Heart-shaped box (2 page)

T
he suit came early Saturday morning.
Jude was up and outside with the dogs.

Angus lunged as soon as the UPS truck ground to a halt, and the leash was yanked out of Jude’s hand. Angus leaped against the side of the parked truck, spit flying, paws scuffling furiously against the driver’s-side door. The driver remained behind the wheel, peering down at him with the calm but intent expression of a doctor considering a new strain of Ebola through a microscope. Jude caught the leash and pulled on it, harder than he meant to. Angus sprawled on his side in the dirt, then twisted and sprang back up, snarling. By now Bon was in on the act, straining at the end of her leash, which Jude held in his other hand, and yapping with a shrillness that hurt his head.

Because it was too far to haul them all the way back to the barn and their pen, Jude dragged them across the yard and up to the front porch, both of them fighting him the whole time. He shoveled them in through the front door and slammed it behind them. Immediately they set to flinging themselves against it, barking hysterically. The door shuddered as they slammed into it. Fucking dogs.

Jude shuffled back down into the driveway, and reached the UPS
truck just as the rear door slid open with a steely clatter. The deliveryman stood inside. He hopped down, holding a long, flat box under his arm.

“Ozzy Osbourne has Pomeranians,” the UPS guy said. “I saw them on TV. Cute little dogs like house cats. You ever think about getting a couple cute little dogs like that?”

Jude took the box without a word and went inside.

He brought the box through the house and into the kitchen. He put it on the counter and poured coffee. Jude was an early riser by instinct and conditioning. When he was on the road, or recording, he had become accustomed to rolling into bed at five in the morning and sleeping through most of the daylight hours, but staying up all night had never come naturally. On the road he would wake at four in the afternoon, bad-tempered and headachy, confused about where the time had gone. Everyone he knew would seem to him clever impostors, unfeeling aliens wearing rubber skin and the faces of friends. It took a liberal quantity of alcohol to make them seem like themselves again.

Only it had been three years since he’d last gone on tour. He didn’t have much interest in drinking when he was home, and was ready for bed most nights by nine. At the age of fifty-four, he had settled back into the rhythms that had guided him since his name was Justin Cowzynski and he was a boy on his father’s hog farm. The illiterate son of a bitch would have dragged him out of bed by the hair if he’d found him in it when the sun came up. It was a childhood of mud, barking dogs, barbed wire, dilapidated farm buildings, squealing pigs with their flaking skin and squashed-in faces, and little human contact, beyond a mother who sat most of the day at the kitchen table wearing the slack, staring aspect of someone who had been lobotomized, and his father, who ruled their acres of pig shit and ruin with his angry laughter and his fists.

So Jude had been up for several hours already but had not eaten breakfast yet, and he was frying bacon when Georgia wandered into the kitchen. She was dressed only in a pair of black panties, her arms folded across her small, white, pierced breasts, her black hair floating around
her head in a soft, tangly nest. Her name wasn’t really Georgia. It wasn’t Morphine either, although she had stripped under that name for two years. Her name was Marybeth Kimball, a handle so simple, so plain, she’d laughed when she first told him, as if it embarrassed her.

Jude had worked his way through a collection of Goth girlfriends who stripped, or told fortunes, or stripped
and
told fortunes, pretty girls who wore ankhs and black fingernail polish, and whom he always called by their state of origin, a habit few of them cared for, because they didn’t like to be reminded of the person they were trying to erase with all their living-dead makeup. She was twenty-three.

“Goddam stupid dogs,” she said, shoving one of them out of her way with her heel. They were whisking around Jude’s legs, excited by the perfume of the bacon. “Woke me the fuck up.”

“Maybe it was time to get the fuck up. Ever think?” She never rose before ten if she could help it.

She bent into the fridge for the orange juice. He enjoyed the view, the way the straps of her underwear cut into the almost-too-white cheeks of her ass, but he looked away while she drank from the carton. She left it on the counter, too. It would spoil there if he didn’t put it away for her.

