Borrowed Hearts

by Rick DeMarinis

  He took me down to the basement where he kept his “photolab.” We had to pass through a hall that led to the back of the house. Halfway down the hall he stopped next to a door and tapped on it softly. Then he pushed it open an inch. I saw a woman with wild gray hair lying in a bed. She was propped up on several pillows. She also had the sickroom look, just as the girl did. Her eyes were dark and lusterless and her skin looked like damp paper. There was a guitar lying across her lap.

  “I’ve got to break in a new boy, Lona,” Billetdoux said. “I’ll get you some breakfast in a little bit.” Lona, who I assumed was Billetdoux’s wife, let her head loll off the pillows until she was facing us. She didn’t speak, but her large, drugged-looking eyes seemed to be nursing specific, long-term resentments. After Billetdoux closed the door, he whispered, “Lona is very creative, amigo.”

  The basement was a hodge-podge of equipment, stacked boxes, file cabinets, work tables, half-finished carpentry projects, all of it permeated with the smell of chemicals. He shoved stacks of paper around on his desk until he found a small brass key. He opened a cabinet with this key and took out a camera. “We’ll start you on the Argus,” he said. “It’s simple to use and takes a decent picture. Later on, if you stick with me, I’ll check you out on a Rolleiflex.”

  He took me step by step through the Argus, from film loading to f-stop and shutter speed. “I’ll go around with you the first few days,” he said, “to show you the ropes. Then you’re on your own. You’re a nice-looking boy—the house-wives will trust you.” He winked as if to suggest that trusting the likes of me and Billetdoux would be the biggest blunder a housewife could make.

  We went back upstairs to the kitchen. “How about some breakfast?” he said.

  I looked at my watch. “It’s after three,” I said.

  “It is? No wonder I’m so hungry. Where the hell does the time run off to, amigo? Well, how about some lunch, then? Could you go for a bite of lunch?”

  “Sure,” I said. I hadn’t eaten breakfast either.

  “Shyanne,” he called. “Honey, would you come in here?”

  She came in, looking slightly more haggard than when I first saw her.

  “Shy, hon, fix us some lunch, will you? The boy here and I are starved.”

  “There’s no bread,” she said. “Or meat.”

  Billetdoux pulled open a cupboard door. “How about some Cheerios, then?” he said.

  “Fine by me,” I said.

  He poured out three bowls of the cereal, then added milk. He handed one bowl to Shyanne. “Here, hon,” he said. “Take this in to Lona, will you? She hasn’t eaten since yesterday.”

  “No one’s eaten since yesterday,” she said. “Except me, if you want to count that measly egg.”

  Billetdoux grinned darkly at me, embarrassed. “Time to make a grocery run, I guess,” he said.

  We ate in silence. The milk on my cereal was slightly sour. A big, late summer fly droned past my ear and landed upside down on the table, where it exercised its thick, feeble legs. A loud, nasty voice broke into the homely sound of our spoons tapping on the Melmac bowls. I heard the word “swill” hiss from the hallway. Shyanne came in, carrying the bowl of Cheerios. “Lona doesn’t want cereal,” she said, dumping the milk-bloated O’s into the sink. “She wants Spam and eggs.”

  “What about toast?” Billetdoux said.

  “Right. Toast, too. And hashbrowns.”

  He leaned forward, his eyes damp and tired-looking. “Listen, kid,” he said. “Can you loan me ten bucks until tomorrow? I’m a little short. I had to get a new transmission put in my car last week. Cost? It’s legal robbery!”

  I took out my wallet. I still had about fifty dollars from my last job. I gave him ten.

  “Thanks, amigo. Splendid. I won’t forget this. This is above and beyond, amigo.”

  Shyanne plucked the ten out of his hand. “I’ll go to the store,” she said.

  “Don’t forget cigarettes,” Billetdoux said.

  Billetdoux told me how to snowjob a housewife, but the first door we knocked on was answered by a kid of about six or seven. I looked at Billetdoux, who was standing right behind me. “What do I do now?” I asked.

  “Is your old lady at home, buster?” Billetdoux said.

  The kid started to close the door. His little sister, naked and grimy, stood behind him, a gray pork chop in her muddy hand. Pale green bulbs of snot plugged her nostrils.

  Billetdoux pulled a bent Tootsie Roll out of his pocket and gave it to the boy. The boy accepted it, visibly relaxing his doorway vigil. “Mummy not at home, huh?” Billetdoux said. “Well, that’s all right. That’s no problem at all.” To me he whispered, “In a way, amigo, it makes our job easier.”

