The Heart is Deceitful above All Things

by J. T. LeRoy

  ‘He was all over me, talking like you, lookin’ like you, baby doll . . .’

  I will wait for them to grow, like Jack’s magic beans, transformed into a beanstalk growing up to heaven. I’ll climb it, even though the raindrop-shaped salt water cuts me.

  ‘You can’t do this to me, baby girl! You can’t!’

  The sky will open like slit skin, and the rope will shatter like glass.

  ‘Something ain’t right with him, baby, just not right.’

  And millions and millions of angels’ tears will shake and pound the earth and solidify into stone crosses.

  ‘I won’t let him get me like that again, baby doll, I swear!’

  And they will wait hundreds of years for me to return and reclaim them.

  ‘We’ll go away, baby, just you and me, somewheres nice and fancy.’

  I will reclaim my tears petrified by the terror of loss.

  COAL

  I’VE SPENT A lot of time searching for Canada Dry ginger ale. Many stores don’t carry it. Canada Dry doesn’t have poison in it. I’m not sure about other sodas. Pringles potato chips with ridges don’t have poison, either. You need a big chain, like Safeway or Piggly Wiggly, that sells fancier items. Whenever things feel out of control I know the black coal is doing it, and I know what to do, my mom taught me.

  I watch all the walls in the supermarket and tell her as soon as I think they move. One time we leave the cart half-full of Pringles and Canada Dry at the checkout. I tug on her black raincoat, lightly; you don’t want to be obvious or they’ll see. She doesn’t notice my tug the first time. I look up at her face hidden in a shadow of tangled dyed black hair. The pale blue whites of her eyes dart round and round, watching the suspicious faces, mostly at the couple in pink sportswear laughing ahead of us.

  They’re buying a lot of poisoned foods: Land O’ Lakes butter, Mr Paul Newman’s salad dressing, Sprite, Burgers ’n’ Buns, and way too orange carrots and Chee-tos. I try not to stare, unlike my mom, who’s trying to figure out what they are. If they’re secret agents of the coal, trying to tempt and trick us. They might be innocent victims hypnotized by the forces of black coal about to be poisoned accidentally, but their pastel pink outfits match too exactly, so my guess is they are forces of evil.

  I tug again at her sleeve, so long her hand is buried in its protective sheathing. It was $15 at the Salvation Army, just bought today soon after we discovered the black coal was active. We tried to find a black raincoat for me, but in my size they were all yellows and greens covered in bunnies and turtles. She said after the dye I’d be safe even without a raincoat.

  The dye is in our cart, buried under six-packs of Canada Dry and the red Pringles cardboard canister with the vacuum seal, and I wish it weren’t. I could slip it in the waist of my jeans, even though stealing only fuels the judgment of the coal.

  I hear the swoosh swoosh of my mother’s nails scratching up the inside of her vinyl raincoat sleeves. Her barefoot heels bounce inside her black rubber boots. I’m still in civilian clothes. My T-shirt is dirty white, as are my Keds, even my socks. My jeans are dark blue, not black. The Laundromat is next.

  I’ll lie naked in the backseat, staring up at the stained cheeseclothlike interior of our Toyota while she dyes my clothes in the washer.

  The pink sportswear spy couple is next in line. She keeps grinning down at me, catching me staring at their Chee-tos. It’s poison, all poison, I chant silently to myself, louder than my rumbling stomach. Then, like a true demon, the woman reaches for a Hershey’s bar from the rack above the conveyer belt, opens and bites into it. Hershey’s can be safe sometimes, but now I know it’s a trick because the chocolate smell sinks into me.

  I look up at my mom to see if she’s noticed, but her eyes are switching to the walls, judging their distances, measuring the inches of movement; she doesn’t trust me to that job completely. I tug lightly again at the frayed sleeve.

  The woman catches my eye and smiles hugely, her lipstick lines extending way beyond her actual lips, her eyes narrowing to Chinese slits with wrinkles like cat whiskers racing from the outer edges.

  I hold on to my mother’s sleeve; the woman leans over so her face is near mine. I smell the sugary chocolate on her breath and look up into the dark patch of nose hairs with snot strands caught inside.

  ‘Would you like a piece of chocolate?’ she asks.

  My mother shakes herself as if trying to pull her body from a trap. The woman looks up toward my mother, her smile disappearing as she speaks. ‘He’s standing so quiet and good . . . I thought he might like . . .’

