“Nobody knows what goes in which,” Boss said, and that was true in my experience. At home the only things we put in the recycling container were beer and soda cans. Boss said even if you recycled right you ran out of room because the containers were way too small and didn’t have wheels so lazy people never used them.
If Boss ever found pipe, he collected that too. The same went for hardware like faucets and doorknobs, and for electronics, though most of the new looking stuff was cheaply made and busted beyond repair. Appliances were another favorite. Boss said Leo could fix almost any appliance. One time Boss came down the north slope of Trash Mountain holding a busted microwave in his arms like a baby calf. He told me Leo would be thrilled. The microwave was good as new except the front glass was cracked, which broke the seal and made it so it wouldn’t work, so people wouldn’t accidentally radioactivate themselves, Boss explained, but it would work if Leo bypassed a meddlesome built-in safety feature.
The items that made Boss most excited, though, were remote controls and cell phones. I was surprised he found so many cell phones. Weren’t cell phones expensive? When I asked, Boss said people were always buying new phones and didn’t know what to do with the old ones so they threw them away. He said that was stupid, because you could get good money for a used phone.
“So y’all sell them?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” Boss said, “but mostly they’re too far gone.”
“So what do you do with them?”
Boss shrugged, which was unusual for him. Usually he has lots to say. And when I asked him why anybody would want a remote control without the TV it went to, Boss thought for a long time before he said, “People sometimes lose them. Ain’t you ever lost a remote?”
“I guess,” I said, but I wondered if he wasn’t telling me the whole story. Some of the remotes he collected looked pretty crappy. It was hard to imagine them working on any TV at all.
For the first couple weeks, I just followed Boss around and stood beside him trying to find stuff but getting beat by Boss every time. He had laser eyes. When the wheelbarrow was full we’d go back to HQ, as he called it, and I’d wait in the path while Boss pushed the wheelbarrow over the hill to Candy and Leo. Eventually it got to where I followed Boss into HQ, to speed up the sorting and piling of recyclables. We gave Leo and Candy a wide berth, but sometimes I caught Leo peering at me over his glasses. I stayed ready for a fight. I wasn’t very strong, but I was young and light on my feet. As long as it was only Leo, I could get in one punch to stun him then run for it. That was my plan, at least. But pretty soon Leo seemed to forget I was there.
One day Boss and I came over the hill to find Leo operating an unusual contraption: a sort of wand hooked up to a metal box. Leo passed the wand slowly back and forth over the little circuit boards of phones and remote controls until it made a noise like whoo, whoo! The wand was intriguing to me, like something from an old sci-fi movie with radioactive monsters roaming the Earth in the wake of an A-bomb attack.
Candy caught me staring and said, “If you got so much time on your hands, how ’bout refilling the cooler?”
She meant the big orange cooler they had. It weighed about a thousand pounds when it was full, and the spigot was at the base of an outbuilding way over where the garbage trucks were parked, but I did as I was told.
I took my time, continuing my study of the various paths and features of the garbage landscape, and when I got to the spigot there was a garbage man filling a bucket. By the time I noticed him I was too close to run without looking like a criminal. Boss had told me not to worry about garbage men—they had an understanding, he said—but I was nervous. I wondered what to say when he turned around and saw me (“Morning”? “What’s up”? dignified nod?), but when he did, he didn’t even acknowledge me. It was like I was invisible.
For the first couple weeks, I left the dump right at 8:15 to get to school by 8:30, for first period, but eventually I started running late. Usually it was because I was in the middle of a barrow-load at 8:15, and I couldn’t well leave it there unsorted. After I got to school late a few times I decided I might as well skip first period entirely, so I started leaving the dump at 9:05 to get to school by 9:20. It seemed to me a tenable situation.
Principal Winthrope didn’t agree. She saw me in the halls one day and asked me to her office. Kids were staring. Probably they wondered what was wrong with me. I went through the school day tired and embarrassed, thinking I smelled like trash. Knowing I smelled like trash but unable to smell it anymore, which was a blessing and a curse.