  He pushed the door all the way open and we went in. “Set the flood lamps up like I told you,” he said. “Remember, the mainlight sits back about seven feet. Put the fill-light about three feet behind it, but over to the right. That way we get an arty shadow.”

  I opened the equipment case we’d carried in and took out the lamps. I set them up on their stands. While I was doing this, Billetdoux set two chairs up in the middle of the living room. I moved the two lamps so that they were the proper distances from the chairs.

  “Hey, buster,” Billetdoux said to the boy. “Your sis got any clothes? Why don’t you be a good scout and hunt up some drawers for her, okay? We don’t want to take what you might call filthy pornographic pictures, do we? And wash off her snot-locker while you’re at it.”

  I set up the tripod and attached the Argus to it. The boy pulled a pair of pink panties on his sister. I took the pork chop out of her hand and set it on the coffee table. I used my own handkerchief to clean her nose. Billetdoux sat them down in the chairs. He stepped back and looked at them in the unmerciful glare of the flood lamps. “Good enough,” he said. “Now, amigo, you are going to have to work on their expressions. Right now they look like starving Lithuanian refugees about to be processed into dogfood by the S.S. Not a cheery sight, is it?”

  “Smile, kids,” I said, bending to the Argus.

  The kids looked dead in the viewfinder.

  “Smile won’t get it, amigo,” Billetdoux said. “Smile is the kiss of death in this racket. You might as well ask them to whistle Puccini. No, you’ve got to bring out some personality, whether they’ve got any or not. You want to get something on their faces their mama will blink her eyes at in wonder. You want her to think that she’s never really seen her own kids. Got the idea?” He knelt down in front of the kids and raised his hands like an orchestra leader. “I want you kids to say something for Uncle Billy Ducks, will you?” The kids nodded. “I want you kids to say, ‘Hanna ate the whole banana,’ and I want you to say it together until Uncle Billy Ducks tells you to quit, okay?”

  He stood up and said to me, “Take ten shots. Press the shutter button between ‘whole’ and ‘banana.’ Got it? Okay, kids, start saying it.” He raised his hands like an orchestra leader again and started the kids chanting the phrase. I hit the button too soon the first time, too late the second, but I gradually fell into the rhythm of their sing-song chant and was able to snap their pictures on the simulated smile generated when their mouths were open wide on “whole” but starting to close for “banana.”

  I took ten pictures, then shut off the floods. Billetdoux was nowhere in sight. I felt uneasy about our being alone in the house with these kids. The heat of the floods had raised a greasy sweat on my back. Then Billetdoux came in. He had a pork chop in his hand. “There’s some grub in the ice box, amigo, if you’re for it,” he said. “Make yourself some lunch.” He bit into the pork chop hungrily. “I’ll say this,” he said, chewing fast. “The lady of the house knows how to fry a chop.”

  Billetdoux began rummaging through the drawers of a built-in sideboard that filled one wall of the small living room. “Hello, there,” he said, lifting a pair of candle holders out of a drawer. “Take a look, amigo.” He hefted the candle holders as if weighing them for va
lue. “Solid sterling, I believe,” he said. He slipped them into his jacket pocket. Then he continued rummaging. The kids didn’t pay any attention to him. They were still mumbling “Hanna ate the whole banana” as they watched me taking down the floods. I worked fast, sweating not just from heat now but from fear. “Hello hello hello,” Billetdoux crooned, dumping the contents of a big black purse on the dining room table. “Coin of the realm—silver dollars, amigo. Cartwheels, 1887. The real McCoy, not the phony pieces of buffed-up tin they pass off as silver dollars these days. The landowners here appear to be silver hoarders... shameful, no?” He picked up one of the silver dollars and bit it lightly. Then he shoveled the big coins into a pile and began to fill his pockets with them. “It’s rotten to hoard money like this when there’s so much real need in the world today,” he said, his voice husky with moral outrage.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “One momentito, por favor, kid,” he said. “Nature calls.” He disappeared into the back of the house. I snapped the equipment case shut, picked it up and headed for the door. I heard the sound of water hitting water followed by a toilet flushing. As I opened the front door I believed I could hear him brushing his teeth vigorously.

