Trash Mountain

by Jane Yolen

  Suddenly he saw two great lights hurtling toward him, even brighter than the lamps in Farmer Temple’s back room. Indeed, he’d seen such lights before but always from the safety of the fir tree. However, Father had told him all about them. How they were always attached to a large People Carrier. How they hauled death in their souls. This one was black, like a moving hole, and careening from side to side on the road.

  Desperate to avoid being hit, Nutley sprang to the left, opened his mouth, and screamed. He hadn’t meant to, but all of the awful day suddenly flooded over him. As he screamed, everything in his cheeks spilled out onto the road behind him—seeds, doll, pillow, rattle—where they were immediately crushed under the large, round things on the underside of the Carrier. In fact, Nutley himself was almost crushed with them.

  “Oh, no!” he cried but didn’t take a second longer to consider the loss of his precious possessions, for now they were the consistency of sand. Useless. Worthless. And Flat. As he would have been had he not jumped away at the last possible second, off to the side of the road. He could see the Carrier turning around and inexplicably coming back toward him. Sometimes People were impossible to understand. No—most of the time they were.

  Now in a great panic, Nutley headed off to the left along a smaller spur road that for the moment seemed the only safe route till he realized a carrier could there, too. A guard house and a wire fence stood on his left. He slipped through one of its many small holes that were just the right size for a Red Squirrel. Briefly, he wondered who had built it that way and sent out a small prayer of thanks.

  The Carrier’s lights moved backward and then were replaced by two red lights that soon disappeared along the Winding Road.

  Nutley couldn’t take the chance that the People Carrier would return again. Father had told him many a story about animals crushed on the Winding Road, flattened like Great Aunt Cornelia, whom he’d never known, left for the Things with Wings to devour. Shuddering, he ran even farther away from the fence, though he could still feel its cold metal presence behind him.

  Before he knew it, he was knee-deep in thick, horrible garbage, and that—for a Squirrel—is very deep indeed.

  “Trash Mountain,” he whispered. Now that his cheeks were empty, he could speak again. He said the name once more, this time with an audible tremor. “Trash Mountain.” That had to be where he was.

  He must have come to Trash Mountain from the side. He’d heard the stories: Here be Rats as big as Collie Dogs. Centipedes that sting. Slugs fast enough to steal a Squirrel’s nuts. He shivered and looked around frantically for an escape. But behind him he thought he could still hear the jeering Grays and the grinding sound of the People Carrier coming back for a third try at crushing him.

  Probably just my imagination, he thought. But the thought was not comforting.

  He didn’t dare chance going out to the Winding Road again. Besides, he knew there was nowhere else for him to go. At least the Grays wouldn’t follow him here. They knew the stories as well as he did. And unlike him, they didn’t need to escape into this awful place. He couldn’t guess what the Carrier would do or the People.

  “Mummy …” His lower lip trembled. “Father …” He squared his shoulders, then—bearing the unbearable—he marched even deeper into the trash.

  ***

  The smells. Mummy had never mentioned the smells. Nor had Father. The smells coming from Trash Mountain were rich, potent, moving, even … Enticing. He wondered how low he’d already fallen to consider that. The smells reminded Nutley a bit of Farmer Temple’s compost heap, which in the summer—under a long sun—was almost irresistible. Only these smells were a thousand times stronger. There were so many strands—sweet, sour, bitter, sharp, tangy, spicy, gamey, flowery, vinegary, and the pungencyof pine resin—oh, he couldn’t name them all. They were simply overwhelming. He almost swooned.

  “There, lad, don’t be faintin’ like an old lady.” The voice had a bit of an edge to it and a lot of hidden laughter.

  Nutley pulled himself together, turned, and saw on top of a hillock of garbage a large, fat, gray, and seriously ugly Mouse. No—no, not a Mouse, rather a bigger creature, with a longer, hairless tail. An elongated snout. And huge front teeth.

  “Why—you’re a Rat!” Nutley blurted. He’d heard of them, though he’d never seen one before. Farmer Temple’s wife ran a clean home that housed several resident Cats.

