I wasn’t sure what to make of the man’s kindness. I wondered if he worked for the dump and didn’t have enough to do, or if he liked little boys. I had never met a sex offender but knew they existed. I also knew that sometimes adults without kids, like Ms. Mikiska, took a special interest in kids and liked to do nice things for them then give long-winded advice afterward.
The next day at school I avoided Ronnie and them because I didn’t have the stuff yet, and I didn’t want to seem like a failure in case they expected me to procure it within twenty-four hours. That meant I had to sneak out before last period, which I didn’t mind. That, in turn, meant I showed up at the hangar building an hour early. There was water dribbling through the fence, and when I got close I could hear men talking. I thought my contact might be among them, but I didn’t hear his weird nasal voice.
The men were hosing something off, and I pressed my eye to the gap between the fence and the hangar and saw a brand new front-loader, red and shining. One man was blasting it with a hose while another gesticulated beside him. Both wore gray coveralls like garbage men. The old yellow frontloader I used to watch from Ruthanne’s window was idling in the distance, waiting its turn. Beyond the frontloaders was an honest-to-God excavator. It was like a construction site in there, like they were building Trash Mountain on purpose. The idea bothered me, but I had to admit it would be pretty cool to ride those machines when nobody was around, even just to sit in the driver’s seat and pretend.
I hid behind the dumpster like before and kept quiet until the voices stopped. I waited until I smelled cigarette smoke, at which point I poked my head out and saw the back of a tall man leaning into the narrow gap between the fence pole and the side of the hangar. He wore black rubber waders caked in mud. Above the collar of his dirty flannel shirt was a sunburned neck and some greasy tentacular hair.
I didn’t know what to say in case the man wasn’t my contact so I mounted my bike preemptively, to be ready for a getaway. “Boss,” I whispered.
The man turned his head to look over his shoulder. His big white face was like a cinderblock, with blonde stubble and a sort of gash going up from the top lip to a thick crooked nose. Maybe whatever broke his nose had broken the lip part too.
He held up a brown plastic grocery bag. “I got good news and bad news,” he said. “Good news is the needles and prophylactics was easy. Bad news is the crack pipe, but check it out.” He lowered the grocery bag and opened it so I could see. There was a thick syringe with reddish liquid crystallized inside, and some condoms that were caked in mud but obviously hard used. There was also a glass tube of some sort. The man picked up the tube between his thumb and forefinger and held it close to the gap for me to see. There was some dark stuff inside one half of the tube, and the glass looked smoky.
“Is that a real crack pipe?” I asked, kind of bewildered. The idea of crack was mysterious and frightening to me.
“Nope,” he said. “It’s just a glass thing I got from the bio-waste pile. What I did was stick some mud in it then light it on fire. Looks pretty convincing, huh?”
“Definitely,” I said, though I wouldn’t have known a crack pipe from a corncob.
He tried to push the bag through the gap but couldn’t get his big hand through. “Reach in here and grab it,” he said.
In a flash I pictured him grabbing my wrist and holding me until some other men captured me from behind. I had to remind myself he wasn’t a sex-offending hobo. This man had done right by me, and I owed it to him to show my trust. Plus I wanted the stuff he got me. So I reached through the gap and grabbed the bag, and when he let go I pulled it through.
“Thank you,” I said. “Can I pay you or something? I have some money at home.”
“On the house,” he said. “Favors always come back around.”
I thanked him again, caught off guard by his friendliness. I wasn’t used to people doing nice things for me, let alone garbage men, who tended to be stoic or surly, maybe on account of having to wake up so early. Or maybe this man wasn’t a garbage man, it occurred to me. He wasn’t wearing coveralls, and he kept glancing over his shoulder. Come to think of it, he had been speaking in a loud whisper ever since we started talking. But if he wasn’t a garbage man, what was he? And what was he doing in the dump?
Asking those questions might scare the man off, I decided, so I waved in the direction of the new frontloader and said real casual, “You ever get to ride that rig?”
The man laughed. “I wish,” he said. “It would make my life easier, let me tell you. Better picking than ever in here.”
