My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “If he felt that collapse, or heard it, or smelled it, whatever,” Jade says, finally getting a strong flame going to occupy her eyes, give her somewhere else to look, “then… then either he thinks we’re dead, which is score one for the good guys, or he went for help.”

  “Instead of digging us out?”

  “How long did it take you?”

  Letha narrows her eyes across the lake, considering this.

  “He’d have had to go all the way around,” she says, liking this.

  “And his leg’s like mine now,” Jade adds with a shrug.

  “He used to play football,” Letha says. “He says he played one game with his kneecap all the way behind his knee.”

  “There you have it,” Jade says, moving her lighter back and forth, daring the flame to flicker out. “But”—and she does look up for this—“why isn’t anybody here yet?”

  Letha flicks her eyes away.

  “Whatever you believe or want to believe or won’t believe,” Jade tells her. “We have to get across the lake. We can’t stay here. Here’s done.”

  “Terra Nova.”

  “Terra Nova’s done, yeah.”

  Letha steps past Jade for the boat garages.

  Jade shrugs to herself, and, being sure Letha’s clear enough, tosses her lit lighter into the dead elk, trusting the pent-up methane to catch that lick of flame, whoosh up into a bulbous explosion, one Jade can walk away from in slow dramatic motion.

  Instead her lighter just adheres to a low wall of meat and hair, is upright enough that it’s still flickering a weak flame.

  “Thanks,” Jade says to it, and turns on her heel, following Letha through the trees, Letha’s long legs eating up the ground, Jade’s limp still there so Letha has to stop, wait for Jade to catch up, then offer her a shoulder.

  “You don’t have to,” Jade says, latching on.

  “I’m not leaving you,” Letha says. “I know you think this is some big horror movie we’re in, and that you’re going to get to choose your death, but—this is real life. A tragedy, but it’s real, and it doesn’t have to follow any rules.”

  Jade doesn’t argue, tells herself to let the unfolding events prove her case.

  Now that she’s moving, though—

  “I have to pee,” she says, stopping them.

  Letha extracts herself, steps away, turns politely around but that’s not quite enough for Jade. She limps to a tree, pushes off it to the next, and the next, struggles twenty or thirty feet between her and Letha before feeling through the gore for the snaps and gummed-up zipper of her blood-matted coveralls.

  When she’s shouldering back into them is when she hears the groan. She radars in on it, the rest of the world falling away.

  A low, long shape maybe fifteen feet back in the trees.

  Theo Mondragon.

  Clamped around his leg—same one, different one?—is another bear trap. One he didn’t have the strength to push apart, apparently. Is he passed out from blood loss, from fatigue, from grief, what? Where’s his kneecap now?

  “Doesn’t matter,” Jade says, actually out loud, just, very quiet. “You’ll get out just in time, won’t you?”

  Unless it’s not him, Letha says in Jade’s head.

  But still, right? Jade knows for sure and certain that he put nails in Shooting Glasses and Cody and Mismatched Gloves. No way is she announcing him to Letha, so she can use her final girl determination to wrench the jaws of that bear trap open. This is a Let-Nature-Take-Its-Course situation if there ever was one.

  “You okay?” Letha asks, meeting Jade halfway to crutch her along again, some part of Theo evidently cueing in that Jade’s close, so he should groan again, louder, longer.

  “Are you?” Jade says back, then has to stop when Letha does.

  “Hear that?” she asks.

  “Mountain alligator,” Jade tells her, doing her eyebrows to show how much she doesn’t mean this. “I scared it, I think.” But challenging Letha to call her on it, too.

  Letha considers this, listens harder, and when the groan doesn’t come again, they move forward, Letha going from garage to garage to garage along the shore, coming out of each shaking her head no: all the boats they never even use are trashed. Not the engines, but the hulls. The boats are taking on water, foundering, the only thing holding them up their mooring lines or the straps looped under them.

  “He wants us to have to walk it,” Jade says.

  “You can’t,” Letha says back.

  “You could swim it,” Jade says.

  Letha nods, already knew that.

