Borrowed Hearts

by Rick DeMarinis

  “A man like your husband here is unable to experience his own life. He’s locked into a totally flawed system. You’re right, Rhea. Infants should baptize us.”

  “Please,” Colbert says, his voice muffled. He is becoming vertiginous in the vise of Trane’s arm. “Let me go.”

  “We should all be baptized,” Rhea says gaily, pushing off her rock and entering the water. “We all need a new start.”

  “Out with the old, in with the new,” Freddie giggles, joining her.

  “This, of course, is my point,” Trane says, muscling Colbert under the hot water again. This time Trane takes him deeper, and Colbert loses his footing altogether. He feels helplessly buoyant as his boxer-style trunks break the surface and balloon, and though he is terrified, he thinks of how foolish the trunks must look, billowing pneumatically, exaggerating his clownish rump, the faded blue sailboats stretched tight. When he feels he has held his breath as long as possible, he begins to claw at Trane for mercy. And when this fails, he puts his hands flat on the silty bottom and tries to push himself up.

  Something moves under this left hand. It is a jagged wedge of granite, roughly the size of a brick. He digs it out of the soft silt and shifts it to his right hand and when Trane finally pulls him into the air, Colbert swings the stone upward with as much force and accuracy as his awkward position will allow and it hits the side of Trane’s head, close to the temple. He believes that if he allows Trane to dunk him again, his breath will give out and he will drown, and so as Trane bellows in pain and surprise, his hands now shielding his bleeding head, Colbert drives the heavy stone into Trane’s face as hard as he can and this time he hears the wet collapse of cartilage and bone. Trane staggers backward, thrashing the water, trying to stay on his feet. Colbert follows him until Trane slumps down in shallow water. Dimly aware of the screams of the women somewhere behind him, he raises the stone with both hands and hammers it into the top of Trane’s skull, and though Trane’s eyes are red and blind, he is able to say, “Oh now wait, Dave. Please, Dave, wait,” as the water around both men turns flagrantly red.

  Colbert, sobbing for breath, wades back to the tents. The bones of his right hand are cramped with pain, as if his hand has suddenly aged and every joint has been frozen with severe arthritis. He looks at his hand and sees that it is still gripping the blood-smeared stone. He tries to will his fingers open but the fingers, white as sun-bleached bone, refuse to comply. He holds his arm out from his side, puzzled, waiting for the rock to drop. He is shaking wildly. His knees unlock, nearly causing him to fall. It is as if all the strength of his body has been concentrated in the hand that holds the stone. He tries to throw it into the trees, but only throws himself off balance, and he falls to all fours, still gripping the wedge of granite.

  It is not until he sees Trane’s hatchet, leaning against the ice chest, that his hand relaxes. He leaves the stone behind and crawls toward the hatchet. He feels as if he is swimming, his movements slowed but also sustained by water. The hatchet feels good in his hand—it is light and well balanced, and it has kept its edge. It is much superior to a stone. The teacher he once was recalls the dozens of millennia between stone and steel, how the efficient steel blade of progress joyously cut down the astonished enemy.

  Colbert feels refreshed and clear-headed as he wades back out to the annoying gabble of voices. He feels as if he’s just awakened from ten thousand years of nightmare.

  The Voice of America

  Pop hit Mom. I heard it, then I heard Mom. She yelled. She started to cry. I unplugged my earphones from my shortwave radio and came out of my room, blinking in the bright light of the kitchen. Mom was sitting at the table, and Pop—Wade Eggers—was leaning over her. I went up to him and hammered him. I nailed him. He went down in slow motion, like a swamped boat. I still had my earphones on. I started to kick him, but Mom said, “Don’t, honey,” real loud, in that voice of hers that makes you think Jesus is in the next room, watching. So I quit. I had no great hate for him. I had no feeling for any of them. By “them” I mean the men she picked out for herself. I was just sick and tired of it. “It” meaning her life and what she dragged along behind it, me included. If I’d had some dynamite just then, I probably would have lit it. In my mind I have burned that house in National City down to the foundation a thousand times, everyone asleep inside. I dreamed of waking up as someone else, in a different place, where things were decent. “Good-bye, forever,” I said. I meant it this time.

