Heart and Soul by Mark Orr

Mark Orr has placed a few dozen short stories, essays, poems and reviews in various online and small press periodicals and anthologies. He has lived in or near Nashville for most of his life, with time out to obtain a B.A. in history from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He currently works as a vocational rehabilitation counselor for the State of Tennessee. Mark and his wife of almost 28 years live in the same house with three daughters, one granddaughter, 10,000 books and too many cats.

I sat on my ass in the gravel and watched the two-year old Chrysler Imperial convertible roar down the road at me. I was so stunned by the wreck I'd just crawled away from I hardly realized what it was doing. At the next to the last second, the driver slewed around and braked, spraying me with limestone dust. When the air cleared the big ragtop was sitting athwart the road. From behind the driver's wheel, a man wearing Ray-bans and a porkpie hat grinned at me.

"Have an accident?"

I shook my head, which cleared the double vision for a moment, a very short moment. "No, thanks. Already had one." I was too groggy to even wonder where that came from. Too much Jack Paar, I guess. Or too much concussion. I tossed my hand up with the thumb pointed back at the rusty Kaiser resting nose first against a mortally wounded shag-bark hickory. It was sort of funny, the way that chrome bullet in the center of the grill on the old Henry J really had killed that tree dead, dead, dead.

"What about your friend? He still in the car?" Behind his words I could hear the Cleft-Tones singing "Heart and Soul".

"Uh, yeah. I think so." I looked over and saw that the steam pouring out from the radiator was matched by wisps of smoke trickling from under the chassis. I stared at it like it was one of those road safety films they show in high school. It was as if it was happening light years away and centuries ago, and just didn't really involve me. It might as well have been in black and white, with the odd skipped frame or a hair caught in the mechanism, flickering over the scene from the bottom of the screen. It was that unreal to me.

The guy in the hat turned off the Chrysler and swung the door out. The front bucket seat swiveled around and he planted both feet in the gravel. I watched him like he was in a commercial being played out just for me, except I don't think they ever ran ads for two year old cars on TV. "Reckon we ought to get him out?"

I nodded, stupidly. The song was still playing, like it had one end looped to the other and just went round and round like a sonic hula-hoop.

Mr. Hat Man stood and let the seat swivel back to face the steering wheel. I was fascinated by that seat. I'd heard of them but never seen one. I've never seen one since, since Chrysler only had them as an option for a year or two. Mr. Hat Man walked across to the Kaiser, crunching rocks under his feet so that it sounded like the soles were eating peanut brittle. I opened my mouth to laugh at the image, but nothing came out so I shut it again and tore my vision from the car seat to watch him drag my friend out of the demolished car.

"Need some help there?" I was trying to stand but someone had come along and surgically removed all the bones from my legs. I plopped down again, feeling the little rocks digging into by butt for the first time since the wreck. I felt bad about that. Brian and I were in Korea together, and I felt obligated to do something to help out.

"Nope. You just sit there, I got him." He did, too. Mr. Hat Man had Brian slung over his shoulder the way firemen carry folks down ladders.

Just then the Kaiser blew up, leaving a flash on my retinas of the shadows of Mr. Hat Man and Brian surrounded by red and orange and yellow flames. I looked away and Mr. Hat Man lay Brian down beside where I was sitting.

"Is he dead?"

Mr. Hat Man shook his head. "Not yet. Won't be long, though." He unzipped Brian's ragged windbreaker and began unbuttoning the blood-stained Oxford cloth shirt beneath it. I could see my friend's chest fall and rise, but it was jerky, as if he were having trouble breathing

I glanced at his car. "Is that the only song that DJ knows?"

He chuckled. "I set it to play that one over and over. I like that version. It fits in so well with what I do."

"Why, are you a heart doctor or something?"

"You might say that."

"Or a preacher. That where the soul part comes in."

"Hardly that." He undid the narrow black tie and pulled it through the collar until it came free. He tossed it into the car.

"Say, how'd you know he was in there? You couldn't have seen him when you pulled up."

