I grabbed a copy of POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine and hunched over it, pretending to read about advancements in body armor technology but really thinking about how nice the other boys looked in their suits. Those suits were wool, probably, nothing like the polyester cheapo I was wearing, which I couldn’t take off because it was so hot that my armpits had already sweat through my shirt.
I waited, pretending to read, while each of the other kids got called on by the receptionist and led away. They’d be gone for ten minutes then come back looking dazed. I wondered if they had been interrogated. Probably Whitey Connors had instructed his HR person to make sure everybody’s story checked out. Maybe there was a heat lamp and two HR people, one good, one bad, and the bad one yelled about how you lied on your résumé and could go to jail for it while the good one offered you soda and whatnot. By the time all the other kids had gone, I was prepared for the worst.
A tall girl in a nice long dress came unsteadily from around the reception desk and left without a word. The receptionist shuffled some papers and said, “Benjamin Shippers?”
“That’s me,” I said.
The receptionist led me down a hallway to an office where a mustachioed man in a short-sleeved dress shirt was sitting behind a pristine desk. His necktie was pinned to the front of his shirt. The receptionist handed the man some papers and he put on reading glasses to examine them.
“Shippers,” he said. “Is that Dutch?”
“Partly,” I said, though I had no idea.
“Sit down for Pete’s sake.”
I sat down in a chair across the desk from the mustachioed man. Behind him was a window with crooked venetian blinds. The sun was peeking through, about to set.
“Local boy, huh?”
“That’s right, sir.”
He glanced at me over his reading glasses. “You look a bit like you’re from out west.”
I didn’t want this man to think I was a hayseed so I wracked my brain for a lie. “This jacket was my father’s,” I said, “and used to be part of a very fine suit. The pants were lost in a tragic house fire.”
The man wrote something on a notepad. He put down my résumé and started reading my cover letter, which emphasized poverty and fatherlessness. Demarcus told me that was my angle. I thought about the boys and girls who went before me, in their nice clothes, and decided to play up the difference between us.
“Excuse me, sir,” I said. “I want our relationship to get off on the right foot so I’m going to tell you the truth. This jacket wasn’t my father’s. My father never wore a jacket a day in his life. He does brake boxes at a factory in the city. I bought this jacket at the Salvation Army because I like it. I suppose I consider myself a westerner in spirit. The wide open spaces fire my imagination.” I couldn’t believe the bullshit that was coming out of my mouth. I was trying to tell the truth, but I couldn’t stop lying!
The man leaned back in his chair and examined me. “The clothes don’t make the man,” he said, “but careful grooming sometimes does.”
The word grooming made me think of dogs.
“Pared fingernails,” the man continued, “a cleanly shaved face. Take your haircut, for example.”
I prepared for the worst. Mom used to cut my hair with shaving clippers but she hadn’t cut it in a long time so I tried it myself the day before, but I screwed up and had to shave the whole thing down to a quarter inch. My ears stuck out like mug handles.
“Most of these boys have mops on their heads,” the man continued, “but your tidy haircut tells me you don’t have time to stand around styling yourself in front of a mirror.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said. “I cut it myself.”
“Why, you don’t even have time to go to the barbershop!”
“That’s right.”
“A self-starter,” the man said, rolling the words around in his mouth, “a self-starter by God.” He seemed to really like self-starters. He picked up my résumé again. “Hmm,” he said. “Why do you want to work at Bi-Cities Sanitation?”
Demarcus had prepared me for just that question. I said, “I want to be part of a thriving and well-run business such as Bi-Cities Sanitation.”
“But why do you, Benjamin Shippers, want to join the Bi-Cities team?”
“Well, I guess I want—I just want”—the word infiltration kept trying to come out of my mouth, but I held it back—“I want to make a difference.”
“Glad to hear it,” the man said flatly. He eyed my résumé. “What’s your major?”
Shit, I thought. I didn’t remember which major we put. “Um,” I said, searching for a lie, “sanitation science?”
