by Claudia Dey
I was still wet from swimming in the reservoir, and my father, just in from the rain, was wet too. Water spilled down his face. He soaked my bed. His black mood, the mean hurt of his body. He told me he felt ill. He said it was his fault the baby died.
Did you do something to her?
My darkest question.
I had to move my feet out of the way when my father sat down. I could hear the squelch of his jeans when he did. My bed was too short for me, and my feet hung off the end of my mattress and touched the wall. My mother had given me a mirror from her purse that was the size of a playing card. I had it propped up on two old nails. Under my bed, I had books and parts of books from the Lending Library. I made the reading to Billie seem random, but it wasn’t. I had thought it through. Like everything I did, I had thought it through.
I knew in the morning, my father would wake angry with his eyes red and his boots on, unable to move his body properly. I knew I would have to wait for him to pass out. His long and uncontrollable sentences. “I have never felt so tired. I have never felt so cold. I’ve never wanted so much to talk. I have things to say. I have no one to talk to,” my father said to me. “Why won’t you talk to me?”
“You don’t have to hold it in,” I said to Billie the last time I saw her. We were in the clearing the day after the final resting for our daughter.
“Hold what in? I mean what would you even call it? What would you call this? Do you have a name for it? With all your reading, you must have a name for it. Tell me! Tell me what you would call this because I don’t have a name for it.” And Billie pounded at her body, fell to the ground. Eventually, she grew quiet, and, when she looked up, the owl hung there, many feet wide and not flying. “Did you make that happen?” She looked from the owl to me like it was the owl she knew, but I was unfamiliar.
* * *
BILLIE − WILL
* * *
MY FATHER PROPPED my desk chair under the handle of my bedroom door with my mother on the other side of it asking if everything is okay in there. And then we could hear as her body slid down, and she hit her head against the door until my father and I told her everything is okay, we will be out in a moment. The sun burned through the curtains of my bedroom window, and, looking like he was on fire, my father, still at the end of my bed, sat on my feet now. Sober, he would not let me go. His wasted days. How little he has felt. He has been disloyal to his wife, jealous of his son. He is the only man who slows to a stop on Saturday night. No other man can bring himself to cheat with the daughter of The Heavy. The Heavy, who has lost so much. He is the only one. He keeps men low and broken. He sewed up his best friend’s gaping wrists with bright blue thread. He nearly let him die. One woman had told him she loved him, and for twenty years she was lying. It was his fault the baby died. He had wished it. Just the night before he had wished it. And his wish had come true. He could not love. He could only trap. And The Silentest Man had seen that in him at a young age. “Traps,” my father spoke his own name. “Traps.”
Then he said, “Remember when The Heavy and the Fontaine mother had that party? People talked about the party for a long time. It was her idea. Remember when we showed up, the first thing we noticed was that badminton net strung across their yard. Remember it came out that the Fontaine mother had made the net. Woven the net. You know it became so after the party, whenever one of the men saw something in town—a truck, a coat, an apple—he’d say, ‘The Heavy’s wife made that.’ We’d joke, ‘Oh that? That ATV? The Heavy’s wife made that. The fucking sun? The Heavy’s wife.’ That baby? Yeah, The Heavy’s wife made that baby too. The Heavy’s wife made that baby. The Heavy’s wife made that baby. With you. The scene at Delivery Day. Your mother walking in, and the Fontaine mother walking out. I couldn’t get it out of my head. And something had gotten into you; that much was clear. I followed you. One night, a few weeks later. Took my binoculars and watched you as you hid yourself there in the woods opposite the Fontaine bungalow. The look on you. That’s when I knew I was right. That’s when I made the wish. Only wish I ever made that came true—”
“Did you do something to her?”
“I didn’t touch the baby. I swear I didn’t touch her. I would never have touched her. Never have harmed her. I’m not sick. I’m not a bad man. Can you see that, Son? Can’t you see that? Just trying to do good. To do right. I’m not a bad man. But I did wish her gone. I did. I could not look at one more thing that was not mine. One more thing I didn’t make.” And when my father went to punch my face, I let him. His pinkie ring caught on then sliced through my top lip. Same room, same bed, same sun. I needed something to look different.
