Waste (22 page)

They were lucky it was wearing a chain.

“Probably five plants each or some—”

The bear burst out of the tall plants, its patchy fur revealing stringy muscles underneath. Teeth snapped in front of B. Rex's nose and then all three were running toward the door. The bear bellowed and crashed after them through the stinking plants. Logan lost a boot in the thick manure but kept on going. The bear rose up on its hind legs and bellowed again, revealing a scarred chest covered in seeping gashes and cigarette burns. A few butts remained embedded in its chest like dead tapeworms. One eye couldn't focus—it stood still in the middle of that roaring face.

The boys didn't remain to observe this new specimen. None of them had ever been this close to a bear. Only B. Rex had ever been to the zoo. They scrambled away into the darkness as the animal continued to bellow and roll its thick neck against the reinforced chain tethering it to the wall. Someone had welded it in place.

The boys stumbled down the hallway, crashing into fallen ceiling tiles and office chairs. Logan's bare foot hit the cold linoleum with a splat as his breathing filled Moses's ears. The bear roared again. It was all fur and teeth and seeping wounds. Some of the cigarette butts looked fresh—they were filled with day-old puss.

The heavy green doors lay ahead. B. Rex led the way, his stubby legs pulling him closer to the cold air outside. As he yanked the steel door open, a large hand grabbed him by the neck and threw him onto the frosted grass. Moses and Logan emerged behind him and were lifted off their feet by two sets of heavily tattooed hands.

“Whoops,” a voice laughed. “Where you runnin' to?”

Moses couldn't breathe. The hands were locked around his neck. He knew the police didn't tattoo their hands. They didn't have bushy beards or snakes encircling their thumbs. B. Rex tried to stand up, but a size-twelve work boot pushed him back down onto the wet grass. A red pickup was parked beside the crippled building. It had mud splashed up to the windows. Logan let out a wheeze as he struggled with his own headlock. The moon outlined their bodies.

“If you go out into the woods today, you better not go alone!”

The man was singing into Moses's face. The other one laughed. He recognized the man from the ice machine. The man dragging the garbage bags and power tools down the dirty hall.

“It's too bad she didn't get one of you. She's been hungry.”

The other man laughed again.

“We saw your car out by the road. A Buick, right? The bowling ball yours too?”

The Judge was in the truck bed. Moses tried to speak, but he couldn't get the words out. The man tossed him onto the ground and pulled out a roll of duct tape. He bound Moses's hands and ran a piece of tape over his mouth. It stuck to his teeth when he tried to speak. The man tore another length of tape off the roll and kicked Moses in the testicles. He blacked out and smoke filled his eyes.

In the haze, Moses watched himself roll around in the grass and his mother kissing men he didn't know with stomachs shaped like bowling balls. He didn't see their faces. The lion from the side of the road warned him it was all going to happen again. Another repetition. Moses tried to drag the lion out of the way, but he could see the headlights coming. The lion spoke, but Moses couldn't hear it over the sound of the horn. His face hit the back of the truck as the three boys were tossed into the pickup.

“Usually we'd just leave you out here, but can't be doin' that no more,” one of them said. “So you're going to have to come along for now till we figure it out. Patience, little bears. Ha.”

The two beards stepped away from the truck bed and slammed the cab doors. Lying on his back, Moses Moon stared up at the sky. A lion in the stars stared back at him—just the pain roiling across his eyes. B. Rex moaned from behind his own duct tape mask. Despite the burning sensation in his wrists and the rash he could feel forming around his lips, Moses tried to breathe through his nose. In and out. He hadn't been eaten by a one-eyed bear. He hadn't been killed by two giants or chopped into pieces. Not yet. In and out. The truck hit a ditch as it drove away from the scattered hospital buildings and slammed Moses's head against the floor.

He had wanted to start at the bottom.

The back of the truck was filled with old screws and small stones that dug into their skin. The Judge stared at Moses with its three tired eyes. The ball didn't blink. Real skinheads didn't shave their heads bald. Moses would tell Logan and B. Rex the truth if this all ended up just being a dream. Real skinheads didn't live in Canada. They didn't even wear steel-toed boots anymore.

