It was the first I ever heard about college. I said, “Thank you. That’s very nice of you. Which college is she gonna go to?”
Principal Winthrope laughed again. I guess I was a comedian to her. She said, “Ruthanne hasn’t applied yet, Ben. Do you mind if I call you Ben?”
“No.”
“Tell me, Ben, do you care about your sister?”
“Yes.”
“Will you help me?”
“I guess.”
“Your sister has a bright future. I want you to encourage her.”
“To go to college?”
“That’s up to her. But I want you to let her know she can do anything she wants to do, and that goes for you too.” The last part sounded like an afterthought.
“Okay,” I said. “Should I go back to class now?”
“That would be fine,” she said. “It was a pleasure to meet you.”
I left with mixed feelings. On one hand, I was glad to get off easy without a big lecture, but on the other I was confused about Ruthanne. I had only a vague understanding of college but knew it involved leaving home most times. I had a notion that most college graduates were bankers, because that’s what Grandpa called everybody who wore a suit to work, and the ones who weren’t bankers were teachers. Even gym teachers had to go to college. But Ruthanne was too shy to be a teacher.
It wasn’t long before kids asked to see the drawing that earned a shriek from Mrs. Bianculli, plus got me sent to the principal’s office, and I showed it to them gladly. Mostly kids said “gross!” or “you’re sick!” but sometimes they liked it. One time this guy Pete Gomez said, “Dang, you’re a good drawer,” which wasn’t something I had thought about myself. I just drew because I was bored.
Pete Gomez seemed like a pretty nice guy, so when he waved to me in the parking lot a few days later, I waved back. Then I noticed who he was standing with: the Haislip white boys. I was curious about those boys, but also wary. In addition to what Ruthanne said about them being secret Nazis, there was the fact that girls avoided them, which was a bad sign in my experience, not because I was interested in girls but because girls had more sense about danger. But now that the boys were looking at me, I didn’t have a choice but to head towards them. I was nervous. I hooked my thumbs through the shoulder-straps of my backpack so I wouldn’t fidget my hands.
The boys were gathered around an open trunk. They showed me what was inside it: a little rifle and a warm twelve-pack of beer. They asked me, what did I think about that? I said it looked good to me, and they laughed like hell.
“Listen to this white trash motherfucker,” Pete said, and the others laughed some more. The only one who didn’t laugh was a boy named Ronnie Mlezcko, who I knew by reputation. Ronnie Mlezcko had looked real big and old in middle school, but now he was kind of small, like me, and just plain old. His hair was black and greasy, and he didn’t wear any of the cowboy stuff his friends wore. He wore dirty black jeans and boxy button-down shirts with pit-stains, like something a jailbird would wear.
Pete asked if I knew how to shoot but before I could answer, Ronnie said, “Of course he doesn’t. He’s just a kid. A pussy, too, by the smell of him.”
“You’re right,” I said cautiously, “I don’t know how to shoot.”
Ronnie seemed confused by my approach. He said, “Damn right you don’t.”
“Yep,” I said.
A handsome boy in a cammo cap said, “Don’t be a dick, Ronnie. Let’s go,” and they all piled into the car. I didn’t know if I was supposed to go with them. I didn’t want to, frankly, so I was thankful when Pete gave me a low five and said, “See ya, dog.”
That night I couldn’t sleep, thinking about those boys. I wondered what it would be like to be part of a group like that. I wondered what they saw in me. I expected they knew I was trouble, like them.
Pete Gomez kept waving me over to the parking lot during lunch and after school, where they’d be standing around the same car, which turned out to belong to a silent boy called Red Dog who had big sideburns and reddish stubble. Sometimes they’d show me a gun they had, or some more beer, or a bottle of whiskey, or some porno magazines, which I didn’t understand the use of until I remembered they didn’t have internet at home in their trailers, and probably not much privacy either.
