Borrowed Hearts

by Rick DeMarinis

  I saw Egypt in my mind, three thousand years ago. I saw myself as Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee making modem devices for the astonished pharaoh, such as the two-way radio, television, the internal combustion engine, and the airplane. Diesel-powered vehicles trucked stones the size of bungalows through the desert as the astonished pharaoh applauded. Pharaoh’s daughter thought I was some kind of god. She came to me bearing gifts. “I’m not a god, Laura,” I told her. “I’m just a regular guy with some American know-how.”

  I liked the name Laura.

  My rumbling stomach interrupted my daydream. I needed to get ready for Wanda Schnell. I couldn’t believe Dillard was bringing her over. I’d seen a snapshot of Wanda wearing a bathing suit. Though she was only fourteen years old in the photo, she already had the full breasts and flared hips of a grown woman. Her face was blurry, but she seemed to be smirking at the photographer, her slit-ted eyes dark with knowledge. She was now sixteen, two years older than me.

  “What about freedom?” I said.

  “Freedom?” Stan passed his hand over the table, like a magician casting or removing a spell. “Bloody hocus-pocus, Antonio. Freedom is an earned condition of the mind. It has nothing to do with the ideals and schemes of a society. Socrates in his cell, staring at his cup of hemlock, was freer than you or I shall ever be. Freedom, Antonio, cannot be conferred upon the profanum vulgus— that is to say, the common riff raff—by fiat alone.”

  Mom snatched up her wineglass and drank it down in audible gulps. “What about their creepy ole zombies?” she asked, laughing with a kind of merry desperation. Stan was her fourth, and worst—I thought—husband.

  He flinched as if someone had flicked ice water in his face. Blatant ignorance always took him by surprise. He regarded her with his big, moon-yellow eyes. “I believe you mean mummies, dear. The so-called zombie is a vulgar Hollywood exploitation of a West Indies folk myth.”

  I pushed away from the table. “Well, I’ve got to cut out,” I said. “Dillard’s coming by.”

  “Clean your plate first, Antonio,” Stan said. “Food such as this is the exception, not the rule. In Ethiopia or Zanzibar, the peasants are often forced to eat insects for want of grain and meat.”

  “Did you really like it, Stanley?” Mom said. She looked hopeful, and a little nervous all of a sudden.

  Stan looked confused. “The chicken? Of course I liked it, dear,” he said. “You know it’s my favorite meal. Why do you ask?”

  “Because, well, it’s not really chicken.”

  Stan looked at his plate, frowned, then looked at Mom. “I’m afraid I don’t...”

  “It’s bunny rabbit, honey, not chicken. Safeway had a wonderful sale, and...”

  Stan jumped up from the table, his face turning a lighter shade of gray. He brought his napkin to his mouth and made a dash for the bathroom. He didn’t have time to close the door. We heard him vomit.

  “Guess he doesn’t like rabbit,” I said.

  “He had three helpings,” Mom said. “Of course he liked it.”

  Stan moaned horribly between upchucks.

  “Lepus cuniculus, ” I said. “A burrowing rodent. He liked it as long as it was chicken. When it was lepus cuniculus, he hated it. He’s vomiting an idea. ”

  Mom tapped a cigarette out of a pack of Lucky’s and lit up. “I suppose you think that makes sense, smarty-pants,” she said.

  I heard Dillard’s shrill whistling out in the street. Then he yelled my name in big baritone shouts. His voice had changed in the last year. He sounded like a fully grown-up man, and he vocalized the change whenever the opportunity presented itself.

  “See you later, Mom,” I said.

  “Does he have to bellow like that?” Mom said.

  “He’s showing off,” I said.

  I gave her a kiss and then smelled the booze. Even under the rabbit, potatoes, lima beans, and cigarette it was strong. Vat 69. She’d been drinking it most of the afternoon. When you considered who she’d married, it was easy to figure out why. What did she ever see in him? I felt sorry for her, wished she could have the man of her dreams, whoever that might be. I pictured someone like Gary Cooper, a tall, quiet man of unshakable integrity who never in a million years would lecture us about the ancient Egyptians or socialistic welfare. Gary Cooper, the brave yet modest man of High Noon, who didn’t like to fight but could if forced to. Not a man full of fancy ideas, but a man who was silently wise. A man who ate slowly and chewed his food with good square jaws that went up and down, and who did not puke at the thought of eating rabbit.

