My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

  She Holden Caulfields it up onto her ramshackle porch again, endures the gauntlet of the living room, her dad making a show of pausing The Night of the Hunter to let her pass, and then she clamps her headphones on, pulls her little television close, and pushes the The Hitcher tape in, tells herself it’s Prom Night II after that, hating the whole time that she kind of wants to sneak back into the living room, see if she can catch any of The Night of the Hunter—see if that old-time preacher in it is maybe some figuration of Ezekiel. Maybe him being on-screen in her own house is a sign, even, that she shouldn’t dismiss Drown Town so fast for this slasher cycle. Jade pauses Rutger Hauer on her thirteen-inch, tries to eavesdrop on Robert Mitchum in there on the twenty-seven inch, and it takes enough effort that part of her sort of drifts off, is partially awake on the couch in the living room, her dad quietly spreading a blanket over her.

  Jade jerks awake blinking hard, trying to shake that image, flush it, and scans her videotapes for that orange pumpkin sticker she put on the spine of Halloween years ago, so it can be the last thing she sees before conking, so she can take it with her into sleep, and the next time she opens her eyes it’s nearly noon, meaning she’s sleeping through today’s litter-stabbing expedition. But fuck it. Let the trash stab itself for one day. Like Rexall’s watching her time card that close? No, his cameras are more zoomed in on her chestal area.

  Jade shudders, trying to shake the grime of his eyes off.

  Carrying a box of Honeycombs and not exactly moving at top speed—the house is empty like the tomb—she folds some of her old pants around her prize A Bay of Blood tape, and then she ties a white ribbon around it both ways, to be sure the boxy VHS won’t clatter out at Tiara Mondragon’s feet, get kicked away like a roach.

  Next she folds all the papers shut, and instead of hiding them at the center with A Bay of Blood, she slips the thick little bundle under the ribbon’s bow like some long, heartfelt, meandering girl-to-girl note about boys and make-up and… and whatever normal girls talk about. Then it’s just suiting up and trucking through the muck around the lake, tightwriting it across the spine of the dam, and clomping up the dock at Terra Nova forty-five minutes later, knocking on whatever passes for a door.

  Except the yacht… isn’t there?

  Jade cases the lake slow. Where can something that size be?

  Camp Blood, it turns out, which she’d saluted down to on the way over, from the top of the bluff.

  “Excuse me?” Jade says out loud, truly affronted about this transgression—about them being at Camp Blood. She comes right up to the lip of the dock as if ten feet more might explain all this to her, and finally cues in that there’s no construction going on in Terra Nova behind her. Like the second Thursday before July 4th is some kind of Idaho holiday? Not any one she knows about, and even if it were, the Founders would be paying holiday rates.

  Where is everybody?

  Jade shields her eyes and squints her vision better, can see now that the yacht’s pulled right up to the jetty in front of Camp Blood, the one that used to be for kids to earn their diving badges off of.

  This makes zero point zero sense. Jade looks around absently, finds the mailbox she’s seen Dan Dan the mailman puttering across the lake for, and stuffs the pants and tape and pages into it like a bomb, just to complete her mission. Because now there’s another mission, this one more recon oriented.

  Twenty breathless minutes later she’s on the chalky bluff back behind Camp Blood, peering down. Hardy’s there, his airboat skidded up onto shore like he always does, and his two deputies are milling around with trash bags. But so are the state police, and some leathery rail of a guy in park ranger colors, and Letha is sitting on the jetty, wrapped in a blanket, Tiara hugging her from the side.

  Jade leans forward, out over open space. She really did bury a heavy-ass double bit axe over here in junior high, “for future use.” And also because it was stolen. But… no. Hardy wouldn’t scramble all available units and rope in civilians just because Proofrock’s high school drop-out of a janitor told him to look under the floorboards of cabin 6.

  Would he?

  Jade leans out over the open space even more, that soft chalky bluff crumbling down and down under the toe of her right boot, and… Letha, in that blanket. Her hated stepmom, consoling her.

  Consoling her.

  From what?

  “The next kill,” Jade says in wonder, and then in the same instant, she feels it: eyes on her.

