Leo stood up and raised the chef’s knife high over his head, blade downward. Had he been closer I might have made a break for it, but he was on the other side of the small clearing. His bulky robe flapped open to reveal a yellowing v-neck undershirt and droopy trousers cinched by a belt. He twirled the knife in the air so it caught the light of the setting sun. The gesture was pretty flamboyant, which made me think it might be for show. He began a slow and menacing creep in my direction, knife held aloft at a jaunty angle. Boss inched forward so he was a little closer to Leo than I was.
“So you want a piece of the action, do you?” Leo asked.
“That’s right,” I said, “and I can help you.”
“How?”
“I’ll be your intern.”
“Ridiculous.”
“What’s the harm? Interns don’t get paid.” I pictured Demarcus shaking his head and telling me I got the intern idea all wrong. This work did not have career potential. But I perceived in these scavengers a closeness to Trash Mountain that I wanted for myself. My childhood memories—my whole life—was wrapped up in that place. “I’ll gather whatever you want,” I said, “so you can spend more time scraping it or whatever, or supervising.”
Leo shuffled sideways to get between me and his work table, blocking my view of the circuit boards. “What have you seen me scrape?” he asked.
“Nothing. I don’t care what it is. I’ll just gather it, I swear.”
“I have Clarence for that.”
“Two is better than one. Plus I’m smaller. Clarence, Boss, can tell me where to go, and I can sort of root around in there and get the small stuff, like a truffle pig.”
Leo lowered the knife and looked at Boss. “Boss, huh? That’s cute.”
Boss said, “Honest, Leo, I could use the help. You’re always telling me I don’t get the stuff fast enough.”
“Fine. Use him. Pay him if you want. Boss him around a little, if that’s what you’re after.” Leo winked. “Do what you like with him, just don’t show him our ways.”
“Can I show him how to get in?” Boss asked.
“Absolutely not.”
“But—”
“How’d he get in this time?”
I said, “The back door of the building.”
Leo laughed like a big crazy bird. “Good luck with that, kiddo. I might not be seeing you after all.” He shook his head and went back to his table, still laughing.
Boss ushered me out of the clearing and onto the path where we had met. “Leo can be a real dick,” he said.
“He seems pretty mean.”
“Yeah. He never stabbed anybody, though. He mostly yells. He don’t ever leave that table so you don’t have to see him if you don’t want to.” Boss stared at the dirt, thinking. “I could use the help, like I said, but I can’t pay you.”
“No worries,” I said. I didn’t need money. I had $1,567 in two shoeboxes, and I would have had more if I didn’t buy groceries for Mom and me sometimes. I liked buying groceries because I got to buy what I liked: marshmallow cereal, frozen tater tots, and Country Home baked beans with maple-smoked bacon flavor.
“If you need money,” Boss said, “I can show you where there’s good stuff to sell.”
“But what about you?”
“We make our money gathering recyclables, mostly.”
“What kind of recyclables?”
“Oh, you know, glass, tin, plastics one, two and five, some other stuff.”
“What other stuff?”
“I’m not supposed to talk about it. Please don’t ask again. I talk too much.” Boss shook his head like he was sick of himself.
“Don’t sweat it,” I said, “I’m not in it for the money.”
Boss looked down at me quizzically. “Then what are you in it for?”
I didn’t want to say infiltration, in case that sounded nefarious, so I just thanked Boss and told him I’d come by the next day after school. He told me the best picking was early in the morning, right after the fleet left. I didn’t relish the idea of waking up before dawn, but I told him I’d try.
By the time I got home it was late enough that the yahoos had gathered in the strip mall parking lot across from the apartment. When I passed on my bike, they threw bottles into the street and called me faggot.
At the apartment complex, I went straight to the basement laundry room, where I stripped off my clothes and stuffed them into the washer, hoping to get the stink of the dump off my new jacket and jeans. The stink of Leo, too. Not that Leo smelled bad (I didn’t get close enough to smell him), but the way he looked made me feel dirty. Those grimy cinched trousers.
