John McManus: Fox Tooth Heart

I succumb to something like postpartum depression after writing a good song, but in that moment, listening for the first gunshot, it felt nice to finish one. I heard the distant wail of another siren. No, no, no, I thought, because as awful as Gracie’s fate was, I had quit feeling sorry for myself. It faded, the siren. For a few seconds before it picked up again, I felt proud of not screwing up. I would stay free. If Ike Senior was dealing in ivory, he could smuggle me across the border with my songs. No one would steal the songs, not that I’d guessed yet that anyone would try. I was in luck. I supposed it derived from my having inherited my father’s inscrutable poker face, which girls called enigmatic. Most of them couldn’t get enough of it. Not just girls, but critics, too. Critics sought my answers, trusted that they were full of subtext. Comment on the metaphorical structures in your songs, the critics would say to me, and I would reply, “There aren’t any.”

THE MEDIA WOULD REPORTthat the teenage Satanist rest-area murderers all hailed from Letcher County, but Betsy grew up in the Daniel Boone Trailers in bordering Pike County. When she was young, her neighbor Jimmy would sing a ballad that went, Don’t you remember Sweet Betsy from Pike? Who crossed the wide mountains with her lover Ike . Daily Jimmy crooned its verses about Sweet Betsy, her lover, their cattle, their rooster, their pets. He said he’d written it about his sweetheart. He sang it while Betsy rocked on the bench swing, waiting for her ma Irene to get done relaxing. Irene’s boyfriend, Floyd, would call to her when they were done, and Betsy would come running, because she loved Floyd, or she did until Irene soured up on them like a jug of milk. Her ma used to toss meat to the three-legged dog, laugh as it galloped toward the meat; now she quit emerging, took to sleeping through the days. One day Floyd tried to rouse her and she said, “It’s daylight, dipshit.”

“Let’s see a doctor.”

“Let’s leave me be.”

“Love you, Irene.”

“Get out of my face,” Betsy’s ma said into her pillow, at which point Floyd decided she wasn’t inside herself anymore.

“Find her some help,” he told Betsy, packing up his things, and then Betsy quit being inside herself too.

Floating high above their farewell hug, she could see ten trailers and across the mountain into Letcher County. From such height she could hardly ask for Floyd to take her along, or say, “Be my dad,” as he drove away from Kentucky. She was twelve and a half. After a long trance like her ma’s, she left her bedroom to find Jimmy, her singing neighbor, on the couch.

“Your ma’s still in bed, Sweet Betsy, and Floyd’s in Tampa,” Jimmy said, his glassy eyes fixed on Betsy’s chest.

“I’m off to Tampa myself.”

“Not if I cut off your legs,” he drawled, so languidly that Betsy didn’t begin to shriek until he was up and tackling her.

Ma will come, she kept telling herself as Jimmy tugged at her T-shirt, smelling of Cheetos and motor oil, but the door stayed shut. She gave up struggling enough for him to unzip her jeans and touch her down there, saying, “That’s all I wanted. Does it feel okay?”

It felt like the cops might come drag her away. To prepare, Betsy locked her mind in jail, where she sewed, wore stripes, played ball, until jail was tolerable enough to let Jimmy kiss her. “I’ve liked you forever,” he said. Next morning he strapped Irene into the car and drove her to the state hospital. He leased his trailer to a mechanic. He moved in with Betsy, signed drop-out-of-school forms, put her on Depo-Provera, called her his belle, and so on like that for some years until Betsy awoke one day from a nap and a dream, tied a rope round the neck of the three-legged dog, and walked it down the river gorge to the vet clinic.

Behind the counter at the clinic stood a pale boy whose dyed hair matched his black jeans and black turtleneck. “Need this fellow put down,” Betsy said to him.

“Name?” asked the boy, looking weak and skinny enough to be overpowered. Betsy glanced to the stump of the dog’s missing leg. In the dream, she had been injecting kids at her school with euthanasia drugs, and now she planned to steal a shot of pentobarbital to use on Jimmy before driving to Florida.

“Tricycle,” she said.

“Sorry about that.”

“He’s seventeen, plus cancer.”

“It’ll be a few more minutes.”

The dog was sniffing around at Betsy’s feet. What was its real name? “Hamburger,” her ma used to shout at it, in a voice fading from her memory. Would the shot work faster in Jimmy’s heart or in his neck, she was wondering when the boy said, “Grab Tricycle.”

She carried the dog into an exam room. The gruff, alert woman across the table had only to eye it before Betsy saw that her plan would fail. They know, she thought, readying herself for jail once more, but the vet produced a needle, swabbed the dog’s leg, and whispered, “Poor sweet thing.”

Stroking the dog with one hand, she stuck it with the other. It began to gasp. “That’s just agonal breaths,” the vet said; “don’t worry.”

Betsy wanted to retort that she wasn’t fretting about some dog, but she kept quiet until it was over. Back in the lobby the boy asked her for money. “Ain’t got none,” she said.

“Did you think it’s free?”

She shook her head. She hadn’t considered the matter at all.

“Have you got a boyfriend?”

“Sort of,” she said, feeling cowardly again. Jimmy had sprung back to life in her mind.

“I’ll bill you later if you dump that dude and go with me.”

Figuring he was making fun of her, she said nothing.

“My name’s Austin. You a Christian?”

Betsy had never set foot in church, but Floyd was a Methodist, Ma a Baptist, and Jimmy Church of God. “I ain’t anything.”

“Your dog died so I could meet you. You scared of Satanists?”

“Guess not,” said Betsy, ready for anything that saved her from walking home.

“Then how about our date?”

“Okay,” she said, bringing Austin trotting around the counter. He propped her chin in his finger. She clenched up, but to her surprise it felt nice. He tasted of clove smoke. As he breathed heat into her body, she trembled at the energy amassing inside her. She didn’t worry about the cops nabbing her, not even as Austin drove them over into Letcher County, to a brick ranch house at the foot of a ridge.

In the den of that place lay two black-haired girls, one fat and one thin, playing a shoot’em-up video game. “My new friend from Pike County,” Austin said to them.

A boy on the couch, thirteen or so, his hair also black, turned to look, but the girls didn’t budge from their bean bag. “What makes you a Satanist?” asked the fat one, facing the TV.

“Ain’t sure,” Betsy said.

“Are you one? Tell the truth.”

“I’m one cause of the men around here, and Helen too,” said the skinny girl, pausing her game so she could indicate the fat girl.

“I’ll do what you say.”

“Listen,” the skinny girl said, now scrutinizing Betsy. “Five dudes from my stepdad’s road crew up in Beefhide. Afterward he wouldn’t quit the job, my mom wouldn’t leave, and they all go to the Church of God. Who’s God’s enemy?”

Betsy understood to reply, “Satan.”

“So what makes you a Satanist?”

“He lives with me. His name’s Jimmy.”

“We’ll add him to our list. I’m Wendy.”

“I’m Zacky,” the couch boy said.

“Pleasure,” Betsy said, and it was. They wouldn’t be telling their names if she couldn’t stay. Hopeful that the worst had passed, she hugged Austin’s neck. He squeezed her back. And when Wendy said, “You’re safe,” she nearly sobbed aloud at how easily she and the Satanists might never have met.