TRASH MOUNTAIN LOOKED different. There weren’t as many oversized items as there used to be, no busted fridges or soiled loveseats or floppy mattresses with their stuffing hanging out. Maybe there was a separate area filled with those items, a wasteland of home furnishings. Trash Mountain itself was more uniform, almost featureless. It looked taller. Wider, too. And there was a sort of mini-mountain to the side of the main peak, like Lhotse, the 27,940-foot mountain connected to Everest by the South Col. Anywhere else, Lhotse would have been the biggest thing around. It was only Everest that made it seem small.
In front of me, between the foothills, was a long straight clearing like an unpaved road. I walked along the slippery mixture of flattened garbage and red clay, listening for workers, preparing in my mind what I’d say by way of excuse, but I didn’t see a soul. There were tread marks where garbage trucks or loaders had been. Some of the foothills were girded by chicken-wire, the kind you see along the highway to keep rocks from tumbling into the road. Here and there, narrower trails like footpaths meandered away from the main road and disappeared between hills of trash.
When I got to the base of Trash Mountain, I looked up. Two black vultures circled high overhead, which made me wonder if there were animal carcasses tucked in shallow graves of garbage: either vermin or pets people were too lazy to bury, or maybe human bodies missing fingers and teeth so the cops couldn’t solve the murders.
At the base of Trash Mountain, the wide road veered right, towards the center of the dump, but a footpath went left towards Komer. I took the footpath. A couple times I came to forks in the path, and each time I went left, hoping to be able to retrace my steps in case I got lost or had to make an escape. In a pinch I figured I could dive into the trash and bury myself until the threat, human or vehicular, passed me by.
It wasn’t too long before I heard a noise, like scraping. Because I hadn’t seen any people I assumed it to be a vulture scraping meat off a bone, but it might have been a puma so I stood still and made no sound. That’s when I heard voices. Someone said “Gimme that” and another person grunted.
I crept along the path, expecting to see garbage men doing maintenance on Trash Mountain, but the only evidence I saw of human activity was an overturned wheelbarrow by the side of the path. The voices were louder now. One was a man’s voice. He said, “Don’t touch that.” A second voice said, “Fuck off.” The second voice was deep and crabby, but I knew it was a woman’s voice. Ms. Mikiska told me how women speak in five tones but men in only three. That’s basic voice science.
I was listening, wondering what these people were up to and if it was secret, when I felt a big hand on my shoulder. I turned, frightened, and saw the tar-black belly of a set of rubber waders. Above me was a big stubbly face staring down.
It was Boss, the man who had gathered my used condoms and improvised crack pipe.
“Hey there,” he said with a wet click, as friendly as if he had run into me on the street, not trespassing at his place of work.
“Hey,” I said.
“Whatcha doing here?”
“Just checking out the scene.”
“A nice evening for it.” He looked over top of the nearest trash pile at the lowering sun, then sniffed the air. When he spoke again it was in a serious whisper: “It isn’t safe for you here.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Leo and Candy will be mad if they see you.”
“Who are Leo and Candy?”
Boss winced a little, like he knew he shouldn’t have said those names and was wondering what to do now that he said them. I wondered if they were his crew. Maybe the crew scavenged copper. I knew about copper scavenging because Grandpa said forest hobos did it to abandoned houses. If Grandpa stayed indoors a few days in a row, during one of his spells, the hobos would start scavenging his house. Just because Boss wasn’t a hobo didn’t mean he wasn’t scavenging copper. There was good money in it.
“I won’t tell anybody,” I said. “I got my own thing going, so silence would be mutually beneficial, know what I mean?”
“I don’t,” Boss said. “What kind of thing you got going?”
“I was just, well—” I found it hard to describe the sequence of events that had led me inside the dump. “I was looking for a job, but I know they won’t give it to me, so I snuck in.”
“To raise hell?” Boss asked.
“To know my enemy, is more like it.”
Boss nodded. “I can see why you think this place is your enemy. It smells bad and looks worse and, well, I guess it’s pretty much horrible to have something like this next to where you live. Leo thinks about it different, though. He says it’s like the ocean and we’re like fisherman. We harvest what’s inside it and have to take good care of it. He calls what we do husbandry.”
“Like with a wife?”
Boss squinted, thinking. “Maybe, but I was thinking more like animals. Animal husbandry.”
