by Joe Hill
Jude turned, reeled toward the door, tasting vomit in the back of his throat, smelling vomit when he exhaled. At the very periphery of his vision, he could see the window, and the seesaw. It was still going up and down. No one was on it. The dogs lay on their sides, asleep in the grass.
He shoved through the door and banged down two warped steps and into the dusty dooryard behind his father’s farm. His father sat with his back to him, on a rock, sharpening his straight razor with a black strop. The sound of it was like the dead man’s voice, or maybe it was the other way around, Jude no longer knew for sure. A steel tub of water sat in the grass next to Martin Cowzynski, and a black fedora floated in it. That hat in the water was awful. Jude wanted to scream at the sight of it.
The sunshine was intense and direct on his face, a steady glare. He staggered in the heat, swayed back on his heels, and brought a hand up to shield his eyes from the light. Martin drew the blade across the strop, and blood fell from the black leather in fat drops. When Martin scraped the blade forward, the strop whispered “death.” When he jerked the razor back, it made a choked sound like the word “love.” Jude did not slow to speak with his father but kept going on around the back of the house.
“Justin,” Martin called to him, and Jude flicked a sidelong look at him, couldn’t help himself. His father wore a pair of blind man’s sunglasses, round black lenses with silver frames. They gleamed when they caught the sunlight. “You need to get back in bed, boy. You’re burnin’ up. Where do you think you’re goin’ all dressed up like that?”
Jude glanced down and saw he was wearing the dead man’s suit. Without breaking stride he began to pull at the buttons of the coat, undoing them as he reeled forward. But his right hand was numb and clumsy—it felt as if he were the one who had just chopped off his fingers—and the buttons wouldn’t come free. In a few more steps, he gave up. He felt sick, cooking in the Louisiana sun, boiling in his black suit.
“You look like you’re headed to someone’s funeral,” his father said. “You want to watch out. Could be your’n.”
A crow was in the tub of water where the hat had been, and it took off, fanning its wings furiously, throwing spray, as Jude went past it in his stumbling, drunkard’s gait. In another step he was at the side of the Mustang. He fell into it, slammed the door behind him.
Through the windshield the hardpack wavered like an image reflected in water, shimmering through the heat. He was sodden with sweat and gasping for breath in the dead man’s suit, which was too hot, and too black, and too restricting. Something stank, faintly, of char. The heat was worst of all in his right hand. The feeling in the hand couldn’t be described as pain, not anymore. It was, instead, a poisonous weight, swollen not with blood but liquefied ore.
His digital XM radio was gone. In its place was the Mustang’s original, factory-installed AM. When he thumbed it on, his right hand was so hot it melted a blurred thumbprint in the dial.
“If there is one word that can change your life, my friends,” came the voice on the radio, urgent, melodious, unmistakably southern. “If there is just one word, let me tell you, that word is ‘holyeverlastinJesus’!”
Jude rested his hand on the steering wheel. The black plastic immediately began to soften, melting to conform to the shape of his fingers. He watched, dazed, curious. The wheel began to deform, sinking in on itself.
“Yes, if you keep that word in your heart, hold that word to your heart, clasp it to you like you clasp your children, it can save your life, it really can. I believe that. Will you listen to my voice, now? Will you listen only to my voice? Here’s another word that can turn your world upside down and open your eyes to the endless possibilities of the living soul. That word is ‘nightfall.’ Let me say it again. Nightfall. Nightfall at last. The dead pull the living down. We’ll ride the glory road together, hallelujah.”
Jude took his hand off the wheel and put it on the seat next to him, which began to smoke. He picked the hand up and shook it, but now the smoke was coming out of his sleeve, from the inside of the dead man’s jacket. The car was on the road, a long, straight stretch of blacktop, punching through southern jungle, trees strangled in creepers, brush choking the spaces in between. The asphalt was warped and distorted in the distance, through the shimmering, climbing waves of heat.
