This Old Heart of Mine

by Thomas Berger

  “I would of put my knife in him,” continued his host, a specimen of what was called locally a “Briarhopper,” a person with Kentuckian antecedents. “I saw my daddy do that onetime. Put a double-bit ax right in some old boy’s head for getting smart with him. FBI ran him to China and we never saw him since. Over there still with them Chinks, probly. I had a Chink girl once. Her gash run crossways, like they say, and that’s no lie. I can go eight times a night, and then I get tared and it hangs down like a old sock. Where you from, Cum-minsville?”

  “No,” answered Reinhart from the floor. He had an under-chin view of his benefactor and consequently a perspective on several boils. From the rear-vision mirror dangled a naked kewpie doll in a nimbus of red and blue feathers. The back seat seemed to be filled with old tires and extra auto parts, because Reinhart looked it over, thinking he might retire there, but no.

  The Briarhopper had one of those little swivel-knobs on the steering wheel, and drove with a hand on it, freeing the other to finger his crotch, pick his nose, and hail—girls, Reinhart assumed though of course he couldn’t see, and what he heard was the frequent repetition of “Got damn! What I need is a piece of cock.” Such are the variations in American idiom that certain terms reverse their meaning from one to the next: Reinhart had served in the Army and hence knew this fellow was anything but a queer: on the other hand, it was not impossible that he might have been waving at chickens.

  “No,” Reinhart answered. “My name is Lorenz Goodykuntz of Pocatello, Idaho, and I am just passing through.”

  The next moment he was hurled into the back of the automobile and saved from serious damage only by the cushion of an old tire. The Briarhopper had suddenly climbed on the brakes. When the skid finally petered out, he pulled off the road, then turned and thrust his wiry hand at Reinhart.

  “Doc Goodykuntz, I be a sonbitch! Recall me, Doc? Homer A. Blesserhart of 119 Snell Avenue and before that I uz in the Army: PFC Homer A. Blesserhart, Twenty-Seventh Messkit Repair Battalion, APO 93, care uh Postmaster S. F. My God, I must of tuck every course you sell, and I got four of your degrees, though them genuine sheepskin parchments must of got lost in the mail.”

  Reinhart sighed and crawled forward, dragging with him a wooden carton of wire and such, which he emptied, upended, and sat on. He was now at a higher level than a normal seat and feared that when they got the show on the road again, Homer’s cowboy driving might send him through the roof.

  “You realize, Blesserhart,” he said severely, “that from my thousands of students it is difficult to remember any single one….” He saw Homer’s slack mouth begin to tighten in a pout. “… Wait a minute—nonchemical medicine, wasn’t it?”

  “Nuh,” said Homer, going sullen again. “Nucklar Science and Industral Mechanics, Radiotellagrafy, Psychic Energy, and Advanced Seminar in Martal Relations.”

  “Oh sure, the marriage course. I remember you very well. How’s the wife?”

  Homer put his head out the driver’s window. They sat on the shoulder of the road, between a wholesale tile house and a gravel pit, and a little farther along was a giant plaster cone from a window in the base of which a red-haired guy in a white overseas cap sold frozen custard, and one of those gaspipe-rack establishments that offered two-pants suits for 19.95, alterations included. However, Homer had averted his head from embarrassment and not to enjoy the view: a blush ran over his pimples.

  “I ain’t got no missus,” he confessed. “I tuck that course because I figured it to be dirty.” He put the car in motion again, running her up close to the ass-end of a big semi that encapsulated them in blue Diesel exhaust. “And my God it was, Doc. You must of got a lot of poongtang in your time if you’ll pardon the exprayshun—’swat them gooks call it in the islands.” He at last swung around the truck, choosing a place where the highway narrowed to two lanes and went into a tight curve: it was a close game for several seconds with an oncoming coupe, but he finally bluffed it off the road, into the adjacent gully, and through a chicken-wire fence on the rise—Reinhart could see no further, for by then they were negotiating the next turn. One thing, his malaise was lifting.

