Heart-shaped box (17 page)

Jude didn’t reply, didn’t think a reply was called for, and anyway was not sure whether the story was true or the latest in a succession of self-delusions that had haunted her.

She sighed, let another strand of her hair flop.
“I was sayin’, though, that he wouldn’t like you, and he has ways of gettin’ rid of my friends when he doesn’t like them. A lot of daddies are overprotective of their little girls, and if someone comes around they don’t care for, they might try and scare ’em off. Lean on ’em a little. Course that never works, because the girl always takes the boy’s side, and the boy keeps after her, either because he can’t be scared or doesn’t want her to
think
he can be scared. My stepdaddy’s smarter than that. He’s as friendly as can be, even with people he’d like to see burnt alive. If he ever wants to get rid of someone he doesn’t want around me, he drives them off by tellin’ ’em the truth. The truth is usually enough.

“Give you an example. When I was sixteen, I started running around with this boy I just knew my old man wouldn’t like, on account of this kid was Jewish, and also we’d listen to rap together. Pop hates rap worst of all. So one day my stepdaddy told me it was going to stop, and I said I could see who I wanted, and he said sure, but that didn’t mean the kid would keep wantin’ to see me. I didn’t like the sound of that, but he didn’t explain himself.

“Well, you’ve seen how I get low sometimes and start thinkin’ crazy things. That all started when I was twelve, maybe, same time as puberty. I didn’t see a doctor or anything. My stepdaddy treated me himself, with hypnotherapy. He could hold things in check pretty good, too, as long as we sat down once or twice a week. I wouldn’t get up to any of my crazy business. I wouldn’t think there was a dark truck circling the house. I wouldn’t see little girls with coals for eyes watchin’ me from under the trees at night.

“But he had to go away. He had to go to Austin for some conference on hypnogogic drugs. Usually he took me along when he went on one of
his trips, but this time he left me at home with Jessie. My mom was dead by then, and Jessie was nineteen and in charge. And while he was gone I started havin’ trouble sleepin’. That’s always the first sign I’m gettin’ low, when I start havin’ insomnia.

“After a couple nights, I started seein’ the girls with the burning eyes. I couldn’t go to school on Monday, because they were waitin’ outside under the oak tree. I was too scared to go out. I told Jessie. I said she had to make Pop come home, that I was gettin’ bad ideas again. She told me she was tired of my crazy shit and that he was busy and I would be all right till he got back. She tried to make me go to school, but I wouldn’t. I stayed in my room and watched television. But pretty soon they started talkin’ to me through the TV. The dead girls. Tellin’ me I was dead like they was. That I belonged in the dirt with them.

“Usually Jessie got back from school at two or three. But she didn’t come home that afternoon. It got later and later, and every time I looked out the window, I saw the girls starin’ back at me. My stepdad called, and I told him I was in trouble and please come home, and he said he’d come quick as he could, but he wouldn’t be back until late. He said he was worried I might hurt myself and he’d call someone to come be with me. After he hung up, he phoned Philip’s parents, who lived up the street from us.”

“Philip? Was this your boyfriend? The Jewish kid?”

“Uh-huh. Phil came right over. I didn’t know him. I hid under the bed from him, and I screamed when he tried to touch me. I asked him if he was with the dead girls. I told him all about them. Jessie showed up pretty soon afterward, and Philip ran off quick as he could. After that he was so freaked out he didn’t want to have anything to do with me. And my stepdaddy just said what a shame. He thought Philip was my friend. He thought Philip, more than anyone else, could be trusted to look out for me when I was havin’ a rough time.”

“So is that what’s worrying you? Your old man is going to let me know
you’re a lunatic and I’ll be so shocked I won’t ever want to see you again? ’Cause I got to tell you, Florida, hearing you get kind of crazy now and then wouldn’t exactly be a newsflash.”

She snorted, soft breathy laughter. Then she said,
“He wouldn’t say that. I don’t know what he’d say. He’d just find somethin’ to make you like me a little less. If you
can
like me any less.”

“Let’s not start with that.”

“No. No, on second thought maybe you best call my sister instead. She’s an unkind bitch—we don’t get along a lick. She never forgave me for being cuter than her and gettin’ better Christmas presents. After Momma died, she had to be Susie Homemaker, but I still got to be a kid. Jessie was doin’ our laundry and cookin’ our meals by the time she was fourteen, and no one has ever been able to appreciate how hard she had to work or how little fun she got to have. But she’ll arrange to get me home without any nonsense. She’ll like havin’ me back, so she can boss me around and make rules for me.”

