Jamie sat still and closed his eyes against the spittle gathering on his cheeks. Mr. Wilkinson, the actual principal, stood against the door with his hands behind his back. Graves Memorial Collegiate and Vocational did not need another visit from local law enforcement. They agreed this would be handled internally.
The questions continued. Jamie had answers for them all but kept his mouth shut. He knew they had no interest in the way the Condom kid always spread out his homemade lunch across an entire table in the cafeteria; the way he raised his hand, always twisting his palm in the air like he was the Queen in a parade.
They didn’t notice the smell of his armpits when he pulled himself up the steps onto the bus, the small black hairs that dotted his nose when you got nice and close to his face before you spat on him. All one hundred and fifty ways that hatred festered through Garrison’s thoughts and found its expression through drive-by eggings and violent free-for-alls behind the Zellers on Friday nights. Don’t forget the cadence of that kid’s voice, as if the vocal cords in his throat couldn’t commit to one sound before the other, causing them to trip and fall out of his mouth in a bloody, phlegmy mess. Make that one hundred and fifty-one ways Jamie Garrison had learned to hate the Condom kid.
The blinds stayed closed and eventually Georgopolous left in a flurry of damp paper and dandruff. His mistress was waiting for him down at the Pillaros Hotel. That was the word in the halls. Mr. Wilkinson took over. He sat across from Jamie in the vice principal’s chair and placed his feet on the table. The room was hot and sweaty. Mr. Wilkinson didn’t say anything for a long time.
“I know what happened with you.”
Jamie didn’t look up from the floor.
“Saw it in the paper a couple weeks ago, you know. Very surprising,” Mr. Wilkinson said. “Something about a fire, right? That you? Tell me if I am getting close here.”
Jamie began to rock back and forth in the chair. He tried to stop himself, but his legs wouldn’t listen. This room was too hot. Sweat gathered in the hollow of his throat.
“Now, when we brought up your file, I noticed you lived on— what was it? Olive Avenue, down by a lot of the factory lots, am I right? Not the community housing, but pretty close? Around that neighborhood. Unless you disagree, I’m going to assume we have the facts right.”
Jamie nodded but kept his eyes closed. He began to regulate his breathing, pulling air in his nose and pushing it out his mouth. The parking lot outside the window sounded quiet. There weren’t any clocks in the room. The low, level tick of Mr. Wilkinson’s watch helped keep track of the seconds. It took eighty ticks for Mr. Wilkinson to speak again.
“I’m sorry. I had to arrange my thoughts. Always better to speak when one has something to say, rather than saying…well, you’ve probably heard that old rotten chestnut before, haven’t you, Garrison?” Wilkinson said. “What I wanted to talk to you about was the fire. It was your house, right? I know a number of the townhomes went up together, but the origin apparently was yours, on Thanksgiving, right?”
That was the night when the whole place had gone up while everyone was asleep. Smoke filled the hallway, his mother pushing the boys down the stairs, his brother coughing and crying, the windows bursting from the inside due to the heat. Their father stood outside amongst the dead leaves smoking a cigarette and watching the house burn. The bullet hole in his palm was still wrapped in a bandage from a few months before at the abattoir. He didn’t say anything as his wife made the boys stop, drop, and roll on the dead grass. The frost melted underneath their backs, freezing again as they waited for the first ambulance to arrive. A burn bubbled around Jamie’s mother’s neck, fusing the nightgown to her pale flesh.
“Now I know you’ve had a rough time lately, and your brother, what’s he in now, ninth grade?” Wilkinson said. “I know he hasn’t been to school in a couple days, so you obviously have some problems at home. Or wherever you’re staying at the moment. And of course, that is your own private business. I don’t mean to probe.”
Silence for five minutes. No tears. Jamie grunted. Mr. Wilkinson just sat with his feet up on the table and watched. A dull, low moan eventually began to spurt from his chest like a dehumidifier. It didn’t sound like him. It didn’t sound like anything human.
