Borrowed Hearts

by Rick DeMarinis

  Alfredo, his heart still hammering, spent some time looking for Sabrina’s fault lines, but only aroused her impatience. “I know exactly what you’re doing,” she said. “I don’t need that. I just want you, not your imagination.”

  Alfredo sighed. She had no fault lines. On the other hand, he didn’t either. Rollie was dead wrong. I am a peaceful man, he thought, and Sabrina is exactly what she appears to be.

  Alfredo made love to his beautiful wife in his usual straightforward way.

  He couldn’t sleep. He got up wanting a cigarette. The house was quiet except for a muffled singsong chattering. It was Gregory. The boy was talking in his sleep. Alfredo went into his son’s room. Gregory’s face was angelic in the faint glow of his night-light. Alfredo shook a cigarette out of its pack and held it in his lips but did not light it. He knelt down next to his son’s bed.

  The boy would have Alfredo’s coarse features. He could see the process of genetic sculpture beginning to express itself. Which probably meant the boy would also share Alfredo’s temperament—docile, calm, reliable, satisfied with minor achievements and moderate pleasures.

  Alfredo knew that Gregory would be unaffected by the incidental abuses and unjust punishments of childhood, and that, in manhood, he would not be driven by abstract furies. His thirsts would be real thirsts, and his quests to slake them would be direct and practical. The boy was a simple expression of blood, bone, and flesh, forged in starlight and gravity.

  He kissed his son’s forehead, then went out into the backyard. The rain clouds had passed, the moonless winter night was strung with stars. He lit his cigarette and said a small prayer. Not of thanks but of acknowledgment. The universe did not require his gratitude. It was unholy and grand and without fault. Alfredo blew a lungful of smoke into his corner of it.

  Feet

  Everyone arrived in boots, but it was too hot in the house to keep them on. Before long the air was skunky with the intimate aroma of winter feet, feet that had been sealed in leather and thick wool socks all day long.

  Most of our guests were half drunk and in an uncritical frame of mind when they arrived. Those who weren’t wearing boots shed their shoes in the spirit of fellowship.

  My girlfriend, Rocio Cantú, hated giving parties in this el norte country. She claimed she didn’t know what white people liked to eat and drink. Even so, this party was her idea. “We go to parties, but we never give parties,” she said, explaining why this one was necessary.

  This was a sore point between us. Her reluctance to entertain embarrassed me. We were poor. I’d been out of work for almost a year, having quit my job teaching English as a second language in El Paso.

  Rocio was born on a farm in Coahuila but grew up just outside Mexico City. When her family moved to Juárez, she came north. She took my class at the community college, and I fell in love with her. I talked her into moving north with me. “It’s better up north,” I said. “No hassles, plenty of work, good pay.” It was a lie, but I’d been in El Paso for five years and needed a change of scenery. I thought the north Rockies would be good for us.

  Throwing parties was an expense our budget couldn’t tolerate. I knew this, Rocio knew this. Another thing: Whenever we talked about entertaining our friends as potential guests in our house, Rocio suddenly perceived them differently. They were no longer just our friends, but finicky strangers—guests. What do you give to a guest? Guests are mysteries, they are full of unknown expectations. They come to you wanting happiness and cheer and good times, and how do you provide that?

  We are not reasonable people. A few jugs of cheap wine, a pot of something hot—chili, fajitas, gumbo, stew. This takes no monumental effort. Even so, Rocio went catatonic. Such pockets of madness in the woman you live with are not negotiable. They are permanent topographical features of the psyche, and you either learn to live with them or they’ll rip the bottom out of your love boat. Other things—the good things—even things out. My own unnegotiable psychic topography no doubt caused her some trouble.

  Most of our friends were also unemployed. Even so, they are reckless with their food stamps and brought over generous pots of hors d’oeuvres. They even brought booze, an eclectic show of partially filled bottles—vermouth, singlegrain whiskey, gin, blended rotgut sold only in one-quart bottles, and tequila.

  A friend of mine who had just gotten married gave me his old stereo that afternoon, the very afternoon my temperamental old Emerson decided to stop working. His new wife had a brand-new Marantz, so he gave me his old Sanyo.

