by Kris Bertin
When you call your boss and launch into your performance, you use your little pictures like flashcards, and it really works. You aren’t sure if it works because you’re a good actor (though back in high school, Mrs. DePalma from English 3 said you could’ve been an actor), or because of the reputation of guys like your brother and your father, or because your boss is just an idiot.
He gives you the rest of the night off, but you say no, you’ll work, and so you’re off to your next job, sent back to the hotel, back to get Lou, who asked for you specifically. You take him to a bar called Ron’s and he comes back with two ladies, two waitresses, Loretta and Dawn. He introduces you as the Champ and tells them the story you told him, except it’s all ass-backwards and he gets every name wrong, but you don’t correct him. Turns out Lou isn’t a gangster, he owns a car lot somewhere in Clayton Park, sells Chevy trucks and Jeeps. At some point he sends Dawn to sit up front with you, probably because he’s going to get blown.
You don’t talk because you’re already getting a hangover, and she doesn’t talk because she doesn’t like the look and probably the smell of you.
You realize that the longer you go without talking the scarier you probably seem, and the more menacing your injured face looks. When you offer her a cigarette, she jumps in her seat, then says no, then asks if she can go home. You take her there and it turns out to be practically next door to Alex. She leaves without saying goodbye to you, though she telephones Lou and Loretta with the direct line and says a secret into the receiver.
A month later you’re at a pet shop buying tropical fish food and maybe a few more fish, maybe another clownfish, because yours haven’t been looking very fresh lately. You’re looking at their selection, walking around in a Hawaiian shirt (because it’s laundry day and the only other clean shirt has your own face on it from your fighting days and you’re not going to wear that in public) when you run into her and a young boy holding a stick with a ball tied to the end.
She doesn’t recognize you, but you recognize her, and when you say hello she doesn’t respond so you pretend to inspect ceramic aquarium decorations like it never happened. She walks by you and out of your life forever, but you realize the ceramic castles are actually pretty neat. There are eight different kinds of castles, eight different colours, eight different ways to go, so you buy them all and are happy with your purchase.
At home you arrange them like they’re warring kingdoms on your coffee table and when you lean in and squint really hard, you can just barely see peasants walking around on the cobblestones, little people with their whole lives ahead of them.
THE END
THE NARROW PASSAGE
Gene and Richard saw the smoke before they saw the people. Billowing up into the air and lit by the dull glow from a fire, it looked like a thick, orange neck and head sticking out of the treetops. It was early in the morning—before the sun had risen, when the sky was the darkest blue it could be without being called black—and the fire was the only source of light. Richard couldn’t think of anything other than a burning house to explain it, didn’t imagine anyone would be up at this hour if something hadn’t gone wrong. He thought he would see people standing outside a home falling in on itself, burping out sparks and smoke and flames. He thought they would be weeping, and clutching each other, watching everything come apart. He wanted to say something about it, but Gene—who had talked all morning long—was silent.
Then, once they passed through a clearing and went over a bridge made of logs and planks that sat in a pool of stagnant water, he saw them. Maybe fourteen of them—men and women—in lawn chairs, sitting inside a circle of four-wheelers and pickup trucks, surrounding a blaze wide enough to throw a body into. They were drinking, and smoking. Richard could smell weed.
All of them raised their bottles to Richard and Gene when they got out of the truck. Dogs were barking.
One of the men turned towards them and called:
How ya doing?
He was Gene’s age, bald and bearded and with a roll of fat around his head and neck like a lion’s mane. He had a big black dog by the collar, pulling it up and off the ground while it croaked out its barks. Gene didn’t answer him, but Richard did, without looking at them:
Not too bad, how are you?
He looked at the plot of land, lit by the truck’s headlights. It was lumpy and uneven without a single blade of grass present and there were three different houses up on posts, their foundations gone or not yet poured. There was every kind of dogshit scattered about, from fresh and brown to hard and black, all the way to the dry stuff, white like powdered donuts. The main house in the middle had a pitched roof and a fence made of pulpy birch logs, front steps leading to a sinking porch. A cold room filled right to the ceiling with debris that Richard couldn’t make out. Things in bags—maybe cans and plastic containers—and stacks of what might be firewood. The bonfire was off to the side of one of the houses, a few feet away from a flap of construction plastic where a wall should have been.
There was a piece of metal nailed to the porch that looked like the back of a license plate, hand-painted with thick, orange paint:
The Cliftons.
Richard and Gene had been going for a long time already, collecting garbage since 4 a.m. Their truck was a modified cube truck with the top peeled off like a sardine lid, and it was full. The two-by-fours that hinged across the back—gates that were always wet with garbage juice and dark with grime, and which could be closed, one by one, as the garbage pile grew in the back—looked ready to pop. This load was a big one, and though they were outfitted with a hydraulic for dumping, there was none for crushing like the trucks from the city had, so there wasn’t much they could do about it.
