Broke Heart Blues

by Joyce Carol Oates

  John had assumed that his call would cancel the checks but six later a second arrived, for $512. 91. He tossed it into a drawer forgot it.

  He might've assumed, since he hadn't cashed either check, that he wouldn't receive any more, but, six months later, the third arrived, for 623. 14. It had followed him to Iroquois Point though he hadn't left any forwarding with the Ogdensburg post office. "God damn. I don't want his charity!" The next check was for $ I, 772, and the next for $6, 829, and when he'd torn open an envelope to discover a check for $26, 336 he vowed he wouldn't open another envelope from HARTSSOFT, it wounded his nerves, spoiled his for the rest of the day. To be a carpenter-handyman driving a bright sky-blue Ford pickup at the beck and call of customers scattered through the you had to maintain a good mood, you couldn't be susceptible to upsets, shocks. Your soul couldn't be in thrall to a man you'd have to confess you scarcely knew, a man you hadn't seen in twenty years and possibly never see again.

  Nola had asked about John's family, had he any brothers or sisters. She knew of his mother in Arizona. She wasn't a woman to pry, even elliptically, but she'd sensed John's hurt. He said, shrugging, "We're scattered.

  brother on the West Coast, younger sister in tlle middle of Missouri. And me in Iroquois Point." He never cashed the checks but he saved them, tossed into the lowermost drawer of his battered filing cabinet in the barn. He about them, the accumulation of how many thousands of dollars, from the of one HARTSSOFT envelope to the next in his mailbox. Go on, cash goddamn checks. You fucking well deserve it. If not you, who?

  Within the past two years the value of HARTSSOFT stock had steadily risen, even like John Heart) who knew and cared nothing about the stock market high-tech computers knew the name and had possibly heard the name "Franklin S. Hart"--a multimillionaire, a man of mystery, rarely photographed, only in his mid-thirties. It had crossed John's mind more than once since meeting Nola Leavey that he could put his brother's charity-money to good use. Nola's teaching salary at Iroquois Point Junior High wasn't much.

  Now she had to pay her attorney legal fees--in itself a form of by her ex-husband. John could help her. She'd say no at first, thank you, but she'd give in. He didn't doubt he could persuade her to give in. They could buy a house together. Move in together. He was fed up with living in a trailer, like living in a submarine. He wasn't in his twenties longer. His next birthday, next February, he'd be--what? --thirty-nine years old. He and Nola knew just the house they wanted, they drove by it often, a slightly rundown clapboard-and-fieldstone house on the edge of town, it would be on the market soon and MR. FIX-IT was the man to take on the task.

  The trouble was, money like Farley's was too much. Like winning lottery you hadn't known you'd entered. Like a fairy tale. It away the incentive, the fun. You didn't need to buy a run-down house, you could buy a new house. You could build your own house. You could change your life if you could figure out another life to change it into.

  After Farley was placed with a foster family in Elmira, New York, his foster father a professor at the state university there, he'd at his high school studies, won a scholarship to MIT and after graduation done advanced work there and at Caltech on computer technology. He'd earned a Ph. D. by the age of twenty-three. He'd begun a company of his by the age of twenty-seven. By the age of thirty, he'd founded an early version of HARTSSOFT. John Heart, during the same years, hired himself out

  manual laborer, a carpenter's assistant, a housepainter, a truck driver. He was happy for Farley, for what he knew of Farley, relayed to him by their mother who was happy, too, and proud, but, if she was drinking, susceptible to sudden remorse--"I lost them. gave them up too easily, didn't l?

  Johnny? You can be frank with me. You can tell the truth to me. I wasn't well in those years. I couldn't have been a responsible mother. Farley needed home. Shirleen needed a stable home. A healthy environment. I couldn't provide it. was a weak woman. I know I was a bad mother. I let that man into our lives, into our house. brought doom onto us. I mean as a family-I destroyed us. The Hearts. Can you forgive me, Johnny? Say you me." John, scowling, opened a beer and watched foam bubbling up his hand. "Fuck it."

