Voodoo Heart by Scott Snyder

and a half months. But what I hoped was that About Face would be my chance to get back in the race, to redeem myself. After all, the camp was designed to help children get their lives on track, and I’d been a child myself when things had spun off course for me.
    “You crack through a person’s front when you scare him, Sergeant Fergus,” said Sergeant Brill. “You penetrate his personal facade. His true colors come out when he’s afraid, who he really is. You can work with that. That’s what we do with these kids. We scare them straight, as the old expression goes.”
    “Get their true colors out in the open. Then work with that,” I said, nodding.
    He laughed. “Don’t worry. That stuff isn’t going to be your department.”
    Not my department? I felt the tightening of disappointment in my chest.
    “I hear you play the trumpet,” said Sergeant Brill.
    I told him I played clean, hard trumpet.
    Sergeant Brill picked up a drawstring sack sitting on the flagpole’s marble base and handed it to me. “This belonged to a friend of mine.”
    I opened the bag and found a trumpet inside, a Blessing with a five-inch bell. I fingered the valves. They were stiff, but pumped smoothly. The last trumpet I played had been played before me by a seal at an amusement park. What I mean is that I hadn’t touched an instrument as nice as this one in over six years.
    “That’s half your job there,” said Sergeant Brill. “You’ll play reveille in the morning to wake up the cadets, then taps at night to put them to bed. Right now all we’ve got is a recording. Piece of shit. Sounds like a someone whistling through a toilet paper tube.”
    I asked him what the second half of my job was going to be. I wanted to do more.
    Sergeant Brill stubbed his cigarette out on the ground and then picked up the butt and slipped it into his pocket. “The second half of the job is my daughter, Mr. Fergus.”
    “Sir?” Behind us, the sprinklers started up, ticking graceful arcs of water over the lawn.
    “My daughter, Lexington. Lex. She was born with her kidneys gummed up. The last few years she’s started having health problems, real ones. I don’t want to get into it. Believe me, it’s heart-breaking stuff. You know what dialysis is? That’s the second half of your job. To drive her up to the hospital in Albany three times a week to get her blood cleaned.”
    Take the girl to get her blood cleaned. I liked the way that sounded. It had a vaguely heroic quality to it, and I began to forget my disappointment over not getting to work with the cadets.
    “Hey, be nice to her,” he said, looking down at his boots. “All this dialysis stuff depresses the hell out of her. It’s made her into an introvert. She’s shy—I mean, she doesn’t have any friends.”
    “When do I start?” I said.
    “Hell, today,” said Sergeant Brill. “Right now.”

    At eleven o’clock that morning, after filling out forms in the office, I set out with Lexington in one of the camp’s vans. How my life had changed since dawn! I now had on a uniform: a tan shirt with little buttoned flaps on the shoulders, tan army pants, and shiny black boots. I felt like playing my new horn right there in the van, felt like shouting over my shoulder to Lexington that she shouldn’t worry because she was in good hands, but she gave no sign of even noticing me; she sat in the back row with her head leaned against the window.
    Though Lexington was twenty-one, she looked about four years younger. She was small, hardly taller than five feet, and while she had hips and breasts, there was still a newness, an awkwardness really, to the curves and flarings of her body. She had dark kinky hair with miniature curls, and that first day in the bus she wore Chap Stick with flecks of sparkle in it. The steroids she took made her face overly plump, but in an appealing, pillowy way. Whether Lex had actually stopped aging because of her kidney problems or was simply a late bloomer, I