Waste (5 page)

“Abraham's son, my man, you gotta get your shit together. What is with the shaved head?”

Texaco Joe took a pull from a cigarette and pushed his way into the refrigerator. He had a giant purple tuque pulled over his head. His lips were chapped and flaking.

“It keeps me cool.”

“It keeps you cool? It's like thirty under out there right now. Under the zero.”

Moses began setting up the cutting boards and pulling the knives out of the sink. The blades were still sharp from the night before. Sometimes Moses would test them on his fingernails when he was closing by himself. Shaving off tiny little slices to flush down the drain.

“If it was thirty below, you'd be bitching a whole lot more. It's like minus ten.”

“I don't bitch, all right? If it is thirty below where I'm from, everyone is dead anyway.”

Texaco Joe never said exactly where he'd come from or where he was born. The odds were sixty to forty on Barbados, according to Jamie. Joe had tried to claim he was from Houston and even wore an Astros cap in the summer, but he had never crossed the border in the five years he'd worked for Don Henley at the shop. He couldn't even name any other Texas cities besides Dallas and San Antonio. However, he did own three pairs of cowboy boots. Purple, green, and tan leather. His wife polished them for church on Sundays.

“You hear what happened to your little white-boy friends last night at the barber's? They always skulkin' round there. Bound to happen finally, little shits.”

“At the Triple K? What happened to them?”

“Yes, my friend's place. He finally got rid of the—what are their names?”

“Since when is he your friend? You can't even remember his name,” Moses said.

“You see this new cut? He did this.”

Joe spun in a circle. His hair was shaved almost to the scalp. Smoke from his cigarette gathered around the dangling lights.

“You aren't supposed to be smoking back here, Joe.”

Joe just waved a hand through the yellow cloud.

“No one will know. You might want to call someone. I will cover for you, little buddy. You really need to get those little skulls under control.

“You didn't see the blood outside, eh? Down the street? I thought you rode your bike.”

“I keep my head down when I ride.”

“The two little skulls got broken noses, I think. I was getting a shave too, you know. Couldn't adjust myself to see exactly what was going on. A lot of whap, whap, whap was all I heard. ”

Joe punched at the air. Moses sat down on one of the bone cans.

“You might want to call the one with the tattoo on his head. The one with the big mouth. He looks like he got the worst of it.”

Joe strutted by Moses and back into the meat fridge, stubbing his cigarette out in the steel sink. Moses didn't move. He knew hanging out at the Triple K had been a bad idea. Logan and B. Rex went there every day after school. Moses usually had to work.

Klips, Kuts, and Kurls. The oldest barbershop on the south side of Larkhill, nestled in between Gerry's Convenience and the local branch of the National Fears and Phobias Crisis Center. Established in 1923 by Luke Hofstadler and his three sons. The Hofstadlers were one of the few black families to set up shop on that side of town. The place had been burned down a few times in the past, though the first two were due to electrical problems and the third involved a drunken reopening party to celebrate the second restoration.

Logan had brought it up when they were drunk and listening to some strange Hungarian folk music his dad had bought at a garage sale. It was two in the afternoon and they were skipping history with Mr. Wallburton, who smoked little Russian cigarettes in his Pinto at lunch while reading harlequin novels. He tore the covers off to hide the titles.

“It's basically a provocation to everything we stand for, you know. Like, spitting in our faces. Collectively, as like, a collective of whites,” Logan said.

“We stand for what exactly?” B. Rex said.

“Break down the name, man. They can dress it up in purple letters all they want, but like, what else does triple K stand for these days? KKK.”

Moses was sitting on Logan's bed, staring at the David Bowie posters and the Star Wars figures lined up on the bookshelf, trying to figure out how they all fit into this new philosophy boiling under his skin every time he rode his bike past his old neighborhood. No, not a philosophy, more like a feeling, a vibration that made the hairs on his back stand up—the small thin white hairs Moses feared would never grow any darker.

“But we don't even wear sheets. That shit is all played out.”

