“Maybe I can find a three bedroom,” she said.
“You’ll only need two,” I said.
“We’re too old to share a room.”
“I’m staying.”
“What?”
“I’m a Komer man.”
“You aren’t a man at all, jackass. You’re a kid. And who gives a shit about Komer?”
“I do. It’s where I live. My friends are here. I have a job now.” I told her about my work at Bi-Cities, trying to cast it in a positive light, which was difficult. I emphasized the hands-on skills I was learning, the upward mobility. I may have used the word “internship.”
Ruthanne wasn’t having any of it. “Scrounging around the dump?” she said. “That’s halfway to pushing a shopping cart and sleeping in the streets.” Her eyes brimmed with tears, maybe thinking about me out on the streets like that. It made me feel bad, but also happy because it meant she still loved me even though she was far away.
“It’s not like that,” I said, and I told her about Boss and Leo and Candy. I tried to communicate Leo’s idea of trash husbandry but by then it was third-hand so it came out pretty confusing.
“Those people are hobos!” Ruthanne said.
“No, they’re not!” I was shocked Ruthanne would say such a thing. She knew how I felt about hobos. Boss and them were shabby, sure, but they weren’t crooks or discernibly drunk. They didn’t lurk in the woods or steal babies. They didn’t have names like Boxcar Johnny or Charlie Peepers. Candy was a woman, for gosh sakes.
“Do they live in a shantytown?” Ruthanne asked.
“Of course not.”
“Then where do they live?”
“How should I know? I’m not gonna live with them.” Anyway it didn’t matter. Living with Boss and them wasn’t my plan. My plan, my true plan, was only beginning to crystallize. Here was the first step: “I’m gonna live with Grandpa.”
“What in God’s name?”
“He said he wanted me to come out there.”
“To visit, you dummy. He doesn’t want you living with him.”
“He does, though. He likes me.”
“What about his spells?”
She meant his good spells and bad spells, as Mom called them, but the way I saw it his spells weren’t any worse than Mom’s, and Mom had been in a bad spell since the day Ruthanne left. I told Ruthanne Mom didn’t do anything but lay in bed watching TV.
“She sounds fine on the phone,” Ruthanne said.
“That’s because it’s you! The moment you hang up she sleeps for twelve hours.”
Ruthanne didn’t believe me. She was pretty worked up, maybe from guilt. She said we had to talk to Mom about it, since I was only sixteen (almost seventeen, I interjected), and Ruthanne was mad we had to bring it up to Mom because it might upset her. I knew it wouldn’t, though. I guess I knew Mom better than Ruthanne did. I was more like Mom than Ruthanne was. What made Mom happy were the things inside her.
We went into Mom’s room and the two of us sat on the bed with her and rehashed our conversation from before. Mom nodded. When the part about me staying behind came up she muted the TV. The silver-haired anchorman was talking, but no words came out. Without words, his face lacked urgency. He was going through the motions.
“It’ll be cheaper with just the two of you,” I said. “You can get a shitty little apartment, and I’ll visit sometimes. I’ll be fine.”
“You’re sixteen years old,” Mom said.
“Almost seventeen,” I said.
“A boy belongs with his family.”
“I’m not leaving.” I was surprised to hear myself say that, and Mom was too, it seemed. It was a while before she said, “Well, what about school?”
Ruthanne was shocked. “You can’t seriously be entertaining this.”
“He’s been as good as on his own since you left,” Mom said. “Fact is, both of you kids been on your own for a long time now. That was why I knew you’d be fine up there in the city, Ruthie. I knew you could take care of yourself, and Ben can too.”
“But he’s just a kid!”
“Kid nothing,” I said.
“Don’t be a stinkpot,” Mom said. “Now what about school?”
“Grandpa’s place is in the county, same school.”
“I know that. But will you go to it? It’s a long way off and you don’t have a car, nor much interest in getting there on time, seems to me.”
“I’ll get Grandpa to drive me. He doesn’t do anything all day except water his sweet potatoes and check puma traps.”
“What if he’s having a spell?”
“Then I’ll drive his truck. If he’s having a spell he won’t need it.”
