My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Now it’s Principal Manx’s turn to offer a corrective, in the form of a cough probably meant to remind Mr. Holmes of some conversation they had about the content of his retirement speech, here.

  Mr. Holmes doesn’t seem to hear it.

  “We have guests among us today,” he says, holding his hand out to the Terra Novans, giving everyone license to look to the center of the bleachers again. He holds his hands up to the side to clap, but there’s something distinctly mocking about it, so the few who fall in clapping with him trail away almost immediately.

  “And I say ‘guests,’ but please, Mr. Mondragon, Mr. Baker, the rest of you—I don’t mean to suggest your stay here will be temporary, of course. We should hope it won’t be. You’re the saviors of this mountain town, this lake, this valley, this county—of all of us.” Mr. Holmes stops again to clear his throat, and when he comes back to the mic, he’s nodding with resolve. “There is of course another filter we can understand ‘guest’ through, as many of these graduates will know, from having processed through my classroom. In Ancient Greece, the gods would come down from Mount Olympus to walk among the mortals, but they would come in the form of travelers, of beggars, and so what developed in that society, due to that belief, was an etiquette built around abject fear. Completely sensible fear. If they didn’t comport themselves properly, offer a bowl of soup, say, even their last bowl of soup, then… then Zeus could stand up from those beggar’s robes and strike them down, erase them as if they never were.”

  Mr. Holmes lets that settle, then repeats it for emphasis: “As if they never were.”

  “Mr. Holmes—” Principal Manx starts, coming up from his chair, but Mr. Holmes holds his hand back, not asking for another minute at the mic, but informing Manx that he’s taking that minute.

  Go, sir, Jade says inside, grinning with wonder.

  “But this is America, of course, not the Mediterranean,” Mr. Holmes says. “I should be more even-handed, use iconography more associated with this soil. Apologies. Let me… here, I know. Pre-contact South America, how’s that? We can find an apt example there, I believe. Look to the Inca, say. Not the Inca as they were when the Spanish blundered into the Andes, but as that empire had been rising and falling for millennia, all on their own. And, before you ask, I don’t mean to say that this mountain we live on is the Andes, or that gods and rulers walk among us. But, these ancient Inca, whose technological sophistication rivaled and surpassed any of their contemporaries across the globe, they eventually achieved a level of social stratification that essentially deified the ruling class, the wealthiest of the wealthy, and how this played out for them is something we should perhaps pay attention to ourselves, still keeping to our Santayana, as that ruling class, the wealthy elite, they didn’t only lock all the resources up for themselves, casting the working classes into not just penury but destitution, but they so revered themselves that they would build elaborate houses for their mummified dead, and continue to serve them food, and assign servants to them, and a society this top-heavy is of course doomed to topple over and over again, until it finds a more stable, and even-handed, way to persist and thrive. Or if you resist Santayana, then perhaps you’ll listen to Mark Twain, who said that history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. I only hope that Proofrock won’t be part of that couplet. But, please, I don’t want any of you associating these Incan houses of the dead with the very nice homes going up across the lake, of course. We’re not the Inca, are we? Neither should we be the Ancient Greeks. When the gods knock on our doors, instead of offering them our last ladle of hard-won soup, we should perhaps, instead, offer them the point of our spe—”

  “Thank you, thank you for that riveting tour through history, Mr. Holmes,” Principal Manx says, finally stepping between Mr. Holmes and the podium and then turning to the side to lead another round of applause—farewell applause.

  In the bleachers, Theo Mondragon is the first to stand, clapping loudly, but then Mars Baker is standing alongside him, and Ladybird Samuels, Macy Todd—all of them, beating their hands together, not a smile among them.

  Mr. Holmes turns back to the graduates, says, just loud enough, “It’s not just soup they want,” and Jade’s the first to shoot up from her seat, clapping, sneaking a look over to Letha in the second row—the only other row. Her lips are moving uncertainly, but she can’t stand with her classmates, against her dad, and Jade hates herself for it, but she regrets having led this round of applause. No, what she regrets is this whole stupid ceremony. This whole stupid town.