  “Then what about those baby shoes hanging in the rear window?” he asked.

  “Belong to muh baby uncle Pearl,” said Homer. “He be three years next week…. Doc, don’t tell me you come up here to deliver my diplomas? Got dam. You recollect I wrote you I uz getting farred from my job? Well I was. I left one of your Martal Relations lessons in the toilet at the garage where I had been reading while taking a dump during my lunch ar, and some woman come in to get gas and slipped in for a quick leak—because we just had one toilet, not like the Sohio with men’s and women’s—and saw it there and come running out to Joe Sawyer who’s the prop, of that station and said you got a sex-fiend hereabout, so Joe come to me and he uz sore as a boil and said you goddam prevert, I don’t want no twenny-two-year-old mechanic who still pulls his pood in the toilet, and farred me. I uz going to put my knife in him but he uz holding a big socket wrench at the time and looked like he would cold-cock me as it was. But that was real nasty, Doc, and I tell you I never abused myself after the age of maybe ten, looking in the Sears catalogue at ladies in their undies. These here pimples must have come from something else.”

  “I’m sure they do, Blesserhart,” muttered Reinhart, who was trying to remember, from one of those magazine filler-articles on What to Do When You Expect a Car Accident, the proper sequence of safety measures: cross arms over face, crouch down below windshield, relax, etc. Fate had ironically elbowed him into what promised to be a suicide most authentic. This is where his hubris had led him: you should not even joke about shuffling off the mortal coil.

  CROSSROAD, said a sign showing a black + on a yellow field, and from the real one for which this was but a symbol, crawled an old Ford station wagon with sides of diseased wood.

  “Hold ya hat,” cried Homer, the foxtail outside his window flying horizontal, “we going to sheer off this sonbitch at the tailpipe.”

  But it was likely that they would hit nowhere near so far aft. Reinhart found that in an emergency he was more inclined to guard his crotch than his eyes—strange, but his hands were paralytically cupped there while he shouted: “Brakes, oh for Christ sake, brakes!”

  “Ain’t got none at this fast,” Homer answered merrily, accelerating further in lieu thereof and still steering with one hand on the swivel-knob.

  Homer’s estimate was right on the nose: brannng, the Buick’s left fender severed that portion of the Ford’s exhaust pipe that extended beyond the rear bumper, without touching the body. A masterful piece of driving on the part of Blesserhart, who waved his no-grudge at the other driver—an old man with a load of egg crates, Reinhart had time to observe before they barreled over the next rise, who never knew what didn’t hit him.

  Onward, Homer driving as if in exemplification of Splendor’s philosophy, which they had both got from Dr. Goodykuntz, whom Reinhart was impersonating for the second time. Small world. Pocatello might be a feasible hideout after he had taken simulation to the limit and faked a departure from the world. He must consider the particularities.

  “Going feeshing down the river, Doc,” said Homer, when queried on his destination. “And be proud to have your company.” He flashed a mouthful of nothing: his front teeth were gone, top and bottom, at age twenty-two.

  Down the river, splendid! Immediately Reinhart had his plans: drowning was the most satisfactory kind of death to counterfeit. A fire wasn’t bad, but you had to provide some sort of organic material, say the body of a pig, to be found afterwards in a charred state; still, they would look for teeth that agreed with the chart of your fillings provided by the family dentist. Then too, Reinhart did not like to destroy property, which was also his objection to spuriously polishing off oneself by blast—TNT, dynamite, gas, etc., you name it, they were all hard to harness, the noise was abominable, and once again you would need that pig or whatever, to be found in fragments.

&
nbsp; You couldn’t beat drowning, with driver’s license, social security card, and checkbook left on the riverbank—and of course a note announcing your intentions and pleading your regrets.

  “I’d be proud to come along,” he answered solemnly, gulping to relieve the ear-pressure as they roared down a slope, and catching the dashboard to hold himself on his box as they began a new ascent. “And,” Reinhart continued, “I’m sorry about those missing diplomas, but you must know from reading my literature that I have many enemies. Indeed, banding together, they have at last succeeded in flushing me out of Pocatello, Idaho, altogether. You see me at a very low point, Blesserhart. Frankly, I am on the run. I shall never forget the kindness you have extended to me. I confess I was at the point of doing laway with myself when I met you.”

