Waste

by Andrew F Sullivan

  Janet stood up and began stomping out the aches in her feet on the kitchen floor. She pulled her coat on and slammed the door behind her. The wind battered it around the jamb.

  “Jamie, you gotta listen to me. You can take the TV, how about that?”

  The hallway was short and crowded with black-and-white photos of the dead. Jamie opened the door to his mother’s bedroom and sat down on the bed. The walls were crooked, the corners mismatched. Jamie could hear his father grumbling, but he knew the man’s muscles had wasted away. Francis couldn’t even hold the gun straight anymore. Jamie dialed Don Henley’s number.

  “Y’allo? Jesus, two in the morning, I coulda been sleeping. Y’allo?”

  Don Henley didn’t sleep. He napped.

  “Donnie, it’s Jamie.”

  “Oh, man, you gonna bullshit me about shifts again?” Don said. “I told you, I can’t get any of the other guys to work. Sunday mornings. There’s like no customers anyway.”

  “It’s not about that, it’s—there’s too much to explain. Never mind. All right. Listen to me,” Jamie said. “You know two guys, big fuckers with beards. Sometimes they come in the store, I guess? Sound familiar?”

  “Look like ZZ Top? Those guys? Should have guitars on them, right?”

  “Yeah, exactly,” Jamie said. “They come around a lot or what?”

  “They give you trouble? My brother knew them better than me. They been ’round forever, back when we still had bikers in town,” Don said. “They aren’t even twins. Irish twins, same year but different birthdays. I think. Their momma musta pumped ’em out real quick, I can tell you that much, and—oh, for fuck’s sake Gloria, no I don’t need another ice cream sandwich. Just let me talk to J here and then we can get back to—”

  “I don’t need their whole life story,” Jamie said. “I think I mighta pissed them off a bit today, and then all this weird shit…well, I just wanted an expert opinion.”

  The line went quiet for a little and Jamie noticed the gun in his lap. He moved it onto the bed, but didn’t like how it looked sitting between the pillows.

  “What did you do? They used to do a lot of the booking for the ring, you know, in the backyard, and they do a lot of—well, they got hands in all kinds of things,” Donnie explained. “The Brothers Vine is what my brother liked to call them. They got hands in everything. Brothers Vine. Used to come by for trim.”

  “They came by this morning, and I gave them some for hunting bears.”

  “Sounds about right. What exactly did you do?” Donnie asked.

  Jamie put the gun on the floor and remembered what he said to the Lorax.

  “Spit it out, buddy. I got fucking Rocky II in the VCR here and it isn’t as shit as I thought it’d be,” Don said. “I might even finish watching it tonight. What did you do?”

  “I think I, um, ran over their dog. Big-ass dog. In my car last night.”

  “You did what?” Donnie asked.

  “Dog. Ran it over. Told some guy about it, and then Brock, he ended up like…”

  There was a low whistle down the line and some whispering. Don spoke into the phone again. His voice was quieter now. Jamie kicked the gun under the bed. He didn’t want to see it.

  “You know when I worked back at the warehouse? And when I was running the weekly Toss-Up Throwdowns in the backyard? They had a finger in that, and they needed to or I woulda been done faster than a goose in a trailer park. Blam,” Don said. “Where do you think all the stolen booze from the warehouse went? You think I didn’t forget to check off certain containers? Never the number-one brands, of course. Where do you think that would go? Brothers Vine.

  “They don’t even care about the money. They don’t even work for themselves. Used to be hooked up with this real mild, skinny dude. He lived in one of those big apartment buildings off Olive, the ones they wanna condemn now since they’re only twenty years old and already falling apart. What I’m saying is, they got fingers in lots of pies and they are dirty fingers—so you don’t wanna just say sorry, you know?”

  “So what do I do?” Jamie asked. “I can’t exactly track them down.”

  In his mother’s mirror, Jamie saw the body in the bone can, ice crystallizing over the nostrils. It smiled and bobbed in the meaty slush.

  “I don’t really know. These are major fuckers. Been around forever, they’re like a cleaning crew—just dealing with everyone else’s mess,” Donnie said. “They don’t cause too much of a ruckus—in and out. I had them do security once when we had the ring set up, like a few summers ago, but it was worse than Altamont. They do not fuck around.

