My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “Sheep’s Head?” Letha says.

  “It’s what the old-timers call that meadow,” Mr. Holmes says with a shrug, like that isn’t the important piece of what he was saying.

  “I told him he shouldn’t have showed that to you all,” Hardy says. “It’s exactly the kind of thing that can add fuel to an overactive imagination.”

  “No need to use names, Sheriff,” Jade says, pointing at her own temple, the overactive imagination in question.

  “Independence Day,” Letha repeats softer, which makes it somehow louder.

  “I know you thought you were helping,” Jade tells her, flabbergasted to the point of no return here. “But, and you couldn’t have known this, authority figures—cops, teachers, parents—it’s not possible for them to believe, not until it’s too late. But your impulse to get help, to fight back, to stop this, that’s what we can take from this, that’s what we can weaponize, that’s what we can—”

  “But we can stop it,” Letha says.

  “You can, yeah,” Jade tells her back.

  “That’s why I called Sheriff Hardy,” Letha says, again with that apologetic tone.

  Jade turns to Hardy about this.

  “I pulled in Mr. Holmes because I—” he says, fumbling a bit, which isn’t his usual way. “I know he was your favorite teacher. Is, is your favorite teacher.”

  Jade levels her imploring eyes over onto Mr. Holmes.

  He shrugs, toes at the gravel with his loafer, says, “I confirmed that you’re crazy for this subgenre of movie. For these type of horror movies. These… slashers.”

  “Thanks?” Jade says.

  “Just… and this is on me,” Mr. Holmes says, spreading his fingers to touch his own chest, indict himself. “I never saw it like Ms. Mondragon is… I knew you didn’t want to write about history, but I never suspected it might be your own history you didn’t want to talk about. So all the papers on horror—”

  “About slashers.”

  “Complete with boogeymen,” Mr. Holmes adds.

  “He shouldn’t have fostered that kind of speculation, he’s saying,” Hardy says, his tone getting across that he’s sort of speaking for Mr. Holmes here, saying what Holmes can’t say himself.

  Still, “I think you mean ‘foment,’ Angus,” Mr. Holmes snaps back to Hardy.

  “That’s Sheriff,” Hardy says.

  Mr. Holmes shrugs, and Jade can tell he’s here against his will, somewhat.

  Not that that helps her even one little bit.

  “This isn’t about me,” she tells all three of them, her tone ramping up into a plea, which she full-on despises. “This is about that dead kid in the water, this is about the Founder who got killed with that fancy golf club—”

  “With?” Hardy asks.

  “Alongside,” Jade corrects, brushing the clarification off. “This is about who might have gone to the dollar store specifically to buy a long black wig, and why they needed to look like that, and how they’re, I don’t know, pretending to walk on the water—maybe they’re tying Jesus lizards to their feet—we don’t know yet!”

  “But, in your estimation, someone is dressing up like the Lake Witch and playacting a horror movie,” Mr. Holmes clarifies.

  “A slasher,” Jade clarifies right back.

  “To use your chosen subject matter,” Letha says, taking Jade’s hand from the side, “yes, as Mr. Holmes was saying, this is about the boogeyman, one hundred percent.”

  Jade jerks away, holds her hand in her other hand as if it’s burned. She tries to smile these accusations off, to make a display of how preposterous all this is getting, but knows full well her smile has to look mechanical and scary to them, like if Michael Myers ever tried a grin on in the dayroom for Loomis. So she gives up, knows she can’t convince all three of them. But… maybe just one? The important one? She turns to Letha, says, “Listen, if you care about your family, about Terra Nova, I need you to—”

  “I read between the lines, Jade,” Letha repeats slower, like that’s going to make Jade finally hear what she’s saying. “You were dressing it up as best you could, trying to hide, even hiding it from yourself, but—here, I’ve got it highlighted.” She extracts Jade’s printed-out letter from the back pocket of the pants that used to be Jade’s, holds it up, flips to the page she wants, and: “ ‘A doctor’s appointment I couldn’t do in Proofrock.’ ”

  The silence after is as wide as the lake.

