Voodoo Heart Part 3

I sat down on the bed and turned the letter over in my hands. The trunks of palm trees wound upward past the windows. A skywriting plane began to write something, but quit after a few letters and flew off.

Finally, I opened the envelope. Inside were my sister's earrings, and a note written on a piece of hospital stationery: To my friend L.J., Happy fish, plus coin.

Gay It's been over a year since I left Florida. I live up in the cold, blue Northwest now, in a small town with rivers on both sides. All I'll say is that I work in a store that sells antique maps and globes, from when the world was not so sharply in focus. There are chimes made of tiny gla.s.s guitars over the door. I go by a new name now, the whole thing just two syllables, so quick you might miss it. My favorite things in the store are the copies of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century globes, which are guides to the hopes and fears of people back then more than they are actual globes. Huge blue-and-white tigers stalk the icy regions to the north; sea serpents slink through the oceans; the eastern sh.o.r.e of a misshapen North America is marked by a freckled ear of corn.

Most of these globes don't show Florida at all, but a few do, usually as a long, squiggly tube, like a deflated party balloon. On one such globe there's an oval of sunshine painted over Florida and the Gulf below, a faint golden spotlight. When I think of Gay, I like to picture him under just such a spotlight, sitting in his chair with Edward nearby, talking to an audience. In my mind he's speaking mostly to old people, but also to people recovering from disaster and misjudgment and heartbreak. He smiles at all of them out of the good side of his face as he talks. His eye is so sensitive now-I picture him wearing sungla.s.ses if the floors are waxed too well and have a high sheen. Sometimes I imagine him wearing a wig with sideburns that never stay completely stuck to his temples; other times not.

What Gay is always talking about, when I think of him, are the moments right before his ordeals. Sometimes he talks about ordeal number one, the fire; other times number three, at the Sh.o.r.es; but mostly he talks about ordeal number two. He sets the scene: he says, "There was a click as the glider was released, as the bigger plane towing us let go. But there wasn't any drop or jolt. Our glider just hung there, suspended at the center of this wide ring of clouds. Then the glider dipped a bit-it nosed down the way they can-and all of a sudden the whole green ma.s.s of the Arkansas marsh rose into view. My girlfriend at the time, Julie, was seated just in front of me. She was the daughter of a nurse at the clinic I went to for my skin grafts. At one point she looked at me over her shoulder and pointed down at this one patch of marsh that was bubbling and fizzing like crazy. Boiling almost. 'Frogs,' Julie mouthed to me. It was frogs breathing at the bottom of the swamp. I remember her mouthing it to me like that, 'Frogs,' even though it was quiet inside the plane."

Right here is when he smiles biggest, despite the torn nerves, the damage; he smiles and everyone listening smiles too, because they think he's remembering that last, fragile instant up there in the plane before the crash. They never guess that he's smiling because of what he's going to say next.

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 cla.s.ses 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 a.s.signment 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 s.h.i.t. 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 b.u.t.t 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 h.e.l.l 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.

"h.e.l.l, today," said Sergeant Brill. "Right now."

At eleven o'clock that morning, after filling out forms in the office, I set out with Lexington in one of the camp's vans. How my life had changed since dawn! I now had on a uniform: a tan shirt with little b.u.t.toned flaps on the shoulders, tan army pants, and shiny black boots. I felt like playing my new horn right there in the van, felt like shouting over my shoulder to Lexington that she shouldn't worry because she was in good hands, but she gave no sign of even noticing me; she sat in the back row with her head leaned against the window.

Though Lexington was twenty-one, she looked about four years younger. She was small, hardly taller than five feet, and while she had hips and b.r.e.a.s.t.s, there was still a newness, an awkwardness really, to the curves and flarings of her body. She had dark kinky hair with miniature curls, and that first day in the bus she wore Chap Stick with flecks of sparkle in it. The steroids she took made her face overly plump, but in an appealing, pillowy way. Whether Lex had actually stopped aging because of her kidney problems or was simply a late bloomer, I couldn't tell, but there was something both weary and innocent in her face that I found myself immediately drawn to.

Another drill sergeant, a black man named Williams, rode in the pa.s.senger seat. He wore tight, wire-rim gla.s.ses, and had neatly trimmed his mustache to look like a perfect third eyebrow beneath his nose. Williams was along to make sure I did my job.

"So, where are you from?" he said as we pa.s.sed a stand where people sold pumpkins and bunches of fresh corn.

"I'm from all over," I said. "I played the trumpet for a long time. I was a jazz musician." I said this very loudly so that Lexington might hear.

"Cool beans," he said. We drove a while longer and Williams told me about his childhood, growing up "on the streets," how hard it had been. The landscape was beautiful. Oak and birch and poplar trees. The sun flashing through the branches. Lex looked so pretty in back. Suddenly Williams paused and turned to me.