But when Jude called her sister’s house, he got the old man anyway, who answered on the third ring.

“What’n I do for you? Go ahead and talk. I’ll help you if I can.”

Jude introduced himself. He said Anna wanted to come home for a while, making it out to be more her idea than his. Jude wrestled mentally with how to describe her condition, but Craddock came to his rescue.

“How’s she sleepin’?”
Craddock asked.

“Not too well,”
Jude said, relieved, understanding somehow that this said it all.

Jude offered to have a chauffeur drive Anna from the train station in Jacksonville to Jessica’s house in Testament, but Craddock said no, he would meet her at the Amtrak himself.

“A drive to Jacksonville will suit me fine. Any excuse to get out in my truck for a few hours. Put the windows down. Make faces at the cows.”

“I hear that,”
Jude said, forgetting himself and warming to the old man.

“I appreciate you takin’ care of my little girl like you done. You know,
when she was just a pup, she had posters of you all over her walls. She always did want to meet you. You and that fella from…what was their name? That Mötley Crüe? Now, she
really
loved them. She followed them for half a year. She was at all their shows. She got to know some of them, too. Not the band, I guess, but their road team. Them were her wild years. Not that she’s real settled now, is she? Yeah, she loved all your albums. She loved all kinds of that heavy metal music. I always knew she’d find herself a rock star.”

Jude felt a dry, ticklish sensation of cold spreading behind his chest. He knew what Craddock was telling him
—
that she had fucked roadies to hang with Mötley Crüe, that star fucking was a thing with her, and if she wasn’t sleeping with him, she’d be in the sack with Vince Neil or Slash
—
and he also knew
why
Craddock was telling him. For the same reason he had let Anna’s Jewish friend see her when she was out of her head, to put a wedge between them.

What Jude had not foreseen was that he could know what Craddock was doing and it could work anyway. No sooner had Craddock said it than Jude started thinking where he and Anna had met, backstage at a Trent Reznor show. How had she got there? Who did she know, and what did she have to do for a backstage pass? If Trent had walked into the room right then, would she have sat at his feet instead and asked the same sweet, pointless questions?

“I’ll take care of her, Mr. Coyne. You just send her back to me. I’ll be waitin’,”
Craddock told him.

Jude took her to Penn Station himself. She’d been at her best all morning
—
was trying very hard, he knew, to be the person he’d met, not the unhappy person she really was
—
but whenever he looked at her, he felt that dry sensation of chill in his chest again. Her elfish grins, the way she tucked her hair behind her ears to show her studded little pink earlobes, her latest round of goofy questions, seemed like cold-blooded manipulations and only made him want to get away from her even more.

If she sensed, however, that he was holding her at a distance, she gave no
sign, and at Penn Station she stood on tiptoe and put her arms around his neck in a fierce hug
—
an embrace without any sexual connotations at all.

“We had us some fun, didn’t we?”
she asked. Always with her questions.

“Sure,”
he said. He could’ve said more
—
that he’d call her soon, that he wanted her to take better care of herself
—
but he didn’t have it in him, couldn’t wish her well. When the urge came over him, to be tender, to be compassionate, he heard her stepdaddy’s voice in his head, warm, friendly, persuasive:
“I always knew she’d find herself a rock star.”

Anna grinned, as if he had replied with something quite clever, and squeezed his hand. He stayed long enough to watch her board but didn’t remain to see the train depart. It was crowded and loud on the platform, noisy with echoing voices. He felt harried and jostled, and the stink of the place
—
a smell of hot iron, stale piss, and warm, sweating bodies
—
oppressed him.

But it wasn’t any better outside, in the rainy fall cool of Manhattan. The sense of being jostled, hemmed in from all sides, remained with him all the way back to the Pierre Hotel, all the way back even to the quiet and emptiness of his suite. He was belligerent, needed to do something with himself, needed to make some ugly noises of his own.

Four hours later he was in just the right place, in Howard Stern’s broadcasting studio, where he insulted and hectored, humiliated Stern’s entourage of slow-witted ass kissers when they were foolish enough to interrupt him, and delivered his fire sermon of perversion and hate, chaos and ridicule. Stern loved him. His people wanted to know when Jude could come back.

He was still in New York City that weekend, and in the same mood, when he agreed to meet some of the guys from Stern’s crew at a Broadway strip club. They were all the same people he had mocked in front of an audience of millions earlier in the week. They didn’t take it personally. Being mocked was their job. They were crazy for him. They thought he had killed.

