Heart-shaped box (4 page)

J
ude glared at the black phone,
still gripped in his white-knuckled hand, and listened to the slow, martial drumbeat of his heart.

“Boss,” Danny breathed. “Ho. Lee. Shit.
Boss.
” He laughed: thin, wheezing, humorless laughter. “What the hell was all that?”

Jude mentally commanded his hand to open, to let go of the phone. It didn’t want to. He knew that Danny had asked a question, but it was like a voice overheard through a closed door, part of a conversation taking place in another room, nothing to do with him.

It was beginning to settle in that Florida was dead. When he had first heard she’d killed herself—when Jessica Price threw it in his face—it had not meant anything, because he couldn’t let it mean anything. Now, though, there was no running from it. He felt the knowledge of her death in his blood, which went heavy and thick and strange on him.

It did not seem possible to Jude she could be gone, that someone with whom he’d shared his bed could be in a bed of dirt now. She was twenty-six—no, twenty-seven; she’d been twenty-six when she left. When he sent her away. She’d been twenty-six, but she asked questions like a four-year-old.
You go fishin’ much on Lake Pontchartrain? What’s the best
dog you ever owned? What do you think happens to us when we die?
Enough questions to drive a man mad.

She’d been afraid she was going mad. She was depressed. Not fashionably depressed, in the way of some Goth chicks, but clinically. She had been overcome with it in their last couple of months together, didn’t sleep, wept for no reason, forgot to put on her clothes, stared at the TV for hours without bothering to turn it on, answered the phone when it rang but then wouldn’t say anything, just stood there holding it, as if she’d been switched off.

But before that there’d been summer days in the barn while he rebuilt the Mustang. There’d been John Prine on the radio, the sweet smell of hay baking in the heat, and afternoons filled with her lazy, pointless questions—a never-ending interrogation that was, at turns, tiresome, amusing, and erotic. There’d been her body, tattooed and icy white, with the bony knees and skinny thighs of a long-distance runner. There’d been her breath on his neck.

“Hey,” Danny said. He reached out, and his fingers grazed Jude’s wrist. At his touch, Jude’s hand sprang open, releasing the phone. “Are you going to be all right?”

“I don’t know.”

“Want to tell me what’s going on?”

Slowly Jude lifted his gaze. Danny half stood behind his desk. He had lost some of his color, his ginger freckles standing out in high relief against the white of his cheeks.

Danny had been her friend, in the unthreatening, easygoing, slightly impersonal way he made himself a friend to all of Jude’s girls. He played the role of the urbane, understanding gay pal, someone they could trust to keep their secrets, someone they could vent to and gossip with, someone who provided intimacy without involvement. Someone who would tell them things about Jude that Jude wouldn’t tell them himself.

Danny’s sister had OD’d on heroin when Danny was just a freshman in college. His mother hanged herself six months later, and Danny had
been the one who discovered her. Her body dangled from the single rafter in the pantry, her toes pointed downward, turning in small circles above a kicked-over footstool. You didn’t need to be a psychologist to see that the double-barreled blast of the sister and the mother, dying at almost the same time, had wiped out some part of Danny as well, had frozen him at nineteen. Although he didn’t wear black fingernail polish or rings in his lips, in a way Danny’s attraction to Jude wasn’t so different from Georgia’s, or Florida’s, or any of the other girls’. Jude collected them in almost exactly the same way the Pied Piper had collected rats, and children. He made melodies out of hate and perversion and pain, and they came to him, skipping to the music, hoping he would let them sing along.

Jude didn’t want to tell Danny about what Florida had done to herself, wanted to spare him. It would be better not to tell him. He wasn’t sure how Danny would take it.

He told him anyway. “Anna. Anna McDermott. She cut her wrists. The woman I was just talking to is her sister.”

“Florida?” Danny said. He settled back into his chair. It creaked beneath him. He looked winded. He pressed his hands to his abdomen, then leaned forward slightly, as if his stomach were cramping up. “Oh, shit. Oh, fucking shit,” Danny said sweetly. No words had ever sounded less obscene.

