“You can't just tear a place like this apart, can you?”
“When the landlord died two years ago and the family is still locked in some bitter feud over who gets his property rights, one that'll probably go on for another fifteen years and inspire a whole new season of
Dallas?
” the little man said. “Well, then I can do whatever I want. And I don't even know why you're here. You know, if you hadn't said anything, you might have got to see some of the really good stuff in here.”
“You never asked me why,” Jamie said.
“Well, first of all,” the little man said. “I'm the Lorax.”
“Like the kids' book?”
“Sure. Let's say that.”
Most of the windows were covered with plywood that had begun to rot from the rain and snow. Moisture dripping in from busted skylights had turned part of the ceiling a bluish green.
“Now who sent you to me? I should give him a bonus for the referral.”
“I don't think he's really a repeat customer,” Jamie said. “It was, uh, this guy, Brock.”
“His face all fucked up like a pumpkin?” the Lorax asked.
“Yeah. Hit with a bottle from a car couple nights ago.”
“I just lost mine last year,” the Lorax said, and clacked his dentures together. He did not elaborate. A draft swept through the busted skylight in the ceiling, rattling the leaves of wallpaper that had come loose from the walls.
“He told me you sold him or no, sorry, he boughtâ”
“No, he sold to me,” the Lorax said. He pushed through tarps and broken two-by-fours that separated the busted offices into smaller compartments. Heavy bright lamps sat unplugged in each section, rows and rows of lamps taken from retirement homes and garage sales. Ugly brass beasts mounted with dogs and dragons and the occasional swan. A faint odor of manure pushed its way into Jamie's nose. He recognized the smell somewhere in the back of his brain.
“You shit in here, too?” Jamie asked.
The Lorax laughed. “No, man, that's not my shit. Best fertilizer known to man. Pig shit. I need it to keep this whole show running here. You get used to it, believe me. Start to pick out the nuance. Like wine or something. But enough of that, you're here now. You can't sleep?”
Someone honked their horn in the parking lot out front.
“Accident the other day,” Jamie said. “Fucked up my neck. Don't wanna deal with a doc.”
“How bad was it? Inquiring minds and all.”
“I hit a buck. Yeah. A buck. Messed the grille up. Gave me and a buddy a mean case of whiplash,” Jamie said. “It'll be a bitch to fix if I can't get the cash.”
“Remember when I said the dude that owned the place died?” the Lorax said. “Now, he had some money. He wouldn't have let this place fall like it has.”
Jamie sighed and tried not to breathe in the pig shit. Cables dangled from the ceiling tiles.
“Impatient, aren't you? Friend with the fucked-up teeth stayed here all afternoon. We even had a little smoke, but whatever. Different strokes, right? I sit in this place all day. Least you can do is let my ass talk before you rip me off and step outside into fresh air.”
“I'm not exactly dressed for this shit is all. Shoulda worn my boots.”
The stink of pig shit grew heavier as he talked. The walls were damp to the touch.
“I'm a bit of a farmer,” the Lorax said. “I always got my boots on.”
Jamie noticed the small grey bulbs pushing through the manure under the tarps and the weak daylight punched through the ceiling in scattered patches.
“The holes work better in the summer months, when I grow bud. I just did my first harvest in here. The electrical bills are crazy, but I'm not paying them. That whole family just has a lawyer footing the bill for this place every month while they tear each other to shreds. Really nasty stuff. I think it might have been in the paper once.” The Lorax laughed. “If they ever bothered to come down here and check out some of the old man's properties, they'd realize they were just fighting over who got a larger slice of the cow pie.”
“And then you'd be up shit creek.”
“I'm very familiar with that creek. That mess you saw inside?” the Lorax said. “Vicious mothers makin' sure I stay far up that creek. You ever want to eat any of these?”
The pale blue walls of the operating chamber glowed around the two of them. A painting of a fox and her pups stood against the wall in the corner. Someone had smashed its glass case and drawn a top hat on the fox. The Lorax pushed a bundle of mushrooms into Jamie's face.
“Eat that shit? All I want is some Vicodin, Percocet or something. Maybe some of the reds.”