“Says here it’s undeclared.”
“Well, I been thinking pretty hard about sanitation science.”
“Hmm. You ever had an internship before?”
“Yes, sir, with Toni Mikiska.”
“I didn’t know Toni hired interns. How is she, by the way?”
“Good. She moved to an island with her wife.”
The man eyed me. “If I called Toni right now, what would she say about you?”
“She’d say I worked hard but was kind of shy, maybe. She wanted me to talk to the old ladies, but I didn’t. Honestly old people kind of scare me, except my grandpa. He lives outside the city. He used to work in the kaolin mine. You know kaolin, china clay?”
The man nodded and I kept talking about Grandpa, then a bunch of other things. I couldn’t shut up!
“You don’t seem shy to me,” the man said.
“I guess I’m nervous,” I said.
“Because this résumé is embellished?”
I said nothing. I was caught. I had a vision of being thrown in some kind of basement detention facility until the cops came for me.
“Look,” the man said, “you’re a self-starter—that much is plain to see—but this internship is for high-achieving college students. Not that any high-achieving college students are applying,” the man added, muttering. “Tell you what, I’ll pass this along.”
“My résumé? But I thought you said—”
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
I nodded, confused. Was the man the horse or the gift?
“No promises,” he said, “but who knows, maybe it’ll stick somewhere.” The man stood up, so I did too, and we shook hands.
“Thank you, sir,” I said, but I didn’t have high hopes. I didn’t know what it took for a résumé to stick somewhere, but I was pretty sure mine didn’t have it.
When I left the man’s office it was after five o’clock, and the place was real quiet. I walked down the hallway to where the waiting room was, and the waiting room was empty. Even the receptionist was gone. So I turned around and kept walking down the hallway. I passed closed door after closed door, some with little windows so I could peek in and see darkened conference rooms and offices full of desks and computers and all kinds of big machines. I’d never been inside an office building before, and the unfamiliar surroundings were kind of scary to me, but I had to put my fear aside in order to infiltrate, I decided. I might not get another chance. For courage I thought about Blood Bank. At the end, Rick Zorn is running around a skyscraper with guys shooting at him until he finds the main bad guy banker standing in front of a plate-glass window, holding a grenade with the pin pulled. The banker guy laughs real crazy and says, “I guess you think you caught me, huh?” and Zorn says, “Red handed,” then shoots the guy’s hand off. The grenade flies bloody through the plate-glass window, shattering it, and explodes in the distance near a helicopter with some other bad bankers inside who catch fire and fall screaming to their deaths.
Nobody was going to shoot at me or pull out a grenade, of course, but still I stayed on my toes. The first open door I saw led to a sort of break room with a stinky microwave and a couple couches. I fought the urge to go in there and poke around for snacks, in case I got caught by a janitor or the guy who just interviewed me, which would have been a pretty good way to make su
re my résumé didn’t stick.
The hallway ended in a metal door with a porthole window. I looked through the window and saw sinuous hills of garbage. Beyond the hills, bluish in the dwindling sunlight, was the hulking shape of Trash Mountain.
I didn’t see any garbage men or office people, so I tried the door.
The door was unlocked.
Chapter 6
TRASH MOUNTAIN LOOKED different. There weren’t as many oversized items as there used to be, no busted fridges or soiled loveseats or floppy mattresses with their stuffing hanging out. Maybe there was a separate area filled with those items, a wasteland of home furnishings. Trash Mountain itself was more uniform, almost featureless. It looked taller. Wider, too. And there was a sort of mini-mountain to the side of the main peak, like Lhotse, the 27,940-foot mountain connected to Everest by the South Col. Anywhere else, Lhotse would have been the biggest thing around. It was only Everest that made it seem small.
In front of me, between the foothills, was a long straight clearing like an unpaved road. I walked along the slippery mixture of flattened garbage and red clay, listening for workers, preparing in my mind what I’d say by way of excuse, but I didn’t see a soul. There were tread marks where garbage trucks or loaders had been. Some of the foothills were girded by chicken-wire, the kind you see along the highway to keep rocks from tumbling into the road. Here and there, narrower trails like footpaths meandered away from the main road and disappeared between hills of trash.
