Voodoo Heart by Scott Snyder Page A

couldn’t tell, but there was something both weary and innocent in her face that I found myself immediately drawn to.
    Another drill sergeant, a black man named Williams, rode in the passenger seat. He wore tight, wire-rim glasses, and had neatly trimmed his mustache to look like a perfect third eyebrow beneath his nose. Williams was along to make sure I did my job.
    “So, where are you from?” he said as we passed a stand where people sold pumpkins and bunches of fresh corn.
    “I’m from all over,” I said. “I played the trumpet for a long time. I was
a jazz musician.
” I said this very loudly so that Lexington might hear.
    “Cool beans,” he said. We drove a while longer and Williams told me about his childhood, growing up “on the streets,” how hard it had been. The landscape was beautiful. Oak and birch and poplar trees. The sun flashing through the branches. Lex looked so pretty in back. Suddenly Williams paused and turned to me.
    “What’s that noise?” he said. “Do you hear a whistling?”
    “What noise?” I said, though I knew very well what noise.
    “I think…It’s coming from you. From your face.”
    “Oh, that. Some of the bones behind my nose are a little out of place. The wind can get in there sometimes.”
    Williams scrutinized my face. “Do you box?”
    “No.”
    “You get in a fight? That why they sent you here?”
    I noticed Lexington watching me from the backseat.
    “I had an accident when I was a kid,” I said. “It was a stupid thing. There are lots of little bones behind your face that you can knock loose pretty easily. The sphenoid bone. The ethmoid. It’s a fragile system.”
    Williams leaned over and looked up into my nose. “Well, that’s a seriously loud whistle you got going on in there. It sounds like a kazoo, you know? Like someone honking on a kazoo.”
    I glanced at Lex and saw that she was still watching.
    “Can you hear it yourself?” Williams asked, still peering up into my nose. “It’s like
toooot. Tooooot.
”
    I rolled up my window.
    Williams tried to get me to talk about myself some more, about what had landed me at About Face, but after I dodged his questions a couple of times, he grew bored and turned on the radio. The rest of the drive was uneventful. Lex kept to herself.
    When we reached the city limits, I got off the highway and followed the blue H signs to the hospital. I parked as close as I could get to the entrance. Lex climbed to her feet and came toward me down the aisle.
    “I’ll be right here when you’re done inside,” I said as she passed.
    “It takes three hours,” she said. Her eyes were as green as limes. “You should go walk around town.”
    “What would you recommend seeing?” I said to Lex.
    She gave a tired smile. “Anything but the hospital,” she said, and then left the van.
    I watched Lex cross the parking lot. At one point a car pulled out of a spot in front of her, and even though it didn’t come close to hitting her, she gave a little frightened jump, then stopped in her tracks. The car paused and the driver waved her across his path, but she insisted he go first.
    “Nervous little thing,” said Williams. “So skittish.”
    I thought about what Brill had said about her not having any friends. Things had been the same way for me at her age. I’d had a hard time of it, and watching her stand there alone and frightened in the parking lot, I felt my affection for Lex bloom.
    She glanced over at me as the car finished its K-turn, and I waved and gave her my warmest grin. She smiled a tight-lipped, friendly smile, but even as she did, she crossed her arms over her chest, as though protecting her heart from me.

    When I was ten, a bullet came screaming down out of the sky and slammed into the top of my head. I was on my way to school, walking through the field behind the schoolyard. My book bag was on my back, my hair was combed and still wet from the shower. I was already late, but I didn’t care. Because the