The Heart Does Not Grow Back: A Novel (17 page)

Mack was standing next to a blonde. “Sampsonite, Tosha. Tosha, this is my main man, Sampsonite.” He seemed less drunk than before. Tosha had to be the alpha female at the gathering—tall, blond, Mack-approved tits. He must have traded up from Kyla. Tosha smiled at me with teeth so white they almost glowed. Kyla continued to hang around them, a bee fluttering around the flower of Tosha. Kyla looked at me, the forgotten friend, as if to say,
Don’t you just hate it when this happens?
As if she sensed that I knew how it felt. And she was right.

Mack wasted no time leading Tosha into the bowels of a strange house that smelled like an old quilt. Crow’s-feet texture on the ceilings, tan walls, baseboards that were high and white, except for a line of dust that had gathered at the caulk line. Family photos on the wall. Tosha was in them. An only child with an old father and a mother who looked to overdo the tanning bed.

Kyla turned on the television. She put on some random ESPN feed featuring thick Germans lifting cars in those strongman competitions that only ran at three a.m.

“We don’t have to watch this,” I said. “You can change it.”

She sat in the recliner. I sat on the couch. An ocean of green carpet separated us, the shag tamped down by foot traffic.

“Come on, now, I know you like ESPN. You’re a guy.”

“I prefer old reruns,” I said.

She laughed.

So ESPN was some sort of olive branch. We watched the Farmer’s Walk competition, grunting men in tank tops sweating in the sand, their straining eyes hidden by Oakley sunglasses.

“Your friend is quite a character,” she said.

“He makes an impression.”

“Not necessarily a good one.”

“We’re here, aren’t we?” I said.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It’s like a vampire thing,” I said. “You invite them into your home, you get bit. I doubt you’d be upset if you were in there with him. Correct?”

“Touché. But fuck you all the same.” She smiled. “You want a drink?”

“Yes,” I said immediately. God yes. Sweat gathered in my palms and armpits. A girl. An empty room. She was smiling at me. She wanted to have a drink.

She brought a bottle of vodka and a carton of orange juice from the kitchen, one in each hand. She took a swig of the vodka, then chased it with a swallow of OJ, then held them out to me. “Screwdrivers. Your mouth is the mixer.”

I stared at the offering.

“Don’t worry, I don’t have cooties. You scared of a girl’s spit?”

My answer to that was three swallows of vodka, big ones, and I guzzled juice to keep myself from puking it up.

“What a trouper,” she told me. “My turn.”

We took turns. The bottle emptied so fast, I didn’t even know I was getting drunk again until she fetched another one.

I didn’t remember falling asleep, but I went from drinking to suddenly waking up on the couch with her head on my chest. My mouth was so dry it felt fossilized. My eyes felt small and tight from dehydration. My hand was on her waist, against her skin, the love handle, where her shirt had curled up slightly from the waistband of her jeans. An erection ached against the side of my leg and I had to piss.

I peeled her off of me. She moaned a little but didn’t wake, curling up tight against the couch cushions, stuffing her face into the crevices.

I had passed out first. I was sure of it. So she had cuddled up to me and slept. Kyla. Pretty enough. Clever girl, and maybe a bit lonely. I looked out the bay window of the living room. Dark, with a tease of light on the horizon. Four thirty-ish.

I was not steady on my feet. Just an hour of sleep had blunted the massive drunk that was settling into me, a drunk that had perhaps not fully gripped me yet. Sick and dizzy and thirsty and I wanted to wake her up and ask if we could talk again sometime. She’d say yes. She liked me. This is what it felt like, to have a girl want you.

I heard the fridge close. Mack was in the kitchen, guzzling a bottle of water.

“Dude, you look fucked-up, like one of those telethon kids,” he whispered. He threw me a bottle of water. I split the cap and drank the shit out of it. “You ready?”

“For what?”

“To get the fuck out of here.”

I looked at Kyla. Something must have been on my face, I’m not sure what, but it got Mack’s attention.

“Say, hey, did you hit that?”

I shook my head and then I remembered:
You’re not Raeanna
, I told her when she started kissing my neck. The kissing stopped.

“You have a girlfriend?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Don’t tell me, it’s complicated. Well, you’re a keeper. Most guys pick getting laid over telling the truth.”