  “The yacht,” she says finally. Again.

  “No motors on the water for the Fourth,” Jade recites.

  “I think this would be an exception.”

  “Except I’m not going on that boat again.”

  “Yacht.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Where’s that… the Umiak, right?”

  “Hunh,” Letha says, looking around for it just the same.

  “He already sunk it, didn’t he?” Jade says.

  “There,” Letha says, and she’s right. The Umiak is drifting out between Terra Nova and Camp Blood. Not sitting quite level anymore, either. It’s the Orca now, after the shark’s been chewing on it.

  Letha shakes her head in frustration.

  “They’ll have hot dogs and stuff over there,” Jade says, about Proofrock.

  “I don’t want to go through that… that old camp, cool?” Letha says.

  Jade nods, doesn’t explain that they’ll just be looking down on Camp Blood from the bluff.

  “We’re gonna miss the movie if we don’t—” she says instead, but Letha’s silence and stillness stop her.

  Jade follows what Letha’s staring at.

  It’s… a head bobbing in the tall grass? An ostrich?

  “You,” Letha says to the ostrich head, pulling Jade ahead with it. “Pedals only,” she narrates, “no motor.”

  Jade tries to force this into a statement that makes sense. But then all at once it does: the swan boat, the one Deacon Samuels was playing on in that memorial slideshow. They have to wade out to it, then Letha has to push and pull to get it unmired, but it’s whole. The only boat over here that is.

  Jade looks around to Letha to confirm that they’re doing this, but Letha’s gone. Jade spins around, about to panic, which is when Letha bursts up from the water, still trying to wash her face.

  Jade follows suit, lowering herself under the surface in what she hopes is a more menacing fashion, swishing left to right, coming up to breathe, then doing it again, and again, until she feels halfway clean. Clean enough for a massacre.

  Letha’s already up in the boat’s fiberglass couple’s seat. She holds her hand down, hauls Jade’s wet heavy self up as easy as anything, the swan boat tilting and rocking, but there’s no hull for water to slosh over, really, no bottom to have to bail out. Just a footspace for water to wash across, run down. Jade clomps her heavy boots down into that slurry, watches the lake run red around her feet, then clear.

  “You should—” Letha says, about Jade’s boots. “If we end up having to swim, I mean.”

  Jade looks down at her combat boots, the ones she pulled on for battle each morning of the war called “high school.” But Letha’s right. She should have kicked them off last night, really. That’s why Letha was able to swim so much faster than her. Well, that’s one reason.

  She unlaces them, works them off, sets them gently down into the lake. It takes them as it takes everything it’s offered.

  “The—” Letha says then, pulling at the nonexistent zipper over her chest, which is her way of saying maybe Jade should leave her coveralls behind as well?

  Jade shakes her head no. Letha might look more killer with each article of clothing she loses, but Jade needs these, at the very least. She gathers her hand over the collars, pulling them together like fighting to keep them on.

  “I feel like we’re going to get noticed in this,” she
says about the swan boat.

  “Good,” Letha says, and starts churning them through the water.

  Jade tries to figure out how to place her feet on the spinning pedals, pitch in.

  There’s a steering wheel of sorts—a joystick with a big white fiberglass egg for a handle, that must be connected to a rudder under the sweeping-back tail.

  “Not exactly how I envisioned my return,” Jade mumbles.

  “Black swan fit you better?” Letha says, not quite with a smile—this isn’t a time for that—but it shows she’s waking up a little anyway.

  “Ever done this before?” Jade asks. “Pedaled across?”

  “We’ll make it,” Letha says, and pedals harder, surging them forward for a few feet. “Isn’t this where… you know,” she asks, sort of.

  Jade rotates her left wrist up so her scar’s right there.

  “It didn’t want me,” she says. “The lake, I mean.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s this preacher Ezekiel down there, purifying the water,” Jade says. “It makes this a Christian burial ground, and, you know. I’m Indian.”

  “You and your dad.”

  To try to head this off, stop Letha’s accusations before they can rev up, Jade says, “I’m sorry about your—your stepmom,” Jade says. “She didn’t deserve that. None of them did.”