B. Rex had his skinny little arms crossed against his massive chest and was smiling, his incisors twice as large as his other teeth. Moses always assumed that was where he got the nickname until they all got wasted at Cheryl Oppenheimer's birthday—the one where someone ripped the phone jack out of the wall—and watched B. Rex do his dinosaur imitations. None of the boys had been invited to that party. They just showed up.

“Same sort of philosophy, though. Don't you guys think so?” Logan said.

Moses didn't say anything. Boba Fett was pointing a gun directly at his face.

“We don't need to hide our faces,” B. Rex said. “We got more pride than that.”

“But don't you guys think this is fucked up?” Logan said. “KKK? It just seems like one major, undeniable fuck-up. That's all. And we shouldn't—I don't know. We should do something. Make a stand.”

In the end, the three of them agreed it was indeed one giant, major, undeniable fuck-up. It was their second meeting as a group, or organization or whatever it was. Even now, in the back room of the meat shop, Moses wasn't sure what they were supposed to be. He rubbed his chest and felt the bruise above his ear where he'd whacked his head against the windshield.

They started hanging out in front of Klips, Kuts, and Kurls after school. At first they just stood around in the parking lot. Customers walked by without even blinking at the three bald heads covered in ingrown hairs and razor burn. Three skinny white boys weren't going to stop them from getting their hair cut at the same place they'd got it done since they were five. These were lifelong customers with weekly appointments.

It was Moses's idea to get the tattoos and the cigarettes. His idea to start wearing the leather jackets he found at Salvation Army when he was looking to replace the Judge for his mother. They were green and yellow football jackets from one of the old high schools. William Orson Collegiate. Each jacket said
EAGLES
across the back over a pair of wings. Logan said black jackets would have been better.

It was Moses's idea to smash old beer bottles in front of the door after old Hofstadler had swept up at the end of the day. His idea to break the front window one night with a piece of paving they found in the parking lot. His idea to piss on the door handles and spray paint a purple triple K onto the glass. B. Rex ended up getting the paint all over his hands, leaving a trail of purple spurts back to his house. The police had no problem finding him. The tattoos were the hardest part, though. They should never have tried to do it all by themselves.

Moses had worked from an old book on sailor and prison tattoos in Logan's basement. He'd found it at the library and snuck it past the front desk under his jacket. That night Moses held a busted blue pen taped to a needle. The hot ink dribbled all over his hand. A lighter lay discarded on the floor between empty bottles.

They had drunk all day from Logan's mom's stash of bourbon, the cheap kind that smelled like a doctor's office. Moses told them it was to dull the pain, hoping they would overlook his trembling hands. Moses had inked himself first. Facing the mirror, he ran the jagged pen across his sternum. He could barely feel the needle, but he could see the drops of blood running down his skinny stomach. It was just three letters they'd decided on after the first bottle of bourbon was empty and Logan had finished throwing up behind the coffee table.

Moses didn't realize until the next morning his own letters were backwards. White Eagle Army. It made even less sense when they all woke up sober and found the red and blue welts carved into their chests. WEA. Another unfortunate acronym.

“Hey, Moses! Little Abraham, you all right?”

Texaco grinned at Moses through the door to the meat cooler.

“Yeah.”

“You going to do any work or cry about your friends all day?”

“I'm fine,” Moses said.

“They aren't in the hospital or anything like that, little man.”

No, because Logan's mom didn't believe in the hospital. Neither did his dad.

“I know that, Tex.”

“I can cover for you if you want to go and pat their little heads,” Joe said.

There was a reason Logan's mom walked with a limp. His father never let her go to the doctor after she fell off the roof putting up the Christmas lights. Logan said she shouldn't have been up there in the first place, but he and his dad were terrified of heights. It was a genetic thing amongst the Chattertons. His mom didn't argue for a doctor. Logan's father set the leg himself and made a cast out of old bed sheets and papier-mâché.

Both Logan's parents had failed out of medical school together after performing bizarre elective operations on each other in the semi-abandoned maternity ward of the university hospital. It was a janitor who found Mr. Chatterton rearranging the tendons in his soon-to-be-wife's hands and called a code blue for the entire building. They were expelled.

