Heart-shaped box (15 page)

But as they crossed the parking lot—thoughtlessly holding hands, a thing they never did—he happened to glance back at their hotel room. Angus and Bon stared out through the picture window at them, standing side by side on their hind legs, with their front paws on the glass and their faces wearing identical looks of apprehension.

T
he Denny’s was loud and overcrowded,
thick with the smell of bacon fat and burnt coffee and cigarette smoke. The bar, just to the right of the doors, was a designated smoking area. That meant that after five minutes of waiting up front to be seated, you could plan on smelling like an ashtray by the time you were led to your table.

Jude didn’t smoke himself and never had. It was the one self-destructive habit he’d managed to avoid. His father smoked. On errands into town, Jude had always willingly bought him the cheap, long boxes of generics, had done it even without being asked, and they both knew why. Jude would glare at Martin across the kitchen table, while his father lit a cigarette and took his first drag, the tip flaring orange.

“If looks could kill, I’d have cancer already,” Martin said to him one night, without any preamble. He waved a hand, drew a circle in the air with the cigarette, squinting at Jude through the smoke. “I got a tough constitution. You want to kill me off with these, you’re gonna have to wait a while. You really want me dead, there’s easier ways to do it.”

Jude’s mother said nothing, concentrated on shelling peas, face screwed up in an expression of intent study. She might have been a deaf-mute.

Jude—Justin then—did not speak either, simply went on glaring at him. He was not too angry to speak but too shocked, because it was as if his father had read his mind. He’d been staring at the loose, chicken-flesh folds of Martin Cowzynski’s neck with a kind of fury, wanting to will a cancer into it, a lump of black-blossoming cells that would devour his father’s voice, choke his father’s breath. Wanting that with all his heart: a cancer that would make the doctors scoop out his throat, shut him up forever.

The man at the next table had had his throat scooped out and used an electrolarynx to talk, a loud, crackling joy buzzer that he held under his chin to tell the waitress (and everyone else in the room):
“YOU GOT AIR-CONDITIONIN’? WELL, TURN IT ON. YOU DON’T BOTHER TO COOK THE FOOD, WHY YOU WANNA FRAH YOUR PAYIN’ CUSTOMERS? JESUS CHRIST. I’M EIGHTY-SEVEN.”
This was a fact he felt to be of such overwhelming importance that he said it again after the waitress walked away, repeating himself to his wife, a fantastically obese woman who didn’t look up from her newspaper as he spoke.
“I’M EIGHTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD. CHRIST. FRAH US LIKE AIGS.”
He looked like the old man from that painting,
American Gothic,
down to the gray strands of hair combed over his balding dome.

“Wonder what sort of old couple we’d make,” Georgia said.

“Well. I’d still be hairy. It would just be white hair. And it would probably be growing in tufts out of all the wrong places. My ears. My nose. Big, crazy hairs sticking out of my eyebrows. Basically like Santa, gone horribly fuckin’ wrong.”

She scooped a hand under her breasts. “The fat in these is going to drain steadily into my ass. I got a sweet tooth, so probably my teeth will fall out on me. On the bright side, I’ll be able to pop out my dentures for toothless, old-lady blow jobs.”

He touched her chin, lifted her face toward his. He studied her high cheekbones and the eyes in deep, bruised hollows, eyes that watched
with a wry amusement that did not quite mask her desire to meet with his approval.

“You got a good face,” he said. “You got good eyes. You’ll be all right. With old ladies it’s all about the eyes. You want to be an old lady with lively eyes, so it looks like you’re always thinking of something funny. Like you’re looking for trouble.”

He drew his hand away. She peered down into her coffee, smiling, flattered into an uncharacteristic shyness.

“Sounds like you’re talking about my grandma Bammy,” she said. “You’ll love her. We could be there by lunch.”

“Sure.”

“My grandma looks like the friendliest, most harmless old thing. Oh, but she likes tormenting people. I was living with her by the time I was in the eighth grade. I’d have my boyfriend Jimmy Elliott over—to play Yahtzee, I said, but really we were sneaking wine. Bammy would leave a half-full bottle of red in her fridge most days, leftover from dinner the night before. And she knew what we were doing, and one day she switched purple ink for the booze and left it for us. Jimmy let me take the first slug. I got a mouthful and went and coughed it all down myself. When she came home, I still had a big purple ring on my mouth, purple stains all down my jaw, purple tongue. It didn’t come out for a week either. I expected Bammy to paddle me good, but she just thought it was funny.”

