Heart-Shaped Box with Bonus Material

by Joe Hill

  “How’d you do?”

  “Took third. We all got T-shirts,” Jude said. “When I came back, he dragged me over to the basement door and smashed my left hand in it. My chord-making hand.”

  She paused, frowning, then glanced at him in confusion. “I thought you made chords with the other hand.”

  “I do now.”

  She stared.

  “I kinda taught myself how to make them with my right hand while my left was healing, and I just never went back.”

  “Was that hard?”

  “Well. I wasn’t sure my left would ever be good for making chords again, so it was either that or stop playing. And it would’ve been a lot harder to stop.”

  “Where was your mom when this happened?”

  “Can’t remember.” A lie. The truth was, he couldn’t forget. His mother had been at the table when his father started to pull him across the kitchen, toward the basement door, and he had screamed for her to help, but she only got up and put her hands over her ears and left for the sewing room. He could not, in truth, blame her for refusing to intervene. Supposed he had it coming, and not for taking a hundred dollars out of the cash box either. “S’okay. I wound up playing better guitar after I had to switch hands anyway. It just took about a month of making the most horrible fuckin’ noises you ever heard. Eventually someone explained I had to restring my guitar backwards if I was going to play with my hands reversed. After that I picked it up pretty easy.”

  “Plus, you showed your daddy, didn’t you?”

  He didn’t answer. She examined his palm once more, and rolled her thumb across his wrist. “He isn’t through with you yet. Your daddy. You’ll see him again.”

  “No I won’t. I haven’t looked at him for thirty years. He doesn’t figure in my life anymore.”

  “Sure he does. He figures into it every single day.”

  “Funny, I thought we decided to skip visiting the psychiatrist this afternoon.”

  She said, “You have five luck lines. You’re luckier than a cat, Jude Coyne. The world must still be payin’ you back for all your daddy did to you. Five luck lines. The world is never going to be done payin’ you back.” She laid his hand aside. “Your beard and your big leather jacket and your big black car and your big black boots. No one puts on all that armor unless they been hurt by someone who didn’t have no right to hurt them.”

  “Look who’s talking,” he said. “Is there any part of you, you won’t stick a pin in?” She had them in her ears, her tongue, one nipple, her labia. “Who are you trying to scare away?”

  Anna gave him his final palm reading just a few weeks before Jude packed her stuff. He looked out the kitchen window early one evening and saw her trudging through a cold October rain to the barn, wearing only a black halter and black panties, her naked flesh shocking in its paleness.

  By the time he caught up to her, she had crawled into the dog pen, the part of it that was inside the barn, where Angus and Bon went to get out of the rain. She sat in the dirt, mud smeared on the backs of her thighs. The dogs whisked here and there, shooting worried looks her way and giving her space.

  Jude climbed into the pen on all fours, angry with her, sick to death of the way it had been the last two months. He was sick of talking to her and getting dull, three-word answers, sick of laughter and tears for no reason. They didn’t make love anymore. The thought repelled him. She didn’t wash, didn’t dress, didn’t brush her teeth. Her honey-yellow hair was a rat’s nest. The last few times they had attempted to have sex, she’d turned him off with the things she wanted, had embarrassed and sickened him. He didn’t mind a certain amount of kink, would tie her up if she wanted, pinch her nipples, roll her over and put it in her ass. But she wasn’t happy with that. She wanted him to hold a plastic bag over her head. To cut her.

  She was hunched forward, with a needle in one hand. She pushed it into the thumb of the other, working intently and deliberately—pricking herself once, then again, producing fat, gem-bright drops of blood.

  “The hell you doing?” he asked her, struggling to keep the anger out of his voice and failing. He took her by the wrist, to stop her sticking herself.

  She let the needle drop into the mud, then reversed his grip, squeezed his hand in hers and stared down at it. Her eyes glowed with fever in their dark, bruised-looking hollows. She was down to sleeping three hours a night at best.

