by Claudia Dey
I made something up about hunting, which I was unskilled at. Run, Billie, The Heavy is not at home. Run. Pull yourself from the clearing and walk in that single-minded way of yours back to the house, and get into the bathtub. You have done harder things. You have done no harder thing. You can make it before he gets back. Wait, am I being a decoy? I have two strengths, and being a decoy is not one of them. Do I just stand here and prolong this conversation so she can get home? Again, not one of my strengths.
“Was just on my way to see your father.”
“Oh. He is at the truck lot.”
“On a Sunday?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and I pictured my father, covered in black paint, talking to the air.
“You sure you’re all right? You’re awfully pale.”
“Yes, sir,” I said to the man whose wife had just delivered my child.
“What did you kill?”
“Sorry?”
“You said you had been hunting. What did you kill?”
And while I had the word rabbit circulating through my mind, I could not get it to exit my mouth, but instead wondered if The Heavy knew Billie had killed a man when she was just sixteen, strangled him with her bare hands, the man was the father of a boy she had saved in a public swimming pool, she had worked there as a lifeguard, and the man had formed a fixation on Billie and had broken into her house, it was the night of her birthday, when her parents were thousands of miles away, always thousands of miles away, and then some fifteen years later, she had fallen for me, that was the word she used for the feeling, fallen, and fairly soon after, only a matter of months, was pregnant with our child—was it a girl, was it a boy, in the low beige house behind me, did I have a daughter or a son?—and on the empty road, The Heavy and I stared at each other, one of us covered in blood, one of us not, two men who could not lie.
* * *
7:39 A.M. The whole territory has come out for the search. Matte black trucks are crowded along the shoulder and parked with forethought so no one is boxed in. Everyone has a personalized license plate. For an additional two hundred dollars, my father will “hook you up.” NDEAN. HOTDLR. FURTHB. LADYGLD. VTHINKR. Some of the trucks have moose antlers rigged to their grilles. Some have horseshoes, bells, strings of lights, fluorescent duct tape shaped into cobras, mountain ranges, naked women. Others have extended their truck beds with wood frames and metal banisters, the hulls of wheelbarrows. One truck has a black tarp over its bed, and the rotating blades from fans drilled into its sides. Shona Lee, her defender’s body, her hot-rollered bangs, steps down from this one. Lip gloss, Kodiaks, widow. WISHBN.
“Morning, dear.”
“Morning.”
“Hard day.”
“Yeah,” I agree with the woman who, just eight months ago, lost her husband to a self-inflicted rifle shot to his heart. Three shots. The first two did not kill him.
Their son is asleep in the back of her truck. He is not named after his father as is the territory way. His father knew he was coming and still blew a hole through his chest. Shona Lee has not come to accept this. An outrage of Shona Lees. “Hard day,” I say to her, as she wakes her boy.
I would like a panic button. I would like to be looking at a mirage. I would like this conversation to be more with God and less with myself. I would like to see Billie again. Even if it is just one more time. “Like our Fully Loaded, isn’t it, Son?” And my father swings his keen, ropy arm high up around my shoulder, trying for something, trying for peace. He gazes over the hulks of the assembled trucks. “That’s our work, Son,” he says, and he speaks the slogan of the lot: “Giving motion to men.” I slip from my father’s grasp without looking at him.
Did you do something to Billie?
Not even my darkest question.
* * *
YESTERDAY, I searched the clearing. I searched the truck lot. I unlocked the trailer door and pulled the string to turn on the overhead bulb. Billie was not hiding beneath the metal desk, not lying on the ground, not throwing a match into the woodstove. All of this I have checked and checked over the last thirty-six hours. I ran the band of gravel, the abandoned logging road. I went to all the places we used to go. Where Billie lifted her workdress, and I read to her.
“ ‘There is no obvious care toward appearance. The teeth are browning and in some cases, broken’ ”—I loved her body, could not get enough of her body—“ ‘The hair is unbrushed, and the whites of the eyes jaundiced to indicate a general lack of health. The skin of the face has taken on years. Given the slight contraction of the diaphragm, the voice is nearly inaudible,’ ” and I went on because Billie commanded me to with her hips though it was not totally straightforward to read this longer text aloud—I had not banked on reading the whole thing—while having sex with a woman who was extremely, if exclusively, pregnant.
