Andrew Sullivan - Waste

Headlights flashed past the boys in the snow, each car too busy to notice their oozing cargo. Moses had wrapped the body in Glad ClingWrap before setting off. It took three whole rolls and made all of Mr. Chatterton’s features look smushed, like a Picasso painting. Moses didn’t want to leave another trail behind.

The store was closed when they arrived at Henley’s Meats. Texaco had shut off all the lights. Only the hum of the coolers remained. Moses unlocked the back door and pushed Logan inside. The cutting room was cold and clean. Moses flipped on the lights. Logan lay on the floor, pressing his wounded head against the cool tiles. He had been crying on and off throughout the day. He still would not reveal what he’d said to Mrs. Chatterton, only repeating she was going, going, fucking gone, all right, Moses?

Moses didn’t argue. He unloaded the body alone. His bones ached from the car accident the day before and there was still lion blood smeared across his shirt. He was tired and his spine tilted to one side when he tried to stand up straight. There were back massagers for rent back at the motel, but Moses didn’t like the smell of them — somewhere between female sweat and old feta cheese.

“Should we take his shoes off?” Logan asked.

“Maybe his clothes too,” Moses said.

“What’re we going to do with them? Burn ’em? Toss ’em in the trash?”

“We can’t use the garbage here. I don’t want to get in any shit,” Moses said.

Logan rolled his eyes and pulled himself up off the tiles, patches of old blood stuck to his shirt. Light bounced off all the steel fixtures and the freshly washed floor. Logan began pulling his father’s running shoes off, one by one. All the unwanted pieces. The hardest part was the T-shirt. It took both of them to pull it over Mr. Chatterton’s bulbous head. They left his underwear alone. Moses used the detergent, the rinse, and the sanitizer on the body while Logan tied all the clothes up inside the honeymoon quilt and put it back in the wagon. The humid air filled their lungs and left no room for conversation.

“Should we…um…”

Logan eyed the long, curved butcher knives soaking in the sink. The bone saw lurked in the corner, dismantled and glistening, a passive threat until the morning totes arrived full of pork back ribs. They were on sale at half price for the next two weeks.

“No, no, I think he’ll fit. He’s not very big. You’re bigger than he is, height-wise,” Moses said. “And he’s — well, he’s not fat.”

“Just around the middle a little bit.”

Moses popped one of the lids. Fat, bone, gristle. Chunks of decaying meat, dark steaks and old chickens. Pints of blood dumped off the cutting boards. Pork fat, beef gristle, rotting turkey gullets. All the unwanted parts. The can was full. Too full. The next container mainly held beef trimmings and broken pig bones bleeding yellow. The blood around the sides of the bone can was green like algae. They could bury him under that blood.

Moses tucked his hands under Mr. Chatterton’s hairy armpits. He nodded at Logan to grab the feet. Moses would make it fit.

“They just take him away with the rest of this stuff?” Logan said.

“I don’t know.”

“And then what will they do?” Logan asked. “What do they do with this shit?”

“I don’t know.”

The body slid into the green muck, bits of bone and fat bubbling around the surface. Moses was used to the smell. The surface congealed around the body like Jell-O as they pushed it farther down. They had to jam the feet under the lid, the long toenails rasping at the plastic. Logan sat on the floor and closed his eyes. Moses pushed and pulled the bone can outside into the snow. Too cold for crows. The moon made everything look clean. No lion waited outside.

“I can’t go back there,” Logan said. “She isn’t coming back, she’s never coming back, Moses. I know that, and he knew it too.”

Moses put an arm around his friend and sat on the tiled floor. Cold beads of sweat trickled down through the mangled swastika on Logan’s head. That tattoo was Moses’s fault too. The red wagon sat in the corner, loaded with its bundle of evidence. They’d have to burn it.

“She’s never coming back, Mosey. And now, well, fuck. Fuck. What about all the blood?”

Moses got up and began to turn off the lights. He sprayed the floor down with the hose again as Logan sat in the corner, the lemon backsplash mixing with the tears on his face. Logan could not go back to that house, a house covered in clown paint and filled with all those drawings of his mother’s hand, a science experiment left half finished. The sound of the hose finally cut out.

“You’ll have to come stay with me.”

“New developments in the unsettling Athabasca case from earlier this month. Police spokesperson Cheryl Landry reports that the body has now been identified as Connor James Condon, long-time resident of Larkhill, Ontario. Police are asking anyone with any information to come forward at this time. They are also reaching out to family…”

Jamie spun the dial on the radio. His hands were still shaking a bit. He’d swallowed two of the pills before hopping on the road, waiting for an elephant to emerge from the darkness and crack his transmission in two. He should have gone to work, back to the grinders and the saws and the mess. Instead he’d sat in his car all day, playing with the radio, listening to Connor’s weeping mother crying on the front steps of the police station with a microphone plunged down her throat as one of the reporters probed her for fifteen minutes. Jamie had parked behind the Pillar, an old hotel that swayed over Larkhill; it’s all-day breakfast buffet shone through the foggy windows. Unlike the motels that ran up and down the highway like neon skid marks, the Pillar was an institution, its massive brick walls witness to far more tragedy than any new age wailing wall or truck-stop parking lot. The inside was filled with decaying cornices, glass chandeliers, and women whose boots rode up over their knees. No one ever questioned the large rusted Cadillacs and old limousines that circled the place on Saturday night, the remnants of something greater now floating around a clogged drain.

Jamie coughed and hacked as he steered his way through the snow. The wipers’ rise and fall soothed his mind, which bounced from the wolves tearing Connor apart to the burst lion hopefully now buried under the snow. No one had found the body yet, or no one had cared to call it in. Maybe someone had taken it up to that guy’s place on Keewatin like Mosey said.

Maybe someone had set it on fire.

Jamie was already late to pick up Kansas, already late for the dinner Alisha might have planned — another olive branch he’d snap off at its barely healed juncture. More like a twig by this point, with those tiny spring buds gasping for air. To get there, he was driving past the old warehouse that dangled below town like a hangar bay out by the water, its massive gates never closing, the three shifts rotating in and out like rusted parts in need of oil. Old foreign clunkers and massive new Dodge trucks the repo man would be collecting from gravel driveways within a year slowly pushed their way out onto the old baseline road.

Jamie didn’t look at the liquor warehouse, its shoddy brown siding torn in places by heavy winds off the lake, its ruptured foundation leaking precious heat in the winter months. He didn’t even glance at its truck yard filled with security cameras no one had ever bothered to plug in. He knew there was nothing in there for him, despite Brock’s insistence they’d take him back if he agreed to do another interview with Collins. Both Brock and Jamie had been hired on the summer after Jamie was expelled and his family had moved into a new unit down in the community housing, between an abandoned grow op and the local cat lady, who let her pets run wild through the whole neighborhood and piss on everything.