Where the Heart Is (13 page)

Sometimes Mr. Sprock would come in the evenings to bring some new seeds or help her weed the garden, then he’d stay over to hear Forney read. Mr. Ortiz came a few times, too, and when he was there, Forney would read louder—hoping, perhaps, that volume would ensure comprehension. Afterward, when there was talk about the reading, Mr. Ortiz would voice his opinion, always with enthusiasm, always in Spanish.

Sometimes Dixie came over with ice cream she had mixed up. Forney would turn the crank and freeze it, then they’d eat on the front porch until mosquitoes drove them inside. Dixie never ate ice cream herself.

She said it gave her diarrhea. Novalee believed she went to all that trouble just so she could hold Americus for a couple of hours. Once Henry and Leona had a fish fry in their backyard, but they argued all night over whether the baby should sleep on her back or her belly.

On the Fourth of July, the Ortiz girls set off their fireworks in the street while everyone gathered on Sister’s porch for lemonade. Mrs.

Ortiz had made Americus a bonnet of red, white and blue and the girls posed her with a flag so they could take her picture.

Novalee sometimes worried about all the attention the baby was getting. She wondered if too many could love her too much. But Americus flourished. She never grew fussy with a crowd around.

They could pass her from hand to hand, from arm to arm and she wouldn’t make a peep. She could sleep on Forney’s shoulder, in Dixie’s lap or across Leona’s knees. She could awaken to the smiles of the Ortiz girls, a waltz with Sister or the touch of Mr. Sprock’s hand.

Novalee could hardly imagine that one tiny creature could create so much love. And that was the problem: the more Novalee loved her, the more she feared she might lose her.

At times Novalee’s fear would come rushing at her, so sudden it would be gone before she quite knew it was there, like a flash of disconnected memory. Or, it might settle on her slowly, press against her chest, build until her heart pounded with it. Now and then it was less insistent, only some vague uneasiness, a fragment of a bad dream nagging at her. But at its worst, it was real . . . a shadow, a shape lurking just beyond the edge of the light.

Always, it came without warning, without cause—while Americus was in her bath, her spindly arms and legs soaped, slippery as cooked spaghetti . . . as she drifted into sleep, a lazy eyelid just closing out the light . . . her mouth stretched into a lopsided O . . . her hand curled into a fist, the twitch of one tiny finger.

And with Novalee’s new fear, the old superstitions held greater peril. Dreams of locked doors could invite croup or measles. Gray horses or broken shoestrings might signal pneumonia or scarlet fever.

Two crows in the same tree might foretell polio. Or worse.

But the greatest portent of disaster, her nemesis—number seven—

now sent her running to Americus, running to feel for lumps or fever, to look for spots or swelling . . . to check her mouth, her heart, her lungs. A seven, any seven, was a scourge, a plague, an affliction, but weeks earlier, at the moment Americus had begun her seventh day of life, Novalee had confronted the most terrifying seven of all.

The night was filled with lurking strangers, the morning with rabid dogs. Every mosquito carried malaria, each gas jet leaked deadly fumes. Knife blades became savage weapons; a gentle breeze, a killer storm.

Novalee checked the windows, guarded the doors, walked the floor. She saw danger in every car that came down the street, whether she recognized the driver or not. The few times she dozed, she saw Willy Jack running at them, his face twisted into a vicious grin.

She held Americus in her arms from midnight till midnight. And when it was over, when the danger had passed, she wondered how they would survive the seventh week, the seventh month, the seventh year.

WILLY JACK ARRIVED at the New Mexico State Prison on a Monday and by the following Friday, he had six stitches in his rectum, a broken nose, a nickel-sized chunk of flesh out of his left buttock and a bruise the size of a Frisbee on his chest. Prison was going to be a hard place for Willy Jack to get used to.

They’d fast-forwarded him out of Santa Rosa. He was in the county jail only nine days before his trial, which lasted just over an hour, and his sentencing took less than three minutes. He was going to do fourteen months in prison whether he behaved himself or not, but then, good behavior had never been a quality Willy Jack aspired to.

