Voodoo Heart (3 page)

Pres nodded; the water felt so good he thought he might cry.

“What’s this airship look like?” said the man nearest him.

“It’s a long balloon with a kind of cabin attached to the bottom,” Pres said.

“A cabin hanging from an observation balloon?” said the man near the window. He was smirking in a way that made Pres’s heart sink; it was clear that these men were about to laugh at him. He’d been laughed at by so many people in such a number of places that he could feel it coming by now, could sense it rumbling up through a person before it erupted.

Pres sat back and studied the map for signs of where the blimp might go next. The few places he’d seen the blimp himself he’d dotted with a check on the map; everywhere the blimp had been spotted by others he’d talked to along the road, with a question mark. Still, the pattern eluded him. He’d chased the blimp down the icy New Jersey coast by trail of rumor, spotted it once near the Virginia border, rising from a marine hangar floating out in the middle of a lake, and assuming it was going down to the Carolinas or maybe even to Florida, he’d rushed south and overshot it, getting himself lost for nearly two weeks in the lush jumble of the Great Smoky Mountains. He finally caught wind of it again near Nashville, where he wound up spotting it near two in the morning, tunneling like a whale through the starry sky, the fins at its tail a spacey blue in the moonlight, only to lose it again in the bubbling hot springs towns of the Ozarks.

Pres traced the marks with his finger. Once connected, the sightings formed a kind of quivering, larger check mark starting high in the Northeast, dipping through the southern states, then swooping back up toward the country’s middle. But would the blimp continue north toward the Dakotas, or plunge back down toward the striped canyons of the western desert? What if he couldn’t find its trail again?

Worse than all this, though, was the plain fear that the blimp would make it to the West Coast ahead of him and head off over the Pacific, to Europe or Asia, somewhere he’d never be able to follow. And he knew somehow that this was its course, that it was trying to get to the ocean before he could catch it.

Pres steeled himself and tore the map away from the windshield. He found that he was parked in an endless sea of yellow grass. It fanned out from the car in all directions—no trees, no buildings, just grassland, flat and golden. He felt a twinge of fear: this had to be Oklahoma; so far west already. He started the car and searched until he found a trampled path, then drove on into the baking afternoon.

The world was level forever. Pres felt like he was negotiating the arena of a giant board game, his car a luckless charm. Every few minutes a solitary farmhouse appeared in the distance, and at each one he stopped to inquire after the blimp. He asked through doorways held open just wide enough to see a wife’s frightened eye peering out. He asked men in heavy gloves, rolling barbed wire out against fence posts beside the road. He asked children playing with a spotted frog on their porch steps, tying its feet to the ends of a scarf and then tossing it so high that the scarf filled with wind and the kicking frog floated out over the yard before being rocked back down to earth.

Eventually, the houses stopped coming altogether and there was nothing to the landscape but Pres and the occasional prairie dog poking its head up from the ground to look quizzically at him. The expressions on their faces were hardly different than the ones he encountered everywhere he told his story.
Why are you still chasing her?
the eyes said.
Why go on?
Even after he’d stopped mentioning Claire altogether, everyone he spoke with seemed to know that he was chasing after a woman who’d left him, a woman who probably didn’t want to be found.

But that’s not how it was, Pres thought as the grass changed to dirt beneath the wheels of the car. He might not know why Claire had left, but what he
did
know, beyond a doubt, was that she wanted him to bring her home.

Since that first summer on Pipe Island he’d watched a number of jumpers pulled live from their barrels, and it always went the same way. First, the lid would come off with a suck of air not unlike a gasp, and Dex would reach into the barrel and try to loosen whoever was curled up inside. He’d gently take them by the elbows and hoist them up, blue-lipped and blinking in the sunshine. Then,
whap!
He’d slap them across the face with those enormous hands of his, and again:
thwap!
After that, Dex propped them on their wobbling feet, still in the barrel, while he and Pres waited for the thank-yous to start.

Because no matter how hard the jumpers had tried to make it over the cataract, once caught, they were grateful. Days after the person had recovered and resumed teaching chemistry or policing the streets, Dex and Pres would invariably receive a note or gift or even a visit at the falls. Joe Greeble had sent them hats from his men’s store. Mrs. Mishara had met them herself on the rickety hanging bridge to Pipe Island—she still had stitches above her eye where she’d taken a bump in the rapids—and she’d kissed them both and taken their hands and blessed them right there, with the same water that had almost killed her rushing not five feet beneath the bridge’s creaking boards.

When Pres turned his thoughts back to the road, he found that the prairie had become endless desert, the grass cooked down to a fine pink sand. The sky was powder blue, too bright to look at. A hot wind kept up outside, butting against the car, rocking it on its wheels and causing it to give off frightened squeaks. Pres realized he must have been staring into the light for some time, as a steady rain of colored spots was falling at the edges of his vision, drops of blue and orange and black. He kept his hat low and drove on, ignoring them until only one lingered in the corner of his eye. He glanced at the spot, figuring it would scatter or vanish altogether, but it remained fixed on the horizon. He turned the car toward it, and still it stood its ground.

