My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “That was you, then,” Jade says to Deacon Samuels, looking up as if she can see all the way to Camp Blood from here. But, if the Terra Novans are the ones using the old campground as a place to shoot fireworks off now, then where are the kids from Proofrock supposed to hook up, drink? More important for Jade: where’s she supposed to hide out for a night or two when she needs a place?

  “But it wasn’t fireworks,” Hardy’s going on, talking quieter now, as if he’s hiding under the monkey bars at recess. “He was—get this—he had a bucket of gas right there by him, in this little tee box where he’d cut the grass down so it wouldn’t wrap the head of his driver up on the way down. A tee box is like, shit—sorry, sorry. It’s like a batter’s box had a baby with a putting green? That help? Anyway, what he was doing… I got to get the order down here, else his ass’ll blow up instead of—but I’m getting to that.

  “So he had good expensive balls down in that gas, Dixon Fires, no joke, and then he had a lit candle maybe four feet away—about as far as he could reach while keeping his feet planted, same position every time, so he could know what to adjust. You know what I’m talking about, Don plays, you’ve seen him swing into that net he sets up in his front yard. Anyway, what Samuels would do is dunk the head of his driver into that bucket of gas—and, no lying, it was a Maruman, Megan, hand-crafted out of Japan, by families who probably, I don’t know, make samurai swords? And these are just as deadly. One of them would pay for two of my trucks, for half of my house probably, and he’s dipping the head in gasoline! And, if anybody asks, that driver’s in Evidence now. But let’s hope nobody asks. You know how tags fall off sometimes, stuff gets lost. Small town, don’t have the manpower to keep up with everything. It’s still a good club, I mean, might get me ten yards farther, out of the rough for good. We’re about the same height, me and Samuels. Or, we were. But I’m getting ahead of myself, sorry, sorry.

  “Anyway, he’d fish down in that gas bucket with the head of his driver, and he’d come up with a dripping ball balanced right perfect on it, deadcenter on that logo, and then, no lie, he’d dribble it up and down just like a paddle ball, just like Tiger, except with a driver, not a sand wedge, which has that flat landing pad on top, not a humped back. Something to see, believe you me. When I puttered over there the first time, it about hypnotized me, that. I thought I was maybe in a commercial. That he was about to make me famous.

  “Then though, he’d get that little Dixon going good and bounce it hard once, so it’d go up a touch over head-height, and he’d use that time to pass the head of that driver through the flame of the candle, and it would poof orange but wouldn’t break his rhythm enough that he couldn’t catch the ball when it came down.

  “Still with me on this? Now the head of that Maruman’s lit, sparking, and the ball catches fire too, is just going up and down, up and down. That first time I was over there, I expected to keep sneaking looks over at cabin five like always, you know, your dad probably told you about that, but anyway, shit, sorry, then I couldn’t stop myself smiling over his little trick. You know he’s on the cover of golfing magazines, right, this Deacon Samuels? Well, it’s not because of his real estate. Some people just have it. Or, had it, yeah.

  “Anyway, just like Tiger then, he’d dribble, dribble, becoming like one with the ball—Chevy Chase, you know that movie? Forget it. Before your time as well. But Samuels would bounce, bounce, his knees starting to go up and down with the ball, like, and then he’d draw the Maruman back and he’d slash it forward with the prettiest stroke you’ve ever seen, I promise, making that perfect little knock, and he’d hold the follow-through too, hold it in a way that told me he’d played some baseball as a kid, wasn’t only a golfer.

  “And that ball, Meg, hot damn. There’d be a crush of sparks each time he did it, each time he slapped it with the head of that driver, and then it would launch up out of that, arc high out over the lake like a meteor, and then plunk down into Ezekiel’s Cold Box with all the other balls he’d already been hitting.

  “I couldn’t ticket him up for something that beautiful, Meg. Or for burying treasure like a whole bucket of Dixon Fires out there either—oh, shit, just hearing that, a Dixon Fire is on fire. But don’t include that in the write-up. Just what we need. ‘Sheriff shows favoritism to rich residents on other side of lake, can evidently be bought,’ no thanks. I did warn him, though. And, if he let me hit any balls into the lake, then, well. Let’s just say he didn’t and leave it at that?”

