Voodoo Heart

  He made me think of fairy tales, of those creatures who swoop in and save you at the last minute, who become your closest, dearest friends, and then, once your problem is solved, vanish. Just like that. So Nancy got worse and worse; the picture darkened every day. One evening I revealed that she’d thrown a steaming iron at my head. The next I told Gay about how I’d woken up in the middle of the night not long ago to find her standing in the doorway of my bedroom, holding her cuticle scissors and just staring at me. Nancy became a bogeywoman hiding in my curtains, grinning at me from behind the clothes hanging in the closet.

  “You have to end it once and for all, L.J.,” Gay would say. “You don’t need someone who doesn’t love you. Abuse isn’t love.” Or “L.J., I want you to call Nancy tonight—no, right now, and tell her it’s over. Tell her good-bye. Period.” And then Gay and I would head to my room and I’d take a deep breath and call my own extension and tell the busy signal that I had too much respect for myself to go on with it anymore.

  Sure enough, though, that night or the next, Nancy would call and tell me that she loved me, that things would be different, and I would usher her right back into my life.

  Out of every thousand children who came to the Home Wrecker, nine hundred and ninety-nine were simply out to have fun—to bounce and flip around inside—but there was always that one with a different motive: to try to pop the house. Like I said, this kind of child was rare; they appeared once a week at most. Some of them were what you’d expect: teenagers with shaved heads or colorful, weapon-like hair. They went at the house’s rubber walls with penknives or box cutters, nothing that could do much damage. The really dangerous customers were of a different sort altogether. These were children with fury in them, real fury. The first one I encountered was a young boy, ten or eleven, with neatly parted blond hair and skin red and scaly with sunburn. He wore slacks and a tie and carried his folded jacket under his arm like a book. As he handed me his ticket, I noticed something sad in his face, a sort of trembling despair around the mouth. Eventually I’d come to watch for exactly this kind of thing, but at the time I just waved him toward the entrance. He offered a quiet thank-you and then vanished inside. I paid little attention at first. I watched the go-carts race around the track. I heard a girl scream at someone for stealing her golf ball and decided that, later that day, I would tell Gay about the time Nancy had hit a golf ball at me inside our apartment and punched a hole in the kitchen wall.

  Suddenly the front wall of the house dented out farther than I’d ever seen it stretched—the cables holding up the house vibrated—then it ricocheted back into place. A few moments passed, and then something barreled into the wall again, hitting the rubber so hard that it whitened up like fist knuckles at the point of impact, before springing backward. I walked over to the door and looked through.

  The boy stood with his back pressed against the far wall, sweat running down his neck, his mouth hanging open. His tie lay on the floor. He stared at the front wall for a moment longer, braced himself, and then ran toward it, his head down, his piggish arms pumping. He hit the wall with everything he had, hurled himself so hard that when it rebounded he was thrown backward through the air almost five feet before bouncing across the floor. He staggered to his feet and backed up to the far wall. Again he flung himself at the front of the house with no success. He was crying by now, sobbing. Peeling skin dangled from his arms. I couldn’t help but cheer him on. You can do it, I thought as he readied himself for another go. Penetrate! Penetrate!

  Part of me rejoiced each time ones like him showed up, kids who refused to believe in a house that couldn’t be knocked down or even hurt, a house that looked like it was giggling, like it was shuddering with delight when they threw themselves at it. Do it, I’d whisper to myself as they charged. Do it! Harder and harder they banged into those walls: whump! WHUMP! And with such hatred in their faces, as though that house contained the very hex of their lives.

  Sometimes, seeing these children leap and plow into the walls, I would think about Gay. His room was down the hall from mine, and every now and then in the middle of the night I’d hear him scream in his sleep, howl and shriek until Edward finally shook him awake. Gay was tough, but watching the walls fling child after child back down to the floor, I had to wonder if there weren’t things out there more resilient than he. Bad things. I did not want to know what they were.

