Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Claudia Dey 2018

Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Cover images © Peter Ptschelinzew/Getty Images (desert background), © Rachel Willey (car)

Claudia Dey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008295073

Ebook Edition © October 2017 ISBN: 9780008295097

Version: 2018-07-11

Epigraph

In love there is no because.

ALICE NOTLEY,

IN THE PINES

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Part One. GIRL

Part Two. DOG

Part Three. BOY

Acknowledegments

About the Author

Also by Claudia Dey

About the Publisher

Part One

This is what I know: She left last night. My mother, Billie Jean Fontaine, stood in our front hallway with a stale cigarette in one hand and her truck keys in the other. The light in our hallway was broken or dying so it flickered above her head, throwing shadows across her face. I don’t know how long she was standing there watching me.

I was only feet away on the couch in my nightpants trying to arrange my body like the woman in that Whitesnake video. It was not going well. The television was on, and I had our telephone receiver pressed hard against my left ear. My ear had gone numb listening to Lana on the other end breathing heavily, which made me picture, unfairly, Lana’s dog, a dog, unlike our dog, of low intelligence. Together in silence, we watched Teen Psychic. The show was already at the love line, making it close to seven o’clock, and 1985, and late October. Teen Stewardess was on next, and for this, I felt deep excitement.

I had my outerwear smoothed flat on my lap. With a black permanent marker, I was filling in the cap letters I had written across the back. I would debut and copyright these later at the bonfire. Note there is no such thing as permanent. Especially in a marker you find in a snowdrift. I also found my camo outerwear in said snowdrift, the snowdrift that borders the north highway outside Neon Dean’s pink bungalow, which on Free Day can be a bonanza. A few other things to keep in mind at this moment: I had almost a hundred dollars in small denominations hidden inside the album covers in my bedroom, twelve jerry cans of gasoline stashed in the woods behind our house, hair to my tailbone I had recently tried to self-feather, and my mother had not come downstairs for two months.

“I am going into town.” My mother spoke this astonishing sentence not to me but to the cold air around me. She had not left our bungalow since the end of July, and it was now almost three months later. Winter had set in. Outside, the trees were skeletal, and the hunters were urinating on their hands to warm them. The men called this dicking the hands. I dicked my hands to turn my keys. Same. Dicked my hands right there on my front porch. Same. Had to dick my hands to cock my rifle. This was the kind of talk you might hear if you went into Drink-Mart for some homemade alcohol. There, under a half-busted chandelier, listening to Air Supply, the men of the territory gathered to clean their rifles with their wives’ old tan pantyhose while being stared at by a wall covered with the beautiful heads of our animals.

Air Supply. A band name none of us wanted to read into.

I joined my mother in the hallway. I had not seen her upright for weeks and now looked down at her scalp, the hair broken in places. Beauty, what is beauty? Beauty is cheap. Beauty is common. Beauty is luck. My father, The Heavy—known for many things but mostly his severe facial issues—loved to say when he first laid eyes on my mother, it was not like the stories you hear about beauty. A man struck down by a woman’s beauty. Taken by a woman’s beauty. No. Not at all. My father liked to say when he first laid eyes on my mother, he had never seen anyone quite so alive.

She was wearing her indoor tracksuit. It hung from her frame and was the color of dirty water. I knew not to touch her, and this was difficult, so I pushed my hands into the large pockets of my nightpants. I had done my bloodwork that morning and was still feeling a bit faint. Moving quickly from the couch to the doorway, I was seeing sparks, and the strobe-light effect of the dying bulb above us was not helping, so I tilted my head down slightly and leaned against the wall, looking but not feeling casual. Of late, I had become a fainter, and this was a most useful quality as it meant instant departure to a dark and neutral space. When my mother and I used to talk, we agreed that HELP was a flawless word. That even if you reordered the letters, people would still completely get your meaning. PHLE.

My mother wasn’t wearing her sport socks or her house sandals, the usual combination for a territory woman who finds herself indoors at home at night, which is always. Her feet were bare and marbled. Her toenails had yellowed, and her shins looked sharp and blue, as if they could slice through wood. In my bedroom, I liked to listen to hot men sing about hot women while studying the images of disease. We had very few books in the territory, but we did have one thick volume that contained nothing except pictures and descriptions of diseases. It didn’t even pretend to offer advice or remedies—just gory, vivid photos of people from the neck down with their various inflammations, and their identities protected. The book gave me solace, and some basic Latin.

Though she wasn’t moving, my mother appeared to be in a rush. She gripped the truck keys, making her knuckles white as chalk. I wanted to write BIRTH across one set and DEATH across the other. She studied my collarbone. You made this collarbone, I wanted to remind her, though I knew not to speak to her. She was in the middle of something and could not be interrupted. Or so she’d told me. In our last conversation. If you could call it a conversation.

I slid down to the floor and closed my eyes to steady myself. I knew my mother was still there because she had taken on a new smell. It was a mineral smell.

This past summer, shortly before she stopped leaving our bungalow, when she still went into town for Delivery Day and her shifts at the Banquet Hall, but it was clear something had come over her, I watched my father dig another man’s grave. Poor, dead Wishbone. The women of the territory had gone to pay their respects to Wishbone’s widow. Get her mind off it. Fashion her hair. Bleach her freezer. Put on the Rod Stewart. My mother had not. She stayed in her bed. She didn’t turn to face us when she asked my father and me to please leave her there. She wasn’t up for it. Wasn’t feeling herself. I had just turned fifteen and was finally at the age where I could go with my mother to these sorts of events. Instead, I ended up with the men at the graveyard. My father was incredible with a shovel, and the men had to tell him when to stop digging, he had gone down far enough, there was plenty of space for a casket. For ten caskets. Jesus, The Heavy, the men said to my father chest-deep in the grave, pulling the shovel from his hands. Take a load off, the men said. The high mound of fresh dirt beside us, and then under our boots as we made our way back to our truck, identically hunched and with our arms touching. My father and I sat in the front seat for a long time. I had been trying to tan my face though it was becoming clear I was allergic to the sun. So far, this is not the best day of my life, I wanted to say to The Heavy. What has come over her? I wanted to ask him. Do you even know?

All around us, the men in the graveyard wore mirrored sunglasses. Some were shirtless and looked barbecued in the July heat. They would alternate the positioning of their hands on their shovels so their musculature would be even. My father did none of these things. Sitting in the driver’s seat, he was an uneven man blinded by the sun. I looked through the front windshield to the sky, which was such a bright blue, I felt embarrassed by it. Strategies for happiness. My mother had said it was important to try to come up with these. I pictured a supply plane dropping nets filled with useless, shiny things like mesh bathing suits and white leather furniture. I wanted a headlamp that worked. I wanted a Camaro. I wanted a Le in front of my name. Pony Darlene Fontaine. Le Pony Darlene Fontaine. Le Pony. That’s what everyone will have to call me from this day forward, I said to no one.

Eventually, my father turned the key in the ignition, and Van Halen came on. It was the tape with the angel on it who even as a baby you could tell would be a future convict. I loved that tape. It was all my mother had been listening to for months. I would watch her in our unfinished driveway, staring into the middle distance in her winter coat while the truck shook with the music.

My father wrenched the tape from the player. He threw it into our backseat. I don’t even know, his face seemed to say, I don’t even know. I made a visor out of my hand and put it above his eyes. He drove home like it was an emergency.

THIS WAS THE SMELL my mother was giving off now in our front hallway—an unfinished space, an open body cavity, an open grave. Our dog came bounding down the stairs and wound herself between my mother’s legs. I worried the force of her would knock my mother down. I watched my mother’s heart lift the threadbare fabric of her tracksuit. I searched for the Latin translation of cancer of the dreams. I pulled myself to standing. Our dog sat at my mother’s exposed feet, taking my place. Our dog had perfect posture. She did not want your companionship. She wanted your throat and your hot parts. She loved only my mother. She was too old to be alive. All around us, the men and women of the territory chased after and screamed for their dogs. Our dog had never run away. Our dog had never barked. Not once.

