by Claudia Dey
Supernatural. O. Supernatural.
He gets up and helps me to my feet. He looks down at me. He is extremely tall. Could there be a taller man? Yes, but not here. Maybe The Heavy. Yes, The Heavy. “You passed out.” I look around. We are alone in the graveyard. I am having trouble summoning language. The bonfire is mostly embers. Everyone has gone home. “Fainted.”
I had pictured this so differently. Now is the moment when I name-drop the lights in the sky, and Supernatural falls in love with me, but instead I say, “I listened to the chants.” And then what I don’t say: I slow danced to the chants. Embarrassed, I lift my hands to my face. No sense of mystery. Visiting cousin. Pinto. Kissless. The rhinestones are still there. Good.
“Are you about to faint again?”
“No.”
“Phew.”
He is moving strangely. “My legs fell asleep,” he mumbles, and then he stands very still.
I see the charred can of butane.
“Did you kill him?”
He shakes his head. “I am so not a murderer.”
The tall boy in the black jeans with the rifle at his side. He has a scar that runs through his top lip. I don’t think I have ever noticed it before. I don’t think I have ever stood this close to Supernatural before. Seen so much of the face under the ball cap under the hood. When did he get the scar? It looks new.
* * *
WHEN WE WERE CHILDREN, our mothers dragged us here while they tidied the plots.
“You good?”
“You good?”
“You good?”
The women never answered the question; they just traded it between them. When my mother and I walked over the incline and joined the circle, they always commented on her hair design. She had the most elaborate hair designs in the territory. I would sit on the edge of her bathtub and watch her twist and pin her hair. Her gold hoop earrings, her gold eyeshadow. The pale pink workdress, the red ski jacket. All around us, the boys of the territory ran between and climbed the headstones, rolled tires, lit cardboard on fire, chanted, “Fight, fight, fight.”
“Graveyard getting big,” the women said.
“Graveyard getting bigger than the town.”
And the widows would break off in their rubber aprons and dish gloves, their cleaning supplies in their pails, their shorter ponytails like pets at their coat collars, to clear their husbands’ headstones of dirt and snow.
“When did the headstones start getting uneven?”
“Who’s to say this one gets a bigger headstone than that one?”
“This one’s headstone’s bigger than my chest freezer.”
“This one’s bigger than my bungalow.”
And the children pinned their arms to their bodies and rolled down the small decline. Clay, rock, and scrub. The girls played at having their blood drawn. Faking dizzy, “I did my bloodwork today. Get me some citrus.” And the boys, with their fathers’ old tools, built makeshift ladders, hunting platforms. Every stick was a rifle. They had knives in pouches and sharpened wood into spears.
“Oh come on, you two,” my mother would say.
“Join the others!” Debra Marie would look from me to Supernatural. And we would leave the mothers and walk toward the children. We wouldn’t look at each other. We wouldn’t talk to each other. We would stand there with our hands in our pockets and search for the next moment.
* * *
SUPERNATURAL BRUSHES OFF my outerwear. He straightens it. He touches me the way my mother would. What is this feeling? I put my head in my hands. There’s a pressure against my skull. A metallic taste in my mouth. Drugs? Fear? Love? I want to ask him if there is any word on my mother. An alarm sounds. A rapid, high beeping. It’s his watch. He has a digital. Black, plastic. He presses a button to turn it off and a blue light comes up: 6:45 A.M. She has been gone close to twelve hours. “No word on your mother,” Supernatural says, and he puts his hand on my shoulder. It startles me. “Sorry,” he says. Did he just read my mind? I need to go. I get on my bicycle and try to ride away from him as fast as possible. “Are you all right to get home?” he calls after me. I don’t answer him. “Hey, Pony!” The sun is breaking up the horizon. “What did you think of the chants?” he asks. I pump my fist in the air. I do not even come close to wiping out.
Next life. Waterbed, field, be there.
