Waste (25 page)

“Get shit done?” Jamie said. “It's overkill if anything.”

“You ever watch a lot of these kids' movies? I mean, like really watch 'em. They let me have a VCR in the hospital for a few months. Calmed me down at first, until I started paying attention.”

Astor turned his gaze away from the television screen.

“I know you looked at the scars. Don't worry, it's not like I fell into a meat grinder or nothing. This is just what happens with the cancer. Sometimes they gotta go inside and pull some pieces outta ya. I watched these movies after they cut me open. I watched them over and over. It helped with the chemo, too. All the stories work out in the end, but they don't actually when you think about it. Even in Oz, those farmhands are looking in the window all creepy and leering. You know? If you were there, and you were there, and you were there, then who the fuck was the Lollipop Guild the whole damn time? The internal logistics alone can mangle your mind.”

“Cancer?” Jamie said. “Really did a number on you.” He eyed the rifle on the floor, but didn't move from his position in the loveseat.

“Adrenal cancer, to be specific,” Astor said. “Adrenaline, right? The stuff that gets your heart pumping. Fight or flight, right? Actually something in your brain, I think—the fight-or-flight part. But the adrenaline contributes, and mine was all over the place. Adrenal glands going crazy. Up and down, side to side, fluctuating like a motherfucker. I was smashing coffee cups when there was too much milk. And your adrenal glands, they are inside you, inside the trunk, you know, like a tree. I had these tumors—”

“Like on the glands?” Jamie asked.

“Exactly. Benign. What a fucking word. I must have had them for years.

“Some of the other guys were jealous I had the VCR in there, but I had to watch them all leave while I stayed and they cut more and more out of me, because the hormone levels weren't balancing out. The tumors were telling my body, go, go, go! Firing on all the wrong cylinders. They'd gone malignant on me. Each time they cut me open, I'd wonder what was going to be left over after. Wouldn't you?”

“Yeah, I guess it wouldn't exactly be pleasant,” Jamie said.

“They still got me popping pills and going in for radiation. I swear my balls are going to fall off if they keep this shit up. All virility shot to hell. Now that's a good word. Virile.”

“You got it,” Jamie said. “Like I said, when you're right, you're right.”

Astor swallowed, then poured another glass. The lines on his chest swayed in the blue glow.

“Well, I did wonder what would be left, what would be left of Astor Crane once the knife went inside, and what would come out?” Astor said. “You see that scar traveling around my belly button? They called that a ‘necessary' procedure. The kids' movies, they were supposed to be an escape. You can escape in a movie, right?”

“You wanna see something get blown up,” Jamie said. “Or something funny like Belushi.” Jamie was fumbling for words. He was out of ice cubes to distract his mouth.

“I watched
The Wizard of Oz
over and over,” Astor said. “I watched
Robin Hood
, I watched
The Land Before Time
, I watched the fucking
NeverEnding Story
, which was just false advertising, you know? Ugh, how many times the nurses made that fucking joke. I started picking up on some weird shit in those movies. The radiation has got me puking out my eyes.”

Astor gestured with his glass. Droplets splashed onto the screen. Elvira dropped something in the bathroom and slammed another cupboard shut. Astor ignored the noise, but Jamie shook himself and tried to stand.

“Maybe I should go check on her. Don't want her to mess up your pills.”

“None of its mine—it's the hotel's stuff. Got my meds by the window, so who gives a shit?” Astor said. “What a piece of work she is though, eh?”

“This shit just landed in my lap. I didn't even see any of it coming. Let me grab her.”

Astor Crane placed an idle hand over the Tin Man's face. He was wearing heart-shaped slippers on his feet. His heels hung out the back of each fluffy organ.

“That is how it works. Just like the cancer,” he said. “Out of nowhere. Just like you stepping out of an elevator and swinging a gun in my face. Nobody is supposed to be ready for it. You don't wake up in the morning and decide to pump adrenaline into your bloodstream for five hours straight. You don't just decide that today is the day you'll get run over by a truck. The truck is there and your eyes lock on the headlights like a deer…and then you go down. Or a raccoon. Or a house cat. Doesn't matter. Splat. You don't see it. You weren't meant to, either. Just another dead dog on the road.”

