Voodoo Heart

  That’s when the safe went over. I don’t know whether the man pushed it or it simply slipped from his hands. All I saw was it going over the railing: tipping forward, sliding a little, and then falling. It didn’t tumble. It didn’t spin or flip in the air. It just dropped.

  The rest seemed to happen in slow motion. First there was a terrible crunching noise as the safe hit. The wheels shot off Gay’s chair and bounced across the parking lot. One hit a car with such force that it shattered the driver’s-side window. The chair tipped over backward and Gay was slammed against the tar, the safe on his chest. There was a popping sound, and then came the sparks, pouring right out of the underside of the chair. Gay’s perfect feet stuck up in the air—one of them had a sandal on it, but the other was bare. Then Edward was shouting for an ambulance.

  Some old people came hurrying out of the lobby. There was a pounding on my door. Everyone but me was rushing about the room, blurred and moth-like. I heard one of the detectives ask another for a knife and a towel. I saw my clothes being stuffed into a garbage bag. Then, when the man holding me let go, I rushed out the door.

  “Get him!” I heard behind me. “Grab his arms!”

  I muscled my way down the hall, now crowded with curious people. I pushed inside the stairwell and took the steps a flight at a time, but as I reached the lobby, I started to gag, to wretch on that taste welling up at the back of my throat. I could hear the detectives on the stairs. I stumbled through the lobby and then I was out in the parking lot, kneeling next to Edward, above Gay’s shattered body.

  Gay’s face looked peaceful; he appeared strangely content, pinned to the tar, gazing up at the darkening sky. His breath came in little hisses of air. I could smell oil leaking out of the chair. One of his eyelids kept winking.

  “Go, before it’s too late,” said Edward. “He’d want you to.”

  I looked around at all the people encircling us, staring. I couldn’t tell which ones were the detectives; their faces all looked menacingly familiar. A woman in a sun hat with a fan on the brim. An old bearded man with a pack around his waist. A man in shades talking into a plastic walkie-talkie. The taste was still there, pooling in my mouth. I was too frightened to move.

  “Go!” said Edward. But I couldn’t.

  Then, above all of this, I saw Melanie. She was standing on the balcony of my old room. She smiled sadly at me. “Run,” she said, and I did.

  I called the hospital round the clock, every day for the next four weeks. It got so I knew all the nurses on Gay’s floor by name. Every time I called they asked me if I wanted to leave a message for Gay, and each time I said no. I didn’t know how to talk to him. One day, though, I called and, instead of picking up, a nurse put me through to Gay’s room.

  “Hello? Gay Isbelle,” he said. “Hello?”

  “Gay?” I said.

  “L.J. Wow. I was hoping you’d call.”

  “Gay, I’m so sorry about what happened. I should have—”

  “Before you start apologizing, let me say something. First, there’s nothing to be sorry about. I have some healing to do, some bumps and scratches, but I’m okay. In fact, I’m glad things happened the way they did. I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  “You wouldn’t?” He had suffered four broken ribs, a punctured lung, and some nerve damage to the right side of his face.

  “Not a thing. This was my third ordeal, L.J., this bout with Nancy. I’ve dodged the bill three times. That’s something.”

  “Gay, I have a confession to make. That wasn’t Nancy at the Shores. There is no Nancy.”

  “I know that,” said Gay.

  I paused. “You do?”

  “Sure.”

  I didn’t know what to say. In the background I heard the chatter from Edward’s portable TV. “Gay, I want to come with you when you go speak,” I said. “I want to be your assistant.”

  “My assistant? God, I don’t know,” he said.

  “Please, Gay. I want to go with you to talk to people.”

  “Geez. I guess that’d be all right. My assistant, L.J. Yes, I like that.”

  I laughed. My body felt light with joy. “L.J., your assistant!” I said.

  “Come by tomorrow and we’ll talk about what you’ll need to do,” he said.

  I arrived at the hospital well before visiting hours the next day. I brought a bouquet of flowers and a bright green pillowcase for Gay. For myself I brought a legal pad to take notes on. But when I was finally allowed up, I found Gay’s room empty, his bed stripped.