  I waited outside, down the street. He showed up in a few minutes, his pockets bulging, another pork chop in his felonious hand. He had an electric frying pan under one arm and a desk encyclopedia under the other. “You didn’t get any lunch, amigo,” he said, his forehead furrowing with concern. “What’s the matter, no appetite? You got a flu bug? Here, this chop is for you. You need to keep up your strength in this business.”

  I put the equipment case down. “You’re a thief!” I said, realizing that this surge of righteousness was about ten minutes late.

  He lowered the pork chop slowly. He looked astonished, then deeply hurt. “Say again, amigo? Billy Ducks a thief?”

  “You heard me,” I said, unmoved by his dismay.

  “You’re too harsh, amigo. I assure you it will all go toward an excellent cause. Look at it this way, try to see it as a redistribution of wealth. It’s good for a society to have its wealth redistributed from time to time. Otherwise you wind up like the Egypt of the Pharaohs—a few tycoons eating chili and caviar in their plush houseboats on the Nile, and everybody else straining their milk shoving big slabs of granite around the desert. Does that make sense to you? Is this an ideal society?”

  “How am I supposed to go back there with an eight-by-ten glossy of those kids?”

  He raised the pork chop thoughtfully, then bit into it. “Well, amigo, you won’t have to. This was just a practice run. I’ll develop and print that film and see what you came up with. Consider it basic training. Boot camp. This is boot camp.”

  Boot camp lasted a week. Billetdoux was a good salesman. He almost always got into a house, and when he didn’t, he vowed to me that he’d come back with a vengeance. I didn’t ask him what he meant because I’d begun to suspect that he was crazy. I guess I should have quit after that session with the kids but I figured that once I was out on my own, his activities and mine would be separate. He was a thief, he was crazy, but I wasn’t. He would develop and print my film and pay my commissions and that would be the extent of our relationship. I wanted the job badly enough to gloss over my own objections. I liked the idea of taking pictures door to door. It was better than working in a saw mill or on a road crew or baling hay for some stingy farmer. I’d be out in a nice neighborhood every day, I’d meet interesting people, no foreman looking over my shoulder, no time clock to punch.

  The last day of boot camp Billetdoux parked his car—a 1939 Chevy whose interior smelled of moss—at the edge of the most exclusive neighborhood in town, Bunker Hill Estates. “Top of the world, amigo,” he said, sipping black wine from a square bottle. The neighborhood was lush and hilly, the houses sprawling and surrounded by vast, perfectly tended lawns. “The land of the Pharaohs, amigo,” he said. “Makes me jumpy, going up against them. I need this little bracer.” He offered me the wine bottle and I took a sip. It was sweet, thick wine, like cough syrup.

  We got out of the car and started walking up the steep street toward the looming estates of Bunker Hill. Billetdoux began laboring right away, wheezing, barely able to put one foot in front of the other. I was carrying all the equipment, but he acted as if he had the full load. “I don’t feel so hot, amigo,” he said, stopping next to a tall, bushy hedge. His face had gone white, his mouth a tom pocket: The Mask of Tragedy. There was a short picket fence on the street side of the hedge. Immediately behind the fence was a narrow flower bed, then the hedge. Billetdoux stepped over the fence and into the flowers. “I’m sick,” he said. He unbuckled his belt. He took off his jacket and handed it to me. He dropped his pants and squatted into the hedge until only his pale, stricken face showed. A dark eruption of bowel noise broke the tranquil air. Billetdoux sighed. “Lord,” he said. “What a relief. Must have been that goddamn chokecherry wine. Aggravates my diverticulitis.” He smiled weakly. I stood there, holding his jacket, the full weight of the incredible situation beginning to impress itself on me.

  A small dog, alerted by the commotion, came snapping up to Billetdoux. The dog was perfectly groomed. It looked like an expensive blond wig that had come to life. Billetdoux put a hand out to it, to appease it or to ward it off, and the dog bit his finger. Billetdoux fell backwards into the hedge, disappearing. The dog went after him, lusting for blood after his initial success with this hedge-fouling trespasser. Then they both emerged, Billetdoux roaring to his feet, the dog in frenzied attack. “Son of a bitch,” Billetdoux said, picking the dog up roughly by its collar, a satiny bejeweled affair. “I hate small dogs like this, don’t you, amigo? Probably eats anchovies and cake.”

  I looked up and down the street, expecting a crowd of curious Bunker Hill residents attracted by the ruckus, but the street remained empty and serene. It was the serenity of people who knew who they were, enjoyed it, and who believed in their basic indispensability to the great scheme of things. Pharaohs. Serene Pharaohs untouched by the small and large calamities that nipped at the heels of people like Billetdoux and me.