A silence followed. Jude noticed, for the first time, that the radio was on, murmuring softly. Trent Reznor sang that he was ready to give up his empire of dirt. It was funny hearing Nine Inch Nails on the radio just then. Jude had met Florida at a Trent Reznor show, backstage. The fact of her death hit him fresh, all over again, as if he were just realizing it for the first time.
You go fishin’ much on Lake Pontchartrain?
And then the shock began to coalesce into a sickened resentment. It was so pointless and stupid and self-involved that it was impossible not to hate her a little, not to want to get her on the phone and curse her out, except he couldn’t get her on the phone, because she was dead.

“Did she leave a note?” Danny asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t get much information from her sister. It wasn’t the world’s most helpful phone call. Maybe you noticed.”

But Danny wasn’t listening. He said, “We used to go out for margaritas sometimes. She was one hell of a sweet kid. Her and her questions. She asked me once if I had a favorite place to watch the rain when I was a kid. What the hell kind of question is that? She made me shut my eyes and describe what it looked like outside my bedroom window when it was raining. For ten minutes. You never knew what she was going to ask next. We were big-time compadres. I don’t understand this. I mean, I know she was depressed. She told me about it. But she really didn’t want to be. Wouldn’t she have called one of us if she was going to do something like…? Wouldn’t she have given one of us a chance to talk her out of it?”

“I guess not.”

Danny had dwindled somehow in the last few minutes, shrunk into himself. He said, “And her sister…her sister thinks it’s your fault? Well, that’s…that’s just crazy.” But his voice was weak, and Jude thought he didn’t sound entirely sure of himself.

“I guess.”

“She had emotional problems going back before she met you,” Danny said, with a little more confidence.

“I think it runs in her family,” Jude said.

Danny leaned forward again. “Yeah.
Yeah
. I mean—what the Christ? Anna’s sister is the person who sold you the ghost? The dead man’s suit? What the fuck is going on here? What happened that made you want to call her in the first place?”

Jude didn’t want to tell Danny about what he’d seen last night. In that moment—pushed up against the stony truth of Florida’s death—he wasn’t entirely sure
what
he’d seen last night anymore. The old man sitting in the hallway, outside his bedroom door at 3:00
A.M.
, just didn’t seem as real now.

“The suit she sent me is a kind of symbolic death threat. She tricked
us into buying it. For some reason she couldn’t just send it to me, I had to pay for it first. I guess you could say sanity isn’t her strong suit. Anyway, I could tell there was something wrong about it as soon as it came. It was in this fucked-up black heart-shaped box and—this will maybe sound a little paranoid—but it had a pin hidden inside to stick someone.”

“There was a needle hidden in it? Did it stick you?”

“No. It poked Georgia good, though.”

“Is she all right? Do you think there was something on it?”

“You mean like arsenic? No. I don’t get the sense Jessica Price of Psychoville, Florida, is actually that stupid. Deeply and intensely crazy, but not stupid. She wants to scare me, not go to jail. She told me her stepdaddy’s ghost came with the suit and he’s going to get me for what I did to Anna. The pin was probably, I don’t know, part of the voodoo. I grew up not far from the Panhandle. Place is crawling with toothless, possumeating trailer trash full of weird ideas. You can wear a crown of thorns to your job at the Krispy Kreme and no one will bat an eye.”

“Do you want me to call the police?” Danny asked. He was finding his footing now. His voice wasn’t so winded, had regained some of its self-assurance.

“No.”

“She’s making threats on your life.”

“Who says?”

“You do. Me, too. I sat right here and heard the whole thing.”

“What did you hear?”

Danny stared for a moment, then lowered his eyelids and smiled in a drowsy kind of way. “Whatever you say I heard.”

Jude grinned back, in spite of himself. Danny was shameless. Jude could not, at the moment, recall why it was he sometimes didn’t like him.

“Naw,” Jude said. “That’s not how I’m going to deal with this. But you can do one thing for me. Anna sent a couple letters after she went home. I don’t know what I did with them. You want to poke around?”

“Sure, I’ll see if I can lay a hand on them.” Danny was eyeing him
uneasily again, and even if he had recovered his humor, he had not got back his color. “Jude…when you say that’s not how you’re going to deal with this…what’s
that
mean?” He pinched his lower lip, brow screwed up in thought again. “That stuff you said when you hung up. Talking about sending people after her. Going down there yourself. You were pretty pissed. Like I’ve never heard you. Do I need to be worried?”

