Heart-Shaped Box

—parody of a penis—she flung it into the air, and her eyes sprang open, and she caught it when it came down and arched her back at the same time, raising her chest to the ceiling like an offering, and sliced the knife downward.

She hacked the black lace down the middle, opening a dark red slash, as if slitting herself from throat to crotch. She rolled and threw off the costume, and beneath she was naked except for the silver rings through her nipples, which swung from her breasts, and a G-string pulled up past her hard hip bones. Her supple, sealskin-smooth torso was crimson with body paint.

AC/DC was playing “If You Want Blood You Got It,” and what turned him on wasn’t her young, athletic body or the way her breasts swung with the hoops of silver through them or how, when she looked right at him, her stare was direct and unafraid.

It was that her lips were moving, just barely. He doubted if anyone else in the whole room besides him even noticed. She was singing to herself, singing along to AC/DC. She knew all the words. It was the sexiest thing he’d seen in months.

He raised his beer to her, only to find that it was empty. He had no memory of drinking it. The waitress brought him another a few minutes later. From her he learned that the dancer with the knife was named Morphine and was one of their most popular girls. It cost him a hundred to get her phone number and to find out she’d been dancing for around two years, almost to the day she stepped off the bus from Georgia. It cost him another hundred to get that when she wasn’t stripping, she answered to Marybeth.

27

Jude took the wheel just before they crossed into Georgia. His head hurt, an uncomfortable feeling of pressure on his eyeballs more than anything else. The sensation was aggravated by the southern sunshine glinting off just about everything—fenders, windshields, road signs. If not for his aching head, the sky would’ve been a pleasure, a deep, dark, cloudless blue.

As the Florida state line approached, he was conscious of a mounting anticipation, a nervous tickle in the stomach. Testament was by then perhaps only four hours away. He would be at her house tonight, Jessie Price, nee McDermott, sister to Anna, elder stepdaughter to Craddock, and he did not know what he might do when he reached the place.

It had crossed his mind that when he found her, it might end in death for someone. He had thought already that he could kill her for what she’d done, that she was asking for it, but for the first time, now that he was close to facing her, the idea became more than angry speculation.

He’d killed pigs as a boy, had picked up the fall-behinds by the legs and smashed their brains out on the concrete floor of his father’s cutting room. You swung them into the air and then hit the floor with them, silencing them in midsqueal with a sickening and somehow hollow splitting sound, the same noise a watermelon would make if dropped from a great height. He’d shot other hogs with the bolt gun and imagined he was killing his father as he did it.

Jude had made up his mind to do whatever he had to. He just didn’t know what that was yet. And when he thought about it closely, he dreaded learning, was almost as afraid of his own possibilities as he was of the thing coming after him, the thing that had once been Craddock McDermott.

He thought Georgia was dozing, did not know she was awake until she spoke.

“It’s the next exit,” she said in a sand-grain voice.

Her grandmother. Jude had forgotten about her, had forgotten he’d promised to stop.

He followed her instructions, hung a left at the bottom of the off-ramp and took a two-lane state highway through the shabby outskirts of Crickets, Georgia. They rolled by used-car lots, with their thousands of red, white, and blue plastic pennants flapping in the wind, let the flow of traffic carry them into the town itself. They cruised along one edge of the grassy town square, past the courthouse, the town hall, and the eroded brick edifice of the Eagle Theater.

The route to Bammy’s house led them through the green grounds of a small Baptist college. Young men, with ties tucked into their V-neck sweaters, walked beside girls in pleated skirts, with combed, shining hairdos straight out of the old Breck shampoo commercials. Some of the students stared at Jude and Georgia, in the Mustang, the shepherds standing up in the backseat, Bon and Angus breathing steam on the rear windows. A girl, walking beside a taller boy who sported a yellow bow tie, shrank back against her companion as they went past. Bow Tie put a comforting arm around her shoulders. Jude did not flip them off and then drove for a few blocks feeling good about himself, proud of his restraint. His self-control, it was like iron.

Beyond the college they found themselves on a street lined with well-kept Victorians and Colonials, shingles out front advertising the practices of lawyers and dentists. Farther down the avenue, the houses were smaller, and people lived in them. At a lemon Cape with yellow roses growing on a flower trellis to one side, Georgia said, “Turn in.”

The woman who answered the door was not fat but stocky, built like a defensive tackle, with a broad, dark face, a silky mustache and clever, girlish eyes, a brown shot through with jade. Her flip-flops smacked against the floor. She stared at Jude and Georgia for a beat, while Georgia grinned a shy, awkward grin. Then something in her grandmother’s eyes (Grandmother? How old was she? Sixty? Fifty-five? The disorienting thought crossed Jude’s mind that she might even be younger than himself ) sharpened, as if a lens had been brought into focus, and she screamed and threw open her arms. Georgia fell into them.

“M.B.!” Bammy cried. Then she leaned away from her, and, still holding her by the hips, stared into her face. “What is wrong with you?”

She put a palm to Georgia’s forehead. Georgia twisted from her touch. Bammy saw her bandaged hand next, caught her by the wrist, gave it a speculative look. Then she let go of the hand—almost flung it away.

“You strung out? Christ. You smell like a dog.”

“No, Bammy. I swear to God, I am not on no drugs right now. I smell like a dog because I’ve had dogs climbin’ all over me for most of two days. Why do you always got to think the worst damn thing?” The process that had begun almost a thousand miles before, when they started traveling south, seemed to have completed itself, so that everything Georgia said sounded country now.

Only had her accent really started reasserting itself once they were on the road? Or had she started slipping into it even earlier? Jude thought maybe he’d been hearing the redneck in her voice going all the way back to the day she stuck herself with the nonexistent pin in the dead man’s suit. Her verbal transformation disconcerted and unsettled him. When she talked that way—Why do you always got to think the worst damn thing? —she sounded like Anna.

Bon squeezed into the gap between Jude and Georgia and looked hopefully up at Bammy. The long pink ribbon of Bon’s tongue hung out, spit plopping from it. In the green rectangle of the yard, Angus tracked this way and that, whuffing his nose at the flowers growing around the picket fence.

Bammy looked first at Jude’s Doc Martens, then up to his scraggly black beard, taking in scrapes, the dirt, the bandage wrapped around his left hand.

“You the rock star?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You both look like you been in a fight. Was it with each other?”

“No, Bammy,” Georgia said.

“That’s cute, with the matchin’ bandages on your hands. Is that some kind of romantic thing? Did you two brand each other as a sign of your affection? In my day we used to trade class rings.”

“No, Bammy. We’re fine. We were drivin’ through on our way to Florida, and I said we should stop. I wanted you to meet Jude.”

“You should’ve called. I would’ve started dinner.”

“We can’t stay. We got to get to Florida tonight.”

“You don’t got to get anywhere except bed. Or maybe the hospital.”

“I’m fine.”

“The hell. You’re the furthest thing from fine I’ve ever laid eyes on.” She plucked at a strand of black hair stuck to Georgia’s damp cheek. “You’re covered in sweat. I know sick when I see it.”

“I’m just boiled, is all. I spent the last eight hours trapped inside that car with those ugly dogs and bad air-