Eventually, in that hot room, a two-week suspension was handed down from one sweaty palm to another. Nothing proven, nothing gained. Jamie walked home to the rambling motel in the cold and told his mother he stayed late after school for homework—a group project on native rights in the aftermath of World War II. She laughed in his face and asked him to change the dressing on her burn. Big yellow bubbles popped every time pressure was applied.
Jamie didn’t say anything to his father, sitting on the balcony of their motel room, smoking and dropping the ashes down onto the patio furniture below. The insurance company was still waiting for the arson judgment. Initial reports suggested an electrical fire. It was too cold for anyone to use the motel pool. The remains of a crow circled its clogged filter, the chlorine slowly dissolving its feathers down to the quick. One of the hotel staff kept trying to fish it out with a pole, cursing at the dead bird in Polish. The motel smelled like cheap champagne and old cigars. They called it the Dynasty. They were only there for two weeks before a city councilor’s girlfriend popped the waterbed in the room above theirs with her stiletto and the water shorted out the television.
Jamie spent those two weeks walking around town, carving his initials into fence posts and doorframes. He walked past the pawnshops on the downtown strip lined up like children’s blocks. Sharkee’s Pawn Palace. Jameson Pawn and Loan. The Loan Arranger. Each one packed with festering potential. Someone who thought they’d get married. Someone who thought they’d play guitar. Each dream propped up in the window. Jamie started spending each morning watching crumpled people trickle into the pawnshops, handing over the old dreams they’d decided to surrender, the ones gathering dust like diplomas dangling from bathroom walls. Sometimes he thought to buy them a cup of coffee, but he had no money—only the change he found in the candy machines at the arenas.
The pawnshops were often empty in the afternoons, the owners watching soap operas or cutting dope in the back rooms with men in leather jackets and ponytails. All of those discounted lives gathering dust until someone else came to pick them up for triple the initial price.
Jamie never bought anything.
Sometimes he spent the afternoons at Melissa Hurley’s, until her father walked in on them with Melissa bent over her old Easy-Bake Oven and Jamie pumping away from behind. It didn’t help that the oven was plugged in and would not stop dinging throughout the entire shouting match. Her father threw Jamie naked down a flight of stairs and tried to whip him with his belt.
It only took four days back at school for Jamie to fuck up again, a knee to the crotch of Harry Knowles that some kids said popped one of his balls. Melissa Hurley had moved on quickly, a whirling dervish of red hair, pancake makeup, and angry yellow pimples in search of the right boy, any boy. Mr. Hurley’s heart attack during a sermon on premarital sex only increased her speed.
Knowles was apparently the newest in a long line of conquests, something that didn’t faze Jamie until Knowles told him about Melissa mocking the size of his dick. Tiny, man, like a pinky. Like a pencil. Like one of those pins they put under a microscope to show you how small a cell is in biology class, you know?
No testicle was actually popped in the ensuing melee.
Jamie did not bother showing up for his official expulsion. He did not want to sit while Mr. Georgopolous rained dandruff down on his face. He didn’t tell his parents either. He didn’t even bother going home that night. Instead he hung out under the eaves of the Coffee Time downtown and watched people in wet trench coats and broken umbrellas hand over pieces of themselves to the bearded men behind greasy bulletproof glass for loose crumpled bills and slivers of change. He wanted to reach out and touch them. Women in torn leggings and jagged leather boots paced through
the puddles outside, some ducking into cars that smelled like cheap cigarettes and formaldehyde before they reappeared again like doppelgangers with busted eye sockets and mussed hair. Jamie kept his own eyes on the pawnshop windows, watching them swallowing everything up whole, every little piece they were given. He had nothing to give.
Even now, eight years later, as he pulled into the strip mall parking lot, Jamie Garrison’s fists clutched the steering wheel, imagining his fingers tautly bound up in the handles of that plastic Kmart bag, watching that fucking kid’s face go pink, then red, then purple, until everything turned white and limp in his hands. This was all his fault, that little fucker. The kid couldn’t think right after that—couldn’t count, couldn’t write his name in a straight line, couldn’t even piss in a straight line. As Jamie climbed up out of the car with his knees popping and crackling, he could not shake that feeling. The little sniveling face. The small lung capacity. The penchant for minor but permanent brain damage. It was all that kid’s fault.