  As if confirming how stupid it is, Principal Manx, trying to salvage graduation, motions for Rexall to rise, accept his certificate for going, as Manx says into the mic, “Above and beyond the duties of a custodian.” The applause continues, and Jade knows that out in the parking lot, her dad’s lifting a can for Rexall, which has to be why he was there. Not for his only daughter, the second Indian non-graduate in twenty years. The only words the two of them have had about graduation at all is when Tab asked her where she was moving out this summer.

  What Jade told him was that it was none of his concern, thanks.

  What she didn’t tell him was that it would pretty much either be Camp Blood or the couch of whoever her mom was living with.

  Rexall shuffles up to the podium, his phone still tight in his hand like a life preserver, but when Manx steps to the side to formally present him, Misty Christy stands up from the crowd, waving her hand back and forth like can Principal Manx please call on her?

  It stops the ceremony, everyone looking to Misty Christy.

  Misty Christy is shaking her head no, pointing past the podium.

  To Jade.

  Jade shrinks, slouches, licks her lip, probably frying her lipstick, blackening her tongue. For the first time in maybe ever, she wishes her hair wasn’t so easy to find in a crowd.

  “It was her, not him!” Misty Christy is saying, her voice unamplified but loud enough.

  Principal Manx looks back to Jade and Jade has to look past him, past the bleachers, past all of it.

  “I saw too!” Lucky says, from another part of the bleachers. He drives the school bus. He was the one who almost hit Misty Christy’s daughter.

  “Me too!” Judd Tambor, Proofrock’s other realtor, calls out, his voice booming.

  Jade’s ninety-nine to a hundred-and-fifty-percent certain he wasn’t there that day, but this is his chance to stand up for the unstood-up-for, and no way in hell does he let his main rival get all the good will for that.

  And now, after Judd Tambor, Jade can’t clock all the other Proofrockers chiming in that they were there, they saw, they know. Part of it’s that herd-thing Mr. Holmes is always telling them about, Jade knows, which is like the underbelly of mob mentality, but part of it too is that, if they don’t stand in support of her, then Rexall gets that certificate, and they probably know him and his high school days and further exploits better than Jade ever will.

  She closes her eyes, counts to three for all of this to be over, but then she looks again at the count of two. Not to Misty Christy, not to Judd Tambor, holding his toddler daughter up and waving her back and forth like some sort of proof of the hero Jade is, not to everyone clapping now, but to the very top corner of the bleachers. At her mom.

  She’s smiling that close-lipped smile she has.

  Jade closes her eyes tighter, is not going to fucking cry right here, in front of everybody. And then, right on cue, her dad steps out from under the bleachers, not in from the parking lot. He’s banging two trashcan lids together like cymbals, his beer clenched between his teeth, splashing onto his face and down his shirt.

  It shuts the rest of the clapping down, but he keeps clanging those lids until Hardy thins his lips, walks down along the fence that direction.

  Jade closes her eyes again, harder. Reminds herself that with every good, there’s two bads. That’s just the way it is. Maybe it’s a thing with Indians, or maybe it’s just her, it doesn’t really matter. True’s true.
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  When she finally looks again, peering up from under her bangs, Rexall’s seated and Principal Manx is leaning down to the mic to “Get these degrees handed out!”

  Because the alphabet is what it is, Jade’s second to walk the stage, second to have to shake Manx’s hand, and the first and only to receive no hoots or applause or confetti cannons going off, since her dad’s been removed from the premises, and her mom couldn’t handle everyone looking up to her, has slunk away under cover of all that clapping.

  When Letha walks, though, in heels for once—she’s got to be six-plus feet in them—the yacht nobody realized was drifting in behind them does a long airhorn blast that sends a choreographed whole flock of white doves up from some hidden place on shore.

  Of course.

  Sidestepping down the second row to take her seat, Letha squeezes Jade’s right shoulder in a sisterly way, a supportive way, and Jade hates more than anything the way her eyes heat up from this contact.