His prison troubles had started early. The broken nose came on the first day when the guards tried to lock him in his cell, an incident that got him three days in isolation. The chewed buttock and torn rectum came about on the second night when he was raped by a pair of brothers named Jabbo and Sammy who bought him from the guard in solitary. The bruise on his chest, seemingly the most minor of his injuries, was, in fact, the most serious. It transpired because he wouldn’t give his devil’s food cake to a desiccated little man called Sweet Tooth—an odd name for a man with no teeth.

By the end of the first week, Willy Jack had been in the infirmary four times. The doctor, Dr. Strangelove to the inmates, found Willy Jack to be wildly attractive, a situation that would not work to Willy Jack’s advantage. Dr. Strangelove’s response to sexual attraction was physical pain—and his craving for Willy Jack was strong. When he packed Willy Jack’s broken nose, he stuffed it with so much cotton that the soft tissue of the septum was perforated. When he treated the wound on Willy Jack’s buttock, he added a pinch of Drano to the salve he slathered across the teeth marks around the soft, torn flesh.

And when he stitched up Willy Jack’s rectum, he signed, with a flourish and fine suture, his name.

Willy Jack’s cell mate was a Navajo called Turtle who didn’t know how old he was. His eyes looked like the whites of runny eggs, and his skin was so thin Willy Jack could see the blood oozing through the veins that snaked across the old man’s temples. And he didn’t talk much. In fact, they didn’t speak until the fifth night, the night Willy Jack’s heart stopped.

He was asleep when it happened, when the pain inside his chest rolled him onto his back and pinned him to the mattress, but it was the silence that brought Turtle to the side of the bunk, silence that made him stare down into Willy Jack’s face.

“This heart. It ain’t beating,” Turtle said. His voice was soft, his speech unhurried in the comfortable way men talk to themselves about malfunctioning carburetors and misfiring pistons.

Willy Jack tried to speak, shaped words with his lips to tell the old man to get help, but the pain inside his chest choked off sound.

“It ain’t beating,” Turtle repeated.

Willy Jack could feel the pressure building inside his belly, then ballooning beneath his ribs and chest where Sweet Tooth had hit him.

“My grandfather’s heart stopped beating once,” Turtle said. “For three moons.”

With his chin tilted up and his lips peeled back tight against his teeth, Willy Jack gulped for air, fought for breath.

“Charlie Walking Away told us he was not dead. Told us to be patient. So we were.”

Willy Jack’s arms began to whip from side to side, his fingers scratching at air.

“But it is not an easy thing to wait for a heart to beat.”

Turtle’s words started drifting away, rising through something inky and thick floating over Willy Jack’s body.

Willy Jack would not remember the singsong pattern of sounds in Navajo or the tapping of Turtle’s gnarled fingers on his chest. But he would remember, though not until much later and always when he wanted not to think of it, the sound of Novalee’s voice, thin and distant like an echo.

Give me your hand.

Willy Jack squinted, trying to see through something dark and murky that separated them.

Feel that?

He remembered then her telling him about the heart.

Can’t you feel that tiny little bomp . . . bomp . . . bomp?

Had she been talking about his heart?

Feel right there.

Or maybe she had asked him . . . could it have been . . .

That’s where the heart is.

And finally he felt a muted thump inside his chest. Then, moments later, another . . . then two . . . beats out of time, stumbling, staggering to fall into the rhythm Turtle tapped out, the rhythm for Willy Jack’s heart to follow.

Claire Hudson, the prison librarian, had sad eyes, eyes that looked even sadder when she smiled. A big smile, which did not decorate Claire’s face often, could fill her eyes with tears, as if smiling resulted more from pain than happiness.

She was a big woman who had to shop for queen tall pantyhose and size eleven shoes, double E. She wore dark clothes—stiff gray gabardines, navy twills and black serges . . . boxy suits with high necks, long sleeves and tight collars. Claire avoided garments with lace, bows and fancy buttons and she owned no jewelry, not even a watch. She held a strong disdain for anything showy, allowing herself only one extravagance: Band-Aids.

Claire Hudson carried Band-Aids in her purse and pockets, in her suits and in her bathrobe. She kept them on her desk, the dash of her Where the Heart Is

car, her bedside table, with her gardening tools and in her sewing kit.

She stuck them in teapots, vases and bowls, in her lunch sack, between pages of her Bible and under the pillow on her bed.

