Waste (2 page)

“He was fucking old, man. Crypt keeper. Like your age.”

Out on the street, faded
HELP
WANTED
signs dotted some of the windows, but there were no store hours posted. Sharkey's Pawn Palace was about the only place open on the block, a sad little window filled with stiff iron bars and snapping teeth painted onto the glass.

“Remember who's driving you home, if you can, Mosey. Might be important in the future.”

“Oh, I'm aware as hell. I can always just bum a ride next time. Got the good old thumb.”

“Last time you did that, you got your ass kicked, if my ancient brain recalls correctly.”

“I got jumped. Wasn't even in the car yet. They just swarmed me down by the park at Vista and Lawrence.” Moses sighed. “It wasn't even that dark out.”

“Just be glad you still have all your teeth, man.”

They were getting closer to the highway now, apartment buildings and row houses giving way to warehouses and old industrial lots. Larkhill used to have twelve different manufacturing plants and three different head offices for minor corporations. The fields told a different story now. Gray lots covered in concrete and the last bits of loosestrife fighting off the cold. A few were fenced off with barbed wire strung through thick chain link. Dead grass and rotten foundations guarded by rusted forklifts. The ground here was filled with sulfur and asbestos and who knew what else, all of it bubbling under the crabgrass.

“Your teeth. I told you about Brock, right?” Jamie said. “Bottle of Ice hits him right in the mouth, and he's always got that jaw of his sagging open, like everything's a joke.”

“He got beaned in the mouth?”

“In the fucking mouth. A forty of Max Ice right in the teeth. They call him Jack-O now. Looks like Halloween every time he cracks his mouth open.”

“He's just gon' leave it like that?”

The streetlights toward the highway flickered on and off at intervals. No residents around to complain. Scattered boxes from dumped loads and old overstock stood in frozen piles by the doors to docking bays, each coated in faded spray paint. The letters were too long and jagged, the faces uneven, the smiles bent at odd angles.

“Says it's too expensive. You should see his mouth though,” Jamie said.

“Can he still eat, and like drink and all that?”

“Yeah.”

“At least he doesn't have to eat from a tube or something like I saw this girl on TV once. She was from Albania?” Moses said. “Or one of those places we should just bomb into glass. Someone we shoulda wiped out years ago. Someone no one cares about except the tabloids.”

It was dark on the roads. The streetlights were gone. Only staggered telephone poles stood with loose nooses of wire dangling up and down the street. The ditches were full of leaky plastic bags that old ladies got their nephews to dump when they didn't want to pay the city to haul them away. Paint cans and adult diapers seeped down into the water table. Up ahead gleamed the long strip of motels, buzzing and flicking their signs to draw everyone out of their holes.

“So she is totally messed up and in this home for girls that can't talk good.”

“So like deaf girls and…”

“No, not deaf. I'm talking like impediments. And so there was a fire there, and the fire alarm was not connected. Mounted on the wall, but fuck, nobody decided to plug it into anything.”

Jamie squeezed the steering wheel tighter.

“You're kidding.”

“This is true! It was on the TV, like, a few nights ago, I swear. The fire alarm isn't connected because these are backwoods people who shouldn't even exist, and guess what? No batteries in the smoke alarms. Turns out the dude running the place was like a total cheapskate—how much you wanna bet a Jew? Do they even have Jews there?”

“Moses, what I tell you about the Jew shit?”

The car still smelled like watered down blood, runoff from the cutting boards that dripped onto their clothes. Jamie flipped on the high beams as they approached the motels. Moses and his mom had a room at the Dynasty, the biggest one on the strip. Five stories of pigeon shit and oversized bay windows decorated in thin lines of purple neon, the letters lit up in bright orange like a landing strip. It was right next door to the Stow-and-Go storage yard.

“Most of the kids end up dying due to like the smoke,” Moses continued. “They're asleep. They don't even know what's happening.”

“What kind of school is this?”

“I think it was just like a home or something,” Moses said. “But there is still this one girl and her dirty little gypsy ass. She can get herself a glass of water even if she can't ask for it. But all the staff there just run straight out when the fire starts. I'm talking nurses, doctors, the guy who changes the piss pans, all of them. They all just book it and totally forget the kids.”

