Broke Heart Blues

by Joyce Carol Oates

  there's a solitary soul in most men you don't find in most women. MR. FIX-IT clearly one of those solitary souls. Never spoke about his private life, rarely asked personal questions. A loner. Had more carpentry work than handle but he didn't seem to want to hire any assistants.

  played poker at Capuano's Tavern, not a very methodical player, trusting to luck, cards. During hunting season he wouldn't offer any comment the talk shifted to hunting. He'd never ask hunters how they'd done. He was a good drinking companion, a good listener. His brooding, eyes. Passing 110 judgment on others, possibly wanting no judgment passed on him.

  The worst of it was after a day's barrage of gunshots, hiking out in the silence, in the gathering cold just before dusk, to discover a wounded deer, sometimes more than one, dying up in the woods. These were likely to be does, even fawns. Illegal game so hunters let them lie where they fell, or crawled. He might have recognized some of the very deer he fed through the long winter, though he tried not to. He found himself squatting over them, a witness to their deaths, his mind empty of intention, even of thought. He could not have said why he was there. He never killed the deer to put them out of their misery. He wouldn't have had the strength. He couldn't bury them, the ground was usually frozen.

  It seemed such a sad fate, to die alone. With no witness.

  As sad a fate as to live alone.

  Some of this he'd told Nola Leavey after they became lovers. He himself telling her things he hadn't told other women. He worried that one day, one night, in a moment of weakness, out of his terrible loneliness, he might tell her too much.

  Nola hated hunting, too. Despised hunters. She told John how she'd been, her first year as a teacher in Iroquois Point, when many as one-quarter of her junior high boy students stayed out of school at the start of hunting season in November. "Their fathers take them hunting.

  Can you imagine? They're only boys." She told him that her ex-husband owned at least one rifle, a. 22-caliber Winchester. He'd gone hunting as a boy, he had fond memories of those years. He'd owned a. 12-gauge at one point, she'd asked him please to get rid of it or she would refuse to allow the children to visit him in his home and he said he would, he had, but she didn't know if she could believe him. She talked for a while how Jordan had changed during the course of their brief marriage.

  wasn't a woman to speak indiscreetly, she despised self-pity and swore she would not succumb to it, but she'd been badly hurt by that man, he'd been to her while she was pregnant with Drew, telling her afterward it hadn't meant anything to him, the woman hadn't meant anything to him, it just something that happened, it had nothing to do with her, and nothing to do with their marriage. "But, for me, it was all over then. The marriage." John listened in silence. He had begun to love Nola, it seemed to him he loved her seriously, yet also helplessly, and he didn't like that feeling, it re minded him of Dahlia's helpless loves, the brutal, manipulative she'd been involved with, her curious failure of will, a perverse sort enthrallment. I know this one's a shit, but I can't help it.

  Only for a little while.

  "That gun. The rifle. I think he still has it. I can't know, I think so.

  He's become a desperate man." Nola spoke rapidly, angrily. Clenching and unclenching her fists was a sign of nerves in her. John was quiet, listening. He understood that there was a secondary layer of meaning here, but he wasn't quite sure what it was.

  Once you were sleeping with a woman, so much was this secondary, lower layer. Often the woman wasn't aware of it herself.

  It was the evening of the day Jordan Leavey had attacked John with his fists in the parking lot of the Oswego County Courthouse.

  the day, traveling in MR. Flx-IT's sky-blue pickup, he'd kept seeing the contorted face of his enemy. Not enemies but brothers.

  Loving the same woman, the same children. His own face, he thought, looked comical, swollen and meaty where he'd taken more than one hard punch. Nola said, gravely, "I think you should make an appointment to speak with the judge in private. I think she should see you, what he's done to you. What he's of. And what kind of man you are." It was a surprise to Nola, an affront, deeply disturbing, that court judge, though a woman, a plumpish woman of youthful middle age, evinced no evident sympathy for her. Judge Whitfield was neutral, coolly matter-of-fact. Frequently, with admirable calm, she interrupted the quarrelsome male lawyers, urging them to move on. She the quarrelsome parents to settle. The term "settle" sounded, on her lips, like a directive issued to a malingering waiter. Why was she reluctant to make a decision? Wasn't that her role (Nola fumed) as a family court judge?