  "John, what? I couldn't hear." "I said sure, Mom. Sure I forgive you. We all do." There was a pause. He'd been cruel, and he wasn't a cruel guy in his heart. When Dahlia spoke, her voice was almost and her words were slurred. She tried to say, "T-thank you." She'd begun to cry. There was another pause and a man's voice, pleasant but firm, came on the line. "John? This is Raymond. ltm afraid your mother will be hanging up now. Thank you for speaking with her." John wasn't jealous of Farley, he'd been relieved that Farley had out so well. The kid might've cracked up. Witness, or almost a witness, to a murder. (John hadn't ever learned just how much Farley had seen.

  might've been sick the way Shirleen had been sick. At that time John Reddy had been imprisoned at Tomahawk Island and none of the Hearts had visited him except his grandfather on the first of each month.

  John had to fight back tears when Grandpa Heart appeared in the visitors' room. He'd desperately to grip his grandfather's hand, just hold it, and be held by it, but that wasn't allowed in the facility. No touching. They'd spoken each other in lowered, shamed voices, seated on opposites sides of a sticky counter. All John could think to ask was

  "How is Mom? "--"How is Farley? "--"How Shirleen? "--"How are you, Grandpa?" Again and again like a cuckoo clock. For no answers Grandpa Heart could give him, in words, were enough.

  He hadn't believed that Dahlia had abandoned him. He would never believe that, exactly.

  The night of Melvin Riggs's death, it was Farley who was waiting for John when he came home, after midnight. Farley told John about Dahlia's friends arriving at the house uninvited. Their angry quarrel in front hall.

  The one who'd gone away, and the one who'd stayed. The one who

  Dahlia upstairs in her bedroom. John hadn't liked any of this. It pissed him off that Riggs (though he hadn't known it was Riggs at the time) was in the house, in such circumstances, because, until that night, Dahlia hadn't brought any of her Willowsville "business associates" home. In Vegas, men had stopped by the house at any time. Some of them were welcome, with hugs and kisses, some weren't. Some who'd been welcome at weren't welcome at another time. A few pounded at the doors, even at the windows. More than one stood in the front yard calling for Dahlia, and threatening Dahlia. Grandpa Heart cursed in return, waving gun. He fired a warning shot. Two shots. Vegas police came to 837 Arroyo Seco. It might have been a night Dahlia Heart herself wasn't home, for many such nights. Two patrol cars were parked in the street, headlights glaring. Neighbors were wakened and came to stare. The child Johnny stood in his shorts peeking around a corner of the house to watch in scorn as a youngish man, beaten about the head by cops, dripping blood, was cuffed, shoved roughly into the rear of a patrol car and driven away.

  nights of sirens, gunshots. There was a carnival mood, a mood like fireworks. You were excited to see some poor bastard beaten about the head, even kicked. But the Village of Willowsville wasn't Vegas. There was an entirely mood here. The Hearts had risen considerably in the world. No one mistake them for white trash now. They were, as Dahlia instructed repeatedly, "residents of the upper middle class." She'd learned word "bourgeoisie" and uttered it in three equally stressed liquidy-sensuous syllables. They lived in a beautiful house, a small mansion. In neighborhood--St.. Albans Hill. Dahlia had purchased outright (or maybe it was a gift? ) a tasteful Mercedes of the hue of silver mist and had given the eyesore Caddie to John Reddy. She was a frequent guest at private Willowsville and Buffalo clubs and had reason to expect she'd be invited to join these clubs soon. She'd teamed up with local businessmen who were her investments. It was her dream to own a small business one day, a beauty salon possibly. A boutique selling high-guality imported merchandise. It was her dream to be a "purely self-capitalized" businesswoman not upon any living soul except herself. Except there were men who with this vision, like Melvin Riggs, Jr. Riggs wasn't
the only one, only the most conspicuous one. The one who'd ended up naked on the floor of bedroom, a bullet in his brain.

  At John Reddy's trial, Farley Heart was called to the witness stand as a hostile witness by the prosecution. It had been a bizarre episode.

  Farley had seemed dazed, drugged, his skin was the sickish color of curdled milk, his eyes swam behind the lenses of his schoolboy glasses. He's Lying.

  For my sake.