* * *
THE MORNING AFTER the bonfire. The Delivery Man pulls into the loading dock of Value Smoke and Grocer. He always arrives right at dawn. Two young girls in ski masks and nightdresses come to a stop beside me and get off their dirt bikes. They are shivering with the cold. Slender and breathless. They are wearing rings made of duct tape. I can see the paint under their fingernails. They hold their arms on a diagonal against their bodies. I recognize the injury. They launched themselves from their bedroom windows, their nightdresses looking like parachutes, but not performing like them. The girls roll up their ski masks. They are sure not to cry when the Delivery Man steps down from his rig. This man is in love with me, the girls tell themselves, and he is going to take me to a place where they never run out of eggs, bullets, or Vaseline.
The Delivery Man has two gold teeth. He wears a hat a horse could drink water from. He moves like there is nothing in his way. Because of the length and barrenness of his trip, he hauls extra gasoline in jerry cans. I can see he is careful to keep these separate from the fresh goods. He unloads crate after crate. He unzips his gray leather jacket. A T-shirt that says LIBRA. A bandanna tied at his neck. Workboots. He has cuts on his knuckles from fighting. His hair is short in the front and long in the back. Neon Dean leans his head into the loading dock. The Delivery Man brings his hands down hard on a keyboard made of air. They exchange envelopes and call each other Brother.
Once the delivery truck is emptied of supplies and filled with bags of teenage blood, the Delivery Man drives back to the perimeter of the territory, one mile outside of town. He eases off the gas pedal, making pauses with his foot. “Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, looks like I have run out of gasoline.” The young girls on their dirt bikes catch up to him. They walk through the trailer part after the sex part and hold up the red bags. “Our blood! It’s so pretty! Look at it in the light! Did you know your blood has particles in it?” the girls say to the man, his rough throat, his smooth body. They sing purely,
TEEN BLOOD,
ALL THE WAY—
Then the coughs of new smokers.
I wait my turn in the passenger seat. I stare out through the Delivery Man’s tinted windshield. Sky, forest, and the north highway cutting a sure line through both. My future. Just behind me, there is a partition that snaps on and off. It is partly open. This is the Delivery Man’s bunk. Single mattress, walls of burgundy tufted leather, picture of Heather Locklear, a carton of menthol cigarettes and a stack of instant soups, a jar of pickles, tasseled vest, jeans in a ball. The Delivery Man’s dashboard and steering wheel are fake mahogany. His steering wheel is worn down in two places. Where his hands spend the most time. On the knob of his gearshift, he has written KEEP ON.
The Delivery Man tells the girls he is making poems out of them. He is a stray and the road is his home. He asks the girls what their favorite television show is. He tells them he is going to be on it. He doesn’t know when. When he says “guest star,” the girls hear “death star.” With a switchblade, he carves whatever he can. Here, a wolf. Here, a woman. Here, a flower. And he gives them gifts of mangled wood. The girls lift their nightdresses. Across their stomachs, they have written their phone numbers in permanent marker. “Memorize it,” they say to the Delivery Man. “I got photographic recall,” he says to the girls. And he closes his eyes, drags his tongue across his teeth. “Life is about making something new,” he purrs. “When you make something new, that’s when you know you’re truly living,” and the territory girls picture babies. In the
territory, babies are the only new things. “What do you see in those two thousand miles?” the girls ask him, but by then, the Delivery Man has grown tired of them. He deadpans, “Trees.” Then, he has to persuade the girls to get off the truck. “You’ll miss your mother,” he says, looking past them.
The Delivery Man gets into the driver’s seat.
“So?”
“So.”
I give him my Complaint Department face. He takes off his leather jacket. He has a tattoo on his right bicep. It’s a triangle. Along each side, it has a word.
“You can’t have it three ways,” the Delivery Man says to me. “But you can have it two.”
I open up my camo outerwear. “I want it fast,” I say, showing him Supes’s rifle, “and I want it easy. Now, give me all your money or I’ll dump your gasoline.”