It was the one night I didn’t bring her into my room. When she didn’t cry, I must have slept.
When my father and I finally opened the door to my bedroom, my mother was in her nightdress and directionless in our hallway. “Look at you,” my father spat at my mother, “just look at you. I believed you. Do you have any idea how much I needed to believe you?” And when he pushed past my mother, she tried to hold him back by the shoulders then by the waistband of his jeans and eventually by the ankles. Her tendons lifting, she had him by the boots. Then, my mother’s noble face, she held her hands to it, and she let my father go.
I watched my mother in her awkward shoes lift her body into the driver’s seat of her small truck. How she made herself keep going. Forever bent over the kitchen table. Doing nothing. Then raking the yard. Then folding the black sheets. Having the baby gave her the chance to move with effect. Now, she moved with no effect, and one morning, on a day that was not garbage day, she put all of the small clothes she had made for the baby, everything she had knit, into a box, and left the box where our yard meets the north highway; then she turned back toward the bungalow, toward me, an empty woman.
* * *
“I LOVED HIM,” my mother tells me now when I come through our side door and into the kitchen. Her coat is on, and her face is glossed and certain. Behind her, a cast-iron pan is bare and smoking. I turn the stove off. Outside, the snow has stopped falling. “I still love him.” She looks away from me standing before her in The Heavy’s clothes. With his hair. His body. The kitchen ceiling has always been too low. “It started before I was married to your father and it lasted until the night of our engagement. I had dreams and I lost track of them, Will Jr. A person is more than one thing; a person is many things. Why can’t a woman be more than one person in a lifetime? Why can’t she be two or three? I know I was unfaithful, in so many different ways, unfaithful, but I don’t know how to explain the need I had for my freedom. My dutiful mother, my dutiful grandmother. That was what I saw lying in wait for me. He was Jay Jr. then. We would jump from the windows of our bedrooms and see each other whenever we could. We kept the relationship a secret. It is good to take risks, Son. It is important to take risks. When I finally gathered my nerve and raised the question of marriage, Jay Jr. could not explain why he wouldn’t marry me. I was desperate for an explanation, and he broke down. He was sorry. He was so sorry, but he never could tell me why. I thought I might die with the pain. I had never felt so much pain. To hurt him, I turned to his best friend, Traps. We were young. You have such a sense of justice and vengefulness when you are young. It is so enlivening! And by these two things, I was moved—not by love—to seduce your father, and your father, easily flattered, proposed. I married him only so The Heavy would have to see me in a wedding dress standing next to another man, in the arms of another man. My thinking became sectional. I put people into sections, and I had to work to keep up with the sections. When Jay’s house caught on fire, and he lost his family, your father, upon seeing my grief, how the sections of my mind caved in, wondered if something had happened between me and Jay. He looked at me differently, our life together differently. He looked at you differently. When I told him we would be parents again, all of his doubt went away. Doubt is desperate. Doubt is lonely. Traps was awash with
belief, and it made him soft for a time. I never told him. Never told him that when we married, I was already pregnant with you, Jay’s son. The Heavy’s son. Heav.”
My father = The Heavy.
My daughter = The Heavy’s granddaughter.
* * *
THE FLOOR IS COLD. “Please forgive me.” My mother crouches. She is the lone, dim light above me. “I don’t know why I have told you so little over the years when inside there was always so much to tell.”
* * *
BILLIE SAID TO ME, “Is love all you need? Is all you need love? Have I loved well enough? Does Pony know how she is loved, that the love I feel for her is an injury? My worst permanent injury. And still I try to walk around.”
* * *
AND STILL I TRY to walk around.
6:42 P.M. October 26, 1985. Saturday. The porch light is on at the Fontaine bungalow. The only question I had for my mother—“Does he know?”—she could not answer. Pony opens the front door before I can knock. Her face is expectant. Behind her, The Heavy stands in the middle of the living room floor. Where I lay just two hours ago. Seeing him, my chest cracks open. I do not say remarkable things to him. Son-like things. I have two strengths, and this is not one of them. Okay. I think of myself as having two strengths. Neither has made itself apparent to me yet.
