The pawnshops were often empty in the afternoons, the owners watching soap operas or cutting dope in the back rooms with men in leather jackets and ponytails. All of those discounted lives gathering dust until someone else came to pick them up for triple the initial price.
Jamie never bought anything.
Sometimes he spent the afternoons at Melissa Hurley’s, until her father walked in on them with Melissa bent over her old Easy-Bake Oven and Jamie pumping away from behind. It didn’t help that the oven was plugged in and would not stop dinging throughout the entire shouting match. Her father threw Jamie naked down a flight of stairs and tried to whip him with his belt.
It only took four days back at school for Jamie to fuck up again, a knee to the crotch of Harry Knowles that some kids said popped one of his balls. Melissa Hurley had moved on quickly, a whirling dervish of red hair, pancake makeup, and angry yellow pimples in search of the right boy, any boy. Mr. Hurley’s heart attack during a sermon on premarital sex only increased her speed.
Knowles was apparently the newest in a long line of conquests, something that didn’t faze Jamie until Knowles told him about Melissa mocking the size of his dick. Tiny, man, like a pinky. Like a pencil. Like one of those pins they put under a microscope to show you how small a cell is in biology class, you know?
No testicle was actually popped in the ensuing melee.
Jamie did not bother showing up for his official expulsion. He did not want to sit while Mr. Georgopolous rained dandruff down on his face. He didn’t tell his parents either. He didn’t even bother going home that night. Instead he hung out under the eaves of the Coffee Time downtown and watched people in wet trench coats and broken umbrellas hand over pieces of themselves to the bearded men behind greasy bulletproof glass for loose crumpled bills and slivers of change. He wanted to reach out and touch them. Women in torn leggings and jagged leather boots paced through the puddles outside, some ducking into cars that smelled like cheap cigarettes and formaldehyde before they reappeared again like doppelgangers with busted eye sockets and mussed hair. Jamie kept his own eyes on the pawnshop windows, watching them swallowing everything up whole, every little piece they were given. He had nothing to give.
Even now, eight years later, as he pulled into the strip mall parking lot, Jamie Garrison’s fists clutched the steering wheel, imagining his fingers tautly bound up in the handles of that plastic Kmart bag, watching that fucking kid’s face go pink, then red, then purple, until everything turned white and limp in his hands. This was all his fault, that little fucker. The kid couldn’t think right after that — couldn’t count, couldn’t write his name in a straight line, couldn’t even piss in a straight line. As Jamie climbed up out of the car with his knees popping and crackling, he could not shake that feeling. The little sniveling face. The small lung capacity. The penchant for minor but permanent brain damage. It was all that kid’s fault.
The wide parking lot was spotted with aging pickup trucks filled with older men who lived with their robes open and their families excommunicated. In the summer months, they lingered after hours at the drive-in theater just outside of Larkhill, where no one ever knocked on your window with a flashlight and a badge. The drivein had been closed for a few months now, so they roamed from one abandoned strip mall to another, writing phone numbers on bathroom walls and pay phones in perfect, tidy script.
A few leered at Jamie through fogged windows. A lone woman scuttled out from the adult video store, white cardboard covering its plate-glass windows. She climbed into her Riviera and began to unwrap a package in her lap. She could not wait to get home. Jamie Garrison tried not to stare at the need exposed so openly around him, wounds dripping with washer fluid and sad, old want. Even now, he still had nothing to give.
8
“He was always satisfied, my father. Complacent. That’s how I would diagnosis him. Made no sense. For God’s sake, he was born in the Year of the Rat, not the Rabbit,” Mr. Chatterton said. “But not at home. At work they could shit all over him, excuse my language, but at home, nothing was ever right, no one was ever right. Not even the television.”
Sometimes Moses Moon would dream his father had never run away to sing Bette Midler classics in the Arizona desert. On some nights, after the dull thwap of leaking water beds had faded into a calming tide, Moses Moon dreamed he had a father who would teach him how to fish; a father who would teach him how to swim the butterfly and check the oil in his first car. In the dreams of Moses Moon, his new father was a lecherous professor, a cocky camp counselor, a crotchety TV executive, and a newly minted Ghostbuster, all wrapped up into one unparalleled human being. In these dreams, his true father was always Bill Murray.
“Yes, Mr. Chatterton.”
Logan’s father sat across from Moses, polishing his glasses on the long sleeve of his shirt. The kitchen was quiet and clean but covered in old drawings, tracings from medical textbooks labeled with nonexistent bones and new tendon systems that would increase power while reducing maneuverability. Mr. Chatterton called them works in progress.
“Now my father always did have a thing about interrupting your elders, one of the few tenets I still uphold in this house. He never did listen, though — that was the problem,” Mr. Chatterton continued. “Didn’t listen to my mother or me. No, we always had to listen to him. Always.”
Logan was still bleeding in the basement. Moses squirmed in his chair, slowly drinking his glass of water. He didn’t want another refill.
“Logan never had to play organized sports. He never had to eat the same goddamn ham sandwich every day either. My wife and I — my former wife and I — we always did our best to let Logan choose his own path. Because rules — do you know how many bowls of cereal my father let me eat?” Mr. Chatterton asked. “Just one. Never mind if I had a long day ahead of me. My welfare, my choices, my personal well-being were all secondary to his choices. His choices — the ones he made for me. You understand?”
“I think I understand,” Moses said. The water was warm in his mouth.
“Let’s just say my wardrobe was never my own. It was always selected for me. As was the paint on my walls, as were my friends. But what friends, really?”
Mr. Chatterton was crying. His eyes were pink and crusty.
“So I always let my son, my Logan — we named him after the mountain. We climbed it on our honeymoon, which seems to be eons ago,” Mr. Chatterton said. “How a woman can say so many things one day and yet the next remove herself from your life — how? And all the work we put into rebuilding her leg and her hand. The hand was almost perfect.”
Moses noticed the house was too quiet, the stumping gait of Mrs. Chatterton muted, silenced. She wasn’t home today. Mr. Chatterton never would have sent her to a real doctor. She didn’t even have her own car. Just like bodies, the machine was another mystery for Mr. Chatterton to turn from the functional to the formidable, as he liked to put it. Each car in the driveway had been there for years, slowly dissolving in the rain.
“But then, you and your friends just had to break the boy…”
Moses didn’t want to look at Mr. Chatterton’s face. It was cracked in too many places.