Georgia called to him from the top of the stairs.
Come lie down, Jude. Come upstairs. We’ll lie down in my room. You wake us up, Bammy, in an hour? We still got some drivin’ to do.”
“You don’t need to go tonight. You know you can stay over.”
“Better not,” Jude said.
“I don’t see the sense. It’s almost five already. Wherever you’re going, you won’t get there till late.”
“It’s all right. We’re night people.” He put his plate in the sink.
Bammy studied him. “You won’t leave without dinner?”
“No, ma’am. Wouldn’t think of it. Thank you, ma’am.”
She nodded. “I’ll fix it while you nap. What part of the South are you from, anyway?”
“Louisiana. Place called Moore’s Corner. You wouldn’t have heard of it. There’s nothing there.”
“I know it. My sister married a man who took her to Slidell. Moore’s Corner is right next to it. There’s good people around there.”
“Not my people,” Jude said, and he went upstairs, Angus bounding up the steps after him.
Georgia was waiting at the top, in the cool darkness of the upstairs hallway. Her hair was wrapped in a towel, and she had on a faded Duke University T-shirt and a pair of loose blue shorts. Her arms were crossed under her breasts, and in her left hand was a flat white box, split at the corners and repaired with peeling brown tape.
Her eyes were the brightest thing in the shadows of the hall, greenish sparks of unnatural light, and in her wan, depleted face was a kind of eagerness.
“What’s that?” he asked, and she turned it so he could read what was written on the side.
OUIJA PARKER BROS. TALKING BOARD
29
She led him into her bedroom, where she removed the towel from her head and slung it over a chair.
It was a small room, under the eaves, with hardly enough space in it for them and the dogs. Bon was already curled up on the twin bed tucked against one wall. Georgia made a clicking sound with her tongue and patted the pillow, and Angus leaped up beside his sister. He settled.
Jude stood just inside the closed door—he had the Ouija board now—and turned in a slow circle, looking over the place where Georgia had spent most of her childhood. He had not been prepared for anything quite so wholesome as what he found. The bedspread was a hand-stitched quilt, patterned after an American flag. A herd of dusty-looking stuffed unicorns, in various sherbet colors, were corralled in a wicker basket in one corner.
She had an antique walnut dresser, with a mirror attached to it, one that could be tilted back and forth. Photos had been stuck into the mirror frame. They were sun-faded and curled with age and showed a toothy, black-haired girl in her teens, with a skinny, boyish build. In this picture she wore a Little League uniform a size too big for her, her ears jutting out under the cap. In that picture she stood between girlfriends, all of them sunburned, flat-chested, and self-conscious in their bikini tops, on a beach somewhere, a pier in the background.
The only hint of the person she was to become was in a final still, a graduation picture, Georgia in the mortarboard and black gown. In the photo she stood with her parents: a shriveled woman in a flower-print dress, straight off the rack in Wal-Mart, a potato-shaped man with a bad comb-over and a cheap checked sport coat. Georgia posed between them, smiling, but her eyes sullen and sly and resentful. And while she held her graduation certificate in one hand, the other was raised in the death-metal salute, pinkie and index finger sticking up in devil horns, her fingernails painted black. So it went.
Georgia found what she was looking for in the desk, a box of kitchen matches. She leaned over the windowsill to light some dark candles. Printed on the rear of her shorts was the word VARSITY. The backs of her thighs were taut and strong from three years of dancing.
“Varsity what?” Jude asked.
She glanced back at him, brow furrowed, then saw where he was looking, took a peek at her own backside, and grinned.
“Gymnastics. Hence most of my act.”
“Is that where you learned to chuck a knife?”
It had been a stage knife when she performed, but she could handle a real one, too. Showing off for him once, she’d thrown a Bowie into a log from a distance of twenty feet, and it had hit with a solid thunk, followed by a metallic, wobbling sound, the low, musical harmonic of trembling steel.
“Naw. Bammy taught me that. Bammy has some kind of throwing arm. Bowling balls. Softballs. She has a mean curve. She was pitching for her softball team when she was fifty. Couldn’t no one hit her. Her daddy taught her how to chuck a knife, and she taught me.”