He ordered a beer he didn’t drink and sat at the end of a runway that appeared to be one long, frosted pane of glass, lit from beneath with soft blue
gels. The faces gathered in the shadows around the runway all looked wrong to him, unnatural, unwholesome: the faces of the drowned. His head hurt. When he shut his eyes, he saw the lurid, flashing fireworks show that was prelude to a migraine.

When he opened his eyes, a girl with a knife in one hand sank to her knees in front of him. Her eyes were closed. She folded slowly backward, so the back of her head touched the glass floor, her soft, feathery black hair spread across the runway. She was still on her knees.

She moved the knife down her body, a big-bladed hunting bowie with a wide, serrated edge. She wore a dog collar with silver rings on it, a teddy with laces across the bosom that squeezed her breasts together, black stockings.

When the handle of the knife was between her legs, blade pointing at the ceiling
—
parody of a penis
—
she flung it into the air, and her eyes sprang open, and she caught it when it came down and arched her back at the same time, raising her chest to the ceiling like an offering, and sliced the knife downward.

She hacked the black lace down the middle, opening a dark red slash, as if slitting herself from throat to crotch. She rolled and threw off the costume, and beneath she was naked except for the silver rings through her nipples, which swung from her breasts, and a G-string pulled up past her hard hip bones. Her supple, sealskin-smooth torso was crimson with body paint.

AC/DC was playing “If You Want Blood You Got It,” and what turned him on wasn’t her young, athletic body or the way her breasts swung with the hoops of silver through them or how, when she looked right at him, her stare was direct and unafraid.

It was that her lips were moving, just barely. He doubted if anyone else in the whole room besides him even noticed. She was singing to herself, singing along to AC/DC. She knew all the words. It was the sexiest thing he’d seen in months.

He raised his beer to her, only to find that it was empty. He had no
memory of drinking it. The waitress brought him another a few minutes later. From her he learned that the dancer with the knife was named Morphine and was one of their most popular girls. It cost him a hundred to get her phone number and to find out she’d been dancing for around two years, almost to the day she stepped off the bus from Georgia. It cost him another hundred to get that when she wasn’t stripping, she answered to Marybeth.

J
ude took the wheel just before
they crossed into Georgia. His head hurt, an uncomfortable feeling of pressure on his eyeballs more than anything else. The sensation was aggravated by the southern sunshine glinting off just about everything—fenders, windshields, road signs. If not for his aching head, the sky would’ve been a pleasure, a deep, dark, cloudless blue.

As the Florida state line approached, he was conscious of a mounting anticipation, a nervous tickle in the stomach. Testament was by then perhaps only four hours away. He would be at her house tonight, Jessie Price, née McDermott, sister to Anna, elder stepdaughter to Craddock, and he did not know what he might do when he reached the place.

It had crossed his mind that when he found her, it might end in death for someone. He had thought already that he could kill her for what she’d done, that she was
asking
for it, but for the first time, now that he was close to facing her, the idea became more than angry speculation.

He’d killed pigs as a boy, had picked up the fall-behinds by the legs and smashed their brains out on the concrete floor of his father’s cutting room. You swung them into the air and then hit the floor with them, silencing them in midsqueal with a sickening and somehow hollow
splitting sound, the same noise a watermelon would make if dropped from a great height. He’d shot other hogs with the bolt gun and imagined he was killing his father as he did it.

Jude had made up his mind to do whatever he had to. He just didn’t know what that was yet. And when he thought about it closely, he dreaded learning, was almost as afraid of his own possibilities as he was of the thing coming after him, the thing that had once been Craddock McDermott.

He thought Georgia was dozing, did not know she was awake until she spoke.

“It’s the next exit,” she said in a sand-grain voice.

Her grandmother. Jude had forgotten about her, had forgotten he’d promised to stop.

He followed her instructions, hung a left at the bottom of the off-ramp and took a two-lane state highway through the shabby outskirts of Crickets, Georgia. They rolled by used-car lots, with their thousands of red, white, and blue plastic pennants flapping in the wind, let the flow of traffic carry them into the town itself. They cruised along one edge of the grassy town square, past the courthouse, the town hall, and the eroded brick edifice of the Eagle Theater.

The route to Bammy’s house led them through the green grounds of a small Baptist college. Young men, with ties tucked into their V-neck sweaters, walked beside girls in pleated skirts, with combed, shining hairdos straight out of the old Breck shampoo commercials. Some of the students stared at Jude and Georgia, in the Mustang, the shepherds standing up in the backseat, Bon and Angus breathing steam on the rear windows. A girl, walking beside a taller boy who sported a yellow bow tie, shrank back against her companion as they went past. Bow Tie put a comforting arm around her shoulders. Jude did not flip them off and then drove for a few blocks feeling good about himself, proud of his restraint. His self-control, it was like iron.

