The Heart is Deceitful above All Things

by J. T. LeRoy

  We all just stand there staring, the water making ticking noises as it splats onto the floor.

  I hold the underwear out to them, up toward the fluorescent light, and there, clearly, is the faded outline of rust-tinged blood. My blood.

  My mother screams again, kicks backward in her bare feet at Jackson’s shins, and struggles free.

  I stand frozen, her panties spread out between my outstretched hands like an old lady’s knitting, as she barrels toward me.

  ‘You’re always trying to steal what’s mine!’ she screams, and grabs a small lamp off the table and hurls it at me.

  I watch it flying toward my face in slow motion, and somehow I jump off the chair so the lamp sails straight into the mirror above the sink. Glass shatters and water sprays everywhere.

  I crouch on the floor where I landed, like a frog. I look up into my mother’s face, covered in red splotches. Jackson’s hands cover her mouth again, and her blue eyes roll wildly like spinning marbles.

  ‘Bleach don’t always work,’ I say quietly.

  ‘Go on,’ he says, holding my mother, who’s rocking back and forth and moaning.

  I rise quickly and go past the divider to their bed.

  I pull off the white baby doll that he’d bought for her.

  I lay it as neatly as I can on the bed, the sleeves crossed in front like a burial gown for a child that has disintegrated away.

  I go to my side of the room and pull on jeans, a T-shirt, sneakers, but no socks and grab my jacket from the hook that’s my height that Jackson had put up especially for me.

  I walk past them. She’s turned toward him now; he’s still holding her arms, but her head is against his chest, bobbing up and down with her sobs and moans. They don’t say a word.

  Jackson motions to the door with his head.

  I step over a chunk of mirror and I see a face, red and splotched, with black raccoon eyes, lipstick smeared across it like a clown, just like hers.

  But it’s me. It is me. And I have to go.

  ‘Bye,’ I whisper, and leave.

  It’s not too cold out, but it feels it. It’s still dark. The only light is from our trailer; we’re very far away from other trailers. I can see the black dinosaur shapes of the woods of the Blue Ridge mountains rising around me and hear the night sounds of crickets and rustling animals. I turn back to our trailer and catch glimpses of movement behind the closed shades. I check to make sure the trailer’s still on cinder blocks, not wheels. It is.

  In my head I turn daylight on to drive away any wolves or vampires. It’s so sunny I have to squint to see, but I know where I’m going. I walk quickly, cautiously, keeping my sneakers from crunching too much on the loosely packed dirt, so nothing knows I’m here.

  Some empty lots down there’s an old doghouse that someone had built and left. It’s wooden, with a red, peeling roof and ‘DOG’ glued on in tarnished gold letters.

  I go there a lot. To keep the raccoons out I’ve put wood from a crate in front of the entrance, like a boarded-up, abandoned building. Inside I keep a pillow, blanket, an overdue library book, and a small flashlight that I stole from a trip with Jackson to Malcom’s Auto Supply shop. I slid the thin silver light up my jacket sleeve and prayed to Jesus that no had seen me. No one had.

  Once inside the doghouse I wrap the blanket around my shoulders, with the pillow on the wooden floor, under me. I turn the piece of crate sideways so it still blocks the door but I can see out some. I turn my flashlight on, but I’m careful not to shine it around too much, just enough to see that all the walls are still there and didn’t open to another dimension like a wardrobe in a book I read did.

  I’m relieved, and disappointed, that it didn’t. I don’t inspect the pointy roof because I know what’s up there and I don’t need to see their shiny webs and dusty strings. I like to think of them as taking me in as one of their own, ready to swing down, like Tarzan, and attack whatever tries to hurt me. We, the flesh-eating predators of the house of DOG, protect our own.

  I breathe in the mustiness of my blankets, mixed with old dog smell and the faint smell of urine I cleaned up as best as I could from the last time I had an accident. It’s so comforting, I decide never to leave; I will wait until a wall finally dissolves away and I escape into another dimension.

  I lie on my pillow and shine my flashlight on the faded picture on the wood of the crate. I stare at the smiling, freckled, red-haired boy in a large sombrero climbing a ladder leaning against a tree dripping with plump peaches. He’s waving with one hand and reaching for a peach with the other. If I jiggle the flashlight, his hand moves, waving to me to join him. I lie on my stomach as I always do, resting on the pillow, with my flashlight under my chest pointing like a spotlight.

