LIVING WITH GRANDPA was great and it was terrible. There were days in the sun and nights in the cold spooky darkness. There were suppers of sugary beans with bacon, and breakfasts of corn flakes with water because Grandpa forgot to buy milk. There were grilled cheese sandwiches and mustard sandwiches. Sweet potato stew and tomato soup made from ketchup. The screens had holes so there were mosquitoes in the house, but Grandpa didn’t care. His leathery skin had lost its food-like aspect. Mine had not. I tried to sleep under the covers but got so hot at night that if I did manage to sleep I would kick off the covers and wake up with mosquito bites on my face and neck. There wasn’t central AC, and the only room with a window unit was Grandpa’s bedroom, but he never used it. He said part of getting old was feeling cold all the time, no matter how warm it was. It was closeness to death, he said. He had come to terms with the fact that he would never feel warm again.
I slept upstairs in Dinwiddie’s bedroom. Dinwiddie was my mother’s brother. He died when he was a kid so I never knew him. It was something with his heart. Anyway, his bedroom was tiny. Drafty too. As a kid I used to fuss about it because Ruthanne got to sleep across the hall in Mom and Aunt Sheila’s old bedroom. There were two beds in that bedroom so I could have slept there too, was the way I saw it, but Mom got mad when I complained. She said Grandma wanted me in Dinwiddie’s room. It was before Grandma died of lung cancer, but she was already on her way so everybody was extra nice to her all the time.
Between the heat and the mosquitoes and the possible ghost of Dinwiddie, it was hard to get a decent night’s sleep. Add the creaking noises the big old wooden house made as it cooled at night, plus the weights inside the old windows that knocked against the sills like insane clocks keeping random time, plus Grandpa, who could be heard snoring in the distance, or pacing on the squeaky floorboards, or opening and closing drawers, and it was damn near impossible to sleep for more than ten minutes at a time.
The lack of sleep might have been tolerable if Grandpa hadn’t been trying to work me to death. First, we dug postholes for a new fence. We dug twenty-seven postholes in one day and would have dug thirty-two if one of the wood handles on the posthole digger hadn’t broke. I was used to laboring in the heat from my work at the dump, but this was a whole different level. To keep my strength up, Grandpa fed me huge helpings of pinto beans from big pots he made every Sunday, with onions and garlic and a bay leaf for flavor. Those beans were damn good after a day in the sun. We used white bread to sop what was left in our bowls.
Second, we tended Grandpa’s sweet potatoes. The sweet potatoes were planted in ragged tires full of dirt. The oldest plants had big dark triangular leaves and little white and purple flowers. The foliage was dense, and my job was to reach under the leaves and pull up all the mushrooms that grew on the damp soil beneath. I also pulled up weeds and Bermuda grass and seedlings that kept creeping through. Pecan seedlings were the worst. Sometimes the little pecans that hatched them were a foot deep and clung for dear life.
On the porch was a shelf where Grandpa kept his sweet potato slips. Slips were little plants that came off the sweet potatoes. Back in March, Grandpa had sliced in half a nice oblong specimen of each sweet potato variety and suspended each half, via toothpicks, in a mason jar. Over time, when the little eyes started to sprout, the sprouts in the water turned into roots and the sprouts in the air turned into slips. When the slips were finger-length and had a few nice green and purple leaves, Grandpa would twist them off the sweet potato and stick them in their own little mason jar until they grew long white roots with little hairy parts. The hairy parts meant the slips were ready for planting, and we would roll out another tire from Grandpa’s pyramid of stacked tires. He got the tires for free because tire shops had to pay to recycle them. The best tires for sweet potatoes were high-performance tires, Grandpa said, because the hub-cabs on sports cars were almost as big as the tires themselves, which left lots of room for soil. He had a couple Bridgestone Potenzas he prized in particular.
We filled the tires with dirt, topped the dirt with compost, then dug little holes for the slips. The key was to spread out the slip roots and lay them sideways so the sweet potatoes could grow downward along the surface of the soil. By the time I moved in there were two dozen tires already, and within weeks we added a dozen more. There were three varieties of sweet potato: Jewel, Georgia Jet, and the less commonplace O’Henry of North Carolina.
Third, we roamed the property to check the puma traps, hunt for hobo beds, and forage mushrooms. Grandpa had a little book he sometimes checked to make sure we didn’t eat anything poisonous. One time we got a puffball big as the top of a skull. Grandpa fried it in slices.
