by Claudia Dey
* * *
AROUND THE BONFIRE, the territory boys approach the girls. They have new shoulders, new jawlines, and are looking for kicks. A boy comes up to Lana. He wears a tire chain for a necklace, has a pine twig behind his ear. Across one set of knuckles, he has written PAIN, and across the other set, PAIN.
“Seriously, let’s reproduce. I’ll give you my chips.”
“I can buy my own chips.”
“You can have my headphones.”
“So?”
“You’re pretty.”
“Ew.”
“What?”
“Stop trying so hard.”
“Okay.”
“Effort is repulsive.”
“Okay.”
“Your effortful smile. Your kingdom of effort.”
“Okay!”
“You have the voice of a beggar.”
“Sorry?”
“Don’t punctuate your questions. A territory man presents his questions with flatness.”
“Will you do me.”
“It’s just don’t be keen. Seriously. It’s gross.”
“Okay.”
“Besides, what are headphones without a Walkman?”
“Okay. Here, take my Walkman.”
And Lana and the boy leave the loose circle for the dark space behind Shona Lee’s husband’s headstone. Lana knows that if she becomes a mother, she will never listen to her Walkman again. But still, Lana +.
* * *
I NEED TO GET some air. Lately, I have been hyperventilating in my sleep. This can be accompanied by a wet face. Love. Brutal error of my human body. Underneath my pillow, I keep a picture of a coach. A glossy image I tore from a magazine. He is wearing a collared shirt and a headset. He has his arms out and he is yelling. This is bullshit! Take a deep fucking breath and wipe your face on your black bedsheet and get back to it, Pony!
My mother has been missing for five hours.
I leave the bonfire and head for the woods that border the edge of the graveyard. The boy with the can of butane follows, and when I say, “Get the fuck away from me,” he says, “Do you need CPR?” And when I give him the finger, he returns to the bonfire, throws his can of butane into it, and yells, “Heads up!” (Heeyed-zyup!), then looks to outer space. “Did you get that?”
Pallas, performer of the Mother Trick, has a little sister now. She’s four. Every night, the girl begs Future to let her sleep with her in her closet bed. Future says sure and blocks the image of her own mother, Rita Star, from her mind. The sound of the girl’s silvery breath. She sleeps on the mattress with her arms above her head like she’s just landed on it.
It’s a new kind of darkness with my mother maybe roaming it. Don’t you scare yourself! Don’t you crack on me now, 88! You’ve got a plan to execute! Pony Supreme! Chin up! Chin the fuck up! I can see the Death Man’s trailer from here. He’s done some landscaping. I cannot picture him touching anything living. His furniture is plastic. His gray, featherless birds are on the roof of his shed. They don’t seem to eat or migrate. They just dive-bomb us, wailing. We’re so annoyed by the birds, but maybe they are trying to tell us something, issue some type of warning?
I wish I had a cigarette. I wish I smoked.
* * *
MY MOTHER WOULD never talk about her life before she arrived in the territory. She didn’t like to remember it, she told me. This was her life now. Her only life.
When Shona Lee’s husband, Wishbone, shot himself in the chest last winter, Shona Lee called my mother and asked her to come over. Said she wanted me to come too. Had a soft spot for me. We stood in Shona Lee’s driveway. Shona Lee lit a Virginia Slim and talked about walking a brave line. She wore a leopard dress, blue eyeshadow, and her dead husband’s plaid outerwear. A week before, the men of the territory had knocked on her door. It was early November. The middle of the night. The men stood on her small cement porch, all of them looking in different directions. Shona Lee was confused by the men and so called for her husband. When he didn’t answer, she checked their bungalow. Surely he was in it and this was her worst dream. “What is love if not a space for horrors to grow?” she said to my mother, and my mother agreed. An accident. He had been fully loaded, the men tried to explain to Shona Lee, something close to a joke. A woman’s despair can be so hard to take. When Shona Lee was told the next morning the ground was frozen and her husband would spend the winter in the Death Man’s shed, Shona Lee begged to see his body. She was told no. Once a corpse is handed over to the Death Man, it is never seen again, but Shona Lee was already walking away when the men told her that. She knew the rules.
The weeping went from bed to sink, floor to shower, vacant room to vacant room, and so much time balled on the bed. Shona Lee could not stand her widowed self. “Enough,” she said, and with her widow money bought twenty jerry cans of gasoline from Traps and an animal print dress from The Woman Store. She was set to drive the two thousand miles south to the next nearest town. “You’re the only one who knows what’s beyond the territory.” Shona Lee lifted the tarp and showed my mother her truck bed. It was filled with fuel. I had the crazed heart rate of prey, but was trying to appear cold and bored like the teen wives on Teen Wives. Like Denis. Arms crossed, eyes half rolled back. As much as I pressed my mother, this was the one line of questioning she would never submit to. What is beyond.
