My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

  It is Mars Baker, and, Jade finally decides, Llewellyn Singleton. Their little laptop screen is glowing onto their faces, and they look for all the world like two twelve-year-olds hunched over a video clip between classes. Hanging a few feet back from them, hands on the rail, is Letha Mondragon, her eyes cupped in the Jackie O sunglasses and pale wrap pretty much mandated for someone who’s now found three dead people since moving to town.

  When you’re mourning, grief-stricken, shell-shocked, sunglasses at night are cool. And… does Letha see Jade? Jade backs up farther, dropping her bags into the bushes, only keeping the machete, but hiding it along her right leg like’s proper.

  Finally Letha’s black lenses move on to Main all at once, Jade’s eyes going with whether she wants to look or not. It’s just a cat crossing under the streetlight, but is there anything more perfect to spook things up?

  Jade nods thank you to Letha for directing her to this next Jonesy, and then whatever Mars Baker and Lewellyn Singleton are trying to magic onto the big screen finally pops.

  “Hunh,” Jade says. Also: of course.

  It’s a slideshow of Deacon Samuels’s life. There he is in a silver hard hat, cutting a ribbon for some groundbreaking event. There he is on the cover of Golf Digest. There he is in a candid shot with Ladybird, his wife. There he is having fun in the swan boat, Indian Lake all around him like the place he’s been looking for his whole life.

  The reason they’re testing this now, Jade figures, is that this is going to play before the movie on Saturday, right? It’s easier than inviting the whole town over to gawk through Terra Nova, breathe all the clean air up.

  It’s funny, too: the Umiak right under these Founders, and part of the pier is cordoned off with Hardy’s yellow tape. Because the fish probably haven’t eaten all of Clate Rodgers yet, have they? The bigger chunks of him had probably been the work of a few minutes: plunge an official fishnet in and back a couple of times and he’s gone, in a bucket, in cold storage, a big “do not drink / not margaritas!” sign taped on it.

  And now the slideshow’s over and… another no-surprise: it’s a video of the remaining Founders. They’re down in some mahogany part of the yacht, it looks like. Lewellyn Singleton, Mars Baker, Ross Pangborne, and the chair of the board, farthest from the camera—meaning the center of the shot—Theo Mondragon.

  Jade tries to look past the screen, past the Umiak, all the way over to the actual yacht, but comes back to the screen when whoever’s holding the camera moves in on the Founders.

  Instead of the suits or high-dollar casual wear they’re usually wearing, all four look to be just in from a swim. Towels around the necks, either actually or artfully mussed hair, and wearing… not “trunks” exactly. More plum-smuggler cycling shorts? Not banana hammocks—there’s legs to them—but not board shorts either.

  And? They can each pull off shorts that tight, that unforgiving. Mars Baker, even, when he coughs into his hand, has a six-pack or thereabouts, and Theo Mondragon looks pretty damn sculpted, Jade has to admit before looking away.

  Of course they’d turn the memorial for their friend into another way to lord it over the common folk, remind them of the pecking order.

  This slasher can’t come fast enough.

  Jade starts to turn away, not be drawn into the practice run for this spectacle—thanks for the warning, Mr. Holmes—but then the speakers crackle. Jade stops, her hands clenching into fists, but she’s listening now.

  Sorry, Mr. Holmes.

  Jade looks back over her shoulder and the memorial slideshow’s still over, but now what Mars Baker and Lewellyn Singleton are playing on the inflatable screen is an actual recording of Deacon Samuels. A Skype session that somebody apparently hit “record” on. Deacon Samuels has his golf cap pulled down low like the frat boy he must be, and he’s just lowering a disposable plastic cup but savoring whatever’s in it, meaning this is maybe the end of the day, except… is that trashy wood paneling behind him? Is that dim light hanging on a fake brass chain familiar?

  Jade turns all the way around, steps closer to be sure, then nods.

  Deacon Samuels is in a room of the Trail’s End Motel just off the highway, three hundred yards from where Jade’s standing right now. To be sure, she turns, uses a tree to help tippy-toe, and, yep, there’s that big dying Indian sign that’s supposed to lure travelers in and, in the same way you warn coyotes by hanging their dead brethren on the fence, keep Indians out.