“I bet,” I said, though I had no idea what he was talking about. “What kind of picking they got, nowadays?”
“Oh, all sorts of stuff. You could live five lifetimes on the stuff they skip over.”
“Valuable stuff?”
“Hell yes. That’s why they did up the fence like they did.”
“Who’s they?”
“Bi-Cities.”
“But don’t you work for Bi-Cities?”
The man eyed me suspiciously. He was onto me, I could tell, but I couldn’t stop talking. I said, “You don’t work here, do you?”
“Not in an official capacity.”
“So you work here off the books?”
The man said nothing.
“In secret?”
The man glanced over his shoulder.
“You’re there in secret?” I repeated, unable to contain my excitement. “Shit, man, you gotta tell me how you get in there.”
“I gotta go,” the man said, and before I could ask another question he was striding away from me across the landscape of trash. He moved quick for such a big fellow. I watched him disappear over a distant ragged hill, and I cursed myself for scaring him off like that, for blowing the opportunity to learn more about the inner workings of the dump. I had to get in there to sabotage it, and a contact on the inside could have helped, but would I ever see the man again? Grandpa once said if you shot at a puma and missed, you wouldn’t see the puma again until the night it crept up and killed you.
Chapter 4
THE NEXT DAY after school I went out to the parking lot where the boys were gathered and handed the grocery bag to Pete. He looked inside and pretended to gag. The other boys looked with disgust at the contents and said they couldn’t believe it. Only Ronnie seemed unimpressed. He asked me how I got into the dump, and I told him about the gap between the fence and the outbuilding. He nodded, but he seemed suspicious.
Red Dog had the syringe and was pretending to inject Kyle James. Ronnie told them to quit horsing around. He said, “Bring out the Manifesto,” and they went through the same ceremony of opening the trunk, taking out the lockbox, unlocking it, and lifting the cluttered manuscript towards me.
I reached for the manuscript, but Ronnie swatted my hand. “We’ll turn the pages,” he said. Somebody groaned, but Ronnie ignored it.
The contents of Satans Manifesto are hard to describe. The part I started reading had been “done up,” as Ronnie said, but it was still pretty jumbled. There were rants about girls and blacks and Mexicans, some discussion of a possible race war, and an extended sex scene between Principal Winthrope and a zombie-type creature of unknown origin. The scene was written in bedroom language (“the creature tongued the dark circles of her pert nipples,” etc.) straight out of Ruthanne’s sleazy novels. The zombie-type creature was called a Sleeper. Satans Manifesto was full of Sleepers. They lurked in abandoned buildings. They hid behind the seats of cars and bit off the backs of people’s heads while they drove. They stole babies and melted them to fuel a laser cannon to incinerate the White House, and while everybody ran screaming from the Oval Office and secret champagne rooms, this one Sleeper jammed his penis in the President’s ear until the President “talked like a penis.” The Sleepers were a strange crew, for sure. Original too, which was why it bothered me I couldn’t picture them.
“These Sleepers,” I said, “what do they look like?”
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p; “Like humans,” Pete said, “but with melted faces and shit, and their guts hanging out.”
“So they’re zombies?”
“Yeah,” Pete said.
“A sleeper is nothing like a zombie,” Ronnie said. “A zombie just goes around eating up everything, but a Sleeper is discerning. He doesn’t just eat the flesh of a man; he eats his knowledge, his memories, all the stuff that’s in the grayish slime of his brain. It’s symbolic.”
The others nodded.
I kept reading. It turned out Sleepers were unlike zombies in another important respect: they came from outer space. “Millennia ago,” according to the document, and they’d been laying underground since then, biding their time; hence the name Sleepers. They had skeletons on the outside of their guts, just under their skin, which made them impervious to bullets. The skin itself was moist and flaky, absorbing water from the damp ground. Now the Sleepers were waking up “to set things right.”
