PRETTY SOON BOSS said I was doing almost as good as he was. He rigged me up my own wheelbarrow out of a peach crate with a Big Wheel underneath, and he drew up a little map of the paths in and around Trash Mountain and divided them between us. I pushed my wheelbarrow with some pride, I’m not ashamed to admit, even though I spent almost as much time repairing the makeshift wheelbarrow as gathering recyclables.
I was pretty much on my own except I ran into Boss more often than made sense. It made me wonder if he watched me from afar to make sure I was doing right. When I noticed him he’d say “Atta boy!” or “We’ll make a digger outta you yet!” Boss was the only one who used the term digger. When I asked him about it he said he was trying to make it catch on. He said his dad had been an iron pig so at first he had tried to coin trash pig, but Candy said it was demeaning.
“What’s an iron pig?” I asked, picturing a pig man with an iron breastplate. I wondered if a pig man could father a pureblood human such as Boss.
“A miner,” Boss said.
I told him Grandpa used to be a miner, and Boss seemed interested.
“It was a kaolin mine,” I said. “You know, china clay?”
“Sure,” Boss said. “You can eat it to keep from feeling hungry.”
“Huh. Well, the stuff Grandpa mined was for paper and industrial ceramics. Lots of people got dust in their lungs and died.”
“I can believe it,” Boss said.
The kaolin dust made me think of the trash particles in the air, and for some reason I told Boss about Ruthanne and her weird spine.
Boss said he could believe that too, and he pulled up his sleeve to show me his forearm. It was covered with crispy looking spots like fish-scales.
“Did the trash do that?” I asked, kind of horrified. For my own part I was wearing a t-shirt. My bare arms were covered in grime.
“That,” Boss said, “or psoriasis.”
My legs weren’t exposed like my arms, but my jeans were soaked with trash water, and I could feel the cold dampness creeping down through my socks into my sneakers. I asked Boss if I should be wearing waders like he did. Boss said yeah, probably, but they were expensive. He said he found his in the trash, which was why they were so tight that the straps barely went over his shoulders. I asked him about his backup set, in the suitcase, and he said those had a big rip in the front, which made me picture a fisherman getting gored to death by a swordfish.
The talk with Boss made me think I should shower after leaving the dump, before school, so I started biking home, showering, then hustling to get to school by 7:30. That meant less time at the dump, so I started waking up even earlier. To get inside the dump before the trucks left I used wire clippers to cut a few links in a weak part of the fence near the back, by the shitty woods. The garbage men never went back there, and the cut links were barely noticeable if I used a plastic tie to keep them closed.
I made it to school on time, but usually I nodded off in class. Sometimes I even nodded off on my bike, on the way home from school. My head would sort of tip downward then snap up, and I’d be swerving. One day in May it was so hot and sunny that I just couldn’t make it home. I laid down my bike in a little strip of grass next to the railroad tracks, hooked my arm through the frame so it wouldn’t get stolen, and slept right there in the sun. When I woke up, it was dark. Frogs were croaking in the trees and a breeze was skittering along the grass. I wondered if that was what it was like to be a hobo, to sleep out there like that. If so, it wasn’t too bad.
That got me thinking it might be better to go home right after school and sleep, then to wake up in the middle of the night and be somewhat alert by the time I got to the dump. The only problem was Mom was asleep by the time I woke up, and she had moved the TV into her bedroom after Ruthanne left, which meant I couldn’t watch it. Without the TV there wasn’t much to do in the apartment so I mostly cruised around on my bike. Cruising was way better at night because there weren’t any cars, and barely any people except for a few drunks outside Frizell’s downtown and some others outside a bar on the outskirts called Zitio’s. It was interesting to watch them. I liked the feeling of watching other people without them knowing.
Mostly I stuck to Komer since it was closer, and since there weren’t as many street lamps in Haislip, which made it harder to avoid potholes and the broken glass and chunks of asphalt in the roads. When I did go to Haislip I made sure to cruise down a street called Grande Esplanade, where there were big old houses with fancy ironwork and shutters and pointy roofs. One house had a round part in front like the tower of a castle. Most of the houses had been converted to apartments or rooming houses, and some were empty. The empty ones had broken windows and peeling paint and looked haunted. I liked them.
