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  Borrowed Hearts: New and Selected Stories

  Borrowed Hearts: New and Selected Stories

  RICK DEMARINIS

  SEVEN STORIES PRESS

  New York / Oakland / London

  Copyright © 1986,1988,1991,1999 by Rick DeMarinis

  Introduction © 1999 by James Welch

  A Seven Stories Press First Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Original collections were published under the following imprints:

  Under the Wheat (University of Pittsburg Press, Pittsburg, 1986)

  The Coming Triumph of the Free World (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988)

  The Voice of America (W. W. Norton & Company, 1991)

  New stories have appeared as follows: “Feet” and “Borrowed Hearts” were published in the Antioch Review, “Novias,” ” A Romantic Interlude” and “Hormone X” were published in GQ; “Fault Lines” was published in New York Stories; “The Singular We” was published in the North Atlantic Review; “Experience” was published in the Paris Review; a short version of “The Boys We Were, The Men We Became” was published in the collection Under the Wheat and in the Rio Grande Review under the title “Good Wars; On the Lam” was published in Zoetrope.

  Published by Seven Stories Press

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

  www.sevenstories.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  DeMarinis, Rick, 1934-

  Borrowed Hearts: New and Selected Stories / Rick DeMarinis. —A Seven Stories Press 1st ed.

  ISBN 978-1-888363-98-9 (cloth); 978-1-58322-040-5 (pbk.); 978-1-60980-177-9 (ebook)

  1. United States—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction.I. Title

  PS3554.E4554B67 1999

  813’.54—dc21 98-55233

  CIP

  FOR CAROLE

  Contents

  Introduction by James Welch

  From UNDER THE WHEAT (1986)

  Under the Wheat

  Billy Ducks Among the Pharaohs

  Life Between Meals

  The Smile of a Turtle

  Weeds

  From THE COMING TRIUMPH OF THE FREE WORLD (1988)

  The Handgun

  disneyland

  Romance : A Prose Villanelle

  Your Story

  Pagans

  Your Burden Is Lifted, Love Returns

  Medicine Man

  From THE VOICE OF AMERICA (1991)

  Safe Forever

  Desert Places

  Paraiso : An Elegy

  An Airman’s Goodbye

  Aliens

  Horizontal Snow

  Wilderness

  The Voice of America

  Insulation

  BORROWED HEARTS (New Stories)

  Borrowed Hearts

  A Romantic Interlude

  Experience

  Fault Lines

  Feet

  Hormone X

  Novias

  On the Lam

  Seize the Day

  The Boys We Were, The Men We Became

  The Singular We

  Introduction

  BY JAMES WELCH

  Sometimes I think I have known Rick DeMarinis all my life but it’s really only been thirty-three years since we met as a couple of pups taking a poetry workshop from the estimable poet and teacher, Richard Hugo. This was at the University of Montana and the year was 1966. It was my first workshop and I felt completely out of my league. Most of the other participants were a few years older than I was, some of them had had careers, some had been in the military, some had wives and children, some even ex-wives. This latter fact left me a bit dumbfounded as I hadn’t thought of having a first wife yet.

  After that workshop Rick moved from Missoula to begin a teaching career in creative writing that has taken him to Seattle, San Diego, Phoenix and now El Paso.

  Although we have been fast friends and in frequent contact during these past thirty-three years, I was as surprised as anyone that Rick would eventually come to be regarded as one of this country’s premier short fiction writers. Not that he wasn’t promising—but then back in those early years, that’s all any of us were—all promise, no real accomplishment. But Rick was as sturdy as a rock in his determination to unleash that bizarre imagination that lurks just beneath the surface of one of the gentlest natures I have ever known.

