Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

And out in the light, he sees Anna, sees her shimmering, glowing like a firefly, watches her turn from the wheel, and smile, and reach toward him, putting her hand over his and Marybeth’s, and that’s when she says, “Hey, you guys, I think this hairy son of a bitch is trying to sit up.”

47

Jude blinked into the clear,painful white light of an ophthalmoscope pointed into his left eye. He was struggling to rise, but someone had a hand on his chest, holding him pinned to the floor. He gasped at the air, like a trout just hauled out of Lake Pontchartrain and thrown onto the shore. He had told Anna they might go fishing there, the two of them. Or had that been Marybeth? He didn’t know anymore.

The ophthalmoscope was removed, and he stared blankly up at the mold-spotted ceiling of the kitchen. The mad sometimes drilled holes in their own heads, to let the demons out, to relieve the pressure of thoughts they could no longer bear. Jude understood the impulse. Each beat of his heart was a fresh and staggering blow, felt in the nerves behind his eyes and in his temples, punishing evidence of life.

A hog with a squashy pink face leaned over him, smiled obscenely down, and said, “Holy shit. You know who this is? It’s Judas Coyne.”

Someone else said, “Can we clear the fucking pigs out of the room?”

The pig was booted aside, with a shriek of indignation. A man with a neatly groomed, pale brown goatee and kind, watchful eyes, leaned into Jude’s field of view.

“Mr. Coyne? Just lie still. You’ve lost a lot of blood. We’re going to lift you onto a gurney.”

“Anna,” Jude said, his voice unsteady and wheezing.

A brief look of pain and something like an apology flickered in the young man’s light blue eyes. “Was that her name?”

No. No, Jude had said the wrong thing. That wasn’t her name, but Jude couldn’t find the breath to correct himself. Then it registered that the man leaning over him had referred to her in the past tense.

Arlene Wade spoke for him. “He told me her name was Marybeth.”

Arlene leaned in from the other side, peering down at him, her eyes comically huge behind her glasses. She was talking about Marybeth in the past tense, too. He tried to sit up again, but the goateed EMT firmly held him down.

“Don’t try and get up, dear,” Arlene said.

Something made a steely clatter nearby, and he looked down the length of his body and past his feet and saw a crowd of men rolling a gurney past him and into the hall. An IV bag, pregnant with blood, swung back and forth from a metal support rod attached to the cot. From his angle on the floor, Jude could not see anything of the person on the gurney, except for a hand hanging over the side. The infection that had made Marybeth’s palm shriveled and white was gone, no trace of it left. Her small, slender hand swung limply, jostled by the motion of the cart, and Jude thought of the girl in his obscene snuff movie, the way she had seemed to go boneless when the life went out of her. One of the EMTs pushing the gurney glanced down and saw Jude staring. He reached for Marybeth’s hand and tucked it back up against her side. The other men rolled the gurney on out of sight, all of them talking to one another in low, feverish voices.

“Marybeth?” Jude managed, his voice the faintest of whispers, carried on a pained exhalation of breath.

“She’s got to go now,” Arlene said. “There’s another amble-lance comin’ for you, Justin,”

“Go?” Jude asked. He really didn’t understand.

“They can’t do any more for her in this place, that’s all. It’s just time to take her on.” Arlene patted his hand. “Her ride is here.”

ALIVE

48

Jude was in and out for twenty-four hours.

He woke once and saw his lawyer, Nan Shreve, standing in the door of his private room, talking with Jackson Browne. Jude had met him, years before, at the Grammys. Jude had slipped out midceremony to visit the men’s, and as he was taking a leak, he happened to look over to find Jackson Browne pissing in the urinal next to him. They had only nodded to each other, never even said hello, and so Jude couldn’t imagine what he was doing now in Louisiana. Maybe he had a gig in New Orleans, had heard about Jude nearly being killed, and had come to express his sympathies. Maybe Jude would now be visited by a procession of rock-and-roll luminaries, swinging through to tell him to keep on keepin’ on. Jackson Browne was dressed conservatively—blue blazer, tie—and he had a gold shield clipped to his belt, next to a holstered revolver. Jude allowed his eyelids to sink shut.

He had a dark, muffled sense of time passing. When he woke again, another rock star was sitting beside him: Dizzy, his eyes all black scribbles, his face still wasted with AIDS. He offered his hand, and Jude took it.

Had to come, man. You were there for me, Dizzy said.

“I’m glad to see you,” Jude told him. “I been missing you.”

“Excuse me?” said the nurse, standing on the other side of the bed. Jude glanced over at her, hadn’t known she was there. When he looked back for Dizzy, Jude discovered his hand hanging empty.

“Who you talkin’ to?” the nurse asked.

“Old friend. I haven’t seen him since he died.”

She sniffed. “We got to scale back your morphine, hon.”

Later Angus wandered through the room and disappeared under the bed. Jude called to him, but Angus never came out, just stayed under the cot, thumping his tail on the floor, a steady beat that kept time with Jude’s heart.

Jude wasn’t sure which dead or famous person to expect next and was surprised when he opened his eyes to find he had his room to himself. He was on the fourth or fifth floor of a hospital outside of Slidell. Beyond the window was Lake Pontchartrain, blue and wintry in the late-afternoon light, the shoreline crowded with cranes, a rusty oil tanker struggling into the east. For the first time, he realized he could smell it, the faint briny tang of the water. Jude wept.

When he’d managed to get control of himself, he paged the nurse. A doctor came instead, a cadaverous black man with sad, bloodshot eyes and a shaved head. In a soft, gravelly voice, he began to fill Jude in on his condition.

“Has anyone called Bammy?” Jude interrupted.

“Who’s that?”

“Marybeth’s grandma,” Jude said. “If no one’s called her, I want to be the one to tell her. Bammy ought to know what happened.”

“If you can provide us with her last name and a phone number or an address, I can have one of the nurses call her.”

“It ought to be me.”

“You’ve been through a lot. I think, in the emotional state you’re in, a call from you might alarm her.”

Jude stared at him. “Her granddaughter died. Person she loves most in the world. Do you think it will alarm her less getting the news from a stranger?”

“Exactly why we’d rather make the call,” the doctor said. “That’s the kind of thing we don’t want her family to hear. In a first phone call with relatives, we prefer to focus on the positive.”

It came to Jude that he was still sick. The conversation had an unreal tinge to it that he associated with a fever. He shook his head and began to laugh. Then he noticed he was crying again. He wiped at his face with trembling hands.

“Focus on what positive?” he asked.

“The news could be worse,” the doctor said. “At least she’s stable now. And her heart was only stopped for a few minutes. People have been dead for longer. There should be only minimal—”

But Jude didn’t hear the rest.

49

Then he was in the halls,a six-foot-tall, 240-pound man, fifty-four years of age, the great bush of his black beard in ratty tangles and his hospital johnny flapping open in the back to show the scrawny, hairless cheeks of his ass. The doctor jogged beside him, and nurses gathered about, trying to redirect him back to his room, but he strode on, his IV drip still in his arm and the bag rattling along beside him on its wheeled frame. He was clearheaded, all the way awake, his hands not bothering him, his breathing fine. As he made his way along, he began calling her name. He was in surprisingly good voice.