Waste

by Andrew F Sullivan

  Another drawer. More shredded baseball cards.

  “Who did I tell what?” the Lorax asked. “The guy with the lion. Kilkenny on the farm. They killed him dead. But the Pirates in this game, I tell you, man, it just goes to show you can’t bet on a guaranteed thing.”

  Jamie gave up on the drawers. The smoke gathered around the ceiling of the room. Pig shit and dying mushrooms. He staggered away from the back wall and began to pry at the tape while more mangled mushrooms and pill capsules fell out of the Lorax’s mouth and onto the dirty floor. The Lorax didn’t seem to notice the chunks dripping from his toothless face.

  “It was June eighth. I remember ’cause it was my birthday, and they took me out to get wasted, both of them. I had this kid working for me, Condon—Astor’s old bitch boy—but couldn’t get him to come out. Just stayed cooped up in his place and never comes out. So just me and those bearded fucks. And we got ten runs in the first inning. Barry Bonds whacking home runs and killing it out there. And it’s against Philly, fucking Phillies. All their fans are assholes. Ten runs. I’m not even from Pittsburgh. Never even been there, but I’m watching this game ’cause it’s my birthday. And they popped my teeth like raspberries. Pop. Just like that.”

  More smoke filled the room. Jamie tried jamming his keys into the tape, but they wouldn’t cut through the thick fibers. On his knees, he began to saw back and forth against between the Lorax’s wrists. It was quiet outside the sound of crackling drywall.

  “Shut the fuck up, Larry. Shut the fuck up for like five seconds,” Jamie said.

  “I had to tell them, you know, had to—it wasn’t like a choice, you know. It took a lot to steal that beast. You wouldn’t believe how much Kilkenny cried before we finished him off, guy was all water. Musta pissed himself. But that game Rooker, the guy calling that ballgame. That was his name. He was calling it in Philly.”

  “Larry, you gotta help me with this shit. Try to lean back or something.”

  “They made me eat it all,” the Lorax said. “Even the little weird hormone shit they give the guys who wanna sprout tits. But not Jim Rooker. He was calling the game. He said he’d fucking walk home from Philly if the Pirates lost. Counting your chickens before they die, right? Or eggs? ’cause that’s what they did, they died right there in front of everybody. Embarrassing.

  “It was like watching an execution in slow motion, but baseball is always in slow motion. It was my birthday, and they’d just got the lion too. The team blew the lead, ten runs. Do you remember? They were supposed to get you too. They didn’t even warn me, didn’t even bring the drill. Never used tape before. That was new, that was very new…”

  The Lorax droned on at a steady volume as the room got smaller and smaller.

  “Larry! I’m trying to—”

  “You. They were supposed to get you first and then they got me, because Crane knows. I’m like a free agent. I play out the contract and the contract ends. They really, really made me eat it all, man—”

  “That wasn’t even….You can’t keep one thing straight, can you? You even recognize my face? That wasn’t even my fucking address on the prescription…”

  The Lorax was not listening to Jamie. He wasn’t even listening to himself.

  “That game. Don’t matter how far you’re ahead. Don’t matter. It isn’t over till the fucking ninth inning. Yeah, they found me. And I always wanted to be a big deal, you know? This operation here, this was just a beginning. This wasn’t an end. I wanted to be like a Mazeroski, the Maz. I wanted that big walk-off. I could hold it on my own out here. I still hung out with them after that too, even after they took my teeth. They tore up my Maz, too. Eight-time Gold Glove winner!”

  Smoke was everywhere. Jamie backed up from the body in the chair. The voice kept pushing at him through the smoke. The same droning voice that told those two all about the lion and the address. It was the wrong address, and now Brock had no teeth at all. A busted fucking jack-o’-lantern, the kind you find shattered on the street after Halloween, and the voice kept speaking inside that cloud of smoke laced with pig feces and burning fungus. The ceiling tiles rippled and began to fall. Jamie dodged the smoking panels and crawled toward the door. Sweat smeared the smoke onto his forehead.

