What It Takes to Replace a Heart
All that long evening as it snowed, the diner was empty and she sat by the window out front thinking about things she had no business remembering. How she’d followed him south to the ocean, west to the factories in Willette, then back east again to Smyte. All the places in between. Russell Wallen’s heart ate up her life, year by year. How to love a man who did not love himself? A man who loved power but watched what he had sift through his fingers. A man who loved the buying up of land, timber, coal, paper, but ended up owning next to nothing. What had she told Miracelle? Some people are like cold houses in winter, houses that can’t stay warm.
She wandered back to the kitchen, spooned coffee, knelt to light the stove. She could hear the storm more back here, and far streetlights showed how the snow was piling up on the roof of the garage. She peered out, wondering if Miracelle had gone to see him at the factory, wondering what they’d said. Wondering, like she always did, whether he’d show up here before dawn, his boots making time up to her room. His fingertips in her mouth, how they tasted sweet. The taste of a cigarette he’d light and put between her lips and now and then a jar of shine, red cherries floating inside. “Come on, Della, I know you love how wild it makes you feel.”
She had loved so much. How young the two of them were at a drive-in with a marathon of old westerns, everything from John Wayne to Gene Autry. He unfastened the speakers from the windows, tossed them far out in the dark and pushed her down on the car’s seat, laid his ear next to her heart. Shh, sweet pea, he said. The weight of his body moved into her as she listened to his breath in time with hers. Those nights were joy, and she shivered with the memory of them.
It wasn’t patience all these years. It was teetering on the edge of a deep place she saw when she shut her eyes when she was alone at night. And when he slipped away and didn’t come home until dawn, his fingers smelling of the fortune-telling woman. Ruby Loving. When had she first known her name? She saw herself at the foot of the stairs in Willette, New Mexico, stairs she’d seen her own husband climb too many times. “Who is that woman who lives up there?” she saw herself asking when a man came out a door in the downstairs. “You mean that card dealer?” The man’s teeth were dark and he spat in the dust beside the steps. “Rose or Ruby,” he said. “Yeah, that’s right. Ruby. Ruby Loving.” She was ashamed of it, the ways and means she found to follow her. Study her face, the curves of her cheeks, the lines of her eyebrows, the fancy trail of her scarves.
She remembered a day she watched as Russell met Ruby, her arms full of paper bags brimming with bread loaves and strings of peppers, the kind so hot they burned the tongue. Russell took the bags and followed up the steps as Della sat on the curb, feeling sweat course down between her breasts. Later she walked the distance across town back to the house. A rancher on a street beside the open doors of clubs and the cha-cha of feet dancing all night long. She liked it, the rooms where she never turned on a fan, how the heat kept her hungry.
Russell Wallen’s heart was not that easy, and it never had been. Wandering heart. Lost heart. Heart that missed and beat and missed. Heart with hurting she knew nothing about at all. Some days she stood outside the Black Cat staring across the highway and watching the river, and she had no explanation for any of it, how her life had gone. He was the mountain that could not be moved, he’d said once, and she’d nearly split a side laughing at him. He was the mountain that had been moved, over and over again. He was the tunnel cracking the mountain open from sky to eternity, and she might as well have been perched at the top of that mountain, watching him fall, end over end over end. How she’d watched, job after job. Woman after woman. Bad poker hands where he’d lost his shirt. And his soul? She told herself some days she’d seen that one too. Seen him standing in the parking lot of the Black Cat in the middle of the night. She’d long been firm about him having no claim to them, these rooms she called her own, but often she’d hide him a key, leave him a door to open. Or she’d look down at him from her window, his sorry face, him begging until she gave in. How he’d tried, tried to shift the core of the earth with his own two hands, again and again.
The wind rose from a place far beyond the parking lot. It saddened her, thinking of how the coldness came from the sky or the mountains or from some land beyond all of it she’d maybe seen once but would likely never see again. She remembered her daddy’s face that long-ago day in West Virginia. How he and the men pushed a cart outside and loaded a no-good engine in the back of a pickup truck to take to the junkyard later on. She remembered how they hoisted the new engine, loaded it on the cart, and wheeled it into the garage. That final moment where they used the hoist and how they whooped and hollered, their voices rising in sheer jubilation. The engine dangling bright and clean, ready to be lowered. The final give and settle of a car’s new heart.
She sat in the dark of the dining room, watching the snowy ribbon of highway out there like she could grab hold of it, reel it in, pull him back to her. There was no such a thing as fixing what could not be fixed, what had been hurt beyond fixing all these years and years now. “The thing is, Miracelle,” she’d said at the end of those long hours of talking at the boardinghouse. Those long hours of at last telling the truth. “The thing is, nobody has ever known what Russell Wallen really wanted.” And here she was, all over again, expecting that what he’d want was more from her. It was the more she’d lived with all these years. The more was a truth she’d folded smaller and smaller, tucked away in the hidey-hole that had become her heart.
She put her hand against the diner’s window, then cracked the front door, letting in the freezing air. She felt the cold of it in her heart as she cupped her hands around a cigarette and lit it. She had come this far, and there was nothing to do but remember it now. All these years later she saw Ruby’s face, the half-smile and shrug as she said, “He’s mine, always has been.” Then they were struggling, first for that notebook Ruby had been writing in, then reaching for the gun, for each other’s hands and shoulders. Behind them a record played, and Della could hear that song still. Hold me, Radiance, honey, till long past daylight. Below the music their breath worked hard, and one of them was saying and saying, anger a force their hands pulled at as they fought. How had she gotten there, after all? That trailer in that no-place town called Dauncy. She’d found its name on matchbooks and slips of paper she’d hoarded from Russell’s pockets. Their arms circled and held on and it was almost, for a minute there, like they were themselves lovers in the heat of it, the trying to get hold of what neither of them had ever had. Russell. For years she wondered if that was really what Ruby Loving said as the gun went off. He’s not yours either. The explosion deafened her, but it was like there was no sound at all as the bullet slipped into Ruby’s body, leaving the look on her face changed hardly at all. There had been surprise, surely, but also a kind of release, a kind of well, now, there it is, as if she’d been waiting for her own death all along.
It was late as Della stepped outside the diner into the parking lot. She folded her arms around herself, rubbed the chill inside her coverall’s sleeves, glad of the clean of the cold. What in God’s name had she wanted that night Ruby Loving died?
She raised her hand to her mouth, breathed cold steam between her fingers. What she’d wanted, she’d told herself then, was to finally, finally fix the miss and beat and miss of him. She could see herself out in the yard as her daddy loaded the hoist in the back of his truck, hear herself, her girl’s voice gone begging: “Let me help this once and I’ll never ever ask again.” How she’d wanted to see it, the car’s engine taken out, made new. She’d thought it would be just as easy, to fix his heart. To talk Ruby Loving out of his life. His heart set free at last. Then they’d fought, the gun firing like it still did in her memory, and now here she was, alone on a winter night as bitter as any she could remember.
She stood a long while in the Black Cat parking lot, studying the highway east until it disappeared over a rise. This day ahead there were two cars waiting for tune-ups. Transmissions checked. There were hours to go before dawn, but she’d like as not stay up, wait on the day. She was always waiting. Waiting for when he’d leave. Waiting to see if he’d tell her where he’d gone, this time. Him with his hangdog looks, him with his wallet empty of his last red cent, and how she opened her arms and held him, one more time. She stamped her feet, bringing warmth to them before she let herself back inside the Black Cat and bolted the door. In the kitchen she fastened the storm door and locked the inner door once and for all against the cold night before she made her way upstairs.