The waitress came for their order. When she was gone, Georgia said, “What was it like being married, Jude?”

“Peaceful.”

“Why did you divorce her?”

“I didn’t. She divorced me.”

“She catch you in bed with the state of Alaska or something?”

“No. I didn’t cheat—well, not too often. And she didn’t take it personal.”

“She didn’t? Are you for real? If we were married and you helped yourself to a piece, I’d throw the first thing came to hand at you. And the second. I wouldn’t drive you to the hospital either. Let you bleed.” She paused, bent over her mug, then said, “So what did it?”

“It would be hard to explain.”

“Because I’m too stupid?”

“No,” he said. “More like I’m not smart enough to explain it to myself, let alone anyone else. For a long time, I wanted to work at being a husband. Then I didn’t. And when I didn’t anymore—she just knew it. Maybe I made sure she knew it.” And as he said it, Jude was thinking how he’d started staying up late, waiting for her to get tired and go to bed without him. He’d slip in later, after she was asleep, so there was no chance of making love. Or how he would sometimes start playing guitar, picking at a tune, in the middle of her telling him something—playing right over her talk. Remembering how he’d held on to the snuff movie instead of throwing it away. How he’d left it out where she could find it—where he supposed he knew she
would
find it.

“That doesn’t make sense. Just all of a sudden, you didn’t feel like making the effort? That doesn’t seem like you. You aren’t the type to give up on things for no reason.”

It wasn’t for no reason, but what reason there was defied articulation, could not be put into words in a way that made sense. He had bought his wife the farmhouse, bought it for both of them. He bought Shannon one Mercedes, then another, a big sedan and a convertible. They took weekends, sometimes, in Cannes, and flew there on a private jet where they were served jumbo shrimp and lobster tail on ice. And then Dizzy died—died as badly and painfully as a person could die—and Jerome killed himself, and still Shannon would come into Jude’s studio and say, “I’m worried about you. Let’s go to Hawaii” or “I bought you a leather jacket—try it on,” and he would begin to strum at his guitar, hating the chirp of her voice and playing over it, hating the thought of spending more money, of owning another jacket, of going on another trip. But
mostly just hating the contented, milk-fed look of her face, her fat fingers with all their rings, the cool look of concern in her eyes.

At the very end, when Dizzy was blind and raging with fever and soiling himself almost hourly, he got the idea in his head that Jude was his father. Dizzy wept and said he didn’t want to be gay. He said, “Don’t hate me anymore, Dad, don’t hate me.” And Jude said, “I don’t. I never.” And then Dizzy was gone, and Shannon went right on ordering Jude clothes and thinking about where they should eat lunch.

“Why didn’t you have children with her?” Georgia asked.

“I was worried I’d have too much of my father in me.”

“I doubt you’re anything like him,” she said.

He considered this over a forkful of food. “No. He and I have pretty much exactly the same disposition.”

“What scares me is the idea of having kids and then them finding out the truth about me. Kids always find out. I found out about my folks.”

“What would your kids find out about you?”

“That I dropped out of high school. That when I was thirteen I let a guy turn me into a prostitute. The only job I was ever good at involved taking my clothes off to Mötley Crüe for a roomful of drunks. I tried to kill myself. I been arrested three times. I stole money from my grandma and made her cry. I didn’t brush my teeth for about two years. Am I missing anything?”

“So this is what your kid would find out: No matter what bad thing happens to me, I can talk to my mother, because she’s been through it all. No matter what shitty thing happens to me, I can survive it, because my mom was through worse, and she made it.”

Georgia lifted her head, smiling again, her eyes glittering bright with pleasure and mischief—the kind of eyes Jude had been talking about only a few minutes before.

“You know, Jude,” she said, reaching for her coffee with the fingers of her bandaged hand. The waitress was behind her, leaning forward with the coffeepot to refill Georgia’s mug and not looking at what she was
doing, staring instead down at her check pad. Jude saw what was going to happen but couldn’t force the warning out of his throat in time. Georgia went on talking, “Sometimes you’re such a decent guy, I can almost forget what an assh—”

The waitress poured just as Georgia moved her cup and dumped coffee over the bandaged hand. Georgia wailed and yanked the hand back, drawing it tight against her chest, her face twisting in a hurt, sickened grimace. For a moment there was glassy shock in her eyes, a flat and empty shine that made Jude think she might be about to pass out.