Over the next few days I read Satans Manifesto while the boys joked and bullshitted, and Ronnie kept one eye on me in case I ran off with it, or maybe to gauge my reaction. I have to admit I got to enjoying it. Care had been taken with it (by Ronnie, most likely), especially on the Sleeper parts. Some of the sex and murder parts were okay too. They were kind of funny, the way shitty horror movies are funny. But as I got deeper into the Manifesto, I started seeing the names of popular girls in school, popular black kids too, and this Mexican kid named Rudy Tovar. Rudy seemed kind of gay, I guess, but he was Vice President of the student council and everybody liked him. In the Manifesto, he got his head bit off and his brains sucked out while a Sleeper “with a spiny penis like a fish penis” sodomized him until he “wore out dead.”
The Rudy part made me want to stop reading, so I skimmed the next couple pages until I got to the end of the section and had an excuse to stop. “Pretty crazy, y’all,” I said, trying to smile.
“Pretty crazy?” Ronnie said. “That’s all you got?”
“There’s some interesting ideas in it.”
“That’s nothing. Wait ’til you start the next section.”
“My eyes are kind of tired.”
“You mean your pussy is tired.”
“What?”
Kyle said, “Come on, Ronnie, we been standing here an hour. It’s almost dark. I told Jen I would meet her at—”
“Jen can eat my pussy. We gotta get this kid straight about the facts.”
Jen was Kyle’s off-and-on girlfriend, so I wasn’t sure how he would take this comment from Ronnie, but he ignored it. He seemed tired. He said, “Kid, Ben, whatever your name is, we want you to do drawings for the Manifesto.”
Having read Satans Manifesto, I no longer relished the idea of doing drawings for it, but I did like the attention. And I liked the way it felt to have some people to meet in the parking lot after school instead of wandering off by myself. So I told them I would do it.
“Hell yeah, homes,” Pete said and bumped my fist.
That night I tried to draw a Sleeper, but I couldn’t do it right. Everything I drew was just a dumb zombie, with none of the menace contained by Ronnie’s Sleeper concept. So the next day, when they asked for a drawing, I told them I was waiting for inspiration. “And after it strikes,” I said, “it’ll take me a while to get the drawing just right. I’m a perfectionist, is what I’m saying.” It was the most words I had ever strung together in front of those boys, and they seemed kind of surprised by it, or put off. I added the excuse of the Sleeper concept being complicated, hoping it would flatter Ronnie and keep him off my back.
“Then don’t start with Sleepers,” Ronnie said. “Start with a murder or something. How about the spree killing at the Drug Time, in the third part?”
“I haven’t read that part yet.”
“Read it. Red Dog, get the Manifesto.”
“Um,” Red Dog said.
“What is it?” Ronnie demanded.
“I guess I left it at home.”
Ronnie shook his head like Red Dog, and all the rest of us, were bad hired help.
I dodged a bullet that afternoon, but they kept pestering me, so to satisfy them I tore old drawings out of my notebook and pretended they were new. Some of them fit the Manifesto pretty well, since it contained just about every atrocity imaginable, and if it didn’t I would say maybe they should add something like that. Even Ronnie had to admit when he had overlooked something choice, like a motorcycle with razor wheels that cut people in half.
Sometimes I came out to the parking lot and it was just Ronnie and Red Dog, and sometimes it was just Ronnie. When it was just Ronnie he didn’t act as mean. The other guys seemed to annoy him just as much as I did.
One time I gave Ronnie a drawing of Hitler giving a donkey a blowjob and Ronnie made a sort of grunting noise that for him was laughing. I asked him where were the other guys, and he said they were busy eating Kyle’s pussy. He went on a long rant about Kyle. It turned out Ronnie thought Kyle was “chickenhearted” and that the other guys only liked him out of weakness, because it flattered their egos to hang out with a good-looking guy who, in a different life, could have been popular. Ronnie said guys like Pete secretly just wanted to be popular. “Not like you and me,” he said.
I didn’t quite know what to make of that, but I nodded.
“I knew it wasn’t a crack-pipe,” Ronnie said.
“Pardon?”
“That thing you brought us, from the dump—I knew it wasn’t real, but I didn’t say nothing.”
