Waste (23 page)

“Who—did they bring you here?” Jamie said.

“I don't know you,” she said. “You weren't supposed to come in here.”

The tall woman sat down on the toilet with her knees pressed together. She began to hum a prayer to herself. When she got to the end of a verse, she began again. Jamie couldn't make out the words. He tried to get her to speak again.

“Are you…can you at least give me a name?” he asked. “I need to know what they did. Was it the brothers? Those guys? They did it to you?”

Jamie grabbed a quilt from the other room. When he returned, she was washing the lipstick off of her face. She pretended not to see him in the mirror. The woman didn't belong in this place. The lock on the bathroom door was too stiff. Someone had spent money on the new door. Her underwear was gone.

“Do you know where they are? Do you know if—are you going to talk to me?”

She ignored him and continued to wash her face.

“Elvira.”

“What?”

“I'm Elvira. You wanted my name, you got it, okay?” the woman said. “You don't need to ask so much. So many questions, and if you are looking for him—I know I was looking for him until I fell in here. I know where he goes when he doesn't want to see me anymore. I know where he goes. He goes away, but not as far as he thinks. Downtown is not so far away.”

There were two of them, but they looked so alike with their beards. She was just confused, Jamie knew that. She could have thought she was seeing double in that state, whatever state she was in. Especially if they had their sunglasses on the whole time, but he didn't want to think about the whole time. He didn't want to think about any of it. Jamie thrust the quilt in her direction. The woman ignored him and splashed more water on her face. Jamie pushed the quilt at her again. It was covered in turkeys and pumpkins, but the pumpkins were green and the turkeys looked skinned. Christmas colors for the wrong holiday.

“Just put this on,” he said. “Where did they find you? How did they find you?”

She couldn't see the body on the bed from inside the bathroom. Jamie knew the twins could return at any time. He opened the door a crack and looked down the hallway. It was still empty, but there were newspapers sitting in front of the doors. Photos from the rally in the park took up the front page. Jamie could not stay here any longer.

“I know he can't hide. He left and he tried to hide. And hide me too.”

Elvira wrapped herself up in the quilt and pulled it over her head like a hood. Her bare feet were almost bigger than Jamie's. She turned off the taps and closed the bathroom door.

“You know where they are?” Jamie asked.

Elvira nodded from inside her new wrap and scratched her leg with one long foot. Jamie grabbed the rifle off the bed. Elvira didn't notice or didn't care.

“Can you—um, can you show me? I need to find them. Him. Can you do that?”

“I can show anyone, but no one will let me. I know the place. You want me to go with you?” Elvira asked. “I don't want to stay.”

“I'm your friend, okay? I am. I am. You just need to…you need to come with me.”

They stepped out into the hallway. There was nothing Jamie could do about the busted doorknob. They would know someone was here either way. He had traded in his corpse for a six-foot woman without any underwear who couldn't look him in the eye. As they made their way down the stairs, Elvira kept talking and smiling. The words bounced off the walls. Jamie knew she wasn't talking to him; she wasn't talking to anyone but herself. It was the same thing Alisha's mom did during visiting hours at the hospice.

“It's the tall place downtown with all the bad chandeliers, but you have to take me with you. You don't get to leave me here,” Elvira explained. “They don't even let dogs in there. They think they're so fancy, but even fancy people got dogs. I don't want to be left places, okay?”

“The tall place? Pillaros?” Jamie said.

“No dogs allowed,” Elvira said. “That place. That is where he goes. Dusty, nasty place, but it's where he likes to go. They have the big elevator in the back to get up to his room.”

“Where they go? Is that where they go?”

“Where he goes,” Elvira said. “It's where he goes.”

“You gotta be more quiet,” Jamie whispered. “Can you do that for five minutes?”

Elvira was already ahead of him on the stairs, her feet skipping around the broken glass. Jamie followed her slowly, taking the steps one at a time on his fractured foot. He held the rifle against his chest and tried to keep a grip on the railing. There were only twenty steps to go.

