Voodoo Heart Page 4

  I’ve seen Melanie just once in the twelve years since she was sent away, at one of our brothers’ weddings, which I’d gone to only out of hopes that Melanie would attend. She acted fidgety and nervous and seemed extremely agitated by me.

  “That’s disgusting. What is that?” she said when I showed her a lock of her own hair she’d given me before one of her train rides. She was pregnant, but the rest of her was thin and elegant. An Arabian man was helping her into her coat. “Get it away,” she said. “Why are you showing me that?”

  So that afternoon at the Happy Fish, Plus Coin, I was staring at this albino girl from a corner stool, this phantom Melanie, when I began to cry. I don’t know how long I was crying, but at some point Gay appeared and said, “I think you and I are the only ones in this motel God painted by the numbers.”

  Something to know about Gay: he had a smile on him. Thirty-two perfect teeth set in twin rows, like two lucky horseshoes dipped in white paint. Also, he had been in some kind of fire, that much was clear: his skin was pink and shiny, like melted wax, and his hands had been baked down into little flippers. His head was hardly more than a hairless knob with a slot for a mouth and one usable eye peering out. And he was paralyzed from pretty high up, his chest, maybe even his neck. He sat buckled into a motorized wheelchair, which he controlled with a reed that extended from a small panel up into his mouth. Still, when he smiled at me I hardly noticed the surrounding mess. I couldn’t stop myself from staring at his mouth, at that grin.

  He took the reed into his mouth and maneuvered his wheelchair a little closer. “Hey,” he said. “What are you, gay?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, I am. Gay Isbelle. That’s my name. Isbelle is French.”

  “What’s Gay?” I said, glad to be talking to someone.

  “What do you mean?” he said. “Gay is just gay. It can mean homosexual or happy. I’m old-fashioned, so I think ‘happy’ when I think of gay.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “Well, why aren’t you gay now, chief? You were crying a second ago.”

  How to describe that voice? There was a musicality to it, a singsong quality that made me feel safe. It made me want to talk to him, to tell him all about my problems, my family. I hadn’t said my last name out loud in over six months.

  “I lost my job yesterday,” I said instead, which was also true. I’d been working in baggage at Orlando International.

  “Is that all?” he said, looking up at me with his one good eye, which was plain brown, nothing dashing about it. “Jobs are easy enough to find around Orlando right now. What a time to be living in Florida!”

  “I need something sort of low profile, though. I’m watching out for some people.”

  “The police?” said Gay. “I don’t hold things like that against people. Know that.” Gay’s nurse, a portly Hispanic man, came over and told Gay he was going to the bathroom. “That’s fine, Edward,” said Gay. “I’ll be right here, with my new friend…” He gazed at me, waiting.

  “L.J.,” I said. This was the name I was using right then, after a character I liked in a musical film.

  “I’ll be right here with my new friend L.J. when you get back,” Gay said. Edward nodded at me and then walked off. “So, who is this you’re hiding from, L.J.?”

  “Just hiding,” I said, though by now I wanted badly to confess. His smile alone was nearly enough to make me do it; it was that glorious, his grin.

  “Come on, now. If you’re hiding, something has to be looking for you, right? What is it, girl trouble?”

  When I opened my mouth to speak again I had every intention of telling Gay the truth; I was going to tell him who my family was, and about how I’d been running from them since just after my nineteenth birthday, nearly one thousand days. I was going to tell him about how they’d nearly caught me in Seattle, then inside a library in Tuscaloosa; about the female detective in Santa Fe whose leg I may have hurt badly with my car. About how they were surely hunting me right then—about how, at that very moment, they might be jabbing flashlights all over central Florida. I had a pair of earrings hung on a lanyard around my neck—ten-carat pear-shaped diamonds. I’d stolen them from my oldest sister the night I left. They were for an emergency. I thought I’d show them to Gay as a way of starting to explain, but looking at him made me really think about that word, emergency, and instead what came out was “Yes, girl trouble. I’m having trouble with my girlfriend.”

