My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

  The whole time the kids are flinching and trying not to run away, especially when he hauls the rudder over fast and guns his big fan, performing a neat little kick turn on the water.

  They’re waiting, they’re holding their breath over and over, but they have to breathe too. Jade remembers it so well, so clearly. She was holding Bethany Manx’s hand on one side, Tim Lawson’s on the other, and she wasn’t that weird horror chick yet, was just another kid, nine years old, the whole summer spread out before her, waiting.

  Sheriff Hardy just kept lecturing about water safety, though, and he kept not doing it, and not doing it, and she was about to explode with anticipation, they all were, they couldn’t wait any longer, and Jade remembers seeing Hardy’s lips trying not to smile, and then he ran his left index finger up the bridge of his nose, pushing his chrome sunglasses all the way on, and then he finally did it, finally gunned his airboat’s throttle all the way up, hauling the rudder over hard, pelting the whole line of kids with a spattery wall of ice-cold water.

  After which he just kept going, standing up in his airboat, skipping out deeper and deeper into Indian Lake.

  This was maybe ten years after his daughter washed up, Jade guesses.

  He probably needed his sunglasses on better to hide his eyes.

  No, when he carried Jade up from the shallows, no, he wasn’t going to let any more girls drown in his lake.

  Jade wipes her eyes, tries to keep her chin from being a stupid prune, and tells him she’s sorry, okay? She’s sorry, she couldn’t help it. And she hopes he fucking kills the goddamn shit out of Clate Rodgers.

  Maybe some of his friends too.

  She sniffles in, stands up against the post office wall, and wonders if that’s it, then: will the slasher this time be dressed like a local cop, like the melty terminator from Judgment Day? Maybe that’s what this slasher cycle will be called when it breaks on the national news: “Judgment Day.” Except it’ll probably be “Wilderness Massacre,” something insulting like that.

  No, of course: “Camp Blood, Chapter 2.” Because, like Randy says in Scream 2, the sequels always have to be bloodier. Unless whoever it is is actually wearing some giant Stacey Graves getup, in which case: The Lake Witch Slayings.

  Jade likes the ring of that one.

  That’s all later, though. Right now she needs to clock out, always keeping her eyes on the floor so she doesn’t accidentally look into any of Rexall’s—

  She flattens herself against the post office wall, holding the litter stick across her chest in both hands, her lips set.

  A Jeep is blasting past, top down, packed with former Hawks cheerleaders.

  It’s on a collision course with the Umiak, surging across the lake, Tiara Mondragon at the flashing chrome steering wheel, her hips wrapped in a gossamer sarong from a fashion catalog, her top a black string bikini, her eyes in, of all things, ski goggles.

  When the Umiak slides in for a sideways stop, washing water over the top of the pier, Letha Mondragon rises from below.

  Jade steps away from the wall to see better.

  The cheerleaders in the Jeep are standing, calling Letha over. Jade catches “finally” and “it’s going to be great!” For them, two weeks after graduation is still a celebration. But that’s probably because their tassels are in frames on the wall already, not burned string by string with a series of cigarettes, just to watch that soft nylon curl up in pain, try to get away, climb back into the safety of high school.

  Letha looks back to Tiara, and Tiara shrugs, washing her hands of this, so Letha hops down from the tall side of the boat as graceful as any cat burglar, touches down on the slick wet boards like sticking this landing is no big thing, just everyday for her.

  Jade cannot wait to see her go up against the tall shape on her dance card. It won’t matter if he’s got a chainsaw or a harpoon gun or is two-fisting machetes like nunchucks, faster and faster. Letha Mondragon, final girl extraordinaire, will walk open-eyed into those whirling blades, come out with a dark heart in her hands.

  She’s everything Jade always wished she could have been, had she not grown up where she did, how she did, with who she did.

  It’s going to be epic, this final-girl-against-slasher high noon.

  Unless Jade’s just making it all up, she reminds herself.