  He stays there, though?

  “And I just had this long wonderful conversation with the gentleman who runs the gas station, I believe his name was… Lonnie, yes. Apparently his family has been here since before electricity, that’s the way he put it.”

  Jade’s eyes skate over the water where the crowd will be bobbing on Saturday and she has to press her lips together, happy for Lonnie in his innertube, his name coming through the speakers. What Deacon Samuels isn’t saying anything about is Lonnie’s stutter, which would have made their conversation at the gas pumps… something a person on the cover of golfing magazine could be poking fun at. But he isn’t. He isn’t even mentioning it. And everybody watching this Saturday night is going to lift their beers to Lonnie, and there might even be a swell of applause for him, probably his first one ever.

  “And then, do you know what he did?” Deacon Samuels says. “I’d forgotten the world could work like this, that it had ever been this small. He—he stepped out into the street and waved at someone having coffee at this perfect little diner, Dot’s”—another round of applause here, surely—“and who he was calling over was a realtor, a Mrs. Christy.”

  Misty Christy takes a bow here, from whatever float she’s on.

  “And, and of course there’s plots of land available here, but that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is… it’s the clarity of the water, Theo. This isn’t like Boston Harbor. And, Lew, the air here, I think it’d be good for Lemmy. Mars, I know Macy likes to birdwatch, doesn’t she? And aren’t the girls on the swim team? And Galatea, Ross, there’s so much up here for her to photograph. But it’s not just what to do, you can do stuff anywhere, it’s… it’s like, do you remember that old movie The Land That Time Forgot? Theo, I know you do, I think you own it now. This is like an idyllic little part of the world that’s stayed safe and pristine, that hasn’t been touched. And, I don’t want to presume, but I think if we were to pool our resources and connections… Mars, this is more your domain, but we could—”

  Jade’s face is slack now.

  This is Deacon Samuels, out driving across America, and stumbling into Proofrock, and falling in love with it, and trying to… not to sell it to his friends, but to get them to see it as he does.

  He’s a realtor, a salesman, Jade reminds herself.

  But still.

  “How could we have said no?” another voice comes in now.

  It’s Lewellyn Singleton, the banker. He’s stepping out from the mahogany locker he was sort of leaning against, and the camera’s close on him now. His hands are working the twisted ends of the towel slung across his neck.

  “This place was and is everything Deacon said it was,” Lewellyn goes on, “and more. Yes, this high mountain air has done wonders for my son’s lung condition. Who’d have thought that a nineteenth- century cure would still work in the twenty-first century?” He smiles, shrugs. “But it’s been good for me, too. I feel like I’ve finally found home, which I know has to sound like… most of you have been here your whole lives, it’s your home, we understand that. But”—he rolls his lips in, looks away like trying to keep his eyes busy—“I don’t know how you define ‘home,’ that’s… I know interest rates and long-term this and that, it doesn’t matter. My little dog of fourteen years, though, Princess Leia, we brought her with us last time we were here, and—and now she’s buried over here in Terra Nova. That’s how I define it, that’s how I define ‘home.’ ”

  He shrugs, steps back, and Jade’s arms are crossed now. Because she’s
trying to resist this.

  “Hi,” Ross Pangborne says, raising his hand and stepping forward, then evidently taking direction from whoever’s behind the camera. He steps over, more into the center of the frame, waves all over again. “First, let me say that I’m not reading any of your direct messages,” he says with a guilty smile, referencing a recent privacy scandal his social media empire just went through. Jade can’t help it, has to smile with him here. He’s so awkward, so vulnerable, so not the raging, power-mad tycoon. “Second, and much more important, I want to thank you for welcoming us not just into your beautiful town, but your lives. And I want to personally apologize for the—the process of building across the lake, here, which is leaving industrial scars, I know. But we want you all to know, and this is a promise, there’s going to be a park there next summer, and it will be fully accessible, and the—the county won’t have to support it. That’s going to be our job. You’ll see one of us out there every weekend, collecting any gum wrappers, any soda bottles. That’s our guarantee. Thank you.”

