Broke Heart Blues

by Joyce Carol Oates

  work, some of the pieces of furniture were what you'd call challenging. Nola said, "Insomnia? You, too?" John said defensively, "No.

  Insomnia's when you want to sleep and can't. When you've got plenty to do, and are happy doing it, that isn't insomnia." Nola said, "But it comes to the same thing. You don't sleep." On the fourth, final day, when at last the shingling was done, John agreed to have supper with Nola and the kids. He drove home, however, and shave and change his clothes. He wore a white shirt, trousers, even a necktie. (A hand-painted, expensive tie that had been a from a well-to-do woman customer when MR. FIX-IT had lived in Watertown.

  "When you wear this, John, will you think of me?" MR. FIX-IT long forgotten her name. ) He brought Ellen and Drew a surprise, a horse from a flea market in Shawmouth he'd bought when his was still alive. For years he'd had no use for it, one item among many in MR. Flx-IT's barn. Now inspired, he repaired the horse, repainted it, a warm golden hue. It was a friendly-looking horse, a miniature, three feet from the ground on a flat wooden platform, when it rocked, it creaked. The children were ecstatic. "He's a palomino pony," them. "His name is Pal." Nola's eyes shimmered with tears, she'd had to turn aside. She said, "I'm sorry. I can't help it." She burst tears, her shoulders shaking. John stared at her in dismay. "I'm not used to people being nice to me. I mean--so nice." John said, "Bullshit, Nola." Nola laughed, laying a hand on his arm, yes it was bullshit but she couldn't crying.

  In MR. Flx-IT's sky-blue pickup he drove home from the Oswego County Courthouse, eleven miles to the nickel-colored trailer in the ruin of an apple orchard on Barndollar Road, Iroquois Point. What our come to!

  How God tests us. Dripping blood from a cut above his eye. For a while, driving, he'd pressed a wad of tissue against the cut, soaking up blood, then gave up in disgust. Sure, those deputies had looked at him, John Heart, with contempt. A man who hadn't defended himself. A man who'd let hit in the face. Who wouldn't press charges against his assailant.

  Probably the deputies knew he was an ex-con, too. Every one to know.

  If anyone had asked him point-blank, he wouldn't have denied it.

  Tomahawk Island Youth Camp wasn't a maximum-security prison for adult offenders like Attica, Sing Sing.

  Nothing to be ashamed of. Not now.

  Nothing MR. FIX-IT couldn't fix.

  But since Jordan Leavey had initiated his custody suit--his blackmail as Nola called it--more of John Heart's private life, his long-ago teenaged life as John Reddy Heart, was emerging. Not just the conviction for theft, to which he'd confessed, and the other accessory crimes, but the for second-degree murder. He'd seen the look in Nola's face when Leavey's attorney alluded to Nola's "current live-in companion," man who'd been tried for murder in Buffalo as a sixteen-year-old and had had a "controversial" acquittal. And those twelve months at Tomahawk without a day off for good behavior.

  He'd seen the look on the judge's face, too. A frowning middle-aged woman with conspicuously rouged cheeks, chunky bifocal glasses.

  John had told Nola about his past, some of it. Not all. Though believed he loved her, and would one day marry her, he would tell her everything.

  She'd said quietly I'll just have to trust you, I guess. Since I love you.

  He'd said That's up to you.

  But maybe it was time to move on. HAVE TOOLS WILL TRAVEL. Possibly, if things worked out, if the custody suit was settled favorably, Nola would come with him. Nola, and the children. There was the

  edge of the state he'd never lived in, Lake Champlain, on the far side of the Adirondacks. A beautiful region, beside another Glass Lake. He owner and executor of Aaron Leander Heart's estate in Shawmouth, hour's drive from Iroquois Point, but he'd hired someone to deal with it, finances, maintenance, publicity, he hadn't any need to live close by. He had money saved, though he'd never accepted a dime from his brother.

  Nor from Dahlia the rich man's wife who was always hinting how much more she had to spend than she ever would spend, always trying to calculate how deprived his life was.

