Waste (18 page)

“Now we'll move to the phones to find out what you have to say. The number to dial is 1-800-KRS-CALL. Again, that number…”

Jamie never said this aloud; he said it with wet laundry piled on the floor. He said it with an empty tank of gas in her Corolla and rings of water on the coffee table. Little neglected pieces grew into a barrier neither of them could breach, accumulated spite packed densely beneath their feet. The carpet wore down under the weight until floorboards poked out. Small incisions invisible to the naked eye spread from Alisha's hands across both their backs; they chaffed and burned under the bed sheets every time someone moved in their sleep.

Alisha said her mother was a Gemini too—two-faced, shattered, corrupted deep down into her brain stem. It was easier to believe in floating planets spinning fates instead of what the doctors said. The nun's tires had unleashed this second half Alisha faced in the damp visitors' room. She brought her daughter sometimes to try and break through to that other face her mother refused to show, the one that had raised her and sewn together all those awful ice-skating outfits.

Kansas became a shield to deflect some of the blows, soundless and unmoving. She was four. Half of the old lady's words could barely penetrate her mind. Alisha's mother ranted about children who sucked sustenance from their mothers. She was a sacrifice, a fresher piece of meat to toss into the flame. Kansas bore it all until the orderlies arrived and wheeled Mrs. Wugg away, her lips still funneling hate down the hallway. She could hear it in the parking lot and on the long drive home, bouncing over the airwaves and polluting every song.

When Kansas finally spoke, it was at the dinner table. Her food was organized by color in a half rainbow across her plate. Methodically, her head counted each piece in silence.

“Bitch.”

When a child speaks its first word, the parents are supposed to celebrate.

“Did she just…”

Kansas whispered to her food, “Sloppy, rutting bitch…”

All the barriers collapsed in a sad pile of wet thermal underwear and ceramic teacups. Jamie's voice rose and cracked against the ceiling fan. A horrible, vicious thing. A fucking monster that needed to stay locked in its cage. That's what she was, that woman. She was all bile and it burned Alisha, it left her ragged and weeping in the bathroom at 5 a.m., you think he couldn't hear it through the door? He could hear everything; it was like an animal in a pit whimpering to be put out of its misery. Did she want to feel this way? Did she get off on it? And then to bring your own daughter, to expose her to such a poisonous, vicious thing. What did she think she was doing? Did she want Kansas to grow up like that? To have it injected into her? No one deserved that shit. No one should be born into it.

Kansas sat in the kitchen, her mouth closed once again. The fight swirled through the living room and toward the massive television that kept Alisha Wugg awake at night with dreams of soap operas where the comas ended and the dead came back from the Amazon with treasures in hand. In that world, the world she watched some mornings when the rain was too heavy outside and her head felt like it would explode, she knew it would all pass. The plot must go on, new hopes built from mysterious cures and identical twins. And here was Jamie, and he was smashing each of those hopes on the floor, crunching the pieces under heavy black boots that woke her up in the middle of the night. The plot was snapped. It was all in shambles. He wasn't listening. She tried to warn the girl about what she could become. A fist shot out in her direction. It cracked the television and spluttered. The splintered screen watched them but didn't say a thing.

Another fist—through a painting this time.

Another fist, but it was hers. It whacked against the top of the television and Alisha's screaming realigned itself. Her screaming found a single focus and bore down. Out. Get out. Take your fucking mouth out of this house. I will not let you talk about her, I won't let you say it. Just get out. Out. Out. Kansas ate her food in the kitchen while they screamed back and forth.

Jamie packed his clothes and Alisha kept saying
Out, out, out
like it was a spell, like he could be cast away because he had said so many fucking things. Out, out, out. He'd said things she didn't want to see, he'd pulled up rocks and dug into the dirt beneath and pulled out all these squirming poisonous things and then shoved them right under her nose, and he didn't care. He laughed. He'd do it again. He would do it until she stopped going back to the poisoned well and drinking in all her mother's rotten words about ruptured varicose veins and the inevitability of divorce and the spectre of failure looming over us all. She was a failure. No one was going to refute that. All the rocks were flipped and Jamie refused to put them back.

