My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Anyway, with THAT explosion of Stacey Graves having been Indian hanging in the air above me and Christine Gillette, she activated her inner demolition man and detonated the next charge, even sort of acted it out so I'd be sure to get it. What she did in her wheelchair was reach her right arm up for the big iron hook coming in under Stacey Graves’ chin, gouging up into her head like she was a fish wriggling on a trotline. And then her left hand joined her right, and using the strength of both she pulled herself up off that black hook, which Christine Gillette said was a good 2 dollar one, which is probably a fact we could check to verify the truthfulness of her story.

  Because of the barb at the point of that hook that caught in this little girl's chin right at the very end, when she was already trying to fall away and do what Stacey Graves DOES, which you of course already know from having lived here for so long and heard the stories, the final releasing of her hands made her hang sideways by only her jaw and everybody thought it was going to crack off and tear away. But then only SOME skin tore instead and runny black blood spurted out and then she was off the hook and to the races, and everybody was shrieking and pulling their hair and going to church first thing and promising not to go across the lake for elk anymore, which is kind of the secret real birth of the national forest if you ask me.

  And Christine Gillette saw all of this 1st hand, Mr. Holmes. She was 14 that year. And the way I know she's not making it up is that the story went on after that, and not because she was just trying to keep me there since nobody ever visits her according to the sheet I had to sign.

  After what happened HAPPENED, nobody would go out onto the old pier anymore. Not even Cross Bull Joe to get his truck. So then one morning they heard a cracking and crashing sound, and by the time anybody looked out there, the old pier had mostly collapsed under the weight of that tow truck, probably when one bird too many landed on that black hook and that tall V of pipe holding the cable. If a pier can be a camel's back, then a bird can be a straw, right?

  Christine Gillette's dad told her he would give her 1 whole dime if she would swim out there and untie that 2 dollar hook for him, but Christine Gillette says that her life was worth more than ten cents, which back then was a lot more than today of course.

  So that hook's still out there, I guess. And maybe that truck too, all rotted and flaked away, the window glass all turned to crumbles.

  And also Stacey Graves, Mr. Holmes.

  You had to know that's where I was going.

  So in conclusion and wrap up for the WHOLE SEMESTER including my course grade which maybe shouldn't be history, what we thought was just fiction has in fact a basis in eyewitness testimony. And the way you can know I didn't make this up is that if I were the one coming up with that then at the end of the story Christine Gillette would huff air out through her nose and two plugs of mud would splat onto the ground between us, and then I'd look up the moment after a shape just left from looking in the window, and there would probably be scary piano and violin playing too.

  But none of that, sir.

  Christine Gillette just reached a shaky hand for her coffee cup of only water, and I helped her by guiding the cup closer to her hand, and then held my breath when she drank because it was always about to spill but never did.

  Then when I was leaving after many nods and grins and thank you's, me the whole time imagining being 14 and seeing a live dead girl hauled up from the cold depths, Christine Gillette hummed a little bit, sir. It stopped me. I looked back to see what was up and if maybe she was having an episode or what.

  "We used to jump rope to it," she explained, and then added that they would jump rope to it when they could steal a rope from their dads' shops or the beds of their trucks or from the "tack" shed.

  "Jump rope to what?" I asked, because the good interviewer prompts with pertinent facts and phrases, as you told us.

  What Christine Gillette came back with, sir, was straight out of a Freddy dream pretty much, and you know I don't write poetry, so this is all her 100%:

  Stacey Stacey Stacey Graves

  Born to put you in your grave

  You see her in the dark of night

  And once you do you're lost from sight

  Look for water, look for blood

  Look for footprints in the mud

  You never see her walk on grass

  Don't slow down, she'll get your--

  Christine Gillette didn't do the obvious rhyming word, but she didn't need to. I felt the shiver all the same, and am still hearing her and her friends' feet slapping the packed dirt as they chant this, being sure to get indoors before dark, because Stacey Graves isn't just a campfire story, Mr. Holmes.

