“How much did they charge you? Was it the same place?” Logan asked.
“The place you got your head done, Loogie, except I didn't let the guy with three fingers do it for me,” B. Rex said. “I saw your head after he was done with it.”
B. Rex met them in the motel room an hour later. He lay down on the bed beside the glowing Judge and listened to Moses explain the whole story of his mother, the bowling ball, the motel rooms, the postcards scattered around the floor, and the fact that she might not even remember who he was anymore.
“Did it hurt? The thing going into your neck?” Moses asked.
“Any more than Loogie's head? No, it didn't hurt so bad.”
Moses went through the previous day and the night beforeâhis mother in the bathtub; the fact he had to wash his hands because he and Garrison, the big dude from the butcher shop, hit a lion and had to drag it over to the side of the road and everything. It was a mess, split open like a melon, intestines everywhere.
“14/88. What the fuck is that supposed to mean anyway?” Moses said.
“Obviously, you have not been reading the literature, Moses. And I do know you can read,” B. Rex said. “88. Eighth letter of the alphabet. HH. Heilâ¦you know who. You get it? Fuck, this is probably bullshit anywayâright, Loogie? African lion safari bullshit.”
They didn't believe him about the lion. That's why they were here now, nosing through the dark and the slush to find the body. No one had reported it on the news. No one had said anything at school. No one even had a lion around here as far as they knew.
“It was like hitting another car,” Moses said. “Where else do you think I got all the bruises? You think I did this to myself?”
Logan wasn't talking as much now, just staring out the window. He still had the purple tuque clamped onto his head, but the blood was beginning to push through the fibers.
“Stop, stop, it was there. You can still see it kinda. In the snow.”
The car shuddered to a stop. Moses hopped out and walked out into the fresh snow, leaving behind size-eleven boot prints for B. Rex to follow. They kept the car running. Logan wasn't talking anymore. His theories about Skynet and the coming apocalypse had lost their momentum as the night dragged on into morning.
“Shit, no lion here,” B. Rex said. “But damn.”
A warm patch of earth stood out on the slushy shoulder. Headlights illuminated the wet patch of blood and feces mixing in the dirt. It hadn't frozen yet.
“You sure it wasn't like a big-ass bear or something?” B. Rex asked.
“With a mane and a tail? Rex, it wasn't a bear.”
There was no wind. The two of them stood with clouds of steam hovering around their heads. The smog from the Buick floated up into the sky. B. Rex sniffed.
“I never smelled anything like that.”
“Well, that's African shit,” Moses said.
“Lion shit,” B. Rex said. “Real bloody lion shit. Shit. Shit, man. Shit.”
“We hit it right up in the belly. Whole thing just collapsed. Goin' like at least ninety down here, there wasn't a lotta snow, and then just fucking
bam!
I didn't believe it at first. And Garrison⦔
“He had you leave it here?” B. Rex said. He stopped and stared down at the cooling mess.
“Call the cops? Yeah, all right.”
“I get it, I get it,” B. Rex. “Where do you think he went?”
“He?”
“The lion. You said it was too big for you and Garrison to drag off to the shoulder. You even listening?”
“It's dark out here,” Moses said. “This look like a winter coat to you?”
They turned back toward the Buick.
“You think it just disappears like that and nobody notices?”
The car doors slammed and B. Rex turned the heater all the way into the red.
“It wasn't in the papers,” Moses said.
“You don't read the fucking papers, Moses.”
“You do after you run over someone's lion.”
B. Rex yawned and wiped a hole in the fog on the windshield. The clock read 4:30 a.m. Moses could feel his toes sticking together in his shoes. He stretched and sighed.
“Loogie, buddy, you ready to go find Moses's crazy mom? I'm going to get in so much shit from the parental unit for this,” B. Rex said. “Well, all for a good cause. Haven't pissed them off in a while. Been wearing a scarf at home to hide the new tat, my mom says it looks like I'm finally taking care of myself. And my dad, well I think he's pretty sure I'm a fag by now anyway. Hey, Loogie, wanna be my boy toy?”