Jamie stared straight ahead at the road. He tried looking in the mirrors. Buzzing AM voices underscored Moses's high-pitched rant.

“Yeah, okay, Mosey. I get it, all right?”

“And so this girl tries to get out on her own. And she falls in the fire—this is what they said on the show. Her whole face goes up like kindling. Melts like butter. Melts her whole mouth shut for some reason. The way her skin burns it all drips down like candle wax. She's still got her nose and her slanty-ass eyes, but her mouth just doesn't exist. Isn't there anymore. Just gone.”

Jamie did not look at Moses. He stared at the speedometer's sickly green light, watched the arrow flicker toward eighty kilometers.

“Moses, why? Why is this something you would tell me?” Jamie said.

“All I'm saying is Brock fucking Jack-O-Lantern Cutcherson should be happy he only lost a few teeth, because this girl has to have tubes hooked up to—”

There was a blur in front of the headlights and Jamie jammed the brake. Moses slammed against the glove box, popping it off the hinges. His face left a greasy imprint on the windshield. The car bucked and thumped into a shape on the road. Jamie's eyes caught a blur of hair before he cracked his head against the driver-side window and then off the cold steering wheel. The car had no airbags. Moses was bleeding from one ear.

“Jamie, what the fuck did you hit? Is that a kid?”

Jamie remembered stories his grandfather told him about moose up north, how the impact usually only broke their spindly legs, sending their massive frames head first through the windshield. By the time the police arrived, usually only the moose lived, its massive head mounted between the front seats wearing a wreath of cracked glass. Sometimes the kids in the backseat were still screaming when the cops pulled them out.

“No, not a fucking kid. Too big to be a kid. My neck, goddamn.”

Jamie pulled himself up in the seat. One of his headlights was busted. The other clicked on and off as he tried to put the car in park. Moses opened the car door.

“What are you doin'?” Jamie asked.

“I gotta see who we hit.”

“We didn't hit anyone. A car doesn't stop when it hits somebody,” Jamie said.

“Well what is it, then?”

The crash rearranged every bone in Jamie's back. His shins burned and buckled as he kicked the door open and his vision blurred once his feet hit the ground. He sat with his head between his knees, fighting the urge to puke up the meatball sub he'd swallowed in three bites for dinner.

“Going to yak?”

“Fuck off, Moses.”

“Hey, I'm not the one who fucked up your ride. My neck is pretty messed up, though.”

Jamie stood up and stretched his arms over the roof. He laid his face on the cold metal. “That's why you're supposed to wear a seatbelt.”

Moses walked toward the front of the car. “Don't freak out, all right, it's just a—oh, goddamn!”

Jamie moved to the front of the car. Each time the busted headlight flashed, Jamie spotted the blond fur and massive paws crushed beneath his front wheels. The grille was imprinted deep into the rib cage. A long tail with a brush at the end of it poked between Jamie's boots.

“You see its teeth, man? Imagine if we hadn't killed it,” Moses said.

Jamie never went to the zoo as a child. He only knew about zebras and giraffes from TV.

“You killed a fucking lion, J.”

The head was massive, the snout dwarfing even Moses's large, lopsided egg. The gums were black and pink, still coated in a thick layer of saliva. The mane was long and tangled, but the lion looked well fed. No mange or patches of discoloured fur. Each paw could have suffocated Jamie in his sleep. The two men stood over the body, their shadows flicking across the two-lane road.

“Is it dead? I think it has to be dead. It's dead, right, J?”

Jamie could tell by the eyes. Massive yellow and black eyes, the lids frozen open, but snuffed out. No flicker. The pupils no longer reacted to the changing light. A tire had crunched through the top of the beast's rib cage, splintering the bone and popping organs until all their juices ran together. Steam rose from the congealing puddles.

“A fucking lion, J. Shit, wait until I tell—”

“You aren't telling anyone shit, Moses.”

“Do you think we can fit it in the trunk? I know this guy from down the hall, he has a brother out on Keewatin. The guy does taxidermy.”

“We aren't going to fit this in the trunk,” Jamie said.