  “You’re running out of time almost as fast as I am. I’ll be more useful when I’m gone. I’m gone. We have no future. Someone is going to try and hurt you. Someone who wants to take everything away from you.” She rolled her eyes up to look into his face. “Someone you can’t fight. You’ll fight anyway, but you can’t win. You won’t win. All the good things in your life will soon be gone.”

  Angus whined anxiously and slipped in between them, burrowing his snout in her crotch. She smiled—first smile he’d seen in a month—and dug behind his ears.

  “Well,” she said. “You’ll always have the dogs.”

  He twisted free of her grip, took her by the arms, lifted her to her feet. “I don’t listen to nothing you say. You’ve told my fortune three times at least, and it comes out a different way every time.”

  “I know,” she said. “But they’re all true anyway.”

  “Why were you sticking yourself with a needle? Why you want to do that?”

  “I done it since I was a girl. Sometimes if I stick myself a couple times, I can make the bad thoughts go away. It’s a trick I taught myself to clear my head. Like pinchin’ yourself in a dream. You know. Pain has a way of wakin’ you up. Of remindin’ you who you are.”

  Jude knew.

  Almost as an afterthought, she added, “I guess it isn’t workin’ too good anymore.” He led her out of the pen and back across the barn. She spoke again, said, “I don’t know what I’m out here for. In my underwear.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “You ever dated anyone as crazy as me, Jude? Do you hate me? You’ve had a lot of girls. Tell me honest, am I the worst? Who was your worst?”

  “Why do you got to ask so many damn questions?” he wanted to know.

  As they went back out into the rain, he opened his black duster and closed it over her thin, shivering body, clasped her against him.

  “I’d rather ask questions,” she said, “than answer them.”

  23

  He woke a little after nine with a melody in his head, something with the feel of an Appalachian hymn. He nudged Bon off the bed—she had climbed up with them in the night—and pushed aside the covers. Jude sat on the edge of the mattress, mentally running over the melody again, trying to identify it, to remember the lyrics. Only it couldn’t be identified, and the lyrics couldn’t be recalled, because it hadn’t existed until he thought it up. It wouldn’t have a name until he gave it one.

  Jude rose, slipped across the room and outside, onto the concrete breezeway, still in his boxers. He unlocked the trunk of the Mustang and pulled out a battered guitar case with a ’68 Les Paul in it. He carried it back into the room.

  Georgia hadn’t moved. She lay with her face in the pillow, one bone-white arm above the sheets and curled tight against her body. It had been years since he dated anyone with a tan. When you were a Goth, it was important to at least imply the possibility you might burst into flames in direct sunlight.

  He let himself into the john. By now Angus and Bon were both trailing him, and he whispered at them to stay. They sank to their bellies outside the door, staring forlornly in at him, accusing him with their eyes of failing to love them enough.

  He wasn’t sure how well he could play with the puncture wound in his left hand. The left did the picking and the right found the chords. He lifted the Les Paul from its case and began to fiddle, bringing it into tune. When he strummed a pick across the strings, it set off a low flare of pain—not bad, almost just an uncomfortable warmth—in the center of his palm. It felt as if a steel wire were sunk deep into the flesh and beginning to
heat up. He could play through that, he thought.

  When the guitar was in tune, he searched for the proper chords and began to play, reproducing the tune that had been in his head when he woke. Without the amp the guitar was all flat, soft twang, and each chord made a raspy, chiming sound. The song itself might have been a traditional hill-country melody, sounded like something that belonged on a Folkways record or a Library of Congress retrospective of traditional music. Something with a name like “Fixin’ to Dig My Grave.” “Jesus Brung His Chariot.” “Drink to the Devil.”

  “ ‘Drink to the Dead,’” he said.

  He put the guitar down and went back into the bedroom. There was a small notepad on the night table, and a ballpoint pen. He brought them into the bathroom and wrote down “Drink to the Dead.” Now it had a title. He picked up the guitar and played it again.

