Waste (9 page)

Moses didn't argue. He unloaded the body alone. His bones ached from the car accident the day before and there was still lion blood smeared across his shirt. He was tired and his spine tilted to one side when he tried to stand up straight. There were back massagers for rent back at the motel, but Moses didn't like the smell of them—somewhere between female sweat and old feta cheese.

“Should we take his shoes off?” Logan asked.

“Maybe his clothes too,” Moses said.

“What're we going to do with them? Burn 'em? Toss 'em in the trash?”

“We can't use the garbage here. I don't want to get in any shit,” Moses said.

Logan rolled his eyes and pulled himself up off the tiles, patches of old blood stuck to his shirt. Light bounced off all the steel fixtures and the freshly washed floor. Logan began pulling his father's running shoes off, one by one. All the unwanted pieces. The hardest part was the T-shirt. It took both of them to pull it over Mr. Chatterton's bulbous head. They left his underwear alone. Moses used the detergent, the rinse, and the sanitizer on the body while Logan tied all the clothes up inside the honeymoon quilt and put it back in the wagon. The humid air filled their lungs and left no room for conversation.

“Should we…um…”

Logan eyed the long, curved butcher knives soaking in the sink. The bone saw lurked in the corner, dismantled and glistening, a passive threat until the morning totes arrived full of pork back ribs. They were on sale at half price for the next two weeks.

“No, no, I think he'll fit. He's not very big. You're bigger than he is, height-wise,” Moses said. “And he's—well, he's not fat.”

“Just around the middle a little bit.”

Moses popped one of the lids. Fat, bone, gristle. Chunks of decaying meat, dark steaks and old chickens. Pints of blood dumped off the cutting boards. Pork fat, beef gristle, rotting turkey gullets. All the unwanted parts. The can was full. Too full. The next container mainly held beef trimmings and broken pig bones bleeding yellow. The blood around the sides of the bone can was green like algae. They could bury him under that blood.

Moses tucked his hands under Mr. Chatterton's hairy armpits. He nodded at Logan to grab the feet. Moses would make it fit.

“They just take him away with the rest of this stuff?” Logan said.

“I don't know.”

“And then what will they do?” Logan asked. “What do they do with this shit?”

“I don't know.”

The body slid into the green muck, bits of bone and fat bubbling around the surface. Moses was used to the smell. The surface congealed around the body like Jell-O as they pushed it farther down. They had to jam the feet under the lid, the long toenails rasping at the plastic. Logan sat on the floor and closed his eyes. Moses pushed and pulled the bone can outside into the snow. Too cold for crows. The moon made everything look clean. No lion waited outside.

“I can't go back there,” Logan said. “She isn't coming back, she's never coming back, Moses. I know that, and he knew it too.”

Moses put an arm around his friend and sat on the tiled floor. Cold beads of sweat trickled down through the mangled swastika on Logan's head. That tattoo was Moses's fault too. The red wagon sat in the corner, loaded with its bundle of evidence. They'd have to burn it.

“She's never coming back, Mosey. And now, well, fuck. Fuck. What about all the blood?”

Moses got up and began to turn off the lights. He sprayed the floor down with the hose again as Logan sat in the corner, the lemon backsplash mixing with the tears on his face. Logan could not go back to that house, a house covered in clown paint and filled with all those drawings of his mother's hand, a science experiment left half finished. The sound of the hose finally cut out.

“You'll have to come stay with me.”

11

“New developments in the unsettling Athabasca case from earlier this month. Police spokesperson Cheryl Landry reports that the body has now been identified as Connor James Condon, long-time resident of Larkhill, Ontario. Police are asking anyone with any information to come forward at this time. They are also reaching out to family…”

Jamie spun the dial on the radio. His hands were still shaking a bit. He'd swallowed two of the pills before hopping on the road, waiting for an elephant to emerge from the darkness and crack his transmission in two. He should have gone to work, back to the grinders and the saws and the mess. Instead he'd sat in his car all day, playing with the radio, listening to Connor's weeping mother crying on the front steps of the police station with a microphone plunged down her throat as one of the reporters probed her for fifteen minutes. Jamie had parked behind the Pillar, an old hotel that swayed over Larkhill; it's all-day breakfast buffet shone through the foggy windows. Unlike the motels that ran up and down the highway like neon skid marks, the Pillar was an institution, its massive brick walls witness to far more tragedy than any new age wailing wall or truck-stop parking lot. The inside was filled with decaying cornices, glass chandeliers, and women whose boots rode up over their knees. No one ever questioned the large rusted Cadillacs and old limousines that circled the place on Saturday night, the remnants of something greater now floating around a clogged drain.