  “That was—” Jade starts, starts over: “My mom, she didn’t want Doc Wilson—”

  “Because he was local?” Letha asks.

  “No,” Jade says, taking a step back, casing all three faces of her little make-do jury, here. “I was just—I was telling you where I found Bay of Blood! Every slasher has an origin story. Jason, Freddy, Michael, Chucky, but every slasher movie has an origin story too. The first time you saw it. Where you found it. That’s all I was—that wasn’t about me, that was about Bay of Blood.”

  Jade looks to each of them in turn again, waiting for the obviousness of this to register. For any of them to hear the logic of it.

  “ ‘My mom was having a conversation with herself in the car about will she, won’t she,’ ” Letha reads this time, since that’s a lot to recite.

  Jade just stares at her.

  “What are you saying?” she says at last. “This is—I was at a random gas station, I happened to look into the bargain bin—”

  “You were at your most vulnerable, your most broken,” Letha says, about to cry. “And you reached out for the first thing you saw, held it as close as you could, like armor. Like it could protect you. And it has, hasn’t it?”

  “A Bay of Blood?”

  “Slashers,” Mr. Holmes says.

  “She’s kind of been hiding in bad behavior too,” Hardy’s compelled to add.

  “What—what—” Jade says, her thoughts swirling, only some of her words finding her mouth. “What are you saying? My mom did something to me?”

  “Your dad,” Letha says, barely loud enough to register.

  “My dad?” Jade blurts out.

  “Happens more than it should,” Letha says. “And among Native Americans, the percentage is even—”

  “You think he’s why I was at the doctor in Idaho Falls?” Jade asks all of them, polling this jury now.

  Yes, none of them say out loud.

  Jade closes her eyes in pain, slams her fingers into her gunky hair and pulls, turns around on her combat heels, giving them her back, and—she doesn’t want to do this, doesn’t want to have to deploy the nuclear option, but what else is there?

  “You’re a father, Sheriff,” she says, no louder than necessary. “Would you have ever done this to your daughter? To Melanie?”

  “Jennifer,” Mr. Holmes says sharply.

  “Jade,” Jade spins back around to hiss at him. “And aren’t you always the one saying read between the lines, sir? Try this on, then. All this… all these accusations, all this textual evidence, whatever. Who’s to say I didn’t pack that in intentionally? Why would a girl like Letha ever give me the time of day if she wasn’t feeling sorry for me? Maybe I wrote it like that to tug on her heartstrings, make her worry about me. Whatever it takes to get her here, talk her into my harebrained scheme about slashers and final girls.”

  Mr. Holmes just stares at her about this.

  “What was your mom arguing with herself about in the car that day?” he says at last, super calmly. “Don’t think, just answer.”

  “What was she—?”

  “ ‘Will she, won’t she?’ ”

  “Will she leave my loser dad, won’t she leave my loser dad,” Jade says without missing even one single beat.

  Before Mr. Holmes can press her on this, she spins around again, glares out across the glinting water, arms crossed.

  “Apologize to the sheriff,” Mr. Holmes says.

  Jade lowers her head, closes her eyes, says, “Sorry, Sheriff. That was out of bounds.”

  “You
were scared,” Hardy says back, and Jade closes her eyes harder, because she knows not to take this bait. If she nods yes to this, then the next question will be Scared of what? The truth? And if she says she wasn’t scared, then what she did to Hardy was just cruel.

  There’s no way to win. Same as ever.

  Why she even gets her hopes up anymore, who knows.

  “We’re just trying to help,” Letha says.

  Jade opens her eyes to the brightness and tears spill down both cheeks. Tears she fucking hates.

  Instead of wiping them away, she slashes her right hand back in the direction of Mr. Holmes, because she can smell his nicotine on the air. He slips the butt between her waiting fingers.

  “It’s not your fault,” Letha says again, still right there.

  “No,” Jade says again, breathing smoke out, finally turning around so they can see her wet face, see what they’re doing to her here. “It’s not what you think. Fathers don’t do that to daughters, not even fathers as sucky as mine, as Indian as mine. I would say you’ve seen too many Lifetime movies, but if you’ve seen too many movies, what does that mean about me and my slashers?”