  Jade shakes her head no, this isn’t happening, this can’t be happening.

  Mr. Holmes was right. He has to be. The Founders are evil, they’re capitalism in human form, they’re only in Proofrock because mountain towns are in style for their tax bracket this year.

  “And don’t worry, I’ll make sure that’s all legal and proper,” Mars Baker says with a smile he can’t quite swallow. This is the point in their pre-movie show where everybody in the water laughs, Jade knows: the high-dollar lawyer reminding them that he can get down and dirty with a contract. “But seriously,” he says, already making his closing argument, “I know you can’t see it yet, but we’ve told the teams putting our homes together that they’re not to cut down even one single tree. And we’re not allowing any fences over here, either. To us, this is still going to be national forest land, and before that, the traditional homeland of the Shoshone, a fact we should all keep in mind. Ownership in these mountains is a recent concept. The one we prefer is stewardship. When the deer come in and nibble Macy’s garden down to nubs, then, well, we’ll just come over to Dot’s, order a salad, right, Ms. Dorothy?” Then Mars Baker steps closer, says behind his hand, “But don’t tell Macy, her squash and black-eyed peas are already all she talks about…”

  Jade looks up into the sky, reminds herself that Macy Todd killed a boyfriend in a hotel once upon a time, and then rented two days’ worth of movies.

  While she’s staring up, Theo takes the stage. She can tell from the silence. The media mogul knows how to work a camera.

  “As many of you know, my daughter will forever be a graduate of Henderson High, class of 2015!” He pumps his fist and then holds it there, like congratulating Letha. Like congratulating all of them. Then he opens that hand, massages Lewellyn Singleton’s shoulder, his eyes still staring right into the soul of the crowd. “And I don’t know what I can add that these fine gentlemen”—Ross Pangborne pushes him, as if “gentlemen” is an insult, a joke, but the effect is that they’re just boys in a locker room. That they’re just like everyone bobbing in the water, soaking all of this in—“that they haven’t already said, and said so much better than I ever could. We do, we love it here. This isn’t a refuge from the modern world, we wouldn’t use your town, your lake, your valley like that. This is a place we want to put down roots, a place we want to watch our children grow, and their children’s children. But shh, shh, we don’t want to tell anybody else about it either.” Laughter here, Jade knows. She knows because she almost burped a laugh up herself. “Where else in all of America can a town come together to float in the water and watch a movie about people in the water!” Theo says, louder now, and Lewellyn swims a rubber shark in behind him, Theo unaware of it. “And yes, a hundred times over, we miss our friend Deacon.” The shark lowers. Theo’s face lowers. “He was the best of us. He was the one who found this place. He’s the one who should be here saying all this to you.”

  The mahogany locker room of Founders dissolves then, replaced by… shit.

  It’s the snapshots Deacon Samuels took of Indian Lake and Proofrock, the first time he swung through. In some of them he’s running to try to be in the shot, but he never quite makes it, and that makes it approximately one thousand times more endearing.

  Finally it holds on a selfie he took, him and Lonnie at the gas pumps, Lonnie’s lips pressed tight together like he always does because he doesn’t want to stutter, Deacon Samuels smiling full-on into the camera, his sunglasses in his right hand, his eyes crinkling into crow’s feet from all his hours spent on the links.

  When that image is finally burned in, faded away, Theo Mondragon is there in that mahogany locker room again, Lewellyn Singleton and Ross Pangborne and Mars Baker all crowded in like groomsmen. Theo Mondragon takes a sip from his plastic water bottle, looks camera right, then leans in, says, “But we’ve got to be part of the community, we want to be part of the community here. Ross, weren’t you saying that? We can’t just invade the place, we’ve got to… we should prove ourselves to them somehow, don’t you think? That we’re committed, involved?”

  It’s obviously scripted, and Jade’s pretty sure Theo Mondragon is being a worse actor than he really is, which takes some real acting chops, but still, it works.

  “And, just so you know,” Theo says, “this wasn’t our idea. This is all Deke—Deacon, I mean. He didn’t want to be a siphon on the community, but a reservoir the community could draw from.”

  “He wanted to pay back into this place,” Lewellyn Singleton, the banker, says.

