Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues

by Broke Heart Blues(lit)

  "The boy wouldn't look at me at first, which wasn't like John who'd look anyone in the eye. Then he said, so softly I almost couldn't hear, like he was ashamed, Sir, I prepared quick to die. But it didn't happen.

  Filer, a popular jock, a state champion wrestler, told how his dad, a surgeon at Buffalo General, ran into John Reddy one morning in the hospital, asked what he was doing so far from home and John Reddy said he'd been there to give blood, he'd tried, too, to visit two friends of his but they were in intensive care and you can't visit anyone in intensive care you're a relative.

  Smoke said, "It's got to be those guys from the crash! We-ird!

  Giving blood, and calling them friends of his! My dad asked me if this John Reddy Heart' is a doper, his eyes were so strange, and I told him, Hell no, Dad, John Reddy is one cool dude." Squeezed into our booth at the Crystal, Smoke Filer importantly recounted this story, with an already deft, practiced air. When finished, he was surprised that none of us spoke. The clamor of the Crystal washed over us, we heard nothing. Mary Louise Schultz was wiping at her eyes.

  Myers was lighting a Camel borrowed from Smoke's pack, with fingers. Ginger McCord was biting her lower lip, staring into the melting ice of her Diet Pepsi as into a vision of her own mysterious future.

  last Trish Elders whispered, "His blood."

  "His actual blood."

  "Imagine, John Reddy's blood."

  "In a transfusion. Hooked to your arm. His blood."

  "Coursing through your veins. Your heart."

  "Your heart!"

  "Oh God. Oh."

  "Ohhhh. God." Smoke grumbled to his buddies how pissed he'd been telling the of the Circle this story about John Reddy he believed would impress hell out of them, only to have them go into practically a trance.

  "It was like being the only guy at a lez-orgy. There was this weird wild electric current between them. Like, suddenly, I didn't fucking exist. ") * * * Then there were "the other Hearts," to whom few of us paid much attention Though clearly they, too, were prone to mysterious accidents.

  For instance, John Reddy's grandfather Aaron Leander Heart. It who owned the "murder weapon" though, as he was forced to admit to police, he had no New York State permit for it. "If that gun hadn't been in the house, John Reddy couldn't have used it. If that gun hadn't been loaded, John Reddy couldn't have killed a man." You could argue that the was Mr.. Heart's fault, and it's possible that the old man guilt and remorse for what had happened, if not to Melvin Riggs ("If there was ere a bastid that deserved death, it was Mel Riggs," Mr.. Heart was several times quoted) then to his grandson John Reddy ("If there was ere a brave boy, our Johnny was him"). But he'd gone on record stubbornly testifying to that the. 45-caliber Colt revolver "hadn't been loaded, no sir, could swear." He'd gone on record angrily protesting the confiscation of the revolver by police--"I purchased that damned gun in Nevada, I paid a hundred and five dollars for that gun, I say that is my rightful gun." At John Reddy's trials he was a reluctant, uncooperative witness for the defense who seemed not to know where he was, or why, and a stubborn, testy, only coherent witness for cross-examination by the prosecution. There were observers who believed Aaron Leander Heart to be "nutty as a fruitcake" and others who believed him to be a shrewd, practiced actor in a drama of his own devising.

  Mr.. Heart had the look and stance of an old Indian fighter. A pioneer of some long-vanished American Southwest past. His horse and his been taken from him but a veiled, sardonic vigilance glinted in eyes. Don't tread on me! Don't even turn your back on me. His hair that was almost too white, like Dahlia Heart's platinum-blond hair that was almost too blond, flowed to his shoulders. His soiled beige hat slanted at a jaunty angle on his head. White, wiry whiskers, tobacco-stained around his mouth, partly obscured a windburnt, creased ruin of a face.

  "But you can see he was once good-looking, can't you? Like John Wayne.

