Voodoo Heart (11 page)

Once, during the cadets’ lunch hour, I saw McCrae, still attached to the others by the leash, fidgeting with something by the edge of the water. The other three drill sergeants were eating their lunches and talking nearby, and though I wasn’t supposed to address the cadets myself, I went over.

“McCrae, what are you up to?” I said in a friendly tone. I never spoke harshly to the cadets. I figured that maybe if I seemed relaxed around them, they might open up to me.

McCrae stood up, but when he glanced over his shoulder and saw who I was, he kept his back to me. I could see that he had something in his hands. “The music man,” he said. He had started the cadets calling me “music man.”

“Hey, music man,” said Cadet Spitz, sitting on a rock by the shore. “You got some bird shit in your hair.”

I reached up to feel my head before realizing that he was talking about my patch of white hair. The cadets laughed, the cable between them shaking. Spitz looked at McCrae as though for approval, but McCrae stood facing the lake.

“Funny, Spitz,” I said. “Hey, McCrae. What’s in your hands there, buddy?”

“Nothing to worry about, music man,” he said, his back still to me. The water lapped at the shore.

“McCrae. Do me a favor and show me your hands,” I said. Out of the corner of my eye I saw another drill sergeant approaching. I wanted to handle this before he took over.

“Come on now, music man,” said McCrae. “Let’s not start acting like a drill sergeant.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said, growing angry.

“It means we all know you were assigned to this job. It’s no secret. Cadet Granz over there thinks they sent you here because you’re one of those special retards who, you know, can do some things real good, like count or play a instrument. No offense. But I’m of the mind that you did something wrong to end up here, just like us. So what’s the story?”

“My story is I’m here to serve my community, McCrae. And as an official drill sergeant I’m ordering you to turn around! Right now!”

McCrae laughed. “Okay, okay. Don’t get all riled up.”

“McCrae!” shouted the other drill sergeant. “Shut up and turn around!” He grabbed McCrae and spun him around.

McCrae let something flap up out of his hands. It rushed at me, beating its wings against my chest and neck. I grabbed it, and saw that it was a baby loon. How McCrae had managed to catch the bird, I don’t know. Attached to its leg was a luggage tag, one of the slips we tied to the cadets’ duffels when we shipped them in or out.
Cunt,
it read in McCrae’s lefty handwriting.

“Empty your pockets, McCrae,” said the drill sergeant.

McCrae pulled his pockets inside out and a dozen little pieces of paper fluttered to the ground.
Ass rape,
said one.
Big diseased cock,
said another.

“That’s the end of lunch, then,” said the drill sergeant. Then he addressed the other cadets. “Drop what you’re eating and get back to work.” The boys sighed and swore under their breath, then got to their feet and started working again. As the other drill sergeant pushed him past me, McCrae shot me a sad look, a look that said he was disappointed in me, as though I’d let him down somehow. I looked at the loon, the tag still attached to its leg. I pictured it landing on the other side of the lake, on the beach where the children from the other camp were playing; I pictured it landing right in some little girl’s hands.

“Nunce” is short for
enunciate,
which is what people used to say I did best on horn: stepping hard and clear on each note in a commanding, declarative way. But this is a style no one wants to play alongside. It’s the style of someone who learned to play alone, not in a band like most people. I’m no good at call-and-response. How I play is like someone talking loudly to himself, yelling at himself.

Each morning at five fifty I took my place beneath the flagpole, dew still beading the grass, the occasional low fog stewing around my ankles, and waited there until it was time to play reveille. I listened to the rope gently bell against the flagpole. I watched a golden outline materialize around the distant treetops. And then, right at six o’clock, I emptied myself into that horn. Sometimes I rang loud enough to knock the birds from the trees. At night, I returned to the spot and played taps the same way.

When Brill didn’t need me to do much, I practiced down by the lake. He’d given me permission to use his locker because it was larger than the standard lockers, which wouldn’t fit my horn. He was one of the only sergeants with keys to the back gate, so I was always careful when I borrowed them to go practice.

I thought someone might complain about my playing, maybe someone who lived on the lake, or even someone from that other camp across the water, but no one ever did. Even when I played at night, imagining that I was playing just for Lex, no one got upset. In the evenings I tried to play softly, hoarsely. I crooned out songs like “In the Still of the Night” and “Blue Hawaii,” songs of romance and longing, coaxing songs, while the lake spun slowly around, black and sparkling as a new record.