  MR. FIX-IT could move! The idea began to interest him. He'd up a solid reputation in Iroquois Point, he was hired on a regular by contractors renovating the spacious old nineteenth-century houses on the lake, he had friends here, and numerous friendly acquaintances--so, why move?

  He'd lived in Iroquois Point for almost five years, the longest period of time he'd lived anywhere as an adult.

  When he'd mentioned to Nola how many places he'd lived, just in New York State, she'd said, "My God, John. You sound like the Dutchman." Flying Dutchman? Who was he?

  Seeing John's carefully neutral expression, meant to mask his ignorance, also his defensiveness about living with a woman more educated than he, Nola said quickly, "A man accursed by fate. Condemned to sail the seas until Judgment Day unless"--and she paused, her face slightly coloring--"he's redeemed by a woman's love." John laughed. "How's about a woman's cooking?" It was true, John Heart had lived in so many towns after fleeing the Village of Willowsville he'd already forgotten some of them, and the he'd gotten to know, even the women he'd loved. The women who him. Sodus, Fair Haven, Lycoming, Red Creek. Briefly in Oswego, and Watertown and Sackets Harbor (in a fishing shanty on the lake).

  lonely months he'd lived in Ogdensburg on the St.. Lawrence River bordering Canada, the vast province of Ontario he'd once studied on a road map found in a stranger's Jeep, fantasizing how he might escape into such vastness where no one would have known him and it would be just life, a flame of a life, setting itself down in that new place. But he'd never made the crossing into that other country.

  His years in Willowsville had passed in a blur like a landscape from a speeding car. He'd been anxious about his family, keeping the family together, monitoring his mother's crises. Her drinking, her drugs, her errors in judgment. Her childlike dependency on him. Even his basketball hadn't been real, somehow--it was a way of focusing his energy, he'd had so much nervous energy, he'd thought sometimes he might explode.

  After graduating from high school he'd gone to live in Shawmouth to be near his grandfather Aaron Leander Heart who was all that remained, him, of his family. (Farley and Shirleen had been placed with foster families and were said to be adjusting reasonably well. Dahlia had had a "nervous collapse" after he'd been sentenced to prison, she'd gone into seclusion yet not long afterward, exactly how he'd never learn, she found a new, well-to-do man friend and fled to--was it Palm Springs? Sun Valley, Idaho?

  a time as any in John Reddy Heart's life, his plane crash of a life, his life strewn with glittering wreckage. He was barely eighteen, desperately lonely for his family yet not always on the best of terms with Grandpa Heart who'd become increasingly eccentric since the "days of vengeance." John loved his grandfather, and his grandfather seemed to love him, but living with the old man on a daily basis was impossible. Grandpa Heart believed ordained by God to create his "wondrous Glass Ark beside the Glass Lake" and no reasoning could shake him from his conviction. (For all his knew, maybe it was true. God did work in mysterious ways. ) It Heart's unshakable belief, too, that he'd bargained personally God to spare John Reddy's life. "Except for me you'd have died in the electric chair, Johnny. Deserving or not, that was your fate in the world of justice." It had seemed beneath John's dignity, as well as a waste of breath, to argue that there was no capital punishment in New York State at this time. The expensive lawyer Dahlia had hired for John, who'd thoroughly disliked him, and who'd never thought he might be acquitted, had told him to be prepared for a sentence of twenty years to life--"Which isn't as severe as it sounds, you'd be up for parole in ten years unless you screw up again." John Reddy had been prepared for this. Almost, he'd been at peace.

  When a murder is committed someone must be punished, that was only fair. He felt, in his heart, that he'd already begun his sentence, a life sentence, when he fled the police that night, slipping into his life as an outlaw, a fugitive from justice, as you'd slip on a glove that doesn't quite fit at first, and then does.


  Then, the jury had acquitted him.

  Acquitted!

  His life handed back to him, in that moment of grace.

  Several of the jurors, interviewed anonymously afterward for the Evening News, said they'd voted to acquit because they believed defense's argument that John Reddy Heart had acted to protect his and himself. His action had not been premeditated, but only instinctive. "A boy, protecting his mother, even if the mother's a you-know-what--he isn't guilty of murder in my book."