  “I say lay low, take some time off work, you can borrow a bit of cash off me, but don’t tell anyone where you’re going. Just be safe. It’s just a dog, so they probably won’t kill you, but I mean the last kind of—Gloria, I can hear you standing at the door.”

  “What if I wanted to apologize? I don’t want to have to worry about this chasing me for the rest of my life. How do I do that?”

  “Shit, they been living at Da Nasty for like ten years now. Room—uh, shit, hold on a second, I had it from the last time I had to call them. You know they might kick your ass, right? They ain’t Santa Claus.”

  “I know, I know. You think I’m happy about this?” Jamie said.

  “It’s Room 227. I think. They been there for years, like I said. Not likely to change.”

  “So what should I do? Beg? Bring a new dog?”

  “You should really—oh, that is not fair, Gloria, I get one nosebleed and you bring it up fucking now? That was like a year ago. I told you, the dry air and my nose,” Donnie said. “We just need to get a dehumidifier and I am still talking to Jamie, so can you give me—”

  Jamie hung up the phone and picked the gun up off the floor. Somewhere one of the next-door neighbors kicked over a kitchen chair and someone in another unit was running up and down the stairs. Jamie didn’t like the green wallpaper his mother kept on these walls. It didn’t hide the water stains. It didn’t hide anything. He strode down the hall, switching the rifle from hand to hand. He’d never really fired it before. He wasn’t exactly sure where to buy rounds at two in the morning, either. And there was still that body waiting for him, and it was a sign after all. A calling card. He’d been right. The Lorax was right, everyone was right. Jamie wanted to be wrong for once and have that be the right answer.

  “You shouldn’t take that.”

  Francis Garrison sat alone in his chair, but the television was still playing. He raised his hand at Jamie, but there was not enough light to pass through the hole. Jamie shook his head and pushed his way out the door. His father yelled his name, but Jamie did not turn around.

  Outside in the cold, Jamie Garrison kicked at the tires of his Cutlass and ran a hand over the busted grille, searching for a piece of mane. The stars were out and the hood of the car was covered in frost. The body in the bone can waited for him in the dark, waited for whoever opened its heavy lid. He waited for his father to stagger outside, to the light the house on fire once again. No one emerged.

  “I am never driving that fucking skinhead home again.”

  Jamie tossed the gun into the trunk. He was going to need a tarp.

  24

  Moses never told his friends that true skinheads didn’t shave their heads. Sure, their hair was short, but real skinheads were never truly bald. They got a one or a two buzz from their mother’s electric razor in a small apartment on a council estate where they lived with senile grandmothers and their father’s ashes on the mantel. They rolled their pants up over their boots and had tiny crosses tattooed on their foreheads. Some of them, at least—Moses knew that much. They loved Sham 69 and the smell of tobacco and they flipped you off with two fingers, not one.

  He’d found pictures in the library after a few months hanging around in the Triple K parking lot. The library was a way station filled with busted spines and strange stains underneath the microfiche readers where the old men lingered. The teeth were what surp
rised him. All the photos were black-and-white pictures from soccer games and riots. The teeth looked so white. Some of them were even straight. The English were supposed to have the worst teeth. Moses had spent his nights naked in the motel bathroom prying his jaw open and examining his mouth.

  He knew his teeth weren’t white enough and his hair was too short.

  “You never said it was abandoned,” Logan said.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Moses said. “It was four fucking years ago.”

  The moon led the way. Moses walked through the grounds of the old hospital with his friends trailing behind him. They didn’t have a flashlight. Most of the windows were broken. Moses chucked a rock at a remaining pane. He didn’t get a chance to see his face in its reflection. A few scattered tags marked the territory of teenagers who’d made the pilgrimage before them. The Larkhill Institute for Mental Health had only been shut down for four years, but it could have been decades. A lack of funding and a receding population in the city had sent hospital finances spiraling down until basic maintenance became a problem. It was at this point the provincial government stepped in to transition many of the faltering patients into new facilities. Many were reassessed and allowed to return to their homes and families. Elvira Moon had only been at LIMH for a few weeks before she was released and welcomed back to work. Two weeks later she quit taking her medication, and after a month she was quietly released from the company. That was when she started buying up all the busted dogs.