By the end of the week I was just standing there nodding while they talked about stuff, wondering what exactly my purpose was but not daring to speak unless spoken to. Their conversations were mostly about shooting and drinking and this or that girl who had “big old titties” or “juicy black thighs,” or this or that guy who gave one of them a dirty look and was “gonna get his soon enough.” Their speech was peppered with old-timey words and phrases like “reckon” and “hell-bent for leather,” whatever that meant. One time Ronnie said as soon as he turned eighteen he was gonna “light out for the territories,” which I took to mean someplace like Utah with lots of canyons and whatnot for hiding out.
The group dynamics were odd. Pete Gomez remained the friendliest of them, and he had to be since they razzed him so hard for being Mexican. Pete had a wispy mustache and wore his black hair in a ragged fade he did himself, using dog clippers. “I ain’t nothing but a dog,” he said with pride. The handsome boy in the cammo cap was named Kyle James, and he seemed to fancy himself a romantic figure. He said that with a name like Kyle James how could he avoid a life of crime? I guess he meant like Jesse James, but really he was the prudest of the bunch. He went to church with his parents, Pete said, and he didn’t actually live in a trailer, just a regular house. Kyle James even had a girlfriend, off and on, and when it was off he would act real surly and complain about her, then the other guys would ask him what it was like to “bang” her and he would tell them she was “the worst piece of pussy” he ever had. I was surprised they said all that stuff in front of me. It made me uncomfortable, frankly, but the moment it got too serious Pete would pop the trunk and show me, say, an unmarked bottle of clear whiskey made by Red Dog’s people and ask me what did I think about that? Like always, I told him it looked alright to me, and they laughed like hell. The only one who didn’t laugh was Ronnie. He seemed suspicious, like he didn’t want to say too much in front of me for fear of having his darkest true thoughts used against him, later. I respected him for that. He seemed like a person with a secret inner life, whatever it was.
One day Pete waved me over and things seemed a bit different. Nobody was laughing and everybody was looking at me instead of ignoring me. There was a sort of solemnity over the group. Pete said, “We got something important to show you.”
I thought it was some kind of prank until Ronnie said, “Don’t show this kid shit, you Mexican idiot.”
“Be cool,” Pete said, but Ronnie stormed off to the other side of the car, where he sat on the hood with his back to us.
“You don’t have to tell me about it,” I said, and not just to placate Ronnie; I had a sense that something bad was about to happen, like they were gonna open the trunk and show me a dead body.
“You’re goddamn right we don’t have to,” Kyle James said, “but we’re going to.” He looked at Red Dog, who popped the trunk.
Inside the trunk was a greasy looking towel wrapped around something about the size and shape of a phone book. Pete reached in and peeled back the towel to reveal a tan metal box with a combination lock on it, like a briefcase. Kyle put his hand on my shoulder, maybe to keep me from grabbing the box and making a break for it, and Pete spun the box so I couldn’t see the lock while he fooled with the combination, hunched over and squinting, his tongue sticking out from concentration. The box popped open. There were papers inside it, and notebooks. The top paper said SATANS MANIFESTO in big block letters.
I was intrigued, remembering what Ruthanne told me about their secret Nazi book. I was flattered, too, that they trusted me enough to show me their work. They were the first people besides Bob Bilger I ever met who did a book. Anyway, Kyle gingerly raised the top corner of the title
page between his thumb and pointer finger and turned it over to reveal a page of type-written text, like a paper for school.
“The notebooks are first drafts,” Kyle said, “and we’ve got lots of them, enough for ten books probably. Now we go through them and pick the best stuff and sort of fix it up, then Red Dog types it.”
Red Dog nodded.
“What we need,” Kyle said, “is illustrations.”
I was stunned. I was happy too, because this gave my presence some meaning. They had seen my dirty drawings and wanted my help. They respected my abilities.
Pete raised the lockbox towards me and I was about to read the first typewritten page when Ronnie came quickly around the car hollering about how they couldn’t trust me yet. He snatched the box out of Pete’s hands and slammed it closed.
“This is important work,” Ronnie said.
“We know that,” Kyle said. “That’s why we want illustrations, to make it better.”
