Borrowed Hearts

by Rick DeMarinis

  “You look sort of funny,” she says. “Oblong. Or top-heavy.”

  “It’s the lens, ma’am. Fish-eye. It puts a bend in the world, but you get to see more of it that way.”

  Cobb stands up and makes a quick pencil mark on the door. “Right about here, I guess. What are you, ma’am, about five foot one?” She nods. “Husband gone most of the day? His work take him out of town a lot? You spend a lot of time alone?” She looks like a fading photograph of herself. Cobb stops his grin before it crawls into his lips. He raises the brace-and-bit, pauses just long enough to get her consent, which she gives by stepping backward a few inches and turning her head slightly to one side, a gesture of acquiescence, and Cobb scores the flimsy laminated wood with the tip of the bit and starts the hole, one inch in diameter, right on the pencil mark, level with her wide-open eyes. He leans on the brace and cranks. The wood is tract-house cheap, false-grain oak, hollow, so thin a child could kick a hole in it.

  To see how fast her door can be penetrated unsettles her and so Cobb tries to calm her down with a brief outline of the Charles V. Farrago success story. Rags to riches in the Home Security field. From shop mechanic to multimillionaire. From Cedar Rapids to Carmel By The Sea. The undisputed king of home surveillance devices. A genius by any standard. Cobb carries a photograph of Charles V. Farrago and promises to show it to the woman as soon as he drills out her door. In the photograph, taken some twenty or thirty years ago, Farrago has a big round head and a smile that goes two hands across with more teeth in it than seem possible. He has shrewd little eyes that preside above the smile like twin watchdogs.

  Cobb tells the woman other stories. He tells her about the woman, housewife like herself, who had oil of vitriol pumped up her nose through one of those old-fashioned door-peepers. Knock knock, and she opened the little peeper to see who was there and it was a de-gent. Splat. Blinded for life and horribly disfigured all for the want of a proper doorstep surveillance device. Blue crater where once was her nose, upper lip a leather flap, eyes milky clouds. The reason? No reason. There never is a reason. It was a prank. The de-gent chemistry student had seen Phantom of the Opera on TV. It was Halloween in Denver or Salt Lake or Omaha. A few years ago. He told the police: “I just had this big urge to melt a face, you know?”

  Cobb tells her the one about the naked de-gent who knocked on a peeper-less door and said, “Parcel Post!” He made love to his victim with a gardening tool right in front of her little kids. He left a red hoofprint on her shag carpet and that’s how the cops caught him; his right foot had only two toes and the print looked cloven, like it had been left by a goat. The Times called him “The Goatfoot Gasher.”

  The grumbling bit chews through the last laminations of veneer and Cobb reaches around the still-chained door to catch the curls of blond wood, which he puts into his shirt pocket. Do not leave an unsightly mess, says Jake the Distributor. Be neat as a pin. Cobb inserts the Cyclops gently and with a little sigh into the tight hole, then screws on the locking flange. “Let’s give it a try, ma’am,” he says.

  She closes the door and Cobb goes out to the sidewalk. He stands still long enough for her to get used to the odd shapes the fish-eye lens produces, then starts to move down the sidewalk in big sidesteps to the other extreme of her vision. He approaches the house on the oblique, crossing the lawn, dropping behind a shrub, reemerging on hands and knees, moving swiftly now like a Dirty Dozen commando toward the welcome mat. He knows what she is seeing, knows how the lens makes him look heavy through the middle, pin-headed, legs stubby, his shined shoes fat as seals, the mean unsmiling lips, the stumpy bulge at the apex of his fat thighs, the neighborhood curving around him like a psychopathic smirk.

  “It really works, ” she says, showing as much enthusiasm as she feels she can afford when Cobb reappears at the door, brushing off his knees and smiling like a helpful Scout. She slips a five-dollar bill through the cracked door and Cobb notices that it has been folded into a perfect square the size of a stamp.

  “Satisfaction fully guaranteed, ma’am,” he says, unfolding, meticulously, the bill. A fragrance, trapped in the bill for possibly years, makes his nostrils flare.

