Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Dennie Junior was feverish past his bedtime. The little girl-niece had been taken home. The men were drinking. The TV was on loud but no one was listening. Dennie Junior was saying Dad-dy you won’t go away again will you anxious and sucking at his fingers and Daddy slapped the fingers away from the sucking fish-mouth and said No.

  Whoever it was that was playing the Lance Corporal/Daddy said no in a firm voice like a fist coming down hard on a table.

  Civilians you can’t tell apart. Dark-skinned, rat-eyed. Kill them all let God sort them out.

  That night it seriously pissed the Lance Corporal how the kid too, which so much fuss was made of was the Lance Corporal’s own flesh and blood, had started playing that same trick disappearing into the left side of . . . whatever it was—a sudden deep hole like a cellar or a pit, a gouged-out mine pit in the side of a mountain, where things went in and were gone. In a slow voice of the kind required to speak to morons and/or the brain-damaged the nerowlgist had explained to the Lance Corporal that he had a nerowloggical deficit. See, sometimes that part of the brain is shut down. Like a light in a room, switched off. As soon as the light is off, you can’t see. You can’t see that the light is off. You can’t see the dimensions of the space the light would illuminate if there was a light because once the light is off the thought of the light is off. The very word “light” is off. Civilians who risk stepping into that darkness disappear. Sometimes they reappear but most often they do not.

  All a man truly craves is the respect of his fellow men. And women too of course. The respect that is due to him. And this is the respect due his country. God will sort out the rest.

  Dennie! No, honey, it’s just a dream.

  The mother hurried to the child’s bed. In the night cries and gasps for breath and choked screams. The Lance Corporal rarely slept through a night even with his numerous meds swallowed down with Coors, but when the Lance Corporal at last drifted off into an exhausted sleep like discolored froth-surf on a beach thinly covering the raddled sand, the Lance Corporal was often wakened by the child’s cries and the commotion of the woman comforting the child. Dennie, honey! Mommy has you, honey, it’s just a dream.

  Now the Lance Corporal was home in the house on Magnesium Street, Ashtree Junction, North Dakota. The Lance Corporal was home permanently and except for his twice-weekly therapy sessions at the VA Hospital at Grand Forks, to which he was driven (usually by a volunteer relative), the Lance Corporal did not often leave the house. The Lance Corporal was left to ponder how it had happened he had been honorably discharged from the most revered of the U.S. armed services and yet the son the Lance Corporal had been given did not appear to be a well child.

  Bad dreams in the night and sometimes while watching TV and videos with Dad-dy. The child who’d been potty-trained began to soil his bedclothes and sometimes—the most shameful times, which threw Dad-dy into a rage—his daytime clothes, for he could not control his pee which leaked out of him as out of a drippy faucet that no matter how hard you twist shut will yet drip.

  The Lance Corporal’s young wife was not the one the Lance Corporal had been remembering in the hospital, which was a sharp disappointment. That was a separate disappointment of which the Lance Corporal (who was a realist in all things) saw no purpose in speaking for the Lance Corporal was a mature man now twenty-seven—twenty-eight?—years old. Three tours of duty he had served his country in the war, this now the Lance Corporal could certainly endure.

  Yes there was sex between the Lance Corporal and his wife. Yes if you are wondering.

  At the therapy clinic the Lance Corporal’s wife attended crucial sessions to acquire certain skills. And so there was sex between the Lance Corporal and his wife, to a degree.

  Yes we are happy together, we are man and wife. Yes if you are wondering.

  Yet the Lance Corporal insulted the wife, calling her by another’s name. In the extremity of his passion, not knowing what the fuck he was saying, or moaning. This is not right, the wife protested. I’m the one who loved you, I was the one who married you, not her, the wife protested piteously and hours were required late into the night to placate her and these hours were exhausting to the Lance Corporal who would come to realize shortly, like so many others, that it is easier to erase some problems than to solve them, or even to make the effort to solve them. In the back closet the bolt-action shotgun, a single barrel for the female and a single barrel for the fretting pissy-smelling kid and a quick reload for himself.

  It was a well-publicized fact, meant to dissuade young males: the leading cause of death in such western states as Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, and the Dakotas among young males sixteen to thirty is (1) vehicular accident, (2) suicide by gun.

  It was a well-publicized fact meant to dissuade but a fact to give solace to most who hear it. Your gun is your friend. Your gun won’t let you down when you need it.

