by Claudia Dey
Debra Marie handed you her cake and then her coat, and then she took off her shoes.
“Don’t do that!”
“Beg pardon?”
“Don’t take off your shoes!”
“But, I wouldn’t want to track dirt!”
“I don’t care about dirt!”
“Sorry! I can’t hear you over this music!”
“It’s a party!”
“What?”
“I don’t care about dirt! It’s a party!”
And when she refused to put her shoes back on, you took her hand and pushed your way through the crowd while everyone watched you, thinking, Where are those two going? and you brought Debra Marie in her stocking feet up to the bedroom. I could tell it was erotic for everyone to watch you lead Debra Marie up the stairs. I could tell it was erotic for Debra Marie to be standing with you in our bedroom. Debra Marie had no name for that feeling.
“Does your dog always stare like that?”
“Yes, she does.”
“She doesn’t blink.”
“No, she doesn’t. She’s a good, loyal bitch.”
“Beg pardon?”
“I said she is a good, loyal bitch!”
I really do come across that way.
And you laughed while Debra Marie, upon your insistence, squeezed her very different feet into your second-best pair of shoes, low blue heels, but not before taking a good look around.
“You should have seen this place when we moved The Heavy in.”
“Oh, I know all about it,” you said, even though you didn’t. Such a smooth liar. Such a long and beautiful neck. You have the neck of a movie star.
The Heavy had held you to the same promise. You would ask him nothing about his past. You did not need to. His face and his wrists told you everything you needed to know.
“You arrived fairly soon after that. Let’s see. The Heavy moved in here in August, and you arrived the following May.” Debra Marie concluded her story about you, to you. I could hear her heart pounding. Below you, the women of the territory were pulling down their hair. It fell to their knees, their ankles. Under it, they swayed their bodies. For once, they were imitating you. The next morning, your living room floor would be gold with pins. Whatever lasting, subconscious hesitations the women had about you disappeared that night. They threw off their guards. They too wanted to put their hands in yours. Be led somewhere by you. But, the women were used to Debra Marie having all the luck. Her rich husband, her mysteriously beautiful son. “Will Jr. was one when you arrived in the territory.” Like you, Debra Marie measured time in her child.
Then Debra Marie turned her face to the north window. Her strong nose, her small mouth, her eyes wide and gray. The clear view of the reservoir: pump at one end, hoses running from the water to the pump. “Don’t know how you can look out at that thing day and night. I sure couldn’t. And I don’t know how Heav does it.” She blushed when she said that. “Looking out at the thing that might have saved his family, and didn’t. Oh poor Heav.” You joined Debra Marie by the window. You could feel she had become hot. Her feet were damp inside your shoes. If I put my jaw around her ankle, she would taste of salt. You had never heard anyone else shorten The Heavy’s nickname; in doing so, she was telling you something. Something about The Heavy’s past. Something of her possession.
You had underestimated her. You felt power leave your body and enter hers. You were not one to lose. “I love the view,” you said to the reservoir. “And I love Heav,” you said to Debra Marie, pointedly.
Then seeing over Debra Marie’s shoulder in the half-open doorway her large, gorgeous boy, who, at the age of thirteen, had just received his nickname, you said, “You know what? I am going to get changed.”
“What?”
“I am going to change my dress.”
“Now?”
“Yes! I’m bored of this dress and feel like wearing another one.”
And Debra Marie watched you move your sensational body out of one long dress and into another one, not noticing her boy, transfixed. “Zip me up?” Debra Marie, thinking you were speaking to her, did as she was told.
* * *
THE HEAVY. It was the only nickname The Silentest Man, proprietor of Drink-Mart and husband to One Hundred, could give to the nineteen-year-old when Traps dragged him from the cinders and steered him into the bar. While One Hundred (the only rider of the founders’ bus still alive, and the only one to have known John the Leader, thereby appointed the territory nurse) tended to Jay Jr.’s wounds, The Silentest Man lined up bottles of alcohol for him. The young man went about drinking the amber liquid until his anguished world gave way to another one. A black square. Jay Jr. looked into the black square. The Silentest Man looked into Jay Jr. Fire can jump a river. Pain can fell a man. “Heavy,” The Silentest Man said to the boy.
The Silentest Man had watched Jay Jr. for years—since the day he turned thirteen—coming close to but never settling on his nickname. All of the other young men in the territory had their names. Traps, Fur Thumb, Wishbone, Sexeteria, Hot Dollar. They had declared themselves so flamboyantly. Naming them had been easy. Although Jay Jr. had a seriousness about him, he also had an inner liberty The Silentest Man admired and felt ready to name him for. If Jay Jr. had not gone hunting with Traps that night, his nickname would have been Liberty. The fire might not have happened. He might still have a family. If Jay Jr. had not gone hunting with Traps that night, he might not be the last Fontaine. Looking at the boy, his boots still smoking, his face raw from the burns: “The Heavy.” The Silentest Man thus reinforced the name. It was the right name. The Heavy was the only young man in the territory with secrets, secrets he knew how to keep.