  Homer was touched and blew both nostrils, alternately, plugging the other with a forefinger, out his window.

  “Just let me catch one of them boys trying to pressecute you, Doc, that’s all I say. I’ll put my knife in him and that’s no lie. I’ll turn my dog on him. I’ll carve him inta a woman. I’ll cold-cock him with one blow of my mighty fist, and I can do it, too, I got hands like am. I’ll lay his belly open and grab his hind legs and flip his guts out like you do a rabbit. I’ll snatch him bald. I’ll bend his ears like a aileron, and he’ll take off straight up in a stiff wind. I’ll string him on a ramrod and cook him over a slow far. I’ll rip out his gizzard and use it for bait.” And so on, adding several more stanzas to his never-ending epic. Reinhart was a little embarrassed to be shown up by comparison as prosaic, he who was supposed to be the poet. Trouble was, the most romantic of his doings had usually to be concealed, such as his project at present, and as for talking colorfully, he couldn’t without a bellyful of drink.

  “Pull in here,” he ordered all at once, and Homer was equal to the occasion, swinging with the scream of tortured rubber into the parking lot of the roadhouse they had just been about to pass at seventy miles an hour.

  He ripped the hand brake on, and stared at Reinhart in respectful obedience. “If you want to go to the toilet, Doc, you could use them booshes there. Don’t look to me like the Kit Kat Klub is open yet.”

  “Matter of fact, what I wanted was a shot of red-eye,” Reinhart robustly announced.

  “Whyn’t you say so?” Homer brought a flat pint of drugstore port from his back pocket, spun off the cap, and passed his hand, with its glaze of grease, over the muzzle.

  Reinhart refused very nicely, confessing an aversion to sweet tastes at this moment, so Homer said O.K. Doc, threw his head back so far you would have thought it would topple off his neck, and drained the last drop of the purple contents, breaking the bottle with a whaaaap on the blacktop when they left the car.

  Homer was almost as tall as Reinhart, but thin as a snake standing on end. His shoulders were broad when you faced him, but let him turn in profile and he vanished. His hips were nonexistent. He wore western-style pants with horizontal pockets, in which while walking he carried his hands, thumbs protruding; and his shoes were yellow to match his eyes, with points like stilettos.

  They barged into the roadhouse. The interior held no surprise: the chairs were upended on the tables, the air was dark green and smelled like a kennel of wet dogs, and the bartender, who had hairy forearms, came in from somewhere out back, lifted the trap door that admitted him behind the mahogany, and asked with cynical courtesy: “What’s yours, gents?”

  Reinhart motioned Homer to a stool and ordered grandly: “Give the gentleman whatever he desires and pour me a Courvoisier while I use the phone.” He grouped through the gloom towards the telephone booth he could just barely spot at the right rear. Inside it smelled of urine and of course neither the dome light nor the little fan was operative. He dialed home by the flare of his Zippo.

  “Gen?”

  “Carl, hello.”

  “Well, what’s happening?”

  “I gained a pound and a half last week, but the doctor said though it’s abnormal, don’t worry.”

  “Swell,” said Reinhart. He had forgotten her visit to the obstetrician, if the truth be known; she must have gone in a cab—for which it was characteristic of her that she did not reproach him, swine that he was. Still, he couldn’t help being impatient: “And what else?”

  “He said for my constipation to eat ordinary licorish candy rather than take all that milk of magnesia that has begun to turn my stomach. Did you know that ordinary licorish has a cathartic action?”

  “I certainly didn’t,” said Reinhart, “and I think it’s wonderful. Any calls for me?”

  “Not so’s you could notice,” gaily answered Gen, who was in a very bright mood for no reason at all, whereas yesterday she had been depressed almost to point of coma: so it goes with gravid women.