  The Lake Witch is real, and she's still out there, coming soon to a nightmare near you, near all of us, we can only hope. Or, if "we" can't hope, then don't worry.

  I've got enough for all of us.

  CURTAINS

  Stab, Stab, Stab.

  Jade jams the sharp end of her litter stick into a Styrofoam cup and imagines the cup writhing, moaning, begging for mercy. She hikes the stick up, uses her gloved left hand to push the dying cup off the stainless steel tip and into the canvas bag slung over her left hip like the most cavernous purse.

  Today the bright yellow litter stick is a spear, but in the afternoons since graduation it’s been a pike for bulls, except that made her feel evil; a long push-dart for wolverines and badgers—rabid, of course; a laser beam that cooks whatever trash it comes into contact with (lots of hissing sound effects); a blood-sampler for crocodiles, also probably rabid; and, like so many of her fantasies, the weapon found sticking up from her father’s right eye socket.

  But the left can work too. She’s not picky.

  Stab.

  In the Scream franchise, that’s what the movie dramatization of Gale Weathers’s tell-all book is called. That and a nickel’ll get you five cents, Jade knows, and can’t help smiling about.

  Because nobody’s around to catch her, she can smile all she wants. Smile and sing, thrash with Cyco Miko in her earbuds, even do a cartwheel if the urge strikes and her inner cheerleader just has to express herself. This is what summer-janitoring for the county is about: there are no kids to clean up after in the halls of the schools, so you become custodian for the whole town.

  And, to be sure, if Jade has an inner cheerleader, it’s one of those ratted-out punk ones from that Nirvana video—the pep rally from hell. That’s nineties not eighties, but so was Popcorn, so was New Nightmare, so was Scream.

  “Without memory, there can be no retribution,” she mumbles, eviscerating a Copenhagen tin’s shiny thin lid with a nice pop. “Without memory, there can be no retribution” is a line from Popcorn, maybe the line. That’s another thing she can do since no one’s out here: quote horror all the day long to test herself, to keep her slasher Q up. It’s just her and the blowing trash, after all, and, somewhere out there, surely, an actual slasher rising from the depths.

  As near as she can suspect, it’s either going to look like or be Stacey Graves, which will be pretty wicked, or it’ll look like or be Ezekiel from Drown Town, the scary-ass preacherman with the big hands and too-wide mouth, the better to sing with—think Poltergeist 2, “God is in, his holy temp-le,” which Jade delivers at high and sudden volume to the birds that keep gathering around in case she uncovers something tasty.

  One of the early extra credit papers she did for Mr. Holmes had been on him—Ezekiel, not the Poltergeist 2 preacher. It was a two-pager, which she had mostly copied from online: when Henderson-Golding was being flooded with what would become Indian Lake, he’d locked his congregation into his one-room church with him, and they sang until the waters swamped the town, and are maybe, Jade said in her conclusion, still singing, awaiting the day they can rise from the depths to punish the town that replaced Henderson-Golding. And then they turn their attentions to Glen Dam, let the waters of judgment flow forth, down-valley, freeing their beloved, soggy little town.

  The problem with
Ezekiel, though, it’s that he’s not really slasher material. What’s there for him to revenge? The people of Henderson-Golding had found him in the woods, nursed him back to health, taught him language even though he already had white hair. They’d probably even given him the Bible he would use like a hammer to smite down what-all he saw as sin—everything, pretty much. If Ezekiel was hanging around, it should be to thank all those people who found him, not choke their descendants out with his big hands.

  No, Ezekiel’s more like a dark and scary force. The only thing he’s got against teens, or anybody, is that they’re all sinning. But, according to him, the whole world is sin, right? Therefore, the whole world needs to burn. He’s more like Nix from Lord of Illusions: came for the mayhem, stayed for the massacre.

  Stacey Graves, then. Either her or someone dressed up like her. Someone killing like she probably would. Case in point: those two Dutch kids out on the water.

