Give Me Your Heart

by Joyce Carol Oates

  And so this was not a dream. If not a dream, there could be no escape. Jess was holding the girl tightly, to calm her. For the girl had begun to squirm, writhe, kick. Savagely she kicked at the car dashboard was if she'd have liked to smash it. Kicked at the windshield as if she'd have liked to smash it, but Jess prevented her in time. "Damn you! Goddamn you, stop!" Hot breaths in each other's faces, they were struggling together. Jess could not comprehend what was happening, why the girl had turned against him. And now suddenly clambering over him, a little wildcat digging her claws into him, laughing, straddling him awkwardly as he sat behind the wheel, her thighs bare be neath the stained dress. To his surprise, he saw that her wax-pale little-girl thighs were smeared with blood. So she had been injured, and had kept her injury from him, bleeding from a secret wound between her legs, and now there were blood smears on his trousers, and on the leather seats of the Audi; the front of the girl's sweatshirt was smeared with blood, and one of the cuffs soaked in dark blood. Furiously Jess thought, Her blood will be all over me. That will be the most damning evidence. With a part of his mind cunning and furtive and detached from their frantic struggle Jess calculated how he might clean himself of the girl's blood, where he might shower, in safety, in utter privacy, if for instance he could arrive home at the house on Fairway Drive overlooking the golf course in North Hills, if he could slip into the rear of the house without anyone noticing and quickly ascend to his room on the second floor; in a swoon of relief and gratitude he would enter his room, his boyhood room, the room he had come to despise by the time he'd left for college but the room that seemed to him now, in retrospect, a place of sanctuary, and if he could shower in his bathroom undetected and undisturbed he would cleanse himself thoroughly of the girl's blood, dark blood coagulated between his fingernails and in snarls in his hair, a difficult time he would have shampooing his hair and combing the snarls out of his hair but he was determined, and he would take away the soiled clothing, the stained and incriminating clothing including underwear and socks, all of his clothing contaminated by the girl's blood; he would destroy this evidence, somewhere—unable to calculate, in the exigency of this moment, in the front seat of the Audi, struggling with the uncannily strong girl, exactly how he would destroy it, for his heartbeat had doubled, tripled, as if he were approaching orgasm and helpless to turn back. The girl cried, "Bad! Bad! Bad! Bad!" like a crazed bird, striking at Jess with hard little fists. Or was the girl laughing at Jess? Teasing, taunting? Was this a trick? For as Jess pushed the girl away the girl bobbed back at him, laugh ing, grinning into his appalled face, pushing boldly into his arms and again straddling his thighs, pressing and wriggling against him where he'd become aroused, helpless to stop her. For Jess didn't want to hurt her. Jess knew that he must not hurt her. Except to protect himself, he must not use force on the child, though clearly this child was older than he'd originally thought, older than nine years and very likely an adolescent girl, a dwarf female, small and stunted and with a flat chest, rounded little tummy, and no hips, soft-muscled upper arms and thighs, an angular face and those glittering blue eyes. "Bad! Bad!" she was panting. Jess managed to push the girl aside and continued driving, not knowing what else to do; the Audi was weaving on the road, must've been that Jess had taken another wrong turn, for the road appeared to be narrowing, the road was deserted and dark except for the Audi's lurching headlights, yet the girl had lowered the window beside the passenger's seat to call out, in a plaintive child-voice, "Help! Help me! He hurt me! Bad man hurt me!" Jess protested, reaching for her, had to stop her, wrestled her away from the window, trying to clamp his hand over her mouth, trying to grip her head in the crook of his arm as in a vise, but another time the girl kicked and writhed and bit at his hand, managing to slip from him and open the door and scramble outside. Jess cursed and braked the Audi, left the key in the ignition to follow after the girl, who ran screaming into a field, following a faint path in the direction of a landfill, or a dump; Jess's nostrils pinched at the smell of something burning, a gar-bagey-rubbery odor, he entered a clearing to see human shapes, derelicts beneath a makeshift shelter huddling together over a small smoldering fire. The girl ran screaming toward them, with Jess close behind her, a large whiskery man in army fatigues paused in the act of lifting a bottle to his mouth to shout at Jess and lurch to his feet; two other men roused themselves, advancing threateningly against Jess and giving him no opportunity to explain himself or the situation. So abruptly were the men strug gling with Jess, cursing, striking, and pummeling him, Jess was taken by surprise, backing away and shielding his head with his arms; one of the derelicts struck Jess repeatedly with a broken umbrella, the skeletal remains of an umbrella, the staves raked his face, Jess snatched it from the man and struck him over the head with it: "Damn you, I'll kill you!" As Jess struggled with the derelicts, the girl escaped; Jess broke away from the men, stumbling after her; for nothing mattered except the little girl in the bloodstained clothes, who would make such terrible accusations against Jess. The derelicts shouted after him but didn't pursue him as Jess tramped through a scrubby woods, now it was nearly night and the icy rain had turned to sleet, panting and miserable Jess found himself on a hill above a four-lane highway, the interstate he'd unwisely exited from what seemed like a very long time ago yet could not have been more than an hour ago. The girl was somewhere ahead; Jess had no choice but to follow, now stumbling down a steep hill, and seeing ahead the small furtive figure of the child, the little demon-girl who'd left her blood in his car and on his person, there she was limping in the direction of an enormous tractor-trailer truck parked on the shoulder of the highway with its engine running. The driver would be sleeping inside and the girl was determined to wake him, Jess had to stop her before she got to the truck to scream for help; he managed to catch up with her, grabbing her, clamping a hand over her mouth before she could scream, whispering, "Stop! Please! You know I didn't hurt you! I am not the one who hurt you!" Jess pleaded but the girl didn't cease her struggling. He saw that her cotton dress was not only bloodstained but torn, she was naked beneath it, her hairless little vagina was bleeding, her legs sticky with blood, fresh blood leaked from her nose and her mouth where one of her front teeth appeared to be loosened. The girl must have done this to herself, for Jess was not responsible. Jess would plead, I didn't want to do any of this, I was left no choice.