  My mother’s head sways like a caged horse’s, long swoops back and forth: no. Her eyes are focused on the checkered floor.

  ‘Sorry . . .’ the woman starts, her face contorting into a grimace. She steps back. ‘I just thought . . .’

  The hand clamping my wrist makes me jump. My mother says nothing to me or to the lady in pink still holding out a Hershey’s bar; she jerks my arm as we hurry down the aisle, trying to find the way out. I can hear her panting, and my heart’s booming.

  All lines are filled, there are no clear checkouts to escape through. Her nails are digging into the skin inside my wrist. I crash into her. She’s stopped dead still and is staring at the wall directly in front of us, stacked with cigarettes, logs, and charcoal, framing the way out.

  It had moved.

  ‘I tried to tell you,’ I whisper, but I know she can’t hear. I look down the row to the entrance turnstile and an empty aisle with a closed chain gate across it. I jerk my arm a few times till she follows, still gripping my wrist. She walks sideways, staring at the wall, her mouth hanging open in an O.

  When we get to the gate I lift it as high as I can.

  ‘Drop under,’ I mumble. She stands frozen, staring at the wall. I shake my arm hard. ‘Go under.’ She only stares. A man with a nametag puts down the apples he’s stacking and starts crossing the floor toward us. I drop the chain and push her as hard as I can. She turns down to me, anger flashing across her face, tightening my stomach.

  ‘Duck under,’ I order, and lift the chain rope again. I bite my lip so she won’t see it shake. She bends her head, leans down, and crouches under the chain, still gripping my arm, pulling me under with her, as if we’re in a sudden game of limbo.

  ‘Excuse me, miss,’ I hear. ‘Miss?’

  My mom walks out, oblivious, almost running through the front door; I gallop to keep up. The heat from the parking lot blasts up at us, making the air visible lines that waver into shapes. ‘Miss . . .’ I hear from right behind us, before I see a thin white hand reach out for her. It barely touches her black padded shoulder when she spins around, her teeth bared, her eyes too wide.

  ‘What?!’

  ‘I need you to open your coat . . . or come back inside the store . . .’ He clears his throat, looking around, but not at her.

  ‘You think I fuckin’ stole? At a time like this? You think I fuckin’ stole?!’ Her hand clenches tighter with each word, around my wrist, like a tourniquet.

  ‘Uh . . . miss?’

  ‘You will be very, very sorry . . .’ she starts, and without releasing my arm unbuttons her raincoat.

  I turn away and watch some kids in the back of a station wagon stick their tongues out at me.

  ‘OK, OK, OK, ma’am. Thank you, thank you . . .’

  ‘Wanna check my cunt?’

  I turn to see my mother holding her coat open, her naked body sheened with sweat and exposed. She drops my wrist and turns her pockets inside out. A small lump of coal falls with a thud to the ground. Her neck stretches out like a turkey’s over a chopping block toward his red face.

  ‘Ma’am?’ He looks into her protruding grin with a mixture of fear and sadness that frightens me more than when he wanted to arrest her.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asks softly.

  A man driving past in a pickup whistles, and I follow his stare to the bristly blond clump of hair between my mother’s legs. She takes a dee
p breath to respond, her face a dark scarlet. I reach up to grab the ends of her raincoat where she holds it clamped open with her fists. I tug gently but firmly, and her hands follow mine, pulling the coat closed like a curtain.

  ‘C’mon,’ I whisper, feeling a strength I treasure and dread.

  ‘Is she all right?’ he asks, talking to me for the first time.

  ‘Just tired,’ I say into my mother’s raincoat, which I hold shut over that dark yellow curly patch. I hear him take a breath to say something, but he only releases a sigh. I look up into my mother’s face, afraid she’s preparing to say or do something, but all I can see is the tip of her chin. She’s looking straight up into the sky, watching, waiting.

  ‘She’ll be OK,’ I say to the man behind me.

  ‘You sure?’ he asks, and I hear him take another step back. It’s always easy to convince people it’s OK because if it isn’t, they’d have to get involved.

  ‘Yeah.’ I nod, looking up at her, and squeeze her coat closed tighter.

  ‘OK . . . uh . . . thank ya . . .’ he says, walking away fast.

