BY THE TIME junior year started I was sleeping at Pete’s a few nights a week. It started off gradual, out of laziness more than anything. It was easy because Milk Dog and Angie spent half their time at Milk Dog’s parents’ house with their kids. Pete and I mostly smoked pot and played video games. There was a soccer game Pete liked but I hated (I didn’t know anything about sports), and a game where we played a small-time drug dealer who had to work his way up by selling increasingly high-end drugs and robbing other dealers, but one time we accidentally played it in front of the kids so Angie made us stop. My favorite was an adventure game where we were an elf lord who got ritually sacrificed by dark magi but, unbeknownst to the magi, entered their magical netherworld in wraith form and had to infiltrate it by marshaling an army in secret and mastering dark magic to take revenge on the dark magi. We never got to the revenge part, though. The game was pretty hard, plus we were high.
When Milk Dog was around, he mostly ignored me. He seemed to make a point of speaking only Spanish to Pete and Angie when I was there. I thought he was talking bad about me, but Pete said Milk Dog thought I was homeless and felt sorry for me. I was okay with that. I barely saw him, like I said. But one day I drove up and Milk Dog was sitting shirtless on the makeshift porch. He didn’t have a THUG LIFE tattoo like I expected. There were stretch marks on either side of his big fat belly. He was drinking a canned beer, which looked like a C-battery in his giant hand. I said hello and expected him just to nod, but he said, “What up, kid.”
“What up,” I said softly. I wanted to go inside, but Milk Dog’s big body was blocking the way.
“Listen,” he said, “I don’t know if you and Pete be fuckin’ or what, but I wish you’d rub off on Pete some.”
I laughed uncomfortably.
“I saw them chips you bought.” Milk Dog was referring to a night when Pete and I had finished a bag of chips. We were high and not really thinking straight, but I had seen Milk Dog eating those chips so I made a point of buying a replacement bag. It hadn’t seemed like a big deal to me at the time. “You wash dishes and shit,” Milk Dog continued. “You gotta teach that boy some respect, know what I’m saying?”
“I’ll try,” I said. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“The compliment.”
“Wasn’t a compliment, just a statement of fact. You bought chips. You wash dishes.”
“Well, it’s my pleasure.”
Milk Dog laughed, which sounded like the word “humph!”
I tried to laugh too, but it came out so wretchedly meek that Milk Dog stopped laughing, like I made him lose his taste for it. He said, “Since you’re sleeping in my little girl’s bed half the time, it’s the least you can do, right?”
“Yes. Definitely. Thanks for everything. You and Angie have been really generous.”
“Humph!”
Milk Dog drained the last of his beer and crushed the can in his hand, but he didn’t get up. I had no idea where the conversation was going. Thankfully one of Milk Dog’s sullen friends pulled up in a noisy car, and I was able to make my escape.
From that point on I went out of my way to wash dishes and buy groceries. Mostly I bought snacks for Milk Dog and us, but I made a point of incorporating healthy snacks like these chips that looked like french fries but were made of vegetables. Milk Dog never touched them, but Angie did. She said they tasted good but gave her gas.
Helping out like that made me feel more welcome, but there was still the issue of Pete. How was I supposed to rub off on him?
School started that Monday, and I knew without asking that Pete had no intention of going. I couldn’t blame him. He had missed so much time during his suspension that he failed a bunch of classes and was supposed to do them over. That was too much even for a laidback guy like Pete. He didn’t want to have to sit there zoning out all day while teachers told him stuff he already heard, talked about books he already read or pretended to read. I had been meaning to get back to work at the dump but decided the dump could wait. I would set an example for Pete by getting to school on time and staying the whole day without even ducking out during lunch.
Sunday night I told Pete I would drive him to school the next day in Grandpa’s truck. He seemed confused. “No thanks, dog,” he said.
“Then how you gonna get to school?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“We’re turning over a new leaf,” I said. I was trying to sound serious and thoughtful. “We’re getting us an education by any means necessary.”
“By means of, like, showing up?”
“That and more. By paying attention. By doing work sometimes.”
“Whatever.”
Pete complained the whole way, but he did let me take him to school. And while I can’t speak for Pete, I can say I paid better attention than I had in a long time. Part of it was all the sleep I was getting by not going to the dump in the morning. I felt laser-eyed, like I was dipping tobacco all day. I even talked sometimes. Principal Winthrope said hello to me in the hall.
