The girl had not even looked at him that first day. She took the form and went back to typing on her typewriter, her thin hands flying over the keys. The false ceiling hung low over Jamie’s massive slouching shoulders as he made his way out, back into the stench of stale red wine and rotten beer embedded in the concrete floor.
Jamie didn’t need to look at the warehouse to know what was in there. He drove past rows of old buildings, massive tombs to industries that had abandoned town as each decade passed. His wrists felt looser now, his tongue had stopped pushing at each rogue tooth inside his mouth. The radio was a quiet burble in his ear. Only the broken grille of his car and the one headlight probing the darkness ahead reminded Jamie of the night before. The little house filled with paintings of Russian skylines and old teak furniture was only a few minutes away.
Jamie had done what Don Henley told him. He found a way to survive the monotony of the warehouse, the smells of the cafeteria, the constant throb in his ears from the rollers. He dropped comments to this girl with black hair and too much eye makeup as they waited in line for free pizza every third Thursday. Sometimes she would laugh and tell him her name again like it was the first time. Alisha Wugg. He didn’t make fun of her name, but his tongue bled against that patient refusal. It bled every time he tried to speak to her. He would stand there with rust growing on his tongue, wondering what her feet looked like naked. And he didn’t even like feet—they were the ugliest part of the human body.
Jamie brought a thick black marker to cover up the graffiti about her in the bathroom. He keyed the cars of men who commented on her ass. He never followed her home. He never left notes inside her locker. He didn’t ask her if she dyed her hair or why she drew so much black around her eyes. He didn’t ask for her number, and he didn’t end up drawing pictures of her until he fell asleep on the couch while the television played Brady Bunch reruns with the wrong audio track all night. Jamie wanted to do all those things, but he was too tired.
Bonsai trees do not grow for long, but they do require constant maintenance. Don Henley always tried to make this clear. It was his wife he went home to every night. She was the one who fed him ice cream sandwiches and Greek yogurt when his jaw was broken in another unlicensed brawl in someone’s barn. Not growth, but maintenance. Pruning, trimming, maintaining a relationship with a little “r” to make the days pass quicker.
Jamie tried to remember that when he found himself waking up in the middle of the night with dreams of her crying about discrepancies in the payroll. The old Ukrainians’ house filled with pizza boxes and old underwear. He made lists to begin cleaning, but lost them in the mess. Laundry gathered everywhere, and Jamie’s smell began to penetrate the walls. Brock said it looked like home, but back then Brock was always drunk and still living with his mom, so any place with a spark of life in it seemed like home to him. Life for Brock was fluid and messy and filled with those little bugs that weren’t quite mosquitoes but weren’t gnats either.
So Jamie Garrison trimmed and manicured his bonsai tree, assuring himself it would never blossom. He continued to draw thick black lines over the graffiti in the bathroom about the Wuggly Dog. Each stroke of marker reminded him she wore too much makeup. Jamie’s hands grew callused and yellow, ridges of hard flesh gathering in the crevices of his palm where the synthetic rope burned cells like kindling every time he tied a knot. Alisha nodded at him in line for cabbage rolls and he made small remarks about the weather, her dress, the smell of cabbage. Anything.
Sometimes Alisha Wugg laughed, but usually she just raised her eyebrows.
The little house sat alone down by the water. There was a tricycle in the driveway, abandoned in the snow. The Ukrainian couple had transferred the lease after Jamie got married. After giving up the house and their old teak furniture, it only took the couple two months to die. Jamie’s car bumped up into the driveway, swerving around the tricycle. Don Henley had always told them the bonsai tree was a safe bet; just another way to pass the time. After all, a bonsai tree was never going to bear fruit. Just something to look forward to in between safety meetings, training new temps, pulling long slivers of glass from your palm with the emergency safety kit tweezers.
“Did you run over my bike?”
She was only five years old and claimed she was too old for a trike.
“Kansas, you know that’s a tricycle, don’t you?”
Kansas Garrison stood there with her orange snowsuit half zipped up and one mitten on her little hand. The wind tossed her hair across her face. Her bottom teeth made her mouth look smaller than it was, crowded and uncomfortable.
“I know what a trike is. Did you run over my bike?”
Handle bars poked out from under Jamie’s front tire.
“Oh.”
Don Henley was wrong about those bonsai trees.
12
The first postcards were landscapes. Barren deserts spotted with cacti and the occasional buzzard. The same return address spelled out in perfect looping script across the back of each card. Moses Moon had enjoyed watching the postal code burn under the flame of his lighter, back when he and Elvira still lived on Keewatin St., back when they had an address.
“Let’s just take the stairs. I got stuck in the elevator once with this dude who wore bunny ears to a party up on the fifth floor. Kept asking me what animal I’d choose if I could be one. When I didn’t say anything, he says a ferret. He called me a fucking ferret,” Moses said.
Eventually the postcards began to change. Buildings in sepia tones with Greetings from Arizona in the corner. Ghost towns and cowboy statues with busted trigger fingers. Lines and lines of houses, a blueprint repeated across the flattened land of suburban Arizona. Moses began to keep the postcards in an envelope, where they remained unread and dormant in his room. He tucked it under his mattress even after they fled the old townhouse, the words remaining benign so long as they were quarantined in that manila envelope. He did not tell his mother.
