Claudia Dey - Heartbreaker

My mother pulled the front door open with her sure grip, her athlete’s grip, and the northwest wind came hurtling in at us. It was a wind that could carry tires and shatter glass. You had to walk with your back into the northwest wind. There was a partial moon, and you could see the snow was blowing sideways. Our dog paced at my mother’s feet, lush and frantic. It had been months since she had truly felt the weather. She had braids all through her coat. My mother, looking ahead and then back, her mouth moving slowly, but sounding like herself for a moment, said with tenderness, “I had forgotten all about you.” I told myself she was speaking to me. At last, she was speaking to me.

My mother came to this place as a stranger. Now I feared she was retracing her steps out. Returning to a world she had refused to describe to me. Billie Jean Fontaine. Billie Jean. Was that even my mother’s real name?

WE LIVE ON a large tract of land called the territory. When the Leader and his followers first laid claim to it some fifty years ago, they called it Upper Big Territory. Now, it’s just the territory. The descriptors were redundant. Aerial view: two thousand square miles of forest. Population: 391. We started as a single busload searching for the end of the world. Now, look at us.

We didn’t spread out.

The north highway cuts a straight line through town, and this is where you will find most of our local businesses. The residential streets branch off from the north highway in a grid. They are not named. In the territory, we go by bungalow number. Lana’s is 2. Neon Dean’s is 17. Ours is 88. Guess how many bungalows are in the territory? Exactly. One of my favorite jokes is to pretend I’m lost. I will be riding my ten-speed in my mother’s powder-blue workdress, her purse strapped across my body and her ATV helmet on, and I’ll see someone at the edge of their property, and I’ll flag them down and say, Yeah, so, hey, there I was on the north highway, made a couple of turns, and now I am just all spun around. Just totally lost. Cannot seem to find my way back home.

Bungalow after bungalow, built all at once when the territory began. Small cement porches. Snowmobiles and swing sets in the yards, and the girls with show hair long like their mothers’, long like their dogs’, and the men and boys shaved to near bald. Let me give you the lay of the land. The men love to start a lecture this way. Our dogs are white here, and there are no leashes. It is acceptable to make a leash-like mechanism for your children, but not for your dog. Your dog is an animal and to forget her nature is to forget your own. If you would like to see a dog on a leash, turn on your television. We will barbecue under a tarpaulin for our dogs in the dead of winter, but we will not give them names. You. Come. Here. Get. Names are for our people not our dogs. If you would like to see a dog with a name, watch Lassie. It’s on at four. Duct tape in medicine cabinets. Radios with batteries carried from room to room. Always the sound of a truck in the distance. Knowing the trucks by sound. Who is approaching. Who is not going home. Deadbolts on garage doors. A bear on your property after the thaw. Motion-detector light. Gunshot. Beards a sign of mental damage. Gunshot. Tanning beds in our sunken dens, and many of our people the shade of anger. Smelling like coconut oil in line at Value Smoke and Grocer. None of the men going by their birth names. Wishbone, Sexeteria, Hot Dollar, Fur Thumb, Visible Thinker, Traps. The Heavy. Let me give you the lay of the land: men, women, children, loaded rifles. Hearts stop. Dogs, trucks, winter, fucking. Hearts break.

See that lone white bungalow? Now, see the lone window looking out from beneath the roof on the south-facing wall, the one with the black sheet for a curtain that appears to have a single word spelled out in duct tape? That is my bedroom and the word is B E Y O N D. From below, you can only really make out Y O, message enough.

WE HAVE A travel agent though no one has ever left the territory. We call her One Hundred as she is either very close to or just past that in years. She has been here from the beginning. Her left pupil is wiped out and translucent with blindness, but otherwise, she is more fit than most and works nights in the back of Drink-Mart at a card table on a foldout chair. If you buy her a drink, she will pull out one of her four black gym bags, unzip it slowly, and show you her away pamphlets. The gym bags are called North, South, East, and West. Given the North is all we know, no one chooses North and it is clear that bag is empty. South, East, and West our broadest men can barely bench-press.

In the cold months, we can’t bury our dead. Our people try to die in the summer. If you don’t, your body is put on a cot and wheeled into the walk-in freezer of the Death Man’s shed, a square of lumber, fiberglass, and Freon tubing twenty steps from the sliding back doors of his well-maintained trailer. He has gulls on his property though he is nowhere near water. While the Death Man is soundless, his gulls whine and screech and dirty themselves, and we tell them, Stop your commotion, we know what mourning is.

We all find it difficult to look at the Death Man when he walks by us in town. The dead have their secrets and he knows them. His bullet eyes, his bleach vapor, his unmarried, mannequin hands. If you die, the Death Man will be the last to touch your naked body with all its private codes. Not your mother, not your girlfriend, but the Death Man and his indoor gloves. The thinking is: Normal men volunteer to fuck women or fight fires, not store the dead.

When the thaw finally comes, we catch up on our funerals. We call this time final resting. For the first month of the thaw in April, sometimes May, we have a funeral every third day. If someone dies during this time, bad luck, their corpse must wait its turn. While it is stored in the Death Man’s shed with the others, we are consoled it does not have to linger there through those long months of the sky in its deep freeze when our people are tanned but heartsick, immortal gulls cawing and bombing like psychotic confetti.

You won’t see a gull anywhere else in town.

The entire territory comes out for a funeral. Even if you just sawed off your finger or lost an eye, you come out. In the beds of their matte black trucks, the men put their shovels. They try to keep their Man Store denim clean when it is time to fill the grave. The territory men wear sunglasses whatever the weather. Sunglasses never come off. The women don’t wear sunglasses, and their black mascara runs down their faces. They don’t bother to wipe it away. A beaten face is a grieving face. Last thaw, the trend was electric blue.

A special-order cassette stereo plays our final resting tape—instrumental—and Shona Lee, her bangs flipped back, her voice holy, solos:

GOOD TIMES, BAD TIMES—

Around the grave, we huddle in a mass until one of the men steps from the scrum to speak. A bottle of local alcohol is passed until it reaches the man in his tribute. He drinks while he speaks, but he does not smoke. Here, at final resting time, women smell like women and men smell like women. No one can light a cigarette for the heavy hairspray, aftershave, and perfume. We smoke the moment we are back in our trucks and speeding to the Banquet Hall with the windows down. Even the children will smoke after a funeral. They are expected to.

Every man in the territory has his portrait taken yearly from the age of thirteen onward. Sometimes the man will pose beside his truck or his dog or his girlfriend or, depending on his fitness, in a clean tank top holding up a barbell or the closest, heaviest thing. Bag of concrete, glass table, propane tank. Sometimes the portrait is just the young man’s face, which can make you feel you never knew him. Never noticed that scar or that chipped tooth. When you walk into the Banquet Hall after the burial, our cots and IV poles pushed to the side, the buried man’s portrait is propped up on the stage. A bouquet on either side of it. A lineup forms and everyone in the territory gets a moment before the portrait. You can touch it, kiss it, and make as much noise as you want, but once you walk away, you have to pull yourself together because you, then all those around you, could lose the point of the endeavor. As grief manhandles, it can be manhandled. This is what we tell each other, followed by, depending on who you are talking to, hard sex or light punching.