by Laurel Dewey
He considered her words. “Well, I don’t know shit, I’m not a thief and if I saw somethin’, I sure as hell don’t remember it.”
“That’s helpful,” she deadpanned. “It doesn’t make sense but you must be one helluva HVT.”
“HVT?”
“High Value Target.”
Harlan took in a quick breath.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’ve heard that before but I can’t remember where.”
“Somebody called you that?”
“No. Not me.” He buried his head in his hands. “Oh, shit. I’m gettin’ all jumbled up again in my head. It’s gettin’ worse than ever now. I don’t know who I am anymore! I don’t know what belongs to me. I can’t be sure what my memories are because they keep tanglin’ up with his.”
“His?”
Harlan pointed to his heart. “His!
“How do you know your heart came from a man?”
“I ain’t sure how I know, but I know. You remember them dreams I told you about? Sometimes in them I pass a mirror or a real still pool of water and I almost catch my reflection. And while I can’t see it exactly, it ain’t Harlan Kipple lookin’ back. It’s like when I’m runnin’ in that field when I’m…he…when he’s a kid…with that .22? I’m so free. So alive.” Harlan shook his head. “Goddamnit, I sound plug crazy, don’t I?”
Jane would have agreed with Harlan a few years ago. But her own bizarre journey dancing between that thin veil of reality made her a believer. She still used logic as her first approach but the understanding and appreciation of what lurks on the other side was not far behind. “I don’t think you’re crazy, Harlan.”
He looked relieved and let out a grateful exhale. “Thank you. It’s hard to explain. You know when you got a guest in your house that you’ve never met before? Ever notice how it’s like the edges around them are real sharp and unfamiliar so they stand out in your house? But if you feel a kind of harmony around them, the sharp edges melt and they begin to blend into the house as if they’re part of it. That’s the way I feel with him inside me. No sharp edges. He’s not a guest anymore. He’s part of my house now.”
She considered his words, impressed by his explanation. “Maybe…I don’t know…whoever’s heart you have inside you is helping you sort out the chaos.” Jane couldn’t believe she said that. It was done to placate Harlan but then it sounded oddly rational.
He nodded. “Yes! That’s what I’ve been thinkin’ too.” He approached Jane with urgency. “But I think he plays an even bigger role in all this.”
“What kind of bigger role?”
“Like maybe there’s a connection between him and everything else that can’t be explained?”
“That’s a stretch, Harlan.”
“Why? My whole world has been upside down and inside out since I woke up from my surgery. Every day I feel like I’m walkin’ a tightrope between different worlds!”
“I’m sure other heart transplant patients feel the same way—”
“No, no, no. Don’t patronize me. This is deeper. There are connections and I aim to find them.”
“How are you going to do that?”
Harlan measured his words carefully. “There are times he takes me over. It’s happenin’ a lot more now. And when it happens, I keep gettin’ drawn to places and people and things that must mean somethin’ to him,” Harlan pointed to his heart.
Jane needed to tread lightly. “Okay. But maybe it’s just left over memories that transferred over somehow when his heart was put into your body.” Jane was open to new ideas but even she was wondering what in the hell she was talking about. “Why do you think it has to be bigger than that?”
“Because before I got my new heart, my life was as predictable as day followin’ night. For nearly forty years, absolutely nothin’ of any import happened to Harlan Kipple. Then, slap-bam, I get me a new ticker and I start to go nuts as my world gets crazier by the day. I mean, hello there, I am on the run for a murder I didn’t commit! Have we forgotten that?! I ain’t a smart man but I can put two and two together and it adds up that all this strangeness is connected to this heart.” He wiped a few more errant leaves from his tangled beard. “Them dreams I’ve been havin’? They’re tryin’ to lead me someplace. When I was at The Blue Heron bar that night talkin’ to Rudy and I told him how I felt I was on the verge of figurin’ it all out, I was plannin’ to take a road trip. I was hopin’ he’d go with me cause he was the only one who believed me. But then, shit happened.”
