Heart-shaped box (28 page)

Marybeth stared at Jude’s hand. He lifted it—discovered he had left a wet red handprint on the table—and put it weakly back down.

“We shouldn’t have come here,” she said.

“Nowhere else to go.”

She turned her head, looked at Arlene’s fat rottie. “Tell me he’s gonna help us.”

“Okay. He’s going to help us.”

“You mean it?”

“No.”

Marybeth questioned him with a glance.

“Sorry,” Jude said. “I might’ve misled you a bit ’bout the dogs. Not just any dogs will do. They have to be mine. You know how every witch has a black cat? Bon and Angus were like that for me. They can’t be replaced.”

“When did you figure that out?”

“Four days ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was hoping to bleed to death before Angus went and croaked on us. Then you’d be okay. Then the ghost would have to leave you alone. His business with us would be done. If my head was clearer, I wouldn’t have bandaged myself up so well.”

“You think it’ll make it okay if you let yourself die? You think it’ll make it okay to give him what he wants? Goddam you. You think I came all this way to watch you kill yourself?
Goddam
you.”

Arlene stepped back through the kitchen doorway, frowning, eyebrows knitted together in a look of annoyance or deep thought or both.

“There’s somethin’ wrong with that phone. I can’t get a dial tone. All I do get, when I pick up, is some local AM station. Some farm program. Guy chatterin’ about how to cut open animals. Maybe the wind yanked down a line.”

“I have a cell phone—” Marybeth began.

“Me, too,” Arlene said. “But we don’t get no reception up in these parts. Let’s get Justin laid down, and I’ll see what I can do for his hand right now. Then I’ll drive down the road to the McGees and call from there.”

Without any forewarning she reached between them and snatched at Marybeth’s wrist, lifting her own bandaged hand for a moment. The wraps were stiff and brown with the dried bloodstains on them.

“What the hell have you two been doin’?” she asked.

“It’s my thumb,” Marybeth said.

“Did you try to trade it to him for his finger?”

“It’s just got an infection.”

Arlene set the bandaged hand down and looked at the unbandaged left hand, terribly white, the skin wrinkled. “I never seen any infection like this. It’s in both hands—is it anywhere else?”

“No.”

She felt Marybeth’s brow. “You’re burnin’ up. My God. The both of you. You can rest in my room, honey. I’ll put Justin in with his father. I shoved an extra bed in there two weeks ago, so I could nap in there and keep a closer eye on him. Come on, big boy. More walkin’ to do. Get yourself up.”

“If you want me to move, you better get the wheelbarrow and roll me,” Jude said.

“I got morphine in your daddy’s room.”

“Okay,” Jude said, and he put his left hand on the table and struggled to get to his feet.

Marybeth jumped up and took his elbow.

“You stay where you are,” Arlene said. She nodded in the direction of her rottweiler and the door beyond, which opened into what had once been a sewing room but was now a small bedroom. “Go on and rest in there. I can handle this one.”

“It’s all right,” Jude said to Marybeth. “Arlene’s got me.”

“What are we gonna do about Craddock?” Marybeth asked.

She was standing almost against him, and Jude leaned forward and put his face in her hair and kissed the crown of her head.

“I don’t know,” Jude said. “I wish like hell you weren’t in this with me. Why didn’t you get away from me when you still had the chance? Why you got to be such a stubborn ass about things?”

“I been hangin’ around you for nine months,” she said, and stood on tiptoe and put her arms around his neck, her mouth searching for his. “I guess it just rubbed off on me.”

And then for a while they stood rocking back and forth in each other’s arms.

W
hen Jude stepped away from Marybeth,
Arlene turned him around and started him walking. He expected her to march him back down the front hall, so they could go upstairs to the master bedroom, where he assumed his father lay. Instead, though, they continued along the length of the kitchen to the back hall, the one that led to Jude’s old bedroom.

Of course his father was there, on the first floor. Jude vaguely recalled that Arlene had told him, in one of their few phone conversations, that she was moving Martin downstairs and into Jude’s old bedroom, because it was easier than going up and down the stairs to tend to him.

Jude cast one last look back at Marybeth. She was watching him go, from where she stood in the doorway of Arlene’s bedroom, her eyes fever-bright and exhausted—and then Jude and Arlene were moving away, leaving her behind. He didn’t like the idea of being so far from Marybeth in the dark and decayed maze of his father’s house. It did not seem too unreasonable to think that they might never find their way back to each other.

The hall to his room was narrow and crooked, the walls visibly warped. They passed a screen door, the frame nailed shut, the screens rusty and bellied outward. It looked into a muddy hog pen, three
medium-size pigs in it. The pigs peered at Jude and Arlene as they went by, their squashed-in faces benevolent and wise.

“There’s still pigs?” Jude said. “Who’s carin’ for them?”

“Who do you think?”

“Why didn’t you sell them?”

She shrugged, then said, “Your father took care of pigs all his life. He can hear them in where he’s layin’. I guess I thought it would help him know where he was. Who he was.” She looked up in Jude’s face. “You think I’m foolish?”

