Joe

by Larry Brown

  The faces around the fire were pinched, the eyes a little big, a little dazed with hunger. They sat and watched the blaze burn the paper off the cans. When the beans began to sizzle, the woman stooped painfully on her bad hip and reached for the cans with a rag wrapped around her hand. Clotted strings of hair hung from her head. She took five paper plates, set them out on the ground, and dumped the beans onto them, shaking them as she went, the way a person might put out dog food for a pet. She dumped the largest portion into the plate intended for the old man.

  The breadwinner was sitting crosslegged on the ravaged grass, the whiskey upright in the hole his legs formed. He was weaving a home-rolled cigarette back and forth from his lips, eyes bleary, red as fire. He was more than a little drunk. His head and chest would slump forward, then he’d jerk erect, his eyes sleepy. Grimed and furtive hands reached out for the plates quietly, took them back and drew away from the fire into darker regions of the yard. The old woman took two small bites and then rose and scraped the rest of her food into the boy’s plate.

  The fire grew dimmer. The plate of beans before the old man steamed but he didn’t notice. A candlefly bored crazily in out of the night and landed in the hot sauce, struggled briefly and was still. The old man’s head went lower and lower onto his chest until the only thing they could see was the stained gray hat over the bib of his overalls. He snuffled, made some noise. His chest rose and fell. They watched him like wolves. The fire cracked and popped and white bits of ash fell away from the tree limbs burning in the coals. Sparks rose fragile and dying, orange as coon eyes in the gloom. The ash crumbled and the fading light threw darker shadows still. The old man toppled over slowly, a bit at a time like a rotten tree giving way, until the whiskey lay spilling between his legs. They watched him for a few minutes and then they got up and went to the fire and took his plate and carried it away into the dark.

  Noon. The field bordering the road lay baking beneath a white sun, pale green rows of little plants that merged far away. The earth seemed to be smoking and it had no color, so dry was it, as if it had never known rain. It seemed dead as old bones. Down at the south end of the bean patch a tiny blue tractor was turning and coming back. It struggled against the immense flat landscape, crawling at what seemed an inch at a time, the dry soil not folding but merely breaking into dust across the plows. The old man scowled up at the blistering sky.

  “Throw the rest of em out,” he said.

  The green metal Dumpster he stood beside was positioned off the blacktop on a bed of pit-run gravel as hard as concrete. The county workmen had bolstered up the shoulder of the highway and widened it, and bits of ground glass lay everywhere.

  The boy was standing inside the rusty iron bin. He picked up another black garbage sack and slit it open with a knife; then, leaning toward the open door, mired to the knees in refuse, he dumped it out. A rain of cast-off matter cascaded: wet beer cans, egg shells, a half-pint whiskey bottle, cigarette butts and blowing ash. Unidentifiable bits of ruined fruit and fly-specked vegetables. Here a half-chewed weiner that a dog or a small child had worked over. All of it covered with wet coffee grounds. The old man bent over, pawing through it. He lifted three Diet Coke cans and fourteen Old Milwaukee cans from the rubble and put them into his tow sack.

  “Ain’t you gonna mash em?” the boy said.

  Wade made a dismissive gesture with his hand. The boy bent to the piles of sacks behind him. He picked up another one and said, “If you’d mash em it’d make more room.”

  The old man just grunted. Each time he bent over, the boy could see a patch of loose belly flesh, pink and soft, in the gap where his overalls buttoned on the side. He tottered light-headed and delirious with hunger over mounds of garbage inside the smoked-up walls. He moved a newspaper. Green bottleflies swarmed up off a stringer of bream that somebody had thrown into the Dumpster. The fish were bloated, their eyes solid white. Their bellies were pale and their scales were gray. His stomach heaved but there was nothing to come up.

  “Hurry up,” the old man said.

  The boy bent once more to his work. He knew his father was wanting to finish and get away from the road quickly, but before they had the tow sack half full, a pickup appeared far down the road. He raised himself up.

  “Who is it?” he said.

  “I don’t know. You got any more in there?”

