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
“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
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 on 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.