I changed back into my school clothes and went upstairs, where Mom was talking on the phone to Ruthanne. I wanted to talk to Ruthanne when Mom was through. To get the phone I had to go into Mom’s room, where she was lying in bed under the covers. All over the bedspread were used tissues. The mucusy smell was overpowering, and made worse by a flowery perfume she spritzed to mask it.
The phone smelled like the perfume so I wiped it on my shirt. When I got it to my ear Ruthanne was saying, “Took you long enough. I was about to hang up.”
“Would have served me right,” I said, which seemed to confuse her. I was still feeling dirty and guilty from my day at the dump. I wanted to tell her about it but didn’t know where to start. I remembered what she said about serious trouble. Did trespassing count?
Ruthanne started up her usual rigmarole about Geraldine. “Mom might be fat,” Ruthanne said, “but this bitch is ugly. And did I mention she’s a bitch?”
I tried to laugh, but my mind was elsewhere. It didn’t matter to Ruthanne, though. She kept going about how the community college classes were for dummies and there was an old guy who kept talking to her. “I swear to God, Ben, he must be thirty at least. He’s got a metal leg so I guess he was in the Army. He’s got a Mexican name, but he speaks English regular.”
“Sounds like you like him,” I said.
“Shows what you know,” she said.
I wanted to ask Ruthanne if it was crazy to work part-time in the dump, off the books, but I was embarrassed. Ruthanne was in college. College was the opposite of a dump! Our lives were headed in different directions.
“How’s Dad?” I asked.
“Annoying,” she said. “I come home from class and he’s stretched out on the couch yelling at the TV. Geraldine does all the shopping and cooking, and from what I can tell she works longer hours than Dad does. He’s worried the Chinese are spying on him. He says there’s gonna be a war between us and the Chinese.”
“Probably so,” I said.
“He says you and Mom will be safe because you live in a low priority target area.”
“I’ll say.”
“But he says if the war starts we’ll have to move to a bunker, maybe Grandpa’s. I told him fat chance. Grandpa thinks Dad’s lazy and can’t pull his weight around a farmhouse, which is true, but it’s not like I can either. I can barely even cook. Goddamn, Ben, I better get a good job out of this college deal. Geraldine says even to be a librarian you have to have a master’s nowadays. Listen, Ben, I gotta go. But what you been up to?”
“Oh, you know, school and whatnot.” I wasn’t really listening. I was looking out the window at the people across the street in the parking lot. A familiar figure was strolling towards them with his hands thrust in the pockets of a black hooded sweatshirt.
“Well, remember what I told you,” Ruthanne was saying.
“About what?”
“Serious trouble. Stay out of it.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, and hung up.
The figure, a small man, nodded to a group of drunks standing in a circle, then walked up to a Pontiac Firebird and bent over the driver’s side window. Words were exchanged, and something else. When the figure turned to walk away, I could see his face: Ronnie Mlezcko.
I came out the front door waving my arms. Ronnie looked up, but I guess he couldn’t see me in the dark. Our
cheapskate landlord only kept one lamp lit in the parking lot, just outside the office, which was also the superintendent’s apartment.
I hollered “Ronnie!” but he didn’t stop. I came down the stairs and saw him walking down the road away from me. “Ronnie!” I yelled.
The drunks in the parking lot took up a chorus: “Ronnie! Ronnie! Ooh, Ronnie!”
I felt like an idiot, but it was too late to run back. Ronnie had noticed me. I expected him to be pissed, and honestly I had no idea what I was doing. I guess I just liked the idea of running into a friend from school, which never happened to me. The people across the street in the parking lot kept cat-calling me and parroting Ronnie’s name and laughing, and I felt like crawling into the gutter. But I was afraid to go back inside because they’d see where I went and maybe tag our door. Somebody wrote GO BACK TO MEXICO on a door downstairs. I felt like I was stranded, like in this dream I used to have where instead of Bob Bilger it was me on the wooden stage back at Milford Perkins, only I was naked and Mr. B, the computer teacher, was sitting in the front row covering his eyes with both hands.
