Andrew Sullivan - Waste

The Lorax rubbed the bottle of pills back and forth between his hands. Sweat stains stretched down his armpits and his bare feet clicked their nails on the hard floor.

“Kilkenny was sneaky though — that was his name! He kept some of his beasties in the woods and no one really cared. The government sent a few people out to check on him and he was never allowed to reopen, but no one really looked too close. Like an idiot, he left the sign up.”

The New Kenya sign still teetered out over one of the concession roads, but it was at least an hour away from Larkhill. Past the nuke plant and the dead trees and the wetlands they kept trying to save every summer with another bottle drive collection. There were tigers and lions on the billboard, faded stripes and raggedy manes. Empty barbed-wire cages visible from the road, overgrown with weeds and solitary sunflowers poking through like massive dandelions.

“So, the lion…”

“He didn’t just up and get rid of everything,” the Lorax said. “He kept a few. Called them his friends. You start naming animals, you start forgetting they can rip your face off. Animals are never your friends. Food, water, shelter, warmth — that’s all they care about. They’ll pretend to like you, but they’ll never love you, and they will eat you when you die.”

The Lorax rubbed his moustache and pulled the baggie out of his pocket again. He mashed up the little gray pods inside and stuffed the whole bundle into his mouth. His cheeks bulged while the dentures worked his food into a paste. It took him a while to swallow.

“Where did it come from? If you actually do know, then I need to know now.”

The Lorax stuck his tongue out and dabbed at it with a stubby finger.

“You don’t believe in the music of a conversation, do you, buddy?” he said. “You can’t even get my name right, or you won’t. Do you think we were just given communication to find food and shelter, like we’re apes? Have goal. Resolve goal. Sleep. No. Conversation is about the dips and falls, the crescendo and the pause.”

Bill Mazeroski was in Jamie’s hand. The winner of eight Golden Gloves, the man who still held the Major League record for double plays made by a second baseman. Not to mention his career field percentage of 0.983. The card was still inside its plastic sleeve. It had never been touched by the toxic air of Larkhill.

“You ain’t going to say nothing, Brock? How do you like that? Jamie? I call you whatever I want now, how about that? My name’s not Larry. It’s the Lorax.”

Jamie just wanted to go home and sleep and stop thinking about his daughter and those floating eyes following him everywhere. The pills would help. The lion had to be put to sleep.

“The Maz loses his head if you don’t hurry up, Larry,” Jamie said. “And I know you want to keep the full set. Collectors value this shit, right? It’s all croquet to me.”

“Oh come on now! I still have a few pods the beards didn’t take last time they came collecting for Crane,” the Lorax whined. “You want those?”

Callused fingers poised themselves around the Maz’s head.

“The lion, Larry.”

“What did Mazeroski ever do to you?” the Lorax said. He spat his dentures out into his hand and slammed them onto the desk amongst the loose prescription bottles that rattled with stolen medication. He didn’t scrape off the owners’ names. “Fine, so you wanna know about the lion. Fine. Give me the card.”

Jamie shook his head. The Lorax sighed.

“There was only a male,” the Lorax began. “Out there in the boonies — at least in the summer, you know — you can find little grow ops, little spurts of industry in that wasteland. So I hired Kilkenny on and he had all kinds of shit out there on that farm. Actual shit for ’shroom growing. Lion shit, no tiger shit. But giraffe, he had a giraffe.

“Perfect place out there. Isolated, plentiful unmonitored fertilizers. I heard they monitor fertilizer sales these days. Did you know that? Same reason I don’t buy hydroponics, they track that shit like it’s buried treasure. Kilkenny was growing me stuff, but he was actually growing it for who I grow it for — you know, chain of command — and he got greedy.

“I think that was an excuse, though. Someone really wanted that lion. A pet lion makes you seem pretty badass when the best some other shithead can do is a Rottweiler. Did you know there are more pet tigers in human homes than exist in the wild?”

“So they stole the lion,” Jamie said, flicking the baseball card again.

“Weeks ago. I went up there to check on him. Must have taken his ass somewhere. He was always trying to rip me off, and I’m not really a standalone operation. Everyone’s gotta answer to someone. There was blood everywhere, someone fucked with the body too. Be nice to the card, man, please.”

“They killed the giraffe?” Jamie asked. He bent the baseball card between steepled fingers.

“I found it out near the plants. A real live giraffe, but dead. They tore up all his stuff, and then of course came looking for me. And now I’m growing everything with lamps from fucking retirement homes and getting all my stuff from pharmacies. I’m barely clinging on here.”

The Lorax pulled out his baggie of mushrooms again, but it was empty.

“So how did it end up jammed into the grille of my car?”

“Well, you try keeping a lion cooped up in an apartment or anywhere else. You think it’s just going to stay? It stayed with that ginger Kilkenny because he loved that beast, because he treated it like a person. Like a brother. They slept in the same bed. Ate the same food. True love between man and beast.”

“So it just escaped?”

The Lorax struggled to push his teeth back into his mouth. One of the canines was chipped.

“It isn’t like they’re going to advertize it. They’ll find it probably,” the Lorax said. “They work like dogs for that motherfucker, but it’s a lion. A lion is going to do whatever it wants.”

Jamie relaxed his spine. He set the card down on the table.

“All right. You can have it back. I still need a favor.”

The Lorax stared at the baseball card. The Maz wasn’t smiling. He was grim.

“What?”

“Twenty bucks good for a couple of those orange guys? You got the card back anyway. You good with that? I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings.”

The Lorax opened the drawer again and pulled the dirty plastic bag out onto the table. He caressed the bottles through the bag, but he didn’t read the names on the prescriptions.

“Just keep an eye out when you’re driving,” the Lorax said. “You say it was a lion, but it could’ve been like a big dog or something, or a kid. I don’t want to go to court. You hit a kid, that’s homicide. How about eight for you? You can owe me.”

Jamie snatched the pills from the Lorax’s greasy hand.

“Everybody owes. I’ll pay next time I see you.”

Three skinheads lurked in the back of Yuri’s bowling alley, staring at all the women throwing heavy stones down perfectly straight lines. Their shouts mixed with the clattering pins.

“You knew my mother, right? Hey, you, thunder thighs! You knew her?”

“Who do you think you’re talking to, boy?” Big Tina bellowed. “Thunder thighs?”

One of them seemed to be crying, refusing to follow the other two down to the lanes. His little arms could barely wrap around his chest. The one in front carried a teal bowling ball. The word JUDGE scrawled across it in black sharpie. The second boy’s skull was bleeding from a half-finished tattoo. The bourbon smell washed over Big Tina as she turned to face the third.

“I said who do you think you’re talking to, boy?”