  He didn’t answer, only stood watching apprehensively as the vehicle grew nearer and slowed. They looked at each other and Wade said: “Get outa there.”

  Gary climbed down from the Dumpster, holding onto the door. The pickup had slowed to a crawl and now a shield emblazoned on the door appeared, a county emblem like a Maltese cross. The truck stopped and the driver shut the motor off. They waited. A tall man with brown hair and khaki clothes got out. He didn’t say anything at first, only studied them as if they were errant children whose unacceptable behavior he had suffered far past reason.

  “Hidy,” Wade said. “How you?”

  The man put his hands on his hips and walked over to the Dumpster. He looked inside and shook his head.

  “You don’t care for us gettin these cans, do you? We didn’t figger nobody wanted em.”

  The man kicked at the piles of trash they’d thrown on the ground, nudging at the mess with his toe as if he’d lost something in that stinking heap of offal. Then he looked up.

  “You people are unbelievable,” he said. “You really are.” He kicked at the stuff again. “What do you think this Dumpster’s for?”

  “We ain’t hurtin nothin,” the old man said. “We just after these cans. Who are you, anyway?”

  The man stared hard at him. “By God, I’m Don Shelby. I’m the supervisor of this beat. Who in the fuck are you?”

  Wade Jones toed among the mosaic of ground glass and said nothing.

  “Look at this mess,” the man said. “Who do you think’s going to clean it up? When we had a dump here and kept it bulldozed you wouldn’t even drive down to the end to throw it out. And now I’ll be goddamned if you’re not throwing it out of the Dumpsters.” He looked at Gary. “Do you know you can get put in jail for this?”

  “Nosir,” he said. He was wondering if he should run for it. The woods were pretty close.

  “Well, by God, you can. It’s a five-hundred-dollar fine for littering. Have you got five hundred dollars?”

  “Nosir. I ain’t.”

  “Well, that’s what it would cost you. It’s a state law.” He looked at the pile of trash again as if he couldn’t believe it was still there. “My hands can’t run over here every fifteen minutes and pick this stuff up. They’ve got other things to do. Now you two pick up every bit of this mess and put it back where you got it. And I’m gonna stand here and watch you.”

  “Say you the supervisor?” said Wade.

  “Damn right.”

  “But you ain’t the law,” he said doubtfully.

  Shelby stepped up until he was in the old man’s face. “Naw, I ain’t the law. Smart son of a bitch. But I got a radio in that truck. And if you don’t pick this shit up in the next five minutes I’ll call the law out here and you can smart off to them.”

  Wade blinked. “Come on, boy.” He nudged him. “Get down here and start pickin this stuff up. I told you not to make all this mess.”

  Gary bent and picked up an armload. “Ain’t you gonna help me?” he said.

  “I’m helpin,” Wade said, tossing in a soup can, a rag, an empty potato chip bag. Nothing too heavy. A cereal box, a paper, an egg carton.

  “I want it just as clean as it was before,” Shelby said. He watched Gary for a bit, watched him bending over trying to pick up the myriad scattered lumps of trash. “Wait a minute,” he said. He walked back to his truck and reached into the bed and brought out a new shovel with the price tag still attached. “Here,” he said. “Use this.”

  “Yessir,” Gary said. He started scooping. Wade stopped and raised one side of his hat, scratching at his head. He leaned back on the hood of th
e truck, the limp sack of cans tinkling faintly. He drew a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. The man on the tractor was coming alongside them in the field and he had his head bent to see the wheel in the row. He and his machine were engulfed in dust, the thin silt rolling up on the tires and pouring like water off the cleats. They watched him pass, and as he came by he lifted a hand in greeting. The blades of the plow where they cut the earth were polished bright as chrome, rising and falling in the lifeless dust and the steady chug of the tractor echoing endlessly over the silence against the scrape of the shovel.

  “He wants it clean, now,” the old man said.

  Gary nodded and kept at it. Shelby looked at his watch. The boy was pushing small piles of rubbish together, pushing them up against the wall of the Dumpster and using his hand to get it all in the shovel.

