Heartbreaker

“She had to kill her baby.”

“Then crashing her truck—”

“So she could go to Fully Loaded and get a new one.”

“Any excuse to go to Fully Loaded.”

“Any excuse to see Traps.”

“We know all about your mother.”

“Poaching Traps.”

“We know all about her cheating.”

“But do you?”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s such a deep geek.”

“Geek nation.”

“Welcome,” I said.

“Freak nation.”

“Bienvenue.”

“Mental like her mother.”

“Demented like her father.”

“As is,” I said. And I dropped the white pill onto my tongue. And I ripped the five-dollar bill in half. And I threw my bicycle a shockingly far way.

And when Pallas and Future started at me and I didn’t flinch, they turned to each other.

“I might just want to go home and get into my nightpants.”

“Yeah, I’m tired too.”

“Seriously, I did my bloodwork this morning and need some citrus.”

And they left in their matching WANT IT MORE sweatshirts. Their sweatshirts hung down to their knees. Future’s had a laminated pin on it that said, FAINTER. I had the same pin.

WHEN MY MOTHER first led me through the woods and down to the reservoir, I was shaking with terror. I thought I might throw up, and I told her so, and she said, “It makes our life so much better to have this other separate life. Just to know it is here,” and she held me by the wrist. I was eight, nearly nine. When we reached the shoreline, she unlaced her boots, unclasped her workdress, pulled it over her head, and hung it from a tree branch. The water was still and gray, and the moon was in it white as a bone, and my mother stepped into the water. I gasped. She turned back and put her hand over my mouth. “Don’t wreck it, Pony.” And then I watched my mother from the banks of the black mud as she walked into the reservoir and then did a shallow dive. Would she be sucked down? Would her skin dissolve? Was this where all life began? Since when did my mother wear nothing under her workdress? Where was her white underwear? Her beige bra? A starless sky. To it, my mother let out a cry. It was happiness. She cut through the water. I agreed with my father. I had never seen anyone quite so alive.

I begged her to teach me how to swim.

IT IS TRAPS’S TRUCK, not ours, that backs sharply into the unfinished driveway and fills my body with dread. A reversal meant to awe me. Traps knows I am watching from my bedroom window, the curtain drawn to one side. B E Y O N D. He shuts down his fog lights and pulls in all the darkness around us. My father gets out of the truck. His bowed head, his slow steps. This tells me everything I need to know.

In the territory, the boys are dragging tires, cabinets, wood pallets, whatever they can find to burn, to the graveyard. They have cans of lighter fluid in their back jean pockets and cigarettes in their mouths. They are wearing fingerless gloves, Yamaha vests, and scarves around their heads, tied into bandannas. It is ten below. They grip their handlebars and hold their bodies high off their dirt bikes and pedal hard. They cannot believe muscle has to rip in order to grow. They have playing cards in their wheels that go tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic. They want the territory to show up on a satellite. They want the bonfire to be photographed from space. The boys think about space the way some boys think about girlfriends. They get stomach cramps thinking about space.

In their headphones, the boys listen to asteroids blazing through the atmosphere toward them. Later tonight, they will trade their cassettes by the bonfire while the leather of their running shoes melts.

“Which one are you listening to?”

“Maxell!”

“Oh, that one is killer!”

“You?”

“Memorex.”

I don’t want to tell the boys the asteroid’s approach is the sound of the tape running, and the sound of its impact the tape coming to its end and then clicking off. I don’t want to tell them their tapes are blank tapes, and Deep Space Tapes is a fraudulent business run by the older, smarter brother of Peter Fox St. John, and they should just hit up the Lending Library and check out the Gregorian chants. They’re in the devotional section.

SEVEN THINGS shortly before 10:00 P.M.:

1 The boys of the territory have the same shaved hairstyle as monks. Monks are their own deep space tape. Correlation.

2 There are a million asteroids on a crash course with the earth. This is not the kind of thing you tell a boy whose running shoes are on fire.

3 I put on my mother’s perfume, and I do this exactly the way she would have. I spray my wrists and then I run my wrists up under my hair, and, in that instant, I become a woman.

4 At night, I reliably think about death. I have no aunts, no uncles, no siblings, no grandparents, and when my mother and father are gone, I will be the last Fontaine living in the Last House. Urgent.

