I followed Debbie all the way to Haislip. I was excited. I thought she might show me an apartment in one of the old haunted houses along Grande Esplanade. But what she showed me was an apartment downtown, which wasn’t much of a downtown, just a strip of shops in two-story brick buildings painted various colors. Most were closed. The apartment Debbie showed me was over a boarded up hardware store. She called it a loft apartment, but what made it a loft I had no idea. It was one long room with a toilet and a sink. The wood floor was pretty scuffed and had an unusual number of electric sockets along the baseboards. “It used to be a dressmaker’s,” Debbie explained. “The rent is five hundred a month.”
I had done the math and knew I would make over four hundred a week, so I could afford the place, but five hundred for a creepy old dressmaker’s shop where the toilet faced the kitchen sink didn’t seem justified. I liked the idea of living in Haislip, though, and I didn’t want to come off as a hayseed, so I said, “This place is nice, but can I think about it?”
“Sure,” Debbie said. “Take all the time you need.” Then she just stood there so I guess I was supposed to start thinking about it. I walked to the big front windows and looked down on Main Street, which was empty, but there were some kids throwing a football in the square. Beyond them were the mansions of Grande Esplanade. One had a long front porch with a lady in a rocking chair. Next to that one was the one with the round part like the tower of a castle. The windows on that one were broken, so I wondered if anybody lived there. I was looking for signs of life when a long-haired white man with a backpack let himself through a wire gate into the side yard. I watched for lights to come on, but none did. I wondered if he was living there in secret, what Grandpa would have called squatting. Grandpa would have called this man a hobo, but I didn’t think of people that way anymore.
I told Debbie I just couldn’t decide. I asked if I could talk to my Grandpa first, and she said yes, of course. “When you’re ready to sign the lease,” she said, “you’ll need the first month’s rent plus a five-hundred-dollar security deposit.”
“A thousand dollars?”
“Cash or certified check.”
I drove to Grandpa’s, meaning to sound him out, but I ended up helping him pull the buckwheat he had planted to overwinter in the raised beds. “Buckwheat fixes nitrogen,” he explained, “and it tastes good too.” For dinner we had buckwheat pancakes. The batter was made from buckwheat flour he got at the store, though, not his garden. Maybe he was trying to convince himself of the usefulness of buckwheat. After dinner we watched Traces of Red, in which a Palm Beach detective runs afoul of a sensual heiress.
After the movie I went up to Dinwiddie’s room and slid out my shoeboxes from under the bed. There was $2,013 inside, twice as much as I needed to cover the security deposit and first month’s rent. A thousand was a lot of money, of course, but I had two thousand sitting right there, and what else was I going to use it for? I wasn’t buying flamethrowers. I wasn’t enriching uranium. I wasn’t saving up for college, that was for sure. The money wasn’t doing me any good sitting in a shoebox wrapped in duct tape. But to spend it felt like a violation. A violation of my ideals. Except what were my ideals anymore? What had they ever been? Destruction? Infiltration? And wasn’t it also a violation not to spend the money? It was a waste, was what it was. The question I had to answer was if spending the money on a dumb apartment was the best way to spend it, or if there was another way that would do more good. I wracked my brain. A new bike? But I needed a car to get back and forth from Grandpa’s. A new truck for Grandpa? But he never even used the old truck, preferring the smooth ride of his Crown Vic. New screens for the porch? A window unit for Dinwiddie’s room? None of it seemed worthwhile. Grandpa and I were doing fine. But there were people in the world besides me and Grandpa. If Boss had been in that room with me I would have given him a hundred in cash right then and there, to ease his way. I would have given money to Leo and Candy, too. Maybe I could go around handing money to people, like some kind of Christmas movie. But I didn’t like the idea of giving money to strangers. I wouldn’t know what they might use it for. Even Leo, what if he just bought a sharper knife? What if Candy bought a moped? What if Boss, who wasn’t too bright, let’s be honest, bought a massage chair or box seats to the rodeo? No, I had to give the money to someone I knew well.
