“And what are we supposed to do with this information?”
“Find yourself a bonsai tree, man. Something to maintain. Cutcherson, man, you want to try that girl who processes all the receiving paperwork. She smiles at you, doesn't she?”
“Have you seen her teeth, man? They don't know up from down. They go fucking sideways. The boys call her the Sidewinder,” Brock said.
“You aren't trying to knock her up. I go home to my wife and I don't even dream about that girl. It's just about having someone to talk to or notice you who doesn't have a dick.”
“Well, like what if she starts thinking it means something?”
“She won't. She's got guys talking to her all the time. She's got guys on the phone, guys on her walk home, guys in her apartment building,” Donnie said. “You ever see the shit they deal with? You'll just be another face. And best thing about the bonsai tree is you don't need to worry.”
“Why?”
The machines began to groan to life around them, the massive rollers churning the rubber belts into motion again. Don Henley stood up and rubbed his nose.
“Bonsai trees don't bear any fruit. Whole thing is sterilized.”
It took Jamie a while to find his bonsai tree. He spent time hanging out in the parking lot, smoking cheap Indian cigarettes and listening to Springsteen, even though Springsteen was a fag too. Sometimes he'd be there until two before calling it a night. The grind wore you out; it got dust deep into your lungs, the booze sneaking into your chest so that every time you sneezed, all you could smell was gin. Emerging in the darkness every night to drive home on roads covered in everyone else's road kill, all the girls you might meet either at work or in classes while you slept the day away. Brock to this day still kept in touch with Jean, the old lady who ran the receiving desk. She said if he ever got married she would just cry.
Jamie met his bonsai tree in the front office when he changed addresses. Payroll needed to know exactly where to send his new statements and find him during an emergency. Jamie had moved out of his parents' place, out of the old living room where his father sat fingering the hole in his hand. His mother talked about nothing but the bingo scores and that time she and Rhonda bought up all the menthols at the hall.
His was a small place near the warehouse, a flimsy wooden box stranded between giant, faceless buildings built from concrete and iron. It came with five appliances and was fully furnished. An old Ukrainian couple rented it to Jamie, the woman doing all the talking, the mole on her chin distracting Jamie the whole time. It bobbed along with her lips, accentuating every syllable. The old man sat by the window in their retirement community, singing folk songs under his breath and swearing quietly at Jamie.
The girl had not even looked at him that first day. She took the form and went back to typing on her typewriter, her thin hands flying over the keys. The false ceiling hung low over Jamie's massive slouching shoulders as he made his way out, back into the stench of stale red wine and rotten beer embedded in the concrete floor.
Jamie didn't need to look at the warehouse to know what was in there. He drove past rows of old buildings, massive tombs to industries that had abandoned town as each decade passed. His wrists felt looser now, his tongue had stopped pushing at each rogue tooth inside his mouth. The radio was a quiet burble in his ear. Only the broken grille of his car and the one headlight probing the darkness ahead reminded Jamie of the night before. The little house filled with paintings of Russian skylines and old teak furniture was only a few minutes away.
Jamie had done what Don Henley told him. He found a way to survive the monotony of the warehouse, the smells of the cafeteria, the constant throb in his ears from the rollers. He dropped comments to this girl with black hair and too much eye makeup as they waited in line for free pizza every third Thursday. Sometimes she would laugh and tell him her name again like it was the first time. Alisha Wugg. He didn't make fun of her name, but his tongue bled against that patient refusal. It bled every time he tried to speak to her. He would stand there with rust growing on his tongue, wondering what her feet looked like naked. And he didn't even like feetâthey were the ugliest part of the human body.
Jamie brought a thick black marker to cover up the graffiti about her in the bathroom. He keyed the cars of men who commented on her ass. He never followed her home. He never left notes inside her locker. He didn't ask her if she dyed her hair or why she drew so much black around her eyes. He didn't ask for her number, and he didn't end up drawing pictures of her until he fell asleep on the couch while the television played
Brady Bunch
reruns with the wrong audio track all night. Jamie wanted to do all those things, but he was too tired.