5 The reservoir is the result of an asteroidal event, which the astrophysicists also call an impact event. A person could organize her timeline into impact events. This is one approach to understanding a life.

6 While asteroids are, in their own catastrophic way, totally romantic, what the boys of the territory want most is a girl rolling off them saying, That was fucking amazing.

7 Tonight, that girl will be Lana. Lana Barbara California as she will come to call herself.

“YOU NEED ME,” Traps tells The Heavy when they come through our front door, bringing with them the bitter air. On our small cement porch, we have a partial telephone, a broken fridge, and a large piece of chipboard with an 88 painted on it. My mother used to trim my nails on our front porch. I would lie on the cement and she would hold my feet in her lap, and she was radiant. The men kick the ice from their boots and push the door closed. Traps refuses to go home to his wife, Debra Marie, should something come up. He makes a “no way” sign with his hands and calls her on speed dial.

Debra Marie has just suffered what the territory calls its worst tragedy in nearly twenty years. The women of the territory talk about it and how she has not cried once. Not broken down once. Not mentioned her dead child once. The women can’t even tan. They can’t drink their coffee. It’s hideous. It’s cruel. The women feel a weight in their chests, heavy as bronze. Debra Marie, oh, Debra Marie. Poor Debra Marie. It wasn’t her fault. Was it?

After the final resting, when we were leaving the Banquet Hall, even through the commotion, I overheard the men of the territory talking to Debra Marie. They hulked before the black square, which stood in place of the portrait, a bouquet on either side of it, under three floor lamps, and they kept their sunglasses on and did not know what to do with their large arms, like bouncers with nothing left to guard.

“Noble Debra Marie.”

“Noble.”

“If you were a man, that’s what we’d call you, Debra Marie.”

“Noble.”

“Your nickname would be Noble.”

“Yeah, Noble.”

“Noble.”

“HE NEEDS ME.” Traps tells this to Debra Marie over the telephone. Quickly, not wanting to tie up the line. I can see Debra Marie on the other end. Her plain hair arrangements, her purposeful body. She would iron her indoor tracksuit but never put it on. “He has only the one truck. Unlike us. The single vehicle.” Traps adjusts himself and looks for cigarettes. “You have your own truck. Unlike the Fontaine mother, you have your own truck. And it’s fully loaded.” Then he pauses to listen and says, “Okay, okay, almost fully loaded,” and he lights a cigarette, one of my mother’s cigarettes. “She’ll be back. Nowhere to go.” And he glances for The Heavy, to share this small encouragement, but The Heavy has left the room. “Pony was the last to see her.”

And then Traps turns his eyes on me, and lets them go soft and pleading on my mouth. My supple, athletic mouth. I can see him working out the timeline in his head. Two nights until Saturday night. Two nights until I walk the side of the north highway in my button-down and pencil skirt with my perfect waistline-to-ass ratio. A 0.8.

THE SECRET OF PONY DARLENE FONTAINE

THREE MONTHS AGO. Nighttime. When the men of the territory were going to and then leaving Drink-Mart, clusters of them smelling medicinal and exhaling turbines of smoke, clapping each other hard on the shoulder, on the back, a half hug here and there, then dispersing into their trucks to one-eye it home and fall asleep on their wives in their nightdresses, I walked the shoulder of the highway in my white button-down and black pencil skirt. I had a plan. This was step one. I carried a clipboard and waved down the trucks, knowing only one of them would come to a full stop. All of the passing territory men called out, “Pony.” They rolled down their windows. “Pony Darlene Fontaine.” Reaching out with a lotioned hand, I introduced myself as The Complaint Department and asked the men the question I was desperate to be asked, “What is troubling you?” Then I gave them my card with my toll-free number, 1-800-OH-MY-GOD, should they wish to discuss their troubles further.

The men laughed. No one complains here. That is not the territory’s way. Complaint is a form of self-degradation. Hardship is a matter of perception. The men quoted the Leader. The men were missing teeth. They were missing fingers. They were missing testicles. They had slipped disks. They ate the tendons of animals. The organs of animals. They carved them up and gave thanks. Thank you for your meat. They delivered their babies. Their babies became teenagers. Men hunting women. Women hunting men. Men hunting animals. That is how it goes here, Pony Darlene, the men called out, and tearing up the gravel, sped home.