  “Are you L.J.?” said a nurse whose voice I recognized as Gina’s. I told her that yes, I was. “He left this for you,” she said. She handed me an envelope, then left me alone in the room.

  I sat down on the bed and turned the letter over in my hands. The trunks of palm trees wound upward past the windows. A skywriting plane began to write something, but quit after a few letters and flew off.

  Finally, I opened the envelope. Inside were my sister’s earrings, and a note written on a piece of hospital stationery:

  To my friend L.J.,

  Happy fish, plus coin.

  Gay

  It’s been over a year since I left Florida. I live up in the cold, blue Northwest now, in a small town with rivers on both sides. All I’ll say is that I work in a store that sells antique maps and globes, from when the world was not so sharply in focus. There are chimes made of tiny glass guitars over the door. I go by a new name now, the whole thing just two syllables, so quick you might miss it. My favorite things in the store are the copies of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century globes, which are guides to the hopes and fears of people back then more than they are actual globes. Huge blue-and-white tigers stalk the icy regions to the north; sea serpents slink through the oceans; the eastern shore of a misshapen North America is marked by a freckled ear of corn.

  Most of these globes don’t show Florida at all, but a few do, usually as a long, squiggly tube, like a deflated party balloon. On one such globe there’s an oval of sunshine painted over Florida and the Gulf below, a faint golden spotlight. When I think of Gay, I like to picture him under just such a spotlight, sitting in his chair with Edward nearby, talking to an audience. In my mind he’s speaking mostly to old people, but also to people recovering from disaster and misjudgment and heartbreak. He smiles at all of them out of the good side of his face as he talks. His eye is so sensitive now—I picture him wearing sunglasses if the floors are waxed too well and have a high sheen. Sometimes I imagine him wearing a wig with sideburns that never stay completely stuck to his temples; other times not.

  What Gay is always talking about, when I think of him, are the moments right before his ordeals. Sometimes he talks about ordeal number one, the fire; other times number three, at the Shores; but mostly he talks about ordeal number two. He sets the scene: he says, “There was a click as the glider was released, as the bigger plane towing us let go. But there wasn’t any drop or jolt. Our glider just hung there, suspended at the center of this wide ring of clouds. Then the glider dipped a bit—it nosed down the way they can—and all of a sudden the whole green mass of the Arkansas marsh rose into view. My girlfriend at the time, Julie, was seated just in front of me. She was the daughter of a nurse at the clinic I went to for my skin grafts. At one point she looked at me over her shoulder and pointed down at this one patch of marsh that was bubbling and fizzing like crazy. Boiling almost. ‘Frogs,’ Julie mouthed to me. It was frogs breathing at the bottom of the swamp. I remember her mouthing it to me like that, ‘Frogs,’ even though it was quiet inside the plane.”

  Right here is when he smiles biggest, despite the torn nerves, the damage; he smiles and everyone listening smiles too, because they think he’s remembering that last, fragile instant up there in the plane before the crash. They never guess that he’s smiling because of what he’s going to say next.

  I MADE A MISTAKE, IS HOW IT ALL STARTED. IT WAS A SIMPLE MISTAKE, the kind anyone could have made. It was dark out, and it was hard to see. But the c
ity of Glens Creek did not think the mistake was so simple, and so, to make up for it, the city decided that I should be given a job. I was thrilled. A job! I couldn’t wait to see what it would be. I left my schedule wide open, open enough for anything.

  All summer I waited to hear about my new job. June came and went. Then July. I tried calling the courthouse, but they always told me the same thing: Be patient. Be patient. So I tried to do just that.

  I was living with a cousin of mine named Ronald at the time. His house was on the northern outskirts of Glens Creek, out where the suburbs gave way to farmland. There wasn’t much to do around there, and so the waiting was painful. Ronald suggested I get a job in the meanwhile, but I didn’t want to complicate things. I was being responsible, for once.