"I've been following you guys all morning." Now he was taking off his plaid sports coat. He hung it over the outer edge of the Chrysler's open door.

"Following us? Why?"

He grinned. "Because I knew this was going to happen. I can smell a fatal accident a million miles away." He sniffed deep and started unbuttoning his own shirt. I scratched my head, but I couldn't puzzle it out.

"Fatal? He's not dead yet, is he? He wasn't dead earlier. How can you smell something that hasn't happened yet?"

He pulled the cloth from his chest, showing a bright blue scar, or maybe seam is a better word, running down from just below his collar bones down to where his navel should be but wasn't. There was another topping that one, along the clavicles, and one below stretching across his gut. It was like a big blue letter I.

"You might say I'm a little different than most of the guys you meet on this planet." He reached up and jerked off the sunglasses.

The eyes were segmented, like a fly's. He grinned as I scuttled back. "Good idea. This is gonna be messy."

He straddled Brian's torso and reached down with both hands for my friend's chest. Long sharp fingers that a minute before had looked perfectly ordinary dug into the flesh over the sternum, making little sprays of blood fountain up. He leaned down and pushed those phalangeal daggers into the torso. I could hear the crackling of ribs separating, the slithery noise of flesh and muscle being forced aside. With a grunt he ripped open Brian's chest, spewing gore all over himself and the road, spattering the white paint of his car and the lower foot and a half of my blue jeans with Brian's blood.

The seam unzipped, and the skin of his own chest peeled back. I could see lungs and a liver and several things I doubt any human doctor could identify. Everything in his chest cavity shuffled around while he dug in Brian's body to bare the still-beating heart. He leaned over Brian, his open chest facing my friend's.

"You might not want to watch this," he said, glancing at me with those clustered eyes.

I think I managed to say something that sounded like it came from an old EC comic book, like the sound effect in the jagged little balloon you saw above a frightened face when somebody finds their wife or husband or kids hacked to pieces, but I didn't move.

He shrugged. "It doesn't matter." He bent down and a light flared up between them, a white glow like a television screen seen from the side in a dark room. He cupped the back of Brian's neck and raised his head. Mr. Hat Man-Bug Eyes planted his thin lips on Brian's limp ones, and the light grew like sunrise in Hell.

Brian stirred, and I could see that the poor bastard was kissing his killer back with what little strength he had to have. I was wondering if he'd embrace the bug-eyed thing, but the bloody hands flopped on the gravel like a couple of flounder on a dusty pier. I couldn't believe it he was enjoying this, since Brian never showed any signs of being, well, that way. But they say you never know, not even about a guy you shared a foxhole with just South of the Yalu River.

On the other hand, it might have been a normal reaction to what Mr. Hat-Man-Bug-Eyes-Frenching-My-Buddy was doing. Hell, it probably didn't matter to him, even if he was what his kind called male. We obviously weren't even his species, and probably not his type, in that sense. We were food, to be harvested at the moment of our deaths, and in whatever world or dimension or level of Hell this asshole came from, this was how they ate whatever part of us it was they ate.

In the background, the song bored through the horror to reach that part of my brain that still understood language. The singer was singing, "Oh! But your lips were thrilling, much too thrilling. Never before were mine so strangely willing."

And that's when I knew what Mr. Hat Man-Bug Eyes-Kissing-My-Best-Friend was up to. Heart and Soul, that's what he does. Somehow the heart to heart and lip-to-lip contact transferred a dying soul into whatever this guy was.

I wanted to run. I wanted to puke. I wanted to hit the son-of-a-bitch, but I just watched until the light faded and Brian's soul had been consumed.

He sat back on his haunches and burped. "Um, tasty." He grinned and slipped the Ray-Bans back over those awful eyes. "Be a neat tale to tell your grandkids, if I was gonna let you remember it."

"You ain't gonna do me that way?"

"Naw. You've got a few decades left before you're ready for another visit from me. Or someone like me."