  Where were you all my life? Jade says to Letha in her head, which is when she remembers having said that once before, or close to it.

  Shooting Glasses.

  Jade scans right to left for a yellow safety vest that hasn’t made a complete exit, and sure enough, there he is leaning against a stanchion of the bleachers on the right side, as if he hasn’t earned a seat up in the bleachers. Not after having stolen them from their rightful owners.

  Jade nods once to him and he nods back, tips the shallow brim of his hardhat in congratulations, then steps away, and she realizes that’s all he was waiting for: her.

  Because she’s the one he saved, and he wants to see her all the way through?

  Because he…

  Jade shakes her head no, not that, not her. No way can he be into her. She shakes the possibility off, finds her eyes locked on Theo Mondragon again. He looks for all the world like Bruce Wayne, with Batman just under his tasteful suit. He’s entrancing, has to own every boardroom he sweeps into, every shareholders’ meeting he graces, every dinner table he settles down at.

  Every town he builds a house in.

  Jade can’t be sure, but, from the angle of his head, she’s pretty sure Mr. Holmes is either watching him too, or memorizing all the Terra Novans’ faces, to burn them in effigy later. Some people count sheep, and some light matches under their enemies, Jade imagines. She knows which of those types Mr. Holmes is. Except he doesn’t use matches, just flicks his lit cigarette to the gas-soaked tinder under their feet.

  Go, sir, Jade says again.

  This is what she’ll remember, she knows. That she wasn’t the only one at this laughable, embarrassing event who would rather have burned it all down. It’s good being the horror chick, sure, always standing away from the rest of the crowd, smoking bitter cigarette after bitter cigarette, she’d have it no other way, but it’s nice to make eye contact with someone else with a black heart, too, and then breathe smoke out slow, like judgment.

  When it’s time to throw the hats, Jade holds on to hers, smuggles it off the football field, and leaves it smiling up from the last trashcan on the way back to the high school for her mop and bucket, and whispers to the camera surely watching to hold on those X’d-out eyes for a few seconds more.

  They’re a good preview of what’s coming.

  SLASHER 101

  For my Interview Project on Proofrock History, since I couldn't interview an ACTUAL slasher as they don't take appointments and are kind of known for leaving anyone within slashing range dead, usually along with their pets and classmates and family, I had to interview someone who had once been slasher ADJACENT, which you said I could do if I could find such a personage. Well I did, Mr. Holmes. I think you were joking when you said it, but if you were then allow me to introduce you to the punchline. It's Mrs. Christine Gillette at Pleasant Valley Assisted Living, who will be 100 2 years from now.

  Perhaps this will be a break from all the other interviews in this stack of papers having to do with mining history or with Henderson-Golding or with Glen Dam or with Indian Lake or with Caribou-Targhee National Forest, which I'm guessing must taste like backwash to you since it's all stuff you told us already this semester, which a student would only know if she had been studiously listening the whole time and hardly that absent if you think about how much she's HERE when she's here, and yes this is supposed to be 5 pages, but since I haven't started the actual interview, I'm not even counting yet, this is all just bonus introducing material I'm doing now.

  As for the slasher in question it's Stacey Graves the Lake Witch, surprise. Common knowledge known locally is that she's an urban legend like Bloody Mary, that she's the Idaho version of Slender Man for the generation that lived and died by Leave It to Beaver. But this is just due to the rust of time covering up the truth, sir, and this interview is the rust remover, bam.

  My original and initial plan was to find a survivor of the rampage at Camp Blood, but this is better in that it's previous to that. And it's even got old timey details that I could never in a hundred tries make up. Let me give you a perfect example.

  Evidently when mining collapsed from all the producing mines in the new town of Proofrock getting swamped by Indian Lake having risen and risen, people started having to boat across the new lake to hunt elk if they didn't want to starve. No seasons, no limits other than how many bullets you had and how smart the elk were. But the problem that came up really fast was getting those big heavy elk back across the lake to town. You can search online that they weigh anywhere from 500 to 730 pounds.

