House of hearts, p.1
House of Hearts, page 1
Also By Francesca Lia Block
The Thorn Necklace: Healing through Writing and the Creative Process
Beyond the Pale Motel
The Elementals
Pink Smog
The Rose and The Beast: Fairy Tales Retold
The Hanged Man
Dangerous Angels
Weetzie Bat
and more...
this is a genuine rare bird book
Rare Bird Books
6044 North Figueroa Street
Los Angeles, CA 90042
rarebirdbooks.com
Copyright © 2022 by Francesca Lia Block
Also available in e-book and unabridged audiobook,
as well as a limited edition vinyl audiobook
narrated by Scout laRue Willis
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic.
For more information, address:
Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department
6044 North Figueroa Street
Los Angeles, CA 90042
Cover Photograph by Algirdas Grigaitis
Cover Design by Robert Schlofferman
Interior Design by Hailie Johnson
epub isbn: 9781644283127
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Block, Francesca Lia, author.
Title: House of hearts / by Francesca Lia Block.
Description: First Hardcover Edition. | Los Angeles, Calif. : Rare Bird, [2022]
Identifiers: LCCN 2021059619 | ISBN 9781644282625 (hardcover)
Classification: LCC PS3552.L617 H67 2022 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059619
I’ve traveled over
Dry earth and floods
Hell and high water
To bring you my love.
—PJ Harvey
Contents
Part I
I See a Darkness
Precious Things
Jennifer’s Body
Bluebeard
Heart-Shaped Box
Common Disaster
Atomic Dog
Part II
California Love
Meet ze Monsta
Long Snake Moan
To Bring You My Love
I Want Your Hands on Me
I Am Stretched on Your Grave
Jackie’s Strength
Petals
Essence
Part III
Under the Bridge
Lost Woman Song
Losing My Religion
All is Full of Love
Acknowledgments
Part I
I See a Darkness
Bad things can happen in the desert.
Beneath the horned head graffitied on a burned and gutted building in Bombay Beach, the scrawled words read: “It didn’t always used to be this way.” Too true, Izzy Ames thought, looking around at the mobile homes and a few houses lining unpaved streets beneath the dike that separated broken town from toxic sea. It didn’t always used to be this way. And it would not be this way forever.
Izzy watched Cyrus Rivera stand from a crouch where he’d been fingering the soil he’d hauled to Bombay Beach in his Chevy Silverado. His jeans slid down over the waistband of his boxers, and he hitched his thumbs through his belt loops and turned to face her. The steep intelligence of his brow, his powerful nose and cheekbones, the stubble on his chin, a mouth that brooded, even in a smile, over a lawless array of teeth. And his eyes—irises the color of seaweed hid behind his shades. She’d once read that true hazel is rare, derived from a combination of pigments. Eumelanin. Pheomelanin.
Cyrus reached for his canteen, tilted it to lips fuller than Izzy’s—sometimes it felt as if his lips could swallow hers whole when they kissed. His Adam’s apple flexed, and muscles moved animal-like under the inked skin of his chest and arms. Rose, serpent, panther, falcon, and skull tattoos twined, pawed, and flew, and, in the case of the skull, hovered like a reminder of the fate that is certain for everyone. The skull reminded Izzy of something else, too. Of the way that, sometimes, her love for Cyrus felt like a different kind of death: even after almost nine years together, she found herself slayed by the sight of him.
She wasn’t the only one. A man that beautiful, that skilled, disturbed people somehow, especially out here in the desert where the beauty that existed was raw and harsh and often hidden. But Cyrus could build almost anything out of anything, could make almost anything grow. When you looked at him, you felt you could do these things, too. You might even start to glow like he did.
He nodded his head once at Izzy, his lips softening and peaking into a smile, and she dipped her chin in response, feeling her own lips lift and her nipples tingle. I love you, she mouthed. Not long till they’d be in bed again, their favorite pastime. But it wasn’t just the sex Izzy yearned for. She felt their love manifested in sleep, as dreams, in the words they whispered to each other like handing a candle back and forth when the desert encroached darkly outside their shack. Now, her womb pinched with desire.
