Heart-Breaker

by Claudia Dey

  When the bungalow was finally quiet and my father had closed the door to the spare room, the baby’s room, and then closed the door to his own, I called Billie’s house. I had never done this before. I wouldn’t take the risk. This time, I knew if The Heavy picked up, I could apologize for the late hour and explain it away with news of the baby. The happy news. The baby that was his wife’s baby. The baby I couldn’t bring myself to look at. It was Pony who picked up. Her voice quick and hushed and matter-of-fact. “The Complaint Department,” she said. “Tell me what’s troubling you.”

  “I get you, they say this in town. I get you. The men say it during the day at the truck lot, and the girls say it at night by the bonfire. I get you. I totally get you. You don’t get me. No one gets me. Even the one person I want to get me, the person I am closest to, doesn’t get me and I don’t know how to get her to get me. When I am not selling trucks, I am having my blood drawn. I have my blood drawn more than any other boy or girl in the territory. I can watch my face change in the mirror. I am both elderly and of the future. Is that even possible? Do you know what I mean? Do you get me? Am I allowed to punctuate my questions? No. In the territory, no man is allowed to punctuate his questions unless he is telling a joke. I don’t tell jokes. I am not that kind of man. I am my own man, but even this is a line I borrowed from a night soap. From watching a night soap through the window of the person I most want to get me. Get me is all I want to say to this person. Get me. I hate to smoke. I hate to hunt. I hate to kill animals. I hate to eat animals, and then smoke after I have eaten them. I am quiet. This is my only hunting quality. This is my only smoking quality. I hate trucks. I am scared of needles, but no one can know needles frighten me. This is not acceptable here. In fact, blood frightens me too. Many things frighten me. Sleep is agony. Make a fist, the women say, and I feed the lines my blood. Sometimes, the line has not been put in properly and the blood makes my forearm swell. Sometimes, the line will come out and my blood will shower the woman standing over me. I am constantly generating new blood and then giving my new blood to plastic bags. I have bruises all over my arms and legs. The women try to find new entry points to me, but sometimes they have to resort to the old ones. Looking for entry points, they say as they prick and stab me. I have control over my reading materials and my cassette tapes, but I do not have control over my blood. I do not have control over my body.”

  “They might as well make vests out of you,” Pony says.

  “Yes.”

  A not uncomfortable silence, and Pony asks, “Is that the extent of your complaint?”

  “No.”

  Then The Heavy’s voice comes on. “Who’s this?”

  That night, I take the baby from her crib and bring her to my bed. I put her on my chest without looking at her face. My daughter’s face. My daughter. “I’m a father. Do you hear that, cold world? I’m a father. Do you hear that, you perfect tiny girl?” I whisper, the two of us together in the black room. “I’m your father. I’m yours.”

  * * *

  THE LIGHT IN the territory is nearly gone. The men turn on their headlamps and aim them at the corpse of John the Leader, rolling the rectangle of ice that contains him, on the count of three, to a tarp, and then roping the tarp closed. Not taking note of the path worn from the water to the Fontaine bungalow, the men follow it, up and through the woods, carrying John’s leaden shape on their shoulders, the way they do a coffin. Pony and I are close behind. She leads me as if I am blindfolded. The gentle push of her hands on my back. “Watch your step there, a big root there,” she says, though she does not have to. I know the path well.

  Fur Thumb, Hot Dollar, and my father carefully lower John into the back of my father’s truck. DEALR. They decide Fur Thumb and Hot Dollar will ride with my father to the Death Man’s trailer. Their wives, Cheryl Chantale and Pamela Jo, can drive the FURTHB and HOTDLR trucks home. My father reaches for the ignition and turns his truck keys, unleashing his fog lights. Wipers on high. The men let the truck warm up. They smoke. John will be the first corpse to spend the winter in the Death Man’s shed. The Death Man will be waiting for the men by his sliding glass door. The men will be announced by the mania of his gulls, their shrill cries. The Death Man will invite the men into his trailer. Have a bit of liquor, listen to some speed metal, sit on his plastic furniture. Take a load off. Sorry, man. Can’t. Another night, for sure. The men will make excuses. The wife, the kids. Then they will place John in the Death Man’s shed, between stacks of empty, body-size shelves.