Every few days I drove Lex back and forth to the hospital. Rich northeastern forest hemmed the road nearly all the way, and as time passed, I got to watch the onset of the frost, the first snow. Williams stopped tagging along after the second week, so the rides were just me and Lex. She always sat in the last row, the farthest away from me. The first few weeks I tried to make conversation, but she kept cutting me short, answering with a nod or a shake of the head. There was no blaming her. By the time we were off to the hospital, her system was clogged with nearly three days’ worth of urea, so much that even from the driver’s seat I could see how egg-pale her skin was. It itched her, too. She kept a housepainter’s brush in her purse that she often took out and used to scratch herself. I’d watch in the mirror as she feathered the brush up and down her neck and arms and thighs. Occasionally her skin pained her so much that she cried, quietly though, with her head leaned against the window. As winter deepened, the trip grew much longer. Deer appeared in the road more often and slipped and spun on patches of ice while trying to get out of the way. The sky became a gray faucet of snow. I had to drive with caution.

One snowy day in December the drive took an especially long time. Usually the trip took about forty minutes, but that afternoon an hour into the ride we were hardly more than two-thirds of the way there. Lex had given up scratching with her brush and now rubbed her arms and legs with her open hands. Then, without warning, she came up and sat next to me in the passenger seat.

“How much farther?” she said, her eyes desperate.

“At least half an hour,” I said. She began to cry.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It just hurts. It won’t stop itching. It’s like the itch is too deep to get to.”

“What can I do to help?” I said, trying not to sound too eager. The windshield wipers creaked as they swatted at the gathering snow.

“Can you pull over for a minute?” she said.

I pulled over to the side of the road and put the hazards on.

“Here,” she said, and gave me the brush. “It helps if someone else uses this while I concentrate on blocking the itch out. My dad usually does it for me. Do you mind?”

I told her I didn’t mind.

She closed her eyes and rested her head against the seat.

I started stroking her arms with the brush, and tiny flakes of skin, like dandruff, fell to the floor. The hazard lights ticked on and off.

“That feels good,” she said, her voice shaky from crying. Her face appeared puffy from the betamethasone, but with the soft winter light falling on her skin, she looked eerily beautiful, like a statue from atop a gravestone.

After a while I laid the brush in her lap and used my hand. I rubbed hard on her jeaned knees, her shoulders. Soon she was able to breathe through her nose and then her breathing evened out, calmed. She kept her eyes closed; her expression was one of resolve. I told her I wouldn’t let anything happen to her. I rubbed her neck and told her it would be all right.

When we finally reached the hospital, she asked me to come in with her. A male nurse led us to the fourth floor, where he eventually hooked Lex up to a device that resembled a large beige sewing machine. Two thick tubes ran into her arm. Dirty blood ran out of her through one tube and into the humming chamber of the machine and then out of the machine through the other tube and finally back into her arm. The dirty blood looked no different from the clean; both were a dark, syrupy red. I couldn’t tell one from the other.

We didn’t say much during that first time. Pop music crackled in from a radio shaped like a cartoon cat perched on the sill. Snow fell past the window, then turned to rain. At one point Lex said, “I heard you practicing your trumpet the other day. You played ‘Embraceable You.’ That was my grandparents’ song.”

“That’s one of my favorite songs. I love that song,” I said. “I learned it the first year I started playing, back when I was thirteen. I was in this YMCA program where coaches taught you a skill or a hobby—you know, to socialize easier? They even had a woman there who could teach you how to ride a unicycle—which still seems ridiculous to me. What popular kid did you know who ever rode around school on a unicycle? Am I talking too much?”

Lex laughed. “A little.”

I nodded and was silent for a while. The dialysis machine whirred. I watched her blood slide through the tubes.

“My father told me what you did, you know, to wind up working at the camp.”

I felt my face grow flushed. What I’d done to wind up at About Face was try to help someone. I’d been driving along one night, just coasting through the streets, when I spied a man stabbing an old woman in the ear right on her own porch. I watched him take a knife from his pocket and start digging its point into her eardrum. So I did what anyone else would have done. I got out of my car and yanked him off. Then I knocked him to the sidewalk. As the man hit the curb, his arm made a sound like dry pasta breaking over a pot of boiling water. But he hadn’t been robbing the old woman. In fact, she was his mother and he’d been testing her hearing aid with a sonic wand.

“It was dark,” I said.

“No, I think it’s funny. It’s romantic, kind of. Chivalrous,” she said. “I see you lingering by groups of cadets sometimes. Standing on the sidelines. You really want to help out.”

“Yes,” I said.

She peeked beneath her bandage. “Sometimes I wonder how well the camp works,” she said. “We get letters pretty often from kids who’ve made something of their lives after being sent to us. Dad puts them up in the barracks. But we also get kids who come back again and again.” She nodded at the arm with the tubes in it. “They’re like me. You can clean them up, but it’s only a matter of time before they go sour again.”

“That’s not how I see you,” I said.

She smiled. Ringlets of dark brown hair hung around her face. “Good. That’s not how I see you either,” she said.

She slept on the way back. I drove a full ten miles per hour below the limit, my eyes on the road. I felt like everything important was in my hands, which I kept planted at ten and two the entire way.