He was glad for the adoration of the Goths. He appreciated the sex even more, their limber, athletic, tattooed bodies and eagerness for kink. But he had been married once, to a woman who used a glass and put things away when she was done, who read the paper in the morning, and he missed their talk. It was grown-up talk. She hadn’t been a stripper. She didn’t believe in fortune-telling. It was grown-up companionship.

Georgia used a steak knife to slice open the UPS box, then left the knife on the counter, with tape stuck to it.

“What’s this?” she asked.

A second box was contained within the first. It was a tight fit, and Georgia had to tug for a while to slide the inner box out onto the counter. It was large, and shiny, and black, and it was shaped like a heart. Candies sometimes came in boxes like that, although this was much too big
for candies, and candy boxes were pink or sometimes yellow. A lingerie box, then—except he hadn’t ordered anything of the kind for her. He frowned. He didn’t have any idea what might be in it and at the same time felt somehow he
should
know, that the heart-shaped box contained something he’d been expecting.

“Is this for me?” she asked.

She pried the lid loose and took out what was inside, lifting it for him to see. A suit. Someone had sent him a suit. It was black and old-fashioned, the details blurred by the plastic dry-cleaning bag pulled over it. Georgia held it up by the shoulders, in front of her body, almost as if it were a dress she was thinking of trying on but she wanted his opinion of it first. Her gaze was questioning, a pretty furrow between her eyebrows. For a moment he didn’t remember, didn’t know why it had come.

He opened his mouth to tell her he had no clue, but then instead heard himself say, “The dead man’s suit.”

“What?”

“The ghost,” he said, remembering as he spoke. “I bought a ghost. Some woman was convinced her stepfather was haunting her. So she put his restless spirit up for sale on the Internet, and I bought it for a grand. That’s his suit. She thinks it might be the source of the haunting.”

“Oh, cool,” Georgia said. “So are you going to wear it?”

His own reaction surprised him. His skin crawled, went rough and strange with gooseflesh. For one unconsidered moment, the idea struck him as obscene.

“No,” he said, and she flicked a surprised glance at him, hearing something cold and flat in his voice. Her smirk deepened a little, and he realized he had sounded…well, not frightened but momentarily weak. He added, “It wouldn’t fit.” Although, in truth, it looked as if the poltergeist had been about his height and weight in life.

Georgia said, “Maybe I’ll wear it. I’m a bit of a restless spirit myself. And I look hot in men’s clothing.”

Again: a sensation of revulsion, a crawling of the skin. She shouldn’t put it on. It unsettled him that she would even joke about it, although he couldn’t have said why. He wasn’t going to let her put it on. In that one instant, he could not imagine anything more repellent.

And that was saying something. There wasn’t much that Jude found too distasteful to contemplate. He was unused to feeling disgust. The profane didn’t trouble him; it had made him a good living for thirty years.

“I’ll stick it upstairs until I figure out what to do with it,” he said, trying for a dismissive tone—and not quite making it.

She stared at him, interested at this wavering of his usual self-possession, and then she pulled off the plastic dry-cleaning bag. The coat’s silver buttons flashed in the light. The suit was somber, as dark as crow feathers, but those buttons, the size of quarters, gave it something of a rustic character. Add a string tie and it was the sort of thing Johnny Cash might’ve worn onstage.

Angus began to bark, high, shrill, panicked barking. He shoved himself back on his haunches, tail lowered, rearing away from the suit. Georgia laughed.

“It
is
haunted,” she said.

She held the suit in front of her and waved it back and forth, walking it through the air toward Angus, flapping it at him, a bullfighter with cape. She moaned as she closed in on him, the throaty, drawn-out cry of a wandering haunt, while her eyes gleamed with pleasure.

Angus scrambled back, hit a stool at the kitchen counter, and knocked it over with a ringing crash. Bon stared out from beneath the old, bloodstained chopping block, ears flattened against her skull. Georgia laughed again.

