“I hit a lion the other day. Just fucking hit it. Bam.”
“I knew you had a look on your face like you did something. You were wearing a seatbelt? I always wear my seatbelt. Even if I’m riding a lawnmower,” the Lorax said, pulling another orange bottle out of his shopping bag.
“A fucking lion.”
“I never ask why,” the Lorax said. “You should know that. Ask and you shall receive.”
“You a priest now?”
“You really hit a lion? I hear all the bullshit, you know. All kinds of excuses: a bad leg, a skiing accident, a wife who is too afraid of doctors to get pills.”
“I hit a lion, Larry.”
The Lorax popped his teeth back into his mouth. He cranked his jaw back and forth.
“You know I wasn’t born with any teeth?”
“What?” Jamie said.
“Of course, no babies are ever born with teeth. How terrifying would that be for the mother? But no, as I aged, no teeth. Just shiny gums. It embarrassed my parents to no end, I can tell you that. They never wanted me to smile in pictures. Figured I would terrify people. When I was like eight they got me the dentures, but the teeth never grew.”
Jamie stopped pacing and stood under the dangling fan.
“I hit a fucking lion out on the utility road—like, killed it. Embedded my tires in its rib cage. Who gives a shit about your teeth?”
The Lorax found the bottle he was looking for. “They kept it out of the papers. Did you know that?”
“Your teeth? You featured in the tabloids or some shit?”
“The lion. And the giraffe…well, they killed that.”
“A giraffe?” Jamie said.
The little man sighed to himself. He pulled a bag of mushrooms out of his pocket and stuffed two little pods into his mouth.
“You ever go up past Stilton?” he said. “Where the nuke plant is? Place up there been closed forever. Guy calls it a zoo, but it was never a zoo—more like ‘exotic farm’ bullshit. He got closed down back in…what was it? Like ten years ago. Old nasty place. A lotta llamas.”
“New Kenya?” Jamie said. “Abandoned little hole by the highway?”
“That’s the place. Bunch of barbed wire and particleboard.”
“I checked the paper,” Jamie said. “You hit a lion, you wait for that headline.”
“No headline though, right?” the Lorax said. “Guy who closed down the place, forget the name right now—he made a show of getting rid of all the tiger cubs.”
The Lorax rubbed the bottle of pills back and forth between his hands. Sweat stains stretched down his armpits and his bare feet clicked their nails on the hard floor.
“Kilkenny was sneaky though—that was his name! He kept some of his beasties in the woods and no one really cared. The government sent a few people out to check on him and he was never allowed to reopen, but no one really looked too close. Like an idiot, he left the sign up.”
The New Kenya sign still teetered out over one of the concession roads, but it was at least an hour away from Larkhill. Past the nuke plant and the dead trees and the wetlands they kept trying to save every summer with another bottle drive collection. There were tigers and lions on the billboard, faded stripes and raggedy manes. Empty barbed-wire cages visible from the road, overgrown with weeds and solitary sunflowers poking through like massive dandelions.
“So, the lion…”
“He didn’t just up and get rid of everything,” the Lorax said. “He kept a few. Called them his friends. You start naming animals, you start forgetting they can rip your face off. Animals are never your friends. Food, water, shelter, warmth—that’s all they care about. They’ll pretend to like you, but they’ll never love you, and they will eat you when you die.”
The Lorax rubbed his moustache and pulled the baggie out of his pocket again. He mashed up the little gray pods inside and stuffed the whole bundle into his mouth. His cheeks bulged while the dentures worked his food into a paste. It took him a while to swallow.
“Where did it come from? If you actually do know, then I need to know now.”
The Lorax stuck his tongue out and dabbed at it with a stubby finger.
“You don’t believe in the music of a conversation, do you, buddy?” he said. “You can’t even get my name right, or you won’t. Do you think we were just given communication to find food and shelter, like we’re apes? Have goal. Resolve goal. Sleep. No. Conversation is about the dips and falls, the crescendo and the pause.”
