Voodoo Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

surprised at his own anger. Next to the closet was a box of her clothes. She’d moved some things over in anticipation of their wedding, but it had been sitting there, sealed, for over a week. Just looking at the box made Pres’s face go hot. He thought about Earl, waiting for her to come back to the museum in the spring, standing there on opening morning, smiling, scanning the street for her, checking his watch.
    She laughed and pressed herself to him. “Oh, come on, don’t be a grump,” she said.
    “Get off,” he said, pushing her away.
    “Are you serious?”
    “Did you hear me?” he said. “Leave me alone. Get lost!”
    She turned away from him. After she fell asleep he moved closer to her, hoping she might find him during the night, but she stayed away and he drifted off alone, staring at the population of lopsided glass babies on the night table.

    “My feet are hurting now. They’re coming back.” Dex flexed his toes, which Pres had earlier cut loose from his frozen shoes with a scaling knife. “When my son, you know, Dennis, when he was just five or six, some girl gave him a doll like this one.” Dex turned the doll over in his hands. “For weeks he dragged it with him everywhere.”
    Pres had seen photographs of Dennis. He was a large, solid boy with a heavy brow like Dex’s. An image of him came to Pres then: he saw Dennis standing at the edge of a wooded shore, on the rocks leading down from the forest into the water. Dennis wore his fatigues and carried his duffel bag on a sloping shoulder. Behind him, other boys in fatigues wandered through the pines, calling out names. Some were dragging duffel bags on the ground. Dennis peered out across the water at Pres, confused and frightened and wanting to come home.
    “It was peaceful,” said Dex. “Being washed along on the current like that.”
    “Washed away,” said Pres. “You’re lucky you came to your damn senses.” He took the doll from Dex and tossed it back into the river, where it quickly vanished beneath the dark water. Pres waited to see it sucked over the long fangs of ice hanging from the lip of the falls, but it never reappeared. He wondered if the doll would end up as part of the blue yodel the city was having that winter. A blue yodel was what people called it when a number of fish swam too close to the falls and were swept against the ice piled up at the cusp. The current held the fish there until they froze, and then slowly, as the ice pushed forward, they were rolled over the edge of the falls and worked down through the glassy stalactites in spiraling columns. All sorts of fish hung in the giant icicle closest to Pipe Island: perch and rainbow trout, sturgeon. None of them looked old, or sick. They were large fish with wide red gills. It seemed to Pres that they could have easily escaped the current had they wanted to, but there they were.
    He looked at the falls. The afternoon sun had burned off the mist, and Pres saw the cascade of Horseshoe Falls curving toward shore, a bow of light sparkling across its apron. For a moment he could almost imagine how a fish, or a person, might be drawn in, romanced by the sheer rumbling beauty of it. There was something romantic about just offering yourself up like that, about surrendering so fully to magnetism.
    He thought of Claire—Claire running her wand through a spout of blue flame and then touching it to the end of a glass pod, teasing out a foot, another foot, then the top of the baby’s head—and he suddenly understood that what had caused his anger the night before was worry. Having the dolls made would be like one more promise to each other that they’d endure. But how many promises did he need from her?
    Below the falls, the ice floes had been pounded into a great arched bridge spanning the whole river, and people from town were strolling across this new promenade of brilliant ice. Children sledded from the center down to the bank on either side, and here and there, girls