The wide parking lot was spotted with aging pickup trucks filled with older men who lived with their robes open and their families excommunicated. In the summer months, they lingered after hours at the drive-in theater just outside of Larkhill, where no one ever knocked on your window with a flashlight and a badge. The drivein had been closed for a few months now, so they roamed from one abandoned strip mall to another, writing phone numbers on bathroom walls and pay phones in perfect, tidy script.
A few leered at Jamie through fogged windows. A lone woman scuttled out from the adult video store, white cardboard covering its plate-glass windows. She climbed into her Riviera and began to unwrap a package in her lap. She could not wait to get home. Jamie Garrison tried not to stare at the need exposed so openly around him, wounds dripping with washer fluid and sad, old want. Even now, he still had nothing to give.
8
“He was always satisfied, my father. Complacent. That’s how I would diagnosis him. Made no sense. For God’s sake, he was born in the Year of the Rat, not the Rabbit,” Mr. Chatterton said. “But not at home. At work they could shit all over him, excuse my language, but at home, nothing was ever right, no one was ever right. Not even the television.”
Sometimes Moses Moon would dream his father had never run away to sing Bette Midler classics in the Arizona desert. On some nights, after the dull thwap of leaking water beds had faded into a calming tide, Moses Moon dreamed he had a father who would teach him how to fish; a father who would teach him how to swim the butterfly and check the oil in his first car. In the dreams of Moses Moon, his new father was a lecherous professor, a cocky camp counselor, a crotchety TV executive, and a newly minted Ghostbuster, all wrapped up into one unparalleled human being. In these dreams, his true father was always Bill Murray.
“Yes, Mr. Chatterton.”
Logan’s father sat across from Moses, polishing his glasses on the long sleeve of his shirt. The kitchen was quiet and clean but covered in old drawings, tracings from medical textbooks labeled with nonexistent bones and new tendon systems that would increase power while reducing maneuverability. Mr. Chatterton called them works in progress.
“Now my father always did have a thing about interrupting your elders, one of the few tenets I still uphold in this house. He never did listen, though—that was the problem,” Mr. Chatterton continued. “Didn’t listen to my mother or me. No, we always had to listen to him. Always.”
Logan was still bleeding in the basement. Moses squirmed in his chair, slowly drinking his glass of water. He didn’t want another refill.
“Logan never had to play organized sports. He never had to eat the same goddamn ham sandwich every day either. My wife and I—my former wife and I—we always did our best to let Logan choose his own path. Because rules—do you know how many bowls of cereal my father let me eat?” Mr. Chatterton asked. “Just one. Never mind if I had a long day ahead of me. My welfare, my choices, my personal well-being were all secondary to his choices. His choices—the ones he made for me. You understand?”
“I think I understand,” Moses said. The water was warm in his mouth.
“Let’s just say my wardrobe was never my own. It was always selected for me. As was the paint on my walls, as were my friends. But what friends, really?”
Mr. Chatterton was crying. His eyes were pink and crusty.
“So I always let my son, my Logan—we named him after the mountain. We climbed it on our honeymoon, which seems to be eons ago,” Mr. Chatterton said. “How a woman can say so many things one day and yet the next remove herself from your life—how? And all the work we put into rebuilding her leg and her hand. The hand was almost perfect.”
Moses noticed the house was too quiet, the stumping gait of Mrs. Chatterton muted, silenced. She wasn’t home today. Mr. Chatterton never would have sent her to a real doctor. She didn’t even have her own car. Just like bodies, the machine was another mystery for Mr. Chatterton to turn from the functional to the formidable, as he liked to put it. Each car in the driveway had been there for years, slowly dissolving in the rain.
“But then, you and your friends just had to break the boy…”
Moses didn’t want to look at Mr. Chatterton’s face. It was cracked in too many places.
“My friends…” Moses began.