  Traffic thundered by on the highway, yet no one seemed to notice the struggle at the side of the road. Though it was night, reflected light from the highway made the surrounding area visible as if by moonlight, where Jess was dragging the girl into the underbrush, panting and grunting he managed to drag her into a clearing where he could restrain her, try to reason with her, they were in a picnic area beside the highway, there were tables, benches, the ground was littered, Jess had to press his hand hard over the girl's mouth to muffle her cries, like a maddened cat she fought him and so Jess had no choice but to straddle her, hold her down with his weight, squeezing her between his knees, Jess must have weighed one hundred pounds more than the girl yet was having trouble restraining her for there was an unearthly strength in her little body. He thought, If there is snow now it will cover her, but he felt little solace, for in the spring, or in another day or two, the snow would melt. In his hand was a chunk of concrete. He lifted it, and he struck with it, and he felt the child-skull crack. The child-skull was composed of soft bones that could not withstand an adult's blows. Blood rushed from a wound in the girl's scalp, an alarming cascade of blood. For head wounds are the bloodiest of wounds. The girl kicked more feebly now, shuddered, moaned and went limp. Her angular little doll-face had grown slack, her eyes were open and staring and empty now of their demonic fury. Jess thought of giving the girl artificial respiration for he'd learned the rudiments of first aid in high school but he dared not press his mouth against the girl's open bloodied mouth as he could not bring himself to lift the girl's torn and bloodied dress to examine her wound, but instead pulled it down over her thighs a
s far as it would go. Who had dressed such a small child in such inappropriate clothes, a thin cotton dress, a sweatshirt of some coarse cheap fabric, and no socks, only just sneakers on the child's bare feet? The girl's parents were to blame. Jess was not to blame. Jess had wanted to help, and Jess's help had gone wrong. He was arguing his case, staggering to his feet in utter exhaustion. What now? What came next? He would try to remember: he covered the girl with leaves, lifting leaves in his clumsy hands, and he located a strip of rotted tarpaulin and dragged it to the limp little body and covered it. Jess then stumbled away to search for his car. Trying to retrace his footsteps through the woods. Shrewdly he was drawn by the smell of a smoldering fire, and at the dump there was the derelicts' makeshift shelter, but the derelicts were nowhere in sight. Jess made his way along a faint path, stumbling and limping and sobbing, and there, as if waiting for him, was a police cruiser, a vehicle with a red light on its roof, parked close by Jess's Audi, which looked as if it had skidded partway into a ditch; the derelicts were speaking with two uniformed police officers, these were New Jersey state troopers examining Jess's car, already they'd discovered the front seats smeared with blood and one of them was shining a flashlight into the opened trunk; by this time it was too late for Jess to turn and flee back into the woods for the state troopers had seen him and were shouting at him to come forward, lift both hands in the air they were shouting, their guns were drawn, Jess hesitated, wondering if he should try to run anyway, back into the woods where there might be a burrow he could hide in, headfirst in a burrow in some dark sheltering place, even as the state troopers continued to shout at him, advancing upon him with their drawn guns like a TV cop show of the kind Jess never watched any longer, shouting, "On the ground, son. On the ground."