So the next morning I took the heaviest shoebox and wrapped it in one more layer of duct tape then dunked it in the toilet to make sure it was watertight (it was) and drove it to the post office in downtown Komer. I told the post office lady I wanted to send it the safest way possible, so for $23.30 I sent it priority mail with two-thousand-dollars insurance. She thought I was crazy to get so much insurance on a shoebox, but I insisted.
Ruthanne called two days later to ask if I was dealing drugs.
“Nope,” I said.
“Then where did all this cash come from?”
I explained to Ruthanne that I had saved every dollar I ever made except for what I spent on the candy we shared.
“Keep saving it,” she said.
“I don’t want it.”
“I don’t either. I don’t need it. Use it for rent so you can quit the Burger Brothers and concentrate on school.”
“What about you? What about college?”
“Well,” I said, then explained my entire situation: how I started showing up late to school when I was scavenging at the dump, then missed a few days living with Pete, then stopped going altogether when I got my job at Connors for State Treasurer. The words came in a flood. It felt good to tell the truth, and what could Ruthanne do? She was a hundred miles away.
She didn’t comment for a while. I expected her to rake me over the coals like she always did, then to tattle on me to Mom at the earliest opportunity, but instead she said, “Ben, you always did go your own way.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What it sounds like. You go your own way.”
“Is that something Mom says or what?”
“It’s something I say. I know you, Ben.”
“So you’re telling me to keep skipping school? What about college?”
“Seems like you’re doing okay without college. Whitey Connors has been good to you. I don’t hate him as much as I used to, now that I don’t live there anymore. I mean, he’s employing people like you, Komer people, which is good.”
Ruthanne was so levelheaded!
“Look, Ben,” she said, “it’s you and me now, is the way I see it, and that’s how it’s always gonna be. It doesn’t matter if you live down there and I live here or vice versa. There’s this thing that happens, that’s been happening to me, as I get older. It’s like, when I’m apart from people—you—you continue to exist for me. Before, it was out of sight, out of mind. Now I think about you, I wonder what you’re doing. I’ll be on the bus to class and wonder if you’re drinking a glass of water or combing your hair or what. It’s kind of dumb, I guess.”
“It’s important not to forget people.”
“That’s right. You wanna talk to Mom?”
“No, I guess not. Don’t tell her about the money, okay?”
“She’s gonna ask when I pay the rent.”
“Huh. Well, come up with something so she doesn’t think I dropped out.”
“I will,” she said, and I knew she would. She was a genius at deceiving Mom.
The conversation was kind of sad in a way, but it gave me a good feeling, deep down. Ruthanne said it was her and me, and she was right. She would be my sister my whole life, or at least until she died. Ruthanne would probably die first, I figured, on account of her inactive lifestyle and possible side-effects from her weird spine.
“Ben,” she said, “what the hell were you going to do with all that money?”
“I was gonna buy a Red Dragon 400,000 BTU Backpack Torch Kit with Squeeze Valve,” I said, and that was that. I wasn’t going to incinerate the dump. I wasn’t going to throw my life away to murder Whitey Connors and end up in
jail like Ronnie, gibbering about the race war apocalypse. I didn’t even dislike Whitey Connors. It was a relief, honestly, except for the vague feeling that with the money went my chance at adventure. But maybe the life of an adventurer just wasn’t for me. Or maybe it was but it would have to be somebody else’s adventure, like Whitey’s or Marie’s, and I would get in on the action as a sort of Sherpa, possibly the superior climber but by virtue of temperament and circumstance more of a facilitator, a technician. That, or I could go my own way. Only time would tell.