My mother went for our front door. She had to kick things out of the way to get to it, agitation like a shock. There was a blue tarp in our living room, hanging behind our television set, where Teen Stewardess had just begun, and through it I could see my father’s shape. LHEP. A high whine. He was sawing through lumber. He would have his hearing protection and snowmobile goggles on. He was adding a room to our bungalow that would be a room just for my mother. Where nothing would be asked of her. Where she could return to her thinking, to what she called her native thinking.

My mother pulled the front door open with her sure grip, her athlete’s grip, and the northwest wind came hurtling in at us. It was a wind that could carry tires and shatter glass. You had to walk with your back into the northwest wind. There was a partial moon, and you could see the snow was blowing sideways. Our dog paced at my mother’s feet, lush and frantic. It had been months since she had truly felt the weather. She had braids all through her coat. My mother, looking ahead and then back, her mouth moving slowly, but sounding like herself for a moment, said with tenderness, “I had forgotten all about you.” I told myself she was speaking to me. At last, she was speaking to me.

My mother came to this place as a stranger. Now I feared she was retracing her steps out. Returning to a world she had refused to describe to me. Billie Jean Fontaine. Billie Jean. Was that even my mother’s real name?

WE LIVE ON a large tract of land called the territory. When the Leader and his followers first laid claim to it some fifty years ago, they called it Upper Big Territory. Now, it’s just the territory. The descriptors were redundant. Aerial view: two thousand square miles of forest. Population: 391. We started as a single busload searching for the end of the world. Now, look at us.

We didn’t spread out.

The north highway cuts a straight line through town, and this is where you will find most of our local businesses. The residential streets branch off from the north highway in a grid. They are not named. In the territory, we go by bungalow number. Lana’s is 2. Neon Dean’s is 17. Ours is 88. Guess how many bungalows are in the territory? Exactly. One of my favorite jokes is to pretend I’m lost. I will be riding my ten-speed in my mother’s powder-blue workdress, her purse strapped across my body and her ATV helmet on, and I’ll see someone at the edge of their property, and I’ll flag them down and say, Yeah, so, hey, there I was on the north highway, made a couple of turns, and now I am just all spun around. Just totally lost. Cannot seem to find my way back home.

Bungalow after bungalow, built all at once when the territory began. Small cement porches. Snowmobiles and swing sets in the yards, and the girls with show hair long like their mothers’, long like their dogs’, and the men and boys shaved to near bald. Let me give you the lay of the land. The men love to start a lecture this way. Our dogs are white here, and there are no leashes. It is acceptable to make a leash-like mechanism for your children, but not for your dog. Your dog is an animal and to forget her nature is to forget your own. If you would like to see a dog on a leash, turn on your television. We will barbecue under a tarpaulin for our dogs in the dead of winter, but we will not give them names. You. Come. Here. Get. Names are for our people not our dogs. If you would like to see a dog with a name, watch Lassie. It’s on at four. Duct tape in medicine cabinets. Radios with batteries carried from room to room. Always the sound of a truck in the distance. Knowing the trucks by sound. Who is approaching. Who is not going home. Deadbolts on garage doors. A bear on your property after the thaw. Motion-detector light. Gunshot. Beards a sign of mental damage. Gunshot. Tanning beds in our sunken dens, and many of our people the shade of anger. Smelling like coconut oil in line at Value Smoke and Grocer. None of the men going by their birth names. Wishbone, Sexeteria, Hot Dollar, Fur Thumb, Visible Thinker, Traps. The Heavy. Let me give you the lay of the land: men, women, children, loaded rifles. Hearts stop. Dogs, trucks, winter, fucking. Hearts break.

See that lone white bungalow? Now, see the lone window looking out from beneath the roof on the south-facing wall, the one with the black sheet for a curtain that appears to have a single word spelled out in duct tape? That is my bedroom and the word is B E Y O N D. From below, you can only really make out Y O, message enough.

WE HAVE A travel 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, and one, a bull’s-eye, spreading across his back. We agree the dog got out behind her. I do not tell him my mother was wearing her indoor tracksuit, no socks and no shoes. That she walked into late October without shoes. Was she even wearing a coat? With only the dog. Her keys and the dog. The Heavy calls Traps, his oldest friend, on speed dial. “She said she was going into town.” He pauses. “She took the truck.”

SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO, my mother showed up in the territory in a wreck. Three months ago, she drove our previous truck into a tree on an iceless day. A day without weather. Impossible to total your vehicle on that July day. The women of the territory gathered in Rita Star’s kitchen to review the crash. Rita Star had one of the few businesses in town not located on the north highway. She ran it out of her small, wood-paneled bungalow.

Rita Star’s Tanning Emporium, Fitness and Palmistry

The women of the territory tucked their ponytails into their waistbands and sat on Rita Star’s leatherette chairs under her hazardous light fixture. Rita Star had a strange and flammable hobby. Light fixtures made out of old Delivery Day baskets. The women concluded my mother was a woman who made her own obstacles. Why, the women of the territory asked each other in Rita Star’s dim kitchen, why in a world that is mostly obstacles would you make more for yourself? What sort of woman would do that? I mean, who would do that? And besides, who can leave her house at that hour, the dinner hour, when everyone needs everything?

WE HAVE ONLY the one truck. “We have only the one truck,” The Heavy apologizes to Traps when he walks through our front door. “I know,” says Traps, erect as a centaur, “I sold it to you.”

Traps’s face is eager. He smells like aftershave, cologne, and truck interior. Like a man at final resting. Snow melts and pools around his cowboy boots, leaving a ring of water on the ground, on my mother’s winter coat. It was her coat she was kicking out of the way. Why didn’t she take it? She loves her coat. When the territory had been warmer than any year on record, she had worn her coat all spring. I pick it up and hang it on her hook by the front door. We each have a hook. We used to be that kind of family.

The Heavy makes me swear I will stay in the house and, when she comes back, call Drink-Mart, and the men there will get the message to him. He will go with Traps in his truck. Everyone knows Traps’s truck. Traps is the only man with fog lights in the territory, and while this is annoying, it makes flagging him down easy. Since Traps owns the truck lot, Fully Loaded, he has access to certain features for his vehicle, and our men have to accept it when they are told the features were limited edition and no longer available. It was a one-time thing only, man. Sorry, man, sorry. No one sells regret better than Traps.

Traps also controls the fuel supply in the territory. In a giant padlocked shed at the back of the Fully Loaded property, he stores jerry cans filled with gasoline. Above the entrance to the shed, there is a video camera. Traps watches the footage from his trailer, also on the lot, where he conducts his business, surrounded by collages. This is his true passion. Traps cuts images from magazines and combines them on large pieces of paper. He hangs them in his trailer and angles spotlights above them. When a man buys a truck, he will comment on the collages, and Traps will remind the man the collages are for sale. Traps rotates his padlocks and wears a necklace of small keys. His neck is thick as a python. He also has keys buried throughout the lot. Only Traps knows where the keys are and which ones will unlock the stack of padlocks on the fuel shed. If a man wants fuel, he places a request, and within a day, Traps provides it. I need time, Traps explains to the man who wants the fuel and then sweeps his eyes over the lot. The man has no choice but to wait for Traps’s call. Sometimes, talking with the men, in his trailer, Traps will hold his lighter to his tongue and see how close he can get it. Once, when a man came in after the death of his wife, Traps pulled out the first aid kit and put a Band-Aid on the man’s heart. He then put one on his own heart in solidarity. No man knows how full or empty the fuel shed is. Territory men have considered trying to break in but lost their nerve. They have considered setting fire to the whole thing but pictured the inferno, and themselves inevitably part of it. What it comes down to is this: If you want to move, you have to see Traps about it. Traps gives motion to our people. Traps is too important to kill.

“At least it’s October,” says Traps, studying our carpet, my mother’s coat, the water stain made by his boots. “No one tries to die in October.” His voice is rough. He clears it and then lifts his sharp, sad eyes to look at me. “Sorry.”

I unknot and tuck my DEVOTIONAL SECTION T-shirt into my nightpants and watch from the open doorway as Traps has my father shake and brush the sawdust from his clothes, leaving a beige mound on our unfinished driveway and then folding his much larger body into the inferior seat. Traps moves around to the driver’s side door slow as a man in the confident position of being needed. He throws me one last look. The truck peels off. It kicks up gravel and ice. The license plate says DEALR.

