Andrew Sullivan - Waste

Bill Murray would never have done this to his children.

Moses grabbed one of the long poles used for lifting paint cans and stolen weights. With its sharp pointed end, Moses lashed out at the pictures, smashing the smiles and the faces into smaller pieces, tearing through the photographs and the father who was somehow something far worse than a man who ran away to Arizona. Far worse than a mother who couldn’t tuck you in at the age of ten. Or a fake father who only existed on the screen, his voice lingering in your VCR to tell you it was all going to be okay, he had a plan to make everything all right. You might even get to meet John Candy, too, if you played your cards right. Moses stopped at the mother’s smile — the complicity not quite full, the smile too kind to be faked. It couldn’t be faked. It was real, and sad, and horrible, but by then Loogie was laughing and trashing the photos still clinging to the walls.

“See what I’m talking about?” Logan said. “You were right, B. This is sick, isn’t it? This is what happens when you start trying to compete with the apes. You see the Easter outfit? The bunny tails? They’ve got bottles of shitty whiskey upstairs.”

“What about Moses’s mom?” B. Rex asked.

“We’ll find her. Right, Mosey? She’s not here, unless you think she’s hiding in the toilet or something. She’s a big momma. No offense, Mosey. I know you don’t want us calling her a babe, but damn, how’d you keep her hidden from us for so long?”

Moses caught another glimpse of the father’s smile. He swung the pole again and glass scattered around them. All three were wearing their steel-toed boots, the ones Moses had made them buy after he found B. Rex with a boot print embedded in his chest on the first day of tenth grade. Moses found the boots at Second Chances, a thrift store covered in dust and dead lice. Logan got his own pair when two girls stole his shoes after gym. He had to walk home in his socks. Like his bedroom, they were bright green and filled with holes.

The boots were an investment for the future, for a friendship built on hates they couldn’t name until they decided it was everything they were not; it was everything that bubbled and seethed and glared and laughed and mocked their flickering pride. There was nothing else outside that hate, no border left to cross, just juice monkeys in your mother’s old basement, and fathers who mangled your mother’s hand, and pine resin lingering in all your senses, a reminder of where it all began to fall apart and the fact that she wasn’t here. She was gone.

“Fuck it,” Moses said. “Let’s just trash this hole.”

Astor Crane discovered the Brothers Vine when he expanded from plants into pharmaceuticals. More money when the drugs were somewhat legal. Prescriptions and half-shipped shipments landed easily inside their pockets. Al and Tommy had survived the purges that drove out most of the bike gangs. The few rats that had jumped ship were found out in the woods with their knees drilled and their mouths filled with bits of their own hands. It was a signature the brothers developed. They had a route to Quebec that bypassed most of the police checks. All the best stuff came from Quebec.

“You find Destinii or what? You guys even looking at her files? You go by LIMH today? Talk to me, boys. You call me from a pay phone, I expect to hear some good things.”

Even in their forties, the Brothers Vine were still looking for father figures. Astor Crane was happy to fill the role. He’d found them skulking around the Turret after a wet T-shirt contest, mumbling approval at each girl who walked by them. The edges of their beards were wet with beer and they had peanut shells in their moustaches. Astor got them high in his suite and taught them how to talk to women. Neither Vine had had much luck since they were released on their eighteenth birthdays. Three years in prison had led to a twenty-year drought. Astor taught them not to stare and to ask questions — always ask questions. Make the girls feel like you care about them. It doesn’t matter if you do or not, but tell them that you do. Believe that you do — you have to believe it or they won’t believe it either.

“You found Falcor. The lion…okay, yeah. Good. That’s good. Take him to the guy we talked about, the taxidermy guy. I’ll go with you when we do it. How about that?”

Astor Crane told Al it was important just to listen, not to try and fix all of their problems at once. He reminded Tommy that the best way to a stripper’s heart was through her nose, not his wallet. With careful coaching and heavy doses of cough syrup in their gin and tonics, Astor Crane showed the Brothers Vine they didn’t always have to pay for sex, and from then on he was untouchable.

“I thought I made it pretty simple, Al. I thought I made it clear. Find the girl. Yes, it’s her real name. You have her? You want to double check? I believe you if you say it’s her. Yeah. I know it sounds stupid. Destinii with two I’s at the end. Yeah, I know it’s a hassle. Write it down if you have to.”

Astor opened up worlds where the Brothers no longer just needed each other; he glossed over the broken bits and presented the two of them as grizzled heroes to the women they met on those long treks into French territory. Only half of the girls spoke English. Astor found this helped his cause. He provided the brothers with the narratives they needed. And the shipments did not stop. Not even when Astor was in the hospital. You could rely on the Brothers Vine to follow your instructions. Sometimes, though, they made a mess — the kind of mess that got plastered all over the six o’clock news.

“And I know they found that Condon kid, so don’t even get me started. You fuck up once, shame on you. You fuck up twice, well, I’m still not taking the blame. Grab the fucker who got the lion too, if you can. Squeeze our friend with the mustache. Maybe we’ll make me a wig out of his hair, my head is getting cold these days. And Al, no more dropping them off in the woods, all right? Condom stole, but he didn’t know where the girl was either. And now we got this bullshit to deal with…yeah, I know, things happen. I know. Things also end. Remember that.”

Astor Crane hung up the phone and stared out the window. He watched the buses and garbage trucks trading spots with each other down in the street below. He tried not to gaze at his reflection, his scalp shining bright in the glare. The lion was gone, a pile of bones and shit now. Probably some drunk asshole, hurtling toward nothing. It had been a mistake to keep it up at the old mental hospital, a mistake to give the animal its own wing to roam at night.

Someone could have been eaten in the dark.

Lions were scavengers, though. Astor read that when they had him in the hospital, chopping him up and redressing his wounds, telling him he was almost cured. Just one more surgery. One more time under the knife. Lions would drive hyenas and jackals off their prey. They would spook cheetahs and wild dogs. They would make their presence known. They would take what was theirs by right and by might. They would suffer no fools out on the plains.

Astor at least saw a small piece of himself in the animal. A small, nasty little piece, something caught in the corner of its eye. Back when he and Destinii were still trying to make things work, before she’d shacked up with Condom and fallen down an escalator, she told him he looked like one — a lion — in the morning, his red hair splayed out over the bed. He had tried to roar, but could only laugh. He had tried to be kind.

Destinii would need to remember he was kind if they had found her. If it really was her — years locked up in the mental ward promised him nothing. He was getting old. Pieces of him were already falling off, pieces he found in the shower, in the toilet, in the bed when he woke up alone again with the television on, only the hiss of a dead tape to comfort him.