“Thanks,” I said, but I was kind of annoyed. Ronnie was talking like he had done me some big favor by not mentioning it to the others, but the others wouldn’t have cared, and I suspected he knew that.
“I was impressed regardless,” Ronnie said. “Doing it up like that took creativity.”
“Thanks,” I said, feeling guilty. I didn’t tell him it was Boss who did it, not me.
“Breaking in, too,” Ronnie said, “that took balls. I can tell you got big fat balls. It’s cuz you got nothing to lose, am I right?”
“I guess not.”
“It’s because you don’t fear death.”
“Sure,” I said, though I certainly did fear death. I didn’t want to give Ronnie any ideas about using me as a suicide bomber, if that was his line.
Ronnie sighed and pitched a rock as far as he could. It hit the hubcap on a shiny red pickup and he grunted, satisfied. He said, “Sometimes I think about that dump like a big old throbbing tumor in the middle of this place. Somebody oughta bust it up from the inside.”
I almost told him how I tried to, but telling Ronnie would have cheapened the memory, I decided, coarsened it somehow, so I just stood there nodding while he talked about the dump and how shitty and stupid it was. In retrospect, I wish I had opened up to him. Ronnie and I might have had more in common than I thought.
Ronnie started talking about how I needed to draw more girls. He had noticed my drawings were always of guys. He said if it was a problem of anatomy he could get me a magazine. “Red Dog has a dozen in his trunk,” Ronnie said, “and fifty more at home. You ain’t afraid to draw girls or nothing, right?”
“No,” I said.
“Would it bother you to draw them?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t. I hadn’t ever tried drawing girls before. I guess it wasn’t as funny to me seeing girls get dismembered and whatnot.
“Well it shouldn’t bother you,” Ronnie said. “Girls are just as shitty as guys. When the war comes they’ll get theirs too.”
I almost asked if he meant the race war or the war against rogue machines, but it was time for me to go to the grocery store, and both wars were subjects on which Ronnie had many lengthy rants. I told Ronnie I had to go, and he grunted without looking at me. I left him there alone.
When I got home that night I tried to draw some girls, out of curiosity more than anything, a sort of personal challenge, but I struggled. It wasn’t the violence that made it hard; it was the embarrassmen
t I felt when I started to draw boobs or even buttcheeks, and a pair of buttcheeks might just as easily have belonged to a man I was drawing getting disemboweled, not a woman. Honestly, though, the main reason I didn’t want to draw girls was because of Ruthanne. It made me think of how the girls in Satans Manifesto could have been her.
Thinking about the girls in the Manifesto made me want to check on Ruthanne, to talk to her and know she was safe. It was like when I was a kid. Back then, whenever I had a bad dream and got afraid, I would sneak into Ruthanne’s room and wake her up. Or if I was feeling more generous I might just creep into bed next to her and lay there quietly for a while. Later, I had to make it into a prank. I would poke my head into her room and say something to get a rise out of her, then she’d say “What is it, you dumbass?” and I’d say something stupid like “Just got a good fart out, is all” and she’d throw a book at my head, or the stapler, and that’d be the end of it. I’d be satisfied. This feeling was different, though. It wasn’t enough just to see her. I had to hear her voice and know she was happy.
I didn’t have to creep into her bedroom anymore since we shared the same room. I had been drawing in the bathroom, for privacy. When I went to the bedroom I knocked on the door, to be polite.
Ruthanne was reading a book in bed, as usual, and looked up at me surprised. “Yeah?” she said.
“Can I come in?” I asked.
“It’s your own goddamned bedroom.”
“I just want you to know you can have some privacy if you want.”
“How thoughtful.”
Instead of going to my own sloppy looking bed I went to hers and sat down on the foot of it, hunched and staring at the floor.
Ruthanne kept reading, ignoring me. She sighed a few times like it was real annoying for her to have me in her bed like that, like if it wasn’t for me she would have done jumping jacks. I thought about how in her old bedroom I would have been able to see Trash Mountain from where I sat. I thought about the marks on the windowsill, to record its height. I wondered how high the marks would have been if we had kept marking them.
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