Red-Blooded Heart

by V. J. Chambers

  That will have to do.

  My work done, I climb back into my truck and drive all the way back home. When I get there, it’s late at night, and I crawl into bed without taking off my clothes and fall asleep.

  I have bad dreams about Darius out there in the woods. In my dreams, he’s not dead, and he’s out there moaning that he’s cold and begging for me to come and bring him a blanket. I go out there to him, feeling guilty, but when I arrive, Darius is in pieces. He’s been dragged apart by the strong beaks of scavenger birds. His face is a bloody mess of pecks and torn skin, but his mouth is intact, and he begs me and begs me to help him.

  I wake up in the morning, sun streaming in the windows, and my heart is beating too fast.

  I force myself to stop thinking about the dream right away. When you react to things, your brain tends to think they’re important and bring them up over and over again. That’s how guilt happens. The only way to beat guilt is to ignore it.

  I manage pretty well. I don’t think about Darius, and no one comes asking after him. Weeks pass. I have some bad dreams, but I survive them.

  It’s late summer, and it’s hot, and I’m working all day on Juniper’s house, which is both good and bad. It’s good to have something to occupy myself with, but it’s also the kind of physical labor that often lets my mind wander. But no matter what, I refuse to think of Darius. Darius is dead, and I had to kill him. There is no point in dwelling on it.

  And then, before I know it, it’s not summer, but fall, and Juniper’s house is getting wiring and plumbing, and other things better left to people besides myself. I did my own wiring and plumbing in my house, but it was all very simple stuff. I tell Juniper it’s better to have an expert take a crack at her house. I could probably manage, but I’m not a hundred percent.

  Soon, she’s coming up with furniture, and I’m back inside the house, doing things like putting in her cabinets and her kitchen counter.

  I work more on the crawlspace, making it comfortable with scraps of carpet, and I divert heat down there so that I can stay warm in the winter if I decide to hang out there then.

  One day, she’s there, walking around in the house while I’m in the crawlspace, watching her through the little holes that I’ve created so that I can see her.

  It’s hot, because it’s one of those days in fall that still feels like summer, and she’s been working on moving things in and decorating, and she’s sweating, wearing a clingy gray tank top. It seems molded to her flesh, and I don’t think she’s got a bra on underneath it, and she is beautiful and fluid and I think about how she belongs to me in this moment.

  Not because she and I have any sort of understanding, but because I have staked my claim on this territory—her territory—and she belongs to me because she is here and I already have claimed this land as mine. Maybe that doesn’t make sense. I don’t care. I know that she’s mine, and when she peels her tank top off and bares her firm, round breasts to me for the first time, I touch myself, and my climax is all-consuming.

  She doesn’t stay in the house yet. It’s not ready. She goes back to the city.

  Then when I am alone in the place, I walk from room to room, touching all her things and making this place as much mine as it is hers. I built it, after all. That must mean something.

  Finally, in October, I am finished. The house is finished. She could move in any day.

  But she doesn’t.

  When she comes to check on my progress, she says she won’t be here until the beginning of November, and she’ll be bringing her chickens with her then. She has a coop for them that she hired me to build, and she pronounced it adorable the first time she saw it.

  So, her house sits empty for weeks, waiting for her, and I feel impatient at the fact she hasn’t yet arrived.

  * * *

  I wake up the day after Halloween to the sound of someone banging on my door. Usually I don’t sleep in, but I ended up in town the night before. I had some beers with some of the locals—most of them were in costume, but I wasn’t. Now, my head is pounding vaguely.

  I stumble out of bed and realize that the wood stove has gone out because I didn’t stoke it enough before I went to bed. It’s not crazy cold out here yet, but it’s getting there. I shiver as I yank on pants and a sweatshirt, and then I open the door.

