Borrowed Hearts

by Rick DeMarinis

  I had always been afraid of disappearing completely, like someone lost at sea. I already suspected that I was becoming invisible. If I became totally invisible, then I’d be lost forever, erased. I remembered being terrified at the movie The Invisible Man, starring Claude Raines. He was there, in substance, until he unwound the bandages that covered his face and neck. Then he was not there.

  His hat floated across a room, his pipe followed the trajectory between what were supposed to be his hand and mouth, but that was never convincing. He was gone, a patch of talking air, forgettable as a dream.

  Hate was the bandaging that made you visible. I nursed my hatred, I protected it. I used it on the boys who were smaller than me. I made them see me and then I made them fear me. I pretended to be a wise guy. “Beat it, you pis-sant punk,” I’d say, and they’d scamper away. “Gimme a nickel, you little bastard,” I’d say, and they’d dig in their pockets.

  I couldn’t eat nun food. They fed us spinach and boiled eggs, chipped beef and steamed cauliflower, fried liver and pickled beets. I stuffed supper into my pants pockets and flushed it down the toilet when I got the chance. I lived on bread and milk. Once when my mother came to visit me with one of her magazine-model girlfriends, I threw my hamburger on the floor of a Tarrytown restaurant. When they took me to a movie, I unbuttoned my pants and peed in the aisle. These were the most disagreeable things I could think of doing. But they were strong, durable women who had seen the bad behavior of grown-ups. My antics only amused them. They laughed at my pranks. My mother had a powerful laugh. It always brought tears to her eyes. She said, “It’s not a life-and-death matter, Charles. Put your wee-wee away, honey. It doesn’t frighten us.”

  She loved my tiny Italian grandmother, Genia Biscotti, who was from Naples, but she’d laugh sometimes at her old-country ways. We’d been living temporarily in a little house on Staten Island with two well-mannered, well-dressed men from Sicily. The men were in New York, for a week, just to rub someone out. They’d been brought over by the mob. They were professionals and were relaxed and businesslike. My grandmother screamed at them in Italian while they were cleaning their guns, a nightly ritual. “Assassins! Murderers!” But the men went about their business calmly, maintaining their dignity and courtly ways. These men did all the cooking, played checkers with me, and read the newspapers out loud to practice their English. But Grandma Biscotti didn’t trust Sicilians and looked down on them as social inferiors. My father, who was their host, treated them with respect. My mother told me, years later, “The old lady hated them because they weren’t Napolidan. If they had been from Naples, it would have been a different story. She would have baked them a cake. Hit men from Naples, as everyone knows, are fine upstanding gentlemen.” She laughed her big laugh every time she told this story.

  On the playground in Tarrytown I caught butterflies and pulled off their wings, denying them the freedom of flight, turning them back into worms. I bullied the smaller boys and was, in turn, bullied by the bigger boys. The nickels I extorted from the smaller boys were extorted from me by the bigger boys. We lived in a hierarchy of fear. You could smell the anxiety. It was a chemical reek, strong as urine. The nuns had us listen to radio speeches by President Roosevelt.

  The nuns, in their innocence, acted as if we were able to care about what the president said, or could be uplifted by his stirring rhetoric. We didn’t know what he was talking about and couldn’t have cared less. We were castoffs, we were the unwanted, and everyone, including the president, could go to hell.

  We routinely fantasized escapes: cutting through the chain-link fence that surrounded the school grounds, or digging a tunnel underneath it, then going on the lam. When we played war, I was a counterspy, blowing up ships, planes, and tanks. When we took prisoners, we tortured them with pinches and Indian bums whether they told us their secrets or not. The object of war was to inflict pain, not establish freedom, democracy, and the American way.

  Grandma Aiti’s house was on U.S. 41, between Negaunee and Marquette. A forest of maples, oaks, and poplars edged up to the back of the house. My grandpa’s 1939 Hudson Terraplane sat out in front of the house like a dream of the future—a future where contoured aerodynamic steel, chrome plating, and brute horsepower would make human flaw irrelevant.

