by Jeff Klima
"I think we're gonna need a bigger boat," I quipped to Dirk, but he didn't comprehend the reference. We had budgeted for three roll-offs, and one of them might have been enough to take care of what was in the backyard alone.
I would worry about that later, though. For the moment, I was keen on tackling the house. I had a comfortable director's chair set on the lawn under an E-Z Up canopy to keep the sun off me, but for the initial breakthrough I was determined to be in on the action.
Arming Kool, the smallest of the group, with a snow shovel and a pair of work gloves, the rest of us pushed on the front door, inching it open enough to slide him through. He had to stand at a hilarious incline on the sloping trash pile, careful not to sink into its boggy midst. Once inside, he used the snow shovel and his hands to scoop what trash he could away from the front door. Quickly I grew bored, though, and returned to the comfort of my chair, where I decided to employ a "Sorcerer's Apprentice" style of leadership.
It wasn't long before Doug brought out the first intact item: a surprisingly decent clock radio, unused and still in its original box. Not sure what to do, I consulted Dirk. He, too, was surprised at finding something of worth and commanded that the workers put all items of potential value off to the side. We'd consult the Public Guardian's office about the findings after the completion of the job.
Shortly thereafter, amid barrels full of trash, several more clock radios came out, also in original packaging. A blender was next, unused, and then another, cheaper clock radio. Then more kitchen items followed. The stack of valuable items was proportionately impressive to the trash removed.
We'd started the job promptly at 8:00 a.m., and by about 9:30 a.m. the first shark had arrived. She was an old lady who had the look of one of those Bewitched neighbor types with mounds of dyed hair, and she was being led around by a small dog on a large leash. She picked her dog up without realizing it was attempting to pee on the lawn and then dangled it aloft so that it could finish its business.
"Thank Jesus, you're cleaning out the Steward house," she said.
"The Steward house?" I inquired casually. I didn't know the backstory on the place, but I wanted to.
"Of course, most everyone around here calls it the Sewer House. Is it horrible inside?"
"It's worse than horrible," I confirmed to her immense delight. "What happened to it?"
"Oh, I don't know too much about it really. I've heard rumors. The guy used to beat his mother…She slept out in one of the cars. For two years she slept in a car, can you believe that?"
Over the course of the day, various well-wishers and gawkers alike came to give me their version of the story on the Sewer House. It seemed that a man and his wife owned several properties in the area and did fairly well for themselves. The two of them lived in the nefarious house in the 1980s with their son, a teenaged burnout and pill popper. When the husband died, the mother and son moved to another of their properties and rented the house out to a large family. The family kept the place nice and was liked by the community, but the owner's son wanted a place of his own.
His mother evicted the family and let the son move in. All night, the son would ride his bike around the neighborhood, threatening neighbors and making their kids uneasy. The mother and her son were both packrats, and by then the mother had made a mess of the house she was living in, so the county stepped in and kicked her out.
She and her son then moved large amounts of the trash from the one house into the corner house, adding trash to more trash. When the son filled up the bathroom with refuse, he eventually began pissing and shitting in bottles. When he got tired of doing that, he began to use one of the bedrooms as a toilet.
I had heard this from one of the county caseworkers as well, so I knew it to be the truth. And what was worse was that although we couldn't actually access the room yet, we knew which one it was.
The son didn't like living with his mother, so he beat her a lot. He was on crystal meth most of the time and had taken to threatening his neighbors with a pellet gun and then darting back into the mess of his house, crawling over the piles like a rat. The neighbors would call the police, but there wasn't much to be done about it.
The son made his mother live in the dirty station wagon, sleeping upright in the driver's seat. She was a big woman and developed bedsores all over her body, not to mention what the insects living in the filth must have done to her. One day the son beat his mother so badly that she had a black eye and was sitting on the sidewalk crying. A woman from a different neighborhood drove by, took pity on the mom, and drove her to the hospital. There, the old woman told the police about her son. They went to the house, called him outside, and arrested him.
That night, the mother told her savior that she had a large amount of money in a jar sitting inside the house. The neighbor woman went and retrieved the jar, which contained around fifty thousand dollars, and turned it over to the police. The police almost arrested her for doing it. Turns out you can't just break into people's houses to retrieve jars of money from their trash piles. Who knew?
When the county found out about the condition of the house, they seized it, intending to liquidate the assets, recoup their investments (us, among other costs), and put the remaining money into a care fund for the mother's well-being.
The son, finally released from jail, had an injunction against him to keep him from going back to the house. For the time being he was homeless, living on the street in a neighboring city.
By the time I called a halt on the first day, I knew that we were going to take a beating in the numbers part of the project. It was no surprise why we'd won the bid—we had no idea what we were doing and had underbid everyone else, probably by a lot. We'd already completely filled the dumpster, and we weren't even finished with the living room.
