John McManus - Fox Tooth Heart

They fed Betsy ice cream, then got out a legal pad and read out some names. There were schoolkids, teachers, cousins, doctors, cops, an Exxon clerk who’d banned them from his store. Get your nasty asses out, that man had said, for which he would die. Was Betsy okay with it? She nodded. “Prove it,” the fat girl said.

“That’s Helen,” Wendy said again.

“The dog I put to sleep today wasn’t mine.”

“At Austin’s vet?”

“It wasn’t even sick. It had three legs, but I was stealing the shot to use on Jimmy.”

“Listen, I said you’re safe here, but only if we’re safe. Cops want us gone.”

“I don’t mind,” Betsy said, without stopping to think.

“Then you can be one of us,” Wendy said. “Prepare for your ceremony.”

Betsy let herself be led outside. The others gathered in a circle. Night was falling on the hollow. Austin and Zacky lit lighters whose flames obscured the ground, giving Betsy a sense of hovering in space. “In the name of Satan,” they all intoned, as she shook with relief, “ruler of earth, chief of the serfs, I command the dark to bestow its power,” and so forth, straight on into Lucifer’s vow, growing louder, while up the valley a coyote screamed back at them like some organic siren.

The next day Wendy drove Betsy to the Save-A-Lot in Whitesburg for hair dye. Back at the house she applied it to Betsy’s hair during her soap operas. She lent Betsy one of her black shirts and one of Austin’s. Betsy was hoping to learn more chants, but there weren’t any. Zacky showed her how to play Tomb Raider . When Austin got home, he snuggled up to her on the carpet. Breathing to match his breath, she tried her best not to move until dinner, frozen pizza, which they ate on the couch during Buffy .

“What’s the plan for tomorrow?” Betsy asked after a while.

“What do you mean?” Austin said.

“Like what will we do?”

“I’ve got my work.”

“I mean long-term. Tomorrow, but also in general.”

“If you want,” said Wendy, “you can fly to the moon, but we’re staying put.”

Later, in his room, Austin let Betsy keep her clothes on and even slept in his own clothes, “So I won’t have to bother with it in the morning.”

“Do you like your job?” she asked.

“I wish I were a girl so I could stay home for All My Children .”

“So you’re saving up money?”

“Saving for what?”

“I’m asking you. Like for school?”

“No, I’m thinking I’ll just hop trains.” His words were slow and measured, as if he’d weighed the merits of trains against the merits of school.

“Can you still do that?”

“No law against it. How do you have fun?”

“Hang out, mostly.”

“I’d quit, but Wendy won’t let me. She and Helen watch Days of Our Lives .”

All night under the covers Austin never unclasped her bra. It was the same on the nights after. A few times he pressed Betsy’s palm to the blond fuzz on his belly, but mostly they just cuddled. She came to feel safe with him, and she liked the faraway burn of his wide eyes; still, it wasn’t long after she’d denied Jesus the deceiver that she decided her new boyfriend was stupid.

He didn’t know who the president was. Nor did he know his own parents’ names or their ages. What bothered Betsy was how he didn’t even mind. She’d dropped out herself, but she still wondered stuff, like what came before the beginning of time? Austin said he’d never considered that. He thought Tennessee was a part of Kentucky. There used to be Indian cities where you could ride around on mammoths; he didn’t care. He tried to suck milk out of her breasts, complained when there was none. “Can I ask you something?” he said one morning in bed.

“Shoot,” said Betsy.

“How often do you think. .” He seemed to trail off.

“How often do I think what?”

“No, how often do you think?”

“Like per minute?”

“Like how many times.”

“It’s hard to count.”

“For real?” he asked, which was when Betsy began to fall out of love. Not just with Austin. Back when Wendy had first spoken about the road crew, she’d struck Betsy as wise. Now, after days on end of her pulling Helen’s hair over nothing, smacking her for winning video games, she seemed compulsively violent. Every dinner was frozen pizza. Never was there a prayer to Lucifer. Afraid that the Satanists might sense her disdain and banish her to Jimmy, she devised plans for mass killings, like gassing the shaft of the Leary Mine.

