Borrowed Hearts

by Rick DeMarinis

  We’re heading, in our roundabout way, for Tucson, normally a five-hour trek from El Paso, where we live. The sandstorms have raised cubic miles of desert, turning it into coastal fog. Our running lights are on and we’ve slowed to forty and the wind is making the big Blazer rock and roll. Hart is feeling the strain, having just undergone his first series of radiation treatments, which he found entertaining. (“Star Wars, troops. They levitate you into the center of a big dome where smart machines that know your body better than you do sniff out and then zap the intruders.”) I have offered to drive, but no one drives the Blazer except Hart. He loves this truck as a settler might have loved his big-bore buffalo gun, his horse, or his quarter section of homestead bottomland. And so it’s decided: We’ll turn off at exit 331, get on U.S. 666, and head for my widowed mother’s adobe hacienda in Paraiso, Arizona, where Death left his stain and dull gloom not long ago.

  It is late afternoon when we pull into her driveway, and Mom—Sada—is already in her cups. She’s been working all morning on Storm over the Dragoons, a six-by-three-foot oil painting, and now is drinking ruby port to unwind. Painting has helped fill in the gaps left by the removal of Lenny Burbek, her husband for the last twenty-six years. Cancer got him, too.

  Sada pours wine for us at her kitchen table. The house smells of oil paint, even though her studio is out in the attached garage. “Hart, you look fer shit,” she says. Sada, at eight-two, has dispensed with all the social delicacies.

  “Fer shit is an improvement over yesterday,” Hart says, holding the cup of ruby port but not drinking. The road beers have already given him grief. Alcohol, mixed with the tumor-poisoning chemicals circulating in his system, makes him sick. He’s got a tumor in his liver, too, and his liver won’t forgive and forget. Hart puts the wine down and takes a picture of Sada. She is a mask of fierce wrinkles and looks more like an old Navajo or Apache squaw than the immigrant Scandinavian that she is. Hart has this theory: The land eventually has its way with us. Live in this desert long enough and sun, wind, sand, and thirsty air will eventually give a native shape to your clay, just as thirty years in Oslo will fade, elasticize, and plump up the austere skin of an Apache. The land works us like a craftsman works maple or oak. Ultimately, the tools and strategies of the craftsman overcome the proud immutability of any hardwood. The land owns us, not vice versa, the current triumph of the capitalist Zeitgeist notwithstanding. This is Hart’s pet idea. The land owns us and we had better treat it with the proper deference. You can see it in his prints. It is often the text and always the subtext of his poems. “We all need a pet idea,” Hart says, “even if it’s a stupid one. Even a stupid idea, pursued long enough with enough dedication, so that all its dead ends are discovered, will lead you to the same place as a nifty one.” We don’t ask Hart what or where that place is. We act like we know, and maybe we almost do. “Besides,” Hart says, “ideas are ultimately wrong anyway.”

  Sada fixes her favorite dish that night, linguini with clam sauce, along with big prawns from Puerto Peñasco, down on the Sea of Cortez. Tyrell Lofton, Sada’s boyfriend, eats with us. Tyreli is a West Virginia mountain man bent on turning his piece of Paraiso into mountaineer country. He’s planted black walnut trees, tulip trees, and a variety of conifers, and has a fecund greenhouse that produces several tons of winter tomatoes. He dreams of building a small still— a genetic mandate. And his house, made of scrap wood, has been half built for twenty years. He’s a lean, hard-knuckled seventy-five-year-old widower who also has the weathered Apache look. As we eat, I can tell Hart is planning photography sessions with Tyreli and Sada, for no one we know proves his pet idea better than these two.

  After dinner, Sada begins to fidget around. She wants to go dancing. “Have you kids been to the Duck Inn?” she asks coyly. The Duck Inn is a little geezer saloon that caters to the population of Paraiso. “They’ve got a terrific little band there. The ex-sheriff of Tombstone owns the place. He’s also the bandleader.”

  Sada was a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies and there is no quit in her. Her bottle-blond hair is startling above her brown, massively grooved, big-cheeked, purse-leather face. “I think we’ll pass, Mom,” I say.