  My real uncles, my mother’s brothers, worked in the iron-ore mines under Negaunee. They invited Uncle Jack to take a sauna bath with them. The sauna was behind the house and was itself a small house with two rooms and a chimney. One room was where the rock-covered barrel stove was, the other was where you got undressed, and, after your sauna bath, cooled off.

  My real uncle, Moose, threw pails of cold water on the rocks, and the steam exploded upward. The steam drove Uncle Jack down to the lowest bench with me. It was kind of a test—to see if we could take it. My real uncles laughed, and Uncle Jack, who was a good sport, laughed too. “You Finlander boys can take the heat!” he said. Then we went into the anteroom and switched ourselves with cedar boughs. Uncle Jack and my real uncles went into the house and drank whiskey and played cribbage. I had cake and milk with my mother and grandma Aiti in the kitchen. Cake and milk and the sober talk between my mother and her mother didn’t get me high. I wanted to be with the men, out on the screened porch. I could smell their cigarette smoke and whiskey. My real uncle, Cuss, had taken out his guitar and was singing “Red River Valley.” He had a sweet tenor voice, and the other uncles, even Uncle Jack, joined in the singing. Getting high and singing, that seemed like the best way to spend your life.

  “Drunk,” Grandma Aiti said.

  “Drunk,” my mother agreed, a statement, not a judgment.

  I liked Michigan, but I was afraid of it too. I knew I was going to be left here with my grandma and grandpa. My grandpa, who also worked in the iron-ore mines of Negaunee, showed me how to tap sugar maples for their sweet sap, and how to set snares for rabbits. One day he took me for a walk with Miko, one of his dogs, an ancient milky-eyed spaniel. Grandpa carried a.22 rifle and a shovel.

  We walked behind the house and down a path that went through the woods. I asked him where we were going, and he said, “It’s time to let Miko go.” This gradually sunk in as we walked. He was going to shoot the old dog.

  Miko seemed to understand that this was his last walk in the woods. He whined and lagged behind, but followed obediently. When we came to the place where it was to be done, Miko got very agitated. His whines grew higher in pitch. They sounded like human pleas. I wanted to tell him to run, to head into the woods and never come back, but I also knew that Miko, who was half blind and stiff with age, could not survive on his own, a vagabond dog on the run.

  Grandpa laid the shovel aside. He pulled a poplar sapling down and pressed it across Miko’s back to hold the old dog still. “You stand on one end of it,” he told me. Miko started moaning. Grandpa put the muzzle of his small rifle against the back of Miko’s head and pulled the trigger. The abrupt thud and Miko’s sudden lurch made me slip off the sapling, which sprung back up.

  Grandpa dug a hole between two trees and dropped Miko into it. He filled it in and we covered the grave with stones to keep animals from digging Miko up. I cried all the way back to the house, but Grandpa didn’t seem to notice. When we got back, Grandpa took a bottle of whiskey out of a kitchen cabinet and poured himself half a glass and drank it down. I watched him closely as he wiped off his mouth. He didn’t get high at all.

  I met some of the neighbor boys—big Finn boys in bib overalls and bare feet. They laughed at my New York accent. I told them they sounded stupid. I wore my New York clothes to intimidate them—porkpie hat, a pinstripe wise-guy suit Big Biscuit had given me before I left on this trip. I even put on a clip-on tie. The big Finn boys laughed at me. I picked one out I thought I could beat and tried to extort a nickel from him. He couldn’t believe his ears. “You go to hell, you damn Dago,” he said.

  We fought. The buttons came off my coat and my porkpie hat went flying. His name was Aino Keckonen and we rolled
around together on the ground, Aino winding up on top. He was too strong for me. I couldn’t budge him. “Give?” he said. “Give,” I said.

  Eventually we all became friends. They got a kick out of my name, Charlie Biscotti. They chanted it, but not to make fun of me. It was as if the syllables of my name were a mysterious incantation. They had names like Kalevi Altonen and Artturi Koskenniemi, which were ordinary everyday names to them.

