House of hearts, p.13
House of Hearts, page 13
The spine in the desert had still not been identified. Ted had called Izzy, apologetic, and told her he’d had to hire someone else, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to look for other work. She still felt compelled to spend her time in the mines, as if nothing else could distract her, at least temporarily, from the helplessness and pain that dogged her. She’d have to make the savings last for now.
Izzy’s birthday had passed without her having noticed. Neither Nephy nor Seth had texted her since their meeting at the restaurant. Fuck them. Cyrus was as gone as ever; his phone was still locked.
Izzy got up, checked her own phone, let Dog out, fed him and Yard. She choked down two hard-boiled eggs and an apple, drank some coffee. She dressed, gathered the supplies she’d packed the night before, including the gun. She stroked Yard’s shell and blinked at him, kissed the soft divot between Dog’s eyes and told him to be good. Then she drove back out into the desert.
◆◆◆
Deep among the Joshua trees and yucca and desert grasses and sand banks and boulders, Izzy closed her eyes and tried to sense where to go next.
“Cyrus,” she said. “Tell me where to go.”
She opened her eyes and walked toward the nearest base, the ball mill where the miners processed ore. Beside the ramshackle wooden ore bin was a large piece of yellow machinery with the words “Compressor Reciprocating Power Drive: Property of US Marine Corps.” stamped on the side. There was also a table with a bowl of rusted nails, a bottle that said “Marvel Mystery Oil” in old-fashioned script, and another large bottle labeled “Cyanide Powder.”
She followed a set of metal tracks that led from an ore dump, a midden of debris that could have been animal, vegetable, mineral, or human, to the mine itself.
Among an outcropping of tan and gray boulders, Izzy found the lower portal. She felt a mild gust of air, ensuring there was oxygen down below. Larry had taught her this. A cable fitted with wheels for transporting buckets of ore ran on a tram from the portal to a deep vertical shaft in the distance.
Izzy closed her eyes, took a breath, and entered the portal. Using her flashlight, she walked, stooped over, along the narrow dirt passage to her left, among the rocks and the discarded gobbing. A lone bat slept snuggled in the rock crevices, kitten-furred and that small. She almost wanted to touch it with her finger, but she’d known a kid who died of rabies from a bat bite.
The mine had been active in the seventies, abandoned in the eighties, she’d read. Along the path of ore cart track crossties, usually removed but still in place after all this time, she found a vinyl kitchen chair, empty bottles of bleach and oil filters in a box, and brown paper bags labeled “Anionic Polymer,” the substance used to help avoid clumping of the ore. Bundled up yellow ventilation tubing the color of crime scene tape. A small metal machine that resembled a torture device. Two white helmets hanging on the wall just like skulls.
The passage she’d chosen led to a collapse, so she turned, went back to the junction, and ventured in the other direction. This passage was steeper, took her farther down.
She came to a wooden ore bin with a rickety ladder that stopped partway up. A hangman’s rope on a pulley led to the chute gate through which the ore would tumble out into a waiting, now broken cart. The chute was marked with the number three, scrawled in red.
Izzy shone her flashlight into a shaft that might have gone one hundred and fifty feet deep. This ladder resembled a rib cage. Darkness lay at the base.
Eventually the tunnel she traversed opened out into a larger square-set chamber with timbers made of tree trunks supporting the roof. Someone had constructed the chamber in a cathedral-like fashion. Remnants of ore carts littered the space, but the area was now broad and open enough that she could venture around the carts and down the wooden stopes.
From here she moved into a narrower passage. So narrow that to see what lay ahead she had to lie flat and wiggle through. Izzy chose her stomach so she would be able to see and shimmied down the opening. The gravel cut into the flesh of her breasts and belly. She felt pressure against her ribs as if invisible hands squeezed the bones together.
The way it would feel to be crushed to death.
She shone her flashlight into the darkness.
And that was when Izzy saw the hand.