  Cooper. ") In profile Mr.. Heart resembled a hawk. His teeth were what you'd describe as "frontier teeth"--with a look as if grit or sand had blasted them, wearing them down, embedded in the cracks. The canine teeth were conspicuously long and pointed. When Mr.. Heart laughed (as he'd laughed several times, unexpectedly, on the witness stand in the courtroom), resembled a wolf laughing. His laughter was silent and hissing and wasn't real laughter. We heard it sometimes, alone in our bedrooms, shivering, knowing it was the wind and not terrible old Mr.. Heart prowling the night like a ghost. "But if John Reddy loves him, he's got to be O. K." It did seem clear that John Reddy loved his grandfather for sometimes they seen together in John Reddy's car, John Reddy treated his grandfather tenderly, yet with respect, always calling him

  "Sir" when we chanced to overhear.

  When it was revealed at the time of John Reddy's arrest that Aaron Leander Eleart was seventy-three years old, the fact was met with surprise and some disappointment. "Somehow you don't think of a character like being any fixed age." Old Mr.. Heart! We tried to see John Reddy in him, but it an effort of imagination that was beyond us. It made some of us just to contemplate our parents, let alone our grandparents, seeing, an unwanted sight in a mirror, a glimmer of our fate in a mother's face, a father's profile. We did not know, nor did we wish to guess, our parents' ages. We did not know, nor did we wish to believe, that our parents had once been young.

  That John Reddy had a hawkish, hungry profile like old Mr..

  Heart--that the bony structure of his young beautiful face was identical to the bony structure of his grandfather's face--that the two, separated by decades, certain unmistakable mannerisms, a cocking of the head, a veiled

  'gaze from beneath knitted brows--not to mention the Texan drawl--were not to be acknowledged.

  "There's no one like John Reddy Heart! No one." Since moving to Willowsville and taking up residence in Colonel Edgihoffer's house, old Mr.. Heart had become a familiar if controversial sight.

  His St.. Albans Hill neighbors strongly disapproved of him. The man was "the worst of the pack." He was "little more than a vagrant. A ragpicker. And a souse." Yet his mismatched, slapdash clothes were perceived to be, by grudging eyes, of quality. Jackets, vests, stained neckties, mismatched gloves, the red kerchief knotted around his turkey-wattled neck. His boots, battered, with a look of being manure-stained, were believed to be of handtooled leather. Each morning he must have risen early, before dawn, up his hickory walking stick and his increasingly frayed, filthy burlap sack, and set out. He was seen everywhere. His ghostly figure might appear unexpectedly in a roadway, out of mist, fog, drizzle, light snow, oblivious of the screeching of brakes, a tattoo of horns. Mr.. Leroux, Millicent's father, who commuted from Willowsville to the Marine Midland Center in downtown Buffalo, leaving his home on the Common before dawn on winter mornings, told the tale of how one misty-drizzly morning he'd struck old Mr..

  with his car's right fender and knocked him down--"I just didn't see the man! He materialized out of nowhere. But he got up immediately, refused to listen to me when I tried to speak to him, waved his hand at me away, indignant. What a character!" For old Mr.. Heart was a passionate man.

  A man with a destination. A man with a vision. (But none of us could have guessed at the time what Mr.. Heart's vision was. ) He prowled our placid suburb as far south as St.. Peter and Paul Cemetery (where he sometimes napped) and as far north as Amherst Hills Tennis Club. Scavenging for discarded bottles and glassware, he tramped the manicured slopes of the Willowsville Country Club golf course as brazenly as if he were through a weedy vacant lot. Visitors to Willowsville recoiled, seeing the apparition of an elderly white-llaired gent with a walking stick, a burlap bag slung over his shoulder, a brisk limp--"My God, who's that?

  Time?" We didn't know how to explain Mr.. Heart. We were embarrassed of him, protective of him, proud of him. John Reddy's grandpa!

  Sharp-eyed and voracious as a vulture scouring parks and paths and alleys for trash-treasure, perusing garbage cans in front of our houses, railroad underpasses, lots, Dumpsters. The tangled banks of
Glen Creek and the nameless that fed into it. Mr.. Heart slept where sleep overtook him, his favorite bench was along the

  "One Hundred Weeping Willows Walk" of Glen Creek.

  Several of us sighted him on a warm spring day wandering, like an upright crow, the marshy no-man's-land beyond Tug Hill Park, we saw, through belonging to Shelby Connor's kid brother, that Mr.. Heart was his findings. Not just any discarded bottle or glass object would do. Frowning, he lifted and examined specimens, holding them to the light before deciding whether to add them to his sack or drop them carelessly down again.