  “I should have burned the whole place down months ago,” Letha says. “We never should have come here.”

  “I’m glad you did,” Jade can’t help but say. “I mean, tragedy aside and all.”

  Letha’s hand comes off the steering egg, finds the top of Jade’s for a quick sisterly squeeze. Jade looks across the dark water to Camp Blood, lurking on Indian Lake’s shore like an infection, like a bad memory.

  Theo Mondragon’s about to be walking through it, isn’t he? And maybe pulling all its ghosts in behind him.

  “Along with my axe,” Jade adds to that visual.

  Letha comes back with, “Say what?”

  Jade shakes her head no, nothing. It’s just what she thinks would look coolest, dragging behind a slasher who’s limping across the narrow whiteness of Glen Dam: the heavy long-handled two-bit axe she buried over there, once upon a runaway night. But, axe or no, if he’s going to make it, he needs to get to hopping to make an appearance before the movie’s over, right?

  Even in this ridiculous swan boat, they’re getting there a half-hour ahead of him. At least half an hour. Which doesn’t mean they’re exactly skipping across the lake. First, they’re bucking the breeze. In town, it never seems to matter. But try to row against it—or pedal—and it stands you right up. Even Letha.

  “Gonna be dark,” Jade says.

  “I’m trying,” Letha says back.

  Jade tries to help with the pedaling but seems to slow things down more than actually contribute to their forward motion.

  “Look,” Letha says.

  It’s the inflatable movie screen.

  Chrissie is running across the dunes, leaving her clothes behind her.

  “Hey!” Letha screams, standing to wave with both arms, the swan tilting back and forth.

  “They crank the sound all the way up,” Jade tells her, holding on.

  Behind the screen, by decree, Proofrock is inky dark. And there’s no phone screens glowing on: nobody wants to douse them when their boat tumps, or when they find themselves in the middle of a splash fight.

  “Y’all do this every year?” Letha asks, out of breath.

  “Halloween for boats,” Jade says. “I mean—everybody dresses their boat up like a parade? Hardy even looks the other way about beer.”

  “He really cares for you, you know?”

  “I remember going in third grade. One of the high schoolers was dressed up as Jigsaw, and I—”

  “He from Bay of Blood?”

  Jade pretends that didn’t just happen, rolls on: “I couldn’t stop watching him.”

  “Or her.”

  “Jigsaw’s a him. When you’re in that mask, you’re a him.”

  “Until two, yeah,” Letha says. “And what about four?”

  Jade looks over in wonder and Letha shrugs, the boat drifting a bit under them.

  “The fuck’s your problem?” Jade says, straight from the movie.

  “You’re my problem,” Letha quotes right back, quirking her mouth just perfect.

  “I thought you didn’t—”

  “That… the night of Banner’s party?” Letha says, pedaling again, having to haul hard on the egg to try to control their drift.

  “The bonfire,” Jade says as if from a dream. “The Dutch boy in the lake.”

  “That’s what we were watching in Banner’s garage,” Letha says. “But we didn’t get to finish, and my—my therapist said it’s unhealthy to leave a narrative incomplete. That it’ll haunt me if I don’t finish it, especially taking into account the… the trauma of that night.”

  “Y’all were watching the first one, then?”

  “I told my dad I needed to finish it in my room. He sent all seven.” Letha shrugs as if embarrassed.

  “You dog,” Jade says, impressed.

  “It’s nothing like… like back there, though,” Letha says. “Who do you think did that to those elk?”

  “Supposedly a bear.”

  Letha looks over like waiting for Jade to say what she thinks: it was Theo Mondragon, either trying to do the killer version of masturbating—animals, not people—or he was out there giving his shiny killing implements a run, seeing if he really had the nerve to go blade-on-skin. He’d have had to drug them first, a little ketamine in the salt lick, but…

  Jade shrugs, and neither of them say anything for a while. Letha’s got a sheen of sweat on her face now.

  “Rest,” Jade tells her, and Letha shakes her head no but does anyway.