Logan was asleep across the backseat. Both hands cupped his wounded head. It sounded like his lungs were drowning, but he was just crying in his sleep.
Back in the yellow motel halls, Moses stood against a dirty window and watched the sun rise over whirring police cars in the parking lot. Two officers argued with a naked man threatening them with a rolled-up newspaper.
Logan and B. Rex were back in his room, tucked under the faded comforter with the Judge between them. B. Rex and Moses had carried Logan into the elevator from the car, avoiding the stairway and the broken glass. No one stopped them as they carried his bleeding body down the hall, even though it was full of loud men in tuxedos with the tags still attached. The boys washed Logan's head in the bathtub and he croaked something about being dirty, impure, a fucking abomination, before the soapy water filled his mouth and he spat it up, cursing his mother.
Moses couldn't sleep. He'd paced the halls and watched the night unfold, the police arriving in disparate waves that washed away one layer of dirt only to reveal another beneath it. He stood over the stairwell and dropped beer bottles from the fifth floor, enjoying the brief second before the glass shattered below him.
Moses loved that second. Moses wished he could live in that second, he wished Elvira could live in that second too. He wanted to watch it expand before him until he could not see the other side, but only the center, before the drop and the crash. He wanted to enjoy the fall without the repercussions.
Elvira was always sane for a second, she was always thoughtful for a second, she was always, always unfailingly beautiful for a second, before she grimaced at his face or the television or the fact that another second was traveling toward her where she would no longer recognize her son or her bowling balls or her own face, or remember she was once married to a man named Ted Moon who told her always and forever, amen, in front of everyone who said they loved her once upon a time. Moses wanted another second before that new one arrived, before everything shattered on the beer-stained floor. The carpet at the Dynasty absorbed everything. It was soaked down to the foundation.
The boys would ride out tomorrow and find Elvira Moon and bring her back to waste away under her son's feeble care. Moses knew that was the best he could provide. A place where she could sleep in the bathtub without any questions being asked. B. Rex had promised they would find her. They had smoked out on the balcony and watched Logan twist and turn on the bed, moaning about his mother and the Sioux and the end of everything. B. Rex had puffed his chest out and blown smoke through his nose before he started coughing.
“We'll fucking find her, man. You know where she'd go, don't you? I'll go, and Loogie too. You helped our asses before, told us what the fuck was up. Stopped letting me get my face stomped every time I went into the hall. Got us on the program, you know?” B. Rex said, shifting his small arms around his chest. The wind spat little bits of snow into their faces. “That's why I got it spelled out on my neck, man. Like you said, we gotta be serious. You gotta rub it in their faces, you gotta imprint it in your blood to show them that you're serious. This is no joke.”
“So that explains the ugly-ass tattoo?” Moses said.
B. Rex nodded and hugged himself tighter.
“Yeah. Exactly.”
“14/88?” Moses said.
B. Rex rubbed his neck and blew more smoke through his nose. He coughed.
“Fourteen words, buddy. âWe must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.' It's probably all bullshit, but it pisses them off to no end.”
“Them?”
“Everybody. Ha. Ain't that the point of all this?”
15
They really did look like ZZ Top.
“You got any trim for us to use?” one of the bearded men said.
Jamie Garrison was still recovering from the night before. He waited for the camera crew to reveal themselves, for some leggy blonde in Daisy Duke shorts to spring up behind the deli counter with a massive sausage in her hands. Then he noticed the popped blood vessels and the dead eyes, and the fact that only one of them was wearing sunglasses inside. The bearded man spoke again and his voice cracked.
“Buddy, you awake, or you still tipsy? I asked if you got any trim.”
After leaving Alisha's the night before, Jamie drove around town swallowing all the orange and black pills the Lorax had given him. He banged on the door to the bingo hall downtown, but it was closed. Someone had had a heart attack during Midnight Madness. Each pill he swallowed was like a seed, planting more illusions in his head, until every branch collided with the next and he had to pull over in the parking lot of the Giant Tiger to calm down. Under its glowing yellow sign, Jamie tried to talk himself into a lucid state where lions weren't lurking behind the shopping cart corral and his daughter's teeth weren't marching through the streets together in pairs, all headed for Noah's Ark and the end of the world. Each curb looked like the perfect place to smash your jaw, and he still had no insurance, no cigarettes either.
