Voodoo Heart (18 page)

That’s what happens with me. The feeling hits me and it won’t go away. I get angry and mean and, most of all, restless. Everywhere I look I see chances to go back and correct my life, chances to start over alone or with someone new. I see opportunity in the starry night painted across the checkout girl’s fingernails. I see it in the cars brought into the yard, especially the Voodoos. The ’76 Triumph motorcycle standing in the lot, gleaming beneath the spotlights. The feel of the helmet, the way the world looks through the visor.

There are so many places I want to go, all of a sudden. So many scenarios I want to live out. The feeling is like standing beneath an active electromagnet at the wrecking yard. I don’t know if it’s the iron in the blood or what, but the magnet creates a sensation like something gently sucking on your insides.

And soon enough, there’s my girlfriend, asleep in our apartment, and here I am, drinking with some woman in a bar all the way out by the airport. The woman has a flower plucked from a cocktail in her hair.

But this was all a long time ago, before Laura. I used to move too fast. Let things barrel forward with no brakes. Laura and I have been together almost five years and I understand that she is the best thing in my life. I look at her and I know that. So I’m making sure we’re doing things right, building slowly. And I’m close now. I’m almost there. I’ve taken to carrying the ring around with me during the day, instead of leaving it at home, beneath the floor. I keep it in the pocket of my bag, zipped into the side. I can feel the bump beneath the canvas. I could pull the ring out any day now.

Sometimes I get scared, though. I get scared that something in me will react and change and push Laura away. If the worries get to me, if they keep me up at night, which is when they come most often, I’ll go for a walk around the house to calm down. I’ll take my walkie-talkie in case Laura wakes up, and put on my robe and creep down the winding staircase, careful not to let the boards creak.

I try to find something active to do, to keep me busy. I’ll do push-ups in the den. I’ll ride the exercise bike. Most of the time, I do something simple, something quiet. I’ll organize our record collection, or riffle through our bills. I’ll check the inventory for the yard. Occasionally I end up looking through the old photo books. Laura has a whole book of photographs devoted to her grandparents and even her great-grandparents. Black-and-white images with that silvery gloss to them, the people’s eyes blank as old lightbulbs.

I only have three photographs of my grandfather. One shows him posing with my grandmother. He’s sitting in a wooden chair on a porch, wearing his suit and tie. She’s standing next to him and he’s got one arm around her thighs, squeezing her, making her laugh. In another photo, my grandfather is holding up his neon star. He’s pretending to shade his face from the bright light.

The photo I like best (and the only one in which his face hasn’t been scratched out) shows my grandfather as he was in the 1920s, still a young man, lean with sleek black hair. He’s sitting in the back of a flatbed truck, parked at a general store in the middle of nowhere. The sky is huge and cloudless. In the corner of the picture you can see a pair of hands emptying a can of petrol into the truck’s tank. My grandfather is sitting on top of a crate of grapes in the back of the truck in his undershirt and suspenders, the sun gleaming on his thin chest. He’s grinning, mugging for the camera, holding a grape sprig high over his face, as though waiting for one of the grapes to drop right into his mouth.

I often wonder, as I stare at the photo late at night, unable to sleep: was he content with his life? I ask myself: Did it make him happy—really happy—to always be leaving things behind, homes and friends and girls who loved him, girls like my grandmother, who’d hate him once he drove away? And if it didn’t make him happy, why did he do it? Did he leave because he just didn’t give a shit about anyone but himself? Because he was a selfish, lusty motherfucker? Or were there other reasons? Did he leave because he was scared? Scared that if he stuck around he’d be an even bigger disappointment to the person he loved? Because he was afraid of hurting her even worse?

The last time my grandmother heard any mention of him was in 1949. A detective called the house where she was living with her new husband and children and told her that a vehicle belonging to my grandfather, a Ford A Roadster, had been found abandoned near San Francisco. The car had been discovered parked on a bluff overlooking the ocean, not far from the Golden Gate Bridge. There was nothing inside it at all, no wallet, no suitcase.

Someone had burned the car, the detective explained. The Ford’s exterior was charred and bubbled. The interior was all melted, the seats blackened husks, the steering wheel a drooping mess. The police suspected that the fire had been started by teenagers who found the car sitting vacant at the edge of the bluff, but they weren’t sure. It’s possible, said the man on the phone, that my grandfather set the car on fire himself. Still, there were no clues. Just a burned-out car sitting on a cliff.

What the police were really trying to figure out, of course, was what had happened to my grandfather himself. Had he committed suicide, jumped off the cliff into the ocean? Had he lit the car on fire and then just walked away, on to somewhere else?

As the detective assumed that my grandmother hadn’t heard from my grandfather in some time, he didn’t expect her to be much help. But, if she did have any information about my grandfather that might help him with the investigation, she should call him right away. My grandmother didn’t even bother to write down the detective’s number.

v.

F
INALLY, I DECIDED TO JUST GO AHEAD AND PROPOSE.

Enough time had passed. Our days had fallen into a warm, familiar pattern. And I felt good. Everything felt right. After nine months in the new house, it was almost finished, everything except the far portion of the backyard, which was still tangled and overgrown.

I figured I’d make a whole day of proposing. I’d surprise Laura at work, spend the day with her, take her out to a nice dinner at a restaurant on the water. Go dancing afterward at the country music bar. Then ask her to spend her life with me.