The mushrooms were the reason we roamed, clearly, but always it was under the pretense of checking for pumas and hobos. As a kid I never questioned the routine, but now, seeing it with fresh eyes, something didn’t add up. The puma traps were rusted open like they never clamped shut, and they looked pretty small to me, like coyote traps, and who in his right mind would trap a puma anyway? What would you do with a puma if you trapped it? The hobo beds were another matter. For all Grandpa’s talk about hobos, we never saw a single bed.
I didn’t say anything about it for a while. Grandpa had his reasons, I figured. But a few days later we started setting posts in Quikrete for the new fence. Setting posts was hard work. I had to stand still for a long time, holding each post, and the lye in the Quikrete burned the skin on my hands, which was abraded from the sand. I had never questioned the fence before, just assumed it was to keep out pumas and hobos, but now I was grumpy.
“Grandpa,” I said, “why are we building this fence?”
“For the goats,” he said.
Goddamn, I thought. First hobos, then pumas, now goats?
“What goats?” I asked.
Grandpa explained that to get an Ag exemption for a reduction in his property tax he had to raise something for profit. He was working on growing his sweet potato operation but until then he had to stick to goats.
I was confused. “Um, Grandpa, there aren’t any goats.”
“There were.” He said this portentously, as though something terrible had happened, possibly involving pumas or vicious thieving hobos. I let the subject drop, annoyed, but I decided Grandpa might be a little crazy, and why not? All we did was work, eat, and sleep. We never left the house except to buy groceries and pick up Grandpa’s books from the library. I started to worry I might go a little crazy too, if I didn’t get out and do my own thing. Plus I was starting to feel guilty. I had explained the situation to Boss before I moved, and he seemed to understand, but weeks had passed. I worried I was letting him down.
I decided to tell Grandpa about my work at the dump. I had to spin the job as more official than it was so he wouldn’t worry I was breaking-and-entering just to be there. To set the stage I told him about losing my jobs at the grocery store and Ms. Mikiska’s and how a boy like me (“a good worker, as you know”) just couldn’t find decent work anymore. “So I got a job off the books,” I said.
Grandpa eyed me. “Dealing dope?”
“What? No. Of course not.”
Grandpa had extreme notions about the corrupting influence of cities, even little ones like Komer. But the extremity of dope-dealing worked in my favor, since scavenging the dump was minor by comparison.
“I never touch the stuff,” I said, “and I don’t approve of those who do. The job I mean is scavenging. There’s lots of recyclables people miss that are worth good money. One week I made fifty bucks.” That was a lie, but I could show Grandpa some cash and pretend it was from the dump. I wasn’t ready to admit I worked for free almost, since admitting that might lead to an awkward conversation about my infiltration and yet-to-be-determined act of terror. Grandpa seemed confused so I laid it on thick: “I work with a crew of old-timers, not unlike yourself.”
“Do I know ’em?”
“Probably not.” I had to throw him a bone, to be convincing. “Um, there’s this one named Leo who’s pretty old, maybe fifty.” Or a hundred, I was thinking. Leo looked like shit.
“Leo what?”
“I don’t know his last name. I think it’s Italian.”
“Never trust an Italian.”
“Sure, of course. But he’s got skills. He fixes toasters and stuff, and scrapes stuff off cell phones.”
“Rare earth metals?”
“I guess.” I had no idea what Leo scraped out of those cell phones, but if rare earth metals, whatever they were, made it sound good to Grandpa, that was fine by me.
Grandpa went on a rant about how the Chinese had cornered the rare earth market and price-gouged Americans and also manipulated their currency, or something. It was pretty confusing. When he was done with the rant he said, “So, where does all this happen? A recycling facility? I have great respect for recycling and recyclers. I grow my sweet potatoes in recycled tires, as you know.”
“That’s right,” I said. This was going quite well, in my estimation. “It happens at the dump.”
Grandpa didn’t say anything. He seemed confused.
“Komer doesn’t have a recycling center,” I explained. “We sort through the garbage at the dump and pull out the recyclables.”
Still Grandpa didn’t say anything. His expression was inscrutable.
“Yep,” I said. “It’s lifting those recyclables that gives me the strength to dig postholes, and the fortitude to work with you all day in the sun.”
“The dump, you say?”
“Yeah, Bi-Cities,” I said with perverse pride. Maybe people’s admiration for the place, as the only growing business in town, had begun to rub off on me.
Grandpa spat in the dirt. “That goddamned Whitey Connors is trying to raise property taxes. He favors poor folks who don’t own property, folks whose oversized broods filling up the schools is why we have to pay property tax in the first place. I hate that man. He’s as crooked as his father.”
“Donkey Dan?”