  "That Melvin Riggs, Jr. --we didn't have any trouble believing he was a brute. The way that S. O. B. treated players, you wouldn't be surprised at anything a man like that might do, including getting himself killed. ") The phone was ringing when John unlocked the door of the trailer.

  He let it ring. He went into the closet-sized bathroom, turned on the cold-water faucet, splashed water carelessly on his face, which was burning, aching, beginning to swell. The answering machine clicked on, it was Nola.

  "John? Are you there? Will you pick up the phone? Please." He stood very still, as if she might hear him. She was saying, pleading, "Will you call me as as you get home? The hearing has been adjourned until tomorrow morning, I'll be home in a half-hour. I need to speak with you. You're coming over tonight, aren't you? I'm so worried. Did he hurt you? What did he say to you? Will you go to a doctor? Please? I feel so responsible! Jordan has revealed himself now, in public, he's a desperate man, everyone can see what he is.

  A man like that, so out of control, demanding full custody of the children!

  The judge knows what happened and my lawyer is going to move that this suit be dropped, it's blatant blackmail, it's an act of cruelty, harassment.

  That bastard!" Nola paused, breathing quickly. "Oh, John--I you so much. But I don't know what to do." John winced, poking at his swelling eye.

  She wants me out of her life. Doesn't even know it yet.

  The message tape ran out, cutting Nola off abruptly. John hoped wouldn't call back.

  Since Leavey had initiated the custody suit, threatening to take the children from her, Nola had lost her good spirits, her wry sense of humor. She'd become, in a way, more feminine. But less a person.

  Calling John often, leaving messages on the machine. She clutched at him hiding her face against his chest--"I know! I'm a little crazy right now." Her pale skin exuded an air of frantic heat. Yet she was perpetually cold, shivering. She was susceptible to colds, sore throats, flu. Her pockets were comically crammed with used Kleenex, there were stiff little wads of beneath her bed pillow, littering the floor beside the bed in the morning.

  She moved like a sleepwalker, eyes open but unseeing. She'd had least one minor accident driving her car of which John was aware. When John didn't stay the night, she allowed Ellen and Drew in her bed, one on side of her, and their tabby cat Pretzel at her feet--"Protected like a fortress!" If John was late to arrive at her house, and John was often late, he'd her anxious and pacing, her forehead creased with worry. "I'm sorry. I can't help it. I wish you didn't ride that damned motorcycle." Where she'd rarely spoken of her marriage, except to say that she and Jordan had young, had respected each other at one time but had stopped loving one another, now she spoke of the marriage, and of Jordan, with bitterness.

  When they made love, in Nola's bed, sometimes in John's bed in trailer, what had been tender, sweet, piercingly lovely had become of an ordeal for them both. John seemed to see without wishing to see woman's delicate face contorted into a masklike expression of strain. Her skin turned slippery with sweat. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth in a savage grimace, her jaws were clenched and eyes tight. A woman straining for orgasm, like a woman straining to give birth--the ordeal was too private to be shared with another person.

  Even a lover.

  He remembered the evening he'd brought the palomino rocking horse for Nola's children. The look in their eyes. And in Nola's eyes.

  Like a flame coming up, the first rush of love. He'd gotten drunk that evening on a few beers, so excited, so deeply moved. Nola told him, "Once you children, you're no longer unique. You give up uniqueness' pretty quickly.

  You want to be ordinary, and you want to do the right thing. You want to good." John told her he'd never wanted anything much else than to be ordinary, and do the right thing, and be good--"The rest of it, whatever it is, is just bullshit, I think." His words were stammered, stuttered.

  He never could himself if he tried to think, it was like trying to write, to set down words on a page, sweating over a few sentences as he'd done in high school, tall lanky kid cramped in a desk, head bent to his examination bluebook and ballpoint pen clumsy in his fingers. They'd begun to make love knowing it, Nola's fingers trailing along his arm, Nola's liquidy yearning eyes turned up to his, Nola's mouth that seemed to him beautiful, against his, talking and laughing even as they kissed. He remembered being surprised at the smallness, lightness, delicacy of her body. Her small hard breasts pressed with such intimacy against his chest. How startling, and how sad--she was so thin, he felt her ribs against his outstretched fingers. He was fearful, almost, of hurting her. Kissing her, running his hands over her, how good it felt, how happy he was, Nola Leavey in his arms, a woman arms, like coming home.