  I turned back to Billetdoux. He was squatting back into the hedge, the dog firmly in his hand. “I really hate these lapdogs,” he said, “but sometimes they come in handy.”

  “What are you doing?” I said. But I could see very well what he was doing. He was using the small dog that looked like a wig for toilet paper.

  “It’s all they’re good for, dogs like these,” he said, a sinister joy playing on his lips. “Bite my jewels, you little pissant, and I’ll feed you to the flowers.”

  The dog whined pitifully. Billetdoux tossed it aside and stood up. The dog burrowed into the thick hedge, making a shrill whistling noise. “I feel much better, thanks,” Billetdoux said to no one’s inquiry as he buckled up. I handed him his jacket and he slipped it on, squaring his shoulders in the manner of someone who has just finished important business and is ready for the next challenge. He stepped over the picket fence. “Well, don’t just stand there, amigo. Time, like the man said, is money.”

  We continued up the street, stopping, finally, at the crest of the hill. Billetdoux leaned on a mail drop. “Look,” he said. “You can see the whole town from up here. Lovely, no? See the smoke rising from the mills? See the pall it makes across the town’s humble neighborhoods? Wouldn’t it be nice to live up here where the air is pure, where all you can smell is flowers and money? What do you think, amigo? Think I should buy a house up here with the Pharaohs?”

  “Sure,” I said, thinking of the ten bucks I loaned him that first day, the twenty I’d loaned him since, thinking of his wife and child, his wrecked yard, his mildewed Chevy.

  He laughed bitterly. “No way, amigo. I couldn’t take it. Too stuffy, if you know what I mean. A man couldn’t be himself up here. I’d wind up playing their game... Who’s Got It Best.”

  We walked along a narrow, tree-lined street called Pinnacle Drive. Billetdoux
pointed at the street sign. “Here we are—the top of the world. The Pinnacle. Everything is downhill from here. That’s the definition of pinnacle, isn’t it? Isn’t that what they’re trying to tell us? You’re damn straight it is.”

  It might have been true. The houses were two and three stories, wide as airplane hangars. Giant blue-green lawns were fitted with precise landscaping. Three to four cars gleamed in every garage.

  We stopped at the biggest house on Pinnacle Drive, a slate gray, four-story saltbox affair with a seven-foot-high wrought iron fence surrounding it.

  “What do you see, amigo?” Billetdoux said, his voice cagey.

  “A house. A nice house.”

  “A nice house, he says. Look again, amigo. It’s a monument, dedicated to arrogance, greed, and the status quo.”

  I looked again. I saw a nice house with a long sloping lawn studded with beautiful shrubs, a piece of metal sculpture—a seal or possibly a bear—curled at the base of a majestic elm.

  “You’re stone blind,” Billetdoux said when I told him this. “You’ll never be a real photographer. You’ve got scales on your eyes big as dinner plates. Stick to mothers and babies—don’t take up real picture-taking. Promise me that, will you?”

  Billetdoux stepped up on the stone retaining wall that held the iron fence. He grabbed the bars and began to yell. “Hey! You in there! We’re on to you! We smell your goddamned embalming fluid, you fat-ass Egyptian mummies!” He began to laugh, enormously entertained by his performance.

  Twin Dobermans came galloping up to the fence. The drapes of the front room moved. The Dobermans leaped at the fence, going for Billetdoux’s hands. “I bet they’ve got us covered with tommy guns,” he said, stepping off the retaining wall. “Look at those front doors, amigo. Eight feet tall and wide enough to run a double column of storm troopers through them. Now tell me, do you honestly feel there is warm human activity blundering around behind those dead-bolted doors? No, you don’t. Tight-assed, nasty, withered old Pharaoh and his Pharaohette live in there, stinking up the place with embalming fluid. Christ, amigo, it turns my stomach.” He sat down suddenly on the retaining wall and covered his face with his hands. His shoulders heaved, as if racked with sobs, but he made no sound. “Lona is sick,” he said, half-whispering. “That’s why I steal things. You called it right, kid, I’m a thief.” He looked at me, his face fighting a severe emotion that threatened to dissolve it. “These people get a head cold and they fly to the Mayo clinic. I can’t even buy medicine for Lona.” He took out his handkerchief and mopped his face with it. “Give me the Argus, amigo. I’ll show you how to take a picture.”