Читать книгу Trash Mountain - Bradley Bazzle - Страница 7

IN THE BEGINNING I had two parents and a sister. The parents weren’t much, but the sister was pretty good. Her name was Ruthanne. She had a weird spine because of the dump next to our house, where there was a big pile of trash we called Trash Mountain.

Trash Mountain loomed outside Ruthanne’s bedroom window, on the other side of a fence. Trash Mountain was so unstable that the fence was lined with razor wire so kids wouldn’t climb around on it. Trash Mountain didn’t smell like trash, weirdly, but like this spray they sprayed on it that smelled like bowling shoe spray, times a million. Trash Mountain was always changing: a flattened fridge on top one day, pieces of car the next, couch cushions, a dried-up house-plant. Trash Mountain grew and grew until it was literally a mountain, meaning taller than one thousand feet. Ruthanne and I could tell how tall it was because we approached the issue scientifically. What we did was put our eyes in the exact same spot, at the bottom left corner of Ruthanne’s bed, and use an old key to scratch a mark on Ruthanne’s window where the top of Trash Mountain was. Then we measured Trash Mountain with a special technique I learned at school to measure trees using the tree’s shadow and a pencil. It was trigonometry, basically. I was a genius at it. Maybe I could have done it for a living, but instead I had to destroy Trash Mountain.

One day Carl, who drove us to school, was hanging around our house while he waited for my parents, who hadn’t paid him, and he saw me marking the window with the key. Ruthanne was in the bathroom, maybe hiding. Carl asked what I was doing, and I told him. He laughed, which pissed me off, but then he got serious. He said, “Yeah, man, it’s fucked up y’all live right next to that thing. Could be worse, though. On the other side, in Haislip, they don’t even spray it down. But those Haislip people don’t complain.”

“Pretty soon they won’t have to complain,” I said, and I laid out for Carl a plan that had been germinating inside me. My plan was to tunnel into the base of Trash Mountain and plant a nuclear bomb inside it, then escape just in time to roll under the porch while the bomb went off and incinerated the whole dump.

Carl nodded. He knew a good plan when he heard it.

“And then,” I said, “they won’t put another dump there because they learned their lesson. If we’re lucky it’ll be a super fun site.”

“Superfund site?”

“Whatever. There’ll be a playground and stuff. And a football field where the goal posts are also soccer goals so you can play soccer too.”

Carl said it sounded like a pretty good plan. I asked him where could I get plutonium and he said he didn’t know. Then Ruthanne came out of the bathroom and Carl said he liked her new brace. “Can I sign it?” he asked.

“It’s not a cast, you idiot,” she said.

“My bad,” he said. Then Ruthanne went into the kitchen, and Carl whispered to me, “Your sister’s got a nice little body but man is she a bitch.”

“Don’t call my sister a bitch,” I said. Then my parents came home and scraped together twenty of the fifty dollars they owed Carl and he left.

That night, after my parents’ light went out, I crept out of my bedroom and down the hall to Ruthanne’s room. She was reading a book under the sheets. I asked her what book it was, and she said it was none of my business. But I saw the cover and it had a picture of a shirtless guy with long hair and shiny boob muscles. I told her about my plan to set off the bomb, since she hadn’t heard it before, and it felt wrong to me that Carl was the first person I told instead of her. She said it was a pretty good plan but maybe too ambitious. She had just turned fifteen and was becoming levelheaded.

“Better just to light it here and there, strategically,” she said, “and watch the fucker burn. The fumes will be noxious so we’ll probably die, but we’ll have sacrificed ourselves for the greater good. They’ll do a monument about us.”

Ruthanne was right, I decided, but I didn’t tell her so she wouldn’t get a big head. I started imagining the monument they’d do about us. Ruthanne’s would look like the peaceful version of Jesus where he’s raising two fingers and tilting his head, except the head would be Ruthanne’s head instead of Jesus’s head. Mine would be a worm-dragon shooting out of the ground with a ferocious scowl and a beard-and-mustache combo like flames and also tiny powerful claws tucked under my chin, for fighting.

