by Claudia Dey
When my mother resurfaced with a long gasp, she paused for a moment before making her sure, fast way toward the shore. She pulled herself to standing, her ravaged body, all planes now, all arguments. She did not notice I was naked. I had just waded in. I was taller than she was. I was stronger. I was going to save her. With her blue lips, looking up at me, convulsing with the cold, all my mother said was “How long?”
“Too long.”
I turn to run up to her bedroom. Only from her window do I have a clear view of the water. Before I can reach the back door, a shape comes at me from the woods. It’s our dog. Ice in her fur has shrunk her by half. I lower myself to the ground to meet her. She is shivering. I pull her to me. I stroke her back. I hold her snout to my face. It is soaked with blood. She leaps at me. She knocks me down. And then she sits with her perfect posture, and for the first time, she barks.
You asked me for it. My opinion. Many times. You were desperate for it. You would stand in front of the mirror. I would lick my fur.
At the beginning of the affair, it was about eyeshadow, gold or blue, belt or no belt, hair up or hair down, but by the end, it was about your name, about your body, what to do about your body. Where to place your body.
I am not sure you heard me. Just before you sprinted to the truck and slammed the door so I could not get in and over your lap to the passenger seat, forcing me to follow your taillights through the ice (love is the highest humiliation), I am not sure you heard me. So here it is: gold, belt, down, Billie Jean Fontaine, rest it, bungalow 88.
You have been gone for a full night and day now. Missing. No signs, not one. It is the first time, since we met, that I don’t know where you are.
Come home.
My opinion.
* * *
HOW DID IT START, Billie Jean?
Where did it go wrong, Billie Jean?
Two years before the affair began, you came home to me empty. “Nothing of substance,” you said when I inquired after your time with the wives and the widows. What a shock, I said, and you laughed. I would go anywhere with you, but after so many pointless encounters, I refused to go to the graveyard. Headstone Saturdays. I had my limits. I could not stand the anxiety of the other dogs, their minor confusions. And worse, the women’s narrow conversation. Standing there in those heavily treaded boots that could kick through oak, yet never would. Those sexless dresses. Puff-sleeved with foam at the shoulders, the high necks, the high waists. Under ski jackets. The light coating of hair on the women’s faces. And their mouths moving, issuing words, but furthering nothing. Speaking only about the weather, about time. As if life is only weather and time. You are standing on top of death, and all you can ask is “You good?”
You good? You good? You good? Are these women full of batteries?
We agreed the better question was You bad?
How bad are you?
How bad can a person be?
* * *
FOR SO LONG it was just the two of us up in the bedroom. Was it two months we shut ourselves in there, Billie Jean? Or was it three? Pony Darlene would know. She tracked everything. On her walls in permanent marker. In that disease book she was writing. Always open on her bed, her body hunched over it, legs crossed, the Latin dictionary beside her. She did drawings of what she saw, the hidden ailments of every person in the territory, and she gave the maladies names. In her large clothes, her nearly hipbone-length hair. What an exquisite child. The only child I could stand. Children are manipulators, hysterics, vaudevillians. Not Pony Darlene. She is a tactician.
In the bedroom, time did not matter to us. Weather did not matter. Spring, summer, fall. How could the weather matter? Time? Tell us how time could possibly matter. Birth. Love. Murder. These were the forces we were contending with. The tragic impulses of the heart.
There was a wooden light fixture above the bed. Whenever we referenced God, we would instinctively look up and see that light fixture. It was a light fixture that imitated a candelabra. I hate any form of imitation, especially when I am looking for God. I know, I know. You told me countless times. The light fixture came with the bungalow, and you and The Heavy, after Pony was born, never got around to updating it. A child will do that, you told me. A new child will prevent a woman from properly appointing a room. A new child will occupy a woman’s every thought.
The bed was a double bed with a dark wooden frame. Mahogany, I think. Casket wood, I would say. Ha, you would say back, sounding just like Pony Darlene, and you would lie like a corpse, your hands clasped on your chest, a pretend bouquet held over your vital organs. There were two side tables with reading lamps. You had a stack of books on your side, your name necklace, wedding ring, and whatever pins you pulled from your hair, and on his side, The Heavy had whatever he dug from his pockets at the end of the day. Bolts, small change, keys, stray thread, a black ink pen. You loved to watch him empty his pockets onto the side table and then drop his jeans. His clothes held his smell. Sweat, dirt, industry. His belt buckle would make a thud on the floor. You loved the consistency of his motions. You could not read the mind of the man, but from his body, you knew what would come next.
The bedding was black. Traps Linklater—one gold incisor tooth, one dark blue thumbnail, one prominent U-shaped scar on his forearm—and his wife, Debra Marie—impassive, long-suffering, ironing her husband’s money at night, working the expression house arrest through her mind—had given you a fur throw for a wedding gift. It was intended for the bed, but you and The Heavy found the throw repulsive. You did not want to sleep underneath a murdered animal. You pictured Debra Marie feeding the fur through her sewing machine, affixing the satin backing under a fluorescent light, moving silver pins between her teeth. You knew Traps would trade her in for a younger face, a tropical vacation. You pictured Traps stumbling onto the north highway with an ax through his skull, Debra Marie following him out of habit. You thanked Debra Marie profusely for the throw, folded it, and stuffed it into your closet, which was, until you crashed the truck on that July evening, filled with your belongings.