  It was shocking to some members of the community, and more that the Hearts were lowlife stock, that Mr.. Heart hadn't a of interest in picking up trash. Whatever he was up to, it was for his own purpose. ) Mr.. Heart soon grew restless in our village where pickings were slim. Mr..

  Olmsted, Katie's father, reported sighting him scavenging miles away near the Naval Park exit of the Buffalo Skyway--"I called to him, tried to get him into the car so I could drive him home but he didn't seem to hear.

  walked away." At various times Maxine Bird reported driving Mr..

  Heart back from Transit Road, and elsewhere, one windy autumn evening, when Reddy was a sophomore at WHS, Mr.. Heart was found "dazed and incoherent" by a roadside in Batavia, and another time in Clarence Center, sometimes local police drove him home, sometimes John Reddy or hurriedly went to fetch him. One winter day (at a time when John was becoming a local basketball star), Mr.. Heart was picked up by police for scavenging on the Thruway where pedestrians weren't allowed.

  His most dangerous episode occurred only weeks before the shooting Melvin Riggs, he was scavenging at the Dodge Road landfill, a small mountain of discarded Christmas trash and unleashed an avalanche, fell and was buried beneath debris for hours, in -5 F, before being discovered and rescued by sanitation workers. Treated for frostbite and hypothermia, Aaron Leander Heart who'd been so stubbornly reticent years began to chatter excitedly, like one who has peered over the horizon nothingness. "The Lord has demanded a Glass Ark! Beside a Glass Lake! I have a 1.

  mission that must be fulfilled." And, clutching the wrists of anyone who came near, with an air of pleading, "I've been a craven sinner I don't repent. I've been a cruel man to other mortals. But there is my mission that must be fulfilled." When Dahlia Heart and fifteen-year-old John came to take Mr.. Heart home, and Dahlia was told by authorities was her duty to supervise her father more closely, she protested," "Supervise'? Him?

  How? Tie him down? What can I do, I'm only his daughter, d'you think that vain old man listens to me?" So Mr.. Heart was saved from freezing to death, and soon afterward resumed his wanderings. He continued them oblivious of our parents' stares of disapprobation and outrage. Until one day we realized we'd been seeing him for years. All our lives. Since we were children. And certain of our parents, too, who'd grown up in Willowsville, swore they remembered him own childhoods. "Old Mr.. Heart? That white-haired old man with sack?

  Oh yes, he's always been here. Some people say he's actually died, and it's his ghost now that's here, haunting us." Then there were John Reddy's young brother Farley, and his younger sister Shirleen. About whom little was known when they were in Willowsville. Both were awkward, uneasy children who shared in family's penchant for accidents, but to what degree isn't clear--"Our knowledge of them, ironic in retrospect, was so minimal." Farley was three years younger than John Reddy--thirteen at the time of Riggs's death. His teachers at Academy Street would speak of him

  "quiet"--"withdrawn"--"intense"--"extremely bright in math"--"from family like that, unexpected!" A ninth grader, Farley was taking course in solid geometry at the high school a mile away, his teacher there, Mr.. Salaman, spoke of him as "naturally gifted"--"very young for his age, though not 'immature." In both schools he passed among his classmates invisibly. "I know he must've been there, I sort of remember his name being called, and a sense in the classroom that, wow, This guy's a brain, this guy's special But if I try to summon back a face for this--is it Farley? --there's nothing there. A blank," Janie Zeiga, Norm's younger sister, us.

  At the high school it was said that John Reddy's very shadow was darker, more vivid and "solid" than ordinary shadows. (Photos in WHS taken of John Reddy on the basketball court seem to confirm this controversial assertion. ) Yet Farley Heart, oddly, was said to have no shadow, at the most, a faint, fleeting shadow that rippled lightly over surfaces and readily vaporized. At thirteen he wasn't quite five feet tall, he weighed hardly seventy pounds, his hair was fair, not quite brown and not blond, already, it appeared to be thinning. His head was bulb-shaped, his eyes myopic and inclined to bulge. Yet there was a distant look in those eyes, an element of haze, as if his mind was elsewhere. "You wanted to knock gently his head and say, Hello? Hello in there? Anybody home?" one of his teachers recounted. It must have been that the Hearts needed money, poor Farley, shy and uncoordinated, had tried a series of part-time jobs for which Mrs.. Heart brought him in person to apply.