  I start to rock up and down.

  ‘Come have a peach with me,’ he always tells me. ‘We’ll go into my treehouse and eat peaches, just you and me, and we’ll never come back.’

  My hands under me start to reach for my thing.

  ‘You can wear my sombrero,’ he promises, and stretches his arm out to me.

  I open my fly and grope around because it’s not there sticking up like a miniscrewdriver handle against my lower stomach. I feel panicky and excited all at once. God finally cured me, the bleach worked! I pat my hands on the flat skin of my crotch, terrified to go any lower.

  I feel something there, between my legs, but I’m not sure what it is. I sit up fast, the blanket wrapped around me, and lean against a wall. Holding my breath, I lift my hips and slide my jeans to my knees and shine my flashlight down. I think I know what I’ll see, just more hard, smooth, white skin, like on a Barbie doll.

  I open my eyes and my flashlight shines on my thing, yellowish pink, Krazy-Glued backward between my legs. And suddenly I feel pressure on my bladder and I need to piss. I move my shaking hand and pull on my thing; it stretches out slightly like gum stuck on a sidewalk but snaps right back.

  I yank again, hard, but it only makes my eyes tear. And then I find a string stuck on the side of my thing and I follow it back with my fingers. It disappears inside of me. I tug hard and it feels like my bowels are being pressed. I moan from the ache of it.

  ‘Oh, Lord’s mercy,’ I say again and again, the words sounding too big and empty inside the wooden box to have any effect.

  I lie on my back on the pillow and close my eyes.

  I turn off the flashlight and reach under my legs to the string. It’s definitely attached to something in my asshole and I can’t remember how it got there. I pull again, and it’s like trying to rip off a thick scab. I tug again, but it barely moves, and the tears roll down the sides of my face. I reach again for my thing, but it’s stuck backward.

  ‘It’s stuck,’ I cry into the spider-filled roof.

  My mouth jerks open in a convulsion of sadness and fear. A high-pitched squeal comes out, like a dump dog shot with a BB gun. The sound frightens me even more, and I roll over onto my stomach and curl up around my pillow. My body shakes and quivers as if in battle with a high fever. I have to pee badly, and I think I still can, but I don’t want to go outside.

  It just drains out of me, spraying backward, between my legs. I hear it hitting the wood wall behind me and bouncing off it. It soaks some of my blanket, but the warm relief only makes me sob harder, my breath moving too quickly, out of control.

  Jackson’s breath is like a mosquito buzzing violently in my ear.

  ‘You’re my pretty baby doll, pretty baby girl,’ he says between gasps and pants in my ear.

  His hands run up and down under the white baby doll quickly, like a dog digging in the dirt. He covers my face in hard, hungry kisses, coating me in the film of his beer-fogged mouth. He lifts me off his lap, my arms encircling his neck. He carries me past the divider to their side, to their bed.

  ‘Sexy baby, Daddy’s hot little girl.’

  ‘Am I pretty?’ I ask.

  ‘Mmmm-hmmm,’ Jackson says, lying next to me, pulling the silver zipper down the middle
of his orange jumpsuit like he’s ripping himself in half. My arms are still wrapped tightly around him. I feel his hands working in the dark, and I hear the snap of his underwear.

  ‘Do you love me?’ I ask.

  ‘Ready for Daddy?’ He takes hold of my arms and pulls them off his neck.

  ‘Nooo . . .’ I reach back, but he pushes them down.

  ‘You’re chokin’ me, baby doll . . .’

  I put my arms out again. He slides on top of me, pinning me down.

  ‘Ready for Daddy?’ He reaches over to the nightstand, and I hear the fart noises of a squeezed container.

  ‘I’m your pretty baby girl,’ I say.

  ‘Uh-huh, OK, baby, jus’ relax, I’m gonna lube you some.’

  I feel him searching, down there, his wet and sticky finger inside the white ruffled panties he bought especially for her.

  ‘What’s this?’ He presses on my glued-backward thing, ignores it, and moves past.