  Mom was drunker than Pop. She got up and went into the living room. I followed her. Blood hung on her lip like a dark red grape. A drop fell onto her carpet. She always said she loved that carpet. It was a fake oriental made in Mexico. “I’m gone,” I said. I kicked the television. It was a big cherrywood Packard Bell with a twelve-inch screen. A clay penguin on top fell off and broke, but Sid Caesar on the screen didn’t flicker.

  “I don’t want you to leave,” she said. “Where can you go, honey?”

  I picked up the Packard Bell and let it drop. I looked around for something else to pick up and drop. The china cupboard.

  “Stop it!” she yelled. She held one hand up to her face. “Stop it!” Her fingers trembled, like she had taken all she could. But I had seen all this before many times. There was no end to what she could take. That’s how it seemed. It was an act. Everything is an act.

  I went back into the kitchen. Pop had pulled a bread knife out of a drawer. That made me blow up. I hit him as hard as I had ever hit anyone. This time he flopped when he went down. His eyes rolled up, showing the whites. His mossy tongue hung out. I put my hands around my mouth and called down to him, like he was in a hole. “Pop, I’ll hurt you this time, I mean it,” I said.

  To show I was serious, I kicked his gut. I walked on him. He started arching his back and waving his arms so as to call me off. I picked him up by his shirt and slammed him a few times on the wall. His head bounced. During all this I still had my earphones on. “Stop it, baby!” Mom yelled. “You’ll kill him!”

  In my earphones her yelling sounded like so much whimpering music. Let her whimper to Jesus, I thought, as I drummed the wall with Pop. I thought about all the times—when I was younger—how I cried in my bed while she and whatever man she had at the time fought and yelled, sometimes with strangers they had brought into our house. I would put on my war-surplus earphones with the big rubber pads and plug them into my war-surplus BC-348 shortwave receiver and try to pick up the Voice of America. But I could hear them right through the Voice of America.

  I thought, as I slammed Pop, about the many times I had sat alone in a car outside some bar in Marquette, Michigan; Fort Worth, Texas; Bakersfield, California; or Tijuana, Mexico. I thought about the motel and hotel rooms I had slept in as a child waiting for someone to come for me while a world of strangers cursed and cried in the hallways and small rooms above and below and to all sides. These things are not so terrible—I have heard of worse—but they add up after a while and you learn to hate them. We had no real home and the stink of liquor and the noise of their lives was something I always ached to get away from. But leaving isn’t easy. There are things you have to think about. Mom married Wade when I was thirteen. He was her fourth husband, if I have counted correctly. None of them was any good. Wade was the worst. I had seen him pick up a knife before, though he never had guts enough to use it.

  I went back into my room. The yellowish glow of the dials on the BC-348 looked like two sour smiles. I plugged my earphones back in and searched around for the Voice of America. I loved to listen to the Voice of America. You could listen to all your favorite radio programs as they were broadcast across the oceans to Communist countries so that the people who lived in them could hear how it was to live in the Land of the Free. Jack Benny, Duffy’s Tavern, Truth or Consequences, Counterspies, The Great Gildersleeve, and so on. I had copper wire strung out to the eucalyptus tree in the backyard for good reception. I found the Voice of America in the thirty-one-meter band, but they just had Walter
Winchell on or somebody like that with the latest bad news.

  “I don’t want you to go, baby,” Mom said. She had come into my room. She stood behind me and my radio equipment. She lifted one earphone away from my head so I could hear her. Then she put her hands on me. I shook her off. She was so stupid with booze she didn’t know how to act. She hardly ever knew how to act. Some people just aren’t ready for the world from the time they are born. She is one of them. This had to be the tenth time she’d begged me not to leave.

  “I’m going anyway,” I said. I was seventeen, almost eighteen, and big. I had talked to a Marine recruiting sergeant. Korea was still going on. They needed men. I lifted weights at my friend Dick Drummond’s house. I could military-press two hundred and dead-lift three. I was ready. To leave her behind.

  She put her hand on my biceps, which I hardened. “I’d be here alone with him if you went away, honey,” she said, squeezing around on my arm as if looking for soft spots.

  I took off the earphones and turned around. “That’s your problem,” I said. “Leave him if you don’t want to take that crap,” I said.

