Heart-Shaped Box

knuckles, and bled into the transmission. It was a rough kind of courtship, and it suited him well.

Around that time Anna had come to live with him. Not that he ever called her by that name. She was Florida then, although somehow, since he’d learned of her suicide, he’d come to think of her as Anna again.

She sat in the backseat with the dogs while he worked, her boots sticking out a missing window. She sang along with the songs she knew and talked baby talk to Bon and kept at Jude with her questions. She asked him if he was ever going to go bald (“I don’t know”), because she’d leave him if he did (“Can’t blame you”), and if he’d still think she was sexy if she shaved off all her hair (“No”), and if he’d let her drive the Mustang when it was done (“Yes”), and if he’d ever been in a fistfight (“Try to avoid them—hard to play guitar with a broken hand”), and why he never talked about his parents (to which he said nothing), and if he believed in fate (“No,” he said, but he was lying).

Before Anna and the Mustang, he had recorded a new CD, a solo disc, and had traveled to some twenty-four nations, played more than a hundred shows. But working on the car was the first time since Shannon had left him that he felt gainfully employed, doing work that mattered, in the truest sense—although why rebuilding a car should feel like honest work instead of a rich man’s hobby, while recording albums and playing arenas had come to seem like a rich man’s hobby instead of a job, he couldn’t have said.

The idea crossed his mind once more that he ought to go. Put the farm in the rearview mirror and take off, it didn’t matter for where.

The thought was so urgent, so demanding—get in the car and get out of here—that it set his teeth on edge. He resented being made to run. Throwing himself into the car and taking off wasn’t a choice, it was panic. This was followed by another thought, disconcerting and unfounded, yet curiously convincing: the thought that he was being herded, that the dead man wanted him to run. That the dead man was trying to force him away from…from what? Jude couldn’t imagine. Outside, the dogs barked in concert at a passing semi.

Anyway, he wasn’t going anywhere without talking to Georgia about it. And if he did eventually decide to light out, he would probably want to get dressed beforehand. Yet in another moment he found himself inside the Mustang, behind the wheel. It was a place to think. He’d always done some of his best thinking in the car, with the radio on.

He sat with the window halfway down, in the dark, earth-floored garage, and it seemed to him if there was a ghost nearby, it was Anna, not the angry spirit of her stepfather. She was as close as the backseat. They had made love there, of course. He had gone into the house to get beer and had come back, and she was waiting in the rear of the Mustang in her boots and no more. He dropped the open beers and left them foaming in the dirt. In that moment nothing in the world seemed more important than her firm, twenty-six-year-old flesh, and her twenty-six- year-old sweat, and her laughter, and her teeth on his neck.

He leaned back against the white leather, feeling his exhaustion for the first time all day. His arms were heavy, and his bare feet were half numb from the cold. At one time or another, he had left his black leather duster in the backseat. He reached for it and spread it over his legs. The keys were in the ignition, so he clicked the engine over to the battery to run the radio.

Jude was no longer sure why he had climbed into the car, but now that he was sitting, it was hard to imagine moving. From what seemed a long way off, he could hear the dogs barking again, their voices strident and alarmed. He turned up the volume to drown them out.

John Lennon sang “I Am the Walrus.” Jude let his head rest on the back of the seat, relaxing into the pocket of warmth under his jacket. Paul McCartney’s slinky bass kept drifting away, getting lost under the low mutter of the Mustang’s engine, which was funny, since Jude hadn’t turned the engine on, only the battery. The Beatles were followed by a parade of commercials. Lew at Imperial Autos said, “You won’t find offers like ours anywhere in the tristate area. We’re pulling deals our competition can’t come close to matching. The dead pull the living down. Come on in and get behind the wheel of your next ride and take it for a spin on the nightroad. We’ll go together. We’ll sing together. You won’t ever want the trip to end. It won’t.”

Ads bored Jude, and he found the strength to flip to another station. On FUM they were playing one of his songs, his very first single, a thunderous AC/DC ripoff titled “Souls for Sale.” In the gloom it seemed as if ghostly shapes, unformed wisps of menacing fog, had begun to swirl around the car. He shut his eyes and listened to the faraway sound of his own voice.

More than silver and more than gold,You say my soul is worth,Well, I’d like to make it right with God,But I need beer money first.

He snorted softly to himself. It wasn’t selling souls that got you into trouble, it was buying them. Next time he would have to make sure there was a return policy. He laughed, opened his eyes a little. The dead man, Craddock, sat in the passenger seat next to him. He smiled at Jude, to show stained teeth and a black tongue. He smelled of death, also of car exhaust. His eyes were hidden behind those odd, continuously moving black brushstrokes.

“No returns, no exchanges,” Jude said to him. The dead man nodded sympathetically, and Jude shut his eyes again. Somewhere, miles away, he could hear someone shouting his name.

“…ude! Jude! Answer me Ju…”

He didn’t want to be bothered, though, was dozy, wanted to be left alone. He cranked the seat back. He folded his hands across his stomach. He breathed deeply.

He had just nodded off when Georgia got him by the arm and hauled him out of the car, dumped him in the dirt. Her voice came in pulses, drifting in and out of audibility.

“…get out of there Jude get the fuck…

…on’t be dead don’t be…

…leeeeeese, please…

…eyes open your fucking…”

He opened his eyes and sat up in one sudden movement, hacking furiously. The barn door was rolled back, and the sunshine poured through it in brilliant, crystalline beams, solid-looking and sharp-edged. The light stabbed at his eyes, and he flinched from it. He inhaled a deep, cold breath, opened his mouth to say something, to let her know he was all right, and his throat filled with bile. He rolled onto all fours and retched in the dirt. Georgia had him by the arm and bent over him while he horked up.

Jude was dizzy. The ground tilted underneath him. When he tried to look outside, the world spun, as if it were a picture painted on the side of a vase, turning on a lathe. The house, the yard, the drive, the sky, streamed by him, and a withering sensation of motion sickness rolled through him, and he upchucked again.

He clutched the ground and waited for the world to stop moving. Not that it ever would. That was one thing you found out when you were stoned, or wasted, or feverish: that the world was always turning and that only a healthy mind could block out the sickening whirl of it. He spat, wiped at his mouth. His stomach muscles were sore and cramped, as if he’d just done a few dozen abdominal crunches, which was, when you thought about it, very close to the truth. He sat up, turned himself to look at the Mustang. It was still running. No one was in it.

The dogs danced around him. Angus leaped into his lap and thrust his cold, damp nose into his face, lapped at Jude’s sour mouth. Jude was too weak to push him away. Bon, always the shy one, gave Jude a worried, sidelong look, then lowered her head to the thin gruel of his vomit and covertly began to gobble it up.

He tried to stand, grabbing Georgia’s wrist, but didn’t have the strength in his legs and instead pulled her down with him, onto her knees. He had a dizzying thought—the dead pull the living down—that spun in his head for a moment and was gone. Georgia trembled. Her face was wet against his neck.

“Jude,” she said. “Jude, I don’t know what’s happening to you.”