Borrowed Hearts

by Rick DeMarinis

  “I’m sorry, I missed that last thing you said,” he confessed, suppressing, now, a smile that he knew would be hellishly dashing if he let it break out.

  “Tomorrow, I said. I’ll be working late again, so you might as well cook only for one. Or maybe you can go to a restaurant. I’ll give you an extra ten dollars.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “That will be fine.”

  He managed to sit through three back-to-back sitcoms. He listened to Raquel’s tinkling, careless laughter as Bob Newhart’s stammering attempts to claim patriarchal authority elicited gales of laughter from the audience. He hated Bob Newhart suddenly, recognizing himself, and half the men he knew, in that beaten, paunchy little guy: twerps, nerds, schlepps, and all the unremarkable cuckolds—cabrones, Raquel would say if moved to Hispanic cruelty—portrayed so perfectly by the Everyman for our times, Bob Newhart. It occurred to him that if the sitcoms were uncensored, if commercial considerations were not a factor, and if the writers were given a free hand, then we would see ourselves as no dramatic literature has ever made any nation see itself. What the Newhart show needed was one more twist toward the black end of the spectrum. A little manic wobble to worry its too-tidy spin.

  Raquel was laughing lightly at Newhart, who once again was left holding the bag. She laughed, too, at the troop of fools who complicated his life, while the women moved handily toward the things they wanted, unimpeded.

  “God damn it,” he said later, when they were undressing for bed, in answer to no remark but to an image in his mind of Newhart standing in a snowbank outside his lodge so that he could peek into a window to spy on his wife. Inside, by the fire, she was allowing an insurance adjuster to pat and paw her, hoping to get a higher estimate on a claim. It was vital to Bob that she succeed, though her sheer skill made him bite his knuckles.

  “What?” Raquel said, unable or unwilling to acknowledge the gripe that had quietly soured the evening.

  “You’re sleeping with him, aren’t you?” he said. “You’re sleeping with Doug.”

  “Doug?"

  “Doug Thurston, Your boss.”

  “What? Are you crazy? Did you take your medication today?”

  This made him laugh. He approached her. “My medication? Is that what I need? Get the hubby zonked, then everyone’s free to play? Is that the way it works?”

  “You are being an incredible asshole, you know that, don’t you?”

  “Just answer the question, Raquel. Are you sleeping with Doug or not?”

  Her eyes flashed in that Latin way he was crazy about. It opened glandular spigots everywhere. It made his hair flex. “Okay, sure. I’m sleeping with him. Is that what you want to hear? Does that thrill you a lot? I’m sleeping with him two, three times a day. In his office, in the janitor’s closet, out in his Mercedes. The Mercedes is best, all that leather and the stereo system...”

  Denial by exaggeration, as a technique, bored him. He laughed again. His laugh was dry and weak, as though his vocal cords were made of paper. He felt an itch in his right hand. The itch made the hand curl into a fist. He thought of giving her a little “chuck” under the chin. But his glandular spigots had been opened wide, amplifying the gesture: the chuck had steam.

  I didn’t sleep that night. Or the next. I took my medication but that didn’t bring her back. I called Doug Thurston. Raquel hadn’t been to work for two days. (He said.)

  I called my shrink, but he had flown his Piper Cherokee to Alaska to videotape caribou migration. Several times I found myself standing in the bathroom with large quantities of pills in my willful hand: cloud-gray bullets, tiny disks the tired pink of haze-dampened suns. On these occasions I became afraid of the unshaven stranger in the mirror.

  I took refuge in chores. I cleaned the house to showplace perfection. I resumed half-finished projects—the windows needed caulking, the patio slab needed paint. While rolling a new layer of insulation across the attic, I found a newspaper dated March 15,1949. The quaint headlines amused me for a while. The world of thirty-eight years ago seemed only knee-deep in quicksand. It was up to its armpits now, praying for a rope. My horoscope was short and sweet: “Your burden is lifted, love returns.” I took it to heart. In the mantic arts, thirty-eight-year discrepancies are trifles only the literal-minded take seriously.

