Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

The fat woman covered her eyes but kept two fingers apart to peek between them.

Jude only had time to get a couple more licks in before Georgia had him by the elbow and was hauling him off. Halfway to the car she began to laugh, and as soon as they were packed back into the Mustang, she was all over him, chewing his earlobe, kissing him above his beard, shivering against his side.

Angus still had Ruger’s loafer, and once they were on the interstate, Georgia traded him a Slim Jim for it, then tied it from the rearview mirror by the tassels.

“Like it?” she asked.

“Better than fuzzy dice,” Jude said.

35

Jessica McDermott Price’s housewas in a new development, an assortment of handsome Colonials and Capes with vinyl siding in various ice-cream-shop colors—vanilla, pistachio—laid out along streets that twisted and looped in the way of intestines. They drove by it twice before Georgia spotted the number on the mailbox. Home was a Day-Glo yellow, like mango sherbet, like the caution light, and it wasn’t in any particular architectural style, unless big, bland, American suburban was a style. Jude glided past it and continued down the block about a hundred yards. He turned into an unpaved driveway and rolled across dried red mud to an unfinished house.

The garage had only just been framed, beams of new pine sticking up from the cement foundation and more beams crisscrossing overhead, the roof covered in plastic sheeting. The house attached to it was only a little further along, plywood panels nailed up between the beams, with gaping rectangles to show where windows and doors belonged.

Jude turned the Mustang so the front end was facing the street and backed into the empty, doorless bay of the garage. From where they parked, they had a good view of the Price house. He switched off the engine. They sat for a while, listening to the engine tick as it cooled.

They had made good time coming south from Bammy’s. It was just going on one in the morning.

“Do we have a plan?” Georgia asked.

Jude pointed across the street, at a couple large trash cans on the curb. Then he gestured down the road, toward more green plastic barrels.

“Looks like tomorrow is garbage day,” Jude said. He nodded toward Jessica Price’s house. “She hasn’t brought her cans out yet.”

Georgia stared at him. A streetlight down the road cast a wan beam of light across her eyes, which glittered, like water at the bottom of a well. She didn’t say anything.

“We’ll wait until she carries out the trash, and then we’ll make her get in the car with us.”

“Make her.”

“We’ll drive around awhile. We’ll talk some—the three of us.”

“What if her husband brings out the trash?”

“He isn’t going to. He was in the reserves, and he got wiped out in Iraq. It’s one of the few things Anna told me about her sister.”

“Maybe she has a boyfriend now.”

“If she’s got a boyfriend, and he’s a lot bigger than me, we wait and look for another shot. But Anna never said anything about a boyfriend. The way I heard it, Jessica was just living here with their stepdad, Craddock, and her daughter.”

“Daughter?”

Jude looked meaningfully at a pink two-wheeler leaned against Price’s garage. Georgia followed his gaze.

Jude said, “That’s why we’re not going in tonight. But tomorrow is a school day. Sooner or later Jessica is going to be alone.”

“And then?”

“Then we can do what we need to do, and we don’t have to worry about her kid seeing.”

For a while they were both quiet. Insect song rose from the palms and the brush behind the unfinished house, a rhythmic, inhuman pulsing. Otherwise the street was quiet.

Georgia said, “What are we gonna do to her?”

“Whatever we have to.”

Georgia lowered the seat all the way back and stared into the dark at the ceiling. Bon leaned into the front and whined urgently in her ear. Georgia rubbed her head.

“These dogs are hungry, Jude.”

“They’ll have to wait,” he said, staring at Jessica Price’s house.

He was headachy and his knuckles were sore. He was overtired, too, and his exhaustion made it difficult to follow any one line of reasoning for long. His thoughts, instead, were black dogs that chased their own tails, going around and around in maddening circles without ever getting anywhere.

He had done some bad things in his life—putting Anna on that train, for starters, sending her back to her kin to die—but nothing like what he thought might be ahead of him. He wasn’t sure what he would have to do, if it would end in killing—it might end in killing—and he had Johnny Cash in his head singing “Folsom Prison Blues,” Momma told me be a good boy, don’t play with guns. He considered the gun he had left at home, his big John Wayne .44. It would be easier to get answers out of Jessica Price if he had the gun with him. Only, if he had the gun with him, Craddock would’ve persuaded him to shoot Georgia and himself by now, and the dogs, too, and Jude thought about guns he’d owned, and dogs he’d owned, and running barefoot with the dogs in the hillocky acres behind his father’s farm, the thrill of running with the dogs in the dawn light, and the clap of his father’s shotgun as he fired at ducks, and how his mother and Jude had run away from him together when Jude was nine, only at the Greyhound his mother lost her nerve and called her parents, and wept to them, and they told her to take the boy back to his father and try to make peace, make peace with her husband and with God, and his father was waiting with the shotgun on the porch when they returned, and he smashed her in the face with the gun stock and then put the barrel on her left breast and said he’d kill her if she ever tried to run away again, and so she never ran away again. When Jude—only he was Justin then—tried to walk inside the house, his father said, “I’m not mad at you, boy, this ain’t your fault,” and caught him in one arm and hugged him to his leg. He bent for a kiss and said he loved him, and Justin automatically said he loved him back, a memory he still flinched from, a morally repugnant act, an act so shameful he could not bear to be the person who had done it, so he had eventually needed to become someone else. Was that the worst thing he’d ever done, planted that Judas kiss on his father’s cheek while his mother bled, taken the worthless coin of his father’s affection? No worse than sending Anna away, and now he was back where he’d started, wondering about tomorrow morning, wondering if he could, when he had to, force Anna’s sister into the back of his car and take her away from her home and then do what needed to be done to make her talk.

Although it was not hot in the Mustang, he wiped at the sweat on his brow with the back of one arm, before it could drip into his eyes. He watched the house and the road. A police car went by once, but the Mustang was tucked well out of sight, in the shadows of the half-built garage, and the cruiser didn’t slow.

Georgia dozed beside him, her face turned away. A little after two in the morning, she began fighting something in her sleep. Her right hand came up, as if she were raising it to get the attention of a teacher. She had not rebandaged it, and it was white and wrinkled, as if it had been soaking in water for hours. White and wrinkled and terrible. She began to lash at the air, and she moaned, a cringing sound of terror. She tossed her head.

He leaned over her, saying her name, and firmly but gently took one shoulder to jostle her awake. She slapped at him with her bad hand. Then her eyes sprang open, and she stared at him without recognition, gazed up with complete, blind horror, and he knew in those first few moments she was seeing not his face but the dead man’s.