by Claudia Dey
Every man in the territory has his portrait taken yearly from the age of thirteen onward. Sometimes the man will pose beside his truck or his dog or his girlfriend or, depending on his fitness, in a clean tank top holding up a barbell or the closest, heaviest thing. Bag of concrete, glass table, propane tank. Sometimes the portrait is just the young man’s face, which can make you feel you never knew him. Never noticed that scar or that chipped tooth. When you walk into the Banquet Hall after the burial, our cots and IV poles pushed to the side, the buried man’s portrait is propped up on the stage. A bouquet on either side of it. A lineup forms and everyone in the territory gets a moment before the portrait. You can touch it, kiss it, and make as much noise as you want, but once you walk away, you have to pull yourself together because you, then all those around you, could lose the point of the endeavor. As grief manhandles, it can be manhandled. This is what we tell each other, followed by, depending on who you are talking to, hard sex or light punching.
It is very rare the portrait is of a woman, and if it is, she poses with her children, and if she does not have any children, she poses with nothing at all.
* * *
THE FOUNDERS GOT OFF their bus here only because they discovered they could go no farther—no farther than our property, bungalow 88, also known as the Last House. You see, the north highway ends in the territory’s only water source. It is directly behind our bungalow. We call it the reservoir, and now, in late October, it is mostly covered by a thin skim of ice. Where you can see it, the water is not blue but gray, branches floating on the surface, a few plastic bags. No one will go near it. Not even us, the teenagers, with our frayed cuffs and our open coats and our blue lips daring each other with money we have stolen. No way. Get real. Dream on. To our people, water is certain death. The reservoir is certain death. From my mother’s bedroom window, you have a perfect view.
Our bungalow is the only one in the territory with a second story and a basement, features added by its former occupant. Our bungalow is fully carpeted, eleven hundred square feet, and split-level. Our bungalow is open concept, and the color scheme is gold-black-beige. You’d think everyone would want to live here. They don’t. Our bungalow is the end of the world.
Yo.
* * *
“PONY DARLENE FONTAINE! Pony Darlene Fontaine!” I come to just in time to see the teen stewardess’s plane break apart. She is over a flatland when the cabin of the plane suddenly bursts open on one side, and the passengers, still strapped into their seats, are sucked out and into space. Worst luck. Permanent winter. Pointless to call out. The teen stewardess throws herself on top of a baby passenger. She and the baby float down on a piece of airplane, and the teen stewardess tells the baby they will make their home under it. You can make a home out of anything, my mother said to me once. Home is in the soul. You will spend your life trying to get back to it.
“Pony!” It’s Lana yelling at me through the receiver, which is dangling off our beige couch. “Did you see that? Did. You. See. That.” Lana, at moments of great excitement, will speak with the cadence of a telegram. We arrange to meet in tight clothes outside of her much nicer bungalow at ten o’clock. To go to the bonfire. The pit party. A full hour. Later. Than. Anyone. Else.
I hang up and look through our front window. The truck is not in the driveway. She did go into town. Did she go into town? I am briefly stopped by my own reflection. This happens when you can watch yourself grow. I am tall. Perhaps too much length in limb. I wouldn’t have minded being a bit more covert, physically. Perhaps slightly less face. The face is a little more niche than I might have liked. The full lips, the thin canopy of a mustache. The failed haircut. The dark, shy eyes. I am not the star of the night soap; I am the visiting cousin. The one in the Pinto no one will kiss. I have a line of safety pins tapering my nightpants. I knot my DEVOTIONAL SECTION T-shirt just above my waistline in case there is a boy in the woods smoking the cold fog, and looking in at me. Wanting me. A boy I have never seen before. He wears a black suit and has a black dog and a few terrible habits that don’t hurt anyone. I roll down the waistband of my nightpants and rotate my melancholia. Front on, profile, rear view. What is not to love? Some of it. Around my neck, I wear a large stopwatch. I took out the clock part and put in the back of Billy Joel’s head from Glass Houses. We have many album covers here and very few albums. Most have been destroyed by overuse. I have no idea how Billy Joel’s music sounds, but I like the look of him in his heeled leather boots and crime gloves about to seriously trash a house. I lift my arm and angle my body. All I need is a rock.
