Voodoo Heart (15 page)

Then, when we’re done, I’ll sit with her while she takes a bath in the giant cauldron of our marble tub, her knees poking up through the water like tiny islands of pink sand. Sometimes I’ll read her part of a book or a magazine. Other times, while Laura soaks, I’ll amuse her by spying on the women in the prison near our home, the federal work camp. I bought a telescope from an antique store in town and set it up by the window. When I look into the eyepiece, it’s like I’ve been transported right inside the camp among the residents.

Joyce was telling the truth, too. The camp’s grounds are beautiful, with shaded walking paths and picnic tables set up beneath the many trees. There’s a pond populated by giant goldfish, a vegetable garden that the women tend in the afternoons. The facility is entirely open, too. There aren’t any barbed wire fences or guard towers, just a bright green sprawl of grass and trees around which the ladies are allowed to wander freely for most of the day. The only thing bounding the property at all is a bright yellow line painted in the grass along the prison perimeter. The paint contains fluorescent chemicals, and at night the line glows an eerie, spaceship green.

“What are they doing now?” Laura said to me the other day. She was lying in the tub.

I used the telescope to scan the grounds for any of Laura’s favorites. The women she most liked to hear about were the high-profile inmates, the society wives and politicians and celebrities who’d lived all sorts of glamorous lives before ending up at the camp. One resident was the owner of a baseball team, another was a restaurateur. There was a famous jazz drummer, the CEO of a baby food company, even a world-renowned eye surgeon. I don’t know about Laura, but sometimes I actually felt a strange surge of pride knowing that such a cluster of accomplished women was gathered so close to our home.

I tried to find something interesting to report, but most of the women had headed inside the canteen for supper. A couple of them were jogging along the gravel exercise path. One, the baseball team owner, was reading the newspaper beneath a tree. It was nearly sunset and the line painted around the prison had just started to glow.

“The chef, the really fat lady? She and your favorite girl, Shirley the golf pro—they’re fighting it out in the yard.”

“Sounds exciting,” said Laura. She knew I was lying. Nothing like that ever happened at the camp.

“It’s ugly,” I said, turning back to Laura. “Shirley just pulled out a shank. Things are looking bad for the chef.”

“Her ass is grass,” Laura said, smiling.

She yawned and let her head fall to the side and I studied her face for a moment—studied the soft shells of her eyelids; her lips; a tendril of wet, brown hair curled against her cheek. I felt a pull in my chest so hard it frightened me.

“I’m going to marry you in this house,” I said. “We can have the wedding in the yard after I clear it out.”

Laura wrung the water from her hair. “Is that a proposal?”

“I guess I can do better than that,” I said.

She laughed. “I should hope so.” Then she closed her eyes and let her body slide down into the water.

“Did you know,” she said, “that in exactly one hundred days from tomorrow, you and I will have been together for five years? I was doing the math in the car the other day. Isn’t that crazy? Five years.”

I leaned over and kissed her on her forehead. “I’ll tell you what. If in a hundred days from tomorrow I haven’t proposed to you, you can leave me forever.”

“Jacob, that’s not what I was getting at.”

“No, I mean it,” I said. “One hundred days.”

“This is silly.”

“It’s not silly,” I said, suddenly feeling agitated. “It’s not silly at all.”

“Are you okay?” she said, sitting up, her skin raw and tender from the hot water.

“I’m fine,” I said, but I was angry now. “You deserve someone who’ll stick around and commit. Someone who’ll love and take care of you. I mean for life.”

“Jake…you’re talking about yourself, right? You’re scaring me.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “Of course I’m talking about myself. Who the hell do you think I’m talking about? I mean myself. Jake. Me.”

My grandfather was a traveling salesman. He met my grandmother in the winter of 1920, while passing through her hometown of Barclay, Virginia. He was twenty-two at the time. She was seventeen.

The way my grandmother remembers it, she was upstairs in her room, doing her homework, when she overheard yelling down on the street. As she came to the window, she spied a young man outside, standing on top of a parked car. He was shouting and gesturing at people, making some kind of sales pitch. A crowd had already gathered around him. In one of his hands he held a little star, which was emitting a cold and piercing light.

My grandmother opened the window to get a better look at the star. She’d never seen light so concentrated before. The little star was shining brighter than all the town’s electrical streetlamps put together.

The star, she soon learned, contained something called neon gas. My grandfather was working for a company called Star Neon, the country’s first manufacturer of neon lighting tubes. The owners of Star paid my grandfather to drive around the South in a new Ford and do promotional demonstrations about the wonders of neon lighting. Neon tubes were still brand-new in 1920. They were delicate and expensive to construct. Only a few businesses in the whole world had neon signs hanging in their windows, and all of them were located in Western Europe. Hardly anyone in the United States had seen a neon light before.

My grandmother watched, fascinated, as my grandfather continued with his demonstration, making his case as to why neon was
the
light source of the future. Neon was beautiful, he said, holding the star up high. It was enduring. Soon enough, everyone would be using neon to light their homes.

It was at about this point in his speech, according to my grandmother, that he noticed her up in the window and winked at her, making her blush.

Later that night, she snuck out to meet the neon salesman. Less than a week after that, she ran off with him, hopping into his car in the middle of the night and driving off.

