My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “Blackfeet,” she says back with faked authority. “What the fuck do you think I said?”

  “Yeah,” Mismatched Gloves says, holding his different-colored hands high and away, not touching this anymore, “she sounds Blackfeet all right.”

  “Adopted,” Cowboy Boots says about himself, by way of introduction. “Could be anything.”

  “What he’s saying is he’s a mutt,” Mismatched Gloves says.

  “Mutt your ass,” Cowboy Boots says back, and Jade files that away: on this job-site, “your ass” is the add-on way of turning anything around. Her kind of place.

  “So who died?” she says to whoever’s answering.

  “He didn’t die,” Cowboy Boots says, blinking something away.

  “Depends on what you consider dead,” Mismatched Gloves adds.

  “Greyson Brust,” Shooting Glasses says, being respectful with the name.

  “Hired on with us,” Mismatched Gloves tells Jade, then shrugs an exaggerated shrug, like trying not to think of something.

  “Zero days since the last accident?” Jade asks, aware of the eggshells she’s walked onto here.

  Shooting Glasses chuckles kind of humorlessly.

  “Place is cursed,” Jade says, which gets all of their attention, a few more unsubtle glances among them. “Probably, I mean,” she adds.

  “So where you headed?” Cowboy Boots asks, trying to get Jade’s eventual exit started.

  Jade, not a poker player, accidentally sneaks a glance in the direction of the great void in the night Indian Lake is, shrugs.

  “She’s not going to,” Mismatched Gloves says, watching Jade hard. “She’s going from, right?”

  “Killer name,” she says back to him, the answer to a question he hadn’t even been asking a little.

  “Say what?” Cowboy Boots says.

  “Greyson Brust,” Jade says, obviously. “That’s—he sounds like horror royalty, I mean. You can hear it, can’t you? ‘Greyson Brust’ is right up there with Harry Warden, with Billy Loomis, with John Wakefield, with Victor Crowley and Sammi Curr. With… I’m gonna say it… Jason Voorhees. Some names just have that killer ring, don’t they?”

  “You good, there?” Mismatched Gloves asks, and Jade looks down to where he means: the red blooming slow in the left pocket of her coveralls, from when she was flicking the utility knife’s razor blade open and shut against her leg on the walk here.

  “Got some red on me, yeah,” she kind-of-quotes, shrugging his inspection off, all the tiny scars up and down her thighs and hips crawling over themselves to be seen. And then, because now nobody’s saying anything and everything’s awkward and starting to suck, Jade backs up a smidge from the fire, says, “But you’re right, yeah. I have to be careful here. Shouldn’t be standing so close to open flames like these, I mean.”

  “You were—” Cowboy Boots starts, then tries again: “I thought you were talking about—”

  “Slashers,” Jade says with her best evil grin. “I was talking about slashers. They’re why I can’t catch fire here. I’m a janitor, I mean, a custodian, and what’s that but a caretaker, right? I’m practically Proofrock’s caretaker when I’m wearing this. And if I stand too close, catch a sleeve on fire, and the rest of me goes up, then…”

  Jade has to gulp her smile down.

  “I’m talking about Cropsy,” she says, looking from face to face for even a hint of recognition. “Slashers from 1981, Alex.”

  “Um,” Shooting Glasses says.

  “Okay, okay,” she says, backing up in her head to figure out where to start for them. “Say you’re the main and only caretaker for Camp Blackfoot. The one from The Burning, I mean. Not the one from Camp Blood, which is a movie to them, a place to us around here, but forget that for now. It’s just—it’s the same way Higgins Haven is in both Friday the 13th Part III and Twisted Nightmare, right?”

  “You’re the janitor for this camp,” Cowboy Boots fills in, playing along.

  “If I’m Cropsy I am, yeah,” Jade says, ignoring everything else. “And I’ve got my own cabin and everything. But these kids, these punks, they don’t really appreciate the way I’ve been ‘taking care’ of things, so much. Remember, this is sleepaway camp. It’s its own little closed system of punishment and reward.”

  “Think I know that camp,” Shooting Glasses says.

  “You went to camp?” Mismatched Gloves says.

