Читать книгу Trash Mountain - Bradley Bazzle - Страница 9

BY THE TIME high-school started I had $726, mostly in singles, which fit in a shoebox after I flattened the crinkled bills inside my copy of The Highest Mountain. It was more than enough to buy the Red Dragon 400,000 BTU Backpack Torch Kit with Squeeze Valve, but for some reason I still hadn’t bought it. I guess I had lost some of my terroristic spark, I’m ashamed to admit. I blamed the working life.

I was still working the blacktop at the grocery store most days after school, and on Saturdays I worked as a gofer for a lawyer. Her name was Ms. Mikiska and she wore slacks and a vest like an old-time banker. She had short, black hair parted and oiled in a way that made you wish she had a waxed mustache to finish the look. Ms. Mikiska would stand outside her storefront office all day saying hello to the old ladies who still shopped downtown, where the only other businesses were a florist that specialized in funeral arrangements and a couple junk shops that called themselves antique stores. The junk shops picked over the estates of dead people who didn’t have family or who didn’t pay their rent and got their stuff put outside when they died, but Ms. Mikiska would tell the old ladies that this or that cherry wood breakfront or Queen Anne dining room set out there on the sidewalk had belonged to a sweet old lady who “hadn’t managed her estate, bless her heart, so her family will never inherit those lovely heirlooms.” My job was to fetch Ms. Mikiska’s lunch and to stand outside when she took calls or went to the bathroom. She told me to say stuff to the old ladies, but I never did.

It was boring as hell and paid real bad, but I was glad for the work. I wanted to be home as little as possible. That’s because home wasn’t our house anymore; it was an apartment. Dad had moved to the city full-time, so when the county offered to buy our house, Mom sold it. Dad didn’t want us to move, but Mom said he didn’t have a say anymore. Mom said the house was too close to the dump so we were better off. We might feel healthier, she said, but Ruthanne said that was bullshit. Ruthanne said we could still smell the dump so whatever was in the air was still going in our noses. Mom said it was only a matter of time before the county claimed the property anyway. She said it was called imminent domain because it was gonna happen sooner or later. Sooner, probably.

The new apartment was in a complex on the highway that looked like a motel. The doors were on the outside, so when you came out of the apartment everybody else could see you, and people in cars on the highway could see you too, and people inside the Burger Brothers across the way, and some seedy characters slouched on the hoods of cars and drinking from paper bags in the parking lot of the grocery store that closed. One time a guy shouted something at Ruthanne that made her cry, but she was too embarrassed to tell me what it was.

The apartment was nice on the inside, though. The living room and kitchen were like one big room so you could be sitting on the couch and talking to somebody while they washed dishes or micro-waved pizza pockets. There were only two bedrooms, but Mom gave Ruthanne and me the big one so we had plenty of room, in my estimation, and a big closet that was bigger than the two closets we used to have combined. But Ruthanne didn’t like it. She said there wasn’t any privacy and I took up all the space with my junk and gross body. I told her I would shower more if she and Mom didn’t hog the bathroom so much.

Grandpa would show up from time to time with a load of food, mostly canned, but also boxes of cereal and dehydrated milk. He told Mom to put the food in the storm shelter, but we didn’t have one anymore. He told us the food was for an emergency. What kind of emergency, he never said, and maybe it was the lack of specifics that caused us to eat the food right away, against his instructions. Sometimes the food had labels like MEAT and CHEESE, and that was the best food, believe it or not. The best food at home, I mean. The best food overall was the food at Pansy Gilchrist High School, hands down. At Pansy Gilchrist there were mini pizzas once a week and a hot dog station so you could eat hot dogs every day.

Though the food was tremendous, the ambience at Pansy Gilchrist was lackluster. The cafeteria was noisy and crowded, and I didn’t know anybody in my lunch period except Demarcus, who had given up on lunch to study in the library. In the cafeteria, the black kids and the white kids sat at different tables, except for the football players, and the football players only sat together on Fridays when they wore their jerseys. The Komer blacks sat apart from the Haislip blacks, and the Haislip whites sat apart from everybody. Sometimes they didn’t sit at all; they just stood around a table with one leg up on chairs so they could lean in and talk in husky voices like they were hashing a conspiracy. They seemed to take pride in being the poorest guys around and living in the shittiest trailers and having the worst looking cars but with the most powerful engines, with trunks full of guns and warm cases of the worst canned beer imaginable. Naturally I was curious about them.