  “His testimony about Proofrock sealed the deal,” Mars Baker, the lawyer, says.

  “He clicked ‘like’ on every person here,” Ross Pangborne adds with a smile.

  The four of them lift their water bottles in toast, and, come Saturday night, all the beer cans come up in response, Jade knows.

  “In the spirit of that,” Theo says, “we propose a standing offer to every graduate of Henderson High starting next year.” He looks around solemnly to the other three Founders, as if confirming this crazy idea. When there’s no takebacks, he looks back into the camera, says, “We propose to establish a scholarship fund that will pay for four years of college at any state university.”

  “To every graduate!” Mars Baker adds.

  “Just state?” Ross Pangborne says to all of them, the most scripted line so far, and Pangborne oversells it by a mile, but this is the “all in good fun” part of the programming.

  “Wherever they want to go!” Lewellyn Singleton adds, like what the hell.

  “The Deacon and Ladybird Samuels Memorial Scholarship Fund,” Theo says as farewell, and, because they can’t take it any higher after that, that’s when the Founders freeze-frame, arms over shoulders, smiling lopsided smiles, fizzing black and white, and THE DEACON AND LADYBIRD SAMUELS MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP FUND burns in over them in a tasteful, dignified font.

  This is how you buy a town in the mountains.

  It’s gonna be a drunk night, Jade can already tell. More than usual. All those college funds will be getting turned into boats, into trucks, into vacations. Jade hates it, but, standing alone at the front edge of the trees, she has to blink away tears herself, even. Not of happiness, but of having been born too late: this starts with the class of 2016, not her and Letha’s class.

  Jade laughs a sick laugh and shakes her head in disgust, trying hard to be bitter against all the Hawks just a year behind her, who now have access to the world. But some of that disgust is also for herself: this was so much easier when she could hate all of these Founders righteously, like Mr. Holmes. Now it’s… it’s complicated. It’s bullshit.

  Worse, what she has to take into account now—to use a Lewellyn Singleton banking term—is that one of these rich goofballs is the slasher? In theory, it’s great, it’s ironclad. Of course it’s one of them. In practice, though, after having actually seen them, heard them… no way could it be Ross, and not Lewellyn either. They could no more l
op a head off than Bill Gates could. Any violence they do, it’s with keystrokes. It still could possibly be Mars, she supposes, but that’s just because he’s a lawyer, has to have a black heart, a hidden agenda, and the ability to think fourteen steps ahead. And the only reason Theo Mondragon would still be in the mix is that he makes the cycle so neat, so contained, so elegant—all in the family.

  She’ll just have to go over there, see. And if it’s not Theo Mondragon? Then… Rexall? Except he’s always fourteen steps behind. It could always be Hardy and Holmes tag-teaming it Billy and Stu–style, she supposes. Or even her dad, out killing between beers, and then popping a beer to celebrate each death, and then probably sneaking a nip or two in the act-of. And of course there’s always Deacon Samuels. He was collected in bags, right? Meaning he was mostly identifiable by his golf clubs, so, if he could stage a body double for that bear, maybe to avoid the SEC or something, he could still be out there, could be the one doing all this.

  The suck-thing about all this, of course, is that if Jade’s wrong about the Founders, then who else is she wrong about? It’s like on cop shows: when the prosecutor turns out to have been bad, then all the people they sent up get released. Is Jade that prosecutor now? Does her mom deserve a second chance? Her father? Is she the one with Michael’s babysitter goggles, except, for her, “babysitter” is all adults, and since she doesn’t have a machete in her hands, she uses her tongue, her accusations, her suspicions?

  “But I do have a machete,” Jade hisses, and thunks it hard into the tree beside her, which makes her general area go halogen-white. She threads her sticky bangs out of her eyes to study the top of the tree, see if this is actually a streetlight. When it’s not, she leaves her hand as visor, and peers around to the dummy light pinning her in place.

  Hardy. Of course. In his Bronco.

  She’s running before she even tells her legs about it, the machete still in her hand, the blade in the tree nearly pulling her shoulder out of its socket, both her boots actually airborne for a moment, like the cartoon she doesn’t want to be.