Claudia Dey - Heartbreaker

Free Day is the day we put our unwanted objects at the edges of our properties, and you can just ride by and take whatever you want. Most of the items are in need of some repair, and these are clearly marked AS IS. I always started at Neon Dean’s on Free Day because sometimes he left money or pills in the pockets of his old clothes. I had done my tour through town and had a Betamax, headlamp, and crimping iron balanced on my handlebars and had roped a shovel and a ceiling fan to the back of my bike. Deal with it. Hell yes. Focus Thine Anarchy. Pony Ali. Things were looking up.

When I got home, my mother’s bedroom was in a pile on our front yard. Neon Dean’s girlfriend, Pallas, a few years older than me, was rifling through it. She had human bite marks on her skin and my mother’s belts fastened around her neck. Her friend was with her. I had seen her friend around. She was Rita Star’s daughter, and Rita Star had called her Grace, and Grace wanted nothing to do with her mother. The women of the territory would sit at Rita Star’s kitchen table in their ski jackets and white underwear after tanning in Rita Star’s tanning bed and talk about their falling-out, and how unnatural it was for a mother to be separated from her daughter even though Grace lived right across the street in bungalow 21 on a mattress in Pallas’s closet. Pallas had rigged a string of lights and nailed a final resting bouquet above Grace’s head. All I need is tuberculosis. Grace laughed and changed her name to Future.

Future was stabbing her cigarette into the ground. She stood up. She had my mother’s lotions, perfumes, waterproof makeup, and underwear stuffed into the large pockets of her daypants. She pulled on my mother’s silver party dress and smoothed it over her body.

“When he sees me in this, he’s going to name his dick after me.”

“He is.”

She found my mother’s red ski jacket and put it on over the silver party dress.

“When he sees me in this, he’s going to make me pregnant with his supernatural baby.”

“He is.”

“Futurenatural.”

And then seeing me, Pallas said, “Seriously?”

And Future said, “Seriously.”

I was wearing hunting glasses and Neon Dean’s discarded camo outerwear, which had a white pill in the right pocket and five dollars in the left. I came to a stop in front of them. It was warm enough to kick up some dirt.

“Nice show the other day,” Pallas said.

“Yeah, nice show at the final resting for Debra Marie’s baby, ” Future said.

“Real nice.”

“Real classy.”

“We know all about your mother, Pony Darlene.”

“She’s a cheater.”

“Yeah, we know all about her rampant cheating.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“So jealous of Debra Marie—”

“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.