A human hand is easily recognizable, even with the flesh and skin eroded away. A hand is what makes us a primate, with its five digits; its muscles, ligaments, tendons, sheaths, arteries, and nerves; its twenty-seven bones. The fingers contain fourteen of those bones, the phalanges—distal, middle, and proximal—in each finger except for the thumb that has only two—the distal and proximal—and the most nerve endings in the body. That is, when the human attached to the hand is alive to feel.
This was a big hand. It was a hand with a silver ring still clinging to one finger.
◆◆◆
By the time Izzy had reached the exit, running from the thing she’d seen, her gut erupted.
She wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her hoodie and fell to her knees.
Izzy saw herself, walking through the desert with outstretched hands. In them, she held something, a gift of some kind. Whether to give or receive, she did not know. A coyote howled the blues. Or was it the devil himself singing? The sun came up, blood-ing her face, her hands, the gift. Dawn. Now even the morning light had become a terrible thing.
◆◆◆
There in a white room, blinded by sun through a window, Izzy saw a man hovering at her bedside, and she cried out for Cyrus.
It did not matter if she was dead. Cyrus was there. He had come back to her.
The sea, too, had come back. The cloudy, skinned water cleared, like a lasered eye, of the selenium that caused embryonic deformities in aquatic birds and fish. Pelicans, double-crested cormorants, egrets, ibis, ducks, geese, stilts, dowitchers, and avocets gathered at the shores. Alfalfa, Bermuda, and Sudan grass grew in abundance where there had once been only fields of white salt. The dust storms had subsided, the sulfuric stench of death been replaced by the sweet sugar beets; the bomb ghosts now rested in peace.
He stepped closer—shaved head and a beard.
This man was not Cyrus.
Cyrus had vanished.
“You scared us there,” Seth said, distantly.
She blinked her eyes at him. He gestured to a vase of sunflowers on the counter. “Hope you like.”
“What about Cyrus?” The sunflowers smelled bitter and the water was already sour with decay.
“You rest now.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Three days. Leanne told us what happened. Nephy sends her love.”
“What happened? Where’s my phone? Wait. What about Dog and Yard?”
“Your mom has them,” Seth said. He wasn’t looking at her but away, out the window. “Very, very big dog. Didn’t like me. He’s okay, though.”
Izzy called out for Cyrus again, repeating his name, and the nurse came and told Seth to leave.
◆◆◆
When Izzy woke, Leanne was there, peering myopically into her eyes over a large stuffed black cat. It resembled, in a perverse way, the kitten Izzy had rescued from the dump as a child. The one that she’d found hanging dead on the clothesline the next morning.
“You still alive, girl?”
Izzy wasn’t so sure. She noticed that the sunflowers were gone. How long had she slept? Had Seth really been there at all?
“I brought tea.” Leanne gestured to a bedside table set with three chipped china cups and a broken teapot. “For us and Kitty.”
“Thanks.” Izzy wanted that thing gone. It looked unsanitary. How had Leanne even gotten it in here?
Leanne poured some water from the teapot, added a straw, and held out the cup to Izzy. She tried to sit up but everything hurt. “I have to go find him. Where’s my phone?”
Leanne wrinkled her forehead. “You can’t go anywhere; you have to heal. The doctor said you could scar real bad.” Izzy’s mother had a mirror, a round one with a plastic handle that looked like bone, and she held it up for Izzy to see. A person she didn’t recognize looked back at her. One eye was black with coagulated blood, the upper lip swollen. A large bandage covered the nose and one side of the face.
“You fell and hit your head outside the mine shaft. Hurt your ankle, too. A ranger found you. Your dog’s okay. And that tortoise you like. Foot.”
“What about Cyrus?” Izzy asked again. Then: “I found something. I found—”
Leanne poured water into the third teacup and set it down in front of the stuffed cat. Some water had spilled—the teacup spout had broken off. When Leanne looked up at Izzy, her eyes were red, and she sounded more lucid than Izzy had ever heard her. “What you found—they said it could be him. They’re not sure.”
It was him. His hand. His ring. It was him.
