The suit came early Saturday morning. Jude was up and outside with the dogs.
Angus lunged as soon as the UPS truck ground to a halt, and the leash was yanked out of Jude’s hand. Angus leaped against the side of the parked truck, spit flying, paws scuffling furiously against the driver’s-side door. The driver remained behind the wheel, peering down at him with the calm but intent expression of a doctor considering a new strain of Ebola through a microscope. Jude caught the leash and pulled on it, harder than he meant to. Angus sprawled on his side in the dirt, then twisted and sprang back up, snarling. By now Bon was in on the act, straining at the end of her leash, which Jude held in his other hand, and yapping with a shrillness that hurt his head.
Because it was too far to haul them all the way back to the barn and their pen, Jude dragged them across the yard and up to the front porch, both of them fighting him the whole time. He shoveled them in through the front door and slammed it behind them. Immediately, they set to flinging themselves against it, barking hysterically. The door shuddered as they slammed into it. Fucking dogs.
Jude shuffled back down into the driveway, and reached the UPS truck just as the rear door slid open with a steely clatter. The deliveryman stood inside. He hopped down, holding a long, flat box under his arm.
“Ozzy Osbourne has Pomeranians,” the UPS guy said. “I saw them on TV. Cute little dogs like house cats. You ever think about getting a couple cute little dogs like that?”
Jude took the box without a word and went inside.
He brought the box through the house and into the kitchen. He put it on the counter and poured coffee. Jude was an early riser by instinct and conditioning. When he was on the road, or recording, he had become accustomed to rolling into bed at five in the morning and sleeping through most of the daylight hours, but staying up all night had never come naturally. On the road, he would wake at four in the afternoon, bad-tempered and headachy, confused about where the time had gone. Everyone he knew would seem to him clever imposters, unfeeling aliens wearing rubber skin and the faces of friends. It took a liberal quantity of alcohol to make them seem like themselves again.
Only it had been three years since he’d last gone on tour. He didn’t have much interest in drinking when he was home, and was ready for bed most nights by nine. At the age of fifty-four, he had settled back into the rhythms that had guided him since his name was Justin Cowzynski and he was a boy on his father’s hog farm. The illiterate son of a bitch would have dragged him out of bed by the hair if he’d found him in it when the sun came up. It was a childhood of mud, barking dogs, barbed wire, dilapidated farm buildings, squealing pigs with their flaking skin and squashed-in faces, and little human contact, beyond a mother who sat most of the day at the kitchen table wearing the slack, staring aspect of someone who had been lobotomized, and his father, who ruled their acres of pig shit and ruin with his angry laughter and his fists.
So Jude had been up for several hours already but had not eaten breakfast yet, and he was frying bacon when Georgia wandered into the kitchen. She was dressed only in a pair of black panties, her arms folded across her small, white, pierced breasts, her black hair floating around her head in a soft, tangly nest. Her name wasn’t really Georgia. It wasn’t Morphine either, although she had stripped under that name for two years. Her name was Marybeth Kimball, a handle so simple, so plain, she’d laughed when she first told him, as if it embarrassed her.
Jude had worked his way through a collection of Goth girlfriends who stripped, or told fortunes, or stripped and told fortunes, pretty girls who wore ankhs and black fingernail polish, and whom he always called by their state of origin, a habit few of them cared for, because they didn’t like to be reminded of the person they were trying to erase with all their living-dead make-up. She was twenty-three.
“Goddam stupid dogs,” she said, shoving one of them out of her way with her heel. They were whisking around Jude’s legs, excited by the perfume of the bacon. “Woke me the fuck up.”
“Maybe it was time to get the fuck up. Ever think?” She never rose before ten if she could help it.
She bent into the fridge for the orange juice. He enjoyed the view, the way the straps of her underwear cut into the almost-too-white cheeks of her ass, but he looked away while she drank from the carton. She left it on the counter, too. It would spoil there if he didn’t put it away for her.
He was glad for the adoration of the Goths. He appreciated the sex even more, their limber, athletic, tattooed bodies and eagerness for kink. But he had been married once, to a woman who used a glass and put things away when she was done, who read the paper in the morning, and he missed their talk. It was grown-up talk. She hadn’t been a stripper. She didn’t believe in fortune-telling. It was grown-up companionship.
Georgia used a steak knife to slice open the UPS box, then left the knife on the counter, with tape stuck to it.
“What’s this?” she asked.
