Borrowed Hearts

by Rick DeMarinis

  “It’ll be good to get home,” I said, for conversation’s sake, but I said it mostly to myself.

  “J.D.’s home already” Lot chuckled. “Home is a warm teat, wherever you happen to be.”

  “Seattle,” I said. “That’s home for me.”

  Lot sipped his coffee, squinted at me through the steam. “Better to be in exile sustained by a dream of home than to endure the disappointments of home itself. Home itself is an idea that never measures up. I speak from experience.”

  “You’re too deep for me, Lot,” I said.

  “Don’t mock him,” Willie said. She said it simply, without taking her eyes off her baby.

  “You’ll find one day that what I said is true,” Lot said.

  And what good will it do me? I wanted to say, but held back. I was tired and a little fed up with his homespun homilies. I wanted to be back in West Seattle, in my parent’s big house overlooking the Sound. I wanted to be in my upstairs room, at my desk, watching the ferryboats at night brilliantly spangled with lights. I wanted to listen to the lonesome call of their foghorns while snuggling deeper and deeper into my old bed.

  There were some names etched by knifeblade into the table before me. Rena + Yank. Pete + Vicki. Remember Me, Annette. I concentrated on those names and sipped my coffee, willing the night to pass quickly. I would come back to Mud and Sinkers four years later as a Boeing field engineer, after completing my degree at the University of Washington, the snag in my thinking long gone and forgotten. Carline Minsky from the town of Balfour would be with me, and those carved names would still be here, among half a dozen more. Carline was pregnant and wanted to get married, but I told her I already was married—even though my wife had left several months earlier. Carline broke down, but what could I do? I said I’d pay for the abortion. She took the money, but our little romantic episode ended then and there. Maybe she got the abortion and maybe she didn’t. I never found out, nor wanted to.

  We’d gotten carried away down in a silo, next to a recently installed Minuteman missile. We were on a service platform, adjacent to the missile’s third-stage motor, near the warhead access ramp, and Carline said, “Let’s do it, right here.” She wasn’t supposed to be in this Top Secret area, but there was no one else around within miles who might object. “This motor is fueled by a ton of nitroglycerin, stabilized by cotton filaments,” I told her. “It’s very dangerous.” This was a partial truth, but it made her moan with fear and excitement. We did it standing up, her bending over the rail and leaning out close enough to the Minuteman to kiss the megaton hydrogen warhead. “I’m so hot,” she said, and I was too. Too hot, it turned out, because we neglected the usual precautions, and she got pregnant, somewhere under North Dakota.

  “I saw something else in your posture,” Lot said, startling me. He was slumped over on his side in the booth, and I thought he’d been asleep. “I saw something besides defeat, or maybe it wasn’t defeat I saw at all. Maybe it was this other thing all along.”

  I held a picture of blue water and white boats in my mind, so as not to get caught up again in his stagey pronouncements.

  “Don’t you care to know what I saw?” he said.

  Willie stirred. Jesus Dakota turned his face left and right before finding the breast she half-consciously offered him.

  “Not especially,” I said.

  “I’m going to tell you anyway. I saw a dangerous hunger. I saw an unfeedable hunger.”

  His primitive head, his bright red hair, the fatigue that lined his face—the complete aspect of an outcast and loser. I smiled and shook my head, affecting dismay.

  “You were going to tell me something about a holy light. You must have forgotten,” I said.

  The need for sleep pulled him lower in the booth. He closed his eyes. “I already did. You weren’t paying attention, son.”

  After a while, they were all sound asleep, that odd and aimless family with no future and a harrowing past. Even when a trucker came stomping into the cafe, kicking snow off his boots, flapping his arms against his chest, and cursing the storm at the top of his lungs, Lot, Willie, and Jesus Dakota didn’t wake up. It was 3 A.M., and the trucker ordered hot cakes and coffee. He talked constantly at the waitress, and from this I learned that he was on his way to the West Coast. I saw my chance and sat next to him at the counter. He was a tall, thin, nervous man, but he was friendly. He was a talker who was starved for conversation, and so when I asked if I could ride along with him to the Coast, he said, “Just don’t ask me to stop every fifty miles so you can piss. I’ve got to make Tacoma by tomorrow afternoon.”