  “Hey, Deke!” The grinning face of Officer Felix Cooper greets me. Felix is a nice guy. He’s probably in his early twenties, barely of legal drinking age, but he and his wife already have two babies. Around these parts, people tend to get started early on the whole baby-making stuff. The girl might not be his wife, but they live together. I know that.

  I’m not judging Felix. I like him fine. He likes me too. He thinks I’m really great. Hell, the guy half-hero-worships me, in fact. He wants to be me when he grows up. If he hadn’t accidentally knocked up his girlfriend in high school and then accidentally knocked her up again—

  Ehh, I sound like I’m judging him.

  The thing is, that’s one of those things that no one has any real control over, though we all like to think that we do. I’m assuming that Felix and his girlfriend didn’t use any sort of birth control, probably because their family heard from their preacher that birth control is from Satan, since we all know that God created sex to feel good so that people would have more babies than makes any damned sense.

  I still sound like I’m judging, don’t I?

  Okay, I’m judging, but it’s not Felix himself or his wife/girlfriend/baby-mama/whatever. Those poor kids are victims of their circumstance. I’m not even judging the preacher who told them that birth control was from Satan. People believe whatever they’re told, if they’re told by a person that they trust. It takes a certain sort of discomfort to start asking questions, and most people are happy.

  I’m not one of those people. I’ve always been irritated with life. I’ve never felt content. I’ve always felt a nagging itch at the back of my mind that I needed to scratch, and scratching it made me learn that things didn’t have to be the status quo, and that I could change my circumstances. That’s why the people I left behind live fat and happy and plugged in, and I live out here in the wild on my own.

  But most people, most people don’t seem to feel that. They wake up, and they’re happy enough with the world that’s presented to them. They eat the prepackaged shit from the grocery stores and they breathe the smog in the air and they sit in traffic for two hours to get to their job where they stare at a screen and fuck off by playing Candy Crush for most of the day and then they go home and do it again. And if someone tells them that sex is evil and babies are divine, they just accept it as fact. They don’t bother to ask questions.

  I’m fine with that, seriously, I am.

  I don’t want everyone in the world to wake up and smell the outdoors, because there’s not enough room for all of us to come out here and have our own space like I do. It’s really better if most people stay crowded in the cities, because that leaves enough of the wilderness to stay, well, wilderness.

  Anyway.

  Felix.

  Good guy.

  But my head is pounding and it’s cold as balls in my house. I try to smile at him, but I’m not sure I manage. “There something I can do for you, Felix?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Sure,” I say, standing aside from the door to let him come in.

  He does and then he rubs his hands together. “Ooh. Not much warmer in here, is it?”

  “Fire went out in the night,” I say. “You want to wait while I stoke it up?”

  “Sure,” he says brightly. “I can help, actually.” He’s eager, like a puppy.

  It’s a little too early and I’m a little too hungover for Felix. I massage my temples. “Yeah, okay,” I grunt. “Let’s go get the wood.”

  We go out to my woodpile and both come back with our arms full.

  I put the wood in the stove and I get the fire going up again.

  Felix leans in behind me, chattering a
bout his grandfather’s wood stove, and how much he liked it, but how all they have at his and Abigail’s place is baseboards, and his mother has a heat pump, but he likes the baseboards better, because you don’t have to heat the whole house, just a few rooms at a time. He’s telling me that he turns the heat off in the bedrooms of his trailer and how much money that saves him on his electric bill, except that I don’t have to worry about that, of course, which he really admires.

  I’m already exhausted, just from listening to him.

  I get up from the stove and face him. “Felix, there’s got to be a reason you came out here this morning.”

  “Oh,” he says. “Yeah. Yeah, there is.” He’s wearing his uniform, and he’s even got a winter coat that has the name of the department stitched on it on the sides of the arms and the back. Now that the fire is going, he unzips it. “Uh, about a week ago, over in Lost Valley, they found a car down in a gully.”

  My heart leaps into my throat. Shit. They’re already questioning me about this? Driving all the way out there was for nothing, then. “Okay,” I say, as if I’m confused as to what this has to do with me.