Bill Mazeroski was in Jamie’s hand. The winner of eight Golden Gloves, the man who still held the Major League record for double plays made by a second baseman. Not to mention his career field percentage of 0.983. The card was still inside its plastic sleeve. It had never been touched by the toxic air of Larkhill.
“You ain’t going to say nothing, Brock? How do you like that? Jamie? I call you whatever I want now, how about that? My name’s not Larry. It’s the Lorax.”
Jamie just wanted to go home and sleep and stop thinking about his daughter and those floating eyes following him everywhere. The pills would help. The lion had to be put to sleep.
“The Maz loses his head if you don’t hurry up, Larry,” Jamie said. “And I know you want to keep the full set. Collectors value this shit, right? It’s all croquet to me.”
“Oh come on now! I still have a few pods the beards didn’t take last time they came collecting for Crane,” the Lorax whined. “You want those?”
Callused fingers poised themselves around the Maz’s head.
“The lion, Larry.”
“What did Mazeroski ever do to you?” the Lorax said. He spat his dentures out into his hand and slammed them onto the desk amongst the loose prescription bottles that rattled with stolen medication. He didn’t scrape off the owners’ names. “Fine, so you wanna know about the lion. Fine. Give me the card.”
Jamie shook his head. The Lorax sighed.
“There was only a male,” the Lorax began. “Out there in the boonies—at least in the summer, you know—you can find little grow ops, little spurts of industry in that wasteland. So I hired Kilkenny on and he had all kinds of shit out there on that farm. Actual shit for ’shroom growing. Lion shit, no tiger shit. But giraffe, he had a giraffe.
“Perfect place out there. Isolated, plentiful unmonitored fertilizers. I heard they monitor fertilizer sales these days. Did you know that? Same reason I don’t buy hydroponics, they track that shit like it’s buried treasure. Kilkenny was growing me stuff, but he was actually growing it for who I grow it for—you know, chain of command—and he got greedy.
“I think that was an excuse, though. Someone really wanted that lion. A pet lion makes you seem pretty badass when the best some other shithead can do is a Rottweiler. Did you know there are more pet tigers in human homes than exist in the wild?”
“So they stole the lion,” Jamie said, flicking the baseball card again.
“Weeks ago. I went up there to check on him. Must have taken his ass somewhere. He was always trying to rip me off, and I’m not really a standalone operation. Everyone’s gotta answer to someone. There was blood everywhere, someone fucked with the body too. Be nice to the card, man, please.”
“They killed the giraffe?” Jamie asked. He bent the baseball card between steepled fingers.
“I found it out near the plants. A real live giraffe, but dead. They tore up all his stuff, and then of course came looking for me. And now I’m growing everything with lamps from fucking retirement homes and getting all my stuff from pharmacies. I’m barely clinging on here.”
The Lorax pulled out his baggie of mushrooms again, but it was empty.
“So how did it end up jammed into the grille of my car?”
“Well, you try keeping a lion cooped up in an apartment or anywhere else. You think it’s just going to stay? It stayed with that ginger Kilkenny because he loved that beast, because he treated it like a person. Like a brother. They slept in the same bed. Ate the same food. True love
between man and beast.”
“So it just escaped?”
The Lorax struggled to push his teeth back into his mouth. One of the canines was chipped.
“It isn’t like they’re going to advertize it. They’ll find it probably,” the Lorax said. “They work like dogs for that motherfucker, but it’s a lion. A lion is going to do whatever it wants.”
Jamie relaxed his spine. He set the card down on the table.
“All right. You can have it back. I still need a favor.”
The Lorax stared at the baseball card. The Maz wasn’t smiling. He was grim.
“What?”
“Twenty bucks good for a couple of those orange guys? You got the card back anyway. You good with that? I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings.”
The Lorax opened the drawer again and pulled the dirty plastic bag out onto the table. He caressed the bottles through the bag, but he didn’t read the names on the prescriptions.