  Cobb winks and the woman allows herself a coo of gratitude. Turtle and mouse rapport, Cobb thinks, pleased. This is what you strive for, says Jake the Distributor. Cross the species lines. This is the hallmark of the true salesman. Make them think you are just like them, practically kin, though we know that this is basically laughable.

  This is Cobb’s tenth sale this morning. He keeps one dollar and fifteen cents out of every five. On good days he’ll sell fifty. But today won’t be a good day— for sales, at least. Too hot. He feels as if there’s this big unfair hand in the sky that’s been lowering all morning, pushing him down. He needs a break. He needs to cool off, wash up—a nice shower would do it—he needs to get out of his swampy shirt, air his pits and the steaming crotch of his slacks. He wants to use her john, but he knows her mouse heart will panic if he asks. Instead, he asks if he can use her phone. “Need to check in,” he explains, his voice decent, a fellow human being making a reasonable request, a finely honed act. She fades a bit, but she is not a swift thinker and can’t find a way to say no pleasantly. Cobb has his Eagle Scout glow turned up full blast. His boylike vulnerability is apparent in the bend of his spine, put there by the unfair bone-warping hand that presses down on him from the dirty sky, trying to make him crawl again, but he is through crawling today and is ready to lay claim to the small things of this world that should be his, but are not. The woman slides the chained bolt out of its slot and opens the door wide in jerky, indecisive increments.

  “Oh, lady,” he says, his voice relaxing now into its natural cadence. “You’re the angel of mercy in the flesh. Really.” Cobb, hard thin lips flexed in a triumphant V, walks in.

  Weeds

  A black helicopter flapped out of the morning sun and dumped its sweet orange mist on our land instead of the Parley farm where it was intended. It was weedkiller, something strong enough to wipe out leafy spurge, knapweed, and Canadian thistle, but it made us sick.

  My father had a fatal stroke a week after that first spraying. I couldn’t hold down solid food for nearly a month and went from 200 pounds to 170 in that time. Mama went to bed and slept for two days, and when she woke up she was not the same. She’d lost something of herself in that long sleep, and something that wasn’t herself had replaced it.

  Then it hit the animals. We didn’t have much in the way of animals, but one by one they dropped. The chickens, the geese, the two old mules—Doc and Rex—and last of all, our only cow, Miss Milky, who was more or less the family pet.

  Miss Milky was the only animal that didn’t outright up and die. She just got sick. There was blood in her milk and her milk was thin. Her teats got so tender and brittle that she would try to mash me against the milk stall wall when I pulled at them. The white part of her eyes looked like fresh meat. Her piss was so strong that the green grass wherever she stood died off. She got so bound up that when she’d lift her tail and bend with strain, only one black apple would drop. Her breath took on a burning sulfurous stink that would make you step back.

  She also went crazy. She’d stare at me like she all at once had a desperate human mind and had never seen me before. Then she’d act as if she wanted to slip a horn under my ribs and peg me to the barns. She would drop her head and charge, blowing like a randy bull, and I would have to scramble out of the way. Several times I saw her gnaw on her hooves or stand stock-still in water up to her blistered teats. Or she would walk backward all day long, mewling like a lost cat that had been dropped off in a strange place. That mewling was enough to make you want to clap a set of noise dampers on your ears. The awful sound led Mama to say this: “It’s the death song of the land, mark my words.”

  Mama never talked like that before in her life. She’d always been a cheerful woman who could never see the bad part of anything that was at least fifty percent good. But now she was
dark and careful as a gypsy. She would have spells of derangement during which she’d make noises like a wild animal, or she’d play the part of another person—the sort of person she’d normally have nothing to do with at all. At Daddy’s funeral she got dressed up in an old and tattered evening gown the color of beet juice, her face painted and powdered like that of a barfly. And while the preacher told the onlookers what a fine man Daddy had been, Mama cupped her hands under her breasts and lifted them high, as if offering to appease a dangerous stranger. Then, ducking her head, she chortled, “Loo, loo, loo,” her scared eyes scanning the trees for owls.

