Heartbreaker. Claudia Dey
agent though no one has ever left the territory. We call her One Hundred as she is either very close to or just past that in years. She has been here from the beginning. Her left pupil is wiped out and translucent with blindness, but otherwise, she is more fit than most and works nights in the back of Drink-Mart at a card table on a foldout chair. If you buy her a drink, she will pull out one of her four black gym bags, unzip it slowly, and show you her away pamphlets. The gym bags are called North, South, East, and West. Given the North is all we know, no one chooses North and it is clear that bag is empty. South, East, and West our broadest men can barely bench-press.
In the cold months, we can’t bury our dead. Our people try to die in the summer. If you don’t, your body is put on a cot and wheeled into the walk-in freezer of the Death Man’s shed, a square of lumber, fiberglass, and Freon tubing twenty steps from the sliding back doors of his well-maintained trailer. He has gulls on his property though he is nowhere near water. While the Death Man is soundless, his gulls whine and screech and dirty themselves, and we tell them, Stop your commotion, we know what mourning is.
We all find it difficult to look at the Death Man when he walks by us in town. The dead have their secrets and he knows them. His bullet eyes, his bleach vapor, his unmarried, mannequin hands. If you die, the Death Man will be the last to touch your naked body with all its private codes. Not your mother, not your girlfriend, but the Death Man and his indoor gloves. The thinking is: Normal men volunteer to fuck women or fight fires, not store the dead.
When the thaw finally comes, we catch up on our funerals. We call this time final resting. For the first month of the thaw in April, sometimes May, we have a funeral every third day. If someone dies during this time, bad luck, their corpse must wait its turn. While it is stored in the Death Man’s shed with the others, we are consoled it does not have to linger there through those long months of the sky in its deep freeze when our people are tanned but heartsick, immortal gulls cawing and bombing like psychotic confetti.
You won’t see a gull anywhere else in town.
The entire territory comes out for a funeral. Even if you just sawed off your finger or lost an eye, you come out. In the beds of their matte black trucks, the men put their shovels. They try to keep their Man Store denim clean when it is time to fill the grave. The territory men wear sunglasses whatever the weather. Sunglasses never come off. The women don’t wear sunglasses, and their black mascara runs down their faces. They don’t bother to wipe it away. A beaten face is a grieving face. Last thaw, the trend was electric blue.
A special-order cassette stereo plays our final resting tape—instrumental—and Shona Lee, her bangs flipped back, her voice holy, solos:
GOOD TIMES, BAD TIMES—
Around the grave, we huddle in a mass until one of the men steps from the scrum to speak. A bottle of local alcohol is passed until it reaches the man in his tribute. He drinks while he speaks, but he does not smoke. Here, at final resting time, women smell like women and men smell like women. No one can light a cigarette for the heavy hairspray, aftershave, and perfume. We smoke the moment we are back in our trucks and speeding to the Banquet Hall with the windows down. Even the children will smoke after a funeral. They are expected to.
Every man in the territory has his portrait taken yearly from the age of thirteen onward. Sometimes the man will pose beside his truck or his dog or his girlfriend or, depending on his fitness, in a clean tank top holding up a barbell or the closest, heaviest thing. Bag of concrete, glass table, propane tank. Sometimes the portrait is just the young man’s face, which can make you feel you never knew him. Never noticed that scar or that chipped tooth. When you walk into the Banquet Hall after the burial, our cots and IV poles pushed to the side, the buried man’s portrait is propped up on the stage. A bouquet on either side of it. A lineup forms and everyone in the territory gets a moment before the portrait. You can touch it, kiss it, and make as much noise as you want, but once you walk away, you have to pull yourself together because you, then all those around you, could lose the point of the endeavor. As grief manhandles, it can be manhandled. This is what we tell each other, followed by, depending on who you are talking to, hard sex or light punching.
It is very rare the portrait is of a woman, and if it is, she poses with her children, and if she does not have any children, she poses with nothing at all.
THE FOUNDERS GOT OFF their bus here only because they discovered they could go no farther—no farther than our property, bungalow 88, also known as the Last House. You see, the north highway ends in the territory’s only water source. It is directly behind our bungalow. We call it the reservoir, and now, in late October, it is mostly covered by a thin skim of ice. Where you can see it, the water is not blue but gray, branches floating on the surface, a few plastic bags. No one will go near it. Not even us, the teenagers, with our frayed cuffs and our open coats and our blue lips daring each other with money we have stolen. No way. Get real. Dream on. To our people, water is certain death. The reservoir is certain death. From my mother’s bedroom window, you have a perfect view.
Our bungalow is the only one in the territory with a second story and a basement, features added by its former occupant. Our bungalow is fully carpeted, eleven hundred square feet, and split-level. Our bungalow is open concept, and the color scheme is gold-black-beige. You’d think everyone would want to live here. They don’t. Our bungalow is the end of the world.
Yo.
“PONY DARLENE FONTAINE! Pony Darlene Fontaine!” I come to just in time to see the teen stewardess’s plane break apart. She is over a flatland when the cabin of the plane suddenly bursts open on one side, and the passengers, still strapped into their seats, are sucked out and into space. Worst luck. Permanent winter. Pointless to call out. The teen stewardess throws herself on top of a baby passenger. She and the baby float down on a piece of airplane, and the teen stewardess tells the baby they will make their home under it. You can make a home out of anything, my mother said to me once. Home is in the soul. You will spend your life trying to get back to it.
“Pony!” It’s Lana yelling at me through the receiver, which is dangling off our beige couch. “Did you see that? Did. You. See. That.” Lana, at moments of great excitement, will speak with the cadence of a telegram. We arrange to meet in tight clothes outside of her much nicer bungalow at ten o’clock. To go to the bonfire. The pit party. A full hour. Later. Than. Anyone. Else.
I hang up and look through our front window. The truck is not in the driveway. She did go into town. Did she go into town? I am briefly stopped by my own reflection. This happens when you can watch yourself grow. I am tall. Perhaps too much length in limb. I wouldn’t have minded being a bit more covert, physically. Perhaps slightly less face. The face is a little more niche than I might have liked. The full lips, the thin canopy of a mustache. The failed haircut. The dark, shy eyes. I am not the star of the night soap; I am the visiting cousin. The one in the Pinto no one will kiss. I have a line of safety pins tapering my nightpants. I knot my DEVOTIONAL SECTION T-shirt just above my waistline in case there is a boy in the woods smoking the cold fog, and looking in at me. Wanting me. A boy I have never seen before. He wears a black suit and has a black dog and a few terrible habits that don’t hurt anyone. I roll down the waistband of my nightpants and rotate my melancholia. Front on, profile, rear view. What is not to love? Some of it. Around my neck, I wear a large stopwatch. I took out the clock part and put in the back of Billy Joel’s head from Glass Houses. We have many album covers here and very few albums. Most have been destroyed by overuse. I have no idea how Billy Joel’s music sounds, but I like the look of him in his heeled leather boots and crime gloves about to seriously trash a house. I lift my arm and angle my body. All I need is a rock.
“Did she say why? Did she say for what? Why did you let her leave? Why didn’t you come and get me?” The Heavy is covered in sawdust. It is trapped in his eyelashes, his shirt collar, his knuckles, the hard scars of his face. He has his snowmobile goggles around his neck. I do not have sufficient answers to his questions. I assure him she will be back any minute.
The Heavy runs out to the driveway to follow my mother in our new truck only to remember it gone; she took it. “Damn it.” He pushes past me to the living room phone. He has sweat through his outerwear in three large circles. Two under his arms,