  I flooded and combed my hair at the kitchen sink, then went out to meet Dillard. His cousin, Wanda, lagged a few yards behind him. She seemed to be examining the neighborhood—the houses, the shrubs, the cars parked in the street. “Hey, neat-o,” she said. “Whose Stude?” She didn’t direct her question to either me or Dillard, content that someone would feel obliged to answer her.

  “My stepdad’s,” I said.

  “Neat car,” she said, still not addressing anyone in particular. She touched the long, sleek fender, then began to stroke it.

  It was a neat car, a brand-new 1948 Studebaker Champion, pearl gray and fast-looking. I oftened wondered how Stan had managed to pay for it, since he was always complaining about how much it cost to support even a small family like ours.

  “You wanna see his stuff?” Dillard said. He meant my radio gear, which was down in the daylight basement where I had my room.

  Wanda shrugged indifferently and sauntered towards us. I got my first clear look at her as she moved into the glow of our porch light. She was wearing flip-flop clogs and a loose-fitting cotton dress. Her face was round and puffy, and she had short fleshy arms that she kept folded against her breasts. Her eyes were small and deep-set. I couldn’t see them even when she faced me. She looked like a mature woman who’d already had her quota of disappointments.

  I led the way down the driveway to the basement. The house was built on a slope, and my room, along with the garage, was under the daylight end. I switched on the lights.

  “What’s all this junk?" Wanda said.

  “That’s his radio stuff,” Dillard said. “Tone’s a ham, a radio head. He got his license last year. Hey, isn’t that right, Tone?”

  “Right,” I said. It always embarrassed me a little when strangers came into this room. My radio gear was a very personal thing. When strangers looked at it, I felt naked.

  The gear did look like junk, to the untrained eye. My homemade work table was crowded with steel chassis studded with vacuum tubes, power transformers, and coils. Tangles of green, red, and yellow wires were strung between them. Large-faced ammeters and voltmeters gleamed from hammered aluminum panels. A wall was covered with QSL cards from other hams around the world.

  “Show her how it works, Tone,” Dillard said.

  Dillard and Wanda sat on my bed, a war-surplus cot covered with surplus wool blankets. I kept a big Westclox alarm clock under it. When I wanted to raise stations in New Zealand or Australia, I’d set the clock for three or four in the morning, the hours when darkness covered most of the Pacific Ocean. That was the best time for long-distance communication.

  I switched on my receiver, a Hallicrafter S-40A, and timed it to one of the busy ham bands. A garble of voices mixed with Morse code whined from the speaker.

  “Yuck!” Wanda said.

  I turned down the volume and spun the dial to one of the commercial shortwave bands. A suave British voice was giving news items in brief sentences, pausing after each one to let the foreign listeners catch up. “Cairo’s response to the Crown was ambiguous at best,” the suave voice said.

  “Pretty cool, huh?” Dillard said.

  “Parliament will take up the question of policy concerning future relations with our former protectorate,” the slow-speaking Englishman said.

  Wanda was looking around the room. It wasn’t much of a room—the walls were concrete blocks, except for the far back one, which was just dirt. I’d
been digging in that dirt to increase the size of the basement—Stan wanted more storage room—but I hadn’t made much progress. Stan paid me fifteen cents for every wheelbarrow of dirt I hauled out.

  My work table was against a wall. High up on that wall was a short window at ground level. Antenna wires passed through this window and into the backyard. I’d nailed some two-by-fours together, braced them with one-by-four splints, set them in three-foot-deep holes sixty-four feet apart, and cemented them in. A folded di-pole antenna hung between these masts, suspended on pulleys. Guy wires anchored to wood stakes webbed the back-yard, which made careless strolling hazardous. Neither Mom nor Stan spent much time outside, so it didn’t matter.

