Red-Blooded Heart

by V. J. Chambers

  First thing I do is simply google her. I type in her name and see what comes up. And mostly, it’s stuff about other people who have the same name as her but aren’t her. There’s some doctor in Louisiana and a woman who runs a dance studio in Utah.

  But then, some of her social media pops up. She has a Pinterest account, and she also has Facebook. They both seem to be covered in posts all about off-grid living. She’s posted pictures of the things that she dreams about doing. I scroll through the array of picture-perfect representations of this sort of living and I snort to myself.

  The people posting this stuff are just selling something. They’re as connected to the rat race as anything else. They’re funding their lifestyle by blogging about it or making Youtube videos. It’s sad, really, how much people want other people to look at them. It’s as if we aren’t sure if we exist if no one else knows we’re there.

  Maybe that’s why I’m having trouble with Juniper. I want her to know I exist for some reason. I want her to be the one who proves to me my existence.

  Is that romantic or just pathetic?

  Maybe there’s no difference between those two things.

  I don’t really begrudge people their tutorials on how to set up a homestead on Blogger. Truth is, if I didn’t need to keep from bringing attention to myself, I might do something similar. It seems like a nice idea, a way to communicate with people without having to leave home, a way to stay inside the bubble of empty space I like to keep around myself at all times.

  I note one post she’s made on her timeline. “The countdown begins!” Juniper writes. “Soon, I’ll be off-grid and FREE!”

  I shut the laptop.

  That’s the biggest misconception of all, I think. The idea that there is such a thing as freedom. There isn’t.

  Sure, there are things that you can escape by coming out here and living in the woods. Sure, if you can grow your own food and make your own electricity, you can be free of bills. Sure, you can be free of a typical job and the nine-to-five-ness of it all. But you trade one set of chains for another.

  When you live off the land, you are imprisoned by your own survival. You can’t fuck off and do whatever you want, because you have to grow and hunt your own food. You have to fight back against the slow creep of the wilderness, which wants nothing more than to reclaim everything you’ve built, choke it out with weeds and feed on it until it’s nothing but rotted ruins.

  There is no freedom.

  There is the sky and the snow and the wind and the distant howl of predators in the woods, and there is only you and your thin layer of skin against it all.

  That’s not freedom. Sorry. It isn’t.

  Still, I guess I’m a hypocrite, because the truth is that I wouldn’t go back to a nine-to-five life for anything. I can’t fucking stand it when people tell me what to do, bosses included. If I had to work that construction job from high school right now, I’d… well, I wouldn’t. I’d quit and go running for the woods as fast as I could.

  * * *

  The hell of building in West Virginia is the hills. There’s no such thing as level land out here. Everything’s on an incline, and that makes for a hell of a time when trying to lay a foundation for a house. The site that Juniper had picked out for her house wasn’t the worst contender, but it wasn’t anything like flat either. The first challenge of the task was digging it out and copiously using a level to check everything I’d done.

  I explained to Juniper that she could hire someone with a bulldozer to clear it out quicker, but she said that if I could do it, she’d rather not hire out a person for every task, and I told her I could do it. Of course I could do it.

  I want her to think that I’m capable, of course. Because I am.

  The foundation takes time, and it takes effort, but it gets done. I make it with wood and stone and modern screws and nails, and as I do it, I think of all the things that I need that I couldn’t make myself.

  It’s tempting to feel superior out here, sometimes, because I feel as though I am so self-sufficient. Now that my garden is up and running, my diet consists almost entirely of things that I grow and hunt myself. My self-composting toilet means that my own shit isn’t even wasted. I am part of my own little plot of land, and I am using and giving back and it’s this beautiful symbiotic process.

  It’s like poetry, right?

  But then, I’m building this house, and I’m forced to acknowledge how much I cannot do myself. In Juniper’s house, I am using lumber that she purchased. When I built my house, I was so dirt poor that I actually chopped my own wood on my property and hauled it to a local sawmill to be turned into usable boards. But even then, I needed someone else to make the wood workable. I lacked the tools and skills to turn the trees to boards. And it didn’t stop there. The tools I used—the saws and hammers—were made by someone else. The nails and screws were all constructed elsewhere. Even though I worked harder than most people did to make my own home, I am still dependent on others in so many ways.

  It makes me think of how amazing it even is that humans figured out how to build houses. I think of a man, like me, nothing but himself against the elements, and how it was even possible that he ever survived in the first place. It seems as if it shouldn’t be possible, that it’s all a stacked deck against us. Nature has its vastness, its extreme temperatures. It has claws and teeth and rain and fur. What do we have against all that? Just our wits.

  It does seem oppositional to me, but I doubt that Juniper thinks of it that way.

  I read through her Facebook posts last night. She’s coming out here to commune with nature. She wants to look up at the sky and feel the stars sing to her and all that shit.

  Actually, I shouldn’t scoff. There is power in all that. I can’t deny what it’s like to be faced with this raw wildness every day. It’s good for the soul, I think, and in some ephemeral way I can’t describe. I know that when I lived in the suburbs and the only piece of nature I ever saw was some horribly shaped hedgerow, I felt empty in some way that I don’t feel out here.