“What’s that?”
“Milking animals and delivering their babies and such.”
I nodded. Leo sounded like a very wise person to me. I hoped to meet him.
“Clarence!” came the gruff lady’s voice. “Who you talking to?”
“Shit,” Boss mouthed.
I should have run to save my hide, and maybe Boss’s too, since he was the low man on the totem pole, clearly, but my curiosity got the best of me. Candy sounded tough, sure, but what could she do? Worst case she’d put out a cigarette on my forearm, like that gypsy pimp in the Rick Zorn movie where he rescues orphans by making them a Kung Fu team, but a cigarette burn would be worth it to know what these people were up to.
A round black lady with a red bandana on her head came out from between two trash hills and saw us. “Goddamn, Clarence,” she muttered. “Who’s this?”
“Just a kid,” Boss said.
“I see that. You know him?”
“Oh, yeah. For sure.”
“What’s he doing here?”
I wanted to speak on my own behalf, but I couldn’t get a word out before this Candy lady said “I ain’t talking to you” in such an un-maternal way that I shut up immediately.
“He know our business?” she asked Boss.
“He won’t say nothing,” Boss said. “He’s a good boy.”
Candy sighed. “We better take him to Leo.”
Now I was worried. Leo sounded wise, sure, but true wise men were unsentimental, and what if he did me in to cover his tracks?
Candy turned around and headed back where she came from, and Boss nodded for me to follow her. I did, with Boss close behind.
We came to a small clearing surrounded on all sides by hills of trash, like a little valley. In the middle of the clearing was a kitchen table with a linoleum top and rusty metal legs. There were a couple school chairs around the table, and in one chair a man sat hunched in a bulky green terrycloth bathrobe. He had a bushy black beard and thick glasses perched on the tip of his long nose. In front of him on the table was a pile of circuit boards, one of which was suspended by a vice. The man was using an exacto razor to scrape something off the circuit board into a small ceramic bowl. He didn’t seem to notice us.
Candy said, “Leo, baby, sorry to interrupt.”
The man, Leo, dropped his exacto, muttering, and turned to face us. He pushed his glasses up his nose with a dirty finger. Behind the heavy glasses, his eyes were huge. The big dark irises looked like giant pupils, like a cartoon character’s eyes, and they lit right on me.
“Who’s this?” Leo asked. His voice was raspy and high-pitched.
“My nephew,” Boss lied.
Candy said, “Goddamn, Clarence, for real?”
“No,” Boss said, wrinkling up his face like he was thinking. I expected him to come up with another lie but he didn’t. I had to speak for myself.
“I’m just a kid,” I said. “I snuck in to check the place out. I was curious. I’m only twelve.”
“A spy,” Leo said. “You work for Bi-Cities, don’t you?”
Candy said, “He’s twelve, Leo.”
Leo eyed me. “He’s lying. I can hear the jingle of coins in his puerile voice, so he’s old enough to want money.”
Unnerved, I said, “I swear, mister—”
“This is how they operate,” Leo said, ignoring me. “They have spies at the schools now, men who look like children. Baby-faced midgets. Always listening. In school, that’s where it starts. There, and in the Mexican encampments. It’s the Mexicans they’re worried about nowadays. In my day it was the blacks and ethnics.” Leo talked about undercover agents whose origin and purpose got murkier as he talked until eventually I started to tune him out and survey the scene. In addition to the circuit boards on the table, there were piles of copper, as I suspected, and plastics piled by color on the wet ground.
When the talking stopped I saw, to my horror, that Leo was holding a chef’s knife. The knife looked old and dirty, but the blade-edge gleamed, which meant it was sharp.
“Tell me, you midget spy,” Leo said, “why shouldn’t I cut your throat right now?”
I was stunned. I got a vision of them killing me and burying me under a pile of trash, never to be found. The only clue would be the circling vultures. I didn’t know what to say. What did Leo want to hear?
Boss put his hand on the back of my neck. It was probably for my protection, so he could throw me out of the way if need be, but in that moment I was sure he was holding me steady so Leo could slash my throat.
“I came here to look for work,” I said. My voice was cracking. “People said Bi-Cities was hiring and—”
“So that’s what you’re after,” Leo said. “A piece of the action. If you leave right now and never show your face again, I’ll spare your life.”
