by William Bebb
Leaning against the rear of the truck's tank, he finished losing his breakfast and then wiped his face with a handkerchief. He used the long crowbar to push the dead animal's carcass off to the side of the road before walking unsteadily back to the truck cab. Breathing hard and still trembling, he replaced the crowbar and climbed inside. At least the day can’t get much worse than this, he sincerely hoped.
After swishing the remaining coffee around in his mouth he spit it back in the cup and poured the foulness out the window. He restarted the engine and drove away trying to think of something, anything, other than the last few minutes.
”I tried to miss it. I really did,” he mumbled, as he drove past a closed convenience store and turned off the empty country highway onto a dirt road.
The truck rumbled past an old wooden sign rotted with decades of neglect. It had partly fallen over and the words Albuquerque Springs Trailer Park were painted on it. The words were faded and almost impossible to read at a casual glance. In fact, it had taken Josey three attempts before he finally discovered that's where the trailer park road was the first time he came for a pickup.
After almost two miles, he downshifted and began the steep run into the canyon.
Some people referred to it as a valley, but to him it always seemed more like a miniature Grand Canyon. From on top of the valley the first rays of the sun started to peek over the landscape. The sunlight reflected off the trailers below and he wondered how the place managed to stay in business at all. At the bottom of the valley, the park was large enough to accommodate several hundred mobile homes.
Decades earlier there used to be that many, but that was before the new interstate made the old dusty highway he’d spent the last thirty minutes navigating nearly deserted. Albuquerque Springs Trailer Park was one of the saddest looking places Josey ever visited. He tried to remember, Are there ten or eleven trailers with residents left?
Eight or nine trailers were full of illegal immigrants. They came from everywhere. There were people living there from all over South and Central America as well as Mexico. They lived together and saved money to send home to their families. One of the more artistic residents even made a large plywood sign, painted red, white, and green, and installed it on top of the first trailer. The sign read Welcome to NEW New Mexico.
Josey's throat tightened when another jackrabbit leaped across the steep road ahead and felt that deep heavy uneasy pain in his stomach again.
Who else was still down in the valley? He wondered and reached for another piece of gum. He chewed at the bitter tasting stuff wishing he could smoke, but knew it was dangerous in a truck carrying as much natural methane as his did. Glancing at the old tattered piece of paper someone had thoughtfully taped to the dashboard that had the words NO SMOKING! He shot it the birdie finger and considered those few people that still lived down in the valley.
There was an elderly man who was probably retired. Josey spotted him using a cane while walking a poodle near a bright shiny silver 1960's era trailer that had an American flag on a pole out front. The old man had seemed nice enough as they exchanged waves.
And then there was Mrs. Remlap. Josey shuddered at the thought of her. She was old, mean, ugly, and just plain rude. She always had a snide comment or sarcastic backhanded compliment for him. He trembled after remembering he had to see her this morning to pick up a payment for draining the park's septic tank.
Her house was hard to miss. It sat on the far side of the valley. It was a big, ancient, two story, termite infested, somewhat dilapidated looking structure. It always reminded him of a movie he couldn't remember the name of with the Bates Motel and some weird guy who dressed in his dead mom's clothes. The Remlap house was situated on a little bluff. Thirty or forty years earlier it may have seemed like a mansion, lording over its mobile home residents. But that early morning as he stared at the old house it was at best a depressing sight, at worst kind of frightening.
For an empty trailer park it sure is full of junk, Josey thought, looking at the piles of junk stretching across the valley floor.
There were shopping carts (some full of bits of metal that had probably been salvaged or stolen), stacks of recycled crumbly looking cinder blocks, bicycles, rusty barrels, an old Yugo car with a flame paint job along its sides, and just plain old trash scattered everywhere. There were also more than a few abandoned trailers, rusting cars, or pieces of cars, and lots of broken appliances. In many ways the whole trailer park looked more like a junkyard than a place people actually lived.
He finally noticed the birds while driving the last switch back on the steep road leading into the valley. Never before had he seen so many. The closest trailers, the ones the illegal immigrants used, were surrounded by thousands of the birds. There are some big ones too, he realized while staring at a giant buzzard or vulture sitting atop the nearest trailer. (He wasn’t sure which kind it was for sure, but thought it must have had a five foot wingspan)
Slowing to enter the trailer park gate, the truck passed between two old cars nearly blocking the road ahead. He wondered briefly if someone had crashed them together. One was a dark green station wagon, the other a big cargo van and both were older vehicles with beer cans and tequila bottles on the dashboard and scattered around them. The van had part of a broken utility pole leaning on its badly dented roof.
He stepped on the gas pedal when a man started to get out of the station wagon.
Josey didn't want to talk to a drunk first thing in the morning or really any other time of the day for that matter. The truck had gone a few hundred yards when he glanced in the rear view mirror and saw behind him several other men standing around the wrecked cars.
I sure hope they don't want a ride into town. After another minute he pulled the truck into the laundry building parking lot and flipped on the generator switch for the pumps. He slid on his thick dirty pair of leather work gloves. Climbing out, he reached for the thick smelly rubber hose and dragged it to the septic tank cap near the dilapidated laundry building. The roof had fallen in from disrepair long ago and Josey only shook his head as he worked to hook up the hose connections.
Sheets of paper fluttered in the wind on his clipboard while he looked them over. According to the invoice it'd been three months since the last pickup. After double checking the connections between the hose and truck he flipped on the pump.
He'd learned through an extremely messy way the undeniable need to always double check septic tank hoses. A couple of years earlier, after his probationary period was up, he'd felt cocky and confident when it came to his job. Until the infamous Vaughn incident, that is.