For the next few days I biked to the grocery store after school and made study of parking lot dynamics. The thing that gave people the most trouble wasn’t carrying their groceries; it was returning their carts. They seemed to hate pushing their carts all the way back to the brick wall where the carts were lined up. Some people just left their carts. Others looked from side to side like they were thinking about maybe leaving their carts, but then they grudgingly pushed them back. These people were my target customer, I decided, and I made a few bucks by popping out during their moments of indecision and offering to return their carts for a small fee. I left the fee vague in case they wanted to give me more than a dollar. Sometimes they gave me a quarter, though. One time a guy in a sleeveless denim vest ignored me, left the cart where it was, and backed into it intentionally. It’s surprising what some people do.
At the Salvation Army Family Store I bought a little green vest that almost matched the vests the grocery store people wore. It even had a nametag like theirs did, but the name said Roger Talamantez, so when old people leaned close to get a look at my name I had to lie and say my name was Roger. And once I lied, I kept lying. That was something I discovered about myself. After I said my name was Roger, I might say I lived in a trailer down by the river with my older brother’s widow and their three kids, whom I was helping to raise, or that I was much older than I looked because of a pituitary gland disease. I might say I was in training to be a checkout person, the youngest ever, but had to cut my teeth the old fashioned way, “out on the blacktop,” which was grocery store lingo for the parking lot.
The lying made it fun, and almost made up for the times people blew me off or didn’t pay me or damn near backed over me with their jacked-up trucks. The worst was when old ladies decided I was “playing dress up” and was “just the cutest little thing.” That bothered me because I was playing dress up, kind of, but I didn’t like to think of it that way. For me it was serious. I had started to think that if you dressed and behaved like a person, you could become that person.
I made about two dollars an hour so in two weeks I had almost thirty dollars in singles. I kept the singles in a shoebox under my bed. It didn’t occur to me to spend any of it until one day I made thirteen whole dollars because an old man in a tracksuit gave me a ten, maybe by accident. On the way home I wondered if I should treat myself to something. The Red Dragon 400,000 BTU Backpack Torch Kit with Squeeze Valve still loomed large in my mind, but I’d have enough for it in a few months either way, and in the meantime I might keep up my gumption with something smaller.
I thought about stuff I liked but didn’t get enough of, in my estimation, and decided milkshakes were near the top of the list. But the drugstore downtown that used to sell milkshakes was closed, and the only other place I could think of, Yummy Pizza Taco, had a weird smell that made the milkshakes taste worse. I decided that candy bars, though a distant second, might make me feel at least some sense of accomplishment, so I stopped in the Drug Time drugstore and bought a Twix. I ate one bar on the way home, then at home I sat on my bed and wondered if I should eat the other Twix bar or save it. Finally I took the bar to Ruthanne’s room and asked if she wanted it. She offered to split it with me, so we sat there on her bed crunching the second Twix bar.
I asked her what book she was reading and she said it was none of my business, but then she felt bad and told me the book was about some gang guys in Oklahoma who got in rumbles but secretly cried all the time and loved each other. I wanted to know more about the rumbles, but she changed the subject. She said, “You know, Ben, if you bought candy like this for a different girl, she might let you touch her boobs.”
“Shows what you know,” I said. I had a notion from Dad that you had to buy a woman at least twenty dollars worth of food before she’d even kiss you, not that I cared about that stuff. I just wanted Ruthanne to allow that I might know a thing or two for myself and not have to be told everything by a smartass like her. I said, “Don’t tease me right now. My nerves are shot. A man coming home from work deserves a little respect.”
She threw a pillow at my head. “You just hung around a grocery store parking lot for an hour. You call that work?”
“What would you call it?”
She shrugged. “I guess I’d call it work too. You know, Ben, I didn’t think you’d land a powerbroker-type job like this, but you sure proved me wrong. Pretty soon you’ll be CEO of a Fortune 500 company.”
“Probably.”