  She looks down, around, finally finds those eyes: Theo Mondragon in khaki shorts and an unbuttoned shirt, like he didn’t have time to attire himself properly for whatever this is. Like he just ran out to whoever was screaming. Jade can almost see him powering the monstrous yacht across the lake, never mind checking depth or battening pitchers and glasses down in the state rooms.

  He’s out at the edge of Camp Blood now, cell pushed up against the side of his head, and he’s looking up at Jade, her off-color half-bleached hair—all the purple’s gone—probably an ash-blond beacon for him to fix on.

  Jade steps back, tightropes it across the rail-less spine of the dam again, and runs all the way home, her chest heaving, spends the next hour coloring her hair black-black with shoe polish, which is all she can find. It’s the hugest mess. The sink looks like a demon exploded in it, like this is a problem only Ben Affleck can solve.

  Except Ben Affleck, as usual, isn’t here.

  Jade hauls out the cleaning shit, does janitor duty for the next hour, wiping up her own mess for once. By the end of it her hair should be dry, but it’s all gummy and oily instead. She goes out to the yard, uses the hose this time, and vinegar, then rubbing alcohol, but some situations are just basically unsalvageable. Evidently deep black and the non-color her burned-out rat’s nest of hair’s been strained down to come together in a weird shade of orangey-brown, like… carrot with undertones of vomit? Leftover tendrils of black are shot through as well, and her scalp looks like the top of a scabby dress shoe, one cheap enough to have bubbled up in the sun.

  Who cares.

  The better to stare you down with, Jade hisses inside, her daily affirmation, and stalks into her room, ransacking it for whatever other papers she can slip to Letha, and then, and then—she has to decide what movie’s going to be next in this Final Girl extension course, doesn’t she?

  She clamps her headphones on again, works her way through The Slumber Party Massacre and April Fool’s Day and Happy Birthday to Me for the rest of the day, and somewhere in there she blisses out, only comes to when the screen fizzes its blue soul up. It’s the same exact shade Casey Becker’s television screen is early on in Scream. Meaning… does that mean that her movie’s starting now, that Jade’s Proofrock slasher is officially cueing up, the preliminary stages all checked off at last? And… and if she had the same stovetop brand of popcorn as Casey Becker, would it pop at the same rate? Does Casey’s stalking and death move in real time or movie time?

  It’s worth investigating, even with just a normal bag of microwave popcorn. In the kitchen, though, her dad is cooking eggs, his whole face bleary.

  He rubs his hand up and down over it, still trying to wake up all the way.

  “Doesn’t work like it used to,” he says for Jade about his get-sober trick, and then smiles with the left side of his mouth, which is an invitation for her to smile with him about how much mornings suck. She almost does, just manages to look away instead, to the front door, cocked open to let the air in, which is something her mom used to do when she was up first, doing chores. For half an instant, Jade’s ten again.

  As if reading the moment right for once in his life, her dad, guiding his eggs from pan to plate, falls into a story Jade already knows, that he used to tell when she was a kid and the time before she was born was mythic, and the only reason her dad could walk across it was that he was a titan, ten stories tall.

  “We used to hide under the pier on days like these, each of us with a sixer floating besides us,” he says, mimin
g the beer at chest-level.

  “ ‘We?’ ” Jade prompts, though she knows: Rexall, Clate, anybody else stupid enough to get roped in.

  Her dad keeps going, says, “This was before Deputy Hardy had that swamp boat, see?”

  “Deputy Hardy” is what Sheriff Hardy was back then, but it’s also the only rank Tab Daniels allows him.

  “Listen, I’m sure this story’s going to be better this time, but I—” Jade starts.

  “The department had that long bass boat with the twin Evinrudes,” her dad says, scrounging in the cabinet for the pepper even though it’s right there on the counter. “Could have pulled a house off its pylons if you tied the knot right.”

  “And you would—”

  “And we would float there all day, our ski ropes tied to that boat, waiting for your mom or somebody to call in the emergency on the other side of the lake.”

  “Like on a schedule?” Jade asks. She’s never thought to ask this question before.