After she lit the candles, she opened both windows a few inches, without raising the plain white shades. When the breeze blew, the shades moved and pale sunshine surged into the room, then abated, soothing waves of subdued brightness. The candles didn’t add much light, but the smell of them was pleasant, mixed with the cool, fresh, grassy scent of the outdoors.
Georgia turned and crossed her legs and sat on the floor. Jude lowered himself to his knees across from her. Joints popped.
He set the box between them, opened it, and took out the gameboard—was a Ouija board a game board, exactly? Across the sepia-colored board were all the letters of the alphabet, the words YES and NO, a sun with a maniacally grinning face, and a glowering moon. Jude set upon the board a black plastic pointer shaped like a spade in a deck of cards.
Georgia said, “I wasn’t sure I could turn it up. I haven’t looked at the damn thing in probably eight years. You remember that story I told you, ’bout how once I saw a ghost in Bammy’s backyard?”
“Her twin.”
“It scared hell out of me, but it made me curious, too. It’s funny how people are. Because when I saw the little girl in the backyard, the ghost, I just wanted her to go away. But when she vanished, pretty soon I got to wishin’ I’d see her again. I started wantin’ to have another experience like it sometime, to come across another ghost.”
“And here you are now with one hot on your tail. Who says dreams don’t come true?”
She laughed. “Anyway. A while after I saw Bammy’s sister in the backyard, I picked this up at the five-and-dime. Me and one of my girlfriends used to play around with it. We’d quiz the spirits about boys at school. And a lot of times I’d be movin’ the pointer in secret, makin’ it say things. My girlfriend, Sheryll Jane, she knew I was makin’ it say things, but she’d always pretend like she really believed we were talkin’ to a ghost, and her eyes would get all big and round and stick out of her head. I’d slide the pointer around, and the Ouija board would tell her some boy at school had a pair of her underwear in his locker, and she’d let out a screech and say, ‘I always knew he was weird about me!’ She was sweet to hang around with me and be so silly and play my games.” Georgia rubbed the back of her neck. Almost as an afterthought, she added, “One time, though, we were playin’ Ouija and it started workin’ for real. I wasn’t movin’ the pointer or anything.”
“Maybe Sheryll Jane was moving it.”
“No. It was movin’ on its own, and we both knew it. I could tell it was movin’ on its own because Sheryll wasn’t puttin’ on her act with them big eyes of hers. Sheryll wanted it to stop. When the ghost told us who it was, she said I wasn’t being funny. And I said I wasn’t doin’ nothin’, and she said stop it. But she didn’t take her hand off the pointer.”
“Who was the ghost?”
“Her cousin Freddy. He had hung himself in the summer. He was fifteen. They were real close…Freddy and Sheryll.”
“What’d he want?”
“He said there was pictures in his family’s barn of guys in their underwear. He told us right where to find them, hidden under a floorboard. He said he didn’t want his parents to know he was gay and be any more upset than they were. He said that’s why he killed himself, because he didn’t want to be gay anymore. Then he said souls aren’t boys and aren’t girls. They’
re only souls. He said there is no gay, and he’d made his momma sorrowful for nothin’. I remember that exactly. That he used the word ‘sorrowful.’”
“Did you go look for the pictures?”
“We snuck into the barn, next afternoon, and we found the loose floorboard, but there was nothin’ hidden under it. Then Freddy’s father came up behind us and gave us a good shoutin’ at. He said we had no business snoopin’ around his place and sent us runnin’. Sheryll said not finding any pictures proved it was all a lie and that I had faked the whole thing. You wouldn’t believe how mad she was. But I think Freddy’s father came across the pictures before us and got rid of them, so no one would know his kid was a fairy. The way he shouted at us was like he was scared about what we might know. About what we might be lookin’ for.” She paused, then added, “Me and Sheryll never really made it up. We pretended like we put it behind us, but after that we didn’t spend as much time together. Which suited me fine. By then I was sleepin’ with my daddy’s pal George Ruger, and I didn’t want a whole bunch of friends hangin’ around askin’ me questions about how come I had so much money in my pockets all of a sudden.”
