Andrew Sullivan - Waste

Jamie got up from the table but did not look Alisha in the eye. He left an envelope on the counter and stomped out into the snow. Alisha got up from the table and walked to the window over the sink. Her daughter’s busted bicycle stood against the railing, its mangled handlebars flashing in Jamie’s lone headlight. The front grille of his car was smashed, the bumper distended. The car pulled away, the muffler hiccupping and popping into the dark of the unlit street.

Alisha Wugg stared at her reflection in the glass of her little kitchen. The window was just as unforgiving as her bathroom mirror in the morning. She didn’t look at the lines around her mouth this time, only stared out into the snow. She was supposed to go and see her mother that past Thursday, supposed to try and make amends. Instead, she took Kansas to the library. They took out every single book on pirates in the children’s section. Kansas had them set up in her room right now, the pages spread open all over the floor. That morning Kansas had told her mother they used to hang captured pirates in metal cages over the ports of cities, the bodies in these gibbets acting like a warning for the next generation of buccaneers and butchers out there on the high seas. Kansas had memorized the passage.

Alisha Wugg did not go see her mother because she knew what she would find. It would always be there, waiting — next week or next year.

It was too quiet outside. There were no animals. She smiled at the glass and watched the cracks grow around the edges of her lips. Alicia did not want to grow old. She knew they would not stop. These lines would move slowly, like a glacier — deliberate and irreversible. All of this was eventual.

B. Rex had a new tattoo emblazoned on his neck. It was dripping.

“You didn’t do that one yourself, did you, B?” Moses said.

The car bounced over the potholes on the utility road. The neon lights of the highway strip faded behind them as the Buick nursed its way through the slush. No one came down here.

“Yeah. This morning. Had the money, finally, not like it was a big job, but I’ve been getting stiffed by the folks lately. Think they’re still mad about me trimming the hair.”

B. Rex had the worst ingrown hairs of the three, mainly due to his refusal of the disposable razor at Logan’s house a few months earlier. He brought his grandfather’s straight razor from World War II instead, a family heirloom his grandfather kept in the study with his tax receipts and old Playboy magazines. B. Rex cut himself eight times before finally accepting the shaving cream and disposable Bick. He wore a hat for a while afterward until the scabs fell off.

“They still won’t let you work, huh?” Moses said.

“Nope. Mom says as soon as I start earning my own money, that’s the last they’ll see of me, and I mean, they’re right,” B. Rex said. “Oppressive as shit. I can’t even take like a shit without my dad asking about the size and color.”

After looking under the beds and the sink, Moses and Logan went from room to room looking for his mother. A few doors had opened to confront a haze of smoke and long hair, the bong glowing like a lantern in the center of the room. Other rooms featured women slapping each other on the television while men cheered and smoked cheap cigars and asked when the fuck the strippers were going to show up. They spotted a few girls from school in the elevator, smoking and tugging each other’s skirts. No one made eye contact. The elevator dinged and the girls had gone down another hallway where the lighting was offset and the wallpaper had yet to peel.

The night manager wasn’t wearing a nametag, and he was too high to tell them if he’d seen her or not. Who? Who is this you look for? Logan asked politely to use the phone and somehow B. Rex picked up. He did have the old Buick tonight, and he was bored like usual. Chemistry was boring, physics was boring, and no, no, he hadn’t learned to blow up anything new or how to make anything new blow up. Give it another week and he’d figure it out.

Moses and Logan scoured the lower floor and walked in on old men locked in deep, passionate kisses with each other. They opened doors to women crying over pictures of their children, or someone else’s children, or maybe pictures of themselves from back when they were children. No one had seen a six-foot-tall woman built like an Amazon and wearing a bathrobe tied at the waist.

“How much did they charge you? Was it the same place?” Logan asked.

“The place you got your head done, Loogie, except I didn’t let the guy with three fingers do it for me,” B. Rex said. “I saw your head after he was done with it.”

B. Rex met them in the motel room an hour later. He lay down on the bed beside the glowing Judge and listened to Moses explain the whole story of his mother, the bowling ball, the motel rooms, the postcards scattered around the floor, and the fact that she might not even remember who he was anymore.

“Did it hurt? The thing going into your neck?” Moses asked.

“Any more than Loogie’s head? No, it didn’t hurt so bad.”

Moses went through the previous day and the night before — his mother in the bathtub; the fact he had to wash his hands because he and Garrison, the big dude from the butcher shop, hit a lion and had to drag it over to the side of the road and everything. It was a mess, split open like a melon, intestines everywhere.

“14/88. What the fuck is that supposed to mean anyway?” Moses said.

“Obviously, you have not been reading the literature, Moses. And I do know you can read,” B. Rex said. “88. Eighth letter of the alphabet. HH. Heil…you know who. You get it? Fuck, this is probably bullshit anyway — right, Loogie? African lion safari bullshit.”

They didn’t believe him about the lion. That’s why they were here now, nosing through the dark and the slush to find the body. No one had reported it on the news. No one had said anything at school. No one even had a lion around here as far as they knew.

“It was like hitting another car,” Moses said. “Where else do you think I got all the bruises? You think I did this to myself?”

Logan wasn’t talking as much now, just staring out the window. He still had the purple tuque clamped onto his head, but the blood was beginning to push through the fibers.

“Stop, stop, it was there. You can still see it kinda. In the snow.”

The car shuddered to a stop. Moses hopped out and walked out into the fresh snow, leaving behind size-eleven boot prints for B. Rex to follow. They kept the car running. Logan wasn’t talking anymore. His theories about Skynet and the coming apocalypse had lost their momentum as the night dragged on into morning.

“Shit, no lion here,” B. Rex said. “But damn.”

A warm patch of earth stood out on the slushy shoulder. Headlights illuminated the wet patch of blood and feces mixing in the dirt. It hadn’t frozen yet.

“You sure it wasn’t like a big-ass bear or something?” B. Rex asked.

“With a mane and a tail? Rex, it wasn’t a bear.”

There was no wind. The two of them stood with clouds of steam hovering around their heads. The smog from the Buick floated up into the sky. B. Rex sniffed.

“I never smelled anything like that.”

“Well, that’s African shit,” Moses said.

“Lion shit,” B. Rex said. “Real bloody lion shit. Shit. Shit, man. Shit.”

“We hit it right up in the belly. Whole thing just collapsed. Goin’ like at least ninety down here, there wasn’t a lotta snow, and then just fucking bam! I didn’t believe it at first. And Garrison…”

“He had you leave it here?” B. Rex said. He stopped and stared down at the cooling mess.