The reception on the radio fizzed in and out, and sometimes he could hear a snatch of something else, music overlapping the radio preacher, who wasn’t really a preacher at all but Craddock using someone else’s voice. The song sounded plaintive and archaic, like something off a Folkways record, mournful and sweet at the same time, a single ringing guitar played in a minor key. Jude thought, without sense, He can talk, but he can’t sing.
The smell in the car was worse now, the smell of wool beginning to sizzle and burn. Jude was beginning to burn. The smoke was coming out both his sleeves now and from under his collar. He clenched his teeth and began to scream. He had always known he would go out this way: on fire. He had always known that rage was flammable, dangerous to store under pressure, where he had kept it his whole life. The Mustang rushed along the unending back roads, black smoke boiling from under the hood, out the windows, so he could hardly see through the fog of it. His eyes stung, blurred, ran with tears. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need to see where he was going. He put the pedal down.
Jude lurched awake, a feeling of unwholesome warmth in his face. He was turned on his side, lying on his right arm, and when he sat up, he couldn’t feel the hand. Even awake he could still smell the reek of something burning, an odor like singed hair. He looked down, half expecting to find himself dressed in the dead man’s suit, as in his dream. But no; he was still in his tatty old bathrobe.
The suit. The key was the suit. All he had to do was sell it again, the suit and the ghost both. It was so obvious he didn’t know why it had taken so long for the idea to occur to him. Someone would want it; maybe lots of people would want it. He’d seen fans kick, spit, bite, and claw over drumsticks that had been thrown into the crowd. He thought they would want a ghost, straight from the home of Judas Coyne, even more. Some hapless asshole would take it off his hands, and the ghost would have to leave. What happened to the buyer after that didn’t much trouble Jude’s conscience. His own survival, and Georgia’s, was a matter that concerned him above all others.
He stood, swaying, flexed his right hand. The circulation was coming back into it, accompanied by a sensation of icy prickling. It was going to hurt like a bitch.
The light was different, had shifted to the other side of the room, pale and weak as it came through the lace curtains. It was hard to say how long he’d been asleep.
The smell, that stink of something burning, lured him down the darkened front hall, through the kitchen, and into the pantry. The door to the backyard patio was open. Georgia was out there, looking miserably cold, in a black denim jacket and a Ramones T-shirt that left the smooth, white curve of her midriff exposed. She had a pair of tongs in her left hand. Her breath steamed in the cold air.
“Whatever you’re cooking, you’re fuckin’ it up,” he said, waving his hand at all the smoke.
“No I’m not,” she said, and flashed him a proud and challenging smile. She was, in that instant, so beautiful it was a little heartbreaking—the white of her throat, the hollow in it, the delicate line of her just-visible collarbones. “I figured out what to do. I figured out how to make the ghost go away.”
“How’s that?” Jude asked.
She picked at something with the tongs and then held it up. It was a burning flap of black fabric.
“The suit,” she said. “I burned it.”
16
An hour later it was dusk. Jude sat in the study to watch the last of the light drain out of the sky. He had a guitar in his lap. He needed to think. The two things went together.
He was in a chair, turned to face a window that looked over the barn, the dog pen, and the trees beyond. Jude had it open a crack. The air that came in had
a crisp bite to it. He didn’t mind. It wasn’t much warmer in the house, and he needed the fresh air, was grateful for the mid-October perfume of rotten apples and fallen leaves. It was a relief from the reek of exhaust. Even after a shower and a change of clothes, he could still smell it on him.
Jude had his back to the door, and when Georgia came into the room, he saw her in reflection. She had a glass of red wine in each hand. The swaddling of bandages around her thumb forced her to grip one of the glasses awkwardly, and she spilled a little on herself when she sank to her knees beside his chair. She kissed the wine off her skin, then set a glass in front of him, on the amp near his feet.
“He isn’t coming back,” she said. “The dead man. I bet you. Burning the suit got rid of him. Stroke of genius. Besides, that fucking thing had to go. Whoo-ee. I wrapped it in two garbage bags before I brought it downstairs, and I still thought I was going to gag from the stink.”