Ruthanne told me they were secret Nazis who wrote a book about killing women and blacks and Mexicans, but I didn’t believe her. First off, they didn’t seem like literary types. I knew from Bob Bilger’s introduction to The Highest Mountain that writing a book was a serious endeavor, a mental exercise akin to the physical exercise required to be in tiptop shape for mountaineering. Second, those boys were too poor to have computers at home. Trailers don’t have computers, as a rule, or flat-screen TVs or fancy stereos, which is why nobody breaks into them like they do houses. Our old house got broken into five times before we moved. It got to where Mom said we should move into a trailer just for security.

Besides, what did Ruthanne know? She was a senior and spent so little time at school that she didn’t even visit her locker. She had to use a rolling suitcase for her bags, because of her spine, so she figured she’d just leave the books in there and save herself the ridicule of standing around the hallways. I kind of envied her.

Classes were by grade but between classes, walking through the hallways, everybody was mixed. I was short and skinny so sometimes I wore two t-shirts to look thicker. It made me hot but gave me confidence. One time I was crouched in front of my locker, which was on the bottom row, and a guy pushed me into it with his foot. He didn’t try to shut me inside or anything, but still it was pretty shitty.

I tried to keep a low profile, especially in class. The trick to not getting called on was to sit up real straight, like I was paying attention, but to stare at the chalkboard instead of the teacher, which is counterintuitive, I know, but if you look into a person’s eyes then the person feels like they know you, so it’s easy to talk to you. I didn’t want to be easy to talk to. I wanted to be hard but polite, sort of like the actor Rick Zorn. In Sudden Kill (or maybe it’s Out for a Murder?) these guys come up to Zorn in an alley and he’s like, “May I help you?” and they’re like, “Yeah, old man, you can help us to your motherfucking wallet.” Zorn raises his hands real cool, but you can tell he thinks these guys are jokers. He reaches for his wallet and you think he’s gonna pull out a gun or something but he does pull out his wallet. Then, just as he’s handing it to a guy, he flicks his wrist and a Chinese star comes out and goes right into the guy’s crotch area. The other guys start running, but Zorn gets one of them in the butt with another Chinese star.

When I got bored staring straight at the chalkboard, I did drawings: a man using another for a puppet by reaching through his butt, a cowboy with his penis on a conveyor belt being cut into coins like a sausage, etc. I sat in back so nobody saw the drawings except me, but one day Mrs. Bianculli came up behind me without me knowing and shrieked. I was drawing a fat man being quartered by four cholos on dirt bikes. His guts were stretched out like a cat’s cradle. It was a pretty good drawing, but Mrs. Bianculli sent me to the principal’s office. The moment of exit was awful. Everybody was staring at me. If my goal was to keep a low profile, this was the opposite.

I hadn’t ever been sent to the principal’s office at Pansy Gilchrist, but I was familiar with the routine from my many visits to Principal Chalmers’s office back at Milford Perkins.

I sat in the waiting room between two older boys and kept my mouth shut. There was a sort of secretary across from us who would peek at us from over a counter, like she was making sure none of us made a break for it. There was a window we could have leapt through in a pinch. There was a framed poster behind her of a big black gorilla face and the word EXCELLENCE. At the bottom it said, “Excellence is not an achievement but a never-ending spirit.”

Eventually a girl came out of the Principal’s office with her head hanging, and the boy next to me went in grumbling. He wore big droopy jeans and had tattoos on his arms. He was a grown man, pretty much. So when he came out minutes later looking like he was coming out of church, I got nervous. It was my turn.

The principal, Principal Winthrope, wasn’t anything like Principal Chalmers. First off, she was a black lady. Second, she was young. Her hair was real shiny and draped on her shoulders in stiff-looking curls, sort of like a sculpture of hair. She was wearing a gray suit that had a skirt instead of pants. She said, “Benjamin Shippers. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I did a bad drawing,” I said. “I’m very sorry for it.”

“I believe I know your sister,” Principal Winthrope said. She didn’t seem to care about the drawing. She said, “Ruthanne Shippers is one of our finest students.”

“Really?”

