My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

  What it hears is the front part of Lotte’s scream.

  She doesn’t get to finish it.

  JUST BEFORE DAWN

  Jade Daniels slouches—that’s the only word for it—into the staging area for Terra Nova on a twelve-degree night on the thirteenth of March, the Friday before spring break officially gets going for Proofrock.

  In the left pocket of her thin custodian coveralls is a box-cutter, what her dad would probably call a “shitrock” knife, and in her right is her fist. Under her overalls there’s just a girl-cut Misfits t-shirt, probably technically too small if that matters, and her threadbare jeans, most of the holes in the thighs not from washing dishes at the pancake house or moving boxes in a shipping warehouse—Proofrock isn’t big enough for either of those places—but from scraping at the fabric with her fingernails during seventh period, her state history class, which she calls Brainwashing 101. Her fingernails are black, of course, and her hair is supposed to be green, that was the plan one hundred percent, it was going to look killer, but Indian hair doesn’t take the dye like the box says “all hair” should, so she’s got a bobbed orange mop to deal with, which was what started the fight at her house thirty minutes ago, spitting her up here.

  If her dad had just been able to watch her cross from the front door to the hall without saying anything, she’d probably be in her bedroom right now, headphones clamped on, a bootleg slasher crackling on the screen of her thirteen-inch television set with the built-in VCR.

  Her dad can never keep his mouth shut, though, especially six beers into a night that’s probably going to take a whole case to get through.

  “You got to stop eating so many carrots, girl,” he said with a halfway chuckle, punctuating it with a drink from his bottle.

  Jade stopped like she had to, like she guesses he must have wanted her to.

  His name, Tab Daniels, is the one he earned in high school, because he threaded fishing line back and forth across the headliner glued to the roof of his Grand Prix, festooned it with fishing hooks, and then proceeded to hang enough pull tabs onto those barbed hooks that the headliner finally collapsed onto him one seventy-mile-per-hour night.

  The wreck should have killed him, Jade knows. Or wishes. She was already on the way by then, so it’s not like it would have blipped her out of existence. All it would have blipped her to would be a less crappy version of her life, one where she lives with her mother, not her so-called father.

  But of course, because she’s doomed to grow up in the same house with her own personal boogeyman, the wreck just broke his bones, Freddy’d his face up, because, as he always tells anybody who doesn’t know to have already left the room, God smiles on drunks and Indians.

  Jade would humbly disagree with that statement, being half as Indian as her dad and getting zero smiles from Above, pretty much. Case in point: her dad’s drinking buddy Rexall chuckling about her dad’s orange-hair joke, and tipping his chin up to Jade: “Hey, I got a carrot she can—”

  Hating herself for it the whole while, Jade had actually bared her teeth at this, expecting her dad to backhand Rexall, living reject that he is. Or if not backhand him, at least give him an elbow in warning. At the very very least Tab Daniels could have whispered not so loud to his high school bud. Wait till she’s gone, man. Anything would have been enough.

  He’d just chuckled in drunk appreciation, though.

  Maybe if Jade’s mom were still in the picture, then she could have thrown that maternal elbow, glared that glare, but whatever. Kimmy Daniels’s place is only three-quarters of a mile away from Jade’s living room, but that might as well be another galaxy. One not in Tab Daniels’s orbit anymore—which is exactly the idea, Jade knows.

  She also knows that stopping in the living room like she did was a mistake. She should have just kept booking, pushed on, shouldered through the smoke and the jokes, landed in her bedroom. Once you’re stopped, though, then starting again without a comeback, that’s admitting defeat.

  She fixed Rexall in her glare.

  “My dad was saying that about eating carrots because girls who want to be skinny try to eat only carrots, and the whites of their eyes will sometimes go orange, from overdoing it,” she said, touching her hair to make the connection for Rexall. “I’m guessing you being such a shit-eater explains the color of your eyes?”

  Rexall surged up at this, clattering empties off the coffee table, but Jade’s dad, his eyes never leaving Jade, did hold Rexall back this time.