  Fur Thumb asks, “What do you think got him? Like, what did that to John the Leader? Do you think there are animals in there?”

  “In the reservoir?”

  Pony and I watch the men climb into the front seat of the DEALR truck and belt themselves in alongside my father.

  “And, I hate to say it, but also out there?”

  The men look through my father’s custom windshield, tinted and made of bulletproof glass.

  “Animals we don’t have names for,” says Hot Dollar, feeling a creep over his skin.

  “Animals we don’t know how to kill,” says Fur Thumb, and he looks over to my father, who, for the first time in his life, is quiet, quiet as a nuclear winter.

  Pony opens the back door of her bungalow and lays me out on the living room carpet. Panic darts through her eyes, which she tries to subdue. She knows there’s something wrong with me—hypothermia? Shock? Grief detonating in my body? Billie’s portrait above the mantel. 4:42 P.M. Confirmation my watch is waterproof. “You are obsessed with time,” Billie said to me. No, I am obsessed with the passing of time. All I have not said and done. The life not lived. The bungalow feels vacated. Where is The Heavy? It was John in the reservoir, I want to tell him. Not Billie. John the Leader. Where is he? “You’re totally thrashing,” Pony says. “Easy, Supes.” She unlaces my boots and pulls them off. She tugs at the frozen cuffs of my jeans. She wraps a black bedcover around my shaking body and then takes the stairs two at a time to get dry clothes for me.

  When I ran alongside Pony, and we came to a stop in front of her bungalow, Friday, sun up, she took my hand and held my palm. Traced the lines. “Something about your father,” she said, and she looked away from my hand and toward the lightless house where my father slept, and one floor above him, The Heavy.

  Pony returns and dresses me. Gets me to my feet. What is this feeling? I put my head in my hands. My heart jolts. Love does hurt. The Heavy pulls back the hood of his black recliner and looks at me without my ball cap, without my hood, my thick, shoulder-length brown hair, in his clothes, his clothes that fit me. “Time you go home, Son.”

  The moon is bright as I run home full of questions for my mother. Am I who I think I am? Am I who I think I am? Am I who I think I am? Saturday night, when I know I will have her to myself. My mother’s words. My mother’s words on Saturday nights only.

  * * *

  WHEN I WORRIED about how my mother got home with the baby, I remembered she was the only woman in the territory with her own truck. My father had a tract of land he had cleared of trees and filled with various-size trucks. Above it, he hung a sign, FULLY LOADED, that flashed on at night. Some of the trucks had been there for the five years he had been in business. When my father saw rust on a truck, he painted it matte black. The men buying trucks caught on, so even the newest models were painted matte black. Now, all of the trucks in the territory were matte black. When my father wouldn’t mark down the price of the older trucks, he made the scales of justice with his hands and cited inflation. One hand went up and one hand went down. If you thought through the value of the dollar then, the value of the dollar now, the price was a bargain.

  The night after my mother told my father they were going to have a baby, at last, a second child, my father gave my mother her own truck. “I can’t believe it, I just can’t believe it,” my father said, and he held his palms to his eyes. Then my father
shook my hand, cried openly, and was unembarrassed. He shook my hand for a long time. The truck he gave my mother was the oldest truck off the lot, and half-eaten by rust. Six months later, my mother would use it to bring home the child she had fooled him into believing was his.

  The Mother Trick.

  * * *

  WHEN IT WAS too cold to meet in the clearing, Billie and I would lie on the floor of the trailer at the back of the truck lot. The Golden Falcon trailer that served as the Fully Loaded office from 8:30 A.M. to 4:30 P.M., Monday to Saturday. Sundays, by appointment, and closed for all final restings. Billie and I put our heads down on the gray slush that had built up that day and listened to the ice dent the roof. There was a small stove we lit for heat. The metal desk coated in frost. And on the walls, my father’s collages. Some nights, he would disappear into our toolshed with his scissors and slice up magazines, coupons, pamphlets, then glue them onto rectangles of paper. To me, they looked like ransom notes. To him, they looked like a new world order.