But it turned out I didn’t have to worry. Ronnie had turned back to the people in the parking lot. He didn’t say anything, just looked at them. They looked back at him, still shouting “Ronnie!” and kind of laughing, but then the shouting stopped, and the laughing did too. I knew the face they were seeing, the face he had turned on Kyle James when he pointed the rifle at him. Ronnie was the kind of person you could imagine bursting into a buffet restaurant with an automatic weapon. I didn’t have that kind of face, but it would have been nice to, sometimes. There was power in it. Terrifying power. Because there wasn’t anything you could do to stop a truly hard-hearted crazy person. Not that Ronnie was like that. He just looked like that.
Ronnie turned away from the crowd and came towards me, slowly, hands thrust in his pockets. His face was still hard from the confrontation. He raised his chin at me, unsmiling. “Walk with me,” he said.
We walked to the back of the apartment building, out of sight of the parking lot people. I didn’t ask Ronnie about those people or what he was doing there, but I could tell they were still on his mind. He was shaking his head and sneering so his crooked front teeth showed like weird fangs.
“Assholes,” he said. His face looked thinner than I thought it was, older too. Maybe Ronnie was different outside of school, I thought. Maybe I didn’t really know him. It was stupid to have come out to talk to him.
“You live around here?” he asked.
I pointed upstairs to the apartment, but there weren’t any windows in the back of the building so it looked like a warehouse.
“What a dump,” he said.
“Don’t I know it,” I said. Then I told him how we used to have a house right next to Trash Mountain.
“Trash Mountain?” he repeated. “You mean that big old trash pile?”
“Yeah, that’s what I call it. My sister does too.”
“Ruthanne, right? How’s she doing?”
I was surprised Ronnie knew Ruthanne’s name. This had quickly become the most civil conversation we ever had. “She’s good,” I said, and told him how she moved away for community college.
Ronnie didn’t seem to be listening, just staring at something far beyond me. “Trash Mountain,” he murmured. “I like that.” His expression changed. “Fucking garbage. Fucking Bi-Cities Sanitation. Motherfucking Whitey Connors.” He spat on the pavement, disgusted. He told me if he had a nickel for every fucked-up thing Whitey Connors did, he’d stuff the nickels up Whitey Connors’s asshole and throw him in the Ocmoolga to drown. I must have looked confused because Ronnie felt the need to clarify: “He’d drown from the weight of them nickels in his stomach. Only problem with drowning a man is you can’t hear him scream.”
“Hmm,” I said.
“I got a new tattoo. Check it out.”
He lifted his hoodie and t-shirt, and there were little doodles on his pale white flanks and some writing on his hairy stomach. But those tattoos were old, he said. The one he wanted to show me was on his back. It was Jesus Christ on the cross, only instead of Jesus’s bearded face in bliss or agony it was a flaming skull.
“Pretty tight, huh?” he said.
“Yeah, tight,” I said, but honestly I was kind of disturbed—not by the content so much as the sheer size of the tattoo. It covered his whole damn back. The flaming skull Jesus was the size of a real-life toddler.
I was careful not to ask Ronnie too much about his life, but he offered some things. He said his mom was a real dick. He said his brother Bill was on the run and was “a goddamn idiot who didn’t know how to handle his business.” He said he spent many hours wandering at night, which gave him time to reflect.
“On what?” I asked, curious about Ronnie’s inner life.
“On what’s coming,” he said ominously.
“What’s coming?”
“A race war,” he said, “the apocalypse.”
“Sure,” I said, kind of disappointed. I’d heard Ronnie speak many times on both those subjects.
“What?” Ronnie said. “You don’t believe me?”
“I don’t know. I mean, the race war and the apocalypse?”
“One leads to the other, obviously. It’s already happening. In the old days Komer and Haislip were mixed, but now the races have separated. The lines are being drawn. And it’s happening everywhere in America, especially in prisons. In prison you have to choose sides already.”
Ronnie had two uncles in prison and, despite his tendency for drama, basically knew what he was talking about on that front.
To change the subject I said, “So, you mostly on foot then?”
