Heart-Breaker Read online

  Peter Fox St. John patted me down. Confusing, but the beginnings of the boner were then. “For fuck sakes, it’s Supernatural,” Dean Jr. (soon to be Neon Dean) said from inside the disco, puffing his chest. “Let him in!”

  Someone had set up a Walkman with speakers, and music was playing. “Video Killed the Radio Star.” I loved that song. The floor of the room was piled high with coats, and the girls were stepping over them, lifting the ends of their dresses up to their hips like they were walking through deep snow. The coats were moving. I watched the girls’ thighs, and my boner went from recreational to serious. I wanted my tongue to make contact with the thighs. My face to make contact. I needed to make contact. The light flickered. Sounds were coming from the floor. Effort, I guess. A girl—Lorraine or maybe Rochelle, this was pre-necklace, Future when she still went by Grace?—came toward me wearing one of the men’s coats. She stood in front of me and unzipped the loose camouflage coat like the zipper was stuck. When she finally got the zipper down, she pried the coat open as if it too were made of metal and she was bending the metal back. Metal is so difficult. Won’t you help me with this difficult metal? Oh, I can do it after all. Beneath the coat she wore white underwear and white sport socks with blue lines around the tops that she had pulled up and over her knees. I took a step toward the underwear. The girl closed the coat. I waited it out. She opened the coat. I got in.

  Even when it promises sex, I have a hard time with any group activity. I am not a group man. The way I am not a contact sport man. Or a private club man. And what was happening in the disco was basically a contact sport in a private club. I was first to leave.

  “Too good for us, eh?” Peter Fox St. John said.

  “Not even close,” I said to myself.

  I made my way upstairs. “Supernatural.” The adults took notice of me, came toward me. Some of them were dancing. My father had a Player’s unfiltered hanging from his bottom lip, his arms in the air. The glint of his belt buckle, a rock to his hips. His pressed jeans, his polished boots. He was in the middle of the living room; Rita Star, Cheryl Chantale, and Pamela Jo circled him and pulled the pins from their hair. Turtleneck sweaters. Complex earrings. A sheen to their faces. Eyes roving the room then catching on me. Sharks to a kill. “Supernatural.” The women put their glasses to my lips. I had thrown up the night before. I had slept on the tiled floor of our bathroom. My body in a sprawl. Smelling badly of fermentation. My mouth at the base of the toilet bowl. Legs jutting into the hallway. My father stepping over them. I would never drink alcohol again. I would be like The Heavy. I dodged the women and continued up the carpeted stairs to the second floor of the Fontaine bungalow. I had never seen The Heavy’s bedroom. I pictured the cell of a monk. Not Billie Jean Fontaine in her black lace underwear and low white heels. Swinging her hair to one side, careful my mother would not see the marks across her neck and back that told me there had once been a fight. One long fight.

  2:00 A.M. March 14, 1980. Friday. The night I was named Supernatural. Before the bathroom mirror, my father propped me up by the elbows, then by the armpits. “Easy,” he said as he placed his much smaller body behind mine to keep me upright. “Easy.” I could feel him shaking as he identified all that was the same in our faces. See, the bridge of the nose. See, the sharpness of the cheekbones. See, that cleft in the chin. My head fell this way and that. The room spun. My eyes, green, were mostly closed, and, despite my height, my father, on my bicycle, had found a way to ride me home.

  His gold.

  * * *

  10:33 A.M. October 26, 1985. The present. The number of places Billie could be grows proportionately to the number of places I have looked. And the time she has been gone. Thirty-nine hours, thirty-three minutes. The men of the territory are tracking Billie with their dogs. I have managed to outrun them. To search alone. “Hold up, Supes!” No. Not holding up. I climb a ladder to a hunting blind for a clearer view of the forest. The blinds are scattered throughout the woods; some are simple platforms made of pallets, chipboard, whatever the men can get their hands on. Others are the bodies of old trucks raised on thick logs, the husks of trailers, and in the distance, I can make out the founders’ bus. Twenty-seven feet off the ground. OR BUUST. The letters of the stolen TOUR BUS rearranged.