  “I know the punishment part, I mean,” Shooting Glasses says back to him.

  “So I’m Cropsy, I’m the janitor, the caretaker,” Jade goes on, before they forget they’re listening to her. “It’s my job to clean up all the blood in the showers. It’s my job to tump the cut-off fingers out of the bottom of the canoe. Any deaths by wasp-nest or arrow or axe, I clean them up just the same. But then all these kids get it in their head that I need to be taught a lesson, so they elect to play a harmless little prank. Kind of a time-honored tradition of camp, right?”

  “Got a jacket in the truck, you want one,” Cowboy Boots says to Jade. Probably because of the way her jaw’s chattering and the muscles around her eyes are jerking. But that’s not cold, that’s excitement. Usually Mr. Holmes will have cut her off by now, his big hand up between them, telling her he’s not letting her write any more papers on horror movies, sorry.

  But she can do them out loud, too.

  “The prank these kids dream up,” she explains, her voice gearing down, really getting into this, “it’s that they sneak a probably-fake human skull into Cropsy’s—into my bedroom while I’m sleeping, leave it there with two little candles burning in the eye sockets, and then bang on the window to wake me up. You can guess what happens next. The prank works—I’m scared, terrified, I’ve woken up to a nightmare—my cabin’s on fire! Lesson learned, right? Wrong. In my half-asleep panic, I knock this skull over, the sheets catch fire, and then for some reason I’ve got a full can of gas in there with me. Probably to keep it away from the kids. To keep them from hurting themselves with it in some stupid way.”

  “Shit,” Shooting Glasses says.

  “Now fast-forward five years after that explosion,” Jade says, like it’s a campfire they’re gathered round. “I, Cropsy, I lived through that burning… somehow. Kind of. Because I’m all melty and cratered, I wear trench coats, and my hat’s always pulled down low because any sunlight practically hisses against my tender skin, my pizza knots of scar tissue—this is three years before Freddy, cool?”

  “Got some gloves too,” Cowboy Boots offers, starting to pull his off.

  “I don’t need a glove,” Jade says, set up so perfect. “First person I kill, it’s with scissors.”

  “Should we—?” Shooting Glasses says to everybody but Jade.

  “Shh, shh,” Mismatched Gloves tells him, getting into this.

  Jade grins a not very secret grin. “By the time I make it back to the lake Camp Blackfoot’s on, though—that’s Blackfoot—those scissors have gone magnum. They’re full-on hedge clippers now. And… why scissors, you think? Why hedge clippers? That’s what I’m wanting to get at here. Maybe you can guess it. My history teacher couldn’t.”

  “There somebody we can call?” Shooting Glasses asks.

  “Think back to that initial prank, right?” Jade says, stopping at each face like an interrogation. “Two candles burning like eyes in that skull? Now, say I just woke up, saw that in the very last part of what I’m going to come to consider the good part of my life, wouldn’t my first impulse be to cover those eyes, to ruin those eyes, to stop this scary shit from happening? But, if I just had a letter opener, say, I’m screwed. I have to either stick it in the left eye or the right eye, which doesn’t make the scare go away, it just turns it into a pirate. But, if I’ve got scissors like Schizoid from the year before, well. Then I can pop both eyes at once. They’re the perfect weapon for this terror I’ve woken up to. But now it’s five years later and I’m back at good old Camp Blackfoot, and there’s just a metric shit-ton of killing that needs to
get done. So I ditch the scissors. Hedge clippers, though, with them I can stay back at a safe distance, just chop-chop-chop.” Jade mimes it for them, coming at each of their throats. They just watch her. “And anyway, hedge clippers, they’ve, one, never been used in a slasher before 1981, and, two, when held up so they kind of flash in the light, they kind of make you feel like you’re already dead.”

  “Can I give you, you know, a ride somewhere?” Shooting Glasses asks.

  “But also,” Jade barrels on, having to remind herself to breathe, “scissors and hedge clippers, they kind of fit the name, don’t they? Think about it. ‘Cropsy.’ If the name is at all descriptive, then it has to mean cropping things. Cutting them shorter than they were. Look it up in the dictionary when you get home. To ‘crop’ is to cut off the outer or upper parts. This is what I do as revenge to these campers, this summer. I crop the living shit out of them. In the woods. On a raft. In a mineshaft… all things we have right here in Proofrock.”