“Cut it the fuck out,” Jude said.

She shot him a snotty, perversely happy look—the look of a child burning ants with a magnifying glass—and then she made a face of pain and shouted. Swore and grabbed her right hand. She flung the suit aside onto the counter.

A bright drop of blood fattened at the tip of her thumb and fell,
plink
, onto the tiled floor.

“Shit,” she said. “Fucking pin.”

“You see what you get.”

She glared, flipped him the bird, and stalked out. When she was gone, he got up and put the juice back into the fridge. Jude dropped the knife in the sink, got a hand towel to wipe the blood off the floor—and then his gaze caught on the suit, and he forgot whatever it was he’d been about to do.

He smoothed it out, folded the arms over the chest, felt carefully around. Jude couldn’t find any pins, couldn’t figure out what she’d stuck herself on. He laid it gently back into its box.

An acrid odor caught his attention. He glanced into the pan and cursed. The bacon was burnt.

H
e put the box on the shelf
in the back of his closet and decided to stop thinking about it.

H
e was passing back through the kitchen,
a little before six, to get sausages for the grill, when he heard someone whispering in Danny’s office.

The sound jumped him and halted him in his tracks. Danny had gone home more than an hour ago, and the office was locked, should’ve been empty. Jude tilted his head to listen, concentrating intently on the low, sibilant voice…and in another moment he identified what he was hearing, and his pulse began to slow.

There was no one in there. It was only someone talking on the radio. Jude could tell. The low tones weren’t low enough, the voice itself subtly flattened out. Sounds could suggest shapes, painted a picture of the pocket of air in which they’d been given form. A voice in a well had a deep, round echo, while a voice in a closet sounded condensed, all the fullness squeezed out of it. Music was also geometry. What Jude was hearing now was a voice clapped into a box. Danny had forgotten to turn off the radio.

He opened the door to the office, poked his head in. The lights were off, and with the sun on the other side of the building, the room drowned in blue shadow. The office stereo was the third-worst in the house, which was still better than most home stereos, a stack of Onkyo components in
a glass cabinet by the water cooler. The readouts were lit a vivid, unnatural green, the color of objects viewed through a night-vision scope, except for a single, glowing, vertical slash of red, a ruby mark showing the frequency to which the radio was tuned. The mark was a narrow slit, the shape of a cat’s pupil, and seemed to stare into the office with an unblinking, alien fascination.

“…How cold is it going to get tonight?” said the man on the radio in a husky, almost abrasive tone. A fat man, judging by the wheeze when he exhaled. “Do we have to worry about finding bums frozen to the ground?”

“Your concern for the welfare of the homeless is touching,” said a second man, this one with a voice that was a little thin, reedy.

It was WFUM, where most of the bands were named after fatal diseases (Anthrax), or conditions of decay (Rancid), and where the DJs tended to be preoccupied with crotch lice, strippers, and the amusing humiliations that attended the poor, the crippled, and the elderly. They were known to play Jude’s music, more or less constantly, which was why Danny kept the stereo tuned to them, as an act of both loyalty and flattery. In truth, Jude suspected that Danny had no particular musical preferences, no strong likes or dislikes, and that the radio was just background sound, the auditory equivalent of wallpaper. If he had worked for Enya, Danny would’ve happily hummed along to Celtic chanting while answering her e-mails and sending faxes.

Jude started across the room to turn off the stereo but had not gone far before his step hitched, a memory snagging at his thoughts. An hour ago he’d been outside with the dogs. He had stood at the end of the dirt turnaround, enjoying the sharpness of the air, the sting on his cheeks. Someone down the road was burning a waste pile of deadfall and autumn leaves, and the faint odor of the spiced smoke had pleased him as well.

