Andrew Sullivan - Waste

“You want what?” he said. “You can’t have the gun. It don’t even work the way it did…”

Jamie pushed past his father into the living room.

Francis never got rid of the gun that propelled that fateful hunk of lead into his skull. He kept it as a reminder of his hubris. That’s what he told his sons before he stashed it in their house on Olive St. A reminder of his pride and all the fallout that was to come. Never interfere. You must let nature take its course — it will decide your fate. This is what he told his sons while their house burned down. They had found him standing on the front lawn smoking and watching it burn in the dark. The rifle was in his hand.

Don’t interfere. This is what he told them in the hotel room downtown while their mother was treated for third-degree burns; the chain she wore had melted the skin around her neck, a cross branded between her breasts. Jamie remembered emerging from the smoke and that figure on the curb with an ember in his hand. Francis hadn’t bothered to wake them up.

It was in that downtown hotel room with the Magic Finger beds that Francis explained why he couldn’t interfere. He’d done it once before, and look what had happened. A line of white through his black hair traced the bullet’s path, the skin beneath a meaty pink that pulsed like a vein. He pointed to his skull and sat on the hotel balcony, watching toads drown in the hotel pool as the chlorine overwhelmed their systems and burned their porous skin.

“Don’t give me that old spiel about it bein’ broken. You had it out at Christmas,” Jamie said. “Mom had to tell you to put it away. Do you remember Christmas? Fucking had the TV on the whole time. It’ll just be for tonight. And Mom isn’t even here, is she?”

“She is. They had a heart attack at the hall. I keep tellin’ her she’s going to have one if she keeps breathing in that smoke every night. Soot in her lungs like I tell her. She wants to kill herself all slow like that, she’s welcome to it.”

The clutch of silence and muted news on the television had seeped into every little room in that row house. It was Janet Garrison who went out and worked, worked until she finally got her pension and could flee as well. The post office set her free after forty years with a fractured disc and collapsed arches in both her feet. Francis Garrison ate whatever she left in the fridge and slept in the living room. He did his own laundry while she was out of the house but washed it in the kitchen sink. Janet did not believe in divorce. It was easier to pretend he was a ghost than file the papers and drag what was left of her husband into a brightly lit courtroom. Everything would be on the record after that. Anyone could access the stenographer’s account of their dysfunction.

“Well, I won’t bother her. Jesus Christ. Where did you put it now? Is it in the kitchen again? You should just give it up. Throw it away if you don’t want me asking for it. I got nowhere to be. I can look for it all night,” Jamie said. “You hear anything from Scott at all?”

Francis Garrison retreated to his chair in the corner.

“So you’re going to shut down again?” Jamie asked. “Like a robot. All right, fine.”

Jamie could still see Brock’s mouth split open with that little tongue pushing through the fluid like a worm. He could still see the lion mashed under the grille of his car, its vacant eyes. Jamie didn’t know what the Lorax had told those two men from the butcher shop. Who else could they be? The Lorax could have said anything with all those mushrooms jammed into his cheeks. Jamie slammed another cupboard and kept looking. He smelled like smoke.

Francis didn’t move. On the television screen, a woman bellowed from a pulpit made out of scrap plywood. Homemade signs fluttered behind her in the breeze. The close angle of the camera made her look massive; you could see small black hairs raised along her upper lip. Her teeth gnashed and she paused for effect. The crowd was smaller than it looked, pumped up with occasional banners and one guy in a motorized wheelchair driving around in circles. He looked more lost than angry.

“Leave it alone, Jamie. You can’t just take whatever you want,” Francis croaked. “It ain’t yours to take. It’s like anything else. Like a microwave or a satellite dish. I keep my eye on it.”

“Just tell me where you stashed the gun, and I’ll leave you alone to whatever you’re doin’. You can do whatever you want with that TV. Mom doesn’t use it anyway.”

Jamie found the rifle underneath the sink, held against the wall by pipes and a stack of iron wool. His father crept up behind him in the cramped kitchen, waving his hand at Jamie like it was a talisman. The light passed right through the hole in his palm, a reminder of cows split down the middle and pigs boiled to clear the bristles off their snouts before their throats were cut.

“Just relax, Dad. You need to take a seat before you hurt yourself.”

Jamie had seen this hand routine before, and he still had Brock’s broken jack-o’-lantern face floating behind his eyes. He tried to push past his father with the butt of the gun — a Remington Fieldmaster, 22LR caliber. It had belonged to his grandfather first. Francis Garrison held fast against his son, trapping him in the doorway. He hadn’t brushed his teeth.

“You’re going to make a mess with that thing. Like everything else you do,” Francis said. “I’ll throw it out like you want. Just give me it. I’ll be the one to throw it out. Things come back at you if you ain’t careful.”

Jamie knew his father always kept one in the chamber — just in case he got tired of waiting for the end. He saw it when his father cleaned the gun. Sometimes the eventual dissolution of this world was not eventual enough.

“So it came back and bit you in the ass — so what?” Jamie said. “So does everything else. No one is trying to take your TV or your microwave or whatever else you think we want. Not taking anything but this, I swear. Mom needs to put a leash on you. Jesus…”

“You don’t know what you’re doing with that,” Francis said.

Jamie shoved past his father and found his mother standing in the hallway. She was dressed in the green pantsuit she wore to the bingo halls. Her eyes were hidden behind a pair of sunglasses, the ones she wore after a good long cry in the bathroom with the tub running. The stoop of her back was reinforced from years of lifting packages onto conveyor belts and sorting through Christmas letters to Santa Claus.

“Mom, can I use the phone?” Jamie said. “I just gotta make a call and the old man ain’t helping. Don’t worry, it’s not long-distance— let go — and it won’t take too long.”

Janet Garrison brushed past her husband. Her eyes didn’t even flicker over his hairy face or the rifle clutched in her son’s hands. That gun was always bouncing around the house. She had slept with it beneath her bed for the last week before Francis moved it again. Sometimes she wished it would fire once of its own volition.

“Sure. As long as it’s not long-distance, you can call whoever,” she said. “You still staying with Scott?”

Janet began to put on her shoes in the kitchen, the large orthopedic ones the doctor advised would reduce the strain on her lower back. Unlike most of her friends, Janet had yet to crumble entirely. She attributed it to a lack of cigarettes and a healthy dose of All-Bran each morning. It was only her feet that looked truly old — like dead roots.

“Scott’s gotta sort some shit out with that wife of his, so I’m letting them kinda air everything out,” Jamie said to his mother. “Phone is still in the back bedroom, right?”

“Where do you think you’re going, Jan? It’s two in the morning!” Francis said.