“Did she say why? Did she say for what? Why did you let her leave? Why didn’t you come and get me?” The Heavy is covered in sawdust. It is trapped in his eyelashes, his shirt collar, his knuckles, the hard scars of his face. He has his snowmobile goggles around his neck. I do not have sufficient answers to his questions. I assure him she will be back any minute.
The Heavy runs out to the driveway to follow my mother in our new truck only to remember it gone; she took it. “Damn it.” He pushes past me to the living room phone. He has sweat through his outerwear in three large circles. Two under his arms, and one, a bull’s-eye, spreading across his back. We agree the dog got out behind her. I do not tell him my mother was wearing her indoor tracksuit, no socks and no shoes. That she walked into late October without shoes. Was she even wearing a coat? With only the dog. Her keys and the dog. The Heavy calls Traps, his oldest friend, on speed dial. “She said she was going into town.” He pauses. “She took the truck.”
* * *
SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO, my mother showed up in the territory in a wreck. Three months ago, she drove our previous truck into a tree on an iceless day. A day without weather. Impossible to total your vehicle on that July day. The women of the territory gathered in Rita Star’s kitchen to review the crash. Rita Star had one of the few businesses in town not located on the north highway. She ran it out of her small, wood-paneled bungalow.
Rita Star’s Tanning Emporium,
Fitness and Palmistry
The women of the territory tucked their ponytails into their waistbands and sat on Rita Star’s leatherette chairs under her hazardous light fixture. Rita Star had a strange and flammable hobby. Light fixtures made out of old Delivery Day baskets. The women concluded my mother was a woman who made her own obstacles. Why, the women of the territory asked each other in Rita Star’s dim kitchen, why in a world that is mostly obstacles would you make more for yourself? What sort of woman would do that? I mean, who would do that? And besides, who can leave her house at that hour, the dinner hour, when everyone needs everything?
* * *
WE HAVE ONLY the one truck. “We have only the one truck,” The Heavy apologizes to Traps when he walks through our front door. “I know,” says Traps, erect as a centaur, “I sold it to you.”
Traps’s face is eager. He smells like aftershave, cologne, and truck interior. Like a man at final resting. Snow melts and pools around his cowboy boots, leaving a ring of water on the ground, on my mother’s winter coat. It was her coat she was kicking out of the way. Why didn’t she take it? She loves her coat. When the territory had been warmer than any year on record, she had worn her coat all spring. I pick it up and hang it on her hook by the front door. We each have a hook. We used to be that kind of family.
The Heavy makes me swear I will stay in the house and, when she comes back, call Drink-Mart, and the men there will get the message to him. He will go with Traps in his truck. Everyone knows Traps’s truck. Traps is the only man with fog lights in the territory, and while this is annoying, it makes flagging him down easy. Since Traps owns the truck lot, Fully Loaded, he has access to certain features for his vehicle, and our men have to accept it when they are told the features were limited edition and no longer available. It was a one-time thing only, man. Sorry, man, sorry. No one sells regret better than Traps.
Traps also con
trols the fuel supply in the territory. In a giant padlocked shed at the back of the Fully Loaded property, he stores jerry cans filled with gasoline. Above the entrance to the shed, there is a video camera. Traps watches the footage from his trailer, also on the lot, where he conducts his business, surrounded by collages. This is his true passion. Traps cuts images from magazines and combines them on large pieces of paper. He hangs them in his trailer and angles spotlights above them. When a man buys a truck, he will comment on the collages, and Traps will remind the man the collages are for sale. Traps rotates his padlocks and wears a necklace of small keys. His neck is thick as a python. He also has keys buried throughout the lot. Only Traps knows where the keys are and which ones will unlock the stack of padlocks on the fuel shed. If a man wants fuel, he places a request, and within a day, Traps provides it. I need time, Traps explains to the man who wants the fuel and then sweeps his eyes over the lot. The man has no choice but to wait for Traps’s call. Sometimes, talking with the men, in his trailer, Traps will hold his lighter to his tongue and see how close he can get it. Once, when a man came in after the death of his wife, Traps pulled out the first aid kit and put a Band-Aid on the man’s heart. He then put one on his own heart in solidarity. No man knows how full or empty the fuel shed is. Territory men have considered trying to break in but lost their nerve. They have considered setting fire to the whole thing but pictured the inferno, and themselves inevitably part of it. What it comes down to is this: If you want to move, you have to see Traps about it. Traps gives motion to our people. Traps is too important to kill.