“The lion? No, he's too big. So we come back with a truck. You think your brother will come by? Maybe do it for free? I only got like twenty-eight bucks on me right now, and I need some of that for tomorrow. How much you think taxidermy costs?” Moses asked.

“We aren't telling anyone about this. We aren't moving shit. We are dragging this fucker into the ditch before my back collapses in on itself and I end up paralyzed for life.”

The car lurched as Jamie lay back on the hood.

“Man, this is money though. This is a lion. You could just even sell the head or something,” Moses said. “Make cash. Pure cash.”

“And how do you think it got here? Fucking flew over the Atlantic to land in the outskirts of Larkhill? This is someone's pet, Moses.”

“Or from a zoo.”

“Exactly. Or a zoo. Someone with money, someone who can afford a fucking lion.”

A small pool was beginning to form under its head.

“So?”

“So you don't think they'll come looking for this…this thing?” Jamie said.

“If we get it out of here soon, we can like—well, do something.”

“And don't you think it'll be all over the papers? Escaped lion in town? And I very much doubt there is going to be a fucking reward for killing it with a Cutlass. What there might be is a trial or a lawsuit, or even just a revoked license and then guess who walks home from work all by himself from now on, getting his skinny, skinhead ass jumped like it's his day job?”

“I get it, I get it. And you think we should just leave it?” Moses said.

“I think Mr. Taxidermy-Up-On-Keewatin might watch the news and might look at your pimply ass and the state of my car and put two and two together with a phone call to the cops.”

“Shit. So what do we do?”

They dragged the massive corpse across half a lane before giving up. The back legs and tail still lay on the shoulder. Jamie's back finally collapsed, and Moses's arms wobbled with the effort. The single headlight flicked on and off through their progress. The lion's rib cage had cracked again when they'd pulled it free from the car. Its lungs and heart remained exposed to the cold night air. With no reverse, the car had to stay in place as they yanked the corpse out from under the wheels. Jamie checked the body for any imprint of his license plate. A faded nine was pressed deep into the animal's flank.

The night got colder. No cars passed as they shoved the furry mound a few inches at time. People rarely took the service road down to the motels. It was easier to get there on the highway.

Moses's windbreaker crackled against the cold air. His pants were still wet from the hose. He could feel the frost in his knuckles every time he yanked the lion another inch. After forty-five minutes of pushing and pulling, the two sat on the hood of the car. Their lungs ached from the cold air. Jamie slapped the hood and the headlight quit flickering. Their shadows urged them to head down the road. A long trail of blood stretched across one lane, ending in a furry pile.

“Someone is going to find him. We still have a lion on the side of the road. This is no big secret if you can still see him,” Moses said.

“Looks like a slug, bleeding out its ass like that.”

Jamie could feel his bones grinding against each other when he stood up.

“Let's go. We ain't going to move it any further talking about it.”

Moses no longer felt like talking. Every time he opened his mouth, the cold clenched his teeth. He climbed into the passenger side and listened to the car hiccup as Jamie turned the key again and again. The pile at the side of the road did not move. The one headlight only illuminated a small patch of darkness up ahead.

After the fifth try, the car finally kicked to life. The grunt of the engine allowed Jamie to relax for a brief second before he looked out the window at the body. Moses was right.

No one was going to just drive past a fucking lion.

3

Elvira Moon loved bowling. For four straight years, her team, the Blooming Broads, dominated the women's league, decimating all opponents until Big Tina quit to start her own team, the South Side Splitters, with that bitch Claudia from Couscous or whatever country she'd arrived from in a banana crate. Moses was still in elementary school when this division occurred.

The Splitters snatched the title two years straight before Elvira could steal it back. Big Tina quit bowling after that year due to a ruptured lower colon, leaving Elvira to dominate once again with her devastating accuracy and a bowling ball she'd named the Judge. Instead, Elvira disbanded the team. Her greatest rival, who'd worn men's shoes without apology and never forgot to send her a Christmas card since they'd met at a Tupperware party in '78, was gone. After the surgery, Big Tina moved in with Claudia and quit competitive bowling for good. No true competition remained. In Elvira's mind, the Blooming Broads had won enough free games, chicken wing platters, bowling alley T-shirts, promotional balls, and buy-one-get-one-free pizza coupons to last a lifetime.