  Nola speculated that the woman might be unmarried, and thus not sympathe ic to the problems of marriage, or if married, childless.

  Though she certainly looked maternal, bosom, hips. A somewhat sensuous face made up in the elaborate manner of another era. (Maybe that's it, Nola told meanly. She's jealous of me, of us. She's old. Too old for sex.

  was true, John saw, that the judge, regarding Nola, contemplated her warmth.

  She contemplated Jordan Leavey who breathe noisily, sighed and shifted about in his chair, with polite, barely disguised disdain. It was doubtful that John Heart could have made a positive impression upon her, a man with a criminal record. A man who'd been tried as a teenager for a serious felony--second-degree murder. Judge Whitfield appeared to be in early forties, and so she might well remember John Reddy Heart in the headlines, the vulgar glamour that had gone on, and on. But John didn't want to I t BRO KE HEART BLUES argue with Nola, not at this time. The woman was exhausted, he'd seen her so disconsolate, her head resting on his arm, in the of his arm, in an odd, awkward pose as of abnegation.

  Between them they'd finished a bottle of red wine at dinner. The children were in bed, the house was quiet. (But Ellen, anxious and edgy and not always obedient since the onslaught of the court hearing, was probably not asleep. ) Again, Nola hadn't invited him to stay the night. He said, "The gun.

  The rifle, if he has it. Do you think you're in danger from him?

  that way?" and Nola said, not lifting her head, "No. But I think you might be." He didn't feel that his life was in danger. Who would want to hurt MR. FIX-IT? That was the point of MR. FIX-IT--who'd want to hurt him?

  Throw your life like dice. Be brave! As a child he'd learned. A wild light of hope and yearning in the bone-blond woman's eyes as she stood at the craps table swinging her fist beside her head preparing to release the dice, tumbling rolling dice.

  "Hey, Heart--mail." A horn sounded importantly at the end of the drive. He could barely hear the shouted words. Unloading a heavy mahogany table from the rear of the pickup backed to the barn door, he squinted to see who it was, waved.

  Martindale the mailman in his low-slung magenta Chevy, splattered with a winter's accumulation of dirty snow like lace, waving as he drove away.

  John felt a stab of dread. That childlike rise of hope, yearning--you learn to beat down, it's so often disappointed.

  John Heart, known for his promptness and reliability as MR. FIX-IT, had a strange habit of neglecting to bring in his mail for days at a time. Why?

  Just forgot. "Didn't get around to it." Until finally the box was stuffed, the lid fallen open like a gaping mouth. An eccentricity like refusing to answer a telephone ringing at his elbow or a question put to him point-blank. Nola said, "Such behavior, in certain quarters, might be interpreted rudeness." She was only partly joking.

  When John Heart had first moved to Iroquois Point several years ago he was approached one day in a local diner by a beefy youngish man with a sandy crew cut, a stranger, who shoved out his hand, "John R. Heart?

  "FIX-IT'? You live out Barndollar Road, right? I'm Terry Martindale, your mailman. Sometimes you don't take in your mail for days and I notice your truck's parked there, you're actually home so I'm wondering--is something wrong? Martindale looked so genuinely concerned, John apologized and made effort to bring in his mail every day for weeks. Then, gradually, he began forget.

  He
hiked down the driveway now, his breath steaming. It was another cold bright-blue windy March day. And that smell of the lake--icy, metallic. His head had ached much of the night. He'd slept some, a jolting sleep, the way a bowling ball might sleep between bouts of rolling and crashing. To dull the pain he'd swallowed a dozen aspirins. He might've had a beer two during the night. Living alone, sleeping alone, you do crazy things.

  washed down with beer was an old bad habit of his--started when he a kid. One of his back molars was rotted and aching like hell and he'd had to do half the driving, if not more, those exhausting days, day following day, two thousand miles bringing the Hearts and their belongings in a U-Haul from Vegas to Willowsville, New York, and they hadn't stop and Dahlia guiltily fed him aspirin, cans of lukewarm beer, they'd find a dentist for him soon. I'll make it up to you, hon.