You would never know Traps had recently buried his youngest.

No Band-Aid big enough.

WHAT IF SHE comes back before The Heavy does? Will she walk through our front door and up to her bedroom without even seeing me? Will she pull me into her hard frame and whisper apologies and speak promises into my ear and swear she has returned? Will she hold my face to hers like a night-soap mother and say, I see you, Pony, I see you for all that you are? Will she work my hair into a design complex as engines? Will I ride my ten-speed to the bonfire and cause a stir with my new hair design? Will I stand near the flames, ignoring them yet well lit by them, and pull the pins out slowly and let the wind make shapes of my hair? Pony Darlene. Hot damn. Who knew? Even Supernatural will take notice. His ball cap under his hood. Showing just enough of his face. It’s not like it’s about sex with him. No. (Not that I would refuse sex with Supernatural.) It’s more that he strikes me as the only boy in the territory I might have a decent conversation with. I heard Gregorian chants coming from his headphones. Maybe my pain has made me better looking. No. No boy wants the visiting cousin. Will I be able to tell my mother that she has been the only emotional weather in this bungalow for three months straight, and that I too have a lot of feelings? I have a lot of feelings.

I had forgotten all about you.

Yes. You had.

WHAT I KNOW about my mother’s arrival in the territory my mother did not tell me. Lana did. We had gone by Neon Dean’s bungalow. This was the end of July. Almost exactly three months ago. He and Peter Fox St. John were on Neon Dean’s small cement porch sitting shirtless on lawn chairs, retrofitted with foam and old carpet, lifting bags of concrete over their heads. They were working out. Doing reps, they called it. And they were listening to Nazareth. “Love Hurts.” We got off our bicycles. They looked us up and down. We had smudged charcoal around our eyes. Our bra straps were showing. They put down their bags of concrete.

“I know who shot J.R.,” Peter Fox St. John said.

“Shut up, Fuck Pants,” Neon Dean said.

Neon Dean was nineteen, four years older than us. He lived alone. Both of his parents were dead. He showered with his dirty dishes. He had a pet rat called Radical Feminist. Rad for short. He had a girlfriend named Pallas, who was tanned and cruel. She looked like an out-of-work wrestler. She had recently tried to self-pierce her tongue, and now she sounded like Sean Connery. How’sh tricksh? she would say when I biked by her in town. Lana and I were relieved she was not there. The boys were alone. They were checking us out. It was the first time, we agreed, we had been truly checked out, and it made us feel dangerous. We had very little money, but we did have our sex appeal. Neon Dean reached for his toolbox. He had $UPERIOR EXI$TENCE written across the top of it. He flipped open the lid. We bought two white pills and two yellow ones and then went into the woods to the metal husk of the founders’ bus to get very, very high and try to make each other levitate, which is a lot harder than it looks on Teen Spirit.

True story, Lana said. To the max. She said everyone else had been born and raised in the territory. Everyone else could tell stories about each other’s grandparents. Everyone else knew how the others liked their meat cooked. What color thread they had used to sew up their gashes. Your mother just showed up one day in a Mercedes sedan. What kind of vehicle is built that low to the ground? The territory demanded clearance. What kind of world does not? A place to be glided through. The people of the territory had seen Mercedes sedans on their night soaps. Green grass, high heels, tuxedos, endless unmarried fucking. A world without facial issues. Mercedes sedans. An impossible world. Was the woman in the low car an apparition?

Covered in dents and scratches, missing a front fender, muffler scraping the north highway. The woman fell from the driver’s seat of the Mercedes sedan, the car still running, skinning her thigh badly and showing her underwear. It was underwear from elsewhere. Her upper portion smelled like gasoline. Her lower portion urine. She had sucked gas into her mouth. The people of the territory knew about siphoning.

The car radio was playing a song our people had never heard. A kind of music they could not get their heads to move to. A 5/4 beat. Think about that later. For now, one of the men reached in and turned off the ignition of the Mercedes. Our people did not let their vehicles run in May. Winter, sure. Winter, hell yes. But, May? Snowmobiles, generators, chainsaws—what would we do without fuel? When one of the broader men bent down for the woman, she flinched, and then put her arms around his neck. The movement, when it came, was swift and rabid. Feeling a rush, another one of the meeker men joined the effort, though the woman was so thin and without muscles that, not useful, he backed away.

Our people were frightened of the woman. We’d never had a complete stranger here. Never had someone just show up. Was she a descendant of the Leader? She looked like she could come from that stock. Fine bone structure. Luxury vehicle. Do we shoot her or do we feed her? The broad man who had picked her up carried her into Home of the Beef Candy, conscious her dress was up around her waist and her black underwear could not be bought in town. The Heavy was standing in line at the lunch counter taking the place of two territory men. The woman saw him, crawled out of the broad man’s arms, stopped crying immediately, and placed her body against The Heavy’s body. Body on body. Like that, her focus shifted. The Heavy bought her a meal. The woman ate like a predator. The Heavy bought her a second meal. Our people gathered around her, filling the restaurant, spilling out onto the north highway, looking through the window. The men knew to stand beside their wives. They all waited for the woman to speak.

Our people would say later, about your mother, Who knows, maybe women from elsewhere like men with facial issues. Your father had pulled off and burned the last of his bandages just that morning. The morning he saw your mother for the first time. FYI. No joke. Totally perf.

After that, Lana and I played a game we called Wanting. She went first: I want Sexeteria to push up the back of my skirt with his face. And then make me a very mixed tape. I want braces. I want a chain-link fence with red roses threaded through it. Real ones. I want a lace bodysuit with a mock turtleneck. I want to call my first son Everlasting. I want to spend a week in a hotel. I want the pill. And I want the territory to be rich again. Or at least how it was five years ago. And I want 9-1-1. I could have really used 9-1-1. And I want Def Leppard to know my name. Lana Barbara Smith. Lana Barbara. I am like that town in California, but minus California.

Lana and I were fifteen, which was only three years away from getting pregnant and married and pulling our hair back into ponytails of duty and service and wearing pastel dresses and taking the blood of the teenagers at the Banquet Hall and then sitting on the leatherette chairs in our kitchens to look out over the snowfields, our children in them, standing tall on piles of aluminum with rabbit feet around their necks and blowtorches in their hands. We have a very small window, I wanted to say to Lana. Urgent. Very. Small. Window. Urgent.

Some of the fathers had already started warming up to The Heavy. I was the only girl in the territory who did not have a Gold Lady Gold name necklace (because I was a virgin). I was the only girl in the territory who did not have a Walkman (because I was an untouched virgin). The fathers knew what this meant, and they were taking note of me for their sons, who, at this age, were just starting to get their nicknames. So while we got jewelry that was quick to tarnish or a Walkman that was sure to break, the boys got nicknames of infamy like Fang and T-Bone. The Heavy wanted nothing to do with the fathers. I wanted nothing to do with their sons.

OUTSIDE OUR BUNGALOW, the northwest wind has died down, and it has started to rain. I hear ice slide off the roof. It hits the hard ground and smashes apart, making my body jump. My mother left just over two hours ago. Her eyes flat, her skin the color of nicotine. Her parting words––“I had forgotten all about you”––echo in my head. If my mother has forgotten all about me, what’s to stop her from leaving the territory for good? A space has opened between us. It feels uncrossable. A war, an entire sea. Me on one side. And my mother on the other, disappearing from view. My pulse pounds in my ears. My throat tightens. Don’t cry now. Cry later. Cry in your sleep. I turn on all the lights and climb the stairs. I consider calling Lana, asking her to come over, but she has no idea. The Heavy and I have kept my mother’s illness a secret, even from each other. It’s not like we agreed to this. We’re the same. Do not enter. Private property. About the sudden change that came over my mother three months ago, we haven’t spoken a word.

Her bedroom is directly across the hall from mine. She thought to close her door before she left.