Izzy, Cyrus, and their friends Seth and Nephy White had gathered in Bombay Beach to tend the “three-sisters” community garden they’d planted. Cyrus had the idea—a gift for the children. He, Izzy, Seth, and Nephy came from Salton City, Slab City, and Salvation Mountain, not here. But no one had built any gardens for them.
They had—all four—grown up on the shores of the man-made lake where movie stars once played golf, water-skied, boat raced, and fished for artificially introduced croaker. Slowly, due to pollution, increased salinity, and an overgrowth of dead algae that cut off oxygen and produced hydrogen sulfide gas, the Salton Sea deteriorated into an anoxic cesspool surrounded by mountains where the military once conducted bombing test operations. Selenium, the poisonous trace mineral present in agricultural drainage, washed into the sea and ravaged the brains, beaks, hearts, livers, wings, legs, feet, and skeletons of aquatic birds and kidneys, ovaries, spines, heads, mouths, and fins of fish.
◆◆◆
Izzy, Cyrus, Seth, and Nephy made the garden in the dust. First, they mounded dirt that Cyrus had hauled in his Silverado, then hollowed out a shallow, moon-like crater and planted corn there. When the crop was at four inches, they sowed bean seeds around it, and in the spring, they planted pumpkins at the perimeter. The prickly pumpkin leaves protected the mulch and drove animals away, the beans wound through the pumpkins, tendrilled up the corn for support, pulling nitrogen from the air and binding the sisters together.
Today, while the others watered and weeded, Seth hammered the wooden slats that made up the fence around the three-sisters mound—a few slats had come loose. He was taller and thinner than Cyrus, with a shaved head, now bandanna-wrapped to protect it from the scorch, a goatee, and iron-shredded abs. His shoulders still bore traces of scars from the cigarette burns he used to give himself. Izzy remembered the first time she’d seen the marks on his shoulders, but she’d been too afraid to mention them that day. She’d assumed Seth’s dad, Rick, had made the marks, and she was even more shocked when she learned about the self-harm. Thankfully, Seth outgrew that habit after he married Nephy.
They were all damaged, weren’t they, in different ways? All traumatized by something—poverty, neglect, unstable or missing parents. Seth’s mother had left when he was a baby, Nephy and Izzy had never felt like they belonged in their families, and Cyrus had been adopted. Seth cut himself; Nephy slept with everyone before she and Seth got together; Cyrus still jumped at loud noises; Izzy clung to him. She tried not to, did her best, but growing up in a trailer by the Salton Sea, with a crazy mother and an unpredictable father, she couldn’t exactly call herself secure. At least she had Cyrus and Nephy and Seth. At least the four of them had each other now.
“You okay, queen?” Izzy asked Nephy. “Is it too hot out here?”
“My nails are frickin’ wrecked.” Nephy, who had somehow managed not to break a sweat, looked up from under her straw cowboy hat and held out hands tipped with white acrylic talons. Or—they had been. Most had broken off since morning. No matter; she’d replace them by tomorrow, Izzy knew.
Nephy’s rounded belly protruded under her white tank top. “I popped,” she’d said that morning, patting her small baby bump. Her breasts, and her ass in the cut-offs, were already fuller, too. Her hair and skin lusher. But her waist still appeared narrow as always above the bump; Seth liked to show how his hands could encircle her, with room to spare.
“And you, my queen?” Nephy said, checking her nails again.
Izzy said, “I’m good.” She didn’t like to complain. Wanted Cyrus to know she was up for this. She looked at her own hands then. The short nails ached with dirt. Seth’s hammer rang out in the hot silence.
Just then a bell chimed and a red-haired girl came riding up on a pink bicycle, Mylar streamers tied to the handlebars. A little white basket entwined with fake pink flowers. She paused, watching the four people planting in the garden, and Izzy got up, wiping her hands on her black jeans. The streamers gleamed like water or a desert mirage.