“I wish I knew the truth,” I said.

“She doesn’t like you?”

“I think she does, but there’s different kinds of like.”

“Oh crap, she’s got a boyfriend. Doesn’t she?”

“She’s married,” I said.

Kyla started shaking her head. “You have to let her go,” she said.

“If I let her go,” I said, “I got nothing else to hold on to.”

“Oh, honey,” Kyla said. She hugged me. I didn’t want to hug her back, not at first—it felt like an admission that I needed it. No one had even attempted to comfort me for anything since my mother died. I hugged her back and tried not to cry, but failed—two narrow streams of tears funneled onto her shoulder. We held each other until we fell asleep.

“Same old Sampsonite,” Mack said with a smile. “Couldn’t get laid in a monkey whorehouse with a bag of bananas.”

“I think I’m going to throw up. Again.”

“Well, be polite and do it on the lawn.”

I stumbled out to the front yard and retched in the grass, the faint tang of orange juice mixing in with bile.

He slapped me on the bottom, a “good game” gesture from our baseball days. “Good thing for you, I banged myself sober. I’ll have you home in time to serve me breakfast in bed.”

Giving Mack Tucker access to a one-night stand was just like putting Popeye on an IV drip of spinach—you can almost sense the strength and confidence billowing back into him. Still, he was just an imitation of his younger self. Everything looked and sounded the same, but his antics were glossed with wistfulness that made it all an act.

Mack drove and the sky went from black to blue, an evolving bruise in the distance, an orange glow flickering up ahead—but it wasn’t the sun.

“What the fuck?” Mack said.

The glow was punctuated by the flicker of lights, of blue, of red, of white—a kaleidoscope twisting in the blur of my blotchy sight.

Fire trucks blinked around a huge fire. As Mack pulled up, I saw a pack of neighbors, that nosy pack of fuckers who wanted to know exactly what was going on, but any blind man could see the flames popping out of shattered windows and the caved-in roof. Any person with decent hearing could detect the whoosh of hungry flames and know that someone’s home was burning down.

My home, my mom’s home, owned by a guy with no money and no insurance, and to make matters worse, I now had no car, either, because it had burned in the driveway, the tires melted, hot and waxy against the concrete.

I just got out and stared. Mack said things like “Holy shit” and “What the fuck, I mean what the
fuck
” over and over again because, really, there was nothing else to say except for “Did you leave the oven on or something?”

No, I didn’t. I just fanned the flames of Harold Stillson.

“I don’t know what to do, man,” Mack said. “I can’t leave you hanging, but I’ve got to be in L.A. on Monday. I’ve got that wedding thing. Come with. Fuck this shit. Fuck Raeanna and her weird-ass husband. This is a sign.”

“Not a sign,” I said. “When will you be back?”

“We never got this far during our talk last night, but hopefully I’ll never be back, man. I want to stay there. It’s all sun and sand and it’s so far away from this place. Grayson, Verner, Meeker, all these little shithole towns, man—fucking nightmares. They’ve been nightmares for years, and I only realized it the first time I hit the skins on a California beach at sunrise.”

We watched my house continue burning. No one bothered us. We stayed quiet for a long time, the parting of ways feeling imminent, maybe this time for good.

I held my hand out for a shake, but he pulled me into a hug.

“You’re my brother, Sampsonite. I love you like a man loves a perfectly grilled steak.” We kept the hug masculine and tough with hard claps on the back. “Let’s get that Mustang,” he continued. “I’ll sell this Jeep and charge the rest. I’m fucking serious. Just come with. Caution to the wind. Walk away from this ash and this town and Raeanna and all that bullshit. This is God telling you to get the fuck up out of here, and this is me telling you we can blow up the West Coast. Just me and you, tearing shit up. We can reverse it, the way we always dreamed—you can be the famous one and I can help you handle your business. Think about it—why sell your kidney for a few bucks when you can give it away on TV? You’d be the biggest story in human history. You’d never have to buy a drink again. The world would fucking love you. You could have whatever you wanted. Just come with me.”

“Whatever I want?” I said. So he wanted to save me and I wanted to save Rae, and Rae had already failed at trying to save me from this, from the beating and the fire. And Regina was still dead. We were all failures at saving people. We all held little lockboxes of hurt that might get a bit smaller if we could just do one good thing. One right thing.