Jay Jr. had slept with a woman. He thought of her now. The smell of fire filled Drink-Mart. His lungs were tight with smoke. An iron taste in his mouth. Sex was a revelation, but he was careful with it, never promiscuous. He was not greedy. Had never been drunk. He did not love this woman. He was enthralled by her body, but he could not see the future in her. Was not one to fake it. He knew what love was. About love, he had no doubt. His love had belonged to his family, and his family was dead. In a matter of minutes. The Heavy threw up on the floor of the bar. The Silentest Man covered it with sawdust. Traps stood nearby, feeling useless, stung and unsure why. The Heavy passed out with the hands of One Hundred stroking his hair and trying to mend his face.
In the territory, the announcement of a nickname is met with celebration. Not The Heavy’s nickname. It produced an awkwardness among the men. Evoking only the tragic fire, The Heavy’s desperate attempts to rescue his family, nearly getting to his sister.
When he ran at the blazing house, The Heavy had to throw off the men. They hung from his arms. Held him by the boots. Tried to tackle him and pin him down. The Heavy pointed his rifle at the men and shot the air just above their heads.
At the front of the Fontaine house, there were two metal supports that held a roof above the small cement porch. His sister’s bedroom window looked out onto the roof. She used the roof to sneak out at night. The Heavy climbed the supports. He said, “Pony.” This was his nickname for his sister. “Pony.” He said it again. She followed him everywhere. Pony. The Heavy got his hands on her burning window frame and was working it open when the window exploded and the roof he was standing on caved in.
The Heavy’s father had started the fire. His wife was having an affair with his best friend. The Heavy’s father was smoking and then, upon his wife’s admission of guilt, held his cigarette to their bedroom curtain. His wife found the gesture elegant, a gesture that did not fit in with his usual ways, which reminded her of a bear. She had no time for the next thought. The Heavy’s father could not believe how fast the fire was. How beautiful. How it climbed. The Heavy’s father was a romantic. He pictured his son. Soon, he would kill an animal. Soon, he would find love. Smo
ke obscured the room. He could no longer see his wife. He could hear her making sounds. He did not know her necklace was on fire. He put his fist through their window and ruined his hand. He understood he had punched the wall, and the window was nowhere to be found. Neither was his wife. Everything was on fire. The bed. His shoes. His hands. Fire was loud as bones snapping. He had no one to make this comment to. He was a social man. Unlike his son, who only faced inward. God, he could be hard to reach. He pictured his daughter. All he could see was the night, and her slicing through it. She was trouble. He did not know she was only feet away. The fire jumped across the hall to her bedroom and consumed it. Around her bed, her father had hung a white lace curtain. On her wall, she had a poster of a shirtless man. Under it, she had written YOU ROCK MY WORLD. In a room of smoke and flame, his daughter had fallen asleep with her headphones on. She was waiting for the asteroid to make impact.
The men of the territory accepted The Heavy’s name, but uttered it with a distancing tone. They could not punctuate it with a clap to his back. They could not shorten it. Make a nickname of his nickname, as they liked to do. There were no jokes to be made with the name so the men tried to avoid using it altogether. The man who was never greeted, never joked with. Already an isolated man, The Heavy rarely heard his name called. What was meant to create closeness had the opposite effect. The Heavy preferred this. Besides, there was only one voice he wanted on his name, and it was yours.
Heav. Short for Heaven.
My mother was the sole survivor of the fire. She refused to leave the bungalow, but was within reach. By her fur, The Heavy pulled her through the blown-out living room window after the roof to his sister had collapsed. He handed her off to one of the men. When my mother went to run back in and was stopped, she bit through the arms of the men, went for their chests and necks, until they locked her in a nearby truck, and she chewed through the interior. That is where I was born. A week later, my mother was run over by Traps speeding toward the Last House with his sewing kit.
When a dog is born, her mother tells her everything she thinks her pup will need to know. We do not, the way humans do, assume the future.
But have you left the fire? I would ask The Heavy. You can leave the fire. You don’t have to stay loyal to the fire. The fire does not have to be all that you see. I would say the things my mother had before me.
* * *
THE DAY AFTER your party, the men and women of the territory woke up in their truck beds, under the badminton net, on the bathroom floor. Had they looked through your medicine cabinets? Yes. While you crawled on your hands and knees, picking up hairpins, tumbler glasses, and half-smoked cigarettes, adults snuck from the bungalow into daylight. Pony was still asleep on a bare mattress in the basement, her friend Lana’s leg thrown over her, and The Heavy was upstairs on your bed. The rhinestones had fallen from your face. You tried not to leap to conclusions.
A quarter mile away, the men gathered at Drink-Mart. Their eyes were bloodshot. They needed fixing. What had you done to them? They could not even joke about poison. I’m all out of love, I’m so lost without you. The Silentest Man did not have to be asked to turn off the Air Supply. “What is the softest drink?” The men shook when they asked One Hundred, who had grown weary of healing them and had, just that morning, nailed a piece of chipboard over the INFIRMARY part of the Drink-Mart sign. “The gentlest, kindest drink?” The men flirted with the old woman. She poured it for them, then left the bar and walked across the highway and northwest to a small clearing in the forest where she had her lawn chair set up. She loved to sun herself. She would arrange her clothing into a sort of bathing suit, oil what she could, and close her eyes.
