“Maybe you should. Just give it a try.”
“Oh, you’re one to talk,” Jamie said. “Look at you giving out advice. Family advice at that. Holy shit. How’s Mom? Huh?”
This was where Alisha usually would begin screaming. Sometimes it was directly in his face. Other times it was from down the hall as she threw her shoes as hard as she could at the closet door, restraining herself from whipping them in his direction. She’d read in the paper once about a man who took a four-inch stiletto through the eye. His wife was later charged.
Alisha Wugg did not scream.
“Look, Jamie, this kid, his mother didn’t talk to him. She didn’t even see him for six years. Six years. Think about how much changes in six years. She didn’t even know he was still living in the same town. They were living in the same city, probably the same area, maybe even the same neighborhood, and it was six years she hadn’t seen her son. The look of regret on that woman’s face…I bet half the people watching ran to call their mom after seeing that kind of thing. I know they did.”
Jamie didn’t look at Alisha.
“And I know that might sound stupid to you, but you still have both parents kicking around. And guess what?” Alisha said. “You still live in the same town as them, and what’s more, they can still talk to you like normal human beings.”
In the world after the nun, it was Harold Evan Wugg, extraordinary inventor of the toaster oven, who had left her for another woman, a younger woman, a woman whose sexual wiles and bountiful body had not been put through the endurance, the pain and the suffering of childbirth. A woman with whom he could commune not only through spirit, but body as well, and wasn’t that what a marriage was all about? The spirit, yes, but the body too. That was what Christ had asked them for, to commune as both, and as one, their duality wrapped in a single sheath. She had been forced to give it all up for these children, leave behind all the riches and wonders, all the chocolate shipped in straight from Belgium. In the world after the nun, in a bed at St. Luke’s Hospice, Mrs. Wugg knew her life had ended the moment she gave birth to that daughter with the tired eyes and the fat ass, the one she saw every other Thursday at two during visiting hours. Mrs. Wugg made sure to tell the world this was not the life she chose.
“What is the point, then?” Jamie said. “I’m a bad man? Boogie man? No love for the family. Is that what you tell the kid?”
“She’s your daughter, not ‘the kid,’ Jamie.”
“Why is she calling me up at three in the morning anyway, waking up Renee and everything? I mean, can you not get her under control? Never mind watching TV, how about you keep her in bed for once?”
“Under control? The girl is five. Five. She is so far ahead in so many things,” Alisha said. “You saw her reading when she was three, you were the one who…and now you think there’s something wrong with her?”
“I’m just saying that maybe, maybe you should—”
“I should do what? Do everything?” Alisha said. “Oh wait, I already do that. I already do that every fucking day of my fucking life, since fucking who knows how long?”
“Let’s build you a shrine, then: Saint Alisha amongst the Masses and the Poor and the Drunk,” Jamie said. “How many of them do you bring back here?”
Jamie got up from the table but did not look Alisha in the eye. He left an envelope on the counter and stomped out into the snow. Alisha got up from the table and walked to the window over the sink. Her daughter’s busted bicycle stood against the railing, its mangled handlebars flashing in Jamie’s lone headlight. The front grille of his car was smashed, the bumper distended. The car pulled away, the muffler hiccupping and popping into the dark of the unlit street.
Alisha Wugg stared at her reflection in the glass of her little kitchen. The window was just as unforgiving as her bathroom mirror in the morning. She didn’t look at the lines around her mouth this time, only stared out into the snow. She was supposed to go and see her mother that past Thursday, supposed to try and make amends. Instead, she took Kansas to the library. They took out every single book on pirates in the children’s section. Kansas had them set up in her room right now, the pages spread open all over the floor. That morning Kansas had told her mother they used to hang captured pirates in metal cages over the ports of cities, the bodies in these gibbets acting like a warning for the next generation of buccaneers and butchers out there on the high seas. Kansas had memorized the passage.
Alisha Wugg did not go see her mother because she knew what she would find. It would always be there, waiting—next week or next year.