The Lorax laughed and clacked his dentures in his mouth. He turned and climbed back through the gaping hole into the hobby shop. Jamie followed. One hundred special-edition Darth Vader models with hologram cards attached stared back at them from the pockmarked floor. All fake duplicates shipped directly from Mumbai. All gleaming black.
The smell of the pigs still clung to Jamie's nose. “So, you've got it or not?”
“Straight from Quebec. That's the best place to go get it,” the Lorax said. “A place where all they eat is gravy and each other. You know some of the early settlers were cannibals in New France? It's true. They like to cut it out of the textbooks. Last time I made some joke about their priests and spent half my time talking myself out of a hole in the ground.”
“A hole?”
Jamie was barely listening now. His leg was starting to spasm with memories of the impact.
“An actual hole. They dug it and everything,” the Lorax said. “I've been partially fossilized. How many people can say that?”
The Lorax pulled a plastic grocery bag filled with prescription bottles and loose pills out from underneath a counter covered in stickers, shards of glass, and chewed gum.
“We'll go with twenty for now. On the house for a first-time customer.”
Jamie watched the little stubby fingers counting out his pills one by one, pushing them into an old prescription bottle assigned to a Mrs. Wanda Chubbs of Burlington, Ontario.
“I don't know if I can just take this shit off youâlike, gratis, you know?”
“It's not a debtâit's an investment.” The Lorax clacked his dentures again into a smile that only filled the right side of his mouth. Jamie looked around at the shattered display cases. There was a busted fan dangling from the ceiling and the cash register was cracked open on the floor.
“I'll take it. Was it like this when Brock came here? The mess?”
“You ever listen to ZZ Top?” the Lorax asked. “ZZ Top. Music?”
“They're all right, I guess,” Jamie said.
The Lorax pushed a children's loot bag across to Jamie. It had a smiley clown face on the front. The smile was offset from the rest of its features, dripping off the face and into the white background. Jamie didn't want to put it in his car.
“Well these guys looked like two rogue agents of the mighty left hand of ZZ Top,” the Lorax said. “Tore the whole place apart, looking for who knows what. Took half my harvest when they left. A lot of rage in those two. And the bickering, man. All they did was talk shit, all day. I shoulda seen them coming.”
“They were here all day?” Jamie asked.
“Maybe like two hours, but never shut up once.”
It had started to snow outside. Jamie could barely see the outline of his car through the dusty window. He pulled out his keys and grabbed the loot bag.
“Hey, hey, hey, you didn't even stick around for my story, man. My story,” the Lorax whined. “About the old dude? Remember?”
“Your uncle? The pervert who dressed up like Peter Pan?”
“Damn, you're twisting my words. No, the guy who ran this place. I guess he got all mad and tried stuffing a big bag of something into the dumpster, kind of a big fuck you to the guy who was supposed to pick it up later that day. Sets off a nest of yellow jackets. Whole swarm of them came out of there. Of course, dude is allergic.
“He's lying there and the place is covered with yellow jackets. My uncle says he just watched through the delivery door. A couple of guys down the lot were unloading a truck and they just sat there too. Watched this guy shaking under a cloud. He said it was like the dude was having a seizure. All 'cause he couldn't be bothered to pay for real garbage pick-up.”
“So they watched?” Jamie said.
“What were they supposed to do? Go get stung? Come on. Owner starts foaming at the mouth, his face gets all swollen, and they can't do nothing. Took ten minutes for him to die. Ten whole minutes and fucker was so fat they could barely fit him in the ambulance.”
Jamie just shook his head and started for the door. His sinuses were filled with pigs and wasps climbing over each other to block out the image of the lion with its backside split open across the pavement. Snow was probably covering it now too.
“Before you go, buddy, anyone you know needs something, you tell them come to me, all right? I can always use more referrals,” the Lorax said. “Business is really just networking.”
“And what am I supposed to say? Look for the little fuck in the baseball jersey?”
The little man laughed and popped his dentures out of his mouth. It only made his moustache look biggerâa caterpillar threatening to swallow his face whole.
“Just tell them to ask for the Lorax.”