  ‘Sarah?’ I tug on her coat. ‘Sarah?’

  ‘The sky has black fire coming,’ she says, her neck strained up.

  A pretty woman in tan shorts pulls her cart up next to the car in front of us. A little boy is in the baby’s seat. She starts to unload brown grocery bags into her truck. She glances at us.

  ‘Hot,’ she says, and smiles.

  ‘Ice cream,’ the little boy says.

  ‘Soon as we get home, Billy,’ she tells him.

  ‘Fire’s gonna come down from the sky,’ my mother says, staring up.

  ‘Pardon?’ she says, lifting Billy out of the cart seat. I can see the colorful tops of food labels sticking out the top of the bags. It’s poison, I tell myself.

  ‘You’re gonna burn, you traitor!’ my mother says, and I look up fast to see if she’s talking to me, but she’s turned toward the woman. The woman blinks at my mother a few times, shakes her head, and turns away. I watch her strapping Billy into a baby seat. My mother stares back up at the sky.

  ‘Mom . . . let’s go . . .’ My throat is dry and I can hardly swallow. I watch the woman give Billy a bottle. He sucks on it with his eyes half-closed. Poison, I think.

  ‘Mom . . .’ I turn back to her. The sun is blasting down on the black tar, and I see the sweat running down her neck. My scalp feels wet. ‘Sarah?’ I let go of the raincoat she’s now gripping closed, and I tap her hand. She doesn’t move.

  ‘Please?’

  The woman in the car starts the engine. She doesn’t look at us. I watch them drive away. I try not to picture the baby bottle filled with milk, filled with poison.

  ‘There’s another store down the road.’ I poke at her hand beaded with sweat. She doesn’t answer for minutes. I stand waiting, squinting at her face in the sun. Suddenly she looks down and around us. ‘Where are our supplies?’

  I look around, too, like they’re missing. ‘I don’t know,’ I tell her.

  ‘It’s all black!’ she screams, pointing to the tar.

  ‘It ate everything,’ I say, and nod at the ground. And suddenly she drops down, grabs up the coal piece that had fallen from her pocket, and runs. I start running to catch her, past our car, out of the lot, onto the sidewalk. She runs down the broken concrete sidewalk to a little thatch of bushes behind a deserted nightclub. I see her crawl inside it. I catch up, panting, and follow her into the bushes. She’s curled up, the jacket over her head. She’s rocking.

  I know I lied about the supplies and them getting eaten, but I was hoping she would forget; times like these she forgets things easily. If she remembered what happened in the store, she might say it was my fault the walls moved, my fault we have nothing to eat or drink, my fault we have no dye and I’m still in a white T-shirt and blue jeans. She might start thinking I’m the traitor. She might decide I’m the evil. I need to be very careful. I hope my lying doesn’t raise the punishing wrath of the coal, but I had just witnessed its destructive abilities. It had burned our house to the ground, maybe killed my stepfather, and maybe burnt up my best friend.

  I climb into the bushes and reach under her coat that’s draped over her head. ‘It’s okay . . . Sarah . . .’ She shakes her head no. I walk cautiously next to her.

  ‘I’ll protect you,’ I whisper above her, and slowly slide the jacket off her head and down to cover her naked shoulders and body. I lower my hand to her matted hair; she whimpers. I stroke her hair soft and wet with sweat.

  ‘It’s coming . . . we’re gonna get it . . .’ I feel her trembling under my hand.

  ‘Shhh . . .’ I whisper, ‘I’ll protect you.’ I pat her shoulder, and she leans her head into my legs. Standing, I’m a little taller than she is sitting, so I crouch down some and wrap my arms halfway around her.

  ‘Gonna get it, gonna get it, gonna get it,’ she mutters.

  ‘It’s OK . . . nobody can get us here.’ I lean around her and gently kiss her tearstained salty cheek again and again.

  ‘It’s OK . . .’ I whisper. ‘It’s all OK.’ I reach down to her hands, black and sooty from the chunk of coal she dug out from her raincoat pocket. Under her nails it’s grimy black as she scratches and scrapes at the black coal while turning it round and round. I pry the coal from her fingers and bend down and place it in the pocket of her bunched-up coat lying behind her.

  I wrap my arms around her, squeezing her tighter and tighter, feeling like Atlas with the weight of the entire world inside my heaving arms.