  But all that said, I don’t know if it’s harmony or communion, at least not in the way that people like to put it.

  I’m not sure if people really think these things through when they say them. To me, harmony is all about co-existing without taking from someone else. It’s not about using parts of things for one’s own gain without giving anything back. And that’s what our relationship with the natural world has to be, because that is how we work. That is how everything works.

  Juniper can’t have a house without wood. The wood has to come from trees. The trees have to be cut down. They have to die. She has to kill trees to have a place to live.

  And, sure, she can plant more trees, to offset what she did, but her house does very little for the world at all. It helps her, not anything else.

  This same pattern is everywhere in nature. All things kill to survive. Everything must eat something that lives, whether we eat meat or plants. Maybe plants themselves don’t kill. Maybe they are truly harmonious, turning sunshine and water into leaves and bark and petals. Maybe someday, we can all be like plants.

  But it’s not like it’s easy for plants, right? They have a struggle, just like everything else. They have to fight to take root and to suck up the things that they need to stay alive and to reproduce. That’s what I’m saying.

  Opposition is what nature is all about. Fighting for survival. Everything is fighting, taking resources from something else if it needs it, killing if it has to, destroying if it has to. It’s all a system of struggling entities jostling against each other to stay alive.

  Strife, not harmony, that’s what it’s all about. At least, that’s how I see it.

  Back when I used to talk to people, a lot of times, they’d tell me that I think too much. Maybe I do. I think if you can convince yourself that nature is all about pretty flowers and twinkling fucking stars and fluffy kittens and all of us protecting each other, then it makes you happier.

  B
ut I’ve often found that happiness is all about ignoring uncomfortable truths. The better you are at lying to yourself, the happier you are.

  Me?

  I’m not bad at lying to myself.

  For instance, as I construct the foundation to Juniper’s house, I lie to myself about the little crawlspace I am building, telling myself that I am building it for Juniper. She might want to use this for storage or she might need to access the wiring or pipes down here. It’s a functional space.

  Of course, it’s not really convenient to pipes or wiring. But I can maybe make the storage idea stick if I concentrate.

  I don’t admit to myself that I am building myself a space in her house. A place where I can see her, and she won’t even know I’m there.

  CHAPTER THREE

  -deke-

  I know, I know. That’s despicable. Spying on a woman without her knowledge? Stalking her? Peeping on her?

  It’s a pathetic thing to do. The kind of man who does that, he’s a disgusting kind of person who doesn’t have any respect for a woman. He doesn’t allow her to choose. Instead, he chooses for her, and he trespasses against her without her knowledge. The kind of guy who would do that, he’s scum.

  I am not scum.

  Really, I’m not.

  What I am is scared. And stupid. And occasionally good at lying to myself. I build the crawlspace without allowing myself to really consciously acknowledge what I am doing. I spend the forefront of my brain thinking pseudo-philosophy about wood and flowers and shit. I’m good at that kind of thing. It’s one of the things I liked about college. They really reward people who can spend a lot of time thinking about things from various angles there.

  Honestly, I see the siren song of civilization. I can imagine being a primitive man who must labor under the sun all day, wishing that he had unlimited time to think and contemplate. I can imagine why he might want to create specialization and automation and give himself a break from hard work.

  Except that’s not how it went down, buddy.

  We sent out all our skills to specialists, thinking that if we didn’t have to do all the things, we’d have more time, but then we had to create money, and then we had to have money, and then we had to become specialists too, and then we still had to work all the time, at things that were increasingly abstract and strange, sitting in tiny cubicles and staring at characters on screens. We didn’t even know how these things connected to anything real. They weren’t the soil or the sky or the cry of birds in the sky.

  Until in the end, we couldn’t even think, because our minds had been raped by our disconnect from everything.

  We destroyed ourselves.

  Which doesn’t directly connect to the fact that I am planning on watching Juniper take off her clothes. As I said, I’m good at going on tangents to distract myself from whatever it is that I’m doing. If I need to confront my actions toward her, and I need a rationalization, I can probably manufacture one if I need to.

  Maybe I can blame it on the fact that I never knew my real father. I was raised by my mother, and I had no good model for masculinity in my life. There was my stepdad, but he was a piece of shit, so he doesn’t count. Deep down inside, there is a tiny, milky center of me, and that center is a little boy who is afraid of the dark. The little boy can’t imagine a way to actually find the courage to talk to a girl, so he’ll take pale imitations, like watching her when she doesn’t know he’s watching her.

  But that makes me sound weak.

  I don’t like to think of myself as weak, no matter how true it is. What was I saying about lying to yourself?

  Yes, perhaps it would be good to confront the uncomfortable truth that I am a pansy ass.

  Instead, maybe I can come at this from a different angle.

  All these rules about how men and women should interact, they’re from society. There is no tablet of commandments sent down from heaven, that say, “Thou shalt not be a peeping Tom.”

  The caveman within me likes looking at Juniper. The caveman within me wants to keep looking at her. So, I’ve constructed this way to make that happen.

