Waste (4 page)

“Hey, Mom, you here?”

“Just in the bathroom, baby boy. Just in the bathroom.”

“You got any plans for coming out of there tonight?”

“I got the Judge in here with me, too,” Elvira said.

It wasn't the same Judge from the old days. This Judge was found at a Salvation Army near the butcher shop; it was bright teal and cracked between the holes. Elvira didn't mind. Moses had scrawled
THE
JUDGE
on it with a Sharpie before he brought it home.

The television blared with piped-in laughter as Moses lay down in the bed. Bill Cosby tried to speak to him about the meaning of life through a blast of static, but he ignored the voice. He could smell the dusted meat sticking to his arm hair, but there was no way to get into that bathroom now. Elvira had locked the door. He walked down the hall past the sound of bashing headboards to the ice machine and plunged his lion-stained hands deep into the ice catcher under the machine.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

A man towered over the ice machine and looked down at Moses. The man's wide gut was mounted over a stiff belt buckle. A long beard covered the top of his stomach. A sword wrapped in a green snake stretched down the knuckles of his left hand. Moses stood his ground, trapped with his hands wrist deep in the cold ice.

“Washing my hands, Grandpa.”

The older man grunted and turned to walk back down the hallway. He dragged a wet garbage bag behind him still covered in snow.

Moses pulled his hands out and followed the man down the hall. The carpet was thick and shaggy. It masked his steps. The door to Room 227 slammed closed behind the man's balding head, and Moses leaned against the yellow wall. He could hear someone praying from somewhere behind the wallpaper, the rise and fall of a Hail Mary repeating as Moses tried to forget every fact he'd learned about lions in his grade-school days. Massive, muscled bodies that could grow up to eight feet in length, heavy spines which lined the male's penis, the power of their kills based on brutal strangulation of their prey.

Everything he ever learned watching television at five in the morning with the sound blaring and cigarettes burning the tips of his fingers. This would be the best way to forget lions and rogue members of ZZ Top dragging garbage bags through his motel, his home. The hallway was quieter than normal, the late-night residents still hitting the bars and each other down in lower Larkhill. Moses kept earplugs in a can under the bed for weekend nights, when all the vacant rooms filled with lot lizards and line workers with new paychecks to burn and burn till there was nothing left but ash. The Hail Marys continued and Moses nodded along until they finally stopped.

Lions. He had to forget lions. He walked down the uneven hallways, barely testing the doors. He didn't expect to find any abandoned wallets tonight. Tonight was supposed to be about forgetting things. Forgetting his mother holed up in the bathroom, forgetting the smell of his pants, his father in Arizona, the essay he was supposed to hand in tomorrow at 10 a.m. for World History. He was already pretty good at forgetting which nation bombed which first, but right now all he had to try and forget was the steaming pile he and Garrison had left on the side of the road for the whole world to find.

From inside his room, Moses heard his Mom cackle and cracked what only the most optimistic man would call a smile.

Jamie Garrison awoke in his brother's unfinished basement and tried to climb out of bed. He'd spent the whole night hosing down the front of his car, chipping off the bits of lion flesh that had frozen to the front bumper. He dropped them down the sewer grate at the base of the driveway, trying to slip them down into the sludge of leaves and dead squirrels that caused the street to flood every spring. Scott almost caught him when he backed out of the driveway at 4 a.m.

Renee had coffee going in the kitchen when he went upstairs. The stench of Scott's sanitation gear was everywhere. Ever since she and Scott got married in the summer, Renee had gone all formal, as if she didn't have a school of mermaids tattooed up her spine.

“You see the paper yet?” Renee said.

Someone had found the lion. Somehow he'd left a glove or piece of the car—there were serial numbers on cars, weren't there? Shit, they put serial numbers on everything now.

“Scottie said you should look at this story they got on like page ten, it's buried in there somewhere. Someone you know.”

It wasn't like Scott had circled the article for him. Every time he turned a page, Jamie felt the grind of his bones against one another. His neck strained to stay in place, every muscle tensed and bleating for some relief. Jamie scanned past the used car advertisements and into the police bulletins. Someone had robbed the beer store again. Someone else had smashed ten windows at the new courthouse they'd built over the old J.P. Chemical land.