Alone in his old living room, Jamie had courted name after name in the dark with rum burning the corners of his mouth. Each name had tasted wrong on his tongue. The name Elvira had only come up once during the whole process. Alisha had banned all those old names immediately. Carmella. Mabel. Margaret. She didn't want her daughter prematurely aging while all her classmates remained Jennys and Susies, fresh-faced and pink-cheeked until eternity or high school, whichever came first. Jamie pushed for those older names the next morning; they were free from his unpleasant midnight associations. Free to do whatever they wanted on their own time. Those names were protected from the hopeless fates he saw swooping down to pluck Melissas and Donnas off their pink tricycles in broad daylight, to plunk them down with busted teeth and three children twenty years later in a subsidized apartment with electric heating and a clogged bathroom sink.

“You're so slow, we'll never find him if you take the stairs like that.”

Elvira wasn't safe, though. There were already stories written there.

“Just wait, Elvira. Can you do that?”

Jamie began to take the stairs two at a time. Kansas was a blank space, but it didn't mean she was safe. She was grain and flat sunsets and a line across the horizon, but there were still basements in Dodge City. Wichita had closets no one wanted to open. There were hidden things he'd never seen and bodies in the rivers, cold cases forgotten in Topeka.

It was the fifteenth step that he misjudged. The broken foot collided with a brown bottle neck that snapped under his weight. Tumbling down the stairs, Jamie felt his right foot crack against the railing. Elvira started laughing and clapped her hands. Jamie clutched the rifle close to his body as his spine rippled down the concrete steps.

Kansas was a blank space for anyone to fill in for themselves. She was already boxed in by the margins they'd drawn around her in that tiny house out on Baseline Road.

Jamie hit the bottom of the stairs in a pile of bloody clothes and prematurely aging bones. He closed his eyes against the pain and tried to stand up against the drywall. His right foot did not agree with this decision.

“Are you going to get up?” Elvira said. “We need to go. He won't be there for long.”

There was another option. Kansas could fill that space in for herself.

Jamie braced himself against the wall. It was a fall; just another fall. Jamie grabbed Elvira's hand and tried breathing in and out his nose while he attempted to stand. Elvira pushed the busted emergency door open. The world was covered with blurred lights that refused to focus. Jamie limped after the woman in the quilt, following her into the dark. He used the rifle as a makeshift cane. Pigeons sat on his car. They fluttered back up into the shit-stained balconies as the slouching figures approached the car in the motel's single shaft of light.

26

This was far worse than a missing lion. “Just stay quiet for now, or we'll really have a problem,” Al said.

Neither brother could avoid the figure glaring at them from across the room. The three smaller boys cowered between them in the doorway. Each one had his hands tied together and a piece of tape over his mouth. They shuffled from foot to foot.

There was a body in Al's bed. It was almost looking at them, but the eyes were dried out and one was oozing down a purple cheek. The walls were splattered purple too and the bathroom door was busted. Tommy's quilt was missing.

“Al, you gotta check this out,” Tommy said.

The exposed sheets looked too white for the room.

“Who the—fuck, the bathroom! Crane is gonna fuckin' flip!”

Logan Chatterton recognized the body. Ducking under arms tattooed with obese reapers and small Guatemalan children wearing skulls for masks, he dove across the motel room floor. The two bearded brothers could only stare as he jumped up onto the bed and tried to speak through his gag. Logan's bald head nodded back and forth with the words he couldn't push past the tape. He ran his stubbled skull against the dripping face and guttural noises worked their way out of his chest. The swastika on his head was leaking again.

“Get the other two into the bathroom,” Al said. “Used to be so much easier when we got to make the decision. I said get them in there, Tom.

“Get offa there! Another freak. Last thing we fuckin' need.”

Al tore the tape off Logan's mouth and threw him to the floor. Logan scrambled away across the carpet on his knees, his chin covered in rug burn. The beard followed him and dragged him back against the wall. Logan kicked his feet against the hard shins behind him. His one bare foot connected with the bone. Logan's voice kept bleating at the body on the bed.

“I didn't mean it! I didn't mean it!”