  “Right. Your girlfriend…” He waited for me to go on.

  “Nancy?”

  “Nancy, right. What’s the problem?”

  “She’s mean to me?” I said. “She acts like she hates me.”

  “Like she hates you, right,” Gay said. He continued smiling, but held me with his stare for a long moment. So long, in fact, that I became sure he’d seen right through my lie. I felt confident that in a second he would spit in my face and leave me there. And I didn’t want him to leave. Just then, Edward returned from the bathroom. He glanced at Gay, and then at me in a suspicious way, before asking what was up.

  “I’ll tell you what’s up, Edward,” Gay said. “What’s up is you and I are going to help our new friend L.J. find a job.”

  When I was born, my father gave the doctor a tiny golden spoon to use to scrape the mucus from my mouth. It had a handle of braided ivory, and in the eighteenth century it had been used by a British nobleman to feed the blood of game animals to his baby hounds. There’s a photograph of the doctor leaning over me, pressing the bowl of the spoon between my lips. The picture frame has a special glass compartment for displaying the spoon itself. To this day, I sometimes taste the bowl of that spoon in my mouth. I never know when it’s going to happen, when the salty, bitter sting of it will well up, but when it does, the only thing that helps is to suck on something sweet. I once dated a woman staying at the Shores for a candy sellers’ convention who made giant gummy animals—bats and rats and even gummy beetles as big as my foot. Her name was Rita Beet, and for a while she worked at a Gummy World at the north end of the Galaxy, the area through which Gay and I were now driving, prowling for employment.

  The Galaxy was a ten-mile strip along the interstate that housed all the seedier tourist spots, each one a world unto itself: Gator World, Flea World, Orange World (housed inside a huge graying orange), Orlando’s Pawn World, World of Thrills, World of Tees, Scary World (which was nothing more than a plaster cave with a few plastic skulls glued on). As we drove down the strip, though, I started to like the idea of working at one of these places. They looked discarded, like giant, mangled toys flung out a car window. No one would come looking here.

  Gay sat propped in the passenger seat with a stack of my résumés on his lap. Whenever I slowed down too quickly, Gay’s head lolled forward, and Edward leaned up from the backseat and righted it for him. “Thank you, sir,” Gay said each time. “Thank you kindly.” Whenever I got out to inquire somewhere, he said, “L.J., this is the one. I feel it. You’re just what they’ve been waiting for.”

  This was a better day than I’d had in a long time and I was cheerful at first, but after we’d tried some places with no real luck, I began to grow nervous. I started glancing around at other drivers, worrying about my family again. Edward was watching a football game on a cheap, handheld black-and-white TV, and through the static I kept hearing the words catch and caught. At one point we sped past a dead deer that had been knocked against a tree; it was sitting with its back to the trunk like a person might, staring out at the highway with its front hooves in its lap. The way the deer seemed to watch us as we passed felt accusatory, damning.

  “Are you okay, L.J.?” Gay said, staring at me. “Do you want to talk about Nancy some more?”

  I turned to Gay, but suddenly he looked so small and helpless sitting there with Edward’s hands propping up his ruined head. How could he help defend me from my family?

  “Nancy’s nasty to me. She…” I tried to go on. My heart beat wildly; I was sweating. I
was sure that any moment now a carload of my brothers would roar up alongside us.

  “I have an idea,” said Gay, smiling warmly at me. “Let’s talk about green. The color.”

  “Green?” I managed.

  “I try to wear as much green as possible. It’s the color of longevity. As in the crocodile, or the turtle, which outlive animals twice, even three times their size.”

  I noticed that Gay’s shirt was green, with dark green diamonds up the front.

  “Hey, look. I didn’t notice that. Your eyes are green,” he said. “You like green, right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, just think of green. Think of yourself in cool, dark green.”

