Heart-Shaped Box

you back.” She laid his hand aside. “Your beard and your big leather jacket and your big black car and your big black boots. No one puts on all that armor unless they been hurt by someone who didn’t have no right to hurt them.”

“Look who’s talking,” he said. “Is there any part of you, you won’t stick a pin in?” She had them in her ears, her tongue, one nipple, her labia. “Who are you trying to scare away?”

Anna gave him his final palm reading just a few weeks before Jude packed her stuff. He looked out the kitchen window early one evening and saw her trudging through a cold October rain to the barn, wearing only a black halter and black panties, her naked flesh shocking in its paleness.

By the time he caught up to her, she had crawled into the dog pen, the part of it that was inside the barn, where Angus and Bon went to get out of the rain. She sat in the dirt, mud smeared on the backs of her thighs. The dogs whisked here and there, shooting worried looks her way and giving her space.

Jude climbed into the pen on all fours, angry with her, sick to death of the way it had been the last two months. He was sick of talking to her and getting dull, three-word answers, sick of laughter and tears for no reason. They didn’t make love anymore. The thought repelled him. She didn’t wash, didn’t dress, didn’t brush her teeth. Her honey-yellow hair was a rat’s nest. The last few times they had attempted to have sex, she’d turned him off with the things she wanted, had embarrassed and sickened him. He didn’t mind a certain amount of kink, would tie her up if she wanted, pinch her nipples, roll her over and put it in her ass. But she wasn’t happy with that. She wanted him to hold a plastic bag over her head. To cut her.

She was hunched forward, with a needle in one hand. She pushed it into the thumb of the other, working intently and deliberately—pricking herself once, then again, producing fat, gem- bright drops of blood.

“The hell you doing?” he asked her, struggling to keep the anger out of his voice and failing. He took her by the wrist, to stop her sticking herself.

She let the needle drop into the mud, then reversed his grip, squeezed his hand in hers and stared down at it. Her eyes glowed with fever in their dark, bruised-looking hollows. She was down to sleeping three hours a night at best.

“You’re running out of time almost as fast as I am. I’ll be more useful when I’m gone. I’m gone. We have no future. Someone is going to try and hurt you. Someone who wants to take everything away from you.” She rolled her eyes up to look into his face. “Someone you can’t fight. You’ll fight anyway, but you can’t win. You won’t win. All the good things in your life will soon be gone.”

Angus whined anxiously and slipped in between them, burrowing his snout in her crotch. She smiled—first smile he’d seen in a month—and dug behind his ears.

“Well,” she said. “You’ll always have the dogs.”

He twisted free of her grip, took her by the arms, lifted her to her feet. “I don’t listen to nothing you say. You’ve told my fortune three times at least, and it comes out a different way every time.”

“I know,” she said. “But they’re all true anyway.”

“Why were you sticking yourself with a needle? Why you want to do that?”

“I done it since I was a girl. Sometimes if I stick myself a couple times, I can make the bad thoughts go away. It’s a trick I taught myself to clear my head. Like pinchin’ yourself in a dream. You know. Pain has a way of wakin’ you up. Of remindin’ you who you are.”

Jude knew.

Almost as an afterthought, she added, “I guess it isn’t workin’ too good anymore.” He led her out of the pen and back across the barn. She spoke again, said, “I don’t know what I’m out here for. In my underwear.”

“I don’t either.”

“You ever dated anyone as crazy as me, Jude? Do you hate me? You’ve had a lot of girls. Tell me honest, am I the worst? Who was your worst?”

“Why do you got to ask so many damn questions?” he wanted to know.

As they went back out into the rain, he opened his black duster and closed it over her thin, shivering body, clasped her against him.

“I’d rather ask questions,” she said, “than answer them.”

23

He woke a little after nine with a melody in his head, something with the feel of an Appalachian hymn. He nudged Bon off the bed—she had climbed up with them in the night—and pushed aside the covers. Jude sat on the edge of the mattress, mentally running over the melody again, trying to identify it, to remember the lyrics. Only it couldn’t be identified, and the lyrics couldn’t be recalled, because it hadn’t existed until he thought it up. It wouldn’t have a name until he gave it one.

Jude rose, slipped across the room and outside, onto the concrete breezeway, still in his boxers. He unlocked the trunk of the Mustang and pulled out a battered guitar case with a ’68 Les Paul in it. He carried it back into the room.

Georgia hadn’t moved. She lay with her face in the pillow, one bone-white arm above the sheets and curled tight against her body. It had been years since he dated anyone with a tan. When you were a Goth, it was important to at least imply the possibility you might burst into flames in direct sunlight.

He let himself into the john. By now Angus and Bon were both trailing him, and he whispered at them to stay. They sank to their bellies outside the door, staring forlornly in at him, accusing him with their eyes of failing to love them enough.

He wasn’t sure how well he could play with the puncture wound in his left hand. The left did the picking and the right found the chords. He lifted the Les Paul from its case and began to fiddle, bringing it into tune. When he strummed a pick across the strings, it set off a low flare of pain—not bad, almost just an uncomfortable warmth—in the center of his palm. It felt as if a steel wire were sunk deep into the flesh and beginning to heat up. He could play through that, he thought.

When the guitar was in tune, he searched for the proper chords and began to play, reproducing the tune that had been in his head when he woke. Without the amp the guitar was all flat, soft twang, and each chord made a raspy, chiming sound. The song itself might have been a traditional hill-country melody, sounded like something that belonged on a Folkways record or a Library of Congress retrospective of traditional music. Something with a name like “Fixin’ to Dig My Grave.” “Jesus Brung His Chariot.” “Drink to the Devil.”

“ ‘Drink to the Dead,’” he said.

He put the guitar down and went back into the bedroom. There was a small notepad on the night table, and a ballpoint pen. He brought them into the bathroom and wrote down “Drink to the Dead.” Now it had a title. He picked up the guitar and played it again.

The sound of it—the sound of the Ozarks, of gospel—gave him a little prickle of pleasure, which he felt along his forearms and across the back of his neck. A lot of his songs, when they started out, sounded like old music. They arrived on his doorstep, wandering orphans, the lost children of large and venerable musical families. They came to him in the form of Tin Pan Alley sing-alongs, honky-tonk blues, Dust Bowl plaints, lost Chuck Berry riffs. Jude dressed them in black and taught them to scream.

He wished he had his DAT recorder, wanted to get what he had down on tape. Instead he put the guitar aside once more, and scribbled the chords on the notepad, beneath his title. Then he took up the Les Paul and played the lick again, and again, curious to see where it would take him. Twenty minutes later there were spots of blood showing through the bandage around his left hand, and he had worked out the chorus, which built naturally from the initial hook, a steady, rising, thunderous chorus, a whisper to a shout: an act of violence against the beauty and sweetness of the melody that had come before.

“Who’s that by?” Georgia asked, leaning in through the bathroom door, knuckling the sleep out of her eyes.

“Me.”