Sometimes I cruised all the way out to the Motown Lounge, the bar Demarcus’s dad owned. It was more of a pool hall than a bar, which meant people could smoke inside, so there weren’t any people outside unless they were coming or going or using the payphone. It was pretty boring to watch somebody use a payphone, but at closing time I could watch Demarcus’s dad sweep the sidewalk. I wondered if he would recognize me. I wanted to say hello, but I didn’t want him to ask why I was out so late. I had a fantasy where somebody would drink and drive into a lamppost or have a heart attack out on the sidewalk and I’d run in hollering “Mister Caruthers, call 911!” and he’d do it and say it was lucky I was out there, not just because I saved the man’s life but because it gave us a chance to renew our acquaintance. He’d say he always thought I was an interesting fellow.
Because of the dark, quiet nighttime, I started thinking about different stuff than I used to think about. Darkness and cold were the real things, I decided, what was left when the sun went away. And quiet was what was left when people went away. I suspected that one day all the people would be gone from Komer and Haislip. They were half gone already, and going fast enough that even someone young as me had noticed. Take Ms. Mikiska, for example. The windows of her old storefront downtown were already broken, and who knows what happened to the house she lived in, or the house her old lady wife lived in before they got married and moved to their island. Maybe the county bought up the houses for trash. Buildings and things only stayed un-trash as long as people used them, was the way I saw it. When people left, their stuff started turning to trash immediately. Trash for the dump. For Trash Mountain. And it wasn’t just buildings and things; it was people too. If nobody saw you, what was to stop you from turning to trash? That’s just an example of the stuff I thought about. Nighttime thoughts.
One night when I came home after a couple hours of cruising and thinking, it was two or three in the morning, but Mom was still awake, watching TV. She had the covers pulled to her chin and a half-empty bowl of marshmallow cereal next to her.
I asked her why she was awake and she said she couldn’t sleep. She held out her hand for me to squeeze, and it felt kind of weak, even for her.
On TV was a news show where a handsome gray-haired man was talking about a new law that made it so you could bring your gun into churches and bars. The man said it was good because we needed protection from all the crazy shooters, but then another man came on and said the opposite. This other man was fat and had a sweaty face. The first man, the host, laid into the second man about how a real man protects his family.
Mom asked me to fetch her the phone and the grocery catalogue, which was for a delivery service offered by the superstore outside of town. Most people ordered online, but there was also a phone option, for elderly people and Mom. Mom called the number before she even opened the catalogue, so the whole time she was browsing there was a person on the phone who she could ask about this or that item, like if the store-brand stuffing tasted like the stuffing she usually bought. Sometimes she just asked what was good, like which fruits were ripe, even though we never bought fruit except for apples, and the apples we got from the delivery service were always mealy. I never ate them. I told Mom the person on the phone gave her bad advice, and she said she knew it. She said the man on the phone was in the Philippines, but she liked to talk to him anyway.
I went back to my room and I must have fallen asleep, I guess, because the alarm went off at 4:30 and I was startled by it. The TV was still on in Mom’s room, so I thought she was awake. I went in there to get the cereal box, and what I saw shocked me: Mom was half out of bed, with her face smushed down on the carpet and her arms flopped out in front of her. Since her legs were still in the bed, her torso was kind of stretched out and her shirt had come up to show her big white belly. At first I thought she was drunk, though it had been a long time since I saw her drunk, and back when she drank she just passed out on the couch or in the bathtub. Then something about the way her legs were still in bed, sort of crooked, made me think she might be dead. My heart started racing.
“Mom,” I said, just standing there like a dummy. “Mom. Mom! Eileen!” Eileen was her name. I thought she might respond to it because it was deeper in her brain, from childhood. “Eileen Shippers! Eileen Durnin!” Durnin was her maiden name.
I knew I was supposed to feel her neck for a pulse, but I was afraid. I didn’t want to know she was dead. I almost called Ruthanne but heading for the phone got me moving towards Mom and from there I got the courage to touch her neck. The neck was warm. It took a while to find the pulse because her neck had gotten pretty fat, and when I did, the pulse was real slow, just a beat every couple seconds, and the beats were real weak, but maybe that was because the fat muffled them? I put her reading glasses up to her mouth to test for breath, which was something else I had a notion I was supposed to do, and the reading glasses fogged up. She was breathing. I shook her to wake her up but she didn’t wake up. I called 911.
