SOMETIMES IN THE summer, when we were smaller—what Big Sam called little sawed-off runts—the boys and I would sneak up Dorset Road, hop the fence, and go poking around in the old gravel pit. You might find anything in the landfill or at least we thought we might: diamonds, gold, arrows, trinkets from lost civilizations. You couldn’t tell us then there wasn’t anything there but crushed sandstone, that this was only a garbageman’s dream.
I’d boost little Todd up, he’d grab hold of Artie, and we’d roll over the fence like ants crossing a stream. This was until we discovered ourselves a hole low in the fence that some previous explorers had dug. Todd always kicked a few rocks underneath first. He’d decided that this was the sort of place copperheads liked. At the time the landfill was still mostly a quarry, more gravel than rats.
Most often we’d start off the day land skiing and sledding.
Here’s how: You run up a little hill and then take off skidding until you start an avalanche that carries you down with it.
Then someone would notice a pretty stone, maybe the color of a shrimp, or maybe pointed like a spear tip. So everybody’d be digging around to find his own. We’d see that our diggings looked like cave villages, or like cities in the desert. We’d build roads and canals in the soft sands to connect our kingdoms, roads that coiled and wound around like snakes. After a soaking rain you could even make tunnels in the hills.
Then someone would misstep and smash-up someone else’s stuff. Sometimes on purpose. What else could a boy do but declare war, bitter wars, fought with great clumps of rock and missiles of sandstone as light as feathers.
“Cr-crck-cruck, splatt, boom, pish,” our whiny voices made the sounds of heavy artillery. Miraculously all sides surrendered in exhaustion long before feelings got hurt, or a too well-aimed salvo found its mark.
Here would be three sweaty, dust-caked boys panting in the gravel pit, two burnt black and the other bright red by the midwest summer sun. until we remembered it was suppertime, scurried back down the hollow, forgetting even to kick rocks under the fence hole. One mamma or the other would want to know where you’d gotten so scruffy, so ashy.
“We was just playing,” we’d say.
When Big Sam got wind of us in the landfill, that bout put an end to our little visits. He said he didn’t want to hear ever again as long as he drew breath of us playing in no trash pit. He about tore up two little black butts, and would have torn up a red one, too, had he been sure how those people ’cross the tracks would have taken it.
We learned our lesson, believe it or not, and the closest we’d gone since was to linger at the fence, longingly watching the last gravel go, watching the hole fill up with plastic milk jugs and lifeless refrigerators.
Never once had I gone to the landfill with Big Sam.
On a Saturday morning after school was out, Big Sam’s at my door saying to me “Get dressed,” which I do. The sun is barely over the top of the hill, the sky still streaked with gray, rose, and hot gold. We load in the pickup with a thermos of coffee and go rolling up Dorset toward Colerain Road. The brown Dodge pickup already sparkles in the morning light, so well-shined is she. In the back of the truck Sam lays blankets and tarps so the bed never gets scratched up by the junk he collects.
I am surprised that rather than go out Colerain to wherever, we pull off into the landfill. Sam gets out, so I take my cue and get out too. He leans back on the fender, by the headlamp, and pours himself a coffee. I climb up on the hood and slide back. My butt makes a loud squeaking sound against the metal. I lean on the windshield.
“You risking death, boy,” he says, giving me a mock-fierce look. He checks for scratches, and then offers me some coffee, which I decline. He swats my tennis-shoed feet off the edge of the hood, off to the side so that they hang in space.
The morning air is chilly, but you can already tell it’ll be a hot one. Sam stares out over the landfill as if it were the Grand Canyon. Above me some scraggly scavenger birds circle.
Sam sips on the steaming coffee. “We’re almost full,” he says. “Maybe another year’s worth, if that.”
“Then what?” I ask.
“Cover it up. Bury it and forget it.”
“Just like that?” I ask, flatly—more a statement, to make conversation.
Sam pours himself some more coffee. “Down south, I think it was twenty years ago, they had a hole that they buried up. Landscaped it and built houses on top. Nice houses. Time goes by and some of that gas backs up. These holes get full of gas. That mess liked to blow the whole place sky high.”
