Waste (14 page)

“We'll find her. Right, Mosey? She's not here, unless you think she's hiding in the toilet or something. She's a big momma. No offense, Mosey. I know you don't want us calling her a babe, but damn, how'd you keep her hidden from us for so long?”

Moses caught another glimpse of the father's smile. He swung the pole again and glass scattered around them. All three were wearing their steel-toed boots, the ones Moses had made them buy after he found B. Rex with a boot print embedded in his chest on the first day of tenth grade. Moses found the boots at Second Chances, a thrift store covered in dust and dead lice. Logan got his own pair when two girls stole his shoes after gym. He had to walk home in his socks. Like his bedroom, they were bright green and filled with holes.

The boots were an investment for the future, for a friendship built on hates they couldn't name until they decided it was everything they were not; it was everything that bubbled and seethed and glared and laughed and mocked their flickering pride. There was nothing else outside that hate, no border left to cross, just juice monkeys in your mother's old basement, and fathers who mangled your mother's hand, and pine resin lingering in all your senses, a reminder of where it all began to fall apart and the fact that she wasn't here. She was gone.

“Fuck it,” Moses said. “Let's just trash this hole.”

17

Astor Crane discovered the Brothers Vine when he expanded from plants into pharmaceuticals. More money when the drugs were somewhat legal. Prescriptions and half-shipped shipments landed easily inside their pockets. Al and Tommy had survived the purges that drove out most of the bike gangs. The few rats that had jumped ship were found out in the woods with their knees drilled and their mouths filled with bits of their own hands. It was a signature the brothers developed. They had a route to Quebec that bypassed most of the police checks. All the best stuff came from Quebec.

“You find Destinii or what? You guys even looking at her files? You go by LIMH today? Talk to me, boys. You call me from a pay phone, I expect to hear some good things.”

Even in their forties, the Brothers Vine were still looking for father figures. Astor Crane was happy to fill the role. He'd found them skulking around the Turret after a wet T-shirt contest, mumbling approval at each girl who walked by them. The edges of their beards were wet with beer and they had peanut shells in their moustaches. Astor got them high in his suite and taught them how to talk to women. Neither Vine had had much luck since they were released on their eighteenth birthdays. Three years in prison had led to a twenty-year drought. Astor taught them not to stare and to ask questions—always ask questions. Make the girls feel like you care about them. It doesn't matter if you do or not, but tell them that you do. Believe that you do—you have to believe it or they won't believe it either.

“You found Falcor. The lion…okay, yeah. Good. That's good. Take him to the guy we talked about, the taxidermy guy. I'll go with you when we do it. How about that?”

Astor Crane told Al it was important just to listen, not to try and fix all of their problems at once. He reminded Tommy that the best way to a stripper's heart was through her nose, not his wallet. With careful coaching and heavy doses of cough syrup in their gin and tonics, Astor Crane showed the Brothers Vine they didn't always have to pay for sex, and from then on he was untouchable.

“I thought I made it pretty simple, Al. I thought I made it clear. Find the girl. Yes, it's her real name. You have her? You want to double check? I believe you if you say it's her. Yeah. I know it sounds stupid. Destinii with two I's at the end. Yeah, I know it's a hassle. Write it down if you have to.”

Astor opened up worlds where the Brothers no longer just needed each other; he glossed over the broken bits and presented the two of them as grizzled heroes to the women they met on those long treks into French territory. Only half of the girls spoke English. Astor found this helped his cause. He provided the brothers with the narratives they needed. And the shipments did not stop. Not even when Astor was in the hospital. You could rely on the Brothers Vine to follow your instructions. Sometimes, though, they made a mess—the kind of mess that got plastered all over the six o'clock news.

“And I know they found that Condon kid, so don't even get me started. You fuck up once, shame on you. You fuck up twice, well, I'm still not taking the blame. Grab the fucker who got the lion too, if you can. Squeeze our friend with the mustache. Maybe we'll make me a wig out of his hair, my head is getting cold these days. And Al, no more dropping them off in the woods, all right? Condom stole, but he didn't know where the girl was either. And now we got this bullshit to deal with…yeah, I know, things happen. I know. Things also end. Remember that.”