  The sound of it—the sound of the Ozarks, of gospel—gave him a little prickle of pleasure, which he felt along his forearms and across the back of his neck. A lot of his songs, when they started out, sounded like old music. They arrived on his doorstep, wandering orphans, the lost children of large and venerable musical families. They came to him in the form of Tin Pan Alley sing-alongs, honky-tonk blues, Dust Bowl plaints, lost Chuck Berry riffs. Jude dressed them in black and taught them to scream.

  He wished he had his DAT recorder, wanted to get what he had down on tape. Instead he put the guitar aside once more, and scribbled the chords on the notepad, beneath his title. Then he took up the Les Paul and played the lick again, and again, curious to see where it would take him. Twenty minutes later there were spots of blood showing through the bandage around his left hand, and he had worked out the chorus, which built naturally from the initial hook, a steady, rising, thunderous chorus, a whisper to a shout: an act of violence against the beauty and sweetness of the melody that had come before.

  “Who’s that by?” Georgia asked, leaning in through the bathroom door, knuckling the sleep out of her eyes.

  “Me.”

  “I like that one.”

  “It’s okay. Sound even better if this thing was plugged in.”

  Her soft black hair floated around her head, had a swirled, airy look to it, and the shadows under her eyes drew his attention to how large they were. She smiled drowsily down at him. He smiled back.

  “Jude,” she said, in a tone of almost unbearable, erotic tenderness.

  “Yeah?”

  “You think you could get your ass out of the bathroom, so I could pee?”

  When she shut the door, he dropped his guitar case on the bed and stood in the dimness of the room, listening to the muffled sound of the world beyond the drawn shades: the drone of traffic on the highway, a car door slamming, a vacuum cleaner humming in the room directly above. It came to him then that the ghost was gone.

  Ever since the suit had arrived at his house in its black heart-shaped box, he had sensed the dead man lingering close to him. Even when Jude couldn’t see him, he was conscious of his presence, felt it almost as a barometric weight, a kind of pressure and electricity in the air, such as precedes a thunderstorm. He had existed in that atmosphere of dreadful waiting for days, a continuous crackle of tension that made it difficult to taste his food or find his way into sleep. Now, though, it had lifted. He had somehow forgotten the ghost while he’d been writing the new song—and the ghost had somehow forgotten him, or at least not been able to intrude into Jude’s thoughts, into Jude’s surroundings.

  He walked Angus, took his time. Jude was in short sleeves and jeans, and the sun felt good on the back of his neck. The smell of the morning—the pall of exhaust over I-95, the swamp lilies in the brush, the hot tarmac—got his blood going, made him want to be on the road, to be driving somewhere, anywhere. He felt good: an unfamiliar sensation. Maybe he was randy, thought about the pleasant tousle of Georgia’s hair and her sleep-puffy eyes and lithe white legs. He was hungry, wanted eggs, a chicken-fried steak. Angus chased a groundhog into waist-high grass, then stood at the edge of the trees, yapping happily at it. Jude went back to give Bon a turn to stretch her legs and heard the shower.

  He let himself in the bathroom. The room was steamy, the air hot and close. He undressed, slipped in around the curtain, and climbed into the tub.

  Georgia jumped when his knuckles brushed her back, twisted her head to look at him over her shoulder. She had a black butterfly tattooed on her left shoulder and a black heart on her hip. She turned toward him, and he put his hand over the heart.

  She pressed her damp, springy body against his, and they kissed. He leaned into her, over her, and to balance herself, Georgia put her right hand against the wall—then inhaled, a sharp, thin sound of pain, and pulled the hand back as if she had burned it.

  Georgia tried to lower her hand to her side, but he caught her wrist and lifted it. The thumb was inflamed and red, and when he touched it lightly, he could feel the sick heat trapped inside it. The palm, around the ball of the thumb, was also reddened and swollen. On the inside of the thumb was the white sore, glittering with fresh pus.

  “What are we going to do about this thing?” he asked.

  “It’s fine. I’m putting antiseptic cream on it.”

  “This isn’t fine. We ought to run you to the emergency room.”