  Billie’s dog stood watch by the trailer door. I never once read to Billie without her dog only feet away. Billie would say, “Oh, she’s keeping guard. She knows things,” but I always felt the dog would, if given the chance, close her teeth around my throat and read to Billie herself. Billie talked about how the dog left dead animals under her pillow, never under The Heavy’s—though he was always the one to carry the bodies from the house—and the dog would leap for the body until The Heavy unhanded it, and the dog would devour it in the yard.

  There was a forty-channel CB radio in the trailer, and Billie and I listened to the territory girls’ plotting voices. Pushing the talk bar and whispering, “Do you read me?” a girl would ask nervously. “I read you,” another girl would reassure. One night, Billie looked at me, and not knowing what else to say, what could be left to say (so much), quoted the girls, “We just have to commit to the motions. Make a list of the motions. We can’t get lost.”

  We can’t get lost.

  * * *

  BILLIE SAW OUR DAUGHTER one time. Once. Briefly, they were in the same room. It was the first Delivery Day after she was born. I heard about it from the territory men who, every afternoon, their windburned faces, bottom lips bulging with chewing tobacco, filed into the trailer. Above the small stove, my father had a black-and-white television mounted in the corner—never turned it off—and the men, while they looked up at the television, told us,

  “The Fontaine mother just…It was her turn at the cash—”

  “And she just left her basket right there and walked out.”

  “I heard Debra Marie checked out her basket.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your mother checked out her basket.” The men looked to me.

  “Pony Darlene had to run to catch up to her.”

  “And Pamela Jo told me she didn’t even have her door closed behind her let alone her safety belt on when the Fontaine mother pulled away.”

  “She didn’t pull away.”

  “It was Pony who pulled away.”

  “The girl pulled away.”

  “A good driver though. A real capable driver.”

  * * *

  THE LAST TIME I read to Billie in the clearing before the baby came, she said after, “Women only warn you about the tiredness. You won’t sleep for two years, the mothers love to warn you when you’re going to have a baby. And they brag about how little they slept when they had their babies. They gloat about their sleepless years. Falling asleep on the floor. At the table. In the shower. But no one warns you about the love. No one even speaks about it. The love for your baby comes with something dark. It comes with death. When you look at your child for the first time, you feel the presence of death. How death is looking at your child too. That is why you don’t sleep. Not because of the child, but because you are watching over her. Keeping death away. It is death that keeps you up. Not the child.” Billie, who kept Pony’s milk teeth in a box in a drawer beside her bed, spoke about her own mother to me only once. “My mother completely missed this feeling.”

  * * *

  I WOULD SEE Billie Jean Fontaine three more times. The third last time, we met in the clearing soon after our daughter’s birth. When I arrived early, feeling triumphant, Billie was already standing there in her faded workdress (she had worn the wrong color that day to the Banquet Hall; the women of the territory were dressed in yellow; she was at her station, the only one in pink) and handed me an envelope. It contained a handful of her hair.

  “Forensic.” I tried to make a joke.

  “It’s falling out,” she said tonelessly. “That’s what happens after a woman has a baby.” On the envelope she had written:

  Mrs. Supernatural

  “I was going to put a question mark after the name.” Billie held her hands out to stop me from touching her. She had the shrink wrap around her breasts now. They were hard with milk and made her wince. I couldn’t go anywhere near her body. She didn’t cry. Even when she asked me: “How is she sleeping? What is she eating? What is she like? Tell me about her face.”

  The second last time I saw Billie was two months later at the final resting for our little girl. I saw Billie’s effort, standing in her large dark dress in front of the black square, how she held her spine straight. Then, how the will left her body. I couldn’t move to help her. My mother’s hand on one wrist, and my father’s hand on the other. I was only feet away. The Heavy carried her out, and she fought him. I heard a woman call Billie vicious. The woman had mascara all over her face. Billie did not. Watching Billie’s struggling body, throwing fists, the woman muttered, “Like a dog with a catch in its teeth trying to snap the neck.” The IV poles, the cots, the refrigerators filled with blood pushed to the walls. “Trying to snap her own neck,” said Rita Star. The Heavy kicked open the metal doors of the Banquet Hall, and Pony Darlene followed. She turned back and yelled at everyone. Everyone looked away from Pony Darlene. The Heavy said, “Enough.” He walked out with Billie into the sun.

