Voodoo Heart

for me in the lunchroom or out by the canteen, I could sense her growing more and more frustrated by our strained encounters.

In the end, I did little those last days at About Face but play reveille and taps. Sometimes I ran stock. Now and then I worked custodial. When I finally left, Brill let me buy the trumpet from him for a cheap price, and I still have it. It’s what I use today. I work at a small museum of natural history near Albany, collecting tickets at the desk. Groups of schoolchildren come by a few times a week and tour the museum with their teachers. Once in a while my new boss, an elderly woman named Reese, has me play my trumpet to let the children know when it’s time to return to their buses.

The museum isn’t much. The wood floors creak. Some stuffed birds dangle from the ceiling. There’s one dinosaur, but it’s the size of a chicken and has lovers’ graffiti scratched all over its bones. Still, the museum is a quiet, pleasant place to work. Now and then, dust in the air reveals secret scaffoldings of sunlight descending from the windows.

One day, about three months after being hired, I was printing up tickets in the office when Reese came in and told me I had a visitor.

“Tell Ronald I’ll be out in a second,” I said, separating a sheet of ticket stubs.

“It’s not your cousin,” she said. “They say they’re from a camp? Somewhere you used to work?”

I looked past Reese, at the doorway, but it was empty. I felt the blood rushing to my head. I hadn’t spoken to Lex since I’d left About Face. Maybe McCrae had finally done what I’d always known he’d do. Maybe he’d broken her heart and she’d come to say she was sorry. I’d been thinking about her a lot lately, sitting next to me in the camp van, her eyes closed as I painted the brush across her legs. Leaning back on her elbows on the doctor’s table, laughing, joking with me while all the blood in her body was being drawn out of her.

I left the tickets on the table and went out to the admissions counter. I scanned the room, but the only person around was a young man standing with his hands in his pockets. He wore an old army jacket and blue jeans and it took me a moment to recognize him.

“It’s okay, music man,” said Haden McCrae, smiling at me. “I’m not used to me in civvies yet either.” His hair had grown into a bright orange shock that he’d wetted and wore smoothed back from his face.

“What do you want?” I said. I felt a liquid heat rising in me.

He dug his hands deeper in his jacket pockets and shrugged. “I don’t know. I just came to say I’m out.”

“Congratulations. I’ve got to get back to work,” I said, and turned to leave.

“Wait. I want to tell you something,” he said.

I stopped and looked at him over my shoulder.

He kicked at the splintered end of a floorboard. “I want to tell you thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome. For what?” I said, sensing a trick.

“Lex told me you said nice things about me when we first started up together. She said you told her I was a stand-up person.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I was just about to tell him what I actually thought of him, right there at the museum entrance, when the memory returned. I had; I’d said he was a stand-up guy the afternoon I’d been trying to find out from Lex which nights they went down to the lake.

I said to McCrae that, yes, I guessed I’d told Lex that.

McCrae nodded. “Why’d you say that about me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You made her happy.”

He seemed to think about this for a moment. “I was never really going to let those birds go, you know. I was just tagging their feet to mess with you guys. I thought you all hated me.”

I sighed. “I don’t hate you, Haden,” I said. “Like I said. I think you’re a stand-up person.”

He smiled at me. “I think you are too, Sergeant Fergus,” he said.

I told him I had to get back.

McCrae saluted. I saluted back, and then he turned to leave. “I’ll tell her you said hello,” he said, and then he was gone.

The museum only has one impressive exhibit. It sits at the back of the third-floor hall, in a square, dusty glass case: the skull of an ancient human, a skull nearly two million years old. The skull doesn’t look human. The top of the face looks familiar enough, from the nose up, but the bottom half is monstrous: the jaw is a massive hinge of bone with crushing rows of giant teeth. Under the harsh lighting inside the case each tooth looks mountainous, rising in knobby peaks, pitted with deep valleys of shadow.

The schoolchildren that visit the museum always find the skull soon enough, and even after they’ve wandered off to see other exhibits, they eventually return to it and look some more. There’s a plaque on the wall beside it, which explains that the skull in the case belonged to a particularly unsuccessful species of man, a species that followed an embarrassing evolutionary path. It seems clear, states the plaque, that just before this species evolved, back when man was still a hunched, ape-like creature, a great climate change occurred in ancient Africa, where man was then living. Fruit puckered, leaves shriveled, and a deep frost came upon the land. All at once, man began to adapt, to change into a number of different versions of himself in order to find one that might survive the freeze. Where almost all these new species of man advanced or developed was in the area of the brain: they grew bigger, more complex minds so that they might figure out new ways of getting food. It was one of these species—a species that used its new intelligence to make tools and hunt animals—that would eventually go on to become early modern man, then man of today, you and me. But there was another, lone species, says the plaque, that didn’t put any energy at all into developing its mind. (Here you can see the children becoming more interested, straining to read over each other’s shoulders, squinting.) What did this species see as its source of promise? Its mouth. It grew a giant mouth so that it might chew up more of the garbage left behind to scavenge, so that it might actually eat up bones, droppings, everything. It’s this, a species of ancient man called Paranthropus, that the skull in the case belongs to.

There’s a drawing of Paranthropus next to the display, and in it he looks sadly bewildered, gazing down at a clutch of stringy gray grass in his hairy palm. He’s forlorn; he seems to understand that at some point, long ago, he took a wrong turn somewhere, and now he’s ended up looking like a fool. From his eyes, though, you can tell that, for the life of him, he can’t remember how this mistake happened; he has no idea where or when he made the error. Often, as the time approaches to call the children to the buses, I imagine that it’s him, Paranthropus, that I’m calling to. Sometimes when I play I close my eyes and I can see myself doing it, aiming the bell of my horn at his ugly face and leading him back this way.

i.

MY GIRLFRIEND AND I ARE NOT RICH PEOPLE. NOT BY A LONG shot. But together we own a mansion—one of the last real mansions in central Florida. It was built by a family of lemon farmers back in 1869, almost one hundred and fifty years ago. We put less than eleven hundred dollars down, hardly anything, but the house has over twenty rooms in all: five bedrooms, a library with a vaulted ceiling, a study, even a garden room that looks out on three full acres of wild backyard.

The morning the realtor first showed us the place, I was sure she’d made some kind of mistake. The other houses she’d taken us to see had been small: one-and two-bedroom apartments mostly. And then, out of nowhere, this.

For a long time, Laura and I stood on the front lawn, just staring up at the house. It had a wraparound porch. There were four stone chimneys rising from the roof. Laura had a good job at the aquarium, and I managed a major wrecking yard, but even so, how could something like this be in our price range?

“I know what you’re thinking!” said the realtor. She had to speak loudly to be heard over the persistent buzzing from insects hidden in the foliage. “But the price is just what I said. I’m tempted to buy this one