The Heart Does Not Grow Back Read online

  I thanked him again for dinner and got silence in return. He stared off into the blackened woods, glued to his patio chair, and I went home. I wondered just how long Doc would sit there having a drink, thinking about that fork and where to cut, how many hours he had spent on that porch reliving that surgery.

  Now he was thinking about my offer. All I had to do was wait. He’d convince himself it was his duty to do it, that it would be worth denting his honor one more time to deliver me to the world.

  FOURTEEN

  I got home after dark, my little piece of neighborhood morphing into a collection of porch lights and streetlights and shadows and the occasional bark of a dog.

  As I approached my front steps, the back of my head took a blow that sounded like distant thunder, sending me face-first into the porch. Pain danced with dizziness, but before I could sort it all out, I was getting kicked with boots and struck with something—definitely not a toaster, but a club of some sort. Something hard and thick—enough to press skin and tissue into my bones, leaving tattoos of scorching hurt. The toes of boots found their way into my legs and sides, my ribs and neck.

  Angled against the porch, one of those boots dropped like a piston, giving me an old-fashioned curb stomp, driving my mouth into the edge of the step, blowing out teeth and gums and lips. I felt jagged stalagmites of shattered tooth jutting from my jaw, the rest of the shards mixing with globs of blood and spit. “Clint?” I gurgled, knowing it wasn’t him, couldn’t be him, but his face is all that I saw in the dark.

  Panting breath, club shots, kicks. The feel of bones giving way, of skin splitting, my head thrumming, my adrenal glands opening up like a boat throttle.

  I tried to roll and flail, to no effect—it just revealed fresh places to get hit. I tried to curl up, fetal-like, but kicks and strikes cockroached their way into my softest areas. The goal might not have been to kill me, but it was a side effect my attacker wasn’t worried about.

  The violence stopped all at once—that serene calm that is made more still by the chaos of the storm that came before it.

  “Tell them you fell,” he said. I couldn’t see him smiling, but I could hear the way it shaped his words.

  I started crawling into the yard. I didn’t have a destination, I was just moving to move, to feel like I was getting away. I had no idea if Harold was still lording over my fallen body, ready for more. The grass was wet with dew, slipping through my fingers. I got to the sidewalk by the closest streetlight, then I turned onto my side and reached for the cell phone in my pocket. The pain in my forearm crackled with each move of my fingers—a broken arm for sure.

  Black fluid seeped from an oblong crack in the screen, the bubonic plague of a fractured display. Then a boot dropped, crushing the phone and most of my hand against the rough surface of the concrete, my fingers twisted and snapping like bubble wrap as he twisted his foot.

  I figured the best thing to do at that point was just play dead. I went limp and closed my eyes. I scanned my body for pain, finding it everywhere, my brain throwing its hands up and saying, “Fuck picking a spot; you’re totaled.”

  Observant, I heard fading footsteps. The clop of running boots. Would he tell Rae about this? Maybe I would die here, on this sidewalk, a noble death dealt out because I couldn’t stand her having a black eye.

  So I closed my eyes and waited for something or nothing to descend upon me.

  * * *

  The fog of sleep lifted. Maybe I was emerging into an afterlife. The secrets of the universe would be mine.

  Cold steel surrounded me—smooth tile, jars on the countertops, no clutter. Each heartbeat was a beacon that lit up spots of pain inside of me.

  Maybe it was heaven. Maybe God was a doctor, and we would die and wake up in His care, and He would fix us up and then we would get our “Welcome to Heaven” party, complete with a smoked pig and barely dressed girls and Jesus making water into wine and beer and Hawaiian punch.

  But this wasn’t heaven, it was just an all-purpose medical room, and a vaguely familiar one at that.

  A big piss burned in my abdomen. I wanted to move, but I was swollen and sluggish, my blood feeling as thick as used motor oil.

  “Hey,” I said, a whisper at first, my throat full of rust and croak. With subsequent tries I gained some throat traction. Louder, but not loud. I banged on the side rails of the cot. Another futile “Hey.”

