by Rob Heinze
Quentin remembered it now as he came back to the spot where they had dumped trash—the strange spot which was accessed through a beaten down track of crab-grass and soggy, sandy soil. Harshly angled trees, with branches like malformed limbs, spotted the landscape. They were the sort of trees that grew in wetland areas, the soil of which was not strong enough for the roots of big trees. Despite all he had done, the trees still grew in the soil, but not deep…they couldn’t grow deep.
He thought about that scare in the 1980s, thought how different it might had turned out for him had they been caught. He remembered how, after his boss told him to move all the stuff, he had thought: not a problem, it will take care of itself.
Quentin Warsaw had not lifted a single piece of garbage from that spot. He had done only one thing, and that was this: he had stopped putting new garbage there. Within two days, the tract of land had been empty and they had passed all their State inspections with flying colors.
Now he came into a copse of trees that formed a rough circle, their eerie angles like something made of a possessed child’s building blocks. There were a few random tires sticking out of the mud like black boils exposing only their heads and a wood piling, snapped in half, like the clawed finger of a buried monster. Had those items been just a few feet further into the “circle” surrounded by trees, Quentin knew they would not be there.
No one could look at the unassuming tract of soggy, undeveloped mud-mess and see anything remarkable about it. Even people who walked on it, feet pressing into the soft earth couldn’t begin to comprehend that which they were standing on. Could Quentin comprehend it? He knew the answer to that was a resounding “no”.
He only knew that it got rid of things, and it had made him a lot of money and new friends.
The strange, bare space was spotted here and there with crab-grass, reeds and tiny white pebbles. It had changed recently, a couple weeks just before The Swarm that Quentin would soon join, and Quentin was unsure why.
It had been a gift to Quentin, and though his association with it had started weirdly, it had grown even stranger when Cole Kensington discovered it.
Cole had been working at the Public Works in the late eighties, he having started a couple years after Quentin. Cole was a young guy with long hair and metal bracelets around his wrists. He favored music like Iron Maiden and Megadeath and Metallica and other metal bands that were popular in the 1980s. He talked a lot about how he hated all the Madonna pop-shit, and Quentin could have cared less: he listened to want sounded good to his ears and didn’t care about who sang it. Cole had gotten the job because his father had been mayor, though his term had come to an end after it all happened. That was also okay with Quentin, because Mayor Kensington had been a stumbling, bumbling fool trying to limit the tourism on Bay Isle, which would have wrecked the local’s existence. Still, there was a very tiny portion of his heart that felt empathic and guilty when Mayor Kensington had announced his resignation, eyes shimmery as they filled with fluid and he then—as the speech ended—exploding into a torrent of tears. Quentin had even toyed with the idea of telling Mayor Kensington that he knew what had happened to his son, but how could he? Who would believe it? It had taken Quentin multiple times of seeing it to believe it was real.
Besides, in the otherwise careless and random cycle of events known as life, something had finally happened to Quentin that was extraordinary, and for fuck’s sake, Quentin meant to keep it his.
Quentin had come to work early on the day Cole found out about the unassuming piece of land, his head aching from the sinus pressure. He hadn’t wanted to work. He had wanted to stay home on the couch, watching old movies and TV all day, drinking coffee laced with Bailey’s. By lunch time, his headache had doubled, and he swallowed Advil by the handful to keep the ache and dizziness at bay. It had worked fairly well. He had a new load of junk to dispose of, and the only time to dispose of it was night. The stuff was in his van at home. He was anxious to get it off-loaded, for he had more junk to collect over the weekend. It was a pretty nice side-business, his only expense the gasoline and two Mexicans he picked up in front of the bus stop on Grand Avenue each Saturday and Sunday morning. Quentin had a few ads taken out in papers, careful not to use his name or other identifying item. After all, he did work at the town dump, and if it somehow got back to his supervisor that he had this side garbage disposal business, eyebrows might arch suspiciously. He couldn’t risk that; it was too great of a gift. He had named the business Junk-It, Inc. His tag-line was Junk-It…and Feed the Earth. He even took out an 800 number. Within a year, he was booked every weekend for four months. People had a lot of shit to get rid of, and no competitors could touch his pricing.