  Vena Cava

  Love you! they'd said.

  Love you so much! they'd said to him, So happy to have you back with us thank God.

  There were fierce hugs, kisses. Hot searing kisses of the kind to leave scars. He was in the midst of the hugs, choked for breath. He was in the midst of their fierce love, observing himself from a distance of approximately fifteen feet—the far side of the room beside the Christmas tree—noting how salt tears sprang from his mangled eyes and ran down the skin grafts of his cheeks like rainwater in rivulets eroding hard-packed red earth. Love you, Dennie, was said to him, Thank God home from that terrible place those terrible people like animals.

  They did not call him Lance Corporal here. All that was left behind.

  Who they'd hired to play him was winking at him over the heads of—who these were—"family," their names were known to him as his name was known to them, except in the excitement the names were like coins in his pockets he'd grope for, through holes in fabric they'd fallen down inside the lining of his jacket, not lost exactly but he couldn't get to the damned coins, not without ripping more fabric.

  His voice was raw and lurching. Wait! I'm over here. This is Dennie here.

  Except the actor or whoever it was had taken his place. So the Lance Corporal got drunk, sullen in a corner of the bright-lit living room beside the Christmas tree they'd been saving, they said, till he could see it. Not a real tree like you'd cut down in the woods but a Wal-Mart tree, "syntheesic," some soft white fluffy material like fur, shiny red bulbs that sent slivers of light like glass to hurt the eyes and a sparkle angel at the top—one of the fat women smelling of her body was earnestly explaining to the Lance Corporal tearing sparkle wrapping paper from a present to reveal to him plaid flannel pajamas. See Dennie, we waited.

  We knew! You'd be back.

  We knew! We prayed! We prayed so hard!

  It was a long time since he'd been hugged like this. Kissed and clawed at and tears splotching his shirt front and the fly of his khakis. He had to resist the wish to fend them off.

  The Lance Corporal wasn't sure if he was hearing these people speak to him directly or if the words were being channeled/monitored through the titanium implant in his (right) inner ear/cochlea. For it did seem to be—he had to concede—if he could not see the mouth, or if the mouth was contorted or mumbling, or a soft sunken mouth lost in fatty jowl ridges or obscured by straggly whiskers, he could not decipher the words and he was left resentful and anxious and alert to being mocked.

  He was the sole bearer of the title Lance Corporal in all of Yelling County, North Dakota. He had served three tours of duty in the war. He had been honorably discharged. You can bet his hometown was damned proud of him.

  By a special request of the Lance Corporal's family the local media was to respect his privacy. There would be no front-page photographs in the Ashtree Junction Gazette or on local TV. He had the ID on his (left) wrist. He had the dog tags. If he'd been shipped here this must be the address they had for him, in their records. Another proof of identity was, the Lance Corporal had been driven past the old high school on their way to the house. In his mangled right eye the Lance Corporal had been ingeniously fitted with an interocular implant lens of plastic guaranteed to withstand melting at temperatures below 1000 degrees Fahrenheit and through this minuscule lens the Lance Corporal saw vividly and in quivering color. Not just the crummy sandstone facade of the high school they'd all gone to but beyond the high school the gouged mountains and the abandoned blast pits and the open-pit mine filled with red-glowering dark water they'd all gone swimming in—these "familiar sights" were glossy and one-dimensional like magazine illustrations. What the hell, the Lance Corporal said. That's really something, the Lance Corporal said uneasily, and Mack who was the Lieutenant's (older) brother said, Yeah, Den, thought you'd like a little detour.