She laughed. “Don’t act so surprised. I’m helping Ruthanne apply to college.”

It was the first I ever heard about college. I said, “Thank you. That’s very nice of you. Which college is she gonna go to?”

Principal Winthrope laughed again. I guess I was a comedian to her. She said, “Ruthanne hasn’t applied yet, Ben. Do you mind if I call you Ben?”

“No.”

“Tell me, Ben, do you care about your sister?”

“Yes.”

“Will you help me?”

“I guess.”

“Your sister has a bright future. I want you to encourage her.”

“To go to college?”

“That’s up to her. But I want you to let her know she can do anything she wants to do, and that goes for you too.” The last part sounded like an afterthought.

“Okay,” I said. “Should I go back to class now?”

“That would be fine,” she said. “It was a pleasure to meet you.”

I left with mixed feelings. On one hand, I was glad to get off easy without a big lecture, but on the other I was confused about Ruthanne. I had only a vague understanding of college but knew it involved leaving home most times. I had a notion that most college graduates were bankers, because that’s what Grandpa called everybody who wore a suit to work, and the ones who weren’t bankers were teachers. Even gym teachers had to go to college. But Ruthanne was too shy to be a teacher.

It wasn’t long before kids asked to see the drawing that earned a shriek from Mrs. Bianculli, plus got me sent to the principal’s office, and I showed it to them gladly. Mostly kids said “gross!” or “you’re sick!” but sometimes they liked it. One time this guy Pete Gomez said, “Dang, you’re a good drawer,” which wasn’t something I had thought about myself. I just drew because I was bored.

Pete Gomez seemed like a pretty nice guy, so when he waved to me in the parking lot a few days later, I waved back. Then I noticed who he was standing with: the Haislip white boys. I was curious about those boys, but also wary. In addition to what Ruthanne said about them being secret Nazis, there was the fact that girls avoided them, which was a bad sign in my experience, not because I was interested in girls but because girls had more sense about danger. But now that the boys were looking at me, I didn’t have a choice but to head towards them. I was nervous. I hooked my thumbs through the shoulder-straps of my backpack so I wouldn’t fidget my hands.

The boys were gathered around an open trunk. They showed me what was inside it: a little rifle and a warm twelve-pack of beer. They asked me, what did I think about that? I said it looked good to me, and they laughed like hell.

“Listen to this white trash motherfucker,” Pete said, and the others laughed some more. The only one who didn’t laugh was a boy named Ronnie Mlezcko, who I knew by reputation. Ronnie Mlezcko had looked real big and old in middle school, but now he was kind of small, like me, and just plain old. His hair was black and greasy, and he didn’t wear any of the cowboy stuff his friends wore. He wore dirty black jeans and boxy button-down shirts with pit-stains, like something a jailbird would wear.

Pete asked if I knew how to shoot but before I could answer, Ronnie said, “Of course he doesn’t. He’s just a kid. A pussy, too, by the smell of him.”

“You’re right,” I said cautiously, “I don’t know how to shoot.”

Ronnie seemed confused by my approach. He said, “Damn right you don’t.”

“Yep,” I said.

A handsome boy in a cammo cap said, “Don’t be a dick, Ronnie. Let’s go,” and they all piled into the car. I didn’t know if I was supposed to go with them. I didn’t want to, frankly, so I was thankful when Pete gave me a low five and said, “See ya, dog.”

That night I couldn’t sleep, thinking about those boys. I wondered what it would be like to be part of a group like that. I wondered what they saw in me. I expected they knew I was trouble, like them.

Pete Gomez kept waving me over to the parking lot during lunch and after school, where they’d be standing around the same car, which turned out to belong to a silent boy called Red Dog who had big sideburns and reddish stubble. Sometimes they’d show me a gun they had, or some more beer, or a bottle of whiskey, or some porno magazines, which I didn’t understand the use of until I remembered they didn’t have internet at home in their trailers, and probably not much privacy either.

By the end of the week I was just standing there nodding while they talked about stuff, wondering what exactly my purpose was but not daring to speak unless spoken to. Their conversations were mostly about shooting and drinking and this or that girl who had “big old titties” or “juicy black thighs,” or this or that guy who gave one of them a dirty look and was “gonna get his soon enough.” Their speech was peppered with old-timey words and phrases like “reckon” and “hell-bent for leather,” whatever that meant. One time Ronnie said as soon as he turned eighteen he was gonna “light out for the territories,” which I took to mean someplace like Utah with lots of canyons and whatnot for hiding out.