Road trip. Jane quickly recalled that that was how her day started out as well. And then, shit happened. “What kind of road trip?”
“If I’m gonna find any kind of peace in my life, I need to find out who this is inside me. How do I set myself free if I don’t know who I am? Who he is? Who he was? I feel like if I put the puzzle pieces together, everything else will make sense.”
“I don’t understand. What pieces?”
“The pieces of his life,” Harlan said, pointing to his heart.
Jane needed to inject a modicum of reality. “You’re on the run for murder, Harlan. A brutal, stem to stern, braining-bashing, death penalty, murder. Now, I know you didn’t do it, but that’s going to be a tough sell now since you escaped custody. Your face will be plastered on every local TV news program. Your mug will be on the Internet and on posters throughout the state. Everybody from your next door neighbor to your first grade teacher is going to whore themselves out on national TV to talk about you. What you were like, who you hung out with, on and on. I don’t think a road trip is prudent right now.”
“I beg to differ.” He looked surprised at himself. “There! Right there! Who in the hell says, ‘I beg to differ’? Not Harlan Kipple! That’s him talkin’ right there.”
Jane looked at Harlan askance. “Oh, fuck. You can’t go on the run, Harlan! Look, somehow you need to get back to Denver and talk to someone who can sort this out—”
“No and hell no! That’s me talkin’! Mr. Ramos or whoever he works for set me up for a murder I did not commit. And then he tried to off me with the help of a doctor and a fake cop this mornin’! I don’t stand a chance in hell of goin’ back to Denver and sortin’ this out. It ain’t the cops I’m mainly worried about. The cops ain’t got nothin’ on the psycho, sons-of-bitches who want me dead! Hey, if they can get a damn doctor to sign on to their plan, they obviously have friends in high places! How high up does that go? Lawyers? Judges? Maybe higher?”
“You sound a little paranoid there, Harlan.”
“Ya think I might got a right to be?! I’m screwed six ways to Sunday, lady! If I went back to Denver, I bet you biscuits to a bankroll I’d be dead in less than twenty-four hours!”
Jane silently agreed, given the explosive footprint of the Anubus coach earlier that day. Yes, someone needed to kill Harlan Kipple and anyone close to him who knew a thing about his faux murder indictment. But why? No, no. She wasn’t going to go there. This was not her problem. She had plans, dammit. Personal plans that had a deadline she intended on meeting. “Well, I don’t know how you expect to work this out now, given the circumstances—”
“Ain’t it obvious? I got your car and I got you…a homicide cop, no less! I understand now why my heart led me to jack your ride and not that crappy pickup.” Jane stared at him in stunned silence. “We’ll lay low tonight and then start out tomorrow…lettin’ my heart lead the way. And little by little, I will figure out what’s goin’ on.”
“Harlan, you really are delusional,” Jane retorted, “if you think you’re kidnapping me and my car so you can…find yourself! For God’s sake, I’ve got a gun,” she pointed to the Glock secured in the front of her jeans. “I could shoot you and end this right now.”
“Aw, hell,” Harland said softly, “I got me a gun too and an extra clip that I stole off that fake cop. I could shoot you too. But I ain’t
gonna and you ain’t gonna shoot me neither.” Harlan’s insistence on gunning down the English language was like fingernails on a chalkboard to Jane. But no matter how guilty he was of grammatical dysfunction, his message was accurate. Jane wasn’t going to plug him. She just wanted out of that damn aspen grove and away from the growing realization that she was between a rock and a very hard place. “Harlan, I’ve got personal business in northern New Mexico and I’ve got a short window of time to take care of that business—”
“That works out fine, actually. See, my heart is pushing me south of here. Well, kinda south and then southwest and then east again and then—”
“Harlan! If I take you with me, I’m harboring a fugitive! I’ve worked my ass off to get where I’ve gotten. I’ve waded through shit and hell to make it to this point. I’m not throwing away everything I’ve worked for on you!”