  It was a pleasant day, sunny with promise. I took a six-pack of beer out to the front porch and waited for her.

  Medicine Man

  Louis Quenon can make you feel better than you had any right to expect. You’ll hear it said he’s trouble in the long run. You’ll hear it said he’ll drink a week and disappear for two. They’ll tell you he’s a Feejee Indian from Africa. They’ll call him a breed, oily customer, quack, boomer, con man, crook. Someone will get around to telling you he was bom in a canebrake on the Guadalupe ten miles below Duck Pond, and a lot of other fairy tales. His wife, Lily, will tell you he’s irresponsible and doesn’t care what becomes of her in this life or the next. “You morons!” she yells at us. We’ll be sitting there with him in Lucky’s, drinking beer or sweet wine, listening. Lily will come in, a hard, narrow-hipped, bony woman of fifty. She’ll start in swinging her big red purse, knocking glasses and pitchers to the floor. Louis looks at her as you might look at a waxwing mindlessly hurting itself against a plate-glass window. “Useless old drunks!” she yells. “Stupid retards!” We all scatter to the dark corners of the bar, except for Louis, and wait for the storm to blow over. Louis takes his time. He has the patience of a mountain, whatever else they might say. He lights up a cigarette. He arranges his lighter and tobacco pouch on the table neatly before him. He asks Leonard, the bartender, who’s winning the ball game. He tilts his chair back. He looks up at the TV set as if at the blue sky. His smile has never had any meanness in it. He looks at Lily. Her anger, which was a solid brick wall coming in, is now like a flimsy membrane thinning out and getting weaker, yielding to a stretching force in the air. Louis will pat the table, rub his stomach, or stick a wood match in his ear for wax, and Lily’s temper will come to heel, snap, and it’s gone. Louis beams. He takes her by the wrist, easy, and she sits down, shaking her head at her own bad manners, but feeling a whole lot better. Louis makes a sign to Leonard, and everyone in the bar resumes his conversation and drinking. The incident is forgotten. Someone will usually dump a load of quarters in the jukebox, and everything is back to normal.

  Now, this is what you won’t hear: Louis Quenon was a real medic in the U.S. Army. He saw action in Sicily and North Africa. He got to know the local herb doctors and practitioners of antique medicine. They showed him things they usually never showed to outsiders. They warned him against surgery directed against the major organs, indecision, and a generally unrecognized plague they called, in a half-joking way, “glitter-blindness.” He ran across a cell of modem Pythagoreans who claimed the universe was nothing more than an idea about tight bundles of woven lines. He who masters the art of line-bundling geometry, they said, will see the Weaver’s Hand. When he returned to the States, Louis refused a scholarship to a big midwestern university that he had won in an open competition. In his letter turning down the offer, he said, “Dear Dean, This is to let you know that I’ve had second thoughts after reading through your catalog and that you are probably barking up the wrong tree over there in Madison.”

  His tribal name is Then-He-Sees-It, but he is only a fraction Assiniboin. His great-uncle, Willard Quenon, was a medicine man and they say that’s where his talent comes from. But Louis says no to all of that, insisting that what he knows comes from a marabout he got acquainted with in Marrakech, and from the Sicilian herb specialists. What his Indian uncle Willard knew worked pretty well among the Tribe, but Louis said it wasn’t very effective with white people. For the white man’s diseases, you’ve got to go to the roots of the old white world and find the ancient remedies.

  He cured me of a delicate constitution with a snail-water recipe that is still widely used in southern Europe by rural people. That’s how I met Louis.
We were at the bar, in Lucky’s, accidentally sitting next to each other. He’s a big, heavy man with a wide Indian face, but his hair is blond and he has a full beard that scratches against his chest. Our eyes met in the mirror behind the bottles. “How long have you had these fainting spells?” he asked me. Right off, my heart did its butterfly imitation and the barroom tilted.