The next day in computer class I read about lighting things on fire and found out the cops could tell when you did it on purpose and put you in jail. The jail was a building by the highway with tiny windows and razor wire around it where sometimes, when we drove by, I could see guys playing basketball and smoking cigarettes. There was a big gray bus like a school bus that took those guys places. They always had their heads leaning against the windows with their eyes open, like they were really tired but couldn’t fall asleep.

Jail wasn’t for me, I decided. I would either succeed or be killed. So I opened my notebook and wrote down the names of the most combustible chemicals I could find: chlorine trifluoride, cellulose nitrate, phosphorus heptasulfide, phosphorus sesquisulfide. I had no idea where I could get any of those chemicals. Eventually Mr. B saw me writing stuff and said, “Hey there, Ben, whatcha working on?”

“Nothing,” I said, covering my notebook with my forearm.

“Mind if I have a look?”

“It’s private.”

“Totally cool, Ben. I respect your privacy. Just let me know if you have any questions, okay? The internet is an unfiltered source of information, and sometimes a parent or teacher can help put things in perspective. But will you do me a favor?”

I shrugged.

“Try to finish the internet treasure hunt before period ends?”

I said I would.

The internet treasure hunt wasn’t a treasure hunt at all, just a list of lame facts we were supposed to find on the internet. This one was Alaska themed, like how tall Mount McKinley was and why Alaska was called Seward’s Ice Box. The questions took about ten seconds so I did them all, to keep Mr. B off my back, then I took my paper to him and he graded it right in front of me and gave me an A-plus. I was a genius at geography, he said. Geography was another thing I could have done for a living if it wasn’t for Trash Mountain.

I stayed on the lookout for chemicals, but by the time Saturday came I hadn’t found any so I decided to proceed to stage two of my plan: canvassing the target area. I told my parents I was going to the empty school where I liked to kick a ball against a brick wall, but instead of going there I started walking the perimeter of the dump, probing for weaknesses.

The wire fence went along the other side of an alley behind our house. It was ten feet tall with planks of wood that went up maybe six feet, and on the very top was a stretched out coil of razor wire. I had climbed the fence before and knew there was no getting through that razor wire, which was woven through the chain-links so you couldn’t lift it up. I kept walking.

Where roads dead-ended into the fence, there were little guardrails to keep drunk drivers from crashing through. Beer cans and soda bottles and fast food wrappers were all around the guardrails, like maybe people had been sitting there during a party. There were clothes hanging in backyards, and sometimes rusted-out cars and appliances that looked pretty cool. I saw an old man watering what looked like a sandbox except there were plants in it. He waved his cigarette at me but I didn’t wave back. I was on a mission.

In half a mile the alley hit an empty six-lane road with a dead grass median, and the fence took a sharp right. There wasn’t any sidewalk so I walked along the median, kicking trash as I went. The sun was up high by then and stung my neck. I wished I’d worn a hat, but I didn’t like wearing hats because I had a big head and hats made it look weird. Eventually the road veered left and the fence kept going straight. Between the fence and the road was a patch of shitty looking forest. The trees had flaky bark and some were dead. The ground between the trees was slick and smelled like the bowling shoe stuff they sprayed at the dump. I wondered what would happen if a person breathed the smell too long. Would he pass out and never be found again?

I saw an empty plastic vodka bottle and some wadded up clothes, what Grandpa would have called a hobo bed. The vodka bottle scared me because the person who had drunk it might be crazed. We saw an educational movie about it at school. The movie was in black and white and the people talked like idiots, but the drunk character made a shocking impression on me. His eyes were bugged out and he had drool all over his lips, and he tried to grab a lady’s boobs with both hands.

I started walking faster but not too fast, hoping to look casual. Then I heard something that sounded like a crow but I decided in my head was a crazed drunkard making crow sounds to signal his crazed partners that there was a kid in their midst, because they preyed on kids like me for who knows what, so I started to run.