  When the sun goes down I get her back to the car.

  ‘Should I go get some supplies?’ I ask, feeling my heart beat in my empty stomach. She shakes her head no, lowers her seat back, and goes to sleep.

  I wake up with a jump, not sure of where I am. The parking lot is empty, and a dim street lamp flickers above us. I open the door quietly and sneak out.

  I walk over to a small green Dumpster next to a dark Burger King and piss. The thick greasy smell from the Dumpster makes my mouth wet. I turn back to the car and see my mother curled up in her raincoat. I lift myself in and start slashing with my nails into the white plastic bags. Fries, soft creamy buns, cups with soda still in them, I cram it all into my mouth so fast, I can hardly breathe. I find more and more as I dig, even unopened ketchup packages I rip open and squirt right into my mouth.

  I don’t know how long I am in there eating or how long she is standing behind me watching. All I can think about is eating more. The starchy smell of it is overwhelming, and I can’t inhale it fast enough. I have no thought of being poisoned and dying.

  When I see her, she has a half smile on her face. It gets bigger as I drop the doughy mush in my hands.

  ‘Temptation has claimed you,’ she says quietly.

  I swallow the crusty fried piece in my mouth and try to speak, but only air comes out.

  ‘You’re lucky you have me,’ she says, walking away from the Dumpster. I pull myself out and follow her to the car, my shaking hands wiping crumbs off my face. She gets in the front and opens the passenger side for me to climb in.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’ve just been poisoned,’ she says solemnly. ‘You’re weak and you gave in to temptation . . . Now you’re gonna die.’

  The grease smell is all over my jeans and shirt, coating me like a film, making it hard to breathe. My eyes fill up, blurring everything. I wipe at them fast, hoping she won’t see; crying would make it all worse.

  ‘I don’t want to die,’ I whisper. ‘Please, please, do we have any antidote?’ I wrap my arms around my stomach and feel it ache.

  ‘You ate poison, you ate poison, you ate poison,’ she chants, her face in a huge smile. The tears start falling. I look down to try to get it under control.

  ‘You ate poison, you ate poison,’ she says like a taunting child in a schoolyard. I push my panic aside and look up at her grinning face, her teeth gleaming a diamond white in dim fluorescence.

  ‘If I di
e, who will watch the walls?’ I say as calmly as I can. Her mouth slowly closes.

  ‘If I die, who will warn you if the earth cracks and swallows the car?’ I hear her swallow.

  ‘If I die, who will be there for the coal to destroy in flames first?’ She says nothing, only turns in her seat and stares out at the Dumpster.

  After a few minutes she reaches under her seat and brings out the small plastic bottle. I watch her unscrew the top as I swallow down a greasy burp. She hands me the bottle and I try to hold it steady, but my hands are trembling, probably from the poison starting to kill me. I bring the bottle up to my nose; the cherry smell of it makes me calmer. We just bought it yesterday at the pharmacy in Wal-Mart. In case we get poisoned, this is the antidote.

  It took up a lot of money, so we only had enough left for a six-pack of Canada Dry in cans––bottles are poisoned. Even when I brought in the empty cans I collected for the deposit, there still wasn’t enough for Pringles.

  But being hungry is purifying and keeps evil from getting into you.

  ‘Drink some,’ she says.

  I hold the bottle to my lips and sip some of the sweet bark-colored maple-cherry liquid down.

  ‘Not all of it!’ she shouts, and snatches the bottle away. ‘Just bought it and now it’s half-gone.’ She holds the bottle up to the light coming in through the windshield to see what’s left. I read the white block letters on the label.

  ‘Did I get enough?’ I ask.

  ‘I should think so. Damned thing’s near gone!’

  ‘It works, though?’

  ‘It should,’ she says, putting it back under the seat.

  ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ I say, leaning back in the seat, secretly feeling warmed and filled by the food, comforted by the syrup, and how easy antidote is.

  She leans back her seat and rolls over in it. ‘The poison’s gonna battle it out in you.’

  ‘OK,’ I mumble, drifting in to sleep, dreaming about other Dumpsters and the cherry syrup antidote I can buy with my bottle deposit money on the sly. No more Pringles and Canada Dry, ’cause it’s there in Wal-Mart waiting for me, that brown bottle with the green label and big white letters. Sweet like candy, my antidote: Ipecac.