  She scoffs. “Don’t be an old fart, sonny, you’re not even fifty yet. Come on, we’ll have a few laughs.”

  Tyrell, who always has a twinkle in his faded blue eyes, says, “Goodness me, I don’t think they ever had four professors in the Duck Inn all at once.” Tyrell is quick to spot the potential fun in a given situation, but his remarks are never mean or sour. According to Tyrell, it’s okay to take the light view of humanity, since only trees have honest-to-God dignity. It’s his pet idea.

  “Hart doesn’t feel up to it,” I say.

  “The hell I don’t,” Hart says, his face drawn, his jaw tight enough to reflect light.

  And so we all walk to the bar, surrounded by black night and the thousand unblinking stars of this high desert. Hart amazes me, plodding along, one painful step after another, Rocky hanging on his arm. What amazes me is his placid indifference to the Big Change coming his way, his refusal to let it become the major dramatic event of the season. And then I think of his pet idea, and how the desert might shape a body for pain, too. The Apaches took pain in stride, even sought it out as a measuring stick of their individual worth. The deserts of the Near East have produced prophetic pain-seekers for thousands of years. Jesus, destined for pain, did not pile up annuities or build Alpine retreats to hide himself from it. Blood and sand are the primary colors of the desert. The agonies of crucifixion are storming in Hart’s bones and guts, but he won’t let us in on this internal secret. I am reminded of Sada’s third and last husband, Lenny (another de facto Apache), settling into his easy chair gingerly, as if some wickedness had turned his burly, ex-ironworker’s frame into crystal stemware. Lenny and his pal from down the street, also dying of cancer, would sit in their bathrobes and watch the Playboy channel for hours at a time, sampling each other’s painkillers. There they were—two old men, all the vigor of their lives sucked into the unappeasable black hole of cancer—denying the sex-hating Intruder by watching the rosy, pile-driving rumps of fornicating youths hour after hour, snacking on chips and queso, washing down opiates and tranks with beer, giving a thin cheer now and then to the gymnastic skills of the actors. Lenny died in bed pushing himself up to a sitting position while insisting that he felt much, much better.

  Paraiso is not exactly a retirement village, though most of the residents are retired. There are a few younger people who commute the ninety miles to Tucson to work. They live here because real estate costs half as much and because the air is about as clean as late-twentieth-century American air can get. A few of these people are in the Duck Inn, dancing and carrying on. Sada knows them all and shouts their names. She backs her straight shots of vodka with draft beer and she has a what-the-hell look in her eyes. Soon she is up on her feet, dancing alone among the younger folk, holding her peasant skirts up over her old hardscrabble knees and yelling, “Yippee, son of a bitch, yippee!” while her carpet slippers flap. Then Tyreli leaps up, his wide pale eyes almost glassy, and does a solo mountaineer buckdance which no one challenges. Rocky is laughing her choppy, nicotine-stained laugh, and Hart, though he’s got a white-knuckled grip on his untouched mug of beer, is smiling. Joyce nudges me under the table, whispering, “Hope you feel strong. You and Tyreli are going to have to carry Sada home.” And the fiddlers chop down feverishly into their fiddles as if everything now depended on this crazed music.

  Later that night, as the coyotes howl and the screech owls make their eerie electronic screams, Joyce and I hear Rocky crying softly through the wall that separates our bedrooms, and under the crying, Hart’s laboring snores. Unable to sleep, I get up and prowl the house. It is 3 A.M., the hour of the wolf, dead center of night when all of us are naked in our small separate selves. At this hour all the technological wonders and powers of America seem like a feeble dream: the optimistic cities of glass and steel, the super
highways, the elaborate networks of instant communication, and the medical colossus that, for all its precise weapons and collective strategic genius, cannot discourage the barbarous imperialism of a wretched horde of mindless tumors.