Principal Winthrope was pretty and smelled good so I felt extra self-conscious, like I was contaminating her nice office. While she talked I stared at her desk, where there was a statue of Jesus helping two kids play football.
Right away she was asking about Ruthanne. Did I hear from her? How was college? How was she faring in the city? “We’re all very proud of her,” Principal Winthrope said. “I’m sure she’s doing great.”
“Oh, yeah, college is great alright,” I said, “except for this old Mexican vet who’s trying to get in her pants.”
“Pardon?”
I was too embarrassed to clarify.
“Ben, is something on your mind?”
“No.”
“Things must be different at home, with Ruthanne gone.”
“Same song, different verse.”
“What do you mean by that?”
I didn’t know what I meant. I said, “I guess you wonder why I smell this way, huh? Is that why you brought me in here?”
“Smell what way? Ben, I—”
“A man’s gotta work.”
“Everybody’s got to work—eventually. Now isn’t the time for you to be working. School will be out soon, and I can help you find a job for the summer.”
“Ain’t no jobs in this town.”
“You’re being very surly.”
I shrugged.
“It seems you want to cut to the chase, so I will. You’ve been late six days in a row. That’s not acceptable.”
“Since when? I used to knock off at lunch half the time.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” She stood up and circled in front of her desk, closer to me. In a softer voice she said, “I notice you have some new friends. Friends are good, Ben. We all need friends. But if your friends pressure you to do things you’re uncomfortable with, you have to be able to tell them you’re uncomfortable. If they ignore your concerns or make fun of you, then they aren’t true friends.”
I sat there listening while she went on about friends. I wanted to tell her that my so-called friends weren’t the problem. I was working at the dump! But there was something pleasurable about not telling her the whole story. It allowed me to see myself as a hard case, an iceberg. I had a secret life as an infiltrator, after all. Anyway, it was better to say nothing and act nice than to keep talking and be a jerk. I was surly. She was right. I needed more sleep, probably, and not to skip breakfast in my rush to get to the dump and school.
At the end of our meeting I said I was sorry for acting surly and promised to try to get to school on time. The word try made it so I wasn’t lying.
On my way back to class I found Pete sitting under the stairs with his legs flopped out in front of him and his head hanging down. He was asleep. He had dark circles around his eyes and his shirt was buttoned wrong. I hadn’t been seeing him or the other boys as much as I used to, because by the end of school I was tired and just wanted to go home. I kicked Pete’s foot.
Pete looked up with surprise. “Shit, dog,” he said, looking around. Had he forgotten he was at school?
I wanted to ask if everything was okay, but I was afraid to in case he said something serious, like his sister’s boyfriend Milk Dog was in jail. I wouldn’t know what to say about something like that. So instead I said, “Check this out,” and took out my notebook to show him a drawing. It was an old drawing, but I never showed it before because it was gross. It was pretty good, though. I knew
Pete would like it.
The drawing showed a big old Sleeper jamming his veiny boner through the windshield of a car with a family inside. The mom was screaming and the dad was trying to cover the kid’s eyes. The kid was screaming too. The windshield was all cracked around the boner. The cracks were the best part. They looked just like how a real windshield cracks, like a spider web.
Pete laughed like hell. “Goddamn, dog,” he said, “this is the best one yet! You gotta show Ronnie and them.”
“Sure,” I said, and after school that day I went to the parking lot to show the drawing to Kyle James and Red Dog and a guy named Shawn Jermyn who had big wispy sideburns. Ronnie wasn’t around.
The day was warm and the leaves were coming out in bright green buds on the tree branches above the crumbling asphalt, where we stood among the cars. People were all around us talking and laughing, smoking and dipping, flirting in the grab-assy way they did.