A normal person would have run away at this point, but words kept coming out of my mouth: “What kind of action do you mean?”
Leo stood up and raised the chef’s knife high over his head, blade downward. Had he been closer I might have made a break for it, but he was on the other side of the small clearing. His bulky robe flapped open to reveal a yellowing v-neck undershirt and droopy trousers cinched by a belt. He twirled the knife in the air so it caught the light of the setting sun. The gesture was pretty flamboyant, which made me think it might be for show. He began a slow and menacing creep in my direction, knife held aloft at a jaunty angle. Boss inched forward so he was a little closer to Leo than I was.
“So you want a piece of the action, do you?” Leo asked.
“That’s right,” I said, “and I can help you.”
“How?”
“I’ll be your intern.”
“Ridiculous.”
“What’s the harm? Interns don’t get paid.” I pictured Demarcus shaking his head and telling me I got the intern idea all wrong. This work did not have career potential. But I perceived in these scavengers a closeness to Trash Mountain that I wanted for myself. My childhood memories—my whole life—was wrapped up in that place. “I’ll gather whatever you want,” I said, “so you can spend more time scraping it or whatever, or supervising.”
Leo shuffled sideways to get between me and his work table, blocking my view of the circuit boards. “What have you seen me scrape?” he asked.
“Nothing. I don’t care what it is. I’ll just gather it, I swear.”
“I have Clarence for that.”
“Two is better than one. Plus I’m smaller. Clarence, Boss, can tell me where to go, and I can sort of root around in there and get the small stuff, like a truffle pig.”
Leo lowered the knife and looked at Boss. “Boss, huh? That’s cute.”
Boss said, “Honest, Leo, I could use the help. You’re always telling me I don’t get the stuff fast enough.”
“Fine. Use him. Pay him if you want. Boss him around a little, if that’s what you’re after.” Leo winked. “Do what you like with him, just don’t show him our ways.”
“Can I show him how to get in?” Boss asked.
“Absolutely not.”
“But—”
“How’d he get in this time?”
I said, “The back door of the building.”
Leo laughed like a big crazy bird. “Good luck with that, kiddo. I might not be seeing you after all.” He shook his head and went back to his table, still laughing.
Boss ushered me out of the clearing and onto the path where we had met. “Leo can be a real dick,” he said.
“He seems pretty mean.”
“Yeah. He never stabbed anybody, though. He mostly yells. He don’t ever leave that table so you don’t have to see him if you don’t want to.” Boss stared at the dirt, thinking. “I could use the help, like I said, but I can’t pay you.”
“No worries,” I said. I didn’t need money. I had $1,567 in two shoeboxes, and I would have had more if I didn’t buy groceries for Mom and me sometimes. I liked buying groceries because I got to buy what I liked: marshmallow cereal, frozen tater tots, and Country Home baked beans with maple-smoked bacon flavor.
“If you need money,” Boss said, “I can show you where there’s good stuff to sell.”
“But what about you?”
“We make our money gathering recyclables, mostly.”
“What kind of recyclables?”
“Oh, you know, glass, tin, plastics one, two and five, some other stuff.”
“What other stuff?”
“I’m not supposed to talk about it. Please don’t ask again. I talk too much.” Boss shook his head like he was sick of himself.
“Don’t sweat it,” I said, “I’m not in it for the money.”
Boss looked down at me quizzically. “Then what are you in it for?”
I didn’t want to say infiltration, in case that sounded nefarious, so I just thanked Boss and told him I’d come by the next day after school. He told me the best picking was early in the morning, right after the fleet left. I didn’t relish the idea of waking up before dawn, but I told him I’d try.
By the time I got home it was late enough that the yahoos had gathered in the strip mall parking lot across from the apartment. When I passed on my bike, they threw bottles into the street and called me faggot.
At the apartment complex, I went straight to the basement laundry room, where I stripped off my clothes and stuffed them into the washer, hoping to get the stink of the dump off my new jacket and jeans. The stink of Leo, too. Not that Leo smelled bad (I didn’t get close enough to smell him), but the way he looked made me feel dirty. Those grimy cinched trousers.