  August came and the levee dried up and then the summer was over. Fall arrived, but everything stayed very warm. In fact, they said on the news that autumn was turning out to be the region’s warmest since 1956. It was amazing to be a part of. Like living in a child’s drawing of autumn: the sun was everywhere at once. A giant, shattered wagon wheel of light. The streets were painted with fallen leaves. Wherever you walked, plump acorns fell from the branches and hit the sidewalks with a joyous sound, a noise like people clapping in church.

  I went for walks in town. I took long drives around the countryside. I became reacquainted with Ronald. He was poor, but, I learned, serious about golf. He coached at a nearby golf resort and each of his clubs had its own little suede hat the wintery green of a crisp dollar bill. Though he was only twenty-five, a few years younger than me, Ronald was quite a wonder at coaching. People called the house all day and sometimes late at night to schedule appointments with him. One of his clients, an old Pakistani gentleman, was so grateful to Ronald for his instruction that he gave Ronald a horse, the offspring of an actual prize Thoroughbred. Ronald’s horse was named Captain Marvel, and though he’d been born with a leg injury that would keep him from ever racing, he was a glorious animal, gray with a blindfold of black spots across his eyes.

  Ronald grazed Captain Marvel in his own modest backyard. There wasn’t much room, certainly not enough for a proper barn, but Ronald was industrious and built a small wooden shelter for Captain Marvel at the yard’s far end, a shelter not unlike a giant doghouse. Ronald painted the walls of Captain Marvel’s house bright red, with a little golden lightning bolt over the arched entrance.

  Ronald made all kinds of efforts to care for that horse. He ordered bunches of sweet green hay from a nearby farm. Once a day he offered Captain Marvel milk from a child’s plastic bucket, milk with electrolytes in it, which I imagined as tiny electrical charges that I could almost see firing along Captain Marvel’s ribs, popping and sparking up and down the carved muscles of his legs. But for all the power coursing through that horse, he had little opportunity to run, to really bolt. Ronald had purchased a cheap horse trailer, not much more than an aluminum crate on wheels, and once in a while, whenever he had time and could get permission, he’d drive Captain Marvel to the local high school after classes were finished and ride him back and forth across the soccer field. Captain Marvel’s hooves pounded the earth so hard I could feel the thuds all the way from where I stood on the sidelines. But as I said, Ronald was a wanted man at the golf course and could rarely go galloping like that. So Captain Marvel spent most of his days in the yard, waiting inside his little red house for his chance to explode through the world. Which is how I felt too, living with Ronald, waiting to be given my job.

  Just when I began to worry that the city had forgotten about me altogether, the call came.

  “Miles ‘Nunce’ Fergus,” I said into the phone. Nunce was my horn name. It’s what people used to call me on trumpet.

  During this phone call, I was told by a man named Sergeant Eugene Brill that my job would be to help out at About Face Juvenile Boot Camp, five miles up Route 17 from my cousin’s house. He said to drop by the office sometime that week, whenever I was free, to be oriented. I drove up the next morning at dawn.

  Before I left I took precautions to make sure I made a good impression. I showered and shaved; I even used some of Ronald’s gel, slicking my hair back from my face. By the time I started up the car, my heart was beating hard. I sat for a moment and stared at Ronald’s long, winding driveway. My new job awaited me just a few miles away. Mist was evaporating all along the driveway, being burned off by the rising sun, and as I watched, I couldn’t help but feel a great hope rising in me. I turned the key and headed down to the road.

  The ride to the About Face Juvenile Boot Camp was quick. As I drove, I wondered what they’d have me do. I knew about places like About Face. There was a juvenile boot camp near Roaring Green, New York, where I’d grown up, a retreat for kids who’d gone bad. It was called Rooden and my mother had always made me hold my breath when we drove by.

  “For the criminals of tomorrow,” my mother said.

  And as I neared the port of entry to About Face, I was struck by how much the camp looked like a prison. A high fence surrounded the property with gleaming loops of razor wire on top. The buildings were blocky and fortress-like. Watching the facility loom up in the windshield made the skin on my arms and neck tingle with excitement.

  At the gated entrance booth, a guard took my name and ushered me into the parking lot. I pulled in between two dark blue vans and began the long walk across the lawn. To the west lay the barracks and to the east stood a set of obstacle courses. Rope bridges and ladders, tires chained together over pits of mud.