Sam laughs and I laugh with him.
“Really,” he says. “This here is most all clean fill—not too much garbage, but who knows what folks sneak in here at night. Won’t be my problem, I guess.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“When we’re full?” He shrugs. “Something. At least I’ll be free of it.”
Sam scans his domain and gets part of a smile across his face. “We used to own all of this,” he says. “All this land come to the Finneys after the Civil War. All this raggedy hollow land down to the tracks. Apple orchards and grapes. You still see those fruit trees, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” I say, but I haven’t seen anything except for a few crab-apple trees and some sour green grapes climbing fences.
“My grandpa wasn’t much for knocking apples, nor for scaring up vegetables from some damn rocky hill. He must’ve been scratching out here one day, hit something hard and dreamed up this: a rock pile. Mr. Samuel Finney Jr.’s Rock and Gravel company. The ‘colored quarry’ they called it.”
Sam sees a box of cans someone left by the big shed which sits facing Dorset road. The shed serves as office and warehouse and garage. He goes over and sorts the cans into one of his recycling bins. Sam can be very organized. All around this dump stuff stands, stacks, piles, or gathers according to category: washing machines here, dead cars there. When you think you got the system figured, like magic a whole pile disappears.
Sam comes back and empties the thermos.
“Yep, they made good money out of this hole. Good money. You’d never know it walking back down the hollow. Niggers living in shacks, lean-tos—some no more than caves. Clean, mind you. Yes sir, them was clean folks back then.
“My daddy tells he went into one joint. The floor was shiny like you’d never believe. Daddy says he’d never seen no linoleum that color. Boy with him says, Tool, that’s dirt.’ Shiny as a new penny, Daddy said.”
“Come on,” I say. When Big Sam and his cronies get going you have to remember everything’s got a little embroidery around it.
“I’m just telling you what my daddy told me,” he says. “Daddy knew all them old folks down there. He was born here. This was his. Ours.”
“Until?”
Sam moves his big hands through his hair, sighs and sputters. The sun, already high enough to warm the windshield, sparkles on a bend in the river that I can see in the distance. You only see that river from up here certain times of the day—like early morning and sunset. Sam catches the sparkle too, I can tell, and watches it until it disappears.
“So much bullshit. So much you’ll never know,” he says. “Let’s walk.” We go ambling along, surrounded by rows of old rubber tires and stacks of rusted appliances. Sam carries a pointed stick, maybe to gather stray garbage, maybe to spear rats with.
“Think about it,” he says. “We emptied this old hole, now filled her back up again. Seems fitting, don’t it? Take and give back.”
“I remember,” I tell him, “when this was like a big canyon.”
“And I’m sure you remember how I wore out your little bottom for playing up in it. Stop right here,” he says.
We arrive on a rise of almost white clay studded here and there with cans, boards, and the bottoms of green glass bottles. A hot wind rustles our pants legs.
“What do you do with a big empty hole in the ground?” Big Sam asks me.
I make a guess. “Fill it up?”
“Smart boy,” he says. “County sees this hole and gets the same idea. Was my daddy’s hole then. Thing was: the county man wasn’t too crazy about paying some spook to use his landfill. Not in 1960, they weren’t.”
“So they bought him out?” I try another guess. Maybe something’s clearer. I’m not sure what. Sam so rarely talks. About anything.
“What’s this land worth? How much? Take a guess.”
Since I don’t have a clue, I just shrug.
“Land where your family’s buried. Bought with blood and sweat. Tell me. How much?” He squares off in front of me, demanding an answer.
“There’s … um … it’s not for sale?”
“Damn right. Remember that.” He goes back to his story. He’s like in a trance. He kicks rocks and throws stones as he talks. Eventually we crouch down, squatting on our haunches like cavemen. You wouldn’t want to sit down here.
“They offered plenty money. Some other land. Some good farm land down in the river valley. Daddy said ‘no.’ We held the title full and clear. That was that.”
“They took the land?”