“Just keep an eye out when you’re driving,” the Lorax said. “You say it was a lion, but it could’ve been like a big dog or something, or a kid. I don’t want to go to court. You hit a kid, that’s homicide. How about eight for you? You can owe me.”
Jamie snatched the pills from the Lorax’s greasy hand.
“Everybody owes. I’ll pay next time I see you.”
20
Three skinheads lurked in the back of Yuri’s bowling alley, staring at all the women throwing heavy stones down perfectly straight lines. Their shouts mixed with the clattering pins.
“You knew my mother, right? Hey, you, thunder thighs! You knew her?”
“Who do you think you’re talking to, boy?” Big Tina bellowed. “Thunder thighs?”
One of them seemed to be crying, refusing to follow the other two down to the lanes. His little arms could barely wrap around his chest. The one in front carried a teal bowling ball. The word JUDGE scrawled across it in black sharpie. The second boy’s skull was bleeding from a half-finished tattoo. The bourbon smell washed over Big Tina as she turned to face the third.
“I said who do you think you’re talking to, boy?”
The giant woman towered over a busted disco floor. Her team flexed their ten-pin skills behind her while old men put their cigarettes out on the plastic chairs and told dirty jokes with no punch lines. Their boots looked wet. Their eyes looked wet. A world full of weeping.
“You knew my mom, right? Elvira? Kinda crazy lady. You two used to bowl together.”
Big Tina was only one who went and saw Elvira Moon after the accident, the one who helped with the prescriptions after Elvira got arrested for public nudity at Paulie’s Pins. Big Tina had been the one who picked her up from the station whenever they found her wandering the streets, asking for her husband Ted, asking for her boy, her little boy. That was a while ago.
“I don’t know what you’re—hold on. Oh, Moses. I thought they just up and took you away,” she said. “Jesus. I thought they took you away. Moses, what happened?”
Big Tina tried not to think about Elvira Moon anymore. It was bad enough when she’d quit the Blooming Broads and started her own team. Tina knew Elvira never really forgave her for that. Elvira never understood the bond Tina had formed with Claudia. It wasn’t just love, but something else that made Tina’s heart stronger.
“No, no, I didn’t get taken away,” Moses said. “We just left. Why didn’t you ever come to look for her? You helped before. And she was so fucking mad at you, I remember that too.”
Big Tina quit the league for a few years after her colon surgery, but the game called her back. The clatter of pins, the comfy plush seats at Paulie’s, the feel of a good twelve-pound ball resting in your palm—all of these things meant home to Big Tina. Bowling alleys were where she fled from the world in her high school days and ever since. Her mother couldn’t ask about boys there, couldn’t berate her for wearing pants to school. Her father couldn’t call her “my favorite ox.” He said it with love, he said it with a smile at the corners of his lips, but it burned her deeply. He’d branded her.
“Well, where did you go? Where is she at now? I had no idea, Moses.”
The clatter of ten pins after a perfect strike could break that image apart. It could drown out her mother and her three sisters. The call for another round of beers and the feel of Claudia’s warm back against Big Tina’s in the middle of the night made it all seem like someone else’s life. Someone who woke up at 2 a.m. and told the mirror she hated herself.
“Of course you didn’t. We got used to it, I got used to it,” Moses said.
Big Tina stared at the boy in front of her and his lumpy shaven head. Big Tina was still at the bottom of the rotation. Her last roll had sealed the win. Another splash of pins behind her broke up the stare. Big Tina knew it was a five-seven split based on the sound. She stopped visualizing Caracas and the beautiful heat and the snaking traffic of its bumpy freeways. Whenever the game got too close, she would envision Claudia’s home and the vacation they took every February to escape the cold that encased Larkhill. She knew once she could taste the humid air that her next roll would be a strike. But Elvira was invading that now, her long legs and perfect posture splayed out in a mess on the polished hardwood lane. She wasn’t wearing underwear, and her face looked like a child had drawn it. Big Tina tried to focus on Moses instead and avoid the sputtering ghost of his mother writhing under the lights.
