“Maybe a bear, I don’t know, all right? Can we just get in the fucking car, J?”
Moses hopped from foot to foot. His jacket was made for spring and it was December.
The car smelled like frozen sanitizer and pork shavings. It was an old Cutlass that Donnie had sold Jamie the summer before. Moses went straight for the radio, listening to nothing, just twisting the dials. They sat in the spinning noise while Jamie waited for the car to heat up. Static and random notes bleated from the speakers.
Jamie put the car in drive. He always made sure to find a pull through whenever he parked. The reverse gear had crapped out on him in the spring. There were two hernias, one accident, and a lot of pushing since then, but Jamie swore he was getting the hang of it.
Jamie made his way across Larkhill, swerving around potholes and the occasional drunk. Moses lived down by the highway, in one of the old motels strung up like discount Christmas lights along either side of the six lanes. The kind of place where the bloodstains were bleached out of the carpet by Czech cleaning ladies and the bathrooms had condom catchers built into the toilets. Jamie had almost moved down there before Scott offered his basement as a temporary fix.
The car made its way down Hepburn Street, past strip malls studded with porno stores and discount tax offices, avoiding old shortcuts through apartment complexes now patched up with plywood windows. Larkhill’s downtown stretched and bloated through the core of the city, dotted with grocery stores and half-empty townhouses with bed sheets for curtains.
“So what’s the story with this dumb fuck in the woods?” Jamie asked. Stopped at a light, he watched the old ladies shuffling in and out of the downtown bingo hall, its storefront windows illuminating row after row of blue hair and gnarled fists wrapped around dabbers and hearing aids. A few men sat amongst them, along with the younger welfare set, babies in their laps. Jamie’s mother was probably in there right now, keeping an eye on Mrs. Kasper, who’d won the last three nights straight. No one was that good at bingo.
“He was fucking old, man. Crypt keeper. Like your age.”
Out on the street, faded HELP WANTED signs dotted some of the windows, but there were no store hours posted. Sharkey’s Pawn Palace was about the only place open on the block, a sad little window filled with stiff iron bars and snapping teeth painted onto the glass.
“Remember who’s driving you home, if you can, Mosey. Might be important in the future.”
“Oh, I’m aware as hell. I can always just bum a ride next time. Got the good old thumb.”
“Last time you did that, you got your ass kicked, if my ancient brain recalls correctly.”
“I got jumped. Wasn’t even in the car yet. They just swarmed me down by the park at Vista and Lawrence.” Moses sighed. “It wasn’t even that dark out.”
“Just be glad you still have all your teeth, man.”
They were getting closer to the highway now, apartment buildings and row houses giving way to warehouses and old industrial lots. Larkhill used to have twelve different manufacturing plants and three different head offices for minor corporations. The fields told a different story now. Gray lots covered in concrete and the last bits of loosestrife fighting off the cold. A few were fenced off with barbed wire strung through thick chain link. Dead grass and rotten foundations guarded by rusted forklifts. The ground here was filled with sulfur and asbestos and who knew what else, all of it bubbling under the crabgrass.
“Your teeth. I told you about Brock, right?” Jamie said. “Bottle of Ice hits him right in the mouth, and he’s always got that jaw of his sagging open, like everything’s a joke.”
“He got beaned in the mouth?”
“In the fucking mouth. A forty of Max Ice right in the teeth. They call him Jack-O now. Looks like Halloween every time he cracks his mouth open.”
“He’s just gon’ leave it like that?”
The streetlights toward the highway flickered on and off at intervals. No residents around to complain. Scattered boxes from dumped loads and old overstock stood in frozen piles by the doors to docking bays, each coated in faded spray paint. The letters were too long and jagged, the faces uneven, the smiles bent at odd angles.
“Says it’s too expensive. You should see his mouth though,” Jamie said.
“Can he still eat, and like drink and all that?”
“Yeah.”
“At least he doesn’t have to eat from a tube or something like I saw this girl on TV once. She was from Albania?” Moses said. “Or one of those places we should just bomb into glass. Someone we shoulda wiped out years ago. Someone no one cares about except the tabloids.”
It was dark on the roads. The streetlights were gone. Only staggered telephone poles stood with loose nooses of wire dangling up and down the street. The ditches were full of leaky plastic bags that old ladies got their nephews to dump when they didn’t want to pay the city to haul them away. Paint cans and adult diapers seeped down into the water table. Up ahead gleamed the long strip of motels, buzzing and flicking their signs to draw everyone out of their holes.
“So she is totally messed up and in this home for girls that can’t talk good.”
“So like deaf girls and…”
“No, not deaf. I’m talking like impediments. And so there was a fire there, and the fire alarm was not connected. Mounted on the wall, but fuck, nobody decided to plug it into anything.”
Jamie squeezed the steering wheel tighter.
“You’re kidding.”
“This is true! It was on the TV, like, a few nights ago, I swear. The fire alarm isn’t connected because these are backwoods people who shouldn’t even exist, and guess what? No batteries in the smoke alarms. Turns out the dude running the place was like a total cheapskate — how much you wanna bet a Jew? Do they even have Jews there?”
“Moses, what I tell you about the Jew shit?”
The car still smelled like watered down blood, runoff from the cutting boards that dripped onto their clothes. Jamie flipped on the high beams as they approached the motels. Moses and his mom had a room at the Dynasty, the biggest one on the strip. Five stories of pigeon shit and oversized bay windows decorated in thin lines of purple neon, the letters lit up in bright orange like a landing strip. It was right next door to the Stow-and-Go storage yard.
“Most of the kids end up dying due to like the smoke,” Moses continued. “They’re asleep. They don’t even know what’s happening.”
“What kind of school is this?”
“I think it was just like a home or something,” Moses said. “But there is still this one girl and her dirty little gypsy ass. She can get herself a glass of water even if she can’t ask for it. But all the staff there just run straight out when the fire starts. I’m talking nurses, doctors, the guy who changes the piss pans, all of them. They all just book it and totally forget the kids.”
Jamie stared straight ahead at the road. He tried looking in the mirrors. Buzzing AM voices underscored Moses’s high-pitched rant.
“Yeah, okay, Mosey. I get it, all right?”
“And so this girl tries to get out on her own. And she falls in the fire — this is what they said on the show. Her whole face goes up like kindling. Melts like butter. Melts her whole mouth shut for some reason. The way her skin burns it all drips down like candle wax. She’s still got her nose and her slanty-ass eyes, but her mouth just doesn’t exist. Isn’t there anymore. Just gone.”
Jamie did not look at Moses. He stared at the speedometer’s sickly green light, watched the arrow flicker toward eighty kilometers.