Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

“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 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.

“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.