  I was twenty-eight years old and my life had come to nothing. I’d had a girl but I’d lost her through neglect and a careless attitude that had spilled over into my personal life, souring it. I had no ambition to make something worthwhile of myself and it nettled her. Toward the end she began to parrot her mother: “You need to get yourself established, Jack,” she would say. But I didn’t want to get myself established. I was getting poorer and more aimless day by day. I supposed she believed that “getting established” would put a stop to my downhill slide but I had no desire to do whatever it took to accomplish that.

  Shortly after Daddy died, the tax man came to our door with a paper in his hand. “Inheritance tax,” he said, handing me the paper.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “It’s the law,” he said. “Your father died, you see. And that’s going to cost you some. You should have made better plans.” He tapped his forehead with his finger and winked. He had a way of expressing himself that made me think he was country born and raised but wanted to seem citified. Or maybe it was the other way around.

  “I don’t understand this,” I mumbled. I felt the weight of a world I’d so far been able to avoid. It was out there, tight-assed and squinty-eyed, and it knew to the dollar and dime what it needed to keep itself in business.

  “Simple,” he said. “Pay or move off. The government is the government and it can’t bend a rule to accommodate the confused. It’s your decision. Pay, or the next step is litigation.”

  He smiled when he said good-bye. I closed the door against the weight of his smile, which was the weight of the world. I went to a window and watched him head back to his government green car. The window was open and I could hear him. He was singing loudly in a fine tenor voice. He raised his right hand to hush an invisible audience that had broken into uncontrolled applause. I could still hear him singing as he slipped the car into gear and idled away. He was singing “Red River Valley.”

  Even though the farm was all ours, paid up in full, we had to give the government $7,000 for the right to stay on it. The singing tax man said we had inherited the land from my father, and the law was sharp on the subject.

  I didn’t know where the money was going to come from. I didn’t talk it over with Mama because even in her better moments she would talk in riddles. To a simple question such as, “Should I paint the barns this year, Mama?” she might answer, “I’ve no eyes for glitter, nor ears for their ridicule.”

  One day I decided to load Miss Milky into the stock trailer and haul her into Saddle Butte, where the vet, Doc Nevers, had his office. Normally, Doc Nevers would come out to your place but he’d heard about the spraying that was going on and said he wouldn’t come within three miles of our property until they were done.

  The Parley farm was being sprayed regularly, for they grew an awful lot of wheat and almost as much corn and they had the biggest haying operation in the county. Often the helicopters they used were upwind from us and we were sprayed too. (“Don’t complain,” said Big Pete Parley when I called him up about it. “Think of it this way—you’re getting your place weeded for free!” When I said I might have to dynamite some stumps on the property line and that he might get a barn or two blown away for free, he just laughed like hell, as if I had told one of the funniest jokes he’d ever heard.)

  There was a good windbreak between our places, a thick grove of lombardy poplars, but the orange mist, sweet as a flower garden in spring bloom, sifted through the trees and settled on our field. Soon the poplars were mottled and dying. Some branches curled in an upward twist, as if flexed in pain, and others became soft and fibrous as if the wood were trying to turn itself into sponge.

  With Miss Milky in the trailer, I sat in the truck sipping on a pint of Lewis and Clark bourbon and looking out across our unplanted fields. It was late—almost too late—to plant anything. Mama, in the state she was in, hadn’t even noticed.

  In the low hills on the north side of the property, some ugly-looking things were growing. From the truck they looked like white pimples on the smooth brown hill. Up close they were big as melons. They were some kind of fungus and they pushed up through the ground like the bald heads of fat babies. They gave off a rotten meat stink. I would get chillbumps just looking at them and if I touched one my stomach would rise. The bulbous heads had purple streaks on them that looked like blood vessels. I half expected to one day see human eyes clear the dirt and open. Big pale eyes that would see me and carry my image down to their deepest root. I was glad they seemed to prefer the hillside and bench and not the bottom land.

  Justified or not, I blamed the growth of this fungus on the poison spray, just as I blamed it for the death of my father, the loss of our animals, and the strangeness of my mother. Now the land itself was becoming strange. And I thought, what about me? How am I being rearranged by that weedkiller?