From then on I made a point of buying a candy bar at the end of the week for Ruthanne and me to share. It felt good to go into the Drug Time with money in my pocket. But in November I realized it would be cheaper to buy discounted Halloween candy at the grocery store, as long as I had the discipline not to eat it all at once. So I bought a bag of fun-sized Twix and kept them in my closet, and every Saturday I pulled out two and brought them into Ruthanne’s room. When the Twix ran out I bought Hershey’s Kisses, which she liked, but eventually the Hershey’s Kisses got this white stuff all over them, like mildew. I scraped it off but the inside part was hard and tasted like coffee.
The next time I bought candy, to replace the weird Hershey’s Kisses, I was standing in line at the Drug Time with a wad of singles in my pocket, listening to the horrible saxophone music they played in there, when I started wondering where was the adventure in making and spending money, especially if you had to spend it someplace like Drug Time or Yummy Pizza Taco or even Burger Brothers, though they had pretty decent burgers. I bought some fun-sized Payday bars, but the thought stuck with me.
That night, after stuffing the rest of the singles into my shoebox, I took out The Highest Mountain again. In the part I was on, Bob Bilger was talking about how the Army made him a man. Before the Army, he said, he had been “steadily transforming into a low-rent flimflam man: picking pockets, prying open payphones with a screwdriver, running errands for men my father detested, men who sat in folding chairs all afternoon circling racehorses in the dailies, circulating cash-filled envelopes among themselves, eating sandwiches of truly disquieting girth.” His distaste for running errands made sense to me, but the only reason he could stop, it seemed to me, was because he joined the Army, and I was too young to join the Army. Plus the Army seemed pretty boring, what with cleaning latrines and marching until you puked. I skipped ahead until I saw the word “Vietnam,” but there was marching in that part too. So much marching! No wonder Bob Bilger’s legs got strong enough to climb a mountain.
I closed the book and turned off the lamp to go to sleep. The view through my bedroom window wasn’t as good as Ruthanne’s, but lying there in the dark I could see a dim glow from the side of Trash Mountain. The glow was from rotting wood, I had learned, but in my heart I considered the glow to be a sign of Trash Mountain’s mystical nonhuman power. The glow made me wonder if money and jobs and even school were just tricks to distract me from my secret hidden purpose, which was to destroy Trash Mountain. And maybe, I thought, destroying Trash Mountain was just the first step in what would become a life of adventure.
I couldn’t fall asleep so I snuck out on Ruthanne’s bike, which I had begun to pay her for in installments of five dollars a month, since Ruthanne’s bike was superior to my own in every respect except its lavender color and lady’s crossbar.
I headed downtown, where the streets were mostly empty. The city didn’t light the street lamps anymore so the only light was the light of the moon, which was full that night, lucky for me, and free from the haze that sometimes made it look like it was shining behind toilet paper. Downtown looked empty, but sometimes old cars came out of alleys so fast that you almost got hit. Sometimes hobos yelled unseen from the pitch black doorways where they made their homes. None of that stuff happened, though, so to make it more exciting I played a game in my head where the cops were chasing me and I had to pedal as fast as I could and be ready to execute escape maneuvers such as hopping the curb or doing a flying wheelie through a plate-glass storefront.
&
nbsp; Chapter 3
BY THE TIME high-school started I had $726, mostly in singles, which fit in a shoebox after I flattened the crinkled bills inside my copy of The Highest Mountain. It was more than enough to buy the Red Dragon 400,000 BTU Backpack Torch Kit with Squeeze Valve, but for some reason I still hadn’t bought it. I guess I had lost some of my terroristic spark, I’m ashamed to admit. I blamed the working life.