  That night, I stood in the woods across from the Fontaine bungalow. The Heavy had started pulling down the east wall of the house and was under a blue tarp beside a work light, sawing through lumber. Pony had her back to the wide rectangular window. She was watching television. Teen Psychic. I went around to the back of the house. The Heavy’s outerwear hung damp on the laundry line. I threw rocks up at Billie’s window. Where’s your stupidity? Where’s my stupidity? Come on, Billie. She came to the glass. I ran through the woods to the reservoir and, knowing she had a clear view, swam the strokes she had taught me. It was late July and the air was thick. It was going to rain. I arched my back and dropped beneath the surface and held my breath for as long as I could, and when I came back up, it was The Heavy who stood in Billie’s place. He watched me through a squint. Billie had given him a black eye that day, and as The Heavy and I stared at each other, we heard the sky open and rain fell on rain.

  “When she cries, she sounds like she is trying to swallow her cries. Like already she is trying to be brave. She has black hair and it’s falling out. New hair is coming in and it’s white. Her eyes are blue. Not sure where that came from, the blue. She’s the most mysterious person. I can almost watch her eyelashes grow. She has your cheekbones, your mouth. But really, she just looks like herself. She is so complete. Sometimes she gets so angry. It’s as if she’s in a fight with the world. Can’t believe this place. She is long. Her grip is firm. She sleeps on her back and kicks off her blankets. Hates to be wrapped in blankets. Doesn’t like to sleep alone. Makes these whale sounds when she is dreaming. Screams when she’s hungry. She wakes up once, sometimes twice in the night and I give her a bottle. She just started to look up at me. To study me. Before that, it was like I was a stranger. Like she was in a separate life, one that ran alongside this one, but one I couldn’t reach. I can hardly take it. Her stare. It’s like, I don’t know, it’s like she knows ever
y secret. Every cure. And she’s just about to tell me.”

  As I stood there in the clearing holding an envelope of her hair, unsure of how to be, Billie said, “Babies’ eyes change color. Her eyes won’t be blue for long.” And even though she knew I did not like questions, she had asked me the questions, wanted answers to her questions; she said, “Now, I want you to stop talking to me. I don’t want to hear the sound of your voice anymore.”

  * * *

  IT HAPPENED TO BABIES. The women crowded around my mother and stroked her back through her final resting dress. “It’s not your fault,” they consoled her. “Babies die in their sleep and no one knows why. It’s hideous. It’s cruel. It’s not your fault. Debra Marie, oh, Debra Marie. Poor Debra Marie.” But my mother could see a strange joy inside the women. She had lost something, and, for the women, this was directly their gain. They thought she should have been a grandmother, not a mother. That her age had made the baby die. That her good fortune in everything else had made the baby die.

  “The thing is, Will Jr.,” my mother said to me later that night, forgetting my nickname, “my pain is real. My grief is real. The strain on my heart is real.”

  I had memorized her face. Billie was right. Her eyes were no longer blue. They were dark. My daughter’s eyes were Billie’s. Do you read me? they said. I read you.

  * * *

  HOURS AFTER I stood in front of the black square, my father opened the door to my bedroom, flicked on the overhead light, and sat on the end of my bed. As he spoke, he filled my room with the smell of alcohol. He told me about a place that was famous for its mountains. The mountains were snowcapped, and people visited the place to see the snowcapped mountains. But the snow had stopped falling, and now the place was no longer beautiful. People had stopped visiting, and the place was in decline. In an attempt to save his people, one man climbed the mountains with cans of white paint. He painted the mountaintops. Tried to return beauty to the place. Prosperity. “I am the guy with the cans of paint,” my father said, laughing a little to himself, playing with his pinkie ring, then zeroing in on me. “I’m just trying to do good, Son. To do right.”