“Now, I know we have already covered this, but I'd like to bring the discussion back to animal control. I mean, do we actually know this was done by humans?”

Jamie turned off the radio. He was parked outside Brock's house and its bright teal garage doors. Somewhere to stay. The street was filled with cars. Frost gathered on the windshields. Jamie swallowed another orange pill and pulled himself out onto the front lawn. Garbage lined the curb up and down the street. Rot crystallized in the air.

The door to the basement was open. Wet sounds blurted from the laundry room below. Jamie made his way down the steps. Underneath the hum of the washing machine, he could hear moaning and another voice mumbling something. It sounded like a lullaby. Farther away, the roar of Maiden's “Number of the Beast” beat against Brock's door. The record was too fast. The settings were wrong. There was detergent all over the stairs.

“Brock? Jack-O, buddy, you all right?” Jamie said.

There was an indent in the dryer the size of a man's skull. Brock lay on the floor, his knees leaking puss and blood and some other fluid Jamie couldn't recognize. His mouth was open and Karina was on her knees, clutching him to her chest. Teeth were lined up on the floor like small soldiers, their dark roots filled with brown blood.

Karina was still dressed for work.

“Brock! What the fuck, buddy?”

Brock tried to sit up on the floor. A perfect hole was punched through each of his kneecaps. The smell of detergent barely covered the copper scent. Fluid seeped from the holes. Karina kept talking, her voice breathing in low whispers. Her hair smelled like formaldehyde.

“I came down to do the laundry. My parents, they come back tomorrow,” Karina said. “And then I saw his face, oh my god. He keeps talking about giants.”

Brock spat blood out onto the floor. His gums were ragged and split, a new Halloween mask permanently affixed to his face. The teeth on the floor looked too big for his mouth. Fluid pooled in deep holes toward the back of his gums. Jamie spotted a tongue pushing through the bloody mess like a blind fish.

“Karina,” Jamie said. “You gotta go.”

“No, I need to stay. You see his face? He can't stay like that.”

“You need to go and you need to call the police and then you can come back. All right? Call the cops. Do it. You need to tell them someone has broken into your house, you need to tell them they have badly beaten your friend. Tell them we need an ambulance.”

Karina nodded. Her awkward office shoes clunked up into the clean air above. Jamie turned back to the remains of Brock's face.

“Buddy, buddy, man. It'll be all right. You just gotta focus on something else.”

“Fucking beards, man,” Brock dribbled. “Thought I ran over their pet.”

Jamie's hands almost pulled away from Brock's head, but he resisted the urge. The tongue popped up again from the mess and tried to speak.

“Huge motherfuckers. I mean, they were just be-beasts. They came right, riii—right in and just, ba-baaam. I didn't even—couldn't see 'em.”

More blood welled up and ran in thin lines down Brock's chin. His T-shirt was soaked.

“They had this fucking drill…”

The words were drowning on their way out of Brock's mouth.

“Just spit the blood out, Brock. Just spit it.”

“Fucking hu-hu-hurts, man,” Brock drooled. “The fucking knees, man…. ”

Brock had done his share of stupid things. He liked to race the trains at night. He told Jamie they reminded him of owls when they hooted at him in the dark. He and Jamie had grown up near the train tracks that ran through town. The same tracks claimed one kid every year until the city council topped the safety fences with barbed wire. Brock told Jamie he could hear everything they had to say, but it was always written in a rust—sounds of livestock and stock-car parts and a million sheep transported to the slaughter. It traveled through the rails. Chlorine gas and computer monitors. The tired wheels didn't click or clack into Brock's ear at night. They bleated.

“Said I killed. I know I didn't…”

“And they…how big were they? You gotta talk to me until someone gets here.”

Brock spat. “Said I ran over Falcor, their pet, man. What the fuck is Falcor?”

Jamie lowered Brock back to the floor. He reached into the dryer and pulled out a pile of sweaters that still smelled like booze. The stink never left you—it just retreated deeper into the fibers. The booze ran deep; it inhabited your pores. Jamie knew if they cut him open half his organs were going to be pickled and full of brine.