  “How did you know about that?” I said, short of breath.

  “You write this down,” he said.

  I started to slide off my stool, but Louis touched my arm and that stopped me. I borrowed a pencil from Leonard and wrote down what Louis said on a paper napkin. Here’s what put me back on my feet:

  “A fourth bushel of good garden snails,” he said. “Put them in a deep clay pot and lay some mint on top of them along with some balm and fennel to clean them. Let them stand all night like that with a colander over them so they can’t creep out. In the morning wipe them one by one with a clean cloth and then bruise the snails, shells and all, into a fine mortar. Mix this mortar into six quarts of red cow’s milk and set it on a medium fire, stirring all the while until it is thick as cream. Have a big pot ready. Lay a double handful of mint, half as much pennyroyal, ale hoof, and hyssop, then pour in the mixture. After two hours on a high flame stir it up, or else it will scum on top. When it cools off some, but before the pot gets comfortable to the touch, put it into as many Mason jars of any size as the mixture will fill. Put three ounces of white sugar candy in the bottom of each jar to kill the taste.”

  I had a hard time admitting to myself that I wanted to find those ingredients, and a lot harder time actually finding them. But I did, and right away, after the first quart or so, I began to take on color. In six months’ time I’d gained thirty pounds. My lungs began to take in more air than they’d ever been able to, and my heart felt like a big fist opening and closing. I moved out of my small room above Lucky’s and rented a little three-room house outside of town and put in a big garden where I could grow the hard-to-find herbs along with a good vari-ety of greens. I felt like a healthy man of forty-five, and I’d been on a railroad pension for several years.

  There’s always a table or booth at Lucky’s with a crowd of us believers trading stories. The younger customers, of course, think we’re a bunch of senile old fools. They think Louis is a common type of gyppo artist, although he’s never asked one of us for money, help, or goods. No one ever asks him why he offers to pass on a cure to ailing folks, because the question won’t come up. You’ll be sitting there, telling stories, adding a few frills here and an outright he there, held in place by a common denominator of unswerving belief:

  “You remember that black spot on my neck? Well, it got big and began to spread out like a stain. When it was as big as a dollar, I went to Louis. He gave me this yellow paste that smelled like antelope musk and in a week it went back to normal.”

  “I couldn’t put any weight on my right leg. Louis said the big vein was shutting down. He gave me a blue unguent. Now I can dance all night.”

  “I was growing what I took to be a sixth finger.”

  “My left ear had a bell in it.”

  “I’d wake up every other night hollering for my brother, who drowned when he was only three.”

  “The wife thought the lead slipped out of my pencil fifteen years ago.”

  “My eyes were turning into bone.”

  “I’d sit down to grunt and nothing would come out but this nasty blue twine. I’d have to cut it off and hope for better luck tomorrow.”

  Here’s another one. They took Moley Gleeson to the county hospital in a taxi. Moley had the room next to mine on the second floor above Lucky’s. This was about a month before I moved out. I’d heard him blubber. I went into his room and found him sitting on the john, shaking with a chill and biting his hands. His eyes were quick and scared. There was a lake of slick brown blood on the floor and a terrible stink they’d never be able to scrub out. At the hospital they said it was cancer, a big one impossible to get at. They gave him sleeping pills and morphine and said it was only a matter of a few days now. A bunch of us would go up and visit with him. He’d forget who you were and once began to call himself Robert Dickinson. “I don’t know this Moley Gleeson. In the hospital with cancer? That’s too bad. That’s a real shame.” It was as if his mind were trading places with someone named Robert Dickinson and in that way freeing itself from the bad business of being Moley Gleeson. We figured it was the drugs that were doing this to him.

  We went over to Louis’s house and asked him if there was anything he could do for Moley. We didn’t think there was, seeing as how the doctors themselves said that his cancer was out of reach, but Louis dipped into his big doeskin medicine bag, took out some fine orange, brown, and green powders, and went into the bathroom with them. When he came out, he said, “Let’s go see Moley.”