  Shrewdly the Lance Corporal had devised a way to drive any vehicle, even the Dodge pickup standing high from the ground. It was an ingenious technique involving one of his old boots, the handle of a ten-pound sledgehammer, and an oversized leather glove. His brother Mack whistled through his teeth Jez-zuz, Dennie! Got to hand it to you, you are one smart dude.

  Or, you are one smart fuck-ass.

  (In such ways the brothers communicated. Since boyhood, in such ways. Often Mack would slap Dennie across the shoulders, or against his head but gently now, for there was the steel plate. There were the implants you could not risk dislodging.)

  On his restless drives mostly into the countryside through the ravaged landscape and into the Hump foothills past slag heaps, open-pit mines, and lakes smelling of sulfur—where in a long-ago time the Lance Corporal’s daddy and granddaddy and who the fuck all else in the family the Lance Corporal had to assume worked for Delphic Ore, Inc., which mined ore—whatever fuck ore the Humps had, Delphic Ore, Inc., mined—you knew that, and you’d know that Delphic Ore, Inc., was bankrupt and shut down and whatever the Humps had to yield to mankind was long since yielded, sold and consumed and gone; and the Lance Corporal knew this and did not contest it. Thinking I have served my country, this is a good thing. This is my country.

  Pa’s old Remington 1100 he took with him. This was not illegal, this was not a concealed weapon. The Remington 1100 is one of the great guns though this specimen had to be forty years old, the nickel-plate barrel scratched and the maple stock worn smooth.

  Just birdshot he’d loaded. In case from the pickup he might see a flock of mallards or snow geese and have the opportunity for a good clear shot—this was a wish of his.

  In the TV version Maudie Skedd would arrive in the house on Magnesium Street. Maudie crying and her crimped yellow hair in her face. Maudie on her knees begging forgiveness. Maudie shamed, for all of Ashtree Junction knew of her betrayal. And the Lance Corporal said calmly All that is past Maudie. I am in love with my wife who is the mother of my son. I forgive you Maudie this is my new life now.

  In the TV version, a handsome actor like the young Brad Pitt would play the Lance Corporal. For you could not portray the Lance Corporal as the Lance Corporal’s actual self which no TV viewers would wish to see and the truth is, the actual Maudie Skedd is twenty pounds overweight and not so great-looking any longer.

  If there was the TV version, there would be the Lance Corporal/Daddy with the beautiful little boy too. A little boy not so fretful always sucking his snot forefinger so you wanted to slap him.

  The Lance Corporal loved his son more than his own life. The Lance Corporal played video games with Dennie Junior, watched TV cartoons, and repaired his broken toys. The Lance Corporal spent time with his son for the wife was working at Pennysavers at the mall where employees are offered such discounts, you’d be a fool not to take advantage.

  Momma-Jeanne came over, also Aunt Sadie, Aunt Bessie, and Grandma-Jeanne. Helping the Lance Corporal with his little boy, for there was the realization This is a transition time for all.

  Sometimes they prayed togethe
r. The Lance Corporal came to believe that he could sleep a purer sleep after prayer.

  The Lance Corporal had killed in the war. The Lance Corporal had no idea how many of the enemy he had killed in the war. Though some of the enemy he had seen die—he had seen actual heads explode—so there was no ambiguity. Civilians he had seen, children and females of all ages he had seen, and these were bodies he could not recall having been upright and living before they’d become bodies. It was easier to recall them as bodies. The Lance Corporal had followed orders given to him by his superiors. The Lance Corporal had followed orders without regret or reproach. In the dark half of the Lance Corporal’s brain figures were gathering. There was whispering, muffled voices. There should be a balance they were saying. The Lieutenant realized It’s in their language. For this was the other language, of the enemy. The sinister guttural language no one could speak nor even comprehend. Saying If you give us yours.

  My what? Give you my—what?

  Yours.

  Waking tangled in sweaty bedclothes or sprawled in sweat-soaked T-shirt and boxers on the couch and the TV on mute a few yards away in the night the Lance Corporal groped in panic for the box cutter he kept by his side at such times, carried in the pickup and Pa’s old Remington 1100 in the back seat (of the pickup)—a man had to be armed at all times. This was post-9/11 U.S.A. This was a time of terror stalking the land. The Lance Corporal with the shunt in his vena cava wakened with the knowledge that the enemy dead had not said If you give us your son you will be forgiven. They did not say that. He did not hear that. For these were but civilians and not empowered to make such proposals. They did not say If you give us your son as you have taken our sons from us you will be forgiven but the Lance Corporal understood, that was the promise.

