Out of desperation, after my mother and her latest husband, Ward Moseley, had left for the swing shift, I searched their bedroom looking for rubbers and other evidence of their sex life. I went through my mother’s lingerie drawer, her jewelry boxes, and felt the top shelf of their bedroom closet. In Ward Moseley’s underwear drawer I hit the jackpot. There among the sandalwood-scented boxer shorts was a nickel-plated.38-caliber snub-nosed revolver. I didn’t know he owned a gun. Next to it was a box of shells.
I took the gun out and hefted it a while, watching myself in the dresser mirror. I was wearing Levi’s, engineer boots, and a white T-shirt. My black hair was greased back into a slick duck’s ass. I broke the gun open and spun the cylinder. Then I filled the holes in the cylinder with six bullets. I aimed the gun at my reflection.
“You’ve fucked me over for the last time, scumbag,” I said. The image in the mirror pointed the gun at my chest. My heart vibrated with disbelief, then started to pound: I had put actual pressure on the trigger, enough to raise the hammer a fraction of an inch. I unloaded the gun, returned the bullets to their box and continued my search.
I found some pamphlet-size comic books. They were just like the Sunday comics but with perverted twists: Blondie and the Bumsteads’ next-door neighbor, Herb Woodley, were naked and going at it in Blondie’s kitchen. A naked Maggie spanked Jiggs’s balloon-big buttocks with a spatula. Captain Easy had Mary Worth bent over a car fender. Alley Oop showed Tarzan’s Jane what a real ape-man could do. I was amazed and delighted. The entire Sunday comics were roaring with lust, the characters crossing over into one another’s lives, breaking every rule of decent comic-strip behavior. I didn’t know such books existed. It was like discovering life on Mars, or picking up TV pictures from a UFO.
The best book in this secret library was called Hormone X, a short novel that played on the Red Scare the House Un-American Activities Committee had recently whipped up to a fever pitch. In the book, the Commies had dumped a synthetic hormone into the water supplies of all major American cities. The results were spectacular. The hormone caused all women between puberty and menopause to become insatiable sex tyrants. Each chapter was illustrated with yellow-tinted photographs of wild-eyed lunatic housewives, secretaries, cheerleaders—even nuns—hunting down men, taking them captive and making sex slaves out of the happily surprised victims while the national defense went to hell.
The trouble with Hormone X was that, while the plot was set up neatly in the first few pages, everything after that was just a series of mechanical repetitions. There was no variation on the theme, no narrative complication. The sex frenzy began to wear thin after Chapter 5. I could sense the boredom of the pornographer, who had begun to plagiarize himself, the scene between the First Lady and the secretary of agriculture was exactly the same as the scene between the housewife and the plumber thirty pages earlier. Only the names, locales and furniture were different. Worse, the writer, whoever he was, wrote in a flowery, ornate style that robbed the story of practically all its erotic effects.
After ten readings of Hormone X, I put it into its dark place among the shorts and undershirts, heady with the belief that I could have written a better sex novel standing on my head. Being a virgin didn’t matter: Sexual knowledge could be borrowed. I had already written a war story, “My Bayonet Sings,” based on my reading of Men at War, a collection of first-person battlefield tales edited by Ernest Hemingway. My junior English teacher, Mrs. Wise, had called “My Bayonet Sings” “terrifying and convincing,” even though she only gave me a C-because of spelling errors and crude figures of speech. I didn’t mind. It was the highest grade I’d received in any subject during the school year, a year that would be followed by a summer of boredom so deep and unvaried that uncommon and desperate acts seemed inevitable.
I hung out with Buddy Askew that summer. Buddy was a tall blond boy with the lean, hungry muscles of a sharecropper. His parents had migrated to California from Arkansas during the Dust Bowl era. The memory of those hard days seemed to have imprinted the Askew blood, because Buddy—though bom in California—had inherited his father’s stark, thin-lipped, hardscrabble face. It was a face that expected the worst, no matter how well things were going. Prosperity, abundance, high wages—these were held suspect in the small, uncompromising eyes of both father and son.
