Voodoo Heart (28 page)

On Monday morning the policeman gave me two calls. I called Roddy and I called Joan. But it was Orlando who came to get me late Monday afternoon. Driving back from the station, he hardly said a word. He looked haggard, and he kept his eyes on the road.

“I’m sorry if I embarrassed you,” I said.

“I’m the one who’s sorry, Miller. I should never have let you go see the singer. That was my mistake.”

“No, I—”

Orlando hissed through his teeth. “Don’t say anything,” he said. “Just rest.”

I leaned my head against the window, letting the glass cool the inflamed skin above my eye. The sun was just setting; all the day’s color was draining into the sky, leaving the trees black. I thought of my apartment back in New York. I could see the same sunset pouring in through those huge bedroom windows, lighting up the floor like the deck of an ocean liner. I saw my little robotic vacuum, slowly dragging itself from room to room, its batteries nearly dead.

I closed my eyes. How had I let this all happen? How could I have been so stupid? An image of Dick’s face came to me—his face the way it had looked in the Coach’s windshield just before I knocked him down, confused and frightened and yet horribly blank. I felt a great shame welling up in me. Dick Doyle was not to blame. He wasn’t a fake. He was just an unfortunate man, now made more so by my attack, left bruised and battered. I was lucky he’d survived at all.

By the time Orlando pulled into the pawnshop’s lot, I felt ready to sleep for a thousand years. It took a great effort to get out of the car. Raoul, another clerk, was just locking up.

Orlando thanked him and sent him home. “Hey, Miller,” he called to me then. “Come inside. Have a drink with me.”

I looked at him through my good eye, then at my car, parked beside the dumpster. A drink sounded like heaven.

I followed Orlando inside the pawnshop, turning on all the lights.

“Back here,” he said, heading to the supply closet. He unlocked the door and from a small box in the back he pulled a bottle of Gullick Single Malt.

“You’ve had that in the store the whole time I’ve worked here?” I said.

He shrugged and took out two plastic cups. “Sometimes, when I’m here at night, after you or Raoul or Sam leave, I call home.” He poured Scotch into a cup and handed it to me.

It took me a moment to realize that by home he meant Argentina.

He took off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. “I’ve been a fool plenty times over, Miller,” he said. Then he took a sip of his drink. “Here. I want to show you something. Look at what came in the other day.”

He opened the jewelry case and pulled out the box of nameplates. “I don’t know why I keep any of these things,” he said. “None of them are worth much. And no one ever buys them from me.” He sifted through the alphabetized bags of names until he found what he was looking for—a pendant reading
Orlando.

“Look at that,” he said, holding the nameplate up to the light. “My first Orlando. I think I must have every name in the box now. None worth anything.”

I smiled, which hurt. “You got a Max?”

“Sure,” he said, digging through the nameplates. “I think we got three or four.” He pulled out a couple, then picked the nicer of the two and gave it to me.

I turned the pendant over.
Max,
in swooping gold letters. “What do you think it’s worth?” I said.

He examined the pendant. “About…twenty-five cents.”

We both laughed.

“Get the acid,” I said.

He slapped me on the back, then took the nitric acid from the cupboard.

I put an empty bowl on the counter. Carefully, Orlando poured in the acid. Then he resealed the jug and locked it away.

“Cheers.” I held up my cup of Scotch.

He nodded and tapped my cup with his and then we dropped the pendants in the acid.

“Hocus-pocus,” he said.

“Exactly.”

I watched as the letters began to fizz and break apart, turning the acid a rusty brown. An odor like vinegar emanated from the bowl. After a moment, the bubbles cleared and the reaction settled and all that was left of the pendants were a few metal rinds, floating and bobbing around in the acid.

“You go home now, Miller,” said Orlando. “I’ll take your shift with the dumpster tonight.”

I shook my head, swallowing the last of my Scotch. “No way,” I said. “I’m doing it.”

“You’ve had a long day. You need to get some sleep.”

“I want to stay.”

He eyed me.

