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Chainsaw: As Is

By Gillian King-Cargile

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All thirteen of us cousins and half-cousins and step-cousins were there that Memorial Day at my Grandma’s house when Dustin ripped into his leg with the chainsaw. This was in New Jersey. In the Pine Barrens. There were thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands—of trees to chainsaw. That’s why Grandma had the chainsaw in the first place. To push the Pine Barrens back. To keep away the trees and the things that hid in their needles. Things with wings and hair and hooves and scales and claws.

I was the oldest and the only girl in the mess of cousins, so I was supposed to be in charge. I was the one who lived the closest and helped Grandma the most—dusting her cobwebs, mowing her sandy lawn, turning the TV up louder and louder and louder so she could hear the Weather Channel and watch for nor’easters and hurricanes hurrying their way up the coast.

That day I was also make-shift mom to twelve boys, aged six to sixteen, who only saw each other all at once maybe once or twice a year. When they got together, they always wanted to do something big. Memorable. This year, they wanted to chainsaw down a tree or make a YouTube video about chain-sawing down a tree. I told them not to be stupid. I was the only one Grandma let use the chainsaw, and I was in charge, as the aunts and uncles said, because they didn’t want to deal with their monster kids while they drank beer and shooed flies away from deviled eggs and crab salad and burgers.

Dustin was the one who got the chainsaw out of the garage, off the work bench I’d left it out on like a dare. “I’ll show you how it’s done,” Dustin said. But he’d never touched the chainsaw before—never helped with yard work because of the ticks and the sunburn and the fact that he was only kind-of related to us because his dad married our aunt and he was only here on vacation.

He yanked the cord, revved the engine. REV-REV-REV-REV! Too many times. The engine had already caught, the chain was already spinning on the bar. He was showing off. Making noise. Just like when we’d play Yahtzee and he’d shake the cup of dice too loud and hard and long and close to my ear. “I’ll show you how it’s done.” And he’d flip the cup and slam it onto Grandma’s good glass table, threatening to shatter everything.

You don’t stop an idiot with a chainsaw. You don’t get in his way. You don’t scream for aunts and uncles. Even if you did, they probably wouldn’t hear you. They’d think your scream was just one of the many noises that happen when a mess of cousins run through the woods. And Dustin definitely wouldn’t hear you over the dragon’s breath buzz of the gasoline engine.

Grandma always said, “A chainsaw sounds dangerous on purpose, like a timber rattler. It’s telling you to stay away.” Her words came out wheezy because Grandma smoked too much and shopped too much and played the slots in Atlantic City too much. She was reckless with things like that, but not with power tools. When it came to chainsaws, she wore sunglasses and thick saw-proof chaps and sturdy shoes. In the woods, she was all about safety.

She’d cut clean through a fallen tree, then engage the handbrake to stop the engine. “A chainsaw can cut you even when it’s not running,” she’d say. “When it’s not rattling its chain as it blurs around the bar.” She’d set the saw on solid ground and tell me to come closer now, to feel how hot the bar got when it bored through the tree. The chain teeth were sharp and shiny and warm. One nicked my finger and drew blood. “Like a rattlesnake’s front teeth,” she told me. “Their fangs still hold that venom, can still kill you even after the head’s cut clean off.”

 

For Sale: Chainsaw

Loud and Dangerous, but so was the person it killed. $50 or best offer.

 

Dustin had messed-up front teeth. His smile teeth. One had a chip out of it from when he’d gone over the handlebars of a bike he stole at the boardwalk. He’d hit a patch of sand and landed on his face. I guess he’d always been bad about keeping himself in one piece.

Dustin laughed a lot and stuck his tongue through the jagged hole in his smile teeth and had perfected the art of spitting through the gap.

“I’ll show you how it’s done,” Dustin’d said when he’d first joined our family five years ago and taught the other cousins how to spit. His saliva traced a thin, wet arc through the sky and landed at least five feet away from him in the sandy dirt. He was a really good spitter.

But he was a terrible lumberjack. When he messed around with that chainsaw, he hit one of the only things that wasn’t a tree when so many dry, spindly, punky trunks leaned toward the saw’s spinning chain and heavy bar, begging to be bitten by its teeth.

His leg didn’t come all the way off. That’s what people ask me about the most. He didn’t cut clear through like you would when you were using the tip of the saw to snap off a sapling at its base. But his leg surely came more off than a leg should. And he didn’t cut down to the bone. That’s what people ask me about the second most. The artery was the thing he hit. The thing the teeth of the saw spun through. Grinded. Like a bull shark biting through boys in the back bay. Like a devil gnawing.