“No,” Jude said.

Arlene eased the door to Jude’s old bedroom inward, and they stepped into a suffocating warmth that smelled so strongly of menthol it made Jude’s eyes water.

“Hang on,” Arlene said. “Lemme move my sewin’.”

She left him leaning against the doorway and hastened to the little bed against the wall, to the left. Jude looked across the room to an identical cot. His father was in it.

Martin Cowzynski’s eyes were narrow slits, showing only glazed slivers of eyeball. His mouth yawned open. His hands were gaunt claws, curled against his chest, the nails crooked, yellow, sharp. He had always been lean and wiry. But he had lost, Jude guessed, maybe a third of his weight, and there was barely a hundred pounds of him left. He looked like he was already dead, although breath yet whined in his throat. There were streaks of white foam on his chin. Arlene had been shaving him. The bowl of hand-whipped foam was on the night table, a wood-handled brush sitting in it.

Jude had not seen his father in thirty-four years, and the sight of him—starved, hideous, lost in his own private dream of death—brought on a fresh wave of dizziness. Somehow it was more horrible that Martin was breathing. It would’ve been easier to look upon him, as he was now, if he were dead. Jude had hated him for so long that he was unprepared for any other emotion. For pity. For horror. Horror was rooted in sympathy,
after all, in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst. Jude had not imagined he could feel either sympathy or understanding for the man in the bed across the room.

“Can he see me standing here?” Jude asked.

Arlene looked over her shoulder at Jude’s father.

“Doubt it. He hasn’t responded to the sight of anything in days. Course it’s been months since he could talk, but until just a little while ago he did sometimes make faces or give a sign when he wanted something. He enjoyed when I shaved him, so I still do that ever’ day. He liked the hot water on his face. Maybe some part of him still likes it. I don’t know.” She paused, considering the gaunt, rasping figure in the far bed. “It’s sorry to see him die this way, but it’s worse to keep a man going after a certain point. I believe that. There comes a time, the dead have a right to claim their own.”

Jude nodded. “The dead claim their own. They do.”

He looked at what Arlene held in her hands, the sewing kit she was moving off the other cot. It was his mother’s old kit, a collection of thimbles, needles, and thread, jumbled in one of the big yellow heart-shaped candy boxes his father used to get for her. Arlene squeezed the lid on it, closing it up, and set it on the floor between the cots. Jude eyed it warily, but it didn’t make any threatening moves.

Arlene returned and guided him by the elbow to the empty bed. There was a light on a mechanical arm, screwed to the side of the night table. She twisted the lamp around—it made a sproingy, creaking sound as the rusted coil stretched itself out—and clicked it on. He shut his eyes against the sudden brightness.

“Let’s look at that hand.”

She brought a low stool to the side of the bed and began to unwind the sopping gauze, using a pair of forceps. As she peeled the last layer away from his skin, a flush of icy tingling spread through his hand, and then the missing finger began, impossibly, to burn, as if it were crawling with biting fire ants.

She stuck a needle into the wound, injecting him here, and here, while he cursed. Then came a rush of intense and blessed cold, spreading through the hand and into his wrist, pumping along the veins, turning him into an iceman.

The room darkened, then brightened. The sweat on his body cooled rapidly. He was on his back. He didn’t remember lying down. He distantly felt a tugging on his right hand. When he realized that this tugging was Arlene doing something to the stump of his finger—clamping it, or putting hooks through it, or stitching it—he said, “Gonna puke.” He fought the urge to gag until she could place a rubber trough next to his cheek, then turned his head and vomited into it.

When Arlene was finished, she laid his right hand on his chest. Wrapped in layer upon layer of muffling bandage, it was three times the size it had been, a small pillow. He was groggy. His temples thudded. She turned the harsh, bright light into his eyes again and leaned over for a look at the slash in his cheek. She found a wide, flesh-colored bandage and carefully applied it to his face.

She said, “You been leakin’ pretty good. Do you know what type of motor oil you run on? I’ll make sure the amble-lance brings the right stuff.”

“Check on Marybeth. Please.”

“I was going to.”

She clicked off the light before she went. It was a relief to be joined to darkness once more.

He closed his eyes, and when they sprang open again, he did not know whether one minute had passed or sixty. His father’s house was a place of restful silence and stillness, no sound but for the sudden whoosh of the wind, lumber creaking, a burst of rain on the windows. He wondered if Arlene had gone for the amble-lance. He wondered if Marybeth was sleeping. He wondered if Craddock was in the house, sitting outside the door. Jude turned his head and found his father staring at him.

His father’s mouth hung agape, the few teeth that were left stained
brown from nicotine exposure, the gums diseased. Martin stared, pale gray eyes confused. Four feet of bare floor separated the two men.

“You aren’t here,” Martin Cowzynski said, his voice a wheeze.

“Thought you couldn’t talk,” Jude said.