  ‘Am I good?’

  ‘Okay, baby.’ His wet finger slides inside of me.

  ‘Am I good?’

  ‘Oh yeah, nice and wet.’ Another one slides in.

  I stare at the shadow his huge head makes on the ceiling.

  Okay, baby . . . just relax it, okay, baby . . . ? Relax . . .’

  ‘I am good, right?’

  ‘There, baby . . . open for Daddy . . . I know you done this before, so open for Daddy.’

  His thing starts to press in on me. He exhales deeply and quickly so it’s hard for me to get a breath.

  ‘I’m good, right?’

  He bends down and kisses me, his beard scratching my face, covering my nose. His tongue gags me as I open my mouth for air. He pulls up onto his elbows, his head is tossed back.

  I try to put my arms around him, but I can’t move them.

  He grunts and pushes himself into me. I feel the tearing and remember the feeling from the last time. He was a cowboy, she was passed out, and I had to get stitches from a local doctor he knew.

  I swear I can hear the tearing, hear it filling my ears, covering his moans and gasps, and I’m losing him. It’s blurry and I can’t see him, just a giant burning sun being smothered.

  I try to tell him to not let me go, that I need to stay with him, to know what he knows, what my mom knows, what that cowboy knows, so after, I can lay in their arms, laugh, and curl up so peacefully I could die.

  But I’m split apart inside, and it’s all I know and all I can find.

  I stand in the bathroom looking at the stain in the middle of her white ruffled panties, the ones he had special-ordered from Victoria’s Secret.

  Afterwards he pulled them back up my legs. He said nothing, I said nothing.

  I wad up some toilet paper and wipe at the sore, throbbing wetness. I bring it back damp with blood and mucousy stuff.

  ‘I’m split apart, and she’s gonna leave me,’ I say out loud to myself, and try not to cry.

  I hear him turning on the TV and snapping a beer open. I stare at the red stain on the panties again, just like the panties she hand-rinses and hangs over the shower door when it’s her time. She bleeds because men are thinking evil thoughts about her, including, and especially, me. So I have to walk to the canteen and buy her Tampax with the plastic applicator to stop the bad thoughts. They sit on the back of the bamboo shelves above the toilet, pink and thin and ready to absorb all evil.

  She came home from cocktailing.

  She saw me, looking like her, wearing the white baby doll Jackson bought her from Victoria’s Secret, standing on a red metal folding chair, washing the bloodstained white matching panties.

  She went looking for Jackson and found him asleep on their bed, laying next to a wet, red splotch on the white nubbly bedspread we got from the Holiday Inn.

  She screamed so loud that Jackson himself woke up yelling.

  She screamed at him for cheating on her. She screamed at him for fucking that little fucking cunt behind her back. She screamed at him for letting me wear the special things he bought her from Victoria’s Secret and which are now ruined.

  She saw that I had ruined everything, and she’s gonna fucking kill me!

  But there are worse things than getting killed.

  I shine my flashlight onto the red-haired, freckled-faced boy waving at me to come and eat peaches. Even though my thing is glued backwards and there’s a Tampax stuck inside me, he’s waving me into his treehouse, where we can hold each other as tightly as possible and be split apart together.

  We practice like we usually do on the way to the clinic, driving in Jackson’s fire red pickup truck. My mom’s not taking me to the local hospital; instead we’re going on a long drive to the backwoods clinic in the Virginia mountains with all the retired doctors that don’t like to do paperwork.

  ‘Now how’d this happen to you?’ she asks, smoking a cigarette in one hand, driving with the other, and staring straight down the highway, occasionally turning her head to blow smoke out the window.

  ‘Did it to myself,’ I mumble, my stomach feeling tight and sour. I swallow a gag.

  ‘Louder, gotta be louder! You look ’em right in the eye, too, understand?’ She tucks a piece of loose hair into her French braid, her cigarette almost burning her ear.

  I nod my head.

  ‘Now what happened?’ she asks again.

  ‘Did it to myself,’ I say louder, and look up at the squashed-bug-filled windshield like it’s the evil face of the Inquisitor.

  ‘Anyone child abusin’ you?’ Her eyes are still a little swollen, but her fresh makeup covers it.