Jamie slammed the door on Henry's Holistic Hobbies. His stride betrayed a slight limp to the left, his face set against the pain shooting up his ankle and exploding behind his right eye. The lion was not forgiving. Snow melted on impact with the grass. A Ford in the corner of the parking lot honked in his direction. Jamie gave it the finger and began brushing the flakes off of his windshield. The clown face on his loot bag watched him while he worked.
10
Logan was mad at first.
He kicked the body and strangled its skinny hairless throat. He smashed its skull against his bed post, stabbed its back again and again with the butter knife until the handle broke off against his father's hip bone. The patch of skin on Logan's head, where half an uneven swastika remained, flapped around while he tried to yank the knife back out. Moses just sat on the corner of the bed wondering when Logan's mother was going to come home. She had to come home.
Mr. Chatterton's blood was sticky by the time Logan stopped crying. For a while he lay on top of the body. The lime-green walls were spattered with red spots that slowly turned brown like decaying Christmas decorations.
“We should call the cops, right?” Logan said.
“We call the police, and they see what you did, and they will say, what, suicide? No way.”
Logan had a record with the school board. Mainly for petty vandalism of the bathrooms and school parking lot. The boys had set off fireworks and spray-painted cars with Skrewdriver lyrics that summer. They only had the one cassette and they played it till the tape wore through to the other side. “White Rider,” the one with Donaldson shrieking about freedom with his teeth pressed against the mic. Most of the graffiti was too messy to read except for the word “Jew” sprayed onto Mr. Goldberg's car and along the auto shop windows. The police were never called.
Logan and B. Rex had egged Goldberg's house the next night, beside the Bargain Bin and the methadone clinic. Moses had spent that night talking his mother off the balcony instead of pitching eggs with his friends. Elvira Moon had threatened to toss the Judge over the edge of the balcony if he didn't begin to give her straight answers about where her husband had disappeared to that morning. She was still looking for Ted Moon.
Logan and Moses spent the entire day staring at the telephone, peeking out from behind the blinds, waiting for someone to expose them. They tried calling B. Rex, who had a car from his grandfather, the same grandfather who took him hunting and taught him how to shoot, how to break an animal down into portable, edible parts. B. Rex would know what to do. He was the one who was supposed to know things. The one whose parents had set up a college fund and even made him lunch for school. No one was home.
Neither of them felt like eating, not after checking on the body in the basement to make sure it wasn't going to get up again. The day moved slowly, the sun charting its progress with their shadows till finally, after a marathon run of
Golden Girls
and uneaten Froot Loops, the streetlights outside began to flicker on one by one.
B. Rex still wasn't answering his phone.
It took an hour to get the body out of the basement. Mr. Chatteron's body seemed to expand with every minute that passed. Logan kept sobbing and then slapping the body across the face, throwing curses down the stairs at Moses. Each tugging motion left another snail stain behind them. The lion stalked Moses up the basement stairs while he tried not to puke. Mr. Chatterton still had his guts intact. Mr. Chatterton didn't belong to anybody anymore.
“We can't leave him in the house. It'll start to smell.”
After traveling six blocks with Mr. Chatterton's skinny body folded up like a lawn chair in the back of Logan's old red wagon, Moses realized it was a bad plan. Two sixteen-year-olds dragging a red wagon behind a bicycle like a tiny caravan. The body was barely hidden under a faded quilt covered with loons and maple leaves. Logan's parents had bought it on their first anniversary, when Logan was conceived in a Comfort Inn suite in northern Alberta.
Headlights flashed past the boys in the snow, each car too busy to notice their oozing cargo. Moses had wrapped the body in Glad ClingWrap before setting off. It took three whole rolls and made all of Mr. Chatterton's features look smushed, like a Picasso painting. Moses didn't want to leave another trail behind.
The store was closed when they arrived at Henley's Meats. Texaco had shut off all the lights. Only the hum of the coolers remained. Moses unlocked the back door and pushed Logan inside. The cutting room was cold and clean. Moses flipped on the lights. Logan lay on the floor, pressing his wounded head against the cool tiles. He had been crying on and off throughout the day. He still would not reveal what he'd said to Mrs. Chatterton, only repeating she was going, going, fucking gone, all right, Moses?