  “Green,” I said, closing my eyes. I pictured myself in a deep green jungle, hidden beneath huge, green, umbrella-like leaves. A cool breeze washed over me. My breathing started to calm. I began to feel in control of myself again. I was suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude for having stumbled upon Gay. I felt like he was something conjured up by my imagination, a friend that didn’t really exist outside my own mind. I was afraid that if I looked over at the passenger seat, he’d already be gone.

  “Gay, what is it that you do? For work, I mean.”

  “This is what I do, L.J. I talk to people. I teach them how to turn bad luck into good. You should come see me live in concert sometime. I speak at churches, meetings, that kind of thing.”

  “Where are you from, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I’m from a long ways away, L.J. Let’s just leave it at that,” said Gay. “Because right now I think you should pull over and try asking for work in this place here. I have a good feeling about this one.”

  I parked and went inside a blinking complex of rides and arcades, where I was hired to work at an attraction called the Home Wrecker, the world’s largest inflated house. Imagine a multiroom home that was essentially an enormous balloon for kids to bounce around inside of; picture one of those puffy castles they have at every fairground in America, but four or five times larger and shaped like a house. My job would be to accept tickets from the kids and then point them toward the Home Wrecker’s entrance, a dark, rectangular hole in the front of the house, quivering with the efforts of children already inside.

  The house itself had five rooms, all equipped with the appropriate inflated furniture—the bedroom had an inflated bed; the dining room, an inflated table and an overhead balloon chandelier; the living room had an inflated TV set with a clown painted on the screen. The points at which these things were attached to the walls, the floor, or the ceiling were actually openings into the larger balloon that was the house itself. The same gas pumped through the whole thing; it was all one bulging organism. Seeing the way the kids tumbled around inside, you’d think that it would topple, maybe even pop. But the house was tough. It was held in place by steel cables, and made of the same rubbery material firemen use to catch falling people.

  Gay and I became fast friends. The Shores had a pedestrian overpass, a little walking bridge that cars drove under upon entering the parking lot, and we began meeting up there in the evenings. I always brought a beach chair and an ice bucket filled with the beer we liked to drink, which was rare but popular just then in Florida. It came from the Caribbean in wooden boxes. The bottles were made of thick black glass and had no labels.

  It was on that overpass that Gay first told me about his ordeals, which is what he called his brushes with death. This was about a week into our friendship. Night had already fallen. Truck-shaped strings of lights moved back and forth along the distant interstate.

  “The first ordeal involved fire,” he said. Empty beer bottles lined the tray on his chair. “Our house burned down when I was a baby. That’s how my skin got this way. How I became paralyzed was a plane crash, the second ordeal, but that was much later, when I was a teenager. There were other people in the plane with me, but I was the only one who lived. It was the same in the fire. Everyone in the house died but me.”

  He paused here and took a sip of beer through his straw. A cat came sniffing out of the scrub by the edge of the parking lot. Somewhere a car alarm went off, then stopped.

  “It’s funny, L.J. You’re not supposed to remember things from when you were a baby, but I remember the fire better than the plane crash. I remember being naked in the sink with my mother standing over me, cleaning my heinie with a wet rag. She had a clothespin between her teeth. The phone rang and my mother let it ring. Once, twice, three times. Then on the fourth ring a tiny blade of flame shot out of the phone jack at the base of the wall and sawed its way right up the wallpaper to the phone, which suddenly became this hissing white fireball. The last thing I recall is the fireball hitting my mother in the side of the head. Not like a flame, but hard, like a punch. I could hear it hit her. Thwap! Like that. And then she flew out of my line of vision. The wet towel she was using to wash me landed on my feet when she fell. They’re the only part of me that didn’t get burned. Go on, take a look.”

  I bent down, my head spinning from the beer, and removed his sneakers. He had two perfect feet at the end of those ruined legs, creamy and white like a girl’s, but with patches of golden hair on the toes.

