My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “Go ahead, turn me in,” Jade tells him, enunciating clearly in case he’s having to lip-read. “I’ll just ask Hardy how he thinks you knew I was here.”

  She puts her eyeliner on thick as hell.

  The next three hours she spends stalking the halls, playing Slaughter High. At least in her head. But she finally ends up being John Bender, escaped from detention in the library, using terrible form to shoot some hoops in the gym.

  And then it’s Mr. Holmes’s old history classroom.

  It’s empty now. Empty of him. His corny posters, the part of the chalkboard he had marked off for that day’s bullshit quote. The drawers of his desk are all stray paper clips and leftover staples.

  Jade sort of wants to cry.

  “Fuck you,” she says instead, and leaves not by the door she used to get in but by throwing a trashcan through the glass of the front doors, ducking through that crashed-open hole.

  This is graduation, she tells herself, crunching through the glass like the four misfits on the cover of her The Craft videotape. All the ceremony she needs.

  It’s night now. Pretty soon the streets of Proofrock will roll up, dousing all the lights. Jade cocks a hip out, glares down the empty streets. She’s not worried about dying and going to hell for all her sins. She’s not worried because she’s been living in hell for seventeen years already.

  She pushes through the darkness, her hands deep in the pockets of her coveralls.

  It was worth it, she decides all at once. Getting fired. Getting fired for memorializing this slasher cycle on the bathroom stall.

  Somebody had to, right?

  Anyway, “The Lake Witch Slayings” is a killer name for what’s going on, and what’s still going on. She has to smile about that, which makes her… yes: there is a pack of cigarettes in the chest pocket of the coveralls. Fucking salvation. Thank you, tiny brown sleeve birds.

  Jade fires up in the alley behind the drugstore. Through the smoke she can just see the Umiak bobbing at the pier, dwarfing Hardy’s little airboat, two of the Founders in town, it looks like. They’re stepping off the pier like just ferried across, anyway. Letha and Tiara are up at the boat cockpit, whatever it’s called, Tiara even wearing a captain’s hat like she’s in a Playboy spread. But Jade only has eyes for these two Founders. Is this the closest she’s actually been to them? It’s hard to look away. The way they move—“fifty” doesn’t mean the same thing at their tax bracket as it does in Proofrock. There’s actual spring in their step, and they’re yoga-limber, almost svelte, even, like they didn’t just step down from a cigarette boat but up from the pages of a magazine.

  Jade leans against the back of the drugstore, takes the most slit-eyed, noirish drag she can, and watches them walk to the Porsche, the Range Rover.

  Neither of them are Theo Mondragon, she can tell, he’s got those football shoulders, those dodgy hips. So… it’s Mars Baker, right? The other one’s either Ross Pangborne or Lewellyn Singleton, she can’t really tell those two apart so well at distance. They’re supposed to be grieving for Deacon Samuels, that’s got to be why they’ve converged on Terra Nova, but they’re not stooped with grief, they’re not dragging, they’re not sad and broken. That bounce in their long strides, really, it’s almost like they’re thrilled it wasn’t them.

  “But it will be,” Jade says to them, and blows smoke out, spins away fast, trying not to let herself get caught up in their shine, their polish, their remove from real actual life.

  Walking purposefully away from the road out of town to pay a visit to Camp Blood gets her going alongside the Terra Nova staging area again. She checks both ways and then, on impulse, why not, she steps in through the laid-over fence panel, walks fast in among the big equipment, the dozers and front-end loaders. Another time she might climb those big tires, sit in the cracked vinyl seats, pretend she’s Godzilla’ing down Main on a righteous rampage.

  She has adult responsibilities now, though, doesn’t she, Sheriff? Civic pride, all that bullshit. To prove it she drops her cigarette, grinds it out under her boot like a proper citizen, and keeps stepping, trying the door of one of the storage sheds—padlocked—then cutting across a pile of junk to a more likely shed, just on the chance she can get eyes on whatever bladed weapon or chainsaw is probably going to be in play on Saturday. Halfway across the pile of junk, though, headlights stab on right beside her. She freezes, telling herself that if she can be still enough, then she’s just another broken pallet, just another torn-off pull of shrink wrap.