Kyle and Red Dog laughed at the drawing, and Red Dog made Shawn Jermyn look away while he unlocked the secret lockbox and added the drawing to Satans Manifesto. That made me feel good, but it wasn’t the same without Ronnie. I wanted to ask where he was, but I guess I kind of knew. Whatever good feelings I had about the drawing, the other boys, and the sunny afternoon were colored by a deeper, darker feeling. Maybe I had a premonition of what was to come.
A week later Red Dog got pulled over for driving drunk, and his rifle happened to be in the backseat. That gave the policemen probable cause to search the whole car, whereupon they discovered three bottles of moonshine and Satans Manifesto. At first the Manifesto was of no interest to them. Just some school papers, they thought. Then they saw the name Ronnie Mlezcko on it, and they happened to be working a case against somebody named Bill “Junk” Mlezcko (Ronnie’s brother, though they didn’t know it at the time), so they went through the Manifesto for clues. They were understandably disgusted. The police were just regular folks, I guess, not used to reading about mutant zombie psychopaths perpetrating acts of terror. They couldn’t press charges, but they called up Principal Winthrope to ask what the hell kind of operation she was running over there at the Pansy Gilchrist. She was embarrassed. And pissed.
Ronnie got expelled. Pete and Kyle James got suspended. I don’t know what happened to Red Dog, but he was eighteen so he might have gone to jail. As for me, I got lucky. My drawings hadn’t yet been integrated in the manuscript. Pete had wanted to do it immediately, but Ronnie told him how in real books there were words and pictures on the same page, so they’d have to shrink the drawings with a photocopier and “do them up” on a computer. Everyone had agreed Ronnie knew best, and that saved my skin. Here’s the thing, though: those drawings were on torn-out sheets of notebook paper right in the box with the book proper. Principal Winthrope saw all the papers in that box, and she had seen at least one of those drawings before, with her own eyes, the drawing that got me called to her office, which meant that she chose not to punish me, but why? Maybe, I thought, she saw through my iceberg routine to my secret inner life, and she approved of it. Maybe that was why she didn’t ask about my grimy clothes. And maybe she didn’t ask about college because she knew I was on a different path. A harder and longer path, more righteous too. Principal Winthrope was a smart lady. I didn’t know whether to thank her or avoid her. I chose avoidance, but I did start coming to school on time, for a while at least.
Pete came back after five weeks and kept a low profile. He showed up right on time, hid out in the parking lot during lunch, and left right after school. He told me he was worried about retribution. I told him nobody except Principal Winthrope and the police knew what was inside the book, just that it was bad.
“If I was the police,” he said, “I’d let it leak which people got mentioned and let those people do my work for me, know what I’m saying?”
“What work?” I asked.
He drew a finger across his throat.
Pete said he wished he was expelled like Ronnie. I asked if he knew why Ronnie was expelled and the rest of us weren’t. We both knew Ronnie was the mastermind, though we wouldn’t have said as much, but the police had no way of knowing that.
“Teachers like me okay,” Pete said, “and they feel bad for me because of my family situation. Because of my dad or whatever.”
I asked him what he meant, and he told me his dad got a DUI and was repatriated to Mexico. I had no idea. I felt sorry, but I didn’t know what to say.
Pete changed the subject to Kyle James. Kyle was back at school after only one week, Pete said, but Kyle’s parents told him he couldn’t hang out with us anymore because we were a bad influence. “He always was a mama’s boy,” Pete said, then spat in the dirt. “Motherfucker thinks he’s better than us.”
I nodded and spat next to where Pete spat, but deep down I wondered if Kyle was better than us, not in a snotty way or in the “too cool” way commonly understood, but in a more fundamental way. Kyle had a nice family who expected things of him. He took some care with his appearance. He had a girlfriend. No wonder Ronnie hated him. Pete said Ronnie and Kyle had been friends since they were little kids. The whole thing made me feel even worse for Ronnie. I wondered what he was doing with all his free time, but I guess I kind of knew. I tried to stay up late enough to see him across the street from my apartment, but the action there didn’t get started until nine or ten at night, and by then I was asleep or drifting in and out on the couch. The problem was I woke up so damn early to get to the dump, but the idea of sleeping in, of skipping the dump, never crossed my mind.