  Below me, the men advance in formation, keeping just over five feet (Billie’s diminished height when she disappeared) between them. They have their headlamps in their outerwear pockets and dig for them now. They know what it is to have their headlamps burn out at night in the woods, but not when there might be a woman in those woods who is lost and could be difficult to understand. Could grab their shoulder, touch their face, run at them. The men stop in their tracks, pull off their work gloves, dick their hands, wipe them down, and test their headlamps. Shine their beams at the ground. The accumulating snow. Almost three inches. The men look to the sky. Eyebrows and eyelashes gathering frost. A sting in the air. A northwesterly. The creak of the trees. Five and a half hours of good light left.

  I pull out my father’s binoculars. I swiped them yesterday from the top drawer of his metal desk. He keeps them there alongside his personal effects, which I try to avoid looking at too closely. (Mouthwash, cologne, Band-Aids, tin of chew, extra padlocks, tire studs, electric razor, various phone numbers, and a backup pair of underwear. Killeth me noweth.) My father loops the binoculars around his muscular neck after I have washed down all the trucks in the dealership, and he goes from row to row inspecting them. Talking about how the air is dangerous. The air is gasoline. Our people are not meant to live for long, Son. Our people are meant to live for short. I hold the binoculars up to my eyes now, and try for the qualities of an owl. Let’s admit. This human form is lacking.

  Around the many sinkholes that have appeared (there are mineshafts throughout the territory that were boarded over five years ago; they tunnel outward two thousand feet below us and have made the ground “unstable”), mostly in the area known as the west woods, but increasingly close to town, fences have been staked and strung with flagging tape. Bright yellow, bright blue, bright green. At the bottom of one crater is the lawn chair of One Hundred. At the bottom of another, the St. John family bungalow. At the bottom of the most recent crater is a truck.

  Sexeteria was not in the truck when the ground gaped open ten by sixteen feet and swallowed his rig whole. He was in the back room of Home of the Beef Candy with Shona Lee. A rapture of Shona Lees. When my father said “Let’s give it a day,” then went by the diner to console Sexeteria, and offer him a deal on his next truck, Sexeteria told my father he had decided he did not want to replace his truck. He was never really a truck man. My father threatened to torch himself. He held a lighter to his FULLY LOADED belt buckle. Then to his gold tooth. His blue thumbnail. The scar on his forearm. His necklace of keys. Sexeteria told him to cool it. He was the first in the territory to say “chill.” Sexeteria then made his own wide-plank skateboard and spray-painted it hot pink with the letters of his former license plate, SXTRA, and started a craze, selling SXTRA decks out of his restaurant to the boys and girls of the territory who got whatever part-time work they could at The Man Store, The Woman Store, Deep Space Tapes, Drugs and More Drugs, and then built ramps on their properties. My father griped that Sexeteria was damaging our business by corrupting the next generation. He still went to Home of the Beef Candy for the lunch special, but now he ran his Zippo along his jeans and stood in line with a high flame.

  11:01 A.M. A makeshift tent has been set up on the Fontaine front yard for the search teams to rest under and shield themselves from the turning weather, but no one will take a break. Inside the tent, there is a foldout table with a plate of oatmeal cookies, baked by my mother, and a tray of sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, donated by Home of the Beef Candy. Margarine, yellow mustard, lunch meat, a lettuce leaf, a cheese slice. Brown bread or white. Always a sense of surplus the day after Delivery Day. Beside them, the leftover flyers.
A rock to weigh them down. BILLIE JEAN FONTAINE. MISSING.

  The women have built a small fire and huddle around it for heat. Neck warmers and earmuffs, a transistor radio crackling some sort of country music. There is a silver pot filled with coffee, a ladle to serve it. My mother serves it. The women hold their mugs to their chests and blow into the steam, making ghosts. “I am sorry to say this aloud, but won’t her feet be giving her trouble by now?” Rita Star asks. “They might be giving her trouble,” Cheryl Chantale responds, and the women look out to the woods and picture Billie, the flurry of Billie, her bare feet coming down against the sharpness of the clay and the sticks. The mean cold of the snow. They were never true friends to her. The tarps above the women snap in the wind.

