“Four of them.”
“Fine.” He studied my face. “Four of them.”
“And how soon will Sammy come see me?”
He shook his head. “You don’t want to do this here spell until the next full moon.”
Would that be too late? What if Deane turned up before then? Everything was all jumbled in my mind. For instance, I had this idea that if Sammy got his hands on Deane’s book, we were through with her. But when you thought about it, that wasn’t necessarily so.
Trouble was, I knew I had power, but this magic world was too much to understand. Where were the rules? It was like trying to control a bunch of tiny, lively rodents, all scrambling off in different directions. All you could do, finally, was put out some cheese and hope most of them stuck around.
You could purchase the spell, get your family to wear the amulets, and make positively sure, come hell or high water, that you never, ever drove by Marie Laveau’s Voodoo Shop.
“When’s the next full moon?”
“Last night was full moon.” For some reason, he avoided my eyes.
“Okay.” I sighed like Stan. “What choice do I have?”
“Don’t farewell,” he said.
“Fare forward.”
Chapter Fifteen
When I opened my eyes, we were all in our usual places, speeding along the highway. The light was early morning gray and the landscape was becoming increasingly hilly. You could tell an immediate difference between Louisiana, with its swampy flatness, and Arkansas, with its rolling hills and pine trees and piles of stones, which were turned into houses with an irregular, patchwork effect. They looked like the kind of place Hansel and Gretel would find.
Signs for restaurants advertised all kinds of odd food: chicken-fried steak, collard greens, sweet potato pie. We were going to have lunch at a place called Hot Springs and then go see the house Stan and Linwood had bought. Day after tomorrow, we’d drive back to New Orleans and pick up Deane at the airport.
My amulet hung around my neck, my bracelet sat on my biceps, and my pockets were filled with poodle toys, the magic book, and the new spell to make Sammy appear. Trouble was, tonight was the new moon! What could you do? Stupid old Deane was coming back too soon, and I’d have to talk everybody into wearing their amulets again, bad enough a scene the first time. For all my personal power, I felt pretty depressed and hopeless. The whole thing had gotten away from me somehow.
“Pet’s awake,” June shouted.
“That’s nice.” Linwood turned around and smiled.
“Where are we?”
Stan consulted his odometer. “Just about exactly half-way between Texarkana and Hot Springs.”
The Holiday Inn in Texarkana was where we’d been staying the last ten days. Every day, Stan and Linwood would go house hunting while June and I stayed at the motel. The coffeeshop had been told that we could charge breakfast and lunch, and even dinner if they weren’t back by seven, but no room service and no candy bars. Also, we shouldn’t get any ideas about ordering a succession of desserts.
There wasn’t a lot to do. In the first place, we were the only children. In the second place, what is there to do in a motel in the dead of January, the pool covered over, the swing set too chilly to sit on, the slide coated with a slick sheet of ice, after you’ve read all the postcards and ordered everything on the menu? Heavy celebrations for Christmas and New Year’s had burned us out on the poodles.
June made up a new game at the Holiday Inn called: I Will Only Do What Is Good For Me. It went like this: It’s good for me to play solitaire and watch The Price Is Right because when I do these things, I’m not eating. (Years later, I can see the exquisite logic here, but it eluded me at the time.) You could mold this game to cover eating as welclass="underline" It’s good for me to eat this candy bar because it will spoil my dinner and I’ll lose weight.
June was also crocheting an afghan with yarn and hooks she’d gotten for Christmas. It was very pretty, black and white and green squares manufactured painstakingly one at a time, the same kind of obsession for detail she brought to the poodle paraphernalia. And, of course, crocheting was Good for her since she wasn’t eating.
So, basically, between the deck of cards, the game shows, and the afghan, she was pretty well amused.
I, on the other hand, was sure I was going mad or coming down with leprosy, whichever came first.
I’d always enjoyed stories about people going mad, and particularly the tales of Edgar Allen Poe, a big volume of which I’d gotten for Christmas. I looked forward to the day when I’d go mad, but I figured that day would come after I blossomed into a buxom beauty; with snow-white skin and long black hair, and after I’d been betrayed by love and locked in a castle. You could see how it would be: sleeping on pearl-colored sheets, never knowing if it was day or night, summer or winter, your cheeks flushed, and you couldn’t tell waking from sleeping, it was all strange haze.
But there was no glamour to going mad at the age of nine, nobody weeping or gnashing their teeth over you. It was true that I could hardly tell day from night or morning from evening, but that was because it was all endless monotony, perpetual boredom.
When you went mad, I thought, you would be taken away from yourself. You would sleep and remember nothing. But in the madness I was in, the world was right there on top of you, each minute an hour in passing, each hour as long as a day.
Each morning Stan and Linwood would sally forth, armed with local papers and jotted-down telephone numbers of various realtors. They’d hooked on to this idea of buying a farm, though neither one of them had ever lived on one or wanted to. They thought a farm would be wholesome. And it was an improvement on their original plan, which was to buy a rundown plantation and transform it into a guest ranch. No way would Linwood take care of guests, and Stan wasn’t what you’d call handy. He always expected applause when he changed a lightbulb.
Arkansas, they explained to us, was a more regular (read remote) place than Louisiana. Since Deane had ratted on Tommy and friends and there wasn’t going to be any trial, we had to get located quickly, and start pretending to have a normal family life. Then she could come back and upset everything again.
So they set off each day determined to find the dullest, most isolated house in the world, plunk on its own little farm. Linwood took her marbles, of course. No tilting floors for us. Each night they’d explain the disadvantages of what they’d seen that day, until last night.
“What’s so hot about Hot Springs?” June asked.
“Whichever one the crippled Roosevelt was,” Linwood said, “he used to bathe there.”
“He had leprosy,” June told me.
She’d been putting leprosy in my head ever since we’d passed that leper colony on the way to Baton Rouge.
“June,” said Stan, warningly.
Leprosy. It made your nose fall off.
“It isn’t really contagious,” June explained. “People who are destined to get it get it. Even the tiniest—”
“That’ll do,” said Stan.
“It’ll be better for Pet if she knows these things. If she doesn’t know what to look for—”
“Let’s decide where we’ll have lunch,” Linwood suggested, pulling out the Automobile Club dining guide.
I looked down at my hands. Was the skin really yellower around the nails? Didn’t the tips of my fingers look a little strange?
“Ben’s Bar-B-Q. Casual attire, good country… Forget it. Morrison’s Cafeteria. I loathe having to carry my own food on a tray! Fat Boy’s—I don’t—”