  “Not just a Rat. A Hanover Rat, a Norway Rat, or a Wharf Rat. Take your pick, bud. You were maybe expecting the Queen?” The Rat spoke while using his long tail to poke something green and slimy from between his teeth. He picked it out with one rather dirty paw. Popping the green back into his now-gaping mouth and swallowing, he let out a huge belch. He followed that with a strange whinnying laugh. “The Queen,” he repeated, enjoying his own joke.

  Nutley didn’t answer that. Mummy was especially fond of the Queen and even had a picture of her, torn from an old Royalty magazine, up on the wall of their hole. Besides, Nutley was careful not to tell the Rat what Mummy always said about his entire race. She called them “Common Rats.” Telling the Rat that wouldn’t have been polite. And possibly not safe, either.

  “Now, lad,” the Rat announced, “here you’ve come to Trash Mountain.” He laughed again. This time it was a series of descending wheezes. “I’m what you might call the welcoming committee. Name’s Naw. Nothing’s silent.” Another laugh, this one short and sharp, rather like the tap of a Woodpecker on a metal gutter.

  Nutley didn’t feel very welcome. And he certainly didn’t understand Naw’s humor, but that too wouldn’t have been polite to say. Instead, he bobbed his head. “Pleased to meet you, sir.” It was a sentence so filled with half-truths and outright lies that he felt sick to his stomach. And this on a day when there had already been much to feel ill about.

  “I’m sure.” The Rat grinned, which showed even more of the green stuff between his teeth.

  For a moment they were both silent, and then overhead there was a loud concatenation: screams and cawings and the heavy flapping of wings.

  “Gulls,” said Naw. “I don’t pay ’em no mind. And you shouldn’t neither.”

  “Oh, I won’t.” Nutley spoke with rather more passion than was called for, but he was so relieved that there was someone to tell him what to do, now that Father was gone. “I won’t neither.” That last, ungrammatical though it was, issued forth almost as a sigh. He knew Father would have been appalled.

  Naw grinned again, that disconcerting smile, part yellow teeth, part green stuff. “Now I’ll show you The Ropes.”

  The Ropes? Nutley wondered for a long minute what the Rat could mean by that and why he needed to see these Ropes. In his experience, Ropes were used to tie things up and tie things down, not necessarily for the good. Like birdseed covers and feeders and cages. He almost shivered. But quickly—and eventually—as Naw took him up and down the runnels and channels, the tunnels and gullies of Trash Mountain, he learned that The Ropes was just a Rat phrase for showing someone around.

  “That there …” Naw said, his paw making a circular motion around them, which included a rather ripe and inviting hillock of trash, “is off-limits to anyone but Rats.”

  Nutley noted the plural. “There are more of you?”

  Naw put his head to one side as if considering how stupid one small Squirrel could be. Then he nodded. “There’s Nawmer, my lovely bride. And our nine bouncing children: Nawman, Nawmal, Nawsome, Nawmus, Naway, Nawgahyde, Nawtickle, Nawty, and baby Nawshus.” His tail twitched with each name. He smiled, which did not improve his looks. “And nothing’s silent in a one of ’em.”

  This time, Nutley thought he understood the Rat. But then again, perhaps not. It’s better not to presume when talking to lower orders, Father always advised. To which Mummy had usually added, Sometimes the Queen or her children go out in disguise. Though it was hard to see how a Rat might be a Royal, in disguise or out of one.

  But then he remembered—the Rat did say h
e was a Hanover Rat. And Hanover, Mummy had often said, was one of the Royal Houses of Britain and the Continent. Better safe than embarrassed, Father often warned.

  “Okay,” Nutley said, though he was really not okay with that many Rats in the neighborhood. Suddenly, the Rats’ hillock was no longer very inviting.

  “That one there’s for the Gulls …” Naw said, pointing to an ocean of garbage that undulated at the foot of the hillock and ran for about two acres north.

  “Absolutely,” said Nutley. He didn’t need to deal with Things with Wings. And especially not Gulls. Mummy called them Garbage Collectors and Flying Rats, and he’d often seen them in the big field following Farmer Temple’s tractor or harrow, picking up anything the sharp knives turned over in the soil.