  “Oh, I know, I know.” He laughs. “I just came out here because I was following orders is all. Just gotta cross the ‘T’s, you know?”

  I nod slowly. Whatever the case, Felix is on my side. He really is like a puppy dog. “I’m not following.”

  He laughs again. “Sorry. Let me start over. So, they find this car, yeah? And it’s been there for months. Probably no one saw it until all the trees dropped their leaves, we’re guessing. Anyway, turns out it belongs to a private detective, guy named Darius Reed.”

  “Felix, does this have something to do with me?”

  “Folks in Lost Valley got in touch with Mr. Reed’s office, and his secretary only knew he was coming to West Virginia. She has some of his notes, and he’d written down Fisher’s Road, Daviston.”

  Oh, that was all? Not my name? Nothing like that? Hell, was I lucky or what? I tried to suppress the grin that was trying to spread across my face.

  “So, that only leaves you and Mr. Watson up the road and that new lady, what’s her name? June or Judith or something?”

  I nod, but now my heart is back in my throat. Because Henry saw me with the fucking car, and I knew that was going to come back and bite me in the ass.

  “Well, I tried to talk to Mr. Watson on the way in, but he wasn’t home. I hear he’s out of town until the day after tomorrow, at least that’s what they said at the coffee shop. So, that leaves you. Did this Reed guy come to see you?”

  I shake my head. “No.”

  “It’s what I figured,” says Felix. “Reed probably got lost is all. You know city folk can’t handle driving on our roads.”

  “I do,” I say. “Whenever I get behind a person with an out-of-state plate, I about lose my mind. They’re just creeping along.”

  “Oh, ain’t that the truth,” says Felix, chortling.

  I grin at him, shoving my hands in my pockets. The room is already starting to warm up. I’ll fry up some eggs and potatoes on the stove and that’ll be breakfast. I’m starving.

  Felix grins back. “Well, that’s all. That’s the only reason I’m here. Just to ask you about that. Sorry to bother you.”

  “No bother at all,” I say. “You helped me get firewood. It was lucky you stopped by.”

  His grin widens. “Oh, man, I love coming out here and looking at this house, I gotta say. I would live like this in a heartbeat, if it wasn’t for Abigail. She doesn’t like roughing it. She won’t even go camping.”

  I nod sympathetically. “Women.”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “Can’t live with ‘em. Can’t kill ‘em,” I say.

  He laughs as if he’s never heard that very bad joke before. “Hey. You got your hot tub up and running yet? You told me that you fill it up in the fall.”

  “Oh, not yet,” I say, even though I’ve been working on getting it ready so that I can show it to Juniper.

  “Darn it,” he says. “I’ve been wanting to see that thing in operation ever since I heard about it. It’s just too dang cool, a word-burning hot tub? I told Abigail about it, and she wanted to know all sorts of things. Does it give you splinters if it’s made out of wood? Doesn’t it leak? Do you use chemicals in it?”

  “Once the wood expands, it doesn’t leak,” I say. “And it’s nice and smooth inside, no splinters. I sometimes use chemicals. Sometimes I just drain it and clean it. Depends on how lazy I am, or how much snow we get to fill up the tub, or if I’ve got the money for bromine.”

  He nods, his face going blank as if he’s trying to memorize all this.

  “You know,” I say, clapping him on the shoulder, “I should have you and Abigail and the kids out here sometime once the hot tub’s up and running.”

  “Really?” His eyes get like saucers.

  “Heck, yeah,” I say and now I’m steering him towards the door. “I’ll let you know, all right?”

  “That would be so cool, man,” says Felix. “Thanks.”

  “Sure thing,” I say. “Sure thing.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  -juniper-

  The house is finished.

  I’m moving in today.

  I’ve been in here a few times since it’s been complete, and each time, I’ve brought more things from home so that this time, when I step inside, it’s all ready for me. I have a few suitcases full of clothes, but that’s all I’ll need.