“You will be a stranger among strangers,” my mother said, and I could feel a charge run through her. “Why can’t a woman be more than one person in a lifetime?” she continued. “Why can’t she be two or three?”
“I will be a stranger among strangers,” Shona Lee motivated herself.
And that summer, while I sunburned nearby on an emergency blanket, The Heavy dug Shona Lee’s husband’s grave, and then Shona Lee stood over it singing Led Zeppelin with the voice of God. She sang over the drone of the horseflies. Her husband was in the ground. He had a place. She had a place. This savage place, her only place. She didn’t want to be a stranger. She wanted to be known. Shona Lee remained in the territory. No one has ever left it. And only she came that close.
* * *
SHORTLY AFTER my mother’s arrival here, Rita Star swore she saw a picture of her on television. The name on the screen was different than the one my mother had used to introduce herself, but the face was the same. She’d cut and dyed her hair, but any novice knew that was the first thing you did to bury your past. Wanted or Missing, Rita Star could not recall. She searched and searched, flicking through her channels, but the picture of my mother did not come back into focus.
Hearing about the picture, the other territory women searched and searched. The Heavy’s thin fox of a stranger is going to murder me, steal my husband, and make a nice den for herself out of my den things. “You are glued to that damn television,” their husbands would rant. The women didn’t know how to make sense of it. Rita Star was a gossip. She was lonely. She would come over and sit at your kitchen table, and tell story after story, and not know when it was time to stop talking and leave. This was long before she invested in her tanning bed and opened her palmistry business. Her young daughter basically lived across the street with Pallas Jones. Who the Grace girl’s father was, none of the women could say with any certainty. She had no husband, and in practical terms, Rita Star had no child. What do you even call that? The women had no name for a woman without dependents. Nothing feeding from her body. Nothing feeding from her hands. One knife, one fork, one spoon, one bowl. The emptiness of her bungalow. Should the women really believe this lone woman of mediocre fitness or was she just looking for attention? The women decided against believing Rita Star.
They all came to my parents’ wedding, and the men and women of the territory marveled at my mother, this woman who had appeared at their lunch counter with her short hair and her short dress now with her lo
ng hair and her long dress. How quickly she looked like one of them.
But sometimes, they felt unsettled by her. She seemed to clock the way they held their bottles of alcohol, their Delivery Day baskets, how they spoke, where to accentuate, when to laugh, and our people looked at her and thought: Lassie. “The thing about Lassie,” the women would say to each other when my mother was not at the table, “is that you watch the show and you think it’s just this one single dog doing all these things, but it’s actually many dogs that look exactly alike, and they all have different talents. This one is good at wagging its tail. This one is good at jumping over logs. This one is good at sitting. This one is good at fetching. This one is good at heeling. This one is good at playing dead.” And when my mother crashed our truck on that July evening, and it was towed through town to be salvaged at Fully Loaded, Rita Star’s story returned to the minds of the women.
The hood bent into a tree shape, the glass cracked where my mother’s head hit the windshield. Once the bleeding was under control, my mother needed only one small bandage. But still. Parts of her had come loose in the crash, the women said to each other. A life has its rigging.
I was up to my mother’s collarbone when she taught me how to swim. I didn’t want to learn. I only wanted her—anything that told me what she felt, loved, protected, lied about, thought of, had been.
* * *
I GUESS THE TEENAGERS of the territory don’t see me, Camo Pony, when I make my way back to the fire. One girl is talking about being courted by a widower. I sit behind a headstone to listen. I fold my knees to my chest. In Latin, cancer of the dreams starts with somnia.
“What widower?”
“The Heavy?” And this makes the teenagers howl with laughter.
“The Fontaine mother isn’t dead!”
“She’s just missing!”
“In the territory, missing is dead.”
“The Heavy—”
“Sick.”
“Plus, the facial issues.”
“Double sick. Seriously. Sick galore.”
“My mom told me he used to be hot. Superhot. Before…you know.”
The girl being courted says she likes the widower’s bigger truck and cleaner stuff, and how he doesn’t just walk around all the time in a black towel, eating off his barbecue with his dog, you know, the update to basic sonic and video technology, the light fixture advantages, but the graying body hair takes getting used to. Big-time. Revulsion can come pretty quickly and has to be integrated for a dimensional sex encounter, when it is time for body on body, for *65 and *69, which, the girl explains, “comes down to the difference between facing my hot rocking body north and facing my hot rocking body south.”