  “Listen,” Reinhart began, opening the booth door slightly to freshen the air, but that of the room was scarcely better and Homer had brought the jukebox obstreperously to life, so he closed it again lest Gen misinterpret. “Listen …”

  “And I had the usual nosebleed, quickly over. And he said that varicose vein behind my left knee will go away after delivery, as will the heartburn, the insomnia, the rash, the backache, and the leg cramps.”

  “But you knew that already, darling,” said Reinhart, touched by her naive need to catalogue. How could he leave her at such a time? But Claude and the Gibbons would get him if he returned; and she was in no condition to come along. He had called merely to get the he of the land, but he now resolved to tell her everything.

  “Listen, hon. Things have gone wrong with the sewer—”

  “Now don’t be angry,” she said. “You were out when I called the office to remind you today was my appointment with the doctor, so I had no resource but to call Daddy.”

  “Genevieve,” Reinhart said gravely, “if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times that while we don’t see eye to eye, your father and me, I would be the last person to want to come between you. Besides, something has come up regarding my work that may make it necessary for you to rely on him for a while. I may have to disappear—”

  “I think he has begun to accept you, dear. Really. I noticed a definite slackening off of bitterness. You might even think of taking him to lunch one day soon. Which reminds me, it’s past one o’clock, and I wonder if you are ever going to get home to have lunch today.”

  “Not today, Gen, and not tomorrow,” Reinhart said portentously.

  “Oh good,” cried Gen, only too pleased. “Then I can have liver, which you despise.”

  “Yes,” said Reinhart tragically, “you’ll be on your own now.” He had meant to tell her the truth but couldn’t seem to get it out, hence this fishy sort of idiom that revealed very little while making him feel as if he really were about to destroy himself.

  “Yes,” said Genevieve. “Did you have anything else to say at this moment, dear?”

  “Maybe I have, Gen,” Reinhart answered reproachfully. “Perhaps I have something of overwhelming importance to tell you….”

  “Well do you? Because the doorbell has been ringing constantly for the last two minutes, and I can see through the window that it’s the boy from the drugstore with my vitamin capsules.”

  “No,” Reinhart said simply. “Just don’t believe everything you read in the papers.” He hung up. He might try again if he could work up any conviction that he would get to first base with Genevieve, but it seemed unlikely. The nearer she got to giving birth, the more she resembled her own mother in woolly-mindedness—whereas premaritally there was a certain equivalence between her personality and that of her old man; both had a certain sharpness though his had rusted. Anyway, somewhere along the line Reinhart had got out of touch with Genevieve while growing closer to her—which is something the hacks who write on problems of marriage never understand or least pretend not to. He wondered whether you could become so intimate with a woman as not to know her at all, to pass on the street without recognition: “Now let me see, coul
d that be Isolde, dearer to me than life itself?” Whereas the waitress in a greasy spoon, say, to whom you were altogether indifferent, was an open book. Such a girl, for example, was waiting outside the phone booth: a stringy-haired blonde with vivid make-up, a little droopy as to tit, a trifle wide in the haunch, and—he would bet, for she wore bell-bottomed red slacks in the fashion of the day—a bit thin in the calf.

  “I’ll bet,” he addressed her defiantly, “I’ll bet that I can give a pretty good analysis of your character though I have never seen you before.”

  She made simple-minded googoo-eyes at him, which were of such a pale blue that had they been outdoors he would have sworn he could see the sky through the back of her head.

  “Gee kid, you can?”

  “How about this,” said Reinhart. “You are patient, but you don’t know anybody else who is. Considerate of your friends, you suffer from inconsiderateness of others. You are nervous, but most other people think of you as the soul of calm. Everybody tells you his troubles; but when you have difficulties, you suffer them in silence. You are generous to a fault, but this generosity is seldom returned, and never by the people who have profited most by yours. You—”

  “Oh golly,” squealed the blonde, “you are sure a genius like Homer said. You got me to a T, honey. Go on.” She laid her breast against his arm, then giggled. Curious sensation.