“You don’t have a license.”
“I’ll get one.”
Ruthanne scoffed. “You gotta take a class, dummy. They don’t just hand out driver’s licenses.”
“Summer’s coming,” I said. “I got months to take a class and pass a test or whatever.”
“Not if you spend all day in the dump gathering trash,” Ruthanne said.
Mom closed her eyes. We hadn’t ever talked about why I woke up so early and wore such raggedy clothes all the time, but she knew, I could tell. She just wanted to pretend I was still a little kid who was happy riding his bike around all day, so she wouldn’t have to worry I’d get in trouble. And I wasn’t in trouble. Not yet, at least. It seemed to me I deserved a pat on the back for the stick-to-itiveness with which I pursued my goals. So what if the goals were infiltration and a yet-to-be-determined act of terror?
“Nobody’s going anywhere,” Mom said. “Ruthie, you should come live with us right here. It’s the summer.”
Ruthanne nodded. She didn’t remind Mom of what Mom said before, about not wasting the deposit for summer school. Maybe Ruthanne felt sorry for Mom. Maybe she didn’t want to upset her. It made me think Ruthanne was growing up, which was a weird thing for a little brother to think about an older sister, but it was true. I could tell from the disappointed look on Ruthanne’s face that she wasn’t coming home. I was sad at first, because it would have been nice to see her more often, but I ended up glad. Having her around would have been tough. I kept such weird hours. Ruthanne would have been on my case for sure.
Chapter 9
LIVING WITH GRANDPA was great and it was terrible. There were days in the sun and nights in the cold spooky darkness. There were suppers of sugary beans with bacon, and breakfasts of corn flakes with water because Grandpa forgot to buy milk. There were grilled cheese sandwiches and mustard sandwiches. Sweet potato stew and tomato soup made from ketchup. The screens had holes so there were mosquitoes in the house, but Grandpa didn’t care. His leathery skin had lost its food-like aspect. Mine had not. I tried to sleep under the covers but got so hot at night that if I did manage to sleep I would kick off the covers and wake up with mosquito bites on my face and neck. There wasn’t central AC, and the only room with a window unit was Grandpa’s bedroom, but he never used it. He said part of getting old was feeling cold all the time, no matter how warm it was. It was closeness to death, he said. He had come to terms with the fact that he would never feel warm again.
I slept upstairs in Dinwiddie’s bedroom. Dinwiddie was my mother’s brother. He died when he was a kid so I never knew him. It was something with his heart. Anyway, his bedroom was tiny. Drafty too. As a kid I used to fuss about it because Ruthanne got to sleep across the hall in Mom and Aunt Sheila’s old bedroom. There were two beds in that bedroom so I could have slept there too, was the way I saw it, but Mom got mad when I complained. She said Grandma wanted me in Dinwiddie’s room. It was before Grandma died of lung cancer, but she was already on her way so everybody was extra nice to her all the time.
Between the heat and the mosquitoes and the possible ghost of Dinwiddie, it was hard to get a decent night’s sleep. Add the creaking noises the big old wooden house made as it cooled at night, plus the weights inside the old windows that knocked against the sills like insane clocks k
eeping random time, plus Grandpa, who could be heard snoring in the distance, or pacing on the squeaky floorboards, or opening and closing drawers, and it was damn near impossible to sleep for more than ten minutes at a time.
The lack of sleep might have been tolerable if Grandpa hadn’t been trying to work me to death. First, we dug postholes for a new fence. We dug twenty-seven postholes in one day and would have dug thirty-two if one of the wood handles on the posthole digger hadn’t broke. I was used to laboring in the heat from my work at the dump, but this was a whole different level. To keep my strength up, Grandpa fed me huge helpings of pinto beans from big pots he made every Sunday, with onions and garlic and a bay leaf for flavor. Those beans were damn good after a day in the sun. We used white bread to sop what was left in our bowls.
Second, we tended Grandpa’s sweet potatoes. The sweet potatoes were planted in ragged tires full of dirt. The oldest plants had big dark triangular leaves and little white and purple flowers. The foliage was dense, and my job was to reach under the leaves and pull up all the mushrooms that grew on the damp soil beneath. I also pulled up weeds and Bermuda grass and seedlings that kept creeping through. Pecan seedlings were the worst. Sometimes the little pecans that hatched them were a foot deep and clung for dear life.