  “I guess that’ll do,” Shelby said. Gary straightened and looked at him and then looked at this father. Wade nodded. The supervisor held out his hand for the shovel and the boy gave it to him.

  “I don’t want to see this happen any more,” he said. He tossed the shovel into the bed of the truck and it hit with a loud bong. He waited for Wade to unlean himself from his hood.

  “My hands has got enough to do as it is. If you want cans you better get out and pick em up off the side of the road. That’s where most of em’s at anyway.”

  “Yessir,” Gary said. Wade had his hands on his hips and was looking around like somebody deaf.

  Shelby opened his door and stood with one hand on it, fixing them with a cold stare, each in turn. “I keep my eye on these things,” he said. “I come by here just about every day.”

  Wade wouldn’t even look at him.

  “All right,” he said. “You been told.”

  He got into the truck and cranked it and pulled away. They stood beside the Dumpster and watched him go up the road slowly, then pull off to the side and turn around. He was doing forty by the time he came by them again. They waved. He didn’t. He went down the highway out of sight and finally even the sound of his tires vanished. It was hot and still where they stood, and the tractor was turning to make another pass.

  “All right,” Wade said. “He’s gone. Get back up in there.”

  “What if he comes back?”

  “He ain’t comin back. It’s dinnertime.”

  “He might, though. He might come back after while to see if we still here.”

  “You hear what I said?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then do like I told you.”

  “We done got just about all the cans,” he said, but he was already climbing back up through the door.

  A pattern emerged, one they discovered by employing a system of regular reconnaissance. The Dumpsters were emptied on Tuesdays and Fridays, which left the other five days of the week for harvesting the depths of them. They changed their salvage operations to night, covered safely by the cloak of darkness. Parts of each day were given over to walking along the sides of the highways, the boy down in the ditches throwing the cans up onto the road, the old man shuffling along and stuffing the sack. Often he would have to sit down and rest, and the boy would range far ahead and come back with his arms laden and his own sack full. They dumped the cans in a pile beside the house, and they would stand sometimes and quietly contemplate their growing wealth.

  The old man made a trip to town one day, hitching a ride with a farmer who was going to the feed mill in a pickup. The farmer had a load of shelled corn, big sacks of it that swirled chaff into the face of the rider where he sat nodding in the back end.

  When the truck stopped, he roused himself and got out in front of a barnlike building, its walls patched over with roofing tin and Purina signs. A rutted parking lot of gravel was littered with rusted farm implements, their moving parts frozen solid with corrosion and decorated with ten or fifteen cats. He climbed down from the back as the farmer came around.

  “I sure thank you for the ride,” he said. “Is it much further to town?”

  The farmer was a man in denim pants and a T-shirt, a busy man hurrying toward his feed. “It’s bout a mile,” he said, pointing up the road with his chin.

  Wade nodded. He looked, his eyes taking in the searing strip of asphalt lined with trees standing still under no breath of air and the sun overhead like a white coin in the sky. The farmer started lifting the sacks out and handing them across to a black man who had come silently from the depths of the shadows inside the building pushing a heavy two-wheeled cart.

  “Well, listen,” Wade said. He put a somber look on his face. The farmer in the truck stopped with both hands on the sewn ears of a sack and regarded him, the muscles in his forearms standing up like little ropes.

  “You couldn’t loan me a dollar or two, could you? I got a sick youngun at home and I done called about the medicine. They said it was five dollars and somethin and I ain’t got but four dollars.”

  “A dollar?”

  “Yessir. A dollar or two. I hate to ask you after I done caught a ride and all with you but she sure needs that medicine.” He had one hand on the sideboards of the truck and his upturned face looked weak and ashamed.

  “Why, hell,” the farmer said, and looked ashamed himself. “Feller, I don’t even know you.”

  “That’s all right,” the old man said quickly. “That’s okay. I thank you for the ride anyway.” He turned away and had taken but three steps when the farmer called out to him.

  “Hey. Wait a minute.”

  He turned. “Yessir,” he said. Waiting.