What with the price of land-fills…
That evening after work, Quentin had gone home, eaten a light dinner, and then packed into the van and drove it to the township Public Works. He never used the Mexicans to help with the actual disposal, only the pickups, and though this physically drained him, it was the only way it could be done. He could not have anyone knowing of his spot. He had come to the Public Work’s property under the light of a full moon, using his key to open the gate and pulling the van inside. He always felt the quick, ratchety way his heart beat during his outings; it was illegal and if caught, he would lose his job and his second job. Maybe go to jail for polluting? He wasn’t sure about that one.
He had come carefully down the road leading towards the spot. The van headlights had shown him the scraggly crab-grass and other reeds that brushed eagerly along his van, their motion somehow like that of fingers welcoming home with loving strokes. When he was close to the spot, he did a rough K-turn, his front wheel going into a bit of muck and he spinning it for a moment. The immediate area was always wet, and Quentin had gotten stuck plenty of times. He had gotten the van turned around and then reversed towards the edge of what he knew was the “dividing line” beyond which the magic happened. The van did not beep in reverse, for Quentin had wisely disabled the alarm by snipping the cable. Above the sky had shown down on him with full moonlight, the bloat of which was so great that Quentin had wondered if it would pop. The full moon was always the best time for him to get rid of the junk, for its supernatural lights turned the night into a blue-coated wonderland by which full visual acuity was possible. With the van in park, taillights shedding silent red glows onto his face, Quentin had started to unload the junk from the back of the van. He had hauled out a soggy carpet and let it flop to the ground. He had taken out a bicycle missing a front wheel, and thrown it into the circle. Here a bag of old, moth-eaten clothes. There a reclining chair with a large laceration exposing the yellowed cushion beneath. He had shoved it into the circle, panting, and then he had looked up to the blue moon and thereupon he had seen the face of it, homely, and Quentin knew that he had come home.
Home is where the heart is, he had thought randomly.
He had been half-way through the work, when he had heard the voices.
They were coming down the trail from the main part of the Public Work’s property. No one was supposed to have been there. No one should have been there. Quentin remembered how he had frozen—frozen like a goddamn deer hearing the click of a hunter’s gun from the trees. Holy Hell, he had imagined that moment for so long but he had never imagined a response, a way to extricate himself from the web he had woven himself into.
Hide.
That had been the first thought into his head. That was just what he did. He had dropped an old TV he was carrying, and he had taken off, sprinting, towards the tree line surrounding the circle—his circle—and goddamn if he wasn’t totally, royally fucked on this one. He was moving so quickly that he half-slid, half-stumbled to the visual safety behind a twisted tree trunk. Once behind the tree, he told himself that it didn’t matter, hidden or not: for on his van was a license-plate and that license-plate, when traced, belonged to one Quentin Warsaw.
He had stayed behind the tree, his heart coming up his throat, every part of his body s
haking…and he had waited.
And listened.
Soon enough the voices had come within earshot.
“What the hell is this?” A male voice. “Someone’s here.”
A female voice: “Cole, let’s go. Let’s go.”
Quentin’s mind, which had been bending under enormous pressure, suddenly released and wobbled as it settled back to a state of equilibrium like a piece of sheet metal. Now he remembered how stupid it had been to think everything was fine, and how stupid he had been to do what he did. Perhaps, in their concern, they might have left and not even taken his license plate numbers. After all, they had only been kids. But under the cast of the moon, Quentin’s mind had worked differently.
Cole, it’s Cole! Thank fucking God, I can talk to him.
“Yeah, let’s go,” Cole had said, his voice clearly uneasy.
“Hullo! Cole!”