“My only complaint,” Traps said to me, too loud, bit of a slur, throwing on his emergency brake and unlocking his doors, “is that you won’t blow me in the back of my truck.” And, step two, I blew him while he said my name over and over, and when he was done I directed him to his fuel shed, where, step three, he took off his heavy necklace of keys, while looking at me under his security camera. The look was exaltation and the Saturday night sky was dark. However grainy, Traps would watch the video of me waiting for my payment, step four, one full jerry can of his gasoline—one hundred miles of transport—again and again, pausing it at certain moments, when he could really see my face.

I HEAR TRAPS opening and closing our kitchen cupboards. He is looking for the alcohol and concluding his call home to Debra Marie. “We did a tour through the territory. The Heavy doesn’t want to do a door-to-door. Not just yet. Says it’s a family matter. A private matter.”

Tonight, Traps will drink himself to sleep on our beige couch. Too much, too little. He still finds this hard to gauge. He will be standing, talking, drinking, taking, killing, talking, drinking, standing. And then unconscious. Debra Marie loves crime shows. Murder shows. Shows where the plot rests on violence. I wonder when she will stop dragging Traps’s faithless body to comfort. When there will be a trail of blood in his wake. An antler plunged through his heart. “Besides, it’s Delivery Day tomorrow, and no territory woman in her right mind would miss Delivery Day.” He agrees with himself: “No territory woman would miss Delivery Day.”

My father is lying in the half-built room on a hooded chair, and because of the tarp, and the work light he has set up in there, we are both a bright blue. Is she missing? I want to ask him. You can tell me. I can handle it. I can’t handle it. “You need to get some rest,” I say instead to my father, and I unlace and pull off his boots, tug at the cuffs of his jeans. I was with him when he bought the jeans. “Not too tight?” The Heavy said to the salesmen, who nodded with their arms crossed, which was a confusing set of messages. “Denim is a tight and captivating weave,” the salesmen said. The Heavy bought them in a moment of hope. Hope makes you buy clothes that don’t fit you. A brawl to pull off, the jeans hold my father’s shape and appear to be standing, a former fighter turning soft.

“I love that perfume,” he says.

Three things he does not say: Where are you going? When will you be back? Won’t you be cold?

My father, who never raises his voice. Never goes to Drink-Mart. Does not listen to music. Does not watch television. He fears he will miss something real, he explains. Life is about paying attention, Pony.

Traps watches me closely as I lace up my boots and throw on my camouflage outerwear. Camo on camo. I open the front door. On the back of my outerwear are the words I was coloring in earlier with Neon Dean’s impermanent marker, when my mother came down the stairs in her indoor tracksuit, a stale cigarette in one hand and her truck keys in the other. Fifteen years of blank tape running out and clicking off. The asteroidal event. The impact event.

CAN’T TOUCH THIS

THE NORTH HIGHWAY is silver with ice, and Lana is riding behind me. This is our usual formation. Tonight, we’re just trying to stay upright. The road is slick. The shoulder better. At least there’s some traction. In the distance, we can see the bonfire, sparks shooting up into the low black sky. Of note: This is exactly what I see before I faint. Same panorama. I listen to protest rallies and sporting events (also in the devotional section). I love the sound of a crowd. I put the tapes into my cassette recorder, and I feel surrounded. I pump my fist in the air and nearly wipe out. Lana lets out a howl behind me.

When I arrived at Lana’s bungalow, she was at her bedroom window. She had teased her hair and was holding a crowbar in her hands, vigorously working the bottom of her window frame. I knew she would be sweating. She was a sweater in the first degree. Nerves or yearning.

Two years ago, Lana’s mother died. Caution. Steep drop. Lifeguard off duty. The women of the territory decided the cause was inconsolability. Soon after her mother’s death, Lana’s father married a girl just a few years older than Lana. This is how it goes in the territory. In the rare instance a woman dies, it is expected her husband will remarry. Children need a mother. If a man dies, his widow remains a widow. Children need a mother, and they still have one. Lana’s mother’s portrait is wrapped in a black bedsheet and stored in their toolshed. Lana’s stepmother’s name is Denise. Her portrait hangs above their mantel. In it, she wears a very tight sweater and Vaseline on her eyelashes, and a smile that seems to say, I am pretty sure I am being paid for sex with food, shelter, and beauty products. Her name necklace, given to her by an ex-boyfriend, says DENIS.