  My father told my mother that Billie Jean Fontaine left bungalow 88 without her boots. Without her socks. Her mitts. Her hat. Just her tracksuit. The indoor one. Without her coat. Damn it. 7:39 P.M. October 24. Thursday. It was Rita Star Roulette who called it in first and described what she had seen. The Heavy, oblivious with his snowmobile goggles and hearing protection on, and that daughter of theirs, also named for tragedy and herewith fated for it, slumped unconscious in their front hall, and that ancient lesbian killer dog nearly getting clipped as Billie hightailed it out the driveway. Couldn’t tell whether the hound got in or not. What with the night. What with the wind. Not like we got streetlamps here. The moment my father hung up, the phone rang again. We all jumped. “Linklater residence.” This time, it was The Heavy. “She said she was going into town.” I could hear The Heavy’s voice, clear as if he was in the airless room with us, in the kitchen of bungalow 1. “She took the truck.” A pause. “Nothing to tell me, eh, friend?” My father cast a quick glance at my mother. She was doing the dishes. The Heavy went on, “I need your truck. I need the fog lights. I need to find Billie Jean.”

  My father is not a bad man. I heard the worry in his voice when he hung up the brown wall phone and told my mother the details of Billie’s disappearance while grabbing his outerwear off the back of his chair, directly across from my chair, and pretending I was not in the room. The shrinking room. Completely avoiding my face. Forgetting his hunting rifle by the side door. How could he forget his rifle? I would take his rifle. And Pony, in the graveyard, later that night, would take it from me—“You think I could borrow that, thank you”—then riding off to rob the Delivery Man. “I won’t be able to come back here,” the Delivery Man said to Pony. “You know I won’t be able to show my face ever again.”

  My father loves to help people. Loves to get calls. Trucks in sinkholes, legs in bear traps, rifle shots to the chest. My father does not love to help me. My mother listened to my father, but she did not lift her head once to meet his eyes. We had had a casserole for dinner. We always had a casserole on Thursday nights. My mother nodded while she attacked the already clean dish with her steel wool.

  12:22 P.M. How will she survive without her coat? I picture Billie coatless at the bottom of a sinkhole. Billie motionless and fixing her gaze up at the sky, waiting not for me to peer down but for death. U + me = 4ever. Don’t picture it. Won’t. Swear to it. Swearing. On Billie’s life.

  * * *

  ALL THROUGH THE BUNGALOW, my father had been preparing for the baby. He painted our spare room and built a crib. It was a beautiful crib. He spent hundreds of hours on that crib. He told me that, when I was a baby, I slept in a drawer pulled from my parents’ dresser. It was on the carpet beside their bed. It had a fur throw in it. Coyote. With a satin backing. I was a bad sleeper, my father said. “Your mother and I lost years.” He laughed.

  My mother, her hands working fast, knit small sweaters and small pants in whatever color yarn she could find in town. One Saturday night when my father was out at Drink-Mart, my mother, nearly finished with a blanket, nearly due, rested her hands on her round stomach and, aglow, said to me, “This is the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me.”

  Six months before (last November, when Billie was just over three months pregnant), Billie and I talked about it and how, regarding options, we had none. She said we had to be practical. Be practical thinkers. “We have to have a plan, Will,” she said. She lived for her daughter. Billie told me this countless times. I finally understood this feeling. Recently. You see, briefly, I was a father, and about my pain, Billie seems to have forgotten. She is not the only one who would like to lock herself in her bedroom, pull the curtains closed, and speak solely to an animal. Lose track of time. Lose track of weather. She is not the only one who wants to be in a black truck driving headlong into a deeper blackness. I too look up from a crater and see a sky that is mostly ice.