  The garage light is on. Sada is up, too, working on her big landscape. She doesn’t hear me come in, and I watch her drag a broad, paint-fat brush across the base of the Dragoons, the range of mountains where Cochise and his band of righteous Chiricahua warriors held off the U.S. Army for ten years. The mountains are blue-black under the angry flex of muscular storm clouds. All the rage of Sada’s eighty-two years is in this canvas, which, the longer I look at it, seems more like a thunderous shout than a painting. “Some painting, Ma,” I say.

  She whirls around, her leaky Apache eyes burning with a warrior’s need to run a spear into the dark gut of the beast.

  “It’s all I can do now,” she says.

  3

  As we head south toward Douglas and Agua Prieta, I am thinking of the strange girl who lives across the street from Sada. She is sixteen and suffering the pain of boredom and the deeper pain of her own oddness, which will isolate her more than geography ever could. Joyce and Rocky found her lying in the middle of the street, her hair chopped close to her scalp, as if by a hunting knife. Thunderclouds sat on the Dragoons. Joyce thought at first that the girl had been run over, but she was only waiting. I am waiting for something to happen to me, is what she said. Joyce and Rocky left her there, spread-eagled in the road, as the tall clouds moved closer and God’s original voice began to rumble with its old no-nonsense authority. Red-tailed hawks lofty as archangels swept down out of the dark sky, choosing among opportunities. Joyce and Rocky decided: Maybe the odd girl was right and was playing her aces now, while she still had them. Maybe we are all waiting for something to happen to us—death or life— but for the girl lying in the street the issue was unclouded by career, marriage, property, and all the other trump cards that must be deferred to before we can clear the slate and move on.

  Hart’s Blazer pitches and yaws over a rough highway that will take us into the mountains. We have turned onto a narrow, shoulderless road that cuts west into the southern foothills of the Dragoons as we head now for Bisbee instead of Douglas and Agua Prieta. “I’ve always wanted to see the Lavender Pit,” Hart says.

  Traveling by whim is touring at its best.

  The old houses of Bisbee cling to the sides of the mountains, prayerfully as exhausted climbers. And the streets, angled like derailed trains, work their way up to the highest ledge of dwellings. We walk these steep streets, finding level ground in a doorway now and then to catch our breath. Hart’s been taking painkillers and tends to stagger against the unexpectedly oblique tugs of gravity that have made the older buildings lean into each other like amiable drunks. He stops now and then to photograph the odd geometry of a ruined hotel, the grit-pocked face of an old miner, the bands of Japanese tourists who photograph everything in their path as if making a visual record of what will one day be all theirs. The four of us often agree that World War Two is still being fought, that the atomic bombings of Japan merely forced a change in weaponry. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the tide turned, and now Japanese samurai in three-piece suits, portfolios in hand, are succeeding where Tojo’s fanatic armies failed. Choice Hawaiian beachfront and Rockefeller Center are theirs, the great evergreen forests of Oregon are theirs, and lately, giant cattle ranches in Montana. “I could settle down here,” Rocky says. “In one of those shacks on the side of the mountain. This place is like Butte, without Butte’s winters.”

  Rocky prides herself on being realistic. She knows we all understand that she is imagining her life without Hart. The terms are hard, but they always have been. We are alone, we have nothing to sustain us but a few pet ideas fueled by a dram of courage. The rest is a pipe dream. Not that pipe dreams are not necessary, we’ve just got to know the differences. This is Rocky’s pet idea, and it’s one that she’s earned. Ten years ago she survived the removal, from her brain, of a benign plum-sized tumor that made her trade her career in parachute journalism for an academic one.

  We are required to be brave. Another pet idea. Also Rocky’s.

  The Lavender Pit is really two pits, big enough to drop a pair of medium-size cities into. On the way out of Bisbee, after getting half-drunk in the Copper Queen Hotel (Hart managing this with a carefully sipped double shot of mescal), we stop with the tourists to gape at this man-made Grand Canyon. Rocky, who has seen her town, Butte, more or less consumed by such a pit, says, “Sucks, don’t it?” to a tourist lady from Arkansas. The tourist lady smiles stiffly and turns her camera on her husband and daughter, who backstep dutifully toward the Cyclone fence that guards the lip of the pit and the thousand-foot drop beyond. The red gouge in the earth looks like a fresh wound, the god-size tumor removed, the lake of blood vacuumed out. A lifeless pond at the bottom of the pit glows like iridescent pus. Oh yes, the planet here is dead. It is deader than the moon, because it was once alive.