“At least it’s October,” says Traps, studying our carpet, my mother’s coat, the water stain made by his boots. “No one tries to die in October.” His voice is rough. He clears it and then lifts his sharp, sad eyes to look at me. “Sorry.”
I unknot and tuck my DEVOTIONAL SECTION T-shirt into my nightpants and watch from the open doorway as Traps has my father shake and brush the sawdust from his clothes, leaving a beige mound on our unfinished driveway and then folding his much larger body into the inferior seat. Traps moves around to the driver’s side door slow as a man in the confident position of being needed. He throws me one last look. The truck peels off. It kicks up gravel and ice. The license plate says DEALR.
You would never know Traps had recently buried his youngest.
No Band-Aid big enough.
* * *
WHAT IF SHE comes back before The Heavy does? Will she walk through our front door and up to her bedroom without even seeing me? Will she pull me into her hard frame and whisper apologies and speak promises into my ear and swear she has returned? Will she hold my face to hers like a night-soap mother and say, I see you, Pony, I see you for all that you are? Will she work my hair into a design complex as engines? Will I ride my ten-speed to the bonfire and cause a stir with my new hair design? Will I stand near the flames, ignoring them yet well lit by them, and pull the pins out slowly and let the wind make shapes of my hair? Pony Darlene. Hot damn. Who knew? Even Supernatural will take notice. His ball cap under his hood. Showing just enough of his face. It’s not like it’s about sex with him. No. (Not that I would refuse sex with Supernatural.) It’s more that he strikes me as the only boy in the territory I might have a decent conversation with. I heard Gregorian chants coming from his headphones. Maybe my pain has made me better looking. No. No boy wants the visiting cousin. Will I be able to tell my mother that she has been the only emotional weather in this bungalow for three months straight, and that I too have a lot of feelings? I have a lot of feelings.
I had forgotten all about you.
Yes. You had.
* * *
WHAT I KNOW about my mother’s arrival in the territory my mother did not tell me. Lana did. We had gone by Neon Dean’s bungalow. This was the end of July. Almost exactly three months ago. He and Peter Fox St. John were on Neon Dean’s small cement porch sitting shirtless on lawn chairs, retrofitted with foam and old carpet, lifting bags of concrete over their heads. They were working out. Doing reps, they called it. And they were listening to Nazareth. “Love Hurts.” We got off our bicycles. They looked us up and down. We had smudged charcoal around our eyes. Our bra straps were showing. They put down their bags of concrete.
“I know who shot J.R.,” Peter Fox St. John said.
“Shut up, Fuck Pants,” Neon Dean said.
Neon Dean was nineteen, four years older than us. He lived alone. Both of his parents were dead. He showered with his dirty dishes. He had a pet rat called Radical Feminist. Rad for short. He had a girlfriend named Pallas, who was tanned and cruel. She looked like an out-of-work wrestler. She had recently tried to self-pierce her tongue, and now she sounded like Sean Connery. How’sh tricksh? she would say when I biked by her in town. Lana and I were relieved she was not there. The boys were alone. They were checking us out. It was the first time, we agreed, we had been truly checked out, and it made us feel dangerous. We had very little money, but we did have our sex appeal. Neon Dean reached for his toolbox. He had $UPERIOR EXI$TENCE written across the top of it. He flipped open the lid. We bought two white pills and two yellow ones and then went into the woods to the metal husk of the founders’ bus to get very, very high and try to make each other levitate, which is a lot harder than it looks on Teen Spirit.