“You? No,” Jude said. “Her? Maybe.”

H
is mind leaped
from one bad thing to another, Anna nude and hollow-eyed and floating dead in scarlet bathwater, Jessica Price on the phone—
You’re goin’ to die, and it’s goin’ to be his cold hand over your mouth
—the old man sitting in the hall in his black Johnny Cash suit, slowly lifting his head to look at Jude as Jude walked by.

He needed to quiet the noise in his head, a thing usually best accomplished by making some noise with his hands. He carried the Dobro to his studio, strummed at it experimentally, and didn’t like the tuning. Jude went into the closet to look for a capo to choke the strings and found a box of bullets instead.

They were in a heart-shaped box—one of the yellow heart-shaped boxes his father used to give to his mother, every Valentine’s Day and every Mother’s Day, on Christmas and on her birthday. Martin never gave her anything else—no roses or rings or bottles of champagne—but always the same big box of chocolates from the same department store.

Her reaction was as unvarying as his gift. Always, she smiled, a thin, uncomfortable smile, keeping her lips together. She was shy about her teeth. The uppers were false. The real ones had been punched in. Always, she offered the box first to her husband, who, smiling proudly, as if
his gift were a diamond necklace and not a three-dollar box of chocolates, would shake his head. Then she presented them to Jude.

And always Jude picked the same one, the one in the center, a chocolate-covered cherry. He liked the
gloosh
of it when he bit into it, the faintly corrupt, sticky-sweet sap, the rotten-soft texture of the cherry itself. He imagined he was helping himself to a chocolate-covered eyeball. Even in those days, Jude took pleasure in dreaming up the worst, reveled in gruesome possibilities.

Jude found the box nestled in a rat’s nest of cables and pedals and adapters, under a guitar case leaned against the back of his studio closet. It wasn’t just any guitar case, but the one he’d left Louisiana with thirty years before, although the used, forty-dollar Yamaha that had once occupied it was long gone. The Yamaha he had left behind, onstage in San Francisco, where he’d opened for Zeppelin one night in 1975. He’d been leaving a lot of things behind in those days: his family, Louisiana, swine, poverty, the name he’d been born with. He did not waste a lot of time looking back.

He picked the candy box up, then dropped it just as quickly, his hands going nerveless on him. Jude knew what was in it without even opening it, knew at first sight. If there was any doubt at all, though, it fled when the box hit the ground and he heard the brass shells jingle-jangle inside. The sight of it caused him to recoil in an almost atavistic terror, as if he’d gone digging through the cables and a fat, furry-legged spider had crawled out across the back of his hand. He had not seen the box of ammo in more than three decades and knew he’d left it stuck between the mattress and the box spring of his childhood bed, back in Moore’s Corner. It had not left Louisiana with him, and there was no way it could be lying there behind his old guitar case, only it was.

He stared at the yellow heart-shaped box for a moment, then forced himself to pick it up. He pulled off the lid and tipped the box over. Bullets spilled onto the floor.

He had collected them himself, as avid for them as some children
were for baseball cards: his first collection. It had started when he was eight, when he was still Justin Cowzynski, years and years before he’d ever imagined that someday he would be someone else. One day he was tramping across the east field and heard something snap underfoot. He bent to see what he’d stepped on and picked an empty shotgun shell out of the mud. One of his father’s, probably. It was fall, when the old man shot at turkeys. Justin sniffed the splintered, flattened case. The whiff of gunpowder itched his nostrils—a sensation that should’ve been unpleasant but which was strangely fascinating. It came home with him in his dungaree pocket and went into one of his mother’s empty candy boxes.

It was soon joined by two live shells for a .38, swiped from the garage of a friend, some curious silver empties he had discovered at the rifle range, and a bullet from a British assault rifle, as long as his middle finger. He had traded for this last, and it had cost him dear—an issue of
Creepy
with a Frazetta cover—but he felt he had got value for value. He would lie in bed at night looking his bullets over, studying the way the starlight shone on the polished casings, smelling the lead, the way a man might sniff at a ribbon scented with a lover’s perfume; thoughtfully, with a head full of sweet fantasy.