  But then the driver’s door opens, and she realizes two things at once. The first is that this isn’t Hardy’s Bronco or some rent-a-cop the Founders have hired to patrol their lot. If it were, a dummy light would be pinning her in place right now, or at least a Maglite.

  The second realization is that she’s been in this particular car before.

  “Um, need some help?” Shooting Glasses asks. He’s the timid silhouette standing up behind the blinding glare.

  “This where y’all keep the explosives?” Jade asks back, shielding her eyes as best she can. “Or, no. The candlesticks, the lead pipes, the daggers?”

  “Who you looking to kill this time?” Shooting Glasses asks.

  This time. Because “last time” was herself.

  “Everybody?” she says, clambering down and out as best she can, without quite puncturing an ankle, or falling into a needle bath.

  “Think they’d notice if you did?” Shooting Glasses asks, reaching in to dial the lights down to just the orange ones.

  “Dead & Buried, 1981,” Jade says by way of an answer. “Whole town of dead people who don’t know they’re dead. It happens.”

  Shooting Glasses makes a show of aiming his finger down to the door panel and punching the unlock button.

  Jade steps around to the passenger side, says, “There’s this other movie called Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things. If there’d been a sequel, it might should have been ‘Children Shouldn’t Get into Cars They Know Are Stolen.’ ”

  Shooting Glasses folds in behind the wheel, says, “Another of your slashers?”

  “I wish,” Jade says, settling in. “The director did go on to make Black Christmas, though, so maybe there’s some genealogy there, if you squint right.”

  “Everything eighties with you, isn’t it?”

  “Those are both dirty seventies,” Jade tells him, tracking the dim headlights prowling along the staging area’s fence line. “But the eighties were great, that’s why. They—”

  Shooting Glasses interrupts by starting the already-started car, which results in metal screeching, parts grinding, and—more important—the brake lights of that car trolling by.

  “That was pleasant,” Jade says to Shooting Glasses without looking at him. Just waiting for that car to move along, move along.

  “It’s so quiet I can’t ever tell if it’s going or not,” Shooting Glasses says about the car.

  “But the eighties,” Jade continues, since someone finally asked, “they’re when the slasher was at its purest. Which is to say its dirtiest, its cheapest. Low production values, throwaway dialogue, nobody actors, recycled premises—all about making that quick buck. But that’s what makes it the Golden Age, when Jason was born, Freddy was born, Chucky was—well, when Chucky was bought, anyway. But every Friday there would be either a new slasher or two, or there’d be the same ones from a few months ago, with new titles. It must have been amazing. And I was born too late for it.”

  “That’s what Cody’s always saying,” Shooting Glasses says, nodding to the taillights finally weaving away into Proofrock.

  “Cody?” Jade has to ask, then, “Oh, yeah. The anyflavor Indian?”

  “He says he was born too late too. That if he’d been born a hundred years ago, things would be different for him.”

  “Good for him,” Jade says. “Don’t think it’d work for me, though.”

  Shooting Glasses cuts his eyes over to her about this.

  “Some boys
from town would play a trick on me,” she says like the most obvious thing, “they’d throw me out on the water, and I’d run away into legend.”

  “Don’t take this wrong,” Shooting Glasses says, “but I don’t think I’ve ever talked to anyone like you.”

  “Y’all almost done building Camelot over there?” Jade asks back, throwing her chin across the water.

  Shooting Glasses backs the car up, repoints it so they’re looking through the lake side of the staging area’s chain link fence. Past it, there’s the lights of Terra Nova.

  “Foundation problems now,” he says.