"What's that noise?" he said. "Do you hear a whistling?"

"What noise?" I said, though I knew very well what noise.

"I think...It's coming from you. From your face."

"Oh, that. Some of the bones behind my nose are a little out of place. The wind can get in there sometimes."

Williams scrutinized my face. "Do you box?"

"No."

"You get in a fight? That why they sent you here?"

I noticed Lexington watching me from the backseat.

"I had an accident when I was a kid," I said. "It was a stupid thing. There are lots of little bones behind your face that you can knock loose pretty easily. The sphenoid bone. The ethmoid. It's a fragile system."

Williams leaned over and looked up into my nose. "Well, that's a seriously loud whistle you got going on in there. It sounds like a kazoo, you know? Like someone honking on a kazoo."

I glanced at Lex and saw that she was still watching.

"Can you hear it yourself?" Williams asked, still peering up into my nose. "It's like toooot. Tooooot."

I rolled up my window.

Williams tried to get me to talk about myself some more, about what had landed me at About Face, but after I dodged his questions a couple of times, he grew bored and turned on the radio. The rest of the drive was uneventful. Lex kept to herself.

When we reached the city limits, I got off the highway and followed the blue H signs to the hospital. I parked as close as I could get to the entrance. Lex climbed to her feet and came toward me down the aisle.

"I'll be right here when you're done inside," I said as she pa.s.sed.

"It takes three hours," she said. Her eyes were as green as limes. "You should go walk around town."

"What would you recommend seeing?" I said to Lex.

She gave a tired smile. "Anything but the hospital," she said, and then left the van.

I watched Lex cross the parking lot. At one point a car pulled out of a spot in front of her, and even though it didn't come close to hitting her, she gave a little frightened jump, then stopped in her tracks. The car paused and the driver waved her across his path, but she insisted he go first.

"Nervous little thing," said Williams. "So skittish."

I thought about what Brill had said about her not having any friends. Things had been the same way for me at her age. I'd had a hard time of it, and watching her stand there alone and frightened in the parking lot, I felt my affection for Lex bloom.

She glanced over at me as the car finished its K-turn, and I waved and gave her my warmest grin. She smiled a tight-lipped, friendly smile, but even as she did, she crossed her arms over her chest, as though protecting her heart from me.

When I was ten, a bullet came screaming down out of the sky and slammed into the top of my head. I was on my way to school, walking through the field behind the schoolyard. My book bag was on my back, my hair was combed and still wet from the shower. I was already late, but I didn't care. Because the day before, a girl I liked had pa.s.sed me a note-Stephanie Leroux, I still remember her name. The note said that tomorrow she'd pa.s.s me a romance note, and so on that morning I was taking my time getting to school, enjoying my own antic.i.p.ation. The day was perfect. Warm, with a glowing blue sky.

I remember hearing a faint static in the atmosphere, a kind of electric crackle. The next thing I knew I was lying on the ground, staring up at the clouds with a metal pebble lodged and cooling in my skull.

I learned later that there had been a race nearby, a charity marathon, and that the man in charge had mistakenly fired an actual bullet into the air to get things started. He came to the hospital almost every day I was there and cried into the rumpled edge of my bed. The woman who won the race also came by once, and gave me a trophy with a man on top, a man painted gold holding a ring of laurels over his head like a shield.

The doctors said that I was lucky, that if the bullet had been falling even a fraction faster, it would have pierced my skull, instead of sticking in the bone, and likely caused serious brain damage, if not death. As it was, the injury, while painful, wasn't all that serious. "It's that thick skull of yours that saved you," said one doctor. He chuckled, then gave me a little punch in the arm. I had a seam of staples down the front of my head. Metal wires ran through my face like whiskers.

I was in the hospital only a month and a half, but when I left, I found that I was afraid to go outside. I developed an irrational fear of lightning-I thought I could sense it coiled in the air all the time, even on sunny days-and if I had to travel anywhere uncovered, I'd start to shake and sweat and stutter. My parents walked me around town day after day to help, but nothing changed. Children picked on me at school because of my jumpiness and my new white hair. They called me "skunk," even after I dyed the white patch brown. They beat me up. I became afraid. My parents bought me a trumpet, which I played alone in my room. I was left back once, then twice. After that I left school altogether.

It's funny how a hit like that can be all it takes to knock you off course. Hardly more than a tap or nudge, and suddenly you find that you've become someone entirely new, some dark version of yourself you never thought possible. One minute you're a boy with promise, you're an honors student, you have friends, a future; and the next you're twenty-nine and living in the bas.e.m.e.nt of your cousin's house. Where has your chance at happiness gone? You don't know. Whenever people talk about how the neighborhood has gone downhill, it feels like they're talking about you.