“I couldn’t do it, it was just too much, too much of everything. And Elvira, she was only floating along—what happened to you, Moses?”
“It’s not your business, all right?” Moses said. “Have you seen her in the bowling alleys at all, or like around your old apartment? I know she used to end up there sometimes; you’d drop her off at our old place. The townhouse. She said you never came in because of a dog allergy. You seen her anywhere?”
The kid was talking too fast, words tumbling out of his mouth and trampling the ones ahead of them. Sure, Big Tina saw Elvira Moon from time to time, but only in the corner of her eye. Only when she was in the grocery store and some lady kept smashing jars of beets on the floor, claiming they had stolen her keys. Big Tina saw Elvira when she drove downtown into Larkhill and had to wait at the stoplights. She saw the long legs of women in high-heeled boots strut past, but their faces were never as pretty as Elvira’s. She was just born tall, with strong, powerful knees. A lot of people forgot how important knees were in bowling. Elvira was the woman in the waiting room with her head done up in bandages, the old man Big Tina saw on the bus to work who had leaves in his beard. Elvira lingered by the curbs and wrote messages to herself on the inside of telephone booths in lipstick. Elvira was everywhere that Big Tina refused to look.
“No, I don’t. Is she missing? She hasn’t called me,” Big Tina said. “I don’t think she’d even know where I was living these days. Kind of dropped off the map after a while.”
“I don’t even know if she’d recognize you,” Moses said. “She doesn’t recognize me half the time. She doesn’t fucking recognize anybody. Only TV or photos. Maybe.”
“I haven’t seen her,” Big Tina said. “No, she doesn’t come around here. You called hospitals or anything like that? The police?”
“I spent like two hours doing that this morning. We did it again two hours later. Nobody answering on nothing. She ain’t around. A six-foot blond woman isn’t invisible. You haven’t seen her at all though? Nothing? You swear?”
“I haven’t seen her in ages. Where are you staying?”
“Outside town, just a little bit. She couldn’t really have walked anywhere. Sometimes, she gets her mind back for a bit. She’ll say your name, or Dad’s or whoever, but she doesn’t…she doesn’t let me know. You have any idea where she might go?”
“They used to take her in at the hospital,” Big Tina said. “Back when you guys had the house still. You never even left a note, Moses. Did you ever think someone would find you?”
“What fucking hospital?” Moses said. “Where?”
“Old one. No more funding. They shut it down years ago. She’s really gone?”
“She wasn’t in her room, in the place, anywhere. We already checked the old house, streets, all the places she used to go. We found you, so that’ll have to do for now.”
His voice was getting higher in pitch. Big Tina noticed his torn clothes and dirty jacket. Moses smelled like condiments. She tried to think about Caracas and the first time she’d met Claudia instead of the doctors sedating Elvira in a cramped room at the old hospital by the lake. Elvira kept asking Tina why she left, why she couldn’t just let them be friends like always, why did she have to take her trophy away? Big Tina focused on Claudia’s hips and the way she held a wine glass. So much of the weight hung on her thin wrist. It helped block out Elvira, who would never hold her or tell her she was all that she needed. Elvira liked Big Tina’s firm arms and her wide stance, but only because it made the team stronger. It let them win and win again. Half-price wings for life. She only wanted Big Tina for the parts, not the whole.
Elvira had been shopping for a bowler. Big Tina pretended not to see it that way until Claudia came along. She pretended it would only take time, water turning rock to sand. Time and patience were the tools to use. But Claudia never saw Tina as a list of specifications to be fulfilled. She wasn’t looking for optimal ball control or unparalleled dexterity. Claudia saw Big Tina in line at the Foodland buying four whole chickens and a bag of corn. She invited herself over for a barbecue, her accent mangling the word between crooked white teeth. Claudia didn’t need Big Tina to bowl every Wednesday. Tina hadn’t looked back.
“Your turn to roll, Tina,” said one of the girls wearing a purple vest. “You ready?”
“You can just skip me, I’m good, I’ve already got all your asses in a sling tonight.”
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