Okay. And the material was regrettable. I had started with the previous chapter, which was all about love, and how love changes us. I thought it would serve as a way of articulating my feelings for Billie. I never thought I would get to the next chapter—when the absence of love changes us. Okay. Kills us. “ ‘The physical withdrawal of the body is typical of reality contact impairment and severe alienation. Other symptoms include shortness of breath, nausea, and a fixed visual focus.’ ” I was definitely wishing for a break from the reading part by this point, but did not want to throw Billie off. “ ‘When interviewed, the brokenhearted asked their examiners to provide a reason to live—’ ”
“Oh God! Oh my God! Yes!” She always said this before her body fell onto mine, and I knew it embarrassed her. It just wasn’t even close to how she talked. “I sound like one of those tanned girls in town,” she would say and laugh it off. Join in. Especially at this bodily moment, join in, but all I could think of was my father and how he laughed in his sleep. How his laugh was the loneliest sound, the sound of a man in the woods separated from his people.
* * *
7:52 A.M. Almost daylight in the territory. I make my way back to the Fontaine front yard and look up at Billie’s bedroom window. Don’t look up at her window. I can’t help myself. She is not there. If you say so. Stop looking. That’s superhard. Look at the ground. Looking. Study the ground. Studying. When the men and women try to trick you into saying “Billie” or even “Billie Jean,” say “the Fontaine mother.” I will. Say it. “The Fontaine mother.” Swear. Swearing. On Billie’s life. Hold up. There is darkness and then there is maximum darkness. On Billie’s life? “Why must you always go for maximum darkness?”
“You are totally talking to yourself, Supes.” A girl—Lorraine, I think, or maybe Tristan, no, Rochelle, no, Tiffany, no, Tina, no, Future, yeah, it’s Future, I’d be so fucked without the necklaces—pulls me aside, unzips her outerwear, pulls over the strap of her sports bra, and then the thinner strap of her other, inner bra, and then pulls down her tube top to show me a red heart painted in nail polish. In this moment, I hate intimacy and all it asks of you. “Once my tan is perfect,” Future says, and she smells of sweat and coconut oil and sugar cereal and closet floor, “I am going to peel the nail polish from my chest and I am going to show my real heart to you, Supes. And you are going to make me your wife. I mean, we’re nineteen. Nearly twenty. Last year of bloodwork. It’s time, Supes. I’m your future.” And she tries to touch me. “Get it?”
Your father is Neon Dean’s father, I do not tell Future. Your father is dead. Your mother, Rita Star Roulette, had a one-night stand with Dean Harvey Sr. after the final resting for his younger brother. Rita Star was engaged to marry the younger brother, but he died when he got his leg caught in a bear trap and bled out before anyone could reach him in the blizzard. Killer winter, everyone said. He was stored for five long months in the Death Man’s shed. After he was buried, Rita Star and Dean Sr. got drunk. In their final resting clothes, they had wasted-mourner sex behind the Banquet Hall. You were the re
sult. Your mother called you Grace. Easy to read into.
Your mother refused to name your father. When you were old enough, you stormed from your mother’s bungalow to live across the street. You shot arrows into the small bodies of grouse from Pallas Jones’s bedroom window. You cooked the grouse over an open fire in her yard and then brought the cooked bodies to her bedroom. You ate them on her twin-size bed. You stole her mother’s cigarettes, her father’s liquor and barbecue sauce. You spread Pallas’s blankets on the floor, and pretended they were a lake. In your bra and underwear, you slid across the blankets. You hung fly tape like streamers. You had your birthdays there. At night, you lit sparklers and sprinted around the Joneses’ property, making circles with the light before it burned out, spelling your name, the names of the boys you loved, while Pallas wrote Grace as fast as she could, over and over.
