The Heart Does Not Grow Back

by Fred Venturini

  After twenty minutes of steady checkout activity, Rae turned off her register light and left her post. She walked past the snack area and gave me a little half wave. “I just have to get my food,” she said. “Be right back.” She brushed her hair away from her eye again. I got a refill and when I turned around, she was sitting at my table, carefully removing a sandwich from a Ziploc bag.

  The sandwich was amazing for its neatness. Neither meat nor cheese hung over the border of the crust of the white bread. The entire works was carefully spliced into two, perfectly equal triangles. She picked up a half and took a bite and you could see the entire contents of the sandwich, like a split pig in a biology class—two slices of cheap bologna, a slice of cheese that came from a standalone cellophane wrapper, and a light slathering of mayo.

  “Where did you go, Dale?” she asked. “I thought you might have left school after it all happened. We heard you got hurt bad, but you never know what to believe. Someone said you lost your hand, which I can see was the rumor mill doing what it does. Then I saw you listed with your graduating class.”

  “Senior year was pretty much optional, credit wise,” I said. “I couldn’t go back.”

  “I went back,” she said. “I didn’t want to, but I’m glad I did. I looked for you.”

  “Why?” I said. “I was there at the end. I cared about her. I would have been a constant reminder.”

  “I was her sister, Dale,” she said. “I see her all the time. It’ll never stop. At least now when I see her, we just smile at each other.”

  She stared at her sandwich and took a contemplative bite. She looked upset.

  “Let’s change the subject,” I said. “How about college. You go to college?”

  “I started,” she said. “Then I met my husband.”

  “Your husband,” I said. “Who is he? Is he from our school?”

  “I need to get back to work,” she said.

  “How long do you work tonight?”

  “Until ten,” she said. I caught her twisting her wedding ring with her thumb.

  “Do you need a ride home or anything? Or maybe we can just hang out and talk more somewhere.”

  “I’m married. I can’t hang out with you,” she said.

  “Right. Sorry.” Embarrassed, I busied myself throwing away my soda and picking up my grocery bags.

  She put the remainder of her sandwich in the Ziploc bag and sealed it with patient grace.

  “I walk to work,” she said. “I like the walk, so I don’t need a ride, but if you’re outside at ten I guess I can’t stop you from walking with me.”

  * * *

  I dropped my groceries off, took my second shower of the day, and searched for my least-wrinkled shirt. I wanted her to see the change of clothes and smell the soap. I wanted her to know it was important to me, because it was. Just seeing her had made it quite clear the last few years were a crucial mistake—in trying to distance myself from the death that Clint wrought that night, I had essentially executed the survivors. Of course I’d never see Regina again, but it was my fault I never saw anyone else, including Mack. Sure we talked on the phone, but the occasional phone call means the friendship is already brain dead—the only thing left is to pull the plug for good.

  I squeezed my regenerated hand—a reminder that beating myself up wasn’t so simple. If I returned in perfectly healed condition, it wouldn’t have felt right. The questions would get uncomfortable when my condition didn’t match any reports or rumors. I was robbed of the injuries I’d earned that night. I needed those scars. I needed physical damage to reconcile it mentally, to tell myself I’d paid the proper price for letting Regina die. The pain of loneliness was all I ever knew. It was the only pain I knew how to magnify.

  I sat outside the Wal-Mart next to the Sam’s Choice soda machine. I listened to the buzz and clap of the automatic doors opening and closing as shoppers funneled in and out of the store. People went in empty-handed and came out pushing carts loaded with plastic bags with handles that rattled in the wind, the same way that oxygen-starved cells filtered through a beating heart.

  Raeanna emerged just past ten with her blue vest neatly hung over her left forearm. She paused and looked around for me. I jumped up to meet her.

  “You actually came,” she said.

  “What can I say, I love to walk. Been doing it my whole life.”