Jamie coughed and hacked as he steered his way through the snow. The wipers' rise and fall soothed his mind, which bounced from the wolves tearing Connor apart to the burst lion hopefully now buried under the snow. No one had found the body yet, or no one had cared to call it in. Maybe someone had taken it up to that guy's place on Keewatin like Mosey said.

Maybe someone had set it on fire.

Jamie was already late to pick up Kansas, already late for the dinner Alisha might have planned—another olive branch he'd snap off at its barely healed juncture. More like a twig by this point, with those tiny spring buds gasping for air. To get there, he was driving past the old warehouse that dangled below town like a hangar bay out by the water, its massive gates never closing, the three shifts rotating in and out like rusted parts in need of oil. Old foreign clunkers and massive new Dodge trucks the repo man would be collecting from gravel driveways within a year slowly pushed their way out onto the old baseline road.

Jamie didn't look at the liquor warehouse, its shoddy brown siding torn in places by heavy winds off the lake, its ruptured foundation leaking precious heat in the winter months. He didn't even glance at its truck yard filled with security cameras no one had ever bothered to plug in. He knew there was nothing in there for him, despite Brock's insistence they'd take him back if he agreed to do another interview with Collins. Both Brock and Jamie had been hired on the summer after Jamie was expelled and his family had moved into a new unit down in the community housing, between an abandoned grow op and the local cat lady, who let her pets run wild through the whole neighborhood and piss on everything.

“Every man has got to have a bonsai tree, man. It is the only way you will survive here.”

Donnie Henley's parents had never even heard of the Eagles when they gave birth to their first son. The band did not even exist at the time. Don spent the first twenty years of his life blissfully unaffected by his namesake. That was, until “Hotel California” became the anthem at his college. Called to countless keggers, where he proudly chugged along as the more famous Henley warned him he would never leave, Don dropped out after failing three chemistry midterms in a row. His failure also might have been connected to the bong his girlfriend bought him for their three-week anniversary. The girlfriend who would later become his wife and personal trainer. On his weekends off, Don Henley liked to bare-knuckle box in his backyard.

With
TACO BELL
tattooed across his knuckles and a freshly broken nose, Henley trained Brock and Jamie in the bowels of the warehouse. He showed them how to empty trucks at the slowest pace acceptable by union standards, and how to build a bed of Heineken cases to rest on if they were hung over. The trick was to pad the top row with bags of sawdust and cover it in a tarp. He showed them how to tie the knots that kept five thousand dollars worth of Johnnie Walker Blue Label from crashing to the floor, and he always knew which table to sit at in the dingy cafeteria. Mostly, Don Henley just showed them how to pass the time.

“Now, I know I love my wife—I've known that ever since she bought me a box of ice cream sandwiches after I had my wisdom teeth out,” Donnie said one day. “A girl who knows exactly what you desire, in the exact moment of desire, the exact millisecond, that is a girl you want to stay with for life.”

Brock and Jamie rolled their eyes. They were still covered in Beefeater gin from when Sweet Pete Colleti had dumped a skid of it across the loading dock. Took three hours to clean up.

“Hey, I don't expect you to up and propose to whatever girl you've got lined up for the night, all right? I'm trying to tell you something important, though. This place is going to drive you crazy if you don't find a way to cope with it. You'll end up driving a forklift right off the dock.

“What you need to survive here is a bonsai tree. My brother has one in his office in Toronto, one of those nice big office towers on Bay. He says they all have them in the office. That's what they use to relax.”