Izzy opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
Instead, the desert whirled its sands and shook dry leaves with woe. Dead sea waters moaned. Jackrabbits and roadrunners screamed in pain. Cracking fault lines rummaged deeper through the earth. Leanne’s mermaid mannequin sobbed, lonely in her dried-up plastic pool.
To Bring You My Love
Izzy could not remember much of what happened next. She’d talked to the police, who’d taken a report. Someone—Izzy wasn’t sure who—had confirmed that there would be an investigation, a forensics report, that the thing she’d found was a man’s severed hand; she had bent over and retched in the dirt. Dismembered. The horror of it struck her again like a blow to the throat. Like that blow to her head when she’d fallen outside the mine.
She had been released from the hospital, and now Nephy was bringing her home. A small crowd had gathered around Cyrus’s truck. Izzy got out and began to limp inside, leaning on Nephy for support.
Alma from Slab City took off her straw hat and wiped sweat from her brow with a bandanna. “Are you all right?”
“What can we do?” someone else asked.
“So awful about Cyrus.”
“It’s effed up is what.”
“Something’s afoot,” Alma said. She grimaced, showing her small, brown teeth.
Nephy asked them to leave.
A woman with plastic curlers in her hair came toward Izzy then, pushing an empty stroller. The woman’s face looked swollen and blotchy. “Nothing’s changed,” she said, grabbing Izzy’s arm. “It was all for nothing.”
“Get the hell away!” Nephy said.
“If he was going to die, at least we could see the change.”
◆◆◆
Nephy opened the front door of the shack, and Dog ran to Izzy, began rubbing frantically against her. She could not find the strength even to touch him. Instead, she stood there, frozen, looking around the room. Cyrus’s chewed-up black sneaker was gone. Izzy hadn’t been able to touch it. Someone—probably Nephy, maybe Leanne—had cleaned for her.
“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” Nephy’s eyelids, usually smooth, maybe slicked with gold or silver shadow, looked red and puffy. Strands of black hair, long, the way Izzy’s had once been, hung disheveled around Nephy’s face. The bruise on her cheek still showed, somewhat paled now, not hidden with makeup.
She put her arms around Izzy. Nephy’s skin pulsed, warm and smooth, and her hair, scented with coconut oil, tickled Izzy’s skin. She could sense Nephy’s baby sleeping like a cherished secret between them, and Izzy closed her eyes. Then the two of them were crying. It sounds like birds, Izzy thought, more like avian shrieks than human cries.
“Shhh. Rest now, my queen,” Nephy said, finally, stroking Izzy’s head. “You have to rest.”
Before she fell asleep, she saw the two of them—Nephy and herself—circling above the desert on tapered wings.
Beneath them stretched an uncanny valley of decedent-sketch zombies. They stared up empty-eyed, and waved their hands above their heads as if they had no shoulder or elbow joints. They wore the clothes they’d been found in—the bathing suits, flowered dresses, jeans, boots, belts with heavy buckles, T-shirts with pictures of New York and Los Angeles. Their hands were full of chunks of minerals, green and blue as Cyrus’s eyes, black as his hair, gold as his skin.
◆◆◆
She didn’t wake until late the next afternoon, Dog nosing her neck, licking her cheek. Nephy had left a note saying she’d check in later. Izzy got up and looked in the mirror, gingerly removed the bandage from her face. The reflection in the mirror did not disturb her, not really, in spite of the small, round artifact of the head, the black eye, the raised and painful gash across the bridge of the nose and the cheek. The scar was only a reflection of her inner cicatrix. This was the mark that branded her as the one who had lost her beloved.
Izzy had been raised in a dead place, found Cyrus, devoted her life to him. She had awakened one morning to find him gone. She’d searched for him, given up, and found a dog and a man who looked like him. She’d returned and shaved her head like a warrior, like a penitent, and entered the mines alone. Down in those mines, she’d feared that Cyrus was dead. But even still, she’d refused to accept that he was really gone.
Her lover, her companion, the man who had rescued her from her childhood, had been murdered. The man with whom she had conceived and then lost a child. The man with whom she had hoped to conceive a child once again. A child with Cyrus’s deep eyes and full mouth and deft hands.