  It had only one working speaker, but that was fine by me. Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Hodges, Lester Young, Duke Ellington don’t require stereo, they come straight at you.

  “Good crowd,” said Duane Mercator, my counselor from the Unemployment Office. “I see some of them from time to time down at the Job Service. My kind of people.”

  “Gold bricks to a man,” I said, offering him a tray of pumpernickel squares layered with brie and prosciutto.

  Duane looked a bit out of place in his blue suit, paisley tie, and milky, blue-veined feet. Even so he maintained a kind of gloomy dignity that tended to make people keep their distance. He had a lean, hawkish face, the face of a dangerous Sicilian, I always thought. Sometimes he seemed more like a Catholic prelate, a man of importance in Holy See politics. Actually, he’s an impressively accomplished amateur magician. His hobby.

  “Got any good leads, Duane?” I said.

  “Everybody’s a teacher, Tony,” he said. “This town is loaded with out-of-work professors. The Ph.D. mills are turning them out like Big Macs. McDoctorates are cluttering up the landscape. These people think they’re lucky to get hired as adjunct faculty at minimum pay and zilch benefits. And the system is happy to use them. In fact, it feeds on them. These people are vampire meat, Tony.”

  His eyelids fluttered like willow leaves in a wind when he talked shop. Under the dancing eyelids, his pale gray eyes would travel upward and crescents of the moony, blue-tinged whites would show themselves.

  The heavy, wet wind of a late-winter storm thumped and groaned against our little house. Taj Mahal rasped his blues through the single speaker. Morton Arthur, a big man with a ZZ Top beard, gave me a conspiratorial hug. “In your study, man,” he said, laying a finger against one side of his ruined nose. I knew what he meant. Morton was connected, and liked to share his coke. He had money to burn, unlike most of the guests. He was our local celebrity. Any day now one of his science fiction novels was going to hit the charts. He wrote a kind of juiced-up 1930s space opera with Cyberpunk features: nubile earth women doing crack on crater-pocked The Pusher Planetoids; slave traders providing American teenagers as slave labor to work the bug farms of the spider people from The Planet of the Arachnids; hermaphroditic cowboys herding desexed human clones though underground Labyrinths of Venus.

  “Feel free,” I told him, but in truth I was uncomfortable with his habit. I glanced around the room to see if Rocio was watching. She did not approve of drugs. She always wore the red “I Am Drug Free” ribbon during drug-awareness week in El Paso.

  Mort had been busted in L.A. while working on a screenplay for a mid-budget but never-distributed SF shoot-em-up called Time Slot. He’d spent a month in jail, and then six more months doing public service. His public service consisted of lecturing local high school audiences about the dangers of drugs. Mort loved his drugs, and asking him to denounce them was like asking Jerry Falwell to promote child pornography.

  “Champagne don’t make me crazy,

  Cocaine don’t make me lazy,

  Ain’t nobody’s business but my own,”

  Morton sang, along with Taj Mahal.

  Rocio came over to us, suspicious. “No drogas, ” she said.

  “Deportes sí, drogas no,” Morton said, laughing. It was a bumper sticker we’d brought up from the border. It was on our refrigerator. It tickled Morton. Sports yes, drugs no. “What sports do you play, Rocio?” he said.

  In truth, he liked
Rodo and Rocio liked him. Their play at hostility was a kind of running joke. But Rocio drew the line at hard drugs. “I mean it, Morton,” she said. “No pinchi drogas en my damn casa.”

  “Rocio, Rocio, Rocio,” Morton intoned, giving her name its rightful Spanish inflections. He passed his middle finger under his nose and inhaled noisily. “I have given up the filthy habit, Rocio. I sniff only taco pescado now. It’s cheaper and gets you almost as high.”

  Rocio’s eyes got big for a second, then she laughed. “I don’t believe you, Morton,” she said, cuffing him lightly on the jaw. “You have a filthy mind.”