“Nothing’s ever that simple, boy. Right here where we standing was a pile of soft powdered silt—so fine you couldn’t get a footing. Daddy brought it in here figuring it might be worth something to somebody. One night a couple of little ones snuck in here to play.” He says this and gives me one of his you-know-what-I-mean looks.
“They got in this mess just as a rain came. Like a cement it set up. Daddy found them the next morning half-dead from screaming and trying to get out. Right here it happened.”
Sam rises and stretches out each long leg. One of his knees pops. I follow him back to the truck. He backs the truck out on Dorset, orders me out to padlock the gate.
“Those boys,” I ask. “Were they all right?”
“Tired. Scared. Not half as scared as Daddy. Something inside him changed. He gave this hole away. The old fool just signed a paper and gave it away. Stuck them papers away in the back of some file like they was nothing. Just like that.” Sam snaps his fingers. “Didn’t say shit to me. To no one.”
Sam laughed a bitter, full laugh. The sort of laugh the bad guys laugh in those James Bond films.
“The county was so grateful to him that they saved the hollow. Suburban renewed us. Built the Washington Park Estates. God’s Little Acre.” He laughed his evil laugh some more.
“I don’t see what’s so funny.”
“Don’t you see, son? You and me, we the trash kings of Saint Louis County. This,” he says, pulling into the driveway, “this is the house that trash built.”
Sam stops laughing. He gives me a sour look. “I wouldn’t of done it,” he says. “And I sure wouldn’t do it to you.” He gets out of the truck, goes in the house, slams the door. I just sit there. In the truck. In the sun.
In my mind I jump out and go after him.
Come back here, I yell at him. Get to the punchline.
Is this about what is supposed to happen or what just happens anyway? About you or about me? Tell me what you want me to think, how I’m supposed to feel. Why’d you take me to your stupid dump? I don’t half believe you anyway.
I get up enough courage to go in and ask questions. Which questions I don’t know yet.
That fast he has changed into some of his good clothes. His silky white shirt and fancy brown blazer.
I’ll be out a little while,” he says. “There’s plenty of food, I think.”
He lays a ten dollar bill on the cracked coffee table.
On the way out the door he stops and says to me, “You take what you get, you know?”
“No, I don’t know.”
Sam nods to indicate that that’s okay, too.
From somewhere Miss Ida gets Artie some wheels: a 1975 Mustang, painted red. Well, it’s not exactly red, it’s faded to sort of a pink: Dentyne. That’s what we call her, Dentyne. A beat-up old piece of car with multi-colored flecks and hunks of rust falling off it.
But she runs good. And Artie—who’s turned sixteen already (seeing how he was left behind one year in first grade because he’s so thickheaded)—is not the worst driver in the world as long as he refrains from showing off and can remember his left from his right and the brake pedal from the gas. Also, he will go almost anywhere you tell him to go, even though Miss Ida has specified school, the library, and the movies as the only legitimate stops. Sometimes Artie gets chicken. Then Todd and I have to twist his arm a little.
“You might as well take us where we want to go,” I say. “We’ll just tell your mom you went there anyway.”
Artie pouts, whines, and drives on.
If you say the right thing, people will do whatever you want.
A while after Sam leaves, I hear rattling and honking.
Artie rolls down Dentyne’s window. Todd shouts, “Let’s go.”
Sounds pretty good to me. I get the ten dollars, and we hit the road.
As soon as we clear Washington Park, Artie cranks up the Mustang as much as it will go. Not that fast. Much over forty and you get all of this smoking and shaking. This alarms poor Artie to no end. He has already developed some sort of paternal thing toward his piece of junk.
Artie snaps on his twenty-nine-cent fashion shades. He always wears them in the car, day or night. Betty Lou took him to some French love movie where the race car driver always wore dark glasses except when he was in bed with an actress with big boobs. That’s just the way he described it. He wants Todd and me to wear sunglasses too so we will be a whole car full of cool dudes, but I tell him I’m not about to, and Todd says he’ll have to get prescription ones, which are not listed anywhere that he knows of in the P.W.T. family budget. Pa P.W.T. gives Todd five dollars or so spending money a week. From what we hear it would not be a good idea to ask for more.