  “They coulda left me anywhere,” the Lorax said. “That’s what they do—like a warning. You don’t need to sign it because you know who it’s for and what it means and they shoulda gone to you first, not me. But they knew, they always know. You can’t blow a lead like that. No one gets the walk-offs. No walk-offs for anybody, just more of the same. I can’t—you still there?”

  The body back at the butcher shop was probably frozen. The bone can wasn’t supposed to be outside. The voice kept coughing and Jamie pushed his way through the door. The thick fumes made his eyes water and he hacked on the pavement outside. His spit was black and chunky. The Lorax kept talking, his voice finally rising as the flames began to nip at his bare, pimpled skin. His voice spat the words into the haze while Jamie watched the whole plaza smouldering.

  “It was my birthday, and they took me out to the bar, and there was a ten-run lead in the first. You can’t stay fucking ahead, though. Never. Final was fifteen to eleven and the announcer said he was gonna walk home all the way from Philly back to Pittsburgh. All the way. They didn’t even take me to the woods and let me crawl, you know that? Just left me here.”

  Jamie stumbled back toward his car. He didn’t hear any sirens, just the voice of the Lorax tunneling into his brain. He could hear his lungs crackling from the heat, the smoke choking each individual cell until they collapsed on top of one another.

  “The announcer walked home and they wouldn’t even let me crawl out of my own.”

  Jamie climbed into the car and turned up the radio. His knees popped with the static. He couldn’t find a station. A lone flame swayed from the roof of Harry’s Holistic Hobbies like a sputtering signal flare. Jamie closed his eyes and tried to start the engine. The cold air clutched it tight and the motor sputtered in convulsions. He needed to return the message.

  “It doesn’t matter how far you get ahead, Brock. Brock, yeah? Doesn’t matter, not until the ump says you’re done. You can’t end it till then—and it’s always too late.”

  Jamie let static fill his ears instead. The body was still waiting for him. A letter they didn’t bother signing. He was the one who ran over the lion. It was addressed to him. Jamie wiped his hands across his lap. Each finger left behind a sticky red mess.

  “It was my birthday, and they took me out for a drink…”

  Jamie drove out of the parking lot. He didn’t bother to signal when he turned onto the street.

  Police would later assume it was insurance fraud tied to the estate case. The bed sheet curtains across the street remained closed as the Lorax burbled and melted in the burning dark.

  23

  The bullet ricocheted four times before embedding itself in the skull of Francis Paul Garrison. It first bounced off the temple of the cow on the killing floor of the Tillson Abattoir and then ricocheted into the rafters. It then struck a two-inch-wide steel beam that fired the slug back down at sixty miles an hour, where it eventually collided with the concrete floor and sprang back up toward Francis’s face. As he tried to protect himself, the lead passed directly through his left palm before burrowing deep into the bone between his temple and right ear. Medical staff on site agreed it was too dangerous to remove the slug, and Francis Paul Garrison quit two months later without any explanation. No cows rejoiced. There was always someone else to pick up the gun.

  “Dad, you need to open the door and let me in,” Jamie said. “It’ll honestly take five minutes. Just open the door. I will leave you be, all right? Open the door.”

  “It’s almost two in the morning.”

  “I can tell time, Dad.”

  “Your mother’s asleep,” Francis said. “She can’t be disturbed. You can’t just come whenever you feel like it and disturb the schedule we have here.”

>   Jamie’s father was never the same after that bullet passed through his hand. In the first few months afterward, Francis sat in the living room with his cigarettes and let the smoke eat a hole through the ceiling. He no longer cared to watch his embattled Leafs lose season after season, and he stopped trimming his hair. The only reason he cut his nails was the annoying click they made against the television remote. He left the clippings in his lap.

  The hole in Francis’s hand never fully healed. You could poke your pinkie finger through it when he was asleep, but he didn’t close his eyes very often. Francis Garrison did not believe he deserved to participate in the world after that incident with the cow. He had interfered enough, caused enough sorrow, eaten from the wrong tree in the wrong garden during his time on this earth. The problem was knowledge, he decided. Knowledge of that gun and everything else—the machines of man had betrayed him. Francis sat in that chair while the Cold War crept past and watched men try to destroy each other with all their hard-earned knowledge packed into warheads and submarines. He still ate meat, but he never asked about its origins. He had uncluttered his mind of all the useless facts his cells had collected over the years. Each synapse was issued an expiry date.