  This little house we rent used to be a barn. Legend has it that a horse thief was hanged from its rafters. It’s a legend that happens to be true. I call it a legend only because hanged horse thieves in this part of the country are legendary. I found out this piece of history from Peter Selvig, a one-hundred-year-old exrailroad conductor who lives across the street. He said that he witnessed the hanging. He no longer remembered the name of the thief. He remembers only that the man was tall and skinny and that there was a lot of drunken joking among the grown-ups about whether or not he wouldn’t slip the noose when they dropped him. Someone suggested tying a sack of feed to his feet so there’d be enough weight to cinch the noose and snap his neck properly. Peter wasn’t supposed to be present—it was strictly a party for adults. But he and his older brother climbed, unnoticed, up a ladder in the far end of the barn and hid behind a stack of hay in the loft. It was New Year’s Eve, 1899, and the thief was to be hanged at the stroke of midnight, ushering in the bright new thief-free century. Peter remembers the condemned man’s face clearly as the sheriff’s deputy put the noose around his long, thin neck. The expression in the thief’s eyes, Peter said, was something to behold. It was calm and peaceful and, in a strange way, generous. It suggested something extrahuman to little Peter, though he could not have articulated this at the time. The look on that man’s face was something Peter could not get out of his mind. It remains vivid, almost a hundred years later. Peter, who was on the edge of his own precipice, has something of this same unafraid look. His foggy old eyes are peaceful and generous. “That old boy’s boots came off,” he said. “They tied the mealsack to his boots, and when they dropped him the sudden stop yanked off his boots. He had little feet, like a girl’s feet. Feet to break your heart.” I liked Peter a lot and we spent many afternoons in his backyard whittling on pieces of maple. These afternoons were so enjoyable that I was almost glad to be out of work. Deportes sí , trabajo no.

  After about six hours the party broke up into subparties. There was a group in the bedroom making militia jokes, a north Rockies pastime. Three wives sat on the sectional discussing the merits of discount warehouses. Mort Arthur had collected half a dozen people and had taken them into the double-size closet I call my study. I went with these. There were about six of us. “I lied to Rocio,” Mort said to me.

  He dismantled a picture frame to get at the glass. Then he chopped some generous lines. Someone provided fat Dairy Queen straws that had been clipped short, and we passed the glass around the small room like a communion palette. I was worried Rocio would come in. She had started going to church again after a ten-year layoff and had hung her grandma’s old crucifix above our bed—a dark, twisted savior carved out of stubborn mesquite by an eccentric but faithful artisan. Under the black eyes of that Indian Jesus, Rocio was becoming less and less willing to participate in the mild exercises of foreplay. There was no telling what new extreme she might be pushed to if she barged in on Mort’s cocaine ceremony.

  I went back to the living room. Rocio had gotten uncharacteristically tipsy. Someone had brought a bottle of Irish Cream, and she indulged herself. She likes candy, and Irish Cream is the candy of hard drink. Manitas de Platas, the gypsy guitarist, was on the Sanyo, and Rocio, who claimed three-quarters Spanish blood, was demonstrating the flamenco. For castanets she was using spoons. Her skirts were flying, exposing her long silky thighs and smoky undies. A thin line of sweat gleamed on her temple. Perfume and pheromones mixed and radiated like woodstove heat from her spinning body. Who is this woman I’ve tied my life to? I asked myself, knowing the question was stupid as well as central.

  I went into the kitchen where Duane Mercator was doing a magic trick at the insistence of a small crowd. “Everybody sit down and close your eyes,” Duane said.

  I sat on the floor, back against the wall. A woman I didn’t know sat next to me. She offered me a hit from her joint, which I refused. “I don’t mix my chemicals,” I said. She shrugged and passed it the other way. “I’m going to count slowly to ten,” Duane said, his voice beautifully modulated. We could have been in Las Vegas, watching an expensive act. His voice was the voice of a professional master of ceremonies. It made you feel that you were in competent hands. You left his cubicle in the employment office feeling that important jobs were being lined up for you.

  When he finished counting, the woman sitting next to me slumped down. The mota dropped from her fingers. I picked it up and passed it to my left. I let my head thunk against the wainscoting of the wall behind me, giving in to a sudden postcocaine fatigue.

  Duane said, “I want you to think of a white wall. It’s fifty feet high and a hundred feet wide and it is pure, unblemished white.”

  The woman next to me slowly raised her head off the linoleum. “I see it,” she said.