Then she was up, clutching the bad hand in her good one. “Want to watch where the fuck you’re pourin’ that, you dumb bitch?” she shouted at the waitress, that accent coming over her again, her voice going country on her.

“Georgia,” Jude said, starting to rise.

She made a face and waved him back to his chair. She thudded the waitress with her shoulder, on her way by her, stalking toward the hall to the bathrooms.

Jude nudged his plate aside. “Guess I’ll take the check when you get a chance.”

“I am so sorry,” the waitress said.

“Accidents happen.”

“I am so sorry,” the waitress repeated. “But that is no reason for her to talk to me that way.”

“She got burnt. I’m surprised you didn’t hear worse.”

The waitress said, “The two of you. I knew what I was serving the moment I laid eyes on you. And I served you just as nice as I’d serve anyone.”

“Oh? You knew what you were serving? What was that?”

“Pair of lowlifes. You look like a drug peddler.”

He laughed.

“And you only got to take one glance at her to know what she is. You payin’ her by the hour?”

He stopped laughing.

“Get me the check,” he said. “And get your fat ass out of my sight.”

She stared at him a moment longer, her mouth screwed up as if she were getting ready to spit, then hurried away without another word.

The people at the tables immediately around him had stopped their conversations to gawk and listen. Jude swept his gaze here and there, staring back at anyone who dared stare at him, and one by one they returned to their food. He was fearless when it came to making eye contact, had looked into too many crowds for too many years to lose a staring contest now.

Finally the only people left watching him were the old man out of
American Gothic
and his wife, who might’ve been a circus fat lady on her day off. She at least made an effort to be discreet, peeping at Jude from the corners of her eyes while pretending to be interested in the paper spread before her. But the old man just stared, his tea-colored eyes judging and also somehow amused. In one hand he held the electrolarynx to his throat—it hummed faintly—as if he were about to comment. Yet he said nothing.

“Got something on your mind?” Jude asked, when staring right into the old man’s eyes didn’t embarrass him into minding his own business.

The old man raised his eyebrows, then wagged his head back and forth:
No, nothing to say
. He lowered his gaze back to his plate with a comic little sniff. He set the electrolarynx down beside the salt and pepper.

Jude was about to look away, when the electrolarynx came to life, vibrating on the table. A loud, toneless, electric voice buzzed forth:
“YOU WILL DIE.”

The old man stiffened, sat back in his wheelchair. He stared down at his electrolarynx, bewildered, maybe not really sure it had said anything. The fat lady curled her paper and peered over the top of it at the device, a wondering frown set on a face as smooth and round as the Pillsbury Doughboy’s.

“I AM DEAD,”
the electrolarynx buzzed, chattering across the surface
of the table like a cheap windup toy. The old man plucked it up between his fingers. It made joy-buzzer sounds from between them.
“YOU WILL DIE. WE WILL BE IN THE DEATH HOLE TOGETHER.”

“What’s it doin’?” said the fat woman. “Is it pickin’ up a radio station again?”

The old man shook his head:
Don’t know
. His gaze rose from the electrolarynx, which now rested in the cup of his palm, to Jude. He peered at Jude through glasses that magnified his astonished eyes. The old man held his hand out, as if offering the device to Jude. It hummed and jittered about.

“YOU WILL KILL HER KILL YOURSELF KILL THE DOGS THE DOGS WON’T SAVE YOU WE’LL RIDE TOGETHER LISTEN NOW LISTEN TO MY VOICE WE WILL RIDE AT NIGHTFALL. YOU DON’T OWN ME. I OWN YOU. I OWN YOU NOW.”

“Peter,” the fat woman said. She was trying to whisper, but her voice choked, and when she forced her next breath up, it came out shrill and wavering. “Make it stop, Peter.”

Peter just sat there holding it out to Jude, as if it were a phone and the call was for him.

Everyone was looking, the room filled with crosscurrents of worried murmuring. Some of the other customers had come up out of their chairs to watch, didn’t want to miss what might happen next.