  Jade turns the corner by the drugstore, her shadow leaking out ahead of her from one of the two streetlights the bank had installed next door to protect its ATM. Because Proofrock is full-to-bursting with kid John Connors, yeah. Important, too, there’s no golf course in all of Pleasant Valley. Even if there was, though, what Jade doesn’t know about golf would still fill all of Indian Lake. All the same, though, her heart does kind of swell, watching those flaming balls arc out over the dark water and hang, hang.

  Which is exactly how easy it would be to fall in love with rich people. With Terra Nova.

  Mr. Holmes is right, one hundred percent.

  And he’s lucky one of those golf ball meteors never burned through the silk of his wings while he was up there, Jade supposes. But, not like he’s not flying with a lit cigarette, either. And, now that Jade thinks about it, just who was it who called these fireworks in, and who in maybe-return for that warning asked for that airspace referendum?

  She nods in solidarity with Mr. Holmes, bumps the dictation back twenty seconds and adjusts her left earbud, doesn’t want to miss a word.

  “Any the hell way, you can take it to the fucking bank that that’s what Samuels was doing over there when he got his ass killed. The bucket was there, still sloshing with unleaded. The club was there in the tall grass, waiting to get tagged and bagged. The candle he’d been using was burned down, somehow managed not to light the whole damn valley up. No witnesses, of course. But it was that Mondragon girl that found him, you know the one—oldest of them all? Black? Looks like a model from a magazine?”

  Jade makes a fist, shakes it. Of course Letha found the next victim. Final girls have an unerring sense, are forever stumbling on eviscerated bodies, decapitated heads. Each one is a stepping stone to who she’s about to become.

  “She says she went out there when the fireballs stopped happening. She made the two girls she was sitting on the dock with… let’s see, I wrote them down. Yeah, the Baker twins, I guess the Bakers left them there for the week or something. Or maybe Samuels trucked them in when he breezed into town, they don’t tell me anything. But, so the Mondragon girl, she made… yeah, ‘Cinn’ and ‘Ginger,’ that’s it, those Baker girls, she made them stay there while she went to see if Samuels had blown himself up, was flopping in the lake trying to douse the flames. She didn’t say ‘flopping,’ though, maybe make a note of that. And I take it ‘Cinn,’ which she spelled for me, is for ‘Cinnamon.’ It’s not like they’re real witnesses.

  “Anyway, the Mondragon girl beats feet over there, it’s only fifteen minutes if you hug the shore, even in the dark, and… she’s probably going to need some therapy, Megan. Good thing her dad can afford it, right? Samuels, he was… I don’t want to paint the picture in your head… let’s just say that that bodybag I keep tucked in the boat, that I might or might not ice down for beers for the Fourth? It wouldn’t do the trick. Had to ask the Mondragon wife, Queenie or whatever, to go into the kitchen of that big yacht, fetch us back some sandwich-size ziplock bags. It was while I was standing around waiting for them, taking a trip down memory lane, cabin five kind of pulsing in my vision, when I saw what was right before my goddamn eyes, Megan.

  “A bear print, clear as day and twice as big, I tell you. Because the mud was wet, there were even claws scratched into the ground two or three inches past the pads of the feet. A big-ass boar, I mean, and, judging by Samuels’s, um, condition, a pretty unhappy one. Rex Allen tried to make a joke about Smokey the Bear just doing his job, open fl
ame and all, but I shut that down quick, got on the horn to the ranger station.

  “Time their man got here—I’m talking about Seth Mullins here, that’s two L’s—they’d decided to let me in on the little secret that they’ve had a trash grizzly causing problems over towards the Wyoming line. These are those bears that start to like human food a little too much. And, know what? Right there in Samuels’s golf bag was a paper sack of some sort of pastries. Smelled them before I saw them, you know how I am when there’s a donut in the room.

  “Anyway, I know it can get kind of stale around these parts, that a little mystery might juice things up nice-like, but all we ended up with, aside from a man getting stuffed in sandwich bags, was about five minutes of mystery, or however long it took me to walk from the remains over to the bear print.