The two giants were still singing in the cab up front, one of the windows open. The beard in the passenger seat pounded the roof with a fat hand and belted out the lyrics. Moses prayed to Bill Murray for deliverance. He prayed to his favorite Bill Murray, the one from
Stripes
. Maybe this was just a rerun. “We are the wretched refuse,” Bill Murray had said. “We are mutants. Something's very, very wrong with us.” Moses Moon closed his eyes and listened to Bill's voice as the truck hit a patch of gravel.
Something's very, very wrong with us
.

“If you go out in the woods today, prepare for a big surprise!”

At least no one had seen Elvira Moon without her underwear.

25

They named her Kansas because it didn't remind them of anything.

“It's just a blank. I mean, have you ever been there?”

Outside the emergency exit of the Dynasty, Jamie unloaded a body wrapped in blue tarp from his trunk. He dragged it to the bent door and tried not to breathe in the smell. The parking lot was quiet. Sunday night was never too wild at Da Nasty. All the emergency exits were busted after years of raids. Teens taped over the deadbolt slots to sneak in after dark.

Jamie yanked the body inside. Donnie had said 227. He pulled the tarp up the first few stairs. One of the feet kept popping out. Its long toenails rasped against the floor. Jamie tried to shove the foot back inside the bundle. They used the tarp in the summer to keep raccoons out of the dumpsters at the butcher shop.

It had taken Jamie a while to get the body out of the bone can. The top layer was like frozen slush. Thick chunks slopped over his chest as he'd pulled the corpse free from the ice. Jamie drove the car with all the windows open and tried not to look at the man's face. Despite the cold, it had begun to collapse in places. The lion had been so much easier.

They named her Kansas because it was a flat place. A quiet place nobody ever decided to visit. Even before the nun ran her over, Alisha's mother said it sounded too sparse, too barren. Why not something pretty? Jamie had met enough girls with names like Lily, Lotus, and Rose. Outside the petals, he knew there was nothing pretty under there. He knew those names and the way they clattered down the stairs after too many drinks, the way they shrieked for cabs and tucked Dilaudid into their bras when the cops raided the bar.

Kansas. Nothing grew there but grain. If you asked someone to draw Kansas, they might just draw a straight line across the page. Or a tornado.

The rifle was wrapped up in the tarp with the body. Jamie didn't know where else to put it. The stairs were filled with broken bottles. He tried to avoid the bigger chunks of glass as he dragged the body up onto the first landing. Jamie nudged the door open on the second floor. The hallway was empty, but voices shook a few of the doors. A woman at high volume discussed the benefits of a low-protein diet as Jamie pulled the tarp behind him. It slid much easier across the orange shag. He could barely see the wet brown trail the body left behind. The carpet absorbed it all.

Jamie saw the door at the end of the hall. He wasn't sure what he meant to do with the body. He was just returning the message.

Jamie knocked on the door. A dead giraffe. They'd killed a giraffe, according to the Lorax. Her name was Kira, and Jamie wasn't sure what sound she made when she died. He didn't know what a giraffe sounded like. Jamie pulled the rifle out of the tarp and waited. There was only one bullet. He couldn't do anything about that. Maybe some bond would trigger a collapse if he shot the first one he saw. He'd heard of these things happening to twins. Brothers separated at birth whose wives looked the same and shared names—men with dogs and children almost identical in their looks and personalities. Maybe the nervous systems were interconnected. There could be a bond in the chemical structure of their brains. They weren't twins, though; they just looked like it. Irish twins with busy parents.

Kansas was the right name for a daughter who didn't speak until she was four. She absorbed everything she read, but she rarely spoke unless it was on the phone in the middle of the night. In the dark, no one could see the teeth shuffled together along the bottom of her jaw. She collected tracings from her library books, pirate faces and the outlines of anteaters. The anteater was her favorite animal. Kansas told Jamie it was because the name explained exactly what it did. Why couldn't all animals be like that? What did a zebra mean?

Kansas was a blank slate for anyone to draw upon, except it wasn't drawing. They were etching things into her every day. Burning little marks she wasn't even going to notice until it was too late. Her grandmother had already started the process—tiny little slits in the surface that would remain benign for years before the chipped portions started to show.