  Rexall’s name is because he used to deal, back in whatever his day was, and Jade’s pretty sure it was exactly that: one single day.

  Jade’s dad chewed the inside of his cheek in that gross way he always does, that makes Jade see the knot of spongy scar tissue between his molars.

  “Got her mother’s mouth,” he said to Rexall.

  “If only,” Rexall said back, and Jade had to blur her eyes to try to erase this from her head.

  “That’s right, just—” she started, not even sure where she was going with this, but didn’t get to finish anyway because Tab was standing, stepping calmly across the coffee table, his eyes locked on Jade’s the whole way.

  “Try me,” Jade said to him, her heart a quivering bowstring, her feet not giving an inch, even from the oily harshness of his breath, the ick of his body heat.

  “This were two hundred years ago…” he said, not having to finish it because it was the same stupid thing he was always going on about: how he was born too late, how this age, this era, he wasn’t built for it, he was a throwback, he would have been perfect back in the day, would have single-handedly scalped every settler who tried to push a plow through the dirt, or build a barn, tie a bonnet, whatever.

  Yeah.

  More like he’d have been Fort Indian #1, always hanging around the gate for the next drink.

  “Might have to take you over my knee anyway,” he added, and this time, instead of continuing with this verbal sparring match, Jade’s right fist was already coming up all on its own, her feet set like she needed them to be, her torso rotating, shoulder locked, all of it, her unathletic, untrained body swinging for the fences.

  It should have worked, too. Tab’s head was turned for the last drink in his bottle, and she’d never tried anything like this before, so he wasn’t special on-guard. He had been getting suckerpunched his whole stupid life, though, and had some radar as a result. Either that or God really was smiling on him.

  Him, not his daughter.

  He caught her fist in his open left hand easy as anything, pulled her face right to his, said, “You do not want to do this with me, girl.”

  “Not with,” Jade said right into his lips, “to,” bringing her knee up into his balls like there was a rocket in her boot heel, and then, in the time it took him to keel over into the coffee table, clattering empty bottles away, Jade was running through the screen door, exploding out into the night, never mind that she wasn’t dressed for it.

  The only reason she got her work coveralls at all was that they were hanging on the laundry line, skinned with frost—nobody expected weather to have rolled in over the pass like it had. She didn’t put the coveralls on until the end of the block, though, and when she did she was watching the street the whole time, her eyes the only heat she had anymore.

  “Alice,” she says to herself now, shuffling through the open gate of the staging area for the Terra Nova construction going on twenty-four/seven across the lake.

  Alice, the final girl from Friday the 13th, has sort-of orange hair, doesn’t she?

  She does, Jade decides with a cruel smile, and that makes this dye-job not a disaster, but providence, fate. Homage. This is Friday the 13th, after all, the holiest of the holies. But she’s pissed, she reminds herself. There’s no smiling when you’re the kind of pissed she is. All that’s left to do now is turn up somewhere with hypothermia. What she’ll tell Sheriff Hardy is that her dad was partying like always and kicked her out just like last time.

  All Jade
has to do is tough it out. Go past shivering to something more blue-lipped and dry-eyed. Her loose plan had been to walk down the town pier to get that done—it’s public, it’s dramatic, somebody’ll find her before she’s all the way dead—but then she’d seen the flickering glow from the staging area, had no choice but to moth over.

  The flickering glow is a fire, it turns out. Not a bonfire, but… she has to smile when she gets what she’s seeing: the grunts on the night shift have used the front-end loader to scoop up all the wood and trash from around the site, probably their last task before clocking out, and then they left all that trash in the big steel bucket, kept it lifted a foot or so off the ground, and dropped a flame in, probably on a shop towel they held on to until the last finger-burning instant.

  Burning’s one way to get rid of a load of trash, Jade supposes. With Proofrock trying to dip down into single digits, maybe it’s the best way.

  What gives Jade license to come right up to the fire with the rest of the grunts, by her reasoning at least, are her work coveralls, grimy from afternoons and weekends mopping floors and emptying trash and scrubbing toilets. Her name—“JD” for “Jennifer Daniels”—sewn onto her chest in cursive thread proves she’s like them: not important enough to bother remembering, but the front office has to have something to call you when there’s a spill needs taken care of.