“Hi, there,” Izzy said. The girl seemed close to the age of the child Izzy and Cyrus would have had if she hadn’t miscarried, and even though that was
The girl squinted. Her face was small, already old-looking, and covered with grime. She’d bitten off her nails. Izzy remembered how she’d bitten her own nails as a child, bitten her nails down to the quick. Maybe as a way to let people know things weren’t okay at home. But no one seemed to notice.
“What are you doing?” the girl asked.
“We’re tending the garden,” Izzy said.
The child took it all in: the wooden beds, the damp patch of earth, the seedlings, the four strangers. Two women, both with long black hair, one curvy, one thin. Two men, one dark, one fair and burned. “Flowers?” the girl asked. “Will there be flowers?”
“Next spring. Beans flower, so do pumpkins.”
She seemed to find this satisfactory and began riding her bike in circles in the dust. “Hartebeest, monk seal. Great auk, ibex. Javan tiger,” she said in what Izzy heard as an almost iambic singsong.
“What’s that?” Izzy asked.
“Passenger pigeon, Pyrenean ibex, quagga, sea mink, Tasmanian tiger, Tecopa pupfish, West African black rhino.”
What was she talking about? Izzy wondered. “I don’t—”
“African elephant, Asian elephant, bald eagle, giant panda, orangutan, polar bear, rhinoceros.” The girl stopped riding.
Okay. Extinct or endangered. Izzy wanted to cover her ears. Instead, she knelt down. “That’s sad about those animals, huh?”
The girl peered up through red eyelashes, almost transparent in the sun, her eyes starting to water. Not tears, exactly. Izzy’s eyes used to water like that when her father, Larry, told her ghost stories to scare her. The little girl swiped a hand across her face, and the dirt there smeared. “We are all sharing the earth’s pain.” Her voice had a slightly robotic tone, as if she were repeating something she’d been told.
Izzy shivered with the kind of cold that comes from within, and a shade lowered down in her mind. That was the only way she could describe it. Some kind of foreshadowing or just anxiety, she still wasn’t sure. Though the first darkness had come when she was just a kid, sleeping on the scratchy trailer cot, not knowing that her new black kitten writhed and mewled on the clothesline outside, its sounds sucked away by a succubus wind.
“What’d you say, honey?” Izzy asked.
The girl set her gaze on Cyrus now. “We will stand around the glass box and cry, and our tears will turn into flowers,” she said.
Then she turned and pedaled away, across the road toward a house painted a salt-corroded blue, with a roughhewn windmill fastened to the front. The windmill didn’t move in the hot, still air. Did it ever move? Stopping her bicycle in the weeds that grew in front of the house, the child got off the bike and ran inside. Watching her go, Izzy had the strangely distinct feeling that somehow, impossibly, this was the child she and Cyrus had lost. The child that had been only blood.
“Freaky,” said Nephy, and Seth laughed. Cyrus’s face remained unchanged.
Izzy was used to strange things happening; her whole life had been strange. Growing up by a burping, sulfuric lake, an ossuary for the bones of a million rotted tilapia. Where dust storms turned a child’s lungs into those of a fifty-year old smoker with chronic obstructed pulmonary disease. And a fungus in the soil, stirred by the wind and inhaled, caused desert fever—coccidioidomycosis. A place where, once, bombs from the marine base detonated regularly in the distance. All strange. But this little girl shook Izzy, somehow, in a different way.
◆◆◆
Later that afternoon, the four friends went for lunch at the Ski Inn—the only real eatery in town. The low, awninged, orange building served burgers, fries, and beer, mostly. Seth ordered all three, Cyrus had a burger, Nephy ate a grilled cheese sandwich, and Izzy picked at some French fries—her body craved the salt, but the grease coated her mouth unpleasantly. They all sat by the bar with the glasses hanging upside down from the ceiling and dollar bills papering every square inch of space.
“Tell me something beautiful and something strange,” Cyrus said. It was a game he’d invented, an easy one for Izzy to play since almost everything seemed both beautiful and strange to her.