  “You know I’ve stayed with him for your sake, baby,” she said. “Baby, you know that’s the only reason I’ve stuck it out. I wanted you to have a home.”

  This was too stupid for words. But I had heard it before and was tired of telling her how stupid it was. It was worse than stupid. It was a lie. This was a lie that she believed herself. How people could lie to themselves, and believe it, was the miracle of human life as far as I was concerned. I’d seen her do it, I’d seen Wade Eggers do it. I have seen others do it since. If you need to believe something bad enough, you do. She sat down on my bed and started crying again. “You could be like Jesus,” she said. “Any boy could, if he wants to let it out, if he isn’t too scared.” This was booze talking. Her Jesus talk made me want to hit her. I got up and left the room.

  Pop was puking into the kitchen sink. The kitchen was heavy with the stink of bourbon-puke. She could really pick the winners. I went into their bedroom and took the keys to the Pontiac off the dresser. Then I went out to the car and unlocked it. Pop, at the kitchen window, saw what I was up to. He rapped the glass with a knife. He came stumbling out of the house.

  “Don’t you dare touch my car,” he said.

  “Go to hell, you goddamn Communist,” I said, ramming the gear lever into first and spraying gravel.

  I don’t know why I called him Communist. He considered himself self-educated and had a superior attitude. He read books, and when he came to a good part, he’d read it out loud, no matter who was there or whether or not they cared about the good parts. Pop drove a sandwich and coffee truck and parked it outside the gates of defense plants at lunchtime and at shift changes. That’s how he made his living. It gave him a lot of time to read books. Walter Winchell said the Communists were in high places, getting ready to take over the country. They wanted to change how we thought. They had sneaky ways to do this, so you had to keep your guard up. Watch out for those teachers and professors who say things that downgrade our nation. I didn’t worry about it. I figured my teachers were too stupid to be Communists. But Pop wasn’t stupid. He’d put on his F. W. Woolworth reading glasses and say things like “Jesus Christ was not the son of God. He was just a good magician. He fooled the gullible with sleight-of-hand tricks and with hypnotic spells. Just add him to your list of egomaniac Jews.” Mom hated this type of talk, since she was religious, or at least she believed in God and Jesus, and that it was bad luck to bad-mouth them. Pop deviled her for fun.

  I drove over to Dick Drummond’s house. It was still early enough for him to be up, though his folks were in bed. I honked the horn in his driveway, two longs and two shorts, so he’d know it was me. He came down in about a minute.

  “What’s happening, Shit-hook,” he said. Dick was a wiseass. He got in the car and the first thing he did was switch on the radio. He searched around until he found the L.A. station that played nothing but R and B, which you could not find on a local station. Local DJs thought Johnny Ray was as cool as it got. They thought Les Paul and Mary Ford were hip.

  I burned rubber coming out of his driveway and caught a yard of second-gear rubber in the street. Dick whistled, but he was being a wiseass. Dick had this chopped deuce coupe with a full-race ’51 Merc engine in it and he could lay a mile of high-gear rubber shifting up from second doing sixty. So a 1949 Pontiac with a low-compression six didn’t exactly impress him, even though I was pretty good at nailing second with a speed shift.

  “Check the mirror, Dad,” he said. “I think you left the transmission in the road.” Coming from Dick Drummond, this was a compliment. Dick was tall and lean. He could bench-press a ton, but he couldn’t clean-and-jerk worth spit. No legs.

  I headed out to the beaches. Dick had the radio turned up full-blast. Lloyd Price was singing “Mail Man, Mail Man.” We were on a dark street in Pacific Beach. Dick said, “Stop here a second, Dad.” I pulled the car over to the curb. Dick got out and walked over to a storefront. He raised his foot, then looked over at me with a comical expression on his face. Dick could be a bad actor. I knew he could do it if he was in the mood. He was wearing his engineer boots. I shrugged. He straightened his leg into the window and it bowed in, then exploded. Dick danced back from the falling glass. Then he reached into the window and picked up a suitcase. He carried it to the car and threw it into the backseat. I popped the clutch, laid yards of rubber, speed-shifted into second, caught another yard of rubber. I hit third with another speed shift, but there wasn’t any top-end power left and the Pontiac just wobbled a little and flattened out.