  “What are you saying?” Cowboy Boots says, looking around like to check if he’s the only one of them wondering this.

  “I’m saying that this is why I say I should be careful here,” Jade tells him, opening her hands to the fire. “If I get too close to this and go up in flames, then I’m going to come back in five years and carve through this town like, like—but I forgot to tell you all the other stuff. Shit. Did you know that on the set of The Burning, Tom Savini still had Betsy Palmer’s decapitated head from Friday the 13th, and the actors actually got to play with it like a volleyball? And, talking Friday, did you know it and Mother’s Day were filming across the lake from each other in 1979? Yeah, yeah, the crews would get together at night and drink beer, and they, no way could they have known that the f-f-floodgates were about to open, like—like those elevator doors in The Shining, right? It must have—it was, it had to be—can you even imagine—”

  Jade hates it, but she’s crying a little bit now.

  Maybe kind of a lot, really.

  And now Shooting Glasses has her by the arm, his jacket off, around her shoulders.

  He guides her away from the precious heat of the trashfire, delivers her into the passenger seat of a late-model dust-caked car that’s out of place for a construction site.

  “I—I’m f-fine,” Jade finally manages to get out, trying to prove that it’s okay, she can stay, she can talk all night, she did all her slasher homework, she knows every answer, please, just ask, ask.

  “I’m taking you to—” Shooting Glasses says from the driver’s seat, grubbing the keys up from the passenger seatback pocket, which makes it feel like his fingertips are touching her back. “Are you really, like, running from something?”

  Jade considers this question for long enough that it becomes an answer.

  “Where can I take you, then?” Shooting Glasses asks, cranking the engine.

  “This your car?” Jade asks him back, wiping her face, finally breathing, and breathing too much now, too deep, like she’s about to just collapse into a girl-shaped column of tears and wishes.

  “It’s like Cody out there,” Shooting Glasses says, nodding back to either Mismatched Gloves or Cowboy Boots. “We adopted it.”

  Cowboy Boots, then.

  “Adopted it your ass,” Jade says, pausing for a slice of a moment to clock if he hears that she’s talking like them. “Adopting a car means—it means you s-s-stole it.”

  She hates shivering like this, showing weakness like this, having to have a body like this. But it’ll pass, she knows. You only shiver for a bit, when your body still has hope it can get back to warm.

  “It was in the way of loading the barge last weekend,” Shooting Glasses says with an easy shrug. “We moved it in here to keep it from getting dinged up.”

  “That d-doesn’t mean it’s y-y-yours.”

  “We’ll give it back whenever whoever’s it is comes for it.”

  “Maybe it’s m-mine,” Jade says, her shoulders jerking in spite of the jacket she’s wrapped in.

  In answer to that, Shooting Glasses plucks a glittery pink Deadwood shirt off the dash, holds it up.

  Jade has to smile, caught. No way can a horror fan claim a shirt like that.

  “Now where we going, final girl?” Shooting Glasses says.

  Jade’s heart stops, being called that. It stops and then inflates like a balloon in her chest. But, “That’s not me,” she has to say, looking out the side of the car, through her own reflection. “F-final girls are virg—they’re p-p-pure… they’re not like me.”

  “Question stands.”

  “I’ll show you,” Jade says, and nods to the right, into downtown Proofrock, then says to Shooting Glasses, “N-now you.”

  “Me what?” Shooting Glasses says, easing the car one tire at a time over the fence panel laid on its side that Jade guesses is a gate. Close enough. When he turns the headlights on, though, she reaches across, touches his arm, shakes her head no. He sucks the light back into the front of the car. It makes it feel like they’re driving through church.

  “I’d never even been here before,” Shooting Glasses says about Proofrock, sleeping all around them.

  “Lucky,” Jade says, a wave of shivers rolling up her back again, her lips set against this physical betrayal. “Here.”

