Elvira told them all about the time her cousin made her eat a snail they’d found on the roof of their apartment building. It had to be magic, ’cause how else could a snail get on the roof? The officers didn’t laugh or humor her. They smelled the rotten food hidden beneath the floating forests Moses Moon had constructed. Their notepads filled quickly.
Moses Moon was upstairs packing during this one-sided conversation. At twelve years old, he knew he would be taken away by Children’s Aid the moment these policemen finished talking to his mother. He would no longer be able to smoke cigarettes or watch the blurry adult channels on the television. They’d take his mom to a room somewhere where she would be scared and alone and surrounded by machines. These wouldn’t be machines like the dogs. These would be cold and silent, and they would never lick your face when you were sad.
Moses Moon knew this like he knew the Tyrannosaurus Rex was most likely a scavenging dinosaur and not a major predator. He knew it like he knew his father would never come back from Arizona. This was an undisputed truth he had learned to recognize. They would never let her out of that room again.
“Ma’am, would it be all right with you if we went down to examine the basement? We just want to make sure we do a thorough examination.”
Moses Moon also called a cab company he’d found in the Yellow Pages. He didn’t give an address, but an intersection down the street. He had two hundred and thirteen dollars he’d been storing away from birthdays and the random bills his mother left scattered around the crowded townhouse. She was always forgetting things, like to shower or to tie up her shoes. Moses had got very good at teaching her to do these things all over again. Sometimes she even remembered the next day. Eventually, she might remember everything.
He packed a bag for his mother too, full of her underwear and socks. He threw in T-shirts and her makeup box and a few cans of her favorite chicken soup. He zipped the bag up and dragged it with his own down the long hallway littered with dog barf and air fresheners that had fallen from the ceiling. He could hear the two men in the basement and the chorus of dogs rattling the heating ducts.
“Moses, did you meet the men who’ve come to check on the dogs?”
Moses took care of the dogs, but he rarely ever gave them names. Big Bitch, Little Bitch, Jaws, Wheelie. He saw them snapping and biting one another each morning when he went down into the basement. He cleaned up the puddles of piss and the wet turds they hid in the corners, the ones the smaller dogs didn’t eat. Kids at school always asked if he’d shit himself and why his eyes were red. Moses would not miss the dogs.
“We’re going for a walk, Mom.”
Moses grabbed a chair from the kitchen. He dragged it over to the basement door and slammed it shut, provoking another round of howls. He could hear the men pounding up the basement stairs two at a time. They bellowed through the fat of their jowls, but Moses could not make out the words. He jammed the chair under the iron knob of the door.
“We gotta go, Mom.”
“Well, I don’t have a bag, you know that, Mosey. I have to have my bag before I go.”
Elvira was still wearing her nightgown and the high heels she’d bought with the prize money from her first Bowlarama tournament, the one where she and Ted won the couples category in a six-game sweep over the Johnstones. Ted bowled a turkey. It was glorious.
“I already packed it. You’ve got everything.”
“What about the dogs?” Elvira asked.
“I’ve got people to pick them up. Kids from school and their parents all want to adopt them. You should hear them.”
“Are you sure?”
A body threw itself against the basement door and the chair legs dug into the floorboards.
“Yes, yes, I’m sure, grab your bag, let’s go, go, go!” Moses said.
Out the door and down through the overgrown garden. The dogs overpowered any other noise on the street. Moses could see the cab sitting at the corner, the driver picking his nails and checking his teeth in the rearview. Elvira ran behind him toward the cab, hopping over each crack in the sidewalk. Moses feared she’d roll her ankle, and then it would be cops, and badges, and bars, and a little room, so he grabbed her hand and pulled her along beside him.
“Just take us down to the highway,” Moses said. “I’ve got fifty dollars, right? That’s enough, enough for you?”
The driver had watched a woman give birth in his car the day before. It still smelled like placenta. He didn’t blink.
“Just to the highway?”
“Yeah, yeah, we can walk from there,” he said. “Right, Mom?”
“We can walk wherever you want, baby boy. We can walk across oceans.”
The driver turned down their street, passing the silent cop car and the small children who raced their bikes up and down on the sidewalk in the rain. The whole street was coated in orange leaves, the wet rain making them cling to everything.
As Moses slid down low in the seat, he saw Mrs. Singh peering out from behind her heavy brown curtains. Her window was covered in sticky leaves. She didn’t see him, but she smiled at the police car sitting on the street. Moses watched her close the curtains while Elvira kept talking about her sister and the plums in the schoolyard. The cab turned the corner without using its signal. That was four years ago.
4
After Jamie Garrison dropped him outside the Dynasty, Moses Moon puked behind the fake Christmas trees that management left outside year round. The smell of lion’s blood and shit still lingered in his senses. He knew if he’d puked in front of Garrison he would’ve never lived it down. He’d heard stories about Garrison beating up kids behind the Zellers when he was in high school, the arms broken over the push bars of shopping carts, the boots to formerly beautiful faces, the jagged snap of fingers in docking-bay doors.
Before he drove off, Garrison had warned him not to say anything.
“You don’t even know what a lion looks like, you understand?”
Everyone called the rambling motel Da Nasty. It leered out over the other smaller buildings on the block, five stories of clapboard and stucco. Moses had moved Elvira from motel to motel over the first few years of their exile, dodging the police and Children’s Aid while riding his bicycle to school. Elvira started collecting bowling balls again, taking them into the shower with her. There were always complaints from housekeeping staff and neighbors concerning missing credit cards and stolen purses. Aliases like Allison Cooper, Joanna Page, Paula McCartney, and Gina Simmons littered the guest books of the tired, neon-coated hovels along the wide strip of the utility road.
Moses hated elevators. The spaces were too small, the walls always mirrored. Reflection after reflection of his pimply skull refracted to infinity till each pore glared at him. He always took the stairs up to the second floor and walked along the thick orange carpeting running his hand along the wall, looking for an open door, a wallet sitting on a dresser, a purse left in the bathroom. Occasionally he walked in on couples locked in complex positions he’d only seen in the pay-per-view movies. He would only order those after his mother passed out in the other double bed, moaning about her poor doggies and the betrayal of Big Tina.
“Mom, you around? I didn’t end up bringing back any food yet.”
The room still smelled liked moth balls and Pepto Bismol. The dark purple carpet was covered in cigarette burns. The blinds to the balcony were closed. Most of the balconies in Da Nasty were locked. There were too many lonely men romancing the concrete five stories down. Pigeons and a lone red-tailed hawk now ruled the balconies, slowly coating the rails in white each summer, only to have it washed away by the rain and snow every winter.