Joe Hill: Heart-Shaped Box

“I won’t argue you on that one. Too many people die in hospitals, and if you can’t be helped, you have to wonder why.”

“So what are you going to do about him not eating? What happens now?”

This was met by a moment of silence. He had an idea that the question had taken her by surprise. Her tone, when she spoke again, was both gently reasonable and apologetic, the tone of a woman explaining a harsh truth to a child.

“Well. That’s up to you, not me, Justin. Doc Newland can poke a feedin’ tube in him and he’ll go on a while longer, that’s what you want. Till he has another little blowout and he forgets how to breathe. Or we can just let him be. He isn’t ever goin’ to recover, not at eighty-five years old. It’s not like he’s bein’ robbed of his youth. He’s ready to let go. Are you?”

Jude thought, but did not say, that he’d been ready for more than forty years. He had occasionally imagined this moment—maybe it was fair to say he’d even daydreamed of it—but now it had come, and he was surprised to find that his stomach hurt.

When he replied, though, his voice was steady and his own. “Okay, Arlene. No tube. If you say it’s time, that’s good enough for me. Keep me updated, all right?”

But she wasn’t done with him yet. She made an impatient sound, a kind of stiff exhalation of breath, and said, “Are you comin’ down?”

He stood at Danny’s desk, frowning, confused. The conversation had taken a leap from one thing to another, without warning, like a needle skipping across a record from one track to the next. “Why would I do that?”

“Do you want to see him before he’s gone?”

No. He had not seen his father, stood in the same room with him, in three decades. Jude did not want to see the old man before he was gone, and he did not want to look at him after. He had no plans to so much as attend the funeral, although he would be the one to pay for it. Jude was afraid of what he might feel—or what he wouldn’t. He would pay whatever he had to pay not to have to share his father’s company again. It was the best thing the money could buy: distance.

But he could no more say this to Arlene Wade than he could tell her he’d been waiting on the old man to die since he was fourteen. Instead he replied, “Would he even know if I was there?”

“It’s hard to say what he knows and what he doesn’t. He’s aware of people in the room with him. He turns his eyes to watch folks come and watch folks go. He’s been less responsive lately, though. People get that way, once enough lights have burned out.”

“I can’t make it down. This week isn’t good,” Jude said, reaching for the easiest lie. He thought maybe the conversation was over, and was prepared to say good-bye. Then he surprised himself by asking a question, one he hadn’t known was even on his mind until he heard himself speaking it aloud. “Will it be hard?”

“For him to die? Naw. When an old fella gets to this stage, they waste away pretty quick without bein’ hooked to the feed bag. They don’t suffer none.”

“You sure on that?”

“Why?” she asked. “Disappointed?”

5

Forty minutes laterJude drifted into the bathroom to soak his feet—size 14, flat arches, and a constant source of pain to him—and found Georgia leaning over the sink sucking her thumb. She had on a T-shirt and pajama bottoms with a cute pattern of tiny red figures that might’ve been hearts printed on them. It was only when you got close that you could see that all those tiny red figures were actually images of shriveled dead rats.

He leaned into her and pulled her hand out of her mouth to inspect her thumb. The tip was swollen and had a white, soft-looking sore on it. He let go of her hand and turned away, disinterested, pulling a towel off the heated rack and throwing it over his shoulder.

“Ought to put something on that,” he said. “Before it festers and rots. There’s less work for pole dancers with visible disfigurements.”

“You’re a sympathetic son of a bitch, you know that?”

“You want sympathy, go fuck James Taylor.”

He glanced over his shoulder at her as she stalked out. As soon as he said it, a part of him wished he could take it back. But he didn’t take it back. In their metal-studded bracelets and glossy black, dead-girl lipstick, they wanted harshness, the girls like Georgia. They wanted to prove something to themselves about how much they could take, to prove they were hard. That was why they came to him, not in spite of the things he said to them or the way he treated them but because of those things. He didn’t want anyone to go away disappointed. And it was just understood that sooner or later they would go away.

Or at least he understood it, and if they didn’t at first, then they always figured it out eventually.

6

One of the dogs was in the house.

Jude woke just after three in the morning at the sound of it, pacing in the hallway, a rustle and a light swish of restless movement, a soft bump against the wall.

He had put them in their pens just before dark, remembered doing this very clearly, but didn’t worry about that fact in the first few moments after coming awake. One of them had got into the house somehow, that was all.

Jude sat for a moment, still drunk and stuporous from sleep. A blue splash of moonlight fell across Georgia, sleeping on her belly to his left. Dreaming, her face relaxed and scrubbed of all its makeup, she looked almost girlish, and he felt a sudden tenderness for her—that, and also an odd embarrassment to find himself in bed with her.

“Angus?” he murmured. “Bon?”

Georgia didn’t stir. Now he heard nothing in the hallway. He slid out of bed. The damp and the cold took him by surprise. The day had been the coolest in months, the first real day of fall, and now there was a raw, clinging chill in the air, which meant it had to be even colder outside. Maybe that was why the dogs were in the house. Maybe they had burrowed under the wall of the pen and somehow forced their way in, desperate to be warm. But that didn’t make sense. They had an indoor-outdoor pen, could go into the heated barn if they were cold. He started toward the door, to peek into the hall, then hesitated at the window and twitched aside the curtain to look outside.

The dogs were in the outdoor half of the pen, both of them, up against the wall of the barn. Angus roamed back and forth over the straw, his body long and sleek, his sliding, sideways movements agitated. Bon sat primly in one corner. Her head was raised, and her gaze was fixed on Jude’s window—on him. Her eyes flashed a bright, unnatural green in the darkness. She was too still, too unblinking, like a statue of a dog instead of the real thing.

It was a shock to look out the window and see her staring directly back at him, as if she’d been watching the glass for who knew how long, waiting for him to appear. But that was not as bad as knowing that something else was in the house, moving around, bumping into things in the hallway.

Jude glanced at the security panel next to the bedroom door. The house was monitored, inside and out, by a collection of motion detectors. The dogs weren’t big enough to set them off, but a grown man would trip them, and the panel would note movement in one part of the house or another.

The readout, however, showed a steady green light and read only SYSTEM READY. Jude wondered if the chip was smart enough to tell the difference between a dog and a naked psychotic scrambling around on all fours with a knife in his teeth.

Jude had a gun, but it was in his private recording studio, in the safe. He reached for the Dobro guitar leaning against the wall. Jude had never been one to smash a guitar for effect. His father had smashed his very first guitar for him, in an early attempt to rid Jude of his musical ambitions. Jude hadn’t been able to repeat the act himself, not even onstage, for show, when he could afford all the guitars he wanted. He was, however, perfectly willing to use one as a weapon to defend himself. In a sense he supposed he had always used them as weapons.