The lady at 911 asked if Mom took any medications so I went through the vials and bottles in the drawer of her bedside table and read the names: Avandia, Precose, Glumetza, GlucoTrol XL, Tofranil, Tofranil PM, Novolog, Lantus, and a Levemir FlexPen.
“So she has diabetes?” the lady asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“And depression?”
“I guess.”
The lady asked if there were any insulin needles in the house, but I couldn’t find any. The lady said not to move Mom and that the ambulance would be there soon. She asked if I wanted her to stay on the phone with me, but I said no.
While I waited for the ambulance I got pissed. It was just like Mom to let her needles run out, she was so lazy. All she had to do was tell me and I could have picked them up, but she was embarrassed about taking so many drugs and kept them in a drawer to pretend she didn’t. I tried not to look at her. I knew if I looked at her I would get sad instead of mad.
The ambulance made an awful racket and lots of people came to the windows and doors of their apartments. It was five in the morning. The EMT guys pounded on the door, and when I opened it they came through like a SWAT team. They talked in loud voices while they felt Mom’s pulse and stuck her with a needle. One guy talked into a walkie-talkie while another swept her medicine bottles and vials into a bag and asked me if there was any more in the bathroom. I said I didn’t know so he went in there and crashed around searching. I wanted to help, but he was moving so fast it seemed dangerous to be near him, like a bucking bronco almost. They lifted Mom onto a stretcher and strapped her down. A lady EMT asked if I wanted to ride in the ambulance with them, and I said did I ever.
In the ambulance I asked the lady EMT how Mom was doing, and she said okay. Her vitals were good, she said, and that made me feel relieved enough that I could look out the back windows while we drove. I had never gone so fast in a car before. It was crazy. Even crazier because of the backward view. The cars had parted for us and everybody was staring. One time a car didn’t get over fast enough and the ambulance had to swerve, and the car that came into the view, the perpetrator, was a big blue Cadillac with an old man in front wearing glasses and a detective hat. The old sucker raised his hands from the steering wheel and had his mouth hanging open, and I thought for sure we scared him into a heart attack and would have to pick him up later.
The big hospital was way down the highway, and by the time we got there the lady EMT had told me Mom’s pulse was stronger. The ambulance swung into the emergency zone so fast it felt like it was going to tip over from speed. When it stopped, everybody filed out like a SWAT team again, pushing Mom on her stretcher while I followed, running, until we were in a sad yellow hallway full of wheelchairs. A big guy in pink scrubs told me I should wait in the waiting area.
The waiting area was like a brightly lit bus station. Men and women in various states of pain and discomfort waited patiently, and sometimes not so patiently. A few kids either slept or played hide-and-seek under the chairs. From time to time the sliding doors crashed open and a stretcher wheeled past surrounded by EMTs or people in pastel scrubs (pink, yellow, baby blue). I tried to look at the people around me without them noticing and to guess what was wrong with them. Some might have been friends and family, like me, but some must have been injured or sick. A somber Latino couple sat in one corner holding hands. Was one of them dying? Nearby, a pale-faced boy not much older than me was dozing with his arms crossed and his hood up. Was he a junkie? Had his girlfriend overdosed? Directly across from me, a haggard looking man was using one hand to hold the other by the wrist. The held hand was limp and gray. Had it been severed? Was this fact concealed by the sleeve of his corduroy jacket? The man looked bashful, maybe homeless and afraid to demand attention. The possibility that he was a hobo made him less sympathetic to me.
A cop in uniform walked past us every few minutes. At first he walked slow, like he was on a beat, but then he started walking faster and stopping here and there to mutter something into his shoulder radio, which crackled. The cop was the most interesting feature of the waiting room by far, so everybody watched him. It got to where everybody stiffened when he walked by, and why not? He might have been searching for a violent madman. I pictured a madman crouching in a dark stairwell, his hairy butt hanging out the back of a hospital gown while he pulled at his madman’s beard, quietly plotting his escape.