  “And the rest is Open Territory, meaning …” Naw suddenly sat down and scratched behind his left ear, an action that left him incapable of speech for some time during which Nutley looked around and wondered what it did mean.

  Naw suddenly stood up again, whatever itch that needed scratching now done. “Meaning …” he said, as if he’d never stopped in midsentence, “that you can fuddle around there.”

  Fuddle. It was an interesting word, and Nutley tried it out, rolling it around in his mouth as if it were a sunflower seed. He almost missed what was said next.

  “And that …” Naw pointed to the sky where a giant tower of garbage teetered. “That’s the real Trash Mountain, and it’s off-limits to everyone.”

  There was a large White Box sitting at the very top of the teetering tower of trash. It had a door with a round window that opened and closed in the wind.

  “Why?” Nutley asked.

  “Why what?” Naw’s left eye seemed to bore into him. It was a bloodshot eye.

  “Why is it off-limits to everybody?” Nutley felt suddenly warm all over as if he had come upon the most important piece of information in the universe. The one thing that might help him regain his home and avenge his parents’ death. That kind of information. “Is it Dangerous?”

  Naw shook his head slowly from side to side. “Don’t know. Just has always been—off-limits. To Everyone.” He took a deep breath and added all at once, “Especially the White Box.” He drew in a ragged breath, and when he expelled it, he said all in a single gasp, “Thosethatgoesindon’tcomeoutagain.”

  “Goes in where?” Nutley asked. “Comes out where?”

  But clearly the tour of The Ropes was over, and so was Naw’s interest in Nutley, because the Rat turned around three times as if chasing his long, hairless tail, then disappeared into a hole in the hillock. As it was the Rats’ hillock, Nutley didn’t follow. Having lived all his life knowing where the limits were—as defined by his Father and Mummy and the Grays—he followed his nose to the fuddling place instead and began to look for something to eat.

  Maybe, he thought, that’s what “fuddling” means. Digging around for food. He was delighted—even proud—of this insight and grinned for the first time since coming to Trash Mountain. Though thinking about food made him suddenly and overwhelmingly ravenous, which was Mummy’s favorite word for being extra hungry.

  This you should know:

  Trash Mountain is over two dozen acres wide and almost two dozen acres long. It is completely surrounded by a wire fence. There used to be a Human guard there every day of the workweek, plus the third Saturday of the month. But times being hard, the town had to cut back on his hours more and more, until at last the guard was only at work on Saturdays nine to noon and only in the new part of the town tip, near the recycling area, which is why there is no guard at Trash Mountain during this story. If there had been, things might have gone very differently.

  Nutley found a couple of slices of greenish bread buried down amongst some rattling papers. The green gave the bread a kind of tang that he both liked and hated in equal measure, but at least it was food. There were several crinkly packets that smelled of nuts but were empty. He tried licking the nut smell, but that wasn’t very satisfactory at all. He found three tins with gray stuff in them, but after a single sniff of each, he threw them over his shoulder toward the Rats’ territory.

  Better safe than sorry, as Mummy used to say. Or was that Father? He was already beginning to forget. He hated that.

  Finally, by digging straight down, he discovered a treasure trove: three old hazelnuts. Nutley did a little happy dance, his tail bobbing up and down with delight. He weighed the hazelnuts carefully in his paws one at a time. Two of them were clearly full. He opened the third anyway, but it was only an empty shell—as he knew it would be. He scolded himself for the waste of energy and time. As Father always said, Don’t spend what you can’t spare.

  By now Nutley’s entire body was making a mumbling, rumbling sound. The two hazelnuts had only encouraged his tummy, not satisfied it. Mummy would have told him what he could and could not eat, and Father would have told him where to find it, but they were gone and he had to accept that. He was on his own. Not a comfortable place to be, but there it was.

  Nutley began scrambling in shorter and shorter jumps around the fuddling place. There was no more food anywhere or at least nothing that wasn’t gray, foul-smelling, or covered with little white crawly things that made a shiver go up and down Nutley’s back.

