Heart-Shaped Box with Bonus Material

by Joe Hill

  Jude interrupted to ask her how she was getting to Buffalo. She said she ran out of bus money back at Penn Station and figured she’d hitch the rest of the way.

  “Do you know it’s three hundred miles?” he asked.

  Reese stared at him, wide-eyed, then shook her head. “You look at a map and this state doesn’t seem so gosh-darn big. Are you sure it’s three hundred miles?”

  Marybeth took her empty plate and set it in the sink. “Is there anyone you want to call? Anyone in your family? You can use our phone.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Marybeth smiled a little at this, and Jude wondered if anyone had ever called her “ma’am” before.

  “What about your mother?” Marybeth asked.

  “She’s in jail. I hope she doesn’t ever get out,” Reese said, and she looked into her cocoa. She began to play with a long yellow strand of her hair, curling it around and around her finger, a thing Jude had seen Anna do a thousand times. She said, “I don’t even like to think about her. I’d rather pretend she was dead or something. I wouldn’t wish her on anyone. She’s a curse, is what she is. If I thought someday I was going to be a mother like her, I’d have myself sterilized right now.”

  When she finished her cocoa, Jude put on a rain slicker and told Reese to come on, he would take her to the bus station.

  For a while they rode without speaking, the radio off, no sound but the rain tapping on the glass and the Charger’s wipers beating back and forth. He looked over at her once and saw she had the seat cranked back and her eyes closed. She had taken off her denim jacket and spread it over herself like a blanket. He believed she was sleeping.

  But in a while she opened one eye and squinted at him. “You really cared about Aunt Anna, didn’t you?”

  He nodded. The wipers went whip-thud, whip-thud.

  Reese said, “There’s things my momma did she shouldn’t have done. Some things I’d give my left arm to forget. Sometimes I think my Aunt Anna found out about some of what my momma was doing—my momma and old Craddock, her stepfather—and that’s why she killed herself. Because she couldn’t live anymore with what she knew, but she couldn’t talk about it either. I know she was already real unhappy. I think maybe some bad stuff happened to her, too, when she was little. Some of the same stuff happened to me.” She was looking at him directly now.

  So. Reese at least did not know everything her mother had done, which Jude could only take to mean that there really was some mercy to be found in the world.

  “I am sorry about what I did to your hand,” she said. “I mean that. I have dreams sometimes, about my Aunt Anna. We go for rides together. She has a cool old car like this one, only black. She isn’t sad anymore, not in my dreams. We go for rides in the country. She listens to your music on the radio. She told me you weren’t at our house to hurt me. She said you came to end it. To bring my mother to account for what she let happen to me. I just wanted to say I’m sorry and I hope you’re happy.”

  He nodded but did not reply, did not, in truth, trust his own voice.

  They went into the station together. Jude left her on a scarred wooden bench, went to the counter and bought a ticket to Buffalo. He had the station agent put it inside an envelope. He slipped two hundred dollars in with it, folded into a sheet of paper with his phone number on it and a note that she should call if she ran into trouble on the road. When he returned to her, he stuck the envelope into the pouch on the side of her backpack instead of handing it to her, so she wouldn’t look into it right away and try to give the money back.

  She went with him out onto the street, where the rain was falling more heavily now and the last of the day’s light had fled, leaving things blue and twilighty and cold. He turned to say good-bye, and she stood on tiptoe and kissed the chilled, wet side of his face. He had, until then, been thinking of her as a young woman, but her kiss was the thoughtless kiss of a child. The idea of her traveling hundreds of miles north, with no one to look out for her, seemed suddenly all the more daunting.

  “Take care,” they both said, at exactly the same time, in perfect unison, and then they laughed. Jude squeezed her hand and nodded but had nothing else to say except good-bye.

  It was dark when he came back into the house. Marybeth pulled two bottles of Sam Adams out of the fridge, then started rummaging in the drawers for a bottle opener.

  “I wish I could’ve done something for her,” Jude said.

  “She’s a little young,” Marybeth said. “Even for you. Keep it in your pants, why don’t you?”

  “Jesus. That’s not what I meant.”

  Marybeth laughed, found a dishrag, and chucked it in his face.

  “Dry off. You look even more like a pathetic derelict when you’re all wet.”

  He rubbed the rag through his hair. Marybeth popped him a beer and set it in front of him. Then she saw he was still pouting and laughed again.

  “Come on, now, Jude. If you didn’t have me to rake you over the coals now and then, there wouldn’t be any fire left in your life at all,” she said. She stood on the other side of the kitchen counter, watching him with a certain wry, tender regard. “Anyway, you gave her a bus ticket to Buffalo, and…what? How much money?”

  “Two hundred dollars.”

  “Come on, now. You did something for her. You did plenty. What else were you supposed to do?”

  Jude sat at the center island, holding the beer Marybeth had set in front of him but not drinking it. He was tired, still damp and chilly from the outside. A big truck, or a Greyhound maybe, roared down the highway, fled into the cold tunnel of the night, was gone. He could hear the puppies out in their pen, yipping at it, excited by its noise.

  “I hope she makes it,” Jude said.