  “It’s rocky over there,” Jade tells him. “That’s why the cemetery is on this side, yeah? Only thing over there are old mine shafts. My history teacher says it’s all pockmarked with caves, too. And”—Jade closes her eyes to get it just right—“he says that, before the lake, when Drown Town wasn’t drowned, that at night you could see the sparks from the pickaxes over there. Everybody trying to strike it rich.”

  “Did they?”

  “What do you think?”

  Shooting Glasses pulls a Dr Pepper can up to spit into, being sure to break the saliva string off before guiding the can back to the cupholder.

  “I like how your eyes squint right when you’re spitting,” Jade tells him. “It’s like you know how gross that is.”

  Shooting Glasses turns the parking lights off, stranding them in the darkness. But it does make the fence go away, which is pretty cool.

  “So why do you want to kill everybody?” he asks.

  “Some more than others,” Jade tells him.

  “No names, no names.”

  “Said the car thief.”

  Shooting Glasses grins a guilty grin.

  “You know that kid they pulled from the lake last week?” Jade says, patting the dashboard lovingly. “Bet his prints are somewhere in here. Hers too.”

  “Her who?”

  “His girlfriend,” Jade says. “She’s dead out there too. Probably sunk, down in Drown Town.”

  “That’s the old town that the reservoir—”

  “Lake,” Jade says. “Yeah.”

  “I heard one of them over there talking about it,” Shooting Glasses says. “The—that astronaut one?”

  “Mars Baker? He’s the lawyer one, I think.”

  “He said he’s going to take a remote-control submarine down there, get some video.”

  Jade looks into her lap, both amused and disappointed.

  “Some things should probably just stay buried,” she says.

  “You saying you wouldn’t watch that video?”

  “I’d watch it until that girlfriend’s decomposed face bobbed into the camera’s eye, yeah.”

  “That’s from Jaws,” Shooting Glasses says, checking her eyes to be sure he’s right.

  “Good enough for Spielberg, good enough for me,” Jade says back.

  Shooting Glasses just sits there. Which is to say, he’s not leaving, not sloping off to whisper to his buds about how weird this girl is with all her throwback references, all the horror, all the gore. Jade’s face heats up, and, praying her voice won’t crack, and only saying it after she’s gone over it and over it in her head, she says, “I could like you, I think.” When Shooting Glasses looks over for more, the Dr Pepper can to his lower lip, she adds in quick, “As somebody to talk to, I mean.”

  “Where was I your last four years?” he sort of quotes.

  “Why’d you come over, shine your headlights like that?” Jade asks. “Did you know it was me?”

  “There’s supposed to be a bear around. Bears like trash.”

  “This one likes human innards, supposedly.”

  “Supposedly?”

  “It’s all setup, distraction, red herrings.”

  “Thought there were just trout up this high.”

  Jade has to grin a tolerant grin about this.

  “I’m not supposed to be there on Saturday, even,” she says all wistfully, changing direction.

  “Independence Day? The movie on the lake thing they do?”

  “We do.”

  “You do.”

  Jade can feel Shooting Glasses’s eyes on her again. “Lot of people are going to, you know,” she says, looking up to see how he takes this: “Die.”

  “Said the girl looking for murder weapons in the junk pile.”

  “No, you’re right,” Jade has to admit. “I’m definitely a suspect, the reddest herring.”

  “Better than being a trout.”

  Jade hits his arm with the back of her hand and he rolls with it into his door, making a show of keeping his spit can level.

  “You told that old sheriff about this big wilderness massacre only you know about?” he asks.

  “Doesn’t believe me.”

  “Because of your hair, your… history.”

  “Among other bullshit reasons.”

  “Your taste in movies?” Shooting Glasses guesses.

  “My good taste in movies,” Jade says, flashing her eyes at him and also, for a snapshot of an instant, seeing the two of them through the windshield: two kids playfighting, making eyes behind the feeble jabs.

  And she doesn’t even know his real name.

  Shooting Glasses holds his hands up in surrender.

  “But if it’s not you,” he says, running with this just to keep her talking, it feels like, “then who? Is it that… who were you talking about? That janitor who caught fire? Cropsy?”

