Voodoo Heart (5 page)

I
ONCE LIVED NEXT TO A MAN WHO WAS INDESTRUCTIBLE. HIS
name was Gay Isbelle and he cheated death three times—twice before I’d met him, and then once in my company.

It was important for me to be around someone like Gay at that point in my life, someone invulnerable, as I was scared and lonely and hiding from my family, which was, and still is, one of the wealthiest in the country. Their money goes back to the days of gas and steam, and the root of the family name means both “vision” and “light” in a language that will not be revealed here. They had detectives out looking for me, detectives with real means, but in Florida at that time, for a short, wonderful period not too long ago, it was easy to find employment without identification of any shape or sort. It seemed you could open a police station with just a few phony papers to tack on the wall. You could become whoever you wanted; that was Florida right then. I had a book of over fifteen thousand baby names, and I changed mine whenever I felt like it.

Gay and I both lived on the second floor of the Shores Motel, which sat on the outskirts of Orlando, near the trashiest of that neighborhood’s three convention centers. This particular convention center didn’t even have a name; it was simply marked by a sign over the interstate exit that read
CNV
.
CNTR
. #
16
, as though it wasn’t even worth plugging vowels into. It only hosted the most dismal conventions—gatherings for the fan clubs of otherwise long-forgotten stars; reunions for high school classes that graduated three, even four generations back, so long ago that only a few ancient people showed up to wander beneath the wrinkled balloons. Whenever a convention came to Cnv. Cntr. #16, most of its attendees washed into the Shores, and it was during one such convention that I met Gay.

I never found out what, exactly, the purpose of the convention was, but that weekend the motel was full of people with all sorts of pigmentation disorders. I saw a woman by the ice machine with skin spotted like a cheetah’s. In the elevator, a man with a purple face nodded at me. A little boy splashing around in the pool was covered from head to toe in a dazzling flock of red butterfly-shaped splotches. I’d never realized how many different kinds of albino existed, but here they all were: some just a shade too pale, others with flesh as white as lobster meat.

The afternoon I met Gay, I was in the motel’s restaurant bar, a Chinese affair called the Happy Fish, Plus Coin. A young albino woman from the convention was eating dinner in the booth across from me. Her eyes were pink, and her hair was as clear as water; it hung down her back in a transparent braid. I couldn’t stop staring at her. She looked just like my sister Melanie, or what I imagined Melanie would look like as a ghost.

Growing up, most of my brothers and sisters were fiercely competitive, even cruel. But Melanie acted different. Though she was older by a full five years, she took an interest in me; she started protecting me from the others. She taught me things—how to trip someone bigger than myself, how to sneak out of the brownstone (climb out the easternmost kitchen window and lower yourself down onto the patio wall. There, now you know too!). Melanie was small and clever and quick. She never looked pretty in photographs, but in real life there was something especially beautiful about the true expressions of her face—the way only one of her eyebrows arched with her smile, the dimpling of her chin when she scowled. The school she went to forced its students to wear a uniform that included a red blazer embossed on the chest with a gold crest. In all my memories Melanie is wearing that red blazer. She had a friendship with one of our family’s drivers, an older Portuguese man named Julius, and she would have Julius secretly drive us places after school: to Chinatown, or to Coney Island, where we’d walk along the pier and watch the families fishing for crabs with plastic baskets they’d stolen from the supermarket.

Once in a while Melanie had Julius take us to the train station, where she’d buy herself a ticket on a northeasterner, a ticket that she said would take her away for good. This was back when I was eight or nine and she was in her early teens. I’d walk with her to the platform, where she’d kneel down and put her hand on my shoulder or my cheek and say something like “Listen, little man. I’m taking this train all the way to Toronto, understand? That’s in the country above us. When I get there, I’ll find someplace awesome for us to live and then I’ll send for you, secretly. You’ll get a letter in the mail with no return address, and when you open it, it’ll just be a train ticket. That’ll be your cue….”

She’d give me a long hug and hand me something of hers—one time she gave me her watch; another time a pen with a tiny cityscape inside, complete with a ferry that slowly sailed from end to end—and then she’d board the train car and I’d stand there at the platform and watch as the train huffed to life and then made its way down the long tunnel and out of the station. I’d watch until the train was just lights, a swirl of vapor, nothing.

After that I’d walk through the station to the taxi stand, where Julius would be leaning against the car waiting for me, brushing lint off the bill of his driver’s cap. He’d wink at me and nod to the passenger door and I’d get in and together we’d drive alongside the train tracks to Ruppendale or East Hunting, whichever suburb Melanie had actually bought a ticket to. If she didn’t get off at one, we’d drive on to the next, and as we did, no matter how often this happened, part of me always became frightened that this time she wouldn’t get off the train, that today she’d keep on going and ride it farther than Julius and I could follow. But she always
did
get off somewhere nearby, and when we pulled up to the station she’d be waiting for us, sitting on a bench in those high gray socks and that red blazer of hers, its crest like a wax seal stamped over her heart.

My father moved Melanie out to the West Coast just before my tenth birthday. I was at school and never got to say good-bye. When I got home, my other brothers and sisters were packing her belongings into boxes. She works for our uncle now, and spends most of her time on a plane, traveling between offices. It’s large, but it has pontoons and can land as gracefully as a seagull on the water. There’s a plane waiting for me, too. My real name is painted on both engines.