  Indian summer came, and the weather got sultry. One day I was out in my grandma’s garden picking corn when I saw a black Ford pull up to the front of the house. Men in coats and hats came to the front door. I heard some yelling, then my mother came out carrying a suitcase. She got into the black car and the men drove her away. I figured they were after Uncle Jack, but he had left for Canada several days before. I ran after the car as it pulled away on U.S. 41, heading toward Marquette. She waved at me through the rear window. Though she was fifty yards away, I saw her eyes, the dark reservoir of sadness in them. I kept running until the car was out of sight. I stood on the empty highway, looking at the dense forest on either side, the dark-blue alien sky, and the white frame house that was going to be my new home.

  “Satana, ” I said. “Perkelle. ”

  I spent another year on the lam. I found the Maybelline girl in magazines my grandma had, and I talked to those untrusting blue eyes. “When are you coming?” I’d say, and the sad beautiful eyes said, “Soon, Little Biscuit, soon.”

  I learned more Finn words to add to my Italian. My uncle Cuss, who called me buska hosa, taught me how to play a few chords on the guitar and sing “Red River Valley.” I learned to roll cigarettes with the neighbor boys and how to smoke them. When we couldn’t get tobacco, we smoked com silk. We smoked in the woods where I embroidered stories about New York gangsters, and how my mother was going to prison for being a gun moll, and how when she got out we were going to California where there was a million dollars hidden in a cave. When we got that money, we were going to buy a big house by the ocean and hire servants to take care of us. I showed them pictures of the Maybelline girl, to convince them that my mother could become a movie star if she wanted to.

  When the year was over, she came for me. She looked tired, as if she had walked all the way across the country. Her face was drawn and her teeth had gone bad. Her clothes were dirty and didn’t fit her. Her eyes weren’t Maybelline-girl eyes anymore. She’d been held in the Bronx County jail as a material witness for eleven months. When they finally caught Uncle Jack, they let her go. “I didn’t recognize him,” she said. “A Canadian plastic surgeon changed his face.”

  After another month in Michigan, she got restless. She had a need to see new places and do new things. California had been on her mind, too. Bronx County paid her three dollars a day for all the time she was in their jail, and so we had enough money to last a while. I asked her what we’d do when we got to California. “We’ll see when we get there, “ she said.

  We took a bus to Chicago, where we would board a train to Los Angeles. It was an old, noisy bus with bad springs. When it turned comers, it felt as if it would roll over, and when it made stops, its brakes would squeal for a full minute, making you grit your teeth. I remembered Uncle Jack’s slick black DeSoto, streaking through Florida. I remembered them getting high, and I remembered getting high with them and singing. In spite of my restlessness and boredom, that had been a real adventure. I wanted this to be one, too.

  I asked her what happened to Uncle Jack. “Sing Sing,” she said. I didn’t understand. “It’s a prison, Charlie. He’ll be there for twenty years. I don’t think we’ll see him again.”

  She didn’t want to talk. She leaned her head against the window and fell asleep. It was dark out, and most of the passengers were slumped down in their seats. A loneliness big as night swept over me. I thought about Uncle Jack, how lonely he must be in Sing Sing. And then I thought of the prison itself—a prison whose name commanded you to sing. I pictured the prisoners, in their cells, singing sad songs while the turnkeys egged them on, their lonely voices rising up out of the cells, over the walls and guard towers, and into the countryside, making people stop in their tracks and think that what they were about to do wasn’t so important after all. I started humming, thinking about the singing prisoners.

  The man seated directly in front of me had set a shopping bag in the aisle. Every now and then he’d reach into it and lift out a slim dark bottle with a long neck. When he finally fell asleep, and when I was sure everyone else around us was asleep, I reached into his bag and pulled out the bottle. I uncapped it and brought it to my lips. It was sweet wine. It tasted like warm cherry juice. I took a full swallow, then another.

  My humming, after a while, got louder. Then I put words to the tune. It was a song about the past and the future. I made it up as I went along. It was a song about staying one step ahead of the thing you needed to get away from, the thing that would always be there.

  Seize the Day

  He woke into light the color of ice. A warm girl was pressed against him. He pushed her away. She groaned and he remembered where he was. He hugged her close. “Did it again,” he whispered into her hair. “Late.”