It was only when Richard finally took his eyes away from the place that he saw what they had left for them. Instead of garbage cans, there were seven rusted drums that were deep and without any kind of lid. Gene was already working on it. He was bent over, pulling at a bag that had taken on rainwater and was suctioned to the inside of the barrel. There were a dozen more bags thrown nearby, sitting in the dirt. One—which was the furthest from the cans and seemed to have been thrown from one of the houses—was burst. They were supposed to accept no more than five per household. Even if they treated this place as three houses, they had exceeded their limit just with the bags left on the ground.
But Gene said nothing, so Richard went to work alongside him. It was his first week and he was being careful.
After wrenching soaking-wet bags that weighed up to twenty pounds from their barrels, they had to throw them—overhand, maybe fifteen feet up—over the gates and into the heap. A few fell off and Richard had to catch up with them, throw them back up.
When he heard laughter, he took another look at the bodies around the fire and tried to guess if they were laughing at him and Gene. He decided it didn’t matter. They were big people, overweight and bearded, wearing down-filled vests, boots. Some of them were young, too young to be there. Two boys with long, bare necks sticking out of hooded sweatshirts, watching him closely. There was a girl with a long yellow braid of hair hung over an open parka, her skin chalky white like she was kept indoors except for special occasions like this. She was maybe twelve. One of the bigger men was fanning the flames with an enormous cedar bough and she was laughing.
Just from the amount of embers in the bonfire and the size of the brush pile beside it, Richard guessed that the fire had been burning for twelve hours. Standing upright by the blaze was a grandfather clock. At first he’d thought it was a person. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched it tilt, then rise and glide towards them in the dark. Someone was walking it to them.
Got room in there still? They called.
It was already before them when Gene said yes, go ahead.
Three of them came to the truck—one of the boys and two of the men. A fourth, an old man wearing a mustard-coloured coat too big fo
r him, came to supervise. He looked frail and weak, his face full of lines like a mud puddle sucked dry by the sun.
Thank you boys, he said.
No problem, Gene replied.
The men stumbled against the truck and the young one climbed the back gate, guided the clock upwards with one hand while the two men lifted. Richard and Gene backed up and watched the clock float up to the top of their truck before disappearing into the black-and-green heap.
The old man touched Richard above the elbow and he was surprised to feel strength in his grip. And his hand was burning hot, hot enough to radiate through the fabric of Richard’s jumpsuit. He said:
Thank you so very much.
His eyes were burning too.
Gene was quick to answer, and repeat himself:
No problem here.
Nothing stayed hidden.
Once a bag went from the truck to the sorting-centre floor and up into the hopper, it would be torn open by a row of men in thick, padded gloves. They saw everything: mould of every colour, adult diapers, stinking turkey carcasses and newspapers, abandoned photo albums and entire outfits—shoes and hats and pressed suits—as if a person had been dissolved in the garbage bag and only their outermost layer remained.
And then there was the stranger stuff, what they didn’t expect to see. Items that peeked out from cantaloupe guts and coffee grinds and used tissues. The realness of a man’s blonde toupee, wet and gleaming from the contents of a nearby plastic bottle of chicken stock. An old scarecrow made of pantyhose and chicken wire, twisted up like a circus rubberman. A hundred or so tiny ceramic busts of Mozart, all identical, most of them still intact and smiling painted smiles. Dozens and dozens of smudged brass casings from spent ammunition all mixed in with heaping strings of red-and-brown animal entrails. Three deer heads, stinking and staring and missing an oval of skull where there had once been antlers.
It wasn’t their job to stop and watch the sorters descend on their load, but nearly every one of the rural guys—the guys who didn’t work for a company—they always stayed and watched it feeding in. Gene would walk right up to them, join the sorters and stare at the bags he’d previously made guesses about. The ones that were overly heavy or strangely shaped. He’d even reach in and poke at things, smiling, a cigarette hanging from his mouth.
On his first day, when Richard asked why they were waiting around, Gene had frowned:
I’ve been doing this since before there even was a sorting centre, he said. Since before you were even born.
Richard felt a quick burst of anger in his chest, but was careful to keep it inside him. He needed this job. When Gene hired him—when Richard walked the three miles along the highway to get to his house—he made it clear he had no problem getting rid of him. He said it while they drank instant coffees, sitting at a tiny vinyl table in the garage.
First, he listened to Richard’s story about buying a trailer with his wife, away from town, and how he’d been laid off from his roofing job. About how seasonal work had just ended and that he’d spotted Gene’s ad on the bulletin board at the Co-op. A story that was mostly true, one that left out an argument over pay with the roofers, and something similar at an apple orchard weeks before that.
Richard had been careful to make himself seem strong and useful, and not too needy, even though he was that as much as the first two. He could feel himself split in three, between the person he was, the one he claimed to be, and the one he wanted to become.
It had worked and Gene had shook his hand, saying the job’s yours before he set Richard straight:
I don’t need to be doing any favours to anyone, he said. If you can’t keep up or do it right or listen to me, I can find another fella as quick as I found you.