“Kansas called for you last night, too, like one in the morning again. Her mom know she's doing that?” Renee said. “Five years old, calling the house? She gonna stay with us again any time soon?”

“Uh, this weekend?”

It was at the bottom of the page. Body found in Athabasca Park identified by police. The body was a few weeks old, according to the article. Jamie remembered the name.

“Kansas still obsessed with dinosaurs? I was thinking we could get a T. Rex pie dish or something, saw it at the Bulk Barn. Or maybe…”

Access to local dental records confirmed the man's identity. A long-time local resident, Connor Justin Condon, now considered a homicide by local officials.

“Sure, yeah. I mean, she hasn't grown out of it yet. Go ahead and get the cake…Renee?”

Renee was slumped down on a chair by the sink, her face buried in her chest, a mermaid peering over the back of her collar. She barely made a noise when she slept.

“You there, Renee?”

Jamie pulled himself up from the table and shoved the page of newsprint into his back pocket. He ran a chapped hand through her faded red hair and turned off the tap she'd left running at the sink. The overhead fan in the kitchen turned slowly, raining dust down on everything in the purple light. Jamie could taste it on his tongue.

5

Brock Cutcherson lived in one of the Polish neighborhoods down by the lake where everybody double parked and stole from their neighbors' tiny herb gardens when they weren't home. He rented a basement apartment from the Karskises and often had to deal with stamping feet when he turned his Iron Maiden records up too loud. But it was fuckin' Maiden, so whatever.

Still, the Karskises often invited him up to dinner with their quiet daughter Karina, who wore the desperately needed braces Brock's rent checks had paid for over the last two and a half years. She worked for Macalister and McGowan, an old downtown law firm based out of a former funeral home. They kept her in the basement sorting old files, where she often composed poems on the back of subpoenas before running them through the shredder, never to be read again. She knew her father would not approve. Sometimes she left Brock notes in the shared laundry room, tucked inside the lint catcher.

“So it's like this, right: ‘Mr. Cutcherson, although you have never spoken to me alone before, I want you to know I thank you every day for the money you provide my family.'”

“Kind of formal, isn't it?” Jamie said.

He sat on Brock's bed and tried to avoid knocking over half-full containers of Chinese food and McDonald's Happy Meal toys Brock had lined up on the floor like soldiers.

“Well, basically she's saying, ‘Let's knock boots, big man, thanks for un-fucking up my mangled mouth.'”

Jamie checked his watch and rocked back and forth on the bed. The longer he sat still, the more he felt each muscle knotting itself tighter and tighter around his bones. Getting out of the car had taken fifteen minutes and he still couldn't turn his neck all the way to the right. Brock's splayed smile stared back at him. Half his teeth were missing after Monday night's bottle accident.

“Face it, you're going to end up marrying that broad and having three little babies with her and moving in with the family and making the pilgrimage see to the Pope and learning the deep, dark secrets of pierogi magic.”

“Shut up, Garrison.”

Jamie kicked a foot out and sent a bunch of Fraggle Rock toys flying into a corner stacked with dirty underwear. Brock winced but didn't say anything.

“Why do you collect these little buggers, anyway?” Jamie said.

“Happy Meals are cheap as fuck. For three bucks, I get a whole meal.”

“Yeah, but you don't need to—whatever. I brought this over.”

Jamie flapped the battered piece of paper in Brock's face.

“You remember him, right? The little wiener from back when we lived on Olive.”

“Which guy?”

“The guy with the—you know, ‘Don't Be a Loner, Wrap Your Boner'—that guy?”

“The chick with the hot dog and her grandma? That's just a story, you know that, right? If you're thinking of the chick, or maybe it was a dude, who knows, but the one with the broom stick? Now I know for a fact that
that
happened. Girl fell right off the fridge. Impaled.”

“No, he's a fucking guy, Brock. Took the bus with us. Little bitch who almost got me booted out of high school, the one with the—”

“Oh, shit, you mean Condom,” Brock said.