“They have trees in their offices?” Brock asked.

“Little Japanese trees, dwarf things. Only grow so big over the course of their lifetime. Sort of look like full-grown trees, only miniature.”

Brock said, “Sounds like your brother is a fag, Donnie.”

“You only wish, Cutcherson. Got your mouth open all the time looks like you're just waiting for a dick to fill it,” Donnie said. “Unfortunately, he's married.”

“All right,” Jamie said. “So what's your point?”

“Always with the point here, eh, Garrison? You guys are just lucky the whole system shut down, otherwise we'd be unloading Peanut Noir all night,” Donnie said. “Point I'm trying to get to is that if you work here long enough, you will go certifiably insane. Maybe it's the fumes from the booze, or the dust, or the fucking monotony, but you will go crazy without a doubt. Whether it's smashing a window or someone's face or jumping off the top row back in storage. And guess who will have to clean that up?”

“You?”

“Yes, me. I will somehow be bestowed with that great honor.”

The warehouse was loud that night, but the three still sat in the shipping container talking in harsh whispers. Harry “Colon” Collins would be on their asses to dust or sweep if he found them hiding out in a trailer while the receiving system rebooted the rolling lines.

“So you need a bonsai tree. You need something to distract you, to keep your mind off the fact that you're stuck in this place for the foreseeable future with a lack of females and a whole lot of ugly motherfuckers who you can barely interact with in a civ manner.”

The boys said nothing.

“And although I do have a wife, I also have a fucking bonsai tree. And you can always have both, that's the beauty of it.”

“Don, this is just fucking confusin'.”

“Everything is confusing for you, Garrison. What I'm saying is pretty simple. With these trees, they always just do a little maintenance, a little interaction with nature every day, a little preservation of something that isn't like a millionaire's stocks or his wife's assets in the divorce over his mistress, secretary, whatever. These guys in the big towers, they get to interact with something real. Real natural.

“Now, back at my place, my wife has a nice little herb garden and that's how she does it. But here, we can't really grow shit, can we? Not even like dill. That shit will grow anywhere if you let it. No, we are kinda stuck. Closest thing we got in here is women.”

“Like ten of them? All in the offices, all typing away or running from here to there with their files and shit,” Jamie said.

“But that's the point, Garrison. It doesn't need to be all the time. These dudes downtown aren't pruning and raking their little trees all day, but they are checking in on them from time to time. That's how you fucking survive here.”

“Most of the girls in here got boyfriends already, or are way old. Like older than you, and you're…shit, you been around since what? Civil War?” Jamie said.

“I'm thirty, I'm not the walking dead, all right? But I get you. You don't need to want to date them. You just need to establish a rapport.”

“A what?” Brock said.

“Okay, I don't know—a relationship.”

“You said we aren't trying to bang these broads, so what are you even talking about, man?”

“I'm talking about decent human interaction here, boys. To connect you with a world that you otherwise would not be able to handle,” Donnie said.

“So what do we do then, huh?”

“Just find one of the girls here, like in the parking lot, or whatever, the caf. Start up a little conversation. Hmm, look. All right, you know Candice?”

“Girl who checks the hours, does all that stuff? She's kinda got a—”

“She's got a weird nose, I know, but she's real nice. I check in to pick up my paystub, or see her in the parking lot. Maybe I chat a little here and there, and it's nice,” Donnie said. “I got something to look forward to, a relationship to maintain, and that's it. Something at work that doesn't have shit to do with work keeps me from getting all crazy.”

“So, you don't wanna ever do anything with Candice? I mean, besides the nose thing, she is pretty fit,” Jamie said. “And she's got that tattoo…”

“No, Garrison, I don't. I really don't. Thing is, I do love my wife, truly, deeply, from the fucking root of my cock all the way to my heart and back, but the other thing is, when I'm here, a little female interaction is what keeps me sane,” Donnie said. “It's why I don't think they should ever be segregating boys from girls in schools, and why I think so many of the numb nuts working here end up either crazy or bitter as shit about women.”