I was still working the blacktop at the grocery store most days after school, and on Saturdays I worked as a gofer for a lawyer. Her name was Ms. Mikiska and she wore slacks and a vest like an old-time banker. She had short, black hair parted and oiled in a way that made you wish she had a waxed mustache to finish the look. Ms. Mikiska would stand outside her storefront office all day saying hello to the old ladies who still shopped downtown, where the only other businesses were a florist that specialized in funeral arrangements and a couple junk shops that called themselves antique stores. The junk shops picked over the estates of dead people who didn’t have family or who didn’t pay their rent and got their stuff put outside when they died, but Ms. Mikiska would tell the old ladies that this or that cherry wood breakfront or Queen Anne dining room set out there on the sidewalk had belonged to a sweet old lady who “hadn’t managed her estate, bless her heart, so her family will never inherit those lovely heirlooms.” My job was to fetch Ms. Mikiska’s lunch and to stand outside when she took calls or went to the bathroom. She told me to say stuff to the old ladies, but I never did.
It was boring as hell and paid real bad, but I was glad for the work. I wanted to be home as little as possible. That’s because home wasn’t our house anymore; it was an apartment. Dad had moved to the city full-time, so when the county offered to buy our house, Mom sold it. Dad didn’t want us to move, but Mom said he didn’t have a say anymore. Mom said the house was too close to the dump so we were better off. We might feel healthier, she said, but Ruthanne said that was bullshit. Ruthanne said we could still smell the dump so whatever was in the air was still going in our noses. Mom said it was only a matter of time before the county claimed the property anyway. She said it was called imminent domain because it was gonna happen sooner or later. Sooner, probably.
The new apartment was in a complex on the highway that looked like a motel. The doors were on the outside, so when you came out of the apartment everybody else could see you, and people in cars on the highway could see you too, and people inside the Burger Brothers across the way, and some seedy characters slouched on the hoods of cars and drinking from paper bags in the parking lot of the grocery store that closed. One time a guy shouted something at Ruthanne that made her cry, but she was too embarrassed to tell me what it was.
The apartment was nice on the inside, though. The living room and kitchen were like one big room so you could be sitting on the couch and talking to somebody while they washed dishes or micro-waved pizza pockets. There were only two bedrooms, but Mom gave Ruthanne and me the big one so we had plenty of room, in my estimation, and a big closet that was bigger than the two closets we used to have combined. But Ruthanne didn’t like it. She said there wasn’t any privacy and I took up all the space with my junk and gross body. I told her I would shower more if she and Mom didn’t hog the bathroom so much.
Grandpa would show up from time to time with a load of food, mostly canned, but also boxes of cereal and dehydrated milk. He told Mom to put the food in the storm shelter, but we didn’t have one anymore. He told us the food was for an emergency. What kind of emergency, he never said, and maybe it was the lack of specifics that caused us to eat the food right away, against his instructions. Sometimes the food had labels like MEAT and CHEESE, and that was the best food, believe it or not. The best food at home, I mean. The best food overall was the food at Pansy Gilchrist High School, hands down. At Pansy Gilchrist there were mini pizzas once a week and a hot dog station so you could eat hot dogs every day.
Though the food was tremendous, the ambience at Pansy Gilchrist was lackluster. The cafeteria was noisy and crowded, and I didn’t know anybody in my lunch period except Demarcus, who had given up on lunch to study in the library. In the cafeteria, the black kids and the white kids sat at different tables, except for the football players, and the football players only sat together on Fridays when they wore their jerseys. The Komer blacks sat apart from the Haislip blacks, and the Haislip whites sat apart from everybody. Sometimes they didn’t sit at all; they just stood around a table with one leg up on chairs so they could lean in and talk in husky voices like they were hashing a conspiracy. They seemed to take pride in being the poorest guys around and living in the shittiest trailers and having the worst looking cars but with the most powerful engines, with trunks full of guns and warm cases of the worst canned beer imaginable. Naturally I was curious about them.