Grandpa nodded. I wanted to ask him about Donkey Dan and Whitey and how crooked they were, to fortify my resolve against Trash Mountain, but he had started in on a rant about the dump: how it was a haven for hobos, a cesspool, a den of iniquity, a charnel house. Half the things he said I couldn’t understand. I wanted to tell him I spent lots of time there and never once saw a hobo, just my colleagues and the occasional unfeeling garbage man, but he was pretty worked up. I let it drop.
I decided I should probably avoid the subject of my work at the dump, so what I did was tell Grandpa I wanted to ride my bike to town and see some friends. He offered to drive me, but I told him I needed the exercise. He seemed suspicious.
“A man who has energy for exercise,” he said, “isn’t working hard enough.”
“Sure,” I said, “but I enjoy the scenery, the country roads and whatnot.”
Grandpa nodded. He seemed to appreciate the sentiment.
The next morning I woke up before dawn and sat in the kitchen looking through the window until the sun peeked over the tops of the pecan trees beyond the clearing of Grandpa’s big back yard. Then I got on my bike and headed for town. It took an hour almost, and when I got to the spot I had cut in the fence, it was gone. The fence was different. The whole shape of the dump seemed kind of different, like maybe it expanded. I biked around to the garbage truck gate. By the time I got there the trucks were long gone, but the fence was still open so I snuck inside like I used to and found my way to the clearing where Leo, Candy, and Boss had their operation.
The clearing was empty. The table and chairs were gone, the recyclables too. It was just flattened trash.
While I was standing there, confused, I heard some people speaking Spanish so I crouched down and hid. The Spanish speakers passed by, laughing. Bi-Cities people, no doubt. I wondered if their number had grown to the point that there wasn’t any room for Leo and them to hide. If so, where had they gone to?
I lay on my back until the laughter dwindled. Beyond the low trash hills that encircled me loomed Trash Mountain, hazy in the distance. A black vulture was standing near the top, the shoulders of its wings hiked up to its burrowed head. Another vulture circled then came down beside it.
I climbed back onto the path and walked deeper into the dump, trying to maintain a mental map in case I had to run for cover again. There seemed to be more paths than before. I was way off to the left, on the Komer side, when I decided there was something different. It was like I was in a whole new part, familiar but strange, like a dream. The trash itself had a different quality: brighter and newer, the hills less settled. The fence was like that too. It was the same type of fence as before, but the mesh was darker and the tips of the razor wire were brighter in the sunlight.
“Psst!”
At the sound of the human voice I searched for a place to dive and bury myself in trash, but before I could make my next move I saw Boss. He was a ways up the path, crouched like he was hiding. He waved me towards him.
When I got close he raised his finger to his lips. He turned and walked, still crouching, and I followed him away from the path, over some well-worn trash, to a spot where his wheelbarrow was leaning against the fence.
“Welcome back!” Boss smiled and made conversation like nothing was different. When I asked what happened to Leo and Candy, he said they had a new hideout. He had worked on it for two whole weeks while Candy gathered trash for Leo, who had set up shop in a new spot each day. “We could have used ya,” he said, and I felt bad.
“Sorry it’s been so long,” I said. “My Grandpa lives real far away.”
“Why don’t you stake out your own place?”
“Maybe I will,” I said, though I wasn’t sure what he meant by that.
Boss said he was on his way to the hideout, if I wanted to join him, then he righted his wheelbarrow and we set off along the fence. I knew without asking that he had cleared the path himself, to keep out of sight. I wondered why all the secrecy. Didn’t Boss and the garbage men have an understanding?
I asked Boss why the fence looked different, and he said they had expanded the dump again. The part we were standing on was brand new. He described with amazement how one day they just dug up the fence and moved it. “All that was here before was a crumbly street, some tree stumps and a couple concrete slab foundations,” he said, “so I guess there were houses here, years ago. But mostly it was just weeds.”
I was disturbed. My old house had a concrete slab foundation. I pressed my face to the fence to see where we were, in terms of Komer, but the weave in the mesh was too tight. All I could see were tiny pinpricks of light. “Right here where we’re standing?” I asked.
“Yep,” he said. “They covered it in trash pretty quick. The trash is brand new so it’s high-yield picking, is the good news. Bad news is there’s way more people around.”
We entered an older part of the dump, near the shitty woods, and came to a long flat hill of ancient looking trash. Beside the fence were stacks of different recyclables—cardboard, cans, bottles, the usual—and Boss started pulling stuff out of his wheelbarrow. I helped.
“This is the new spot?” I asked, kind of disappointed.