When I got to the base of Trash Mountain, I looked up. Two black vultures circled high overhead, which made me wonder if there were animal carcasses tucked in shallow graves of garbage: either vermin or pets people were too lazy to bury, or maybe human bodies missing fingers and teeth so the cops couldn’t solve the murders.
At the base of Trash Mountain, the wide road veered right, towards the center of the dump, but a footpath went left towards Komer. I took the footpath. A couple times I came to forks in the path, and each time I went left, hoping to be able to retrace my steps in case I got lost or had to make an escape. In a pinch I figured I could dive into the trash and bury myself until the threat, human or vehicular, passed me by.
It wasn’t too long before I heard a noise, like scraping. Because I hadn’t seen any people I assumed it to be a vulture scraping meat off a bone, but it might have been a puma so I stood still and made no sound. That’s when I heard voices. Someone said “Gimme that” and another person grunted.
I crept along the path, expecting to see garbage men doing maintenance on Trash Mountain, but the only evidence I saw of human activity was an overturned wheelbarrow by the side of the path. The voices were louder now. One was a man’s voice. He said, “Don’t touch that.” A second voice said, “Fuck off.” The second voice was deep and crabby, but I knew it was a woman’s voice. Ms. Mikiska told me how women speak in five tones but men in only three. That’s basic voice science.
I was listening, wondering what these people were up to and if it was secret, when I felt a big hand on my shoulder. I turned, frightened, and saw the tar-black belly of a set of rubber waders. Above me was a big stubbly face staring down.
It was Boss, the man who had gathered my used condoms and improvised crack pipe.
“Hey there,” he said with a wet click, as friendly as if he had run into me on the street, not trespassing at his place of work.
“Hey,” I said.
“Whatcha doing here?”
“Just checking out the scene.”
“A nice evening for it.” He looked over top of the nearest trash pile at the lowering sun, then sniffed the air. When he spoke again it was in a serious whisper: “It isn’t safe for you here.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Leo and Candy will be mad if they see you.”
“Who are Leo and Candy?”
Boss winced a little, like he knew he shouldn’t have said those names and was wondering what to do now that he said them. I wondered if they were his crew. Maybe the crew scavenged copper. I knew about copper scavenging because Grandpa said forest hobos did it to abandoned houses. If Grandpa stayed indoors a few days in a row, during one of his spells, the hobos would start scavenging his house. Just because Boss wasn’t a hobo didn’t mean he wasn’t scavenging copper. There was good money in it.
“I won’t tell anybody,” I said. “I got my own thing going, so silence would be mutually beneficial, know what I mean?”
“I don’t,” Boss said. “What kind of thing you got going?”
“I was just, well—” I found it hard to describe the sequence of events that had led me inside the dump. “I was looking for a job, but I know they won’t give it to me, so I snuck in.”
“To raise hell?” Boss asked.
“To know my enemy, is more like it.”
Boss nodded. “I can see why you think this place is your enemy. It smells bad and looks worse and, well, I guess it’s pretty much horrible to have something like this next to where you live. Leo thinks about it different, though. He says it’s like the ocean and we’re like fisherman. We harvest what’s inside it and have to take good care of it. He calls what we do husbandry.”
“Like with a wife?”
Boss squinted, thinking. “Maybe, but I was thinking more like animals. Animal husbandry.”
“What’s that?”
“Milking animals and delivering their babies and such.”
I nodded. Leo sounded like a very wise person to me. I hoped to meet him.
“Clarence!” came the gruff lady’s voice. “Who you talking to?”
“Shit,” Boss mouthed.