Hands.
Cyrus’s hand.
That had built things. That had fixed things. That had touched her with love.
But now there was no Cyrus; there would be no child. Even if he had loved someone else, there was now no chance of reconciliation. The loss had changed her into someone else. Though she knew even then that it would take her a long time to fully exhume the person she had become.
She popped a Percocet and left the bathroom, almost stumbling over Yard who looked up at her beadily, as if to say, What now? Ignoring him and Dog, too weak to even reach down and stroke the tortoise’s shell or the dog’s smooth, bony back, Izzy stood blinking around the room. Her eyes rested on the mannequin Leanne had given her.
Izzy lit some white candles. She stoppered the tin bathtub and filled it with water from the pipes Cyrus had installed. She took the mannequin and lowered him into the tub, arranged the stiff limbs so that they fit. She ran the water over the plastic body with its strange planes and flat beige curves, then rinsed it away.
What was she doing? She didn’t know. But she felt she must not stop.
Izzy took the mannequin out of the tub and dried it with Cyrus’s bath towel, which she had not touched since he left. It smelled vaguely of mildew but also—still, when she pressed it to her face—of sage and of smoke. Or at least she imagined it smelled of these things.
She carried the mannequin to the bed and laid it on a sheet. The hard head, the flat chest, the weirdly blank pubis, the jointed legs and arms, the awkward, useless feet. The thing was not like Cyrus at all.
Cyrus’s head: the high forehead, the thick hawkish eyebrows and cheekbones, the deep-set eyes.
Cyrus’s generous shoulders and chest that she’d often rubbed with coconut oil. His tapered waist. His muscled arms, full of his blood. The way the veins stood out like the venation of leaves in his forearms. The V of muscles pointing toward his groin—
Cyrus’s legs, smooth, almost hairless, and narrow in proportion to the rest of him, but long like his arms. She’d rubbed out the knots that formed there after he ran.
Cyrus’s large feet with the long second toe. She’d bathed those feet at night in salt water strewn with rose petals.
She remembered the ever-surprising softness of his skin, the warmth penetrating through fabric. The flowered and winged flesh of his back and chest.
She remembered his hands.
She poured some acrylic paints—red, green, black, blue—into cups, added water and painted Cyrus’s tattoos as best she could onto the mannequin’s shoulders and chest. The roses, the serpent, the skull, her name. She sat beside the mannequin and closed her eyes and tried to breathe while the paint dried. Then she turned the mannequin over and painted a primitive-looking panther and falcon on the plastic back. Let these dry.
She gathered up two chunks of the green malachite, the small piece of amethyst and the rose quartz and taped the malachite over the mannequin’s eyes for protection, the amethyst to its forehead for enlightenment, the quartz over its heart for love.
She took Cyrus’s pocketknife from beside the bed.
He had not carried this knife with him when he stepped outside that morning.
She flicked open the knife and touched the blade.
Nicked her finger. Let some drops of blood fall onto the mannequin. Staunched the bleeding with her shirt. Then she took off her shirt and tore at the thin cotton until a strip ripped away. She used the material to tie the knife to the mannequin’s wrist.
She needed one more thing.
She needed his ring.
But his ring was gone.
The police had it.
“Take my ring now,” she said and removed the small silver band from her finger. Placed it in the mannequin’s left hand. Without the ring, her hand felt foreign, too light, as if it might detach and float away.
Someone had killed him. Not only killed him but ragefully torn him asunder.
“Return to me,” she said. “Cyrus Rivera, I speak your name. I speak your name so you may live again.” And a chill ran through her body, as if her spine were a string of icy pearls pulled by an unseen hand.
Dog sat on his haunches, horn-ears perked. Motionless, as if he’d been carved from obsidian, except for his nose with its 300 million olfactory receptors. His eyes gazed at her with worry and with love. Her protector. She realized he’d been in this position the entire time she’d acted out this weird, compulsive ritual that she herself could not even begin to understand.