Ronnie said he didn’t have a car so he was always on foot. He said bikes were for kids. He said he wasn’t in a rush to get anywhere anyway, so who gave a fuck. Then he raised his hand for me to clasp, and I clasped it. He pulled me in for half a hug and patted me one time hard on the back. “Take care of yourself,” he said, then he flipped up his hood and sauntered off into the darkness. He had his shoulders up and his hands stuck deep in his pockets, sort of swaying from side to side like thugs on TV. It wasn’t the way he walked at school. I wondered if it was because he knew I was watching him, or because somebody might be watching him, and he had to make the right impression.
Chapter 7
THE NEXT MORNING, I crept out of bed before sunrise and biked to the dump. It was still dark when I got to an overgrown field across the street from the gate where the garbage trucks came and went. I laid down my bike and got behind some bushes to watch, and pretty soon a few sets of headlights came on. The trucks were mustering. A man with a clipboard wheeled open the gate, and the garbage trucks came out one by one like tanks in a convoy. Each truck had two fellows in the cab. Probably one would be hanging off the back later on.
Sometimes the man with a clipboard would wave his hand for them to stop so he could write something on the clipboard, maybe how a door was dinged or a tire looked flat. This man was the last one standing after all the trucks left. He looked out at the wide street with his arms crossed and his chest puffed out like he had just sent a brood of kids off to school.
Eventually the man took a deep breath of morning air then went inside. I tucked my bike up under the bushes and ran through the scraggly trees until I was a couple hundred yards down the road, where I emerged, crossed the road, then slinked along the fence towards the gate. It was still open, so I crept around the corner of the open gate and dashed behind a big tin wall where they blasted the trucks with a fire-hose to clean them.
The space between the tin wall and the fence was long and narrow. The smell was awful. Slime and scraps of trash had accumulated ankle-high. My shoes and socks and the legs of my jeans were wet with foul-smelling water, but I kept going. I trudged through the narrow passage, trying not to breathe through my nose and to ignore the squishing of the slimy garbage.
By the time I got to the other side, the cleaning guys had
emerged. Some spoke English, some Spanish. Then the water came on, and the sound of water blasting the tin wall right beside me was so loud it rattled my skull. As I waited, covering my ears with both hands, the sky began to brighten in the narrow space above me. By the time the water stopped and the voices dwindled, the morning sun had emerged to my left, on the Komer side, and put a soft pink color on the rolling hills of trash.
I found my way to the central lane, behind the HQ building, and followed the same route I had with Boss. Pretty soon I heard Leo and Candy talking. I didn’t want to see them, in case Leo tried to cut my throat again, so I waited behind a smelly pile of white kitchen trash-bags until Boss came around with his wheelbarrow.
“Morning!” he said. “Just a sec.”
He wheeled the wheelbarrow over the hill to where Leo and Candy were, then a few minutes later came back with the wheelbarrow empty. He asked if I had any gloves. I didn’t, so he led me to a spot where he kept some extra clothes inside a shiny blue suitcase: shirts and socks, a second set of waders, and a tattered pair of garden gloves with white rubber grip pads. He handed the gloves to me. They were big as gauntlets so I had to hold my hands up or ball them into fists to keep the gloves from falling off, but I was thankful. I didn’t relish the idea of touching trash barehanded.
Right away Boss started showing me the ropes. We didn’t have much time to lose, he said, because they were dumping that day, which meant some trucks would be arriving with big loads from construction sites.
“Where’s there any construction around here?” I asked.
“Not around here,” Boss said. “Up the highway, near the city.”
“Then why don’t they put the trash someplace in the city?”
Boss shrugged.
The reason Boss wore waders, I soon learned, was he trudged in and out of trash piles all day looking for cans, bottles, greasy pieces of cardboard, and so much other stuff I couldn’t keep track. There were inspections twice a year, he explained, to make sure the dump wasn’t trashing recyclables, and it was cheaper for Bi-Cities to let people like him go through the trash looking for recyclables than to pay their own people to do it. I asked him why there were so many recyclables in the trash since we all had county-issue recycling containers.
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