There was a big black family where everybody was asleep except one little girl who was hiding under the chairs and crawling through them like a tunnel. At some point she started grabbing people’s ankles, to scare them. When she grabbed the ankle of the man with the severed hand, the man kicked his leg. The girl, who was too young to be afraid, got mad and started yelling. In one fluid motion her father rose, scanned the room, located the child, and headed towards her like a terminator cyborg. A brief chase ensued.
My magazine options were Popular Mechanics, National Geographic, and POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine. The cover of POLICE showed a fat, expressionless cop staring down the length of a single-barrel shotgun, with the cover story “10 Essential Skills to Win a Gunfight.”
I was reading about the second skill (“A solid grip on your pistol is a must . . .”) when a thin man in a necktie and a lab coat came out to ask if I was Ben Shippers. I said I was. He said his name was Dr. Chakrabarti. I thought he was a black guy with his hair straightened like a TV preacher, but maybe he was foreign.
Dr. Chakrabarti asked me about my home life, who cooked and stuff like that. He was being a little too polite, it seemed to me, so for a while I thought he was building up the courage to say “she’s gone” or “we lost her,” like they do on TV, but he ended up saying Mom was okay. He gave me a little plastic deal with letters for the days of the week and a list of which pills to put in there on which days. It was a long list. He said he was taking her off a couple pills and adding a few more. I said okay. He gave me a speech about helping her take her medicine on time and making sure her pills didn’t run out, like I was supposed to sneak into her bedroom while she was sleeping and count the pills in her pill bottles. I wanted to tell him the pill factory should just send her the goddamned pills when she needed them, since she was supposed to take one per day so it didn’t take a genius to figure out when she’d need more. But I didn’t say any of that. I just nodded, trying to look friendly, and at the end of his speech Dr. Chakrabarti seemed pleased to have held my attention for so long. He offered his hand and we shook. The hand was soft as a fat little baby’s hand.
A few minutes later Mom came out in a wheelchair being pushed by the big guy in pink scrubs. She looked good, all things considered, but she was smiling so big I could tell it was for show. The guy in pink scrubs knelt down next to her to ask if she needed anything and she said no, and he took off before I could ask him how the hell we were supposed to get home. The ambulance that drove us was nowhere to be found, and we didn’t have a dollar to our names for a cab. I ended up pushing Mom in her wheelchair along the highway. For a while she talked but before long she started nodding off. The walk took two hours and both of us were sunburned afterward.
Grandpa came over that afternoon. He was going through a good spell and had been coming over most Sundays to deliver MEAT and CHEESE and sweet potatoes from his garden, where the only thing he grew anymore were sweet potatoes. The man loved sweet potatoes. He showed me how to bake them, mash them, and fry them in the oven like french fries, then dip them in mayonnaise instead of ketchup. He said mayonnaise was better for sweet potatoes.
Usually Mom fussed over him and made him a bourbon and soda, but that day she stayed in her bedroom, for obvious reasons. He went in there and talked to her for a few minutes, and when he came out he seemed agitated. He stood in the kitchen biting his fingernails while I boiled water and washed two fat O’Henry sweet potatoes. The O’Henry is a North Carolina sweet potato famous for its smooth white flesh.
Grandpa was a small man with a wide, flat body and white hair that was thin all over, like the memory of hair still clinging to his head in the shape it had been in his youth. He kept a close white beard. His pants were cinched because he was shrinking, and his short-sleeved plaid shirt puffed out like a Hawaiian.
“How’s her diabetes?” he asked.
“Pretty good,” I said. I summarized what Dr. Chakrabarti told me and showed Grandpa the days-of-the-week pill thing.
“She looks fat,” he said.
“Fatter than usual?”
“Don’t joke like that about your momma.”
“I wasn’t joking.”
“Don’t talk back.”
I held my tongue. He was sore, I could tell.
“How’s Ruthanne?” he asked.
“Pretty good,” I said. “She calls most nights and talks to Mom.”
Grandpa shook his head. “Your momma lives through that girl. It isn’t healthy. What happens when she gets married? She won’t have time to talk every night, I’ll tell you that much, not unless her husband don’t like his meals home cooked.”
I nodded. I almost told him about the one-legged Mexican veteran, who loomed large in my mind, but it wasn’t as fun to see Grandpa rant and rave as it used to be. He was pretty old.