It was too quiet outside. There were no animals. She smiled at the glass and watched the cracks grow around the edges of her lips. Alicia did not want to grow old. She knew they would not stop. These lines would move slowly, like a glacier—deliberate and irreversible. All of this was eventual.
14
B. Rex had a new tattoo emblazoned on his neck. It was dripping.
“You didn’t do that one yourself, did you, B?” Moses said.
The car bounced over the potholes on the utility road. The neon lights of the highway strip faded behind them as the Buick nursed its way through the slush. No one came down here.
“Yeah. This morning. Had the money, finally, not like it was a big job, but I’ve been getting stiffed by the folks lately. Think they’re still mad about me trimming the hair.”
B. Rex had the worst ingrown hairs of the three, mainly due to his refusal of the disposable razor at Logan’s house a few months earlier. He brought his grandfather’s straight razor from World War II instead, a family heirloom his grandfather kept in the study with his tax receipts and old Playboy magazines. B. Rex cut himself eight times before finally accepting the shaving cream and disposable Bick. He wore a hat for a while afterward until the scabs fell off.
“They still won’t let you work, huh?” Moses said.
“Nope. Mom says as soon as I start earning my own money, that’s the last they’ll see of me, and I mean, they’re right,” B. Rex said. “Oppressive as shit. I can’t even take like a shit without my dad asking about the size and color.”
After looking under the beds and the sink, Moses and Logan went from room to room looking for his mother. A few doors had opened to confront a haze of smoke and long hair, the bong glowing like a lantern in the center of the room. Other rooms featured women slapping each other on the television while men cheered and smoked cheap cigars and asked when the fuck the strippers were going to show up. They spotted a few girls from school in the elevator, smoking and tugging each other’s skirts. No one made eye contact. The elevator dinged and the girls had gone down another hallway where the lighting was offset and the wallpaper had yet to peel.
The night manager wasn’t wearing a nametag, and he was too high to tell them if he’d seen her or not. Who? Who is this you look for? Logan asked politely to use the phone and somehow B. Rex picked up. He did have the old Buick tonight, and he was bored like usual. Chemistry was boring, physics was boring, and no, no, he hadn’t learned to blow up anything new or how to make anything new blow up. Give it another week and he’d figure it out.
Moses and Logan scoured the lower floor and walked in on old men locked in deep, passionate kisses with each other. They opened doors to women crying over pictures of their children, or someone else’s children, or maybe pictures of themselves from back when they were children. No one had seen a six-foot-tall woman built like an Amazon and wearing a bathrobe tied at the waist.
“How much did they charge you? Was it the same place?” Logan asked.
“The place you got your head done, Loogie, except I didn’t let the guy with three fingers do it for me,” B. Rex said. “I saw your head after he was done with it.”
B. Rex met them in the motel room an hour later. He lay down on the bed beside the glowing Judge and listened to Moses explain the whole story of his mother, the bowling ball, the motel rooms, the postcards scattered around the floor, and the fact that she might not even remem
ber who he was anymore.
“Did it hurt? The thing going into your neck?” Moses asked.
“Any more than Loogie’s head? No, it didn’t hurt so bad.”
Moses went through the previous day and the night before—his mother in the bathtub; the fact he had to wash his hands because he and Garrison, the big dude from the butcher shop, hit a lion and had to drag it over to the side of the road and everything. It was a mess, split open like a melon, intestines everywhere.
“14/88. What the fuck is that supposed to mean anyway?” Moses said.
“Obviously, you have not been reading the literature, Moses. And I do know you can read,” B. Rex said. “88. Eighth letter of the alphabet. HH. Heil…you know who. You get it? Fuck, this is probably bullshit anyway—right, Loogie? African lion safari bullshit.”
They didn’t believe him about the lion. That’s why they were here now, nosing through the dark and the slush to find the body. No one had reported it on the news. No one had said anything at school. No one even had a lion around here as far as they knew.
“It was like hitting another car,” Moses said. “Where else do you think I got all the bruises? You think I did this to myself?”