Here’s what Dustin did: he whipped the chainsaw around in the air like a sad-sack Leatherface at the end of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Then he lunged toward a spindly tree, a small enough victim. The tip of the saw entered the soft bark, sprayed woodchips into his hair. He pushed deeper, not with the cutting bar like you’re supposed to, but with the tip, until the saw penetrated bark and hit hardwood. He probably felt so good making the initial cut. It’s a good feeling. Engine screaming. Body vibrating. Nature yielding.

But he was wearing shorts and flip-flops. He was not prepared.

He couldn’t handle the tool.

The chain blurred around the bar at seventy miles an hour. Fast as a car on the parkway. The difference between a saw and a car is that a car is supposed to get you somewhere all in one piece; a chainsaw’s metal is meant to collide. To tear apart.

Dustin pushed in like an idiot. The saw’s tip hit something unmovable: a knot in the hardwood. The trunk resisted, collapsed on the saw. The saw bucked down and back. It flayed Dustin’s leg, calf muscle to knee bone. Then it continued up up up up. Seventy miles an hour. RevRevRevRev! Finding purchase on his thigh. Sinking its teeth in. A strong, solid bite.

Blood sprayed like mist off a wave—a strong, sudden breaker—saturating all the cousins who were standing close. He screamed and finally finally finally dropped the saw. Dropped his finger from the trigger. The pine trees and our clothes and hands and arms and faces were splattered with so many shades of Dustin.

We’d all seen enough horror movies and creature features and Shark Week specials to know right then that it was too late. We’re basically just blood balloons bobbing through the world avoiding sharp, tearing things. Once you start bleeding—really bleeding—like Dustin was doing all over the ground in front of us, screaming, trying to hold his leg together, you probably won’t stop.

For Sale: Chainsaw

Stain resistant. Easy to clean!

 

The 911 people didn’t take the chainsaw. That’s the thing that surprised me the most. That and all the blood. An ambulance, a fire truck, and a patrol car all answered the 911 call. I thought one of the uniformed guys would have taken the chainsaw or our bloody clothes as evidence. But they didn’t. I guess that only happens for murders, not for chainsaw-icides.

My aunt and step-uncle followed the 911 people to the hospital. The rest of us waited at my Grandma’s house for someone to tell us what to do. The adults went through the motions of cleaning the grill and covering the deviled eggs and throwing out the fly-filled crab salad and pouring the bottom-of-the-bowl chip dust into their mouths. We almost forgot we were covered in blood until Cousin Aaron tried to reach a red hand into a bowl of Cheez-Its and Aunt Marcy freaked out. We couldn’t go inside to change because Grandma didn’t want us dripping Dustin all over the house.

I was the one who got the garden hose and twisted the nozzle to full blast and sprayed the boys until the water running off them went from red to pink to clear.

Everyone kept looking out into the woods where the sandy lawn became scrubby pines. Where the chainsaw still sat. Where blood now fed the thirsty roots of scrub pines and poison ivy and attracted every manner of Pine Barren monster.

“Throw the chainsaw away,” my mom said. She hated clutter. “Nobody’s going to use it.”

“It’s like new,” my dad said. “Worth something if we just hose it down.”

“Like new,” my Grandma echoed. She was sitting there buried in thick-threaded blankets and had missed most of the thread of the conversation. Dustin was one of her least favorites, but she really liked the chainsaw. Back when she could still lift it, she’d revved it like a badass.

“Who would want it?” my littlest cousin asked. He was seven and sweet and still growing into his big-kid teeth and probably wished he had a chip in one so he could spit like his step-cousin. The kid’s eyelids squeezed shut like he was trying to clean the image of Dustin’s mangled leg off his eyeballs.

“It’s not like we’re going to tell the truth in the want-ad,” I said.

 

For Sale: Chainsaw

Great for cutting trees and limbs.

 

Grandma was the one who taught me how to use the chainsaw when I was little. When I was one of the only cousins, step or half or otherwise. Grandma said that chainsaw safety was like driver’s safety. “You have to understand the power of the machine. And you have to understand how a tree is going to fall just like you have to understand the road ahead.”

Grandma would square her feet in the sandy dirt just right, so she could control the rattle of the saw and the severing of the tree limb. The engine would shake her thinning arms, but her feet remained planted in the pine needles, immovable objects. The limb always landed square where she planned with a satisfying thunk.

She taught me how to oil the chain so it cut clean and how to open the body of the saw to blow out the grit and dead wood that threatened to choke up the exhaust. It’s amazing what you can accomplish with an owner’s manual, a screwdriver, and some patience.

When she got older, I had to start the chainsaw for her. When I wasn’t around, she’d stand by the road to flag down neighbors or the mailman or shoobies on their way down the shore and have them yank the cord, rev the engine, and bring the saw to life so she could push the Pine Barrens a little farther from her back door. Sometimes they’d offer to help her cut what needed cutting, but she’d shoo them away. She liked to do things her own way. And if she couldn’t do them on her own, she could always call me.