The Heavy is unwrapping a wooden frame. He drops the black bedcover. The rope that bound it. Square in his hands, he holds the last portrait taken of him, when he was still Jay Jr. The Heavy has never seen the portrait. Never showed it to Pony. Never showed it to Billie. He studies himself now, who he was before the fire that killed his family.
Nearly twenty years ago, after his suicide attempt, The Heavy’s portrait was briefly propped up in the Banquet Hall. The nickname he had been given after his bungalow was destroyed (the Fontaine bungalow was bungalow 2, next door to his best friend, Traps; it was Traps’s father who was having the affair with The Heavy’s mother, and it was The Heavy’s father who started the fire out of heartbreak; when Lana Barbara Sr. and her husband, Visible Thinker, decided to build their bungalow on the site of the Fontaine family tragedy, they were cautioned against it; the newly married couple made it known they did not believe in ghosts) THE HEAVY, was burned into plywood and, as is the territory way, placed beneath the portrait of the young man. The lights and flowers were set up. It was August, and his grave, beside his sister’s, was swiftly and easily dug by Traps. A day later, it was filled with clay and rock. The portrait was taken down. Looked like The Heavy would make it after all.
The Heavy would tell me later—we would talk, oh, how we would talk—that his younger sister had taken the picture. It was late summer, the end of the day. Their father said, “It’s time, Jay Jr.” His sister had to tilt the camera up to get his face. Really get his face. She stacked wood pallets and chipboard, and stood on them in her combat boots. She was particular about the slant of the sun, about Jay Jr. being in the center of it. She got Jay Jr. to look this way and that. “You’re so serious,” she said. “Lighten up!” The other young men in the territory took off their shirts and held cinder blocks over their heads, thick chains. The Heavy was not like the other young men. His sister had the same green eyes as him. They were honest, bracing. She had her headphones around her neck, and on her bicep, FOCUS THINE ANARCHY written in permanent marker. She begged him not to go hunting that night. To stay home with her. To hang out. She had a funny feeling, she said. She couldn’t name it. Wanted him near. But The Heavy had had an affair with Debra Marie, and felt Traps was catching on. He needed to defuse Traps’s suspicions, and keep the peace. He felt guilty. The Heavy wasn’t a cheat. “Sorry, Pony,” Jay Jr. said to his younger sister, conflict in his heart. Outside the frame is The Heavy’s dog. Her perfect posture, her grave face. She sat at his feet. Behind him is his house. That night, it would burn to the ground.
Everything The Heavy loved was inside that moment. He was nineteen. My age. The Heavy looks at his former face, the defiant face, the one he could not stand to look at until now, and in it, he sees me. The Heavy confirms I am his.
The Heavy and I do not hug each other. It is Pony and I who hug each other. And there it is, my first strength: brother to Pony Darlene Fontaine.
My sister.
* * *
A TRUCK PULLS INTO the Fontaine driveway. With his fog lights, Traps is the only man in the territory who can light up so much of it. He cuts the engine. We are standing in the picture window. Pony, The Heavy, and I. We watch Traps jump down. A slick of black ice, and Traps steadies himself against the body of the truck, the FULLY LOADED slogan at his back. And then Traps punches the air. I put my hand to my mouth, where his ring tore through my lip. Traps had tried so many times to teach me how to throw a good punch. “When you make contact with your target, don’t stop,” Traps said. “You gotta go through it. The motion is about completeness.” He spoke the words his father had to him. “Come on, kid. Try it.” I wouldn’t.