  As I neared the main office, I saw an elephant of a man standing in front of the entrance, smoking a cigarette. He smiled and saluted me. “Mr. Fergus?” he said. “We spoke on the phone. I’m Eugene Brill, the camp director.” He wore fatigues and a tented hat that reminded me of paper boats I used to float down the gutter.

  I saluted back. I’d worn a sleeveless shirt to suggest an air of toughness. I’d always considered myself leanly muscular, but standing here next to Sergeant Brill I realized that I was just plain skinny.

  “The drive up all right?” he said. “We’ve had a problem with deer in the road. That’s an interesting hairdo you have.”

  As for my general appearance, I am a white, plain-looking person. Dark eyes. Average height. The only thing abnormal about me is my head. I have a small shock of white hair in the center of it.

  “Sir, this is from scar tissue, sir,” I told him.

  “Well, allow me to remove my foot from my mouth and apologize, Mr. Fergus. And you don’t have to call me ‘sir.’ You’re a drill instructor now. You’re Sergeant Fergus. As per the city, you’re supposed to work here at least three days a week. If you want, you can work up to five. You’ve got seven hundred and sixty hours to fill. ‘As per’? Is that the right expression? ‘As per’?”

  “Can I work seven days straight through?” I said.

  Sergeant Brill smiled. “Judge Neal said you were raring to go. He told me you called his office near twenty times between June and August, asking what your assignment was going to be.”

  “I won’t let you down.”

  “I know you won’t, Sergeant Fergus,” said Sergeant Brill. “As you probably know already, around here we basically specialize in this. Boo!” He suddenly contorted his face into a thing of horror: lips peeled back from his clenched teeth in a terrible grin, his bottom jaw humped out like an ape’s, his eyes wide and bulging, smoke curling from his nose.

  “See that? See how you jumped back a step, but then stood tall quick? Tells me a lot about you, Sergeant Fergus,” said Sergeant Brill, his face having returned to normal. “Quite a lot. Tells me that you’re a little nervous, a little scared, but that you’re also determined to stand up for yourself, to prove yourself. Tells me you’re eager. Am I right?”

  “Yes,” I told him, and he was right. I was scared. And I was determined to do well at About Face. I saw it as a last chance of sorts. Because at twenty-nine, I was no Ronald. No one was calling the house asking for me. I had no
degrees. My longest stay at any one job had been six and a half months. But what I hoped was that About Face would be my chance to get back in the race, to redeem myself. After all, the camp was designed to help children get their lives on track, and I’d been a child myself when things had spun off course for me.

  “You crack through a person’s front when you scare him, Sergeant Fergus,” said Sergeant Brill. “You penetrate his personal facade. His true colors come out when he’s afraid, who he really is. You can work with that. That’s what we do with these kids. We scare them straight, as the old expression goes.”

  “Get their true colors out in the open. Then work with that,” I said, nodding.

  He laughed. “Don’t worry. That stuff isn’t going to be your department.”

  Not my department? I felt the tightening of disappointment in my chest.

  “I hear you play the trumpet,” said Sergeant Brill.

  I told him I played clean, hard trumpet.

  Sergeant Brill picked up a drawstring sack sitting on the flagpole’s marble base and handed it to me. “This belonged to a friend of mine.”

  I opened the bag and found a trumpet inside, a Blessing with a five-inch bell. I fingered the valves. They were stiff, but pumped smoothly. The last trumpet I played had been played before me by a seal at an amusement park. What I mean is that I hadn’t touched an instrument as nice as this one in over six years.

  “That’s half your job there,” said Sergeant Brill. “You’ll play reveille in the morning to wake up the cadets, then taps at night to put them to bed. Right now all we’ve got is a recording. Piece of shit. Sounds like a someone whistling through a toilet paper tube.”

  I asked him what the second half of my job was going to be. I wanted to do more.

  Sergeant Brill stubbed his cigarette out on the ground and then picked up the butt and slipped it into his pocket. “The second half of the job is my daughter, Mr. Fergus.”