Waste (7 page)

A few leered at Jamie through fogged windows. A lone woman scuttled out from the adult video store, white cardboard covering its plate-glass windows. She climbed into her Riviera and began to unwrap a package in her lap. She could not wait to get home. Jamie Garrison tried not to stare at the need exposed so openly around him, wounds dripping with washer fluid and sad, old want. Even now, he still had nothing to give.

8

“He was always satisfied, my father. Complacent. That's how I would diagnosis him. Made no sense. For God's sake, he was born in the Year of the Rat, not the Rabbit,” Mr. Chatterton said. “But not at home. At work they could shit all over him, excuse my language, but at home, nothing was ever right, no one was ever right. Not even the television.”

Sometimes Moses Moon would dream his father had never run away to sing Bette Midler classics in the Arizona desert. On some nights, after the dull thwap of leaking water beds had faded into a calming tide, Moses Moon dreamed he had a father who would teach him how to fish; a father who would teach him how to swim the butterfly and check the oil in his first car. In the dreams of Moses Moon, his new father was a lecherous professor, a cocky camp counselor, a crotchety TV executive, and a newly minted Ghostbuster, all wrapped up into one unparalleled human being. In these dreams, his true father was always Bill Murray.

“Yes, Mr. Chatterton.”

Logan's father sat across from Moses, polishing his glasses on the long sleeve of his shirt. The kitchen was quiet and clean but covered in old drawings, tracings from medical textbooks labeled with nonexistent bones and new tendon systems that would increase power while reducing maneuverability. Mr. Chatterton called them works in progress.

“Now my father always did have a thing about interrupting your elders, one of the few tenets I still uphold in this house. He never did listen, though—that was the problem,” Mr. Chatterton continued. “Didn't listen to my mother or me. No, we always had to listen to him. Always.”

Logan was still bleeding in the basement. Moses squirmed in his chair, slowly drinking his glass of water. He didn't want another refill.

“Logan never had to play organized sports. He never had to eat the same goddamn ham sandwich every day either. My wife and I—my former wife and I—we always did our best to let Logan choose his own path. Because rules—do you know how many bowls of cereal my father let me eat?” Mr. Chatterton asked. “Just one. Never mind if I had a long day ahead of me. My welfare, my choices, my personal well-being were all secondary to his choices. His choices—the ones he made for me. You understand?”

“I think I understand,” Moses said. The water was warm in his mouth.

“Let's just say my wardrobe was never my own. It was always selected for me. As was the paint on my walls, as were my friends. But what friends, really?”

Mr. Chatterton was crying. His eyes were pink and crusty.

“So I always let my son, my Logan—we named him after the mountain. We climbed it on our honeymoon, which seems to be eons ago,” Mr. Chatterton said. “How a woman can say so many things one day and yet the next remove herself from your life—how? And all the work we put into rebuilding her leg and her hand. The hand was almost perfect.”

Moses noticed the house was too quiet, the stumping gait of Mrs. Chatterton muted, silenced. She wasn't home today. Mr. Chatterton never would have sent her to a real doctor. She didn't even have her own car. Just like bodies, the machine was another mystery for Mr. Chatterton to turn from the functional to the formidable, as he liked to put it. Each car in the driveway had been there for years, slowly dissolving in the rain.

“But then, you and your friends just had to break the boy…”

Moses didn't want to look at Mr. Chatterton's face. It was cracked in too many places.

“My friends…” Moses began.

“Yes, your friends, the ones you brought to Logan, got him mixed up in all these things. I would not let my son grow up like I did,” Mr. Chatterton said. “I mean, can you imagine eating only brown, grey, and white for eighteen years—to never know what a red piece of meat looks like, to only find its flavor on your tongue in a darkened restaurant on a date with your future wife from the prairies, the fucking prairies. A woman who had never been to a real restaurant with napkins that weren't made of paper. A woman who will then leave you after your son becomes a violent little shaved monster. Too many experiments. Too many failures, Moses.”