  “Only other tracks for the staties to find with their fancy degrees and thousand-dollar equipment were ours, and then the Mondragon girl left some bare feet tracks I guess, that’s ‘bare’ as in no shoes, not ‘bear’ as in… you get it. So, not counting all the tracks we could account for, and taking into account the one track from a bear we now knew was a problem case for the federal Forest Service—police work really isn’t that hard, is it, Meggie? Hard part’s—”

  Jade pulls the earbuds down, has to lean over she’s breathing so deep.

  So Banner Tompkins and Lee Scanlon and the rest of them are out after a rogue bear, then. A killer bear. A verified monster. “Grizzly, 1976, Alex,” she manages to dredge up, spit out. “Sometimes called a slasher with a bear, but really just Jaws on land, minus Quint.” Which is minus everything.

  Still.

  If it had been a Proofrocker getting portioned up for the freezer here, Jade would know that the prank that woke this slasher was some crime twenty years ago, maybe even Melanie Hardy’s drowning, which would probably put Jade’s dad on the victim list, which would be just fine, thank you.

  What does it mean that an untouchable Founder had been killed, though? And, not just killed, but killed in a way that a bear could be framed? How long had it taken whoever was doing this to lure a bear in to cover their tracks?

  More important, why? Is this some townie with a chip on his shoulder about who was pulling good hours at the construction site, who wasn’t? Is Terra Nova messing up the back porch vista a certain someone had been counting on staring into for retirement? If so—if either of those—then why now instead of months ago? Had it been last night because whoever it was knew Deacon Samuels would be out there alone, since he’d been alone out there before?

  “Who are you?” Jade says to Indian Lake.

  It’s a good reflective moment, and she’s milking it for all the drama it’s worth when her phone rings in her hand and she fumbles it away, drops her coveralls, tangles her feet in them and falls, her pages unrolling every which way at once, her elbow scraping on the asphalt so she can answer the phone with a sharp “What already?”

  At first, nothing. Then, timidly, “Um, I think I know you from, from the ladies’ r—”

  “You got the package,” Jade says, rolling over onto her back, the wash of stars opening up above her. “You found the—the… you found them both. The kid in the lake. The Foun—Deacon Samuels. You know it’s really happening.”

  Again, silence.

  “Do you need those pants back?” Letha Mondragon asks in a way that Jade can see her mouth, kind of smiling.

  “There’s so much I need to tell you,” Jade says. “I’ll be your… what’s that Pinocchio dude called, with the love letters?”

  “Cyrano de Bergerac?”

  “Like, together, my knowledge, what I know, mixed with your… your everything.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Something’s coming is what I’m saying. It’s already here is what I’m saying. You’ve seen it yourself, the proof anyway.”

  Letha doesn’t respond to this.

  Jade goes on: “I didn’t know it was going to cross the lake for… for Terra Nova, though. I’m sorry.”

  “I have so many questions.”

  “I’m the girl made of answers.”

  “The bench,” Letha Mondragon says, and it takes Jade a moment to reel through all the benches in Proofrock, finally settle on the only one that could be considered the main one: Melanie Hardy’s memorial bench by the water, just up from the pier. To Letha, arriving by Umiak every morning for school last semester, it’s probably the only bench.

  “Out in the open, good, good,” Jade says. “You don’t know if you can trust me yet. You’ve got to be careful, I might be the one doing all this. Shit, I should have thought of that.”

  “My dad says—”

  “Parents in slashers are either drunks or they want to put bars on your bedroom windows. Sometimes both.”

  Letha breathes in and out, is maybe about to cry, here.

  Jade is looking across the lake at the yacht, back at its mooring.

  “It wasn’t a bear,” Jade says at last. “I think you know that, don’t you?”

  “Somebody pinched the candle out,” Letha says, quieter, like this is just for Jade.

  “It didn’t just blow out?” Jade asks back.

  Letha doesn’t answer, and in that silence Jade stands and spins around, silently cussing at herself: whose side is she on here? Not her own, evidently.

  “Never mind,” she adds.

  “Okay,” Letha says back timidly.

