Heartbreaker. Claudia Dey
people looked at her and thought: Lassie. “The thing about Lassie,” the women would say to each other when my mother was not at the table, “is that you watch the show and you think it’s just this one single dog doing all these things, but it’s actually many dogs that look exactly alike, and they all have different talents. This one is good at wagging its tail. This one is good at jumping over logs. This one is good at sitting. This one is good at fetching. This one is good at heeling. This one is good at playing dead.” And when my mother crashed our truck on that July evening, and it was towed through town to be salvaged at Fully Loaded, Rita Star’s story returned to the minds of the women.
The hood bent into a tree shape, the glass cracked where my mother’s head hit the windshield. Once the bleeding was under control, my mother needed only one small bandage. But still. Parts of her had come loose in the crash, the women said to each other. A life has its rigging.
I was up to my mother’s collarbone when she taught me how to swim. I didn’t want to learn. I only wanted her—anything that told me what she felt, loved, protected, lied about, thought of, had been.
I GUESS THE TEENAGERS of the territory don’t see me, Camo Pony, when I make my way back to the fire. One girl is talking about being courted by a widower. I sit behind a headstone to listen. I fold my knees to my chest. In Latin, cancer of the dreams starts with somnia.
“What widower?”
“The Heavy?” And this makes the teenagers howl with laughter.
“The Fontaine mother isn’t dead!”
“She’s just missing!”
“In the territory, missing is dead.”
“The Heavy—”
“Sick.”
“Plus, the facial issues.”
“Double sick. Seriously. Sick galore.”
“My mom told me he used to be hot. Superhot. Before … you know.”
The girl being courted says she likes the widower’s bigger truck and cleaner stuff, and how he doesn’t just walk around all the time in a black towel, eating off his barbecue with his dog, you know, the update to basic sonic and video technology, the light fixture advantages, but the graying body hair takes getting used to. Big-time. Revulsion can come pretty quickly and has to be integrated for a dimensional sex encounter, when it is time for body on body, for *65 and *69, which, the girl explains, “comes down to the difference between facing my hot rocking body north and facing my hot rocking body south.”
“Show us,” the girls say, “show us how you do the widower.”
“Better than the dick channel,” one boy rasps when the girl is done.
“Okay. Losing your mind. Hard or easy?”
“Hard.”
“Killing yourself, hard or easy?”
“So easy,” says Lana.
“How would you know?” Then the skinny boy remembers Lana’s circumstances. Her dead mother, and her new mother, the ex-girlfriend of Peter Fox St. John, who misspelled her name on her name necklace, but she still wears it even though Lana’s father bought her one with her name in full and made of a purer gold, and Denise is pregnant with the Delivery Man’s baby, and she painted their whole bungalow red, even the toilet seats, and Lana’s father might be the one who’s inconsolable now. “Sorry, Lana,” the skinny boy says. And hating his voice more than ever, “I’m really sorry.”
And everyone falls quiet, waiting for Lana to break down. Then Lana says, still very, very high, “Lana Barbara California!” and a cheer goes up.
“High hopes!” she says.
Another cheer.
“Leaving the territory, hard or easy?”
“Impossible.”
“Don’t even.”
Some of the older girls who are invited to sit at Rita Star’s kitchen table tell the others my mother left our bungalow in her indoor tracksuit and no shoes shortly after 7:00 P.M. How could they know that? How could they possibly know that? And she has not been seen since. No sign of the truck.
“Where is the Fontaine mother pacing without her shoes?”
“She could be right there.”
“Don’t!”
“Watching us.”
“She could be crouching to the ground like an animal.”
“Behind that headstone.”
“She was that small.”
“Small as their dog.”
“Their dog is massive.”
“She was filled with a disease,” Lana says. “Mental damage.”
“It took her hair, her muscles.”
“And now she is out here.”
“Getting closer, getting closer, getting closer.”
The snap of a twig. A stirring all around.
“Wait.”
“Did you hear that?”
Their hearts leaping all through them. Their fingertips going numb.
“Did you hear something?”
“Seriously.”
And then I’m standing there, and the boys and girls of the territory are shrieking, “You can’t just sneak up on people like that!”
“I didn’t mean to,” I say dumbly.
“You fucking scared us!”
“Sorry.”
“You scared us so bad.”
“Sorry.”
I want to tell them they’re wrong. My mother soaped my body and sang me to sleep. She taped my drawings to the walls. She got down on her knees and brushed the knots from my hair. How you’re growing, she would say, I can’t keep up with your growing, and she would laugh and kiss my neck. Tell me a story, she would say when I got older. Tell me about your day. Thrill me, she would say. You thrill me.
And the boy who had the can of butane comes to stand beside me and says with perfect pronunciation, tracing lines across the air with his hands, as if he is reading the words off a headstone, my headstone, “Pony Darlene Fontaine. Even her mother couldn’t love her. 1970 to—”
Gunshot.
And the boy falls to the ground, taking me with him, and some of the teenagers scream and cover their ears.
“Don’t be mean.” Coming down the decline toward us, his rifle aimed at the sky, and then his rifle aimed at the boy. “Don’t be mean,” Supernatural repeats himself. His ball cap under his hood. Giving just enough of his face.
IN THE TERRITORY, when a woman has a baby, she’s attended to by another woman. This is the territory’s way. Let me give you the lay of the land. While birth is beautiful, it’s primarily a fight.
Fifteen years ago, when The Heavy in his shoulder-length gloves followed my naked mother, in a state of manic concentration, out of our bungalow and into the front yard and then back inside to our living room floor, he suggested Debra Marie come over. She could place a damp cloth on my mother’s back and say the thing territory women say to each other: “A woman’s body knows just what to do.”
“Ha!” My mother, four feet around, turned to my father and said, “I am a phenomenon. I am multiplying. I am one becoming two, and then I am two becoming one, and as I do this, let’s admit Debra Marie’s help will be a small act. She will not be feeling. I am feeling. I am feeling everything there