“No. I’ve got to stay.”

“You can’t be serious. For what?”

“Business.”

“You know I love a good fight, but you aren’t winning this one. Drugs and thugs. This isn’t a fistfight on a baseball diamond. This is real. This is—”

“It’s Clint Phillips stuff. Right?”

I sensed the Mack Tucker hate gland filling his eyes with liquid steel. “Suit yourself. But it’s time to let that shit go. It’s a big world out there. You should join it sometime.”

I stared at the fire.

“You need a ride somewhere?” he asked.

I shook my head. He lingered for a moment, and then he was gone, the Jeep curling away at the stop sign at the end of the block, the brake lights fading from view.

When the fire was out the sun was barely up. The cops took my information for their report, the firemen had done their work and left, and the neighbors were done asking if I needed anything. I went behind my house and laid down in the wet grass of my stamp-sized backyard, smelling the cold air made humid by the char of the house, pieces of soot falling, black snowflakes in an open sky, unblotted, nothing between me and the universe.

Sleep came. I woke to the sound of an idling truck. The sun was high and I felt filthy, the way you feel after burning leaves all day. The house was a dark canker sore on the block now, the remnants of the studs jutting up like abscessed teeth. The car was the color of rust, aged a million years overnight, surrounded by a skirt of broken glass, the rims locked into the driveway by hardened puddles of rubber. My stomach grumbled, expecting breakfast, or lunch, or more water to help chase the thud of my hangover. My skin itched for a shower.

The FedEx guy stood there with a small box, staring at the remains of the house. I shambled toward him.

“Dale Sampson?” he said sheepishly.

“Yeah,” I said, and signed for my new cell phone. I walked to Grayson. I checked in at the Allsop Motel, a cheap and dirty place where the rooms made me think of semen and blood and suicide and moths and Bibles. My gun remained in the ashes of my burned house. I left it there, where it belonged.

SIXTEEN

After two nights at the Allsop, the manager told me my check bounced. No surprise there. I drained the account right after I wrote the check, buying a digital camera with a video clip recording function and a pair of bypass loppers, cashing out eighty bucks for food. I didn’t argue with the guy. Turned out another night at the Allsop would not be necessary, so that was one stroke of luck.

The argument held me up enough to get to Doc Venhaus’s office later than planned, but I still got there on time. It was only day three of my stakeout at Doc’s, and I hit pay dirt. At nine thirty, Harold’s GMC Sierra was one of the few parked vehicles in the lot. The sun was weak that morning, allowing the frost to linger on windshields longer than usual. The black paint of the Sierra appeared icy and dull. I went into Doc’s building through the back door with the key that he had given me for all of our after-hours appointments.

It was game time with Harold on neutral turf. I went inside, entering into the main hallway that connected the exam-room entrances, and Doc Venhaus was looking at a chart. He looked at me, shook his head, and put the chart back.

“Get out, Dale.” I’d ignored his calls and never gave him an answer about letting him get me into clinical testing, but it looked like he was expecting me.

“I need to talk to Harold,” I said. “I’m sorry I haven’t gotten back to you, but if you didn’t know, my fucking house burned down. I’ve been busy.”

“Busy, but you’re here,” he said.

“I’ve made a decision. I’m not going to sell my organs. I deleted Winston’s messages. I’m out. But I’m not in with you, not yet. One day, though. On my terms and my timeline.”

“You think it’s your decision?” he said. “It won’t be for much longer.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I said.

He slotted his chart into one of the exam-room doors. “Follow me.” The door at the end of the hallway was clearly marked as an emergency exit. He pushed the bar on the door and we stepped into the cold. His white coat flapped in the sharp morning wind. Water gathered at the corners of his eyes and blood rushed into the capillaries of his nose, turning the tip cherry red.

“You’ve obviously been staking me out, waiting for Harold,” he said. “Did you happen to notice a young man in a naval uniform come into the office yesterday?”

As a matter of fact, I did—he was carrying a briefcase. Something about a uniformed soldier carrying something so uncharacteristic caught my attention.

“Well, he’s not in the Navy. He’s from the US Public Health Commissioned Corps, under the direction of the CDC.”