“Or a fucking lion,” Jamie laughed. “You never know.”

Astor Crane grinned and massaged the thick scar tissue scaling his stomach. Flying monkeys tore apart the scarecrow on the screen. Straw and bits of felt fluttered in the air as the scarecrow shrieked without making a noise. With one heart-shaped slipper, Astor slammed his foot down onto Jamie's right ankle.

“That happens too, doesn't it, Jamie?”

Jamie shrieked—a sound he hadn't heard before—and scrabbled at the floor for his rifle. Astor kicked the gun away with another heart-shaped foot. Tears filled Jamie's eyes. He saw four blurred versions of Astor Crane toss the gun from one hand to the other and check its sight.

“My fucking foot—”

Astor Crane leaned in toward Jamie. His eyebrows were barely visible in the gloom. Little red hairs poked through transparent skin. The veins underneath were blue and his eyes were wet and pink. All the blood vessels were broken. Something yellow was dripping from the corners.

“I don't know how you stumbled in, but that's okay,” Astor said. “You can just walk out on that leg now. It'll hurt, but you can do it. Grab your friend, too. I'm sure the cops will love to see you two walking down the street. That was the second break, wasn't it?”

“I fuckin' told you we could just leave,” Jamie said. “Oh Jesus, it's snapped.”

“They'll put a pin in it. Slap you back together. Good as new, like Robocop,” Astor said. “Who doesn't want to be Robocop?”

Jamie tried to take a swing at Astor, but the smaller man danced away. He ran a hand over his chest scars and walked to the window. The line of prescription bottles had times drawn on their caps. Five thirty was dumped down his throat and then he began to talk again.

“Leave a man in a bed for that long and see what happens. The docs gave me a list, but how do you expect a man to keep track of that? And yes, you do have to listen to this. It's just a fucking foot,” he said. “You'd think I castrated you.”

“You fuck,” Jamie said. “I'm going to barf on all your shit.”

“I did that too. All over the place. And I was spewin' words all over the place too. Lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my! Delirious as shit and just singing along to keep myself from getting sick. Singing along to all that shit. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

“And of course those dipshits take it literally. Wonder twins, wonder twins both of them. They only survive because they're too stupid to take any initiative beyond stealing a lion. And then the beast gets run over, of all things. Steal the lion, give it a name, and watch it get railroaded by some drunk in the middle of the night. Or you, I guess. Were you drunk? We're gonna get the head stuffed now because you kind of have to at this point. All this bullshit because of me fucking singing while high on whatever they had me on. It wasn't like I made a special request.”

Jamie coughed and tried not to think about the swelling in his boot. Astor kept bouncing the rifle up and down on the bar. His hands didn't look out of place on the barrel. “You're gonna get it stuffed,” Jamie said. “Why? Jesus, I can't even feel my toes.”

“Because you bond with an animal. Even if you didn't want it and you think it's a stupid idea and it smells like shit, you bond with it because it eats from your hand,” Astor said. “They had a bear, too. We didn't name it though. She was too dumb.

“All because of a stupid codeine high with me babbling about the fucking
Wizard of Oz
in the recovery ward, I get two pets like it's a present. I never asked for a fucking lion.”

Jamie groaned and tried to massage his busted ankle.

“Gotta get him stuffed because some people don't know how to drive,” Astor said. “A dead lion. Kept them just outside the city, too, where we grow the plants. And of course, the Lorax was trying to ruin all that shit. We had the hydro set up perfect. We tapped right into the main line and bypassed the meter. But the Lorax is always trying to run something on the side, never ever a team player. I didn't really care as much as before though. Wild, you know? I wouldn't have just broken your foot back in the day.

“But I come out of the hospital and it's gone. The wildness. They took it. They took something. Something that I needed, and they left all these lines on me. You see? Look at them.”

Astor pulled back his robe and pointed at the thick, rigid tissue burrowed into his flesh.