With Dustin all cut open, we speculated there would be hospital bills to pay and maybe ambulance bills, too. Did you have to pay the 911 people? Tip them like reverse-pizza-delivery drivers? And there’d probably be funeral expenses. No one wanted to admit that quite yet. But it just made dollars and sense to sell the chainsaw. And no one wanted to cook dinner, either, because we were all still thinking about the way Dustin looked like a faded, wet beach towel, heavy and sandy, when we dragged him out of the woods. We’d need to order some food eventually. White pizza, probably. Nothing with red sauce.

 

Chainsaw, It’s New to You!

It took our step-cousin, but most of us didn’t like him anyway.

 

You can’t put that in an actual ad. Or in a eulogy. You can’t tell people then, when he’s chain-sawing at death’s door, that you always thought something like this would happen.

Not the chainsaw part.

That was a shock to most of the family. For sure. But the dying part, the dying-stupid part, wasn’t much of a shock. Where do you document the time he burned down your grandparent’s neighbor’s shed to see what would happen? Or the time after your grandpa’s funeral when he spent the luncheon eating all the crab cakes, breathing out Old Bay breath and bragging about how he was going to grow up to be a long-haul trucker so he could transport illegal shit from state to state? Or the time you and the other older cousins stole beers from the ice-filled cooler to see if you’d get giggly and he stole a bottle of your dead grandpa’s special whiskey because he was the kind of person who didn’t know where to draw the line, who could only take and take and take? Where do you record that he was the type of person who always drained things? Not because he was thirsty, but because he was empty.

 

Chainsaw, Maybe Haunted?
But the ghost would probably just sneak Tastykakes and beers from your Grandma’s fridge and twenties from her wallet to buy more Tastykakes and beer.

 

My Grandma had a book about haunted places up and down the Jersey Shore. She’d read it to me before there were too many cousins to tuck in. “Some places,” she told me, “are set apart for shipwrecks.” I think about that a lot, not the shipwreck part, really, not this far back in the Pine Barrens, but the idea that there are places where bad things always happen, where the devil peeks through the pines and sees you being bad.

Grandma told me about the devil, too. How he’s in these woods, where the ocean drains to the bay, loses its salt, and becomes the river. The devil’s mother was a witch from Leeds Point, who had too many children, twelve, so the thirteenth one she cursed. The Jersey Devil.

She cursed him to be red and hairy and winged and horned and homeless. And so he is. She cursed him to eat the entrails of dogs and deer and wicked children. And so he does.

The devil’s feet are hooves, his nails are claws, his tongue is forked. Sometimes he’s a man disguised in dead night’s darkness. Sometimes he’s a dancer tap-trampling on your rooftop. And he swims, too. He can be the rolling red tide that chokes the water and poisons the shellfish. Some people think he was the killer shark that swam into the back bay and killed five boys, fishermen’s sons, in the summer of 1916. My Grandma believes it. I believe it, too.

The Jersey Devil is the reason you have to cut down the trees, to keep them from creeping up on the property, too close to the house, windows, and beds. Nobody can be good all the time and you don’t want him to see you being bad.

 

For Sale: Chainsaw

VERY SAFE!!! (in skilled hands). Keep out of reach of wicked children.

 

I was the one who went back into the pine trees with a bucket of soapy water while the rest of the family waited for a call from the hospital. I was the one who splashed the water and sudded the bloody pine-needled ground. I was the one who carefully sprayed off the toothy spikes of the chain to make sure we weren’t going to sell anyone chunks of our least-favorite step-cousin when the time came.

I told myself to think of cleaning the chainsaw like cleaning a cutting board after trimming the throw-away fat off a nice slab of meat.

I was the one who remembered the way Dustin’d ripped the legs off stranded, struggling horseshoe crabs at the beach so their blue blood streaked the dry sand. I was the one who remembered trying to save the white jellyfish—the non-stingy jellyfish—picking them off the beach and putting them back in the water, until he grabbed them and threw them like frisbees. Threw them at me and the other cousins so they splatted against our bare skin.

I was the one who remembered him holding our younger cousins under the waves and liking the way they struggled. He was bigger and older and would pretend to teach them how to body surf before he’d attack. “I’ll show you how it’s done.”

And the way he’d grab me in the water and snap my straps against my sunburned shoulders and try to stick seaweed and dead crab legs down the front of my one-piece suit. Back on shore, he’d snatch my beach towel so he could stare at me as I shivered and dripped dry in the cold wind off the ocean. He told me I was his favorite step-cousin.

But maybe everyone remembered. Maybe my parents and my other aunts and uncles talked about it while they waited for the call. Maybe we all secretly came to the same conclusion that if his life hadn’t drained out here, he would have pissed it away in a few weeks or months or years. Maybe it was the inevitable that made the chainsaw gnaw into Dustin’s thigh, spraying red mist into the air.