“Show us,” the girls say, “show us how you do the widower.”
“Better than the dick channel,” one boy rasps when the girl is done.
“Okay. Losing your mind. Hard or easy?”
“Hard.”
“Killing yourself, hard or easy?”
“So easy,” says Lana.
“How would you know?” Then the skinny boy remembers Lana’s circumstances. Her dead mother, and her new mother, the ex-girlfriend of Peter Fox St. John, who misspelled her name on her name necklace, but she still wears it even though Lana’s father bought her one with her name in full and made of a purer gold, and Denise is pregnant with the Delivery Man’s baby, and she painted their whole bungalow red, even the toilet seats, and Lana’s father might be the one who’s inconsolable now. “Sorry, Lana,” the skinny boy says. And hating his voice more than ever, “I’m really sorry.”
And everyone falls quiet, waiting for Lana to break down. Then Lana says, still very, very high, “Lana Barbara California!” and a cheer goes up.
“High hopes!” she says.
Another cheer.
“Leaving the territory, hard or easy?”
“Impossible.”
“Don’t even.”
Some of the older girls who are invited to sit at Rita Star’s kitchen table tell the others my mother left our bungalow in her indoor tracksuit and no shoes shortly after 7:00 P.M. How could they know that? How could they possibly know that? And she has not been seen since. No sign of the truck.
“Where is the Fontaine mother pacing without her shoes?”
“She could be right there.”
“Don’t!”
“Watching us.”
“She could be crouching to the ground like an animal.”
“Behind that headstone.”
“She was that small.”
“Small as their dog.”
“Their dog is massive.”
“She was filled with a disease,” Lana says. “Mental damage.”
“It took her hair, her muscles.”
“And now she is out here.”
“Getting closer, getting closer, getting closer.”
The snap of a twig. A stirring all around.
“Wait.”
“Did you hear that?”
Their hearts leaping all through them. Their fingertips going numb.
“Did you hear something?”
“Seriously.”
And then I’m standing there, and the boys and girls of the territory are shrieking, “You can’t just sneak up on people like that!”
“I didn’t mean to,” I say dumbly.
“You fucking scared us!”
“Sorry.”
“You scared us so bad.”
“Sorry.”
I want to tell them they’re wrong. My mother soaped my body and sang me to sleep. She taped my drawings to the walls. She got down on her knees and brushed the knots from my hair. How you’re growing, she would say, I can’t keep up with your growing, and she would laugh and kiss my neck. Tell me a story, she would say when I got older. Tell me about your day. Thrill me, she would say. You thrill me.
And the boy who had the can of butane comes to stand beside me and says with perfect pronunciation, tracing lines across the air with his hands, as if he is reading the words off a headstone, my headstone, “Pony Darlene Fontaine. Even her mother couldn’t love her. 1970 to—”
Gunshot.
And the boy falls to the ground, taking me with him, and some of the teenagers scream and cover their ears.
“Don’t be mean.” Coming down the decline toward us, his rifle aimed at the sky, and then his rifle aimed at the boy. “Don’t be mean,” Supernatural repeats himself. His ball cap under his hood. Giving just enough of his face.
* * *
IN THE TERRITORY, when a woman has a baby, she’s attended to by another woman. This is the territory’s way. Let me give you the lay of the land. While birth is beautiful, it’s primarily a fight.
Fifteen years ago, when The Heavy in his shoulder-length gloves followed my naked mother, in a state of manic concentration, out of our bungalow and into the front yard and then back inside to our living room floor, he suggested Debra Marie come over. She could place a damp cloth on my mother’s back and say the thing territory women say to each other: “A woman’s body knows just what to do.”
“Ha!” My mother, four feet around, turned to my father and said, “I am a phenomenon. I am multiplying. I am one becoming two, and then I am two becoming one, and as I do this, let’s admit Debra Marie’s help will be a small act. She will not be feeling. I am feeling. I am feeling everything there is to feel.” Then my mother hissed, “Debra Marie,” and begged for an apple. When The Heavy gave her the closest thing—they were two days before Delivery Day with only frozen goods in the house—my mother broke the frozen side of caribou in half with her bare hands, and I was born.
A tiny girl in his arms. The Heavy didn’t know why he was choking. There was a problem with his body. “You’re s
obbing,” my mother told him. Was the baby sweating? No, he was soaking the girl with his tears.
* * *
MY HEAD IS in the lap of Supernatural. Repeat. Situation critical. My head is in the lap of Supernatural.
S.O.S.