  Up in La Jolla where all the bankers and doctors live, Dick had me drive alongside parked cars, real slow, while he reached out of his window with a jack handle and knocked off side mirrors and punched holes into windows. I saw a kid’s bike lying out on a sidewalk. I hopped the curb and mashed it. Dick laughed.

  Back down in Mission Beach we picked up a couple of girls. They were gang girls who’d been dumped. Their hands were tattooed. Dick had Julia and I had Inez. We drove up to Torrey Pines and found a dark spot looking over the moonlit ocean. On the radio: Earl Bostick playing “Flamingo.” It was real romantic, and Dick had Julia’s pants off in half a minute, but I had too much on my mind for it. Inez said, “What’s wrong, mon? You feeling out of it? No quieres nookie, mon?” She was good-looking enough, but my mood was wrong. I just didn’t feel like it. She was in my lap. Her breath burned my eyes. I turned the radio dial, looking for more L.A. R and B stations. I found Ray Charles. “Lonely Avenue.” This made it worse.

  We drove the girls back to Mission Beach, then headed home. We didn’t talk. We listened to music.

  “You okay, Dad?” Dick said when I let him off. “That was prime muff, man. You missed some choice gash.”

  I shrugged. I backed out of his driveway and headed home. Two blocks down the street I caught high-gear rubber by floorboarding the fat Pontiac for a full three or four seconds before I popped the clutch. There was a gravel patch on the street. I slid. The rear fender hit a parked car. This made me laugh. I drove home laughing, tears on my face, singing like Lloyd Price.

  It was late, almost morning. I let myself in through the back way and went to my room. I felt ripped, like I’d been into the wine. I turned on the BC-348 and looked for the Voice of America. It was lost in static, on every band. Then I found an American-sounding announcer saying how the Chinese were kicking the Americans out of Korea and how cities in the U.S.A. were full of crime and how the whites hated the Negroes. It was Radio Moscow. I shot Radio Moscow the finger through the glowing dials. Then I went to bed.

  “Jesus planned this out,” Mom was saying. She was sitting on my bed. The sun was up. She’d been talking, thinking that I was awake even though my eyes were closed.

  “What?” I said.

  “He’s gone, honey,” she said. “Pop. He left an hour ago. He’s not coming back.” She dabbed a tear out of the comer of h
er eye. “He was destined to stay four years three months, and now he’s gone. I believe Jesus had this in mind for me.

  My hand was sore. I looked at it. It had swollen up and the knuckles were raw and blue. I wondered what he had in store for me. I didn’t believe there was anything in store for anyone. People just let themselves believe any bullshit that makes things easier for them. I said it before: This amazes me.

  “Oh God, you gave him a terrific wallop, honey,” she said.

  “He’s gone?” I said.

  “I’ve never seen a terrific wallop like that.”

  “You mean he’s not coming home tonight?”

  She sneered, and for a second, though everyone always said she was a very pretty woman, she looked ugly. Then she smiled and was pretty again. “Not tonight, not any night. He’s gone.” She picked up my hand and kissed it. Her lips lingered on each battered knuckle as if to heal it. “I’ll make you a nice breakfast, baby,” she said.

  Breakfast sounded good. It had been a long night. I was hungry.

  Insulation

  I am haunted by lightning. When the sky is streaked with jagged blue flame, when the blue-white tongues fork the earth, when the deep-throated anvils or hammerheads drift their weightless tons over my house murmuring my name in the oldest language men know, it is time for me to put insulating miles between myself and the weather or dash quickly to the rubberized shed in the backyard.

  Conductivity runs in my family, reliably leapfrogging the generations. My father was not affected by voltage from the sky. My grandfather, however, was lifted out of his Adirondack lawn chair by a furious bolt arcing, literally, out of the blue: no storm, no cloud, no freak manifes-_ i i • tation of ionized dust—just naked a capella

  Insulation lightning. The empty windless sky gave him false security as he sat reading the papers in the lovely light of an August afternoon. Grandmother was watching him fondly from the kitchen window as she stirred batter for peach cobbler, her specialty. Then the blue shaft, thick as God’s middle finger, lifted him out of a satisfied doze as she watched, not in horror, but as one might relive the strangeness of one’s dreams.