“I said shut up!”

“I didn't mean it!” Logan said. “She didn't even want to look at me! I don't want to be like them. I don't want to have part of them in me, like Frankenstein. Did you want me to be like Frankenstein? Like pieces of everyone else? 'cause that's what she told me! Part of whatever fucking tribe! I was already a freak enough, and now I've got their blood in me too?”

“Shut the fuck up!” Al said.

Al threw him down onto the floor again and Logan tried to crawl away under the bed. He kicked at the large hands trying to yank him out and kept yelling at the purple body.

“And then she just walked away, but you didn't even say anything, 'cause you knew! I didn't cut her open. I just smashed the mirror, but then she got cut, and she looked at me like…fuck!”

The bearded man was too strong.

“She looked at me like when she looked at you when you went outside! And I saw the fucking blood in her, just scum fucking water, fuck! Let go! Let go! Let me fucking go!”

One spring sliced through Logan's index finger as the giant man yanked him out from underneath the bed.

“You got it in me now, too!” Logan said. “Fuckin' scum water!”

One of Logan's flailing feet connected with something soft. He heard Al groan from behind him and climbed back onto the bed. The quilt was ruined. Logan's arms were still tied behind his back. He leaned his face against what remained of his father's left ear.

“I didn't mean any of it. But she left and then you came home, and you meant it all!” he spat. “And she knew that it was not going to stop. Nothing perfected, everything half-finished, even me, like— like a fucking frog!”

Al Vine wrapped his hand around the boy's spluttering mouth and dragged him off the bed. The kid had to go. Al just wanted some silence. Ten years ago, the Cardinal Inn had evicted them when some kid from Trois Pistoles tried to pull the same kind of freaky shit.

“Shut the fuck up, you—don't bite me!”

“Just toss him, Al! She's gone anyway. We gotta bring all this to Crane to fucking clear it,” Tommy said. “One kid in the woods and now, fuck, he wants to rubber-stamp all our shit.”

“Enough. Kid, you need to shut up now!”

As Al released him into the air, Logan Chatterton was still sorting out the look in his mother's face after he had broken the bathroom mirror.

“Oh fuck, are you kidding me, Al?” Tommy said. “The fucking TV?”

The buzzing and hissing died slowly. The kid's body was limp and his neck bled over the fake oak varnish. Al kicked at the short, skinny legs but didn't pull him out of the massive television. The static was gone. Tom Vine dragged the other two boys out of the yellow bathroom, shoving them onto the floor. The carpet caressed their knees as they stared at what was left of Logan—smouldering and six inches deep inside a television set.

“Well, what do we do now?” Tommy said. “Crane said no one, not without an order or a decision. Oh, fuck, he is going to be pissed. First the girl, and then this?”

“He didn't even know about the kid,” Al said. “We don't gotta say anything.”

“No, but he'll find out,” Tommy said. “And we can't do three at once.”

“We bring them with us. They can fucking tell him the story, all right?” Al said. “We gotta pack them back up and take them, but whatever. Beats having to explain ourselves. We found them with the bear, we come back, we find the door's busted, Crane's lady is gone.”

“Was it his lady? Files are a mess.”

“I know what he wants, but he can't always get it. We couldn't get him the tiger, right?” Al said. “And he just had to deal with that. She might not be the right one.”

“It's the right one, man,” Tommy said.

Al Vine grabbed the chins of the two boys on the floor.

“You're going to tell him exactly what happened. You don't even need to lie. You just tell him how your friend went crazy,” he said. “Tell 'em how we came back here and all that shit was busted up. The bathroom door off the hinges, and your friend, he was just—well, he was crazy. He'll listen to you guys, it'll sound better.”

Logan hadn't moved since they were dragged out of the bathroom. Small sparks still crackled from inside the box. The floor was wet under the boys. B. Rex had pissed himself.

“We're going back outside,” Al continued. “And it's almost morning, so keep it quiet. We'll take the tape off your mouths in case someone sees, but not a word.”

Tommy Vine grabbed the drills and tested the batteries. They were running low again.