But by then the "loot" had also piled up handsomely. In addition to numerous pairs of new shoes (size 9), several more kitchen appliances, more clock radios, a brand-new black-and-white TV, and several stereos, we found a brand-new electric guitar, also in its original box and still wrapped in its packing material. When the men pulled that out of the house, I tried to look nonplussed. I had always wanted an electric guitar, and it would look great sitting next to my new bed frame.
My guys asked if they might be able to keep some of the stuff, and once more I deferred to Dirk. He suggested that they could take some of the smaller crap they'd amassed as long as the big-ticket good stuff went into our storage to hold for the Public Guardian's office. When the big-ticket items were delivered to Dirk's garage that night, the pile was short one electric guitar. Dirk was cool with that and asked if there was anything that he might've liked from the house. I told him I'd keep my eyes open.
That night, I laid in bed, strumming my guitar to the envy of my frat bros. Sure it wasn't as impressive without an amplifier to plug it into or any knowledge of how to play it, but for the first time in months, Jeff the old loser was noteworthy again.
My new acquisition was made all the sweeter the next day when my crew pulled out of the trash a new amplifier and a carrying case for the guitar, as well as a bag containing the brand-new picks, whammy bar, and an instruction manual on how to play an electric guitar. The Sewer House was like Christmas. Doug took all the shoes, and he and Kool fought over the lower-end kitchen stuff and clothes pulled out with the tags still on them.
* * *
While the house was certainly full of an incomprehensible amount of pure trash, feces, and spider webs, it also yielded a wealth of awesome toys. New high-end bike frames came out, two brand-new drum sets (I already owned a perfectly good one of those), several more stereos, and more TVs, not to mention all manner of electric tools. We kept what we thought the Public Guardian would want and gave the rest to the crew to take home. Everybody was coming out a winner except our business.
On the third day, we had used our allotted dumpster money and still were nowhere near finished. We also had only budgeted to pay the crew for three days of work, so anyt
hing more was going to start eating into our profit margins. The two Mexicans had to leave the project, as they'd been contracted elsewhere, and I had a two-person hole to fill in my crew. Enter Mark and Kim.
Mark was a frat bro of mine. He'd come in a couple years before me but was still a few years younger, and Kim was his girlfriend. They were an odd pair, but they wanted the work. Well, Kim wanted the work. She was a morbid sort and had eaten up all the stories I had told her about the Sewer House. She was begging to work on it, and when I needed two people, she and Mark jumped aboard.
It was a good and bad decision on my part. The good part was that Kim was so eager for my acceptance that she kept an eye on the crew, making sure that nothing shady was going on inside the house. The bad part was that she and Mark were more eager to explore the trash piles and gossip with the neighbors than work. Still, it was because of her that we found the cash.
I was sitting in my chair, stewing in my own loathing for the project, when Kim marched out with a bag full of wrinkly green money. Glancing into the bag, I was shocked to see that the majority of the money was twenties, but several fifties and hundred-dollar bills were in there as well. I could scarcely believe it. The money looked as if it had simply been forgotten and left in the bag for years.
Throughout the day, more money came out—more fifties, more hundreds, more twenties, and large bags of ones and fives. Out next was an impossibly heavy bowling bag without a ball in it but stocked full of coins. It was so weighty that the handle almost tore off when Kim walked out with it.
Once again I called Dirk, and his immediate suggestion was to put all the money into the cab of his truck and make sure none of the neighbors saw it…particularly not "the witch." The neighbor with the little dog had explained "the witch" to me over successive mornings. The witch was a woman who lived in the house directly across the street from the Sewer House and was the only one in the neighborhood who considered the son a friend. I was told I'd meet up with her eventually.
* * *
My first run-in with the witch came on our third day. I was sitting in my chair, keeping watch over the accumulating house treasures, when she came stalking up onto the lawn.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" she cried, crazy and furious.
"We're working in conjunction with the county to remediate this property," I said, puffing up like a bullfrog. The bowling bag, which now contained all the loot, was sitting beside my chair. Discreetly, I pushed the flaps closed.
She wasn't deterred by my sense of presence. "I'm fine with what you're doing," she said, backing down only slightly. "But a lot of this stuff is mine," she said, heading for the stacks of stereos and other goods. Bending, she began to gather things at random from the pile and loading her arms.
"Drop it," I barked, well aware from the other neighbors that she might attempt something like that. She did, letting the merchandise tumble to the ground. She turned to face me, and I could see why the others called her a witch. Her dark hair was stringy and hung about her face like dying lengths of grass, and her skin was unnaturally wrinkled. She looked like she was an old lady, but there were patches in her thin face where she looked as if she was in her forties and all the drinking and smoking she'd likely done in her life had pickled her prematurely.
"You know, I'm friends with Gary, the son," she said with an edge to her voice that conveyed a threat. "He has a prepaid cell phone, and he calls me. Don't think he doesn't know what is going on."
