“Face it, you’re going to end up marrying that broad and having three little babies with her and moving in with the family and making the pilgrimage see to the Pope and learning the deep, dark secrets of pierogi magic.”
“Shut up, Garrison.”
Jamie kicked a foot out and sent a bunch of Fraggle Rock toys flying into a corner stacked with dirty underwear. Brock winced but didn’t say anything.
“Why do you collect these little buggers, anyway?” Jamie said.
“Happy Meals are cheap as fuck. For three bucks, I get a whole meal.”
“Yeah, but you don’t need to — whatever. I brought this over.”
Jamie flapped the battered piece of paper in Brock’s face.
“You remember him, right? The little wiener from back when we lived on Olive.”
“Which guy?”
“The guy with the — you know, ‘Don’t Be a Loner, Wrap Your Boner’—that guy?”
“The chick with the hot dog and her grandma? That’s just a story, you know that, right? If you’re thinking of the chick, or maybe it was a dude, who knows, but the one with the broom stick? Now I know for a fact that that happened. Girl fell right off the fridge. Impaled.”
“No, he’s a fucking guy, Brock. Took the bus with us. Little bitch who almost got me booted out of high school, the one with the—”
“Oh, shit, you mean Condom,” Brock said.
“Yes, yes, exactly, that’s the dude. The dude just disappeared off the planet,” Jamie said. “I figured he killed himself or something, like years ago, but apparently he was still kicking around here somewhere. Until this.”
“Until what?” Brock asked.
“Just read the fucking article.”
Brock spent every night from four until midnight slugging boxes of booze down at the liquor warehouse. The place had always looked like a deserted hangar bay to Jamie, even back when he was working there on the day shift. Brock would drive home at night covered in beer and gin, avoiding major intersections and the highway in case he got pulled over, but he always failed to wash his pants till the weekend. T-shirts covered in abstract splashes of red wine and vermouth sat in piles till Brock could no longer leap over them.
“You ever think of buying hangers?” Jamie said.
“I’m trying to read here, stop screwing with me,” Brock said.
Jamie swung his feet back and forth over the islands of Chinese food on the floor. They were about the only bones in his body that did not hurt. He closed his eyes. Alisha was supposed to call him about the kid again tonight. And Scott still wanted him out in a couple weeks, and the meat shop was going to call him in for another shift. Behind all these thoughts lurked the lion with its rib cage split open and its intestines spooling out across the pavement. Its eyes were open.
“It is the Condom. Goddamn,” Brock said. “What a knob. You remember when he cried ’cause we told him yogurt was just elephant jizz, and — shit, what did one of the girls say to him?”
“I don’t remember, but he was a shit stain. Pissed himself once on the bus, remember?”
“That was probably the one time I felt bad about that dude. We razed his ass more than once. And he was always making shit look so dramatic. I mean he probably brought it on himself anyway. But no one deserves this kind of shit,” Brock said.
Brock leaned back in his chair and coughed in his hand.
“I saw you fucked the front of your car up.”
“Just a raccoon, sent me spinnin’ off the road a little,” Jamie said. “Might have knocked a tree or a shrub or something. No big deal.”
“A raccoon?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m also here about; I know you got all those meds, for the teeth, right? So I was wondering. I mean, my neck is killing me.”
“Sold ’em, boss,” Brock said.
“What?”
“I fucking sold ’em for pretty good money.”
“Well, shit, you know where I can get any? I need something. I won’t be able to go to work otherwise.”
“Go see a doctor like I did.”
Jamie stood up and kicked a few more Happy Meal toys across the floor.
“I’m the one who took you to the fucking doctor in the first place.”
“You wanna know who I took ’em to?”
“Why else do you think I’m here?” Jamie asked.
“All right, okay? Go down Olive until you see a one-way for Monroe, and then just cruise down there until you hit the old strip malls that pretty much just have like nothing going on. You know the ones I’m talking about. Well, one has a porno store, and the other might still have a sub sandwich place, but anyway, it’ll be an old hobby shop, with um, a sun roof?”
“A sun roof?”
“Shit, um, that’s the best I can describe it,” Brock said.
“Skylights?”
“Yeah, whatever. Just knock there, it says like Henry’s Holistic Hobbies on the door.”
“You can remember that name, but not the word skylight?” Jamie said.
Brock smiled his pumpkin smile and pulled a two-liter bottle of Coke out from under the bed.
“You’ll recognize the guy ’cause he has a big-ass moustache. He’ll want you to call him Larry or some shit. I was pretty messed up when I went to go sell him the stuff so I don’t really remember. It won’t be his real name, I can tell you that. But he has some righteous stuff. Woulda put old Condom out of his misery, if he knew what was good for him. Now watch this.”
Brock took a swig from the bottle and then fired two parallel streams from between his teeth across the floor. When he smiled, all Jamie could see were the holes.
6
Moses didn’t mind working the morning shift. He liked the quiet. He liked the smell of sanitizer in the cutting rooms, the glow of the battered off-white cutting boards propped up against the floor. All the stuff in the back was stainless steel — the tables, the carts, the sinks. Sometimes he wandered into the refrigerator with his bike helmet still on, dodging the massive sides of beef that weighed more than he did. They dangled from the ceiling on long hooks that swayed in the breeze from the cooling fans.
“Abraham’s son, my man, you gotta get your shit together. What is with the shaved head?”
Texaco Joe took a pull from a cigarette and pushed his way into the refrigerator. He had a giant purple tuque pulled over his head. His lips were chapped and flaking.
“It keeps me cool.”
“It keeps you cool? It’s like thirty under out there right now. Under the zero.”
Moses began setting up the cutting boards and pulling the knives out of the sink. The blades were still sharp from the night before. Sometimes Moses would test them on his fingernails when he was closing by himself. Shaving off tiny little slices to flush down the drain.
“If it was thirty below, you’d be bitching a whole lot more. It’s like minus ten.”
“I don’t bitch, all right? If it is thirty below where I’m from, everyone is dead anyway.”
Texaco Joe never said exactly where he’d come from or where he was born. The odds were sixty to forty on Barbados, according to Jamie. Joe had tried to claim he was from Houston and even wore an Astros cap in the summer, but he had never crossed the border in the five years he’d worked for Don Henley at the shop. He couldn’t even name any other Texas cities besides Dallas and San Antonio. However, he did own three pairs of cowboy boots. Purple, green, and tan leather. His wife polished them for church on Sundays.