Buddy owned a.22-caliber Remington carbine, and we would walk the dry arroyos in the eastern foothills of the county, shooting randomly at small animals. We’d drive out on Highway 80 to a town at the foot of the Cuyamaca Mountains, fill our canteens with Nesbitt orange soda, then set off into the steep country roads in Buddy’s 1936 Ford sedan. Buddy had bought the car the previous summer with two years’ of paperboy pay. It was a clean car that had belonged to a grade-school teacher. It had crisp maroon plastic seat covers and a steel sun visor above the windshield. When he bought the car, big freckles of black primer showed through the original gray paint. So Buddy and I drove it to
L.A. to take advantage of a $19.95 Earl Scheib paint job. The car came out a dull, light-absorbing seaweed-green. It looked like the staff car for the army of some failing country. We drove back home in tense disappointment. The engine was a small, flathead V-8 that put out a tepid eighty-five horsepower, but Buddy installed headers and twin exhaust pipes along with a pair of twelve-inch glass-packed mufflers called “Smittys” that gave the little engine a darkly sexual throb. The twin-trombone sound of the exhaust somewhat made up for the car’s boring appearance.
Sometime after his seventeenth birthday, Buddy adopted worldly airs. I figured it was because of TV. There had been a lot of spy shows that year dealing with foreign intrigue. He became as rigidly sophisticated as an East German saboteur. He had two expressions: Amused Contempt and Cynical Insight, both of which he used with devastating effect.
Most of my enthusiasms made his lips curl with Amused Contempt. Now and then, when I said something I thought was profound, he’d look at me with Cynical Insight, as if to let me know he’d had this same thought years ago but had since discovered its many flaws. Whenever my conversation drifted into the great unknowables—sex, death, life on other planets, atomic weapons, and the future of mankind—he would regard something far away, his eyes narrow with Cynical Insight, and then his lips would curl thinly in Amused Contempt. It was an ego-shattering combination. It was as if he had yet to discover someone capable of discussing with him on an equal footing. His favorite put-down was, “Think again, shit-for-brains.”
On one of those cruelly beautiful days in June, we were sitting on a steep hillside looking for targets down in the bottom of an arroyo. We’d already emptied a box of.22 long rifles at bottles and cans, birds and field mice, hitting nothing. The barrel of the carbine was too short for accuracy and the muzzle velocity was so slow you could actually see the curving flight of the bullets if the sun struck them just right.
A light airplane droned in the sky directly above us. Buddy languidly raised the carbine and shot at it. My boredom, which had caught up with me, disappeared in a gut-punching surge of adrenaline. The plane was at least a thousand feet above us, and there was little chance the slow, curving bullet could reach it, but even so, the criminal potential of what Buddy had done woke up every nerve in my body. Then he shot at the airplane again. He amazed me. It was as if shooting at planes was no more interesting or serious than shooting at rusted cans.
He handed me the carbine. “You try,” he said. “See if you can put a hole in that rich fucker’s aeroplane.” I took the gun from him and drew the bolt back as slowly as I could. I was a little nearsighted and saw the plane as a drifting yellow smear. By the time I was ready to fire, the smear was about to vanish over the crest of a hill. I shot at the patch of blue sky the plane had vacated a split second earlier. Buddy looked at me: Amused Contempt.
As we walked back toward the highway, I told Buddy about my discovery of my stepfather’s secret collection of dirty books. For once he didn’t give me one of his sophisticated expressions
. He looked... blank. His parents were strict religious people who were always alert for deviant behavior, in Buddy’s friends as well as in society at large. Not much in the way of smut got through their front door. I gave him a thumbnail sketch of the plot of Hormone X.
“That’s a load of bullshit,” he said. “There isn’t such a thing as a hormone like that.” He tried to give me Amused Contempt, but he was too stimulated to make it work. He only looked peevish and alarmed, as if he’d just swallowed a sharp chicken bone.
“I know there isn’t,” I said. “It’s just a story.”
Buddy had long legs, and his strides were quick. I had to half-trot to keep up with him. Suddenly he whirled around and fired a shot over my head. I dropped to a crouch as he fired again. “A dove,” he said. “I think I winged the little cock-sucker.”