On my wall, I have a black-and-white picture of Muhammad Ali that I tore from a magazine that’s a decade old. Ali is holding up a piece of paper that says, THE SECRET OF MUHAMMAD ALI. When I have my portrait done, this is how I’ll do it. Beside him is my blood schedule for the month. The days I have completed are x-ed out, and above it is a postcard Lana put in our mailbox that just says, SIGH!!! I have Ric Ocasek’s face inside Samuel Beckett’s hair in a frame beside my bed. He is wearing dark sunglasses and under him I have written DREAM MACHINE.

PONY BECKETT OCASEK.

Le Pony Beckett Ocasek.

The Secret of Le Pony Dream Machine Beckett Ocasek Ali.

I GLUE RHINESTONES around my eyes. I put on my mother’s camouflage tracksuit and her gold hoop earrings. I have two books on my bed: my disease book, which from the Latin loosely translates into Brutal Errors of the Human Body, and a romance novel, Chance Encounter, that I stole out of a turquoise mother purse at the Banquet Hall. My album cover collection takes up half a wall. It is in milk crates. I have it organized by emotion. To be free is to have achieved your life. Someone said this once. I’ll count my money later when I’ve got more to add to it.

I am going to the bonfire. Whether The Heavy comes back or not, I am going. I sat at my mother’s door with my knees folded to my chest for the last two months. You can see the imprint in the carpet, where it has worn out and the vinyl floor is shining through. I pushed notes under her door. Notes I don’t know that she ever read, or even saw.

I am not waiting anymore. I have plans.

Wantings.

I press play on my tape recorder, and the Gregorian chants come on. I borrowed them from the Lending Library after I heard them coming from the tormented headphones of Supernatural. I wanted to ask him if I could listen to them, but I had forgotten how to speak. We were lying side by side on the cots at the Banquet Hall having just had our blood taken. I was trying to subtly Whitesnake my body while he lay perfectly still, staring up, black paint on his jeans and smelling like woodstove, which was more than I could handle. His boots hung over the end of his cot. I pretended we were in bed together, that our cots were joined and the bed was a waterbed, and we were in a field where we wouldn’t get shot or mauled. Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full blown storm where everything changes. Someone said this once. Here, you have a rest. Here, you have some citrus. This one’s a fainter. Oh, look at her go. Have mercy. The women in their puffed-sleeved pink dresses, talking about me, moving busily around me, gripping my shoulders, getting me to put my head between my knees and make it settle, then lift it up slowly, slower now, Pony Darlene. That’s a girl. God, you look like your mother. Doesn’t she now?

SUPES IS THE SON of Traps, the truck dealer, and his wife, Debra Marie, and he is by far the best-looking boy in the territory. He was also the youngest boy in the history of our people to be given his nickname. Let me give you the lay of the land. It is between the ages of fourteen and nineteen that a territory boy gets his nickname. He will be called by this nickname until he is buried at final resting. It is his nickname, burned into a piece of shellacked plywood, that will be placed under his portrait when the territory mourners line up before it to hammer out their grief.

Supes got his nickname when he turned thirteen. Supes was not like the other boys. Their running shoes worn through and thick with mud, sticks of dynamite between their teeth. Wade Jr., Ivo Jr., Gary Jr., Constantine Jr. Their voices took forever to break. Supes’s voice went from boy to man in a night. He never lit things on fire. He never chased. Never barked. Was never breathless. The boy practically had light coming off his body. Where did he come from? Visible Thinker would think. The boy’s clean tank top under his parka. The shape of his arms. At Drink-Mart, The Silentest Man spoke the only name he could think to give the boy. Matches striking. Glass against glass. The younger men tossed the name between them.

“Supernatural.”

“Supernatural.”

“Supes for short.”

“Yeah, Supes.”

“Supes.”

The men of the territory laughed, and when the boy did not, they stopped laughing.

All of the girls wanted him. They loved their dogs, but they loved Supernatural more. In the graveyard, by the bonfire, Thursday night after Thursday night, they trained their eyes on the incline, the one he might walk over any moment. Sometimes his hood would show. Oh God, oh my God. The girls would elbow each other, throw fits under their outerwear. Quiet one, he is. The girls would flick their eyes toward him and then away, let their hair fall in front of their faces. I can do things to you simultaneously, the girls would communicate with their minds. This is serious. I have skills I can coordinate, combos I can execute. Make me your wife. But by the time the girls cleared their faces of their hair, Supes would be gone.

I wanted his soundtrack.

And possibly, him.

I fold the hem under and pin my mother’s camo track jacket so it shows off my midsection. Better. Baby one night somebody going to strike a match on a tombstone and read your name. Someone said this once. SETTLE YOUR HEAD. This is what I have written on a flag above my bed. Settle your head.

I twist the knob and creak the door open to my mother’s bedroom. I turn on the overhead light. It still works. The curtains are drawn. A knot of black bedcovers, and her pillow curved where her head lay against it. I look through her dresser drawers, her closet. I get down on my knees and run my hands over her carpet. I look under her bed. Lift the black bedcovers.

Nothing.

The room is empty.

THE DAY AFTER my mother crashed our previous truck into a tree on an iceless day was the day our people call Free Day. When I left our bungalow, my mother was in her bed with a white bandage across her forehead, raking her fingers through our dog’s fur. Save for our totaled truck, our yard was empty. I held and kissed her hand three times and cranked her window open. You could hear the reservoir lap the shoreline. It was summer. Summer is a beautiful time here. Don’t you see that, I wanted to say to my mother. See that.

Free Day is the day we put our unwanted objects at the edges of our properties, and you can just ride by and take whatever you want. Most of the items are in need of some repair, and these are clearly marked AS IS. I always started at Neon Dean’s on Free Day because sometimes he left money or pills in the pockets of his old clothes. I had done my tour through town and had a Betamax, headlamp, and crimping iron balanced on my handlebars and had roped a shovel and a ceiling fan to the back of my bike. Deal with it. Hell yes. Focus Thine Anarchy. Pony Ali. Things were looking up.

When I got home, my mother’s bedroom was in a pile on our front yard. Neon Dean’s girlfriend, Pallas, a few years older than me, was rifling through it. She had human bite marks on her skin and my mother’s belts fastened around her neck. Her friend was with her. I had seen her friend around. She was Rita Star’s daughter, and Rita Star had called her Grace, and Grace wanted nothing to do with her mother. The women of the territory would sit at Rita Star’s kitchen table in their ski jackets and white underwear after tanning in Rita Star’s tanning bed and talk about their falling-out, and how unnatural it was for a mother to be separated from her daughter even though Grace lived right across the street in bungalow 21 on a mattress in Pallas’s closet. Pallas had rigged a string of lights and nailed a final resting bouquet above Grace’s head. All I need is tuberculosis. Grace laughed and changed her name to Future.

Future was stabbing her cigarette into the ground. She stood up. She had my mother’s lotions, perfumes, waterproof makeup, and underwear stuffed into the large pockets of her daypants. She pulled on my mother’s silver party dress and smoothed it over her body.

“When he sees me in this, he’s going to name his dick after me.”

“He is.”

She found my mother’s red ski jacket and put it on over the silver party dress.

“When he sees me in this, he’s going to make me pregnant with his supernatural baby.”

“He is.”

“Futurenatural.”

And then seeing me, Pallas said, “Seriously?”

And Future said, “Seriously.”

I was wearing hunting glasses and Neon Dean’s discarded camo outerwear, which had a white pill in the right pocket and five dollars in the left. I came to a stop in front of them. It was warm enough to kick up some dirt.

“Nice show the other day,” Pallas said.

“Yeah, nice show at the final resting for Debra Marie’s baby,” Future said.

“Real nice.”

“Real classy.”

“We know all about your mother, Pony Darlene.”

“She’s a cheater.”

“Yeah, we know all about her rampant cheating.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“So jealous of Debra Marie—”

“She had to kill her baby.”

“Then crashing her truck—”

“So she could go to Fully Loaded and get a new one.”

“Any excuse to go to Fully Loaded.”

“Any excuse to see Traps.”

“We know all about your mother.”

“Poaching Traps.”

“We know all about her cheating.”

“But do you?”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s such a deep geek.”

“Geek nation.”

“Welcome,” I said.

“Freak nation.”

“Bienvenue.”

“Mental like her mother.”

“Demented like her father.”