The group dynamics were odd. Pete Gomez remained the friendliest of them, and he had to be since they razzed him so hard for being Mexican. Pete had a wispy mustache and wore his black hair in a ragged fade he did himself, using dog clippers. “I ain’t nothing but a dog,” he said with pride. The handsome boy in the cammo cap was named Kyle James, and he seemed to fancy himself a romantic figure. He said that with a name like Kyle James how could he avoid a life of crime? I guess he meant like Jesse James, but really he was the prudest of the bunch. He went to church with his parents, Pete said, and he didn’t actually live in a trailer, just a regular house. Kyle James even had a girlfriend, off and on, and when it was off he would act real surly and complain about her, then the other guys would ask him what it was like to “bang” her and he would tell them she was “the worst piece of pussy” he ever had. I was surprised they said all that stuff in front of me. It made me uncomfortable, frankly, but the moment it got too serious Pete would pop the trunk and show me, say, an unmarked bottle of clear whiskey made by Red Dog’s people and ask me what did I think about that? Like always, I told him it looked alright to me, and they laughed like hell. The only one who didn’t laugh was Ronnie. He seemed suspicious, like he didn’t want to say too much in front of me for fear of having his darkest true thoughts used against him, later. I respected him for that. He seemed like a person with a secret inner life, whatever it was.

One day Pete waved me over and things seemed a bit different. Nobody was laughing and everybody was looking at me instead of ignoring me. There was a sort of solemnity over the group. Pete said, “We got something important to show you.”

I thought it was some kind of prank until Ronnie said, “Don’t show this kid shit, you Mexican idiot.”

“Be cool,” Pete said, but Ronnie stormed off to the other side of the car, where he sat on the hood with his back to us.

“You don’t have to tell me about it,” I said, and not just to placate Ronnie; I had a sense that something bad was about to happen, like they were gonna open the trunk and show me a dead body.

“You’re goddamn right we don’t have to,” Kyle James said, “but we’re going to.” He looked at Red Dog, who popped the trunk.

Inside the trunk was a greasy looking towel wrapped around something about the size and shape of a phone book. Pete reached in and peeled back the towel to reveal a tan metal box with a combination lock on it, like a briefcase. Kyle put his hand on my shoulder, maybe to keep me from grabbing the box and making a break for it, and Pete spun the box so I couldn’t see the lock while he fooled with the combination, hunched over and squinting, his tongue sticking out from concentration. The box popped open. There were papers inside it, and notebooks. The top paper said SATANS MANIFESTO in big block letters.

I was intrigued, remembering what Ruthanne told me about their secret Nazi book. I was flattered, too, that they trusted me enough to show me their work. They were the first people besides Bob Bilger I ever met who did a book. Anyway, Kyle gingerly raised the top corner of the title page between his thumb and pointer finger and turned it over to reveal a page of type-written text, like a paper for school.

“The notebooks are first drafts,” Kyle said, “and we’ve got lots of them, enough for ten books probably. Now we go through them and pick the best stuff and sort of fix it up, then Red Dog types it.”

Red Dog nodded.

“What we need,” Kyle said, “is illustrations.”

I was stunned. I was happy too, because this gave my presence some meaning. They had seen my dirty drawings and wanted my help. They respected my abilities.

Pete raised the lockbox towards me and I was about to read the first typewritten page when Ronnie came quickly around the car hollering about how they couldn’t trust me yet. He snatched the box out of Pete’s hands and slammed it closed.

“This is important work,” Ronnie said.

“We know that,” Kyle said. “That’s why we want illustrations, to make it better.”

“More engaging,” Pete said. “We talked about this, dog.”

Ronnie said, “Yeah, well, that was before I found out this kid’s such a pussy.”

I didn’t take the comment personally. To Ronnie, everybody was a pussy, or had a pussy, or didn’t care about anything except pussy. He said to Pete, “We can’t trust him yet, you pussy.”

“Yet?” Pete asked.

“He has to prove himself. The stakes are high. We could go to jail for this shit.”