He was heartbroken. To Jane, he looked like a puppy—an obese puppy—you want to rescue but you know you’d end up regretting it later on. But then, his expression changed. It wasn’t aggressive but it felt very focused and almost otherworldly. It was if he was boring into Jane’s mind and rifling through the intricate web of her surging thoughts. “You don’t have a choice,” Harlan quietly stated, his eyes glazing over as he spoke with a different modulation. “You made your bed this morning. You threw away a part of yourself because you saw something that made you a believer. You’re as much on the run as I am.” His words appeared to shock him back into his body.
Jane looked at him with guarded courtesy. “How in the hell did you just do that?”
“I have no damn idea. But it looks like you and I are two peas in a dangerous pod.”
Oh, shit, Jane thought, as she ran her fingers through her hair. The dye was cast and there was no looking back. Letting out a sigh, Jane resumed her all-business tenor. “You said you’ve been collecting stuff in a bag and writing down your thoughts? Well, let’s see it.”
∆ ∆ ∆
Jane slid into the driver’s seat of the Mustang while Harlan wedged his thick frame into the passenger side. He lifted a dirty burlap sack the size of a small gym bag off the floor of the passenger seat and removed a five-inch black spiral notebook with a faux snakeskin cover. Turning to the first page, he held it out to Jane. On the top of the page Harlan had drawn the letter “R” surrounded by what looked like a diamond. Beneath that was the rough drawing of an animal that looked like a vicious dog.
“What’s that?” Jane asked, pointing to the animal.
“A wolf,” Harlan said as if it was obvious.
“Of course,” she said, rolling her eyes. “What does the ‘R’ stand for?”
“Hell if I know.”
She examined the letter and surrounding diamond closer. “It kind of looks like a shield or maybe a family crest?”
Harlan regarded her with a blank expression. “Okay.”
“What prompts you to scribble this stuff?” She glanced through the book.
“Prompts?” he asked with a quizzical expression.
Jane looked at him. “Yeah. You know? What triggers you to write all this?”
“Oh. I don’t know. I don’t remember drawin’ or writin’ any of it. But I can tell you that right before it comes through me, my head gets real quiet. I feel this pressure building between my ears and at the base of my head and then as quickly as that starts, it just stops. That’s when I see the blue light special and hear the noon day whistle.”
“Blue light special? What whistle?”
“It’s like this bright, pinpoint of blue light that hovers in the air. And the whistle? Well, it’s more like a high-pitched sound I imagine only dogs can hear. It starts in my left ear and crisscrosses over to my right and then somewhere in the middle, it feels like something lights up or gets ignited. Like one of them butane lighters? It feels like I got me a tiny flame in the center of my head and then it begins. I start writin’ or doin’ things I’ve never done before. Just like in that hospital this mornin’? Grabbin’ the drugs, jabbin’ them with the needles?” He rooted through the bag. “Speakin’ of drugs, it looks like I picked up more than what I needed for my heart. I got me some Valium, Vicodin and some Oxycontin.”
Jane turned to him. “You stole Oxycontin? Jesus, Harlan!”
“I didn’t steal it—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. He stole it. Oxycontin? Well, add that theft to your growing list of felonies. That stuff is serious shit. It’s synthetic heroin.”
“No kiddin’? Wow. I bet it’ll make a good tradin’ item.”
“Trading? What are you, Amish?” She turned her attention back to his notebook. “People who barter for Oxy are not the people we need to hang with.”
“Well, I ain’t throwin’ it away.”
“Then do me a favor. Toss it in the glove compartment.”
Harlan complied. Sitting back in the passenger seat, he reached behind his neck. Using his thick first finger, he started digging his nail into a single spot directly under his hairline.
Jane glanced at him. “What in the hell are you doing now?”
“I feel like I got something stuck back there. Can you see anything?” He turned his large body in the seat.