  Like most writers, Rick’s early work appeared in the small, small magazines that come and go but are so important to literature in this country. The early stories were just fine, carefully made, satisfying to read, but they lacked that DeMarinis signature that his faithful readers now look forward to and recognize at once. In fact, his first big success was a short novel called A Lovely Monster, a hilarious, chilling, touching send-up of the Frankenstein myth. This was followed by three other works of longer fiction, all masterfully done, but Rick came into his full power with a collection of stories titled Under the Wheat, which more than deservedly won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for short fiction. In these stories, we begin to meet those bizarrely normal people that have populated Rick’s work since. We begin to think these could be the people next door; then we think, My God, if these are the people next door, what is this world coming to? Are we them?

  Sometimes we are them. We’ve been caught in loveless marriages; we’ve paused to reflect on the meaninglessness of our lives; we’ve gotten drunk at parties and tried to seduce the host or hostess; we’ve been told by our bosses that we just don’t measure up. These things happen in our lives and we end up moving on. Rick DeMarinis is a master at exposing these moments and the emotions that go along with them—surprise, lust, enlightenment, embarrassment, wisdom, that awful sense of absurdity that strips us naked and leaves us standing on the edge, exposed and vulnerable. And yet there is a c’est la vie quality that rescues Rick’s characters from maudlin self-pity or bitter hopelessness. In fact, the reader finds himself laughing, almost awkwardly, at the plight of many of these characters. Maybe we’re laughing at ourselves—we see something of ourselves in these poor wretches.

  But Rick isn’t above helping us along in our almost helpless laughter. He has a genius for comedy and the comic moment that can occur in the most miserable circumstance. Choose virtually any story in this collection and see if you don’t come away with a couple of out-loud laughs and several stifled giggles. At the same time you are thinking, almost guiltily, My God, that’s awful, why am I laughing?

  But to think that humor is the only strength, or even the most salient feature, of these stories is to miss their underlying humanity. Even the most fabulous of them—“Your Story” comes to mind—is grounded in human desires, determinations and the inevitable frailties of flawed people. Even the more despicable characters—like Stan Duval, the pretentious stepfather in “Experience” or Price Billetdoux, the thieving con man of “Billy Ducks Among the Pharaohs”— have their moments of vulnerability. In “Under the Wheat,” Lloyd, who knows his missile systems and weather, is not very bright when it comes to interpersonal relationships and is perhaps a little willfully cruel about them. Yet, we stand shoulder to shoulder with him and gaze into the distance at a “thick tube hairy with rain” and wonder, along with him, if the incipient tornado will touch down, and if it does, will it change Lloyd, and if so, for better or for worse?

  Lest I give the impression that Rick DeMarinis writes only about the ostensible “losers” in our society and that they are readily identifiable by their occupations and circumstances, let me s
ay he writes about all aspects of society, from truckers to people who live in gated communities, from scientific whizzes to door-to-door salesmen. But I personally think Rick is at his best when he writes about children, particularly teenagers. One might imagine, given the kind of unsettled and unsettling adults in these stories, that the children would be equally screwed up. For the most part, this in not the case. In fact, more often than not, it is the young people who seem the most mature. Certainly they are the most observant. If one is seeking a reliable narrator, look to the children.

  In “The Boys We Were, the Men We Became,” a longish story written in several parts, each one denoting an advance in time, we are introduced to Bernard, a boy of indeterminate age. As in many of these stories, the father is a wreck (he actually comes home from the Second World War fat!), the mother a sweet, accommodating woman who wants things to work for everybody. After the father just picks up and leaves one day, she goes through a string of men, none of them what we might call a “catch.” Bernard’s observations concerning these men are almost astonishingly accurate. He figures them out in no time flat. Yet he is capable of being conned by her latest suitor (who eventually becomes his stepfather), when he claims to have been a hero in the French Resistance during the war. When his mother tells him that “Frenchy” actually spent the war on a GM assembly line Detroit, Bernard, embarrassed, says, “So what if he’s lying... as long as what he’s saying is true.” It is to the author’s credit that he gives this mature, reliable boy/narrator a chink in his credibility. He is human, after all, and that’s what these stories are all about. And the fact that Bernard, in adulthood, ends up working as a security guard in a large department store after being sacked from his job as an engineer with Lockheed only adds to the poignancy of how we live our lives.