The shades lifted and fell. The room brightened and dimmed. Angus yawned.
“So what do we do?” Jude said.
“Haven’t you ever played with one of these?”
Jude shook his head.
“Well, we each put a hand on the pointer,” she said, and started to reach forward with her right hand, then changed her mind and tried to draw it back.
It was too late. He reached out and caught her wrist. She winced—as if even the wrist were tender.
She had removed her bandages before showering and not yet put on fresh. The sight of her naked hand drove the air out of him. It looked as if it had been soaking in bathwater for hours, the skin wrinkly, white, and soft. The thumb was worse. For an instant, in the gloom, it looked almost skinless. The flesh was inflamed a startling crimson, and where the thumbprint belonged was a wide circle of infection, a sunken disk, yellow with pus, darkening to black at the center.
“Christ,” Jude said.
Georgia’s too-pale, too-thin face was surprisingly calm, staring back at him through the wavering shadows. She pulled her hand away.
“You want to lose that hand?” Jude asked. “You want to see if you can die from blood poisoning?”
“I am not as scared to die as I was a couple days ago. Isn’t that funny?”
Jude opened his mouth for a reply and found he had none to make. His insides were knotted up. What was wrong with her hand would kill her if nothing was done, and they both knew it, and she wasn’t afraid.
Georgia said, “Death isn’t the end. I know that now. We both do.”
“That isn’t any reason to just decide to die. To not take care of yourself.”
“I haven’t just decided to die. I’ve decided there isn’t goin’ to be any hospital. We’ve already talked that idea in circles. You know we can’t bring the dogs into no emergency room with us.”
“I’m rich. I can make a doctor come to us.”
“I told you already, I don’t believe that what’s wrong with me can be helped by any doctor.” She leaned forward, rapped the knuckles of her left hand on the Ouija board. “This is more important than the hospital. Sooner or later Craddock is going to get by the dogs. I think sooner. He’ll find a way. They can’t protect us forever. We are livin’ minute to minute, and you know it. I don’t mind dyin’ as long as he isn’t waitin’ for me on the other side.”
“You’re sick. That’s the fever thinking. You don’t need this voodoo. You need antibiotics.”
“I need you,” she said, her bright, vivid eyes steady on his face, “to shut the fuck up and put your hand on the pointer.”
30
Georgia said she would do the talking, and she put the fingers of her left hand next to his on the pointer—it was called the planchette, Jude remembered now. He looked up when he heard her draw a steadying breath. She shut her eyes, not as if she were about to go into a mystic trance but more as if she were about to leap from a high diving board and was trying to get over the churning in her stomach.
“Okay,” she said. “My name is Marybeth Stacy Kimball. I called myself Morphine for a few bad years, and the guy I love calls me Georgia, even though it drives me nuts, but Marybeth is who I am, my true name.” She opened her eyes to a squint, peeped at Jude from between her eyelashes. “Introduce yourself.”
He was about to speak when she held up a hand to stop him.
“Your real name, now. The name that belongs to your true self. True names are very important. The right words have a charge in them. Enough charge to bring the dead back to the living.”
He felt stupid—felt that what they were doing couldn’t work, was a waste of time, and they were acting like children. His career had afforded him a variety of occasions to make a fool out of himself, however. Once, for a music video, he and his band—Dizzy, Jerome, and Kenny—had run in mock horror through a field of clover, chased by a dwarf dressed in a dirty leprechaun suit and carrying a chain saw. In time Jude had developed something like an immunity to the condition of feeling stupid. So when he paused, it wasn’t out of a reluctance to speak but because he honestly didn’t know what to say.
Finally, looking at Georgia, he said, “My name is…Justin. Justin Cowzynski. I guess. Although I haven’t answered to that since I was nineteen.”
Georgia closed her eyes, withdrawing into herself. A dimple appeared between her slender eyebrows, a little thought line. Slowly, softly, she spoke. “Well. There you go. That’s us. We want to talk to Anna McDermott. Justin and Marybeth need your help. Is Anna there? Anna, will you speak to us today?”