Moses took another sip of his water. The kitchen door was locked; Moses could see the key dangling from the knob. The hallway back to the front door was too short, its garish lipstick red illuminating a path to another locked exit. And Logan was still in the basement.

“My mistake was thinking that with no real controls, my son might make the right choices, that he might experience the joys I was denied. My wish was that he wouldn't feel the same dreadful spike of joy when I heard that bastard was finally dead, chewing on the same sandwich he'd been eating since 1965, chewing on the same bullshit he'd always fed my mother and I until she ended up like a catatonic—like the unchanging face of a goddamn fucking mountain. A face that never changes. You ever see someone like that?

“And instead, I have a son like this. All hate and bile. I had a wife, too, but that's gone. She left. She blames me. Me, me, me! Yes, me, Moses.” Mr. Chatterton spat onto the floor. “Back to Saskatoon, of all fucking places for a woman to go—because she doesn't recognize her son. She's part native and so is he, and when he found that out—”

“I don't really know what you want me to say.”

Mr. Chatterton settled his glasses back onto his face before stabbing the scalpel deep into the table between them. Moses stood up from the table, considering which drawer held the knives. In another's kitchen, Moses realized, you were always at their mercy.

“My wife can no longer look her only son in the face. She can't look at me. I am the one who made her this way, just like my father made me into what I am now. He never changed, Moses. He stayed static,” Mr. Chatterton said. “The same clothing for forty years. The same job, the same meals. He never could abide what happened on this street. Never could sell the land as those cheap little fire hazards sprang up to kill all the trees on the street with their shadows…such long shadows, don't you think, Moses?”

Moses tried to pretend he was talking to Bill Murray, tried to replace the sneer on Mr. Chatterton's face with a smirk and a wink. This was all just a big joke. A scene that had gone off the rails a little. It happens on the set after a long day. That was all it was. Maybe they'd use the footage for a trailer or during the closing credits. It was a blooper reel.

“Yes, Mr. Chatterton. I think maybe I'll go check on Logan. He didn't seem exactly—”

“Exactly what? Exactly perfect? No. And that's what his mother wanted him to be. That's what we were striving to make here. Not perfect, maybe, but pure. And then you and your hate and your bile and all your—why?” Mr. Chatterton asked. “Why did you have to pick him? And she—she was my best chance at reversing years of research! Control over our own destiny! And now it's all fucked up by your little dirty hands. Look at yourself, you little cunt!”

Moses was flying now, his feet gliding down the stairs, his hands tearing belts from Logan's trembling, sweaty body, the overwhelming green of the bedroom bursting cells apart in Moses's pupils.

The basement door popped open behind him. Mr. Chatterton was still muttering aloud about his father—that bastard, that bastard—because he could never say the man's real name anymore, not after nights of holding that rabbit antenna until his shoulders collapsed under the strain, not after all the mornings where oatmeal was crammed down his gullet, not after years of living under the torture of that deadening sameness, an unending loop of the mundane that had caused his mother's mind to rot. After all that, there was no name—there was only that bastard, that fucking bastard and his goddamn ham sandwiches.

Mr. Chatterton drew closer, his teeth shining and freshly cleaned by the dentist. He'd come home from an appointment to find a note about the hatred living in his basement and the wife who could no longer sustain herself as the focal point of his countless little cuts. His son had reacted so violently to revelations of his heritage that he'd split his skull against the bathroom mirror. The note was written in her gorgeous looping hand, but there was no love signed to the bottom. Only her maiden name without a forwarding address.

“You had to make him into one of you,” Mr. Chatterton said. “And you know, we really thought it was a phase. We thought he might have just been confused, you know? But it wasn't. No, it wasn't a phase. And she tried to teach him, but he wouldn't listen. What did you think you were teaching him, Moses?”

“Nothin',” Moses said. “I wasn't even there. I told them it was stupid.”

The gag sprang out of Logan's mouth and he was sliding out of the bed. He couldn't stop coughing. Mr. Chatterton stood in the doorway, his skinny shoulders casting the room in jagged shadows. The light bounced off his oily scalp. He held the homemade scalpel in his hand, and he drew a line down the side of his arm with it. His hand didn't waver as it moved.