When the forest ended I stopped to hunch over and catch my breath, and I saw that the fence looked different. The razor wire had turned into a droopy coil of barbed wire, which any self-respecting thief could get over with a heavy blanket or scrap of old carpet. But I had neither. I thought about climbing the fence to get a good look at the trash, but I was too tired. Thirsty, too. Lucky for me, there were some houses in the distance. I crept towards them along the fence, hoping to find a hose or something (I would have drunk out of a dirty kiddy pool by that point), but before I got to the houses I heard some kids. I followed their cries to a big, empty lot where crumbling asphalt was being overtaken by weeds. Some black boys a few years older than me were drinking beer and playing catch with a football. I watched them for a while, waiting for a break in the action to test my courage and ask them about the water situation, then I noticed a boy standing apart. He was a little younger and was digging in the dirt with a stick. When he saw me his stick went still. He glanced over his shoulder, like he was deciding whether or not to holler at the older boys, then he resumed poking around with his stick. When I got closer, I saw he was working loose some kind of soiled garment from the rocky dirt.

“That yours?” I asked.

“Hell no,” he said. “Look like I wear teal?”

I laughed. The garment had indeed been teal at one time, and had fringes like a lady’s shirt. I told the boy my name was Ben, and he said his was Demarcus. I never heard that name before so I said, “Like Marcus?”

“Of Marcus.”

“So your dad’s named Marcus?”

“Gerald.” On the subject of Gerald, his dad, Demarcus opened up considerably. Demarcus’s dad owned a bar outside Haislip that kids weren’t allowed to go to. He came home early each morning to have breakfast with Demarcus and his brother, Daryl, but by the time they came into the kitchen he was usually hunched over the table sleeping.

Now that Demarcus was warmed up I asked him about maybe getting some water, and he glanced back at the older boys before leading me across the overgrown lot to a tin building painted white. Behind the building was a hose faucet. Demarcus turned the spigot and each of us drank some water.

The water was superb. I felt like it was going straight from my stomach into my blood and the skin on my arms, and my eyes too. Everything was bluer and greener now, somehow more hopeful. Demarcus’s face was shiny with sweat. He had a bald spot on his head, and when I asked him about it he said he fell off the monkey bars and they shaved it to give him stitches but when they took out the stitches the hair didn’t grow back. It was lumpy, he said, and he let me feel it. It was lumpy, and I told him it was cool. He said he didn’t think so. But I told him that when he was older and had more muscles it would make him look hard, like a guy in an action movie. He agreed.

I had a notion I couldn’t ask Demarcus directly about Trash Mountain, couldn’t let him know what I was after in case he thought differently and told the police on me, or maybe even the FBI, since I was basically a terrorist by this point, so what I did was ask him what he thought about “that old trash pile over there,” tilting my head in the direction of Trash Mountain without looking at it so the overall effect was, I hoped, nonchalant.

“There’s pretty interesting stuff in there,” Demarcus said.

I was shocked. “You’ve been in there?”

Demarcus shrugged.

“How’d you get in?”

Demarcus led me across the street and between some houses to the fence. Here, the fence didn’t even have barbed wire, let alone razor wire, so I thought we were going to climb it, but Demarcus kept walking along the fence until we came to a spot where the fence seemed to have popped up from the ground. There was a divot in the dirt beneath it where some boys or dogs had dug it out. I watched with reverence as Demarcus took off his shirt, balled it up and stuffed it into his pocket, then slid on his back under the fence. I did the same and slid after him pretty easy. By the time I put my shirt back on, Demarcus had found a chrome-sided toaster and was inspecting it. All around us were tin cans and plastic bottles and scraps of wood and trash bags, some closed and some ripped open with their guts hanging out: coffee filters, banana peels, wadded up Kleenex. Some furniture was arranged in a ring nearby, and some faded beer cans were stacked in a pyramid. I was so dazzled by the spread that it took me a while to remember we were at the base of Trash Mountain. When I did remember, I looked up from the junk furniture and ripped trash bags, up from the dried grass clippings and dirty plastic toys, up and up until the surface of the mountain was so far away it looked like pieces of a colorful jigsaw puzzle spilled in a big, tall pile. I was overwhelmed. It was like when we went to this lake one time and I was sitting on the dock, not really thinking about anything, just staring at the calm, dark water, when suddenly I thought about how deep the water might be, and the thought of all that cold, dark hidden space made me dizzy. That feeling by the lake had been frightening, but this, I decided, in the shadows of Trash Mountain, was the greatest and most frightening feeling of my life.

Demarcus acted real casual, though. He said he and his friends messed around in there all the time. That made me sore. I guess I felt like a softie for being so moved. “You and your friends, huh?” I said in a needling way. “Were those boys playing ball without you your friends?”