  I went back to the booth. Willie had scooted over so that my coat was partly under her. I didn’t want to wake her up, so I just left it there. It was just an unlined windbreaker anyway. I took one last look at them. I hoped they’d make it to Bonners Ferry, but given what they were, it didn’t seem to matter much where they wound up. They’d be back on the road again before long, the road being the only place where they would feel welcome.

  In the truck, a huge Diamond T hauling double trailers, the driver said, “Who was that ugly fuck and the bony squaw you were with?”

  “Just a ride,” I said, tossing my suitcase behind the seat.

  The trucker poured himself a cup of coffee from a thermos, shook two white pills from a small envelope. He placed the pills carefully on his tongue, then swallowed them with coffee.

  “Got to jump-start my fucking brain” he said, winking.

  Then we roared out into the blinding storm.

  Wilderness

  Dave Colbert is sick of hearing about the geology of the northern Rockies, but the man driving the car, Marv Trane, is a relentless know-it-all who never passes up a chance to display his knowledge or to correct Colbert’s less encyclopedic grasp of the earth’s crust. The wives of the two men are chatting in the back seat of Trane’s Isuzu Trooper. It was Colbert’s wife, Rhea, who suggested the joint week-long trek to Montana. Trane’s wife, Freddi—a small, high-strung woman whose eyelids flutter hysterically when she speaks—had been bitten on the arms by her husband and had found a sympathetic confidante in Rhea. They had met in Relationship Dynamics, a class taught in a local community college’s adult education division. The two men had not met each other until yesterday morning, and Colbert—who has already had his fill of Marv Trane—is gloomy with the realization that there is no way to avoid the six days of misery that lie ahead.

  Colbert is afraid of Trane, convinced that the man is dangerous. Now and then Colbert catches Trane glancing at him with narrowed eyes and sly grin, as if sizing him up. Trane has done this often enough to keep Colbert on edge. When they shook hands yesterday, Trane’s grip had nearly made Colbert wince. Then, when Trane smiled, he exposed his teeth to the back fillings, a trait that Colbert has always associated with ambition, aggression, and the need to intimidate. People in the public eye, the great successes of our time, seem to have this mirthless smile, which Colbert has dubbed the Attila Grin.

  Trane, however, is not in the public eye. He is an unemployed systems analyst, recently laid off by Lockheed. Rhea has argued that the bites on Freddie’s arms were most likely inflicted in the heat of passion, and not intended to cause pain or damage. Nonetheless, Freddi was alarmed enough to seek out Rhea for support.

  “He really loves her,” Rhea told Colbert, “but he sometimes loses control, especially when he goes off his medication.” Trane bit his wife in a Wal-Mart parking lot, during a lightning storm. He wanted to make love, right there in the Isuzu, as the sky convulsed.

  “He forced her?” Colbert said. “He attacked his own wife in a parking lot?”

  Rhea frowned, then said, “No. Not really. There was consent, but it was a bit surprising, and... in retrospect, frightening. Freddi was afraid of what might have happened if she had refused him.” Trane, Rhea said, was very upset at losing his job. Being laid off had “unmanned” him somehow. He wanted sex to be random and violent or he didn’t want it at all. His consequent
mood swings were hard for Freddi to cope with. A psychiatrist had prescribed an antidepressant, then, after further diagnosis and consultation, lithium, but Trane hated the side effects of such drugs and would not take them regularly. Rhea thought a trip into the mountains would be therapeutic. “It will do us good, too,” she said.

  “Up there, above that scree!” Trane shouts suddenly, jolting Colbert out of his troubled reverie. “You can see some outcroppings of Precambrian basement rock!” He rolls down his window and leans out of it, pointing up the sheer slope to the left side of the highway. His face in the wind is Attila: challenging flash of teeth, the warrior’s terrain-assessing squint, the taut jut of jaw. The Isuzu drifts over the center line into the oncoming lane of traffic. There is no traffic, luckily, and Colbert, though tempted to grab the wheel, lets the car drift, half hoping it will find its way to the far shoulder of the highway, maybe even roll over into the ditch that borders it. This is the morning of the second day of the trip and Colbert is desperate enough to sacrifice his own safety, and the safety of his wife, if it results in the abrupt end of this “therapeutic” trek.