Rita Star wanted you back. She put up a sign in her picture window,
Rita Star’s Tanning Emporium,
Fitness and Palmistry
She had no intention of starting a business. She thought those were your interests, and the sign might work as a lure. It didn’t. Whenever you saw your mother enter or exit her bungalow, you lifted Pallas Jones’s cracked bedroom window and you screamed, “Give me a name! I need a name! Without it, I’m only half-alive!” Your mother left you that way. “Spill it!” She wouldn’t. One night, Pallas Jones consoled you. “You have to get free of your past.” Taking this comment to its end, you did what no woman in the territory had done before. You renamed yourself. Future. No last name. No family name. No family.
“Oh God! Oh my God!” someone is yelling at me. It’s Future. She is zipping up her outerwear. “Are you even listening to me?”
“No.”
“Ugh!” Striding away from me, Future has to adjust the plaid blanket she has cut and belted for a kilt. The hem of her kilt is stapled. On the back of her jacket, she has written STAY UGLY.
Dean Harvey Sr. That’s who you are looking for, I do not tell Future.
* * *
ELEVEN MORE THINGS I do not tell Future shortly after 8:00 A.M.:
1. I will never marry you.
2. Even though your mother has offered my father a share in her thriving business. A majority share.
3. And my father has been pressing me, waking me in the night—“You’ll be set for life; she’s a pretty girl, a real firecracker”—I will not marry you.
4. I will never marry.
5. I will never love again.
6. Love kills.
7. I am the last Linklater.
8. I would like a sister.
9. More than anything, I would like a sister.
10. A sister I can die with.
11. The last Linklaters. Plural.
* * *
8:13 A.M. The search teams step into the north woods. The same woods the Fontaine dog lunged from the night before, her snout bloodied and, for the first time, barking. I watched Pony as she clamped the dog’s snout with her hands and barked back, “What happened? Tell me, Gena Rowlands, tell me,” and then unclamped the dog’s snout, held her hands to her nose, and inhaled the scent of the blood.
As the men enter the forest, the territory women hand them flyers. Pregnant Denise, married to Lana Barbara Smith’s father, Visible Thinker (complexion like sandpaper, boring in more than fifteen ways, basically Phil Collins, the defeated owner of Furniture City, where Denise worked as a cashier-in-training without ever making it to cashier), hands one to me. “Too bad,” she says through her overbite. Then she looks at my mouth, the gash through my top lip. Before I can stop her, she touches it—“Hot. Superhot”—and then blows on her fingertips. I haven’t been touched in three months.
BILLIE JEAN FONTAINE
MISSING
And below, Billie’s portrait. The rhinestones, the party dress. The one I watched her pull off her body. She had to do a slight contortion of her hips. She left the dress in a silver pool on the floor of her bedroom. She had her back to me. From the half-open doorway, I watched her with a boner I can only describe as aerodynamic. Was I breaking physical laws? Could I even blink? Who was this woman? How could I get her to take notice of me? Questions I would ask myself later. She stood in her black lace underwear and low white heels. Her hair hung down to the band of her black lace underwear. She wore stockings with a shimmer in them. They had lines that ran up the backs of her legs. The lines and the stockings ended at the tops of her thighs. At the crease. I was thirteen. I would never be the same. I had done my first bloodwork that day. Inside my father’s flashbulbs. With a violent hangover. It was 1980.
The night before, The Silentest Man had motioned for me to come into Drink-Mart Infirmary. I thought I would find my father drunk and have to arrange his limp though laughing body across my handlebars and ride him home (not easy). Instead, The Silentest Man put his hands on my shoulders and said the word supernatural. The men of the territory drew closer. Their weekends were for hunting. They had their shows. They had their drinks. Their meals were hot, their lunches packed. They had their jokes with the other men, and these were verbal patterns the men knew to repeat with slight variations every time. The ante. The men agreed to up it. They took risks. They knew what it was to be scared, and they sought that out. They wanted the rush. Stalking an animal, a woman’s legs spread, the crack of a rifle, a window rolled down, a song played so loud your dog could explode. They understood the headbang. The power of it. How it made you dizzy, and that dizziness had a lifting effect. Speed metal was the savior. It would carry you up. If you moved your neck fast enough, you would lose the horizon. In his rough and hyper sentences, my father talked about these things. Went on talking about these things. He did not notice The Silentest Man’s hands on my shoulders. Meaningfully on my shoulders.