* * *
“TIME TO DO a door-to-door,” Traps says to The Heavy when The Heavy raises the blue tarp and joins Traps in our living room. It’s morning, early, Friday. The Heavy’s arms at his sides, hands making fists. Supes stands there too, his long straight body in the same position. Traps lifts himself off our beige couch. The surge of alcohol and the private fantasies of men hang all around him. “Hello, Son.” Traps glances at Supes, who barely lifts his chin toward his father. His eyes are fixed elsewhere. He does not pull back his hood, take off his ball cap, but I can see what he is looking at. The portrait that holds him.
“Son.” The Heavy nods his acknowledgment to Supes and makes his way to the kitchen sink. He puts his head under the faucet, running it beneath the cold water. Then he stands and combs his fingers through his wet hair, pulling it back off his face. “Sir,” Supes says to my father. And then, one quick look in my direction, and he is gone. Not the kind to say goodbye.
And where the hell have you been? The Heavy does not ask me as I take off my camo outerwear and put it on my hook. My mother’s coat is still in a heap in the front hallway. All of us taking care to step over it.
Sometimes, at final resting, we don’t have a portrait, and so we stand before a black square, a bouquet on either side of it, under three floor lamps. We need something to touch, to kiss, to talk to. When we came home from the final resting for Debra Marie’s youngest, The Heavy confronted my mother. “Why did you have to go and make a scene like that in front of the portrait? Why did you have to go and make a scene when Debra Marie didn’t even make a scene? There wasn’t even a portrait and you had to go and make a scene? Making a scene in front of a black square, what is that? Why did I have to pull you from the black square when the child’s own mother held it together?” My mother would not answer my father. She got in our truck and drove into a tree.
Climbing the stairs to my bedroom, I can hear Traps call Debra Marie on speed dial. “We need you here at the Last House. It could use a mother’s touch.” And, a man bad at whispering, he whispers, “And so could Pony Darlene. Have mercy. She just got home from God knows where looking like”—bad whisper—“I don’t even want to say”—(but you know he can’t help himself), and from the top of the stairs, I watch him touch his FULLY LOADED belt buckle, then run his fingers over his stained teeth, his sharp cheekbones, his stubbled jaw, and order his features into glory, authority, former handsomeness, cunning, sympathy—“her mother.”
I pull back my bedroom curtain. The town is just waking up. The men swing their screen doors open and let their white dogs out. The women load their smallest children into the backseats of their trucks and head toward Value Smoke and Grocer. They will wait in line with their Delivery Day baskets trading details. She was last seen around 7:00 P.M. Indoor tracksuit, no shoes. No word yet. No word. The Heavy told Traps he’d left some outerwear, a spare rifle, and some fuel in the cab. That could be the difference between. I don’t want to say it. Life or death. Sure could. It was Rita Star. Rita Star who said Billie Jean left the house in the first place. With the dog. Just the dog. Did Rita Star see Billie Jean? She said she was walking by. How did Rita Star just happen to be walking by bungalow 88 at that hour? Going for her constitutional. As only she could. 7:00 P.M. Thursday. Not seen since. Thirteen hours. Billie Jean Fontaine. No shoes, no coat? Was she wearing a coat? And like a brain sickness, the women will bat these same few facts between them; they won’t make any progress. At this point, there is no progress to make.
* * *
“HUNTING IS WAITING.” Traps was on our front porch with my father. I could hear them from my bedroom, which is directly above it. He wanted my father to come hunting with him. This was when we had chairs on our small cement porch rather than broken things. About five months ago. Around the time Traps’s and Debra Marie’s baby was born. A warm night. My window was open. The horseflies hadn’t come out yet.
“The hunter must be able to distinguish sound.” Traps loved to lecture my father. “Let me give you the lay of the land. Wind can confuse and other animals can confuse. He must be able to slow his heart rate, keep his pupil size intact, hold his water, hold his functions so he can separate out the sounds of nature. When he sees his target, he cannot think of where it is coming from and where it is going. He cannot think of what might be following it. He just has to commit to the motions. He can’t get lost. He has to know what to do next. The Heavy. Are you even listening to me?” asked Traps.
“No.” Then there was a silence, and my father said, “Nothing to tell me, eh, friend?”