  There. End of story. That’s tidy.

  Eventually, I won’t need this crawlspace, anyway. I’ll watch her to understand her, and then I’ll know how to approach her. Then I’ll be with her really.

  I suppose.

  I don’t have an endgame. I don’t even know why I built this damned crawlspace. It’s not like I can settle down somewhere and be the head of my household with a little woman and a brood of rugrats. I can’t be tied down. Sometime, I might simply have to leave. So, my roots have to be shallow.

  Juniper is trouble. I know it.

  After I finish the foundation, I go home and lie in my couch/bed, listening to the distant sounds of insects calling to each other, and I think that I should fill the crawlspace in. That wouldn’t solve the problem entirely, but it would be a step in the right direction. It would mean that I was not planning to go back to her in the future. I could finish the house and make a clean break.

  But who am I kidding? She’s going to live a half a mile down the road from me. If I don’t have the crawlspace, I’m just going to find another way to watch her. Maybe binoculars. Maybe a tree stand. Maybe…

  Yeah, that crawlspace isn’t going anywhere.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  -juniper-

  “This yours?” Deke is saying, patting the side of my new pickup truck.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “You didn’t have it when you were here before. You had that little sedan.”

  “Yeah, I traded that in,” I say. I have been hoping that the next time I see Deke, he won’t be as alluring to me as he was the first time. I don’t need the problem of being hot for the guy building my house, especially since he seems closed minded and a little sexist. I should hate him, but some part of me really likes him. It seems to be the part between my thighs, unfortunately.

  All my life, I’ve been told that women are not as interested in sex as guys. Maybe that’s the case, and maybe it isn’t. I couldn’t speak for half the population, frankly. All I know is that I’m not one of those women. I don’t sleep around or anything. I can control myself in that way, at least usually. I have to admit that I’ve never felt as unraveled as I do when I’m around Deke. He’s different than other guys.

  It’s partly the way he looks, which is so wild and untamed, with his curls falling out everywhere—messy on the top of his head and spilling out of the top of that tight t-shirt he’s wearing. It’s partly the way he moves. He has a sort of animal grace, like a lion. It’s casual and powerful. It’s partly just the atmosphere also, I think.

  This is what I’ve wanted for so long, to live out here in nature, and somehow it must bring out the primitive within me.

  “Well, this will definitely be more useful than that little thing,” says Deke.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Lot of truck for you, though.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I toss my hair.

  He licks his lips. “Nothing.” He raises his eyebrows. “You get pissed off easily, don’t you?”

  “No,” I say. “Only when people say assholish things.”

  He scratches his chin. He’s shaved this time, but he still has dots of dark stubble over his lip. I want to rub my thumb over them. “You calling me an asshole?”

  I step closer to him. I can’t seem to stop myself. My hips seem drawn to him in a strange way. “Are you an asshole?”

  He chuckles. “Could be. There’s got to be a reason I live out here on my own, right?”

  “Right,” I say.

  “You need to get new tires for this truck,” he says. “And get good ones with decent tread. I’ll order them for you and put them on.”

  “You don’t think I can buy my own tires?” I am moving even closer to him. For some reason, it is extremely arousing having him tell me what to do. Maybe it’s that primitive thing again. Some ancestral dance that governs sex. Males bite f
emales on the back of their neck and hold them down and—

  I square my shoulders.

  We are not fucking.

  He doesn’t get to tell me what to do.

  And even if we were fucking, he wouldn’t get to tell me what to do outside of the bedroom.

  “The tires are none of your business.” I try to take a step back. I really do.

  “I’ll feel awful if anything happens to you.”

  “You shouldn’t,” I say. “Because I’m not your concern.”

  He regards me coolly, and then smirks. “Just business, then, got it.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  He shrugs, unruffled, but he doesn’t move away from me either. We’re these two people having a conversation about how we don’t mean anything to the other, and we’re practically touching. I can smell him. He smells like sweat and peppermint—maybe that’s his soap. I like it.

  Suddenly, I’m talking again. “I got the truck so that I could bring things up here.” I gesture to the back of the truck, which is full of various things I need for the house. Solar panels, my stove, the counter for my kitchen, a couch I want in the house. I brought it all myself because it was easier than arranging for various different places to deliver it out here. This site is so far out in the middle of nowhere that it’s hard to get things delivered anyway.

  “Yeah, wouldn’t have been able to fit all this in that car you had,” he says. He runs his fingers over the refrigerator I’ve brought. It’s not full size, but it’s bigger than a dorm fridge. It has an actual separate freezer. It’s small, but it should be enough for me on my own. “Wouldn’t have fit at all.”

  “No,” I say.

  And then we are quiet.

  It’s a long silence that stretches out, and it should be awkward, because there’s nothing to say, and we are strangers, but it somehow isn’t at all. It feels electric and full of promise, like storm clouds about to release their rain.

  I simply gaze at him, and he smirks at me again, and I start thinking that maybe he’s going to lean over and kiss me, and I think that if he does, I will bury my fingers in his curls.