Due to Pony Darlene’s display of fury, the throw was the only thing those young women took from you on Free Day. They were a few years older than Pony, loose, spiteful, and overtanned. A casual hygiene. Matted hair, coral lipstick. I thought they looked exhumed. Pony was not intimidated by the young women. I watched as Pony rejected her peaceable nature and put forward a different one. Like The Heavy, Pony hated all forms of conflict. She would do anything to avoid it. But on this day, Pony crisscrossed the yard with her arms spread, her bombastic stride, and she was vicious. She was defending her territory. She was defending you.
You were asleep, and I did not want to nose you awake, return you to logic, tell you that in giving everything away, a person does not get everything back. I spent my first year of life watching The Heavy make wishes. He would walk from room to room trading in comforts. I will do this if only that. He gave up his hot coffee, his wool socks inside his boots, the pillow under his head. For his sister, for his mother, for his father.
The girl with the deeper tan rode away with your fur throw across her shoulders like a demented queen. Her friend, gauze and tape up and down her shapeless arms, the face of a trance, followed. You lay on your back in the corpse posture we joked about. You had the complexion of pavement. The Heavy came into the room and dressed your wound. His motions were tender and efficient. He was a natural nurse. Your eyelids were moving. I knew you were dreaming. I believed you could confront and repair a life in your dreams. I did not want The Heavy to wake you. You were concussed from the crash. I would wake you in an hour. I knew about concussions and how they could change a person.
Despite my objections, The Heavy roused you. He started to shoot questions at you. You deflected him expertly by giving him just enough of the truth. His pupils dilated as he listened to you. He swatted me off the bed. This, I can handle. I am a fucking animal. I
will always be the most punk in the room. Pony Darlene watched us from the half-open doorway. She had cleared the yard of your belongings and run everything into her bedroom, taking the steps two at a time.
I’ll do this if only that.
* * *
IN THE BEDROOM, there were two medium-size windows. One looked south onto the town. The low, squat bungalows all built from the same beige bricks, and fronting them, gray porches of crumbling cement. A mess of television antennae. The black driveways. The identical trucks.
I found it amusing the founders of the territory had fled suburbia only to re-create it here. They got off their stolen silver bus in their tennis shoes. A city transit bus. What city, they had deliberately forgotten. The city name had been wiped out, scratched at by a key or a knife blade, and then shot at several times. OR BUUST, it said in large cap letters in the oblong slot above the bus’s windshield.
The founders had a Leader. He spoke about systems, creating new systems, and an end to hierarchies, both real and self-imposed. He argued a dome was the highest architectural form. He had the body of a fencer, a luxuriant head of hair. His face was average, but with a large mustache that divided top from bottom and eyes the green of the sky just before a squall. His teeth indicated wealth, a history of orthodontists, his diction too. He was a learned man. But his education did not matter. The Leader’s talent was persuasion and this was talent enough to begin a new civilization. Who is with me? I am. All the way. This was a common rallying cry among the founders. All the way. Under his suit jacket, the Leader wore a white smock that came down to his knees. No one spoke of it as a hospital gown. He called himself John.
Young women fell in love with him. John stared at them until they could not take it, then ignored them so long they doubted they were actually there. On the bus, John erected a curtain around his seat, and behind it, held consultations. He studied the area just above the women’s breasts and read their futures off it. He told the women they were born disrupters. This was exactly what they wanted to hear, and they offered to thank John with their bodies. Give him children. A legacy. “I am a monk,” John told them, “but the kind who will fuck you.” He was fluent in seven languages and used them all when he said the coarse word. The women described him as touched. Sometimes, John would sleep in the overhead compartments. Sometimes, he would ask one of the men to lock him in the luggage hold beneath the bus. Once, on the way north, he saw a field, a gray horse in it, and climbed onto the animal’s back while his followers watched awestruck as he tore across the open. His head would fill with numbers. Distances, fuel amounts, outside temperature, inside temperature. The date, the hour, the second. The bus picked up every hitchhiker. Some wore tube tops and gas masks. One woman wore a housedress. Her hair neatly combed back, a furtive look, and a sign in her hands that read, AS FAR AWAY AS POSSIBLE. John eyed her like he was hypnotizing her. She left her bag in the ditch. No possessions needed when you have your freedom. In the territory, she would become known as One Hundred.