  “To Buffalo? I don’t see why she wouldn’t,” Marybeth said.

  “Yeah,” Jude said, although he wasn’t sure that was what he’d really meant at all.

  HEART-SHAPED ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Raise your lighters for one last schmaltzy power ballad and allow me to sing the praises of those folks who gave so much to help bring Heart-Shaped Box into existence. My thanks to my agent, Michael Choate, who steers my professional ship with care, discretion, and uncommon good sense. I owe much to Jennifer Brehl, for all the hard work she put into editing my novel, for guiding me through the final draft, and especially for taking a chance on Heart-Shaped Box in the first place. Maureen Sugden did an extraordinary job of copyediting my novel. Thanks are also due to Lisa Gallagher, Juliette Shapland, Kate Nintzel, Ana Maria Allessi, Lynn Grady, Rich Aquan, Lorie Young, Kim Lewis, Seale Ballenger, Kevin Callahan, Sara Bogush, and everyone else at William Morrow who went to bat for the book. Gratitude is owed, as well, to Jo Fletcher, at Gollancz, in England, who sweated over this book as much as anyone.

  My deepest appreciation to Andy and Kerri, for their enthusiasm and friendship, and to Shane, who is not only my compadre but who also keeps my web site, joehillfiction.com, flying with spit and imagination. And I can’t say how grateful I am to my parents and siblings for their time, thoughts, support, and love.

  Most of all, my love and thanks to Leanora and the boys. Leanora spent I don’t know how many hours reading and rereading this manuscript, in all its various forms, and talking with me about Jude, Marybeth, and the ghosts. To put it another way: She read a million pages, and she rocked them all. Thanks, Leanora. I am so glad and so lucky to have you as my best friend.

  That’s all, and thanks for coming to my show, everyone. Good night, Shreveport!

  Throw Up Your Horns:

  Thoughts on the Second Novel

  The first concert I went to was KISS, Madison Square Garden, the original members in their glam makeup, Gene Simmons vomiting blood and breathing flame. I was psyched. I had the Colorforms set, the comics, Double Platinum on vinyl. I knew all their secrets. I knew their true names: Demon and Catman, Spaceman and Starchild, names that suited them far better than Gene, Paul, Ace, and Peter. I knew that KISS stood for KNIGHTS IN
SATAN’S SERVICE, even if the band said it didn’t (wink wink). I was a card-carrying member of the KISS Army. I was eight years old and when the band hit the stage, leaping through a curtain of white fire, I screamed my head off and threw my horns in the air. You know about throwing the horns: make a fist, then stick up your index finger and your pinkie, to show your enthusiasm for personal damnation and the devil. At my age I probably didn’t know that was what it meant; I just knew it felt right.

  People tend to overrate the importance of their firsts: concert, kiss, friend, lay, car, broken promise, broken heart. We aren’t ducklings, doomed to imprint on the first moving creature we see, and think of it as mother for the rest of our lives. Yeah, KISS made the first music that ever connected with me, but thirty years after that initial infatuation, it’s my sense that their genius lay in their marketing, not their music. (‘Course, Judas Coyne would’ve been glad to go on tour with them. Jude’s Hammer and KISS on the same bill? Money in the bank, baby.)

  I’ve moved on. Borrow my iPod for an hour, put my music on shuffle, you might come across Josh Ritter or Weezer, but you won’t be hearing “Lick it Up.”

  But if early influences are overrated, it’s still probably true that what charged your batteries as a kid will often provide clues to what will charge them later. The excitement I felt when I heard “Heaven’s On Fire” for the first time was a shock of discovery, of having come across a secret door, one that opened into a whole series of connected rooms. Dark rooms, with different music playing in each one. And not just any music. Loud music: AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, Nine-Inch Nails.

  And while I may have outgrown KISS’s sound, I remain preoccupied with certain dizzying notions first suggested to me by that gang of good-Jewish-boys-gone-glam from New York City. Such as: The power of casting aside your old name and taking on a new, more honest one; the thrill of breathing fire, either metaphorically, or actually; the possibility of an ordinary man transforming himself into something bigger-than-life, something both monstrous and wonderful, in the way Chaim Witz only needed to daub on some face makeup to become a demon with a guitar. Jesus saves, but the devil rock-and-rolls all night long (and parties every day). And while, as a child, I could not understand the erotic link the band made between burning heaven and getting laid—between destruction and sexual release—I wasn’t deaf either. It made its impression.

  I wrote about some of these things in Heart-Shaped Box, and then that novel was done, and I didn’t know what to do next. I picked at this, I made a mess of that. It wasn’t a great time. I think now that most writers who struggle are really wrestling not with their work, but with their identities. They’d like to write someone else’s novels—Michael Chabon’s maybe, or Neil Gaiman’s. Because maybe they felt they gave too much of themselves away in the last book, and they’re scared to do it again. Maybe the version of themselves they revealed wore devil makeup and spat blood and they don’t want to be that person; they want to wipe the makeup off, be taken seriously.