Logan wasn’t talking as much now, just staring out the window. He still had the purple tuque clamped onto his head, but the blood was beginning to push through the fibers.
“Stop, stop, it was there. You can still see it kinda. In the snow.”
The car shuddered to a stop. Moses hopped out and walked out into the fresh snow, leaving behind size-eleven boot prints for B. Rex to follow. They kept the car running. Logan wasn’t talking anymore. His theories about Skynet and the coming apocalypse had lost their momentum as the night dragged on into morning.
“Shit, no lion here,” B. Rex said. “But damn.”
A warm patch of earth stood out on the slushy shoulder. Headlights illuminated the wet patch of blood and feces mixing in the dirt. It hadn’t frozen yet.
“You sure it wasn’t like a big-ass bear or something?” B. Rex asked.
“With a mane and a tail? Rex, it wasn’t a bear.”
There was no wind. The two of them stood with clouds of steam hovering around their heads. The smog from the Buick floated up into the sky. B. Rex sniffed.
“I never smelled anything like that.”
“Well, that’s African shit,” Moses said.
“Lion shit,” B. Rex said. “Real bloody lion shit. Shit. Shit, man. Shit.”
“We hit it right up in the belly. Whole thing just collapsed. Goin’ like at least ninety down here, there wasn’t a lotta snow, and then just fucking bam! I didn’t believe it at first. And Garrison…”
“He had you leave it here?” B. Rex said. He stopped and stared down at the cooling mess.
“Call the cops? Yeah, all right.”
“I get it, I get it,” B. Rex. “Where do you think he went?”
“He?”
“The lion. You said it was too big for you and Garrison to drag off to the shoulder. You even listening?”
“It’s dark out here,” Moses said. “This look like a winter coat to you?”
They turned back toward the Buick.
“You think it just disappears like that and nobody notices?”
The car doors slammed and B. Rex turned the heater all the way into the red.
“It wasn’t in the papers,” Moses said.
“You don’t read the fucking papers, Moses.”
“You do after you run over someone’s lion.”
B. Rex yawned and wiped a hole in the fog on the windshield. The clock read 4:30 a.m. Moses could feel his toes sticking together in his shoes. He stretched and sighed.
“Loogie, buddy, you ready to go find Moses’s crazy mom? I’m going to get in so much shit from the parental unit for this,” B. Rex said. “Well, all for a good cause. Haven’t pissed them off in a while. Been wearing a scarf at home to hide the new tat, my mom says it looks like I’m finally taking care of myself. And my dad, well I think he’s pretty sure I’m a fag by now anyway. Hey, Loogie, wanna be my boy toy?”
Logan was asleep across the backseat. Both hands cupped his wounded head. It sounded like his lungs were drowning, but he was just crying in his sleep.
Back in the yellow motel halls, Moses stood against a dirty window and watched the sun rise over whirring police cars in the parking lot. Two officers argued with a naked man threatening them with a rolled-up newspaper.
Logan and B. Rex were back in his room, tucked under the faded comforter with the Judge between them. B. Rex and Moses had carried Logan into the elevator from the car, avoiding the stairway and the broken glass. No one stopped them as they carried his bleeding body down the hall, even though it was full of loud men in tuxedos with the tags still attached. The boys washed Logan’s head in the bathtub and he croaked something about being dirty, impure, a fucking abomination, before the soapy water filled his mouth and he spat it up, cursing his mother.
Moses couldn’t sleep. He’d paced the halls and watched the night unfold, the police arriving in disparate waves that washed away one layer of dirt only to reveal another beneath it. He stood over the stairwell and dropped beer bottles from the fifth floor, enjoying the brief second before the glass shattered below him.
Moses loved that second. Moses wished he could live in that second, he wished Elvira could live in that second too. He wanted to watch it expand before him until he could not see the other side, but only the center, before the drop and the crash. He wanted to enjoy the fall without the repercussions.