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

Orlando nodded, then went to get me the spear gun.

Spring nights in Central Florida are full of turbulence. Almost every cloud has a secret storm balled up inside it. They skid across the atmosphere, trailing strange, violent winds behind them, winds that sway the palm trees, blowing the mice that live in the leaves out into the sky.

I was enjoying my time outside, my last night guarding the dumpster. I lay on the hood of my car, watching the sky, which was clear and filled with stars and blinking satellites. The wind felt wonderful on my bare skin, warm and close and breathy. I felt far away from myself, completely alone in the world, but strangely calm, too.

The dumpster creaked on its base. I scanned the area, but saw no one. Just then I noticed the sound of an approaching car. I sat up and reached for the spear gun.

Headlights appeared from around the corner. They stopped at the end of the block. Someone exited the car, and though I squinted to make the person out, the headlights were pointed at me, and all I could see was a hazy red silhouette.

“Is that you, Joan?” I said. “Joan, I have some things to say.”

“I’m not here to start trouble,” said Dick Doyle.

The blood rushed out of my face. I shielded my eyes, but he was just a shadow and a voice.

Then the headlights went off and I could see him. He wore a T-shirt and jeans, a trucker’s cap on his head. One of his arms hung in a sling. The fingers of his other hand were all splinted. His expression was sharp and alert, though. Just the way I imagined he lived in his private time.

“Well, well,” I said.

“Look. It wasn’t an act, at first,” he said, walking toward me. “After that asshole ran me down, I couldn’t hardly do anything. It was like someone padlocked my brain. But then things came back to me. It was slow going.” He stopped right in front of me. “It took a long time to recover.”

“So, who knows about this?” I said. “Who knows you’re faking?”

He shrugged. “My family, my friends. I don’t know. Whoever. I’m not faking, though, because that’s not what matters about the act. That’s not what it’s about.”

“Does Pearl know?” I said.

Dick sighed. He turned toward his car and gave a nod. A tiny light went on inside and I saw Pearl sitting in the driver’s seat. She wore a kerchief over her hair, like an old woman. There were dark circles beneath her eyes.

“I’m dropping the charges against you,” said Dick.

“Why are you doing that?” I said.

“Because I want this to be over and done. I need it to be, man. Look, if you want to go tell everyone I’m a fake, then go ahead. Be my guest. Splash it all over the place. I don’t care anymore. You want to beat the shit out of me? You want to fire that spear through my chest? I deserve it, right? I ruined your life or whatever you want to think. Here. Go ahead. Shoot.”

He flung open his good arm and waited.

“Really,” he said. “Do it. Now’s your chance. Fuck me up, man. I stole your girlfriend, dragged you down here.”

He lifted his shirt, revealing his belly. “Come on!” he said, angry now. “Do it. Here I am! Exposed!”

I kept waiting for the old anger to kick in, but it just wouldn’t. None of my past with Dick Doyle seemed to matter anymore. I actually felt silly, standing there with my spear gun, facing off.

“Let’s call it even,” I said.

He squinted at me. “Hold up,” he said. “You understand, right? This
has
to be the end?”

I glanced at Pearl sitting in the car, pale and exhausted.

“It is the end,” I said.

Dick hesitated a moment, then let the hem of his shirt drop. He put out his splinted hand for me to shake. “Truce?”

I took his thumb in my hand and gently shook it. “Truce.”

“Well, phew,” he said. Then he looked around, as though just now noticing the store, the lot, the dumpster.

“Hey, I’m sorry about that handshaking thing at the fair. That was shitty of me. I was just feeling jealous. I mean, Pearl’s a special lady, you know?”

“Yes,” I said, though, much as I’d have liked to just then, I supposed I didn’t know. I didn’t know much about her at all.

“Bygones and buried hatchets, right?” Dick laughed, so cheerful all of a sudden. “So you have to stay out here all night, huh? Your boss told Pearl you’d be here till morning. That is one bad bitch.”

I explained that it wasn’t so bad.