She wore them constantly and in abundance—from her scalp to the soles of her feet. She wore sheer, clear, medicated and white and she used specific sizes and shapes for certain areas of her body . . .

circular spots for her throat and face, juniors for her fingers and toes, three-quarter by threes on her torso and one by threes on her arms and legs. Occasionally she mixed them to form overlapping protection if the need arose.

She covered warts, moles and ingrown hairs . . . pimples, cuts and fever blisters . . . burns, abrasions, hangnails and bites . . . eczema, psoriasis, scratches and rashes. Claire had spent her life, all sixty-one years of it, hiding her injuries from the world—until she opened the most painful wound of all to prisoner number 875506: Willy Jack Pickens.

She was just applying a fresh medicated junior to a paper cut on the pad of her index finger when she saw Willy Jack for the first time, when he entered the library with a crew coming in to clean.

“Finny,” Claire shouted at Willy Jack. Then she collapsed.

She was carried to the infirmary where Dr. Strangelove revived her with smelling salts, but not before he peeked beneath a dozen of her Band-Aids, disappointed not to find raging infections and disfiguring wounds. By the time Claire had recovered and returned to the library, the cleaning crew was gone. But it didn’t take her long to get Willy Jack back.

When he walked through the door, she once again called him Finny, this time her voice little more than a whisper. Willy Jack edged a couple of feet into the room, then stopped and studied Claire suspiciously.

“Come on in,” she said, motioning him toward her desk. “It’s okay.”

“They said I’m supposed to mop up a spill in here.”

Without taking her eyes from Willy Jack’s face, Claire shook her head, a gesture of disbelief.

“It’s just incredible,” she said. “Incredible.”

“What?”

She picked up a framed photograph from the corner of her desk, stared at it several moments, then handed it to Willy Jack. An enlargement of a snapshot, it showed a young man standing on a stage playing a guitar.

“Can you believe it?” Claire asked.

Willy Jack wasn’t sure what he was supposed to believe, but he nodded as she handed him another picture. In this one, the same boy held a trophy in one hand, a guitar in the other.

“That was taken at the State Fair. He was eighteen.”

Willy Jack could tell the pictures were old, but he didn’t know if that was a clue.

“Feel like you’re looking at your twin, don’t you?” Claire said.

Then Willy Jack knew what it was he was supposed to believe. He and the boy in the pictures looked alike.

“Yeah,” he said as he handed the photos back to Claire. “Who is he?”

“My son, Finny.”

“Oh.” Willy Jack looked around the library. “What’d you spill?”

Claire’s gaze wandered from the pictures to Willy Jack’s face, then back again. “It’s in the eyes.” She touched a finger to the face in the picture. “The lips, too. One time a girl drew his picture on a napkin when he played at a club in Tucumcari. She gave it to him with a note that said he had beautiful lips.” Claire smiled her sad smile.

Willy Jack moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue. Somebody had told him once that wet lips were sexy.

“This was his last picture,” Claire said, nodding at the one with the trophy. “He was killed two months later.” She looked up at Willy Jack then as if she expected him to say something, but he didn’t. “He was hit by a drunk driver on his way home from a dance hall in Carlsbad.”

“Well,” Willy Jack said, “that’s too bad.”

“Twenty-two years ago. About the time you were born, I’d guess.”

Claire put both pictures back on her desk. “But I just can’t get over it, how much you look like Finny. You’ve even got the same build . . .

about the same size.”

“How tall was he?”

“Five eight.”

Willy Jack pulled himself to his full height and then some. “Yeah.

That’s about right.”

He hated the prison shoes he was wearing. The only thing he’d found to stuff them with was toilet paper, but it kept working its way up the back of his heel.

“He had the sweetest voice. Everyone said so.”

Willy Jack watched a tear wash down Claire Hudson’s cheek, spill across a Band-Aid near her upper lip, then drop onto another taped to her wrist.

“This is all pretty strange,” he said. “See . . . I’m a musician, too.”

Claire’s hand lifted to her mouth.

“Guitar.” Willy Jack nodded, a big gesture designed to communicate the full irony of the situation. “And . . . singer.”

“Musician,” Claire said softly, reverence in her voice.

“Well, I mean I was a musician.”

“But . . .”