I expected the others to tell Ronnie he was being ridiculous, but they seemed to agree with him. I wondered what kind of book could get a person put in jail. At Milford Perkins, there’d been a story about a kid who sold drugs and got put in jail for life when they found a bloody gun in his locker. The judge wanted to hang him, but the governor said no, he was just a kid. As a compromise they put him in a man’s jail with grown men, and people said you could see him at his window at night with his hands together praying for a quick and painless death.

“You have to earn our trust,” Ronnie told me. It might have been the first time he spoke to me directly without looking at somebody else. His eyes were bright and fierce, but the skin around them was purplish, like he was tired. His face made me think of the prickly, sore-eyed feeling I got when I woke up too early, and I imagined that was how Ronnie felt every second of every day.

“How can I earn it?” I asked.

“Go to the dump,” he said.

I nodded, thinking I had this in the bag. I knew all about the dump. But I had to play dumb. I said, “But it’s got a big fence around it.”

“Break in,” Ronnie said. “There’s things there I want you to find for me.”

“I’ll try,” I said.

“You’ll do.” he said, “if you want us to trust you. Find me a used crack-pipe.”

Kyle shook his head. “Come on, Ronnie—”

Ronnie spun on Kyle. “Don’t you get it? It has to be incriminating. It’s this or we make him commit an honest-to-God crime like stealing liquor, but he’s too much of a pussy for that. Now shut up until I’m finished. A used crack pipe,” he continued, “and a dirty needle. And a used condom!”

“What’s incriminating about a used condom?” Kyle asked.

“Nothing, but it’s risky. He might get AIDS. That’ll show his commitment.”

“I don’t know—”

“Make that five used condoms.”

I looked at Pete, who shrugged, and that was that. I had no choice. These boys were better than nothing, friend-wise, and I really was curious about that book. So I headed to the dump in search of a crack pipe, a dirty needle, and five used condoms. I didn’t even know what a crack pipe looked like.

I rode to the dump on Ruthanne’s bike, which I owned outright by then. The first thing I did after I finished the six-month installment plan was paint it black, but I accidentally bought paint with matte finish so it looked weird. I used a paintbrush to add badass flames but the enamel paint was expensive so I only had one color, and the color turned out to look more red than orange so the flames looked like I was bleeding all over my bike or had rode through a slaughterhouse, which was pretty badass too, I guess.

The closest part of the dump was where our house used to be, but I didn’t want to go there. I wasn’t as upset about moving as Ruthanne was, but I didn’t want to see another kid staring out my window at Trash Mountain. I might feel like I was missing out. So I rode to the Haislip side.

Trash Mountain still loomed, taller than ever, but the perimeter of the dump was changing. In some spots the fence was reinforced by plywood, and holes like the one I climbed through with Demarcus were plugged up with blobs of tangled barbed wire, half buried so there was no way to push them aside. I figured it was the dump workers, cracking down, but there were rumors of hobos who tried to seal up the dump for a lair. There were rumors too of a coven of witches and wizards who conjured spells using cat’s blood and precious ingredients they gathered from Trash Mountain. One time a gray-haired coot who caught me snooping behind my old house told me space aliens crash landed there, years before, and the trash was to hide them, but now the government wanted to study them and had to make the site impregnable. Who knows. All I knew was I had to get in there.

Since the fence was stronger than ever, and topped by gleaming coils of brand-new razor wire, I started inspecting the junctures between the fence and various outbuildings. Nearby was a giant tin structure like an airplane hangar, for the trucks and loaders, and sure enough the fence post was fastened to the side of the building with nothing but plastic zip ties. I tried tugging one of the ties apart, then biting it, but it was tougher than it looked, like the handcuffs plainclothes cops use in movies.

There was a dumpster behind the tin hangar, and I thought that from the lip of the dumpster I might be able to jump up and grab the edge of the hangar, climb onto the hangar roof, then scramble overtop of it and lower myself into the dump. But the lip of the dumpster was slippery with trash juice so it was hard to get a good jump, and when I did, I couldn’t get a good grip on the hangar roof. I scraped my hands on the edge of the roof and fell to the ground. It didn’t hurt too bad, but the whole thing was embarrassing and made an awful clamor, so I crouched down behind the dumpster to hide for a while.

