Voodoo Heart (9 page)

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 city 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.”

“Sir?” Behind us, the sprinklers started up, ticking graceful arcs of water over the lawn.

“My daughter, Lexington. Lex. She was born with her kidneys gummed up. The last few years she’s started having health problems, real ones. I don’t want to get into it. Believe me, it’s heart-breaking stuff. You know what dialysis is? That’s the second half of your job. To drive her up to the hospital in Albany three times a week to get her blood cleaned.”

Take the girl to get her blood cleaned. I liked the way that sounded. It had a vaguely heroic quality to it, and I began to forget my disappointment over not getting to work with the cadets.

“Hey, be nice to her,” he said, looking down at his boots. “All this dialysis stuff depresses the hell out of her. It’s made her into an introvert. She’s shy—I mean, she doesn’t have any friends.”

“When do I start?” I said.

“Hell, today,” said Sergeant Brill. “Right now.”