My father drank more, grew maudlin, started to throw the word love around. Looking at the nugget of gold in the square glass case behind the bar, he talked about the days when the mines were still operative, and the men spent more time underground than above it. The blast every afternoon at four o’clock, and one shift of men would come up, and one would go down. When you surfaced, security would check your pockets, your boots, the hoods of your outerwear, your work gloves, under your tongue. Make sure you weren’t going home with any gold. “I have my gold already,” my father said. And the men, having heard the story so many times before, shouted in unison, “Already got my gold at home!”
All I could hear when someone approached me was the sound of sirens. All my father could hear was himself. My father was a deep participant. Into all moments, he inserted himself, and was at ease only when dominating. Growing up, I looked for someone to be like. And the only one I could find was The Heavy. When I was a child, he let me run my fingers over his face, the scars from his burns. They were hard. I understood the human body this way: hard parts protected by soft parts. The Heavy was inside out. He did not hunt. Did not make jokes. Had long hair. Used a fork to part it. Did not drink. He was not at Drink-Mart Infirmary. Never came to Drink-Mart Infirmary.
“Supernatural.”
“Supernatural.”
Even my father got quiet.
“Supernatural,” The Silentest Man said one last time, and the men started to bat the word between them, abbreviate the word. Only when they bought me bottles of moonshine, put cigarettes in my mouth and lit them, hit me on the back like I was choking, I might have been choking, did I understand I had been named. “Supernatural.” The men wanted to shake my hand. This, I ignored. I kept my hands in my pockets. My immense hands, would they ever stop growing?
“Supernatural.”
“Supes, for short.”
“Yeah, Supes.”
“Supes.”
All around me, a great noise erupted. It was my new name, and from the mouths of the men, from the mouth of my father, it came at me like
sirens.
Approaching the Fontaine property the next night, the night of the party, my mother and father in the front seat, and me, a dread of Supernaturals, in the truck bed, I could see lights strung across the yard and a net of some kind. Later, I would find out it was a badminton net. My father would spend most of his night on one side of it, winning. From the house came loud music. My mother had made a cake. This was at the time of her primary sadness (I will get to this). The cake was small, and in her anticipatory hands made smaller. Billie in her silver dress with the little silver squares around her eyes immediately led my mother in her stocking feet up the stairs. Seeing only adults, adults who wanted to talk to me and ask me questions—remember, I had been named the night before, the wrong name, a name that did not fit me, did not get me—I pushed my way through the crowd to a room in the basement. There was one bulb on the ceiling, and someone had unscrewed it so the light was strobing. “It’s a disco,” Peter Fox St. John told me. He stood at the door with his arms crossed, pretending to be a bouncer.
“You eighteen?”
“No.”
“You got ID?”
“No.”
“Money?” Then he called after me, “Yeah, that’s right, Will Jr. Walk away! Just walk away! Like you always do!”
In the next room, the younger kids were wrestling. Pony Darlene was duct-taped into a black skirt and a white button-down with the word SERVER stitched on it. Her hair was high and curved around her head. She watched the boys of the territory throw themselves onto a stack of mattresses. “Heads up!” The boys tore their shirts off, and their vapors filled the room. They found a roll of yellow flagging tape and tied strips around their necks. Called them gold chains. Said they were miners. Lana Barbara Smith flung her arms wide and told everyone she was a psychic. “I can read your mind,” she said. “I know who you love. The one you love is the last one you think about at night. When you’re falling asleep.” In three years, she would be motherless. Her purple blouse with the high collar and the ruffles down the front, and over it a territory-issue corduroy dress. Her hair was auburn and wide as a halo. A group of girls braided their ponytails together. One wore an eye patch. Her brother had recently half-blinded her with a BB gun. She wanted to play Truth or Dare. Pony had no idea where to place herself. Who to talk to. What she would say. A loneliness of Ponys. No. A loner of Ponys. Big difference. I went back to the disco.