“I tried to raise him in a way that my father would have disapproved, but he has the same hate, just now directed outward instead of…instead of in,” Mr. Chatterton said. “It can only push out for so long. For so long that hate can only push out until it reaches the edges of the universe, and it has no other place to go. Expanding till the center can't hold together.”

Mr. Chatterton drew the blade down his other arm. Down and not across. No, he drew it down, straight down and deep inside his arm, flicking the blade out once he reached the base of his palm. Mr. Chatterton never did things in small strokes. The paint in each room was always a performance.

“It's like a star, boys. That's how it works. It pushes and pushes those on the outside, swallowing them whole into its burning, burning—but it can't hold all of it for long, and just like a star, eventually it implodes. Collapses in on itself. Have you ever seen that?”

Mr. Chatterton dropped his homemade scalpel to the floor and it scurried under the bed.

“It falls inward, and all that spite, that fucking bile, it gets redrawn, redirected—some would say misdirected—but that is where the hate was meant to go in the first place.”

The blood was no longer seeping slowly from Mr. Chatterton. There was nothing slow about it. He staggered against the wall as the two teenage boys climbed up on the bed, scrambling to back away from his collapsing body. His hands were trembling, the knuckles growing pale like his face. He was no longer smiling, but his eyes were still pink, still raw.

“It all turns inward.”

Moses Moon knew this would never have happened with Bill Murray.

“It turns…”

It was Logan who climbed off of the bed and kicked his father's head. Mr. Chatterton just shuddered once. There was no hollow noise, only a wet thunk like someone collapsing on a water bed. Neither of the boys ran for the phone. They crouched over the body and Moses tried to close Mr. Chatterton's eyelids with his fingers. Logan slapped his shaking hand away.

“Don't touch that bastard. Don't even touch that fucking bastard.”

9

Henry's Holistic Hobbies. Brock had got one thing right. The windows were frosted with yellow dust. AM stations burped up old Buddy Holly songs from the idle trucks in the parking lot. Jamie knocked hard on the glass. Nothing. He slammed a flat palm onto the glass again. The door opened and a rush of hot, mildewed air swept out into the parking lot. A small man stood there with a sheet of baseball cards in his hands.

“You looking to buy or sell? I know the Pirates aren't exactly stellar this season, but I've got the whole team for sale. Topps, of course. The good ones. You want to take a look at 'em?”

“No, I don't really, um, do the card thing,” Jamie said.

“Well, come on in anyway. I'm sure we got something you're looking for. Sort of in a transitional phase right now,” the little man said.

Jamie shut the door behind him and staggered around piles of model planes and collectible Star Wars figures still wrapped in plastic. There were no shelves left in the store, just busted glass display cases and tiny slivers glinting from the corners where they'd been swept.

“You musta pissed someone off,” Jamie said.

The short man smiled, showing a set of dentures under his thick moustache. He couldn't have been more than twenty-five.

“I'm always pissing someone off. Part of my charm, you know?”

“When did this happen? Who did this shit?” Jamie asked.

“Oh, you always know who. That's the point. They want to strike some fear in your heart. If I didn't know who…well, there really wouldn't be much of a point, now would there?”

It looked like a sledgehammer had smashed through one of the walls.

“They do that too?”

“No, that was all me. I'm expanding the store. Can't deal with such a cluttered space. I'm not Henry, by the way, and I don't really know what half this shit is besides the baseball cards,” the man said. “I'm pretty sure that's why he left the whole place to me.”

“Henry?” Jamie asked.

“My uncle. Crazy motherfucker—just a nut for all things teenage boys love. And I'm not saying he was into them. Not saying that. Just had a Peter Pan complex—never grew old.”

Jamie ducked his head under the pipes and followed the little man through a hole smashed into the abandoned unit next door. The place looked like an old dentist's office. A forgotten Nintendo system lay buried under dust and flakes of plaster. There were files on the floor, old X-rays and yellowed receipts for forgotten procedures.