  After maybe three seconds, Letha has to smile about this. Jade grins with her, takes another long drag, handing the cigarette back to Mr. Holmes before exhaling.

  “Just saying,” Hardy says, getting his own cigarette going, having to lean down into his cupped hand the way cowboys in westerns always do, “it would explain an awful lot. Your—all this gothic stuff, the way you dress, your attitude, the trouble you’re always—”

  “That’s just me,” Jade tells him, blowing her smoke out now, as underline. “Horror’s not a symptom, it’s a love affair.”

  “Are you saying—?” Letha starts, and Jade finishes for her: “I’d be like this anyway, yeah.”

  It’s only when she looks up to Mr. Holmes that she hears what Letha tricked her into saying. It’s the same story you hear about drunks on a traffic stop, arguing how they can’t even say the alphabet backwards when they’re sober. Meaning what Jade just said to all three of them was: Even if my dad hadn’t done that to me when I was eleven, I still would have fallen hard for horror.

  And trying to backpedal would just be protesting too much, she knows.

  “Ask my mom, then,” she says, just plucking the idea straight from the air without running it through the fire first.

  “Kimmy?” Hardy asks.

  “She’s at work,” Jade says, pointing with her lips down Main, to the dollar store.

  All three of them look, and in that moment Jade knows she can run, that none of them can catch her, untied laces or no. As full of hatred as she is now, she could probably even run on top of the water, because no way would Ezekiel let her pollute his lake.

  But her mom is her ace.

  “She’s got no reason to lie for him,” Jade adds, to sell it. “Tell me I’m lying.”

  Hardy just keeps looking up Main.

  “She’s got a point,” Mr. Holmes says. “The mom would know.”

  “It’s a small house,” Jade says. “And it was back then too. You hear everything.”

  “I don’t like this,” Hardy says, coming around to the three of them. “She can—she can warn him. Kimmy, I mean. She can warn Tab.”

  “Tab?” Letha says.

  Nobody answers her.

  “Just because he’s Indian doesn’t mean he can turn to smoke,” Jade says. “If anything, he’d turn into a puddle of beer. But there won’t be anything to warn him about. Just false accusations.”

  “If it matters, I don’t think they talk anymore,” Mr. Holmes adds, just to Hardy.

  “All you have to do is admit it for the process to start,” Letha says, like reading from a pamphlet.

  “I know you’re trying to help,” Jade says, studying the gravel between her boots now, “and I thank you, really. I’m a stranger, I’m nobody, I’m the town reject, the weird girl, the walking suicide, the Indian who shouldn’t even be alive, and you’re—you are who you are, what you are. But you’ve got this all wrong, trust me.”

  “There are tests,” Letha says. “Kits, the hospital can—”

  “Test if I’m a virgin?” Jade scoffs. “Do you really think anybody in this town suspects that the custodian with different hair color every week has been able to keep her legs closed all these years? That she’s even tried to?”

  Neither Hardy nor Holmes can push back against this.

  “I asked around,” Letha says at last, like a card she didn’t want to have to play. “You’ve never dated, never had a boyfr—”

  “Maybe I’m not into guys,” Jade cuts in.

  “It’s not about—” Letha says, trying to start this whole line over. “It’s perfectly natural for you to want to defend him, it’s the… it’s like you consider yourself an accomplice just because you were involved. But your involvement wasn’t complicit, wasn’t voluntary, it never is, it can’t be, you don’t even know you can say no to a parent. Parents are good, parents are shining and right, they’re the gods of our world, so whatever they do can never be wrong. It must be your feelings that are wrong. Their mask is that they’re parents. Some of them are more, though. Some of them are monsters. But now, all these years later—”

  “ ‘Our’?” Jade says.

  All eyes shift to Letha.

  “We all think our parents are perfect,” she says, blinking a touch faster than she has been, a tell Jade logs. “They feed us, clothe us, keep us safe—”

  “Bring in another mother when the original’s…?” Jade says, leaving that blank for Letha to fill in: Just what happened to your mother, final girl?