Danny had come out of the office, shrugging on his jacket, headed home. They stood talking for a moment—or, to be more accurate, Danny stood jawing at him while Jude watched the dogs and tried to tune him out. You could always count on Danny Wooten to spoil a perfectly good silence.

Silence. The office behind Danny had been silent. Jude could remember the crows going
crawk-crawk
and Danny’s steady stream of exuberant chatter, but not the sound of the radio coming from the office behind him. If it had been on, Jude thought he would’ve heard. His ears were still as sensitive as they’d ever been. They had, against long odds, survived all that he’d inflicted upon them over the last thirty years. By comparison, Jude’s drummer, Kenny Morlix, the only other surviving member of his original band, had severe tinnitus, couldn’t even hear his wife when she was yelling right in his face.

Jude started forward once more, but he was ill at ease again. It wasn’t any one thing. It was all of it. It was the dimness of the office and the glaring red eye staring out from the face of the receiver. It was the idea that the radio hadn’t been on an hour ago, when Danny had stood in the open office door zipping his jacket. It was the thought that someone had recently passed through the office and might still be close by, maybe watching from the darkness of the bathroom, where the door was open a crack—a paranoid thing to think and unlike him, but in his head all the same. He reached for the power button on the stereo, not really listening anymore, his gaze on that door. He wondered what he would do if it started to open.

The weatherman said, “…cold and dry as the front pushes the warm air south. The dead pull the living down. Down into the cold. Down into the hole. You will di—”

Jude’s thumb hit the power button, switching off the stereo, just as he registered what was being said. He twitched, startled, and stabbed the power button again, to get the voice back, figure out what the hell the weatherman had just been going on about.

Except the weatherman was done talking, and it was the DJ instead: “…going to freeze our asses off, but Kurt Cobain is warm in hell. Dig it.”

A guitar whined, a shrill, wavering sound that went on and on without any discernible melody or purpose except perhaps to drive the listener to madness. The opening of Nirvana’s “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die.” Was that what the weatherman had been talking about? He’d
said something about dying. Jude clicked the power button once more, returning the room to stillness.

It didn’t last. The phone went off, right behind him, a startling burst of sound that gave Jude’s pulse another unhappy jump. He shot a look at Danny’s desk, wondering who would be calling on the office line at this hour. He shifted around behind the desk for a glance at caller ID. It was a 985 number, which he identified immediately as a prefix for eastern Louisiana. The name that came up was
COWZYNSKI, M.

Only Jude knew, even without picking up the phone, that it wasn’t really Cowzynski, M., on the other end. Not unless a medical miracle had transpired. He almost didn’t pick up at all, but then the thought came that maybe Arlene Wade was calling to tell him Martin was dead, in which case he would have to talk to her sooner or later, whether he wanted to or not.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello, Justin,” said Arlene. She was an aunt by marriage, his mother’s sister-in-law, and a licensed physician’s assistant, although for the last thirteen months her only patient had been Jude’s father. She was sixty-nine, and her voice was all twang and warble. To her he would always be Justin Cowzynski.

“How are you, Arlene?”

“I’m the same as ever. You know. Me and the dog are gettin’ along. Although he can’t get up so much now because he’s so fat and his knees pain him. But I’m not callin’ to tell you about myself or the dog. I’m callin’ about your father.”

As if there could be anything else she might call about. The line hissed with white noise. Jude had been interviewed over the phone by a radio personality in Beijing and taken calls from Brian Johnson in Australia, and the connections had been as crisp and clear as if they were phoning him from down the street. But for some reason calls from Moore’s Corner, Louisiana, came in scratchy and faint, like an AM radio station that’s just a little too far away to be received perfectly. Voices
from other phone calls would bleed in and out, faintly audible for a few moments and then gone. They might have high-speed Internet connections in Baton Rouge, but in the little towns in the swamps north of Lake Pontchartrain, if you wanted a high-speed connection with the rest of the world, you souped up a car and got the fuck out.