I was also the one who’d taken off the chainsaw’s hand guard and chain brake that morning, the things that make chainsaws a little more idiot-proof. The things that stop the chain from spinning and the bar from pressing in when your blade bucks. When you grind against something unmovable.

It’s amazing what you can accomplish with an owner’s manual, a screwdriver, and some patience.

I was the one who was tired of him saying, “I’ll show you how it’s done,” and stealing twenties out of Grandma’s wallet. I was the one who wouldn’t forget how he’d found me in Grandma’s garage after a long day at the beach when most of the cousins were sleeping and most of the adults were sleeping off afternoon beers.

Here’s what Dustin did: he told me all the things he’d learned since I’d seen him the summer before. All the things girls in his hometown let him do to them. He cornered me by the tools, pushed me up against the peg board so the metal hooks pressed into my back. So that I was unmovable. I thought that when he finally let me loose, I’d have impressions of peg board stippled along the skin of my back like acne scars.

He pushed his hands up under my shirt and whispered in my ear so close I could hear his breath hiss over his chipped front tooth. “I’ll show you how it’s done.”

 

For Sale: Chainsaw

All the blood is cleaned off it now. I told him to leave me alone.

 

While all the aunts and uncles waited for the call from the hospital and thought about what half-way decent black clothes they’d packed in their suitcases, I sat next to the clean chainsaw on the dirty pine needles and waited to see if the Jersey Devil would show himself.

I imagined him coming to the forest floor to claim me. Pictured his black claws slashing, tearing through my t-shirt and my white belly-skin beneath. And I wondered if his wings, when they flapped, would chill my exposed innards, if his red fur would tickle what remained of my flesh.

Did Dustin feel the pine and gasoline scented air inside his leg when he cut it? Could a wound still feel when you cut that many layers deep?

If the Jersey Devil did come to claim me, would I try to stop him or would I let him dig inside me, take what he wanted, eat till I was hollow? Till I was gone?

But the Jersey Devil only eats wicked children. Was I wicked? I lay on the cooling carpet of needles and decided to let him taste me. To let him decide.

 

I sat until Memorial Day evening turned to full dark. Till stars strained to shine through the pine boughs. Then I heard him. He was tapping in the darkness above my head, trampling over and around and up and down the treetops so that branches shivered and shed their driest needles. His hoof-beats echoed through the Pine Barrens like Grandma’s coughs in the morning.

When he flapped to the ground, he whipped up a hurricane of pine needles. They stung my summer-bare legs and arms. The devil was red and hairy and winged and horned and hooved and homeless. The devil planted his claws in the sandy soil, spreading out and down, taking root in the blood. He’d come here to feed.

 

By the weak moonlight trickling through the pine boughs, I watched him stand and I could almost believe he was a man. His owl-wide eyes ogled me, then the chainsaw, then me again. He folded to the ground like a beast. His snout snuffled the bloody pine needles. His forked tongue licked the bar of the chainsaw, clicked along the chain’s teeth. He breathed in like he could inhale the whole forest. I clutched the sandy ground but felt myself slipping toward him.

His eyes were on me now. Ocean abysses. I could have given up and drowned, but I forced myself to breathe, to stare down the gut-eater, the hoofed-dancer. The Jersey Devil snuffled around me now. His snout wet my neck, my shirt, my arm, my hand. He paused. Breathed in and in and in. Licking at the fingers that had gotten greasy that morning loosening the safety bolts. Removing restraints.

The devil reared back and brayed. It sounded the way a shipwreck must have sounded when a metal hull tears itself apart trying to move through something unmovable. When all hands know they’ll be lost. I thought my family must have heard it from the house, but no one bothered to look for me or check on the night screaming up from the forest.

I scrambled away from him until my back hit a half-sawed tree trunk. He rose up on hind legs and stood like a man again, eclipsing the moon. One taloned hand swept the ground at my feet, nearly slicing off the fronts of my sneakers. Instead of my toes, he came away with a claw full of blood-clotted pine needles. His broad mouth broke into a bestial grin.

He hissed through his jagged smile teeth, his fangs. And he leapt into the air and disappeared over the trees.

 

For Sale: Chainsaw

Licked clean. The Jersey Devil was hungry. I needed to feed him.

 

My legs rattled as I carried the newly cleaned saw through the woods to my Grandma’s garage. Inside the house, they’d gotten the call. Some of the cousins were crying, the ones who still remember Dustin as a smiley guy and a really great spitter. I remember him differently.

I spent that night repairing the chain brake, making the saw once-again idiot proof. Surely someone else could get some use out of a good, sturdy tool.

 

Chainsaw: “As Is”
Clean and in good working order.
It’s seen some use, but the teeth are sharp, the engine is willing, and it gets the job done.