Bonsai trees do not grow for long, but they do require constant maintenance. Don Henley always tried to make this clear. It was his wife he went home to every night. She was the one who fed him ice cream sandwiches and Greek yogurt when his jaw was broken in another unlicensed brawl in someone's barn. Not growth, but maintenance. Pruning, trimming, maintaining a relationship with a little “r” to make the days pass quicker.
Jamie tried to remember that when he found himself waking up in the middle of the night with dreams of her crying about discrepancies in the payroll. The old Ukrainians' house filled with pizza boxes and old underwear. He made lists to begin cleaning, but lost them in the mess. Laundry gathered everywhere, and Jamie's smell began to penetrate the walls. Brock said it looked like home, but back then Brock was always drunk and still living with his mom, so any place with a spark of life in it seemed like home to him. Life for Brock was fluid and messy and filled with those little bugs that weren't quite mosquitoes but weren't gnats either.
So Jamie Garrison trimmed and manicured his bonsai tree, assuring himself it would never blossom. He continued to draw thick black lines over the graffiti in the bathroom about the Wuggly Dog. Each stroke of marker reminded him she wore too much makeup. Jamie's hands grew callused and yellow, ridges of hard flesh gathering in the crevices of his palm where the synthetic rope burned cells like kindling every time he tied a knot. Alisha nodded at him in line for cabbage rolls and he made small remarks about the weather, her dress, the smell of cabbage. Anything.
Sometimes Alisha Wugg laughed, but usually she just raised her eyebrows.
The little house sat alone down by the water. There was a tricycle in the driveway, abandoned in the snow. The Ukrainian couple had transferred the lease after Jamie got married. After giving up the house and their old teak furniture, it only took the couple two months to die. Jamie's car bumped up into the driveway, swerving around the tricycle. Don Henley had always told them the bonsai tree was a safe bet; just another way to pass the time. After all, a bonsai tree was never going to bear fruit. Just something to look forward to in between safety meetings, training new temps, pulling long slivers of glass from your palm with the emergency safety kit tweezers.
“Did you run over my bike?”
She was only five years old and claimed she was too old for a trike.
“Kansas, you know that's a tricycle, don't you?”
Kansas Garrison stood there with her orange snowsuit half zipped up and one mitten on her little hand. The wind tossed her hair across her face. Her bottom teeth made her mouth look smaller than it was, crowded and uncomfortable.
“I know what a trike is. Did you run over my bike?”
Handle bars poked out from under Jamie's front tire.
“Oh.”
Don Henley was wrong about those bonsai trees.
12
The first postcards were landscapes. Barren deserts spotted with cacti and the occasional buzzard. The same return address spelled out in perfect looping script across the back of each card. Moses Moon had enjoyed watching the postal code burn under the flame of his lighter, back when he and Elvira still lived on Keewatin St., back when they had an address.
“Let's just take the stairs. I got stuck in the elevator once with this dude who wore bunny ears to a party up on the fifth floor. Kept asking me what animal I'd choose if I could be one. When I didn't say anything, he says a ferret. He called me a fucking ferret,” Moses said.
Eventually the postcards began to change. Buildings in sepia tones with
Greetings from Arizona
in the corner. Ghost towns and cowboy statues with busted trigger fingers. Lines and lines of houses, a blueprint repeated across the flattened land of suburban Arizona. Moses began to keep the postcards in an envelope, where they remained unread and dormant in his room. He tucked it under his mattress even after they fled the old townhouse, the words remaining benign so long as they were quarantined in that manila envelope. He did not tell his mother.
“You actually live in this place?” Logan said. “No wonder you were never taking us back here. B. Rex always just said to let it go, but I was kind of sketched out. You never actually told us where you lived. This place is like a fucking disease.”