  I wanted to swing my legs over to get up, but then I noticed I had a piss tube stuffed into my johnson. This helped me scream a little louder.

  Doc Venhaus came through the door and shushed me. He wore street clothes—jeans, sneakers, a polo shirt.

  “Don’t rush yourself,” he said, standing bedside, his mere doctorly presence enough to drive my head back into the pillow. “You’ve got a broken leg, among other broken things. If breathing hurts, it’s from rib breakage—and you have been lucky enough to have your lungs intact after breaking your ribs. Again.”

  “You definitely did your research on me.”

  “Of course.” He did doctor things, checked things, wrote things down. He was monitoring me, but from the feel of my injuries, I belonged in a hospital. This wasn’t an altruistic act that Doc Venhaus was doing; he found me and decided to bring me to his office because he wanted me all to himself.

  “Damn lucky I came along when I did,” he said. “Healing’s one thing, but I don’t know if you have nine lives yet.”

  I had never thought about the possibility, but it would have been just my luck to be immortal and suicidal at the same time.

  “So did they do the toes, or did you?” he said.

  I pointed to my own chest.

  “That’s why they’re ahead of the curve then.”

  He pulled the blanket back and raised my foot to show me. They were whole, completely regenerated, except for the pinkish color and the fact that the nails hadn’t grown completely in yet, making them look queer, like a face without a nose or eyes.

  “When did you find me? What day is it?”

  “You’ve been out for about thirty-six hours.”

  I felt around my mouth—tips of new teeth were already ascending. My split lip was sealed up into one piece of flesh instead of the two curtains I remember from the beating.

  “I’d like to take you into X-ray again in the morning. Seems there’s no need to cast your leg at all—I have observed the bone mending perfectly on its own.”

  He’d arrived at my house to continue our discussion. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I needed you to know I couldn’t betray the trust of a patient. Not even for you. I owed you that answer in person.”

  Sadly, he was still a few minutes too late to save me from the latest entry in the Dale-Beating Hall of Fame.

  “Did you call the cops?” I asked.

  “No one knows you’re here.”

  “You should have taken me to a hospital. Right?”

  “If you were normal, yes. But hospitals have access to things like medical records. One look at a chart that says you should have half a hand and only one ear, and you’d soon have every doctor in America poking around inside of you for answers.”

  “As opposed to just one. Am I on painkillers right now?”

  “No. I didn’t want to interfere with your natural process.”

  “Well, don’t be stingy. It may heal fast, but it hurts like fuck. How about your best painkiller cocktail? And when I wake up, I’d like some soup. Vegetable beef.”

  Doc juiced me up until it felt like a pat of butter was melting on my brain. I dozed off, wanting to sleep through my healing until it was over, like it were some boring car ride that I wanted to end as soon as possible. Healing might come with positive connotations, all these images of light and warmth and hope, but in reality, healing hurts like a motherfucker.

  * * *

  Two days later, Doc let me go home. My broken leg was nothing but an annoying limp. My teeth were back, whole and slick and white as a glass of milk, untouched by years of food an
d abuse. My split lip was a true laceration, the flesh parted by blunt force, but the wound had already fused back together. Splints held my fingers straight as they mended clean, which didn’t take long.

  The pain of broken bones vanishes until you try to move them, so my healing became a game of keeping the broken parts still. Bruises melted away from my skin, draining away the pools of tenderness that lurked underneath. Lumps on my head receded. The abrasions probably hurt the worst—they were deep rashes on the back of my hand, on my arms and legs, on my right cheek. The skin was scrubbed away by concrete and boot soles, removing the epidermis and exposing the nerve endings, where even a cool breeze across an undressed wound felt like the sizzle of a grease fire. Even the subtle pulse from my beating heart pounded the rashes like a drum. I felt my cheek get hard and crusted-over. When those scabs fell away, leaving patches of gloriously restored pink behind, I knew I could take off the bandages from my arms and legs. I think the pain was worse because I was so engaged in it, monitoring myself for the healing I knew would come, but it’s hard to describe because pain is like a bad dream—your recollection of it never matches the actual experience.