  “You really think she would come back? We could barely even find it,” Logan said. “Place is like the end of the Earth. Is she a homing pigeon? Caw!”

  The boys had parked the car on the road out front before hopping over the chain-link fence. Six buildings leaned out over the grounds. I LOVE YOU TERESA was spray-painted in purple across the front door of the administrative offices. Someone had tagged FAGGOT underneath it in neon green. The letters looped over one another. Moses felt bad for Teresa, but he kept walking. Maybe the rain would wash it away. It was too cold to stop.

  “Let’s just hold up, all right. Ruining my jacket on all the fuckin’ branches,” B. Rex said.

  “Don’t be a little Jew, B. Rex,” Logan laughed. “You got the cash to buy a new one.”

  Logan was the one who clung to it the hardest. Not just the haircut, but all of it—all the speeches and the heritage movements. That was the sneaky way to say it, according to B. Rex. A heritage movement—the phrase was a dog whistle. Only those attuned to its frequency would pick up the necessary meaning.

  Moses provided the rhetoric for the boys, words he found in pamphlets and Ayn Rand newsletters left on the bedside tables of slumbering women in the Dynasty. He found missives from the businessmen who never tipped and brought plastic sheet covers for the motel beds. Moses gathered inspiration as he and his mother fled the ghosts of group homes and observation wards, stumbling from one motel to the next. Even at school, Moses found the words he needed scrawled into the cafeteria tables, sprayed inside bathroom stalls and dangling unsaid from the upturned corners of his teachers’ mouths. Moses didn’t need all those words, but he held onto them like usedup batteries. Drained of their power, but still filled with the necessary acid. He spat them out in large gobs.

  “Fuck you, Logan,” B. Rex said. “Can’t even see out here. And I don’t like leavin’ the car out by the road like that. It’s like a big sign for the cops. Like, hey, look, somebody’s home!”

  “I’m not the one who stomped the old lady’s face,” Logan said. “You know that, right? You remember that, Moses?”

  They weren’t going to be like the KKK. It wasn’t about blacks or Catholics or fags. That was too easy. Back at the motel, Moses had stayed up late and listened to old men talk about weekly lynchings in the Southern states. He saw the photos of children posing beside the bodies of flayed black men. The kids’ grins revealed gap-toothed smiles. It made him sick, but he kept watching on the blurry satellite channels the motel got for free. He watched until he didn’t feel sick anymore, and then he watched it again.

  “She was asking for it. She…she…”

  “You fucking killed her, Moses,” Logan said. “Now we ain’t going to say anything…but like, you can’t say it didn’t happen. You took the bitch out. It was cold, man.”

  “I didn’t do it like that,” Moses said. “I wasn’t the one who started whaling on her. She was an old lady, she didn’t even—she shouldn’t have been there.”

  “Well, I just threw a few punches,” Logan said. “B. Rex can back me up; I just threw some punches, that’s all. I didn’t kill nobody.”

  Moses wanted action. B. Rex lent them old books by angry white men from the States and neo-Nazi pamphlets his dad had hidden in the garage. They laughed at the overblown fears and words like sandnigger and camel jockey. Moses knew this wasn’t what he wanted, but it was a place to start. It was filled with all the fear they had; it spoke to those little angry bits they hadn’t organized into thoughts yet. Madison Grant, David Lane, and Frazier Glenn Miller Jr. made them laugh, but Moses could repeat some of their speeches word for word.

  “You threw more than fucking punches,” Moses said. “She was on the goddamn floor!”

  B. Rex didn’t say anything. He kept poking at the holes in his jacket.

  “I didn’t finish it though. I didn’t go crazy just ’cause some old lady came into my house,” Logan said. “It wasn’t even your house anymore. You don’t live there now, Moses, you know?”

  “Then just go home. Go home, Logan. Oh wait, you fucking can’t, can you? No one is fucking coming home. Get that through your fucking head. You got something better to do tonight, go ahead, but you’ll be walking. And it’s a long fucking walk.”