They waited. The shade moved. Children shouted in the street.
“Is there anyone who would like to speak to Justin and Marybeth? Will Anna McDermott say somethin’ to us? Please. We’re in trouble, Anna. Please hear us. Please help us.” Then, in a voice that approached a whisper, she said, “Come on. Do somethin’.” Speaking to the planchette.
Bon farted in her sleep, a squeaking sound, like a foot skidding across wet rubber.
“She didn’t know me,” Georgia said. “You ask for her.”
“Anna McDermott? Is there an Anna McDermott in the house? Could you please report to the Ouija information center?” he asked, in a big, hollow, public announcer’s voice.
Georgia smiled, a wide, humorless grin. “Ah, yes. I knew it was only a matter of time before the fuckin’-around would commence.”
“Sorry.”
“Ask for her. Ask for real.”
“It’s not workin’.”
“You haven’t tried.”
“Yes I have.”
“No you haven’t.”
“Well, it just isn’t workin’.”
He expected hostility or impatience. Instead her smile broadened even more, and she regarded him with a quiet sweetness that he instantly mistrusted. “She was waitin’ for you to call, right up to the day she died. Like there was any chance of that. What, did you wait a whole week, before moving on in your state-by-state tour of America’s easiest snatch?”
He flushed. Not even a week. “You might not want to get too hot under the collar,” he said, “considering you’re the easy snatch in question.”
“I know, and it disgusts me. Put! Your! Hand! Back on the mother-fuckin’ pointer. We are not done here.”
Jude had been withdrawing his hand from the planchette, but at Georgia’s outburst he set his fingers back upon it.
“I’m disgusted with the both of us. You for bein’ who you are and me for lettin’ you stay that way. Now, you call for her. She won’t come for me, but she might for you. She was waitin’ for you to call right to the end, and if you ever had, she would’ve come running. Maybe she still will.”
Jude glared down at the board, the old-timey alphabet letters, the sun, the moon.
“Anna, you around? Will Anna McDermott come o
n and talk to us?” Jude said.
The planchette was dead, unmoving plastic. He had not felt so grounded in the world of the real and the ordinary in days. It wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t right. It was hard to keep his hand on the pointer. He was impatient to get up, to be done.
“Jude,” Georgia said, then corrected herself. “Justin. Don’t quit on this. Try again.”
Jude. Justin.
He stared at his fingers on the planchette, the board beneath, and tried to think what wasn’t right, and in another moment it came to him. Georgia had said that true names had a charge in them, that the right words had the power to return the dead to the living. And he thought then that Justin wasn’t his true name, that he had left Justin Cowzynski in Louisiana when he was nineteen, and the man who got off the bus in New York City forty hours later was someone different entirely, capable of doing and saying things that had been beyond Justin Cowzynski. And what they were doing wrong now was calling for Anna McDermott. He had never called her that. She had not been Anna McDermott when they were together.
“Florida,” Jude said, almost sighed. When he spoke again, his voice was surprising to him, calm and self-assured. “Come on and talk to me, Florida. It’s Jude, darlin’. I’m sorry I didn’t call you. I’m calling now. Are you there? Are you listening? Are you still waiting for me? I’m here now. I’m right here.”
The planchette jumped under their fingers, as if the board had been struck from beneath. Georgia jumped with it and cried out weakly. Her bad hand fluttered to her throat. The breeze shifted direction and sucked at the shades, snapping them against the windows and darkening the room. Angus lifted his head, eyes flashing a bright, unnatural green in the weak light from the candles.
Georgia’s good hand had remained on the pointer, and no sooner had it rattled back to rest on the board than it began to move. The sensation was unnatural and made Jude’s heart race. It felt as if there were another pair of fingers on the planchette, a third hand, reaching into the space between his hand and Georgia’s and sliding the pointer around, turning it without warning. It slipped across the board, touched a letter, stayed there for a moment, then spun under their fingers, forcing Jude to twist his wrist to keep his hand on it.