  The solution to all that heaviness was to use rawhide string or a belt to tie the elk's mouth shut, and also plug up their aft end, as Mr. Krabs might say and I don't want to think about, and then using your mouth to blow as much air as you could into the elk's nose holes and plug them up with mud before the air can whistle back out.

  What you've done now is turn this big dead animal into a flotation device, sir. So one day Christine Gillette's friend's dad Mr. Bill got an elk, and only shot it in the head instead of the side so there wouldn't be another hole to plug with mud. And there he is floating that kill back to town like a champion hunter when that elk thrashes awake in the water and blows its two nose plugs of mud up onto Mr. Bill's boat like dog droppings fresh from the dog, and you can tell we're in the interview now, since this is Paraphrase and Distillation instead of Transcription, just like the example you gave us.

  What had happened, Christine Gillette says because she wants me to get an A for this project and therefore save my semester grade in one fell swoop, was Mr. Bill had evidently shot that elk only in the BASE of its horn, not the skull, so the elk was only knocked out. And Mr. Bill hadn't dressed it out by cutting its stomach open because then all its air would leak out too.

  So now this awake and severely unhappy elk was tied to his actual boat, which has to be a panic situation. What Mr. Bill had to do in order not to sink down to Drown Town, which was still Henderson-Golding to him, was shoot that elk between the eyes and then cut the rope, at which point that elk sunk and sunk.

  End of story? Not even close, sir.

  That was too much good meat to just kiss goodbye in starvation times, see. So Mr. Bill came back with an iron hook from the hardware store and paddled back and forth all night until he hooked onto what he was sure was that elk. Either that or a submarined log. But he didn't think it was going to be a log. Because it was too heavy to lift with arms and shoulders, he brought in this local dude Cross Bull Joe, who drove the model A version of a tow truck. This means he had a cable and winch on his truck. And what he did was back that truck all the way down the old pier, as Christine Gillette called it, the outsides of his rear tires hanging over the actual edges on both sides.

  What I asked her here as I'm sure you can guess was "OLD pier?" As in, there was another before the one that's there NOW? How do we not all know this? What ELSE do we not know, sir? This is why history class is a requirement. If I wasn't for sure graduating, I could take it again and again, until I knew
about ALL the old piers.

  But, Christine Gillette. Or, Cross Bull Joe, really. His winch strained and pulled and I imagine that, like Quint in Jaws, he had to pour water on that winding-up cable. What he finally pulled up made all the women scream, all the children fall to their knees, and all the men take a long step back like whoah.

  It was an Indian girl, sir.

  Which, I know what you're thinking, Mr. Holmes. You're thinking that it's sad but people drown in lakes every day, probably more back then before life jackets and safety signs, and that Indian Lake is cold enough that they don't even decompose, just bob around in Ezekiel's Cold Box, waiting for the day somebody with a tow truck hooks them, pulls them up into the light. I know this is what you're thinking because it's also what I was thinking.

  But we're both wrong, sir.

  The way Christine Gillette told it to me, the way they knew this wasn't some random Shoshone or Bannock in a stolen and rotting water logged dress was what happened 10 seconds later. But let's time these explosions if we can. The first for me sitting there in room 522 of Pleasant Valley Assisted Living was what you're probably asking now, which is "Stacey Graves was INDIAN?"

  If you're rocked and shocked, it's because this is not exactly common knowledge and it's also not part of the accepted lore about our Lake Witch. But evidently Stacey Graves had been half Indian, meaning that since her dad was all white, her mom must have been full blooded. Which everybody used to know and I guess we still would if we talked to the right old people. Christine Gillette told me that the boogeyman of Indian Lake used to not even be Stacey Graves in the first place, OR Ezekiel with his big hands. It used to be Stacey Graves's MOM, always walking around the shore line looking for her lost daughter, and taking any kids after dark back to her cave where she would hold them to her, in Christine Gillette's picture painty words, "leathery dugs" and make them drink her milk, which pretty much did the opposite of real mother's milk, so the lesson there was to not go out after dark, kids, get it?