Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

“Well,” Jude said. “We weren’t far from my daddy’s place, and I knew my aunt was there. She’s a registered nurse.”

“That so? Tell me about the car that hit you.”

“A truck,” Jude said. “A pickup.” He glanced at Nan, who nodded, just slightly, eyes watchful and certain. Jude drew a deep breath and began to lie.

51

Before Nan left his room,she hesitated in the doorway and looked back at Jude. That grin was on her face again, the stretched, forced one that made Jude sad.

“She really is beautiful, Jude,” Nan said. “And she loves you. You can tell the way she talks about you. I spoke to her. Only for a moment, but…but you can tell. Georgia, is she?” Nan’s eyes were shy, and pained, and affectionate, all at once. She asked the question like she wasn’t sure if she really wanted to know.

“Marybeth,” Jude said firmly. “Her name is Marybeth.”

52

They were back in New Yorktwo weeks later for Danny’s memorial service. Marybeth wore a black scarf around her neck that matched her black lace gloves. The afternoon was windy and cold, but the gathering was well attended nonetheless. It seemed everyone Danny had ever chatted up, gossiped with, or blabbed to on the phone was there, and that was a lot, and none of them left early, not even when the rain began to fall.

53

In the spring Jude recorded an album,stripped down, mostly acoustic. He sang about the dead. He sang about roads at night. Other men played the guitar parts. He could handle rhythm, but that was all, had needed to switch back to making chords with the left, as he had in his childhood, and he wasn’t as good at it.

The new CD sold well. He did not tour. He had a triple bypass instead.

Marybeth taught dance at a tony gym in High Plains. Her classes were crowded.

54

Marybeth found a derelict Dodge Chargerin a local auto graveyard, brought it home for three hundred dollars. Jude spent the next summer sweating in the yard with his shirt off, restoring it. He came in late each night, all of him tanned, except for the shiny silver scar down the center of his chest. Marybeth was always waiting just inside the door, with a glass of homemade lemonade. Sometimes they would trade a kiss that tasted of cold juice and motor oil. They were his favorite kisses.

55

One afternoon,close to the end of August, Jude wandered inside, sweating and sunburned, and found a message on the machine from Nan. She said she had some information for him and he could call her back anytime. Anytime was now, and he rang her in her office. He sat on the edge of Danny’s old desk while Nan’s receptionist patched him through.

“I’m afraid I don’t have a lot to tell you about this George Ruger person,” Nan said without any preamble. “You wanted to know if he’s been mentioned in any criminal proceedings in the last year, and the answer to that appears to be no. Maybe if I had more information from you, as to exactly what your interest in him is…”

“No. Don’t worry about it,” Jude said.

So Ruger hadn’t brought any kind of complaint to the authorities; no surprise. If he was going to bring a suit, or try to have Jude arrested, Jude would’ve known about it by now anyway. He hadn’t really expected Nan to come up with anything. Ruger couldn’t talk about what Jude had done to him without risking that it would come out about Marybeth, how he’d slept with her when she was still in junior high. He was, Jude remembered, an important figure in local politics. It was hard to run a really effective fund-raiser after you’d been accused of statutory rape.

“I had a little more luck concerning Jessica Price.”

“You did,” Jude said. Just hearing her name made his stomach knot up.

When Nan spoke again, it was in a falsely casual tone, a little too cool to be persuasive. “This Price is under investigation for child endangerment and sexual abuse. Her own daughter, if you can imagine. Apparently the police came to her home after someone called in an accident report. Price drove her car into someone else’s vehicle, right in front of her house, forty miles an hour. When the police got there, they found her unconscious behind the wheel. And her daughter was in the house with a gun and a dead dog on the floor.”

Nan paused to allow Jude a chance to comment, but Jude didn’t have anything to say.

Nan went on, “Whoever Price drove her car into took off. Never found.”

“Didn’t Price tell them? What’s her story?”

“No story. See, after the police calmed the little girl down, they took the gun away. When they went to put it back where it belonged, they found an envelope with photos in it, hidden in the velvet lining of the pistol’s case. Polaroids of the girl. Criminal stuff. Horrible. Apparently they can establish that the mother took them. Jessica Price could be looking at up to ten years. And I understand her girl is only just thirteen. Isn’t that the most terrible thing?”

“It is,” Jude said. “Just about.”

“Would you believe all of this happened—Jessica Price’s car accident, dead dog, photos—on the same day your daddy died in Louisiana?”

Again Jude did not reply—silence felt safer.

Nan went on, “Following her lawyer’s advice, Jessica Price has been exercising her legal right to remain silent ever since her arrest. Which makes sense for her. And is also a lucky break for whoever else was there. You know—with the dog.”

Jude held the receiver to his ear. Nan was silent for so long he began to wonder if they’d been cut off.

At last, just to find out if she was still on the line, he said, “That all?”

“One other thing,” Nan said. Her tone was perfectly bland. “A carpenter doing work down the street said he saw a suspicious pair in a black car lurking around earlier in the day. He said the driver was the spitting image of the lead singer of Metallica.”

Jude had to laugh.

56

On the second weekend of November,the Dodge Charger pulled out of a churchyard on a red clay dirt road in Georgia, cans rattling from the back. Bammy stuck her fingers in her mouth and blew rude whistles.

57

One fall they went to Fiji.The fall after, they visited Greece. Next October they went to Hawaii, spent ten hours a day on a beach of crushed black sand. Naples, the year following, was even better. They went for a week and stayed for a month.

In the autumn of their fifth anniversary, they didn’t go anywhere. Jude had bought puppies and didn’t want to leave them. One day, when it was chilly and wet, Jude walked with the new dogs down the driveway to collect the mail. As he was tugging the envelopes out of the box, just beyond the front gate, a pale pickup blasted by on the highway, throwing cold spray at his back, and when he turned to watch it go, he saw Anna staring at him from across the road. He felt a sharp twinge in the chest, which quickly abated, leaving him panting.

She pushed a yellow strand of hair back from her eyes, and he saw then that she was shorter, more athletically built than Anna, just a girl, eighteen at best. She lifted one hand in a tentative wave. He gestured for her to cross the road.

“Hi, Mr. Coyne,” she said.

“Reese, isn’t it?” he said.

She nodded. She didn’t have a hat, and her hair was wet. Her denim jacket was soaked through. The puppies leaped at her, and she twisted away from them, laughing.

“Jimmy,” Jude said. “Robert. Get down. Sorry. They’re an uncouth bunch, and I haven’t taught them their manners yet. Will you come in?” She was shivering just slightly. “You’re getting drenched. You’ll catch your death.”