in the passenger seat, with the first-aid kit that had accompanied them from New York open in his lap. He undid the wet, tacky dressings and dropped them on the floor at his feet. The Steri-Strips he’d applied to the wound the day before had peeled away, and the puncture gaped again, glistening, obscene. He had torn it open getting out of the way of Craddock’s truck.

“What are you going to do about that hand?” Georgia asked, shooting him an anxious look before turning her gaze back to the road.

“Same thing you’re doing about yours,” he said. “Nothing.”

He began to clumsily apply fresh Steri-Strips to the wound. It felt as if he were putting a cigarette out on his palm. When he’d closed the tear as best he could, he wrapped the hand with clean gauze.

“You’re bleeding from the head, too,” she said. “Did you know that?”

“Little scrape. Don’t worry about it.”

“What happens next time? Next time we wind up somewhere without the dogs to look out for us?”

“I don’t know.”

“It was a public place. We should’ve been safe in a public place. People all around, and it was bright daylight, and he went and come at us anyway. How are we supposed to fight somethin’ like him?”

He said, “I don’t know. If I knew what to do, I’d be doing it already, Florida. You and your questions. Lay off a minute, why don’t you?”

They drove on. It was only when he heard the choked sound of her weeping—she was struggling to do it in silence—that he realized he’d called her Florida, when he had meant to say Georgia. It was her questions that had done it, one after another, that and her accent, those Daughter of the Confederacy inflections that had steadily been creeping into her voice the last couple days.

The sound of Georgia trying not to cry was somehow worse than if she wept openly. If she would just go ahead and cry, he could say something to her, but as it was, he felt it necessary to let her be miserable in private and pretend he hadn’t noticed. Jude sank low in the passenger seat and turned his face toward the window.

The sun was a steady glare through the windshield, and a little south of Richmond he fell into a disgusted, heat-stunned trance. He tried to think what he knew about the dead man who pursued them, what Anna had told him about her stepfather when they were together. But it was hard to think, too much effort—he was sore, and there was all that sun in his face and Georgia making quiet, wretched noises behind the steering wheel—and anyway he was sure Anna hadn’t said much.

“I’d rather ask questions,” she told him, “than answer them.”

She had kept him at bay with those foolish, pointless questions for almost half a year: Were you ever in the Boy Scouts? Do you shampoo your beard? What do you like better, my ass or my tits?

What little he knew should have invited curiosity: the family business in hypnotism, the dowser father who taught his girls to read palms and talk to spirits, a childhood shadowed by the hallucinations of preadolescent schizophrenia. But Anna—Florida—didn’t want to talk about who she’d been before meeting him, and for himself, he was happy to let her past be past.