  “Howdy,” she says all around, trying for no lingering eye-contact, no extra attention drawn to her. She immediately regrets howdy, is certain they’re going to take that as insult, but it’s too late to reel it back in now, isn’t it?

  The one with the yellow aviators—shooting glasses, right?—nods once, leans over to spit into the fire.

  The guy beside him with the mismatched gloves backhands Shooting Glasses in rebuke, nodding to Jade like can’t Shooting Glasses see there’s a lady among them?

  To show it’s no big deal, Jade leans over into the heat, her frozen face crackling, and spits all she can muster down into the swirling flames, her eyelashes curling back from the heat, it feels like.

  The grunt with his faded green Carhartts tucked into his cowboy boots chuckles once in appreciation.

  Jade wipes her lips with the back of her bare hand, can feel neither her lips nor the skin of her hand, is just using the brief action to case the place.

  It looks the same from inside as it does through the ten-foot chain link: pallets and pallets of building material, ditch witches and scissor lifts, tired forklifts and crusty cement chutes, trucks parked wherever they were when dusk sifted in, brought the real chill with it. The heavy equipment like the front-end loaders and the bulldozers are all herded onto this side of the fenced-in area, the silhouette of the backhoe rising behind like a long-necked sauropod, the crane the undeniable king of them all, its feet planted halfway between this fire and the barge that ferries all this equipment back and forth across Indian Lake.

  The day that barge was delivered by a convoy of semis and then assembled on-site, just before Thanksgiving break, it had been enough of an event that a lot of the elementary school classes took a field trip to watch. And ever since that day, Proofrock hasn’t been able to look away. It never seems like that long, flat non-boat can carry one of these ten-ton tractors, but each time it just squats down in the water like it thinks it can, it thinks it can, and then, somehow, it does. Watching through the window during seventh period, Jade hates the way her heart swells, seeing the monstrous backhoe balanced on the nearly-submerged back of the barge again.

  Does she want the backhoe to slide off, plummet down to Drown Town under the lake, or does she want the water to just rise and rise around its tall tires, nobody noticing until it’s too late?

  Either will do.

  At the other end of that ferry trip is Terra Nova, which Jade despises just on principle. Terra Nova is the rich development going up across the lake, in what used to be national forest before some fancy legal maneuvers carved a lip of it out for what the newspapers are calling the most gated community in all of Idaho—“So exclusive there aren’t even roads around to it!” If you want to get there, you either go by boat, balloon, or you swim, and balloons fare poorly with mountain winds, and the water’s just shy of freezing most of the year, so.

  What “Terra Nova” means, all the articles are proud to reveal, is “New World.” What one of the incoming residents said, kind of famously, was that when there are no more frontiers, you have to make them yourself, don’t you?

  Right now there’s ten mansions going up over there at a pace so breakneck it looks almost like the houses are rising in time lapse.

  What those entrepreneurs and moguls and magnates probably don’t know, though, is that if you walk the shore around to the east from Proofrock to Terra Nova, having to tippy-toe along the dam’s spine at a certain point, the one clearing you’ll stumble into will be the old summer camp, long gone to seed: nine falling-down cabins against a chalky white bluff, one chapel with open sides so it’s pretty much just a low roof on pillars, like a church that’s sinking, and a central meeting house nobody’s met at since forever. Unless you count the ghosts of all the kids murdered on those grounds fifty years ago.

  To everyone in Proofrock it’s “Camp Blood.” Give Terra Nova a summer or two, Jade figures, and Camp Blood will be the Camp Blood Golf Course, each fairway named after one of the cabins.

  It’s sacrilege, she tells anyone who’ll listen, which is mostly just Mr. Holmes, her state history teacher. You don’t remake The Exorcist, you don’t sequel Rosemary’s Baby, and you don’t be disrespectful about soil an actual slasher has walked across. Some things you just don’t touch. Not that anybody in town cares. Or: everybody likes the fifteen dollars an hour Terra Nova’s smooth-talking liaisons are paying anybody who wants to hire on for the day. Anybody like, say, Tab Daniels. Thus the surge of beer he’s been riding the last couple of months.

