After turning all the pages in reverent silence, Whitey explained how he was going to sell the outskirts of the dump to real estate developers in order to create “a self-perpetuating endowment that will last for eternity.”
As I listened I was stunned but also relieved, and a little confused by this turn of events, this re-jiggering in my mind of Whitey’s motivations and, by extension, his character. Only minutes before, I’d been angry, thinking about Leo and Ruthanne and everybody else who suffered because of this man, but now I felt different. It was a beautiful park. I guess I felt proud of Whitey, and a little bit sorry for him too. I thought about the empty unfinished subdivision where I found Leo, and about the weird ziggurat apartment Debbie showed me. The man walking his dog, the people eating lunch, the kid on the bike—where would they come from?
“Thanks for sharing this with me,” I said.
Whitey stood up and tucked the book under his arm. “It felt good to show it to somebody like you,” he said, “somebody young and full of ideas. The kind of person I hope this town can keep, down the line.” He glanced around. “You seen my drink?”
“I think it’s empty.”
“Shit. Anyway, what did you want to see me about?”
“Pardon?”
“You’re 4:15 on my calendar and it’s damn near five.”
“Oh, nothing. I just wanted to touch base.”
“You want a raise, but you lost your gumption, didn’t you?” He wagged the book and smiled. “It was the park, wasn’t it? You think I’m a philanthropist now. Nobody wants to swindle a philanthropist.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess that’s it.”
On the way home I was relieved. I didn’t have to confront Whitey quite like I thought I would, and I didn’t feel bad about it because Whitey really did have a vision that went beyond money. I admired it. So what if the vision was self-aggrandizing and possibly delusional, built as it was on a hypothetical Komer/Haislip metropolis? It was more vision than anybody else had in Komer, or Haislip, or in Buda or Pest, probably. I was relieved, like I said, but a little dispirited too. I guess I wished it was my own vision, not his.
I parked down the block and was walking to my squat when a lady in a tracksuit came towards me smiling and waving. I thought she was just being friendly, but she stopped. She said, “You the boy who lives down there?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, since she was old enough to be called ma’am.
“That’s the old Jermyn place,” she said.
“Delores Jermyn?”
“That’s right. You knew her?”
“No, ma’am, but I tried to contact her next of kin.”
“Good luck.” She rolled her eyes. Then she said how she had known Delores Jermyn, who was “just the nicest little old lady you ever met.” This woman, whose name was Barbara, had been “school chums” with Delores’s younger sister, Pearl McCaskill. Pearl never married, Barbara explained, which was why she still had the last name McCaskill. Delores had married a serviceman by the name of Lawrence McCoughtrie, then somebody else whose name Barbara didn’t remember, and then, finally, the dentist Arthur Jermyn. “Everybody around here knew Arthur Jermyn,” she assured me, “and was his patient!” She laughed. I smiled. Then she told me about her own sister whose sister-in-law had married into the Donaldson family, and the Donaldsons were cousins to the Jermyns. “So we’re all related, you see? Why, Doctor Tom Donaldson and me go to the same family reunion. Can you beat that?”
I told her I couldn’t.
She smiled again and said, “Well, young man, I’m glad to meet you!” Then she walked away fast, swinging her hips with her fists tucked up near her shoulders. It was some kind of exercise, I guess. She seemed like a nice lady.
Downstairs I sat in a camping chair and tried to read one of the dusty National Geographic magazines somebody left behind. There was an article from March 1985 that showed some wrinkly Mongolian guys hunting with eagles. The hardest part, the article said, was racing on horseback to get to the dead rabbit or mountain goat before the eagle ripped it to shreds.
After I finished reading about the Mongolian eagle hunters, I couldn’t find another article that piqued my interest. All of them made me think of adventure, and here I was in a basement squat reading a magazine. It was pathetic.
I felt hungry so I could have passed the time cooking, but I didn’t really feel like it. I guess I felt lonely.
