Claudia Dey - Heartbreaker

“At least it’s October,” says Traps, studying our carpet, my mother’s coat, the water stain made by his boots. “No one tries to die in October.” His voice is rough. He clears it and then lifts his sharp, sad eyes to look at me. “Sorry.”

I unknot and tuck my DEVOTIONAL SECTION T-shirt into my nightpants and watch from the open doorway as Traps has my father shake and brush the sawdust from his clothes, leaving a beige mound on our unfinished driveway and then folding his much larger body into the inferior seat. Traps moves around to the driver’s side door slow as a man in the confident position of being needed. He throws me one last look. The truck peels off. It kicks up gravel and ice. The license plate says DEALR.

You would never know Traps had recently buried his youngest.

No Band-Aid big enough.

WHAT IF SHE comes back before The Heavy does? Will she walk through our front door and up to her bedroom without even seeing me? Will she pull me into her hard frame and whisper apologies and speak promises into my ear and swear she has returned? Will she hold my face to hers like a night-soap mother and say, I see you, Pony, I see you for all that you are? Will she work my hair into a design complex as engines? Will I ride my ten-speed to the bonfire and cause a stir with my new hair design? Will I stand near the flames, ignoring them yet well lit by them, and pull the pins out slowly and let the wind make shapes of my hair? Pony Darlene. Hot damn. Who knew? Even Supernatural will take notice. His ball cap under his hood. Showing just enough of his face. It’s not like it’s about sex with him. No. (Not that I would refuse sex with Supernatural.) It’s more that he strikes me as the only boy in the territory I might have a decent conversation with. I heard Gregorian chants coming from his headphones. Maybe my pain has made me better looking. No. No boy wants the visiting cousin. Will I be able to tell my mother that she has been the only emotional weather in this bungalow for three months straight, and that I too have a lot of feelings? I have a lot of feelings.

I had forgotten all about you.

Yes. You had.

WHAT I KNOW about my mother’s arrival in the territory my mother did not tell me. Lana did. We had gone by Neon Dean’s bungalow. This was the end of July. Almost exactly three months ago. He and Peter Fox St. John were on Neon Dean’s small cement porch sitting shirtless on lawn chairs, retrofitted with foam and old carpet, lifting bags of concrete over their heads. They were working out. Doing reps, they called it. And they were listening to Nazareth. “Love Hurts.” We got off our bicycles. They looked us up and down. We had smudged charcoal around our eyes. Our bra straps were showing. They put down their bags of concrete.

“I know who shot J.R.,” Peter Fox St. John said.

“Shut up, Fuck Pants,” Neon Dean said.

Neon Dean was nineteen, four years older than us. He lived alone. Both of his parents were dead. He showered with his dirty dishes. He had a pet rat called Radical Feminist. Rad for short. He had a girlfriend named Pallas, who was tanned and cruel. She looked like an out-of-work wrestler. She had recently tried to self-pierce her tongue, and now she sounded like Sean Connery. How’sh tricksh? she would say when I biked by her in town. Lana and I were relieved she was not there. The boys were alone. They were checking us out. It was the first time, we agreed, we had been truly checked out, and it made us feel dangerous. We had very little money, but we did have our sex appeal. Neon Dean reached for his toolbox. He had $UPERIOR EXI$TENCE written across the top of it. He flipped open the lid. We bought two white pills and two yellow ones and then went into the woods to the metal husk of the founders’ bus to get very, very high and try to make each other levitate, which is a lot harder than it looks on Teen Spirit .

True story, Lana said. To the max. She said everyone else had been born and raised in the territory. Everyone else could tell stories about each other’s grandparents. Everyone else knew how the others liked their meat cooked. What color thread they had used to sew up their gashes. Your mother just showed up one day in a Mercedes sedan. What kind of vehicle is built that low to the ground? The territory demanded clearance. What kind of world does not? A place to be glided through. The people of the territory had seen Mercedes sedans on their night soaps. Green grass, high heels, tuxedos, endless unmarried fucking. A world without facial issues. Mercedes sedans. An impossible world. Was the woman in the low car an apparition?

Covered in dents and scratches, missing a front fender, muffler scraping the north highway. The woman fell from the driver’s seat of the Mercedes sedan, the car still running, skinning her thigh badly and showing her underwear. It was underwear from elsewhere. Her upper portion smelled like gasoline. Her lower portion urine. She had sucked gas into her mouth. The people of the territory knew about siphoning.

The car radio was playing a song our people had never heard. A kind of music they could not get their heads to move to. A 5/4 beat. Think about that later. For now, one of the men reached in and turned off the ignition of the Mercedes. Our people did not let their vehicles run in May. Winter, sure. Winter, hell yes. But, May? Snowmobiles, generators, chainsaws—what would we do without fuel? When one of the broader men bent down for the woman, she flinched, and then put her arms around his neck. The movement, when it came, was swift and rabid. Feeling a rush, another one of the meeker men joined the effort, though the woman was so thin and without muscles that, not useful, he backed away.

Our people were frightened of the woman. We’d never had a complete stranger here. Never had someone just show up. Was she a descendant of the Leader? She looked like she could come from that stock. Fine bone structure. Luxury vehicle. Do we shoot her or do we feed her? The broad man who had picked her up carried her into Home of the Beef Candy, conscious her dress was up around her waist and her black underwear could not be bought in town. The Heavy was standing in line at the lunch counter taking the place of two territory men. The woman saw him, crawled out of the broad man’s arms, stopped crying immediately, and placed her body against The Heavy’s body. Body on body. Like that, her focus shifted. The Heavy bought her a meal. The woman ate like a predator. The Heavy bought her a second meal. Our people gathered around her, filling the restaurant, spilling out onto the north highway, looking through the window. The men knew to stand beside their wives. They all waited for the woman to speak.

Our people would say later, about your mother, Who knows, maybe women from elsewhere like men with facial issues. Your father had pulled off and burned the last of his bandages just that morning. The morning he saw your mother for the first time. FYI. No joke. Totally perf.

After that, Lana and I played a game we called Wanting. She went first: I want Sexeteria to push up the back of my skirt with his face. And then make me a very mixed tape. I want braces. I want a chain-link fence with red roses threaded through it. Real ones. I want a lace bodysuit with a mock turtleneck. I want to call my first son Everlasting. I want to spend a week in a hotel. I want the pill. And I want the territory to be rich again. Or at least how it was five years ago. And I want 9-1-1. I could have really used 9-1-1. And I want Def Leppard to know my name. Lana Barbara Smith. Lana Barbara. I am like that town in California, but minus California.

Lana and I were fifteen, which was only three years away from getting pregnant and married and pulling our hair back into ponytails of duty and service and wearing pastel dresses and taking the blood of the teenagers at the Banquet Hall and then sitting on the leatherette chairs in our kitchens to look out over the snowfields, our children in them, standing tall on piles of aluminum with rabbit feet around their necks and blowtorches in their hands. We have a very small window, I wanted to say to Lana. Urgent. Very. Small. Window. Urgent.