Heart-shaped box (18 page)

W
hen they had been introduced,
formally, Jude found out her name was Mrs. Fordham, which is what he called her from then on. He could not call her Bammy; paradoxically, he could not really think of her as Mrs. Fordham. Bammy she was, whatever he called her.

Bammy said, “Let’s put the dogs out back where they can run.”

Georgia and Jude traded a look. They were all of them in the kitchen then. Bon was under the kitchen table. Angus had lifted his head to sniff at the counter, where there were brownies on a plate under green Saran Wrap.

The space was too small to contain the dogs. The front hallway had been too small for them, too. When Angus and Bon came running down it, they had struck a side table, rattling the china on top of it, and reeled into walls, thudding them hard enough to knock pictures askew.

When Jude looked at Bammy again, she was frowning. She’d seen the glance that had passed between Jude and Georgia and knew it meant something, but not what.

Georgia spoke first. “Aw, Bammy, we can’t put them out in a strange place. They’ll get into your garden.”

Bon clouted aside a few chairs to squirm out from under the table.
One fell over with a sharp bang. Georgia leaped toward her, caught her by the collar.

“I’ll take her,” Georgia said. “Is it all right if I run through the shower? I need to wash and maybe lie down. She can stay with me, where she won’t get into trouble.”

Angus put his paws up on the counter to get his snout closer to the brownies.

“Angus,” Jude said. “Get your ass over here.”

Bammy had cold chicken and slaw in the fridge. Also homemade lemonade, as promised, in a sweating glass pitcher. When Georgia went up the back stairs, Bammy fixed Jude a plate. He sat with it. Angus flopped at his feet.

From his place at the kitchen table, Jude had a view of the backyard. A mossy rope hung from the branch of a tall old walnut. The tire that had been attached to it once was long gone. Beyond the back fence was an alley, unevenly floored in old bricks.

Bammy poured herself a lemonade and leaned with her bottom against the kitchen counter. The windowsill behind her was crowded with bowling trophies. Her sleeves were rolled up to show forearms as hairy as his.

“I never heard the romantic story of how you two met.”

“We were both in Central Park,” he said. “Picking daisies. We got to talking and decided to have a picnic together.”

“It was either that or you met in some perverted fetish club.”

“Come to think of it, it might’ve been a perverted fetish club.”

“You’re eating like you never seen food before.”

“We overlooked lunch.”

“What’s your hurry? What’s happenin’ in Florida you’re in such a rush to get to? Some friends of yours havin’ an orgy you don’t want to miss?”

“You make this slaw yourself?”

“You bet.”

“It’s good.”

“You want the recipe?”

The kitchen was quiet except for the scrape of his fork on the plate and the thud of the dog’s tail on the floor. Bammy stared at him.

At last, to fill in the silence, Jude said, “Marybeth calls you Bammy. Why’s that?”

“Short for my first name,” Bammy said. “Alabama. M.B.’s called me that since she was wetting her didies.”

A dry mouthful of cold chicken lodged partway down Jude’s windpipe. He coughed and thumped his chest and blinked at watering eyes. His ears burned.

“Really,” he said, when his throat was clear. “This may be out of left field, but you ever go to one of my shows? Like, did you maybe see me on a twin bill with AC/DC in 1979?”

“Not likely. I didn’t care for that kind of music even when I was young. Buncha gorillas stompin’ around the stage, shoutin’ swearwords and screamin’ their throats out. I might’ve caught you if you were openin’ for the Bay City Rollers. Why?”

Jude wiped at the fresh sweat on his forehead, his insides all queer with relief. “I knew an Alabama once. Don’t worry about it.”

“How’d the two of you both get so beat up? You got scrapes on your scrapes.”

“We were in Virginia, and we walked to Denny’s from our motel. On the way back, we were nearly run down.”

“You sure about the ‘nearly’ part?”

“Going under a train trestle. Fella ran his Jeep right into the stone wall. Bashed his face a good one on his windshield, too.”

“How’d he make out?”

“All right, I guess.”

“Was he drunk?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“What happened when the cops got there?”

“We didn’t stay to talk to them.”

“You didn’t stay—” she started, then stopped and threw the rest of her lemonade into the sink, wiped her mouth with the back of her forearm. Her lips were puckered, as if her last swallow of lemonade had been more sour than she liked.

“You are in some hurry,” she said.

“A mite.”

“Son,” she said, “just how much trouble are the two of you in?”

G
eorgia 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

S
he 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.”