  To prove she’s not, when Letha Mondragon chocks her sneaker up onto the rear tire of the Jeep and vaults in, sitting under the roll bar not on it, Jade steps out from the wall she’s been hiding against, tracks the Jeep’s exit to get a read on where the party is tonight. Right before the shadows take Letha, she looks longingly back across the lake, as if beaming apology over to the yacht, to her family, for doing something for herself for once.

  Jade knows that look.

  She outgrew it in fifth grade, but still, she remembers not wanting to leave the house, broach into the big scary world.

  “But everything’s scary,” she reminds herself, gathering her coveralls at her throat because too much exposure to Proofrock might finally just do her in. When the Jeep’s headlights finally kiss each other goodbye, fold themselves into the dusk, Jade beats the darkness back by lighting a cigarette. It flares harsh orange, and, her lungs swirling with death, her litter stick hidden far up under the bushes, she falls in behind the Jeep and just goes ahead and says it out loud: “The party was great on… Girls Nite Out.” It’s the slasher where the killer wears the bear suit with whackadoodle eyes. But, extra points for the blades hidden in the paw, right? 1982 too, a couple of years before the Springwood Slasher would have knife fingers. But Jade can’t get lost in her head, needs to keep up with the Jeep long enough to get a read on where this party’s going to be. But these girls—the driver’s Bethany Manx, Jade’s pretty sure—are making it easy. The way they’re hugging the shore, the only place they can be going is Banner Tompkins’s house, right on the lake. His parents aren’t jet-setters or anything, but it is bowling night up the road in Ammon, and bowling usually takes until two in the morning to weave back from. Leaving time to invite a few friends over. Say, twenty of them, and all the booze they can carry?

  Jade knows it’ll be swim trunks and bikinis until about midnight. After which it’ll be nothing but smiles.

  On the twenty-minute walk to get there, skirting the Bay and Devil’s Creek, Jade keeps finding herself looking to the left, across the lake. She tries to come back, watch for tripping hazards, keep from busting her face on a tree root, but her chin keeps cranking over, her eyes tunneling across all that water, to Terra Nova.

  She hates it on principle, sure, but it’s also what’s delivering a final girl to town, so maybe she should give it a sort of grudging pass. At least until this slasher cycle is over. After that it can burn, be a haunted husk in the cold open of the sequel, where that installment’s blood sacrifice happens, well away from prying eyes that might try to shut things down before they even get going proper.

  Why is she watching it now, though?

  She actually stumbles when the obviousness of it hits her: she’s not watching Terra Nova at all. She’s glaring back at Letha’s father, Theo Mondragon, the one who rolled his arm forward for the graduation crowd, telling Proofrock it could get on with its little ceremony.

  The chip on her shoulder for him isn’t only about that, though. It’s… it’s that he’s a father of a sort-of young girl, isn’t it? An innocent girl, at least.

  Shit.

  Jade collects herself, walks faster, with more purpose.

  Her job here, it’s not only to educate Letha on what’s coming. It’s also to keep her safe so it all can happen.

  That includes keeping her safe from her father, who, by marrying a woman half his age, is already whispering to the world that he’s not averse to stepping well outside his age group. Maybe even has a taste for it.

  Is this the chink in Letha Mondragon’s otherwise impervious armor? Final girls these days do have those pesky pre-existing issues, Jade knows. She thought it was whatever hap
pened to Letha’s real mom, which would be enough, but—no no no—she has something more intense, doesn’t she? Something in her past, in her childhood, that’s left her skittish, that fundamentally broke her confidence in the world.

  Her father.

  It all tracks, doesn’t it? Letha isn’t timid and conservative and right-moral’d from nature, but because she’s trying to make up for something, trying to cover it with good deeds. Something that wasn’t even her fault. She was just a little girl left alone with her dad for the afternoon.

  Jade is crashing through the bushes now.

  Chancing another look across the water, she can nearly see Theo Mondragon up in his office in their yacht, getting off scot-free one more time, skating like he always has with his wealth, his privilege, his good looks and charm. His funny excuses, his believable lies.