The first week went well. We made it to school on time every day except Wednesday, when one of Angie’s friends blocked the truck with her car so we had to take the bus. Pete and I even did homework while watching TV. Milk Dog made fun of us, but I could tell he approved.
On Friday I dropped off Pete then headed to Grandpa’s for Labor Day weekend.
Grandpa seemed to be doing better. He asked me what I was studying, and I told him English, geometry, chemistry, parenting and paternity awareness, and US history. He asked if I learned about the Boston Tea Party, but I hadn’t. We were still on pilgrim times.
We talked about school while brushing wood seal on the fence and porch. Grandpa said he wished he’d had my help during the week, with the power washing, but he understood school was important. He said he didn’t mind me sleeping over at my friend’s house during the week, to be closer to school, but he wanted me home weekends. I said that was fine by me.
On Labor Day proper Grandpa grilled a dozen hotdogs and we ate them with sweet potato fries. I didn’t know I could eat so many hotdogs, but Grandpa said he wasn’t surprised. He said a man in Japan one time ate fifty.
The next week at school went as well as the first, and I started feeling guilty. I guess I felt like school was only going well because I had sacrificed this other part of my life, the dump part, and what about my secret infiltration? And what about Boss? Boss didn’t have the luxury of hiding out in school all day, or of wasting time getting high and playing video games.
One day after school I drove out to the dump, parked across the street from where the garbage trucks came and went, and slipped inside. I didn’t see any garbage men so I crept along the fence to the spot where I usually found Boss. He wasn’t there. I waited a while then walked along the other side of the hills that lined the big path we took, but I didn’t find him there either. I thought about the last time we were there, how we hid in trash dugouts as the garbage men passed by, how my heart had been racing. I got nervous. The dump was so quiet. The only sound was the fluttering of garbage bags where the wind blew high across Trash Mountain. Not even the buzzards were circling.
I decided to check the bunker. I didn’t like the idea of going in there without Boss, in case Leo was in a bad mood, but I had no choice, was the way I saw it. Maybe Leo and Candy would help me look for Boss, or would tell me he had been arrested.
I cleared the trash off the rough wooden door and knocked. No response.
I knocked again, waited a while, then pulled the door open a crack and saw it was dark down there. “Candy?” I whispered. “Leo?”
No response.
I swung the door all the way open so the room was partly lit by the low afternoon sun. I walked inside.
The room was empty. There was a toaster sitting on the table with its metal shell off to the side like the shell of a turtle about to be cooked. There was an open can of beans, half full.
With a feeling of dread I crept back out of the bunker and looked around me at the quiet landfill. What had been eerie turned sinister. I decided to leave.
The next day, I set my alarm early and headed back to the dump. I tried to keep a positive attitude as I drove. The day before had been a blip, I told myself, a sort of holiday they took off sometimes, or maybe a family emergency. Everybody had families, didn’t they? Friends? Fellow scavengers?
But the dump was still empty. There weren’t even garbage men. It was like a nuclear bomb had gone off and this was the forbidden blast zone with KEEP OUT signs. I walked around the features I knew by heart, not only Trash Mountain but the ancillary peaks I thought of as Lhotse and the South Col. The biggest shapes were much as I remembered them, but here and there were little gullies where trash had been dug away and compacted into cubes, stacked two and three high in a way that made them look like Aztec temples.
My search for Boss led me all the way over to the Haislip side, to the big metal hangar where I’d met him the first time. The excavator was parked inside with its scoop slumped down like the head of a sleeping dinosaur.
Since nobody was around, I climbed the fence and hefted myself onto the corrugated tin roof of the hangar. The sun was up so I could see all of Haislip stretched out before me, from Demarcus’s house and the other little white houses scattered country-style, facing any which way, to the big Victorian rooming houses of Grande Esplanade. From far away those houses still looked like the mansions they had been. Beyond them was a little park. Though I couldn’t see it through the tops of the pecan trees and scraggly live oaks, I knew that in the middle of the park stood a peg-legged statue of Colonel Llewellyn Haislip, the wizardy looking Civil War guy who built a toll bridge over the Ocmoolga River.