  “I’m already halfway in the door anyway,” Jamie said. “I promise I won’t waste any of your precious fucking meditation time or whatever. Go sit by the TV and I’ll find it myself. I just need the gun. The old one, all right? Just for a few days. You going to let me in or what?”

  Jamie had watched his father recede for years, the old man’s inaction burning pancakes and abandoning laundry until ants began to treat it like a home. Mrs. Garrison did her best to stay out of the house, spending shifts at the bingo halls downtown, where the glass was covered in greasy facial imprints from the homeless. Two of these illuminated fishbowls sat on King Street, their clouded interiors beckoning with heaters and a two-dollar minimum to sit down at the tables. Jamie’s mother’s hands were covered in green dabber ink like liver spots, and the second-hand smoke made her smell like the bathroom stalls at work—musty and overgrown with mildew. It was better than home, though, and the lump in the corner who refused to turn the television from anything but the news. Francis Garrison watched it on mute.

  “You want what?” he said. “You can’t have the gun. It don’t even work the way it did…”

  Jamie pushed past his father into the living room.

  Francis never got rid of the gun that propelled that fateful hunk of lead into his skull. He kept it as a reminder of his hubris. That’s what he told his sons before he stashed it in their house on Olive St. A reminder of his pride and all the fallout that was to come. Never interfere. You must let nature take its course—it will decide your fate. This is what he told his sons while their house burned down. They had found him standing on the front lawn smoking and watching it burn in the dark. The rifle was in his hand.

  Don’t interfere. This is what he told them in the hotel room downtown while their mother was treated for third-degree burns; the chain she wore had melted the skin around her neck, a cross branded between her breasts. Jamie remembered emerging from the smoke and that figure on the curb with an ember in his hand. Francis hadn’t bothered to wake them up.

  It was in that downtown hotel room with the Magic Finger beds that Francis explained why he couldn’t interfere. He’d done it once before, and look what had happened. A line of white through his black hair traced the bullet’s path, the skin beneath a meaty pink that pulsed like a vein. He pointed to his skull and sat on the hotel balcony, watching toads drown in the hotel pool as the chlorine overwhelmed their systems and burned their porous skin.

  “Don’t give me that old spiel about it bein’ broken. You had it out at Christmas,” Jamie said. “Mom had to tell you to put it away. Do you remember Christmas? Fucking had the TV on the whole time. It’ll just be for tonight. And Mom isn’t even here, is she?”

  “She is. They had a heart attack at the hall. I keep tellin’ her she’s going to have one if she keeps breathing in that smoke every night. Soot in her lungs like I tell her. She wants to kill herself all slow like that, she’s welcome to it.”

  The clutch of silence and muted news on the television had seeped into every little room in that row house. It was Janet Garrison who went out and worked, worked until she finally got her pension and could flee as well. The post office set her free after forty years with a fractured disc and collapsed arches in both her feet. Francis Garrison ate whatever she left in the fridge and slept in the living room. He did his own laundry while she was out of the house but washed it in the kitchen sink. Janet did not believe in divorce. It was easier to pretend he was a ghost than file the papers and drag what was left of her husband into a brightly lit courtroom. Everything would be on the record after that. Anyone could access the stenographer’s account of their dysfunction.

  “Well, I won’t bother her. Jesus Christ. Where did you put it now? Is it in the kitchen again? You should just give it up. Throw it away if you don’t want me asking for it. I got nowhere to be. I can look for it all night,” Jamie said. “You hear anything from Scott at all?”

  Francis Garrison retreated to his chair in the corner.

  “So you’re going to shut down again?” Jamie asked. “Like a robot. All right, fine.”

  Jamie could still see Brock’s mouth split open with that little tongue pushing through the fluid like a worm. He could still see the lion mashed under the grille of his car, its vacant eyes. Jamie didn’t know what the Lorax had told those two men from the butcher shop. Who else could they be? The Lorax could have said anything with all those mushrooms jammed into his cheeks. Jamie slammed another cupboard and kept looking. He smelled like smoke.

