Voodoo Heart

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 her 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.”

He made me think of fairy tales, of those creatures who swoop in and save you at the last minute, who become your closest, dearest friends, and then, once your problem is solved, vanish. Just like that. So Nancy got worse and worse; the picture darkened every day. One evening I revealed that she’d thrown a steaming iron at my head. The next I told Gay about how I’d woken up in the middle of the night not long ago to find her standing in the doorway of my bedroom, holding her cuticle scissors and just staring at me. Nancy became a bogeywoman hiding in my curtains, grinning at me from behind the clothes hanging in the closet.

“You have to end it once and for all, L.J.,” Gay would say. “You don’t need someone who doesn’t love you. Abuse isn’t love.” Or “L.J., I want you to call Nancy tonight—no, right now, and tell her it’s over. Tell her good-bye. Period.” And then Gay and I would head to my room and I’d take a deep breath and call my own extension and tell the busy signal that I had too much respect for myself to go on with it anymore.

Sure enough, though, that night or the next, Nancy would call and tell me that she loved me, that things would be different, and I would usher her right back into my life.

Out of every thousand children who came to the Home Wrecker, nine hundred and ninety-nine were simply out to have fun—to bounce and flip around inside—but there was always that one with a different motive: to try to pop the house. Like I said, this kind of child was rare; they appeared once a week at most. Some of them were what you’d expect: teenagers with shaved heads or colorful, weapon-like hair. They went at the house’s rubber walls with penknives or box cutters, nothing that could do much damage. The really dangerous customers were of a different sort altogether. These were children with fury in them, real fury. The first one I encountered was a young boy, ten or eleven, with neatly parted blond hair and skin red and scaly with sunburn. He wore slacks and a tie and carried his folded jacket under his arm like a book. As he handed me his ticket, I noticed something sad in his face, a sort of trembling despair around the mouth. Eventually I’d come to watch for exactly this kind of thing, but at the time I just waved him toward the entrance. He offered a quiet thank-you and then vanished inside. I paid little attention at first. I watched the go-carts race around the track. I heard a girl scream at someone for stealing her golf ball and decided that, later that day, I would tell Gay about the time Nancy had hit a golf ball at me inside our apartment and punched a hole in the kitchen wall.

Suddenly the front wall of the house dented out farther than I’d ever seen it stretched—the cables holding up the house vibrated—then it ricocheted back into place. A few moments passed, and then something barreled into the wall again, hitting the rubber so hard that it whitened up like fist knuckles at the point of impact, before springing backward. I walked over to the door and looked through.

The boy stood with his back pressed against the far wall, sweat running down his neck, his mouth hanging open. His tie lay on the floor. He stared at the front wall for a moment longer, braced himself, and then ran toward it, his head down, his piggish arms pumping. He hit the wall with everything he had, hurled himself so hard that when it rebounded he was thrown backward through the air almost five feet before bouncing across the floor. He staggered to his feet and backed up to the far wall. Again he flung himself at the front of the house with no success. He was crying by now, sobbing. Peeling skin dangled from his arms. I couldn’t help but cheer him on. You can do it, I thought as he readied himself for another go. Penetrate! Penetrate!

Part of me rejoiced each time ones like him showed up, kids who refused to believe in a house that couldn’t be knocked down or even hurt, a house that looked like it was giggling, like it was shuddering with delight when they threw themselves at it. Do it, I’d whisper to myself as they charged. Do it! Harder and harder they banged into those walls: whump! WHUMP! And with such hatred in their faces, as though that house contained the very hex of their lives.

Sometimes, seeing these children leap and plow into the walls, I would think about Gay. His room was down the hall from mine, and every now and then in the middle of the night I’d hear him scream in his sleep, howl and shriek until Edward finally shook him awake. Gay was tough, but watching the walls fling child after child back down to the floor, I had to wonder if there weren’t things out there more resilient than he. Bad things. I did not want to know what they were.

One evening, about a month into our friendship, there was a commotion in the Happy Fish, Plus Coin. I was talking to Gay about Nancy over dinner, but by this time, I was running out of things to say about her. I could feel my imagination stalling, circling back over the same territory. But this only made my talk about Nancy more insistent and compulsive, more desperate. Lately, I’d been waking up with a hint of the taste of that spoon in my mouth. By the time I sat up and searched for it with my tongue, though, it had always disappeared.

That night at the Happy Fish, Plus Coin, I was telling Gay about how I was sure I’d seen Nancy’s brother’s car trolling around the parking lot the night before.

“I know it was him because of the fact that one of his headlights flickers on and off,” I said. “I could see it winking around out there. And I thought I saw an arm holding a bat hanging out the window.”

“You better call her,” Gay said distractedly.

“Call her? Gay, are you listening to me?”

“What? Oh, I meant call the police. L.J., do you hear something?”

I listened: somewhere in the restaurant, a girl was crying softly to herself.

“I don’t hear anything,” I said. “So you really think I should call the cops?”

“L.J., someone is upset. Can you see who it is? They’re right behind us.”

I craned my neck to see. A few booths back from ours, a girl was crying. She looked about nineteen and was tall with muscular shoulders and arms. Her face was mannish, made even more so by her hair, which she wore in two fist-like buns. She was rummaging through a tote bag with the name of a radio station on it. I recognized her from around the motel. She had come with a singing troupe that had stayed at the Shores for an a capella convention the previous weekend. Gay and I had heard them practicing through the doors to their rooms, their voices weaving in and out of each other. Looking at the girl now, I recalled seeing her argue with the troupe leader in the parking lot one evening when I was out on my balcony. She’d been crying then, too.