  My cell phone got smashed in the brawl, so I called from my home phone to order a new one and asked the clerk how to check my voice mails from a landline.

  Shockingly, I had three of them. The first was Frank Winston, who wanted to talk to me about “that thing,” like I were some drug-running gangster. He left a callback number. I saved the message.

  The second was Mack. He sounded downtrodden. “It’s me,” he said. “I just figured since the shit has simmered down for a while now, we should talk it out. Hug it out. Punch it out. Whatever. Call me.” The message was a day old. I wondered if he thought I was blowing him off on purpose.

  The third one was Rae. She just said, “I hope you’re okay” after a long breath, and hung up.

  FIFTEEN

  I went straight to Raeanna’s house in broad daylight. Fuck Harold, I thought. If he was worth a shit he’d be at work anyway. Still, I parked down the street and walked most of the way, the limp from my broken leg slowing me down. I was healed-up, but not all the way. I had patches of pink all over and all the bruised places were still a subtle shade of yellow. My broken bones had mended, but I still had a day or two before they stopped hurting. I was limping on a broken femur after just a couple days of recovery, though, so I couldn’t complain.

  Rae wore sweatpants and an old fleece top, her hair flickering in the cool wind as she watered the mums lined up in front of her porch. She saw me limping down the sidewalk, and she choked off the water hose. I caught a look of relief in her eyes, maybe even happiness, but it vanished quickly, gone in thick, molten drops, showing me fear and panic with such stark clarity that a tingle of my own fear gave my lungs a hard squeeze. She went from fear to anger, the seasons of emotion changing in her face. She walked up to me, her lips clenched, and slapped me across the face, waking up the heat in the healed abrasions.

  “That was for the neighbors to see,” she said. “Meet me behind the Wal-Mart in thirty minutes.”

  * * *

  Raeanna was there, as promised. She was edgy and nervous, pacing by the recycling dumpster. She got into my car.

  “Drive,” she said. “West, on the country roads. I can’t be gone forever. He’ll be home soon and…” She stopped midsentence, squinting as she looked at me. “He said he smashed your face into a stair.”

  “I don’t bruise easily,” I said.

  I thought we’d talk about her escape from Grayson, how we’d leave together, where we would go. I left my hand on my right thigh as we drove, hoping she would hold it. She was married. I barely knew her. Hell, I barely knew Regina and took a blind dive into that one. I could have bailed on the whole rotten situation. I could have said, Dale, you learned your lesson. Quit that stupid job and move out of your mother’s house. Go somewhere and do something. Meet someone. Get to know them. Ask them out. Then, when it’s a date, and only then, hold hands. Maybe kiss at the end of the night. But this wasn’t courtship—this was heroism. I left my hand on my thigh and continued to hope.

  “Harold is involved with drugs,” she said, tilting the conversation in an unexpected direction.

  Harold used to run meth—cheap and dirty, toxic and destructive, made from farm chemicals and over-the-counter medicine. Southern Illinois’s drug of choice. One dose could start a brushfire of human rot and addiction, turning skin and teeth and hair black and green, building a zombie stench in addicts one could smell from a mile away if the wind was right. But he was smart enough to never sample the stuff himself, which Rae told me with palpable relief. Harold was rotten enough to begin with, so I could only imagine his violent impulses magnified by the paranoia of being a tweaker. Meth addicts are among the most paranoid, dangerous, desperate, and reckless motherfuckers you’re ever apt to come across. Crack heads were mild by comparison—they would sell their mom’s DVD player to get a fix, but a meth head would blow up a church with their mom in it just to pick the loose change from the collection tray out of the ashes.

  We were on an old road in Grayson, Jasper Bridge Road, which felt safe and secluded because the corn was high and unharvested and the potholes made it clear that only a few people ever drove this road on purpose.

  So I stopped the car. She kept breathlessly getting me up to speed on Harold. She was afraid he would call in some old connections, tried-and-true tweakers who would do anything for a fix.

  “If you stay, he’ll keep after you,” she said. “All he has to do is dangle a bag of crank and you’ll be in a ditch somewhere.”