“Yes, yes, exactly, that's the dude. The dude just disappeared off the planet,” Jamie said. “I figured he killed himself or something, like years ago, but apparently he was still kicking around here somewhere. Until this.”

“Until what?” Brock asked.

“Just read the fucking article.”

Brock spent every night from four until midnight slugging boxes of booze down at the liquor warehouse. The place had always looked like a deserted hangar bay to Jamie, even back when he was working there on the day shift. Brock would drive home at night covered in beer and gin, avoiding major intersections and the highway in case he got pulled over, but he always failed to wash his pants till the weekend. T-shirts covered in abstract splashes of red wine and vermouth sat in piles till Brock could no longer leap over them.

“You ever think of buying hangers?” Jamie said.

“I'm trying to read here, stop screwing with me,” Brock said.

Jamie swung his feet back and forth over the islands of Chinese food on the floor. They were about the only bones in his body that did not hurt. He closed his eyes. Alisha was supposed to call him about the kid again tonight. And Scott still wanted him out in a couple weeks, and the meat shop was going to call him in for another shift. Behind all these thoughts lurked the lion with its rib cage split open and its intestines spooling out across the pavement. Its eyes were open.

“It is the Condom. Goddamn,” Brock said. “What a knob. You remember when he cried 'cause we told him yogurt was just elephant jizz, and—shit, what did one of the girls say to him?”

“I don't remember, but he was a shit stain. Pissed himself once on the bus, remember?”

“That was probably the one time I felt bad about that dude. We razed his ass more than once. And he was always making shit look so dramatic. I mean he probably brought it on himself anyway. But no one deserves this kind of shit,” Brock said.

Brock leaned back in his chair and coughed in his hand.

“I saw you fucked the front of your car up.”

“Just a raccoon, sent me spinnin' off the road a little,” Jamie said. “Might have knocked a tree or a shrub or something. No big deal.”

“A raccoon?”

“Yeah, that's what I'm also here about; I know you got all those meds, for the teeth, right? So I was wondering. I mean, my neck is killing me.”

“Sold 'em, boss,” Brock said.

“What?”

“I fucking sold 'em for pretty good money.”

“Well, shit, you know where I can get any? I need something. I won't be able to go to work otherwise.”

“Go see a doctor like I did.”

Jamie stood up and kicked a few more Happy Meal toys across the floor.

“I'm the one who took you to the fucking doctor in the first place.”

“You wanna know who I took 'em to?”

“Why else do you think I'm here?” Jamie asked.

“All right, okay? Go down Olive until you see a one-way for Monroe, and then just cruise down there until you hit the old strip malls that pretty much just have like nothing going on. You know the ones I'm talking about. Well, one has a porno store, and the other might still have a sub sandwich place, but anyway, it'll be an old hobby shop, with um, a sun roof?”

“A sun roof?”

“Shit, um, that's the best I can describe it,” Brock said.

“Skylights?”

“Yeah, whatever. Just knock there, it says like Henry's Holistic Hobbies on the door.”

“You can remember that name, but not the word skylight?” Jamie said.

Brock smiled his pumpkin smile and pulled a two-liter bottle of Coke out from under the bed.

“You'll recognize the guy 'cause he has a big-ass moustache. He'll want you to call him Larry or some shit. I was pretty messed up when I went to go sell him the stuff so I don't really remember. It won't be his real name, I can tell you that. But he has some righteous stuff. Woulda put old Condom out of his misery, if he knew what was good for him. Now watch this.”

Brock took a swig from the bottle and then fired two parallel streams from between his teeth across the floor. When he smiled, all Jamie could see were the holes.

6

Moses didn't mind working the morning shift. He liked the quiet. He liked the smell of sanitizer in the cutting rooms, the glow of the battered off-white cutting boards propped up against the floor. All the stuff in the back was stainless steel—the tables, the carts, the sinks. Sometimes he wandered into the refrigerator with his bike helmet still on, dodging the massive sides of beef that weighed more than he did. They dangled from the ceiling on long hooks that swayed in the breeze from the cooling fans.