Chapter 8
PRETTY SOON BOSS said I was doing almost as good as he was. He rigged me up my own wheelbarrow out of a peach crate with a Big Wheel underneath, and he drew up a little map of the paths in and around Trash Mountain and divided them between us. I pushed my wheelbarrow with some pride, I’m not ashamed to admit, even though I spent almost as much time repairing the makeshift wheelbarrow as gathering recyclables.
I was pretty much on my own except I ran into Boss more often than made sense. It made me wonder if he watched me from afar to make sure I was doing right. When I noticed him he’d say “Atta boy!” or “We’ll make a digger outta you yet!” Boss was the only one who used the term digger. When I asked him about it he said he was trying to make it catch on. He said his dad had been an iron pig so at first he had tried to coin trash pig, but Candy said it was demeaning.
“What’s an iron pig?” I asked, picturing a pig man with an iron breastplate. I wondered if a pig man could father a pureblood human such as Boss.
“A miner,” Boss said.
I told him Grandpa used to be a miner, and Boss seemed interested.
“It was a kaolin mine,” I said. “You know, china clay?”
“Sure,” Boss said. “You can eat it to keep from feeling hungry.”
“Huh. Well, the stuff Grandpa mined was for paper and industrial ceramics. Lots of people got dust in their lungs and died.”
“I can believe it,” Boss said.
The kaolin dust made me think of the trash particles in the air, and for some reason I told Boss about Ruthanne and her weird spine.
Boss said he could believe that too, and he pulled up his sleeve to show me his forearm. It was covered with crispy looking spots like fish-scales.
“Did the trash do that?” I asked, kind of horrified. For my own part I was wearing a t-shirt. My bare arms were covered in grime.
“That,” Boss said, “or psoriasis.”
My legs weren’t exposed like my arms, but my jeans were soaked with trash water, and I could feel the cold dampness creeping down through my socks into my sneakers. I asked Boss if I should be wearing waders like he did. Boss said yeah, probably, but they were expensive. He said he found his in the trash, which was why they were so tight that the straps barely went over his shoulders. I asked him about his backup set, in the suitcase, and he said those had a big rip in the front, which made me picture a fisherman getting gored to death by a swordfish.
>
The talk with Boss made me think I should shower after leaving the dump, before school, so I started biking home, showering, then hustling to get to school by 7:30. That meant less time at the dump, so I started waking up even earlier. To get inside the dump before the trucks left I used wire clippers to cut a few links in a weak part of the fence near the back, by the shitty woods. The garbage men never went back there, and the cut links were barely noticeable if I used a plastic tie to keep them closed.
I made it to school on time, but usually I nodded off in class. Sometimes I even nodded off on my bike, on the way home from school. My head would sort of tip downward then snap up, and I’d be swerving. One day in May it was so hot and sunny that I just couldn’t make it home. I laid down my bike in a little strip of grass next to the railroad tracks, hooked my arm through the frame so it wouldn’t get stolen, and slept right there in the sun. When I woke up, it was dark. Frogs were croaking in the trees and a breeze was skittering along the grass. I wondered if that was what it was like to be a hobo, to sleep out there like that. If so, it wasn’t too bad.
That got me thinking it might be better to go home right after school and sleep, then to wake up in the middle of the night and be somewhat alert by the time I got to the dump. The only problem was Mom was asleep by the time I woke up, and she had moved the TV into her bedroom after Ruthanne left, which meant I couldn’t watch it. Without the TV there wasn’t much to do in the apartment so I mostly cruised around on my bike. Cruising was way better at night because there weren’t any cars, and barely any people except for a few drunks outside Frizell’s downtown and some others outside a bar on the outskirts called Zitio’s. It was interesting to watch them. I liked the feeling of watching other people without them knowing.
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