“They aren’t my friends,” Demarcus said. He had popped the chrome shell off the toaster and was inspecting the inside. “They’re older. My brother’s with them.”

“Where are your friends?”

Demarcus didn’t say anything, and in the silence I pictured a bunch of black boys lying in bed wearing braces, like Ruthanne. That made me feel bad for saying what I did. Demarcus was a good man, I decided. He could be trusted. So I told him Trash Mountain made my sister’s spine weird and was poisoning the rest of us and stinging Jesus’s eyes worse than sin. Demarcus nodded in a serious way that made me think he had suspected this all along. Then he said, “But we don’t eat it or nothing.”

“You don’t gotta eat it,” I said. “It’s in the air. It’s all around. We’re breathing it right now and getting it into our skin. Don’t worry, though. I’m gonna blow it all up.”

Demarcus squinted at me. “What?”

“Well, maybe not all of it, but part of it.” I didn’t have time to go into more detail. The sun was just over top of the trees, which meant I wouldn’t get home before dark. I was scared, not of the scolding I might get from my parents but of that stretch through the forest, with the hobo beds. The crazed hobos came out at night, I suspected, to do their perversions. I decided to call Carl. I asked Demarcus if I could use his phone. He said of course and led me back under the fence, then a few blocks away to a little wooden house with a sagging front porch. The screen door was latched to keep a gray cat inside. We slipped in sideways, using our feet to block the cat, whose name was Ghost.

Demarcus said “Hey Dad” as we passed through the front room. Demarcus’s dad was wearing a bathrobe and sitting in a lounge chair, reading a newspaper. He eyed us over the paper as we went into the kitchen. After Demarcus showed me the phone and I took it off the cradle, Demarcus’s dad called to his son in the warm yet commanding voice I associated with dads on TV. I was convinced that he, unlike Demarcus, knew at a glance I was a terrorist. So after I called Carl, who was startled by my request to be picked up in Haislip and said he’d come right over, I walked boldly into the living room. I had decided I would introduce myself to this man in a friendly way that suggested I had nothing to hide.

“Hello, sir,” I said, “I’m Ben. Pleased to meet you.”

The father, who was very tall and had graying puffs of hair over his ears, shook my hand and introduced himself as Mr. Caruthers. He asked what brought me to Haislip, and I surprised myself by telling the truth: that I was following along the fence until I found a way inside the dump.

“Why on Earth do you want to go inside that nasty old dump?” Mr. Caruthers asked.

“To see it,” I said, which was true, though I left out the part about strategizing to destroy it by firebomb.

“Can’t you see it from over there in Komer?”

“There’s razor wire to keep us out.”

He shook his head. “Figures,” he muttered, then told us we shouldn’t be playing in that dump, though he admitted the temptation to be irresistible. He told us about a creek where he grew up and how they built forts out of old tires and driftwood that floated down the muddy water. “Simpler times,” he said.

When Carl showed up, he looked stoned. Mr. Caruthers shook his hand in a stiff way and asked if he was here for his brother. I’m not sure why Mr. Caruthers thought Carl and I were brothers—we looked nothing alike—but for some reason I blurted, “Yeah, he’s my brother. He’s gonna take me home.” Then I shook hands with Mr. Caruthers and on my way out I whispered to Demarcus that I would be back to finish the job.

In the car, Carl started making a speech about how I shouldn’t wander so far away, but I told him to fuck off. He said he was doing me a favor and I should be more respectful. I said I was sorry. Then I asked him about Haislip. Carl said he sometimes delivered pizzas over there but it was scary at night because the empty houses had vagrants inside. I had no idea what a vagrant was but assumed it to be a sort of creature.

We went back the opposite way that I came, completing my loop around the dump. Turns out I had walked the long way before, and Haislip and Komer were only a mile or so apart. I made note of this for later.

When I got home, Ruthanne was washing dishes and asked me where I’d been. I told her the whole story, leaving out the particulars of my plot but allowing that I had been casing the dump. It was important to tell at least part of the truth to Ruthanne because she had a nose for lies.

“I swear, Ben,” she said, “sometimes you just don’t think.”

“I think all the time,” I said. “Pretty hard, too.”

