Voodoo Heart (7 page)

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 come 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.”