  Tired, exhausted, he was about to lie down in the trash—Which is where I deserve to be, he thought miserably, the Grays were right. But his right paw felt something odd, stiff, and interesting. And when he’d dug it up, he saw that it was an overturned wooden box. The bad news was that the box was empty of anything resembling food. But when he cocked his head to one side and looked at it with a bit of imagination, Nutley realized that the box was very like a hole. Not a round hole in a tree but a hole nonetheless. He figured it could keep him safe from the night fliers, especially Owls, and so he turned it upside down; crawled in under it; and immediately fell into a deep sleep full of dark, disturbing dreams.

  In one of his dreams, Nutley heard a cry. The cries were from his mother and father as they were thrown from the fir tree. And the sound of their hitting the ground was like the loud bang-bangs of the rockets Farmer Temple’s grandchildren set off on holiday visits.

  In another dream, his parents did not fall, but—like Flying Squirrels—glided soundlessly down and down and down. His father had often told Nutley tales about that exotic race, and maybe some of the stories were actually true. How will I ever know now? Nutley asked himself in the dream.

  In yet another dream, he ran over and caught his parents before they smacked into the ground. He held them in his arms and he was the big Squirrel and theywere no more than the size of newborn pups. And they showered him with kisses and fur licking and …

  He woke to more crying. A weak wailing, not at all Squirrel-like. Really, a mewling sound. A whimper. He threw the box back and emerged into the early morning. The dawn air still trembled with dark, and that only seemed to make the sound larger, sadder.

  Though what can be sadder, Nutley thought, than dreaming you have saved your mother and father and waking up to a different reality?

  He stood up a bit wobbly on his feet, almost as if he wasn’t quite sure where he was, though actually it was the trash moving under him as it settled. Oh for the solid earth beneath my feet or the scratch of tree bark. Even the hard pack of the Winding Road is preferable to this, he thought. But then he scolded himself for such thinking. I am safe here on Trash Mountain, and for now, here I will stay.

  Turning around twice, he finally located the sound. It was off in the ocean of trash reserved for the Gulls. Well, Naw warned me about them, he thought, turning the box back over and lying down under it again, which brought on a false dark. Let the Gulls help their own family. He’d had no one to help him with his.

  Nutley closed his eyes. For a little while, he heard nothing but the wind puzzling through the trash and that sound very far away. The box filtered out a lot. He tried to fall asleep again. Really he did. Sleep and dreams were better than what was rea
l. Even dreams about his parents falling. But somehow he was no longer tired.

  He sighed and crawled out from under the box again.

  Morning light had begun to overcome the darkness so that outside was a kind of gray. Gulls on the litter were rising up in a single great group, screaming at one another, “Mine! Mine! Mine!” and “Not yours! Not yours!” and “Give it here! Here! Here!” At the best of times, Gulls were not great thinkers, or so Father always said whenever a great cloud of them descended on the newly plowed fields of the farm. From what Nutley could hear of the Gulls’ conversation, Father was absolutely right.

  Then the Gulls were gone, lifting up and over Trash Mountain, flying off toward the sunrise—that small line of bright light as red as the red of the roses that climbed on Mrs. Temple’s pergola—and toward fields where the early harvesters had most likely already spread out a great breakfast for them.

  Nutley felt a sudden pang of jealousy. If only I really was a Flying Squirrel, he thought. I’d join the Gulls, even though they have little to say. I’d fly above the Grays and bombard them with old corncobs and pieces of hard trash. I’d …

  But he wasn’t a Flying Squirrel and he would soon be nothing at all if he didn’t find something to eat. Though at least if he were nothing at all, he could join Mummy and Father in Squirrel Heaven and feast forever in God’s nut trees. At that moment, it didn’t seem like such a bad ending at all.

  The mewling cry came again, now elevated to a kind of eerie moan. Nutley jumped straight up, spinning round till he was facing in the direction the sound had come from. In the lightening air, he could see something moving slightly in the trash ocean, rolling a bit as if on waves of litter.

  Glancing over his left shoulder, Nutley saw the towering Mountaintop where the dangerous large White Box perched ominously. Looking over his right shoulder, he could see the Rats’ domain. No one else was up and awake.