The day I chose to do all this was Laura’s day-care shift at the aquarium. The day-care center was one of the best resources the aquarium offered to its employees. The facility was small, just one classroom, but it was filled with all sorts of state-of-the-art educational material—computers and electronic toys, a whole library of storybooks. All employees were required to spend at least one day a month helping out at the center, which basically amounted to a day off. You played with the children, read them stories, finger-painted with them.

I’d always liked visiting Laura at the day-care center. I loved the craziness of the classroom, all the noise and commotion, little pumpkin-heads swirling around your waist, shouting and laughing. And it was romantic in a strange way, too. Being responsible for little children with your girlfriend.

I woke full of nervous energy the morning of Laura’s day-care shift. She’d already gone to work by the time I got up, so I took my time getting ready. I had an extra-long shower. I shaved with the fancy lotion she used on her legs.

I waited until I was ready to leave to retrieve the ring. As I bent down to pull up the floorboard, I felt a stab of fear that I’d find the hole empty. But as soon as I reached inside, my fingers found the plastic bag with the box inside. The ring looked beautiful. The diamond was small, but it sparkled brightly, slicing the light into pieces. I imagined myself giving it to Laura that night, kneeling down and holding it out to her, looking up into her face.

I put the ring in my pocket and left for the aquarium.

“Delivery for Laura,” said Marie, a day-care attendant, as she opened the door to the building for me. “We’ve got a delivery for Laura.”

“This isn’t what I ordered,” said Laura, coming to the door.

“You want me to send him back?” said Marie.

Laura kissed me. “No, I’ll keep him,” she said. Then, to me: “What are you doing here?”

“I had a date, but she stood me up.” I held up the yellow roses I’d bought. “I don’t know. You want to go out with me instead? I mean, I already have these flowers.”

She took the flowers from me. “All dolled up and no one to dance with, huh?”

“Something like that.” I put my arm around her waist and followed her inside.

The morning went even better than planned. Laura and I had a ball playing with the children, drawing pictures with them, reading them stories. We made crocodiles out of egg cartons with a girl named Lucy. Another child, a black girl named Christina, showed us how to make little fortune-telling devices out of sheets of colored paper.

I touched one of the numbered panels on Christina’s fortune-teller.

“G-r-e-e-n, and that spells
green,
” she said, manipulating the little paper mouth, making it open and close on her fingers. The fortune-teller finally stopped moving and Christina looked inside.

“What’s the verdict?” I said.

She read my fortune. “You smell funny,” she said, giggling.

“Let me see that,” I said. When I looked, I saw that all the panels said the same thing.

“He does smell funny,” said Laura, laughing. “P.U.”

Throughout the day we teamed up to help different kids. We read a storybook about a talking coffee cup to a girl named Susan, Laura reading the female voices while I read the male characters. We helped an Indian boy build a birdhouse out of Popsicle sticks and glue. The second half of the day we spent helping to operate the train. One of the women working at the center had a husband who ran a model train shop nearby, and he’d built an elaborate train set for the kids, with tracks that ran around the whole classroom. He’d even designed four different towns for the train to pass through, each town in a different corner of the room. Every town represented a different season of the year, too. One was winter: the yards were snowy; tiny icicles hung from the roofs of the houses. In another town, over by the toilets, it was autumn. Children trick-or-treated. Thimble-size jack-o’-lanterns flickered from porches.

The kids’ favorite part of the train set, though, was the tunnel. In one place, near the cubbies, the tracks disappeared into a dark hole in the wall painted to look like an old, rickety tunnel, with little
DANGER
and
ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK
!!! warnings all around the entrance. The kids never got tired of running the train through—steering the engine into the tunnel’s dark mouth, watching the cars disappear one by one, then rushing to the tunnel’s exit, at the other side of the cubbies, to wait for the glow of the engine lamp.

They made a game of putting notes in the coal car and sending them around to one another. One kid would stand by the spring section of the tracks, the other in winter, and when the first had put his note in the coal car, he’d make a sound like a train whistle and Laura and I would help the second child operate the control box and bring the train around the tracks, through the tunnel, and finally over to us.
Hello, Jim,
said one note.
Good-bye, Carol,
said the reply.

The train tracks were equipped with special hook rails that gripped the engine’s wheels, keeping it from tipping over. That afternoon, though, something must have been off with one of the engine’s wheels, because it kept derailing. We could hardly get the train around a turn without it tipping over. At one point the engine fell off the tracks inside the tunnel. All the kids crowded around the tunnel’s mouth, peering into the darkness. One boy was even trying to stick his head inside the hole.

“Hang on there, Poncho,” I said, and pulled him off the tracks.

Laura started toward the cubbies, where the door to the crawl space was, but I told her I’d go instead. The crawl space was just a sealed-up storage area, but it was dusty and cramped and I knew that none of the women liked going back there.

“My hero,” Laura said. I struck a superhero pose and the kids squealed with laughter.

The crawl space was narrow, only about four feet wide, and lengthwise it ran for about fifteen feet, like a short, dark hallway. I opened the door and slid inside. The air was cold and musty, and when I tried the lightbulb nothing happened. The two train tunnel openings didn’t offer much light, and it took me a good minute of fumbling around to find the engine lying beside the tracks.

“How you doing back there?” Laura called through the tunnel’s exit.

“All aboard,” I yelled back, righting the engine.

Then, out of nowhere, an idea came to me.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the ring box. A note one of the children had written lay inside the coal car. I would write a proposal on the other side of the note and then send the train down the tracks.

I glanced down the length of the tunnel at Laura’s face, peering back at me. Taking the note, I got a pen from my pocket and wrote on the blank side.

Laura. You and me?