She snorted like it was ridiculous, the idea of me thinking. That made me mad. It also made me mad she had the energy to stand there washing dishes but hadn’t told me before, because if I knew she felt strong we could have rode bikes. So I went into my room and didn’t sneak into hers even once that night.

During computer class the next day I tried to find out more about Haislip. I wanted to know if it was worthy of my sacrifice, if saving Haislip, in addition to Komer, would doubly glorify me. The internet said Haislip was named after a Civil War guy and was known as Flag City, USA. I was confused. I thought Komer was Flag City, USA. Then the internet said Haislip was the hometown of mountaineer Bob Bilger, who was the first man to videotape climbing Mount Everest and wrote a book about it, but I thought Bob Bilger was from Komer. Then the internet said Haislip was the birth-place of the frozen hamburger even though everybody knew Komer was the birth place of the frozen hamburger, so when Mr. B came over to bug me about staying on task I asked him where was the birthplace of the frozen hamburger.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Is that question on the internet treasure hunt?”

“I finished that. You know anything about Haislip?”

“Haislip is a very interesting city, full of history and hardworking people, not unlike Komer. You’ll learn more about Haislip in high school, where half the students will have gone to Truckee.”

He meant John R. Truckee, the middle school in Haislip. I was at Milford Perkins, the one in Komer, which people said was better but had sloppy joes made of rat meat.

“Why the curiosity about Haislip?” Mr. B asked.

“No reason.” I didn’t want to let anything slip that might be a clue when the FBI questioned everybody who knew me. “I gotta finish my internet treasure hunt now.”

Mr. B walked away, looking confused.

I knew Mr. B wouldn’t bug me for a while so I turned my attention to the actual firebombing. I learned that firebombs, aka incendiary weapons, looked like rusty logs and were thrown from planes during World War I to light towns on fire. Since I couldn’t get my hands on one of those logs, I would have to settle on an “improvised” incendiary weapon such as a Molotov cocktail. Molotov cocktails were easy to make. All you needed was gasoline and a glass bottle and some fabric for a wick.

The beer Dad drank came in cans, so late that night I snuck out my window to check the alley for glass bottles. The bottles in the alley were all broken, though. Then I heard a distant clang and saw a dark shape lurching down the alley. At first I thought it was a junk monster of some sort, born from the dump, but it turned out to be a lady hobo pushing a grocery cart. I watched her lift the top off a trashcan and root around in there until she pulled out some bottles, so I did the same thing and found some nice clean bottles of my own. She noticed me and muttered something, probably a hex.

Next, I got the big red jug of gasoline Dad kept by the side of the house for his mower. The jug was almost empty (he had used it to top off his car) but there was just enough gas in there to fill three bottles halfway, which was how much you were supposed to fill them for Molotov cocktails. It was dark outside and hard to see so the gas went all over the bottles and my hands and shorts. I rinsed the bottles in the kitchen sink then balled up my shorts and hid them under the stairs in front of the house. They were my favorite shorts so this was a terrible sacrifice, but it felt good to feel the feeling of sacrifice.

Next came the wicks. I looked under the sink for a dishrag but got nervous because Mom had a peculiar memory. I opened my closet and got my worst, most skid-marked underwear, but the underwear was so threadbare that I worried it might burn too fast. So what I did was cut a strip from the bottom of my bed sheets. If I cut cleanly enough, I reasoned, no one would notice that my top sheet was a few inches shorter. I cut the long thin strip into three and tied each strip as tight as I could around the side of each bottle. (The internet said most people stick the wick directly into the bottle, but the wick can get too much gas on it and explode in your hand so it’s better to do it on the side.)

I kept the Molotov cocktails under my bed until five o’clock Saturday morning, when I stuck them in my backpack and crept out the door before Mom and Dad woke up. It was still dark outside, which was good. I needed to commit my act of terror under cover of darkness. But as I walked down the alley I started thinking about Ruthanne, because what if I died? Wouldn’t she want to know what I died for? I was still sore at her for what she said about me not thinking, but I didn’t want to leave things bad between us in case I was blown up by my own firebomb. I decided to write a note.