  “More like whenever she got around to it,” her dad says, leaning back to fork his first runny bite of egg in. “Kimbat knew we were down there, would torture us by not calling in.”

  “Kimbat” is Kimmy plus Batman, because her purse was her utility belt, something like that, it’s all dim and distant for Jade.

  “And then the sheriff—” she says, trying to get this over with already.

  “Deputy,” her dad corrects, holding his fork up like to cross that T.

  Jade makes her voice as bored and flat as possible, finishes his story: “He would blast off for the other side of the lake for this emergency call, and you and Rexall and Clate and whoever would come up from under the pier on those ski ropes, barefoot skiing until he looked back to see what the drag was.”

  “We’d have had cameras in our phones back then, there’d be proof,” her dad says, bringing his plate up to his face because the yolks are just gelid enough to string. “Or if we’d have had phones at all,” he adds with a smile-and-eyebrow thing that Jade would bet everything she owns is the exact same smile that lured her mom over to Camp Blood for a party one night, at the right-wrong time in her uterine cycle.

  But it always starts like that, doesn’t it? Some randy dude making eyes when he should be making tracks? Even when she dials up old Indian stories online, there’s always some goofy old dude smiling exactly like Tab Daniels while he scraps the world together from goopy mud, making deals with muskrats and beavers, ducks and crows, anybody stupid enough to listen to him.

  “You’re saying a bass boat can pull three skiers?” Jade says to her dad.

  “We were skinnier back then.”

  Jade shakes her head, narrows her eyes, and looks out the front door again, telling herself she’s not doing this, she’s not interacting with him, not even on accident. Because he can flip it all around on her in an instant.

  “Why you telling me this story again?” she asks. “It was bullshit then, it’s bullshit now.”

  Her dad forks another bite in, makes a show of savoring it, swallowing it down.

  “You’ve got a mouth on you, you know?” he says.

  “And a knee,” Jade says. “A machete in my room.”

  Her dad smiles to show how little threat she is and rattles his plate down into the sink to either sit there for days or for Jade to wash it. And if she doesn’t do it? Eggs are superglue after about half an hour. She hates when he’s still in the house, can hear her doing his dirty dishes. But they don’t have enough plates to let them sit, either.

  “The ski rope’s what I want you to pay attention to, there,” he says at last, all the silence before it serving as emphasis.

  “The rope?”

  “How long they go, you think?”

  “Why’s it matter?”

  “Seventy feet,” her dad very clearly enunciates, reaching into his pants to scratch his hip bone but never breaking eye contact with Jade. “But let’s say seventy-five, just to be safe.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jade says. “And I don’t care, either.”

  “You should,” he says. “Seventy-five feet is as close as I need to be to the law, get it? It went for high school and it goes for now too.”

  “Thanks for the update?”

  “And the street in front of the house here is a sight closer than that. Want me to measure it out?”

  Jade dials back, translates. “This is about Sheriff Hardy dropping me off last night?”

  “This is about you bringing the law to my front door. And how that’s gonna be the end of that.”

  “It was just—”

  “Any more interactions with Deputy Hardy, I’m gonna have to think my own daughter’s a snitch.”

  “What am I going to rat you out about? Drinking on the job? Do you think that’s some big secret?”

  “Safer this way.”

  “What way?”

  “Any more interactions with the law, you’re out of here.”

  “You can’t kick me out,” Jade says, her eyes heating up. “I’m not eighteen yet.”

  “You’re out of school. Might need to find your own place, like your mom there.”

  “Because I take up so much room here?”

  “Because you’re bringing the law to my front door,” her dad says again, taking a step closer, putting himself in knee range as a dare, Jade knows.

  “You shouldn’t even be here right now,” she tells him.

  “My own house.”

  “Why aren’t you at work, I mean? They giving Breathalyzer tests to cross the lake now?”

  “Everybody go home, one of us Richie Riches bought it,” her dad says like repeating an announcement, and then, so he can be the one to end this conversation, turns to the fridge, reaches in for milk, or a beer, or who cares, Jade’s already stalking out, her heart thumping from anger, from fear, but mostly from what he just said: one of the Founders bought it?