Boss laughed. “Out in the open like this? Hell no. In the new spot there isn’t room for this cheap stuff, so I leave it out here.”
When the only stuff left in the wheelbarrow was cell phones, remote controls and the like, Boss pushed the wheelbarrow about a hundred yards further along the fence, where he rested it. Then he got down on his knees and started pushing through trash like he was looking for something. What he was looking for, it turned out, was a roughhewn wooden hatch like the door to a cellar. He opened it just wide enough for me to creep through, which I did with some trepidation. The space it led to was dark and cold. Boss came down after me and wedged his wheelbarrow halfway in the door to keep it propped.
The propped door let in enough light that I could see we were in a tiny room reinforced by wood and sheet metal. Leo and Candy were sitting across from us, tinkering. A dim camping lantern hung between them. Boss started pulling stuff out of the wheelbarrow and piling it at Leo and Candy’s feet. The ceiling was so low he had to sit down, but he could reach from the door to the table without moving, like he planned it that way.
“Hey there, sugar,” Candy said without looking. “Like our new digs?”
“Seems pretty secret,” I said.
Leo didn’t look at me or say anything. But later, when I was helping Boss unload the wheelbarrow, I caught him giving me a dirty glance.
Back on the surface, making our rounds, Boss apologized for Leo. He said Leo was even more paranoid than before on account of being arrested.
“Leo got arrested?”
“For trespassing. Spent the night in jail.” Boss said the unspoken agreement they used to have about collecting recyclables, to beat the inspectors, didn’t seem to hold anymore. He didn’t know why. “Thing is,” he said, “I never see those Bi-Cities boys scavenging for bottles and such, but there’d be plenty to go round even if they did. This new trash is filthy with it.” He pointed with his shoe at six brown beer bottles in a cardboard case, neat and tidy. “See what I mean?”
“Maybe they’re after the rare earth,” I said, testing Grandpa’s theory.
“Maybe so,” Boss said. “Leo tells me to keep the phones in my pockets in case I run into trouble, but my waders don’t have pockets so I still put them in the wheelbarrow.” Boss laughed. “Old Leo probably thought you was a spy sent by Whitey Connors to infiltrate our operation.”
I laughed, to be congenial, but the name Whitey Connors was starting to make my blood boil. These were hard working people, the way I saw it, and Whitey Connors was stabbing them in the back. I wondered if I should tell Boss I was turning it around on Whitey Connors—that I was going to infiltrate him—but I decided to keep it secret.
Boss gathered electronics while I gathered the more obvious recyclables. Boss said he had my makeshift wheelbarrow in a secret place but that I shouldn’t use it until I got a feel for how things had changed, since we had to be extra careful.
The wheelbarrow was almost full when Boss whispered “Shh!” and got low. He knocked the cheap recyclables off the wheelbarrow with a sweep of one long arm and started stuffing the cell-phones down the front of his waders. “Take cover,” he whispered, and we scrambled over the nearest pile of trash. He started digging into the pile until he had made a sort of hollow for himself. I dug too, but my hollow was so close to his that by the time we slid into our respective hollows and started covering ourselves with trash, to hide, we were right next to each other. The smell of the trash wouldn’t have been so bad—I was used to it by then—if it weren’t for the reek of Boss’s steamy breath. His breath was tinged with the sweet smell of decay, like the trash all around us had somehow contaminated his body.
Some men strolled past, speaking Spanish. One made a joke, I guess, because the others laughed like hell. I was afraid. I should have listened to Grandpa, I thought. I should have listened to Ruthanne. This was serious trouble. What we were doing was illegal now, if it hadn’t been before. Leo had spent the night in jail for it. My heart was racing. I tried to control my breathing like Rick Zorn in Detroit Ninja, where some ninjas show him how they slow their heart-rates until they’re legally dead, but I just couldn’t do it. I wasn’t a ninja, and I wasn’t Rick Zorn. By the time those garbage men were out of earshot I was ready to burst. I clawed my way out of the trash Boss had piled on top of us and hunched over with my hands on my knees. I was almost crying. Boss leaned over me and said he was sorry. I said I was too. I said I had to go home.
I would have gone straight home, to Grandpa’s, if I could have found my bike. I had left it in my old hiding place behind some bushes next to the gravel parking lot across the street from the dump, but it was gone. At first I was confused. I thought I must have left it somewhere else, by mistake. I looked behind all the bushes and all the trees until it dawned on me that my bike had been stolen. I couldn’t believe it. It was a kid’s bike! Sure I was sixteen, seventeen almost, but nobody would have known that by looking at the bike. What was the world coming to?