Lana’s mother’s color scheme was violet. Now, Lana’s bungalow is red, and her stepmother sits sidesaddle on the shag carpet in their living room, watching television and eating from a large bowl. She is pregnant, and most nights, Lana’s father stands in their driveway with his truck running, staring into his high beams until his eyes sting. When Lana screamed at her father, “Admit it, there’s a stranger in the house, and she’s evil! Admit it, Denis is pregnant with another man’s baby!” Lana’s father put a lock on her bedroom door and painted her window shut.

I watch Lana fall to the ground and walk unevenly to her ten-speed. Her father has rigged their front yard with motion-detector lights. Lana’s father reminds me how completely I have slipped from The Heavy’s view. Maybe it’s the camo on camo, I joke to myself. A joke is a disguise. Don’t you think there is always something unspoken between two people? Someone said this once. Paint my window shut. Worry about me. I want my father, The Heavy Fontaine, to paint my window shut. I want my father to worry about me. I want my mother to come home.

“You are totally talking to yourself,” Lana says and looks back at her bungalow, bungalow 2. “Teen prison break. Seriously. I might have just broken my wrist. Is everything all right? You look like Cherie Currie. Only after a fight. And before a hunt. With longer hair. And more height. And less fame.”

“Thank you.”

“And maybe poorer and more isolated.”

“Let’s roll.”

“Psyched.”

Lana has tied a strip of leather around her neck. She is wearing a snowmobile suit and her steel-toe, steel-shank boots. She has belted the snowmobile suit and cut off the arms. She has her wool socks pulled up above her knees. “It’s the closest I can get to lingerie,” she says. On the back of her armless suit she has written HIGH HOPES. She digs her heels into the ground. It’s frozen. Even The Heavy couldn’t muscle through it. Winter in the Death Man’s shed. “Damn-o that camo. I can barely see you. Don’t get shot!” Lana says. Then a tremble to her lower lip. “Seriously. Killing you would kill me.” She laughs. “1-800-OH-MY-GOD.”

I DID NOT NAME the complainant (as much as she tried to get it out of me), but I did tell Lana about The Complaint Department. One July night, in the founders’ bus. Two pink pills, three blue ones. This was soon after I secured my first jerry can of gasoline. Nineteen more to go.

“It’s not like kissing on television,” I said.

“Duh,” Lana said.

“Not even close.”

“Okay.”

“You have to really relax your mouth. See? More. That’s better. That’s good. Your mouth goes a lot farther back than you think it does. Remember when we took our emotional measurements? We thought I would have the broader shoulders, but you did? The actual measurement of your mouth will astound you. Blowing will free you from the emotional measurement of your mouth.”

“Exciting.”

“And could have a domino effect on your other body parts.”

“Bonus.”

“Despite the name, there’s no blowing.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t blow on it.”

“I won’t.”

“Don’t blow on the dick.”

“I won’t. I mean, when the dick shows, I won’t blow on it.”

“By the end, it will not be unlike the headbang.”

“All right.”

“You’ll feel it in your neck in the morning.”

“Okay.”

“If you need a break, you just tuck the dick under your hair and up behind your ear. Rub it against your jawline. You are in charge. This is an exchange and you are in charge of the exchange.”

“I am in charge.”

“Regardless of depth, pacing, and tongue placement, this is the most important part. You are in charge.”

“I am in charge.”

“Don’t worry.”

“You know that’s hard for me,” Lana said.

And then stoned, so stoned, Pony Ali, Le Pony Ali of the Superior Existence, I said, “This might be my one natural talent.”

“You are so lucky, Pony.”

The small voice. The large darkness. It opened up between us. And I was suddenly no longer stoned. I was so unstoned. So unlucky. Pony of the Inferior Existence.