  All of it!

  A kid of eleven, Johnny'd been proud of his driving. He'd only learned, instructed by one of Dahlia's man friends. He looked than his age, he was quick to catch on, fearless behind the wheel of the old glitzyorange Cadillac Eldorado where another kid his age would've been terrified.

  While Grandpa Heart was still alive, up in Shawmouth, John would receive cards from him every eight or ten months. Johnny, boy.

  here. Can't complain. Life is good. Come see Grandpa soon or it's too late.

  Bless you, boy. Our love to you. The signature was

  "Grandpa H. " and below it a stamp in green, AARON LEANDER HEART, as if John might need further identification. These cards were slick, full-color reproductions of THE ARK at Shawmouth, N. Y. --A world-renowned collection of more than 30, 000 bottles and other glass items open to the general public 365 days a year. Aaron Leander Heart's Glass Ark was a bona fide tourist attraction seventy miles beyond Oswego on the lake. Listed in the New York State AAA Tour for the Oswego-Watertown region. Ten years before there'd been a twopage feature in People showing the stately old white-haired and

  "native-grown seer and artist" posed proudly before the glittering Ark he'd constructed, piece by piece, in the backyard of his shanty-house in Shawmouth. There'd been numerous other features in regional magazines, newspapers, tourist guides. John Heart was occasionally asked if was related to "that old man named Heart, the one with all the bottles, or whatever" and he said no, he wasn't, his reply curt and probably so transparent a lie no one believed it, including Nola Leavey who backed off and never brought up the subject again.

  What a character, Grandpa Heart! Johnny had always loved him, no matter what. As an adult, John Heart had loved the old man, too.

  not quite so unconditionally. Not entirely trusting him. He'd driven up to every few months to visit, enjoying the old man's company, all remained of his family by that time. They'd talk circumspectly Dahlia, Farley, "little Shirleen"--it seemed that Aaron Leander Heart's memory of the family was set, perhaps deliberately, in a time predating Willowsville. It was as if Willowsville, where they'd lived for seven years, where John Reddy Heart had come of age, hadn't existed. But mostly they talked of the Glass Ark, how many visitors had come recently, this was a seasonal tourist attraction of course, though Grandpa Heart kept it open daily--"As God has ordained." They talked of the future of the Glass Ark, beyond Heart's lifetime--"You will take it over, Johnny? You're my sole executor, my only heir." John mumbled a reply. He couldn't think of a less likely fate. He couldn't think of the old man dying. All that remained for him of his family.

  But Grandpa Heart had died last November. Already four months had passed. The Glass Ark was being managed by a woman friend, a assistant of Aaron Leander Heart who lived in Shawmouth. John Heart kept distance. He didn't want to think about it. He had too much to think about in Iroquois Point--his MR. FIX-IT work, his connection with Nola and her children. What he missed was Grandpa Heart's cards in the mailbox. Those cards with their enigmatic messages in that could recognize at six feet had ceased forever.

  He'd fetched his mail from the box and slammed the loose-fitting lid.

  MR. FIX-IT was painted in bright blue above JOHN R. HEART in black on both sides of the handsome aluminum box.

  Quickly he scanned the envelopes, advertising brochures and flyers in his hand, seeing, yes, he'd been expecting it, the envelope, computer-addressed, IOHN R. HEART, BARNDOLLAR RD. , IROQUOIS POINT, NY 13016 from HARTSSOFT, PALO ALTO, CA 94303. "Fuck it." Every six months like clockwork check came to him. He'd never cashed one of these checks yet they coming, following him from one address to another. Through the galaxy of instant information available in cyberspace to his brother Farley he could be tracked anywhere on earth, he supposed. Not Farley but one of Farley's numerous assistants. Though probably it was done entirely now by machines.