His father blinked slowly. Gave no sign he’d heard. “You’ll be gone when I wake up.” His tone was almost wishful. He began to cough weakly. Spit flew, and his chest seemed to go hollow, sinking inward, as if with each painful hack he were coughing up his insides, beginning to deflate.

“You got that wrong, old man,” Jude told him. “You’re my bad dream, not the other way around.”

Martin continued staring at him with that look of stupid wonder for a few moments longer, then turned his gaze to the ceiling once more. Jude watched him warily, the old man in his army cot, breath screaming from his throat, dried streaks of shaving cream on his face.

His father’s eyes gradually sank shut. In a while Jude’s eyes did the same.

H
e wasn’t sure what woke him,
but later on Jude looked up, coming out of sleep in an instant, and found Arlene at the foot of the bed. He didn’t know how long she’d been standing there. She was wearing a bright red rain slicker with the hood pulled up. Droplets of rain glittered on the plastic. Her old, bony face was set in a blank, almost robotic expression that Jude did not at first recognize and which he needed several moments to interpret as fear. He wondered if she’d gone and come back or not yet left.

“We lost the power,” she said.

“Did we?”

“I went outside, and when I came back in, we lost the power.”

“Uh-huh.”

“There’s a truck in the driveway. Just settin’ there. Sort of no particular color. I can’t see who is settin’ in it. I started to walk out to it, to see if it was someone who could maybe drive somewhere and call emergency for us—but then I got scared. I got scared of who was in it, and I came back.”

“You want to stay away from him.”

She went on as if Jude had said nothing. “When I got back inside, we
didn’t have power, and it’s still just some crazy talk radio on the telephone. Bunch of religious stuff about ridin’ the glory road. The TV was turned on in the front room. It was just runnin’. I know it couldn’t be, because there isn’t any power, but it was turned on anyway. There was a story on it. On the news. It was about you. It was about all of us. About how we was all dead. It showed a picture of the farmhouse and every-thin’. They were coverin’ my body with a sheet. They didn’t identify me, but I saw my hand stickin’ out and my bracelet. And policemen standin’ ever’where. And that yellow tape blockin’ the driveway. And Dennis Woltering said how you killed us all.”

“It’s a lie. None of that is really going to happen.”

“Finally I couldn’t stand it. I shut it off. The TV came right back on, but I shut it off again and jerked the plug out of the wall, and that fixed it.” She paused, then added, “I have to go, Justin. I’ll call for the amble-lance from the neighbors. I have to go…. Only I’m scared to try anddrive around that truck. Who drives the pale truck?”

“No one you want to meet. Take my Mustang. The keys are in it.”

“No thank you. I seen what was in the back.”

“Oh.”

“I got my car.”

“Just don’t mess with that truck. Drive right over the lawn and through the fence if you have to. Do what you need to do to stay away from it. Did you look in on Marybeth?”

Arlene nodded.

“How is she?”

“Sleepin’. Poor child.”

“You said it.”

“Good-bye, Justin.”

“Take care.”

“I’m bringin’ my dog with me.”

“All right.”

She took a sliding half step toward the door.

Then Arlene said, “Your uncle Pete and I took you to Disney when you were seven. Do you remember?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“In your whole life, I never once saw you smile until you were up in them elephants, goin’ ’round and ’round. That made me feel good. When I saw you smile, it made me feel like you had a chance to be happy. I was sorry about how you turned out. So miserable. Wearin’ black clothes and sayin’ all them terrible things in your songs. I was sick to death for you. Wherever did that boy go, the one who smiled on the elephant ride?”

“He starved to death. I’m his ghost.”

She nodded and backed away. Arlene raised one hand in a gesture of farewell, then turned and was gone.

Afterward Jude listened intently to the house, to the faint straining sounds it made in the wind and the splatter of the rain falling against it. A screen door banged sharply somewhere. It might have been Arlene leaving. It might have been the door swinging on the chicken coop outside.

Beyond a feeling of gritty heat in the side of his face, where Jessica Price had cut him, he was not in great pain. His breathing was slow and regular. He stared at the door, waiting for Craddock to appear. He didn’t look away from the door until he heard a soft tapping sound off to his right.

He peered over. The big yellow heart-shaped box sat on the floor. Something thumped inside. Then the box moved, as if jolted from beneath. It titched a few inches across the floor and jumped again. The lid was struck from within once more, and one corner was knocked up and loose.

Four gaunt fingers slipped out from inside the box. Another thump and the lid came free and then began to rise. Craddock pulled himself up from inside the box, as if it were a heart-shaped hole set in the floor. The lid rode on top of his head, a gay and foolish hat. He removed it, cast it aside, then hitched himself out of the box to the waist in a single, surprisingly athletic move for a man who was not only elderly but dead. He
got a knee on the floor, climbed the rest of the way out, and stood up. The creases in the legs of his black trousers were perfect.

In the pen outside, the pigs began to shriek. Craddock reached a long arm back into the bottomless box, felt around, found his fedora, and set it on his head. The scribbles danced before his eyes. Craddock turned and smiled.

“What kept you?” Jude asked.