The air swayed with heat, but as Pres approached, the spot took on shape: it grew a boxy frame, its roof rose in a point. He knew what it was, the thing in the distance. A chill climbed the knuckles of his spine. A fence appeared around the property—a sign warned that the site was still under construction—but the gate stood wide open, and Pres raced through. Though he’d seen two hangars so far, he was never able to get close enough to get a good look. From a distance, they’d all looked the same to him, like giant barns or garages. But the binoculars hadn’t accounted for their sheer size. As he neared this hangar’s gaping entrance, its true proportions became apparent and he found himself trying to blink away his incredulity. It was at least fifteen stories tall, the highest structure he’d ever laid eyes on. There were no other buildings around, save some shacks out back. No trees in the area, just scattered bunches of desert four-o’clock and some tongue leaf cactus.

Pres skidded to a stop just outside the hangar’s mouth. High, spidery scaffolding buttressed its walls on both sides, and though there were no men working now, Pres could see pails and rags scattered along the planking. A pair of overalls draped over a banister whipped back and forth in the wind. Pres pulled his suspenders up over his undershirt and slipped the .38 into his pocket.

As soon as Pres stepped into the hangar’s shade, he was hit with a soft shower of water. He glanced around for a leaky pipe or someone hosing down a piece of machinery, but when he looked up, he saw that above the hangar’s highest rafters there floated a soupy gray cloud from which a quiet rain was falling. Dex had shown Pres postcards his son had written from Europe, in which he told of churches so tall that air sometimes condensed up in the rafters and created miniature clouds, but Pres had not been able to picture such a thing.

He looked around and noticed some heavy fans aimed up at the cloud from the catwalks zigzagging the hangar’s walls. Whoever was working on the hangar must have been taking a break while they waited for the moisture to dissipate. He stared at the square of clear blue sky framed by the doorway at the other end of the hangar, at the shacks and tents burning with light in the distance, but he saw no one. He wondered if the hangar was even operational yet. He didn’t see any hydrogen or helium tanks, no main line anywhere. A runway of mooring rings had been anchored in the cement floor, but there were no cables hooked to them. Perhaps the blimp hadn’t come this way at all. For the thousandth time in the last couple of months, the picture of what it would be like to return home without Claire crept up on him: opening the door on a dark house; finding her dresses still hanging in the closet, her empty side of the bed, a hair curled up on her pillow. He forced the image from his mind and headed through the rain toward the far end of the hangar. He would get some information from whoever was working there. He touched the cold bulge in his pocket. He could taste his sweat through the sweet water running down his face.

Something twinkled from the ground, catching his eye: when Pres walked over, his heart seized: Claire’s compact. He picked it up and held it in the palm of his hand for a moment. He’d bought it for her six months ago, after hers was stolen at the museum. Claire had been sitting on her bench, powdering her forehead, when a girl came around the corner and surprised her. Claire had been forced to quickly resume her pose, hands gripping the edge of the bench, frozen like that, neck craned down the tracks. The compact fell to her lap, and the girl snatched it up and ran down the hall before Claire had time to react. So Pres had bought her this one. It was white with gold webbing and shaped like a mitten. He’d picked it because it reminded him of winter, which was when they were going to be married. When he flipped it open now, a tiny puff of powder rose from its dish, and for a moment he could smell Claire in the hangar with him. Behind the puff he thought he saw a design in the powder well. At first he figured it was just a smear left by a quick dip of the fingers, but no, it was a traced letter, a
V
or a
W,
he was sure of it. Suddenly, though, a fat raindrop hit the compact, and then another, and before he could snap it closed the compact was a puddle of cream. No matter, he thought, racing back through the hangar to the car. The message had been a
W,
for west—there was no doubt in his mind.

Pres had been working at the falls the afternoon Claire vanished. The day was clear and bitter cold, with chunks of ice spinning through the black water. He and Dex sat at the island’s rocky tip, waiting for the ambulance to appear across the bridge and take Dex to the hospital. Dex had fallen into the water making a grab at a girl floating by, and though he was calm, he could not stop shaking beneath his heavy blanket. He refused to let Pres move him inside the tower. “I’m fine, Pres,” he said, his voice ragged with tiny gasps. Frost sparkled in his beard. “Let’s just wait here by the falls.”

“Your funeral,” Pres said, and clapped Dex on the back. He knew that the water here was shallow, and he knew that Dex was too strong a swimmer to be pulled far from the shore. But no matter how many times he watched it happen, seeing Dex fall into the river never failed to terrify him. It was the moment just after Dex hit the water that always scared him most, the instant when the current first tugged Dex toward the edge of the rock as though he were the one being hooked. But the falls could get you like that, Pres thought. He looked at the southern shore where a tree had been grabbed by the ice and moved fifty yards downriver, just plucked out of the ground with its roots intact.

“I took a couple swallows of that water and I can feel it sitting right here,” said Dex, moving his trembling hand to his stomach. “It’s like a frozen pond at the bottom of my gut.” In Dex’s lap was the girl he’d saved from the river, who, it turned out, wasn’t a girl but a girl’s doll. She had three faces, and they turned beneath a wig fastened in place: happy, sad, and tired, with her eyes drawn half-closed.

Looking at the doll now, Pres could hardly believe that he hadn’t seen it for what it was. But he’d argued with Claire until late the night before and he was exhausted; his eyes ached in their sockets. The fight had erupted over a present. Their wedding was approaching, and as a gesture of congratulations, Claire’s old boss, Earl Flatt, had offered to use the two of them to make molds for a new pair of background figures at the museum. Pres was excited about the idea.