“Last few months I been spoonin’ him food. Soft stuff he don’t have to chew. He was likin’ them little stars. Pastina. And vanilla custard. I never met a dyin’ person yet didn’t want some custard on their way out the door.”

“I’m surprised. He never used to have a sweet tooth. Are you sure?”

“Who’s takin’ care of him?”

“You are.”

“Well, I guess I’m sure, then.”

“All right.”

“This is the reason I’m callin’. He won’t eat custard or little stars or anything else. He just chokes on whatever I put in his mouth. He can’t swallow. Dr. Newland was in to see him yesterday. He thinks your dad had another infarction.”

“A stroke.” It was not quite a question.

“Not a fall-down-and-kill-you kind of stroke. If he had another one of those, there wouldn’t be any question of it. He’d be dead. This was one of the little blow-outs. You don’t always know when he’s had one of the little ones. Especially when he gets like he is now, just starin’ at things. He hasn’t said a word to anyone in two months. He isn’t ever going to say a word to anyone again.”

“Is he at the hospital?”

“No. We can care for him just as well or better here. Me livin’ with him and Dr. Newland in every day. But we can send him to the hospital. It would be cheaper there, if that matters to you.”

“It doesn’t. Let ’em save the beds at the hospital for people who might actually get better in them.”

“I won’t argue you on that one. Too many people die in hospitals, and if you can’t be helped, you have to wonder why.”

“So what are you going to do about him not eating? What happens now?”

This was met by a moment of silence. He had an idea that the question had taken her by surprise. Her tone, when she spoke again, was both gently reasonable and apologetic, the tone of a woman explaining a harsh truth to a child.

“Well. That’s up to you, not me, Justin. Doc Newland can poke a feedin’ tube in him and he’ll go on a while longer, that’s what you want. Till he has another little blowout and he forgets how to breathe. Or we can just let him be. He isn’t ever goin’ to recover, not at eighty-five years old. It’s not like he’s bein’ robbed of his youth. He’s ready to let go. Are you?”

Jude thought, but did not say, that he’d been ready for more than forty years. He had occasionally imagined this moment—maybe it was fair to say he’d even daydreamed of it—but now it had come, and he was surprised to find that his stomach hurt.

When he replied, though, his voice was steady and his own. “Okay, Arlene. No tube. If you say it’s time, that’s good enough for me. Keep me updated, all right?”

But she wasn’t done with him yet. She made an impatient sound, a kind of stiff exhalation of breath, and said, “Are you comin’ down?”

He stood at Danny’s desk, frowning, confused. The conversation had taken a leap from one thing to another, without warning, like a needle skipping across a record from one track to the next. “Why would I do that?”

“Do you want to see him before he’s gone?”

No. He had not seen his father, stood in the same room with him, in three decades. Jude did not want to see the old man before he was gone, and he did not want to look at him after. He had no plans to so much as attend the funeral, although he would be the one to pay for it. Jude was afraid of what he might feel—or what he wouldn’t. He would pay whatever he had to pay not to have to share his father’s company again. It was the best thing the money could buy: distance.

But he could no more say this to Arlene Wade than he could tell her
he’d been waiting on the old man to die since he was fourteen. Instead he replied, “Would he even know if I was there?”

“It’s hard to say what he knows and what he doesn’t. He’s aware of people in the room with him. He turns his eyes to watch folks come and watch folks go. He’s been less responsive lately, though. People get that way, once enough lights have burned out.”

“I can’t make it down. This week isn’t good,” Jude said, reaching for the easiest lie. He thought maybe the conversation was over, and was prepared to say good-bye. Then he surprised himself by asking a question, one he hadn’t known was even on his mind until he heard himself speaking it aloud. “Will it be hard?”

“For him to die? Naw. When an old fella gets to this stage, they waste away pretty quick without bein’ hooked to the feed bag. They don’t suffer none.”

“You sure on that?”

“Why?” she asked. “Disappointed?”