  Where is Dennie Junior? In sudden fear for the child the Lance Corporal woke the snoring woman and stumbled into the child’s room where the child had wakened in fear of him and he saw—it could not be for the first time he saw—that this child was not Dennie Junior but another child, scrawny, undersized, with deep-socketed, slightly crossed eyes. These eyes shone with feral cunning like a creature’s eyes glaring up beside the highway in headlights. Where is Dennie Junior? the Lance Corporal demanded, and the woman said, This is Dennie, this is our son, and the Lance Corporal said, This is not our son! This is not my son! Where have they taken my son! And the woman comforted the crying child, saying that Daddy was having a bad dream, Daddy did not mean what he was saying, and the Lance Corporal backed off in fear of the misshapen child with the large rat-head and staring eyes in which there glared that look of recognition, of the damned. And the woman said, Of course this is Dennie Junior, don’t scare us like this, honey, please, it’s one of your nightmares, and the Lance Corporal said hesitantly, Is it? That’s what it is? A nightmare, and the woman said, Yes, it’s a nightmare, now come back to bed.

  Twice weekly he was driven to therapy in Grand Forks. More frequently now his brother Mack drove him, for other relatives had ceased volunteering. The Lance Corporal did not now have a driver’s license for his license had been taken from him, for “disability.” The Lance Corporal yet persisted in driving the Dodge pickup into the countryside when he wished, making his frequent stops at taverns where the Lance Corporal was likely to be known and drinks bought for him, and if the Lance Corporal required assistance out to the Dodge pickup, there were volunteers to assist him. If Yelling County sheriff’s deputies sighted the disabled war vet driving his Dodge pickup on local roads they were inclined to look the other way, but there was no question the Lance Corporal dared not drive on the state highway to Grand Forks where vehicles sped at beyond eighty miles an hour and eighteen-wheelers careened heedless and headlong through the waste landscape like banshees.

  On TV these trips to Grand Forks would be deeply moving for the intimacy springing between the Lance Corporal and his brother driving alone together to Grand Forks and back in Mack’s SUV, but in actual life the brothers did not much speak. There was so much to speak of! and yet the brothers were frequently at a loss for words. Mack wore his grimy HarleyDavidson cap pulled low over his forehead, sucked at cigarillos with a clamped jaw exhaling smoke sideways from his mouth in the shape of a single errant tusk as his (younger) brother the Lance Corporal tried to summon forth boyhood memories to share with his brother yet lost these memories in the very instant of recalling them as, like the tusk-smoke drawn out the opened window of the SUV, the boyhood memories vanished. So much was shifting into the left side of the Lance Corporal’s impaired brain, he wondered how he could bear it. Saying one day in a voice of hoarse raw boyish grief, Mack, they took my son from me, the one they left isn’t mine. I know that I am meant to accept him, I am meant to love the little guy and I do love the little guy, but Jesus, Mack, it is so unfair. I thought I deserved more respect, Mack. Quietly beginning to cry, tears like warm pee leaking from his mangled eyes. Mack said, Jesus, Dennie, hey—c’mon. Mack was shocked, embarrassed as hell, a hot blush rising into his face, That’s not so, Dennie, Dennie Junior is your son for sure. That’s crazy talk, Dennie. And the Lance Corporal said, Is that so, Mack? Tell me, Mack, is that so? I will believe you, Mack, and Mack said, staring straight ahead at the state highway bland and featureless and empty as the pavement of hell and groping to lay his hand on the Lance Corporal’s wasted arm, Jez-zuz, Dennie, sure, why’d I lie to you?

  Because you are one of them, you bastard. That’s why.

  • • •

  In the war there was not always combat. There was boredom as well as combat in the war and as danger came in streaks and streams and deafening explosions so boredom came like lava slow and suffocating and like sand filling the moist crevices of the soul. The decapitated goat, the decapitated dog. Later, there were other decapitated bodies. Exploded heads but also rescued heads. Heads in jars fitted with sunglasses and helmets and cigarillos between the jaws and the eyes glazed and empty at first until maggots began to fester and writhe with a look of inner crafty life. In the barracks there was laughter, these sights were so funny! In this recovered life back home he heard their laughter and was roused and frightened by it and fumbled for his weapon. Sometimes in the night when the child woke in terror the child’s choked cries sounded like laughter of a jeering sort. The Lance Corporal took his meds as prescribed and these he supplemented with Oxies and Percs he’d scored at one or another of his frequent stops in town and along the state highway (Friday’s, Wineberie’s, Starburst Lounge, Pussy a Go-Go) but after a while the Lance Corporal gave up the quest for sleep was a vanity of the long-ago life he had renounced. Upright he sat in a chair facing the muted TV. Lately he dared not lie on the couch for he’d felt the shunt inside his chest begin to shift just perceptibly from the vena cava and there was the risk of sudden breakage, leakage, and death.