It was in his mind to say, He wanted you to do it, but he didn’t. It wouldn’t do her any good to hear it, and it was over and done with now.
Georgia narrowed her eyes at him, studying his expression. His doubts must’ve been there in his face, because she said, “You think he’ll be back?” When Jude didn’t reply, she leaned toward him and spoke again, her voice low, urgent. “Then why don’t we go? Get a room in the city and get the hell out of here?”
He considered this, forming his reply slowly, and only with effort. At last he said, “I don’t think it would do any good, just to up and run. He isn’t haunting the house. He’s haunting me.”
That was part of it—but only part. The rest was too hard to put into words. The idea persisted that everything to happen so far had happened for reasons—the dead man’s reasons. That phrase, “psychological operations,” rose to Jude’s mind with a feeling of chill. He wondered again if the ghost wasn’t trying to make him run, and why that would be. Maybe the house, or something in the house, offered Jude an advantage, although, try as he might, he couldn’t figure what.
“You ever think you ought to take off?” Jude asked her.
“You almost died today,” Georgia said. “I don’t know what’s happening to you, but I’m not going anywhere. I don’t think I’m going to let you out of my sight ever again. Besides, your ghost hasn’t done anything to me. I bet he can’t touch me.”
But Jude had watched Craddock whispering in her ear. He had seen the stricken look on Georgia’s face as the dead man held his razor on a chain before her eyes. And he had not forgotten Jessica Price’s voice on the telephone, her lazy, poisonous, redneck drawl: You will not live, and no one who gives you aid or comfort will live.
Craddock could get to Georgia. She needed to go. Jude saw this clearly now—and yet the thought of sending her away, of waking alone in the night and finding the dead man there, standing over him in the dark, made him weak with dread. If she left him, Jude felt she might take what remained of his nerve with her. He did not know if he could bear the night and the quiet without her close—an admission of need that was so stark and unexpected it gave him a brief, bad moment of vertigo. He was a man afraid of heights, watching the ground lunge away beneath him, while the Ferris wheel yanked him helplessly into the sky.
“What about Danny?” Jude said. He thought his own voice sounded strained and unlike him, and he cleared his throat. “Danny thought he was dangerous.”
“What did this ghost do to Danny? Danny saw something, got scared, and ran for his life. Wasn’t like anything got done to him.”
“Just because the ghost didn’t do anything doesn’t mean he can’t. Look at what happened to me this afternoon.”
Georgia nodded at this. She drank the rest of her wine in one swallow, then met his gaze, her eyes bright and searching. “And you swear you didn’t go into that barn to kill yourself? You swear, Jude? Don’t be mad at me for asking. I need to know.”
“Think I’m the type?” he asked.
“Everyone’s the type.”
“Not me.”
“Everyone. I tried to do it. Pills. Bammy found me passed out on the bathroom floor. My lips were blue. I was hardly breathing. Three days after my last day of high school. Afterward my mother and father came to the hospital, and my father said, ‘You couldn’t even do that right.’”
“Cocksucker.”
“Yup. Pretty much.”
“Why’d you want to kill yourself? I hope you had a good reason.”
“Because I’d been having sex with my daddy’s best friend. Since I was thirteen. This forty-year-old guy with a daughter of his own. People found out. His daughter found out. She was my friend. She said I ruined her life. She said I was a whore.” Georgia rolled her glass this way and that in her left hand, watching the glimmer of light move around and around the rim. “Pretty hard to argue with her. He’d give me things, and I’d always take them. Like, he gave me a brand-new sweater once with fifty dollars in the pocket. He said the money was so I could buy shoes to go with it. I let him fuck me for shoe money.”
“Hell. That wasn’t any good reason to kill yourself,” Jude told her. “It was a good reason to kill him.”
She laughed.
“What was his name?”
“George Ruger. He’s a used-car salesman now, in my old hometown. Head of the county Republican steering committee.”
“Next time I get down Georgia way, I’ll stop in and kill the son of a bitch.”
She laughed again.