I walked across the slanted roof and lowered myself down to the rim of the dumpster behind it. I was close to the forest that went along the back side of the dump, and I decided to search it. I hadn’t been through those shitty woods since the day I met Demarcus, years before—before we attacked Trash Mountain with Molotov cocktails—but I remembered the wadded up clothes, the empty vodka bottle, the crazed hobo of my imagination. There were still rumors of people sleeping back there.
The forest wasn’t as dark as I remembered. Enough light came through the scrubby trees that I could see baby kudzu and all kinds of weeds on the ground, and little pink and blue mulberries. Mulberries were trash trees from China, Grandpa said, and he pulled them whenever he saw them. Whoever owned this patch of forest didn’t take care of it, that was for sure. Probably the county, or Whitey Connors. That scoundrel Connors might have been using his power as Comptroller to let the forest to fall into disrepair so he could get it for a low price, bulldoze the trees, and fill the forest with trash. Just the thought of it made me spit.
As I wandered deeper into the trees, I tried to keep my bearings by way of the sun. I saw a dirty wadded up blanket or towel beside a sort of homemade dugout like war trench. There wasn’t any food or empty bottles so it may have been old. I channeled my inner Ocmoolga Indian the way Grandpa showed me, by looking for crushed up leaves on the ground and tiny broken branches on trees. Grandpa had insisted Ocmoolgas were superior to ninjas, over my objection, because they could see in the dark and smell danger. I could do neither, so I was pretty much stumbling around looking for more hobo beds but afraid to call out because I didn’t know what to do if I met an actual hobo. Though I disagreed with Grandpa on the predatory nature of hobos, his scary stories were swirling in my head.
I was beginning to lose hope when I spotted something bright blue in the distance. Closer, I saw it was a blue plastic tarp like they wrap around burned up houses to keep out kids and dogs. It was spread out and tied to tree trunks like a sort of picnic shelter, with blankets and coolers and cardboard boxes underneath. I didn’t want to sneak up on anybody so I said, “Hello? Is anybody home?”
Nobody answered, so I crept towards the encampment and got a better look at what was under the tarp: big backpacks like explorers have, and boxes full of neatly stacked food. Maybe whoever lived there was on a long camping trip, I thought. The idea that it was campers, not hobos, gave me some comfort.
I wandered the forest for the better part of the afternoon, looking for whoever lived in that camp, in case it was where Boss and them lived (they could have done worse), but I didn’t find a soul. I got all the way out to the tire shops that lined the road. Some were closed, and one had been torn down to make room for a strip mall with a pizza restaurant. I almost bought their cheap-ass pizza, I was so hungry.
I might have been halfway to Grandpa’s house by that point, but I didn’t feel like going there. I didn’t feel like going to Pete’s, either. I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I knew what happened. I remembered, dimly, what Boss had said about getting loaded into a van and dropped outside of town. Like a goddamned raccoon, he had said. It was abduction, I thought, like what aliens do, only instead of aliens it was Whitey Connors and his secret crew. My mind was racing. One time I saw an unsolved mystery on TV where a guy said he was made to procreate with an alien woman on and off for twenty years. It was rape, pretty much.
I turned around and headed back the way I came. I would make one more pass, I decided, and I was glad I did.
When I got to the blue tarp there was a man beside it with a pretty black dog on a leash. The dog was the first one who saw me, but it didn’t bark; it just raised its front paws up and down like it wanted to jump but knew it shouldn’t. The man had his hands in a washbasin. He was shirtless and had a hairy chest with tattoos on it. I thought he was old because he had a big beard, but when he looked up at me, he had a young face. He had dreadlocks like a black guy, but he was white. He tilted his head, like he was surprised to see me, then he smiled and said hello. I was nervous, but I said hello back to him.
“I’m Jon,” he said, “but my friends call me J Star. This is Jericho.” He held his hand, palm up, towards the black dog. The black dog, Jericho, rested its paw on his hand like an old lady about to be walked across the road. It was a pretty cool trick.
I tried to think up a nickname for myself, but I couldn’t do it fast enough so I told him my name was Ben.
“Son of the south,” he said.
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“Ben Jamin means son of Jamin, and Jamin means right hand, which in eastern-oriented cultures means south.”
I was impressed. “How did you know all that?”
“It’s Hebrew. I’m Jewish.”
“For real?” I had never met a real Jew before. I wondered where his little hat was, and if he knew the Old Testament by heart.
