“You had to make him into one of you,” Mr. Chatterton said. “And you know, we really thought it was a phase. We thought he might have just been confused, you know? But it wasn’t. No, it wasn’t a phase. And she tried to teach him, but he wouldn’t listen. What did you think you were teaching him, Moses?”
“Nothin’,” Moses said. “I wasn’t even there. I told them it was stupid.”
The gag sprang out of Logan’s mouth and he was sliding out of the bed. He couldn’t stop coughing. Mr. Chatterton stood in the doorway, his skinny shoulders casting the room in jagged shadows. The light bounced off his oily scalp. He held the homemade scalpel in his hand, and he drew a line down the side of his arm with it. His hand didn’t waver as it moved.
“I tried to raise him in a way that my father would have disapproved, but he has the same hate, just now directed outward instead of…instead of in,” Mr. Chatterton said. “It can only push out for so long. For so long that hate can only push out until it reaches the edges of the universe, and it has no other place to go. Expanding till the center can’t hold together.”
Mr. Chatterton drew the blade down his other arm. Down and not across. No, he drew it down, straight down and deep inside his arm, flicking the blade out once he reached the base of his palm. Mr. Chatterton never did things in small strokes. The paint in each room was always a performance.
“It’s like a star, boys. That’s how it works. It pushes and pushes those on the outside, swallowing them whole into its burning, burning—but it can’t hold all of it for long, and just like a star, eventually it implodes. Collapses in on itself. Have you ever seen that?”
Mr. Chatterton dropped his homemade scalpel to the floor and it scurried under the bed.
“It falls inward, and all that spite, that fucking bile, it gets redrawn, redirected—some would say misdirected—but that is where the hate was meant to go in the first place.”
The blood was no longer seeping slowly from Mr. Chatterton. There was nothing slow about it. He staggered against the wall as the two teenage boys climbed up on the bed, scrambling to back away from his collapsing body. His hands were trembling, the knuckles growing pale like his face. He was no longer smiling, but his eyes were still pink, still raw.
“It all turns inward.”
Moses Moon knew this would never have happened with Bill Murray.
“It turns…”
It was Logan who climbed off of the bed and kicked his father’s head. Mr. Chatterton just shuddered once. There was no hollow noise, only a wet thunk like someone collapsing on a water bed. Neither of the boys ran for the phone. They crouched over the body and Moses tried to close Mr. Chatterton’s eyelids with his fingers. Logan slapped his shaking hand away.
“Don’t touch that bastard. Don’t even touch that fucking bastard.”
9
Henry’s Holistic Hobbies. Brock had got one thing right. The windows were frosted with yellow dust. AM stations burped up old Buddy Holly songs from the idle trucks in the parking lot. Jamie knocked hard on the glass. Nothing. He slammed a flat palm onto the glass again. The door opened and a rush of hot, mildewed air swept out into the parking lot. A small man stood there with a sheet of baseball cards in his hands.
“You looking to buy or sell? I know the Pirates aren’t exactly stellar this season, but I’ve got the whole team for sale. Topps, of course. The good ones. You want to take a look at ’em?”
“No, I don’t really, um, do the card thing,” Jamie said.
“Well, come on in anyway. I’m sure we got something you’re looking for. Sort of in a transitional phase right now,” the little man said.
Jamie shut the door behind him and staggered around piles of model planes and collectible Star Wars figures still wrapped in plastic. There were no shelves left in the store, just busted glass display cases and tiny slivers glinting from the corners where they’d been swept.
“You musta pissed someone off,” Jamie said.
The short man smiled, showing a set of dentures under his thick moustache. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.
“I’m always pissing someone off. Part of my charm, you know?”
“When did this happen? Who did this shit?” Jamie asked.
“Oh, you always know who. That’s the point. They want to strike some fear in your heart. If I didn’t know who…well, there really wouldn’t be much of a point, now would there?”
It looked like a sledgehammer had smashed through one of the walls.
“They do that too?”
“No, that was all me. I’m expanding the store. Can’t deal with such a cluttered space. I’m not Henry, by the way, and I don’t really know what half this shit is besides the baseball cards,” the man said. “I’m pretty sure that’s why he left the whole place to me.”
“Henry?” Jamie asked.
“My uncle. Crazy motherfucker—just a nut for all things teenage boys love. And I’m not saying he was into them. Not saying that. Just had a Peter Pan complex—never grew old.”
Jamie ducked his head under the pipes and followed the little man through a hole smashed into the abandoned unit next door. The place looked like an old dentist’s office. A forgotten Nintendo system lay buried under dust and flakes of plaster. There were files on the floor, old X-rays and yellowed receipts for forgotten procedures.
“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 bought—”
“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 you—like, gratis, you know?”
“It’s not a debt—it’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 bigger—a 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.
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