I was hiding there, plotting my next move, when somebody said, “Hey, little buddy.”

I looked around, startled, but I didn’t see anybody.

“Over here, buddy.” It was a man’s voice, sort of nasal and wet sounding.

I thought about running but decided a grown man could probably outrun me, and if I took the time to mount my bike he’d have me for sure. So I mustered a tough, deep voice and said, “Who is it?”

“Boss,” he said.

“The boss of what?” I asked.

“Boss of nothing,” he said. “They call me Boss is all.”

I wondered if the man was a hobo. Hobos had nicknames, I knew. Grandpa told stories about a childhood hobo named Charlie Nickels who trained a pigeon to filch cigarettes. I prepared in my mind for a vicious thieving hobo to slit my throat from ear to ear.

“You looking for somebody?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’ll leave right now.”

“Easy, buddy. Come around here so we can talk.”

The man didn’t sound like a murderer, I had to admit, so I opened my eyes, which had been closed from fear, and looked around. Nobody was there. I looked up at the edge of the hangar roof, but nobody was there either. I peeked inside the dumpster. Nobody.

“Where are you?” I asked, preparing in my mind to mount my bike and escape.

“On the other side of the fence. I saw you jumping and came to tell you to be careful. If they catch you they’ll send you away.”

“Send me away where?”

“They’ll load you into a van and take you to a place outside of town and leave you there in the middle of the night with nothing but the shirt on your back, like a goddamned raccoon.”

That didn’t sound like a logical punishment to me, but the man, Boss, seemed pretty worked up so I didn’t comment.

“Like a grown man can’t find his way back to a place he been before,” he was muttering. “What’re you doing here anyway?”

“I’m supposed to get some stuff for some guys.”

“Sounds secret.”

“Pretty much.”

“Tell me what you need and I can help, maybe.”

I didn’t want to tell him, from embarrassment, so I asked if there was a secret way to get inside. “Not that I don’t appreciate your offer,” I said. “It’s just, you know—”

“It’s secret, I hear you. Unfortunately there ain’t no way to sneak in here like there used to be.”

“Then how’d you get in?”

He paused. “I work here.”

I was relieved. If he worked there as a garbage man or whatever, then he wasn’t a hobo; I could trust him. I said, “Okay, here it goes: I need a crack pipe, a dirty needle, and five used condoms.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“I know. I’m real sorry. You don’t have to get it.”

“No, no, I can get it.”

“For real? You got that stuff?”

“Oh yeah, we got it. If you can name it, it’s in here. This place, it’s like a second world where everything’s mushed together within easy reach.”

The term second world intrigued me. I thought about the netherworld occupied by ghosts and wizards, and possibly Jesus and God.

The man told me about some bio-waste bags from the hospital that were supposed to go to a special bio-waste site, but the hospital cheaped out and put them in the dump, which meant plenty of dirty needles. And condoms were pretty much everywhere, the man said, but highly concentrated in a spot where they put what got filtered out of the sewer water, since people were always flushing condoms down the toilets. “As for the crack pipe,” he said, “I’m not too sure. Most of that stuff gets tossed on the floor and crunched up underfoot. The one-hitters, I mean. People don’t just throw away nicer pipes. But I’ll see what I can do.” He asked if I could meet him there the next day, and I said I would.

I wasn’t sure what to make of the man’s kindness. I wondered if he worked for the dump and didn’t have enough to do, or if he liked little boys. I had never met a sex offender but knew they existed. I also knew that sometimes adults without kids, like Ms. Mikiska, took a special interest in kids and liked to do nice things for them then give long-winded advice afterward.

The next day at school I avoided Ronnie and them because I didn’t have the stuff yet, and I didn’t want to seem like a failure in case they expected me to procure it within twenty-four hours. That meant I had to sneak out before last period, which I didn’t mind. That, in turn, meant I showed up at the hangar building an hour early. There was water dribbling through the fence, and when I got close I could hear men talking. I thought my contact might be among them, but I didn’t hear his weird nasal voice.

The men were hosing something off, and I pressed my eye to the gap between the fence and the hangar and saw a brand new front-loader, red and shining. One man was blasting it with a hose while another gesticulated beside him. Both wore gray coveralls like garbage men. The old yellow frontloader I used to watch from Ruthanne’s window was idling in the distance, waiting its turn. Beyond the frontloaders was an honest-to-God excavator. It was like a construction site in there, like they were building Trash Mountain on purpose. The idea bothered me, but I had to admit it would be pretty cool to ride those machines when nobody was around, even just to sit in the driver’s seat and pretend.