Logan was talking again. He'd talked the whole way over here. About the rise of illegal immigration in the city and the broken window theory and the ways you could tell the difference between a Muslim and Hindu Paki if you looked close enough. A lot of his theories had to do with pork consumption and going through their trash. Moses had jammed Texaco's purple hat over Logan's head to cover up the bleeding swastika before they left the butcher shop. Purple didn't show the blood or the hateâjust absorbed it. Swallowed it whole. They didn't talk about Mr. Chatterton folded up in the bone can. They didn't talk about Logan's mother, either.
“Well, what did you expect?” Moses said.
“I don't know. Maybe your mom was a spic or something? Fucking revelations happening all over the place today,” Logan said. “I guess none of this shit should surprise me. Did you hear they're making another
Terminator?”
Da Nasty on a Saturday was loud, so loud you felt it down in your gut, in the tiny hairs on your forearms. There were no vacancies. The hallway was littered with bottle caps and White Snake lyrics belted at the top of smokers' lungs. The air conditioners huffed away at full capacity as the meth heads complained about stuffy eyes and phantom itches behind their ears. Someone blasted a porno at top volume with the door open, a woman loudly critiquing the performances of the men on screen. Too soft, she said. Too soft.
“
Terminator?”
“Yeah, like Part II,” Logan said.
The boys walked past Room 227 and the sound of power tools.
“Arnold can't even speak fucking English.”
Moses's room was at the end of the hall. He hoped Elvira would just stay in the bathroom tonight. He could play it off as some junkie hiding out in his room, or an old family friend who just needed a place to stay for a while. No, that was stupid. Fuck it. Logan could say whatever he wanted tonight. At least Moses had a parent around.
“One of your ultimate heroes, after your whole attempt at getting some retribution last night backfired all over your face at the Triple K, is a fucking immigrant in the real world.”
“Yeah, but he's German⦔ Logan said.
“He's fucking Austrian,” Moses said.
“I don't care what country he is from. What you aren't seeing here, Moses, is the fact that the American government is so corrupt now, it can't see what's coming,” Logan said. “Look, the American government won't even admit how it's playing into the hands of the blacks and the Jews and theâhey, I bet a fucking black dude created Skynet! Just wait for the fucking new movie. Shit, man, you see what I'm talking about? Fucking Skynet. Apocalyptic, four horseman shit. And Arnold, he's the fucking white reckoning come to set the record straight.”
The Judge was alone on the bed, tucked in under the faded flower-print duvet. A thousand washes couldn't get some of the stains out, only pushed them deeper into the fabric until they became a part of the patternâirrecoverable evidence of someone else's bad decisions. The door to the bathroom was open. Both taps on the sink ran hot and cold. Steam gathered under the fan. The bathtub was empty. The television was on, but the sound was muted and the whole room was too quiet. Bill Cosby waved at the two boys from behind the screen and smiled. Someone had left the door to the balcony open. Postcards spilled across the floor.
“What's with the bowling ball, dude? You got some fetish you haven't told me about?”
Elvira Moon was gone.
13
Alisha Wugg no longer wore any eye makeup.
“I don't let her watch any TV,” she said. “I hope you know that.”
She still worked in the payroll office at the liquor warehouse, filing away the addresses of every creep who commented on her ass into a folder entitled “Eventualities Et Al.” Eventually one of them would have his foot run over by a thousand-pound fork lift, snapping all the toes off inside his steel-toed boot. Eventually one of them would come in drunk and puke all over the scanners before he was fired, losing his wife, house, and custody of three children in the process. Someday they would all disappear. She would shred their file page by page in the storage room with a smile on her face. All of this was eventual.
“Not even, like,
Sesame Street?”
Jamie said.
“Well, what is a Snuffleupagus anyway?” Alisha said.
“I think it's a mammoth.”
Jamie Garrison sat across the table from her, his hands fidgeting in his lap. Kansas sat at the end of the table, dividing her peas into separate nations based on size and relative color. The small dark greens would soon outnumber all others, swelling like a tidal wave on one side of her plate.
“Not like an elephant? Or something?”
Alisha was already clearing the table, her thin hands flaking skin from too many showers and not enough soap. She didn't paint her nails, afraid of the chips and flakes.