Jane checked it out but all she saw was a lot of surface irritation and redness from where he’d obviously been rubbing and picking at it on a regular basis. “There’s nothing there, Harlan.”
“It don’t make no sense.”
“Well, neither does your notebook.” To Jane, it was like reading the mind of a mental patient who was on lockdown. The mysterious “R” framed in the diamond motif was repeated throughout the various pages. Another repeated drawing was a single circle with a dot in the center. Turning the first page, Jane found another rudimentary drawing of a human hand and wrist. On the inside of the wrist, Harlan drew what appeared to be a bird.
“That’s a dove,” he told her.
“Really? How do you know that?”
“I don’t.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I just do.”
Jane shook her head at his bizarre reply. She continued to scan the notebook, stopping at a sketch of a picket fence with an arrow pointing to the word “blue.” “What does this mean?”
“It means that if I’d had a blue colored pencil, I’d have colored that fence blue.”
“Blue picket fence…None of this makes any damn sense, Harlan—” Jane turned the page and took in a slight breath. There on one single page, were two numbers repeated over and over again, one on top of the other. It was the number seventeen with the number thirty-three below it, both with a single accent mark after the number. No line separated the two numbers; they just free floated up and down and across the page. “Explain this to me,” she said with a gruff tone, holding up the page for him to see.
“That’s weird, ain’t it? If I saw that in somebody’s notebook, I’d think they was one taco short of a combo platter.”
“It’s got to have meaning. You devoted an entire page to it.”
“Ain’t got a clue. And I keep tellin’ you that I didn’t do it.”
Jane flipped through the pages, stopping at a random spot. “Agna? Is that what you wrote?” She held the page up to him.
“Looks like it.”
“Did you mean the name Agnes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Jesus, Harlan! Work with me, would you? Do you know someone named Agnes?”
He looked cornered. “I don’t think so. Should I?”
Jane thought for a second. “Maybe it’s the name of one of those women you told me you dream about?”
“Which one? The one with the big boobs? I don’t think anyone would name that sweet young thing Agnes. If they did, she’d change her name, pronto.”
Jane shook her head and put down the notebook. She stared into the grove of circling aspen trees. “Did you ever try to figu
re out who your donor was?”
“When I was in the cardiac rehab, there was this real nice nurse. She’d been with me in the recovery area the whole time. Her name was Stella. I do remember that name. Every single time I yelled ‘Stella,’ she’d come on over and ask, ‘What is it, Stanley?’ Poor gal had a hard time rememberin’ my name—”
“Is there a point to this story?” Jane asked, irritation building.
“I’m gettin’ there. I like to pace myself when I tell stories.”
“Pick up the pace. You got a lot of people after you and I’m trying to help you.”
“I had a lot of questions for Stella. I wanted to know when the next meal was goin’ to get served because I was always real hungry. I asked her why I got lucky and had a room right across from the nurses’ station. I asked her who that guy was who kept sittin’ on the left side of my bed the whole time I was in recovery. I asked—”
“Wait. What guy?”
“Never found out. She said there wasn’t nobody there and I had no visitors but besides forgettin’ my first name, she also obviously couldn’t remember my friend—”
“Friend? Why would you assume that?”
“I was out of it but I could tell he didn’t mean me any harm. He was a big guy. Real muscular. Kinda thick in the arms and upper body, like he worked out every day.”
Jane focused on the words “muscular” and “thick.”
“He was like a cop or a bodyguard,” Harlan continued. “But he never talked so I can’t say for sure what his line of work was.”
Jane’s gut twisted. “Why would you need a cop or a bodyguard by your bed all the time?”
“Good question. It just felt like he was guarding me. I was pretty out of it when he was there.”
“Describe his face.”
“That’s the weird part. Every time I reach up in my head to bring down his picture, it fades away like vapor. It’s kinda like the same block I get with my nightmares. Every time I get to that door and start to turn the knob…”