Of course that July night I had been thinking about the scene I left at home. It was Free Day. The day after my mother totaled the truck. My mother, a fresh cut above her left eyebrow where she hit the windshield, almost invisible under her black bedcovers, our dog the only one allowed in there with her, and one floor below, my father building a room, which, let’s admit, is not for my mother but for him. His alternate jeans and his outerwear folded in a neat stack on the ground. While other territory men drag razors across their scalps and weep into black towels, my father wets his hair and combs it off his face with his fingers. He leans over our kitchen garbage and trims his beard. He is the only man in the territory with hair, and this is because of his scars, because before Debra Marie and Traps, my father’s tragedy was what the territory called its worst tragedy. And right now, my father is sleeping on a hooded chair. A chair he built for my mother after she said—and we could see she had been crying—“If only this chair had a hood.” A chair to keep her coming downstairs. To keep her sitting with us. Our people are a sitting people. When the women of the territory aren’t drawing blood at the Banquet Hall, they are sitting across from each other and starting with “You good?”

My father called it the Easiest Chair. Not the easier chair. Not the less difficult chair. But the Easiest Chair. My father, The Heavy. My father, the heaviest.

The sun was rising, and with it, I could read the graffiti on the ceiling of the founders’ bus, and it was all about love, which seems to be all about addition, about surplus.

person + person

person + person

person + person

Where were the minus signs?

THE PIT PARTY. The boys have set what they can on fire, and the girls are sitting in a loose circle, leaning on headstones, leaning on each other, flames as high as their bungalows. Perfect circles are for other people, people who don’t have the dead in their way. Lana and I add our bicycles to the pile. I hand Lana her three pills. “Ready?”

“Amped.”

I put mine on my tongue. Yellow, pink, blue. We swallow them together.

“Sit on my face, Pony Darlene!” one boy yells. He pronounces face like fay-uhssss. He has small bleeds on his jaw from shaving. He jogs around the bonfire holding a can of butane in the air. He has drawings up and down his bare arms. Fangs, knives and tires, guitars, bikinis and telephones, the Death Man, an IV drip, and words cap-lettered—BLOOD, JUSTICE, LADIESMAN. He pounds his chest and says, “What do we have left to burn?” He pronounces burn like bee-yurnnnn. The pills kick in.

Neon Pony.

Welcome.

Bienvenue.

“I’m the Secret Service!” yells another boy. He is looking at the girls and needing the girls to look back at him. They won’t. The girls, who have all had sex encounters, have their names on their necklaces. They glint by the fire. Their hair falls far down their backs and is picked up by the black wind. It takes on a new form with every gust. Touch it. Touch me. I am the softest thing going. “Nature wants girls and kills boys,” one girl says. She is wearing an eye patch, and I know it’s because she needs it. “I tried to make alcohol from potatoes,” one skinny boy says, “and my father duct-taped me to a chair for two days.” The other boys hold themselves and laugh, “Two days!” And the skinny boy laughs though I can see he is sore, and was after love.

The girls pass a bottle, drinking through a straw to quicken the effect. The ones who did their bloodwork this morning are seeing spots. They fall back and take in the sky. “This sky is so dull! Do something, sky! Do a meteor shower or something! Feel me up! Make it summer!” The girls grin until they show their gums. They untuck their shirts and knot them under their breasts. They fold the waistbands of their pants down so the edges of their hipbones come up. My hipbones. You like them? They’re new. Softness bracketed by hardness. Copyrighting this look, the girls think, copyrighting this whole look, my best look, and when the girls sit up, “Head rush,” they stare down at the ground to settle it. Their blood multiplies itself, racing to occupy the spaces that need occupying. They train their eyes on the incline, the one Supes might walk over any minute. Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love. Someone said this once.

One night, almost two years ago, Lana and I snuck into her father’s truck. We wanted to steal his cigarettes, his small change. Whatever we could find. He had just married Denis. “She brought a belt to the marriage,” Lana said. “Seriously. She showed up with a belt. That was it. A belt.” We wanted to steal her father’s truck.

“I can drive,” I said.

“Not well enough,” Lana said.

Like every matte black truck in the territory, Lana’s father’s had a CB. We dialed through the frequencies, getting mostly static. “Come in, come in,” I said. We were both in our nightdresses, had badly crimped hair and whatever press-on nails we could press on. “Come in, come in.” And then a girl’s voice came through, “I read you.” Lana grabbed the microphone. “Go ahead,” the girl said. “I’m pregnant,” Lana said, lying. My mouth dropped open. “I need help,” Lana said, not lying. The girl began her instruction. It was Pallas. Before she got together with Neon Dean. Before she got tanned and cruel, and tried to pierce her tongue. After her fourteenth birthday. When she got pregnant with the Delivery Man’s baby.