Voodoo Heart by Scott Snyder Read Free Book Online

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.
    The Galaxy was a ten-mile strip along the interstate that housed all the seedier tourist spots, each one a world unto itself: Gator World, Flea World, Orange World (housed inside a huge graying orange), Orlando’s Pawn World, World of Thrills, World of Tees, Scary World (which was nothing more than a plaster cave with a few plastic skulls glued on). As we drove down the strip, though, I started to like the idea of working at one of these places. They looked discarded, like giant, mangled toys flung out a car window. No one would come looking here.
    Gay sat propped in the passenger seat with a stack of my résumés on his lap. Whenever I slowed down too quickly, Gay’s head lolled forward, and Edward leaned up from the backseat and righted it for him. “Thank you, sir,” Gay said each time. “Thank you kindly.” Whenever I got out to inquire somewhere, he said, “L.J., this is the one. I feel it. You’re just what they’ve been waiting for.”
    This was a better day than I’d had in a long time and I was cheerful at first, but after we’d tried some places with no real luck, I began to grow nervous. I started glancing around at other drivers, worrying about my family again. Edward was watching a football game on a cheap, handheld black-and-white TV, and through the static I kept hearing the words
catch
and
caught
. At one point we sped past a dead deer that had been knocked against a tree; it was sitting with its back to the trunk like a person might, staring out at the highway with its front hooves in its lap. The way the deer seemed to watch us as we passed felt accusatory, damning.
    “Are you okay, L.J.?” Gay said, staring at me. “Do you want to talk about Nancy some more?”
    I turned to Gay, but suddenly he looked so small and helpless sitting there with Edward’s hands propping up his ruined head. How could he help defend me from my family?
    “Nancy’s nasty to me. She…” I tried to go on. My heart beat wildly; I was sweating. I was sure that any moment now a carload of my brothers would roar up alongside us.
    “I have an idea,” said Gay, smiling warmly at me. “Let’s talk about green. The color.”
    “Green?” I managed.
    “I try to wear as much green as possible. It’s the color of longevity. As in the crocodile, or the turtle, which outlive animals twice, even three times their size.”
    I noticed that Gay’s shirt was green, with dark green diamonds up the front.
    “Hey, look. I didn’t notice that. Your eyes are green,” he said. “You like green, right?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Well, just think of green. Think of yourself in cool, dark green.”
    “Green,” I said, closing my eyes. I pictured myself in a deep green jungle, hidden beneath huge, green, umbrella-like leaves. A cool breeze washed over me. My breathing started to calm. I began to feel in control of myself again. I was suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude for having stumbled upon Gay. I felt like he was something conjured up by my imagination, a friend that didn’t really exist outside my own mind. I was afraid that if I looked over at the passenger seat, he’d already be gone.
    “Gay, what is it that you do? For work, I mean.”
    “
This
is what I do, L.J. I talk to people. I teach them how to turn bad luck into good. You should come see me live in concert sometime. I speak at churches, meetings, that kind of thing.”
    “Where are you from, if you don’t mind my asking?”
    “I’m from a long ways away, L.J. Let’s just leave it at that,” said Gay. “Because right now I think you should pull over and try asking for work in this place here. I have a good feeling about this one.”
    I parked and went inside a blinking complex of rides and arcades, where I was hired to work at an attraction called the Home Wrecker, the world’s largest inflated house.