“As is,” I said. And I dropped the white pill onto my tongue. And I ripped the five-dollar bill in half. And I threw my bicycle a shockingly far way.

And when Pallas and Future started at me and I didn’t flinch, they turned to each other.

“I might just want to go home and get into my nightpants.”

“Yeah, I’m tired too.”

“Seriously, I did my bloodwork this morning and need some citrus.”

And they left in their matching WANT IT MORE sweatshirts. Their sweatshirts hung down to their knees. Future’s had a laminated pin on it that said, FAINTER. I had the same pin.

WHEN MY MOTHER first led me through the woods and down to the reservoir, I was shaking with terror. I thought I might throw up, and I told her so, and she said, “It makes our life so much better to have this other separate life. Just to know it is here,” and she held me by the wrist. I was eight, nearly nine. When we reached the shoreline, she unlaced her boots, unclasped her workdress, pulled it over her head, and hung it from a tree branch. The water was still and gray, and the moon was in it white as a bone, and my mother stepped into the water. I gasped. She turned back and put her hand over my mouth. “Don’t wreck it, Pony.” And then I watched my mother from the banks of the black mud as she walked into the reservoir and then did a shallow dive. Would she be sucked down? Would her skin dissolve? Was this where all life began? Since when did my mother wear nothing under her workdress? Where was her white underwear? Her beige bra? A starless sky. To it, my mother let out a cry. It was happiness. She cut through the water. I agreed with my father. I had never seen anyone quite so alive.

I begged her to teach me how to swim.

IT IS TRAPS’S TRUCK, not ours, that backs sharply into the unfinished driveway and fills my body with dread. A reversal meant to awe me. Traps knows I am watching from my bedroom window, the curtain drawn to one side. B E Y O N D. He shuts down his fog lights and pulls in all the darkness around us. My father gets out of the truck. His bowed head, his slow steps. This tells me everything I need to know.

In the territory, the boys are dragging tires, cabinets, wood pallets, whatever they can find to burn, to the graveyard. They have cans of lighter fluid in their back jean pockets and cigarettes in their mouths. They are wearing fingerless gloves, Yamaha vests, and scarves around their heads, tied into bandannas. It is ten below. They grip their handlebars and hold their bodies high off their dirt bikes and pedal hard. They cannot believe muscle has to rip in order to grow. They have playing cards in their wheels that go tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic. They want the territory to show up on a satellite. They want the bonfire to be photographed from space. The boys think about space the way some boys think about girlfriends. They get stomach cramps thinking about space.

In their headphones, the boys listen to asteroids blazing through the atmosphere toward them. Later tonight, they will trade their cassettes by the bonfire while the leather of their running shoes melts.

“Which one are you listening to?”

“Maxell!”

“Oh, that one is killer!”

“You?”

“Memorex.”

I don’t want to tell the boys the asteroid’s approach is the sound of the tape running, and the sound of its impact the tape coming to its end and then clicking off. I don’t want to tell them their tapes are blank tapes, and Deep Space Tapes is a fraudulent business run by the older, smarter brother of Peter Fox St. John, and they should just hit up the Lending Library and check out the Gregorian chants. They’re in the devotional section.

SEVEN THINGS shortly before 10:00 P.M.:

1 The boys of the territory have the same shaved hairstyle as monks. Monks are their own deep space tape. Correlation.

2 There are a million asteroids on a crash course with the earth. This is not the kind of thing you tell a boy whose running shoes are on fire.

3 I put on my mother’s perfume, and I do this exactly the way she would have. I spray my wrists and then I run my wrists up under my hair, and, in that instant, I become a woman.

4 At night, I reliably think about death. I have no aunts, no uncles, no siblings, no grandparents, and when my mother and father are gone, I will be the last Fontaine living in the Last House. Urgent.

5 The reservoir is the result of an asteroidal event, which the astrophysicists also call an impact event. A person could organize her timeline into impact events. This is one approach to understanding a life.

6 While asteroids are, in their own catastrophic way, totally romantic, what the boys of the territory want most is a girl rolling off them saying, That was fucking amazing.

7 Tonight, that girl will be Lana. Lana Barbara California as she will come to call herself.

“YOU NEED ME,” Traps tells The Heavy when they come through our front door, bringing with them the bitter air. On our small cement porch, we have a partial telephone, a broken fridge, and a large piece of chipboard with an 88 painted on it. My mother used to trim my nails on our front porch. I would lie on the cement and she would hold my feet in her lap, and she was radiant. The men kick the ice from their boots and push the door closed. Traps refuses to go home to his wife, Debra Marie, should something come up. He makes a “no way” sign with his hands and calls her on speed dial.

Debra Marie has just suffered what the territory calls its worst tragedy in nearly twenty years. The women of the territory talk about it and how she has not cried once. Not broken down once. Not mentioned her dead child once. The women can’t even tan. They can’t drink their coffee. It’s hideous. It’s cruel. The women feel a weight in their chests, heavy as bronze. Debra Marie, oh, Debra Marie. Poor Debra Marie. It wasn’t her fault. Was it?

After the final resting, when we were leaving the Banquet Hall, even through the commotion, I overheard the men of the territory talking to Debra Marie. They hulked before the black square, which stood in place of the portrait, a bouquet on either side of it, under three floor lamps, and they kept their sunglasses on and did not know what to do with their large arms, like bouncers with nothing left to guard.

“Noble Debra Marie.”

“Noble.”

“If you were a man, that’s what we’d call you, Debra Marie.”

“Noble.”

“Your nickname would be Noble.”

“Yeah, Noble.”

“Noble.”

“HE NEEDS ME.” Traps tells this to Debra Marie over the telephone. Quickly, not wanting to tie up the line. I can see Debra Marie on the other end. Her plain hair arrangements, her purposeful body. She would iron her indoor tracksuit but never put it on. “He has only the one truck. Unlike us. The single vehicle.” Traps adjusts himself and looks for cigarettes. “You have your own truck. Unlike the Fontaine mother, you have your own truck. And it’s fully loaded.” Then he pauses to listen and says, “Okay, okay, almost fully loaded,” and he lights a cigarette, one of my mother’s cigarettes. “She’ll be back. Nowhere to go.” And he glances for The Heavy, to share this small encouragement, but The Heavy has left the room. “Pony was the last to see her.”

And then Traps turns his eyes on me, and lets them go soft and pleading on my mouth. My supple, athletic mouth. I can see him working out the timeline in his head. Two nights until Saturday night. Two nights until I walk the side of the north highway in my button-down and pencil skirt with my perfect waistline-to-ass ratio. A 0.8.

THE SECRET OF PONY DARLENE FONTAINE

THREE MONTHS AGO. Nighttime. When the men of the territory were going to and then leaving Drink-Mart, clusters of them smelling medicinal and exhaling turbines of smoke, clapping each other hard on the shoulder, on the back, a half hug here and there, then dispersing into their trucks to one-eye it home and fall asleep on their wives in their nightdresses, I walked the shoulder of the highway in my white button-down and black pencil skirt. I had a plan. This was step one. I carried a clipboard and waved down the trucks, knowing only one of them would come to a full stop. All of the passing territory men called out, “Pony.” They rolled down their windows. “Pony Darlene Fontaine.” Reaching out with a lotioned hand, I introduced myself as The Complaint Department and asked the men the question I was desperate to be asked, “What is troubling you?” Then I gave them my card with my toll-free number, 1-800-OH-MY-GOD, should they wish to discuss their troubles further.

The men laughed. No one complains here. That is not the territory’s way. Complaint is a form of self-degradation. Hardship is a matter of perception. The men quoted the Leader. The men were missing teeth. They were missing fingers. They were missing testicles. They had slipped disks. They ate the tendons of animals. The organs of animals. They carved them up and gave thanks. Thank you for your meat. They delivered their babies. Their babies became teenagers. Men hunting women. Women hunting men. Men hunting animals. That is how it goes here, Pony Darlene, the men called out, and tearing up the gravel, sped home.