  “I’m losing my buzz, campers,” Rocky says. “Let’s clear the fuck out.” The lady with the camera gives Rocky a murderous look, protecting the innocence of her child. Rocky grins good-naturedly. “Too late for Miss Manners, hon,” she says cryptically, swinging her arm out to indicate the pit, the precarious town, the silent witness of the elderly mountains.

  4

  We skip Tucson and head back, but the Blazer heats up outside of Deming, New Mexico. We were headed for Palomas, the little Mexican town where General Pershing launched his failed attempt to bring a taste of gringo justice to Pancho Villa, but are now stalled in a gas station where two head-scratching mechanics decide the problem is in the fan clutch and that it will take about an hour and a hundred dollars to fix it. It’s hot, over a hundred degrees, and we sit inside the crankcase smell of the garage drinking lukewarm Cokes and watching a TV that seems to have only one color: puce. One of the advertising industry’s truly horrifying commercials comes on: “Your marriage will never end. Your children will never grow old. Your pets will never die.” It’s an ad for a video camcorder, showing a family watching their dead past captured and preserved forever. Whatever unhappiness lies ahead, it cannot touch these moments of joy. Mom kissing Dad in the kitchen; Junior chasing a ball; Rover begging for table scraps—immortal, immutable. Old age, sickness, alienation, divorce: all our little hells defeated by videotape. Paradise secure in a cassette, the grim episodes edited out.

  We step back into the heat and stroll up the desert road. To the east, the gray humps of the Florida Mountains wobble in the corrugated air. A man, ragged and barefoot, approaches us. He’s so far beyond the liberal dream of salvage and social recycling that he almost seems happy. His weak hair and crosshatched sunburned skin make him look sixty but, his clear blue eyes put him closer to thirty. He is hashed with small cuts, as if he’s been climbing through barbed-wire fences all morning. Hart greets him with the head-on nod of equals. Hart and the ragged man are down to common denominators, and they recognize this in each other. The man asks for a cigarette and Hart gives him one, then lights it for him. As the rest of us stroll on, Hart reaches into his camera bag. When Hart has his camera ready, the man begins to shift his weight from left foot to right and back again. The asphalt road is burning hot and I assume the man is moving oddly because his bare feet are giving him trouble, but then he raises his stick-figure arms as if they were big sunny wings and begins to turn in half-circles, first one way, then the other, his cigarette held delicately in his fingertips. He lifts his face up to the sky to let God see him better, and chants a broken-throated nonsense. It’s an Indian dance, or his idea of one. “He didn’t want any money,” Hart says when he rejoins us. “He said all he needs now is smokes. He gave me permission to take his picture, but only while he was doing his atonement dance.”

  We continue our stroll; the man, who doesn’t need an audience, continues his dance. The sun has baked curiosity out of our thoughts. Curiosity is a luxury of the tem
perate zone. When a shoeless man in a parched land tells you he’s doing an atonement dance, you more or less have to accept him at his word. Besides, there’s enough to atone for to keep half of humanity dancing shoeless in the desert for a century while the other half lights cigarettes for them.

  A few months later I will think of this moment while looking at Hart’s photographs matted and framed on our apartment walls, and it will seem as if all of us are moving to the drumbeat of some privately realized dance—the ducking pickpockets with large incongruous smiles under their stony eyes; Sada and Tyreli holding hands shyly but glaring like unyielding Apaches from their mountain stronghold, determined to make their stand; Rocky tugging defiantly on her cigarette as she fixes something at infinity with wide-open eyes that won’t blink; even the headless mule floating near the concrete bank of the Rio Grande like an offering to the indifferent northern gods. And Joyce and me, caught looking at each other with slightly shocked expressions, as if on that very day, before the small white church in Palomas, we grasped for the first time that love is possible only because it must end.