Voodoo Heart (2 page)

A high gate blocked them from getting close to the facility, but through gaps in the trees they could see the fireworks of construction blazing across the hangar’s translucent walls—arcs of bouncing blue sparks, loops of flame. Pres and Claire spread their blanket on the grass by the fence and watched along with the other lovers who’d come from town, visible to each other only during particularly fierce bursts of light from inside the hangar. Claire often brought snacks, while Pres offered up a jelly jar of apple wine bought from one of the men who made it in his tub at the boardinghouse near Pres’s place. As they sipped and ate, the two of them whispered guesses back and forth as to who the other spectators were, who those two glowing cigarette tips belonged to, who that woman was being kissed there with her hands above her head, her fingers laced through the fence links. Pres figured that all the people at the clearing were from nearby, people they knew, but Claire liked to pretend they’d ventured there from the kinds of places she read about in travel magazines.

“I bet she’s from Spain. See how her hair’s pulled to the side? That’s a Spanish style.” Or “That man beneath the trees, he’s got fat on him like a Russian. They need it because of the tundra.”

She knew things about places he’d never heard of, cities with rivers for streets, countries where for part of the year the sun never dropped below the horizon, where a single day lasted for weeks.

Pres had trouble visualizing such places. He’d never ventured more than fifty miles from Niagara. His parents had died in bewilderingly quick succession, and the single greatest comfort to Pres, the sole comfort really, was knowing that the city in which he lived contained all the artifacts of their lives: their friends, their haunts. Two streets west of the house was the tannery where his father had worked. Three blocks toward the river was Harbor Lights, his grandparents’ restaurant, above which his mother had grown up. Here was the chapel where his parents had been married. There, the cemetery where they lay. The city was like a private museum that Pres could tour whenever he pleased.

Even now, nearly a year after their deaths, Pres had trouble imagining himself going much of anywhere at all. But sometime early in the summer Claire started using
we
instead of
I
when she talked about traveling.
We.
For Pres, that tiny word transformed the whole future into a hot little secret between just the two of them.

The summer seemed full of secrets. In the moonlit forest, blimps were being built for reasons that, though clearly explained by the city’s naval officers as part of a national “contract,” still were hooded in mystery. Every few months another blimp emerged from the woods, glided over city hall, and moored on the high school baseball field for a brief celebration. The blimps had summery names:
The Mayfly, Honeysuckle Rose, The Raindrop.
That one boasted a cabled observation basket that could lower from the clouds. Another—
The Roost
—had a ladder hanging from its cabin that airplanes could cling to in midair like trapeze artists. No one knew for sure where the blimps flew off to afterward; some people said to a naval base in New Jersey, but others claimed out to sea.

The blimps’ architects and engineers had come from Germany, and in the spring the city’s naval officers had moved them into a house on Jemmison Street, right near the city center. They were large, blocky men, these Germans, broad-shouldered as umpires. And yet they seemed so helpless, so lost all the time, startled by the passing clatter of a police horse, frightened into apologetic fits of nodding and waving by a simple hello from someone passing on the sidewalk. One of them, a man named Heitmeyer, never went anywhere without a parasol to keep off the sun. Pres knew his name because he’d gone into the diner right behind Heitmeyer one morning and seen him write it in the guest book. As Pres ate his breakfast, he kept glancing over at Heitmeyer, who sat in a booth against the far wall. He was studying what Pres guessed was some kind of blueprint spread before him on the table. Every now and then Heitmeyer took up his pencil and began working on whatever it was, bending close to the paper, creating a little fort around it with his arm. Pres got so curious that he pretended to have to go to the men’s room just to catch a glimpse. What he saw, though, when he passed the booth wasn’t a blueprint at all, but a drawing, a fanciful sketch of a sky filled with blimps of all shapes and sizes: fleets of blimps layered one on top of the next, stretching up into the atmosphere. An elegant network of ladders and rope bridges and spiraling tubes connected the blimps, creating a city in the sky, a floating metropolis protected by a vast, blue moat. How wild to get to live someplace like that, Pres thought. But even as the sketch disappeared behind Heitmeyer’s arm, Pres found himself wondering how great it would really be. What if lightning popped one of the blimps? What if they ran out of fuel? What if someone living up there wanted to come down?

There were other secrets that summer, too. More people than ever before were going over the falls. For years no one had done such a thing, simply stepped into a barrel and shoved off toward the rapids, but now there were jumps all the time. The jumpers were always local people, too, not daredevils from Buffalo or Albany, not publicity hounds or stuntmen, but people everyone had known for years: Gideon Wells, who delivered milk and ice and butter every week, and pretty Laura, who kept minutes at city hall. No one knew why they did it, but all around the city, people wondered who would be next.

Claire loved Pres’s stories of working on the patrol. She loved them so much, it made him blush with pride there in the pinescented darkness. Over and over he told her about Pipe Island, where he worked, a slender strip of land shaped like a corncob pipe at the edge of the falls. He told her about the squat stone tower at the bowl end of the island, where he spent his days scanning the river for barrels. He even taught her how to spy jumpers. First thing, he explained, laying his head on her leg, was to watch the shore. Barrels were cumbersome, and the hedging along the riverbanks was leafy even in winter. More often than not, people could be spotted before they made it within a hundred feet of the water. It happened all the time, he said. He’d be looking through the binoculars, scanning the American, then the Canadian side of the river, and he’d catch a rustling in the bushes near the top of one of the banks. All of a sudden, a lady in bathing trunks and a frilly swimming cap would be rolling a fat, brown barrel down the bank and splashing it out into the river. Occasionally, though, the barrels were already in the water by the time he saw them rushing toward him.