“My only complaint,” Traps said to me, too loud, bit of a slur, throwing on his emergency brake and unlocking his doors, “is that you won’t blow me in the back of my truck.” And, step two, I blew him while he said my name over and over, and when he was done I directed him to his fuel shed, where, step three, he took off his heavy necklace of keys, while looking at me under his security camera. The look was exaltation and the Saturday night sky was dark. However grainy, Traps would watch the video of me waiting for my payment, step four, one full jerry can of his gasoline—one hundred miles of transport—again and again, pausing it at certain moments, when he could really see my face.

I HEAR TRAPS opening and closing our kitchen cupboards. He is looking for the alcohol and concluding his call home to Debra Marie. “We did a tour through the territory. The Heavy doesn’t want to do a door-to-door. Not just yet. Says it’s a family matter. A private matter.”

Tonight, Traps will drink himself to sleep on our beige couch. Too much, too little. He still finds this hard to gauge. He will be standing, talking, drinking, taking, killing, talking, drinking, standing. And then unconscious. Debra Marie loves crime shows. Murder shows. Shows where the plot rests on violence. I wonder when she will stop dragging Traps’s faithless body to comfort. When there will be a trail of blood in his wake. An antler plunged through his heart. “Besides, it’s Delivery Day tomorrow, and no territory woman in her right mind would miss Delivery Day.” He agrees with himself: “No territory woman would miss Delivery Day.”

My father is lying in the half-built room on a hooded chair, and because of the tarp, and the work light he has set up in there, we are both a bright blue. Is she missing? I want to ask him. You can tell me. I can handle it. I can’t handle it. “You need to get some rest,” I say instead to my father, and I unlace and pull off his boots, tug at the cuffs of his jeans. I was with him when he bought the jeans. “Not too tight?” The Heavy said to the salesmen, who nodded with their arms crossed, which was a confusing set of messages. “Denim is a tight and captivating weave,” the salesmen said. The Heavy bought them in a moment of hope. Hope makes you buy clothes that don’t fit you. A brawl to pull off, the jeans hold my father’s shape and appear to be standing, a former fighter turning soft.

“I love that perfume,” he says.

Three things he does not say: Where are you going? When will you be back? Won’t you be cold?

My father, who never raises his voice. Never goes to Drink-Mart. Does not listen to music. Does not watch television. He fears he will miss something real, he explains. Life is about paying attention, Pony.

Traps watches me closely as I lace up my boots and throw on my camouflage outerwear. Camo on camo. I open the front door. On the back of my outerwear are the words I was coloring in earlier with Neon Dean’s impermanent marker, when my mother came down the stairs in her indoor tracksuit, a stale cigarette in one hand and her truck keys in the other. Fifteen years of blank tape running out and clicking off. The asteroidal event. The impact event.

CAN’T TOUCH THIS

THE NORTH HIGHWAY is silver with ice, and Lana is riding behind me. This is our usual formation. Tonight, we’re just trying to stay upright. The road is slick. The shoulder better. At least there’s some traction. In the distance, we can see the bonfire, sparks shooting up into the low black sky. Of note: This is exactly what I see before I faint. Same panorama. I listen to protest rallies and sporting events (also in the devotional section). I love the sound of a crowd. I put the tapes into my cassette recorder, and I feel surrounded. I pump my fist in the air and nearly wipe out. Lana lets out a howl behind me.

When I arrived at Lana’s bungalow, she was at her bedroom window. She had teased her hair and was holding a crowbar in her hands, vigorously working the bottom of her window frame. I knew she would be sweating. She was a sweater in the first degree. Nerves or yearning.

Two years ago, Lana’s mother died. Caution. Steep drop. Lifeguard off duty. The women of the territory decided the cause was inconsolability. Soon after her mother’s death, Lana’s father married a girl just a few years older than Lana. This is how it goes in the territory. In the rare instance a woman dies, it is expected her husband will remarry. Children need a mother. If a man dies, his widow remains a widow. Children need a mother, and they still have one. Lana’s mother’s portrait is wrapped in a black bedsheet and stored in their toolshed. Lana’s stepmother’s name is Denise. Her portrait hangs above their mantel. In it, she wears a very tight sweater and Vaseline on her eyelashes, and a smile that seems to say, I am pretty sure I am being paid for sex with food, shelter, and beauty products. Her name necklace, given to her by an ex-boyfriend, says DENIS.

Lana’s mother’s color scheme was violet. Now, Lana’s bungalow is red, and her stepmother sits sidesaddle on the shag carpet in their living room, watching television and eating from a large bowl. She is pregnant, and most nights, Lana’s father stands in their driveway with his truck running, staring into his high beams until his eyes sting. When Lana screamed at her father, “Admit it, there’s a stranger in the house, and she’s evil! Admit it, Denis is pregnant with another man’s baby!” Lana’s father put a lock on her bedroom door and painted her window shut.

I watch Lana fall to the ground and walk unevenly to her ten-speed. Her father has rigged their front yard with motion-detector lights. Lana’s father reminds me how completely I have slipped from The Heavy’s view. Maybe it’s the camo on camo, I joke to myself. A joke is a disguise. Don’t you think there is always something unspoken between two people? Someone said this once. Paint my window shut. Worry about me. I want my father, The Heavy Fontaine, to paint my window shut. I want my father to worry about me. I want my mother to come home.

“You are totally talking to yourself,” Lana says and looks back at her bungalow, bungalow 2. “Teen prison break. Seriously. I might have just broken my wrist. Is everything all right? You look like Cherie Currie. Only after a fight. And before a hunt. With longer hair. And more height. And less fame.”

“Thank you.”

“And maybe poorer and more isolated.”

“Let’s roll.”

“Psyched.”

Lana has tied a strip of leather around her neck. She is wearing a snowmobile suit and her steel-toe, steel-shank boots. She has belted the snowmobile suit and cut off the arms. She has her wool socks pulled up above her knees. “It’s the closest I can get to lingerie,” she says. On the back of her armless suit she has written HIGH HOPES. She digs her heels into the ground. It’s frozen. Even The Heavy couldn’t muscle through it. Winter in the Death Man’s shed. “Damn-o that camo. I can barely see you. Don’t get shot!” Lana says. Then a tremble to her lower lip. “Seriously. Killing you would kill me.” She laughs. “1-800-OH-MY-GOD.”

I DID NOT NAME the complainant (as much as she tried to get it out of me), but I did tell Lana about The Complaint Department. One July night, in the founders’ bus. Two pink pills, three blue ones. This was soon after I secured my first jerry can of gasoline. Nineteen more to go.

“It’s not like kissing on television,” I said.

“Duh,” Lana said.

“Not even close.”

“Okay.”

“You have to really relax your mouth. See? More. That’s better. That’s good. Your mouth goes a lot farther back than you think it does. Remember when we took our emotional measurements? We thought I would have the broader shoulders, but you did? The actual measurement of your mouth will astound you. Blowing will free you from the emotional measurement of your mouth.”

“Exciting.”

“And could have a domino effect on your other body parts.”

“Bonus.”

“Despite the name, there’s no blowing.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t blow on it.”

“I won’t.”

“Don’t blow on the dick.”

“I won’t. I mean, when the dick shows, I won’t blow on it.”

“By the end, it will not be unlike the headbang.”

“All right.”

“You’ll feel it in your neck in the morning.”

“Okay.”

“If you need a break, you just tuck the dick under your hair and up behind your ear. Rub it against your jawline. You are in charge. This is an exchange and you are in charge of the exchange.”

“I am in charge.”

“Regardless of depth, pacing, and tongue placement, this is the most important part. You are in charge.”

“I am in charge.”

“Don’t worry.”

“You know that’s hard for me,” Lana said.

And then stoned, so stoned, Pony Ali, Le Pony Ali of the Superior Existence, I said, “This might be my one natural talent.”

“You are so lucky, Pony.”

The small voice. The large darkness. It opened up between us. And I was suddenly no longer stoned. I was so unstoned. So unlucky. Pony of the Inferior Existence.