“Cops?” Wendy retorted.

“We’ll kill them too.”

“Don’t be a moron.”

“But the list.”

“Satan ain’t about killing, it’s about power.”

“He,” said Helen, as if they had a stake in Satan’s gender.

“So the list was some joke?”

“If we kill in Kentucky,” said Wendy, maneuvering her avatar across a chasm, “we’ll get stuck in Kentucky.”

“How about Florida?”

“Thousands of miles away,” said Austin, reaching his stupid hand toward her. She had only wanted to seem useful. She’d sworn to have her heart torn out should she betray the oath, but no one needed her. She excused herself, not that they cared, and went wandering onto an old goat trail. It climbed to a high meadow where azaleas bloomed red-orange against the green hills. She paused there to take in the vista. Half the men on their list were down below, in a coal mine. A methane explosion could end their lives, but the Satanists were just kids, scared kids without imagination. To worship somebody, even Satan, Betsy believed, you needed a range of imagination.

As if the cops had read her mind, a siren came slicing through the valley, its wail alien to a landscape whose only manmade sight was their house. It slowed, became stationary. Run and hide, she was thinking when the house burst into flame.

Perplexed, she sat down on a rock. It was spreading quickly. Do something, she thought, poking at a skin of clay coating the rock, but she couldn’t remember how you prayed to Satan. Were her friends burning alive?

When the siren fell silent, she heard only crackling flames, tree limbs in the wind.

It occurred to her why the fire had metastasized so fast: the cops had arrested the Satanists for arson, and only then had they doused the place in gasoline.

Strangely empty of fear, Betsy hiked down the opposite side of the ridge. In the valley, where the trail met the road, she came to a place called Beech’s Store.

“Seeking a ride to Florida,” she told the Mayfield Dairy man.

“Anything for you,” the milkman said, letting her into his truck. He drove them onto the highway. “Hear about that fire?” he said.

“Ain’t from these parts.”

“Devil worshipers burned their house to a crisp.”

They were coming into a steep gorge. “Why do they worship the devil?” Betsy asked, keeping watch on the man’s reflection while her eyes followed the river.

“Who knows, but those kids have been lurking for years. Fire was God’s blessing.”

“Huh.” A blessing, thought Betsy, taking stock of his hanging cross, his Jesus fish, his John 3:16 sticker. Red dots on the radar detector were blinking as if in code. Something didn’t seem right. “Why’s the river going upstream?” she asked, reorienting herself to realize they were traveling north into the Kentucky hills again.

“Like I’m driving to Florida with a truck of milk,” said her driver, chuckling as if Betsy was a holy fool.

“Stop,” she demanded, right at the Pike County line, so that when he did coast to a halt, it was at the foot of the drive leading to the Daniel Boone Trailers.

•

Gazing up that eroded slope, Betsy could see the bench swing, her bedroom window, and Jimmy’s Dodge Daytona. Full of the adrenal fear that had been wearing her down ever since her pa had split, she decided to steal that car from Jimmy. Upon her vow, the dread didn’t recede. I’ll never return, she swore, standing in place, but still it surged. I’ll be just a few minutes. I’ll shoot Jimmy with his rifle, and that did it; now she could wend her way uphill, recalling memories of Pa. Turnip had been his name. He spoke Québécois French, assembled clocks for fun, worked at the hardware store until one day he up and quit. Could it be he’d grown tired of missing his soaps? There was one in particular; had it been All My Children ? “You’re mocking me,” Irene had replied, reaching for the cast-iron skillet, which she hefted and swung into Turnip. He slumped over, blood trickling out of his temple onto one of his clocks. “I’ll do worse,” Irene threatened while Betsy ran to the crawlspace, where she hid while her father staggered off toward Canada.