The two of them ended up traveling all across the South together. My grandmother learned to help with the demonstrations: she passed out pamphlets about the science of neon, she gathered names and addresses. They were a team: two kids in love, living in a shiny black Ford, the whole country spread out before them. They kept blankets and tins of food on the backseat, along with a loaded revolver. At night they slept in the car, huddled together. Sometimes, when they ended up parked out in the middle of nowhere, my grandfather would hang the neon star from the rearview mirror and leave it turned on, glowing through the night.

They traveled together for three months before my grandmother became pregnant. They were in Bristol, Tennessee, when she told my grandfather, who seemed thrilled at the news. He took her out to dinner to celebrate, bought them both fried steaks and wine, and then took her dancing afterward. He even rented a hotel room.

The next morning my grandmother woke to find the car gone. No trace of my grandfather anywhere. She waited at the hotel for three days before giving up on him.

The wrecking yard I manage is down on Orange Blossom Road. There’s a neon sign in the front window of the office: a big, flashing dollar sign that goes from green to yellow to orange.
CASH FOR WRECKS
!!! And so on.

Wrecking is a lucrative business in our part of Florida. There are more trade-ins per year here than almost anywhere else in the country. During the week, our yard is always busy with acquisitions and parts cataloging. Still, I understand that managing a wrecking yard, even a huge one like ours—a yard that pays a real salary—wouldn’t be enough for some people. I enjoy the work, though. Putting vehicles to rest: rolling them into the lot, dismantling them piece by piece, loading the empty husks into the crusher. I’ve been at the yard in one capacity or another since I was a teenager, when I spent a summer helping the owner, Liam, with the books. By now Liam and I are close friends. He relies on me.

More than the work, though, I enjoy the yard itself. For all the business that goes on—for all the sawing and loading and jacking, for all the squealing metal and busting glass—the property is generally a quiet and restful place. The lot covers two acres; the maze of wrecks stretches back from the office almost to the interstate. You can spend hours walking its deep alleyways, getting lost, listening to the towers of flattened cars creaking in the wind.

The lot is especially beautiful when it’s stormy out. The rain drums and pings off the crumpled metal, making everything glisten for a brief moment. On rainy days I usually give my assistants, Jesus and Marco, the afternoon off and just man the shop by myself. No one seems to want to bring in a car on a rainy day—to drop off their ride and then have to wait in the bad weather for the bus or a cab to take them home. The time drags by. I read or listen to the radio, to the old country station I like. Once in a while a car will glide past on I-35 in a cloud of water. The songs keep coming through the radio: songs full of yodels and whining slide guitar and all the otherworldly sounds I love about that music. Here’s a song about a woman who murdered her husband by dipping the mouthpiece of his horn in poison. Here’s another, about a man whose wife flew away in a huge silver blimp.

And while the songs come, one after another, I’ll examine the neon dollar sign flashing in the shop window, and I’ll think of my grandfather; I’ll picture him speeding across an open landscape in his Ford Model T, alone behind the wheel.

He came back into my grandmother’s life periodically, through the years, haunting her. Out of nowhere the doorbell would ring and she’d answer it and there he’d be, standing on the porch, holding his hat by his side. He’d tell her how sorry he was, how badly he wanted to work things out. If she’d only give him another chance. He’d be selling something else by now, ladies’ shoes, or typewriters, or parlor furniture for Beaulieu and Sons. And of course my grandmother would be dating someone new, someone kind and reliable—the type of man her own daughter, my mother, would eventually marry—and even though she knew better, even though she understood exactly how things would unfold, my grandmother would come outside to meet him.

He kept hurting her, over and over. He’d come back and stay with my grandmother just long enough for her to become attached, even hopeful, and then he’d vanish. Poof. Gone.

ii.

L
AURA AND I LIKE TO JOKE THAT WE MET ON THE BOTTOM OF THE
ocean, that we swam up to each other—just two lonely people drifting along the dark, empty moonscape of the ocean floor—and introduced ourselves.

“Hello,” I said, which, underwater, came out more like: “Mebbo.” Bubbles tumbled from my mouth as I spoke.

“Hi,” Laura managed, her hair swaying around her face.

The truth is that Laura and I met at the aquarium, where she was doing evaluation work for its public relations department. I had gone to the aquarium to see an exhibit that had just opened, an exhibit on deep ocean life that was causing a big stir in the news.

The exhibit was called “Creatures of the Deep: Life in the Bathypelagic Zone,” and everyone I knew was talking about it. The opening had been a big event for the state of Florida. Politicians had come, and local celebrities.

The exhibit featured fish from the deepest parts of the ocean, strange, frightening fish that had never been on display before. Until this particular exhibit, no one had been able to successfully bring any bathypelagic fish up from the depths. The captured specimens had always died as a result of the massive changes in pressure that occurred as the traps were brought up toward the surface.

But in acquiring their specimens, the marine biologists at our aquarium had used a brand-new type of trap from Australia called a PrAc, which stood for pressure acclimatization. A PrAc trap gave a fish time to adjust to a low-pressure tank by reducing the atmospheric pressure inside the trap a fraction at a time, over a period of days.