Borrowed Hearts

by Rick DeMarinis

  Louis ignored him. “I was in the Badlands. Don’t ask me how I got there. It was a dream. There had been a terrible drought. I hadn’t sold a tractor in over a month. A custom cutting crew brought their combines in from Kansas, took one look at the dead, empty land, and got mean drunk for a week. And then, all at once, I was up north, in the Badlands, alone. What am I doing here? I said to myself. I met a woman who called herself Mrs. Tree. She was big and fat. She didn’t know what I was doing there either. She lived in a mud-wall cabin. She said that she was responsible for the weather. She’d been sick. The wind had blown something bad into her ear. She couldn’t remember things. Like the patterns of her stones. She had to line up some stones, big round ones that she had to shove with her shoulder. Every day she had to line them up in a different pattern just so the weather would stay normal. But the bad thing that had been blown into her ear made her forget the patterns.”

  Louis took a swallow of beer. One Pipe was staring into his whiskey glass. He had a slightly disgusted look on his face. Louis paid him no attention. “So I told her,” Louis continued. “I said, ‘I can fix up your memory with a little bit of this tea here.’ I made her some and she drank it down. Her eyes lit up. ‘That’s real good,’ she said. T almost remember everything now.’ ‘Almost?’ I said. ‘There is one more thing,’ she said. She took off her dress and laid down in the dirt. ‘You have got to be my husband for a little while.’ There was a dangerous look in her black eyes, but at the moment she only seemed flirtatious and coy to me. So I piled on her and we were getting to it before long like a husband and wife.”

  “Take it easy, Louis,” Leonard said. “There’s mixed company here.”

  “Filthy lunatic,” said an elderly prim woman in a flaming-red wig.

  Louis ignored these protests. “But just as I reached the point of no return, I felt myself starting to shrink. At the same time, I got groggy and weak. Something was pulling me in, a powerful suction that had started to fold me in half, backward, at the hips. I mean to tell you that it came from her, that I was being sucked up into her, like the reverse of being bom. Everything went black and warm and I could hear her heart thudding over me someplace like a rhythmic thunder. I moved upward, sort of swimming, sort of flying, in the pitch-black dark. Then there was something in front of me. A big, hard-shelled bug of some kind, like a sow bug, only it was half as big as me. It blocked my path. ‘Kill it,’ said Mrs. Tree. I was real surprised that I was able to hear her voice. It was like she was behind me someplace, talking through a culvert. I picked the sow bug up in my hands and killed it easy enough, but it took a while and it stank something terrible. Then I felt myself falling. Down down down I went until I hit something soft and warm. Pressure like I never felt before pressed me from all sides. I was being squeezed down smaller and smaller. I wanted to cry out, but there was no air to be had. Then the light hit me again like the blast of an atomic bomb. I was out in the open air flat on the mud floor of her hut, covered with blood and crying. She had given birth to me. I was her baby.”

  “Will someone please call the police?” said the prim woman in the red wig.

  “When I was myself again,” Louis said, unbothered by the interruption, “Mrs. Tree said, ‘Thank you. You killed the thing that had gotten into my ear. I feel a lot better. I remember everything now.’ We crossed over to where her stones were kept and she shoved them around with her shoulders until they formed a pattern of X’s, circles, and stars. It was a lot of hard work and it took a long time. When she was done, she went into her mud hut and laid down to sleep. Pretty soon a big black cloud comes boiling out of Canada. ‘Going to hail,’ I said. Mrs. Tree pokes her head out of her hut and gives me a funny look. ‘Be quiet, you,’ she said. ‘I got to sleep. The weather is back to normal now.’ And sure enough, the white stuff starts jumping all around us, hail, big and lumpy. But something’s wrong with it. It isn’t exactly hail. After it hits the ground, it moves around and tries to sit up. I bend down to get a closer look. It’s the figure of a man. Millions of them. They are all pasty white and naked as day one. They can’t be alive, but they are. Half-alive anyway, and cold to the touch, cold as the hail I thought they were. You’d pick one of them up in your hand and he’d turn over and look at you with those sad icy-white eyes. There was no real energy in them. They seemed to be carved out of soft white soap. They didn’t have any mouths to speak of, and they didn’t have any assholes. You can’t get the medicine into them and you can’t get the poison out. They would just turn over and look at you with those miserable dead-cold icy-white eyes. They had little frosty mustaches and each one of them was holding on to a little glass of that sweet port. They made you want to puke. All they can do is think about how it used to be back in Minneapolis a hundred and ten years ago. I hollered into Mrs. Tree’s hut that it would be better to have the drought, but it was too late, she was dead to the world of ordinary people.”