"Someone like you?"

"Oh, yeah. We're all over the place." He stood and got dressed, tidying up clothes dripping clotted blood and bits of internal organs.

"Don't worry, somebody'll be along soon. You'll be taken to a hospital for observation and released. There won't even be any charges filed."

I nodded at what was left of Brian. "What about that? How'm I gonna explain that?"

"I'll take care of it." A long sharp bloody finger flicked out and tapped my forehead.

Next thing I can remember was waking up in the hospital. I looked around and saw a nurse reading in a chair by my bed. I croaked out, "Where's Brian?"

People came, doctors and police and relatives and even my old commanding officer from Korea. I had lots of flowers and cards. The police took a report and went away. They told me before they went that Brian was burned up in the wreckage. What was left of him was buried a week before I came out of my coma. I didn't dispute them. Mr. Hat Man carried Brian out, he could have put him back while the car was still burning.

My insurance company paid off the car, which didn't help my situation much since it was only worth a couple hundred bucks. But I was glad for whatever I could get.

I don't think I was supposed to remember him, but Mr. Hat Man must not have known about the plate in my head, a souvenir of a Chinese bullet I'd gotten in the way of up near the Chosen Reservoir. Or maybe he did, and just didn't care. Anyhow, I knew what happened, but I didn't tell anybody. Who'd believe it?

I looked for him, though. I wanted to face him when I didn't have a concussion. I didn't know what I could do to him, but I wanted to find out. He told me I had a few decades left, and I spent a good part of them searching for Mr. Hat Man.

So, I knocked around the world, going from one hot spot to another, any place where Mr. Hat Man or his kind might find a plentiful harvest. When Johnson sent the Marines into Vietnam, I was already there as a civilian advisor. My service career was over because of the injuries I got in Korea, but I wanted to be in country. I figured if there was one place in the world I was sure to find Mr. Hat Man, Vietnam would be it. How many mangled bodies would he be able to get to? Heck, he wouldn't even have to do his chest cracking trick half the time.

I think I saw him for a split second during the Tet Offensive in January of 1968. I was in Hue, pinned down by North Vietnamese regulars when I looked over the wall I was crouched behind and spotted a Green Beret wearing Ray-Bans. I nudged the guy next to me, a kid with wide, scared blue eyes and the flattest Midwest twang I've ever heard.

"Say, what's up with that guy? He's just standing there, like he's daring Charlie to zap him," the kid said when I pointed him out.

"Yeah, wonder what he's got in mind. You ever see him before?"

The kid just shook his head, and then half his face disappeared into a fog of blood and powdered bone and brains as a round from an AK-47 bore in just below the steel rim of his helmet. I watched him sag down, then turned my blood-drenched face towards the Green Beret.

He caught my stare and grinned at me the same way Mr. Hat Man did back in '61. He snapped his fingers and gave a slight shake of the head, as if he knew that was one meal he'd have to forego, then he turned and jumped over a wall. I never saw him again.

Maybe I imagined the whole thing. Maybe the plate in my head was picking up a broadcast of some science fiction TV show from somewhere nearby just after the wreck. I can't swear that it was real. But I can't swear that it wasn't.

And maybe what happened in Vietnam was just combat fatigue, or shell shock or PTSD or whatever they call it now.

I quit looking for him after that. I retired and went home. I got married and got a job and had some kids. I stopped worrying about Mr. Hat Man. I realized that if he was real, there wasn't much I could do to prevent him from taking anything he wanted from anyone he wanted to take it from. If he wasn't, well, that didn't matter much either.

Still, every time I hear some kid plinking out "Heart and Soul" on a piano somewhere, or it gets played on an oldies station or an elevator or over my dentist's phone line when I'm on hold, a cold chill sweeps up my spine, circles around that plate in my skull and shoots back down the center of my chest, all the way to my belly button. And then I start looking around me for that damned pair of Ray-Bans, and the grinning bastard wearing them.

And wondering who he's come for this time.

© 2009 by Mark Orr