“More engaging,” Pete said. “We talked about this, dog.”
Ronnie said, “Yeah, well, that was before I found out this kid’s such a pussy.”
I didn’t take the comment personally. To Ronnie, everybody was a pussy, or had a pussy, or didn’t care about anything except pussy. He said to Pete, “We can’t trust him yet, you pussy.”
“Yet?” Pete asked.
“He has to prove himself. The stakes are high. We could go to jail for this shit.”
I expected the others to tell Ronnie he was being ridiculous, but they seemed to agree with him. I wondered what kind of book could get a person put in jail. At Milford Perkins, there’d been a story about a kid who sold drugs and got put in jail for life when they found a bloody gun in his locker. The judge wanted to hang him, but the governor said no, he was just a kid. As a compromise they put him in a man’s jail with grown men, and people said you could see him at his window at night with his hands together praying for a quick and painless death.
“You have to earn our trust,” Ronnie told me. It might have been the first time he spoke to me directly without looking at somebody else. His eyes were bright and fierce, but the skin around them was purplish, like he was tired. His face made me think of the prickly, sore-eyed feeling I got when I woke up too early, and I imagined that was how Ronnie felt every second of every day.
“How can I earn it?” I asked.
“Go to the dump,” he said.
I nodded, thinking I had this in the bag. I knew all about the dump. But I had to play dumb. I said, “But it’s got a big fence around it.”
“Break in,” Ronnie said. “There’s things there I want you to find for me.”
“I’ll try,” I said.
“You’ll do.” he said, “if you want us to trust you. Find me a used crack-pipe.”
Kyle shook his head. “Come on, Ronnie—”
Ronnie spun on Kyle. “Don’t you get it? It has to be incriminating. It’s this or we make him commit an honest-to-God crime like stealing liquor, but he’s too much of a pussy for that. Now shut up until I’m finished. A used crack pipe,” he continued, “and a dirty needle. And a used condom!”
“What’s incriminating about a used condom?” Kyle asked.
“Nothing, but it’s risky. He might get AIDS. That’ll show his commitment.”
“I don’t know—”
“Make that five used condoms.”
I looked at Pete, who shrugged, and that was that. I had no choice. These boys were better than nothing, friend-wise, and I really was curious about that book. So I headed to the dump in search of a crack pipe, a dirty needle, and five used condoms. I didn’t even know what a crack pipe looked like.
I rode to the dump on Ruthanne’s bike, which I owned outright by then. The first thing I did after I finished the six-month installment plan was paint it black, but I accidentally bought paint with matte finish so it looked weird. I used a paintbrush to add badass flames but the enamel paint was expensive so I only had one color, and the color turned out to look more red than orange so the flames looked like I was bleeding all over my bike or had rode through a slaughterhouse, which was pretty badass too, I guess.
The closest part of the dump was where our house used to be, but I didn’t want to go there. I wasn’t as upset about moving as Ruthanne was, but I didn’t want to see another kid staring out my window at Trash Mountain. I might feel like I was missing out. So I rode to the Haislip side.
Trash Mountain still loomed, taller than ever, but the perimeter of the dump was changing. In some spots the fence was reinforced by plywood, and holes like the one I climbed through with Demarcus were plugged up with blobs of tangled barbed wire, half buried so there was no way to push them aside. I figured it was the dump workers, cracking down, but there were rumors of hobos who tried to seal up the dump for a lair. There were rumors too of a coven of witches and wizards who conjured spells using cat’s blood and precious ingredients they gathered from Trash Mountain. One time a gray-haired coot who caught me snooping behind my old house told me space aliens crash landed there, years before, and the trash was to hide them, but now the government wanted to study them and had to make the site impregnable. Who knows. All I knew was I had to get in there.
Since the fence was stronger than ever, and topped by gleaming coils of brand-new razor wire, I started inspecting the junctures between the fence and various outbuildings. Nearby was a giant tin structure like an airplane hangar, for the trucks and loaders, and sure enough the fence post was fastened to the side of the building with nothing but plastic zip ties. I tried tugging one of the ties apart, then biting it, but it was tougher than it looked, like the handcuffs plainclothes cops use in movies.