  He slid out of bed. The cold linoleum shocked his feet. The girl pulled her clock radio close to her face. Gray light came from a small square window in the door of her apartment. “I think it’s after eight,” she said. He turned on the bathroom bulb, looked at himself. He thought: Rotten. Very rotten. Even so, he was happy with this. The girl was a reward he allowed himself. Reward for what he could not say. He knew he was not an especially deserving man. His ordeals had been run-of-the-mill by any standard.

  In any case this affair wasn’t going to last much longer.

  The girl said, “Does the wife know you’re here?” He could barely understand her. She had buried herself under the quilt, hoarding the diminishing warmth of the bed. He liked the way she always said “the wife.” He liked the way she held herself in her own arms when he left the bed. He looked at his several faces in the badly cracked mirror. “Why don’t you replace this thing?” he said.

  He had a marijuana and Thunderbird hangover. No board in his head, no splinters of glass in his stomach, but he felt assaulted by small waves of giddiness. He needed to think, to organize his thoughts, to put the morning, if not his life, in order. But the thoughts tripped over themselves, digressed, got lost in a traveling pastiche of images and voices.

  He looked at his multiple, bloodshot eyes. His many gray tongues. He brushed his teeth with her toothbrush, as she had told him to do. He liked that, too: her domestic commands, her little directives. She did the same when they were having sex, whispered breathy instructions, something his wife could never allow herself to do.

  “You better hurry,” she called. “I don’t want her busting in here with some kind of betrayed-wife act.”

  He raised his right arm, carefully, because of a new stiffness, then cursed.

  “All right, then,” the girl said, flapping open the quilt. “Get back in here.” He obeyed.

  It had snowed. He walked past the feed store that fronted her apartment. His car was hummocked with white. The temperature had dropped to zero. She stood in her doorway, wearing only the quilt. He waved. She took the cigarette from her lips and kissed the crystal air.

  She was twenty—fifteen years younger than he. She worked as a waitress in a dim café called the Chicken Shack. He’d met her there. She brought him a half-chicken in a basket with slaw and cottage fries. He’d been depressed for weeks, and the accumulation of routine days had made him bold. And he knew this: the weeks would cycle into months, the months into years. The cold certainty that nothing now would ever change for him could not be trivialized by the antidepressants, which, in any case, he had stopped taking.

  He’d said the right things to her and she agreed to meet him later on. They smoked some of her reefer, drank the wino wine from Dixie cups in his car. They got wondrously drunk and two-stepped themselves sweaty in
every shitkicker bar they could find. Three months ago. It seemed like minutes.

  She had a way of looking at things that he could envy if he could believe it. All her obligations, she said, were voluntary. “I stopped living my life for other people when my ma said the only reason she got her breast lump was because I didn’t finish nurses’ training.” People, she had said, hold on for dear life to the thing that enslaves them. “Ma tried to turn that cancer in her tit into an iron ball chained to my leg.”

  He’d shrugged his shoulders at first, then laughed. She threw a fake karate punch at his chest. “You prick,” she said, laughing. “I guess I’m just not a subtle person,” he said. She gave him a sidelong pickerel smile, her small teeth needle-sharp, then made a machine gun of her arm and shot him dead. They collapsed into each other, in the direction of the bed.

  The storm that had made the city storybook white was receding to the south. The sharp air rattled with the sound of chained tires. He thought of his wife, on the other side of town, making breakfast as usual, in spite of everything, finding comfort in routine, thriving on injustice. He pictured the snappy apartment, neat as a magazine photograph, the Sears furniture, the big Zenith television set heaving early-morning cartoons into the passive eyes of his children, the hanging lamps, the potted plants, everything in its place, accountable. He had no hatred for any of this. This was how it was supposed to be. It made no sense to find fault with it.

  He swept snow from the windows of his car with his hands. The girl would be back in bed now, holding herself in her arms under the patchwork quilt, always the satisfied one, each moment adequate, a way he wished he could be. Her radio would be on so that she wouldn’t lose track of time. He buried a small urge to go back inside, and started the car. The engine turned over slowly in its thickened oil. It came to life and gave out a ghostly whistle that increased in pitch until it could no longer be heard. The cold plastic of his dashboard hummed.