Seth put his hand on Nephy’s belly. “Beautiful,” he said. “And strange.” He took a pull on his beer.
His wife laughed, a little nervously, Izzy thought. “The garden’s beautiful,” Nephy said. She raised her glass of ice water in a toast. “That little girl was strange.”
Cyrus shrugged. “She’s just finding ways to make it out here,” he said. “You gotta start young.”
“To make it out of here or make it out here?” Izzy said.
He leaned forward in his chair, put his hands on his knees, then leaned back so his hands slid up the length of his thighs. He didn’t answer her.
“She reminds me of you,” Seth told her. “When you were a kid. Making shit up all the time.”
“She still does,” Cyrus said. “Not shit. Beautiful and strange things.” He leaned forward again, slung his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close so that she could smell the comforting, grassy scent of his sweat and feel the dampness through his cotton T-shirt. “Or I guess now you make it real.” He was talking about the items she created. She found porcelain and ceramic figures at flea markets and thrift stores—Buddha, Aphrodite, the Virgin Mary, cherubs, and roses—and made silicone molds of them, then poured in beeswax for candles or organic chocolate with different flavorings—rose, lavender, and prickly pear, the cactus with the pulpy flesh and bloody juice like a human heart. The chocolates and candles, along with Izzy’s part-time massage business, brought in cash to supplement Cyrus’s landscaping and construction work.
Izzy leaned into the curve of his arm, where it felt as if her bony shoulders had permanently carved out a space. “What about you, babe?”
“You are beautiful,” he said, looking down at her under the thick shade of his lashes. “I am strange.”
Nephy smiled with baby-sized teeth. She leaned forward, revealing her even more-generous-than-usual cleavage. Izzy got a whiff of patchouli oil and jasmine. The patchouli conjured the pale pinkish-white deadnettle-family flowers from which, Izzy knew, the scent was derived. “Same,” Nephy said. She beamed around the table. “We are all lucky to have each other.”
They raised three glasses of water and a beer and clinked again.
“To the beautiful and the strange,” Cyrus said.
Precious Things
That Halloween morning, Cyrus drove them to work at the 29 Palms Inn. Izzy opened the truck’s passenger window and her hair blew around her head in a squall. Sand gritted her mouth like particles of splintered, macerated bone. When they came to a sudden stop, something skidded out from under the seat and hit the back of her foot. She bent to pick it up: an old-school cassette tape. On the front, Cyrus had scrawled the words “For You” in Sharpie. She showed it to him.
“That’s where it went,” he said, looking back at the road.
“Thank you.” She pushed the cassette into the car stereo. Nineties music blasted. The brutal, beautiful sound of their love.
The hills lay crumpled like discarded animal pelts, and beneath the truck tires, streaks of red stained the road as if the eviscerated landscape had bled to death. Izzy didn’t want to imagine what else the red stains might be. Billboards of the various Deadly Sins—the gluttony of fast food, the greed of gambling, the pride of plastic surgery, the lust of strip clubs advertised by baby-faced women. Other signs: “Child Molestation: It Doesn’t Just Happen to Girls” with a picture of a sad young man. “Sex Trafficking? Get Help!” “Reward: $10,000. MURDERED. We will find you!”
Cyrus drove past the exits for Palm Desert, Palm Springs, Desert Hot Springs, Pioneertown, and then pulled off the highway and parked in the dusty lot of the 29 Palms Inn. He and Izzy walked past the lagoon where a red houseboat bobbed on algae-dark water. The twenty-nine date palms for which the inn had been named, one planted by the Serrano Indians for each baby boy born at the Oasis of Mara, seemed to lean in, listening for clues. The dates, gathering heat from the sun, fattened with sugar. Whole civilizations had depended on them for energy, Izzy knew. The dry palm fronds rattled softly as if bemoaning the invasion of long-dead prospectors who had come to use water from the Oasis and extract gold from the earth at the Anaconda, Lost Horse, and Desert Queen mines. Soon after the arrival of the miners, the Serrano and Chemehuevi Indians abandoned Mara.