  But just as the car is about to stagger onto the soft shoulder of the opposite lane, the shoulder widens into a scenic turnout and Trane wheels the big Isuzu smartly to a sliding stop next to a rushing cataract, as if this was what he meant to do all along. Trane has his door open before the car stops rolling, setting the parking brake as an afterthought. Colbert leans his head back into the headrest and closes his eyes. Jesus, he thinks. I took five days of emergency sick leave for this? He turns around to give Rhea a scathing look, but both women are peering out the windows at the cataract that is roaring down a sheer rock wall. “My God, my God,” Rhea says, her voice constricted with reverence, a tone that instantly infuriates Colbert.

  Colbert is a high school social studies teacher who is in the throes of burnout. He has been in the grip of a fatigue so profound that he has lost his train of thought on several occasions recently while lecturing to his honors class. Each time this has happened, he has excused himself from the room. In the hallway, nearly in tears, he would try to collect his wits. He’d smoke to calm himself, and when he’d return to the classroom he would read aloud from the textbook until the bell rang, giving him reprieve. His honors class—good kids from good middle-class homes—listened to their Walkmans while he read, or they gossiped in small groups. Some of the bolder boys and girls would pair off and make out in the back of the room. Colbert didn’t care. He read mechanically from the text, not listening to himself either, fighting the urge to put his head down on his arms and go to sleep.

  Rhea, always alert to behavioral aberrations, sent him first to counselors and then to doctors. The diagnoses invariably described him as a candidate for “burnout” even though his physical indicators were quite good—a bit overweight, subpar muscle tone, cholesterol level a few points out of the normal range, blood pressure up a bit, but generally speaking, he was in tolerable good health.

  One counselor suggested a career change. But, at forty-two, Colbert is terrified of this option. It isn’t an option at all, as far as he’s concerned. It’s a one-way ticket to chronic unemployment and poverty, and to an even greater lethargy of spirit. He can endure things as they are now for another ten years, when he will be eligible for an early retirement.

  Colbert sighs heavily, startling himself. He realizes he has been staring at Trane’s wide back, unconsciously curious, and is now abruptly recognizing Trane’s posture: legs apart and loose at the knees, elbows out, head bent forward slightly in concentration. In full view of the women, Trane has unzipped his pants and is urinating next to the picturesque waterfall, the hot urine steaming in the cool mountain air. That Trane is relieving himself in front of everyone doesn’t surprise Colbert at all, it only adds to his general peevishness. Rhea and Freddi, however, are looking in the opposite direction, squinting at a ridge of snowcapped peaks to the south.

  “I love this country,” Rhea says. “I don’t know why we just don’t move here. My God, imagine waking up every morning to that view!”

  “I’m sick of Sunnyvale,” Freddi agrees. “I mean, you can’t even see the coastal mountains anymore because of the smog.”

  “I could get work making birch-bark canoes,” Colbert says. “Rhea could weave baskets from the native grasses and sell them to tourists. We could chew peyote and commune with the mountain spirits.”

  “David’s first response to beauty is cynicism,” Rhea says to Freddi. “Depend on it.”

  “I’m not a cynic,” Colbert protests mildly.

  “You’ve got to earn your stripes to be a true cynic,” Trane calls over his shoulder as he yanks up his zipper. Colbert is shocked that Trane has heard them. It seems impossible. The man must have the ears of a bat, he thinks. Trane leans into the Isuzu. “You’ve got to understand the system completely before you have the right to doubt it,” he says, his teeth exposed in a white challenge that makes Colbert look away.

  “Who understands any system completely?” Colbert mumbles.

  “I don’t mean to pull rank, Davey, but I’m a senior systems analyst, remember? It’s my job to understand systems.”

  An unemployed senior systems analyst who bites his wife and pisses in public, Colbert thinks, and, as if Trane’s keen hearing can even pick up thoughts, his smile collapses into a thin sneer and he slaps the side of the Isuzu hard, making the women, and Colbert, jump.