Of course, Richard said.
So at the sorting centre Richard just stood back and let Gene have his fun. He liked to show off the what-the-fucks but also the perfectly goods. A pressed shirt in its crinkly plastic package, still sealed, still with that bit of cardboard around the collar, a price tag. A Con-Air hairdryer, still in its box, boasting Salon Performance. Two-dozen fresh cabbages, immaculate and waxy green like they’d been bought that day, spinning away like model planets down the conveyer belt.
He could explain their origins too. The box of Pal-O-Mine chocolate bars still in shrink-wrap came from a household of compulsive eaters who were trying to turn things around. A giant freezer bag full of pill bottles and loose tablets and powder mixes were uppers that probably belonged to the DeLongs, who were husband and wife—and both truckers—and needed this sort of thing to get through their lives. He connected a cheap policeman’s costume to the Tremblay boy, a senior in high school—who might have started the highway tire fire in October wearing this very costume—who was trying out for the RCMP next year.
He’d start the same way, by saying what this is here, and then gave Richard something that it had him taken years to understand. A map he’d made in his mind, that he could unfold and lay out and point to at a moment’s notice, with pride. Richard understood that this was why they were here. Gene was proud of what he knew, but presented it as basic information that Richard needed in order to do the job. Something he’d share, quietly, respectfully, but as a simple fact, the same way he’d show how to work around the sticky part of the clutch, or the best place to tip their load once they pulled into the sorting centre.
Richard imagined that Gene had been in this place so long that the facts had simply stuck to him. He had grown up in town, in apartments, and moved a lot, and felt like he never learned anything. He had a neighbour who fought with his wife, but he’d only ever heard any of it when he was exactly on the other side of the wall from them. With Gene, it was as if he had been listening outside of every house, all the time—and all at once—for as long as he’d been alive. It felt like he had access to every river, every stream flowing beneath the surface of all the houses, all the lives on their route. He could pan out the hard little nuggets that told a story about the world above.
To Richard, this was a waste of time. All of it was equal. All of it was garbage and deserved to get down the chute with the eggshells and the willow branches and the phonebooks and all the plastic and paper rattling away on the belt. All of it—everything that was separate—would come together and become a single torrent, gushing into the system.
When Gene sorted through their load, Richard couldn’t stand to take part. He would stare out the hangar doors and watch it all emptying out in the landfill, watch the seagulls picking through it. Stared at the spot where it collected and joined slow-moving waves of pulp and debris, mounting and tumbling over as the bulldozers ploughed through the grey tide.
There were four legs to the garbage run. Routes that Gene had been driving and collecting from for more than three decades.
The first leg was all the houses strung along the main road, all in a line. These houses were mostly well built, if not large, and had garages, sometimes boats. Big lawns, front and back, edged by the forest. This was where Gene lived. Everyone knew him and would wave to him. Some left notes for him, taped to their cans.
Gene,
Sorry about the extra junk, Jill went off to college this week and we had a big clean up. Back to three bags next week (or less) we can promise you that!
Thank you,
Mike & Louise
The second leg was made of all the cul-de-sacs that had sprung up in the last twenty years, houses that were all pretty much identical. Almost all of them two storeys with white siding and black-shingled roofs. Almost all of them inhabited by military families who didn’t want to live on the base. Producers of very little trash, except for cardboard boxes from all the shuffling they did across the country. Always in a pile, always tied with twine and set in the very corner of the lawn, beside a pair of cans. If nobody gave them too much, if the weather was good, and their truck was in good health, the first two runs c
ould sometimes be done in one day.
The fourth leg was the Pine Crest Trailer Park, where Richard and his wife lived. Gene explained that they did it last because it had lots of stops and could take a long time, though it was generally a lesser load for the simple fact that the households were so small. One time, Richard picked out a single grocery bag filled with paper plates and hotdog packages, crushed drink boxes and chip bags that represented the total waste from a single trailer. Richard held it up like a prize and threw it in effortlessly, like a ball of paper into a wastebasket.
Thank god for the deadbeat dads, Gene said to Richard once they were back in the truck. Richard laughed because he felt he was supposed to.
The third leg of the run was the rural route.
This was a place Richard had never seen before. Even when he was in junior softball, and he and his mother had to drive out to places like Tracy and Lincoln and Clayton and Maugerville, he had never gone down those roads. Gene said it was a place that was in between places, too far out to be collected by any other contractor but him. He explained that it wasn’t really part of the county’s responsibility, but it had somehow been lumped into their route by someone in the seventies. Explained it like it was an embarrassing thing that had happened to him personally.
We’re following the river, because that’s how all the settlers got here. Back then you couldn’t go through hills and rock, you had to go around, Gene said. That’s why the road’s shit. Everyone moved away and forgot about it.
The other places had their names posted on signs that were put up by someone who cared, who had one made with municipal funds, either by a machine or a draftsman with a paintbrush and a sense of design. They said:
WELCOME TO STOCK
and
The Village of Kennedy
and
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