In high school he strung the British bullet on a leather thong and wore it around his throat until the principal confiscated it. Jude wondered that he had not found a way to kill someone in those days. He’d possessed all the key elements of a school shooter: hormones, misery, ammunition. People wondered how something like Columbine could happen. Jude wondered why it didn’t happen more often.

They were all there—the crushed shotgun shell, the silver empties, the two-inch bullet from the AR-15, which couldn’t be there, because the principal had never given it back. It was a warning. Jude had seen a dead man in the night, Anna’s stepfather, and this was his way of telling Jude that their business was not done.

It was a crazy thing to think. There had to be a dozen more reasonable explanations for the box, for the bullets. But Jude didn’t care what
was reasonable. He wasn’t a reasonable man. He only cared what was true. He had seen a dead man in the night. Maybe, for a few minutes, in Danny’s sun-splashed office, he’d been able to block it out, pretend it hadn’t happened, but it had.

He was steadier now, found himself considering the bullets coolly. It came to him that maybe it was more than a warning. Perhaps it was also a message. The dead man, the ghost, was telling him to arm himself.

Jude considered the .44, his Super Blackhawk, in the safe, under his desk. But what would he shoot at? He understood that the ghost existed first and foremost within his own head. That maybe ghosts always haunted minds, not places. If he wanted to take a shot at it, he’d have to turn the barrel against his own temple.

He brushed the bullets back into his mother’s candy box, pushed the lid back on. Bullets wouldn’t do him any good. But there were other kinds of ammunition.

He had a collection of books on the shelf at one end of the studio, books about the occult and the supernatural. Around the time Jude was just beginning his recording career, Black Sabbath came out big, and Jude’s manager advised him that it couldn’t hurt to at least imply that he and Lucifer were on a first-name basis with each other. Jude had already taken up the study of group psychology and mass hypnosis, on the theory that if fans were good, cultists were even better. He added volumes by Aleister Crowley and Charles Dexter Ward to the reading list, and he worked his way through them with a careful, joyless concentration, underlining concepts and key facts.

Later, after he was a celebrity, Satanists and Wiccans and spiritualists, who from listening to his music mistakenly thought he shared their enthusiasms—he really didn’t give a fuck; it was like wearing leather pants, just part of the costume—sent him even more (admittedly fascinating) reading: an obscure manual, printed by the Catholic Church in the thirties, for performing exorcisms; a translation of a five-hundred-
year-old book of perverted, unholy psalms written by a mad Templar; a cookbook for cannibals.

Jude placed the box of bullets up on the shelf among his books, all thoughts of finding a capo and playing some Skynyrd gone. He ran his thumbnail along the spines of the hardcovers. It was cold enough in his studio to make his fingers stiff and clumsy, and it was hard to turn pages, and he didn’t know what he was looking for.

For a while he struggled to make his way through a strangled discourse on animal familiars, creatures of intense feeling who were bound by love and blood to their masters, and who could deal with the dead directly. But it was written in dense eighteenth-century English, without any punctuation. Jude would labor over a single paragraph for ten minutes, then wouldn’t know what he’d read. He set it aside.

In another book he lingered on a chapter about possession, by way of demon or hateful spirit. One grotesque illustration showed an old man sprawled on his bed, among tangled sheets, his eyes bulging in horror and his mouth gaping open, while a leering, naked homunculus climbed out from between his lips. Or, a worse thought: Maybe the thing was climbing in.

Jude read that anyone who held open the golden door of mortality, for a peek at the other side, risked letting something through, and that the ill, the old, and those who loved death were especially in danger. The tone was assertive and knowledgeable, and Jude was encouraged until he read that the best method of protection was to wash yourself in urine. Jude had an open mind when it came to depravity, but he drew the line at water sports, and when the book slipped from his cold hands, he didn’t bother to pick it up. Instead he kicked it away.