I started chopping a sweet potato for sweet potato french fries while Grandpa watched. It made him nervous to see me with a kitchen knife, like I was still a little kid. I could tell he wanted to take it from me and do it himself—and he would have done it much faster, he was an ace with a knife—but he refrained. He said, “You two ought to come out to the farm.”
“To visit? Sure, but you’ll have to drive us. Dad’s got the car.”
“To live.”
He mentioned this every time he came over, so I didn’t put much stake in the offer, but this time he seemed more serious. Probably because of the hospital. Mom was his daughter, and the idea of outliving her might have been scary to him. Grandma had died of lung cancer when I was a little kid. I barely remembered her. Mom said that when she got diagnosed, Grandpa had quit smoking right away, but Grandma couldn’t do it and smoked until she died. Grandpa thought Grandma was weak, Mom said, and in secret he looked down on her. But Mom said it wasn’t a matter of weakness or strength, just addiction, and addiction was stronger in some people than in others.
The idea of living with Grandpa appealed. I hadn’t been to the farm in years, but I had fond memories of tramping around the property foraging mushrooms and whatnot. The property was full of tall pecan trees and one time I picked up the pecans and put them in a special sack while Grandpa led the way with his shotgun over his shoulder, in case of hobos. He said it was important to evacuate hobos before they got squatter’s rights.
When Mom smelled the sweet potato fries in the oven she came out and joined us, and we ate and talked. Grandpa didn’t mention the farm again. After we ate, he left.
Ruthanne came home that night and fussed over Mom nonstop. She yelled at me about how the apartment was a pigsty, but she yelled it in a whisper so Mom couldn’t hear from her bedroom, where she lay in bed watching TV and looked up angelically whenever Ruthanne came into the room with a glass of lemonade or a big bowl of mac and cheese.
Ruthanne wanted to move back permanently, but Mom said no. Ruthanne had already enrolled in summer classes in order to “get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible,” meaning college, and it was too late to get her money back. Mom said wasting money like that was plain stupid. To her credit, Mom may have suspected that if Ruthanne moved back in with us she might never graduate. It had taken a miracle to get her out of Komer in the first place.
Ruthanne’s next big idea was for Mom and me to come live with her in the city. We could get our own apartment, she said, and “leave Dad and goddamned Geraldine to wallow in their den of iniquity.”
Mom told Ruthanne to hush up about Geraldine, who had taken her in, after all. But Mom liked the idea of moving to the city, I could tell. It wasn’t like she had a job to hold down, and Ruthanne said apartments in the city were much nicer than apartments in Komer, especially ours, which was pretty much the worst anybody could imagine.
I played along, saying how good it would be for them to be together again but leaving myself out of the picture they were painting, which didn’t seem to bother them too much. But the night before Ruthanne left because summer classes were about to start, she started talking to me about when we were going to make the move. She had July in mind. That would give her time to find a decent place and to see about borrowing a truck from this guy she knew.
“Maybe I can find a three bedroom,” she said.
“You’ll only need two,” I said.
“We’re too old to share a room.”
“I’m staying.”
“What?”
“I’m a Komer man.”
“You aren’t a man at all, jackass. You’re a kid. And who gives a shit about Komer?”
“I do. It’s where I live. My friends are here. I have a job now.” I told her about my work at Bi-Cities, trying to cast it in a positive light, which was difficult. I emphasized the hands-on skills I was learning, the upward mobility. I may have used the word “internship.”
Ruthanne wasn’t having any of it. “Scrounging around the dump?” she said. “That’s halfway to pushing a shopping cart and sleeping in the streets.” Her eyes brimmed with tears, maybe thinking about me out on the streets like that. It made me feel bad, but also happy because it meant she still loved me even though she was far away.
“It’s not like that,” I said, and I told her about Boss and Leo and Candy. I tried to communicate Leo’s idea of trash husbandry but by then it was third-hand so it came out pretty confusing.
“Those people are hobos!” Ruthanne said.
“No, they’re not!” I was shocked Ruthanne would say such a thing. She knew how I felt about hobos. Boss and them were shabby, sure, but they weren’t crooks or discernibly drunk. They didn’t lurk in the woods or steal babies. They didn’t have names like Boxcar Johnny or Charlie Peepers. Candy was a woman, for gosh sakes.