I changed back into my school clothes and went upstairs, where Mom was talking on the phone to Ruthanne. I wanted to talk to Ruthanne when Mom was through. To get the phone I had to go into Mom’s room, where she was lying in bed under the covers. All over the bedspread were used tissues. The mucusy smell was overpowering, and made worse by a flowery perfume she spritzed to mask it.
The phone smelled like the perfume so I wiped it on my shirt. When I got it to my ear Ruthanne was saying, “Took you long enough. I was about to hang up.”
“Would have served me right,” I said, which seemed to confuse her. I was still feeling dirty and guilty from my day at the dump. I wanted to tell her about it but didn’t know where to start. I remembered what she said about serious trouble. Did trespassing count?
Ruthanne started up her usual rigmarole about Geraldine. “Mom might be fat,” Ruthanne said, “but this bitch is ugly. And did I mention she’s a bitch?”
I tried to laugh, but my mind was elsewhere. It didn’t matter to Ruthanne, though. She kept going about how the community college classes were for dummies and there was an old guy who kept talking to her. “I swear to God, Ben, he must be thirty at least. He’s got a metal leg so I guess he was in the Army. He’s got a Mexican name, but he speaks English regular.”
“Sounds like you like him,” I said.
“Shows what you know,” she said.
I wanted to ask Ruthanne if it was crazy to work part-time in the dump, off the books, but I was embarrassed. Ruthanne was in college. College was the opposite of a dump! Our lives were headed in different directions.
“How’s Dad?” I asked.
“Annoying,” she said. “I come home from class and he’s stretched out on the couch yelling at the TV. Geraldine does all the shopping and cooking, and from what I can tell she works longer hours than Dad does. He’s worried the Chinese are spying on him. He says there’s gonna be a war between us and the Chinese.”
“Probably so,” I said.
“He says you and Mom will be safe because you live in a low priority target area.”
“I’ll say.”
“But he says if the war starts we’ll have to move to a bunker, maybe Grandpa’s. I told him fat chance. Grandpa thinks Dad’s lazy and can’t pull his weight around a farmhouse, which is true, but it’s not like I can either. I can barely even cook. Goddamn, Ben, I better get a good job out of this college deal. Geraldine says even to be a librarian you have to have a master’s nowadays. Listen, Ben, I gotta go. But what you been up to?”
“Oh, you know, school and whatnot.” I wasn’t really listening. I was looking out the window at the people across the street in the parking lot. A familiar figure was strolling towards them with his hands thrust in the pockets of a black hooded sweatshirt.
“Well, remember what I told you,” Ruthanne was saying.
“About what?”
“Serious trouble. Stay out of it.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, and hung up.
The figure, a small man, nodded to a group of drunks standing in a circle, then walked up to a Pontiac Firebird and bent over the driver’s side window. Words were exchanged, and something else. When the figure turned to walk away, I could see his face: Ronnie Mlezcko.
I came out the front door waving my arms. Ronnie looked up, but I guess he couldn’t see me in the dark. Our cheapskate landlord only kept one lamp lit in the parking lot, just outside the office, which was also the superintendent’s apartment.
I hollered “Ronnie!” but he didn’t stop. I came down the stairs and saw him walking down the road away from me. “Ronnie!” I yelled.
The drunks in the parking lot took up a chorus: “Ronnie! Ronnie! Ooh, Ronnie!”
I felt like an idiot, but it was too late to run back. Ronnie had noticed me. I expected him to be pissed, and honestly I had no idea what I was doing. I guess I just liked the idea of running into a friend from school, which never happened to me. The people across the street in the parking lot kept cat-calling me and parroting Ronnie’s name and laughing, and I felt like crawling into the gutter. But I was afraid to go back inside because they’d see where I went and maybe tag our door. Somebody wrote GO BACK TO MEXICO on a door downstairs. I felt like I was stranded, like in this dream I used to have where instead of Bob Bilger it was me on the wooden stage back at Milford Perkins, only I was naked and Mr. B, the computer teacher, was sitting in the front row covering his eyes with both hands.
But it turned out I didn’t have to worry. Ronnie had turned back to the people in the parking lot. He didn’t say anything, just looked at them. They looked back at him, still shouting “Ronnie!” and kind of laughing, but then the shouting stopped, and the laughing did too. I knew the face they were seeing, the face he had turned on Kyle James when he pointed the rifle at him. Ronnie was the kind of person you could imagine bursting into a buffet restaurant with an automatic weapon. I didn’t have that kind of face, but it would have been nice to, sometimes. There was power in it. Terrifying power. Because there wasn’t anything you could do to stop a truly hard-hearted crazy person. Not that Ronnie was like that. He just looked like that.