  One evening, about a month into our friendship, there was a commotion in the Happy Fish, Plus Coin. I was talking to Gay about Nancy over dinner, but by this time, I was running out of things to say about her. I could feel my imagination stalling, circling back over the same territory. But this only made my talk about Nancy more insistent and compulsive, more desperate. Lately, I’d been waking up with a hint of the taste of that spoon in my mouth. By the time I sat up and searched for it with my tongue, though, it had always disappeared.

  That night at the Happy Fish, Plus Coin, I was telling Gay about how I was sure I’d seen Nancy’s brother’s car trolling around the parking lot the night before.

  “I know it was him because of the fact that one of his headlights flickers on and off,” I said. “I could see it winking around out there. And I thought I saw an arm holding a bat hanging out the window.”

  “You better call her,” Gay said distractedly.

  “Call her? Gay, are you listening to me?”

  “What? Oh, I meant call the police. L.J., do you hear something?”

  I listened: somewhere in the restaurant, a girl was crying softly to herself.

  “I don’t hear anything,” I said. “So you really think I should call the cops?”

  “L.J., someone is upset. Can you see who it is? They’re right behind us.”

  I craned my neck to see. A few booths back from ours, a girl was crying. She looked about nineteen and was tall with muscular shoulders and arms. Her face was mannish, made even more so by her hair, which she wore in two fist-like buns. She was rummaging through a tote bag with the name of a radio station on it. I recognized her from around the motel. She had come with a singing troupe that had stayed at the Shores for an a capella convention the previous weekend. Gay and I had heard them practicing through the doors to their rooms, their voices weaving in and out of each other. Looking at the girl now, I recalled seeing her argue with the troupe leader in the parking lot one evening when I was out on my balcony. She’d been crying then, too.

  “It’s nothing,” I said to Gay. “She’s fine. Listen, I think that calling the police on Nancy is the wrong move.”

  “Let me see what’s going on. Turn me around, L.J.,” Gay said, but I made no move to do so.

  A waiter approached the girl, but this only made her more upset.

  “Hey, behind me!” Gay yelled, sitting there in our booth, limp as a puppet. “Excuse me!”

  “Gay, the waiter’s got it under control,” I said. “Gay! I’m talking to you!”

  The waiter continued to speak to the girl, until she said, “Fine! Of course!” She threw some money on the table and then got up and headed toward the door. She was even taller than I’d thought, over six feet.

  When she approached our booth, Gay said, “That’s a lovely bag, miss.”

  She glanced at him but kept walking.

  “I’d love to hear you sing sometime,” Gay called after her.

  Once she was gone, Gay shifted his gaze to me. “Why didn’t you help me, L.J.?”

  “I didn’t hear you. I was thinking about Nancy.”

  “You should have turned me around,” said Gay. “She’s obviously in need of some kind of help.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, ashamed and eager for the incident to be over.

  Gay sighed. “That’s all right, L.J.,” he said. But there was a sadness in his voice, a tiredness. He asked me to help him into his chair, which I did.

  “Now, where were we?” he said as I unlocked the brake.

  I tried to remember what I’d just told him about Nancy. My mind scrambled to co
me up with something, but I couldn’t bring myself to say one more word about her.

  I glanced at Gay. He was watching me, his gaze sympathetic but also strangely appraising, almost judicious. I had the sinking feeling that this would be my last chance to tell him the truth about my family. I reached into my shirt, but just as my fingers closed around the earrings, the sun came out from behind a cloud and light poured in through the window, bringing Gay’s face into harsh relief—the pits, the knots and whorls of scar tissue—and my fears returned. The earrings felt warm in my fingers. I had them pinched all the way up at my shirt collar, dangling right there at the base of my neck. “I have an idea,” I said. “Let’s go up to the overpass and have a drink.”

  Gay sucked air through his teeth. “I wish I could, L.J., but I should get some rest soon. I have time to talk a bit, though. Were you about to say something?”