I’ve seen Melanie just once in the twelve years since she was sent away, at one of our brothers’ weddings, which I’d gone to only out of hopes that Melanie would attend. She acted fidgety and nervous and seemed extremely agitated by me.

“That’s disgusting. What is that?” she said when I showed her a lock of her own hair she’d given me before one of her train rides. She was pregnant, but the rest of her was thin and elegant. An Arabian man was helping her into her coat. “Get it away,” she said. “Why are you showing me that?”

So that afternoon at the Happy Fish, Plus Coin, I was staring at this albino girl from a corner stool, this phantom Melanie, when I began to cry. I don’t know how long I was crying, but at some point Gay appeared and said, “I think you and I are the only ones in this motel God painted by the numbers.”

Something to know about Gay: he had a smile on him. Thirty-two perfect teeth set in twin rows, like two lucky horseshoes dipped in white paint. Also, he had been in some kind of fire, that much was clear: his skin was pink and shiny, like melted wax, and his hands had been baked down into little flippers. His head was hardly more than a hairless knob with a slot for a mouth and one usable eye peering out. And he was paralyzed from pretty high up, his chest, maybe even his neck. He sat buckled into a motorized wheelchair, which he controlled with a reed that extended from a small panel up into his mouth. Still, when he smiled at me I hardly noticed the surrounding mess. I couldn’t stop myself from staring at his mouth, at that grin.

He took the reed into his mouth and maneuvered his wheelchair a little closer. “Hey,” he said. “What are you, gay?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, I am. Gay Isbelle. That’s my name. Isbelle is French.”

“What’s Gay?” I said, glad to be talking to someone.

“What do you mean?” he said. “Gay is just gay. It can mean homosexual or happy. I’m old-fashioned, so I think ‘happy’ when I think of gay.”

“Me too,” I said.

“Well, why aren’t you gay now, chief? You were crying a second ago.”

How to describe that voice? There was a musicality to it, a singsong quality that made me feel safe. It made me want to talk to him, to tell him all about my problems, my family. I hadn’t said my last name out loud in over six months.

“I lost my job yesterday,” I said instead, which was also true. I’d been working in baggage at Orlando International.

“Is that all?” he said, looking up at me with his one good eye, which was plain brown, nothing dashing about it. “Jobs are easy enough to find around Orlando right now. What a time to be living in Florida!”

“I need something sort of low profile, though. I’m watching out for some people.”

“The police?” said Gay. “I don’t hold things like that against people. Know that.” Gay’s nurse, a portly Hispanic man, came over and told Gay he was going to the bathroom. “That’s fine, Edward,” said Gay. “I’ll be right here, with my new friend…” He gazed at me, waiting.

“L.J.,” I said. This was the name I was using right then, after a character I liked in a musical film.

“I’ll be right here with my new friend L.J. when you get back,” Gay said. Edward nodded at me and then walked off. “So, who is this you’re hiding from, L.J.?”

“Just hiding,” I said, though by now I wanted badly to confess. His smile alone was nearly enough to make me do it; it was that glorious, his grin.

“Come on, now. If you’re hiding, something has to be looking for you, right? What is it, girl trouble?”

When I opened my mouth to speak again I had every intention of telling Gay the truth; I was going to tell him who my family was, and about how I’d been running from them since just after my nineteenth birthday, nearly one thousand days. I was going to tell him about how they’d nearly caught me in Seattle, then inside a library in Tuscaloosa; about the female detective in Santa Fe whose leg I may have hurt badly with my car. About how they were surely hunting me right then—about how, at that very moment, they might be jabbing flashlights all over central Florida. I had a pair of earrings hung on a lanyard around my neck—ten-carat pear-shaped diamonds. I’d stolen them from my oldest sister the night I left. They were for an emergency. I thought I’d show them to Gay as a way of starting to explain, but looking at him made me really think about that word,
emergency,
and instead what came out was “Yes, girl trouble. I’m having trouble with my girlfriend.”

“Right. Your girlfriend…” He waited for me to go on.

“Nancy?”

“Nancy, right. What’s the problem?”

“She’s mean to me?” I said. “She acts like she hates me.”

“Like she hates you, right,” Gay said. He continued smiling, but held me with his stare for a long moment. So long, in fact, that I became sure he’d seen right through my lie. I felt confident that in a second he would spit in my face and leave me there. And I didn’t want him to leave. Just then, Edward returned from the bathroom. He glanced at Gay, and then at me in a suspicious way, before asking what was up.

“I’ll tell you what’s up, Edward,” Gay said. “What’s up is you and I are going to help our new friend L.J. find a job.”

When I was born, my father gave the doctor a tiny golden spoon to use to scrape the mucus from my mouth. It had a handle of braided ivory, and in the eighteenth century it had been used by a British nobleman to feed the blood of game animals to his baby hounds. There’s a photograph of the doctor leaning over me, pressing the bowl of the spoon between my lips. The picture frame has a special glass compartment for displaying the spoon itself. To this day, I sometimes taste the bowl of that spoon in my mouth. I never know when it’s going to happen, when the salty, bitter sting of it will well up, but when it does, the only thing that helps is to suck on something sweet. I once dated a woman staying at the Shores for a candy sellers’ convention who made giant gummy animals—bats and rats and even gummy beetles as big as my foot. Her name was Rita Beet, and for a while she worked at a Gummy World at the north end of the Galaxy, the area through which Gay and I were now driving, prowling for employment.