  Jade takes a step closer to the water, then another step, is standing in it up to her shins now, her printed-out pages floating around her.

  “That candle being out could mean it’s somebody from over here,” she says, quiet as well now. “We’ve all been trained on not burning down the national forest since kindergarten.”

  “Then—”

  “But nobody over there would want to burn down their new house, either,” Jade says. “And… did the sheriff ask if you were wearing shoes when you—you…?”

  “He didn’t ask,” Letha says with barely enough air to activate her larynx.

  “We can’t do this over the phone,” Jade tells her.

  “Three o’clock?”

  Jade counters with lunch, which she can sacrifice for this. A thousand lunches, even. All the lunches she has left.

  “Which light is yours?” she asks then.

  In reply, one of the thirty or so glowing windows over there blackens, then comes back.

  “Noon,” Letha says, confirming it.

  Jade nods, hangs up without a goodbye, holding the warm face of the phone to her chest, her feet not even cold in the water. She tells the Mr. Holmes in her head that she’s not falling in love with Terra Nova, sir, don’t worry.

  Not all of it, anyway.

  SLASHER 101

  So okay I know I said this sequel or part 2 of my 2 parter extra credit paper would get here, and here it is, after what I guess we can call the Interview Project Meat Grinder. But if "Soul Crusher" works better then cool. I am still barely a sophomore though anyway, so there's that. And it's lucky I am too, since whoever it was that made a Leatherface mask for themselves out of edible panties from the truck stop and then ran down the hall doing boogity boogity hands at everybody didn't escape down the sophomore hall, but the JUNIOR hall, meaning it was most definitely and undoubtedly for sure a junior. And I might add that all so called evidence should be edible.

  But part 2 -- masks and cameras, which means going to Italy.

  While Psycho was getting its success and formula ripped off all during the 60s, which I'm sure you remember first hand, there was another tradition cooking in the red sauce over in Italy's boot heel, or maybe the leg part, this isn't Geography. I'm talking about the Giallo, sir, which is a word that means yellow and a name that means "trashy movie with a bodycount." As you can tell, a Giallo is like a proto slasher. It is to the slasher what dinosaurs are to birds.

  Why the Giallo is super important is that it's where the camera technique was born that's basically what Carpenter would
do in 1978 for Halloween. Killers in Giallos don't wear masks I mean, sir. Or, they do wear masks, but they're HAND masks. What's a hand mask you ask? That would be a… GLOVE. Killers in Giallos all wear these black gloves. Those gloves are like that Father Death robe in Scream. They hide gender and race and body type and marriage status and tattoos and finger count and also knuckle hairiness, Pamela Voorhees, ha ha. But the camera in the Giallo is always looking down AT those gloves doing their bloody work. And because everything is limited to what those killer eyes can see, black gloves are all the disguise that's needed to keep an identity hidden as setup for the Reveal.

  So to conclude already so soon, what was black gloves in the groovy 60s became through John Carpenter's director camera MASK eyeholes to look through in the 70s, which is what we in Slasher Studies call "SlasherCam," which for example is Billy's starting out Point of View in Black Christmas or the shark's in Jaws, which isn't just a monster movie but also a slasher, wink wink.

  Never mind that that's Debra Hill's hands on the actual knife in that Halloween opening, not Kid Michael's. What you need to pay attention to instead is what those hands are wearing, which proves my point that John Carpenter knew the tradition he was using, the Italian bodycount movie, the Giallo. Those gloves, sir, are WHITE. This is Carpenter saying that, yes, he knows from whence all this bloody business comes, but he's doing the INVERSION of that, he's one-upping it all, sir. This isn't the only reason Halloween is and was great and forever will be, but this is a 2 page part 2 so I can only talk about the first 5 minutes. But I'll "BE RIGHT BACK… " don't worry.

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME

  Jade comes to all at once and dives for her phone, frantically changing her school email password to, to.… to “S@v1N!,” sure, why not, doesn’t matter. Anybody who knows anything about horror or about her could crack it third try, but what’s important is that it’s not what it was last night, this morning, whatever. Meg’s browser at the sheriff’s office might have lodged that one in its memory, giving her access to Jade’s sent box.