Voodoo Heart Read Online Free

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