  Everything from my life in the city is gone. I had about another three weeks paid up on the apartment, which I shared with three other people, but I found someone to move in at the beginning of November, so I got everything out of there. My other roommates weren’t glad that I was leaving. I was the best roommate ever because I was never there. I was always working. That’s what I’ve been doing with myself ever since I had this dream.

  I worked two jobs, sometimes three, and I lived as cheaply as I could. I’ve never lived on my own before, because I’ve never been able to afford it, not while I was socking away everything that I could to buy this place. I’m pretty excited at the prospect.

  This is going to be amazing. It’s going to be quiet. It’s going to be private. And it’s mine, all mine. I have this house, and I own it outright. How many people can say that they own their first house without any debt?

  It’s just me and my chickens.

  It’s real. I live off the grid in the woods. After all this time, I’ve made this happen, and I’m so excited.

  I step inside the house. When the door opens, it opens onto an open area that will serve as my dining room, living room, and bedroom. It’s all here.

  The far right end of the room is raised a little bit, and that raised area has my table, which is built in. The seating wraps around the table. It’s built into the walls as well.

  Underneath this raised area is my mattress. When I want to sleep, I can pull it out, because it’s on a wheeled platform. In the morning, I tuck it back under the table.

  The area where the bed rolls out to is my living room, and there’s a couch built into the wall directly in front of me. The cushions on the couch can be lifted up and there is storage built-in beneath them.

  On one side, there are steps leading up to the loft, which I will use as storage. The steps have a wardrobe under them. That’s where all my clothes will go.

  At the far end of the house is the kitchen. It is beautiful, with dark stained cabinets and a granite counter. My refrigerator is there, along with my stove. And through a small door is my bathroom, which has a sink and a composting toilet.

  At first, I just walk through the whole place, touching everything, feeling so excited to have finally done this on my own.

  Then I’m not sure what to do with myself.

  I unpack my suitcase and then I check on my chickens, which are still little chicks. They sent them to me in the mail, and they live in a brooder that I made, which is just a big container with a heat lamp.
It’s currently sitting on the counter in my kitchen. They’ll soon grow too big for the brooder, though, and then they’ll live outside in the coop that Deke built.

  As if my thoughts have summoned him, I look up and see him making his way across my back lawn. He is wearing a hoodie with the hood covering his unruly curls and he almost has an actual beard going on, but it’s not quite that long. He cuts a hulking figure against the fall sky. I think appreciatively that his shoulders are so very broad.

  When I see him, my body responds. I wish it would stop. I need to figure some way to get Deke out of my life now that he’s built this house. He’s obviously only going to cause me problems.

  He knocks on my door.

  My truck is out there, and I told him when I was moving in. I can’t hide from him. I have to go and open the door.

  He hands me a can of pickled hot peppers. “Housewarming present,” he says. “You like spice?”

  I hate how I feel all breathless and too warm around him. “Love it,” I say. I turn the can over in my hands. “These are… these are great.” I smile at him.

  “They’re from my garden,” he says. “I canned them myself. You’re picking a tough time to move in, you know. You’re going to need a lot of stuff stored up if you want to make it through the winter.”

  There he goes again, telling me what to do, acting like I’m an idiot woman who can’t take care of herself. “Right,” I say, sarcastic. “Well, I came out here entirely unprepared, as you well know.”

  “No, I know you’ve got all that freeze-dried stuff,” he says.

  “I’ve been buying it up and storing it for years now,” I say. “It’s really great stuff. And it takes just like frozen food. If you don’t open it up, it can last for decades.”

  He looks me over.

  I forget what I’m even talking about. Damn him.

  “You going to invite me in?”

  No, no, don’t invite him in, I tell myself. He needs to understand that he isn’t welcome here. If I have him here all the time, poking his nose around, it’s going to ruin everything. But I step aside. “Please.”