“I want you to look at them. Women want to touch them, but they don't really want to know. They want to imagine what it was like, but not ask me. It was like swimming underwater while they played music. They play music while they cut you open, did you know that, Jamie? A scalpel is like another instrument for them. Only in the right hands does it ever play true. Nobody wants to say they got fucked up by a violin. I don't, at least. Not by a symphony.”

There was pink light streaming in through the thin curtains. It clashed with the blue of the television and made Astor look purple as he paced back and forth in front of Jamie. On the screen, Dorothy was yelling at the man behind the curtain, and he was bellowing into a machine that echoed through the Emerald City. Jamie's ankle had puffed out of his sock.

“I'm slower now. I'm kinda glad I don't have a kid because like, how the fuck am I supposed to be surprised anymore? There is just nothing there, nothing. I can't even blink.”

There were three hard knocks on the door. Elvira stopped making noises inside the bathroom. She stepped out into the suite and pulled on the ruined quilt. She ignored Jamie and Astor. Her long blond hair was swept across her face. Astor readjusted the rifle in his hairless hands. Three hard knocks again.

“You guys going to come in or stand out there?” Astor yelled. “Come in! COME IN! Are you hungry, Jamie? I'm always fucking hungry, but I can't keep anything down. COME IN!”

There was spittle on Astor's chin. It was pink and thick.

29

Two skinny boys with bruised skulls and razor-burned scalps fell into the honeymoon suite. Duct tape bound their thin wrists together behind their backs. Jamie recognized Moses's head, the lumpy plateaus that rose from the boy's forehead to the crown. He didn't say anything though, and Moses kept his eyes on the plush red carpet. Astor still twirled the gun from his skinny wrist and watched everyone in the blue glow. The other boy's pants were wet. He moaned. Behind these two sad bundles, the Brothers Vine entered the room with a bowling ball and a power drill.

“That's the one, man. How the fuck did you get here?”

Elvira stared at them from the bathroom door. She didn't recognize the bearded men pointing at her, the ones who'd grabbed her under Astor's deluded demand.

“That's the one, guys?” Astor said. “You think that's the one?”

Astor was pointing the gun at the two brothers now. Al spoke up.

“Like you said. We went and dug up all that shit. All the paperwork. Found the pictures, too. She was the best one. Hard to match up the photos and shit, but that's the one. We woulda brought her sooner, but you were in the hospital. Can't bring a lady like that to hospital. They'd just lock her up all over again.”

Astor Crane sighed. He ignored the two sad piles on the floor. The twins were always bringing their experiments home. He had insisted they weren't supposed to kill anyone anymore after the kid in the forest. Not like it helped too much. The boys on the floor looked close enough to dead and smelled like piss.

“So this is supposed to be Destinii?” Astor said. “And what did she say her name was? Did you even bother trying to ask her?”

“She said Elvira, but I bet that's what she tells half the cops who pick her up,” Al said. “Most do the same if they don't want a record. We checked the files, too. It's her.”

“Did you even look at her face?” Astor said. “When I described her, did she sound like she was six foot and blond with shoulders like something out of a fucking comic book?”

Jamie tried to stand up and Astor tapped his forehead with the rifle barrel. He slid back down into the loveseat. The two boys in the corner were shivering. Astor hadn't raised his voice. The room was quiet. It was too cold for any birds to begin chirping at the sun outside.

“We went through all the stupid file cabinets and that's what we found,” Al said. “And we found these kids too, and they were fucking everything up.”

“I asked you if you thought that was her,” Astor said. His teeth clicked together.

“It's fucking her, all right. It's Destinii,” Al said. “It's the goddamn girl, all right? We found her. So give it up.”

This time the bullet didn't ricochet. Jamie felt the air blast into his left eardrum as the slug burst from his father's Remington and into the center of Al Vine's face.

The back of Al's head burst outward due to the incoming force of the lead and the imbalance of pressure within his forty-five-year-old skull. As it bored through bone, blood, and the soft tissues of his brain, Al Vine lost consciousness and the ability to feel that little cylinder of metal ripping open his skull, splattering his fine motor skills and spatial sense across his brother's face.