Jamie had smoked them all staring at the flashing ambulances outside the bingo hall and the blue hair hurling up her entire life onto the chests of the tired paramedics. His mother wasn't there, but she was never around in those moments. He waited for fires to spring forth from rotting foundations, held his head between his knees to block out flashes of his mother's burns, the ones encircling her neck like dried snakes.
He didn't remember getting home, only remembered walking downstairs to find his brother's wife in his bed, her naked back revealing a school of mermaids trapped in a fisherman's net. They waved at him and blew sad kisses from fleshy lips. Renee no longer slept in Scott's bed. Jamie had walked upstairs to sleep on the couch, past the old stain and the laundry drying on the railing. Renee needed to sleep in her bed. She needed to start wearing more clothes. She needed to be all the things he did not want right now. Eventually Jamie fell asleep to the smell of garbage and his brother's voice singing Meat Loaf in falsetto from the kitchen.
“Trim? Like the fat?” Jamie said.
“Yeah. Need it. Going up to the park today. Big day.”
“What you need that shit for?”
There were no other customers in the store. It was only eight. In his dreams on the couch, Jamie had watched Alisha walk his daughter up to the roof of the old Osprey building. The wind spun them up to the roof and the crowds below all looked like Jamie. She told Kansas that she could fly, and then a bicycle burst forth from inside her body, its gears replaced with a set of wings labeled
PEGASUS
UNLIMITED
. The wings were bloody but functional, and the feathers glowed like pearls. A bicycle built for two, and no one else would fit into its silken harnesses. Jamie had woken up angry. Alisha always found the better gifts.
“We just wanted to help you out,” the bearded man said. “If you're going to be a bitch about it, we can just go somewhere else.”
Don Henley had booked Jamie for the morning shift on a Sunday. The store was cleanest in the morning, before the blood worked its way into the grout between the tiles and the dust from the bone saw filled the air with pink fluff.
“Just a long night,” Jamie said. “You want trim from the cans, or what?”
The other beard in the sunglasses nodded.
“I guess I can wrap it up for you, or we canâ”
“We brought a bucket, we'll just slop it in there,” the first beard said. “We know Don. Knew his brother too. Place looks like it's gone to shit since he died. You guys really need to step your game up a bit. Chad always ran it like a pro. A real pro.”
“Got that right,” said the other beard.
“You feed this to the dogs?” Jamie asked.
Don had inherited the place from his brother after the older Henley forgot to attach his seatbelt on a rollercoaster in Gurnee, Illinois. Chad Henley had hit the ground at an advanced speed, fast enough to push his organs outside his body.
“A dog gets out of hand if you spoil it like that,” the one beard said. “Can't teach it nothing. All it'll do is get gut rot. You ever eat a whole roast and then just sit on your ass all day?”
Henley only hired Jamie after he was fired from the warehouse. After Harry “Colon” Collins caught him with Alisha in the bathroom, their faces pressed together and their voices muffled in each other's mouths. Collins stood in the doorway and watched the bathroom stall shake violently, the sound of their breathing competing with the air conditioner. Hairy Colon. Jamie and Brock wrote it on everything. Some of the stores complained about drawings on their boxes, all of them signed Hairy Colon. Fuzzy asses and stick men bending over in front of one another. Harry found it on permission slips and doctor's notes, and on the underside of his desk when he had to climb under there to grab a pen. Jamie was gone before the stall door opened.
“You should see the dog we got now,” the first beard said. “We call him Artax. Size of a horse, big white thing. Turkish or some shit. Got him from a farmer. Got nailed by a car the other dayâjust totally destroyed its headlight, but he lived. One eye is all black now, but he'll get over it. You never want a dog that is taller than you when it's on its hind legs.”
“You guys use the trim yourselves, then?” Jamie said.