On the porch was a shelf where Grandpa kept his sweet potato slips. Slips were little plants that came off the sweet potatoes. Back in March, Grandpa had sliced in half a nice oblong specimen of each sweet potato variety and suspended each half, via toothpicks, in a mason jar. Over time, when the little eyes started to sprout, the sprouts in the water turned into roots and the sprouts in the air turned into slips. When the slips were finger-length and had a few nice green and purple leaves, Grandpa would twist them off the sweet potato and stick them in their own little mason jar until they grew long white roots with little hairy parts. The hairy parts meant the slips were ready for planting, and we would roll out another tire from Grandpa’s pyramid of stacked tires. He got the tires for free because tire shops had to pay to recycle them. The best tires for sweet potatoes were high-performance tires, Grandpa said, because the hub-cabs on sports cars were almost as big as the tires themselves, which left lots of room for soil. He had a couple Bridgestone Potenzas he prized in particular.
We filled the tires with dirt, topped the dirt with compost, then dug little holes for the slips. The key was to spread out the slip roots and lay them sideways so the sweet potatoes could grow downward along the surface of the soil. By the time I moved in there were two dozen tires already, and within weeks we added a dozen more. There were three varieties of sweet potato: Jewel, Georgia Jet, and the less commonplace O’Henry of North Carolina.
Third, we roamed the property to check the puma traps, hunt for hobo beds, and forage mushrooms. Grandpa had a little book he sometimes checked to make sure we didn’t eat anything poisonous. One time we got a puffball big as the top of a skull. Grandpa fried it in slices.
The mushrooms were the reason we roamed, clearly, but always it was under the pretense of checking for pumas and hobos. As a kid I never questioned the routine, but now, seeing it with fresh eyes, something didn’t add up. The puma traps were rusted open like they never clamped shut, and they looked pretty small to me, like coyote traps, and who in his right mind would trap a puma anyway? What would you do with a puma if you trapped it? The hobo beds were another matter. For all Grandpa’s talk about hobos, we never saw a single bed.
I didn’t say anything about it for a while. Grandpa had his reasons, I figured. But a few days later we started setting posts in Quikrete for the new fence. Setting posts was hard work. I had to stand still for a long time, holding each post, and the lye in the Quikrete burned the skin on my hands, which was abraded from the sand. I had never questioned the fence before, just assumed it was to keep out pumas and hobos, but now I was grumpy.
“Grandpa,” I said, “why are we building this fence?”
“For the goats,” he said.
Goddamn, I thought. First hobos, then pumas, now goats?
“What goats?” I asked.
Grandpa explained that to get an Ag exemption for a reduction in his property tax he had to raise something for profit. He was working on growing his sweet potato operation but until then he had to stick to goats.
I was confused. “Um, Grandpa, there aren’t any goats.”
“There were.” He said this portentously, as though something terrible had happened, possibly involving pumas or vicious thieving hobos. I let the subject drop, annoyed, but I decided Grandpa might be a little crazy, and why not? All we did was work, eat, and sleep. We never left the house except to buy groceries and pick up Grandpa’s books from the library. I started to worry I might go a little crazy too, if I didn’t get out and do my own thing. Plus I was starting to feel guilty. I had explained the situation to Boss before I moved, and he seemed to understand, but weeks had passed. I worried I was letting him down.
I decided to tell Grandpa about my work at the dump. I had to spin the job as more official than it was so he wouldn’t worry I was breaking-and-entering just to be there. To set the stage I told him about losing my jobs at the grocery store and Ms. Mikiska’s and how a boy like me (“a good worker, as you know”) just couldn’t find decent work anymore. “So I got a job off the books,” I said.
Grandpa eyed me. “Dealing dope?”
“What? No. Of course not.”
Grandpa had extreme notions about the corrupting influence of cities, even little ones like Komer. But the extremity of dope-dealing worked in my favor, since scavenging the dump was minor by comparison.