  I started to cross the parking lot. “Not that way,” she said. She led us behind the Wal-Mart, where it was considerably darker without the streetlights that pocked the parking lot. I could make out a dumpster and a docking area for the trucks. She led me across a grassy median behind the store and we ended up on an access road.

  “You go this way, it takes you deeper into the country. Back roads,” she said, pointing west. “This way is parallel to the main drag and it takes you into the residential areas on that side of town.”

  “You walk this by yourself at night?” I asked. I could see lights in the distance from the residences she was talking about, but the road itself had no adjacent lighting for the entire stretch. On a cloudy night, you would need the sound of your own shoes to let you know if you were on the road or had wandered off. Luckily, we had a few open patches of starlight to help us along.

  “I think when I walk,” she said. “Quiet is good. What, you afraid of the dark?” She took my hand. I legitimately lost my breath. It took me a few awkward seconds to say, “Of course not.”

  “Too bad,” she said, and let my hand go.

  We walked. I had to slow my normal pace to match hers. I secretly hoped she was sandbagging to give us more time together. We endured a long silence at the start of the march before she said, “Whatever happened to Mack Tucker?”

  “He’s finishing up at Carbondale,” I said, leaving out his quest for reality-show fame.

  “Good for him,” she said, but she was really saying shame on us for not completing college. “He was always … interesting.”

  “That’s a polite way of saying he was a prick,” I said, and we both laughed.

  “Regina had a soft spot for him. Lots of girls did.”

  “Did you?”

  “Not at all,” she said. “He was one of those talkers. Always keeping his lips moving so he didn’t have to spend a quiet moment considering just how boring he really was. No offense, I know he’s your friend.”

  “You might have summed it up perfectly,” I said.

  “Well, the quiet, smart kids usually do good for themselves—do you have a lucky lady in your life?”

  “Just you,” I said, hoping it would sound clever. Instead, it sounded inappropriate and desperate, a reminder of how lucky she was to have survived Regina.

  “Dale! That’s not the shy boy that I remember.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Of course you meant it like that.”

  We approached the cluster of houses. Porch lights and streetlights converged as we emerged from the shadows. It felt like waking up from a dream.

  “I don’t live far from here,” she said.

  “I’ll walk you to your door,” I said.

  “You can’t,” she said. “Are you forgetting that I’m married?”

  “Why did you hold my hand, then?” I said.

  “I’m sorry about that. I just didn’t want you to be scared.”

  “I’m not scared of the dark,” I said with a self-deprecating chuckle.

  “I’m not talking about the dark.”

  She took my hand again. My once-broken ribs tightened around my lungs and I got a little dizzy. “Are you okay, Dale? I mean really okay?”

  “What happened to your eye?” I asked.

  She let go of my hand again.

  “I fell,” she said.

  “I know what that’s code for.”

  “I can walk the rest of the way.”

  “You didn’t even tell me his name. You haven’t said anything about him at all.”

  “Do you really want to know?”
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  “I do now,” I said. “Tell me about your husband. About marriage. Do you have any kids or anything?”

  She walked away from me. I followed her, hoping she’d turn around and invite me back into lockstep with her. She didn’t. She stared at the sidewalk as we got closer to her street. Finally, she stopped at a corner and turned to me.

  “You need to go,” she said. “I’m not mad or anything, but you just have to.”

  “Can we walk again sometime?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I just can’t walk you any farther than this?”

  “You’re already too far,” she said, looking around. “If he sees us—”

  “It’s okay. I understand.”

  She thanked me for the company and turned down Marshall Lane. I waited, then peeked around the corner. I saw her shadow moving in the distance, walking faster than she had before. I wanted to follow her home. I wanted to go inside and meet her shitty husband and let him know that if he touched her ever again, I’d make him pay. I wanted her fear and my fear to disappear. I wanted to see her eyes again without the marring of bruises and swelling. But most of all, I wanted her to hold my hand just one more time.