  He told this story as a daily routine. The details of Louis’s dream would change, but it always ended with the little ice-cold men falling out of the cloud. I believed it was a real dream and that he’d just doctored it up a little so that it seemed to be especially about Roland Towne. Then one day, he told it while Lily and Roland were in the bar. Leonard looked like he expected trouble. The rest of us went on with business as usual. When Louis finished with the story, he stared directly at Roland. Roland nodded to him, amiable, and took a sip of his port. Lily was red as a turnip, having been insulted by the off-color dream and its outrageous ending. She had her big red purse with her, ready for action.

  Louis had something with him. It was a moth-eaten blanket with wheels and thunderbirds stitched on it. He walked over to the table where Lily and Roland were sitting. He took something out of a pouch he was carrying and sprinkled it in the air over Roland’s head. Then he unfolded the blanket and tossed it on top of Roland so that the old man was completely covered by it. Lily’s jaw dropped. She gave Louis a thud on the back with her purse. Louis mumbled a little hocus-pocus in a foreign language. Roland didn’t move. You could see his outline under the blanket. He was a cool old man. He let Louis ramble on. I saw the shape of his glass slide up the blanket as he raised it to his lips and then back down as he returned it to the table. He was drinking his sweet port as if nothing at all peculiar was happening. Louis took the blanket off with a big swooping yank. Roland’s white hair was mussed a little but he looked serene as ever if not slightly bored. He nodded to Louis, still amiable, and took another sip of his wine, his mind nine hundred and fifty miles dead east. Some people are like that. Something inside of them is solid as rock even though their exteriors seem frail and delicate. I had to give old Roland credit. Louis gave him too much credit, though. He stumbled backward, swallowing hard, as if Roland had leveled a Smith & Wesson.38 at his nose. I don’t know for sure, but I think Louis had tried to make the old accountant disappear. It didn’t work.

  Louis got desperate after that. He got an old Model T ignition coil from the junkyard and began to give himself strong electrical shocks with Art One Pipe’s reluctant help. These shocks were supposed to rejuvenate something that had gone dormant inside of him. When winter came, he stood for an hour in a blizzard without any clothes on, singing magical songs into the north wind. In the spring, he went on a diet of berries, bark, and roots. He slept in the skin of a grizzly killed eighty years ago by an Indian’s arrow. The Indian had broken some kind of spiritual law by killing the grizzly and the skin was said to be inhabited by an angry spirit. Louis wanted to strike a deal with this dark spirit.

  The dreams he had while sleeping in that skin led him to do things to himself that were painful and dangerous. He stuck long pins into his feet. He swallowed ordinary garden dirt, worms and all. He nearly blinded himself in the left eye with some kind of caustic. He dunked himself into the June rapids of the Sweetroot River and was swept downstream a mile before he could beach himself.

  He learned new songs and sayings all the way from Alaska. He made a tel
ephone call to North Africa and talked for an hour to a hostile bureaucrat who wouldn’t give him the information he wanted. He rode freight trains to the West Coast and drank salt-water out of the Pacific Ocean where two great currents met in a war of waves, and when he came back he set fire to everything he owned except his medicine bag and his house.

  He was thrown in jail again, let out, thrown back in again, forced to spend a couple of months in the state mental hospital, let out, and so on, in a battle between the authorities and Louis’s ever-widening circle of desperate actions.