  My brother! John would not be able to recall afterward the details of Farley's stumbling yet passionate testimony, a dull roaring as of Niagara Falls in his ears obscured much of the trial for him. He'd appeared an outlaw, a dissident, a vicious young murderer in the eyes of others yet had been to himself stunned and helpless as a patient under anesthesia. Farley had brother-patient, as helpless as he. Saying, his eyes snatching the prosecutor's, Sir, I look at a thing sometimes and it disappears. A solid object. A person. My mind is somewhere else. My own thoughts intrude... Someone else--another "agent"--might have carried it there? It might have been--me?

  No one in the courtroom had believed his testimony of course. But feeling behind it, the desire to spare his brother John Reddy--that was unmistakable.

  It hadn't mattered. That trial had ended in a mistrial. Farley hadn't been called to the witness stand again. John hadn't been able to tell him how grateful he was for the testimony, how much he loved him. My only brother.

  Twenty years later. "Franklin S. Hart." HARTSSOFT. The pioneer Virtualized Reality.

  Click into the event from X possible points of view. Soon your perspective will be multiplied to infinity. Limitless as the universe.

  Mankind will truly become as God, having information access from an inhnite number of perspectives! Dahlia, proud if more than a little baffled, sent an article her husband Raymond had clipped from Scientific American. The new discoveries that had been made within the past eighteen months of the possibilities of cyberintelligence. The explorations of cyberspace.

  "Franklin S. Hart" about whom little biographical information was was one of a dozen young men renowned in the field, not the most perhaps, nor the wealthiest, but an individual, a loner, about the others spoke with respect. (There were five very young-looking photographed for the article, but Franklin S. Hart hadn't been available. ) HARTSSOFT was known for its rapid advances. The computing power in their new chips was doubling, on the average, every fifteen months.

  read the article word by word, frowning as he read, feeling a wirelike band tighten around his head, he'd wanted so badly to understand his brother's work if only conceptually, he'd never had much of a mind for math, he'd liked geometry, the actual visualization of space bounded by lines you could draw yourself, but beyond that--trigonometry? calculus? he'd a vocational arts major in high school, he hadn't had to take such courses.

  Dahlia was enormously proud to own one hundred shares of original stock in HARTSSOFT and couldn't resist boasting to her Casa Adobes friends, the mysterious Franklin S. Hart, president of HARTSSOFT, was her son." Why has he changed his name? --they ask. tell them, My son is an American. But an American born in the West, right here in Arizona at Gila Bend. We believe in revolution. We believe in starting over, rebaptizing ourselves. We're optimists." On the phone with John, this was Dahlia's usual tone--upbeat, cheery, just slightly defensive but good-natured.

  was rare in recent years she'd break down.

  The other Hearts were grateful for HARTSSOFT's dividends, too.

  Leander said humbly, "This is truly God's blessing! It will go the further development of the Glass Ark and to its maintenance, and publicity--for the Glass Ark must be seen by as many men, women and children as possible, for its beauty to be known." Sister Mary Agatha, Shirleen, accepted the dividends as she accepted any and all contributions to support her work with learning-disabled and autistic children at her Kansas City school--"For the greater glory of mankind, which is identical with the glory of God." Shirleen never failed to call her brother John twice a year, on his birthday on February 8, and on Christmas Eve. If he wasn't home to take call--and usually he wasn't--she left a breathy, rambling message him a happy birthday or happy Christmas, asking after his health and spiritual well-being and his work and moving on then to speak not of herself but of her recent work, about which she was invariably enthusiastic, excited.

  Alone of the Hearts, Shirleen retained the nasal, curiously hollow-sounding accent of western New York. Her voice was cheery and upbeat as Dahlia's yet rang with a girlish innocence that had never been Dahlia's. You envisioned, hearing her, a tall gawky self-conscious girl with glasses, slightly crooked teeth, a habit of wetting her lips as she spoke. So far as John knew, though he hadn't seen his sister face to face in many years, this was in how she looked, she'd never gained back the excess weight she'd lost at the time of her illness aged eleven and twelve. She spoke at length, interlarding her remarks with Bless you, John! and a catch in her throat as if she was about to cry but she did not cry, only continued, until the answering abruptly cut her off in mid-sentence. When John tried to return call, she was never available to come to the phone. An assistant would say hushed voice, "Oh, Sister Mary Agatha is out!" or

  "Sister Mary Agatha is with one of her children!" They hadn't spoken together, so far as John could calculate, in ten years at least. But we think of each other day of our lives. My sister. ) He stooped to open the lowermost drawer of the battered old filing cabinet and tossed the HARTSSOFT envelope inside. A dozen unopened envelopes. More. He'd never counted them. Checks never cashed, thousands of dollars' worth by this time? His brain shut off, he didn't want to think. Resist ye not evil. But he'd resist evil. He had that strength.

