Voodoo Heart - Hardcover

Snyder, Scott

 
9780385338417: Voodoo Heart
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385338414 ISBN 13: 9780385338417
Verlag: Dial Pr, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

Scott Snyder’s protagonists inhabit a playfully deranged fictional world in which a Wall Street trader can find himself armed with a speargun, guarding a Dumpster outside a pawnshop in Florida; or an employee at Niagara Falls (his job: watching for jumpers) will take off in a car after a blimp in which his girlfriend has escaped. But in Snyder’s wondrous imagination there’s a thin membrane between the whimsical and the disturbing: the unlikely affair between a famous actress—in hiding after surgery—and a sporting goods salesman takes an ominous turn just as she begins to heal; an engaged couple’s relationship is fractured when one of them becomes obsessed with an inmate at the women’s prison next door.

Dark, funny, powerful, this debut collection underscores the remarkable gifts of a fiercely original young writer.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Scott Snyder teaches at Columbia University.

SCOTT SNYDER has been published in Zoetrope, One Story, Tin House, Epoch, and other journals. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Voodoo Heart


My girlfriend and I are not rich people. Not by a longshot. But together we own a mansion–one of the last real mansions in central Florida. It was built by a family of lemon farmers back in 1869, almost one hundred and fifty years ago. We put less than eleven hundred dollars down, hardly anything, but the house has over twenty rooms in all: five bedrooms, a library with a vaulted ceiling, a study, even a garden room that looks out on three full acres of wild backyard.

The morning the realtor first showed us the place, I was sure she’d made some kind of mistake. The other houses she’d taken us to see had been small: one- and two-bedroom apartments mostly. And then, out of nowhere, this.

For a long time, Laura and I stood on the front lawn, just staring up at the house. It had a wraparound porch. There were four stone chimneys rising from the roof. Laura had a good job at the aquarium, and I managed a major wrecking yard, but even so, how could something like this be in our price range?

“I know what you’re thinking!” said the realtor. She had to speak loudly to be heard over the persistent buzzing from insects hidden in the foliage. “But the price is just what I said. I’m tempted to buy this one myself.”

I studied the house, trying to take in the whole giant sprawl. Granted, it would need work. The place looked like it had stood vacant a long time, abandoned for ten, maybe even fifteen years. Ferns had sprouted though the slats of the porch. The columns were covered in a scaly silver mold. There were mushrooms growing in one of the rain gutters, a whole row, white with red spots, like tiny bloodstained umbrellas.

The grounds were in bad shape too: everything wild and overgrown, choked by weeds and bramble. Long tatters of moss hung from the trees.

Still, there was no disguising what lay beneath all the disrepair. With time and effort, this could be a wonderland for us.

Laura must have sensed my excitement. “This house is incredible. But it’ll be way too much work. I mean, look.” She waved a hand over the tall, weedy grass, which came all the way up to our thighs. “The yard alone will take weeks to clear.”

“We wouldn’t tackle the whole thing all at once,” I said. “We could just do a little every day.”

Laura turned to examine the house again. I spotted a tick crawling up the back of her shirt and quickly plucked it off before she could notice.

“I don’t know, Jake,” she said. “If it’s so great, why has it been standing here, empty, year after year? What’s wrong with it?”

“So,” I said to the realtor. “What’s wrong with it?”

The realtor shrugged, mopping the sweat from her face. Her name was Joyce. She was an older lady, a grandmotherly type; she wore her white hair in a bun; her sneakers were brand-new. The house had been hard to find. It lay off the main road, hidden behind the old lemon fields. Walking over from where we’d parked had been a big exertion for Joyce.

“Nothing’s wrong with this place, love,” she said. “People are just afraid of privacy, I suppose.”

I waited for her to go on. “You’re sure? There’s no catch?”

“Fess up, Joyce,” said Laura.

Joyce sighed and wiped her glasses on her shorts. “Look. The only thing I can think of that might have kept people away is the camp. There’s a camp nearby.”

“A camp? Like a camp for kids?” Laura said.

“No. It’s a camp for ladies,” said Joyce. “It’s more like a retreat.”

“Like a spa?” I was intrigued; I’d never been to a real spa before. I pictured myself relaxing in pits of bubbling mud.

“Not exactly a spa,” said Joyce.

“Not exactly how?” Laura asked.

Joyce picked a daisy from the brush and sniffed the petals. “It’s a federal retreat.”

“A federal retreat like a prison?” said Laura, sounding alarmed.

“I suppose it’s sort of like that,” Joyce said. “But it’s strictly a white-collar facility. It’s not like there are any violent offenders in there or anything. This is a place for society ladies.”

“A jail for them,” said Laura.

“Laura, it’s not something to worry about,” said Joyce. “It’s practically
a resort.”

Laura turned to me. “Jacob, I don’t want to live near a prison. What if we were here and there was a jailbreak or something? Those women would make a beeline straight for our house.”

I noticed a glimmer of excitement in Joyce’s expression at hearing Laura refer to the house as “ours.”

“You heard Joyce,” I said. “It’s not that kind of place. It’s for society ladies.” I made a tea-sipping gesture.

“I’ve heard of some very high-profile women spending time there,” Joyce said, swatting at a cloud of mosquitoes. “Remember Shirley Sayles, the famous golfer? She bet all that money on the U.S. Open? The one she was playing in? She’s at the retreat right now.”

“Listen to that,” I said. “Shirley Sayles.”

“Maybe we should look at something else,” Laura said.

“Come on.” I stepped onto the front porch, which groaned loudly.

“Jacob,” said Laura.

But I was already opening the front door.



The inside of the house was dark and cavernous, with a fog of dust rolling across the floor. Trees stood crowded against the windows, their green-and-yellow leaves pressed to the glass like children’s hands.

As I stepped into the parlor, I could feel the temperature dropping around me. The room was empty except for a burned-out chandelier reaching down from the high ceiling. I glanced around, examining the peeling wallpaper, the molding sculpted along the ceiling’s edge. I already knew that this was the house for us. It had stood for over a hundred years, like a fortress hidden in the woods. Nothing about it was cheap or makeshift. The beams supporting the ceiling looked like they were carved from stone.

It didn’t take long for the house to win Laura over, either. The touches were what got her, all the charming details: the claw-foot tub in the master bathroom, cracked but still usable. The carved lemons at the ends of the banisters. The small stained glass window in the parlor door, round as a coin.

What really brought her around, though, was the garden room. It lay at the south end of the first floor and extended out from the rest of the house, overlooking the sloping backyard. The curtains were drawn when we entered, and the room was especially dark, except for a trickle of light seeping in through the far end of the ceiling. I figured there was a crack in the roof, but when we walked over, we saw that in fact, in a certain spot, the ceiling rose and gave way to a small crystal dome. Laura’s face lit up when she saw it, the gentle swell of glass, the elegant iron webbing. The dome was filthy with soot, but when she reached up and wiped off one of the panels, a spear of sunlight pierced the room.

“Romantic,” said Joyce, and then coughed from the dust.



Of course, even now, six months after we moved in, we still have lots to do. If you came over to our house today, you’d find some rooms fully furnished and others completely bare. If you chose to open the sliding door to the library, you’d find it thoroughly...

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Verlag
Dial Pr
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385338414
ISBN 13 
9780385338417
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
278
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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