I should have run to save my hide, and maybe Boss’s too, since he was the low man on the totem pole, clearly, but my curiosity got the best of me. Candy sounded tough, sure, but what could she do? Worst case she’d put out a cigarette on my forearm, like that gypsy pimp in the Rick Zorn movie where he rescues orphans by making them a Kung Fu team, but a cigarette burn would be worth it to know what these people were up to.
A round black lady with a red bandana on her head came out from between two trash hills and saw us. “Goddamn, Clarence,” she muttered. “Who’s this?”
“Just a kid,” Boss said.
“I see that. You know him?”
“Oh, yeah. For sure.”
“What’s he doing here?”
I wanted to speak on my own behalf, but I couldn’t get a word out before this Candy lady said “I ain’t talking to you” in such an un-maternal way that I shut up immediately.
“He know our business?” she asked Boss.
“He won’t say nothing,” Boss said. “He’s a good boy.”
Candy sighed. “We better take him to Leo.”
Now I was worried. Leo sounded wise, sure, but true wise men were unsentimental, and what if he did me in to cover his tracks?
Candy turned around and headed back where she came from, and Boss nodded for me to follow her. I did, with Boss close behind.
We came to a small clearing surrounded on all sides by hills of trash, like a little valley. In the middle of the clearing was a kitchen table with a linoleum top and rusty metal legs. There were a couple school chairs around the table, and in one chair a man sat hunched in a bulky green terrycloth bathrobe. He had a bushy black beard and thick glasses perched on the tip of his long nose. In front of him on the table was a pile of circuit boards, one of which was suspended by a vice. The man was using an exacto razor to scrape something off the circuit board into a small ceramic bowl. He didn’t seem to notice us.
Candy said, “Leo, baby, sorry to interrupt.”
The man, Leo, dropped his exacto, muttering, and turned to face us. He pushed his glasses up his nose with a dirty finger. Behind the heavy glasses, his eyes were huge. The big dark irises looked like giant pupils, like a cartoon character’s eyes, and they lit right on me.
“Who’s this?” Leo asked. His voice was raspy and high-pitched.
“My nephew,” Boss lied.
&
nbsp; Candy said, “Goddamn, Clarence, for real?”
“No,” Boss said, wrinkling up his face like he was thinking. I expected him to come up with another lie but he didn’t. I had to speak for myself.
“I’m just a kid,” I said. “I snuck in to check the place out. I was curious. I’m only twelve.”
“A spy,” Leo said. “You work for Bi-Cities, don’t you?”
Candy said, “He’s twelve, Leo.”
Leo eyed me. “He’s lying. I can hear the jingle of coins in his puerile voice, so he’s old enough to want money.”
Unnerved, I said, “I swear, mister—”
“This is how they operate,” Leo said, ignoring me. “They have spies at the schools now, men who look like children. Baby-faced midgets. Always listening. In school, that’s where it starts. There, and in the Mexican encampments. It’s the Mexicans they’re worried about nowadays. In my day it was the blacks and ethnics.” Leo talked about undercover agents whose origin and purpose got murkier as he talked until eventually I started to tune him out and survey the scene. In addition to the circuit boards on the table, there were piles of copper, as I suspected, and plastics piled by color on the wet ground.
When the talking stopped I saw, to my horror, that Leo was holding a chef’s knife. The knife looked old and dirty, but the blade-edge gleamed, which meant it was sharp.
“Tell me, you midget spy,” Leo said, “why shouldn’t I cut your throat right now?”
I was stunned. I got a vision of them killing me and burying me under a pile of trash, never to be found. The only clue would be the circling vultures. I didn’t know what to say. What did Leo want to hear?
Boss put his hand on the back of my neck. It was probably for my protection, so he could throw me out of the way if need be, but in that moment I was sure he was holding me steady so Leo could slash my throat.
“I came here to look for work,” I said. My voice was cracking. “People said Bi-Cities was hiring and—”
“So that’s what you’re after,” Leo said. “A piece of the action. If you leave right now and never show your face again, I’ll spare your life.”
A normal person would have run away at this point, but words kept coming out of my mouth: “What kind of action do you mean?”
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