“You actually live in this place?” Logan said. “No wonder you were never taking us back here. B. Rex always just said to let it go, but I was kind of sketched out. You never actually told us where you lived. This place is like a fucking disease.”
Logan was talking again. He’d talked the whole way over here. About the rise of illegal immigration in the city and the broken window theory and the ways you could tell the difference between a Muslim and Hindu Paki if you looked close enough. A lot of his theories had to do with pork consumption and going through their trash. Moses had jammed Texaco’s purple hat over Logan’s head to cover up the bleeding swastika before they left the butcher shop. Purple didn’t show the blood or the hate—just absorbed it. Swallowed it whole. They didn’t talk about Mr. Chatterton folded up in the bone can. They didn’t talk about Logan’s mother, either.
“Well, what did you expect?” Moses said.
“I don’t know. Maybe your mom was a spic or something? Fucking revelations happening all over the place today,” Logan said. “I guess none of this shit should surprise me. Did you hear they’re making another Terminator?”
Da Nasty on a Saturday was loud, so loud you felt it down in your gut, in the tiny hairs on your forearms. There were no vacancies. The hallway was littered with bottle caps and White Snake lyrics belted at the top of smokers’ lungs. The air conditioners huffed away at full capacity as the meth heads complained about stuffy eyes and phantom itches behind their ears. Someone blasted a porno at top volume with the door open, a woman loudly critiquing the performances of the men on screen. Too soft, she said. Too soft.
“Terminator?”
“Yeah, like Part II,” Logan said.
The boys walked past Room 227 and the sound of power tools.
“Arnold can’t even speak fucking English.”
Moses’s room was at the end of the hall. He hoped Elvira would just stay in the bathroom tonight. He could play it off as some junkie hiding out in his room, or an old family friend who just needed a place to stay for a whil
e. No, that was stupid. Fuck it. Logan could say whatever he wanted tonight. At least Moses had a parent around.
“One of your ultimate heroes, after your whole attempt at getting some retribution last night backfired all over your face at the Triple K, is a fucking immigrant in the real world.”
“Yeah, but he’s German…” Logan said.
“He’s fucking Austrian,” Moses said.
“I don’t care what country he is from. What you aren’t seeing here, Moses, is the fact that the American government is so corrupt now, it can’t see what’s coming,” Logan said. “Look, the American government won’t even admit how it’s playing into the hands of the blacks and the Jews and the—hey, I bet a fucking black dude created Skynet! Just wait for the fucking new movie. Shit, man, you see what I’m talking about? Fucking Skynet. Apocalyptic, four horseman shit. And Arnold, he’s the fucking white reckoning come to set the record straight.”
The Judge was alone on the bed, tucked in under the faded flower-print duvet. A thousand washes couldn’t get some of the stains out, only pushed them deeper into the fabric until they became a part of the pattern—irrecoverable evidence of someone else’s bad decisions. The door to the bathroom was open. Both taps on the sink ran hot and cold. Steam gathered under the fan. The bathtub was empty. The television was on, but the sound was muted and the whole room was too quiet. Bill Cosby waved at the two boys from behind the screen and smiled. Someone had left the door to the balcony open. Postcards spilled across the floor.
“What’s with the bowling ball, dude? You got some fetish you haven’t told me about?”
Elvira Moon was gone.
13
Alisha Wugg no longer wore any eye makeup.
“I don’t let her watch any TV,” she said. “I hope you know that.”
She still worked in the payroll office at the liquor warehouse, filing away the addresses of every creep who commented on her ass into a folder entitled “Eventualities Et Al.” Eventually one of them would have his foot run over by a thousand-pound fork lift, snapping all the toes off inside his steel-toed boot. Eventually one of them would come in drunk and puke all over the scanners before he was fired, losing his wife, house, and custody of three children in the process. Someday they would all disappear. She would shred their file page by page in the storage room with a smile on her face. All of this was eventual.
“Not even, like, Sesame Street?” Jamie said.
“Well, what is a Snuffleupagus anyway?” Alisha said.
“I think it’s a mammoth.”
Jamie Garrison sat across the table from her, his hands fidgeting in his lap. Kansas sat at the end of the table, dividing her peas into separate nations based on size and relative color. The small dark greens would soon outnumber all others, swelling like a tidal wave on one side of her plate.
“Not like an elephant? Or something?”
Alisha was already clearing the table, her thin hands flaking skin from too many showers and not enough soap. She didn’t paint her nails, afraid of the chips and flakes.
“Well, without the tusks,” Jamie said.
“So just a hairy elephant, and then they gave it a name. It doesn’t really make sense to me.”
“It’s a kids’ show, Alisha.”
Kansas nodded and began to eat her peas. She saved the vegetables for last.
“I know it’s a kids’ show, but if I can’t figure out what’s going on, then—well, I can barely afford the cable. Not that I’m saying—I have been getting your checks.”
The checks had been coming twice a month for the last year or so, ever since the night the television got cracked. She had a new box now, humming and spitting out large angry words about God in the living room. The house could get lonely without the noise. And Kansas only talked on her own schedule.