  Instead, I headed back to my car. I slept and dreamt of kissing a blue-eyed girl, as I often did, but for the first time I didn’t know which twin I was kissing.

  ELEVEN

  Frank Winston was the proprietor of the biggest crematorium in the tri-county area. He insisted on speaking in person, and said nothing specific over the phone. I took this to mean I had struck black-market gold.

  Frank was a big guy, thick-shouldered with a salt-and-pepper mustache and a handshake that could crack a stone. He didn’t know how I could come up with body parts, and didn’t care to know.

  Turns out that tissue is one of the last bootlegging frontiers in America, poorly regulated and improperly structured. Guys like Frank knew how to turn a profit, and they weren’t hard to find. I just cold-called funeral homes and crematoriums, asking if I they knew how I could sell body parts. Most conversations turned incredibly uncomfortable. Frank kept it short, cutting me off. I thought he was a nonstarter, just blowing me off. However, he called me right back from a different number and, after making it clear I was serious, we decided to meet in person.

  He took me at my word when I told him I could supply a steady stream of body parts, and he was more than excited to take a piece off the top in order to broker the exchanges. He chatted me up in immense detail, proud of his business, sounding more like a polished CEO than a black-market peddler.

  I can only imagine he was comfortable enough to reveal layers of his operation because I had a cooler packed with ice, and inside were the dismembered toes from my right foot. Probably not worth much, but enough for him to know I meant business.

  And yes, it hurt like a bitch.

  One weekend a month, he had a diener with connections come in to do some disarticulation, which sounds fancy, but I got Winston to explain it a bit more simply: he found out he could make extra money selling off body parts from dead bodies he was supposed to incinerate, so he had a pathology assistant come in once a month to chop the bodies up and get the parts ready for the highest bidder. Dieners are the grunts of the medical world. They often cut apart the dead bodies during autopsies, as the pathologist gets to keep his hands clean while he talks into a tape recorder, weighs the organs, and reports the results. Since dieners aren’t doctors and don’t get paid like them, they’re always on the lookout for an extra buck, and one corpse could be taken apart for about fifteen grand for the sum of its parts.

  None of these parts went to people. They went to companies. A knee to the orthopedist medical summit, some bone to a tissue company that sterilizes it and uses it for its supply of bone paste, a foot to the medical research company looking to attract the best podiatrists in the country to a convention.

  To the body-parts industry, I’m a gold mine. Demand for dead bodies overwhelms supply. I’m an income stream without the need to fabricate medical records or death certificates. I’m the legit way to get parts, as opposed to handing a grieving family an urn full of Kingsford charcoal that they think is Uncle Ted.

  Guys like Frank have a big drum full of ashes stashed in the crematorium. If he cut and sold a body, he could give the family a scoop of ashes and they’d never know the difference. Ashes contain nothing that can be traced—the DNA is destroyed just as thoroughly as the flesh itself.

  We discussed all the details surrounded by the comforting environs of the Winston-Day Funeral Home. His office was adorned with flowers and soft colors highlighted by ambient lighting. We sat at his desk, wooden but slick, a too-clean and glossy surface where it would be tough to pick up coins. A brochure holder displayed company literature, a picture of an every-family with a slug line that proclaimed, “Helping you honor life.”

  He asked me about what I could acquire in my supply chain while I looked at the front of the brochure. “Do you have a price list?” I asked.

  He seemed surprised by this, but started naming off parts and their value, from memory. The brochure said, “Because your family means so much.” He started rattling off the prices from top to bottom.

  “A skull with the teeth in it, a little over a grand.”

  Family members had sat in this very chair. He would talk in hushed tones, no doubt, about the peace and tranquility they were buying for their investment.

  “Five hundred for a shoulder. Skin is a flat ten bucks per square inch. A hand with the forearm attached is about four hundred.”

  So this is what it feels like to deal drugs or run hookers, I thought. To make money off of ruining people.