I looked around at the empty, birdless sky. Buddy had reclaimed his normal superiority by scaring me and now regarded me with a muted form of Cynical Insight. “You believe everything you read, shit-for-brains?” he said, casually pushing bullets into the carbine’s magazine.
“I said it was a story,” I repeated, but he ignored me, following the line of thought that suited him.
We drove down to Sweetwater Reservoir. Buddy parked on an embankment about twenty feet above the water.
“I guess this is where they’d dump it,” he said.
“Dump what?”
The carbine was on the floor, between our feet. He picked it up and aimed it out the window. He sent a visible bullet hooking out across the still waters. “Hormone X,” he said.
“There’s no such thing,” I reminded him.
“Think again,” he said, his beady eyes narrowing at invented targets.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“I’m talking about the Commies. They’d do it if they could, and they probably can. How do you know that book of yours wasn’t written by some ex-Commie who had the facts?” Buddy got out of the car and urinated into Sweetwater, which provided half a million people with drinking water. I joined him.
Buddy’s father, Terrel Askew, sold electric-eye equipment to large retailers. This was the beginning of the automatic-door era. I had dinner at their house once: macaroni and cheese and yellow Jell-O salad in which fragments of fruits and nuts were suspended. Mrs. Askew put the food on the table and we served ourselves. They weren’t a talkative family, but Mr. Askew did ask about my parents.
I didn’t tell him that my mother had been married four times, or that my present stepfather and I had different last names. Minutes passed between Mr. Askew’s questions. The click and scrape of forks against the Melmac plates filled the intervals. Mrs. Askew cleared her throat several times as if to speak, and her face brightened as if a pleasant thought had occurred to her, but this appeared to be a vestigial mannerism with no present function, a social counterpart of the human appendix. She said nothing during the entire meal.
Buddy and I finished eating first. Buddy asked to be excused. His father scanned our plates, making sure we had scraped them clean, then nodded. We went to Buddy’s room. There was a picture frame nailed to his door. There was no picture in it, just a printed sign:
“A BOY IS KNOWN BY WHAT HE DOES
WHEN HE HAS NOTHING TO DO”
“You sure pissed off my dad, shit-for-brains,” Buddy said.
“What? I didn’t do anything!” I was stunned. “What pissed him off?”
“You didn’t say what your old man did for a living.”
“He didn’t ask.”
“Don’t you know any manners? You don’t make someone play twenty questions with you. If they ask you anything at all about your old man, they probably want to know a couple of other things, too.”
“Should I go back and tell him?”
Amused Contempt. “Too late now. You blew it.”
“Maybe I should tell him my old man collects dirty books.”
“Don’t be dumb. He’d never let you over here again if you did a dumb thing like that.”
I took this as a compliment: Buddy valued our friendship. “Thanks,” I said. “For nothing, shit-for-brains.”
He pulled a checkerboard out from under his bed and set it up on the floor. “You’re black,” he said.
When Buddy and I went out shooting again, I brought Hormone X with me. I also brought Ward Moseley’s.38.I didn’t plan to shoot it; I just wanted Buddy to see it and be impressed. A nickel-plated snub-nosed.38 was far more sinister than a cheap.22 carbine with a short barrel. I wore an old army-surplus fatigue jacket and kept the pistol in one of the big side pockets.
We filled our canteens with orange Nesbitt and headed out into the arroyo. When we sat down in our favorite spot, I took out Hormone X and thumbed through it casually.
“What’s that?” Buddy said.
I showed him the cover.
“Give it here a sec,” he said. He flipped through the pages, looking first at the yellow pictures, then at the text. He frowned hard and his lips began to move. “Crap,” he said. “What the hell is ‘tume—tume...”
“Tumescence,” I said.
“‘Tume—ess—sent member.’ What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Stiff dick,” I said.
He slapped the book against his thigh. “Well, for shit sakes, why don’t they just say so?”
I couldn’t help him there.