  The transaction’s not what they think, though, that’s the thing. They’re not selling their time, their labor, their sweat, they’re selling Proofrock. Once Camelot starts sparkling right across Indian Lake, nothing’s ever going to be the same—this rant courtesy of Mr. Holmes. Before, all the swayed-in fences and cars with mismatched fenders on this side of the lake were just the way it was, the way it had always been. Now, with Terra Nova’s Porsches and Aston Martins and Maseratis and Range Rovers rolling through to park at the pier, Proofrock’s cars are going to start seeming like a rolling salvage yard. When people in Proofrock can direct their binoculars across the water to see how the rich and famous live, that’s only going to make them suddenly aware of how they’re not living, with their swayed-in fences, their roofs that should have been re-shingled two winters ago, their packed-dirt driveways, their last decade’s hemlines and shoulder pads, because fashion takes a while to make the climb to eight thousand feet.

  As Mr. Holmes put it on one of his sad digressions—it’s his last semester before retirement—Terra Nova wants to make the other side of the lake pretty and serene, nice and pristine. It’s not quite so concerned about Proofrock, which before long is going to be just what gets left behind on the way to something better: cigarettes ground out under boot heels, quick pisses behind tires as tall as a house, little jigs and jags of angle iron pushed into the dirt along with layer after sedimentary layer of lonely washers and snapped-off bolts, which is why no way will Jade be staying here even one more minute than she has to after graduation. That’s a promise. There’s Idaho City, there’s Boise, there’s the whole rest of the world waiting for her. Anywhere but here.

  But that, like the hypothermia, is all later.

  Right now it’s just rubbing her hands together over the fire, never mind the sparks swirling up. If she flinches from them, she’s a girl, she won’t deserve to be here at this hour.

  “You all right there?” Shooting Glasses asks.

  “Excellent,” Jade says back, giving him a sliver of a grin. “You?”

  Instead of answering, Shooting Glasses tries to make
subtle eye contact with the other grunts, except quarters are too close for “subtle.”

  “I interrupting something?” Jade says all around.

  Mismatched Gloves shrugs, which means yes.

  “Feel like I just barged into a wake, I mean,” Jade says, going from face to face.

  “Good call,” Cowboy Boots says while wiping at his nose.

  “I’m not Catholic,” Jade says, pulling back with all of them from a long swirling exhalation of sparks, “but isn’t there usually more drinking at a wake?”

  “You’re thinking Irish,” Mismatched Gloves says with a sort-of grin.

  “Let me guess,” Jade says. “Your name… McAllen? McWhorter? Mc-something?”

  “That’s Scottish,” Shooting Glasses says, staring into the fire. “Irish is O’Shaunessy, O’Brien—think luck O’ the Irish, that’s how I remember it.”

  “Which of them has leprechauns?” Cowboy Boots asks.

  “Shh, shh, you’re Indian, man,” Shooting Glasses tells him. “We’re talking Europe stuff here, yeah?”

  “Me too,” Jade says.

  “You’re a leprechaun?” Mismatched Gloves asks, smiling now as well.

  “Indian,” Jade says, and, by way of formal introduction to Cowboy Boots, “Blackfoot, my dad tells me.”

  “Isn’t that Blackfeet?” Shooting Glasses asks.

  “Montana or Canada?” Mismatched Gloves adds in.

  Jade doesn’t tell them that, in elementary, until she caught the Montana return address on what turned out to be a Christmas check, she’d always thought she was Shoshone, because those were the Indians her social studies class said were in Idaho. So, being in Idaho, that’s what she must be. But then that return address, and that tribal seal by the address—she’d saved it, kept it hidden alongside her Candyman tape. Too, back in those days she’d had the idea that, since she was starting out half Indian, that as she got bigger and taller—got more and more physical actual blood—someday she’d be full-blood like her dad.