Astor Crane hung up the phone and stared out the window. He watched the buses and garbage trucks trading spots with each other down in the street below. He tried not to gaze at his reflection, his scalp shining bright in the glare. The lion was gone, a pile of bones and shit now. Probably some drunk asshole, hurtling toward nothing. It had been a mistake to keep it up at the old mental hospital, a mistake to give the animal its own wing to roam at night.

Someone could have been eaten in the dark.

Lions were scavengers, though. Astor read that when they had him in the hospital, chopping him up and redressing his wounds, telling him he was almost cured. Just one more surgery. One more time under the knife. Lions would drive hyenas and jackals off their prey. They would spook cheetahs and wild dogs. They would make their presence known. They would take what was theirs by right and by might. They would suffer no fools out on the plains.

Astor at least saw a small piece of himself in the animal. A small, nasty little piece, something caught in the corner of its eye. Back when he and Destinii were still trying to make things work, before she'd shacked up with Condom and fallen down an escalator, she told him he looked like one—a lion—in the morning, his red hair splayed out over the bed. He had tried to roar, but could only laugh. He had tried to be kind.

Destinii would need to remember he was kind if they had found her. If it really was her—years locked up in the mental ward promised him nothing. He was getting old. Pieces of him were already falling off, pieces he found in the shower, in the toilet, in the bed when he woke up alone again with the television on, only the hiss of a dead tape to comfort him.

There would need to be some changes. She would have to learn to live by his rules again, the old rules that kept him safe, that kept money flowing into this city, even as Larkhill barked and gasped for more air, for more people, for something to sustain it. It lived on flesh. She would have to learn to be quieter, kinder, softer. Like him. Like him after they chopped and twisted and yanked his insides around one more time. To make sure everything would work for once.

Astor would ask her about that escalator. Once you start falling, it's difficult to stop. Her face had got caught at the bottom, that's what Condom said. Shredded her cheek on the way down. He would ask her about the baby. He would tell her about the lion, how all good things had to end. He would tell her about new things he wanted, new ways he was going to live. There would need to be a baby.

He would ask her why she fell down that escalator.

Astor Crane sat down on his heart-shaped bed and pressed play on the VCR. He watched a vicious nothing tear across the landscape, swallowing everything in its path. He waited for someone to cry out, but the sound was muted. He waited for the Brothers Vine to call.

He tried not to get sentimental about the lion.

Astor knew he needed something more than a pet. He wanted an heir. Something to replace whatever the doctors were scheduled to remove in the next few weeks.

Something wet and mewling. Something he could call his own.

Astor Crane didn't want to die a scavenger, living off of someone else's sons.

18

Mrs. Singh was alone. Her son now went to a boarding school in Toronto, his letters to her growing shorter and cruder with each passing month. Mainly they asked for money. When she called him in the late afternoon on weekends, she heard laughing and drinking and a boy named Henry offering to introduce all the guys to some real prime gash.

Gash. The way he said it made her spine crumple under her housecoat. It was always her son who hung up first, barely saying goodbye before the click. It was the click that made her wrench her hair and cry and watch
Oprah
with the volume up all the way, waiting for someone like her to appear on the screen, to tell everyone just how horrible that click was.

Her husband still worked long hours in the factory that made child car seats. Some nights when he got up early to deliver newspapers, his second job, Mrs. Singh dreamed of going home and holding her sister's babies. She dreamed her father wasn't drowned in three inches of water by the men he opposed on the zoning commission. She dreamed he was still alive, and he would see her on
Oprah
, and it was on
Oprah
where she could tell the world about that click. Oprah would probably clap and tell her to tell it like it is, tell it like it was, because Oprah knew the truth. She knew what it was to be lost and abandoned by husbands and children and the world at large. Mrs. Singh knew this.