Chapter 15
BY THE SUMMER, I was sending half my paychecks straight to Ruthanne and living in a squat beneath a mansion on Grande Esplanade. Squatting turned out to be pretty easy. The house upstairs was empty so nobody could hear me in the basement, and I came and went through a cellar door in the backyard, where the weeds were so tall nobody could see me. To get the water turned on all I had to do was show up at the county water office and give them enough money to cover the deposit and back bills. I didn’t even have to pretend to be the owner of the house, a dead lady named Delores Jermyn. Electricity was harder, though. I had to show a title or lease and when I told the lady at the electricity office that Mrs. Jermyn was dead she went back to get her supervisor, so I left. I made do with camping lanterns, which I hung from the low ceiling by hooks. I had a camping stove too, but I didn’t do much cooking since I didn’t have a fridge. I kept milk for breakfast cereal along with some sandwich fixings in the break-room fridge at Bi-Cities. I was working at Bi-Cities HQ instead of the campaign office because Whitey Connors lost the election.
After he lost, Whitey asked Marie to stay and be VP of Public Relations for Bi-Cities, but she said no. She told me privately that she thought hard about it, because she was getting sick of moving around all the time, but her mom had cancer back in Rhode Island, so that’s where she went. I was sad to see her go. After she left, it fell to me to take photos of Whitey at all the events he went to and spoke at, and whenever a photo was really bad I emailed it to Marie as a joke, like when the new PR guy convinced Whitey to wear a chicken costume at a half-marathon sponsored by a sports bar called Chicken Fingerz. I sent her a photo of Whitey sipping his soda through a hole in the beak and she wrote back, “What a clown—lol.”
Whitey was a clown, for sure, and a weirdo and a terror, but I liked him. My job was to help his assistant, Carol, keep his schedule and arrange his travel. So I was sort of like the assistant to the assistant, and also the assistant to the body man, Daryl, though Daryl worked strictly from nine to five so if anything happened early or late, I was substitute body man. If we stayed past seven Whitey would send me out for food and tell me to spare no expense. Then, at the end of the night, he’d peel me off a couple twenties. Overtime, he called it. Things might have gone on like that forever, and I would have been fine with it, if it wasn’t for this one thing that happened, which reminded me of my former life, and of the underbelly of Whitey’s success.
It happened at a fancy new grocery store on the outskirts of town, where the campaign office use to be. I was buying groceries for Grandpa and me (I still spent weekends at Grandpa’s, where I could shower and have some company), and when I came out of the store with my groceries and was about to get in the truck, I noticed a man bent over by the dumpster. He was picking through trash that had overflowed from the top of the dumpster and fallen to the concrete below. His gray overcoat looked familiar. His hands had a careful quickness that was also familiar, tapping along the surface of the trash like a pianist. When he held up a bag of romaine hearts to get a look at them in the sunlight, I recognized his grizzled bird-like face.
“Leo!” I said. I was happy to see him. Enough time had gone by that I didn’t think about all the mean stuff he did to me.
Leo peered at me from under the brim of his hat, a stocking cap on top of a baseball cap like some folks wear, but he didn’t say anything. Maybe he didn’t recognize me, I thought, so I got closer. I waved and acted real smiley because I didn’t want to spook him, but when I was close enough to shake his hand he still looked like he didn’t recognize me. He had little red flecks on his cheeks, like shaving bumps, except he hadn’t shaved in quite a while. He looked older than I remembered. On the other side of the dumpster was a shopping cart full of overstuffed black trash bags.
“Any cell phones in there?” I joked.
Leo seemed confused. He glanced back at his shopping cart, then at me again. I was starting to get offended, but I reminded myself that Leo was older; he’d seen many more faces than I had. Plus he probably loomed larger in my mind than I did in his.
“I tried to find y’all, you know,” I said. “I tried to find you, but you were gone.”
“Where?” His voice was raspy, like he hadn’t used it in a while.
“The dump. Remember?”
“Where did we go?”
I was confused. “I don’t know. You tell me.”
Leo didn’t say anything. He glanced at his shopping cart again. Maybe he was just being secretive, I thought. He had always been paranoid.
“How’s Boss?” I asked, to change the subject. That’s what I really cared about anyway.
Leo still didn’t say anything. It occurred to me he might not know who I was talking about. He almost certainly hadn’t called the man Boss, and I couldn’t remember Boss’s real name. I tried again: “How’s Candy?”
At the name Candy, Leo looked down and grunted. “Candy,” he repeated.