Of course that July night I had been thinking about the scene I left at home. It was Free Day. The day after my mother totaled the truck. My mother, a fresh cut above her left eyebrow where she hit the windshield, almost invisible under her black bedcovers, our dog the only one allowed in there with her, and one floor below, my father building a room, which, let’s admit, is not for my mother but for him. His alternate jeans and his outerwear folded in a neat stack on the ground. While other territory men drag razors across their scalps and weep into black towels, my father wets his hair and combs it off his face with his fingers. He leans over our kitchen garbage and trims his beard. He is the only man in the territory with hair, and this is because of his scars, because before Debra Marie and Traps, my father’s tragedy was what the territory called its worst tragedy. And right now, my father is sleeping on a hooded chair. A chair he built for my mother after she said—and we could see she had been crying—“If only this chair had a hood.” A chair to keep her coming downstairs. To keep her sitting with us. Our people are a sitting people. When the women of the territory aren’t drawing blood at the Banquet Hall, they are sitting across from each other and starting with “You good?”

My father called it the Easiest Chair. Not the easier chair. Not the less difficult chair. But the Easiest Chair. My father, The Heavy. My father, the heaviest.

The sun was rising, and with it, I could read the graffiti on the ceiling of the founders’ bus, and it was all about love, which seems to be all about addition, about surplus.

person + person

person + person

person + person

Where were the minus signs?

THE PIT PARTY. The boys have set what they can on fire, and the girls are sitting in a loose circle, leaning on headstones, leaning on each other, flames as high as their bungalows. Perfect circles are for other people, people who don’t have the dead in their way. Lana and I add our bicycles to the pile. I hand Lana her three pills. “Ready?”

“Amped.”

I put mine on my tongue. Yellow, pink, blue. We swallow them together.

“Sit on my face, Pony Darlene!” one boy yells. He pronounces face like fay-uhssss. He has small bleeds on his jaw from shaving. He jogs around the bonfire holding a can of butane in the air. He has drawings up and down his bare arms. Fangs, knives and tires, guitars, bikinis and telephones, the Death Man, an IV drip, and words cap-lettered—BLOOD, JUSTICE, LADIESMAN. He pounds his chest and says, “What do we have left to burn?” He pronounces burn like bee-yurnnnn. The pills kick in.

Neon Pony.

Welcome.

Bienvenue.

“I’m the Secret Service!” yells another boy. He is looking at the girls and needing the girls to look back at him. They won’t. The girls, who have all had sex encounters, have their names on their necklaces. They glint by the fire. Their hair falls far down their backs and is picked up by the black wind. It takes on a new form with every gust. Touch it. Touch me. I am the softest thing going. “Nature wants girls and kills boys,” one girl says. She is wearing an eye patch, and I know it’s because she needs it. “I tried to make alcohol from potatoes,” one skinny boy says, “and my father duct-taped me to a chair for two days.” The other boys hold themselves and laugh, “Two days!” And the skinny boy laughs though I can see he is sore, and was after love.

The girls pass a bottle, drinking through a straw to quicken the effect. The ones who did their bloodwork this morning are seeing spots. They fall back and take in the sky. “This sky is so dull! Do something, sky! Do a meteor shower or something! Feel me up! Make it summer!” The girls grin until they show their gums. They untuck their shirts and knot them under their breasts. They fold the waistbands of their pants down so the edges of their hipbones come up. My hipbones. You like them? They’re new. Softness bracketed by hardness. Copyrighting this look, the girls think, copyrighting this whole look, my best look, and when the girls sit up, “Head rush,” they stare down at the ground to settle it. Their blood multiplies itself, racing to occupy the spaces that need occupying. They train their eyes on the incline, the one Supes might walk over any minute. Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love. Someone said this once.

One night, almost two years ago, Lana and I snuck into her father’s truck. We wanted to steal his cigarettes, his small change. Whatever we could find. He had just married Denis. “She brought a belt to the marriage,” Lana said. “Seriously. She showed up with a belt. That was it. A belt.” We wanted to steal her father’s truck.

“I can drive,” I said.

“Not well enough,” Lana said.

Like every matte black truck in the territory, Lana’s father’s had a CB. We dialed through the frequencies, getting mostly static. “Come in, come in,” I said. We were both in our nightdresses, had badly crimped hair and whatever press-on nails we could press on. “Come in, come in.” And then a girl’s voice came through, “I read you.” Lana grabbed the microphone. “Go ahead,” the girl said. “I’m pregnant,” Lana said, lying. My mouth dropped open. “I need help,” Lana said, not lying. The girl began her instruction. It was Pallas. Before she got together with Neon Dean. Before she got tanned and cruel, and tried to pierce her tongue. After her fourteenth birthday. When she got pregnant with the Delivery Man’s baby.

“Okay, girl. Listen close. You have to starve yourself, but make it look like you are suddenly eating like that woman on that show. The one who can’t leave her house except by a crane. Then, hard as this is, you have to wear baggier clothes. Like a widow. Never let anyone see you naked. You can use duct tape and girdles to pretty convincing effect. Ask Rochelle. Or Lorraine. Or even Tristan. Tina had skills with the whole weight-lifter belt, shrink-wrap thing, and Tiffany with those junior-size pants. You can only stop a pregnancy from happening on night soaps. Or, and this is a last fucking resort, you do the Mother Trick. You break down and tell your mom, and when she is done hitting your pretty face, she gets her owl feathers and her foam and hides them under her bed, and starts stuffing herself to the appropriate measurements. Inches versus time. Watch your inches. Watch your time. Parallel baby. And she suffers with it. The nausea lays her right out. No one can touch her. No one can see her. And when you start to feel the hellishness coming on, you wait as long as you can, and then your mom drives you out to the forest with some cough syrup or whatever you can get your hands on at Drugs and More Drugs. We all know the forest is for the babies. It grows for the babies. To have them, to hide them if you have to. And you get that thing out of your body and against hers. Make sure your father doesn’t figure it out. Make sure he doesn’t catch on. Seriously. That’s on your mom. And you. Fathers hate to be tricked. Remember Stephanie. But seriously, if you can pull this off, you will make both your parents so happy. Your mom will seem young to your dad, and your dad will seem young to our men. You handed your youth over to them. They should be giving thanks inside. But seriously, you have to be ready. Something can happen between you and the baby. You just have to commit to the motions. Make a list of the motions. You can’t get lost. You have to know what to do next. Have the baby. Hand over the baby.”

AROUND THE BONFIRE, the territory boys approach the girls. They have new shoulders, new jawlines, and are looking for kicks. A boy comes up to Lana. He wears a tire chain for a necklace, has a pine twig behind his ear. Across one set of knuckles, he has written PAIN, and across the other set, PAIN.

“Seriously, let’s reproduce. I’ll give you my chips.”

“I can buy my own chips.”

“You can have my headphones.”

“So?”

“You’re pretty.”

“Ew.”

“What?”

“Stop trying so hard.”

“Okay.”

“Effort is repulsive.”

“Okay.”

“Your effortful smile. Your kingdom of effort.”

“Okay!”

“You have the voice of a beggar.”

“Sorry?”

“Don’t punctuate your questions. A territory man presents his questions with flatness.”

“Will you do me.”

“It’s just don’t be keen. Seriously. It’s gross.”

“Okay.”

“Besides, what are headphones without a Walkman?”

“Okay. Here, take my Walkman.”

And Lana and the boy leave the loose circle for the dark space behind Shona Lee’s husband’s headstone. Lana knows that if she becomes a mother, she will never listen to her Walkman again. But still, Lana +.

I NEED TO GET some air. Lately, I have been hyperventilating in my sleep. This can be accompanied by a wet face. Love. Brutal error of my human body. Underneath my pillow, I keep a picture of a coach. A glossy image I tore from a magazine. He is wearing a collared shirt and a headset. He has his arms out and he is yelling. This is bullshit! Take a deep fucking breath and wipe your face on your black bedsheet and get back to it, Pony!

My mother has been missing for five hours.

I leave the bonfire and head for the woods that border the edge of the graveyard. The boy with the can of butane follows, and when I say, “Get the fuck away from me,” he says, “Do you need CPR?” And when I give him the finger, he returns to the bonfire, throws his can of butane into it, and yells, “Heads up!” (Heeyed-zyup!), then looks to outer space. “Did you get that?”