“Or at least thoroughly stomp his ass into the Georgia clay,” Jude said, and played the opening bars of “Dirty Deeds.”
She lifted his glass of wine off the amp, raised it in a toast to him, and had a sip.
“Do you know what the best thing about you is?” she asked.
“No idea.”
“Nothing grosses you out. I mean, I just told you all that, and you don’t think I’m…I don’t know. Ruined. Hopelessly fucked up.”
“Maybe I do and I just don’t care.”
“You care,” she said. She put a hand on his ankle. “And nothing shocks you.”
He let that pass, did not say he could’ve guessed the suicide attempt, the emotionally cold father, the family friend who molested her, almost from the first moment Jude saw her, wearing a dog collar, her hair hacked into uneven spikes and her mouth painted in white lipstick.
She said, “So what happened to you? Your turn.”
He twitched his ankle out of her grasp.
“I’m not into feel-bad competitions.”
He glanced at the window. Nothing remained of the light except for a faint, reddish bronze flush behind the leafless trees. Jude considered his own semitransparent reflection in the glass, his face long, seamed, gaunt, with a flowing black beard that came almost to his chest. A haggard, grim-visaged ghost.
Georgia said, “Tell me about this woman who sent you the ghost.”
“Jessica Price. She didn’t just send him to me either. Remember, she tricked me into paying for him.”
“Right. On eBay or something?”
“No. A different site, a third-rate clone. And it only looked like a regular Internet auction. She was orchestrating things from behind the scenes to make sure I’d win.” Jude saw the question forming in Georgia’s eyes and answered it before she could speak. “Why she went to all that trouble I can’t tell you. I get the feeling, though, that she couldn’t just mail him to me. I had to agree to take possession of him. I’m sure there’s some profound moral message in that.”
“Yeah,” Georgia said. “Stick with eBay. Accept no substitutes.” She tasted some wine, licked her lips, then went on. “And this is all because her sister killed herself? Why does she think that’s your fault? Is it because of something you wrote in one of your songs? Is this like when that kid killed himself after listening to Ozzy Osbourne? Have you written anything that says suicide is okay or something?”
“No. Neither did Ozzy.”
“Then I don’t see why she’s so pissed off at you. Did you kn
ow each other in some way? Did you know the girl who killed herself? Did she write you crazy fan letters or something?”
He said, “She lived with me for a while. Like you.”
“Like me? Oh.”
“Got news for you, Georgia. I wasn’t a virgin when I met you.” His voice sounded wooden and strange to him.
“How long did she live here?”
“I don’t know. Eight, nine months. Long enough to overstay her welcome.”
She thought about that. “I’ve been living with you for about nine months.”
“So?”
“So have I overstayed mine? Is nine months the limit? Then it’s time for some fresh pussy? What, was she a natural blonde, and you decided it was time for a brunette?”
He took his hands off his guitar. “She was a natural psycho, so I threw her ass out. I guess she didn’t take it well.”
“What do you mean, she was a psycho?”
“I mean manic-depressive. When she was manic, she was a hell of a lay. When she was depressive, it was a little too much work.”
“She had mental problems, and you just chucked her out?”
“I didn’t sign on to hold her hand the rest of her life. I didn’t sign on to hold yours either. I’ll tell you something else, Georgia. If you think our story ends ‘and they lived happily ever after,’ then you’ve got the wrong fuckin’ fairy tale.” As he spoke, he became aware that he’d found his chance to hurt her and get rid of her. He had, he understood now, been steering the conversation toward this very moment. The idea recurred that if he could sting her badly enough to make her leave—even if it was just for a while, a night, a few hours—it might be the last good thing he ever did for her.
“What was her name? The girl who killed herself?”
He started to say “Anna,” then said “Florida” instead.
Georgia stood quickly, so quickly she tottered, looked as if she might fall over. He could’ve reached out to steady her but didn’t. Better to let her hurt. Her face whitened, and she took an unsteady half step back. She stared at him, bewildered and wounded—and then her eyes sharpened, as if she were suddenly bringing his face into focus.