“Still, that’s a lot of downtime,” he said. He reached into his back pocket and took out a CD. “This might be ridiculous, but I thought that maybe, if you’ve got nothing better to do, you could take a listen.” He handed it to me.

On the cover was a picture of him with that same dazed expression on his face.

“Will do,” I said.

Dick nodded. “Well…I’m going to get back,” he said. “Listen, I’m glad we talked, brother.”

He patted me on the shoulder with his better hand, and then turned and walked back to his car. As he got in, I cast a last look at Pearl, watching me from the driver’s seat. I wanted to talk to her, to apologize,
something,
but she was already starting the engine. A moment later they disappeared down the street.

I walked back to my car. Inside, I took the CD from its case and slipped it into the player. The first song was about two truck drivers, a man and a woman, who meet over the CB radio. They start talking to each other one night, while driving their routes, just two lonely voices in the darkness.

It was a beautiful song and I hoped that I’d get the chance to listen to it with Joan the next day. I imagined myself lying on the couch with her, listening to the story together. The man and woman keep driving right past each other’s trucks, barely missing each other without even knowing. In one verse the truckers come close to meeting: The woman eats at a truck stop, and the man comes in so soon after her that when he unknowingly sits down on her stool, her tip money is still on the counter. The change is still warm from her pocket.

J
OHN CIRCLED BACK OVER THE PUMPKIN PATCH, BRINGING THE
plane lower this time, just to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. He’d been flying for over two hours straight; he felt dizzy from engine fumes and his goggles were smeared with gasoline. But as he brought the plane around, he spotted them again: forty, maybe even fifty people gathered among the pumpkins—a whole party waving at him, shouting and cheering, waiting for him to land. They were dressed formally, the men in sack suits and bright silk ties, the women in smart summer hats of pink or cream straw. They’d even laid out a runway, a long strip of white cloth that cut a clear, straight path through the pumpkin vines.

John wondered for a moment if he had the wrong town. He pulled his map from beneath the seat, unfolded it, and pinned it with his forearm against the leather rim of the cockpit. The map’s edges whipped about as he did his calculations: he’d taken off from Poth, Missouri, at nine in the morning and followed the railroad tracks west across the grasslands until about eleven o’clock, when he’d landed to refuel. It was near two thirty in the afternoon by the time he’d lifted off again, and now it was just after five, which would put him at—John scanned the wrinkled expanse of eastern Kansas—yes, this had to be Bunting. It was the only town for a hundred miles in either direction, and when John looked up from the map he saw, as though to underscore the obviousness of his deduction, a water tower standing just to the south with
BUNTING, KS
painted across its tank.

He refolded his map and glanced again at the crowd assembled below, the tiny white blossoms of their faces. He slowed down to let them read the lettering painted on the bottom of his wings. On the left wing:
JOHN BARRON. EXPERT PILOT.
On the right:
RIDES JUST
$2!!!

Then he leaned out of the cockpit to watch the reaction. Some of the men saluted and a few women waved as his shadow streaked over them.

John waved back, beaming. As he turned to the controls to ready his Curtis JN “Jenny” for landing, he felt an electric joy thrum through him: he had an actual welcome party. People had dressed up in fine clothes and hiked out to the middle of an empty pumpkin patch to welcome him to their town. He’d been barnstorming for three months now, since just after his twenty-first birthday, in February of 1919; so far he’d visited over thirty towns scattered throughout the Midwest, from Minnesota to Iowa to Nebraska and now down into Kansas, and never, not once, had there been a real welcome party waiting for him. Now and then he’d arrived in a new town to find some aviation enthusiasts standing out on the sidewalks, their Kodak Brownies aimed up at the sky. Sometimes a group of children, drawn outside by the Jenny’s approaching whine, chased after him as he flew past. But most often, John flew into a new town to find no one waiting for him or cheering him on. Nobody even expecting him, save a telephone operator or two.

