“She came back home to kill herself, you asshole,” she said, Jessica Price of Florida, whose name was unfamiliar to him, but maybe not quite as unfamiliar as he would’ve liked. Her voice had suddenly, without warning, lost the veneer of easy humor. “After you were done with her, she slashed her wrists in the bathtub. Our stepdaddy is the one who found her. She would’ve done anything for you, and you threw her away like she was garbage.”
Florida.
Florida. He felt a sudden ache in the pit of his stomach, a sensation of cold, sick weight. In the same moment, his head seemed to come clear, to shake off the cobwebs of exhaustion and superstitious fear. She had always been Florida to him, but her name was really Anna May McDermott. She told fortunes, knew tarot and palmistry. She and her older sister both had learned how from their stepfather. He was a hypnotist by trade, the last resort of smokers and self-loathing fat ladies who wanted to be done with their cigarettes and their Twinkies. But on the weekends Anna’s stepfather hired himself out as a dowser and used his hypnotist’s pendulum, a silver razor on a gold chain, to find lost objects and to tell people where to drill their wells. He hung it over the bodies of the ill to heal their auras and slow their hungry cancers, spoke to the dead with it by dangling it over a Ouija board. But hypnotism was the meal ticket: You can relax now. You can close your eyes. Just listen to my voice.
Jessica Price was talking again. “Before my stepfather died, he told me what to do, how I should get in touch with you and how to send you his suit and what would happen after. He said he’d see to you, you ugly, no-talent motherfucker.”
She was Jessica Price, not McDermott, because she had married and was a widow now. Jude had the impression her husband had been a reservist who bought it in Tikrit, thought he recalled Anna telling him that. He wasn’t sure Anna had ever mentioned her older sister’s married name, although she’d told him once that Jessica had followed their stepfather into the hypnotism trade. Anna had said her sister made almost seventy thousand dollars a year at it.
Jude said, “Why did I have to buy the suit? Why didn’t you just send it to me?” The calm of his own voice was a source of satisfaction to him. He sounded calmer than she did.
“If you didn’t pay, the ghost wouldn’t really belong to you. You had to pay. And, boy, are you goin’ to.”
“How’d you know I’d buy it?”
“I sent you an e-mail, didn’t I? Anna told me all about your sick little collection…your dirty little oh-cult pervert shit. I figured you couldn’t help yourself.”
“Someone else could’ve bought it. The other bids—”
“There weren’t any other bids. Just you. I put all those other bids up there, and the biddin’ wasn’t goin’ to be done until you made an offer. How do you like your purchase? Is it what you were hopin’ for? Oh, you have got some fun ahead of you. I’m goin’ to spend that thousand dollars you paid me for my stepdad’s ghost on a bouquet for your funeral. Goin’ to be one hell of a nice spread.”
You can just get out, Jude thought. Just get out of the house. Leave the dead man’s suit and the dead man behind. Take Georgia for a trip to L.A. Pack a couple suitcases, be on a flight in three hours. Danny can set it up, Danny can…
As if he had said it aloud, Jessica Price said, “Go ahead and check into a hotel. See what happens. Wherever you go, he’ll be right there. When you wake up, he’ll be settin’ at the foot of your bed.” She was starting to laugh. “You’re goin’ to die, and it’s goin’ to be his cold hand over your mouth.”
“So Anna was living with you when she killed herself?” he said. Still in possession of himself. Still perfectly calm.
A pause. The angry sister was out of breath, needed a moment before she could reply. Jude could hear a sprinkler running in the background, children shouting in the street.
Jessica said, “It was the only place she had. She was depressed. She’d always been bad depressed, but you made it worse. She was too miserable to go out, get help, see anyone. You made her hate herself. You made it so she wanted to die.”
“What makes you think she killed herself because of me? You ever think it was the pleasure of your company drove her over the edge? If I had to listen to you all day, I’d probably want to slash my wrists, too.”
“You’re going to die—” she spat.
He cut her off. “Think up a new line. And while you’re working on that, here’s something else to think about: I know a few angry souls myself. They drive Harleys, live in trailers, cook crystal meth, abuse their children, and shoot their wives. You call ’em scumbags. I call ’em fans. Want to see if I can find a few who live in your area to drop in and say hello?”
