Free Waste by Andrew F. Sullivan Page A

were damp to the touch.
    â€œI’m a bit of a farmer,” the Lorax said. “I always got my boots on.”
    Jamie noticed the small grey bulbs pushing through the manure under the tarps and the weak daylight punched through the ceiling in scattered patches.
    â€œThe holes work better in the summer months, when I grow bud. I just did my first harvest in here. The electrical bills are crazy, but I’m not paying them. That whole family just has a lawyer footing the bill for this place every month while they tear each other to shreds. Really nasty stuff. I think it might have been in the paper once.” The Lorax laughed. “If they ever bothered to come down here and check out some of the old man’s properties, they’d realize they were just fighting over who got a larger slice of the cow pie.”
    â€œAnd then you’d be up shit creek.”
    â€œI’m very familiar with that creek. That mess you saw inside?” the Lorax said. “Vicious mothers makin’ sure I stay far up that creek. You ever want to eat any of these?”
    The pale blue walls of the operating chamber glowed around the two of them. A painting of a fox and her pups stood against the wall in the corner. Someone had smashed its glass case and drawn a top hat on the fox. The Lorax pushed a bundle of mushrooms into Jamie’s face.
    â€œEat that shit? All I want is some Vicodin, Percocet or something. Maybe some of the reds.”
    The Lorax laughed and clacked his dentures in his mouth. He turned and climbed back through the gaping hole into the hobby shop. Jamie followed. One hundred special-edition Darth Vader models with hologram cards attached stared back at them from the pockmarked floor. All fake duplicates shipped directly from Mumbai. All gleaming black.
    The smell of the pigs still clung to Jamie’s nose. “So, you’ve got it or not?”
    â€œStraight from Quebec. That’s the best place to go get it,” the Lorax said. “A place where all they eat is gravy and each other. You know some of the early settlers were cannibals in New France? It’s true. They like to cut it out of the textbooks. Last time I made some joke about their priests and spent half my time talking myself out of a hole in the ground.”
    â€œA hole?”
    Jamie was barely listening now. His leg was starting to spasm with memories of the impact.
    â€œAn actual hole. They dug it and everything,” the Lorax said. “I’ve been partially fossilized. How many people can say that?”
    The Lorax pulled a plastic grocery bag filled with prescription bottles and loose pills out from underneath a counter covered in stickers, shards of glass, and chewed gum.
    â€œWe’ll go with twenty for now. On the house for a first-time customer.”
    Jamie watched the little stubby fingers counting out his pills one by one, pushing them into an old prescription bottle assigned to a Mrs. Wanda Chubbs of Burlington, Ontario.
    â€œI don’t know if I can just take this shit off you—like, gratis, you know?”
    â€œIt’s not a debt—it’s an investment.” The Lorax clacked his dentures again into a smile that only filled the right side of his mouth. Jamie looked around at the shattered display cases. There was a busted fan dangling from the ceiling and the cash register was cracked open on the floor.
    â€œI’ll take it. Was it like this when Brock came here? The mess?”
    â€œYou ever listen to ZZ Top?” the Lorax asked. “ZZ Top. Music?”
    â€œThey’re all right, I guess,” Jamie said.
    The Lorax pushed a children’s loot bag across to Jamie. It had a smiley clown face on the front. The smile was offset from the rest of its features, dripping off the face and into the white background. Jamie didn’t want to put it in his car.
    â€œWell these guys looked like two rogue agents of the mighty left hand of ZZ Top,” the Lorax