  Remember what happened when the guys in KISS started performing without greasepaint and dropped the freaky names? All the magic was gone. They ran from what made them . . . them. They weren’t KISS anymore, they were just four hard-rock musicians, technically capable, of course, but oddly flavorless. All the craft in the world doesn’t mean a thing if you won’t let your freak flag fly and write your enthusiasms, excitements, secret turn-ons, wishes, hates, and hopes. It is my suggestion that when KISS wiped off the makeup they were not showing their true faces to the world, but erasing them. The mask was more exciting (because it was more honest) than what lay beneath it.

  I mention all this to make a point, that the artist’s primary creation is not their work, but the sensibility that creates the work. You want to write (or paint, or direct, or dance) from your truest self, and that means knowing what belongs to you—your particular subjects, motifs, characters, and rhythms. Eventually I found my way back to what belonged to me, and Horns was the natural byproduct: a story about transformation, fire, spitting blood, music, regret, and redemption not from sin, but through it. It goes to a different place than Heart-Shaped Box, but anyone can see the same guy with the same interests (obsessions) wrote it. I don’t know what it means, that I have to write about those things; I just know it feels right.

  To put it another way, I did try for a while to be someone good, someone better, someone else, someone who could write a love story that acts like a love story, someone who could win a literary prize or two with a novel full of classical allusions and social meaning . . . but in the end, I could only be the devil you know.

  Here’s hoping you’ll let me whisper in your ear one more time. And when I tell you to go to hell—remember, I mean it in the kindest possible way.

  Throw up your Horns. Let’s rock.

  Joe Hill

  November 2009

  Herewith follows a bonus excerpt from Horns, Joe Hill’s new novel, on sale everywhere in February 2010.

  one.

  Ignatius Martin Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke the next morning with a headache, put his hands to his temples and felt something unfamiliar, a pair of knobby pointed protuberances. He was so ill—wet-eyed and weak—he didn’t think anything of it at first, was too hungover for thinking or worry.

  But when he was swaying above the toilet, he glanced at himself in the mirror over the sink and saw he had grown horns while he slept. He lurched in surprise and for the second time in twelve hours, he pissed on his feet.

  two.

  He shoved himself back into his khaki shorts—he was still wearing yesterday’s clothes—and leaned over the sink for a better look.

  They weren’t much as horns went, each of them about as long as his ring finger, thick at the base, but soon narrowing to a point as they hooked upward. The horns were covered in his own too-pale skin, except at the very tips, which were an ugly inflamed red, as if the needle-points at the ends of them were about to poke through the flesh. He touched one, and found the point sensitive, a little sore. He ran his fingers along the sides of each and felt the density of bone beneath the stretched-tight smoothness of skin.

  His first thought was that somehow he had brought this affliction upon himself. Late the night before he had gone into the woods beyond the old foundry, to the place where Merrin Williams had been killed. People had left remembrances at a diseased black cherry tree, the bark peeling away to show the flesh beneath. Merrin had been found like that, clothes peeled away to show the flesh beneath. There were photographs of her placed delicately in the branches, a vase of pussy-willows, Hallmark cards warped and stained from exposure to the elements. Someone, Merrin’s mother probably, had left a decorative cross with yellow nylon roses stapled to it, and a plastic Virgin who smiled with the beatific idiocy of the functionally retarded.

  He couldn’t stand that simpering smile. He couldn’t stand the cross either, planted in the place where Merrin bled to death from her smashed-in head. A cross with yellow roses. What a fucking thing. It was like an electric chair with floral print cushions, a bad joke. It bothered him that someone wanted to bring Christ out here. Christ was a year too late to do any good. He hadn’t been anywhere around when Merrin needed Him.

  Ig had ripped the decorative cross down and stamped it into the dirt. He had to take a leak and he did it on the Virgin, drunkenly urinating on his own feet in the process. Perhaps that was blasphemy enough to bring on this transformation. But no—he sensed there had been more. What else, he couldn’t recall. He had had a lot to drink.

  He turned his head this way and that, studying himself in the mirror, lifting his fingers to touch the horns, once and again. How deep did the bone go? Did the horns have roots, pushing back into his brain? At this thought, the bathroom darkened, as if the light bulb overhead had briefly gone dim. The welling darkness, though, was behind his eyes, in his head, not in the light fixtures. He held the sink and waited for the feeling of weakness to pass.

&
nbsp; He saw it then. He was going to die. Of course he was going to die. Something was pushing into his brain, all right: a tumor. The horns weren’t really there. They were metaphorical, imaginary. He had a tumor eating his brain and it was causing him to see things. And if he was to the point of seeing things, then it was probably too late to save him.

  The idea that he might be going to die brought with it a surge of relief, a physical sensation, like coming up for air after being underwater too long. Ig had come close to drowning once, and had suffered from asthma as a child, and to him, contentment was as simple as being able to breathe.

  “I’m sick,” he breathed. “I’m dying.”

  It improved his mood to say it aloud.

  He studied himself in the mirror, expecting the horns to vanish now that he knew they were hallucinatory, but it didn’t work that way. The horns remained. He fretfully tugged at his hair, trying to see if he could hide them, at least until he got to the doctor’s, then quit when he realized how silly it was to try and conceal something no one would be able to see but him.