  The silence is amazing. They must be just farther than the speakers can reach, even across the water.

  “I can’t believe you know Jigsaw,” Jade says, still catching on that. “Saw’s… Saw’s like Hatchet. What you graduate to, not where you start.”

  “I’ve never seen this one, if that helps,” Letha says, nodding with her head to the inflated screen.

  “You’re from Boston, right?” Jade asks. “That’s pretty much where this one happens, I think.”

  “And you’ve seen every mountain man movie?” Letha asks right back.

  “Point,” Jade says, and Letha starts in pedaling again.

  “I can’t believe we’re talking about what we’ve seen and what we haven’t,” she says. “I can’t believe we’re talking at all, after…”

  She bats her eyes about the yacht.

  “I’m never eating elk again,” Jade says, a laugh slipping out her lips.

  Letha smiles too, has to cover it with her hand as if embarrassed, shaking her head fast that no, no, she’ll never eat it again either.

  “Or maggots either,” Jade can’t help but add.

  “Stop!” Letha pleads.

  Now it’s Jade who’s having to blink the feelings away.

  “Everybody bumps their boats into each other for this part,” she says, chucking her chin ahead of them, to the movie. It’s all the wannabe trophy hunters crowding the boating lanes of Brody’s harbor to catch the killer shark, get that reward money. Invariably some seventh-grader drops an M-80 into the water, in honor of the dynamite one of those fishermen have. Even the adults bring buckets of chum: red Jell-O run through the blender.

  “Why that movie, though?” Letha asks, pedaling slower either from fatigue or inattention. In that lull, a bottle rocket arcs up into the velvety sky, its sparks drifting behind it. Jade feels the muted pop in her chest.

  “Because of that,” she says. “I mean, Jaws happens on the Fourth.”

  “Wouldn’t a monster-bear movie fit better up here, though?”

  “Prophecy, 1979, yeah,” Jade tells her. “But we’ve got bears. Bears are a fact of life. Sharks aren’t. Sharks are the fantasy.
It’s fun to scream about them.”

  “Fun?”

  “Fun,” Jade says, grinning in the dark, and doesn’t even fall into some involved lecture about where Jaws can fit on the slasher evolutionary chart.

  Letha holds the top of Jade’s hand again, and keeps holding it, and Jade doesn’t pull away, just rides, and watches the movie. It’s not quite on mute anymore for them, but on “distant burble.” She pictures Hardy up on the pier, trying to zero in on who that is on shore with the roman candle. “I thought I was going to die back there,” she says all at once, surprising herself. “I guess I thought I already was dead, sort of.”

  “I wouldn’t let that happen,” Letha tells her, and she’s so earnest that Jade almost has to chuckle, just as counterweight.

  “How’d you get out?” she asks instead.

  When Letha doesn’t answer at first, Jade looks over just casually, catches her blinking a touch faster than she has been—like Jade just was. Except, Jade was trying not to let her emotions get the better of her, wasn’t she? And… Jade’s dialing back, back—back to Melanie’s bench a week ago, yeah. When she clocked this exact tell from Letha.

  “What?” Letha’s asking.

  “How’d you get out of the pile of elk?” Jade hears herself asking, a coldness washing up her, gripping her heart, her face, her hand slithering back into her lap. She can’t remember how many of the who’s-doing-it breed of slashers have been eureka’d just this way: a dumb, inconsequential question that exposes some simple gap in logic.

  “I wasn’t as deep in as you?” Letha is saying from what seems like far away.

  “Because you’re faster,” Jade hears herself saying back, just to finish what she knows Letha is going to say. “You were almost all the way out when it fell down.”

  “Lucky,” Letha says.

  Jade looks behind them into the darkness, as if she should be able to see Theo Mondragon slouching along the shore, dragging that shiny axe behind him. Or, she can’t lie to herself: she’s studying the shore for even just a distant glint of that axe, please. Because that would mean that she’s just light-headed from lack of calories, lack of real sleep, a concussion—that she’s thinking wrong. That she’s not sitting right by the one somehow behind it all.