I hid behind the dumpster like before and kept quiet until the voices stopped. I waited until I smelled cigarette smoke, at which point I poked my head out and saw the back of a tall man leaning into the narrow gap between the fence pole and the side of the hangar. He wore black rubber waders caked in mud. Above the collar of his dirty flannel shirt was a sunburned neck and some greasy tentacular hair.

I didn’t know what to say in case the man wasn’t my contact so I mounted my bike preemptively, to be ready for a getaway. “Boss,” I whispered.

The man turned his head to look over his shoulder. His big white face was like a cinderblock, with blonde stubble and a sort of gash going up from the top lip to a thick crooked nose. Maybe whatever broke his nose had broken the lip part too.

He held up a brown plastic grocery bag. “I got good news and bad news,” he said. “Good news is the needles and prophylactics was easy. Bad news is the crack pipe, but check it out.” He lowered the grocery bag and opened it so I could see. There was a thick syringe with reddish liquid crystallized inside, and some condoms that were caked in mud but obviously hard used. There was also a glass tube of some sort. The man picked up the tube between his thumb and forefinger and held it close to the gap for me to see. There was some dark stuff inside one half of the tube, and the glass looked smoky.

“Is that a real crack pipe?” I asked, kind of bewildered. The idea of crack was mysterious and frightening to me.

“Nope,” he said. “It’s just a glass thing I got from the bio-waste pile. What I did was stick some mud in it then light it on fire. Looks pretty convincing, huh?”

“Definitely,” I said, though I wouldn’t have known a crack pipe from a corncob.

He tried to push the bag through the gap but couldn’t get his big hand through. “Reach in here and grab it,” he said.

In a flash I pictured him grabbing my wrist and holding me until some other men captured me from behind. I had to remind myself he wasn’t a sex-offending hobo. This man had done right by me, and I owed it to him to show my trust. Plus I wanted the stuff he got me. So I reached through the gap and grabbed the bag, and when he let go I pulled it through.

“Thank you,” I said. “Can I pay you or something? I have some money at home.”

“On the house,” he said. “Favors always come back around.”

I thanked him again, caught off guard by his friendliness. I wasn’t used to people doing nice things for me, let alone garbage men, who tended to be stoic or surly, maybe on account of having to wake up so early. Or maybe this man wasn’t a garbage man, it occurred to me. He wasn’t wearing coveralls, and he kept glancing over his shoulder. Come to think of it, he had been speaking in a loud whisper ever since we started talking. But if he wasn’t a garbage man, what was he? And what was he doing in the dump?

Asking those questions might scare the man off, I decided, so I waved in the direction of the new frontloader and said real casual, “You ever get to ride that rig?”

The man laughed. “I wish,” he said. “It would make my life easier, let me tell you. Better picking than ever in here.”

“I bet,” I said, though I had no idea what he was talking about. “What kind of picking they got, nowadays?”

“Oh, all sorts of stuff. You could live five lifetimes on the stuff they skip over.”

“Valuable stuff?”

“Hell yes. That’s why they did up the fence like they did.”

“Who’s they?”

“Bi-Cities.”

“But don’t you work for Bi-Cities?”

The man eyed me suspiciously. He was onto me, I could tell, but I couldn’t stop talking. I said, “You don’t work here, do you?”

“Not in an official capacity.”

“So you work here off the books?”

The man said nothing.

“In secret?”

The man glanced over his shoulder.

“You’re there in secret?” I repeated, unable to contain my excitement. “Shit, man, you gotta tell me how you get in there.”

“I gotta go,” the man said, and before I could ask another question he was striding away from me across the landscape of trash. He moved quick for such a big fellow. I watched him disappear over a distant ragged hill, and I cursed myself for scaring him off like that, for blowing the opportunity to learn more about the inner workings of the dump. I had to get in there to sabotage it, and a contact on the inside could have helped, but would I ever see the man again? Grandpa once said if you shot at a puma and missed, you wouldn’t see the puma again until the night it crept up and killed you.