“No one will help you,” she said, voice strangled and trembling with fury. “The black mark on you will infect anyone who joins your cause. You will not live, and no one who gives you aid or comfort will live.” Reciting it through her anger, as if it were a speech she had rehearsed, which perhaps she had. “Everyone will flee from you or be undone like you will be undone. You’re goin’ to die alone, you hear me? Alone.”
“Don’t be so sure. If I’m going down, I might like some company,” he said. “And if I can’t get help, maybe I’ll come see you myself.” And banged the phone down.
8
Jude glared at the black phone, still gripped in his white-knuckled hand, and listened to the slow, martial drumbeat of his heart.
“Boss,” Danny breathed. “Ho. Lee. Shit. Boss.” He laughed: thin, wheezing, humorless laughter. “What the hell was all that?”
Jude mentally commanded his hand to open, to let go of the phone. It didn’t want to. He knew that Danny had asked a question, but it was like a voice overheard through a closed door, part of a conversation taking place in another room, nothing to do with him.
It was beginning to settle in that Florida was dead. When he had first heard she’d killed herself—when Jessica Price threw it in his face—it had not meant anything, because he couldn’t let it mean anything. Now, though, there was no running from it. He felt the knowledge of her death in his blood, which went heavy and thick and strange on him.
It did not seem possible to Jude she could be gone, that someone with whom he’d shared his bed could be in a bed of dirt now. She was twenty-six—no, twenty-seven; she’d been twenty-six when she left. When he sent her away. She’d been twenty-six, but she asked questions like a four-year-old. You go fishin’ much on Lake Pontchartrain? What’s the best dog you ever owned? What do you think happens to us when we die? Enough questions to drive a man mad.
She’d been afraid she was going mad. She was depressed. Not fashionably depressed, in the way of some Goth chicks, but clinically. She had been overcome with it in their last couple of months together, didn’t sleep, wept for no reason, forgot to put on her clothes, stared at the TV for hours without bothering to turn it on, answered the phone when it rang but then wouldn’t say anything, just stood there holding it, as if she’d been switched off.
But before that there’d been summer days in the barn while he rebuilt the Mustang. There’d been John Prine on the radio, the sweet smell of hay baking in the heat, and afternoons filled with her lazy, pointless questions—a never-ending interrogation that was, at turns, tiresome, amusing, and erotic. There’d been her body, tattooed and icy white, with the bony knees and skinny thighs of a long-distance runner. There’d been her breath on his neck.
“Hey,” Danny said. He reached out, and his fingers grazed Jude’s wrist. At his touch, Jude’s hand sprang open, releasing the phone. “Are you going to be all right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Want to tell me what’s going on?”
Slowly Jude lifted his gaze. Danny half stood behind his desk. He had lost some of his color, his ginger freckles standing out in high relief against the white of his cheeks.
Danny had been her friend, in the unthreatening, easygoing, slightly impersonal way he made himself a friend to all of Jude’s girls. He played the role of the u
rbane, understanding gay pal, someone they could trust to keep their secrets, someone they could vent to and gossip with, someone who provided intimacy without involvement. Someone who would tell them things about Jude that Jude wouldn’t tell them himself.
Danny’s sister had OD’d on heroin when Danny was just a freshman in college. His mother hanged herself six months later, and Danny had been the one who discovered her. Her body dangled from the single rafter in the pantry, her toes pointed downward, turning in small circles above a kicked-over footstool. You didn’t need to be a psychologist to see that the double-barreled blast of the sister and the mother, dying at almost the same time, had wiped out some part of Danny as well, had frozen him at nineteen. Although he didn’t wear black fingernail polish or rings in his lips, in a way Danny’s attraction to Jude wasn’t so different from Georgia’s, or Florida’s, or any of the other girls’. Jude collected them in almost exactly the same way the Pied Piper had collected rats, and children. He made melodies out of hate and perversion and pain, and they came to him, skipping to the music, hoping he would let them sing along.
Jude didn’t want to tell Danny about what Florida had done to herself, wanted to spare him. It would be better not to tell him. He wasn’t sure how Danny would take it.
