Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

“How’s she sleepin’?” Craddock asked.

“Not too well,” Jude said, relieved, understanding somehow that this said it all.

Jude offered to have a chauffeur drive Anna from the train station in Jacksonville to Jessica’s house in Testament, but Craddock said no, he would meet her at the Amtrak himself.

“A drive to Jacksonville will suit me fine. Any excuse to get out in my truck for a few hours. Put the windows down. Make faces at the cows.”

“I hear that,” Jude said, forgetting himself and warming to the old man.

“I appreciate you takin’ care of my little girl like you done. You know, when she was just a pup, she had posters of you all over her walls. She always did want to meet you. You and that fella from…what was their name? That Mötley Crüe? Now, she really loved them. She followed them for half a year. She was at all their shows. She got to know some of them, too. Not the band, I guess, but their road team. Them were her wild years. Not that she’s real settled now, is she? Yeah, she loved all your albums. She loved all kinds of that heavy metal music. I always knew she’d find herself a rock star.”

Jude felt a dry, ticklish sensation of cold spreading behind his chest. He knew what Craddock was telling him — that she had fucked roadies to hang with Mötley Crüe, that star fucking was a thing with her, and if she wasn’t sleeping with him, she’d be in the sack with Vince Neil or Slash — and he also knew why Craddock was telling him. For the same reason he had let Anna’s Jewish friend see her when she was out of her head, to put a wedge between them.

What Jude had not foreseen was that he could know what Craddock was doing and it could work anyway. No sooner had Craddock said it than Jude started thinking where he and Anna had met, backstage at a Trent Reznor show. How had she got there? Who did she know, and what did she have to do for a backstage pass? If Trent had walked into the room right then, would she have sat at his feet instead and asked the same sweet, pointless questions?

“I’ll take care of her, Mr. Coyne. You just send her back to me. I’ll be waitin’,” Craddock told him.

Jude took her to Penn Station himself. She’d been at her best all morning — was trying very hard, he knew, to be the person he’d met, not the unhappy person she really was — but whenever he looked at her, he felt that dry sensation of chill in his chest again. Her elfish grins, the way she tucked her hair behind her ears to show her studded little pink earlobes, her latest round of goofy questions, seemed like cold-blooded manipulations and only made him want to get away from her even more.

If she sensed, however, that he was holding her at a distance, she gave no sign, and at Penn Station she stood on tiptoe and put her arms around his neck in a fierce hug — an embrace without any sexual connotations at all.

“We had us some fun, didn’t we?” she asked. Always with her questions.

“Sure,” he said. He could’ve said more — that he’d call her soon, that he wanted her to take better care of herself — but he didn’t have it in him, couldn’t wish her well. When the urge came over him, to be tender, to be compassionate, he heard her stepdaddy’s voice in his head, warm, friendly, persuasive: “I always knew she’d find herself a rock star.”

Anna grinned, as if he had replied with something quite clever, and squeezed his hand. He stayed long enough to watch her board but didn’t remain to see the train depart. It was crowded and loud on the platform, noisy with echoing voices. He felt harried and jostled, and the stink of the place — a smell of hot iron, stale piss, and warm, sweating bodies — oppressed him.

But it wasn’t any better outside, in the rainy fall cool of Manhattan. The sense of being jostled, hemmed in from all sides, remained with him all the way back to the Pierre Hotel, all the way back even to the quiet and emptiness of his suite. He was belligerent, needed to do something with himself, needed to make some ugly noises of his own.

Four hours later he was in just the right place, in Howard Stern’s broadcasting studio, where he insulted and hectored, humiliated Stern’s entourage of slow-witted ass kissers when they were foolish enough to interrupt him, and delivered his fire sermon of perversion and hate, chaos and ridicule. Stern loved him. His people wanted to know when Jude could come back.

He was still in New York City that weekend, and in the same mood, when he agreed to meet some of the guys from Stern’s crew at a Broadway strip club. They were all the same people he had mocked in front of an audience of millions earlier in the week. They didn’t take it personally. Being mocked was their job. They were crazy for him. They thought he had killed.

He ordered a beer he didn’t drink and sat at the end of a runway that appeared to be one long, frosted pane of glass, lit from beneath with soft blue gels. The faces gathered in the shadows around the runway all looked wrong to him, unnatural, unwholesome: the faces of the drowned. His head hurt. When he shut his eyes, he saw the lurid, flashing fireworks show that was prelude to a migraine.

When he opened his eyes, a girl with a knife in one hand sank to her knees in front of him. Her eyes were closed. She folded slowly backward, so the back of her head touched the glass floor, her soft, feathery black hair spread across the runway. She was still on her knees.

She moved the knife down her body, a big-bladed hunting bowie with a wide, serrated edge. She wore a dog collar with silver rings on it, a teddy with laces across the bosom that squeezed her breasts together, black stockings.

When the handle of the knife was between her legs, blade pointing at the ceiling — parody of a penis — she flung it into the air, and her eyes sprang open, and she caught it when it came down and arched her back at the same time, raising her chest to the ceiling like an offering, and sliced the knife downward.

She hacked the black lace down the middle, opening a dark red slash, as if slitting herself from throat to crotch. She rolled and threw off the costume, and beneath she was naked except for the silver rings through her nipples, which swung from her breasts, and a G-string pulled up past her hard hip bones. Her supple, sealskin-smooth torso was crimson with body paint.

AC/DC was playing “If You Want Blood You Got It,” and what turned him on wasn’t her young, athletic body or the way her breasts swung with the hoops of silver through them or how, when she looked right at him, her stare was direct and unafraid.

It was that her lips were moving, just barely. He doubted if anyone else in the whole room besides him even noticed. She was singing to herself, singing along to AC/DC. She knew all the words. It was the sexiest thing he’d seen in months.

He raised his beer to her, only to find that it was empty. He had no memory of drinking it. The waitress brought him another a few minutes later. From her he learned that the dancer with the knife was named Morphine and was one of their most popular girls. It cost him a hundred to get her phone number and to find out she’d been dancing for around two years, almost to the day she stepped off the bus from Georgia. It cost him another hundred to get that when she wasn’t stripping, she answered to Marybeth.

27

Jude took the wheel just beforethey crossed into Georgia. His head hurt, an uncomfortable feeling of pressure on his eyeballs more than anything else. The sensation was aggravated by the southern sunshine glinting off just about everything—fenders, windshields, road signs. If not for his aching head, the sky would’ve been a pleasure, a deep, dark, cloudless blue.