  The town formed a committee to deal with the problem. He visited the committee meetings in white skins and paint on his face. He would sit in the back row, by himself, staring at the members of the committee without comment. One by one the committee members found strange-looking figures carved out of wood stuck into their front lawns. The chairman of the committee found a necklace of dead mice hung on his mailbox. But the committee members, all hardheaded businessmen, scoffed at Louis’s mumbo-jumbo. Once Louis brought his moth-eaten blanket to the committee meeting, threw some of that green dust into the air, sang something in a falsetto voice, waved the blanket, but if it was meant to make the committee disappear into thin air, it didn’t work. A couple of the members, though, came down with the flu shortly after that.

  Art One Pipe had long since gotten fed up with Louis and had left town. Lily filed for a divorce. She got it quick and without any catches. She married Roland Towne a few days later and they went back to Minneapolis, forever.

  Louis moved into an old mineshaft on a hill just south of town and was rarely seen anymore. People began to think of him as a harmless old hermit. They liked it that way. So long as he stayed up in his cave brooding, everybody was happy. Everybody got the idea that Louis had found his proper place in the world. “That crazy old hermit” is what you’d hear, always said with a kind of relief. And then all the old stories would take on a comic element. There had always been something awe-inspiring about Louis, but now people would chuckle and shake their heads remembering the funny side of his antics. Only a few of us remembered how it really was. Even some who had been given a cure for one thing or another would now tell you how most disease was really ninety percent in your head, anyway. “One cure is as good as the next if you believe in it, for the mind is the true healer.” Or, put another way: “If you think you’re sick, then by God you are sick, or soon will be.” One old fool who Louis had raised up out of a hospital bed argued, “It wasn’t my heart that was bad, it was my attitude.” A husband who had promised to give Louis a two-year-old Cadillac if he could help his wife said, “Hell, she wore that cancer like a glove. When she decided to take it off because she wasn’t getting any mileage off it anymore, off it came.” Louis got the Cadillac, but it had piston slap and the transmission was balky.

  After hearing this sort of talk one afternoon in Lucky’s, I jumped up and yelled, “You’re all ingrates and liars!” I danced a little old man’s war dance, holding a chair out in front of me like a weapon or a dance partner. “Look at me!” I said. “I had one foot in the grave all the way up to the hip before Louis came along!”

  But no one pays much attention to a white-haired seventy-year-old man doing a war dance with a chair. A few of them chuckled, and Leonard turned up the TV so that the baseball game would drown out my little commotion. An Indian woman named Nan Person came over to my table and sat down. She was about sixty years old, tall and angular. She had a fine long jaw but not many teeth in it. Her leathery hands were beautiful—slender and calm.

  “They only feel betrayed,” she said.

  “What?” I was still a little hot. I stared at her and she didn’t look away. “You don’t make sense,” I said.

  “They are mad at him for going crazy,” she said. “They feel like fools, having put their faith in a crazy man. Now they are proving to themselves that nothing ever happened to them.”

  That made me laugh. I touched Nan Person’s hand. “One thing is sure,” I said. “Nothing will ever happen to them again.”

  She laughed too, and I picked up her fine hand and kissed it.

  But another thing did happen to them. It was a Sunday afternoon, maybe as much as a year later. A few of us were sitting around having some muscatel. Nan Person, who had moved in with me, was holding my hand under the table. A love affair so late in life is an undreamed-of thing. But there it was, full-blown and real. A gift from nowhere for no good reason, but taken with gratitude and no questions asked. We never discussed it, Nan and me. It was there, in our eyes, a crazy thing that made us sweet and giddy.

  Something was in the air that day. I saw Nan shiver slightly, with that nervousness you feel before an important event. It was quiet. The quiet was inside of you and outside of you. I didn’t know I was holding my breath until I got dizzy. A few others were glancing at the doors every now and then. Leonard was sitting at the end of the bar where he kept the 12-gauge shotgun, pretending to read the newspaper. The TV set was on. A bullnecked preacher was hollering to beat hell into ten microphones. The sound was turned off, but the address of where you could send your money was being flashed across the bottom of the screen. Bullneck wasn’t taking any chances.