  I guess I should have gotten mad, but I didn’t. Maybe I had been changed by the spray. Where once I had been a quick-to-take-offense hothead, I was now docile and thoughtful. I could sit on a stump and think for hours, enjoying the slow and complicated intertwinings of my own thoughts. Even though I felt sure the cause of all our troubles had fallen out of the sky, I would hold arguments with myself, as if there were always two sides to every question. If I said to myself, “Big Pete Parley has poisoned my family and farm and my father is dead because of it,” I would follow it up with, “But Daddy was old anyway, past seventy-five and he always had high blood pressure. Anything could have touched off his stroke, from a wasp bite to a sonic boom.”

  “And what about Mama?” I would ask. “Senile with grief,” came the quick answer. “Furthermore, Daddy himself used poison in his time. Cyanide traps for coyotes, DDT for mosquito larvae, arsenic for rats.”

  My mind was always doubling back on itself in this way and it would often leave me standing motionless in a field for hours, paralyzed with indecision, sighing like a moonstruck girl of twelve. I imagined myself mistaken by passers-by for a scarecrow.

  Sometimes I saw myself as a human weed, useless to other people in general and maybe harmful in some weedy way. The notion wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Jack Hucklebone: a weed among the well-established money crops of life.

  On my way to town with Miss Milky, I crossed over the irrigation ditch my father had fallen into with the stroke that killed him. I pulled over onto the shoulder and switched off the engine. It was a warm, insect-loud day in early June. A spray of grasshoppers clattered over the hood of the truck. June bugs ticked past the windows like little flying clocks. The thirteen-year locusts were back and raising a whirring hell. I was fifteen the last time they came but I didn’t remember them arriving in such numbers. I expected more helicopters to come flapping over with special sprays meant just for them, even though they would be around for only a few weeks and the damage they would do is not much more than measurable. But anything that looks like it might have an appetite for a money crop brings down the spraying choppers. I climbed out of the truck and looked up into the bright air. A lone jet, eastbound, too high to see or hear, left its neat chalk line across the top of the sky. The sky itself was hot blue wax, north to south. A fat hammerhead squatted on the west horizon. It looked like a creamy oblong planet that had slipped its orbit and was now endangering the earth.

  There’s where Daddy died. Up the ditch about fifty yards from here. I found him, b
uckled, white as paper, half under water. His one good eye, his right (he’d lost the left one thirty years ago when a tractor tire blew up in his face as he was filling it), was above water and wide open, staring at his hand as if it could focus on the thing it gripped. He was holding on to a root. He had big hands, strong, with fingers like thick hardwood dowels, but now they were soft and puffy, like the hands of a giant baby. Water bugs raced against the current toward him. His body blocked the ditch and little eddies swirled around it. The water bugs skated into the eddies and, fighting to hold themselves still in the roiling current, touched his face. They held still long enough to satisfy their curiosity, then slid back into the circular flow as if bemused by the strangeness of dead human flesh.

  I started to cry, remembering it, thinking about him in the water, he had been so sure and strong, but then—true to my changed nature—I began to laugh at the memory, for his wide blue eye had had a puzzled cast to it, as if it had never before seen such an oddity as the ordinary root in his forceless hand. It was an expression he never wore in life.

  “It was only a weed, Daddy,” I said, wiping the tears from my face.

  The amazed puzzlement stayed in his eye until I brushed down the lid.

  Of course he had been dead beyond all talk and puzzlement. Dead when I found him, dead for hours, bloated dead. And this is how I’ve come to be— blame the spray or don’t: The chores don’t get done on time, the unplanted fields wait, Mama wanders in her mind, and yet I’ll sit in the shade of my truck sipping on Lewis and Clark bourbon, inventing the thoughts of a dead man.

  Time bent away from me like a tail-dancing rainbow. It was about to slip the hook. I wasn’t trying to hold it. Try to hold it and it gets all the more slippery. Try to let it go and it sticks like a cocklebur to cotton. I was drifting somewhere between the two kinds of not trying: not trying to hold anything, not trying to let anything go.