  “Think of this wall,” Duane said, “as a place of complete peace. It is untouched by petty aggravations. Nothing can mar it. Nothing has ever marred it. It was clean at the beginning of time, it is clean now, and it will be clean at the end of time. It is the wall that surrounds Eden.”

  “Wow,” said the woman. “Man, I’m going snow-blind.”

  I didn’t see any wall. Maybe a pale spot, wide as a quarter. But I had to push it to believe it.

  “Try not to be so cynical,” Duane said to me. I guess he read the expression on my face.

  I made an honest effort. The little pale spot widened. This interested me.

  “Now,” said Mercator. “Open your eyes.”

  I opened my eyes. The pale spot was still there. Not fifty feet tall, but definitely there. Mercator opened the oven door. He took a bottle of milk out of the fridge and put it into the oven. He turned the oven on and set the dial to “Bake.”

  “I’m going to start counting again,” he said. “When I reach twenty, I’ll open the oven. He reached twenty, then opened the door again. The bottle of milk was gone. In its place was a package. Duane took the package out and removed the heavy brown wrapping paper that covered it. He tore the paper off the package and opened the box. A kitten raised its head and mewed. Duane closed the oven door. He counted to twenty again. Then he opened the oven again. Inside was the bottle of milk. He got a saucer out of the cupboard and poured some milk into it. I could see, from the way it steamed, that it was warm milk. The kitten ran to the saucer and began lapping it up, her tail erect and quivering with pleasure. We applauded.

  I got up and went back into the front room. For some reason, Duane’s magic trick had bothered me. The white haze he’d called up was still with me. It flared around the living room like a halo. Rocio had finished dancing and was now sitting on the sofa sipping Irish Cream.

  I went down to the basement to lie down and watch television, hoping the party would break up pretty soon. I watched part of a T and A movie on the Playboy channel. Then I switched to one of the Christian channels, where a pair of evangelists, a man and a woman, told their audience how at one time they did not have a measurable ounce of faith. “Hey!” the woman cried out with the élan of a cheerleader. “Look how far we’ve come!”

  I slept for a while. When I woke, the party was over, our guests were gone. I found Rocio sitting on the floor of the shower stall. She sat with her knees pulled up, her arms crossed on her knees, her head on her arms, while tepid water lashed her brown back, the knuckles of her spine shining like wet stones.

  I turned off the wat
er. “Come on, let’s go to bed, honey,” I said.

  She sobbed. One big, ragged sob. This is where she goes when she is sad, the shower. I lifted her up and held her against my chest. Her breasts turn outward in their fullness. I read that somewhere once—a generously erotic phrase—and it applies to Rocio. When she got her feet under her, I wrapped her in a towel.

  I locked up the house and went to the bedroom. Rocio had collapsed on the bed in a careless sprawl—her thighs loose in a parody of invitation. But I knew, from experience, that it would have been a mistake to misread the moment. I left her there, her eyes half open, her mind halfway back to the slopes of Chapultepec.

  I cleaned up the house, put the coke-dusty glass back into the picture frame, washed the dishes. When I went back to the bedroom. Rocio was kneeling at the head of the bed, kissing the gnarled mesquite feet of her grandmother’s Jesus. She was still weeping, silently, and I knew that we would soon be going back to the border.

  I knelt beside the bed, stroked her calves and her feet. They were perfect feet—long, narrow, highly arched. I touched the sweetly knuckled toes, traced the delicate webbing of veins under the transparent skin, the bleak and startling rise of the ankles.

  As she kissed the tragic feet of her grandmother’s Jesus, I kissed the fragile spray of bones that reached down from the instep and ended at the toes: for they too were fossils of starlight that had not forgotten their radiant freedom.

  Hormone X

  The summer I turned seventeen, freedom and boredom were two sides of the same equation. Total freedom equaled total boredom. I felt it physically. It squeezed me, it made me sweat. In dreams it hung in the air like a hot, paralyzing fog. It weighed on me, pressed me down. I was trapped under the weight of absolute liberty.

  Both my parents were working a lot of overtime at Convair making B-36’s— the intercontinental atomic bomber that would send the Communist world back to the Stone Age—and I was left to my own devices. But I had no devices and was caught like a fly in the web of my own sloth.