“What are you doing, J?”

“I'm trying to soak up some of the stuff.”

Karina was there beside him, pushing pillows under Brock's head. Jamie swept up the teeth and set them on the dryer. He could trace Brock's nose and eye sockets in the dent. He imagined ZZ Top smashing Brock's face into the dryer again and again while a crowd cheered and waved homemade signs from the general admission seats. They came here for the lion. Jamie sat down on his haunches and watched Karina clear the red from Brock's face. It welled up again when he tried to speak and she hushed him. Scattered pages from her love letters were lying on the floor with handwriting like rivets on the page.

“You called the cops, right?”

“Yes, I called the police,” Karina said. “I called and called, and they put me on hold, and then finally someone answered.”

“You called what? The station?”

“I had to find it in the phone book, and then I had to go through a directory once I got through on the line, and then—”

“You didn't just fucking call 911?”

“You told me to call the police.”

The room tasted like the bone cans. Jamie rinsed them out every couple weeks, the blood rising in founts under the spray of the hose, the lemon suds barely concealing the rot. The runoff ran down into the sewer grates, trickling its way through the alley. In the summertime, you could watch the bugs follow it, the gnats and mosquitoes hovering above the mess in confusion.

The ants never hesitated.

The long wail of the ambulance siren trickled down the stairs. Brock's tongue pushed up again from the mess and tried to speak. Jamie hushed him. Karina kept humming. She soaked the blood with each sweater and then neatly stacked them beside her.

“Hey buddy, buddy, you need to just breathe, all right? No, no, through your nose, okay? Let's keep it clear, let's keep it clear. You just gotta nod when I say things, all right? Just nod, that's it.”

Jamie looked down at Brock's face—what was left.

“Brock, look at me. Look at me, okay? I said look at me, Brock, for fuck's sake, okay?”

Larkhill had done this to him. Same thing it did to everyone else. No teeth and busted kneecaps—an accelerated decline.

“You shouldn't be yelling at him,” Karina said.

“I'm going to fucking say whatever, Karina. Okay? Brock, I'm going to go, but don't freak out, all right? I'm not actually leaving. You just gotta stay here.”

“Guuh—no!”

“No, no, I am not leaving you,” Jamie said. “Just—just close your eyes. You'll be fine…I will figure this out, all right?”

Jamie left Karina holding Brock on the floor. Outside, the air was still cold and filled with garbage. The siren grew louder. Jamie began to drive away from the house, headed toward the Village Plaza with only one headlight burning in the dark. The radio was off and the trains were hooting at him from somewhere out there in the cold. Jamie knew Brock could hear the wheels in his fingertips, even if the doctors could never sew his busted ear back on correctly. It was a vibration, not a sound. A transmission delivered along molecules of marrow up into your bones from the root source of the rails. You could feel it rattle in your skull. Brock said it looked yellow when he closed his eyes. It looked like anywhere but here.

There was an abandoned ambulance in the parking lot.
SATIN
RULES!!
was sprayed across the back doors, the words colliding with
LARKHILL
MUNICIPALITY
typed out in faded red stencil. Someone had removed the front seat and set it up on the roof like a recliner. Jamie Garrison smelled smoke as his legs carried him across the parking lot and past the frozen condoms scattered on the broken asphalt. Brock swirled around his head, mixed up with images of lions hunting children. The parking lot had no working streetlights. Smoke threaded through the night sky, but there weren't any stars. Only the moon forced its way through the clouds and made everything blue and cold. Jamie's hands kept clenching involuntarily.

“You can't even keep a fucking fact straight, can you? Fucking junkie motherfucker…”

Jamie slammed the door open. A chair stood in the middle of the room. A broken pair of dentures lay on the floor. The bottom palate was split in two. Broken orange prescription bottles and sandwich bags littered the ground. Scattered dustings of crushed medication sprouted from the tiles. Trails of smoke pushed their way into the room through the hole the Lorax had carved into the wall. Jamie recognized the smell. The Lorax's fungi were burning with his lamps.