I called Ruthanne, but she didn’t pick up her phone. I called Pete, but he didn’t pick up either. It had been a couple months since I saw him, and he hadn’t graduated. I hoped he was okay. I couldn’t call Ronnie, though I made a note to visit him again in jail. I could have called Grandpa, I guess, but our conversations always involved errands or directions and only lasted about fifteen seconds. It wouldn’t have been satisfying. So I decided to call Demarcus. He had graduated and it was almost time for school to start, but I had no idea where he was headed. Tech, probably, or somewhere out of state for smart people. I would call him and find out, I decided, but his number wasn’t on the phone I got from Bi-Cities, which meant I hadn’t talked to him since I started there. Actually, I hadn’t even seen him since then. In all the years since I met him I never hung out with Demarcus even once outside of school, never even saw him. But why? He was my friend, wasn’t he?
I left the apartment and got back in the truck. It was six o’clock, a decent hour because it was late summer and still light outside.
The little white house looked the same, though the porch might have been sagging a bit more. Even the gray cat, Ghost, was still behind the screen door, so fat and old he barely raised his head when I came creaking up the stairs onto the porch.
I knocked on the doorsill real softly, in case Demarcus’s dad, Gerald, was asleep between shifts. But when I heard a man’s voice call out “Who is it?” I knew I woke him up despite my effort.
“Sorry to bother you, sir,” I said. “It’s Ben, Demarcus’s friend. He around?”
“He’s at work.”
“Oh yeah. Right. Where does he work again?”
“Hold on.”
The floorboards creaked, and the man I’d seen years before emerged in the same blue bathrobe. He wasn’t quite as tall as I remembered, and the puffs of hair over his ears were completely gray. He said, “I remember you.”
“Yessir,” I said.
“It’s good you came around. Demarcus is leaving soon.”
“Leaving, sir?”
“Yep. Made his decision. He can tell you all about it. He’s down at the Lounge.”
“The Motown Lounge?”
“That’s right. Go in the back, since you ain’t twenty-one. It’s the door by the dumpster. It’ll do him good. Pretty slow in there at this hour.”
When I got to the Motown Lounge there were a few cars in the parking lot, but some of them might have belonged to people inside the title loan office next door. As per Gerald’s instructions, I walked around back to a metal door beside a dumpster. I would have knocked, but I didn’t want to draw undue attention, so I let myself inside.
The inside of the Motown Lounge was dark except for some dim lights behind the bar and a lamp hanging over the pool table. The lampshade was stained glass with a Schlitz logo. There was a man leaning over the bar and another man in the corner at the table. Both looked at me then looked away. Demarcus was behind the bar fiddling with his phone.
I went to the side of the bar, not daring to sit down, and whispered “Demarcus? Demarcus?” until he looked up at me with surprise.
“Ben?” He came towards me. “You can’t be in here. You have to be twenty-one.”
“Your dad said I could come see you.”
“Oh. Well, if Dad says it’s okay.”
The man at the bar croaked, “Can’t be in here if you ain’t twenty-one.”
“Can if my dad says you can,” Demarcus told the man in a different voice than he used with me. The voice was stern, and it made Demarcus seem pretty old.
“Your dad told me you’re leaving town,” I said.
Demarcus nodded. “The army.”
I couldn’t believe it. The army? Demarcus didn’t seem like the type. But he explained how the army would pay a hundred percent of his college tuition if he served on active duty for thirty-six months. “That way,” he said, “I can go wherever I want. I don’t have to go to Tech or some community college. No offense.”
“I don’t go to community college.”
“But Ruthanne does, right?”
I nodded, touched that Demarcus remembered her. He was a considerate person. I couldn’t imagine him marching around, hefting a gun, cleaning latrines and whatnot. I didn’t want to imagine those things. I said, “But what if, you know . . .” I didn’t know how to phrase what I was trying to ask. I didn’t want to jinx him.
“What if I get my ass shot off?”
“Yeah.”
“With my grades, I’ll get a desk job. Plus I got a skin condition.” Demarcus explained how he got rashes ever since he was a kid, and how it was probably related to the spray they put on the trash at the dump. There was a class-action lawsuit pending and his dad was looking into it on his behalf. We were discussing whether or not Ruthanne could get in on it, what with her weird spine and all, when it occurred to me I worked for the man Demarcus was planning to sue. I let the subject drop. Demarcus talked some more about the Army and how he was sure he’d get his ass kicked in boot camp since he was “pretty wimpy,” he allowed, but he looked forward to seeing other countries.
“Like Iraq and Afghanistan?”
“More soldiers are stationed in Japan and Germany, believe it or not. How about you, Ben? What you been up to?”