Quentin had come out behind the tree, moving towards the parked van. The two intruders had been around the front.
“Who’s that?”
Quentin could see the two shapes in the darkness as he came around the van. They had been staring hard at him, unable to yet see his face.
“It’s Quentin.”
“Quentin? What are you doing?”
Quentin, who was just going to tell Cole he was getting rid of some stuff for the township, had not considered the out-of-normality of it all. From someone else’s viewpoint, anyway. How could he have? He had wanted things to stay the same, and when someone wants that so badly, how could they see anything but the false-reality they had imagined? It was like a burglar breaking and entering a house, and when the homeowner comes home, the thief says hello and asks to stay for dinner, hoping that it would somehow workout okay.
Quentin had come to stand in front of Cole and the girl with whom he had come. She was short, with black hair, and pale in the moonlight.
“Oh, just working a few extra hours,” Quentin had said. “Had to haul some stuff from Easterly Street. Goddamn bums throwing shit on that vacant lot we own there.”
In the blue light of the moon, Cole had looked to the pile in the circle, then to the half-filled van. Somewhere under the cover of his long hair had been a mind and that mind, not slow, had concluded that there was too much trash to have come from the vacant lot on Easterly Street.
“Okay,” Cole had said.
“Who’s your friend?”
“What?”
“Your friend here,” he had said. “What’s her name?”
“I don’t know,” Cole had said. “We’ll get going now, okay?”
Quentin had not expected this response. “What? Why? Everything’s okay.”
“Nah, we’re going to go now,” Cole had said again.
Cole and the girl had started to back away. Quentin, confused, had spread his hands as if to illustrate a question.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Quentin.”
“Cole, it’s just stuff from the township.”
“Why were you hiding?” The girl with Cole said.
“Shut-up!” Cole hissed at her. Then to Quentin he said: “It’s okay, I’ll see you.”
“Hiding?”
Now Quentin took steps forward, to follow them, unaware he was doing so, his feet moving independently of his mind, squishing on the soft ground.
“I wasn’t hiding,” he chuckled. “I had to pee, that’s all. Everything’s okay.”
“Okay, Quentin. I don’t care. We’re just going to go.”
“Cole, wait...”
“I don’t care, okay? Whatever.”
The damage had been done, Quentin knew, and he had seen his life unraveling like a string of yarn cast into a windy day.
He couldn’t let it happen.
He had taken another step forward, and the girl with Cole had turned and run, as if receiving a telepathic signal of his thought change or seeing some emotion come onto his face.
Ah, fuck, Quentin had thought, here we go.
Cole had delayed a little longer, and for that Quentin was thankful. Had Cole immediately taken off, Quentin was pretty sure it would have been a much different outcome. Quentin had dipped back into the van, started the engine, and sped after the two fleeing interlopers. Cole’s back came into view of the van. Quentin punched the gas petal, the van jerking forward. Cole tried to turn to the right and leap, knowing that he was going to be run down, but he was a second too late: the van clipped him on the rear right hip. All Quentin heard was a hollow clunk as it struck, spinning Cole in a complete circle, knowing that he had hit him but he not stopping because the girl was ahead, now out of the reeds and running across the bare gravel of the Public Work’s parking lot. She might have made it, too, but Quentin saw that she was running barefoot, having lost her flip-flops as she fled. That must be fucking her feet up, Quentin had thought. He had closed the distance to her, she looking back with wide eyes, trying to run at diagonals. Come on girl, Quentin could remember thinking, face me and jump out of the way at the last minute, like they do in the movies. Instead the girl had continued to run, laboring, her back to the inevitability of the approaching headlights. She had turned and looked over her right shoulder just as Quentin ran her down. The sound of her body clinking and banging on the van’s underside reminded Quentin sickly of stones being thrown at metal. He went forward until that noise stopped, then he turned the van around. He saw the mangled shape of the girl, who was somehow still moving. The sight of her crab-like body moving along the dirt was one that Quentin would never shed, and it would claim from him nights of peaceful sleep.