Now, as he started his descent—pushing on the Jenny’s elevator, nosing her down toward the pumpkin patch—he tried to guess which of the women below was Marlene, the Bunting telephone operator he’d spoken with. Maybe the girl in the sleeveless dress at the back of the crowd? Waving a glove at him? John felt a small thrill at the thought of meeting her. He got along well with telephone operators. He made a habit to call ahead to every town he planned to visit and introduce himself to at least one telephone operator first. The women who worked the telephone lines in the kinds of towns John visited—country towns where a plane was still big news—usually spent their afternoons connecting the same people over and over again, knitting and reknitting familiar patterns: plugging Mr. Gray into Mrs. Beige. Wiring Mrs. Beige to Dr. Brown, and so on. A new voice on the line excited these girls. They joked and flirted with John. It was easy to get them on his side, to get them to help publicize his arrival. All it took was the promise of a free plane ride and they were swearing up and down that as soon as they hung up they were going to tell everyone they knew that an expert pilot was coming to town. And they were fun girls, too. Outgoing and social. The type to show him a good time, take him out to movie theaters and dance halls.

He’d called Marlene twice while he was still performing in the town of Poth, two hundred miles to the east.

“You owe me one,” she’d said the last time they’d spoken. “I got the whole town waiting for you. You better be cute.”

“I’ll wipe off some of the grease. Just for you,” said John.

“Well, try not to make me look bad. Everyone’ll be out there when you fly in.”

John had taken “everyone” to mean a couple of Marlene’s friends standing outside the telephone offices, yelling hellos or whistling at him or maybe waving a scribbled paper sign. Nothing like this.

The women’s lawn dresses shimmered in the sun, pale green and yellow and tangerine. At the back of the pumpkin patch stood a table lined with bottles of champagne. John tried to think up something extraordinary he could do for Marlene to thank her for preparing all this for him. He could make a banner for her:
MARLENE, MARLENE, BUNTING QUEEN
. Something like that, and fly it over town. Or he could buzz her house at sunset, shower her yard with flowers.

John took the plane low as he crossed the edge of the pumpkin patch. Green, unripe pumpkins rushed by beneath his wheels. He tilted the tail down, dragging in wind to slow the plane. The levers trembled in his hands. Through the blur of the propeller he could see the men and women part, moving away from the makeshift runway to give him room.

The Jenny hit hard, knocking John against the controls, but then it bounced, rising and leaping forward. John shoved on the elevator and brought the plane back down. Pumpkins burst against the wheels with dull, sickening thuds. The sour odor burned his nose as bits of pumpkin meat splattered across his face, getting in his mouth, slapping across his goggles. The pulp fouled up the wheels too. The plane skidded and spun, tossing John around the cockpit, the world a cyclone of shouts and colors, until finally the Jenny whipped to a jarring halt.

John tried to catch his breath, but his chest hurt where the lever had punched into him.

“Hello?” said a woman’s voice. “Are you all right in there?”

John winced and pulled off his goggles. “Just part of the act,” he said, wiping the pumpkin from his face.

He ran a hand through the sticky tangle of his hair and looked around. What a dream-like vision, all of these men and women dressed in fancy clothes, gathered around him in the middle of a pumpkin patch. Each woman carried a single pink rose. A large house stood off in the distance, just beyond the edge of the field. The sight sent a pang of excitement through John; he might actually get to sleep in a bed that night.

This, he thought as he took it all in—the party, the pumpkin patch, the warm afternoon sunlight—this was what he loved best about barnstorming. Between the last five towns combined he’d made seventy-two dollars profit, but this morning he’d landed to a champagne toast and a warm bed. You never knew when your luck would turn. You just cranked the propeller, lifted off, and followed the silver thread of the railroad tracks.

John climbed out of the cockpit and stood on the plane’s wing. Everyone, the men, the women, seemed stunned to silence by his arrival. Probably none of these people had ever seen a plane before, John thought. And even if they had seen a plane, they’d never had one roar to a stop right in front of their faces. He scanned the crowd for Marlene.