A second box was contained within the first. It was a tight fit, and Georgia had to tug for a while to slide the inner box out onto the counter. It was large, and shiny, and black, and it was shaped like a heart. Candies sometimes came in boxes like that, although this was much too big for candies, and candy boxes were pink or sometimes yellow. A lingerie box, then — except he hadn’t ordered anything of the kind for her. He frowned. He didn’t have any idea what might be in it, and at the same time felt somehow he should know, that the heart-shaped box contained something he’d been expecting.
“Is this for me?” she asked.
She pried the lid loose and took out what was inside, lifting it for him to see. A suit. Someone had sent him a suit. It was black and old-fashioned, the details blurred by the plastic dry-cleaning bag pulled over it. Georgia held it up by the shoulders, in front of her body, almost as if it were a dress she was thinking of trying on but she wanted his opinion of it first. Her gaze was questioning, a pretty furrow between her eyebrows. For a moment he didn’t remember, didn’t know why it had come.
He opened his mouth to tell her he had no clue, but then instead heard himself say, “The dead man’s suit.”
“What?”
“The ghost,” he said, remembering as he spoke. “I bought a ghost. Some woman was convinced her stepfather was haunting her. So she put his restless spirit up for sale on the Internet, and I bought it for a grand. That’s his suit. She thinks it might be the source of the haunting.”
“Oh, cool,” Georgia said. “So are you going to wear it?”
His own reaction surprised him. His skin crawled, went rough and strange with gooseflesh. For one unconsidered moment, the idea struck him as obscene.
“No,” he said, and she flicked a surprised glance at him, hearing something cold and flat in his voice. Her smirk deepened a little, and he realized he had sounded . . . well, not frightened but momentarily weak. He added, “It wouldn’t fit.” Although, in truth, it looked as if the poltergeist had been about his height and weight in life.
Georgia said, “Maybe I’ll wear it. I’m a bit of a restless spirit myself. And I look hot in men’s clothing.”
Again: a sensation of revulsion, a crawling of the skin. She shouldn’t put it on. It unsettled him that she would even joke about it, although he couldn’t have said why. He wasn’t going to let her put it on. In that one instant, he could not imagine anything more repellant.
And that was saying something. There wasn’t much that Jude found too distasteful to contemplate. He was unused to feeling disgust. The profane didn’t trouble him; it had made him a good living for thirty years.
“I’ll stick it upstairs until I figure out what to do with it,” he said, trying for a dismissive tone — and not quite making it.
She stared at him, interested at this wavering of his usual self-possession, and then she pulled off the plastic dry-cleaning bag. The coat’s silver buttons flashed in the light. The suit was somber, as dark as crow feathers, but those buttons, the size of quarters, gave it something of a rustic character. Add a string tie and it was the sort of thing Johnny Cash might’ve worn on stage.
Angus began to bark, high, shrill, panicked barking. He shoved himself back on his haunches, tail lowered, rearing away from the suit. Georgia laughed.
“It is haunted,” she said.
She held the suit in front of her and waved it back and forth, walking it through the air toward Angus, flapping it at him, a bullfighter with cape. She moaned as she closed in on him, the throaty, drawn-out cry of a wandering haunt, while her eyes gleamed with pleasure.
Angus scrambled back, hit a stool at the kitchen counter, and knocked it over with a ringing crash. Bon stared out from beneath the old, blood-stained chopping block, ears flattened against her skull. Georgia laughed again.
“Cut it the fuck out,” Jude said.
She shot him a snotty, perversely happy look – the look of a child burning ants with a magnifying glass – and then she made a face of pain and shouted. Swore and grabbed her right hand. She flung the suit aside onto the counter.
A bright drop of blood fattened at the tip of her thumb and fell, plink, onto the tiled floor.
“Shit,” she said. “Fucking pin.”
“You see what you get.”
She glared, flipped him the bird, and stalked out. When she was gone, he got up and put the juice back in the fridge. Jude dropped the knife in the sink, got a hand towel to wipe the blood off the floor – and then his gaze caught on the suit, and he forgot whatever it was he’d been about to do.
He smoothed it out, folded the arms over the chest, felt carefully around. Jude couldn’t find any pins, couldn’t figure out what she’d stuck herself on. He laid it gently back into its box.
An acrid odor caught his attention. He glanced into the pan and cursed. The bacon was burnt.
Excerpted from Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill Copyright © 2007 by Joe Hill. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.***