He pulled past her, just into the reeds, and stopped the van. He had gotten out to look for Cole. He had found him in the reeds, the grasses arched around his body as if to hold him captive. He was breathing hard, and when he heard Quentin’s footsteps, his breathing had increased.
“No! No! No!” he had repeated.
Quentin did not hear. He had grabbed Cole by the ankles and begun to pull. He had not given any conscious thought to what he was going to do with them after running them down. He hadn’t needed to, for just beyond his van was a space and that space, percolating, called to him. There was only one way to save himself and his life. He had dragged Cole by the ankles, the boy screaming as the loose and disconnected hip bones stabbed at his sensory nerves. Quentin had come into some ethereal energy and he moved manic now, amazed that Cole felt so light, forgetting what had done and loving how the landscape had changed under the blue moon.
Don’t look at him, don’t look at his face, Quentin had told himself.
He pulled the body into the circle. Already the pools of pink liquid were starting to appear. They were phosphorescence, glow-in-the-dark and radioactive: strange digestive juices that the spot shed before finally consuming that which it had been fed. Quentin could see them coming up now, seeping up, more and more in random spots: the TV he had dropped was now in a pink puddle; a runner of the loose liquid touched the lacerated recliner and spread. Quentin knew he had to move faster lest he be caught in the liquid. He had left Cole among the garbage in the spot. Then he went back down the road to get the girl.
She had been gone.
For a moment of sheer terror, Quentin thought she had gotten up and run. But then he had remembered how she had looked, and he knew she had not gone far.
He had found her, amazingly, in the reeds to which she had dragged her body. She was dragging herself with her elbows, which were leaving tracks in the sand. Quentin had tried hard not to notice her limbs—or her sobbing—and grabbed her ankle. He had pulled her down the trail towards the waiting circle. His strange strength had not faded, and he pulled her by the jean’s leg cuff with his hands behind his back and his legs digging into the ground like a man pulling a trash-bag of wet grasses. Ahead he could see the pink liquid appearing in more circles, each one shimmering in the moonlight like gigantic coins.
It’s almost ready…
He had grunted and pulled the girl, who had come with Cole just to smoke up
and fool around, into the circle, he being extremely careful not to touch the pink liquid (that were most certainly digestives) now spotting the area. He had left her next to Cole, and then he high-stepped and picked his way out of the clearing like a foot-ball player breaking past linemen. He went to the van, the back doors of which were still open, and he sat on the ledge and lighted a cigarette. He had puffed, and the liquid came up more and more, the contained circles of which over-spilled to other circles with soundless beauty. He had always questioned how it, the space, knew that something had been given onto it: like a bell ringing to Pavlov’s dogs or the first initial seepage of saliva from glands upon scent of food; the special place did not discriminate on what it ate, but it always ate the same way—with an alien, terrible and haunting harmony. Quentin had never thought that it, this space, was eating and that he, Quentin, was feeding it. Since that never occurred to him, he had never considered a very important question: what does anything need food for? The answer would have been to live…and grow. It was a question that would come to haunt Quentin in the next few months after The Swarm, when his life—and the life of Bay Isle—fell into madness around them. He remembered now how strange that cigarette had been: the butt of it leaving in his mouth the taste of rusted copper, the smoke of it like burning oil, the texture of the paper like a slimy appendage. Now the fluid had come up to form a uniform pool and Quentin smoked and in the moon-light the liquid came to touch the skin of two people and they…had…screamed.
He had not expected the screams, and the reality of it startled him. He had dropped his cigarette, standing up, his heart pounding up his neck.
Oh, God, why had he not thought about the screams!
He should have. He should have known there would be screaming. Digestive juices digested, didn’t they? Like shitters shat and pissers pissed and fuckers fucked? Right, Quentin, you dumb bastard?
You should have known there would be screaming!