I’ll never forget the sound of his voice as he said her name: a croak, but not like a frog’s croak; like something halfway between a burp and the sound a machine makes on the fritz. The sound was chilling. It combined with his hollow expression for an uncanny effect that revolted me. I wanted to get away as quickly as possible, but I felt bad. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, in case he had any left. “Leo,” I said, “are you okay?”
Leo turned without looking at me and started away, like I wasn’t there. I felt sorry for him. I figured he must be fried on drugs, a bad trip or something. That would have explained why they left the dump: if something had happened to Leo, Candy and Boss wouldn’t have been able to keep the operation going. But the idea of a bad trip didn’t quite ring true. Leo didn’t seem like the type who took enjoyment from the escape offered by drugs—unless something terrible had happened, something that changed him.
I watched him push his cart across the alley behind the grocery store, where the trucks came and went. The concrete slab backed up to some dirty thin woods. Leo pushed his cart between the trees and disappeared from view. I decided to follow him.
Where he disappeared turned out to be a dirt path, worn from use. I walked along the path, dodging tree branches, until I saw Leo up ahead. He was moving real slow so I kept my distance. My view of Leo came and went among the trees, but I could always hear his rattling grocery cart. There must have been cans in there.
We kept walking and walking. Instead of harder to follow, the path got wider. It made me think of the ancient buffalo traces, worn by animals and the hunters who hunted them. Now we were the animals.
I wasn’t sure why I was following Leo, since he had made it clear he didn’t want to talk to me. I guess I just wondered where—and how—he lived. Plus Boss might have lived there with him, though I hoped not, because if Boss was still hanging around Leo, this Leo, he couldn’t have been in much better shape himself.
There was light up ahead. Leo had entered a clearing full of tall grass and weeds. Beyond him were the backs of three houses along a winding road of pristine black asphalt. Beyond the road was what looked like a dried up pond. One of the three houses looked incomplete. The top was jagged, like a dinosaur had come by and taken a big bite out of it. It looked new, though. All the houses did. I thought they might be brand new construction, but later I found out online that the houses had been aborted in 2008, around the same time as my first attempt on Trash Mountain. No one ever moved in. The new people, the people who bought groceries at the fanc
y grocery store, didn’t like those houses I guess.
Leo pushed his cart up to the sliding glass door behind one of the houses, slid open the door, and went inside. If it had been anybody except Leo, I would have knocked on the door, but Leo had threatened me with a chef’s knife the first time we met. For all I knew he still kept the knife in the pocket of his dirty cinched trousers. I imagined knocking on the door only for Leo to circle around the house from the front door, sneak up behind me, and stab me in the back again and again until I flopped face-first into grass and tossed around clutching my wounds, gasping for breath, then looked up at the sun through a death mask of terror and regret.
It wasn’t worth it.
On the way back to the grocery store, I started feeling sorry for Leo again. Maybe he got senile from boredom, I thought. Grandpa once told me how old men who retire get senile because they don’t have anything to do, but how he, Grandpa, had retired young enough to develop hobbies like growing sweet potatoes and dragging his property for hobos. If Leo was senile from boredom, I reasoned, it was because he got kicked out of Bi-Cities. It was because of Whitey. It was because of me!
When I got back to the truck and my bags of overpriced groceries, I felt low. The parking lot was full of fat people pushing grocery carts. The SUV parked in front of me had stickers on the back of stick figures representing the husband and wife and their three little kids. There was even a goddamned dog sticker. Were there hobo stickers? Jailbird stickers? Or how about a Sleeper sticker, where the Sleeper’s stroking his veiny Sleeper dick while leering at the rest of those goddamned stickers?
Grandpa and I had a nice dinner of hot dogs and baked sweet potatoes, which made me feel better, but I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept picturing Leo shuffling around behind that dumpster, and me coming up behind him, coming closer than I had in real life. The way I pictured it, half dreaming, I put my hand on Leo’s shoulder and he turned to face me but his face was slack. He was looking at me without seeing me. His eyes were dead. The brain they led to had been hollowed out like a dried-up beehive.
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