“Do they live in a shantytown?” Ruthanne asked.
“Of course not.”
“Then where do they live?”
“How should I know? I’m not gonna live with them.” Anyway it didn’t matter. Living with Boss and them wasn’t my plan. My plan, my true plan, was only beginning to crystallize. Here was the first step: “I’m gonna live with Grandpa.”
“What in God’s name?”
“He said he wanted me to come out there.”
“To visit, you dummy. He doesn’t want you living with him.”
“He does, though. He likes me.”
“What about his spells?”
She meant his good spells and bad spells, as Mom called them, but the way I saw it his spells weren’t any worse than Mom’s, and Mom had been in a bad spell since the day Ruthanne left. I told Ruthanne Mom didn’t do anything but lay in bed watching TV.
“She sounds fine on the phone,” Ruthanne said.
“That’s because it’s you! The moment you hang up she sleeps for twelve hours.”
Ruthanne didn’t believe me. She was pretty worked up, maybe from guilt. She said we had to talk to Mom about it, since I was only sixteen (almost seventeen, I interjected), and Ruthanne was mad we had to bring it up to Mom because it might upset her. I knew it wouldn’t, though. I guess I knew Mom better than Ruthanne did. I was more like Mom than Ruthanne was. What made Mom happy were the things inside her.
We went into Mom’s room and the two of us sat on the bed with her and rehashed our conversation from before. Mom nodded. When the part about me staying behind came up she muted the TV. The silver-haired anchorman was talking, but no words came out. Without words, his face lacked urgency. He was going through the motions.
“It’ll be cheaper with just the two of you,” I said. “You can get a shitty little apartment, and I’ll visit sometimes. I’ll be fine.”
“You’re sixteen years old,” Mom said.
“Almost seventeen,” I said.
“A boy belongs with his family.”
“I’m not leaving.” I was surprised to hear myself say that, and Mom was too, it seemed. It was a while before she said, “Well, what about school?”
Ruthanne was shocked. “You can’t seriously be entertaining this.”
“He’s been as good as on his own since you left,” Mom said. “Fact is, both of you kids been on your own for a long time now. That was why I knew you’d be fine up there in the city, Ruthie. I knew you could take care of yourself, and Ben can too.”
“But he’s just a kid!”
“Kid nothing,” I said.
“Don’t be a stinkpot,” Mom said. “Now what about school?”
“Grandpa’s place is in the county, same school.”
“I know that. But will you go to it? It’s a long way off and you don’t have a car, nor much interest in getting there on time, seems to me.”
“I’ll get Grandpa to drive me. He doesn’t do anything all day except water his sweet potatoes and check puma traps.”
“What if he’s having a spell?”
“Then I’ll drive his truck. If he’s having a spell he won’t need it.”
“You don’t have a license.”
“I’ll get one.”
Ruthanne scoffed. “You gotta take a class, dummy. They don’t just hand out driver’s licenses.”
“Summer’s coming,” I said. “I got months to take a class and pass a test or whatever.”
“Not if you spend all day in the dump gathering trash,” Ruthanne said.
Mom closed her eyes. We hadn’t ever talked about why I woke up so early and wore such raggedy clothes all the time, but she knew, I could tell. She just wanted to pretend I was still a little kid who was happy riding his bike around all day, so she wouldn’t have to worry I’d get in trouble. And I wasn’t in trouble. Not yet, at least. It seemed to me I deserved a pat on the back for the stick-to-itiveness with which I pursued my goals. So what if the goals were infiltration and a yet-to-be-determined act of terror?
“Nobody’s going anywhere,” Mom said. “Ruthie, you should come live with us right here. It’s the summer.”
Ruthanne nodded. She didn’t remind Mom of what Mom said before, about not wasting the deposit for summer school. Maybe Ruthanne felt sorry for Mom. Maybe she didn’t want to upset her. It made me think Ruthanne was growing up, which was a weird thing for a little brother to think about an older sister, but it was true. I could tell from the disappointed look on Ruthanne’s face that she wasn’t coming home. I was sad at first, because it would have been nice to see her more often, but I ended up glad. Having her around would have been tough. I kept such weird hours. Ruthanne would have been on my case for sure.