  “I don’t care about any of that. Forget it. I’ll manage. I need to tell you something.” She was breathing hard. Nervous. She looked up at me. “Rae, I wasn’t in love with Regina,” I said. “Christ, I was a kid.”

  “And he works in insurance and he just got promoted, so he can look things up and know—”

  “Rae, dammit, listen to me. I wanted her but I didn’t love her. I give myself too much credit, as if she cared for me more than she did. Time has made this into a great tragedy in my own head because I don’t have anything else.”

  “It never feels like you’re really talking to me,” she said.

  “I don’t know what that means,” I said. “But we could just pick up stakes and get out of here. Leave Harold behind to punch walls and sell crystal.”

  “If I wanted that, I would tell you to keep driving,” she said. “I wouldn’t even bother to pack or call anyone.”

  “Right now, then,” I said. “I don’t have to go home. I’m ready to punch the gas and get us both the hell out of here.”

  “It’s a nice thought, isn’t it?” she said. The wind rustled in the high corn. The heat battered us through the windshield. I had the air conditioner turned down low so we could hear each other, and sweat was bursting out of her forehead. I saw it gather at the base of her neck and felt it crawling down my own cheeks in fat drops.

  She looked at me and I could tell she was about to say no. I leaned in to kiss her and she recoiled, pulling her head out of range.

  “Dale, please,” she said, and there was that hand again, on my face this time, gently pushing me back into the driver’s seat.

  I turned around without saying another word. We got back to the dumpster, the drive back spent in total silence. I kept the car idling as she walked to Wal-Mart’s service-entrance doors. She stopped and doubled back to the car. I rolled down the window to accommodate her.

  “There’s nothing to wait for if you stay,” she said. My head felt suddenly heavy. I let it drop and stared at the Chevy bow tie in the center of my steering wheel. “I’m sorry if I gave you that impression. If you don’t leave, the only thing you’re waiting on is him.” I didn’t answer her. Her fingers rested on my car door and I waited for her to move so I could roll up my window and bottle myself up in air-conditioning and white noise.

  “Look at me!” she said. It took me two lon
g breaths, but I looked at her, looked into the blueness of her eyes and they made me regret every one of my wasted days. “You need to leave,” she said at last, and she was right.

  * * *

  I pulled into my driveway and found Mack Tucker seated on my porch, a backpack slung on his shoulder and a weak smile on his face.

  I got out of the car and just stared at him. I felt ready for the .38, almost excited on the way home, hungry for the relief it would offer me, but now it seemed I’d be living a little while longer, at least until Mack was gone.

  “Well, Sampsonite, you were right, man. The producers had us all set up in a piano bar for a nice, romantic date. My only job was to get her there at a certain time on a certain night without tipping her off. She asked about the cameras, and the waiter just said a famous piano player was performing. I knew it was Ben McCann. I met the guy when we taped the first segment of the show.”

  I knew how Dedications usually went. Mack and Ben would go over all the ways Mack loved Lori, all their special times together. The second segment would be Ben torturing himself artistically, coming up with an original song dedicated to Lori that incorporated all of Mack’s bullshit.

  “Anyway, when I met him, the entire time I’m thinking, Who the fuck is this guy, he isn’t any famous musician. So we’re at dinner and the fucker comes out onstage and the place erupts. I’m, like, the only guy there who doesn’t know who this fool is, and he starts tinkering on that piano, says it’s an original song, says Lori’s name, says my name, the cameras come in tight, and I about puked up my steak, I swear to God, because I saw it in her face right that second. I saw the ‘yes’ in her throat just waiting to come screaming out of there.”

  “So she said yes?” I said.

  “Just like you said she would. I’m engaged.” He dropped his backpack and kicked it.

  “Tell the producers you don’t love her,” I said.

  “I can’t. They like the episode. They like me. Hell, they even want to tape the wedding. They think the song’s going to be a hit: “My Life for You.” Nothing huge like those other reality shows, just a small thing in a small church to show that we’re so in love we couldn’t wait for a bigger production.”