  Letha’s own face becomes a mask then. Nothing changes about it exactly, just, now she’s hiding behind it. But she can’t be owning up to all this yet either, Jade knows. There’s a time and a place for everything. Both bibles agree on that.

  “Family Dollar,” Jade says, letting the pressure off. “Her break’s in ten, so we might want to get there.”

  It’s a lie, of course, but the best kind, in that it’s the last question Hardy will ask, standing at the register of the dollar store in an official capacity.

  “We’ll take my—” he says, reaching back to pat his hood while clamping his hat on, but Jade’s already brushing past. Letha falls in, and then Jade hears Hardy and Mr. Holmes crunching through the gravel as well, and suddenly it’s like the four of them are doing some epic walk down to the OK Corral, Jade’s eyes slits to shoot arrows through, Hardy clamping his hat on tighter, Letha’s hair bouncing with her every step, and Mr. Holmes’s tie trying and failing to blow back over his right shoulder, his eyes both grim and, at the same time, amused, too aware of the absurdity of all this.

  Jade does okay with the walk until all the eyes on Main could be clocking them through the plate glass windows. Like every time she’s ever been the center of attention, her legs go robot, so that she’s now having to give precise mechanical instructions to her hips, her knees, her ankles and feet, even to her arms that don’t know how to swing anymore. How does Michael do it, his Panaglide walk? He’s so inexorable, completely unstoppable, never wavering, always taking the most efficient line.

  Jade decides that the reason he can do it—walk—and she can’t, not without practically having a seizure from all the brain activity required, is that he has that singular focus: the next babysitter. Whereas what Jade has is… it’s all the usual shit she drags with her, that she doesn’t want to think about, but now there’s even more tin cans dragging behind her: Letha’s sincere but misdirected pity, Hardy’s shrugging suspicion that Letha might be right, and Mr. Holmes’s not even remotely wanting to be here, just wanting to please be retired. And, worse, a complete blindside, does Jade feel responsible here? For all the lives this slasher can take, and how many more it can take if she doesn’t get Letha prepped right?

  That’s the part that’s not tracking for her: she should be thrilled about the prospect of necks being opened, limbs be
ing hacked, guts spilling their steamy delights.

  Proofrock deserves it.

  But Letha doesn’t, she decides. And, who knows, right? Maybe every final girl in the history of final girls has had a horror chick whispering to her from just off-screen. Maybe this isn’t a deviation but the usual build. Just one nobody ever knows about until they’re smack-dab in the beating heart of it.

  Jade nods, likes that.

  It’s best she’s behind the curtain, too. Unless the play she’s in can be about robots, in which case her arms and legs have already got that down.

  Thinking about what she must look like, walking like this, doesn’t help at all, either.

  And—and the pressure building around them, around all of Proofrock. It’s like they’re trying to cross from one side of an inflating balloon to the other. But Jade knows the pressure-relief valve: the front door of Family Dollar.

  She flails her arm ahead to haul it open, stop this moment from lasting any longer, please, but… Hardy has his meaty paw on her shoulder, is keeping her from pushing through, into the store?

  “Excuse me?” Jade says, spinning away from his hand, probably making it more dramatic than it needs to be.

  “Stay here with your favorite history teacher,” Hardy grumbles, not a hint of give to his voice, and then he’s barreling through the door alone, on a mission, only reaching back at the last moment to hold his cigarette up for whoever wants it.

  In solidarity or at least an attempt at it after her betrayal, Letha slides in before the door can close, nodding to Jade on the way like she’s going to make sure this is all legit, that she isn’t going to let Jade fall through the cracks.

  But the cracks are where bugs like me live, Jade wants to tell her back, and then have roaches spill from her mouth and eyes. Instead she brings Hardy’s cigarette up in frustration, draws deep on it, and turns her head to the side to blow a clean, pissed-off line of smoke. When Mr. Holmes is just standing there awkward and unsure, she offers him a drag.

  “It’s not against the rules now,” she says about the cigarette. “You’re not a teacher, I’m not a student.”

  He looks away, down Main and across the lake.

  “You really hate it, don’t you?” Jade says to him. “Terra Nova, I mean.”