He read on. ‘“Carlyle gently presented his tumescent member to Vivian’s hot...’ What? Vivian’s hot Volvo? He’s screwing a damn souped-up foreign car?”
“Not ‘Volvo.’ ‘Vulva.’”
“‘Vulva.’” He shook his head, unwilling to ask me what the word meant. He tossed the book back to me. “This isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on,” he said. “I doubt if it was any ex-Commie that wrote it. Just some dumb fruit who went to college.”
He took the book back and opened it to the photographs. “The pictures are pretty good, though,” he conceded. “Your old man got any more books?”
“Just cartoons.”
He looked at me with Cynical Insight. “Tijuana Bibles,” he said. “I’ve seen them. They’re pretty stupid.”
He picked up his carbine and stared at it, as if it were a strange device he hadn’t seen before. He opened the breech and snapped it shut. Then he fired. I watch the bullet curve across the canyon and chip a large rock about fifty yards away.
I pulled out the.38 and fired three times at the rock. The.38, even with its short barrel, had more muzzle velocity than the carbine, and its report had twice the authority. It bucked in my hand, its power surprising me. Buddy jumped away from me, stunned. Which was the effect I was hoping for. “Damn!” he said. “Where’d you get that thing?”
I started to tell him, but a scream from across the arroyo shattered the air. Two people, a man and a woman, ran in full crouch from behind the rock we had shot at. They were naked. The woman fell and the man stopped to help her up. Then the man looked up and saw us. “You fucking idiots!” he yelled. “I’m going to come over there and shove those guns up your asses!” I squinted hard, to sharpen my vision. He was about thirty years old and big. He ran behind the rock again and came out pulling up his pants. He tossed a blanket to the woman, then sat down to put on his shoes. The woman remained crouched, the blanket pulled tightly around her.
“Let’s get out of here!” I said, jumping up.
Buddy didn’t move. He reloaded his carbine. Then he fired at the rock again. The man, who had begun to move down his side of the arroyo, stopped dead in his tracks. He looked like he was going to yell at us again, but nothing came out of his mouth. He started backpedaling up the slope, as if he realized he’d misjudged what he was dealing with.
So had I. Buddy had an expression on his face that made my heart skip. A cold hatred mixed with an eerie calm made him look older. He was a stranger to me, someone from another world, a world of piney hills, smoldering resentments, the warring blood of ancient clans. I was suddenly more scared
of him that of the man across the arroyo.
“Come on, cocksucker!” Buddy yelled. “Come on over here and shove these guns up our asses!” His whooping voice was high-pitched with a kind of eager delight.
The woman started screaming again. “They’re murderers, Philip! Let’s get away from this place!”
Philip gathered the woman’s clothes and they scrambled up their side of the arroyo. The blanket the woman was wrapped in snagged on some bushes and fell off her shoulders. She left it behind. I looked cautiously at Buddy, who was still sighting down the barrel of his carbine. “Look at that ass wiggle,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind having me some of that.” The dead calm in his voice had nothing to do with me or with anything I knew about. When Philip and the woman were gone, we headed for the car.
“We’d better make tracks,” I said. “They’re probably going to call the cops.”
Buddy nodded but did not hurry. And when we got to the car, he didn’t start it right away. He sat behind the wheel with his hands relaxed in his lap, staring thoughtfully out the windshield.
“You know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking. ‘Vulva’ is maybe the dirtiest word I ever heard of. The way it sounds. I better have me another look at that Hormone X.”
“Jesus, will you just start the car, ” I said. “We’ve got to haul ass before the cops come.”
He looked at me and grinned. Amused Contempt. “You know what?” he said. “I finally got you figured out.”
This startled me. But in a way I felt flattered. He’d been thinking about me; I was someone who needed figuring out. I had not been as curious about him. Until now.
“You don’t keep your head,” he said. “You get all worked up at the drop of a damn hat. That won’t do you any good in the long run. You got to remember that you’re in the middle of everything around you, kind of like what they call on TV ‘the eye of the storm.’ If you forget that, then you’re just a part of the storm—wind and tom-up trees and scared shitless.”
Borrowed Hearts Page 38