  This will save your life, son. Have faith.

  Goddamn, he did! He had plenty of faith.

  Therapy was working. There was “progress.” He struggled to walk in baby steps, he lifted twenty-pound dumbbells that left him dazed and breathless and the dark side of his brain enlarged. There began to be talk of his former job being returned to him. There began to be talk of promotion to store manager. The North Dakota governor spoke passionately of the war and of those “sons of the state” who had sacrificed. The president was optimistic about the war. On TV the president was optimistic and bravely smiling about the war. The president had sent by certified mail a personal letter thanking the Lance Corporal for his “selfless service” in the war as well as a color photograph of the president with his optimistic and courageous smile and the photograph was inscribed to the Lance Corporal and signed with the president’s signature. There was a gold seal of the United States of America. This the Lance Corporal presented to his parents, Momma-Jeanne and the old man, Pa, whose lungs wheezed and whistled like air escaping from a balloon from forty years in the Hump mines but the old bastard was proud of his son, and that was something. What guts he had, it was said of the Lan
ce Corporal. What courage. Yet there were those who yawned rudely and in the mirror beyond the massed whiskey bottles and the blaring TV there were knowing smirks, winks. What a sucker to enlist. What a total fuckhead asshole sucker to enlist. Now you aren’t even him. You aren’t Dennie Krugg.

  Where Dennie Junior was, Lance Corporal/Daddy didn’t know. The child was hiding from him beneath the bed. The child was whimpering, crying. The child’s pajamas were soaked in pee. The dimensions of the house were askew and mocking, not rectangular but a parallelogram the Lance Corporal recalled from high school geometry. The bathroom faucets (sink, tub) had been switched, to confuse him. Where hot had been now there was cold. In the hospital they’d tested him: do you feel heat do you feel cold. There was never any clear answer, for whatever he said the response was Good! He could not bear it, how the child cringed and hid from him. Seizing the child in his arms that were unexpectedly strong he had no choice but to haul the child into the bathroom and into the tub making Daddy-cooing noises of comfort. On one of their drives to Grand Forks he’d begged Mack to tell him, how do you bear it, being a father, and Mack said, Hey dude—you just do. You learn, and you do.

  But how, Mack. Tell me fucking how.

  You learn. You get used to it. You get cool with it, see? You just do.

  Mack, I don’t know. I don’t think so, Mack.

  A baby crying you get used to it. You tune out. Worst case, you walk out. Every guy does. As long as you don’t, you know, do anything. And you won’t.

  Okay, dude, see what I’m saying? You won’t.

  Every guy is scared he will. But it passes. You won’t.

  This night though, this was a bad night. The female had been at him and he’d had to deal with her. And the child, which was not his child (he knew) but was his responsibility. In the tub the child was screaming, the child with the misshapen head and crazed eyes. This was not a child but a goat—a goat carcass. The heads were wrapped in plastic bags from Pennysavers, he’d used double bags to catch the drippage. Such strain, and a coughing spasm he was in fear the shunt would slip from the vena cava bearing used and despoiled blood into his heart to be cleansed of impurities. He’d thought it had to be his own blood his bare feet were slipping in. On the bathroom-floor linoleum, and on the stairs. The phone had been ringing he’d knocked to the floor. The woman’s cell phone he had demolished with the heel of his foot. Their noise had been silenced, the Lance Corporal was feeling good about that. The Lance Corporal was feeling hopeful about that. He’d washed his bloodied hands, forearms, and his face and he’d felt the steely stubble on his jaws. In the pickup he’d wrapped the tools—the hand ax, the saw—in garbage bags. He would carry the carcasses and the heads out to the pickup when he’d rested. He was very tired, his blood sugar was low. Dennie? Hey. Somehow, Mack was with him. Must’ve driven up in the SUV and the Lance Corporal had not heard for he’d dozed off Or, could be the fucking titanium implant in his inner ear had lost its charge. A tiny battery in the implant, it had lost its electrical charge. So much had been swallowed up in the dark side of his brain. He had appealed to the officer who’d discharged him Don’t send me back to them. I am not ready to return to them yet. I can’t live with civilians. I am afraid that I will hurt civilians. The Lance Corporal was asked why would he hurt civilians of his own kind who loved him and the Lance Corporal said Because that is the only way to stop them loving me sir.