  There was a test here, the Lance Corporal supposed. One of them instructing, Shut your eyes son. Tell me am I lifting your arm or lowering it, and he'd concentrated with all his strength, not wanting to give in, to peek through his eyelashes, saying firmly, Lifting. And the doctor—if it was a doctor—said, And now what am I doing, lifting or lowering, and he'd said less firmly, Lowering. No—lifting.

  Later he'd realized it was a trick: whoever it was had only been taunting him, neither lifting nor lowering his arm as there'd been the trick with the pin in his big toe—was it pricking? Or not? Or—which toe? The Lieutenant's feet were obscured from him, he couldn't have cheated if he'd wished to cheat.

  So at the high school, some kind of vision test. Or the high school had been physically altered, repainted (but subtly, in a color near identical to the old) or (more ingenious yet) the building he'd been taken to see had not been crummy Ashtree Junction High they'd all gone to but an entirely different building on a different street; as the gouged mountains in the near distance hadn't been the old familiar Humpbacks mined to exhaustion by Delphic Ore, Inc., but photo-projection of some kind, triggered into "virtual" existence by the approach of the Lance Corporal's brother's Bronco pickup. So shrewd was the Lance Corporal, he'd conned his brother into believing that he had been taken in by these tricks, he'd reacted exactly as a normal returning vet would react in such circumstances.

  So long as the Lance Corporal took his meds. In particular the chalky-white Zomix tabs. And the red-jelly capsules that went down smoothest with cold Coors.

  Dennie, look at you! Oh, honey.

  They were proud of him. The females wiped at their eyes. The men tried not to stare. Noisily they passed around the medals, the citations. The stained and dog-eared photos. The Lance Corporal hoped to hell the animal-head photos weren't in that batch.

  There was Maudie, his young wife. He'd been crazy for her in high school. There was Sadie, and there was Bessie, and there was Momma-Jeanne, and there was Grandma-Jeanne, sag-faced teary women in puff perms to make their small heads appear larger on their bulky bodies in J.C. Penney stretch Orlon pantsuits observed from the rear you could not easily distinguish between those fat asses.

  There was his brother Mack. Or whoever they'd gotten to play Mack—shit-colored goatee, hair beginning to thin at the crown of his head, the identical Harley-Davidson cap he'd been wear
ing since the Lance Corporal had seen him last, as if the Lance Corporal even with a steel plate in his (shaved) head was such an asshole to fall for that. There was the old man with the sour sag-face splotched with liver spots like dirty rainwater. There were his uncles. His brother-in-law with the beer gut. Guys from Ashtree High he'd swear were dead, like him. Blown up like him. But he'd been the Jokester and a Jokester doesn't stay dead.

  Daddy! Dad-dy!

  Trembling little four-year-old kid scared to death of the Lance Corporal, blinking in awe and fear of the Lance Corporal's skin-graft face and glaring plastic eye and the shaved head with the glinting steel plate in like a sliding slot of bluish hue. Poor pathetic kid sucking his snot forefinger urged by the shiny-faced woman with the great-looking boobs falling out of a scoop-neck peach-color Orlon sweater sprinkled with seed pearls—this wasn't Maudie, was it? This was the other one, not Maudie Skedd he'd been crazy for. But the one who'd been so sweet to the Lance Corporal after he'd been ditched by Maudie. The one who seemed to know a lot about him, laughing and excited in a way to put Momma-Jeanne's nose out of joint, the Lance Corporal knew. This one was so hot, she displayed her wifely right to touch the Lance Corporal, kiss him wetly and streak his graft-skin face with lipstick to prove I am not disgusted or revulsed, I am the most loving wife as I am the most faithful wife and a damned devoted mother. Many times in the course of the afternoon this one confirmed her wife status by running her red-painted plastic fingernails along the Lance Corporal's shivery neck, along his wasted arms and along his wasted thighs, and by whispering in his ear to provoke him to bare his teeth in a slow smile. Saying Dennie Junior had not seen his Dad-dy in XXX months and every night he'd prayed for his Dad-dy and been such a good little boy, his Dad-dy had come home at last and forever.