Upper Big Territory was a gold mining town. The fathers of Wishbone, the Death Man, Hot Dollar, Fur Thumb, Traps, and The Heavy had discovered gold a year after they stepped off the founders’ bus. Shortly after, their Leader, John, went for a swim in the reservoir and never returned. John had lived in the bungalow they called the Last House. Wanted to be at the northernmost point of the territory. When he vanished, his followers left the Last House unoccupied as if he might come back to it. They were used to him disappearing for a day, two days, but this time, the days stretched into weeks. Every morning, his followers checked the shoreline to see if his body had washed up on the black mud. One morning, the black mud had a glimmer to it. The people of the territory had struck gold.
On her lawn chair, under the blazing sun, One Hundred grew thirsty, and she returned to the bar. The Silentest Man handed her a drink. She always drank her drink while The Silentest Man fixed her a second, identical drink. He did this now, and she thanked him. There was love when his skin grazed hers. A life together. Barefoot, One Hundred walked back to her clearing, but where her lawn chair had been set up there was now a gaping hole.
Crowding around the crater, the teenagers of the territory could not believe it. They thought they had missed an asteroid. “Classic,” they commented to each other. “Finally, something happens here and we miss it.” One girl, Pallas Jones, said she had actually heard the approach and was the first to get here on her dirt bike, but by then, it had already hit. Others agreed the sound was furious. Still others thought only of the night before, and having sex for the first time under a large coat on a pile of mattresses on the cement floor of the Fontaine bungalow basement. The crater was deepening. The teenagers stepped back and watched the earth open.
The men looked from the sinkhole, the result of an abandoned mineshaft, to the frontier, and saw it for what it had become. Yes, there may still be some gold deposits in the territory, but they had become too difficult to extract. The fog downed planes. The cold broke metal. So much of the time, the men worked their instruments in darkness. It was cheaper to do this type of thing elsewhere. That is what they were being told, and had been told for years.
But this was the only place the men and women knew, and they didn’t want to leave it. They didn’t think they could. They had to come up with a different way. Supplies were no longer flown in. They were driven in. Once a month. A single truckload. Milk became expensive. You can make a lot out of very little, the people told themselves, and they competed for austerity. The men counted out their cigarettes and smoked them to the filter. They cut their hair. Their hair, which had been long and full like the women’s hair, went into the bonfires. When their gums grew weak, the men pulled their teeth. “Complaint is a form of self-degradation,” the men said to each other. “Beauty is a state of mind.” The words of John the Leader became more resonant than ever. “Hardship is a matter of perception.” The women pulled down the hems of their children’s clothing. Paperbacks were ripped into chapters and parceled between the bungalows. With duct tape, everything could be used more than once. Babies smelled like mothballs. A woman could no longer change her dress midway through a party. There was no second dress to wear. There were no parties. There were no joyrides. Trucks were driven with purpose. All materials had purpose. The men thought about starting in on the forest, and did briefly, but faced the same obstacles. The fog, the cold, the dark. They needed a new export. Something lasting. Something endless. Something that could renew itself. Look within.
Blood. The world always needed fresh blood. And blood became the new export of the territory.
* * *
YOU TOLD ME your surroundings were blurry when you fell from the Mercedes sedan, the rush of transport from the highway to the lunch counter. The arms that held you were the wrong arms. The man’s smell was wrong. His skin against yours made you bristle. The body never lies. And then, through the door to Home of the Beef Candy, a chime of bells, and there he was standing at the lunch counter. The Heavy. He turned to you. You didn’t even see the ravaged face. What you saw was the body of a fighter. The sheer solidity of him. And then the eyes. Green, bottomless.
While you recovered in the Last House, and your name—Billie Jean—was spread throughout the territory, the wo
men circled the dark blue Mercedes sedan (painted that color by you in the big and empty parking lot of a mall). It was a car that did not understand clearance. The territory demanded clearance. Opening the glove box, the women found a pair of underwear. One of the women held the pink underwear up with a finger and let the sun shine through them. “I could do that to my underwear with a pair of scissors,” she said, then reconsidered. “Our men can never see this underwear,” she warned and went to light them on fire before being stopped—“Fuck!” clutching her ankle—by me. They scoured the car floor but collected only a few old wrappings for foods they already knew. Hands on the upholstery, between the seats, under the visors, inside the armrests: nothing worthy of their time or contemplation. They went to the trunk, and when they found it sealed shut, key not working, grew excited. Crack, the supplicant whine of the hinges, and one woman, crowbar in hand, lifted out a white plastic bag containing something small. “Is it a baby?” The women emptied the bag. A white button-down. A black pencil skirt. SERVER stitched on the right breast pocket of the button-down. A change of clothes. Clothes for a different climate.
They scrapped the sedan. They would circle you, instead.
The women left the plastic bag by the front door of the Last House alongside a second plastic bag. Clothes for this climate. An indoor tracksuit, an outdoor tracksuit, beige bras, white underwear, wool socks, heavily treaded boots, a winter coat. They left a note explaining the clothes’ designations as they had been declared by John.
