Heartbreaker. Claudia Dey

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