There were no neighbors out here, just old factories for J.P. Chemical and the Osprey Windshield system, discontinued in 1983 after Ford bought them out and closed the whole operation down. An old iron osprey still dangled from a weathervane on the roof with a salmon clutched in its rusted claws. A few miles down the road, the sprawling Larkhill Institute for Mental Health remained closed. Kids still broke in on summer weekends to drink beer and decipher old symbols carved into the walls with dirty fingernails and sharpened toothbrushes.
“You’ll keep getting them,” Jamie said. “I know what we agreed on.”
“And I’m not complaining. That’s why I wanted to have you come over again.”
The snow had stopped falling outside. Alisha washed the dishes at the sink. The dishwasher was still flooded, and after the plumber showed her an estimate a month ago, she’d kicked him out and screamed at him from the doorway. Something about cheats and liars and the comeuppance provided in the afterlife for every fraudster in his own boiling pot of regret. Something her mother would have said.
Sometimes Alisha would look in the mirror before the sun was up only to see her mother’s face, the long lines drawn around her mouth, like channels focusing the piercing file of her scream, magnifying its judgment until all you heard was someone slamming the door and the fact that it was your fault, it was always your fault, don’t you realize you broke me? Broke me like a fucking horse. Like a horse that should be put down. Just like you. A nothing.
Alisha Wugg did not want to grow old.
“I saw that thing on the news too, about the boy in the forest. I’m surprised they’d even air that garbage,” Alisha said.
“What, what garbage?” Jamie said. “It’s been a long day. Right, kiddo?”
Kansas consumed each pea on its own. She nodded.
“The guy they found in the woods,” Alisha said. “Partial remains? Is that the way to say it with Kansas here?”
“Like half there?” Kansas said.
“Yes, dear. Do you want to go upstairs and read for a bit?”
The last of the peas disappeared in one movement and there was a gallop up the stairs.
“She still likes books,” Jamie said.
“Which is part of why I don’t want TV to take that away from her. She is happy now with just her books,” Alisha said. “What’s she going to do with—well, for example, that boy? Was it a boy?”
The older you got, the more likely something would go wrong. Alisha knew this. The nun confessed she never even saw her mother walking out of the Hasty Mart that day. It was only her third day with the license and her first day driving the priest’s new Crown Vic. The crunch of Mrs. Wugg’s hip, she told the first responding officer, she thought it was a snow bank, or a pop bottle. Only the screams and the snap of Mrs. Wugg’s ulna alerted her to the problem.
“What boy? You need to turn that shit off.”
“The one they found in the woods, they had him on TV tonight. Well not him, his mother actually,” Alisha said. “She had photo albums and everything. You should see some of the people who’ve come out. It’s pretty amazing—the response. You’d think the fact he was left in the woods for so long was depressing, but it’s pretty incredible they were able to find so many people to come out.”
“The one with the dental records?” Jamie said. “That dude?”
“Is that how they did it?” Alisha said. “I don’t really know how bad the damage was, but the guy on channel eight was saying something like ‘extensive desecration’ of the remains. I guess it was the teeth.”
“Teeth. Yeah. Everyone has them, ’cept maybe a few pill freaks down at the Greyhound.”
“Well, your dad for one, Jamie. I don’t think he’s ever even gone to see a dentist, much less any kind of doctor. Does he have a doctor?”
“He has, just not…well, shit, I don’t even see his ass around anymore.”
The nun was eventually given six years’ probation and had her driver’s license revoked for ten. Crying in the witness seat, she swore she would never drive again; the wheel was beyond the realm of her responsibility. She wished to atone, if only she could atone, but Alisha and her brother did not make their n
ames known to the court. Old Mrs. Wugg remained in critical care for three weeks before emerging from a coma.
Somewhere in that three-week haze, Alisha’s mother had restructured her life around moments that did not exist, had never existed. Scenes from films and songs from her childhood. It was true she’d been a beauty queen at seventeen, a mother at twenty, and a divorcee by the age of twenty-three. A divorcee lumped with two children and a mortgage on the north side of town with the good schools and the supermarkets with the extra-wide aisles, and the better dentists. All of this was true. She remembered all of these things.
“You don’t even call them? What about Christmas?” Alisha said.
“I guess I was there for Christmas. It’s not like we’re excommunicated. It’s just not like I’m calling him up to say, ‘Hey, pops, how’s it going? Still whittling bullshit and ignoring Mom? How’s that going for you, buddy?’” Jamie said. “I don’t think he’s even answered the phone in the last five years. He lets Mom do that. No way am I calling him. That just leads nowhere.”
In the world before the nun, Mrs. Wugg had divorced Harold Evan Wugg after catching him with a neighbor in the family bathtub, her hands clutching a box of chocolate-covered strawberries she’d bought for their upcoming weekend alone. She had sold the house, told her children she loved them and that nothing was ever going to change that. Their father might have left, might have gone off to run some fleabag motel in some other place, some other city, but she wasn’t going anywhere. In the world before the nun, she made sure both her children finished high school with honors and watched her daughter learn to figure skate.
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