Ruthanne told me they were secret Nazis who wrote a book about killing women and blacks and Mexicans, but I didn’t believe her. First off, they didn’t seem like literary types. I knew from Bob Bilger’s introduction to The Highest Mountain that writing a book was a serious endeavor, a mental exercise akin to the physical exercise required to be in tiptop shape for mountaineering. Second, those boys were too poor to have computers at home. Trailers don’t have computers, as a rule, or flat-screen TVs or fancy stereos, which is why nobody breaks into them like they do houses. Our old house got broken into five times before we moved. It got to where Mom said we should move into a trailer just for security.
Besides, what did Ruthanne know? She was a senior and spent so little time at school that she didn’t even visit her locker. She had to use a rolling suitcase for her bags, because of her spine, so she figured she’d just leave the books in there and save herself the ridicule of standing around the hallways. I kind of envied her.
Classes were by grade but between classes, walking through the hallways, everybody was mixed. I was short and skinny so sometimes I wore two t-shirts to look thicker. It made me hot but gave me confidence. One time I was crouched in front of my locker, which was on the bottom row, and a guy pushed me into it with his foot. He didn’t try to shut me inside or anything, but still it was pretty shitty.
I tried to keep a low profile, especially in class. The trick to not getting called on was to sit up real straight, like I was paying attention, but to stare at the chalkboard instead of the teacher, which is counterintuitive, I know, but if you look into a person’s eyes then the person feels like they know you, so it’s easy to talk to you. I didn’t want to be easy to talk to. I wanted to be hard but polite, sort of like the actor Rick Zorn. In Sudden Kill (or maybe it’s Out for a Murder?) these guys come up to Zorn in an alley and he’s like, “May I help you?” and they’re like, “Yeah, old man, you can help us to your motherfucking wallet.” Zorn raises his hands real cool, but you can tell he thinks these guys are jokers. He reaches for his wallet and you think he’s gonna pull out a gun or something but he does pull out his wallet. Then, just as he’s handing it to a guy, he flicks his wrist and a Chinese star comes out and goes right into the guy’s crotch area. The other guys start running, but Zorn gets one of them in the butt with another Chinese star.
When I got bored staring straight at the chalkboard, I did drawings: a man using another for a puppet by reaching through his butt, a cowboy with his penis on a conveyor belt being cut into coins like a sausage, etc. I sat in back so nobody saw the drawings except me, but one day Mrs. Bianculli came up behind me without me knowing and shrieked. I was drawing a fat man being quartered by four cholos on dirt bikes. His guts were stretched out like a cat’s cradle. It was a pretty good drawing, but Mrs. Bianculli sent me to the principal’s office. The moment of exit was awful. Everybody was staring at me. If my goal was to keep a low profile, this was the opposite.
I hadn’t ever been sent to the principal’s office at Pansy Gilchrist, but I was familiar with the routine from my many visits to Principal Chalmers’s office back at Milford Perkins.
I sat in the waiting room between two older boys and k
ept my mouth shut. There was a sort of secretary across from us who would peek at us from over a counter, like she was making sure none of us made a break for it. There was a window we could have leapt through in a pinch. There was a framed poster behind her of a big black gorilla face and the word EXCELLENCE. At the bottom it said, “Excellence is not an achievement but a never-ending spirit.”
Eventually a girl came out of the Principal’s office with her head hanging, and the boy next to me went in grumbling. He wore big droopy jeans and had tattoos on his arms. He was a grown man, pretty much. So when he came out minutes later looking like he was coming out of church, I got nervous. It was my turn.
The principal, Principal Winthrope, wasn’t anything like Principal Chalmers. First off, she was a black lady. Second, she was young. Her hair was real shiny and draped on her shoulders in stiff-looking curls, sort of like a sculpture of hair. She was wearing a gray suit that had a skirt instead of pants. She said, “Benjamin Shippers. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I did a bad drawing,” I said. “I’m very sorry for it.”
“I believe I know your sister,” Principal Winthrope said. She didn’t seem to care about the drawing. She said, “Ruthanne Shippers is one of our finest students.”
“Really?”
She laughed. “Don’t act so surprised. I’m helping Ruthanne apply to college.”
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