  The nurse who brought us to Moley’s room wasn’t too happy to see us again. “Now, don’t you boys tire out Mr. Gleeson. He’s got about as much strength as a squashed cat.” Louis closed the door behind us and tried to lock it, but there was no way to do that from the inside. There were four or five of us in the room with him. Louis went to the window and looked skeptically at the light coming in. He adjusted the blinds, dimming the air. Moley was lying there, half-asleep. His eyes, when they opened, were covered with that glazed look of fear and loneliness the dying usually have. Louis looked at us with a strange expression in his eyes, as if we were familiar and new to him at the same time. We didn’t know what to make of it, and so we kept ourselves at a respectable distance, figuring it was his show anyway. He bent his big shaggy head down to Moley and whispered something in his ear. We couldn’t make out what it was, but it took a long time, like a priest’s last rites, so it was probably more than just “How ya doing, Moley?”

  Louis pulled the sheet off Moley and then opened up his hospital gown. Moley looked like hell. There were bruises up and down his side and his arms were swollen up from the injections. His skin was soft and mushy-looking. He looked like a big wingless moth. He looked like he would come apart in your hands if you tugged at him. Louis rolled up his sleeves. He began to open and close his hands. His eyes were shut tight. Then he opened his hands wide. His hands began to stretch and taper out. They became long and narrow as snakes. They started to move toward Moley’s underbelly and when they reached the pasty-white skin they didn’t stop. His hands slid into Moley. Past the wrists. Up to the forearms. Moley’s eyes were popped wide now, his mouth was ajar. I could see his tongue clicking around in there. Out of his mouth, from deep inside, I could hear a clacking, hammering sound, like wood on stone. The sweat was boiling out of Louis’s forehead. He was searching around for something inside Moley, the way you’d feel the bottom of a swampy slough for something you’d dropped there. Then all at once the nurse comes busting into the room. She saw what was going on and began to holler for help. Louis was dragging something up. His forearms were dark red and the room smelled—a thin, sharp smell like arsenic smoke, comparable to what you’d expect just downwind of a smelter. What’s coming out of Moley looks like an oblong head of lettuce. It’s dark purple, nearly black, and wriggling like a speared eel. It was coming out of Moley’s belly, just at the left of his navel and under the heart. If the thing had a head, then what I saw in it might have been eyes— dull and ugly, three of them in a row, looking around at the world of hospital rooms. The hammering sound that was coming out of Moley’s throat had quit and Moley was grunting low and strong, with a kind of hard pleasure, like a woman giving easy birth.

  A doctor came into the room. He hollered at Louis and then grabbed him by the beard. Another doctor came in and began to punch Louis in the back. But Louis hung on to the black lettuce eel, which, by the looks of it, was halfway out. The doctors were grinding their teeth and spitting curses at Louis and the nurse was running in and out of the room screaming for the cops. A young intern came in then with a steel chair in his hands. “Leave it to the Marines,” he said. He
took a baseball swing at Louis’s head that landed with a gong. Louis staggered away from the blow but he didn’t let loose of the thing in Moley’s belly. The young intern swung the chair again and this time it dropped Louis to one knee. He lost his grip on the lettuce eel and it slipped back with a dark murmur into Moley to clack away at whatever was left of his innards. Moley sighed and went back to sleep, calling himself Robert Dickinson and telling us it was too bad about that poor bastard Moley Gleeson, whoever the hell he was. There was no mark or anything unusual at all on his belly. The blubbering nurse closed up Moley’s gown and pulled his sheet up to his chin, and Moley, a kind of dying amusement in his old black eyes, caught her trembling hands to steady her.

  The police came in then and carried Louis off to jail. Three days later, Moley died.

  Any prosecutor in the state would have had a hard time convincing a jury to lock up Louis Quenon because he had entered the insides of a dying man with his bare hands in order to prowl around in there for dangerous lettuce eels, and so, after holding Louis for a while, they decided to let him go, fining him twenty dollars for disorderly conduct.