True story, Lana said. To the max. She said everyone else had been born and raised in the territory. Everyone else could tell stories about each other’s grandparents. Everyone else knew how the others liked their meat cooked. What color thread they had used to sew up their gashes. Your mother just showed up one day in a Mercedes sedan. What kind of vehicle is built that low to the ground? The territory demanded clearance. What kind of world does not? A place to be glided through. The people of the territory had seen Mercedes sedans on their night soaps. Green grass, high heels, tuxedos, endless unmarried fucking. A world without facial issues. Mercedes sedans. An impossible world. Was the woman in the low car an apparition?
Covered in dents and scratches, missing a front fender, muffler scraping the north highway. The woman fell from the driver’s seat of the Mercedes sedan, the car still running, skinning her thigh badly and showing her underwear. It was underwear from elsewhere. Her upper portion smelled like gasoline. Her lower portion urine. She had sucked gas into her mouth. The people of the territory knew about siphoning.
The car radio was playing a song our people had never heard. A kind of music they could not get their heads to move to. A 5/4 beat. Think about that later. For now, one of the men reached in and turned off the ignition of the Mercedes. Our people did not let their vehicles run in May. Winter, sure. Winter, hell yes. But, May? Snowmobiles, generators, chainsaws—what would we do without fuel? When one of the broader men bent down for the woman, she flinched, and then put her arms around his neck. The movement, when it came, was swift and rabid. Feeling a rush, another one of the meeker men joined the effort, though the woman was so thin and without muscles that, not useful, he backed away.
Our people were frightened of the woman. We’d never had a complete stranger here. Never had someone just show up. Was she a descendant of the Leader? She looked like she could come from that stock. Fine bone structure. Luxury vehicle. Do we shoot her or do we feed her? The broad man who had picked her up carried her into Home of the Beef Candy, conscious her dress was up around her waist and her black underwear could not be bought in town. The Heavy was standing in line at the lunch counter taking the place of two territory men. The woman saw him, crawled out of the broad man’s arms, stopped crying immediately, and placed her body against The Heavy’s body. Body on body. Like that, her focus shifted. The Heavy bought her a meal. The woman ate like a predator. The Heavy bought her a second meal. Our people gathered around her, filling the restaurant, spilling out onto the north highway, looking through the window. The men knew to stand beside their wives. They all waited for the woman to speak.
Our people would say l
ater, about your mother, Who knows, maybe women from elsewhere like men with facial issues. Your father had pulled off and burned the last of his bandages just that morning. The morning he saw your mother for the first time. FYI. No joke. Totally perf.
After that, Lana and I played a game we called Wanting. She went first: I want Sexeteria to push up the back of my skirt with his face. And then make me a very mixed tape. I want braces. I want a chain-link fence with red roses threaded through it. Real ones. I want a lace bodysuit with a mock turtleneck. I want to call my first son Everlasting. I want to spend a week in a hotel. I want the pill. And I want the territory to be rich again. Or at least how it was five years ago. And I want 9-1-1. I could have really used 9-1-1. And I want Def Leppard to know my name. Lana Barbara Smith. Lana Barbara. I am like that town in California, but minus California.
Lana and I were fifteen, which was only three years away from getting pregnant and married and pulling our hair back into ponytails of duty and service and wearing pastel dresses and taking the blood of the teenagers at the Banquet Hall and then sitting on the leatherette chairs in our kitchens to look out over the snowfields, our children in them, standing tall on piles of aluminum with rabbit feet around their necks and blowtorches in their hands. We have a very small window, I wanted to say to Lana. Urgent. Very. Small. Window. Urgent.
Some of the fathers had already started warming up to The Heavy. I was the only girl in the territory who did not have a Gold Lady Gold name necklace (because I was a virgin). I was the only girl in the territory who did not have a Walkman (because I was an untouched virgin). The fathers knew what this meant, and they were taking note of me for their sons, who, at this age, were just starting to get their nicknames. So while we got jewelry that was quick to tarnish or a Walkman that was sure to break, the boys got nicknames of infamy like Fang and T-Bone. The Heavy wanted nothing to do with the fathers. I wanted nothing to do with their sons.