  Gay and I took to spending our breakfasts together, too, at the Happy Fish, Plus Coin. Gay loved the name. He supposed it meant “good fortune” in some other language, but figured the expression didn’t translate well. “That’s what I like about it, though,” he said. “I like that the restaurant’s owner just kept the phrase exactly how it went in his language, no matter how it might sound to people here. It’s like he trusted other people to understand, even if it sounded strange at first. I think I’m going to start ending my letters like that. Instead of ‘take care,’ or ‘best of luck,’ I’m going to write ‘happy fish, plus coin.’”

  Often I tried to pay for our meals, but whenever I laid the money on the table he got a waitress to come over and give half the money back to me. Sometimes, if she was taking a while, I’d push the bills at Gay, slowly, though—I’d creep them toward him like a spider crawling across the table. “Waitress! Waitress!” he’d yell, both of us laughing now, and when the bills were close enough he’d try to blow them back at me, huffing frantically. Gay kept a billfold in his breast pocket and he always paid for exactly half the meal, even if mine was more expensive, which was usually the case.

  “I enjoy your company, L.J.,” he’d say. “I’m paying for half of the good time being had at this table.” He was always saying things like that, things that swelled the tubes of your heart.

  Occasionally we took trips together. We drove down to the Everglades, saw the alligators and weird swamp birds. We went to Miami and sat on the beach, which was white and soft as flour. I dug a chair in the sand for Gay while Edward walked back and forth along the lip of the surf in his sneakers. We visited the many amusement parks—one of which my family had helped finance—getting to skip the lines for rides and food because of Gay’s condition. One morning we went to Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, and Gay became taken with an exhibit on a man from Iowa who’d been struck by lightning seven times over the course of his life. Gay kept coming back to it, asking me again and again to push the button that caused the tiny thunder sounds and sparked off the lightning.

  What we did most of the time, though, was talk about Nancy, the girlfriend I was supposed to be escaping from at the Shores. Nancy, who yelled and screamed and mistreated me in more ways than I even knew existed. She was beautiful, but in the worst way—a clean, sharp-edged kind of way; beautiful like frost in the corner of a window. She worked as a realtor for a condominium, one much nicer than the complex we’d lived in together, and she was always having affairs with the men she showed apartments to. Sometimes, when I was telling all this to Gay, I actually got angry thinking about her letting them do it to her on the floors of those empty apartments, or pinning her against the blank walls. She laughed at me when I confronted her. She said I was worthless. Did I want to see the handprint on h
er thigh? The tooth marks on her breast?

  I couldn’t make her bad enough. Every time I started in about her, I wanted to stop and tell Gay the truth, but I could never get over my fear that he’d laugh at me, that he’d say, “Look at me. Look at what I’ve lived through. You’re going to stand there and tell me that that’s what you’re running away from? That?” I was afraid that he’d tell me to just go home already, to go back to my big house and my rich family and get out of his sight for good.

  It’s a difficult thing to explain, hiding from a family like mine, a family most people would give anything to belong to. The truth is that sometimes, when your name precedes you—when it actually appears to you as an overgrown twin, forever loping ahead of you, shoving open every door it passes with its hip, announcing your arrival with its ape-like hands cupped to its mouth—all you want to do is outrun it. But after a while you find that there is no outrunning your name. Sooner or later you find that the only thing to do is run away.

  Occasionally I went to hear Gay talk at a nearby church or old age home, and every time, as soon as he finished, the entire audience would line up to meet him. They’d tell him how inspiring it had been to hear him talk; they’d hug him and kiss him on the top of the head, give him little tokens of affection—flowers or maybe a box of clementines. Of course, they all wanted him as a friend. Twice the universe had arranged itself into a great instrument of death and bore down on him, but how did he feel about it? Lucky. Not just for having survived his ordeals, but for the ordeals themselves.

  “They taught me who I am,” he said. “They gave me a calling that makes me happy every day. For that I feel like the most fortunate man alive.”