  “So what, I’m supposed to live in a motel with you and your crazy-ass mother?”

  It wasn’t Elvira’s fault either. She might have prayed to Bill Cosby and loved her bowling balls like children, but she never hurt him. She didn’t call him stupid or mock his high voice, or ask when his balls were going to drop. She still knew who he was sometimes. Elvira wasn’t the reason for any of this, and neither was Ted Moon. He was just an envelope full of weird promises and lipstick kisses on napkins and postcards. He was just dust and fucking hawks circling the city and waiting for Moses to die. Ted Moon could do whatever he liked. Moses didn’t write him back, and he wasn’t dying any time soon.

  “She’s fine, she’s not even…she’s not that crazy. You haven’t even seen her yet.”

  “Then why are we running all the fuck over town?” Logan asked.

  “It’s fine with you to run into bowling alleys and smack people around, but all of a sudden it gets dark and you’re afraid? Is that it?” Moses taunted. “She’s going to be here. This is where her doc was…”

  “Is that what the giant dyke said?”

  Moses Moon knew it wasn’t about skin or accents or the way someone walked. That wasn’t the reason why they were here with their scabby skulls and in-grown hairs. It was to build something of their own. Something new. They needed to make it new, and the only way you did that was harvesting the past. Pulling up all the broken things your parents had buried and killed and making them your center. Turn trash into your cosmos—either worship it or burn the fucker down. Moses wanted to pull everyone down to that level, and it was easiest when you were already on the edge of the radar. It was easy when you sucked cock or spoke Cantonese or cut hair for the two hundred black men in town. It was easy to slip off the map and end up in the small little place, crowded with everyone else’s misery and bleeding from open pores you couldn’t close. That was why they bought the big heavy boots and ran razors over their heads and stabbed pens into their tiny bird chests. Start at the bottom of the level, start in your own tenements and tattoo MADE IN LARKHILL on the line above your skull. Let the ink settle and blur till you can barely read the letters. It was best to start at the bottom, and Larkhill was dead weight.

  “You can suck my cock,” Moses said.
>
  They would tear it down, and then it would be new.

  “Like you even—”

  Moses tackled Logan, and then they were rolling around in the dead leaves and melted snow. He pinned the smaller boy underneath him and raised his fists. One, two, three, and there was blood pouring from Logan’s nose. Logan coughed and tried to choke Moses but then B. Rex was tearing them off each other, using his short arms to hold them apart and laughing.

  “You know how stupid this is, Loogie? I am going to get my ass kicked tomorrow by the old man. The cops are already probably at my house. Now I have to babysit you two? No, not going to play it this way. You two can throw your little pity party some other time. It’s fucking cold. You get that?”

  The two boys flopped down on the grass. Logan wiped the blood from his face while Moses massaged his throat. From one of the brick buildings, they heard something bang against a wall. It groaned in the darkness.

  “Where you going, B. Rex?” Moses asked.

  “To find your fucking mom. You coming or not?”

  The double doors were painted industrial green. B. Rex yanked one door open and pushed his way inside. Moses and Logan followed him down the hallway, stepping around small holes in the floor and pink tufts of insulation. There was a painful light coming from down the hall. A small sign on the wall read WARD 3-W. They passed a nurse’s station covered in old schedules and crowned with a busted clock. It was always 7 a.m. in WARD 3-W.

  There was another thud from farther down the hallway, toward the light. B. Rex kept striding forward. Moses wanted to sit down. He could feel his stomach turning. Elvira had tried to run away many times before, but Moses always caught her waiting for the elevator. Elvira pretended she knew where she was going, but she was never wearing any underwear. Sometimes she said it was a job interview at Scotiabank. Other days she had a hair appointment. The nightgowns she liked to wear didn’t cover much; Moses found it hard to find extra larges at the second-hand stores. It seemed like only small people handed down their clothes. People got fatter with age. The ones who got thinner were usually sick, their bodies retreating away from poisoned bones or squeezing the last bit of energy out of each fat deposit until there was nothing left.