Ronnie turned away from the crowd and came towards me, slowly, hands thrust in his pockets. His face was still hard from the confrontation. He raised his chin at me, unsmiling. “Walk with me,” he said.
We walked to the back of the apartment building, out of sight of the parking lot people. I didn’t ask Ronnie about those people or what he was doing there, but I could tell they were still on his mind. He was shaking his head and sneering so his crooked front teeth showed like weird fangs.
“Assholes,” he said. His face looked thinner than I thought it was, older too. Maybe Ronnie was different outside of school, I thought. Maybe I didn’t really know him. It was stupid to have come out to talk to him.
“You live around here?” he asked.
I pointed upstairs to the apartment, but there weren’t any windows in the back of the building so it looked like a warehouse.
“What a dump,” he said.
“Don’t I know it,” I said. Then I told him how we used to have a house right next to Trash Mountain.
“Trash Mountain?” he repeated. “You mean that big old trash pile?”
“Yeah, that’s what I call it. My sister does too.”
“Ruthanne, right? How’s she doing?”
I was surprised Ronnie knew Ruthanne’s name. This had quickly become the most civil conversation we ever had. “She’s good,” I said, and told him how she moved away for community college.
Ronnie didn’t seem to be listening, just staring at something far beyond me. “Trash Mountain,” he murmured. “I like that.” His expression changed. “Fucking garbage. Fucking Bi-Cities Sanitation. Motherfucking Whitey Connors.” He spat on the pavement, disgusted. He told me if he had a nickel for every fucked-up thing Whitey Connors did, he’d stuff the nickels up Whitey Connors’s asshole and throw him in the Ocmoolga to drown. I must have looked confused because Ronnie felt the need to clarify: “He’d drown from the weight of them nickels in his stomach. Only problem with drowning a man is you can’t hear him scream.”
“Hmm,” I said.
“I got a new tattoo. Check it out.”
He lifted his hoodie and t-shirt, and there were little doodles on his pale white flanks and some writing on his hairy stomach. But those tattoos were old, he said. The one he wanted to show me was on his back. It was Jesus Christ on the cross, only instead of Jesus’s bearded face in bliss or agony it was a flaming skull.
“Pretty tight, huh?” he said.
“Yeah, tight,” I said, but honestly I was kind of disturbed—not by the content so much as the sheer size of the tattoo. It covered his whole damn back. The flaming skull Jesus was the size of a real-life toddler.
I was careful not to ask Ronnie too much about his life, but he offered some things. He said his mom was a real dick. He said his brother Bill was on the run and was “a goddamn idiot who didn’t know how to handle his business.” He said he spent many hours wandering at night, which gave him time to reflect.
“On what?” I asked, curious about Ronnie’s inner life.
“On what’s coming,” he said ominously.
“What’s coming?”
“A race war,” he said, “the apocalypse.”
“Sure,” I said, kind of disappointed. I’d heard Ronnie speak many times on both those subjects.
“What?” Ronnie said. “You don’t believe me?”
“I don’t know. I mean, the race war and the apocalypse?”
“One leads to the other, obviously. It’s already happening. In the old days Komer and Haislip were mixed, but now the races have separated. The lines are being drawn. And it’s happening everywhere in America, especially in prisons. In prison you have to choose sides already.”
Ronnie had two uncles in prison and, despite his tendency for drama, basically knew what he was talking about on that front.
To change the subject I said, “So, you mostly on foot then?”
Ronnie said he didn’t have a car so he was always on foot. He said bikes were for kids. He said he wasn’t in a rush to get anywhere anyway, so who gave a fuck. Then he raised his hand for me to clasp, and I clasped it. He pulled me in for half a hug and patted me one time hard on the back. “Take care of yourself,” he said, then he flipped up his hood and sauntered off into the darkness. He had his shoulders up and his hands stuck deep in his pockets, sort of swaying from side to side like thugs on TV. It wasn’t the way he walked at school. I wondered if it was because he knew I was watching him, or because somebody might be watching him, and he had to make the right impression.