There was a dumpster behind the tin hangar, and I thought that from the lip of the dumpster I might be able to jump up and grab the edge of the hangar, climb onto the hangar roof, then scramble overtop of it and lower myself into the dump. But the lip of the dumpster was slippery with trash juice so it was hard to get a good jump, and when I did, I couldn’t get a good grip on the hangar roof. I scraped my hands on the edge of the roof and fell to the ground. It didn’t hurt too bad, but the whole thing was embarrassing and made an awful clamor, so I crouched down behind the dumpster to hide for a while.
I was hiding there, plotting my next move, when somebody said, “Hey, little buddy.”
I looked around, startled, but I didn’t see anybody.
“Over here, buddy.” It was a man’s voice, sort of nasal and wet sounding.
I thought about running but decided a grown man could probably outrun me, and if I took the time to mount my bike he’d have me for sure. So I mustered a tough, deep voice and said, “Who is it?”
“Boss,” he said.
“The boss of what?” I asked.
“Boss of nothing,” he said. “They call me Boss is all.”
I wondered if the man was a hobo. Hobos had nicknames, I knew. Grandpa told stories about a childhood hobo named Charlie Nickels who trained a pigeon to filch cigarettes. I prepared in my mind for a vicious thieving hobo to slit my throat from ear to ear.
“You looking for somebody?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’ll leave right now.”
“Easy, buddy. Come around here so we can talk.”
The man didn’t sound like a murderer, I had to admit, so I opened my eyes, which had been closed from fear, and looked around. Nobody was there. I looked up at the edge of the hangar roof, but nobody was there either. I peeked inside the dumpster. Nobody.
“Where are you?” I asked, preparing in my mind to mount my bike and escape.
“On the other side of the fence. I saw you jumping and came to tell you to be careful. If they catch you they’ll send you away.”
“Send me away where?”
“They’ll load you into a van and take you to a place outside of town and leave you there in the middle of the night with nothing but the shirt on your back, like a goddamned raccoon.”
That didn�
��t sound like a logical punishment to me, but the man, Boss, seemed pretty worked up so I didn’t comment.
“Like a grown man can’t find his way back to a place he been before,” he was muttering. “What’re you doing here anyway?”
“I’m supposed to get some stuff for some guys.”
“Sounds secret.”
“Pretty much.”
“Tell me what you need and I can help, maybe.”
I didn’t want to tell him, from embarrassment, so I asked if there was a secret way to get inside. “Not that I don’t appreciate your offer,” I said. “It’s just, you know—”
“It’s secret, I hear you. Unfortunately there ain’t no way to sneak in here like there used to be.”
“Then how’d you get in?”
He paused. “I work here.”
I was relieved. If he worked there as a garbage man or whatever, then he wasn’t a hobo; I could trust him. I said, “Okay, here it goes: I need a crack pipe, a dirty needle, and five used condoms.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“I know. I’m real sorry. You don’t have to get it.”
“No, no, I can get it.”
“For real? You got that stuff?”
“Oh yeah, we got it. If you can name it, it’s in here. This place, it’s like a second world where everything’s mushed together within easy reach.”
The term second world intrigued me. I thought about the netherworld occupied by ghosts and wizards, and possibly Jesus and God.
The man told me about some bio-waste bags from the hospital that were supposed to go to a special bio-waste site, but the hospital cheaped out and put them in the dump, which meant plenty of dirty needles. And condoms were pretty much everywhere, the man said, but highly concentrated in a spot where they put what got filtered out of the sewer water, since people were always flushing condoms down the toilets. “As for the crack pipe,” he said, “I’m not too sure. Most of that stuff gets tossed on the floor and crunched up underfoot. The one-hitters, I mean. People don’t just throw away nicer pipes. But I’ll see what I can do.” He asked if I could meet him there the next day, and I said I would.
Trash Mountain Page 5