“Ladies and gentlemen of Bunting,” he said, unzipping his leather aviator jacket. “I can’t thank you enough for this warm welcome. When I saw all of you gathered here, I almost cried tears of joy.”

A young man approached John with a bottle of champagne. “Now you’re really trying to make me cry,” John said, taking the bottle. He popped the cork and let the fizz run down his glove before taking a long sip.

The man’s fist hit John on the side of the head. It flew up out of nowhere and knocked him backward against the fuselage. Champagne splashed across John’s face and chest. Through the ringing in his ears, he heard people shouting, rushing around. The man who’d hit him climbed up on the wing and stood over him now, a huge silhouette blocking out the sun.

John braced himself for another blow, but before his attacker could swing again, an arm slid around the man’s waist and yanked him down off the wing.

A hot throbbing started in John’s temple. When he touched the side of his head, his fingers came back wet with blood. Two men were struggling beside the wing of his plane. The man being restrained was young, about John’s own age, with a thick black mustache. The man holding him was older, his beard streaked with gray.

“This boy is probably a present from someone, Charley,” said the older man. “I’m sure he’s here as a gift to you.”

“Who sent him, then?” said Charley, writhing.

“Why don’t you stop thrashing about and ask him?”

Charley glared at John. A vein shaped like a tiny lightning bolt pulsed at the center of his forehead. “Well?” he said. “Are you a gift?”

“I’m here to offer you the gift of flight, if that’s what you mean,” John said. He scanned the crowd, waiting for a reaction, but they seemed frightened and confused. Some of the women looked like they were about to cry. John felt a cold, sinking sensation in his stomach.

“This party is for me, right?” he said. “John Barron? The pilot?” He gestured to his plane. Strings of pumpkin seeds dangled from the lower wings. “Is there a Marlene here?”

“For you?” the older man said. “Son, this is a wedding. You’ve crashed into my daughter’s wedding.” He pointed to the aisle runner—the long strip of white cloth John had mistaken for a runway—lying rumpled and torn beneath the wheels of the plane.

“I’m the groom,” said Charley, pointing a thumb at himself. “And that was my champagne, asshole.”

John felt very weak all of a sudden. It was then that he noticed, standing at the far end of the field, behind the crowd, a young girl in a white dress. She stared blankly at John, her dark red hair pinned above her face. She had one hand on the fence railing; the other hung limp at her side. Her dress was decorated with intricate beadwork that sparkled in the late sunlight. A bouquet of pink roses lay at her feet.

Then, all at once she turned and ran toward the house, her dress dragging behind her in the grass. Charley ran after her.

John felt a growing, painful pressure on the side of his head.

“Come down from there. You’re bleeding,” said the father of the bride. “Let’s get you some medical attention.” He put out his hand.

John reached for it but grabbed only air. A wave of panic hit him. He felt an overwhelming need to escape from there, to climb back into his plane and lose himself in the cold, oceanic emptiness of the sky. But he was so dizzy.

He turned to the crowd. The men and women were blurs to him now, watery shapes smearing into one another. “Sorry about the misunderstanding, everyone,” he said, blinking hard. “If one of you would just point me to the nearest petrol station, I’ll be on my way.”

Then he stepped down from his plane and passed out in the grass.

John woke with a start. The skin around his temple felt hot and swollen, and when he touched it, he found that someone had taped a small gauzy bandage over his cut. He knew he should lie back down and ice his head, but all he could think about was getting back to his plane. He threw off his blankets and sat up. How long had he slept? Slipping on his aviator jacket, he opened the door to his room and peered out. The hallway was dark and empty.

John snuck past the other bedrooms and headed downstairs. When he reached the foyer, he stopped and wrote a note on a pad by the telephone.

Dear Sir,

I apologize for destroying your daughter’s wedding. All moneys I have at present have been laid beside this note to pay for damages.

Sincerely,
John M. Barron (Pilot)

John placed a stack of dollar bills beside the note—practically everything he had. The bills were wrinkled and dirty and the pile sponged to one side. John frowned and picked up the pen.