“Take the morning off, all right?” Joe said. “You don't need to be here right now, you were here last night. I don't even think you changed your clothes, man. You stink.”

Moses looked down at his chest. There was still a smear of blood on his shirt. It must have soaked through his windbreaker the night before. Joe slammed a side of pork down on the bone saw and pulled a white coat over his skinny shoulders.

“Heavy stuff, your friends. You go. I'll say you called in sick. You look like a dead man anyway.”

The sun was beginning to rise. Trees cast off the last of their leaves one by one, brown flakes coating the pavement. Moses pushed his bike down the street. Logan didn't live in any of the old apartment buildings on this block. They towered over the sidewalks, casting the whole strip in shadows that only grew as the morning passed. The balconies were covered in alternating patterns of pink and teal railings.

Moses could see the house at the end of the street and the two rusted cars parked in the driveway. Both of them sat up on concrete blocks Mr. Chatterton had lifted from the construction site near his dentist's office. He might not have believed in doctors or mechanics, but Mr. Chatterton wasn't going to let anyone but a professional touch his teeth.

The front door was bright yellow, repainted every summer by Mr. Chatterton. He'd inherited the house from his father, a man whose color wheel consisted of four distinct shades of brown. Logan's grandpa had been the janitor at the coal plant and then the nuclear plant just an hour outside Larkhill. He had eaten the same ham sandwich from the same lunchbox on the same bench for fifty-five years before his heart finally clogged and abruptly stopped. When the night shift took over, they found him with a mouthful of ham still clenched in his teeth.

Each room in the house was another indictment against this man who Mr. Chatterton believed had stunted his childhood—the bright mauve of the kitchen a slap to the old man's disregard for family photo collages framed in macaroni, the lime-green hallway a rebuke to his decree that real men did not ask for a pet rabbit on their fifth birthday, and the teal tiles around the tub a final dismissal of his claim that bubble baths were only for women, homosexuals, geriatrics, and the schizophrenic community.

The doorbell was broken. Moses walked into the rainbow-walled house, the hasty paint showing brown and gray in the corners, old wallpaper peeping through the primer near the ceiling. The brush-work looked like loose stitches, barely holding wounds together. Each room was brightly painted in the Chatterton home, but every seam was frayed—every corner slowly unraveling.

Moans came from the basement in slow gasps. Moses forced himself down the stairs, blocking out memories of bipedal dogs and overweight policemen. A long work table covered in old medical textbooks, a surgical saw, Tarot cards, phone bills, and the annual horoscope for those born in the Year of the Monkey took up most of the floor.

“Logan, you all right? I heard you got fucked up down at the Triple K.”

The door to Logan's room, painted in what his father would call a “spritely magenta,” was wide open. Logan was restrained on the bed with old utility belts and a bright yellow extension cord. His father leaned over him, glasses dangling on a chain above his son's face.

The wound in the side of Logan's head was still bleeding, a slow seepage around the homemade bandages. Logan was awake. His chest rose and fell against the wide carpenter's belt attempting to hold him in place. A woozy black swastika poked out from underneath the bandages on his head.

“Um, Mr. Chatterton, I just came by to check on Logan,” Moses said.

Mr. Chatterton was humming to himself. He held a scalpel in his hand; the same one he'd used on his wife's leg the winter before. It was an old breadknife he had modified in the garage.

“Moses. Moses Moon. Hold on one second.”

“What did you do to Logan?” Moses asked.

“Nothing drastic, yet. Just removed some of the debris the silly nurses at St. Joe's couldn't get out of the wound. You'd be surprised how dirty someone's boot can be. The amount of filth we carry around on our persons is quite astronomical—that is, when you look at it on a molecular level. What you might call the nitty gritty.”

“Molecular?”

“Yes, Moses. Logan is going to be fine, but I've spoken to his mother about removing those awful tattoos on his head. Would you like something to drink?”