"If he comes here, it's my understanding that he'll be arrested. So let's hope that he has the good sense not to. And if you keep threatening me, well…" I countered.
"I'm not threatening you," she cowed instantly, dropping the edge in her voice and adopting one of shocked surprise. "Personally, I say good for you guys. He needed to be evicted. You know there's all kinds of rotting meat in there? Just perfectly good steaks that he'd buy and leave out on the counter!"
After that she became my best pal, popping over throughout the day, always smoking a cigarette and trying her sneaky small talk to ascertain if I knew whether there was any money in the house.
"I heard there was, but some woman took it to the police," I'd say, shrugging.
"You knew about that, huh?" the witch said slyly, as if it were a trap, only to ask again hours later.
At the day's end, Dirk and I conferred and decided that we needed to just suck it up and start eating our costs. The Sewer House would be a learning lesson that we did for free. I wasn't happy about that decision whatsoever, as I had spent several days out there sitting around, which, when you have a bad back, is still hard work. Many more days and dumpsters would be necessary to complete the project, but that didn't seem to matter to Dirk. He wasn't the one out there doing it.
On the fourth day we finally broached the kitchen and the room that had been used as a toilet. First forty-odd three-liter bottles of piss, reduced to the flat, stale color of swamp water, were pulled from the house, the workers all carrying them extended from their bodies, repulsed. The feces content of the room had been reduced to a claylike consistency of dark black bricks.
Kool, wearing a painter's mask over his face, bravely dove into the midst of it, perhaps not comprehending what it was, and scooped it into a rolling trash can with his snow shovel. The others, too grossed out to even watch, concentrated on the kitchen and a large family room.
The witch had been right about the steaks, as large melted puddles of green liquid with familiar-looking T-bones in the middle had to be chipped off the counter. It was an interesting experience for the crew, because the level of trash in the kitchen was flush with the counters, and they had to stand on the Formica tops to push any of the trash down and out into the hallway.
The house was built like a swastika, with four arms extending outward from a fixed central hall. While all of the rooms had large, cumbersome beds, it was clear that none had been used, as they were all upended and used to brace up more trash. Clearly the son had favored sleeping in the trash, curled in the fetal position into one of the piles.
* * *
The finding of money, even money that they couldn't have, had reenergized the crew, and they eagerly tore into the remaining wreckage, searching through every nook and cranny. I tried to tell them to ignore the money and concentrate on getting the work done, but when Doug brought out an old fan still in its box and found nearly a thousand dollars stuffed along the inside edge, it made things tough.
The presence of rat poop sprinkled over the entirety of the house, and spiders that would dart deeper into piles as they were unearthed, made everyone extra cautious. No living rats were actually found, although several mummified skeletons, their tiny limbs splayed outward as they'd been crushed under the rubble, were taken out of the house and subsequently tossed into the dumpsters like rat Frisbees.
It was all quite a show, and the neighbors continued to stop by with their opinions and stories. A highlight came when the corpses of two medium-size dogs were found buried in the trash, sending a ripple of new speculation through the accumulated crowds. One dog, mostly bones, was found in the compacted piles of the fireplace; the other was midway up a peak in the family room and had a bit more meat still attached to it.
Nobody, least of all me, was interested in giving them a good Christian burial, and so they, too, went into the trash. Several neighbors confirmed that the son had had two German shepherds living with him for a while, but the neighbors had all stopped hearing them bark a few years back.
On the fourth day we had a new dumpster brought out once again, and more money was slashed from our profits, but the day would still yield some exciting finds. First the son's pellet gun was found, the one he'd used to become the scourge of the neighborhood, and it set off a frenzy with my workers. They were all certain that it was a real gun and told all the available neighbors that whenever a smoke break was called.
I finally had to point out that it was only a pellet gun, but still the hype was there and only added to
the excitement when two real guns were found. The rifles were both covered in rusty patches that resembled an STD, and under Dirk's advisement we called the local police to pick them up. The arriving police laughed. They knew all about the Steward boy and the legacy of the house. Police presence on the street just made the spectacle grander, and with the presence of the erected E-Z Up shade, the Sewer House had taken on the appearance of a circus.
By the fifth day in the wreck, Dirk called me in for an emergency meeting. We were hoping to have all the trash excavated by the sixth day, but our cash supply had been tapped. We had no money and had resorted to paying the workers with the mulched bills pulled from the house. We didn't tell them that we were doing so, but it had to have been obvious, what with the stained, wrinkled bills devoid of all moisture and most of their color.
Each day I would make an envelope for each person and hand them their allotment of cash while keeping track of the money put out so we could replace it later. We'd brought Kim and Mark in at twelve an hour, and we'd keep Doug at fourteen dollars an hour if he could get Kool to accept twelve dollars an hour as well. It was all part of the little maneuvering we had done to keep us in the black. But by the fifth day we were in trouble.