I decided to come clean. I told Demarcus how after the campaign was over I stayed on at Bi-Cities. I explained what I did as succinctly as possible, not wanting to sound like I was bragging in case Demarcus thought I was a sellout. But he didn’t. He was smiling like he couldn’t believe my good fortune.
“My man,” he said. “My man!” He gave me an elaborate handshake. “That’s the American dream right there. That’s sit-down work for sure.”
I wanted to tell him more, about the not-so-nice thing I did to Tom Donaldson, about what happened to Leo, about how strange Whitey was, but it made me feel good that Demarcus seemed proud of me. And anyway the man at the bar was asking for a refill and another bowl of goldfish crackers. I said I should probably go. I said it was good to see him, and Demarcus said the same about me. I said I’d see him around, but I wasn’t too sure.
After leaving the Motown Lounge, I felt nostalgic. I drove out to the west side of the dump, where Demarcus and I had snuck in, years before, and I walked along the strong new fence until I got to the outbuilding I used to climb. The dumpster was still behind it, so I climbed up the dumpster and onto the corrugated tin roof of the building. I didn’t care anymore if a garbage man saw me, since I worked there and some of them knew me by sight.
It was a clear day so I looked all the way across the dump and tried to approximate where my house used to be. In the distance were some houses I recognized, but I couldn’t remember which street was which anymore. I was still looking for my house when I noticed something different about Trash Mountain. It was still a mountain by any stretch, still as tall as it had ever been, but the trash all around it had gotten so high that Trash Mountain didn’t seem like a mountain anymore. More like a bluff or something. The flattened expanse of trash made it easier to imagine the park Whitey envisioned, the weird Central Park of his dreams. In my mind I could overlay the landscape of trash with rolling green hills of similar shape. I tried to see it like Whitey did, to see the picnickers and dogs, the outdoor café, maybe a fountain or two, kids running through fields of cut grass instead of picking through trash. But there was something sad about that. Picking trash was more fun than running in circles like an idiot. That vague sadness must have colored my thoughts, because the field I was seeing began to transform. It got spooky, less like a park than like a graveyard. A graveyard without headstones. I began to see dark figures emerge, first hands then heads full of foul yellow teeth, then whole pale rubbery bodies. The Sleepers. One of them might have been Leo, I thought. Another might have been Boss, bigger than the rest, a real Frankenstein. Yet another might have been Ronnie, the true seer of these horrors. Ronnie was alive, of course, but he was also dead. He was forgotten. You didn’t have to be dead to be forgotten, see? And if you were alive, you could still be partway dead. The trash was all mixed up with us. Trash Mountain could be flattened, sent to China, and replaced by a park, but it would loom out there forever, and inside us too.
In Gratitude
Many people contributed to this book, and I thank them. I thank Cheryl and Wayne Bazzle, my parents, who let me leave my drawings and weird projects all over the house when I was a kid, and who continue to encourage me. I thank Andrea and Lenore, my family, who support me and bear with me through the ups and downs of the writing life. I love you both. I thank Maceo Montoya, my friend and tireless reader. I thank my uncle, Tim Coveney, for his wisdom and excellent web design. I thank the rest of my friends and family for their kindness and support. I thank my collaborators in the comedy groups I’ve been part of (Trophy Dad, the Viola Question and Improv Athens, among others), who have guided me over the years towards what’s funny and/or interesting. I thank Stuart Dybek, who selected a portion of this book to win the Third Coast Fiction Contest. I thank Third Coast. I thank the good people at Red Hen Press, and I thank Steve Almond, who selected this novel to win the Red Hen Press Fiction Award, and whose comments helped me shape the book into its final form. And I thank the other writers and teachers who have encouraged me, especially Judith Ortiz Cofer, who died too young, and whose praise for an early version of the first chapter started me down this road.
Biographical Note
Bradley Bazzle is the recipient of the 2016 Red Hen Press Fiction Award, judged by Steve Almond, for Trash Mountain. His short stories have won awards from the Iowa Review and Third Coast. They also appear in Epoch, Copper Nickel, New England Review, New Ohio Review, Web Conjunctions, and elsewhere. Bradley grew up in Dallas, Texas, and has degrees from Yale, Indiana University, and the University of Georgia, where he taught writing. He remains in Athens, Georgia, with his wife and daughter.
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