  “What’s all this stuff for?” Wanda said. She’d shoved Dillard off the cot so she could have it for herself, and was now lying on her side, her head propped on her hand. Her puffy face and stringy hair made her seem exotic. The great arc of her hip rose and fell slightly as she dangled her foot over the side of the cot and kicked rhythmically. Her flip-flop hung precariously from her toe.

  Dillard sat on the concrete floor, spinning a king-size marble he’d found. His legs had outgrown his torso. They took up most of the space between the cot and my work table. His size-twelve shoes scuffed against my chair. He was only about five foot seven, but he had the legs and feet of a six-footer. “Hey, talk to somebody, Tone,” he said. “Show her how you do that.”

  I put on my earphones and turned on my homemade transmitter. When the tubes got hot, I tuned it. The electrical smell of hot insulation filled the room. It was a smell I liked. I liked the smell of hot solder, too. I glanced quickly at Wanda to see if she had noticed the change. Her nose was crinkled a bit, so I guessed she had.

  I tapped out a series of CQs with my telegraph key. I got an answer right away. I pulled the earphone jack out of the S-40A so that the code would come over the loudspeaker. It was a strong station in Bakersfield, someone I’d contacted before. I didn’t like this guy because he used a Vibroplex semi automatic speed key and sent his messages too fast. He had a lousy “fist.” His dashes were too short—you could easily take them for dots—and his spacing between word groups was erratic. He also bragged too much about his rig. A thousand watts generated by a pair of big Eimac tetrodes in the final amplifier. Anybody could do that if they had the money.

  “There it is,” I said as code thumped through the basement. “Bakersfield, California. Over two hundred miles north.” I was a little vain about my ability to send and receive Morse code over long distances.

  “Bakersfield, huh?” Wanda said. “You actually want to talk to somebody you don’t even know in Bakersfield?”

  I tapped out the usual greeting with my old-fashioned brass key, a relic of the 1920s spark-gap days, a present from my uncle Lamar. Then I turned to Wanda. Her small dark eyes seemed oriental to me. Her flip-flop had dropped off, and her little painted toes splayed and unsplayed in time to some rhythm she was hearing in her head. “I’ve raised stations in Japan,” I said, trying to recover lost ground.

  This seemed to interest her. “How can you do that?” she said. “You don’t even speak Japanese.”

  “It’s just the same as Bakersfield,” I said. “It’s just farther away. You have to wait until the atmospheric conditions are right. Radio waves bounce off the ionosphere, hundreds of miles up. It’s like banking a pool ball. And language is no problem. We just use international Q signals.”

  “Oh, I’m sure,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  “Tone’s a whiz, no lie,” Dillard said. “He can tell you how the stuff works, can’t you, Tone?” He flipped the marble all the way into the dirt hole at the back of the basement. He went to look for it. “Tell her how it works!” he yelled from the dark excavation.

  “It’s actually pretty simple,” I said. I signed off with Mister Vibroplex from Bakersfield and unplugged the crystal from my transmitter. “This is a quartz crystal. It vibrates at about seven million times per second once you excite it with a small amount of electricity. Then this seven-megacycle oscillation is amplified by this Pierce oscillator”—I tapped on a glowing vacuum tube—“and the signal is fed into a final amplifier”—I tapped on the bigger of the two tubes in my transmitter. “This boosts the power of that seven-megacycle oscillation to about twenty-five watts. Next, I tune the final amp with this knob here, which is connected to a variable capacitor under the chassis. This plug-in coil is designed to match the crystal’s frequency”—I tapped on the forty-meter coil at the back of the chassis—“and then the tuned signal goes into the half-wave folded di-pole antenna out in the backyard, where it is radiated into space. You understand any of this, Wanda?”

  She was lying on her back now, hands behind her head and chewing gum methodically. “Any of what?” she said. She stared into the joists of the kitchen floor, which was directly above us. It was an indolent, small-eyed gaze.

  “How I can talk to Japan,” I said.