  For it was all clockwork. What had once been emotional, vivid as man's glistening blood.

  At the barn, in his workshop, the phone was ringing. A woman's clicked onto the answering service, asking when MR. FIX-IT could drop by to repair a broken window. Quickly John sorted through the mail, away most of the advertising brochures and flyers, setting aside the weekly Iroquois Point Sentinel he'd read diligently to absorb the mysterious life of the community in which he lived. There were two or three checks MR. FIX-IT from customers who'd owed him for weeks, maybe months. He put pressure on anyone to pay him, never telephoned. He might a second bill, eventually. Some people waited to be billed twice they paid any bills. He'd encounter these people in town, at the mall, guilty evasive smiles, he'd just smile back, wave, walk by. It more important, MR. FIX-IT had always believed, to be liked and than to be paid on time. His own bills, he paid as soon as they came in.

  his finances in scrupulous order. It was easier, in fact, than the other.

  Hearts! Dahlia and Aaron Leander. They'd left Vegas owing of dollars. Maybe more. Driving away in the middle of the night from the rented bungalow on Arroyo Seco where they'd owed two months' rent.

  Grandpa Heart might've owed money to gambling acquaintances.

  might've borrowed from friends to buy the Caddie Eldorado from friend. Though he'd wanted to marry her, and he was a rich man, Edgihoffer hadn't given Dahlia any money, it was all to come when were legally "man and wife. ") John examined the envelope from HARTSSOFT without opening it. His hand shook slightly.

  Resist ye not evil. He'd never understood what Jesus meant by that remark.

  Not that he, John Heart, was a man who brooded, trying to decode isn't decodable. He'd read the Bible, the New Testament mainly, Tomahawk Island. Frowning over the verses, sometimes moving his lips as he read.

  He'd been John Reddy Heart then, kind of a brash smart-ass scared kid, he'd thought that if he could've met Jesus Christ face to face a lot of the mystery, the murk, would've been cleared up.

  One day four years ago when John was living in Watertown, working as a carpenter for a local contractor, a rare personal letter had come to him, certified mail.

  Dear John, One hundred shares of HARTSSOFT have been purchased in your name and dividends will be processed and sent to you in due course.

  Please note that my legal name is now Franklin S. Hart.

  I hope you are well, as I am.

  Sincerely, your brother " Farley"-(dictated but not read)

  John was mystified, mildly annoyed. He didn't need his younger brother's charity.

  Later he would learn that identical letters had been sent to the rest of the family. Aaron Leander in Shawmouth, Shirleen who was Sister Agatha of the St.. Anne's Sisters of Charity in Kansas City, Heart in Casa Adobes, Arizona.

  He put away the letter, forgot it. Then the first of the checks arrived--at his new address, in Ogdensburg. He'd opened the envelope to discover a check made out to JOHN R. HEART for $460. 73 and for a long moment couldn t figure what it was, who it was from. When he realized, a burn seemed to spread across his face. He hadn't spoken to Farley in years but he to get through to him, for in those days you could get through to "Franklin Hart" if you could convince an assistant of his that you were in fact the man's brother, with an
urgent message. "Hey Farley, if you'd me this by hand, as a gift, I'd cash it with thanks." (Not that that was true. John wouldn't have cashed it in any case. ) Farley stammered some sort reply, taken by surprise, as if no one ever spoke to him in such a familiar, intimate way any longer. He'd sounded exactly like the boy John had known, shy quiet startled-seeming brainy kid brother of whom no one took notice, even his mother. John, not very comfortable on the phone himself, congratulated Farley on forming his own computer company, he'd heard from Dahlia that Farley was doing really well, he'd patented some new invention? --or more than one.7--"microchips"? --"neurological-cybernetical microchips"? --and how did he like California? There was an pause, and Farley said, his voice almost inaudible over the breadth of continent, that he wasn't much aware of California yet--"It's just the place I live and do my work." After this the conversation between the brothers had quickly died.