  He’s smug because no one is ever going to know. Letha sure isn’t going to tell, and, from what Jade hears, it’s just them over there—the Mondragons. The other Founders swing through on and off to check on the progress of Terra Nova, but they’ve got empires to run, and their yachts are probably cutting through other waters anyway, the world being their playground and all.

  “You’re being paranoid,” Jade tries to tell herself. But she doesn’t slow down any. What she’s seeing now that she’s deeper in the trees, cutting across to the flickering bonfire at Banner Tompkins’s, what she can’t help but picture, is Theo Mondragon in what he would probably call a skiff or a dinghy, with a silent little trolling motor. Not the Umiak, as everybody knows that one, and of course not the pontoon boat with all the seats that they use when the other Founders are in town. It’s got festive lights strung all over it now anyway. And the catamaran with the big sail would be like advertising his progress across the lake, and the gondola boat tied to their dock has to be purely for show, and wouldn’t last out in Indian Lake’s chop anyway, and the canoe and rowboat are too slow, too labor intensive for a CEO, and the stupid white pedal boat with the high arching swan neck and tiny aristocratic swan head has to be just for any kids who show up, doesn’t it?

  No, a little flat-bottomed jonboat with a trolling motor. It’s like putting a silencer on a small-caliber pistol. Theo Mondragon’s probably sitting in the bow right now, his hand on that steering handle, the wind in his tight hair, his five o’clock shadow raspy, his eyes brimming with the most expensive wine.

  Does he have a spotting scope up on that tallest part of the yacht? Has he been tracking the party?

  Jade can’t say there’s not a sliver of a chance.

  And, right now, Letha, she’s in a between-place, she’s unaccounted-for, it’s her first big night out on her own. Anything can happen.

  Jade slows a few feet back in the trees, eases the Michael mask out, fits it over her face just in case, fluffing her purple-tinged hair out over the elastic band. Watching like this, a mask just feels better. It’s not the first time she’s done it, of course—she treats parties like anthropology field work, taking mental notes the whole time—but it’s the first time she’s doing it for a reason that might make sense later.

  The bonfire blazing in the yard is the jumbo-size version of her dad’s yearslong fire pit in the backyard, that he makes her scrape out some Sundays.

  The Jeep is already there.

  Jade creeps over, holds her hand close to the tailpipe, feeling for heat, then finally thins her lips, just clamps right on.

  It’s only warm.

  Letha’s in the house, then. With all the music, all the loud talking, all the squeals.

  Good for her. She deserves this. Be a kid before it’s too late, this is the last summer for it.

  Jade feels around for the right tree to stand behind, for the right dip to crouch in, for the right pile of junk to mask her pale coveralls, and it doesn’t match the mask, but she can’t help doing the sound effects a bit: ki-ki-ki, ma-ma-ma.

  She’s not here to carve through the party, though. Let them have their fun, she doesn’t care. She’s here because—because what if Theo Mondragon is about to drag his Saturday night special jonboat up onto the shore?

  Jade would never kill anyone just because. With reason, though, yeah. Twice-over, with interest, and more than a little attitude, maybe even something a little extra, for style points.

  Her plan is to wait until Theo Mondragon throws Letha down in the tall grass. Then Jade’ll step into frame, having filched a piece of rebar up from the scrap pile, limbered an axe up from a stump. There’s always an axe around when you need it. If there’s one thing horror movies have taught her, it’s that.

  For now, though, she just lips her new cigarette, knows better than to spark up.

  Already couples are traipsing out to the cars, steaming up the windows. Meaning all the beds inside must be occupied.

  Normally, in a town the size of Proofrock, there’d be even money that she’d have gone to seventh-grade homecoming with one of those naked backs in the front seat, that she’d have a secret matching tattoo with the prom queen who’s just bare feet-on-glass, that she’d have written love notes to whoever’s in that car with the squeaky springs. Guy or girl.

  There’s nothing normal about Jennifer Daniels, though.

  By seventh grade she was already the death metal girl, the D&D girl, the devilchild, practically was the walking, talking cover for Sleepaway Camp II. She knew all the songs the other kids’ parents knew, had memorized all the movies those parents had screamed to in their own junior high, and she could reel them out on command, from the slightest provocation, like weaving a cloak of protection around her, and pulling tight.

