Waste (11 page)

“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 names 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.

“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.