  Jade spears a tissue she doesn’t want to touch even with her thick glove, then stabs through the side of a Diet Coke bottle, then goes for a triple-stacker—a long, faded receipt in addition to the Diet Coke and tissue.

  Lifting gently, slowly, she guides them all into her bag of infinite holding. Infinite smelly holding.

  Stacey Graves does make sense out on the water, she supposes. But it’s not like Ezekiel doesn’t. The lake is both of their territory, and probably the shore too.

  Jade looks out across the lake and mimes poling ahead with her litter stick, both hands, has to jog to catch a candy wrapper trying to make it to the tall grass. Candy wrappers are always the fastest. Something about their no-friction paper and their basic weightlessness, and how each upflung tatter is another sail.

  Stab. Stab.

  When the candy wrapper flits up into the air instead of riding her spear into the bag, Jade tries to move slow enough to impale it at eight feet high and spiraling. When she misses three times in a row, just scaring it higher away, she takes a couple of running steps and hurls her stick like a spear at it.

  One one-hundredth of a second after the handle’s gone from her hand, she thinks to look ahead to where her litter stick might be landing.

  Time slows for her, hardly even moving at all.

  At the other end of this not-a-javelin’s arc is—is… there’s the sheriff’s big plate glass window, there’s two county vehicles, there’s the light pole with the frosted glass bulb by the sidewalk leading to the sheriff’s building, there’s a blue post office box which it’s probably a federal crime to puncture.

  Jade turns her head away to not have to witness this, and, when it has to be over, her future decided, she takes a timid peek.

  The litter stick landed point-first in the hump of grass. A small brown bird flutters down, perches on it, and gives Jade the eye, like this new and unexpected vantage point is his, now, thank you very much. Jade looks past the bird to Sheriff Hardy’s window, which has to be like his big television screen, the one always tuned to “Proofrock.” Just, now it’s got this one girl traipsing across it.

  This one girl who owes him some community service. Which she can’t dodge anymore, can she?

  “Might as well,” she says. She has to go over there anyway to collect her litter stick, doesn’t she? Maybe signing up for some hours can be her payment for the luck of not having broken out any windows, perforated any car roofs.

  Jade waves the bird away, its sharp claws not letting go of the stick’s handle until the last possible instant.

  That would for sure be scary, Jade thinks, tracking the bird zigging and zagging away: a human body with a sparrow head, like the owl-head dude in Stage Fright.

  Slashers these days tend to be more off-the-shelf, though, don’t they?

  As if to prove this, Jade pulls the so-called lapel of her coveralls over on the left side, to check if the dull white Michael Myers mask she’s got stashed there is riding well. It’s just a hard plastic shell with a wimpy elastic band, your basic face eraser, but no way can she risk carrying a sixty-dollar pull-on full-head bleached-out Captain Kirk around in her pocket just for kicks and grins. No, in circumstances like hers, keep a little two-dollar clearance job that you can leave behind if need be. It’s not like she paid the two dollars for it anyway.

  Now that she’s actually here at Hardy’s building, though, this close to the threat of community service, she’s kind of having second and third thoughts.

  What if he wants her to wash his Bronco? What if he tells her to use her litter stick out in the shallows of Indian Lake, where every third piece of flotsam is going to be not just a rubber, but the rubber of someone she knows?

  No thank you.

  Maybe she can just cross the summer with those twelve hours untouched. What’s he going to do, arrest her? Keep her from graduating any more than she’s already not graduating?

  Moving sneaky, she dislodges the gross tissue from the top of her canvas bag o’smells, lets it go in a gust of wind, then jogs backwards-like, being as conscientious a litter-stabber as she is, she has no choice but to run catch it. Except it keeps being one stab ahead of her stick. And again, again, until she has to be out of sight of Hardy’s office window.

  The life of the summer janitor, yeah. Gloriouser and gloriouser, until she can’t contain the gloriousness anymore, has to burst with sunshine from the pure joy welling up inside her.