I worked at my father's comic book store. I delivered tanks of carbonated water for a soda company. I played the trumpet around town for extra money. I landscaped. I worked at a warehouse where they used pig fat to make fireplace logs that could burn all day. At night, I often traveled to Albany and drove up and down the fanciest streets, the ones with the most expensive houses, and watched the lighted windows slide by through the darkness like trays displaying all the things I didn't have. Now and then I thought about stealing, about hurting people, but more often I wanted to be the one to catch someone else doing things like that. As I drove, I often fantasized about spotting some catastrophe I could prevent-spying a prowler creeping through the hedge; catching sight of the fire just now starting in the kitchen of that house. I wanted to be there to save someone else from the kind of disaster that had happened to me, because I felt that if I did, maybe I'd get another chance at things. Maybe someone would help steer me back to where I was supposed to be.

Every morning I tell myself that things will turn around, that today will be a new start. I lean in close to the bathroom mirror and say, "Ready. Set. Go."

Though most of the cadets at About Face wanted to improve themselves, there were some, a handful, who went out of their way to be as bad as possible. A few were in gangs and had cryptic tattoos branded on their arms and necks. Some had relatives in prison, so their desire to end up there made at least a bit of sense. But others just seemed to enjoy being cruel. There wasn't much room for them to do wrong, but they liked to throw their weight around. They teased and tried to injure other boys, some much bigger than themselves. They went around jabbing erections at each other, and at the drill sergeants. One cadet, a boy named Unger, refused to march in step; he'd stagger this way and that like a drunk, or shove the boy ahead of him and try to topple the whole line. Another, a Spaniard from New York City, kept hitting other boys in the groin with his belt, even after Brill punished him with fifteen-, sixteen-, even eighteen-mile marches around the grounds. The one that worried me most, though, was a local boy named Haden McCrae.

McCrae didn't act out the way the other boys did; he didn't fight or misbehave, but there was a lazy, unworried way about him that troubled all the drill sergeants. He always looked at us in a sleepy, heavy-lidded manner-he looked at us like he'd seen it all before. It was this calmness in the face of authority that made him so popular with the other cadets. This and the fact that at sixteen, McCrae had pulled an old man from his car, robbed him, and kicked him in the head until he was near death. Now, at almost eighteen, he was one of the oldest boys at the camp. McCrae was tall and lanky and pale, his face covered with thick, brown smears of freckle. His hair, before being shaved when he arrived at About Face, had been bright orange, and I could always spot his head from far off, glowing like a hot coal among the others.

Most of the grounds at About Face had an air of the military about them: everything sheared flat and laid out at right angles, as though plotted on a grid of crossed sabers. But below the camp lay thick woods, woods that suggested play and joy and mischief. The pine trees stood in bunches, their branches grown together in dark, tangled canopies. The tunnel-like paths beneath them twisted and wound this way and that, past other kinds of trees-gnarled maples and birch trees with papery bark that unraveled in long, teasing curls. There were jags of rock to hide behind, patches of canary gra.s.s high as my waist. And the woods had a downward tilt to them-they sloped down from the camp in a way that implied decline, a kind of crumbling collapse toward Lake Deed, which lay below, and which was black and miles around and always fringed with a foamy white discharge. There were deep currents in the lake, too. If you watched it closely for a long time, you could detect a slow churning motion, a sluggish kind of spinning.

I had my first encounter with McCrae at Lake Deed.

This land below About Face was to be used to expand the camp. Sergeant Brill hoped to get a permit from the state to raze most of the trees by next year, and he often punished the camp's worst cadets, like McCrae, by forcing them to help clear the walkway leading down through the trees to the lake. When I wasn't on trumpet or driving Lex to the hospital, Sergeant Brill had me do menial things around the camp-help dolly boxes of food from the supply trucks into the canteen closet, or restock the bathrooms. But sometimes when he sent cadets down to the lake he had me go with the other drill sergeants "to have an extra set of eyes around," as he said. So I tagged along and watched drill sergeants like Williams tie the cadets together by their waists with a leash-like metal cable and then march them through the locked fencing at the back of the camp and down into the woods. I followed them through the trees and hovered at the edge of the group, looking for any kind of acting out. There was an after-school camp for wealthy children somewhere on the other side of the water, and though we never saw them out on the lake itself, on still days we could hear those other children playing on their beach-the yelps, the laughter, the gasps brought on by the sting of cold water. I often caught McCrae staring out over the dark, spinning expanse in the direction of those voices. And with such hatred in his eyes! Like if he had a second's chance he'd split their heads open one by one, like pieces of firewood.

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 sh.o.r.e. "You got some bird s.h.i.t 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 sh.o.r.e.

"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.