  “How do you know if it’s really Japan?” she said. She blew a bubble, popped it. “How do you know if it’s even coming from Bakersfield? Maybe it’s just some joker down the street yanking your chain.” She raised up a little and looked at me. “Hey, Tony. Does that radio of yours play music?”

  The sound of my name coming from her lips made me feel strange. My stomach lurched. I switched the Hallicrafter to the broadcast band and tuned in a local station. Dick Haymes was singing “Together.”

  “That’s more like it,” she said. She flopped her arms out to her sides and her bare legs dangled off the cot. She swung her feet lazily to the music. The thin cotton material of her dress gathered in the valley between her round thighs. The contours of her lower body were amazingly visible. Dillard crawled up to me on his hands and knees, pushing the big marble ahead of him. He tugged my arm hard. I bent down so that he could whisper in my ear. “I think she wants to show it to you, Tone,” he said.

  “You said we were going to get Cokes, Dill,” Wanda said.

  Dillard’s words made my mouth go dry as paper. “I’ll get them,” I whispered.

  When I came back down, Wanda was sitting in my chair, fooling with the dials of the S-40A. She had my earphones on. I looked at Dillard. He was sitting on my cot. He shrugged, then winked. I passed out the Cokes. Wanda pulled the earphones off and got up. “All I can hear is noise,” she said.

  We sat there, sipping our Cokes. Dillard burped every few seconds. He was swallowing air to do it. Wanda didn’t seem to mind.

  Dillard punched my arm. “Ask her, numb nuts,” he said.

  My face got instantly hot.

  “Ask me what?” Wanda said.

  “You ask,” I said, shoving Dillard away.

  The chair she was sitting on swiveled and she began to push herself in slow circles. “I’m dizzy,” she said, letting her head loll about helplessly, as if her neck had been snapped.

  “Tone here wants to see it, Wanda,” Dillard said.

  I could have killed Dillard on the spot. I couldn’t swallow my last mouthful of Coke. It backed up into my nose.

  Wanda got up and stretched, her woman’s breasts rising inside the cotton dress. The she turned her back on us and strolled to the dark end of the basement where I’d been excavating. Dillard and I sat on the cot.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “You go on,” I said.

  “I’ve already seen it,” he said.

  “Sure, two years ago.”

  “It was last year, chicken.” He made a clucking chicken noise.

  My heart was beating fast and a burp was trapped halfway between my stomach and my throat.

  “We’ll stroll the lane... together,” Wanda sang at the dark end of the basement. Her voice contradicted her mature body. It was small and high, the voice of a little girl.

  Dillard set his Coke down and pulled me off the couch. He gave me a hard shove towards Wanda, which gave me the momentum I needed, physical and mental.

  “Sing love’s refrain... together, ”
she sang.

  Then I was standing next to her on the dark dirt floor, our shadows looming large and formless against the unevenly excavated area.

  “What do you want, Tony?” she asked.

  “You know,” I mumbled. “What Dillard said.”

  “What did he say? I forget.”

  My pickax was stuck in the wall of compacted dirt. I grabbed it and took a few energetic swings. I hadn’t worked down here in a week. I’d run into some rocks, and the going was slow. Fifteen cents a load wasn’t half enough. For all his money, Stan was a cheapskate.

  I hit a rock, and big red sparks flew down towards our feet. I put the pick down. “He said that you were going to show it to us,” I blurted out.

  “Dillard’s a geek,” she said. She folded her arms against her breasts. She bent and unbent a knee impatiently. “In fact, both of you are geeks. I bet you two are the geekiest freshmen at Lowmont.” The knee rocked faster and faster, building up speed.

  I started to leave, but she grabbed my arm and spun me towards her. She kissed me. Her hard lips were cold from the Coke and tasted of Double Bubble. She pushed me away but held me in place with her eyes. Even wide open they were small. But I couldn’t turn away from them.

  She drew up her skirt as if squaring a tablecloth. I saw it all—the trembling pink thighs, the anonymous dark where they met.

  The skirt dropped. “You’ve got a real neat haircut, Tony,” she said. “Does your old man let you drive the Stude yet?”

  “No, I won’t be sixteen for almost two years.”