  Anyway, she doesn’t need the stupid rituals of parties like these, does she? All the laughter is nervous and forced, all the come-ons and invitations so inelegant.

  It’s better to just watch, she tells herself. It’s better to hide in the trees, part the leaves, take notes in her head, not missing a single thing, because you never know what’s going to matter. And then when it’s time, she’ll step out with that sharp piece of rebar, step out and drive it through a thick fatherly chest, and the blood is going to mist across her graduating class’s faces, and they’re going to thank her, because this night could have gone the complete other way.

  Jade can see it all in her head, from every angle.

  Hours later the bonfire is down to embers, though, and nothing’s happened yet, except in her head. There’s less cars, but there’s no dragon silhouette taking shape in the shadows. She taps her knuckle on her hard plastic cheek like a metronome, to anchor herself in the moment, to stay awake, and, finally, thirty minutes before midnight, ten minutes after telling herself screw it, the side door off the garage opens, spills thready blue light.

  Ah.

  They’re watching movies in there, then. Horror movies, probably. What else would you watch in a garage, with a group, at this time of night?

  It’s something she’s seen, Jade knows—she’s seen everything twice—but still, she wants worse than anything to just catch a glimpse, to make the movie out from a single frame. One of the Child’s Plays, maybe? Ringu? Dialing all the way back to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? She wants worse than anything to speak up from the back of the garage, let them in on the true story of this cursed production, on the trivia about the movie’s limited engagement in Italy, about how the soundtrack in the theatrical release isn’t the same as the one that was released on VHS. For reasons she can explain and trace and unfold for however long they’ll sit there listening.

  Wasn’t meant to be, though. Either she’s one of the flock, or she knows horror movies. Not both. And they’re probably jeering at the effects anyway. Overplaying their reactions to the jumpscares. Not even paying the right kind of attention.

  Jade’s glad not to be in there. She lifts her mask to spit, and when the eyeholes settle down again like binoculars, the doorway opens. A girl steps into it, two girls, three girls now, the second helping the first.

  The second is Letha Mondragon in a pair of
bright white shorts she must have borrowed at the party, since she didn’t have them on at the pier. And of course the second one is her. She would never be stumbling drunk like the first one obviously is. But she would keep the drunk one safe.

  The third one is Bethany Manx, the Jeep driver, the principal’s daughter, always trying to shake that mantle off. Jade can tell it’s her from her rail-thin profile, her mod cut, longer in front than back, and the flash of silver from her mouth: the tongue stud Daddy Dearest doesn’t know about, that she only, famously, puts in for get-togethers like this.

  Bethany peels off, has some errand back at the cars, leaving Letha and the drunk one—it’s Tiffany Koenig. She’s throwing up into the tall grass by one of the cars, which, if scuttlebutt heard over bathroom stalls is right, is kind of her party trick. Letha is patiently threading Tiffany K’s hair back from the puke.

  The good thing about people throwing up outside is that the janitor doesn’t have to clean it up. In the great outdoors, raccoons are the janitors. And they love their job.

  After it’s over and Tiffany K’s crying—you do that when it comes out your nose as well as your mouth, you do that when you panic that you’re never going to be able to breathe again—Letha stands her up, steadies her a bit, and starts to lead her into the dark house, to clean up.

  Tiffany K pulls away. It’s embarrassing, looking like this. Vomit stringing between your fingers. Cheeks wet with hot tears.

  This party is happening right by a giant sink, though…

  Letha looks around for help, for guidance, for Bethany who’s nowhere, and finally just leads Tiffany K carefully around the coals of the bonfire. Because unsteady people shouldn’t lean out over the water alone, she takes her shoes off and squelches into the mud of the shore with Tiffany K, helps her splash her face.

  Jade creeps closer, trying to see if this—“friendship”—looks like it does in the movies. Of the two of them, she imagines she’s Tiffany K here, the self-destructive one. Not the responsible one. Not the good friend.