  Francis didn’t move. On the television screen, a woman bellowed from a pulpit made out of scrap plywood. Homemade signs fluttered behind her in the breeze. The close angle of the camera made her look massive; you could see small black hairs raised along her upper lip. Her teeth gnashed and she paused for effect. The crowd was smaller than it looked, pumped up with occasional banners and one guy in a motorized wheelchair driving around in circles. He looked more lost than angry.

  “Leave it alone, Jamie. You can’t just take whatever you want,” Francis croaked. “It ain’t yours to take. It’s like anything else. Like a microwave or a satellite dish. I keep my eye on it.”

  “Just tell me where you stashed the gun, and I’ll leave you alone to whatever you’re doin’. You can do whatever you want with that TV. Mom doesn’t use it anyway.”

  Jamie found the rifle underneath the sink, held against the wall by pipes and a stack of iron wool. His father crept up behind him in the cramped kitchen, waving his hand at Jamie like it was a talisman. The light passed right through the hole in his palm, a reminder of cows split down the middle and pigs boiled to clear the bristles off their snouts before their throats were cut.

  “Just relax, Dad. You need to take a seat before you hurt yourself.”

  Jamie had seen this hand routine before, and he still had Brock’s broken jack-o’-lantern face floating behind his eyes. He tried to push past his father with the butt of the gun—a Remington Fieldmaster, .22LR caliber. It had belonged to his grandfather first. Francis Garrison held fast against his son, trapping him in the doorway. He hadn’t brushed his teeth.

  “You’re going to make a mess with that thing. Like everything else you do,” Francis said. “I’ll throw it out like you want. Just give me it. I’ll be the one to throw it out. Things come back at you if you ain’t careful.”

  Jamie knew his father always kept one in the chamber—just in case he got tired of waiting for the end. He saw it when his father cleaned the gun. Sometimes the eventual dissolution of this world was not eventual enough.

  “So it came back and bit you in the ass—so what?” Jamie said. “So does everything else. No one is trying to take your TV or your microwave or whatever else you think we want. Not taking anything but this, I swear. Mom needs to put a leash
on you. Jesus…”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing with that,” Francis said.

  Jamie shoved past his father and found his mother standing in the hallway. She was dressed in the green pantsuit she wore to the bingo halls. Her eyes were hidden behind a pair of sunglasses, the ones she wore after a good long cry in the bathroom with the tub running. The stoop of her back was reinforced from years of lifting packages onto conveyor belts and sorting through Christmas letters to Santa Claus.

  “Mom, can I use the phone?” Jamie said. “I just gotta make a call and the old man ain’t helping. Don’t worry, it’s not long-distance— let go—and it won’t take too long.”

  Janet Garrison brushed past her husband. Her eyes didn’t even flicker over his hairy face or the rifle clutched in her son’s hands. That gun was always bouncing around the house. She had slept with it beneath her bed for the last week before Francis moved it again. Sometimes she wished it would fire once of its own volition.

  “Sure. As long as it’s not long-distance, you can call whoever,” she said. “You still staying with Scott?”

  Janet began to put on her shoes in the kitchen, the large orthopedic ones the doctor advised would reduce the strain on her lower back. Unlike most of her friends, Janet had yet to crumble entirely. She attributed it to a lack of cigarettes and a healthy dose of All-Bran each morning. It was only her feet that looked truly old—like dead roots.

  “Scott’s gotta sort some shit out with that wife of his, so I’m letting them kinda air everything out,” Jamie said to his mother. “Phone is still in the back bedroom, right?”

  “Where do you think you’re going, Jan? It’s two in the morning!” Francis said.

  “They’ve moved the games to the high school,” Janet said. “I can’t sleep after watching Audrey keel over like that, and I’m not staying here to watch the two of you go at it again. I’ve already seen that before. Many times.

  “Its fine, Jamie. You do whatever you need to do, just make sure your father eats something, and for God’s sake don’t bother returning that thing,” Janet continued, ignoring her husband. “Shoulda been taken out of this house a long time ago. Take the TV too, if you want, but he probably won’t go for that. You tell your brother I said hello, okay? We never see enough of him around here, but I understand why. Oh, don’t tell him that, though. Just say hi.”