Both Logan’s parents had failed out of medical school together after performing bizarre elective operations on each other in the semi-abandoned maternity ward of the university hospital. It was a janitor who found Mr. Chatterton rearranging the tendons in his soon-to-be-wife’s hands and called a code blue for the entire building. They were expelled.
“Take the morning off, all right?” Joe said. “You don’t need to be here right now, you were here last night. I don’t even think you changed your clothes, man. You stink.”
Moses looked down at his chest. There was still a smear of blood on his shirt. It must have soaked through his windbreaker the night before. Joe slammed a side of pork down on the bone saw and pulled a white coat over his skinny shoulders.
“Heavy stuff, your friends. You go. I’ll say you called in sick. You look like a dead man anyway.”
The sun was beginning to rise. Trees cast off the last of their leaves one by one, brown flakes coating the pavement. Moses pushed his bike down the street. Logan didn’t live in any of the old apartment buildings on this block. They towered over the sidewalks, casting the whole strip in shadows that only grew as the morning passed. The balconies were covered in alternating patterns of pink and teal railings.
Moses could see the house at the end of the street and the two rusted cars parked in the driveway. Both of them sat up on concrete blocks Mr. Chatterton had lifted from the construction site near his dentist’s office. He might not have believed in doctors or mechanics, but Mr. Chatterton wasn’t going to let anyone but a professional touch his teeth.
The front door was bright yellow, repainted every summer by Mr. Chatterton. He’d inherited the house from his father, a man whose color wheel consisted of four distinct shades of brown. Logan’s grandpa had been the janitor at the coal plant and then the nuclear plant just an hour outside Larkhill. He had eaten the same ham sandwich from the same lunchbox on the same bench for fifty-five years before his heart finally clogged and abruptly stopped. When the night shift took over, they found him with a mouthful of ham still clenched in his teeth.
Each room in the house was another indictment against this man who Mr. Chatterton believed had stunted his childhood — the bright mauve of the kitchen a slap to the old man’s disregard for family photo collages framed in macaroni, the lime-green hallway a rebuke to his decree that real men did not ask for a pet rabbit on their fifth birthday, and the teal tiles around the tub a final dismissal of his claim that bubble baths were only for women, homosexuals, geriatrics, and the schizophrenic community.
The doorbell was broken. Moses walked into the rainbow-walled house, the hasty paint showing brown and gray in the corners, old wallpaper peeping through the primer near the ceiling. The brush-work looked like loose stitches, barely holding wounds together. Each room was brightly painted in the Chatterton home, but every seam was frayed — every corner slowly unraveling.
Moans came from the basement in slow gasps. Moses forced himself down the stairs, blocking out memories of bipedal dogs and overweight policemen. A long work table covered in old medical textbooks, a surgical saw, Tarot cards, phone bills, and the annual horoscope for those born in the Year of the Monkey took up most of the floor.
“Logan, you all right? I heard you got fucked up down at the Triple K.”
The door to Logan’s room, painted in what his father would call a “spritely magenta,” was wide open. Logan was restrained on the bed with old utility belts and a bright yellow extension cord. His father leaned over him, glasses dangling on a chain above his son’s face.
The wound in the side of Logan’s head was still bleeding, a slow seepage around the homemade bandages. Logan was awake. His chest rose and fell against the wide carpenter’s belt attempting to hold him in place. A woozy black swastika poked out from underneath the bandages on his head.
“Um, Mr. Chatterton, I just came by to check on Logan,” Moses said.
Mr. Chatterton was humming to himself. He held a scalpel in his hand; the same one he’d used on his wife’s leg the winter before. It was an old breadknife he had modified in the garage.
“Moses. Moses Moon. Hold on one second.”
“What did you do to Logan?” Moses asked.
“Nothing drastic, yet. Just removed some of the debris the silly nurses at St. Joe’s couldn’t get out of the wound. You’d be surprised how dirty someone’s boot can be. The amount of filth we carry around on our persons is quite astronomical — that is, when you look at it on a molecular level. What you might call the nitty gritty.”
“Molecular?”
“Yes, Moses. Logan is going to be fine, but I’ve spoken to his mother about removing those awful tattoos on his head. Would you like something to drink?”
He smiled and pushed his glasses up.
“We’ll have to go upstairs for that. I think all we have is water, and maybe some Kool-Aid. Now, back when this was my father’s house, and this was years ago…”
Mr. Chatterton’s veined hand propelled Moses up the stairs, farther and farther away from Logan’s breath, which rose and fell in gaps before disappearing as the basement door closed behind them. The light in the kitchen was dim. Mr. Chatterton turned on the tap but kept on talking. Moses stared at the hand-drawn diagrams stapled to the mauve wall above the cupboards. A woman’s hand. A child’s foot. Each piece was detailed with small letters, the lines slightly slanted, the ruler slipping in the artist’s trembling, veined hands.
“Yes, my father. His house, you know…and well, he wasn’t a very nice man,” Mr. Chatterton said. “In fact, he had quite a few problems. And he always brought them home.”
Moses tried to drink the water quickly. Mr. Chatterton poured him another glass.
7
Jamie Garrison knew he’d made a mistake when Connor Condon began to thrash around inside the plastic Kmart bag. The kid looked like a fish, his big mouth puffing out and pulling in the plastic, his lips fat and purple. Jamie saw Connor’s eyes staring back at him in the window. He could see the boy’s skin slowly changing color, the muscles in his neck straining to yank the plastic off his face.
Jamie didn’t stop though. He just ground his teeth together and pulled tighter while the ninth-graders near the front took up a chant of condom, condom, condom, condom…their voices bounced between the syllables. The bus driver wasn’t even looking, her eyes burning into the back of a stalled driver’s head, her horn blaring at the green Chevy that refused to move from the turning lane. Brock was in the seat beside Jamie and leading the chant with his hands in the air, his mouth dangling open as it always did, his leather jacket reeking of cat piss. Brock flicked his wrists like a maestro and the chant rose.
Jamie kept his eyes on the scummy window and watched Connor’s head slowly nod itself into a blank stare. It was then the fear struck, that this little piece of shit might not wake up, that this little pimply ass in track pants and a Ghostbusters T-shirt might never open his eyes again. Jamie took Connor’s head and bashed it hard against the window again and again until the handle on the bag snapped. Brock and a bunch of the other kids laughed and said it sounded hollow, like a fucking coconut, man. The condom chant receded and then died out altogether.
Every few weeks they would grow tired of tormenting Connor, forgo all the condoms filled with condiments and the permanent markers they used to draw on his face. Jamie’s favourite was the Fu Manchu they gave him for Thanksgiving. Brock used a brown marker he stole from his remedial art class. But then the kid would have to go and do something stupid, start singing the Cheez Whiz song or bring his GI Joes on the bus like it was show and tell. Without fail, Connor Condom would always find a way to draw a larger target on his back, an ever-expanding circle. The longer the gap between his humiliations, the bigger the target would grow, until every eye in the hall seethed at his presence. Teachers looked the other way or smiled behind their attendance sheets. Bets were made on when exactly he would kill himself.