  “Hell. Come back here a minute. You didn’t say nothin about you had a sick youngun.”

  Wade scuffed his shoes among the little stones.

  “I just hated to,” he said. “You’s good enough to give me a ride and all. I hated to ask you for anything else.”

  The farmer in the truck and the black man on the dock were watching him. The black man pulled the cart back and turned it and pushed it away into the dim stacks of feed and disappeared. The farmer got down from the truck and dusted his hands off. He approached his rider with a hurt look, his eyes downcast.

  “Is she bad sick?” he said.

  “Well. She stays sick pretty much. Been sick all her life.”

  The farmer nodded and rubbed his chin with a finger.

  “How old is she?”

  “She’s four years old. Course the doctor’s always sayin he’s surprised she’s lived this long. They said at first she would never live this long.” He lifted his head and looked off into the distance, shaking his head slightly in awe. “She don’t never complain, though. Just to look at her you’d never think they’s nothin wrong with her.”

  “Well, Lord,” the farmer said softly. “I got a granddaughter four years old.” He had one hand in his back pocket and one hand rubbing his lower lip in indecision. It didn’t take him long. He pulled out his billfold and opened it. He took some money out and thrust it at the old man as if it were burning his fingers.

  “Take this,” he said. “She might need somethin else.”

  Wade didn’t look at the money but shook his head firmly. “I couldn’t take that,” he said. “I can’t take that.”

  The farmer shook the money at him. “Go on,” he said. “Hell fire. Take it.”

  “I sure hate to, mister. You done been so good already.”

  The farmer walked close and stuffed the money down in the old man’s pocket. Wade stood with his head down, shaking it. He did that for about a minute. Then he turned and took five steps and stopped and looked back. The farmer was standing in the gravel watching him, his face touched with compassion or maybe something else.

  “I got a bunch of stuff to do here or I’d carry you on into town,” he said, and he seemed still ashamed. “But if I’m here when you come back by I’ll be proud to give you a ride back home.”

  “I thank you,” Wade said. “I reckon I better get on uptown and see about that medicine.”

  “Well. I hope your youngun gets all
right,” the farmer said softly.

  The old man nodded and walked away.

  In the air-conditioned cool of the supermarket he plucked a small bunch of grapes from the produce stand and had them all in his mouth by the time he got to the peanut butter. Squatting against the shining jars of jelly, he worked his mouth stealthily, firing the seeds down between his feet into a razored-open carton that he pulled from beneath the shelves. He went up front and got a cart and loaded the little section in the rear with dented cans of Vienna sausage and purple hull peas from a crate of damaged goods marked down to quarter price. He was a careful shopper, a bargain hunter adding figures in his head, carrying the ones. Like a blank-eyed countryman, he stopped in the middle of the aisle with his face up, as if the computations he performed so swiftly in his mind were written on the ceiling panels. He paused beside the dairy case, idly inspecting the merchandise, noting with disbelief the price of real butter. When no one was looking he opened a plastic half-pint of grape juice from the shelf and poured it down his throat, placing the empty carton behind the full ones. A few feet away, a boy in a green apron came pushing out from the double metal doors that led to the back. He got a quick glimpse of baled flour tiered to the roof, dog food on skids, block walls against which pallets of beer and soft drinks were neatly arrayed. He pushed his cart down to the meat case and examined the chickens and pork chops. Leg quarters were on sale for twenty-nine cents a pound but he passed them by. He picked up a package of sliced smoked picnic ham, the meat so brown and delicately marbled, the cooked hub of sawn bone in the middle. It was $6.97 for eight slices. He dropped it in his cart. Through the glass he could see a great hanging side of beef on a hook and butchers at work around tables. There was a button to summon the meatcutters set into the front of the case, and he pushed his cart down to it and pressed it with his finger, watching them. Heads looked up, looked back down. A young black man with a white paper cap on his head stared at him with thinly veiled disgust and wiped his hands on a paper towel before coming out to the front. He bent over the meat case and rearranged sirloin steaks and chuck roasts as he worked his way down to this customer.