  Borrowed Hearts is a major work by a writer who has toiled in the trenches of pure literature to emerge as one of America’s finest storytellers. That I was there at the inception of Rick DeMarinis’ remarkable career is both humbling and exciting. Thank you, Seven Stories Press, for giving this work the platform it deserves in a collection that spans his whole career. Perhaps Rick will now receive the attention he has so richly earned over the years. And now, dear reader, have a go at it. I think you will share my unalloyed excitement and my deep pleasure.

  From UNDER THE WHEAT (1986)

  Under the Wheat

  Down in D-3 I watch the sky gunning through the aperture ninety-odd feet above my head. The missiles are ten months away, and I am lying on my back listening to the sump. From the bottom of a hole, where the weather is always the same cool sixty-four degrees, plus or minus two, I like to relax and watch the clouds slide through the circle of blue light. I have plenty of time to kill. The aperture is about fifteen feet wide. About the size of a silver dollar from here. A hawk just drifted by. Eagle. Crow. Small cumulus. Nothing. Nothing. Wrapper.

  Hot again today, and the sky is drifting across the hole, left to right, a slow thick wind that doesn’t gust. When it gusts, it’s usually from Canada. Fierce, with hail the size of eyeballs. I’ve seen wheat go down. Acres and acres of useless straw.

  But sometimes it comes out of the southeast, from Bismarck, bringing ten-mile-high anvils with it, and you find yourself looking for funnels. This is not tornado country to speak of. The tornado path is to the south and west of here. They walk up from Bismarck and farther south and peter out on the Montana border, rarely touching ground anywhere near this latitude. Still, you keep an eye peeled. I’ve seen them put down gray fingers to the west, not quite touching but close enough to make you want to find a hole. They say it sounds like freight trains in your yard. I wouldn’t know. We are from the coast, where the weather is stable and always predictable because of the ocean. We are trying to adjust.

  I make five hundred a week doing this, driving a company pickup from hole to hole, checking out the sump pumps. I’ve found only one failure in two months. Twenty feet of black water in the hole and rising. It’s the company’s biggest headache. The high water table of North Dakota. You can dig yourself a shallow hole, come back in a few days and drink. That’s why the farmers here have it made. Except for hail. Mostly they are Russians, these farmers.

  Karen wants to go back. I have to remind her it’s only for a year. Ten more months. Five hundred a week for a year. But she misses things. The city, her music lessons, movies, the beach, excitement. We live fairly close to a town, but it’s one you will never hear of, unless a local goes wild and chainsaws all six members of his family. The movie theater has shown Bush Pilot, Red Skies of Montana, Ice Palace, and Kon Tiki so far. These are movies we would not ordinarily pay money to see. She has taken to long walks in the evenings to work out her moods, which are getting harder and harder for me to pretend aren’t there. I get time and a half on Saturdays, double time on Sundays and holidays, and thirteen dollars per diem for the inconvenience of relocating all the way from Oxnard, California. That comes to a lot. You don’t walk away from a gold mine like that. I try to tell Karen she has to make the effort, adjust. North Dakota isn’t all that bad. As a matter of fact I sort of enjoy the area. Maybe I am more adaptable. No, scratch that. I am more adaptable. We live close to a large brown lake, an earthfill dam loaded with northern pike. I bought myself a little boat and often go out to troll a bit before the car pool comes by. The freezer is crammed with fish, not one under five pounds.

  There’s a ghost town on the other side of the lake. The houses were built for the men who worked on the dam. That was years ago. They are paintless now, weeds up to the rotten sills. No glass in the windows, but here and there a rag of drape. Sometimes I take my boat across the lake to the ghost town. I walk the overgrown streets and look into the windows. Sometimes something moves. Rats. Gophers. Wind. Loose boards. Sometimes nothing.