  “You’re heading to bed? It’s only six o’clock.”

  “What I meant was that I have to practice my speaking a little, in my room. I should lecture the mirror for a bit. Unless there’s something else you want to tell me about?”

  I was still holding the earrings. “No. I was all done.”

  As we left the restaurant I took the earrings from around my neck and slipped them into the pouch on the side of his wheelchair. I don’t know what I hoped to accomplish. Maybe I thought he would find them and it would force the issue. Maybe I wanted to give him something, a gift to keep him my friend. “Gay, listen,” I said, but he was already pulling away from me and heading toward the elevators.

  After he’d gone up to his room, I sat alone in the lobby for a long while. I watched people check in, check out. I know I might have made it seem that only strange people lived in this area of Florida, but it wasn’t so. There were plenty of plain men and women, children too, living and visiting. But detectives are very plain people, the plainest of all. You might imagine them hunching around in rumpled trench coats, their faces always surfacing through cigarette smoke, but they are dull almost to being invisible. They look like your mother with no makeup, or your uncle.

  Gay started spending less and less time in and near Orlando; he left to speak at places farther away, in Velusia or Delans, and he wouldn’t come back for days at a time. More and more often, I’d return from the Home Wrecker and find his room locked, find it dark. My fear was that I’d return one afternoon and see it being vacuumed out, or even worse, rented to someone new. One evening, as I drove toward the Shores, I spied Gay up on the overpass with that girl, the one from the a capella troupe. He was beaming at her from his chair, smiling as widely as I’d ever seen him smile. I pulled to the side of the road and watched. Even from far away I could hear her singing. Her voice sounded beautiful and deep; so deep in fact that it seemed more like a low vibration than an actual voice, the kind of voice that moves beneath the other voices in a choir like a current on which everything else floats.

  I began to have trouble concentrating on work. There was no joy in it. I changed my name to Mel Captiol, then changed it again, this time to something very close to my given name. One afternoon, just before closing, a massive girl came into the Home Wrecker. She wore a sleeveless dress and her arms had to be two, even three times the size of my legs. She had it in her. I could tell. She lumbered up to me and pulled her ticket from her purse, all the while staring at the house, which rocked gently against its cables in the wind. I took her ticket and she thanked me and then went directly inside, no hesitating at the door, just right on in. I hurried over to watch.

  The girl marched around for a minute, sizing everything up, poking at this and that with her shoe—the coffee table in the living room, the refrigerator. I looked on from the doorway, excited. She carried her purse in a tight fist. She sank up to her shins in the balloon floor each time she took a step. The whole house shook with her, as though terrified. She was the one. I knew it. She was going to bring the place down. I could almost feel the heat coming off the back of her neck. The flowers on her dress were red on red.

  Suddenly she flopped down on an inflated sofa, took a book out of her purse, and started to read. I was stunned with disappointment. There was nothing to do but stand there and watch as her eyes scanned the pages, her book propped on her chest, her crossed feet wagging from side to side.

  When I got home, I went straight to Gay’s room, but he wasn’t there. I sat outside his door and waited for a long time before finally heading to my room. As soon as I entered, a detective gently shut the door behind me, just slid it closed with his loafer. There were five of them sitting calmly about, waiting. A woman with a cast on her foot had already gone through my clothes and stacked them neatly on the bed. Her blouse was the exact color of the walls. Another one had dragged the safe out of the closet and onto the balcony, where he was banging on its bottom with a wedge and hammer.

  Normally at this point I would have fled, maybe fought, but I felt so defeated, so run-down. One of them was sitting on the air conditioner, his T-shirt tucked into his bathing suit. “You can run if you want,” this one said. “We’ll just find you again.”

  “Your family’s worried about you,” said the woman, yawning.

  “They want the best for you,” said another.