Elvira was always sane for a second, she was always thoughtful for a second, she was always, always unfailingly beautiful for a second, before she grimaced at his face or the television or the fact that another second was traveling toward her where she would no longer recognize her son or her bowling balls or her own face, or remember she was once married to a man named Ted Moon who told her always and forever, amen, in front of everyone who said they loved her once upon a time. Moses wanted another second before that new one arrived, before everything shattered on the beer-stained floor. The carpet at the Dynasty absorbed everything. It was soaked down to the foundation.
The boys would ride out tomorrow and find Elvira Moon and bring her back to waste away under her son’s feeble care. Moses knew that was the best he could provide. A place where she could sleep in the bathtub without any questions being asked. B. Rex had promised they would find her. They had smoked out on the balcony and watched Logan twist and turn on the bed, moaning about his mother and the Sioux and the end of everything. B. Rex had puffed his chest out and blown smoke through his nose before he started coughing.
“We’ll fucking find her, man. You know where she’d go, don’t you? I’ll go, and Loogie too. You helped our asses before, told us what the fuck was up. Stopped letting me get my face stomped every time I went into the hall. Got us on the program, you know?” B. Rex said, shifting his small arms around his chest. The wind spat little bits of snow into their faces. “That’s why I got it spelled out on my neck, man. Like you said, we gotta be serious. You gotta rub it in their faces, you gotta imprint it in your blood to show them that you’re serious. This is no joke.”
“So that explains the ugly-ass tattoo?” Moses said.
B. Rex nodded and hugged himself tighter.
“Yeah. Exactly.”
“14/88?” Moses said.
B. Rex rubbed his neck and blew more smoke through his nose. He coughed.
“Fourteen words, buddy. ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.’ It’s probably all bullshit, but it pisses them off to no end.”
“Them?”
“Everybody. Ha. Ain’t that the point of all this?”
15
They really did look like ZZ Top.
“You got any trim for us to use?” one of the bearded men said.
Jamie Garrison was still recovering from the night before. He waited for the camera crew to rev
eal themselves, for some leggy blonde in Daisy Duke shorts to spring up behind the deli counter with a massive sausage in her hands. Then he noticed the popped blood vessels and the dead eyes, and the fact that only one of them was wearing sunglasses inside. The bearded man spoke again and his voice cracked.
“Buddy, you awake, or you still tipsy? I asked if you got any trim.”
After leaving Alisha’s the night before, Jamie drove around town swallowing all the orange and black pills the Lorax had given him. He banged on the door to the bingo hall downtown, but it was closed. Someone had had a heart attack during Midnight Madness. Each pill he swallowed was like a seed, planting more illusions in his head, until every branch collided with the next and he had to pull over in the parking lot of the Giant Tiger to calm down. Under its glowing yellow sign, Jamie tried to talk himself into a lucid state where lions weren’t lurking behind the shopping cart corral and his daughter’s teeth weren’t marching through the streets together in pairs, all headed for Noah’s Ark and the end of the world. Each curb looked like the perfect place to smash your jaw, and he still had no insurance, no cigarettes either.
Jamie had smoked them all staring at the flashing ambulances outside the bingo hall and the blue hair hurling up her entire life onto the chests of the tired paramedics. His mother wasn’t there, but she was never around in those moments. He waited for fires to spring forth from rotting foundations, held his head between his knees to block out flashes of his mother’s burns, the ones encircling her neck like dried snakes.
He didn’t remember getting home, only remembered walking downstairs to find his brother’s wife in his bed, her naked back revealing a school of mermaids trapped in a fisherman’s net. They waved at him and blew sad kisses from fleshy lips. Renee no longer slept in Scott’s bed. Jamie had walked upstairs to sleep on the couch, past the old stain and the laundry drying on the railing. Renee needed to sleep in her bed. She needed to start wearing more clothes. She needed to be all the things he did not want right now. Eventually Jamie fell asleep to the smell of garbage and his brother’s voice singing Meat Loaf in falsetto from the kitchen.
Waste Page 9
