Waste (15 page)

“I'll finish it, all right?”

“What the fuck are you doing, Mosey?”

Mrs. Singh didn't feel the crunch. She didn't know her eye socket was fractured, or feel the bruises blooming like spilled red wine across the inside of her skull. She didn't even remember the name of the boy who had lived next door with all his wild robot dogs.

Mrs. Singh was just a wheelbarrow of fat and she was with Liberace now.

19

Someone was protesting outside the courthouse downtown. A lone man with a megaphone and a pharmacist's coat paced the sidewalk. Jamie Garrison drove past the man and his sign, the broken capitals lettered in red ink. He didn't bother to read it. The man screamed something.

Jamie sped up.

After work, Jamie had found all of his underwear folded into tiny parcels on the frozen lawn. Scott refused to say much, still wearing his garbage-man gear, hauling boxes outside onto the dead grass. Renee watched from the window, holding her pregnant stomach. Scott refused to listen to Jamie's explanations about sleeping on the couch, about turning over a new leaf. He told Jamie all that shit was rotted out now. It was already gone. Some neighbors had walked away with his sweaters and a few VHS tapes.

“No need for you to go back inside.”

The bone can was still waiting for Jamie. It was patient. Compared to that slowly molting face, the lion was just a blip. It only lingered along his shins and in the spaces between his vertebrae like isolated sparks. If he stood very still, Jamie could barely feel it.

The Condom kid was still all over the radio, his ragged teenage face plucked from yearbooks in someone's basement, so-called friends and former acquaintances emerging like bed bugs from the woodwork to feed off the excitement. Jamie listened to them sob over a body they all claimed to know, while another marinated behind the store in pig's blood and leftover fat.

The strip mall parking lot was empty. The old pickups had moved on to less conspicuous spots. Jamie walked across the pavement with a limp and banged on the glass door. He should never have swallowed all those pills the night before. He banged on the door again. Renee had slept in his bed again, had been doing that on and off for months when she was sleepwalking. Mornings where he woke up to a school of mermaids beside him. It had been a few months since she had thrown herself down the basement stairs. She had bled all over the steps, but the baby was fine.

“Larry, you home?”

The door opened to a cloud of smoke and the Lorax's pink eyes peered out.

“Oh, it's you again. What do you want? And it's the Lorax. If you read the book, you'll see it's kind of inspirational,” he said. “In like a sad, defeated way.”

“I need to talk to you a bit.”

The Lorax bit his lip and pulled the door wide open. He was only wearing a baseball jersey.

“I still got the entire Pirates' starting lineup, if you're interested. Never even been touched by air, vacuum sealed as soon as they came off the printing press. I also got the Maz himself, limited edition, very fancy shit. You know the Maz? Only guy to ever pull off the walk-off homer to win the Series, and he did it for Pittsburgh. No one gets walk-offs anymore.”

“Not here for baseball,” Jamie said. “It's like croquet to me: a stick, a ball, and a bunch of idiots chasing each other around the field. Look, my knee is still—”

“It's an acquired taste,” the Lorax said. “Baseball is a game of waiting and patience. Requires skills like those of a pitcher, kept away from the drudgery of batting in the civilized world known as the American League.”

Jamie was already past the Lorax and inside. Someone had piled all the trash into garbage bags. A few loose Darth Vaders huddled on fragments of glass shelving. The Lorax's bare legs were covered in goose bumps and the air smelled like pigs.

“Not even a hello, then? Or a discussion of America's favorite pasttime?” the Lorax said.

Jamie paced back and forth across the small room. He stuffed his hands inside his pockets. The body was still sitting back there at the shop, waiting for him to look it in the eye again. The beards might be there too, with their scarred hands and the cold bed of their pickup truck. Maybe they would bring a bear to dance around his grave. Maybe they would leave him in his own bone can to stew.

“You already run out? How much did I give you yesterday? You have to pay this time, you realize that?”

The Lorax had his top denture out and was polishing it on his Pittsburgh jersey. He walked behind the counter and pulled out a lumpy plastic bag. He whistled while he worked. Bill Mazeroski's rookie card sat on the table in front of him. The Maz was caught mid swing, his eyes closed against the sun.

“I hit a lion. That's—that's the problem, okay?”

“What? First thing you do is come and tell me this?”

The smell of pigs was everywhere. Jamie's father had smelled the same when his sons were young, like blood and puss and shit. Whenever the brothers took a bath, strange colors would swim up out of the drain to circle them. The Lorax kept shuffling through the bag, looking for the bulky orange pills that made the world fade until your daughter's mouth spit teeth like cracked sunflower seeds and everything was blank and hazy. Jamie picked up the baseball card and began to flick it between his fingers.

“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.”