He read about the Borley rectory, about contacting spirit companions by way of the Ouija board, and about the alchemical uses of menstrual blood, his eyes going in and out of focus, and then he was flinging books, lashing them about the studio. Every word was crap. Demons and familiars
and enchanted circles and the magical benefits of piss. One volume swept a lamp off his desk with a crash. Another hit a framed platinum record. A spiderweb of gleaming shatter lines leaped through the glass over the silver disk. The frame dropped from the wall, hit the floor, tilted onto its face with a crunch. Jude’s hand found the candy box full of bullets. It struck the wall, and ammo sprayed across the floor in a ringing clatter.

He grabbed another book, breathing hard, his blood up, just looking to do some damage now and never mind to what, then caught himself, because the feel of the thing in his hand was all wrong. He looked and saw a black, unlabeled videotape instead. He didn’t know right away what it was, had to think awhile before it came to him. It was his snuff film. It had been sitting on the shelf with the books, apart from the other videos for…what? Four years? It had been there so long he’d stopped seeing it among the hardcovers. It had become just a part of the general clutter on the shelves.

Jude had walked into the studio one morning and found his wife, Shannon, watching it. He was packing for a trip to New York and had come looking for a guitar to take with him. He stopped in the doorway at the sight of her. Shannon stood in front of the television, watching a man suffocate a naked teenage girl with a clear plastic bag, while other men watched.

Shannon frowned, her brow wrinkled in concentration, watching the girl in the movie die. He didn’t worry about her temper—anger didn’t impress him—but he’d learned to be wary of her when she was like this, calm and silent and drawn into herself.

At last she said, “Is this real?”

“Yes.”

“She’s really dying?”

He looked at the TV. The naked girl had gone slack and boneless on the floor. “She’s really dead. They killed her boyfriend, too, didn’t they?”

“He begged.”

“A cop gave it to me. He told me the two kids were Texas junkies who
shot up a liquor store and killed someone, then ran for Tijuana to hide out. Cops keep some sick shit lying around.”

“He begged for her.”

Jude said, “It’s gruesome. I don’t know why I still have it.”

“I don’t either,” she said. She rose and ejected the movie, then stood looking at it, as if she had never seen a videotape before and was trying to imagine what purpose one might serve.

“Are you all right?” Jude asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. She turned the glassy, confused look upon him. “Are you?”

When he didn’t reply, she crossed the room and slipped past him. At the door Shannon caught herself and realized she was still holding the tape. She set it gently on the shelf before she walked out. Later the housekeeper shoved the video in with the books. It was a mistake Jude never bothered to correct, and soon enough he forgot it was even there.

He had other things to think about. After he returned from New York, he found the house empty, Shannon’s side of the closet cleaned out. She didn’t bother with a note, no Dear John saying their love had been a mistake or that she’d loved some version of him that didn’t really exist, that they’d been growing apart. She was forty-six and had been married and divorced once before. She didn’t do junior-high theatrics. When she had something to say to him, she called. When she needed something from him, her lawyer called.

Looking at the tape now, he really didn’t know why he had held on to it—or why it had held on to him. It seemed to him he should’ve sought it out and got rid of it when he came home and found her gone. He was not even sure why he had accepted it in the first place, when the tape had been offered to him. Jude teetered then on the edge of an uncomfortable thought, that he had, over time, become a little too willing to take what he was offered, without wondering at the possible consequences. And look at the trouble it had led to. Anna had offered herself to him, and he
had taken, and now she was dead. Jessica McDermott Price had offered him the dead man’s suit, and now it was his. Now it was his.

He had not gone out of his way to own a dead man’s suit, or a videotape of Mexican death-porn, or any of the rest of it. It seemed to him instead that all these things had been drawn to him like iron filings to a magnet, and he could no more help drawing them and holding on to them than a magnet could. But this suggested helplessness, and he had never been helpless. If he was going to throw something into the wall, it ought to be this tape.

But he’d stood too long thinking. The cold in the studio sapped him, so that he felt tired, felt his age. He was surprised he couldn’t see his own breath; that was how cold it felt. He couldn’t imagine anything more foolish—or weak—than a fifty-four-year-old man pitching his books in a fit of rage, and if there was one thing he despised, it was weakness. He wanted to drop the tape and crunch it underfoot, but instead he turned to put it back on the shelf, feeling that it was more important to recover his composure, to act, at least for a moment, like an adult.