The founders’ bus sat forty-eight passengers comfortably. By the time it arrived in the territory, there were ninety-seven of them. John was the last to disembark. In each hand, he held a rope, and at the end of each rope was a large dog straining against him. The animals came up to his waistline. From the cargo area, he unloaded a bullwhip, spare fuel, paintings of sparrows he was unable to sell at rest stops, and in a leather trunk, his vast inheritance. He had been on many canoe trips and had spent eight summers working in remote logging camps before he had his breakdown. He could drive a truck through a mud slick, start a cooking fire in a blizzard, swim an icy lake with a hammer in his hand should he need to bash the surface, and when it came down to it, not die in the wild. John had a satellite phone. He needed five large trailers, a mess tent, and a food drop. He knew the snow would come in three months. They had three months to build.
* * *
DENSE WOODS TO the east.
Dense woods to the west.
Behind us, perfectly framed by the north-facing window, the water.
You were obsessed by the water.
You spoke to me long after you stopped speaking to The Heavy. To Pony Darlene. We could hear The Heavy just below us, building a room for you. Working from a drawing he did when he sat at the end of the bed and asked you several times in a row, What do you need? Seeing your wet face, your devastations piling up. What do you need? What do you need? What do you need? Sizable question. Beautiful voice. The kind that could be on the radio in the middle of the night listing off plant varieties, cloud formations. Eventually, to your husband, you said, “Privacy.” You needed to be left alone. Beneath the black bedcovers, you held your secret. Your soft body, your secret body.
The Heavy ran the word privacy through the circuits of his mind and arrived at the idea of the room. Black ink drawing on white paper. He showed you the plan. You moved your head and The Heavy took this to be approval. He had an elegant hand. I remember when Pony Darlene was born, she fit inside his hand. He held her there. It was the only time I saw The Heavy cry, when there were already, in his short life, too many occasions. In his daughter’s face, he could see his sister’s. His shaking body lulled his new daughter into sleep. He cried for the miracle of her. First you, and then her. “Tell me,” he said to you, “tell me nothing will ever separate us.”
You did not lift the blue tarp to see what The Heavy was building for you—not once—and this added to his devastations, also piling up, of which you, remote, defeated, changed, had become the only source. He made a sloping roof that was translucent, and the walls of the room were entirely composed of glass. Beams of wood at the corners, holding the whole thing up. I would bring progress reports to you. I would say, Do you know how difficult it is to build with glass in a climate like this one? If not angled and treated correctly, the whole thing could crack and shatter in an instant. And for a man to do this alone. With no crew. To hold up plates of glass and to position them properly. I would watch The Heavy, his arms outstretched, and think: Love is dumb. Dumb as muscle. Love will lead a brilliant man to build a glass room in a wild northwest wind that wants only for him to fail. That wants to pull out his teeth. Make his eyes burn. Scar him over and over and over again.
And Pony Darlene. She would sit in the hallway with her back to the other side of our bedroom door, a hot slice of desperation. We could hear her long body slide down the wood, to the carpet, and then she would fold her knees against her chest. Arms wrapped around herself, head down. She would have a warm red mark on her forehead from staying in place, unmoving. Signs of endurance, of great stubbornness. I wonder where she got that from, Billie Jean. She spent hundreds of hours like that. A whole portion of her youth. Waiting. Waiting for you.
A dog understands waiting.
Come home.
I could hear Pony Darlene’s pulse on the other side of the door. I could smell her worry. It was frantic, livid; it circled and consumed her. She stopped eating. Some nights, she would pull herself up and bang on the door. By then we had a lock on it. You had told The Heavy you needed a lock, and he was so yielding. Wanting only to please you, to make you better.
Pony Darlene started to pass notes under the door. I would see the ends of her fingers, her nails painted red, the skin around them bitten raw, and I would pick up the notes with my teeth and bring them to you. I felt for the child. The notes had a thin coating of sweat on them. She palmed them before sliding them into the room. They were quotes. To be free is to have achieved your life. That kind of thing. My favorite was I can’t go on, I’ll go on. Samuel Beckett. A sadist, but Pony’s deepest crush. She would go to her Lending Library and find what she thought was beautiful, and transcribe it for you. She would spend her days there. She had a stack of loose-leaf paper, white, and she would tear it into strips, and on the strips, write down the quotes she thought might coax you out of the bedroom. She used other people’s words. She worried her o
wn might take you somewhere darker.
Her closest friend, that enthusiast Lana Barbara, had lost her mother two winters before. A bottle of homemade alcohol, a handful of pills. House sandals, sport socks, the toolshed. A straight arrow to death. The mother’s determination haunted Pony Darlene. For Pony, you were a storm, Billie Jean. A dangerous and unpredictable storm.
* * *
“THE PEOPLE IN this place don’t name their dogs, and I think that’s barbaric,” you said to me in our first conversation. The Heavy had carried you to the Last House. In his arms, you were frail, shorn, but your eyes were vivid and alert. I could see you would miss nothing. My admiration was immediate. I was one year old. “To name an animal is a form of love,” you went on. “I know you saved The Heavy’s life. And I know, if it came down to it, you would save mine.” You ran your fingertips along the backs of my ears, and then dug them in, moved them back and forth. You could climb a cliff face with those fingers. I let my eyes close. “What will I call you?” you said.