“Yes, your friends, the ones you brought to Logan, got him mixed up in all these things. I would not let my son grow up like I did,” Mr. Chatterton said. “I mean, can you imagine eating only brown, grey, and white for eighteen years—to never know what a red piece of meat looks like, to only find its flavor on your tongue in a darkened restaurant on a date with your future wife from the prairies, the fucking prairies. A woman who had never been to a real restaurant with napkins that weren’t made of paper. A woman who will then leave you after your son becomes a violent little shaved monster. Too many experiments. Too many failures, Moses.”
Moses took another sip of his water. The kitchen door was locked; Moses could see the key dangling from the knob. The hallway back to the front door was too short, its garish lipstick red illuminating a path to another locked exit. And Logan was still in the basement.
“My mistake was thinking that with no real controls, my son might make the right choices, that he might experience the joys I was denied. My wish was that he wouldn’t feel the same dreadful spike of joy when I heard that bastard was finally dead, chewing on the same sandwich he’d been eating since 1965, chewing on the same bullshit he’d always fed my mother and I until she ended up like a catatonic—like the unchanging face of a goddamn fucking mountain. A face that never changes. You ever see someone like that?
“And instead, I have a son like this. All hate and bile. I had a wife, too, but that’s gone. She left. She blames me. Me, me, me! Yes, me, Moses.” Mr. Chatterton spat onto the floor. “Back to Saskatoon, of all fucking places for a woman to go—because she doesn’t recognize her son. She’s part native and so is he, and when he found that out—”
“I don’t really know what you want me to say.”
Mr. Chatterton settled his glasses back onto his face before stabbing the scalpel deep into the table between them. Moses stood up from the table, considering which drawer held the knives. In another’s kitchen, Moses realized, you were always at their mercy.
“My wife can no longer look her only son in the face. She can’t look at me. I am the one who made her this way, just like my father made me into what I am now. He never changed, Moses. He stayed static,” Mr. Chatterton said. “The same clothing for forty years. The same job, the same meals. He never could abide what happened on this street. Never could sell the land as those cheap little fire hazards sprang up to kill all the trees on the street with their shadows…such long shadows, don’t you think, Moses?”
Moses tried to pretend he was talking to Bill Murray, tried to replace the sneer on Mr. Chatterton’s face with a smirk and a wink. This was all just a big joke. A scene that had gone off the rails a little. It happens on the set after a
long day. That was all it was. Maybe they’d use the footage for a trailer or during the closing credits. It was a blooper reel.
“Yes, Mr. Chatterton. I think maybe I’ll go check on Logan. He didn’t seem exactly—”
“Exactly what? Exactly perfect? No. And that’s what his mother wanted him to be. That’s what we were striving to make here. Not perfect, maybe, but pure. And then you and your hate and your bile and all your—why?” Mr. Chatterton asked. “Why did you have to pick him? And she—she was my best chance at reversing years of research! Control over our own destiny! And now it’s all fucked up by your little dirty hands. Look at yourself, you little cunt!”
Moses was flying now, his feet gliding down the stairs, his hands tearing belts from Logan’s trembling, sweaty body, the overwhelming green of the bedroom bursting cells apart in Moses’s pupils.
The basement door popped open behind him. Mr. Chatterton was still muttering aloud about his father—that bastard, that bastard—because he could never say the man’s real name anymore, not after nights of holding that rabbit antenna until his shoulders collapsed under the strain, not after all the mornings where oatmeal was crammed down his gullet, not after years of living under the torture of that deadening sameness, an unending loop of the mundane that had caused his mother’s mind to rot. After all that, there was no name—there was only that bastard, that fucking bastard and his goddamn ham sandwiches.
Mr. Chatterton drew closer, his teeth shining and freshly cleaned by the dentist. He’d come home from an appointment to find a note about the hatred living in his basement and the wife who could no longer sustain herself as the focal point of his countless little cuts. His son had reacted so violently to revelations of his heritage that he’d split his skull against the bathroom mirror. The note was written in her gorgeous looping hand, but there was no love signed to the bottom. Only her maiden name without a forwarding address.
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