And so every night, before she went to bed beside her husband who snored and never cleaned his beard after eating supper, she would sit in the kitchen and attempt to write Oprah letters. Letters about her son and the click and the smell of another woman on her husband's breath. She couldn't prove it, but maybe Oprah could, and all she was asking for was some guidance. All she was asking for was some help from America's number-one talk show host, who never felt ashamed to cry in front of millions on the television screen.

Mrs. Singh wished she was so brave.

She was writing another letter to Oprah about the hopes she had for her new garden in the summer when she heard shouts and stomping boots from next door. She knew her neighbors, with their bulging golden muscles and breastless daughters, were not home. They had left for Columbus on Thursday. But there were sounds coming from their house, maybe raccoons inside the walls. Another shout rattled her writing hand, and Mrs. Singh pulled on her coat.

She did not bother knocking. There was no door, just shattered splinters in the frame. The floor was covered in bleach, and someone had piled all the bodybuilding costumes in the middle of the living room, dousing them in condiments from the refrigerator. Ketchup and pickle brine filled Mrs. Singh's nose as she avoided the puddles of bleach eating through the stain on the wood floor. Someone had torn down all the fire alarms and lined the batteries up like soldiers on the windowsill. Detergent mottled the purple curtains and mustard spelled out
MURDERERS
across the buzzing static of the television set.

Mrs. Singh told herself to leave, told herself it was the smart thing to do, the right thing to do. All she needed to do was turn around and step out into the cold air. Instead, her legs began to move towards the stairs and the loud noises coming from above— the noises that had drawn Hitler's moustache on photos of dogs and family members without discrimination.

Mrs. Singh sidled up to a bedroom door and peered inside. Three boys with shaved heads and boots too big for their feet sat on pink twin beds, each sipping from bottles held in bandaged hands. One of them had a patch of gauze affixed to his left temple. The boys swigged from their bottles, but their faces twisted with every sip. They were just boys.

“You shouldn't be here.”

The one with the gauze on his head belched and laughed when he saw her.

“What the fuck, is it cleaning day already?”

Another of the boys stood up.

“This bitch. I do remember you. You called them, right?”

“I have already called the police. And I will do it again,” Mrs. Singh said. This was the voice she had used on her son when he was little and afraid of the moon.

“Yeah, that's what you do, isn't it? That's what she did last time. You're why we moved.”

The boy was in front of her now, his shoulders rising and falling and the smell of alcohol on his breath, the same smell she swore filtered through the phone lines from her own son's distant bedroom. This boy in front of her was just another Henry, another corrupter offering his unsavory wares to her impressionable son. All three of them were Henrys.

“You must leave now. I have already called the police.”

It was the boy with the bleeding skull and the veiny hands who punched her nose. She felt the bones collapse inward. The pain blinded her eyes. The boy's fists did not stop. Mrs. Singh tried to defend herself but the blows broke down her arms and she could no longer speak through the loose teeth rolling over her tongue. His hands were hard and bony and she heard them pop and crackle against the soft, wrinkled skin of her face, her chest, her veined thighs.

“Logan! Loogie! Get off!”

On the floor, Mrs. Singh remembered when Oprah had wheeled out her cart of fat for the whole world to see. Oprah dividing herself, breaking her body down into separate selves. Mrs. Singh imagined herself now like that fat, beyond the realms of pain. She watched that old reel of the fabulous man in all his bright clothes, his blazer and his sagging skeleton telling Oprah he would die, he would die, because we all die, and Mrs. Singh had watched that at home and cried for the man who would die. Liberace. That was his name. She cried for him because he wore such beautiful clothes, and because he knew he would die. She saw the knowledge he carried with him that day in her living room, whispering the truth in front of millions.

“Logan, Logan, get off, you stupid…look at her face. Look at her, fucking hell. You gotta finish it now. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…”

Mrs. Singh was fading. The click on the other end of the line rumbled toward her ruptured eardrum. She watched one boy toss the other aside, looked at his eyes. They were looking right at her but she didn't remember them, she didn't remember his voice or his name and then she saw him raise a heavy boot above her face.