Back at the house I got a piece of paper and puzzled for a while over what to write. It had to be somewhat vague in case the FBI questioned her, but also heroic and majestic and memorable. Finally I wrote, “Dearest Ruthanne, You’re the best sister a boy could have. What I do today I do for you, for all of us, and for the galaxy. Your ever loving brother, Ben.” I folded up the note and was going to put it in her favorite shoes, but then I heard Dad banging around in the kitchen looking for something to eat. I thought about sneaking out, but I knew I shouldn’t risk it. He had eagle eyes like me, and it was getting light outside anyway. I didn’t want to spoil my plan out of hastiness.

I spent the whole day fidgeting alone in my bedroom until the sun was just over the treetops, then I grabbed my backpack and told my parents I was sleeping over at a friend’s house. What friend, they asked, which was a reasonable question since I didn’t have friends. I told them Timothy McCoughtrie. I had slept over at his house one time, years before. They looked suspicious. “Didn’t his family move away?” Mom asked.

“Yeah,” Dad said, “and I thought McCoughtrie killed himself. But maybe I’m thinking of Mike McCutcheon.”

“No, that was Mike McCoughtrie,” Mom said, adding that Mike McCoughtrie had been a great basketball player and should have gone to college for it.

“You always were hung up on that guy,” Dad said.

“I just think it’s a shame he’s dead is all. When someone’s so good at something it makes it harder to imagine them dead. It’s funny is all.”

“Nothing funny about being dead.”

I said, “So, um, is it okay if I go?”

They said okay so I hit the road.

I walked the way Carl had driven me home, which was only a mile and had a sidewalk the whole time. It was a pretty nice walk.

In Haislip, all the houses were the same size and had the same little screened-in front porch so it took me a while to locate Demarcus’s house. When I did, I circled it, peeping in windows for Demarcus, but he wasn’t there. No one was there. So I strolled out to the field where I had found him before, and sure enough he was out there stacking rocks in a pile while the older boys played ball. I told him tonight was the night. He asked if I needed his help.

“No way,” I said. “It’s too dangerous.”

“Then why’d you come tell me?” he asked.

I didn’t know what to say to that. By then some older boys had noticed me and were approaching us. I worried that if I ran they’d come after me, so I stood my ground. They were bigger than they looked from a distance and crossed their arms to show their muscles. One, the tallest, who was basically a man, asked me who I was.

“A friend of Demarcus,” I said, but Demarcus just looked at the ground.

The boy turned to Demarcus. “He a friend of yours?”

Demarcus didn’t say anything.

I thought the boys were going to attack, but they just stood there, arms crossed, staring at me. They seemed to be waiting for something. Finally I just turned around and walked away. I didn’t dare look back until I heard them hollering, resuming their game, but by then Demarcus wasn’t among them.

Who needs him, I thought. Each man stands alone. But I really didn’t want to be alone just then. I wished Ruthanne were with me.

I found my way back to the hole under the fence, but I didn’t slip through it right away. I strolled around a bit, trying to look casual. Then, when I was sure the coast was clear, I carefully slid my back-pack under the fence and slid through after it, on my back. On the other side of the fence I looked up at Trash Mountain. It was reddish from the sunset, like a wayward outcropping of the mountains of hell. Its shaggy piebald flesh of plastic rippled in the breeze. I walked along the base, looking for a spot that was partially blocked from view, in case anybody crept up on me, and I found a nook between two rusted-out refrigerators. I opened my backpack. It smelled like gasoline even though the bottles were closed, and the inside felt greasy. I took out one of the Molotov cocktails and turned it in my hand, appreciating not only my handiwork but the craftsmanship of the bottle itself, which spoke of a bygone era when kids like me hung around corner stores with bar stools and bartenders who served soda instead of beer, and the kids were always stealing candy but the bartender guys just shook their heads and said, Boys will be boys.

There was a rustling nearby. I ducked into one of the refrigerators to hide, and in a moment I saw Demarcus walk past holding a heavy bucket. “Psst,” I whispered, and he turned and saw me in the fridge.

“Ben!” he said. He said he was sorry again and again but that Daryl and Boogie one time beat up this white boy for goofing with Boogie’s sister.

“What’s goofing?” I asked.

“You know,” he said, then made his finger and thumb into a circle and stuck another finger through it.

I said the whole thing was no problem, but Demarcus seemed pretty worked up, so I said I absolved him, which was something I saw a priest on TV say.