  “No, they don’t,” I started to say, but my tongue felt big. The bitter taste filled my mouth. “I’ll give you money if you leave,” I said, though I’d tried this with them before. All of this had happened before.

  “We don’t want money. We want you,” a familiar voice said from the balcony. Then it called me by my real name. Melanie came in through the curtains. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, the same way she’d worn it when we were kids. She had on jeans and sneakers and a sweater with a row of crowns across the front. For a moment I thought she’d come to save me.

  “It’s been so long. I missed you,” she said, and gave me a hug. Her hair smelled both lemony and strangely medicinal. When she pulled away, she kept her hands on my arms. “How have you been?”

  “I want to stay here,” I said.

  “Please don’t,” she said, smiling at me, her hands still gripping my arms.

  “I don’t want to go back,” I said.

  “Well, I’m afraid you don’t have a choice in the matter, okay?” she said. “You know you can’t just gallivant around forever. Don’t you ever think about how it reflects on Mom and Dad and the rest of us? Believe me, you’re lucky we found you before you did anything to attract bad attention. I know. You don’t want to see what happens to someone from a family like ours when they screw up.”

  “Melanie, I won’t embarrass anyone. I just want to—”

  “No. All right?” she said, her voice growing strained. “I’m sorry. I am. But I’m too tired to start arguing. I want to get back home.” There was something a little anxious about the way she said all this, almost frantic. “Now, where are the earrings?”

  “I gave them away,” I said.

  “Don’t give your sister a hard time,” said the man in the bathing suit. “You should be grateful to her for coming all this way.”

  “Plenty of people in this world have no family,” said the woman.

  “They’re out on the street,” said another. A hot breeze rolled over the balcony. I felt myself growing small, weak. I looked desperately at Melanie, but she stared right back at me with her own great need.

  “Are you going to open the safe or not?” said the man behind me.

  “No,” I said, though I felt tired enough to do it.

  He slipped me into a nelson.

  “Don’t hurt him,” said Melanie, reaching for me, then pulling back.

  “I’ll have this cracked in a minute,” said the man on the balcony with the safe. “It’s a cheapie.” He put down his hammer and hefted the safe onto the balcony railing. He had it lying on its side so the bottom faced us. “Knock it on the screw there,” he said to the one in the bathing suit, who picked up the hammer and began pounding away at the bottom of the safe. The noise
traveled through me in waves. I thought I might pass out.

  “Melanie, please help me,” I said.

  The man holding me tightened his grip and a web of pain spread through my shoulders. “Enough from you, kiddo,” he said.

  And then, out of nowhere, Gay’s voice: “What’s going on up there? Are you all right, L.J.?”

  “Gay!” I shouted, writhing. “They’re taking me back!” I managed to maneuver the man holding me out onto the balcony. Gay was with Edward, stopped just below my room.

  “Who is that down there?” Melanie said, coming out onto the balcony.

  “Well, well. I thought we’d never get the pleasure,” said Gay. “I have a bone to pick with you, Nancy.”

  “Is he talking to me?” Melanie’s eyes darted back and forth between Gay and me. “Please go away!” she called down.

  “Not until you leave L.J. alone. He’s through with you. You and your family are out of his life forever.”

  “Please, this is our business!” she said.

  “No, Nancy, it’s my business when your goons treat my friend like he’s your property! It’s my business when you stop my friend from making his own decisions!”

  “Who is he?” Melanie said to me. “How does he know about our family?” She had the wild look on her face of one of those children at the Home Wrecker.

  “Shut up, gimp!” said the man holding me.

  “You watch your mouth!” said Edward.

  “How do you know what’s best for him?” said Melanie. “He doesn’t even know what’s best for himself right now!”

  “He knows what’s not best for him,” said Gay. “And that’s enough for me.”

  “We’re his family,” said Melanie, her hands gripping the rail. “We love him. We’re bringing him home because we love him.”

  “If you really loved him you’d let him go.”