Pallas, performer of the Mother Trick, has a little sister now. She’s four. Every night, the girl begs Future to let her sleep with her in her closet bed. Future says sure and blocks the image of her own mother, Rita Star, from her mind. The sound of the girl’s silvery breath. She sleeps on the mattress with her arms above her head like she’s just landed on it.

It’s a new kind of darkness with my mother maybe roaming it. Don’t you scare yourself! Don’t you crack on me now, 88! You’ve got a plan to execute! Pony Supreme! Chin up! Chin the fuck up! I can see the Death Man’s trailer from here. He’s done some landscaping. I cannot picture him touching anything living. His furniture is plastic. His gray, featherless birds are on the roof of his shed. They don’t seem to eat or migrate. They just dive-bomb us, wailing. We’re so annoyed by the birds, but maybe they are trying to tell us something, issue some type of warning?

I wish I had a cigarette. I wish I smoked.

MY MOTHER WOULD never talk about her life before she arrived in the territory. She didn’t like to remember it, she told me. This was her life now. Her only life.

When Shona Lee’s husband, Wishbone, shot himself in the chest last winter, Shona Lee called my mother and asked her to come over. Said she wanted me to come too. Had a soft spot for me. We stood in Shona Lee’s driveway. Shona Lee lit a Virginia Slim and talked about walking a brave line. She wore a leopard dress, blue eyeshadow, and her dead husband’s plaid outerwear. A week before, the men of the territory had knocked on her door. It was early November. The middle of the night. The men stood on her small cement porch, all of them looking in different directions. Shona Lee was confused by the men and so called for her husband. When he didn’t answer, she checked their bungalow. Surely he was in it and this was her worst dream. “What is love if not a space for horrors to grow?” she said to my mother, and my mother agreed. An accident. He had been fully loaded, the men tried to explain to Shona Lee, something close to a joke. A woman’s despair can be so hard to take. When Shona Lee was told the next morning the ground was frozen and her husband would spend the winter in the Death Man’s shed, Shona Lee begged to see his body. She was told no. Once a corpse is handed over to the Death Man, it is never seen again, but Shona Lee was already walking away when the men told her that. She knew the rules.

The weeping went from bed to sink, floor to shower, vacant room to vacant room, and so much time balled on the bed. Shona Lee could not stand her widowed self. “Enough,” she said, and with her widow money bought twenty jerry cans of gasoline from Traps and an animal print dress from The Woman Store. She was set to drive the two thousand miles south to the next nearest town. “You’re the only one who knows what’s beyond the territory.” Shona Lee lifted the tarp and showed my mother her truck bed. It was filled with fuel. I had the crazed heart rate of prey, but was trying to appear cold and bored like the teen wives on Teen Wives. Like Denis. Arms crossed, eyes half rolled back. As much as I pressed my mother, this was the one line of questioning she would never submit to. What is beyond.

“You will be a stranger among strangers,” my mother said, and I could feel a charge run through her. “Why can’t a woman be more than one person in a lifetime?” she continued. “Why can’t she be two or three?”

“I will be a stranger among strangers,” Shona Lee motivated herself.

And that summer, while I sunburned nearby on an emergency blanket, The Heavy dug Shona Lee’s husband’s grave, and then Shona Lee stood over it singing Led Zeppelin with the voice of God. She sang over the drone of the horseflies. Her husband was in the ground. He had a place. She had a place. This savage place, her only place. She didn’t want to be a stranger. She wanted to be known. Shona Lee remained in the territory. No one has ever left it. And only she came that close.

SHORTLY AFTER my mother’s arrival here, Rita Star swore she saw a picture of her on television. The name on the screen was different than the one my mother had used to introduce herself, but the face was the same. She’d cut and dyed her hair, but any novice knew that was the first thing you did to bury your past. Wanted or Missing, Rita Star could not recall. She searched and searched, flicking through her channels, but the picture of my mother did not come back into focus.

Hearing about the picture, the other territory women searched and searched. The Heavy’s thin fox of a stranger is going to murder me, steal my husband, and make a nice den for herself out of my den things. “You are glued to that damn television,” their husbands would rant. The women didn’t know how to make sense of it. Rita Star was a gossip. She was lonely. She would come over and sit at your kitchen table, and tell story after story, and not know when it was time to stop talking and leave. This was long before she invested in her tanning bed and opened her palmistry business. Her young daughter basically lived across the street with Pallas Jones. Who the Grace girl’s father was, none of the women could say with any certainty. She had no husband, and in practical terms, Rita Star had no child. What do you even call that? The women had no name for a woman without dependents. Nothing feeding from her body. Nothing feeding from her hands. One knife, one fork, one spoon, one bowl. The emptiness of her bungalow. Should the women really believe this lone woman of mediocre fitness or was she just looking for attention? The women decided against believing Rita Star.

They all came to my parents’ wedding, and the men and women of the territory marveled at my mother, this woman who had appeared at their lunch counter with her short hair and her short dress now with her long hair and her long dress. How quickly she looked like one of them.

But sometimes, they felt unsettled by her. She seemed to clock the way they held their bottles of alcohol, their Delivery Day baskets, how they spoke, where to accentuate, when to laugh, and our 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 is to feel.” Then my mother hissed, “Debra Marie,” and begged for an apple. When The Heavy gave her the closest thing—they were two days before Delivery Day with only frozen goods in the house—my mother broke the frozen side of caribou in half with her bare hands, and I was born.

A tiny girl in his arms. The Heavy didn’t know why he was choking. There was a problem with his body. “You’re sobbing,” my mother told him. Was the baby sweating? No, he was soaking the girl with his tears.

MY HEAD IS in the lap of Supernatural. Repeat. Situation critical. My head is in the lap of Supernatural.

S.O.S.

Supernatural. O. Supernatural.

He gets up and helps me to my feet. He looks down at me. He is extremely tall. Could there be a taller man? Yes, but not here. Maybe The Heavy. Yes, The Heavy. “You passed out.” I look around. We are alone in the graveyard. I am having trouble summoning language. The bonfire is mostly embers. Everyone has gone home. “Fainted.”

I had pictured this so differently. Now is the moment when I name-drop the lights in the sky, and Supernatural falls in love with me, but instead I say, “I listened to the chants.” And then what I don’t say: I slow danced to the chants. Embarrassed, I lift my hands to my face. No sense of mystery. Visiting cousin. Pinto. Kissless. The rhinestones are still there. Good.

“Are you about to faint again?”

“No.”

“Phew.”

He is moving strangely. “My legs fell asleep,” he mumbles, and then he stands very still.

I see the charred can of butane.

“Did you kill him?”

He shakes his head. “I am so not a murderer.”

The tall boy in the black jeans with the rifle at his side. He has a scar that runs through his top lip. I don’t think I have ever noticed it before. I don’t think I have ever stood this close to Supernatural before. Seen so much of the face under the ball cap under the hood. When did he get the scar? It looks new.

WHEN WE WERE CHILDREN, our mothers dragged us here while they tidied the plots.

“You good?”

“You good?”

“You good?”

The women never answered the question; they just traded it between them. When my mother and I walked over the incline and joined the circle, they always commented on her hair design. She had the most elaborate hair designs in the territory. I would sit on the edge of her bathtub and watch her twist and pin her hair. Her gold hoop earrings, her gold eyeshadow. The pale pink workdress, the red ski jacket. All around us, the boys of the territory ran between and climbed the headstones, rolled tires, lit cardboard on fire, chanted, “Fight, fight, fight.”

“Graveyard getting big,” the women said.

“Graveyard getting bigger than the town.”

And the widows would break off in their rubber aprons and dish gloves, their cleaning supplies in their pails, their shorter ponytails like pets at their coat collars, to clear their husbands’ headstones of dirt and snow.

“When did the headstones start getting uneven?”

“Who’s to say this one gets a bigger headstone than that one?”

“This one’s headstone’s bigger than my chest freezer.”

“This one’s bigger than my bungalow.”

And the children pinned their arms to their bodies and rolled down the small decline. Clay, rock, and scrub. The girls played at having their blood drawn. Faking dizzy, “I did my bloodwork today. Get me some citrus.” And the boys, with their fathers’ old tools, built makeshift ladders, hunting platforms. Every stick was a rifle. They had knives in pouches and sharpened wood into spears.