  Unsurprisingly, -Farley was nearly always hired. ) He worked for a week at Muller's Drugs--"We had to let the kid go. He was always dropping things, cutting himself on broken glass." He worked for a week at The Village Food Mart--"We had to let the kid go. He was always dropping things, cutting himself on broken glass." At La Casa di Napoli, where he worked briefly in the kitchen, Farley scalded his hands in steaming hot water--"Poor kid. We had to take him to emergency.

  Then we let him go." It was said that, some months later during summer vacation, when Farley was bicycling home from his job at Nurseries, he collided with a delivery van--"The kid just ran into me, into my path like he's blind or something"--was knocked down, suffered and a broken left wrist. It might've been that time, or another, that John Reddy was seen, in his Caddie (by this time painted a brilliant acid-green, with a subtle pattern of gold trim bordering the windows, and a prominent tailpipe) arriving with a shriek of brakes to carry his sniffling brother, and his brother's crumpled Schwinn, home. He'd said, exasperated, "O. K. , kid.

  Climb in. Wipe your nose. I'll shove the fucking wreck in the trunk." And Shirleen. We'd rack our brains trying to remember Shirleen.

  Plain, pudgy, sad-faced, eleven years old at the time of Riggs's death it was surmised) she'd never laid eyes on Riggs, hadn't met any mother's "business associates." (Except it might've had a lot to with her converting to Roman Catholicism, joining a convent and taking a vow of celibacy. That seemed plausible! ) Her classmates couldn't her. Her teachers tried valiantly, in vague terms, as people when trying to recall, years later, an individual who has received unexpected renown.

  Shirleen Heart was "a quiet girl"--"a good girl"--"jumpy, nervous"--"secretive."

  "You could see she had spiritual leanings, maybe." Or was she "stubborn, sometimes. An obstinate little mule." Shirleen's didn't reflect her soberness, they were only average to mediocre, she was too shy to speak in class, her weakest subject was math--"The poor child was incapable of comprehending the objective logic of math. She seemed to think could will a thing to be, or not to be, with your mind. As if, you wished hard, and you were good, whatever solution you came up with had to be right." Her sixth-grade homeroom teacher said of her, "Shirleen kind of shy, plain, young-old child you hope won't grown up embittered and filled with rage at the world in the guise of humility." Like Farley, Shirleen wore glasses from an early age, yet even with her vision corrected she appeared nearsighted and oblivious of her surroundings. She had a habit of walking with a book held up a few inches from her eyes, so that was continually stumbling into things, bruising and cutting herself. If you spoke to her in such a state, she didn't hear. It was said that, at the of ten, she'd tumbled down a flight and a half of stairs in the house at 8 Meridian Place, clutching an oversized, illustrated copy of Alice in Wonderland which she refused to let go even in the ambulance. Her right leg was badly broken and she had to endure a cast for eight months during which time she reverted to crawling on her hands and knees like a baby. Force
d to leave the house, she had to be pushed in a wheelchair, she came reluctantly to use crutches, for her legs, she said, "scared" her. Dr.. Groves, Pattianne's father, who treated Shirleen Heart, said, "It happens sometimes, the child loses in her ability to walk. She doesn't trust her legs to hold her up. And she's angry at * her legs. Or at someone she imagines controls her legs." Long after the terrible cast was removed, Shirleen walked unsteadily, as if making her way across the deck of a tilting ship.

  "You can see whose fault it is--that woman's." So our mothers sniffed to one another.

  None of us, their children, walked unsteadily. Except Chris who'd had polio as a young child somewhere in Indiana, before the moved to Willowsville. ) Though Mrs.. Heart and John Reddy were often seen together in town, striking couple, Mrs.. Heart was rarely seen with her younger children. She did not, in fact, appear to be a woman who'd had children. There was something sculpted and tranquil about her beautifully shaped body, it did not have the look of a body stretched to accommodate childbearing. Yet Mrs..