With his rifle aimed at the door and a body soaked in pig guts behind him, Jamie Garrison understood tonight might mark his daughter far worse than any grandmother had.

There was no answer. The televised voices continued their diatribes in the hallway. Jamie knocked again and tried the doorknob. Locked. The doors in Da Nasty were thin. It was too expensive to replace them every weekend. Jamie raised a foot and kicked at the knob. A jolt of pain traveled up his leg, the lion returning to wrack his spine. He fell backward onto the cold, hard corpse behind him. The stiff body didn't complain. The door had moved slightly. Jamie wound his foot up again and felt the particleboard give a little more. The tiny bones inside his foot rearranged themselves around the knob. Jamie bit his tongue against the pain and tasted blood. He had no more of the Lorax's pills. With a third kick, the door snapped open and he dragged the body in behind him with one hand.

The television was filled with static. Two queen beds stood beside each other against the far wall. Each one was neatly made and covered in a homemade quilt. Bright reds and greens made it look like Christmas. The furnishings didn't belong to the motel. Matching green lamps and bright white dressers sat in front of the locked balcony doors. A workbench and two toolboxes leaned against the television stand. There were no family pictures.

It was too clean. Jamie had expected cigarette burns and pools of Jack with dead houseflies on the floor. He wanted to find them passed out drunk in front of pay-per-view with their hands in each other's pants. He wanted to press the gun into the fat rolls on the backs of their necks and wake them up slowly from a naked slumber with their guts hanging over the side of the bed. There weren't any stains on the ceiling, no condom wrappers on the floor. Jamie tossed the gun onto a bed to thumb through a stack of medical files on the bedside table. Women's faces gazed back at him from hospital gowns and leather restraints. Prescriptions, toxicology reports, and therapists' notes were mixed into a pile on one of the beds. None of the pictures were labeled.

Jamie dragged the body over to the far bed and unwrapped the tarp. The face looked up at him from sagging sockets. Bits of pig fat clung to its lips. Jamie held his breath as he scooped the body up and laid it on the bed. The skinny legs were rigid and bent at odd angles. He had to press on them with all his weight to crack the knees into place. On the right leg, he heard the knee pop and a gout of purple fluid hit the ceiling fan, sputtering around the room. Jamie didn't pause. The arms were easier to adjust. He got the body into a sitting position and piled up knitted pillows to support the slippery back. He spent another five minutes trying to turn the head toward the door, pretending it wasn't a person. It was too purple and mottled to be a person. Jamie yanked at his dead model's neck to face the entrance, but it wouldn't budge. He wanted the brothers to look their prize in what was left of its eyes when they came home with drills in hand.

Jamie's reflection in the screen was covered in wet splotches and his arms looked black in the static. He tried the bathroom door, but it was locked too. Jamie sighed and tried a fist against the wood. It did not move. He used the same foot as before and felt the bones give again. This wasn't a regular Dynasty door. The lock was heavier and the wood was too solid. The pain forced him to curl up on the floor for a few minutes, breathing through his nose till the urge to puke passed. He could smell the purple stains on the wall creeping toward him. It was just like cleaning out the bone cans in the summer. That was what he told himself as he wound up again. Just cleaning out another bone can. There was always more waste to come. The door gave away and so did Jamie's ankle.

The woman in the bathtub wasn't wearing much. Her long legs stretched over the edge of the tub, covered in blue and yellow bruises. Her lipstick was messy and stretched up to her nose. She pulled her teal housecoat tight across her chest. Long blond hair filled the tub around her. The water was running and she kept one hand under the warm flow. For a few seconds, Jamie thought she was a man. Then he noticed the long, tapered fingers and the swell of her hips crammed into the back of the bath. Her legs were shaved and she had a ring on her left hand. The diamond was missing. Jamie didn't move from the doorway.

Elvira Moon waved hello and climbed out of the tub.

The woman from the tub walked up to Jamie and reached out to touch his face. Her back was wet from the bath and she had fine wrinkles stretching out from the corners of her eyes. Her large hand wrapped around his cheek. The light made her skin look yellow.