Truthfully it is only Artie who’s got all this stuff: cash, clothes. A car, too, for that matter. There are no jobs in Washington Park except for a lawn to mow now and then. Sometimes Miss Ida hires us on to unload fresh stock at the store. Wherever we’re going today, it had better be cheap.
Artie drives Dentyne out Colerain toward Chesterfield Mall. There, I spend part of the ten dollars on some greasy french fries, which make everyone sick. Hoping it will make us feel better, I make Artie spring for a large Orange Julius. It doesn’t.
It’s ninety-five degrees outside, so everyone is at the mall. The high school kids all sit by the center court fountain, because that’s where you can see who else is here. They call that the meet market. The boys walk one way around the fountain and the girls walk the other. Unless you are already going with somebody. Then you parade around the upper level. The three of us sit there for a while and watch the show.
What do you know, here comes Connie Jo with this blond freshman chick. Even though it looks like they are headed in another direction, they veer off at the last minute and walk right in front of us—just close enough to make sure we see them. Connie’s little girlfriend grabs Connie’s arm and giggles.
Todd and I are pretending like they’re not there, but then Artie says, real loud, “Hi Connie, hi Sue.”
This Sue smiles and says, “Hi Arthur,” which causes Connie Jo to look disgusted. She stares across the mall in the opposite direction.
Todd and I want to crawl beneath the fountain and die. I mean, one thing you don’t do is actually talk to anyone. That’s against the rules. But you could never explain that to Artie. He just barges right ahead.
“Having a good summer, Sue?” Artie goes on. I keep nudging him in his side.
“Guess what?” Sue says. “We’re going to Disneyworld.” Artie’s eyes get big and she bubbles with excitement.
What, did she win the World Series of Bimbos? Her hair is all ratted out off the left side of her head. She stares at Artie as if he were a delicious chocolate bar. Artie looks faint. Or more faint than usual.
Connie Jo has the good sense to drag Sue away before the two of them can announce their engagement.
“See you in September,” she calls as she’s hauled away.
Artie’s all smiles. “We have classes together,” he says.
“Your mental retardation classes,” I say.
“Learning disability,” he says, all prim and proper. “And I ain’t shame. People do the best they can. You’re just jealous cause they spoke to me and not you.”
Todd puts on his deepest drawl. “Son, her daddy’ll have you and your learning disabilities strung up from the tallest tree in Ballwin.”
“She’s a nice friend,” Artie says. “And everybody’s not that way.”
“Sure,” I say.
How could someone like him get a girl to even think of talking to him? What’s the deal on this? Artie’s got some rich white gal talking to him, and the bimbos out here follow Todd around like kittens.
What am I, invisible?
“Look, look,” Artie says. “It’s Heather and Jennifer.”
Todd suggests we get Elmer Fudd out of the mall before we all get lynched. We start to drive back up Lindberg. Artie spots Sue’s car, so we have to go follow them around for a while. We go from the McDonald’s to Steak and Shake to the Shell Station. Back around the mall. Every once in a while we pull up beside them. Sue and Artie wave moronic little waves at each other. Todd finds imaginative and unobvious ways of giving Connie Jo the finger. She doesn’t see. She’s hiding behind some Hollywood-sized dark glasses. I believe she is what is called mortified, which I am, too. I put my hands on both sides of my head like blinders.
“Can we just drive some place else, please,” I say.
But that’s the problem. There is nowhere else to go. It’s hard to find creative ways to kill time.
Another Saturday Todd makes us stop at the main branch library on Lindberg. Todd carries loads of books these days. Books such as The Fate of the Earth and Hunger in America. Titles from the list Ohairy gave him for summer reading, books full of grim and awful information about the state of things. Some days Todd is impossible to talk to.
“Did you know,” he asks, “that after a nuclear holocaust all that would survive would be grass and bugs?”
Another time: “What about nuclear winter? All of life would be dead. All of it.”
That sort of thing.
