Joe Hill: Heart-Shaped Box

three.

He drove to the Modern Medical Practice Clinic, where they had walk-in service. The small waiting room was almost full, and it was too warm, and there was a child screaming. A little girl lay on her back in the center of the room, producing great, howling sobs in between gasps for air. Her mother sat in a chair against the wall, and was bent over her, whispering furiously, frantically, a steady stream of threats, imprecations, and act-now-before-it’s-too-late offers. Once she tried to grip her daughter’s ankle, and the little girl kicked her hand away with a black buckled shoe.

The remainder of the people in the waiting room were determinedly ignoring the scene, looking blankly at magazines, or the muted TV in the corner. It was My Best Friend is a Sociopath! here too. Several of them glanced at Ig as he entered, a few in a hopeful sort of way, fantasizing, perhaps, that the little girl’s father had arrived to take her outside and deliver a brutal spanking. But as soon as they saw him they looked away, knew in a glance that he wasn’t there to help.

Ig wished he had brought a hat. He cupped a hand to his forehead, the way a person will when they want to shade their eyes to see into a distance on a sunny day, hoping to conceal his horns. If anyone noticed them, however, they gave no sign of it.

At the far end of the room was a window in the wall and a woman sitting at a computer on the other side. The receptionist had been staring at the mother of the crying child, but when Ig appeared before her, she looked up, and her lips twitched, formed a smile.

“What can I do you for?” she asked. She was already reaching toward a clipboard with some forms on it.

“I want a doctor to look at something,” Ig said, and lifted his hand slightly to reveal the horns.

She narrowed her eyes at them, and pursed her lips in a sympathetic moue.

“Well that doesn’t look right,” she said, and swiveled to her computer.

Whatever reaction Ig expected—and he hardly knew what he expected—it wasn’t this. She had reacted to the horns as if he had showed her a broken finger, or a rash . . . but she had reacted to them. Had seemed to see them. Only if she had really seen them, he could not imagine her simply puckering her lips and looking away.

“I just have to ask you a few questions. Name?”

“Ignatius Perrish.”

“Age?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Do you see a doctor locally?”

“I haven’t seen a doctor in years.”

She lifted her head and peered at him thoughtfully, frowning again, and he thought he was about to be scolded for not having regular check-ups. The little girl shrieked even more loudly than before. Ig turned his head in time to see her bash her mother in the knee with a red plastic firetruck, one of the toys stacked in the corner for kids to play with while waiting. Her mother yanked it out of her hands. The girl dropped onto her back again and began to kick at the air—like an overturned cockroach—wailing with renewed fury.

“I want to tell her to shut that miserable brat up,” the receptionist remarked, in a sunny, passing-the-time tone of voice. “What do you think?”

“Do you have a pen?” Ig asked, mouth dry. He held up the clipboard. “I’ll go fill these out.”

The receptionist’s shoulders slumped and her smile went out.

“Sure,” she said to Ig, and shoved a pen at him.

He turned his back to her and looked down at the forms clipped to the board, but his eyes wouldn’t focus.

She had seen the horns but hadn’t thought them unusual. And then she had said that thing about the girl who was crying and her helpless mother: I want to tell her to shut that miserable brat up . She had wanted to know if he thought it would be okay. So had Glenna, wondering if it would be all right to stick her face in the box of donuts and feed like a pig at the trough.

He looked for a place to sit. There were exactly two empty chairs, one on either side of the mother. As Ig approached, the girl reached deep into her lungs, and dredged up a shrill scream that shook the windows and caused some in the waiting area to flinch. Advancing forward into that sound was like moving into a knee-buckling gale.

As Ig sat, the girl’s mother slumped back in her chair, swatting herself in the leg with a rolled-up magazine . . . which was not, Ig felt, what she really wanted to hit with it. The little girl seemed to have exhausted herself with this final cry, and now lay on her back with tears running down her red and ugly face. Her mother was red in the face too. She cast a miserable, eye-rolling glance at Ig. Her gaze seemed to briefly catch on his horns—and then shifted away.

“Sorry about the ridiculous noise,” she said, and touched Ig’s hand in a gesture of apology.

And when she did, when her skin brushed his, Ig knew her name was Allie Letterworth, and that for the last four months she had been sleeping with her golf instructor, meeting him at a motel down the road from the links. Last week they had fallen asleep after an episode of strenuous fucking, and Allie’s cell phone had been off, and so she had missed the increasingly frantic calls from her daughter’s summer day camp, wondering where she was and when she would be by to pick up her little girl. When she finally arrived, two hours late, her daughter was in hysterics, red-faced, snot boiling from her nose, her blood-shot eyes wild, and Allie had to get her a sixty-dollar Webkinz, and a banana split, to calm her down and buy her silence; it was the only way to keep her husband from finding out. If she had known what a drag a kid was going to be, she never would’ve had one.

Ig pulled his hand away from her.

The girl began to grunt and stamp her feet on the floor. Allie Letterworth sighed and leaned toward Ig and said, “For what it’s worth, I’d love to kick her right in her spoiled ass, but I’m worried about what all these people would say if I hit her. Do you think—“

“No,” Ig said.

He couldn’t know the things he knew about her, but knew them anyway, the way he knew his cell phone number, or his address. He knew, too, with utter certainty, that Allie Letterworth would not talk about kicking her daughter’s spoiled ass with a total stranger. She had said it like someone talking to themselves.

“No,” repeated Allie Letterworth, opening her magazine, and then letting it fall shut. “I guess I can’t do that. I wonder if I ought to get up and go. Just leave her here and drive away. I could go stay with Michael, hide from the world, drink gin, and fuck all the time. My husband would get me on abandonment, but like, who cares? Would you want partial custody of that? ”

“Is Michael your golf instructor?” Ig asked.

She nodded dreamily and smiled at him and said, “The funny thing is I never would’ve signed up for lessons with him if I knew Michael was a nigger. Before Tiger Woods there weren’t any jigaboos in golf except if they were carrying your clubs . . . it was one place you could go to get away from them. You know the way most blacks are, always on their cell phones with f-word this and f-word that, and the way they look at white women. But Michael is educated. He talks just like a white person. And it’s true what they say about black dicks. I’ve screwed tons of white guys, and there wasn’t one of ‘em who was hung like Michael.” She wrinkled her nose and said, “We call it the five-iron.”

Ig jumped to his feet and walked quickly to the receptionist’s window. He hastily scribbled answers to a few questions and then offered her the clipboard.

Behind him the little girl screamed, “ No! No I won’t sit up!”

“I feel like I have to say something to that girl’s mother,” said the receptionist, looking past Ig at the woman and her daughter, paying no attention to the clipboard. “I know it’s not her fault her daughter is a screechy puke but I really want to say just one thing.”