  In her bedroom she scrolls through her phone for whatever news blips she can glom onto, finally finds it out of Idaho Falls, which tracks since Proofrock doesn’t exactly have its own broadcast: one of the Terra Novans has died in a “tragic accident,” “stick with us,” “more details as they surface.”

  No news on which Founding Father it is, but Jade knows it’s not Theo Mondragon, anyway. She just saw him. Meaning it was one of the other four? Are there only five of them? Aren’t there ten houses over there, meaning more moguls and tycoons coming in? But aren’t they all waiting for their, you know, homes to be complete? This must be one of those ones who sniped in to breeze through, check on progress, be hands-on.

  Still? Letha knows who it is. Because she’s at the swirling center of it all. Because she’s the focus, the star, the hero. As for Jade… this is what it’s like to be at the periphery, she decides. She’s safe, or safe-ish, sure, but it’s like watching the story through a telescope.

  Which is some bullshit for Proofrock’s number one slasher fan.

  Jade clamps a cap on over the greasy mess her hair is now, shrugs into her coveralls so Meg Koenig will know she’s a county employee, and once it’s dark enough, she shuffles down to the sheriff’s office a full fourteen hours before she’s due. Because she’s such an eager beaver, yes.

  For news.

  SLASHER 101

  Before I get started with this MAKE UP work for 40 PERCENT of my history grade, Mr. Holmes, let me just say once again and in writing that a certain Christine Gillette exclusive was NOT made up even one little bit. Okay so there's no recording, but that's just because I didn't have space on my phone, but that doesn't mean she's making it up. A broke clock is still right sometimes. But don't worry, sir. I found another Stacey Graves witness, surprise. I went to the most trustable historical personage in town, if badges mean anything.

  I present now the honorable Sheriff Hardy, who I'm transcribing FROM THE ATTACHED RECORDING, and if the sheriff goes over the page limit then feel free to give me extra points, I don't mind.

  This is hi
m now. You'll know me from my ALL CAPS.

  "Oh, yeah, Camp Winnemucca? Camp Winn-e-MUCC-a. You've got to say it like that, kind of ramping up at the end. It's an old Indian word, that's how they talk. That's gamey stuff for a school paper though, don't you think? Oh, wait. The 50 year anniversary, right? You'll be, what, a senior then? 50 years, [expletive]. I was hardly even in long pants. Don Chambers was still wearing the star. That's Alison Chambers's dad? Didn't she teach you all gymnastics?"

  YOU CAN TELL I'M MUTING HIS CUSSING, SIR?

  "Anyway, it only ran for that one summer. Nobody had the heart to try it again after, well, [bleep], after what happened. It was supposed to be haunted, all that malarkey. 'We shouldn't have broke ground over there,' blah blah blah, you know how people are. But the name is from the Indians. Same as the lake. My dad says when it was filling, all these bow and arrow Indians stepped out of the trees on the other side of the valley on their painted ponies, feathers braided into their manes. The horses AND the half naked bucks. They'd come to see the creek they'd always known turn into something bigger. That's when everybody started calling it INDIAN Lake, not Glen Lake like it was supposed to have been. And before you ask, no, there WEREN'T supposed to be any Shoshone still going free range. But Idaho's a big [bleeping] place, little miss, pardon my French. There's like to be folks out there haven't heard about the auto-mo-bile yet. Any the hell way -- strike that, sorry -- I was going to say about "Winnemucca," the word. It looks good on a sign, don't you think? Like you're going somewhere farther away than just across the lake. Back into history, like. To when this was ALL Indian land -- "

  I MAY HAVE LAID SOME SLASHER LORE ON HIM HERE. SUE ME.

  "Sleepaway Camp, that's it. But yeah, that article you found's on the money. 4 teenagers. Let me see if I can get their names without looking… Stoakes, Howarth, Walker, and… TRIGO! And that's 50 years ago, little miss. Winnemucca was a Shoshone though, bet that's not in the article. Maybe your great great great grandpappy could have told you that. The SNAKE Indians, they were called back then. I don't know that's exactly what they called themselves. 'Winnemucca' in English comes out to Bad Face. Figure they named people different back then, don't you?"