I’ll bet you think that barrels float, he said, that they bob along like corks. Well, they don’t, not at all. In fact, he told Claire, they tumble forward underwater, hardly ever rising to the surface. They would come at him like mice moving beneath a carpet, little swells in the current. Winter was even worse, he said. The barrels often drifted beneath ice floes headed downriver and were only visible as shadowy spots on the white plates of ice. And once a jumper made it past the patrol, chances were no one would ever see him or her again; the jumper would just vanish into the white curtain of the falls.

He told her everything. Staring up at her from the cushion of her lap, the stars visible behind her head, he told her about Dexter, his partner, the boulder of a man who always sat smoking at the tip of the island, with the long, hook-ended metal pole across his lap. Dex, whose son had been killed overseas, in the Argonne Forest. Dex, with that sad look to him, sitting there staring at the passing water all day. Pres explained how, when he did see a barrel coming, he’d ring the bell and Dex would spring to his feet and ready himself, holding the pole tightly in those hands of his, pouched and leathery as baseball mitts. While Pres radioed the crew of the
Maid of the Mist,
trolling below the falls, and warned them to prepare their rescue gear just in case, Dex would wait like that—pole across his thighs, feet planted at the rocky edge of the island—until the barrel was close enough to be seen. Then, in one swift motion, Dex would thrust the pole out into the driving water and yank it back, catching the hook deep in the wood.

“Is this kind of how he hooks them?” Claire said calmly, before lunging at Pres, digging her fingers into his ribs, making him squirm and laugh.

Lying chest-to-chest beneath the blanket, the two of them spent long hours wondering why people went over the falls at all. For the life of him, Pres couldn’t figure out why anyone would do something so foolish, why they’d let themselves be so charmed by what amounted to a simple drop in the river. He told himself it was nothing more than hysteria. After all, he’d lived less than two miles from the falls his whole life and he’d never felt the slightest tug. But even so, Pres found himself deeply troubled, as though his failure to understand the lure of the falls pointed to some larger flaw.

“Maybe they just want to go somewhere,” Claire said one night toward the end of summer. “Like an escape. Maybe they don’t think about it.”

Pres was now deeply in love with her. He wanted to tell her so, but he refused to say anything until he could compose an adequate description of his feelings, which, frustratingly, he never felt able to do. The best comparison he’d come up with involved an exhibit on hydroelectricity he’d seen at a fair downtown when he was a child. The exhibit’s main attraction was a clear, life-size figure, a glass man filled with miniature wheels and paddles and belts hung with tiny wooden buckets. When water was poured through a hole at the top of the man’s head, the machinery inside him whirred to life and one by one a series of bulbs strung through his legs and arms and head lit up like the points of a constellation until, finally, a large heart-shaped bauble of glass in the man’s chest flickered on and shined brighter than the other lights, so bright that Pres was forced to shield his eyes. Best he could figure, that was how he felt for Claire, how he would always feel, aglow.

Pres brushed his fingers over her thigh. The hangar walls flashed, illuminating the figures in the trees.

“Maybe they just look at the falls too long and get hypnotized, like by a snake charmer,” Claire said. She put her arms out in front of her and stared at the blinking hangar like a zombie. Seeing her like that—her gaze focused yet eerily vacant—sent a slight chill through Pres’s chest. He didn’t like the naturalness of her pose or the facility with which she’d assumed it. It was how she’d appeared when he first laid eyes on her back in the wax museum; when, no matter how he tried to hold her eyes with his, they’d looked past him. Even as he was thinking this, though, she broke her pose, grabbing him and pulling him to her.

Pres woke to find the map illuminated in front of his face. It had somehow tumbled up from the backseat and spread itself flat against the windshield. The early sun lit the paper as though it were stained glass. There had been no sign of the blimp in Gum Junction and now he was two days’ drive outside the city limit, though where exactly he didn’t know. He’d fallen asleep while driving again, just passed out of consciousness. Since he didn’t feel ready to look out the windshield and find the car hammered into a tree or teetering on the edge of a cliff, he just sat and stared at the map for a while. Each of the forty-eight states was a different hue—Arkansas crimson, Texas mint-jelly green. The sun projected the map’s colorful design onto Pres’s chest and face. He found his pen lying against the inside of the door and drew a heavy black check mark where he assumed Gum Junction, Arkansas, to be.

Neighboring mountain towns like Holly and Bonanza Springs were rich off their mineral springs, so Pres had been surprised to find Gum Junction a shabby and cheerless place, as though the town’s own mountain were a sharp knee over which it had been snapped. The only building open the evening Pres arrived was the public bathhouse. When he opened the door and stepped inside, he’d found a single steam-clouded room lined with changing stalls. The wooden floor was pocked with deep holes fizzing with bubbling water, and inside each hole was an old man. Some, submerged up to their chins, bobbed up and down, their beards and the tips of their long white mustaches dipping in and out of the water. Others were spilling water over themselves from jars of poor-quality purpled glass. To Pres’s eye they looked like a garden of ruined fountains.

“Excuse me, sir,” Pres said to the man nearest him. “Did you happen to see an airship pass by here a little while ago? A flying machine?”

The man was frail, his chest kicked in by time. “You ought to wet those down, boy,” he said, gesturing toward Pres’s hands. When Pres looked down, he found that his hands had clawed up from gripping the steering wheel.

“Go on,” the man said. “It only costs to take it with you.”

“Six cents for the glass,” said a man in a hole near the window.

Pres knelt down and dipped his hands in the water. It was a hundred and fifteen degrees, easy, and within moments he felt the tightness in his knuckles melt away.

“Feels good, don’t it?” called a man too far back to see, a shadow behind the steam. “That’s arsenic and iron working on you.”