He told him anyway. “Anna. Anna McDermott. She cut her wrists. The woman I was just talking to is her sister.”
“Florida?” Danny said. He settled back into his chair. It creaked beneath him. He looked winded. He pressed his hands to his abdomen, then leaned forward slightly, as if his stomach were cramping up. “Oh, shit. Oh, fucking shit,” Danny said sweetly. No words had ever sounded less obscene.
A silence followed. Jude noticed, for the first time, that the radio was on, murmuring softly. Trent Reznor sang that he was ready to give up his empire of dirt. It was funny hearing Nine Inch Nails on the radio just then. Jude had met Florida at a Trent Reznor show, backstage. The fact of her death hit him fresh, all over again, as if he were just realizing it for the first time. You go fishin’ much on Lake Pontchartrain? And then the shock began to coalesce into a sickened resentment. It was so pointless and stupid and self-involved that it was impossible not to hate her a little, not to want to get her on the phone and curse her out, except he couldn’t get her on the phone, because she was dead.
“Did she leave a note?” Danny asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t get much information from her sister. It wasn’t the world’s most helpful phone call. Maybe you noticed.”
But Danny wasn’t listening. He said, “We used to go out for margaritas sometimes. She was one hell of a sweet kid. Her and her questions. She asked me once if I had a favorite place to watch the rain when I was a kid. What the hell kind of question is that? She made me shut my eyes and describe what it looked like outside my bedroom window when it was raining. For ten minutes. You never knew what she was going to ask next. We were big-time compadres. I don’t understand this. I mean, I know she was depressed. She told me about it. But she really didn’t want to be. Wouldn’t she have called one of us if she was going to do something like…? Wouldn’t she have given one of us a chance to talk her out of it?”
“I guess not.”
Danny had dwindled somehow in the last few minutes, shrunk into himself. He said, “And her sister…her sister thinks it’s your fault? Well, that’s…that’s just crazy.” But his voice was weak, and Jude thought he didn’t sound entirely sure of himself.
“I guess.”
“She had emotional problems going back before she met you,” Danny said, with a little more confidence.
“I think it runs in her family,” Jude said.
Danny leaned forward again. “Yeah. Yeah. I mean—what the Christ? Anna’s sister is the person who sold you the ghost? The dead man’s suit? What the fuck is going on here? What happened that made you want to call her in the first place?”
Jude didn’t want to tell Danny about what he’d seen last night. In that moment—pushed up against the stony truth of Florida’s death—he wasn’t entirely sure what he’d seen last night anymore. The old man sitting in the hallway, outside his bedroom door at 3:00 A.M., just didn’t seem as real now.
“The suit she sent me is a kind of symbolic death threat. She tricked us into buying it. For some reason she couldn’t just send it to me, I had to pay for it first. I guess you could say sanity isn’t her strong suit. Anyway, I could tell there was something wrong about it as soon as it came. It was in this fucked-up black heart-shaped box and—this will maybe sound a little paranoid—but it had a pin hidden inside to stick someone.”
“There was a needle hidden in it? Did it stick you?”
“No. It poked Georgia good, though.”
“Is she all right? Do you think there was something on it?”
“You mean like arsenic? No. I don’t get the sense Jessica Price of Psychoville, Florida, is actually that stupid. Deeply and intensely crazy, but not stupid. She wants to scare me, not go to jail. She told me her stepdaddy’s ghost came with the suit and he’s going to get me for what I did to Anna. The pin was probably, I don’t know, part of the voodoo. I grew up not far from the Panhandle. Place is crawling with toothless, possumeating trailer trash full of weird ideas. You can wear a crown of thorns to your job at the Krispy Kreme and no one will bat an eye.”
“Do you want me to call the police?” Danny asked. He was finding his footing now. His voice wasn’t so winded, had regained some of its self-assurance.
“No.”
“She’s making threats on your life.”
“Who says?”
“You do. Me, too. I sat right here and heard the whole thing.”
“What did you hear?”
Danny stared for a moment, then lowered his eyelids and smiled in a drowsy kind of way. “Whatever you say I heard.”
Jude grinned back, in spite of himself. Danny was shameless. Jude could not, at the moment, recall why it was he sometimes didn’t like him.