“I never touch the stuff,” I said, “and I don’t approve of those who do. The job I mean is scavenging. There’s lots of recyclables people miss that are worth good money. One week I made fifty bucks.” That was a lie, but I could show Grandpa some cash and pretend it was from the dump. I wasn’t ready to admit I worked for free almost, since admitting that might lead to an awkward conversation about my infiltration and yet-to-be-determined act of terror. Grandpa seemed confused so I laid it on thick: “I work with a crew of old-timers, not unlike yourself.”
“Do I know ’em?”
“Probably not.” I had to throw him a bone, to be convincing. “Um, there’s this one named Leo who’s pretty old, maybe fifty.” Or a hundred, I was thinking. Leo looked like shit.
“Leo what?”
“I don’t know his last name. I think it’s Italian.”
“Never trust an Italian.”
“Sure, of course. But he’s got skills. He fixes toasters and stuff, and scrapes stuff off cell phones.”
“Rare earth metals?”
“I guess.” I had no idea what Leo scraped out of those cell phones, but if rare earth metals, whatever they were, made it sound good to Grandpa, that was fine by me.
Grandpa went on a rant about how the Chinese had cornered the rare earth market and price-gouged Americans and also manipulated their currency, or something. It was pretty confusing. When he was done with the rant he said, “So, where does all this happen? A recycling facility? I have great respect for recycling and recyclers. I grow my sweet potatoes in recycled tires, as you know.”
“That’s right,” I said. This was going quite well, in my estimation. “It happens at the dump.”
Grandpa didn’t say anything. He seemed confused.
“Komer doesn’t have a recycling center,” I explained. “We sort through the garbage at the dump and pull out the recyclables.”
Still Grandpa didn’t say anything. His expression was inscrutable.
“Yep,” I said. “It’s lifting those recyclables that gives me the strength to dig postholes, and the fortitude to work with you all day in the sun.”
“The dump, you say?”
“Yeah, Bi-Cities,” I said with perverse pride. Maybe people’s admiration for the place, as the only growing business in town, had begun to rub off on me.
Grandpa spat in the dirt. “That goddamned Whitey C
onnors is trying to raise property taxes. He favors poor folks who don’t own property, folks whose oversized broods filling up the schools is why we have to pay property tax in the first place. I hate that man. He’s as crooked as his father.”
“Donkey Dan?”
Grandpa nodded. I wanted to ask him about Donkey Dan and Whitey and how crooked they were, to fortify my resolve against Trash Mountain, but he had started in on a rant about the dump: how it was a haven for hobos, a cesspool, a den of iniquity, a charnel house. Half the things he said I couldn’t understand. I wanted to tell him I spent lots of time there and never once saw a hobo, just my colleagues and the occasional unfeeling garbage man, but he was pretty worked up. I let it drop.
I decided I should probably avoid the subject of my work at the dump, so what I did was tell Grandpa I wanted to ride my bike to town and see some friends. He offered to drive me, but I told him I needed the exercise. He seemed suspicious.
“A man who has energy for exercise,” he said, “isn’t working hard enough.”
“Sure,” I said, “but I enjoy the scenery, the country roads and whatnot.”
Grandpa nodded. He seemed to appreciate the sentiment.
The next morning I woke up before dawn and sat in the kitchen looking through the window until the sun peeked over the tops of the pecan trees beyond the clearing of Grandpa’s big back yard. Then I got on my bike and headed for town. It took an hour almost, and when I got to the spot I had cut in the fence, it was gone. The fence was different. The whole shape of the dump seemed kind of different, like maybe it expanded. I biked around to the garbage truck gate. By the time I got there the trucks were long gone, but the fence was still open so I snuck inside like I used to and found my way to the clearing where Leo, Candy, and Boss had their operation.
The clearing was empty. The table and chairs were gone, the recyclables too. It was just flattened trash.
While I was standing there, confused, I heard some people speaking Spanish so I crouched down and hid. The Spanish speakers passed by, laughing. Bi-Cities people, no doubt. I wondered if their number had grown to the point that there wasn’t any room for Leo and them to hide. If so, where had they gone to?
Trash Mountain Page 13