Artie and I have to shut him up quick, because who wants to be depressed? I mean, we all have our own problems. For example, I was wondering how come it is that a person’s life should turn out to be one way instead of a different way. I was really lying there on my bed thinking about that one. I mean, take for example all of those starving people over in the desert of Africa. If I had money for them or food for them, I’d give it to them in a second. I would, and I know that almost anyone else would, too. But, the point is, how is it that I got to be here in Washington Park, and they had to be there. What if it was just an accident? What if I woke up tomorrow and I was there, in the middle of nowhere, hungry? Instead of here with Sam? What would that be like? Would I think about McDonald’s? Would I even know what that was? Or, you could wake up a soldier half-dead on a World War I battlefield. Or trapped under the rubble of a building in Pompeii. I think about that stuff sometimes until it starts to drive me crazy. Then I just stop. Sometimes it’s best to think of nothing at all.
Todd persists, though. He reads in the car while we drive. You’d think he’d be carsick, especially with all this technical stuff he’s reading—about chemical waste and nuclear reactors.
“I don’t understand this,” he whines, but he won’t give up, ruining his already ruined eyes.
Every afternoon we go driving. We stop any place that might be free: any museum or park. We watch planes take off at the airport. We drive by all the rich people’s houses in Ladue.
One stone house in Ladue has three or four stories, must have a hundred and fifty rooms. The swimming pool could hold two crackerboxes.
“Look at these joints,” I say. I just can’t imagine having so much dough. “Who lives here? Where do they get the money?”
“From poor people,” Todd says. “People like you and me.” I feel one of his new lectures coming on. Todd goes on and on as to how he read in one of his books how rich people get money by making poor people work for them. He says there have to be poor people because there are rich people. He says a lot of other crap, too, and he says it in this real smug way—as if he knew what he was talking about.
“It doesn’t sound fair to me,” I say. “If it’s true.”
“Oh, it’s true, all right. And, it’s not fair to you or to anyone else, either.”
Artie says, “Prob’ly some of them get the money from their parents. Nothing wrong with that.”
“Where do you think their parents got it, bonehead.” I say. I say this because Todd is all of the sudden so sincere, so convincing. So much so, I feel like I should be on his side.
I add, “The point is they got it and we don’t. Maybe not ever.” I stare up the lawns at all these joints and think about the life me and Sam could have there. We’d have cooks and maids for sure, I know that much.
“You don’t have to be so mean,” Artie whines. He drives us by a famous architect’s house, by a house with a stable, by a five car garage.
“Do you think having all this stuff is worth it?” I ask.
“Worth what?” Todd asks. “The suffering of others? The guilt?”
“Worth whatever it costs. However they get it.”
Todd thinks for a while. “All I know is it is worth doing whatever you have to do to make things more fair in the world.”
“You’ll never change the world.” I say.
“But I’ll try. What about you?”
One day there’s Todd in the back seat, big tears rolling down his freckled cheeks. Artie pulls over in the Target parking lot.
“So what are we going to do?” Todd wants to know. “We have to do something. How can they do this? How can they leave it like this for us?” He’s seething.
“Do about what?” I ask.
“About any of it. Were part of this shit, and we got to do something.” He shouts.
“No reason to get upset,” I say. “Maybe there’s nothing we can do.”
“That’s not good enough for me,” he answers.
This is how we spend the whole summer I am fifteen. Artie driving, cool and smug, Todd getting angrier and more frightened by the day. Me just watching. Almost dead from boredom. Nothing ever happens to me.
Todd sees stuff going down all around us—poisoned air, nuclear bombs, all kinds of stuff. Some of it too awful to imagine. For some reason I cannot get excited about it. All that happens somewhere else, to someone else. Sometimes I think I don’t have much of a life at all.
Oh, poor Marshall, you’d say. But that’s not what I mean at all. What I’m talking about is how stuff can go on all around you and you don’t know about it at all. And when you find out about it, you just feel used and stupid.
Take Sam and Betty Lou Warner, for instance.
All summer long.
Right under our noses.
You’d think I didn’t know my father at all.