Voodoo Heart (14 page)

The museum only has one impressive exhibit. It sits at the back of the third-floor hall, in a square, dusty glass case: the skull of an ancient human, a skull nearly two million years old. The skull doesn’t look human. The top of the face looks familiar enough, from the nose up, but the bottom half is monstrous: the jaw is a massive hinge of bone with crushing rows of giant teeth. Under the harsh lighting inside the case each tooth looks mountainous, rising in knobby peaks, pitted with deep valleys of shadow.

The schoolchildren that visit the museum always find the skull soon enough, and even after they’ve wandered off to see other exhibits, they eventually return to it and look some more. There’s a plaque on the wall beside it, which explains that the skull in the case belonged to a particularly unsuccessful species of man, a species that followed an embarrassing evolutionary path. It seems clear, states the plaque, that just before this species evolved, back when man was still a hunched, ape-like creature, a great climate change occurred in ancient Africa, where man was then living. Fruit puckered, leaves shriveled, and a deep frost came upon the land. All at once, man began to adapt, to change into a number of different versions of himself in order to find one that might survive the freeze. Where almost all these new species of man advanced or developed was in the area of the brain: they grew bigger, more complex minds so that they might figure out new ways of getting food. It was one of these species—a species that used its new intelligence to make tools and hunt animals—that would eventually go on to become early modern man, then man of today, you and me. But there was another, lone species, says the plaque, that didn’t put any energy at all into developing its mind. (Here you can see the children becoming more interested, straining to read over each other’s shoulders, squinting.) What did this species see as its source of promise? Its mouth. It grew a giant mouth so that it might chew up more of the garbage left behind to scavenge, so that it might actually eat up bones, droppings, everything. It’s this, a species of ancient man called
Paranthropus,
that the skull in the case belongs to.

There’s a drawing of
Paranthropus
next to the display, and in it he looks sadly bewildered, gazing down at a clutch of stringy gray grass in his hairy palm. He’s forlorn; he seems to understand that at some point, long ago, he took a wrong turn somewhere, and now he’s ended up looking like a fool. From his eyes, though, you can tell that, for the life of him, he can’t remember how this mistake happened; he has no idea where or when he made the error. Often, as the time approaches to call the children to the buses, I imagine that it’s him,
Paranthropus,
that I’m calling to. Sometimes when I play I close my eyes and I can see myself doing it, aiming the bell of my horn at his ugly face and leading him back this way.

i.

M
Y GIRLFRIEND AND I ARE NOT RICH PEOPLE. NOT BY A LONG
shot. But together we own a mansion—one of the last real mansions in central Florida. It was built by a family of lemon farmers back in 1869, almost one hundred and fifty years ago. We put less than eleven hundred dollars down, hardly anything, but the house has over twenty rooms in all: five bedrooms, a library with a vaulted ceiling, a study, even a garden room that looks out on three full acres of wild backyard.

The morning the realtor first showed us the place, I was sure she’d made some kind of mistake. The other houses she’d taken us to see had been small: one-and two-bedroom apartments mostly. And then, out of nowhere, this.

For a long time, Laura and I stood on the front lawn, just staring up at the house. It had a wraparound porch. There were four stone chimneys rising from the roof. Laura had a good job at the aquarium, and I managed a major wrecking yard, but even so, how could something like this be in our price range?

“I know what you’re thinking!” said the realtor. She had to speak loudly to be heard over the persistent buzzing from insects hidden in the foliage. “But the price is just what I said. I’m tempted to buy this one myself.”

I studied the house, trying to take in the whole giant sprawl. Granted, it would need work. The place looked like it had stood vacant a long time, abandoned for ten, maybe even fifteen years. Ferns had sprouted though the slats of the porch. The columns were covered in a scaly silver mold. There were mushrooms growing in one of the rain gutters, a whole row, white with red spots, like tiny bloodstained umbrellas.

The grounds were in bad shape too: everything wild and overgrown, choked by weeds and bramble. Long tatters of moss hung from the trees.

Still, there was no disguising what lay beneath all the disrepair. With time and effort, this could be a wonderland for us.

Laura must have sensed my excitement. “This house is incredible. But it’ll be way too much work. I mean, look.” She waved a hand over the tall, weedy grass, which came all the way up to our thighs. “The yard alone will take weeks to clear.”

“We wouldn’t tackle the whole thing all at once,” I said. “We could just do a little every day.”

Laura turned to examine the house again. I spotted a tick crawling up the back of her shirt and quickly plucked it off before she could notice.

“I don’t know, Jake,” she said. “If it’s so great, why has it been standing here, empty, year after year? What’s wrong with it?”

“So,” I said to the realtor. “What’s wrong with it?”

The realtor shrugged, mopping the sweat from her face. Her name was Joyce. She was an older lady, a grandmotherly type; she wore her white hair in a bun; her sneakers were brand-new. The house had been hard to find. It lay off the main road, hidden behind the old lemon fields. Walking over from where we’d parked had been a big exertion for Joyce.

“Nothing’s wrong with this place, love,” she said. “People are just afraid of privacy, I suppose.”

I waited for her to go on. “You’re sure? There’s no catch?”

“Fess up, Joyce,” said Laura.

Joyce sighed and wiped her glasses on her shorts. “Look. The only thing I can think of that might have kept people away is the camp. There’s a camp nearby.”

“A camp? Like a camp for kids?” Laura said.

“No. It’s a camp for ladies,” said Joyce. “It’s more like a retreat.”

“Like a spa?” I was intrigued; I’d never been to a real spa before. I pictured myself relaxing in pits of bubbling mud.

“Not exactly a spa,” said Joyce.

