Heartbreaker

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: 2019-11-27

Praise for Heartbreaker:

‘A dark star of a book, glittering with mordant humour and astonishing, seductive strangeness and grace. I am a giant fan of Claudia Dey’s wild brain’

Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

‘An incandescent flare of a novel – acrobatic, devastating, and wickedly funny. It is effortlessly sly and fresh in its language, and I loved it’

Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure

‘A whole-cloth, word-for-word triumph of imagination’

Publishers Weekly

‘Disturbed, seductive, and thrilling’

i-D

‘I read My Absolute Darling and discovered a transcendent teenage narrator in the form of Turtle Alveston. Pony Darlene Fontaine is a match for Turtle – an ordinary teenage girl in a wholly extraordinary world. Her voice will echo in your head for months – even years – to come’

Sam Baker

‘A curious, memorable novel in vital prose that catapults the reader into a strange and compelling land’

Irish Times

‘Heartbreaker totally bewitched me. I love its outlandishness – its sizzling energy – the bright, fierce music in every sentence’

Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks

‘A fierce exploration of memory and zeitgeist … Heartbreaker is a darkly comedic weirdo of a book that pulls the string of nostalgia from one side while unravelling it from the other’

The Paris Review

‘This book gave me chills all the way through. It is deeply original – in its wildness, its structure, its wisdom, and its world … I floated in the perfection of its ending. I loved this novel’s shining sensitivity. I loved its every page’

Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood

‘Behold the virtuosity of Heartbreaker! Claudia Dey has a perfect ear and the sharpest eye … devastating, unsparing and unforgettable’

Miriam Toews, author of All My Puny Sorrows

‘What begins as a simple mystery – a daughter attempting to investigate the sudden disappearance of her mother – turns into a much stranger and more engrossing tale … Dey’s rich prose drives the story with poetic acuteness’

LA Weekly

‘This book is beautiful, a perfect balancing act of dark and light. It broke my heart and then put it back together again’

Claire Cameron, author of The Bear

‘Heartbreaker makes high and hilarious art from the emotional pop-rocks and glittery junk of a certain way of being young. And vulnerable … A thrillingly fun and original novel’

Rivka Galchen author of Little Labours

‘Claudia Dey renders 1985 in perfectly crimped, shoulder-padded detail … Come for the Shyamalanian premise. Stay for the hard-rock soundtrack’

Chicago Tribune

‘Heartbreaker plays out as a vivid, tender, complex magic. A totally compulsive, singular and wild read. The people in this book are so alive, and the book itself feels unthinkably new’

Leslie Feist

‘What begins as a simple mystery – a daughter attempting to investigate the sudden disappearance of her mother – turns into a much stranger and more engrossing tale … Dey’s rich prose drives the story with poetic acuteness’

LA Weekly

‘It’s as if poet Anne Carson and satirist Mordecai Richler accidentally collided at a drunken PEN fundraiser to produce a mischievous, magical and observant girl-child’

Toronto Star

‘Devoted, as I am, to the oddities of northern, remote lands, I could not put this book down. In turns, hilarious and harrowing, Heartbreaker’s icy exactitude is direct, disturbed and entirely splendid’

Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark

‘Stunning … Claudia Dey’s beautiful, off-kilter music has been missing from our literary landscape for too long – a most welcome return’

Michael Redhill, author of Giller Prize-winning Bellevue Square

‘What a completely thrilling novel! In its story, people, vision, sentences and fervor – in its pure intelligence and unbridled bravery – it stands apart … You are forever changed’

Barbara Gowdy, author of The White Bone

‘This is a book like no other. It’s eerie, it’s cult-y, it’s so very exciting, and I never wanted it to end’

Buzzfeed, Best Books of Fall 2018

Epigraph

In love there is no because.

ALICE NOTLEY,

IN THE PINES

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Heartbreaker

Epigraph

Part One. GIRL

Part Two. DOG

Part Three. BOY

Acknowledgements

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.