  I watch her red, glossy lips clamp down hard on her cigarette.

  She’s wearing little Fairy Stone cross earrings. The tears of angels from when Jesus died. Jackson bought them for her at the Fairy Stone Park gift shop.

  ‘Well, did they?’ She slaps my thigh.

  ‘No, no, ma’am or . . .’ I stare back at the windshield.

  ‘Or sir . . .’ I glance up at her. She nods halfway for me to continue.

  ‘Did it all myself, sir, or ma’am.’

  ‘Say it loud.’

  ‘All myself, ma’am . . .’ I say louder.

  ‘Why’d you do such a goddamn stupid fuckin’ thing?’

  I turn to her, she’s staring straight ahead, blowing smoke, not even out the window like she usually does so she doesn’t smell like a barroom slut.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Umm . . . I wanted to be a pretty girl,’ I mumble.

  ‘No, no, no.’ She hits the wheel after each no. ‘You want them to arrest you? Lock you up in a mental hospital like they did before?’ She blows her smoke straight into the windshield. ‘Or put you in jail?’

  ‘No,’ I whisper.

  ‘What?’

  ‘No, ma’am . . .’

  ‘You make sure you’re not rude to them, you show them I raised you correctly.’

  ‘Yes’m.’

  ‘Now why you’d do such a goddamned stupid evil fucking thing?’

  ‘’Cause I wanted to know,’ I say too loudly.

  ‘Know what?’ she says louder, and hits the wheel again.

  I don’t answer.

  ‘Know what?!’ She slaps it again, lighter.

  ‘What?!’

  ‘What it feels like to be good.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘What? I think you need to be locked up in a loony bin for quite some time.’

  ‘Stop!’ I yell.

  ‘What?’ But she pulls over to the side of the two-lane highway.

  I jump out and dry-heave into the dark green ivy growing along the black tar road.

  But there’s nothing inside me to come out.

  ‘You about done?’ she calls from the truck.

  When everything was over and done, the white-haired nurse shook her finger at me and said, loudly enough for everyone else in the waiting room to hear, for me not to be doing fool things like I’d done. She gave us two orange bottles of pill
s. One was to keep my stitches from getting infected, the other for pain and discomfort. The nurse gave me one of the second ones, and when we got to the truck my mom swallowed two of them.

  We say nothing on the ride home. I must have fallen asleep because I wake up in my bed, under the blankets. I wonder if my mom carried me in or if Jackson did. I wish I’d been awake but only faking sleep when someone held me in their arms and put me to bed. I rub my forehead and check my fingers to see if there are any lipstick marks from when I was tucked in. There aren’t. They probably rubbed off already anyway.

  My blankets are up around me, and a little pink stuffed bear that Jackson won for me at a fair is next to me. A bigger bear he won for her sits on their bed, but it’s too big to be held and is thrown on the floor at night anyway.

  They’re fighting.

  ‘Please, baby doll,’ he says again and again.

  ‘I’m sick of you,’ she tells him.

  ‘I’m so sorry, baby doll,’ he keeps saying.

  ‘You make me sick.’

  I reach over to the window ledge and pick up the perfect brown angel’s tear stones I found in Fairy Stone Park.

  ‘Lookit what I bought ya, sugar, please, honey, it’s real pretty.’ He sounds like he’s gonna cry. I know it’s hopeless. I know she’s going to leave. I hold my stone crosses and pray she takes me with her.

  ‘Please, baby, I’m sorry, please, baby.’

  I didn’t really find the stones in the forest.

  ‘You can’t just leave me, baby!’

  I stole them from the gift shop, where they sell the perfect ones that others had found. I pretended I found them, pretended that only I could find something so perfect, so blessed, and so special.

  ‘Please.’ He’s crying now.

  I pull myself up with difficulty, like trying to run fast inside a dream. I lean out the small window over my bed.

  ‘Baby doll, it won’t never happen again!’

  I inhale the sweet decaying smell of autumn and look at the yellows and reds spreading down the mountains, like wildfire infecting all the other trees surrounding our trailer.

  ‘I thought he was you, I really did, looked just like you, I swear . . .’

  I reach out my balled-up fist and toss my crosses out through the window into the dirt.