“Not exactly how?” Laura asked.

Joyce picked a daisy from the brush and sniffed the petals. “It’s a federal retreat.”

“A federal retreat like a prison?” said Laura, sounding alarmed.

“I suppose it’s sort of like that,” Joyce said. “But it’s strictly a white-collar facility. It’s not like there are any violent offenders in there or anything. This is a place for society ladies.”

“A jail for them,” said Laura.

“Laura, it’s not something to worry about,” said Joyce. “It’s practically a resort.”

Laura turned to me. “Jacob, I don’t want to live near a prison. What if we were here and there was a jailbreak or something? Those women would make a beeline straight for our house.”

I noticed a glimmer of excitement in Joyce’s expression at hearing Laura refer to the house as “ours.”

“You heard Joyce,” I said. “It’s not that kind of place. It’s for society ladies.” I made a tea-sipping gesture.

“I’ve heard of some very high-profile women spending time there,” Joyce said, swatting at a cloud of mosquitoes. “Remember Shirley Sayles, the famous golfer? She bet all that money on the U.S. Open? The one she was playing in? She’s at the retreat right now.”

“Listen to that,” I said. “Shirley Sayles.”

“Maybe we should look at something else,” Laura said.

“Come on.” I stepped onto the front porch, which groaned loudly.

“Jacob,” said Laura.

But I was already opening the front door.

The inside of the house was dark and cavernous, with a fog of dust rolling across the floor. Trees stood crowded against the windows, their green-and-yellow leaves pressed to the glass like children’s hands.

As I stepped into the parlor, I could feel the temperature dropping around me. The room was empty except for a burned-out chandelier reaching down from the high ceiling. I glanced around, examining the peeling wallpaper, the molding sculpted along the ceiling’s edge. I already knew that this was the house for us. It had stood for over a hundred years, like a fortress hidden in the woods. Nothing about it was cheap or makeshift. The beams supporting the ceiling looked like they were carved from stone.

It didn’t take long for the house to win Laura over, either. The touches were what got her, all the charming details: the claw-foot tub in the master bathroom, cracked but still usable. The carved lemons at the ends of the banisters. The small stained glass window in the parlor door, round as a coin.

What really brought her around, though, was the garden room. It lay at the south end of the first floor and extended out from the rest of the house, overlooking the sloping backyard. The curtains were drawn when we entered, and the room was especially dark, except for a trickle of light seeping in through the far end of the ceiling. I figured there was a crack in the roof, but when we walked over, we saw that in fact, in a certain spot, the ceiling rose and gave way to a small crystal dome. Laura’s face lit up when she saw it, the gentle swell of glass, the elegant iron webbing. The dome was filthy with soot, but when she reached up and wiped off one of the panels, a spear of sunlight pierced the room.

“Romantic,” said Joyce, and then coughed from the dust.

Of course, even now, six months after we moved in, we still have lots to do. If you came over to our house today, you’d find some rooms fully furnished and others completely bare. If you chose to open the sliding door to the library, you’d find it thoroughly decorated—a sofa by the fireplace, a glass coffee table, the towering bookshelves lined with books. But, on the other hand, if you picked the door at the end of the second-floor hallway to open instead, you’d find a room with nothing in it but an old electric picture of a beach hanging on the wall. When the picture is plugged in, the palm trees sway gently in the breeze, the waves sparkle and roll across the white sand. A flying fish even jumps out of the water, then slaps back down.

There are a few rooms Laura and I haven’t even begun yet, storage closets mostly, little side rooms with shelves built into the walls. We leave the doors to them closed for days at a time, weeks. Sometimes we’ll forget one exists altogether, until one day when we happen to notice a doorknob sticking out of the wall. Just the other morning I opened the door to a storeroom near the basement and found a dead snake lying on the floor. It must have been there for months; all that was left of the corpse was a skeleton. A winding comb of bones coiled in the dust.

All the space used to make Laura nervous, the empty rooms, the dark door frames. Now and then she’d panic and call to me from wherever she was in the house and I’d have to come up from the cellar, or down from the study, and stay with her for a while.

Recently, though, I bought a pair of walkie-talkies from a toy store, so that whenever we’re working on different rooms we can stay in contact. We’ve started making up tag names for each other, like truckers.

“Kitty Cat, this is Hunka Luv. What is your twenty? Over,” I say, the plastic receiver to my mouth.

“Well, hey there, Hunka Luv,” says Laura. “I am currently en route to the shower, over.”

We sand, and we paint, and we drill, and every day the house progresses. The old layers of wallpaper are scraped off. Little by little the floors brighten, revealing rich swirls and knots in the wood grain. The chimneys are flushed out, and suddenly a cool, sweet draft flows through every room.

Our bedroom is my favorite place in the house. It sits at the top of a wide central tower, and it’s round, with shuttered windows that look out over the treetops. The ceiling is high and cone-shaped, pointy as a witch’s hat. If we forget to shut the windows at night, fruit bats fly in and hang from the rafters like little leather change purses.

Laura’s almost finished with the garden room. She removed the heavy curtains. She cleaned the dome so that the glass sparkles in the sunlight. I told her I’d cut down some of the vines lashed across the windows if she wanted me to, as they obscured the view, but she said to just leave them.

“They make the room feel like a tree house,” she said. “I like it this way.”

She keeps a bunch of pillows scattered around, big satin pillows with tassels on the corners, and I often wake up on weekend mornings to find her already downstairs, lying beneath the bright dome, reading the newspaper in her nightgown and sunglasses.

I chase Laura up the creaking spiral staircase, laughing, both of us naked. I carry her to the windowsill, her arms around my neck, and I make love to her with the whole blue sky behind us.