  Colbert opens his door and gets out to stretch his legs. He walks to the rear of the car, then beyond it to the edge of the turnout. He hears a diesel truck laboring up the grade, the caw of crows, the rush of wind in the stately Ponderosas. Northern Idaho is more beautiful than he expected and he is momentarily confident that the trip might not be so bad after all. Trane is a bully and a jerk, he knows, but easy to ignore once you stop reacting to his insufferable running commentary and aggressive glances. Colbert fills his lungs with the nippy autumnal air and heads back to the car. For the first time he notices the big red-and-white bumper sticker, glued diagonally—with swashbuckling carelessness—to the back of the Isuzu: “Crisis Doesn’t Make Character—It Exhibits It,” and Colbert’s moment of optimism fades as quickly as it came.

  By midday, they are almost in Montana, nearing Lolo Pass. “I’ve got a surprise for you,” Trane says, taking the Trooper off the highway and shifting it into four-wheel drive. Colbert, who has been dozing, is instantly alert. He feels his innards rise, weightless, as the car drops down a steep dirt road that winds through a stand of beautiful old cedars. “There’s a natural hot springs down here not very many people know about,” Trane says.

  “You’ve been here before?” Colbert asks, alarmed. It occurs to him suddenly that this trip was Trane’s idea to begin with and that Rhea was finessed into thinking it was hers. Rhea, for all her night-school classes in pop psychology, could be astonishingly naive. She tended to think that most people were as straightforward and honest as she was, that they meant what they said, and that liars and cheats were their own worst enemies—to be pitied, or rescued by therapy, rather than feared or avoided. She often argued that good therapy could transform the world. She believed that people were basically decent and that civilized behavior was instinctive, not an extrinsic ideal (as Colbert has often jibed) that has teased humanity for ten thousand years like a mirage in the desert.

  Trane hesitates, then says, “Oh, sure. I’ve been here. Years ago, when I was a kid. My dad used to take me to Montana to hunt.”

  “How wonderful to have a committed father,” Rhea says. “I mean, I don’t approve of hunting per se, but I think a father taking his son on outings and so forth is so... beneficial, in terms of the son’s future stability. I only wish David had had a father like that. A father like that gives his son permission, ultimately, to become a man.”

  “What kind of father did you have, Davey?” Trane asks. “Did he give you permission to become a man?”

  Colbert ignores Trane’s glance, though
he can see, out of the comer of his eye, the glare of teeth. “He was a son of a bitch,” Colbert says.

  Trane releases a single angry bark of laughter and downshifts abruptly, making the Isuzu fishtail. “So was mine,” he says. “He gave me permission to get the fuck out of his house.”

  “Aren’t you driving a little too fast for this road, darling?” Freddi says.

  “No, actually I’m not, darling,” Trane says, mocking his wife’s tone. He presses the accelerator to the floor and upshifts, making the car lurch into a nearly broadside skid.

  “Please slow down,” Rhea says. Her voice is reasonable, but Colbert knows she is terrified. He turns around so that she can see his I-told-you-so smile. Her face is rigid, her eyes are wide.

  “Marv knows what he’s doing,” Colbert says to Rhea. “He’s obviously an experienced off-road driver, no need to fret.”

  Rhea leans her head back and closes her eyes. “Don’t take that tone with me, David,” she says. “I’m not a child.”

  “There it is,” Trane announces, bringing the Isuzu to a hard stop. They are in a clearing: a bowl with steep granite sides, the high, sky-touching rim of which is screened with thick stands of larch and fir. At the bottom of the bowl is a steaming pool of water about the size of a baseball diamond. The pool is studded with large gray boulders. “Hot springs,” Trane says. “This is part of the Lolo batholith.”

  “Remarkable!” Rhea says, her voice resuming the irritating pitch of reverence Colbert has not heard before today.

  “Molten granite magma rose into the earth’s crust here about fifty million years ago,” Trane says, lecturing again. “What you see all around you is young granite. Now, fractures in the granite and in the Precambrian sediment rock permit rainwater, or the runoff from snowmelt, to circulate deeply enough to get heated by the still-hot batholith before it percolates back up to the surface at the springs.”