  When the weather is out of Canada you can watch it move south, coming like a giant roll of silver dough on the horizon. It gets bigger fast and then you’d better find cover. If the cloud is curdled underneath, you know it means hail. The wind can gust to one hundred knots. It scares Karen. I tell her there’s nothing to worry about. Our trailer is on a good foundation and tied down tight. But she has this dream of being uprooted and flying away in such a wind. She sees her broken body caught in a tree, magpies picking at it. I tell her the trailer will definitely not budge. Still, she gets wild-eyed and can’t light a cigarette.

  We’re sitting at the dinette table looking out the window, watching the front arrive. You can feel the trailer bucking like a boat at its moorings. Lightning is stroking the blond fields a mile away. To the southeast, I can see a gray finger reaching down. This is unusual, I admit. But I say nothing to Karen. It looks like the two fronts are going to butt heads straight over the trailer park. It’s getting dark fast. Something splits the sky behind the trailer and big hail pours out. The streets of the park are white and jumping under the black sky. Karen has her hands against her ears. There’s a stampede on our tin roof. Two TV antennas fold at the same time in a dead faint. A jagged Y of lightning strikes so close you can smell it. Electric steam. Karen is wild, screaming. I can’t hear her. Our garbage cans are rising. They float past the windows into a flattened wheat field. This is something. Karen’s face is closed. She doesn’t enjoy it at all, not at all.

  I’m tooling around in third on the usual bad road, enjoying the lurches, rolls, and twists. I would not do this to my own truck. The fields I’m driving through are wasted. Head-on with the sky and the sky never loses. I’ve passed a few unhappy-looking farmers standing in their fields with their hands in their pockets, spitting, faces frozen in expressions of disgust. Toward D-8, just over a rise and down into a narrow gulch, I find a true glacier. It’s made out of hail stones welded together by their own impact. It hasn’t begun to melt yet. Four feet thick and maybe thirty feet long. You could stand on it, blind in the white glare. You could tell yourself you are inside the Arctic circle. What is this, the return of the Ice Age?

  Karen did not co
ok tonight. Another “mood.” I poke around in the fridge. I don’t know what to say to her anymore. I know it’s hard. I can understand that. This is not Oxnard. I’ll give her that. I’m the first to admit it. I pop a beer and sit down at the table opposite her. Our eyes don’t meet. They haven’t for weeks. We are like two magnetic north poles, repelling each other for invisible reasons. Last night in bed I touched her. She went stiff. She didn’t have to say a word. I took my hand back. I got the message. There was the hum of the air conditioner and nothing else. The world could have been filled with dead bodies. I turned on the lights. She got up and fit a cigarette after two tries. Nerves. “I’m going for a walk, Lloyd,” she said, checking the sky. “Maybe we should have a baby?” I said. “I’m making plenty of money.” She looked at me as if I had picked up an ax.

  I would like to know where she finds to go and what she finds to do there. She hates the town worse than the trailer park. The trailer park has a rec hall and a social club for the wives. But she won’t take advantage of that. I know the neighbors are talking. They think she’s a snob. They think I spoil her. After she left I went out on the porch and drank eleven beers. Let them talk.

  Three farm kids. Just standing outside the locked gate of D-4. “What do you kids want?” I know what they want. A “look-see.” Security measures are in effect, but what the hell. There is nothing here yet but a ninety-foot hole with a tarp on it and a sump pump in the bottom. They are excited when I open the access hatch and invite them to climb down the narrow steel ladder to the bottom. They want to know what ICBM stands for. What is a warhead? How fast is it? How do you know if it’s really going to smear the right town? What if it went straight up and came straight down? Can you hit the moon? “Look at the sky up there, kids,” I tell them. “Lie on your backs, like this, and after a while you sort of get the feeling you’re looking down, from on top of it.” The kids lie down on the concrete. Kids have a way of giving all their attention to something interesting. I swear them to secrecy, not for my protection, because who cares, but because it will make their day. They will run home, busting with secret info. I drive off to D-9, where the sump trouble was.