  “I’m not going to sit in some emergency room for three hours to have someone look at the place I poked myself with a pin.”

  “You don’t know what stuck you. Don’t forget what you were handling when this happened to you.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. I just don’t believe that any doctor is going to make it better. Not really.”

  “You think it’s going to get better on its own?”

  “I think it’ll be all right—if we make the dead man go away. If we get him off our backs, I think we’ll both be all right,” she said. “Whatever’s wrong with my hand, it’s part of this whole thing. But you know that, don’t you?”

  He didn’t know anything, but he had notions, and he was not happy to hear they matched her own. He bowed his head, considering, wiped at the spray on his face. At last he said, “When Anna was at her worst, she’d poke herself in the thumb with a needle. To clear her head, she told me. I don’t know. Maybe it’s nothing. It just makes me uneasy, you getting stuck like she used to stick herself.”

  “Well. It doesn’t worry me. Actually, that almost makes me feel better about it.” Her good hand moved across his chest as she spoke, her fingers exploring a landscape of muscle beginning to lose definition and skin going slack with age, and all of it overgrown with a mat of curling silver hairs.

  “It does?”

  “Sure. It’s something else her and I got in common. Besides you. I never met her, and I don’t hardly know anything about her, but I feel connected to her somehow. I’m not afraid of that, you know.”

  “I’m glad it’s not bothering you. I wish I could say the same. Speaking for myself, I don’t much like thinking about it.”

  “So don’t,” she said, leaning into him and pushing her tongue into his mouth to shut him up.

  24

  Jude took Bon for her overdue walk while Georgia busied herself in the bathroom, dressing and rebandaging her hand and putting in her studs. He knew she might be occupied for twenty minutes, so he stopped by the car and pulled her laptop out of the trunk. Georgia didn’t even know they had it with them. He’d packed it automatically, without thinking, because Georgia took it with her wherever she went and used it to stay in touch with a gaggle of geographically far-flung friends by way of e-mail and instant message. And she dribbled away countless hours browsing message boards, blogs, concert info, and vampire porn (which would’ve been hilarious if it weren’t so depressing). But once they were on the road, Jude had forgotten they had the laptop with them, and Georgia had never asked about it, so it had spent the night in the trunk.

  Jude didn’t bring his own computer—he didn’t have one. Danny had handled his e-mail and all the rest of his online obligations
. Jude was aware that he belonged to an increasingly small segment of the society, those who could not quite fathom the allure of the digital age. Jude did not want to be wired. He had spent four years wired on coke, a period of time in which everything seemed hyperaccelerated, as in one of those time-lapse movies, where a whole day and night pass in just a few seconds, traffic reduced to lurid streaks of light, people transformed into blurred mannequins rushing jerkily here and there. Those four years now felt more like four bad, crazy, sleepless days to him—days that had begun with a New Year’s Eve hangover and ended at crowded, smoky Christmas parties where he found himself surrounded by strangers trying to touch him and shrieking with inhuman laughter. He did not ever want to be wired again.

  He had tried to explain the way he felt to Danny once, about compulsive behavior and time rushing too fast and the Internet and drugs. Danny had only lifted one of his slender, mobile eyebrows and stared at him in smirking confusion. Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same.

  Now, though, he was in the mood to score. He lugged her laptop back to the room, plugged in, and went online. He didn’t make any attempt to access his e-mail account. In truth, he wasn’t sure how to access his e-mail. Danny had a program all set up to reel in Jude’s messages from the Net, but Jude couldn’t have said how to get at that information from someone else’s computer. He knew how to Google a name, however, and he Googled Anna’s.

  Her obituary was short, half the length her father’s had been. Jude was able to read it in a glance, which was all it merited. It was her photograph that caught his attention and gave him a brief hollow sensation in the pit of his stomach. He guessed it had been taken close to the end of her life. She was glancing blankly into the camera, some strands of pale hair blown across a face that was gaunt, her cheeks sunken hollows beneath her cheekbones.