“Naw,” Jude said. “That’s not how I’m going to deal with this. But you can do one thing for me. Anna sent a couple letters after she went home. I don’t know what I did with them. You want to poke around?”
“Sure, I’ll see if I can lay a hand on them.” Danny was eyeing him uneasily again, and even if he had recovered his humor, he had not got back his color. “Jude…when you say that’s not how you’re going to deal with this…what’s that mean?” He pinched his lower lip, brow screwed up in thought again. “That stuff you said when you hung up. Talking about sending people after her. Going down there yourself. You were pretty pissed. Like I’ve never heard you. Do I need to be worried?”
“You? No,” Jude said. “Her? Maybe.”
9
His mind leaped from one bad thing to another, Anna nude and hollow-eyed and floating dead in scarlet bathwater, Jessica Price on the phone—You’re goin’ to die, and it’s goin’ to be his cold hand over your mouth—the old man sitting in the hall in his black Johnny Cash suit, slowly lifting his head to look at Jude as Jude walked by.
He needed to quiet the noise in his head, a thing usually best accomplished by making some noise with his hands. He carried the Dobro to his studio, strummed at it experimentally, and didn’t like the tuning. Jude went into the closet to look for a capo to choke the strings and found a box of bullets instead.
They were in a heart-shaped box—one of the yellow heart-shaped boxes his father used to give to his mother, every Valentine’s Day and every Mother’s Day, on Christmas and on her birthday. Martin never gave her anything else—no roses or rings or bottles of champagne—but always the same big box of chocolates from the same department store.
Her reaction was as unvarying as his gift. Always, she smiled, a thin, uncomfortable smile, keeping her lips together. She was shy about her teeth. The uppers were false. The real ones had been punched in. Always, she offered the box first to her husband, who, smiling proudly, as if his gift were a diamond necklace and not a three-dollar
box of chocolates, would shake his head. Then she presented them to Jude.
And always Jude picked the same one, the one in the center, a chocolate-covered cherry. He liked the gloosh of it when he bit into it, the faintly corrupt, sticky-sweet sap, the rotten-soft texture of the cherry itself. He imagined he was helping himself to a chocolate-covered eyeball. Even in those days, Jude took pleasure in dreaming up the worst, reveled in gruesome possibilities.
Jude found the box nestled in a rat’s nest of cables and pedals and adapters, under a guitar case leaned against the back of his studio closet. It wasn’t just any guitar case, but the one he’d left Louisiana with thirty years before, although the used, forty-dollar Yamaha that had once occupied it was long gone. The Yamaha he had left behind, onstage in San Francisco, where he’d opened for Zeppelin one night in 1975. He’d been leaving a lot of things behind in those days: his family, Louisiana, swine, poverty, the name he’d been born with. He did not waste a lot of time looking back.
He picked the candy box up, then dropped it just as quickly, his hands going nerveless on him. Jude knew what was in it without even opening it, knew at first sight. If there was any doubt at all, though, it fled when the box hit the ground and he heard the brass shells jingle-jangle inside. The sight of it caused him to recoil in an almost atavistic terror, as if he’d gone digging through the cables and a fat, furry-legged spider had crawled out across the back of his hand. He had not seen the box of ammo in more than three decades and knew he’d left it stuck between the mattress and the box spring of his childhood bed, back in Moore’s Corner. It had not left Louisiana with him, and there was no way it could be lying there behind his old guitar case, only it was.
He stared at the yellow heart-shaped box for a moment, then forced himself to pick it up. He pulled off the lid and tipped the box over. Bullets spilled onto the floor.
He had collected them himself, as avid for them as some children were for baseball cards: his first collection. It had started when he was eight, when he was still Justin Cowzynski, years and years before he’d ever imagined that someday he would be someone else. One day he was tramping across the east field and heard something snap underfoot. He bent to see what he’d stepped on and picked an empty shotgun shell out of the mud. One of his father’s, probably. It was fall, when the old man shot at turkeys. Justin sniffed the splintered, flattened case. The whiff of gunpowder itched his nostrils—a sensation that should’ve been unpleasant but which was strangely fascinating. It came home with him in his dungaree pocket and went into one of his mother’s empty candy boxes.