  Which is only halfway a lie: the longer this slasher takes to rise, the more her anticipation has been ratcheting up. Time and again, watching Letha Mondragon walk from her stepmother’s slick little Audi to the pier for their cigarette boat the Umiak, Jade’s reached out for her, to warn her, to explain it all to her, but she’s never reaching with her hands, quite. Just with her eyes. She’s going to have to actually tell her at some point, though. It’s not stacking the deck, it’s just common courtesy.

  But, Jade has to admit, she guesses the reason she hasn’t approached Letha Mondragon yet is that she’s not a hundred and ten percent absolute certain that this isn’t all just in her head, that she isn’t a victim of wishful thinking. Maybe all her videotapes have rotted her mind. Maybe all the hatred balled up inside her has started sending tendrils out into her thinking, to blacken her thoughts, dim her perception of the actual world.

  If she starts seeing tracking lines in the sky, that’s when she’ll know, she tells herself.

  Until then, she’ll just keep watching, and waiting.

  Except—except it has to be true this time, doesn’t it? Letha Mondragon wouldn’t be here if there weren’t a slasher in the vicinity, would she? That’s not the way it works. Jade guesses she doesn’t know which came first, the slasher or the final girl, the chicken or the bloody egg, but she does know that where there’s one, there’s gonna be the other, so it doesn’t really matter.

  And, okay, she does know which came first: the slasher, of course. It rises to right the wrongs, then when it gets all carried away, nature spits up its governor, its throttle, its one-woman police force, its fiercest angel: the final girl. She’s the only cap the slasher cycle recognizes.

  But Jade’s not writing her cute little papers for Mr. Holmes anymore. Those days are over, gone forever.

  Now she’s in a slasher.

  Stab.

  This time it’s a dead bird. The meaty feel and muted crunch comes up through the fiberglass pole into Jade’s palm, and she makes it last as long as she can, imagines a paternal hand spread on the ground, fatherly fingers clutching at the gravel, a left work boot jerking involuntarily, blood leaking down into the whorls of an ear. Right or left, it doesn’t matter.

  Instead of burying the bird in the trash bag at her hip, she uses her heel and the point of the stick to scrape a deep-enough hole under a bush by the post office. It’s Saturday, so nobody’s there to ask her what she’s doing.

  She pushes the dead bird in, covers it up, then studies the dark blood on her stainless steel prod.

  It makes a lump swell in her throat. This is what stories mean by “gorge,�
� she knows.

  She turns away, spits long and stringy but doesn’t quite throw up. Technically.

  Just from a one-ounce bird, yeah.

  Real brave, Jennifer, she tells herself. Very metal.

  To deal with the trauma, she works her way around to the side of the post office then sits there for an hour she measures in cigarettes smoked, the shadows lengthening all around her, the temperature clicking down with the sun.

  If she doesn’t get back to Golding Elementary in time to turn her stick back in, big loss. It’ll just mean not being in Rexall’s hidden camera, and that can’t be the worst thing in the world. And Hardy’s not even in his office to catch her not working. From here she can see him out on the water, skipping around in the airboat he bought with the insurance money for his daughter’s death back when.

  “Get him, sir,” Jade says.

  She’s talking about Clate Rodgers, Hardy’s daughter’s junior high boyfriend at the time of her drowning.

  What was her name? Jade’s mom used to say it sometimes, as if, had this dead girl lived, the whole town would be different, better, as if, with that one girl walking down its streets, Proofrock could be what it was meant to have been. Not the current thing it is.

  Melanie, that’s it.

  It’s lettered right there on the sides of Hardy’s airboat, were Jade close enough to see. The first time she sounded the name out, just trying to make it be a word, not a jumble of blue letters stuck to his hull, she was… second grade? But it could have been first, she supposes. In the summer, it’s tradition for all the kids who don’t think they’re too old to line up on the pier in their swimsuits, line up and hold hands, Sheriff Hardy coasting his airboat back and forth before them like a drill sergeant, informing them about water safety, about how all of them, if they follow his instructions to a T, can have the best, and safest, summer ever.