  Already panting, sweating inside his clothes. He'd run up the stairs. Past Farley in his pajamus, glasses halfway down his nose as if he'd been hit in the face. The deafening-loud gunshots. The vibrating of the air. So that what you heard once, twice, three times you would hear yet again, and again, again.

  Ihrough your life you would hear. At the farther end of the corridor in his underclothes was the white-haired, white-whiskered old man now unmistakably old. A hand pressed to his chest stricken in astonishment, pain. He was calling, shouting--what? There was Shirleen in her flannel nightgown crawling on hunds and knees like a panicked animal, bumping her forehead the floor. There was Dahlia through the doorway fumbling to WMP around her loose-seeming, soft helpless body a filmy negligee. There was the man, the body, fattish, naked, on the floor, on his back, head turned to the as if he was trying to see over his shoulder. Dead or almost-dead, dying. Blood seeping into the dusty-rose carpet Dahlia had thought so elegant. The. 45-caliber Colt revolver on the floor. Where it had been dropped. It was Dahlia's eyes he met, blank and glassy with horror, he would not afterward believe there'd been in those eyes Pick up the gun, Johnny! Take it! Take it out of here! Johnny, save us! yet there was no protest when he did so, nor would there be in the weeks, months and even years to come, he'd acted out of instinct, his John Reddy-instinct, fastest kid on the basketball court, eyes in the back of his head, reacting without thinking, without needing to think, as might leap into freezing water to save another person with no regard for one's own safety, no regard for any time beyond this terrible moment. Throw your like dice.

  MR. FIX-IT didn't feel that his life was in danger. But he had a premonition that his life was going to change radically.

  So he kept in motion. Ten hours on the road. The shiny sky-blue pickup MR. FIX-IT HAVE TOOLS--WILL TRAVEL! looping about the back roads of Oswego County, servicing customers as far to the as Port Calumet on the lake, as far to the east as Waukeega, as far to south as Bridgeport on the Erie Canal and as far to the west as Sodus (where once, in another lifetime it seemed, he'd lived, aged twenty, an and roofer who'd fallen in love with his boss's wife). He replaced a bedroom window someone seemed to have smashed with a boot. (The boot was on the floor amid shards of glass. No explanation was offered, MR. FIXIT wasn't one to inquire. ) He repaired, in three deft minutes, for n
o charge, a rusted old toilet that wouldn't stop flushing. With loud rapid rhythmic blows of his hammer he laid in speckled green-gold tile linoleum in a ranch-house kitchen, he loaded onto the rear of his pickup a brass-colored leather sofa with broken springs to be repaired in his shop. For an edgy hour with a chainsaw, a treacherous implement he distrusted and feared, storm debris from around a house. He whistled atop a stepladder loose shutters, he replaced another window, painted a child's closet-sized room (pale pink walls, creamy-white ceiling--his heart ached, he thought of Ellen peeking at him through her fingers when they'd first met).

  shimmied his way into a cobweb-infested crawl space to retrieve, for an anxious elderly woman, an obese elderly cat who'd perversely hidden away from mistress--"He could hear me calling and calling, begging him to come out and eat, and he wouldn't." Expertly and cheerfully he hammered, sawed, sanded, painted and shellacked. He repaired a sump pump standing inches of dirty water. Ele accepted a beer, two beers, from customers who urged him to sit down, stay a while. Stay for lunch. Stay for supper. Thanks, MR. FIX-IT told them. But he had to keep going--"My next customer's waiting." A Bridgeport housewife in her mid-thirties, ash-blond, goodlooking, pushy and nervous and practically falling into MR. Flx-IT's muscled arms, laughed heartily at this saying, "Hmmm. don't doubt she is. ".