  I excused myself form the table to get a little air. The street was empty. It had rained hard earlier that day and everything was still wet and clean-looking. I was thinking how fine and permanent everything is in spite of all the individual comings and goings and the hoopla that goes with it, when a big hand touched me on the shoulder. It was Louis.

  “Must have been the Apple of Peru,” he said as if resuming a conversation we might have been having two or three years ago. I looked at him. He looked good. He was filled out and he had gotten himself a clean suit of ordinary clothes that almost fit. His hair was plastered down and his beard had been combed. My eyes must have been watery because he also seemed blurred around the edges, like an old photo that had seen too much sunlight. “Also known,” he went on, “as the angel’s trumpet, stinkweed, night-shade, and Jamestown weed. You may have heard the bastardized version, which is most popular in this neck of the woods. Jimson weed. That’s what it must have been.”

  I figured he meant for me to ask him what he was talking about, so I did.

  “I grew some,” he said, “up on that hill, among a lot of other things. I sang a number of serious lamentations, and I needed helpers. But living up there in that mineshaft aggravated my piles, and my gonads had begun to produce severe and regular aches. Apple of Peru is a good helper for such troubles.”

  I wiped the blur out of my eyes. He came into focus for a second; then his edges got threadbare again. “Have you come back down?” I asked.

  He didn’t say anything. He stroked his beard and looked up and down the street as if it were the first time he’d been on it. He seemed to be vibrating like a tuning fork. I don’t mean he was trembling as if he had the shakes after a killer binge. I just mean you couldn’t concentrate on his edges. “Let’s go have a drink,” he said. “I’ll tell you about it.”

  There was a general shamefaced welcoming commotion inside. Tables were shoved together and pitchers of beer were ordered. Leonard brought over a fresh bottle of Louis’s favorite whiskey. Louis poured himself a generous shot. He stared at the glass for a minute. We waited. Then he pushed it slowly away. “I’d better not,” he said, and everyone murmured something in an understanding way, since it was pretty clear that Louis had been dry for quite a while.

  “Apple of Peru,” he said. “That, and the fact that there’s a big deposit of pitchblende in that hill. It wasn’t hard to figure out what happened. At first, anyway. Then...”

  You could hear everyone suck air as Louis picked up the shot glass and sipped at it. “What the hell,” he said. “Spirits for the spirit, what’s the harm?”

  We didn’t ask him what he was talking about. But Nan heard something in his tone of voice, a change, that made her dig her long, slender fingers into my leg. She leaned on me and her
lanky body suddenly felt frail.

  “Apple of Peru,” Louis said again. “It has a characteristic way of getting down into your marrow. It probably had some pitchblende in it, too. I got real sick. But I got... healthy, too. Healthy in a way I’d never been.”

  He looked too tall all of a sudden. It was as if he were sitting on a pillow, giving him a few extra inches of height. A humming swarm of small white moths flew out of his left ear. I blinked and looked around to see if anyone else had seen them, but no one looked amazed. I took a long drink of wine.

  “Leeches,” Louis said, looking directly at me. He was smiling a little, as though we were sharing a private joke. A few people took offense at the remark and left the table, but they were the ones who had scoffed loudest at the memory of Louis’s cures.

  “Fever moved into me like a weather front,” Louis said, resuming his story. “I went into a coma, I think. I was way back in that mineshaft, wrapped in a tarp. I think I was unconscious for two or three days. It’s dark way back in a stope, darker than any night in the woods, and when I woke up... I would see a glow. It was coming from me, from my bones, from my blood, greenish-white, like I’d swallowed a quart of radium.”

  A round of throat clearing passed through Lucky’s. No one was willing to swallow this part of his story. Some chair legs scraped the floor as the doubters got ready to depart.

  “I was crazy for a while. I would run around the hillside, hollering and throwing myself down, flailing and kicking at imaginary beings. You could probably hear me all the way in town on a clear night. Once I tried to bite the moon, which had hooked itself onto my shoulder like a big cocklebur. It was trying to turn itself into a pair of wings. Owl wings. These were dreams and they were not dreams.”