7:16 P.M. Traps gave me this watch. He would have had to organize the gift months in advance. Found a picture of the watch in one of his magazines and slipped the cut-out image and an envelope of money to the Delivery Man. On the face of the watch it says WATER RESISTANT. I always took it off before going in the reservoir. Never forgot. Fastened it to my belt loop, jeans neatly folded and at least ten strides from the water. Traps handed the gift to me the night I turned eighteen. It was wrapped in deerskin and duct tape. It was the one night I felt Traps got me. I put the watch on and shook his hand. “Thank you.” Then from across the kitchen table, candles blown out between us, he passed me a card he had made. The card was a collage of letters: Dear Son, Live a little.
“You need my truck. You need my fog lights. You need to find Billie Jean.” On the Fontaine front porch, Pony and I watch as Traps hands his truck keys to The Heavy. His breath spirals white in the cold. About Traps, The Heavy would tell me, “He was a good man, a good friend, and then he became a vain man and, after my family died, a deceitful one.” The Heavy spent time with him only so he could spend time with me. His boy.
Traps takes my hand in his and looks into my eyes. This is his goodbye. The gold incisor; he flashes it at The Heavy. “Nothing to tell me, eh, friend?” He smiles, cocking his head and running a palm over his forearm, the one with the mouth-shaped scar. He turns his body away from us. We watch him walk down the driveway. Under the glare of the moon. In his trapper hat and his cowboy boots. The shined black leather, the red stitching. He makes his way toward home, toward my mother.
* * *
“SHE’S NOT HERE,” The Heavy says. “We’ve had it all wrong. She’s not in the woods. She’s not in the territory. She’s not even close.” Pony and I leave the cement porch for her stash of jerry cans in the north woods. When we pull back the black tarp to load them into the DEALR truck, we see it has already been stocked. In the space where John the Leader had been laid out only hours before, Traps has put water, canned food, ammunition, and plenty of fuel.
The Heavy switches off the light in the front hall. When he reaches for the knob to close the door behind him to the Last House, the mostly empty house, he pauses and his dog comes bounding down the stairs. She winds herself between The Heavy’s boots. “Don’t think we would have forgotten you,” he says to the dog, and he kneels down. Face-to-face, he runs his hand along the ridge of her spine. While search teams combed the woods for Billie, the dog allowed The Heavy to lift her ragged body off the master bed and wash her in the bathtub. She let The Heavy pull the remnants of the muskrat she had killed, the frozen blood, from her snout. She let him wash her clean. Bring her back to life.
Once The Heavy gets into the truck, sliding the driver’s seat back as far as it will go, the dog leaps over him and arranges herself in the passenger seat. Pony and I are together in the back. The last Fontaines. This is a new feeling for me. I am ready. I have always been ready for this feeling. Pony holds a b
ook in her hands, Brutal Errors of the Human Body. She opens the cover to show me a thick stack of money. “Drug money,” she mouths. “Le Pony,” I mouth back. And then, as The Heavy reverses onto the highway, he reaches for the CB. “Do you read me, Billie Jean? Do you read me?”
* * *
8:19 P.M. We are driving along the north highway toward the perimeter of the territory. The closest I have been to the perimeter (it lies a mile past the truck lot) was at dawn, yesterday, when I watched Pony pull off her first and last armed robbery. I knew what she had done with Traps to get fuel. Traps had left her card in the top drawer of his metal desk. I tucked it into my jean pocket.
THE COMPLAINT DEPARTMENT
1-800-OH-MY-GOD
I knew the lengths she was willing to go to get Billie back. I wanted to keep Pony safe.
Tonight, there are no teenage girls walking the ditch. No boys pedaling fast on their dirt bikes. No white barking dogs. No bonfires. No men salting their driveways. Staring into their high beams, mugs in hand. I can make out the chandelier in Drink-Mart that is only partly working, the mottled mirror behind the bar. The place is empty. The lights are out at Home of the Beef Candy, Furniture City, Gold Lady Gold, Value Smoke and Grocer. Though it says CLOSED in the window, the mirror ball spins at Hot Dollar’s Hi-Fi Discount Karaoke and Sporting Lounge. When we pass the truck lot, the FULLY LOADED sign blinks on. I can see the black-and-white flicker of the television from the trailer. I look back at the territory, the only place I have ever known, expecting the ground to gape open and swallow it whole.