  “Pull out a good coronary artery, fifteen hundred. A foot is about two to four hundred.”

  These were not impressive dollar amounts, considering the time and pain I’d have to endure. But it was either this or the gun, selling off parts or dying all at once.

  “If the torso is already eviscerated, it’s worth a lot less, but it’s easier to come by.” He paused and leaned closer, as if to tell me a secret. “The fresh stuff is where the real money’s at. Blood, tissue, a fresh set of eyeballs to tinker with … If all you’ve got are toes, I’m afraid you’re not going to make much money.”

  He winked, smiled, and I battled the urge to jump across the desk and choke him. Probably would have, if my foot were capable of jumping. Underneath the gauze of my fresh dismemberment, I already felt the deep, destructive itch that comes with my special healing.

  “So what’s a kidney worth?”

  He leaned back in his chair, looking a bit uncomfortable.

  “From a cadaver?”

  “Live,” I said. “Ready for transplant. Fresh from a healthy donor.”

  “I’m not the guy for that,” he said. “You’re talking about heavier shit than I dabble in. You’re talking organ brokerage, some real dirty stuff. Cutting up bums from overseas for peanuts to give their parts to rich donors.”

  “How much?” I asked again.

  “Depends. A bum in Brazil can sell a kidney for six grand,” he said, “but that’s because he doesn’t know any better. But the operation? Rich-ass recipients pay around two-fifty. The broker who sets it all up and makes the connections makes an assload. He gets the recipient a mini-vacation, where they come home with a healthy kidney inside of them and a new lease on life. They don’t check for that shit at customs, you know? But there’s a reason it’s done in shit countries. The situation can get pretty hot.”

  “So can you get me a broker?” I grabbed one of his brochures. “I can call you in a couple weeks.”

  “If you’re looking to sell your own kidney, I don’t want to get involved in that,” he said. “There’s no heat on the small stuff. The bigger stuff takes a broker with more balls than me.” He walked by me, not making eye contact, presumably to show me the door.

  “You can call somebody, so call them. Tell the broker it’s all you can eat. I can get him a steady s
upply of stateside organ donors, and not just kidneys. No need to screw with permissions or medical records. I can tap the mother lode.” Was I sure my organs would regenerate like everything else? No, but in situations like this, you bluff or you fail.

  Winston thought about my offer for a long time. He stood up, approached me, and snapped the brochure away from me.

  “I noticed you were walking like a guy who just lost his toes in some sort of freak … accident.”

  I shrugged. “Athlete’s foot.”

  “Toes are worthless, and that’s got to hurt like a bitch.”

  “You in or out?”

  “What’s my cut?”

  “Reasonable. Depends on price, but expect a wedge of the action. I’m a fair guy.”

  “I’ll have to make a few calls,” he said.

  “If that’s the case, I need about five hundred for those toes.”

  “They aren’t worth that.”

  “I’m worth that,” I said. “Like I said, all you can eat.”

  “You’re a weird little fuck, you know that?”

  “And you’re in the healing and consoling business. Sure.”

  I left, determined not to limp, the fire from my missing toes forcing me to bite deep into my cheek.

  Toes, fingers, ears, tonsils. They had all returned. But organs? Knowing my luck, the only commodity I could home-grow that was worth a shit would be the things that wouldn’t grow back. Only one way to find out.

  I pulled out my cell phone and I heard Winston behind me.

  “Wait,” he said. He handed me a white envelope. “Am I lighting this money on fire, kid?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “That’s not the most encouraging answer, but a gamble is a gamble. There’s three hundred in there, not five. More than fair.”

  “Like I said, I’m a fair guy,” I said. More important, it was enough to pick up a hefty dinner tab and fill up a cart with some groceries.

  * * *

  Mack arrived the next night, looking tanned and weathered, his hair cut shorter than ever before, his undersized shirt no match for his thickened biceps.