  Shooting Glasses hand-over-hands the wheel to the left again, easing them past the drugstore, past the bank, and it’s not like church anymore. Now it’s like they’re coasting through a painting: “Quaint Mountain Towns.” “Lakeside Pastoral.” “What If 1965 Never Stopped Happening?”

  “Your turn,” Jade tells Shooting Glasses. “I told you—I told you some stuff. Now you tell me some stuff. That’s how it works. Quid pro quo, Clarice.”

  Shooting Glasses shakes his head side to side slow, apparently impressed that, in spite of these early stages of hypothermia, the girl’s still got it.

  Jade nods that, yes, this is her, this is what she does.

  “Where were you the last four years?” she says to him, kind of accidentally out loud.

  “I was—” he starts, then hears it like she means it, just purses his lips, peers ahead into the unheadlit darkness.

  “This is where you tell me about your buddy,” Jade explains to him. “The one that wasn’t a wake for back there. The one who didn’t die all the way or whatever.”

  “Greyson.”

  “Did he go live with a distant aunt to recover? Was her barn full of pitchforks, her hands full of s-sewing needles, her head full of bad ideas?”

  Shooting Glasses looks over to her about this.

  “That’s how it usually goes, I mean,” Jade explains, trying to show she means no insult. “The wronged party, victim of the prank, has to go somewhere long enough that everyone else can forget all about him, so it can be a s-s-surprise when he’s back.”

  “You said this place was haunted,” Shooting Glasses tells her.

  “By all the ghosts of who everybody used to want to be, before they died inside,” Jade says.

  “What were you doing out here?” Shooting Glasses asks.

  “Did you know Friday the 13th, it was trying to cash in on Halloween, yeah, sure, but then right at the very end it forgot what it was doing, started thinking it was Carrie?”

  “Why do you talk about horror so much?”

  “Slashers,” Jade corrects, is always correcting.

  “I mean, and don’t take this the wrong way, but, have you considered that maybe you’re just hiding be—”

  “Can’t I just like horror because it’s great? Does there have to be some big explanation?”

  “I’m just, your leg, I think maybe that’s blood. I think maybe I should—”

  Jade doesn’t hear the end because she’s popped the door, is rolling out into the cold, can’t take any more of this—her dad, this town, high school. Questions, glances, judgments. The sad way stupid Sheriff Hardy looks at her. The way Mr. Holmes is always asking her these exact same questions, every time she turns in a paper. N
ow even construction grunts she doesn’t know are treating her like she’s in need of special-delicate handling.

  Fuck that. Fuck all of them.

  She falls on the heels of her hands and her knees, doesn’t let that stop her, is already running like a ragdoll down the town pier, that kind of running that’s all untied boots, that you have to lift your chin for, because you know you’re going so fast. Halfway to the end of the pier, the stolen car’s brights blast on, throwing her shadow out ahead of her, where it plunges past the wooden planks, into the water.

  Jade tries to stop but it’s slick, so, yeah, the perfect capper to the perfect night: she goes flailing over the end, just like every kid all summer long, except it’s not summer yet, and she’s seventeen, and it’s cold-thirty in the dead-dead morning.

  The last thing she thinks as she’s slipping over the end is how stupid it is that that shaky light is steady for once, isn’t flickering out, and then she’s holding her breath for the icy plunge, is trying to insulate herself with slashers that happen in the snow but can only come up with Cold Prey and Cold Prey 2, and that’s not going to be enough to keep her blood from freezing.

  Instead of splashing into the lake or cracking through the thin sheet of ice that has to be there, she thunks into the bottom of the green canoe always tied there, BYOP-style: Bring Your Own Paddle.

  The canoe rocks and founders, doesn’t quite roll.

  Jade sits up holding the back of her head, the world blurry and getting blurrier, then, hearing footsteps coming for her, she lets the scratchy nylon rope loose, reaches out with one boot to push off into the darkness, the scrim of ice on the surface crackling around her in large, slow sheets. So she won’t have to see Shooting Glasses standing there looking for her, she fetals down on her side in the bottom of the canoe, the gunwales to either side hiding her and her orange hair, her blue lips, her red left leg, her pitch-black heart.

  And she hates it more than anything, but she’s sobbing now.

  No, she can never be a final girl.