  He felt a stab of love, of responsibility, guilt. But he didn't call Nola back, not that afternoon.

  Washed up, stuck a square flesh-colored bandage against his swollen eye, changed his clothes. Fed the mewing, anxious cats, who were semiwild barn cats, as many as eight of them, back of the trailer. Scattered across the ice-stippled ground for wild birds, and corn for wild deer. A of twelve white-tailed deer, does and yearling fawns, wintered in a nearby woods and were close to starving at this time of year. He whistled thinly through his teeth though his mouth was slightly swollen. His breath steamed, briskly about outside without a jacket. There was a curious pleasure in his throbbing face, his beaten face, blood quickened beneath the lacerated skin.

  It was a cold windy March day, now overcast, clouds like rippled gray concrete scudding across the sky from the north, above the lake. That sharp, I, metallic smell of snow. From the highest point of his property you could see, a mile to the north, a rim of pale, icy blue. Lake Ontario stretching to what could be seen of the horizon, large as an inland sea. He didn't want to leave this place but if forced, he would find another place beside another lake. For it seemed that he, John Heart, had fallen under the spell of the Glass Lake of which his grandfather had spoken with such stubborn passion.

  has demanded a Glass Ark! Beside a Glass Lake! My mission that be fulfilled. An afternoon of carpentry work awaited him in the barn. And he'd see Nola that evening, and stay the night with her, and possibly he wouldn't. Maybe that was why he felt so good. Whistling, smiling himself. Such moods swept upon him suddenly. He didn't question them, wasn't cynical about happiness. He recalled Grandpa Heart of the old reckless days, in Vegas--"When things are going to hell in a handbasket, and you're rushing right along in that basket, hooo-eee! A Heart will always feel B , , gooa.

  John laughed. The old bugger'd had the right idea.

  The first time John Heart lifted the. 45-caliber Colt revolver l one day be tagged the murder weupon in the shooting death of Riggs, Jr. , he was Johnny Heart, nine years old.

  "Go on, boy. Take er up. Time you learned to respect firearms.

  Heart, basking in the white winter-solstice sun of the Nevada desert, was in one of his good whisky moods. (He had bad whisky moods, too, in equal measure, but that's another story. ) He was filled at such times, he said, with the bounty of the Lord and wanted to share his happiness. His handsome ruin of a face was flushed with inspiration and love of grandchild. His eyes, netted with broken capillaries like cobwebs, shone. His big-knuckled hands had been steady enough that morning for a careful trim of his rakish white beard. Sometime the previous day at a private game in town Aaron Leander Heart had won an undisclosed amount of money with a stake of only $249--possibly as much, Dahlia had hinted, as $4, 000! Alre
ady he'd brought Dahlia an enormous bouquet- "To my Beloved Daughter"--and presents for the underfurnished house including a brass floor lamp with an American eagle icon and a full-sized refrigerator with a self-defrosting freezer to replace rattletrap midget refrigerator that was always breaking down and turning the children's cereal milk sour. And for the protection of the household, as he told solemnly, a smile of boyish excitement twitching at his lips, the metallicgray. 45-caliber Colt revolver to replace one he'd lost long ago.

  "Your momma's dealing blackiack till late tonight, she says. So let's go." Grandpa Heart slid the bulky revolver into an inside pocket of his rawhide jacket with a wink.

  Arroyo Seco, a narrow street, paved only in the downtown area of glittering casinos, high-rise hotels and neon-lit restaurants, disintegrated into gravel and red dust as it ran out into the desert. Grandfather and made their way up the street and across a railroad track and through a littered vacant lot to the edge of the desert. Their targets would be Coke and Coors cans, bottles, strips of metal. A Styrofoam slab, white, of the approximate size and shape of a human torso.