  “Cropsy’s strictly Staten Island,” Jade says. “That’s New York City.”

  “Jason, Freddy, that other one?”

  “Michael,” Jade fills in, shaking her head no. “I already—”

  “No, the one who eats people.”

  “Leatherface. Bzzzt, not a slasher, sorry. It’s not about revenge with him, just—there’s nobody to get revenge against. Who’s he supposed to come after, the Texas economy that forced his family into cannibalism?”

  “Other one who eats people, I mean,” Shooting Glasses says.

  “Hannibal Lecter,” Jade fills in. “Bzzt, not a slasher either, but partial credit because he also wears a face of human skin. He just likes how people taste, right? Anybody else before we move on? Terminator, Alien, Fatal Attraction?”

  “You can do this all night, can’t you?”

  “What I was saying,” Jade tries to continue, “is that I already explained all this slasher stuff to who needs to know the most.”

  “Did he buy into it?”

  “She.” Jade shakes her head no, sadly, Letha didn’t. “Wait, though. I think it’s gonna be someone dressing up like our local legend, Stacey Graves.”

  “Good name,” Shooting Glasses says, having to rush the Dr Pepper can in to wrangle a grainy line of spit that won’t break.

  “Speaking of good names…” Jade says, looking past his current situation with the can to his yellow-tinted eyes.

  He gets it, smiles, says when he can, “Greyson?”

  “Greyson Brust,” Jade completes, showing off that she still has that rattling around in her head. “I never heard the end of that story.”

  “I told you the beginning?”

  “Never heard any of it.”

  “Because you… jumped out of the car?”

  “Had to,” Jade tells him. “You were about to spill, and I couldn’t know this particular backstory yet.”

  “Because it matters?”

  “At this stage we don’t know what matters.”

  “But you think what happened to Greyson does?”

  “I think you’re stalling,” Jade says. “What happened to him? There any reason not to tell me?”

  Shooting Glasses looks down into the crusty mouth of his Dr Pepper can, kind of shrugs, says, “Sort of?”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that one way to look at it is that—it’s that we sold him, I guess.”

  “How much?”

  “Eight hundred each. That church guy, he counted it out in cash. We had
to sign the accident report the way he wrote it up.”

  “Church guy?” Jade has to ask. “Old-timey preacher, white hair and crazy eyes, big-ass hands, name rhymes with Bezekiel?”

  “What? No, no—the… his name. That one the bear—”

  “Deacon Samuels,” Jade fills in. “The church of the flipped house.”

  “He paid us off. Now if we say anything, it’s like perjury.”

  “Not sure that’s really how it works.”

  “That’s how he’ll make it work.”

  “He told you this?”

  “Didn’t have to.”

  “But he’s dead now.”

  “And my signature’s still on that report,” Shooting Glasses says, leaning forward to rest his chin on the top of the padded steering wheel.

  “So the report’s a lie, I take it.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to matter,” Shooting Glasses says. “We thought he was gonna be dead on the ambulance ride, I mean. But Greyson—”

  “I really do like that name.”

  “You can have it,” Shooting Glasses says, leaning back and looking out his window, his face right there in the reflection for Jade. “He’s pretty much done with it.”

  “This is the part where you tell me,” Jade tells him.

  “What, am I hypnotized?” Shooting Glasses asks.

  “I’ll trade,” Jade hears herself tell him back.

  He looks over to her, says after a beat, “Trade what?”

  “Not what you’re thinking,” she says, sure to hold his eyes for that. “Ever since… since we first met. That night. You’ve been wondering why I did it.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” he says. “It’s—I know there’s never just one reason, I mean.”

  “Try me.”

  He considers this, considers it some more, then nods to himself, spits again, taking his time with it, and starts: “He could have been any one of us, right? Greyson, I mean. It was—we were leveling that lot on the point where the big house is going in. The dragon one.”

  “Mondragon.”

  “Mondragon, yeah. One where that—I mean—”