I considered calling Grandpa to explain and get a ride home, but I didn’t have any money for a payphone and I didn’t feel like going anywhere to ask to use a regular phone. I was angry. I was also hungry. I would have bought a sandwich except I didn’t have any money, like I said. What an idiot I was.
The walk to Grandpa’s took much longer than I expected, and was pretty awful. I was hungry from the start, and the two-lane highway was so narrow I had to jump out of it a couple times to avoid oncoming cars. By the time I got to Grandpa’s it was well past nightfall.
Grandpa had the front light on and was waiting for me in the kitchen, which surprised me. I wasn’t used to having anybody wait up for me. When I came through the door, he set down his book and lowered his reading glasses. He looked pissed.
“I called Bi-Cities,” he said, “and no one named Leo is on the payroll.”
“Huh,” I said.
“Don’t play dumb. There isn’t any recycling program either.”
“But I’ve been recycling. I swear.”
“These people you work with, where do they sleep?”
“How should I know?”
“Don’t talk back. Where do they sleep?”
I thought of the shelter Boss had dug. “I really don’t know,” I said. “Trailers, maybe?”
“How do they smell? Are their clothes clean?”
I wanted to say Boss smelled great and dressed like a banker, but I couldn’t. I was tired of lying. I was upset, too, because I knew what Grandpa was getting at. I said, “Don’t hobos, like, ride the rails and stuff?”
“Sometimes,” Grandpa said, “but sometimes they stay put in one place for quite a while. The important part is they live by stealing. This so-called scavenging business is just stealing by another name.”
“Leo had a deal with Whitey Connors.”
“If he’s dealing with Whitey Connors, then he got what he deserved. My God, boy, do you realize the danger you’re in?”
“I’m not in danger.”
“Not in danger, huh? Hobos use sodomy as initiation!”
“They aren’t hobos!”
It was the first time we ever yelled at each other. Mom said Grandpa used to yell at lot when she was a kid but that he mellowed with age, so I guess I caught a glimpse of the old Grandpa, before he was Grandpa and was just a mean dad. I didn’t like it. I felt sorry, though. I had stayed out late and made him worry.
He seemed sorry too. He offered me dinner, and I accepted.
After a dinner of beans and white bread we sat by the windows in the kitchen. That’s where Grandpa kept his recliner, along with a scratchy old chair he had dragged over from the seldom-used living room when I first moved in. The windows faced the screened-in back porch, but it was hard to see much through the screens.
After a bourbon and soda Grandpa said, “In the Army, to train the medics, they had us do trachs on goats.”
“What’s a trach?” I asked.
“A tracheotomy. It’s where when somebody’s choking you stick a pen or a straw into their necks.”
“The goats were choking?”
“No.” He got quiet, remembering. “It was just for practice.”
I was shocked. “You practiced on goats? Live goats?”
Grandpa nodded.
“Did they die? The goats?”
“Yeah, but we could do few on each goat before it ran out of room on its throat or bled to death.”
It took me a while to notice Grandpa was crying, and when I did I tried to pretend I didn’t. But he knew I noticed, and he said he was sorry. I wanted to tell him he didn’t have to be sorry, but by then he was telling me how by crying for the goats he was actually crying for the men who died. But also for the goats. It was confusing.
“I have to keep up the fence for appearances,” Grandpa said, “to make it look like I’m still raising them, to keep my Ag exemption.”
I had lots of questions. Like why had the Army taken Grandpa’s goats? Or were those different goats? Were there two sets of goats? But it would be better to change the subject, I decided, and seeing Grandpa cry made me feel like I could open up to him about my own life. But I didn’t want to talk about Mom and Dad or Ruthanne, and it was too soon to open up about my secret inner feelings on the subject of Trash Mountain, so I ended up just sort of sitting there until Grandpa started in on his story about the time he found a hobo bed in the converted garage (“A hobo bed atop an actual bed—whoever heard of such a thing!”) so he had stripped the blanket and sheets and burned it all in the back yard as a warning to the hobos. He sat back and crossed his arms, like thinking of the burning still gave him a satisfied feeling, years later. But burning perfectly good sheets seemed pretty stupid to me. Probably those hobos, if they even existed, just needed a place to sleep and figured he wouldn’t notice. He never used that part of the house. In fact, he used so little of the house except his bedroom and the kitchen that a whole squadron of hobos might have been living there as we spoke, which was creepy to think about so I didn’t say it. Anyway, the whole thing made me wish Grandpa could get an Ag exemption for hobos instead of goats.