* * *
THE TEENAGERS WHO don’t have to do their bloodwork today are still asleep. I can see their flags in their windows: TAKE MY CHANCES. REMEMBER LAST NIGHT. LOSING STREAK. CALL OF THE DEEP. WAIT FOR ME. Words written with duct tape or scissors. Neon Dean has two small holes for his eyes to look through. The ones who do have to do their bloodwork are climbing wearily onto their bicycles and heading toward the Banquet Hall. The boys with blue circles under their eyes, headbands made from old black bedsheets, duct-tape cuffs at their wrists, the thick chains they used to pull the cabinets, tires, and wood pallets to the bonfire now looped into necklaces. And two girls, arms linked, walking slow and conspiratorial. They have braided their hair together. You can’t get lost. You have to know what to do next. Have the baby. Hand over the baby. Lana flashes through my mind. Her belted, armless snowmobile suit. Her teased hair. I know she will call me later. She will breathe heavily and then say, eventually, I want Pony Darlene Fontaine to forgive me. Impossible. Right? No. Possible. She will leave a postcard for me. Sorry. No. SORRY!!!
There is Sexeteria in his hairnet on his DIY skateboard, riding past Hot Dollar’s Hi-Fi Discount Karaoke and Sporting Lounge on his way to open Home of the Beef Candy. The skinny boy unlocking the front door of Gold Lady Gold, the shop that employs him part-time. And Supes. I can see Supes running along the shoulder of the north highway. The long stride. Dressed like a thief. The insulated black hoodie, the black jeans. He has the same boots as the Delivery Man. Beige, size twelve. He is just south of our bungalow, and just north of the activity of the town. He will have to go through it to get home. Bungalow 1. He turns back toward our house, the Last House. I know he can make out my shape in the window, the last Fontaine.
Yo.
He runs a little farther, and then he cuts into the woods. The part of the woods opposite the woods where you’ll find the founders’ bus. The part of the woods none of us will go near because of the sinkholes that started forming in there five years ago. Beware. Keep back. Unstable ground. Has he lost his mind? I lift my window, lean out, and scream, “Danger!” No one even turns around.
* * *
I LIE NAKED on my bed counting money.
I snap the elastic off and peel each bill from the roll. Higher denominations than I ever found in Neon Dean’s old jackets. Twenties, fifties, a couple of hundreds. I put on my hunting glasses; I need a tinted lens. I have pine gum in my hair. I smell like fire, cold air, and the end of my mother’s perfume. Between my fing
ers, the money feels like velvet. I’ll store these big bills in my disease book. I have been saving for three months. It has been three months since my mother crashed the truck. Three months since my mother lost her rigging. Three months since I made my plan to get it back. “You have to have a plan, Pony,” my mother always said. “You have to have a plan.” THE SECRET OF PONY DARLENE FONTAINE.
* * *
“YOU HAVE GOT to be kidding me,” the Delivery Man said. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.” “No,” I said, “I am not kidding you. I am not fucking kidding you,” and I leaned against the passenger-side door with plenty of room to point a rifle. One spacious rig.
The Delivery Man gets paid by the mile, he told me. His name is Gerald. Named after his father, who he never met but his mother loved to talk about. Everyone calls him Ger for short. His girlfriends call him Leger, which in French means gentle. “Fuck,” he says again, slapping a plush roll of money into my nonrifle hand. I tell him I have always wanted a Le in front of my name.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“Ha,” I say. “Good try.”
He flirts, “Le ha. I like you, Leha.”
“You like everyone, Leger,” I say, and I tuck the roll of money under my camo outerwear and into my sports bra.
He is not actually a Libra. He stole the shirt from a girlfriend’s trailer one night when he had to make a quick exit. He knows he can be bad, he says. That he has a hundred sons and daughters. But he does believe people are good. He is good. When it gets right down to it. Good and bad. “I am more than one thing,” he says. “Most of us are more than one thing,” I agree, and then I ask him with my teen-wife face, cold and bored, nothing to lose, “On your way here, did you see a black truck, a matte black truck? A woman driving and a white dog in the passenger seat?”