Beyond the college they found themselves on a street lined with
well-kept Victorians and Colonials, shingles out front advertising the practices of lawyers and dentists. Farther down the avenue, the houses were smaller, and people lived in them. At a lemon Cape with yellow roses growing on a flower trellis to one side, Georgia said, “Turn in.”

The woman who answered the door was not fat but stocky, built like a defensive tackle, with a broad, dark face, a silky mustache and clever, girlish eyes, a brown shot through with jade. Her flip-flops smacked against the floor. She stared at Jude and Georgia for a beat, while Georgia grinned a shy, awkward grin. Then something in her grandmother’s eyes (Grandmother? How old was she? Sixty? Fifty-five? The disorienting thought crossed Jude’s mind that she might even be younger than himself ) sharpened, as if a lens had been brought into focus, and she screamed and threw open her arms. Georgia fell into them.

“M.B.!” Bammy cried. Then she leaned away from her, and, still holding her by the hips, stared into her face. “What is wrong with you?”

She put a palm to Georgia’s forehead. Georgia twisted from her touch. Bammy saw her bandaged hand next, caught her by the wrist, gave it a speculative look. Then she let go of the hand—almost flung it away.

“You strung out? Christ. You smell like a dog.”

“No, Bammy. I swear to God, I am not on no drugs right now. I smell like a dog because I’ve had dogs climbin’ all over me for most of two days. Why do you always got to think the worst damn thing?” The process that had begun almost a thousand miles before, when they started traveling south, seemed to have completed itself, so that everything Georgia said sounded country now.

Only had her accent really started reasserting itself once they were on the road? Or had she started slipping into it even earlier? Jude thought maybe he’d been hearing the redneck in her voice going all the way back to the day she stuck herself with the nonexistent pin in the dead man’s suit. Her verbal transformation disconcerted and unsettled him. When she talked that way—
Why do you always got to think the worst damn thing?
—she sounded like Anna.

Bon squeezed into the gap between Jude and Georgia and looked hopefully up at Bammy. The long pink ribbon of Bon’s tongue hung out, spit plopping from it. In the green rectangle of the yard, Angus tracked this way and that, whuffing his nose at the flowers growing around the picket fence.

Bammy looked first at Jude’s Doc Martens, then up to his scraggly black beard, taking in scrapes, the dirt, the bandage wrapped around his left hand.

“You the rock star?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You both look like you been in a fight. Was it with each other?”

“No, Bammy,” Georgia said.

“That’s cute, with the matchin’ bandages on your hands. Is that some kind of romantic thing? Did you two brand each other as a sign of your affection? In my day we used to trade class rings.”

“No, Bammy. We’re fine. We were drivin’ through on our way to Florida, and I said we should stop. I wanted you to meet Jude.”

“You should’ve called. I would’ve started dinner.”

“We can’t stay. We got to get to Florida tonight.”

“You don’t got to get anywhere except bed. Or maybe the hospital.”

“I’m fine.”

“The hell. You’re the furthest thing from fine I’ve ever laid eyes on.” She plucked at a strand of black hair stuck to Georgia’s damp cheek. “You’re covered in sweat. I know sick when I see it.”

“I’m just boiled, is all. I spent the last eight hours trapped inside that car with those ugly dogs and bad air-conditionin’. Are you going to move your wide ass out of the way, or are you going to make me climb back into that car and drive some more?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“What’s the holdup?”

“I’m tryin’ to figure what the chances are you two are here to slaughter me for the money in my purse and take it to buy OxyContin. Everyone is
on it these days. There’s kids in junior high prostitutin’ themselves for it. I learned about it on the news this morning.”

“Lucky for you we aren’t in junior high.”

Bammy seemed about to reply, but then her gaze flicked past Jude’s elbow, fixed on something in the yard.

He glanced back to see what. Angus was in a squat, body contracted as if his torso contained an accordion, the shiny black fur of his back humped up into folds, and he was dropping shit after shit into the grass.

“I’ll clean up. Sorry about that,” Jude said.

“I’m not,” Georgia said. “You take a good look, Bammy. If I don’t see a toilet in the next minute or two, that’s gonna be me.”

Bammy lowered her heavily mascaraed eyelids and stepped out of the way. “Come on in, then. I don’t want the neighbors seein’ you standin’ around out here anyway. They’ll think I’m startin’ my own chapter of the Hells Angels.”