  Billie would have the child and know the child remotely. This, we decided, was the only way forward. The child would be in my home, and this gave Billie comfort. The woodstove, my hands, my voice. I cared. I was the most caring human. Billie’s words, not mine. At least I would be near our child. Day after day, for this was how we saw the world then—as an ongoing enterprise—I would get to be with our child. She could not leave her own home (nor did I want her to). Pony Darlene, The Heavy. While she loved me, she also loved him. The loves were not opposing, but simultaneous. “I loved him,” she said, “and then you just happened to be there at the same time, and I loved you too. First the atmosphere, then the sun. First the sun, then the atmosphere.” Okay. Am I the sun or the atmosphere? I wanted to ask Billie, but did not. “Love is not finite,” she told me. Yeah, I know that. Infinity is something I have totally come to know.

  Love = infinite.

  Pain = infinite.

  Billie = finite?

  * * *

  I STEP OVER the flagging tape and stand at the edges of the craters, look down into the hollows. Going methodically, sinkhole after sinkhole. 1:16 P.M. In the clearing, I lift every branch, move every rock, again, again. Why did we even call it the clearing when it was crowded with boulders and fallen trees and brambles and nests, and barely findable? Billie always had pine needles in her hair. I would make her sit still while I pulled them out, raked my fingers through her hair. I knew she felt cared for. The truth was I didn’t want to get caught. I was so frightened of being asked a question I couldn’t answer. I knew Billie could handle any question. She could lie.

  The story she had told the women to gain their trust was about growing up in a small town and then moving to an outpost. On a great body of water that froze in the winter. You could drive across it. Her mother taught her how to needlepoint. How to crochet. Her father was a deer hunter. Her parents died in a car accident. Driving across the ice road and hitting open water. The story had just enough for the territory women to relate to. They felt Billie’s life could have been their own.

  I am not a liar. I never could lie. Okay. One lie. I don’t like to run. That was my first lie to Billie. And my last. I had read about being casual. About how to start a conversation. I had so many lines in my head, but when one came out of my mouth, I yelled it. “I like to run!” I don’t. I don’t like to be further inside my own panicked breath. Blood filling my boots. My lungs burning. I did not lie about the owl. It would have been easy, but I did not lie about the owl.

  I look back to the Fontaine bungalow. Pony Darlene, blocked from the ground search like The Heavy, sits on the slickening roof in her red jacket and hunting glasses, now on top of a black ski mask, her knees folded to her chest. The window she climbed through hangs open, Billie’s bedroom filling with snow. 1:53 P.M. A couple of hours of good light left. I wave to Pony. Pony catches sight of me. She is waving back. No. She is pointing at me and then pointing wildly in the direction of the reservoir, and nearly slipping off the roof as she pulls her body through Billie’s bedroom window. 1:54 P.M. I am close to the water, running to the water.

  * * *

  IT WAS A LATE August night when Billie first led me into the reservoir. I waited for her near the shoreline as we had agreed that morning. (I was always at l
east ten minutes early for every encounter. An anxiety of Supernaturals. Chronological. Not chill.) I could hear her footsteps approaching, then her body exited the trees. Her amphibious body. Swift limbs, bare feet. She stepped lightly onto the black mud and looked around. She did not see me. I chose not to announce myself. I watched her strip off her nightdress, hang it from a branch, and enter the water. She did not pace herself. Had no patience. She wanted things immediately. Sensations, revelations. To die during a storm.

  I watched Billie propel herself out and into the center of the deep blue hole. Her motions were fantastic. Her weightless body terrifying. I had asked her to describe swimming. She refused. Said I had to feel it for myself. Said, “Meet me at the reservoir at 3:00 A.M.” “Or what?” I said, trying to sound like the bold person who would ask that question and with any luck, become that person. I did not want to remind Billie that my only experience of water was to rotate my stooped body, six and a half feet, in the shower every morning after I went running and before I went to the truck lot.

  I rolled the cuffs of my black jeans. I stepped into the dark water and heard a faint sound leave my mouth. “Ah” or “Fuck me.” Leaves drifted from the trees. The leaves coated my shoulders. They fell on my head. I had just stopped shaving it and had a down on my scalp Billie loved to run her hands over. The water was up to my ankles when Billie saw me and came toward me sleek as a torpedo. The ground beneath me was soft and cold, and consuming my feet. Some bodies don’t float. Would my body be one of those bodies? I took another step and could not believe the resistance.