“Thanks,” Demarcus said. He held up his bucket to show me it was half-filled with water in case I lit myself on fire, and we got started.

I had planned to dig a hole in the side of Trash Mountain so I could ignite my Molotov cocktails beneath it, to cause it to collapse from the inside or possibly explode at the top like a volcano, but the trash was so smelly that I gave up digging after just a few minutes. Demarcus said maybe I should just light one and throw it as high as I could, to see what happened. I agreed. I reached into my pocket for the matchbook I had stolen from the kitchen, and while my hand was in there I felt a piece of paper. I took it out and saw my note to Ruthanne. I almost cried, thinking how the note might have burned up with me, without her knowing what it said and how I felt about her. I handed the note to Demarcus. “If anything happens to me,” I said, “give this to my sister.”

“What does she look like?”

I wasn’t sure how to describe her so I told him my address and said she was the girl living there, not the lady. I also told him to deliver the note under cover of night in case FBI snipers were watching the house.

Then I took out the matchbook, lit a match and held it up to the wick. It caught fire real quick, maybe because of the extra gasoline in my backpack, so I sort of panicked and threw the bottle just ten feet or so up onto a trash bag. It landed with a thump and didn’t break. I watched the flame peter out, hoping something in the trash pile would catch fire, but nothing did.

Demarcus said I should aim for a big blue metal thing that looked like the fender of a van. It was about thirty feet up, close enough to hit but far enough to be hard to aim at. I accepted the challenge. I took out the second Molotov cocktail, lit it, grabbed it by the bottleneck, as described on the internet, and flung it with force at the fender. But I flung it with so much force that the wind put out the wick and by the time the bottle smashed against the fender, the fire was long gone.

“Fuck, man,” I said.

“Maybe throw it softer,” Demarcus said.

“How can I throw it softer? I gotta hit the goddamn fender.”

“Wait for the rag to be more on fire, maybe. You threw it pretty quick after it was lit.”

Demarcus had a point. But I was nervous. This was my last Molotov cocktail, and I had to make it count. The lucky thing was some gasoline was already on the trash from the second Molotov cocktail, so if I could hit the fender again then the fire might be doubly intense. So I took a few deep breaths and shook out my hand, then I lit the final Molotov cocktail and waited. The waiting was eerie, watching the fire slowly devour the wick. Demarcus was watching too, his eyes glistening with tiny reflected flames. When the fire met the bottle I flung it with not quite as much speed but a higher arc, and Demarcus and I watched for what felt like minutes as the flaming bottle traced a trajectory high in the air. At first I thought I had missed, because the bottle went so high, but sure enough it began to sink, and then, suddenly, it shattered against the fender and bright orange flame spread like spilled juice splashing across the floor. We kept watching, stunned, then something else caught fire beneath the fender and rumbled so loud I could feel it in my chest. A tiny fireball shot up and showered sparks. We ran.

The next part is fuzzy. I remember watching Demarcus basically dive under the fence and scoot through on his belly. I followed him, but by the time I got through he was shrinking in the distance, running for home. I looked over my shoulder and saw smoke. I ran along the fence, stumbling over clods of dirt and falling at least once, scuffing the palms of my hands. When I got to the road to Komer I was still running. It was dark and I was running down the sidewalk, not even thinking about perverted hobos or what my parents would say, just desperate to get home. Once or twice I looked over the fence and saw what looked like a plume of smoke in the purplish night sky.

When I got home I fumbled with the doorknob for what felt like an age, then I ran through the empty house to Ruthanne’s bedroom. She was there, thank God, reading her paperback. She looked up at me, startled. I told her to look out her window.

“Ben,” she said, “are you okay?”

I went over to the window and pulled back the drapes. “See?” I said, but there was nothing to see. There weren’t any flames in the distance. Not even smoke. Just the lumbering dark shape of Trash Mountain. Near the top, a big floppy mattress glittered in the moonlight. Its stuffing was coming out in balls, and for days the puffy white balls had been rolling in slow-motion down the raggedy slope. If only I had caught that stuffing on fire, I thought, but the thought rang hollow. To destroy Trash Mountain would take more than a couple Molotov cocktails, I knew. Much more.