Claudia Dey - Heartbreaker

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?”