“Well, I used to be,” he said. “I don’t really practice anymore.”
“Is this where you live?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” he said.
“Do you have, like, neighbors and stuff?”
“Sure. I live here with some other folks. And some others live down the way. People are always coming and going through these woods.”
J Star had a friendly face and a warm voice, which was a relief after so many hours alone. I decided I could trust him. I told him who I was looking for.
“Sure, I know them,” he said. “I met ’em at the shelter a couple times.”
“This shelter? Do they sleep here sometimes?”
“I mean the food pantry. In Komer. You know, Saint Labre?”
I nodded, but I had no idea what he was talking about.
“It’s pretty decent for a town this size, or at least it was.” J Star explained how the Saint Labre place had served dinner five days a week last time he passed through town but now it was open only one night a week, and might be closing for good.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
He laughed. “Me too.”
“Then why are you laughing?”
“The way you said it. You’re a funny kid.”
“I’m no kid. I’m eighteen.” I had just turned seventeen, but close enough.
J Star seemed surprised by my age, and the look on his face got more serious, as I hoped it would. He said, “I haven’t seen your friends in a few days. Do you think they might have moved on?”
“Moved on where?”
“To another town.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think they’re hobos like that.”
J Star laughed again. “You don’t think they’re what?”
“Hobos.” It occurred to me I shouldn’t have used the word hobo in front of this man, in case he was a hobo himself, but he seemed more like a hippy college kid on a camping trip.
“What’s a hobo?” J Star asked, smiling.
I shrugged. “A homeless wino who rides the rails and whatnot.”
J Star laughed so hard he hunched over.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“I haven’t heard anyone say that in a while. The term hobo is a bit old fashioned. Wino too, for that matter.”
“My Grandpa says it.” This wasn’t much of a defense, though; Grandpa was extremely old fashioned.
“It’s pretty funny, but you probably shouldn’t say it.”
“Why not?”
“It’s—I don’t know—politically incorrect.” He sighed. “Have you tried the jail?”
“No,” I said. The idea was frightening, but of course it made sense. If Whitey Connors was cracking down, and if Leo and them wouldn’t move, then he might have called the cops. He probably had the cops in his pocket, that scoundrel. There were always patrol cars in the Bi-Cities parking lot.
J Star sniffed, like he smelled something unpleasant. He lowered his head so it was closer to mine. He said, “You’ve been in the dump, huh?”
I was embarrassed. “Do I smell like trash?”
“Nothing in there smells like trash. Look, I know it’s tempting: there’s great stuff in there—the things people throw away, it’s a shame—but that spray they use is poison.” He fingered the sleeve of my t-shirt. “Can’t you smell it?”
I sniffed the sleeve. I couldn’t smell anything except mild body odor. But it occurred to me that I hadn’t smelled the dump in years. “I used to smell it,” I told J Star. “It used to smell like bowling shoe spray.”
“It still does,” J Star said. “You should shower off. You can use our water if you want.”
I didn’t like the idea of stripping down in front of a stranger so I told him I’d shower as soon as I got home.
“Where’s home?” he asked.
I gestured vaguely towards the hills, where Grandpa lived.
J Star nodded. “Why don’t you stay here tonight with my friends and me? They’ll be coming back soon. Some of them are about your age.”
“Thanks for the offer, but I should get back home.”
We shook hands and J Star said, “God bless you, brother.” I had no idea why he called me brother. He was weird, I guess.
Back at the dump I crouched outside the fence to listen for garbage men, but there still weren’t any voices. I climbed back in the way I climbed out, then I wandered around a bit more, not seeing anybody. It was kind of fun to be alone because I could wander wherever I wanted. I wandered into the hangars where the loaders and excavator were parked. I even sat in one of the loaders and pretended to be driving it. Then I walked right up to the back of the headquarters building and tried to look into some windows, but the windows had burglar bars.
Time must have got away from me because the sun started setting. I decided to check the bunker one more time before I left. It was way in the opposite corner of the dump as the building, and by the time I got there the sun had disappeared behind Trash Mountain. I knocked on the door, just in case, then let myself inside.
The bunker was still empty, but they had left their camping lantern. I lit it so I could shut the door and be safer. There were some cell phone parts on the table, which gave me hope since Leo wouldn’t have left that stuff unless he meant to come back for it. I sat in a chair and waited for a while, but then I started to get tired. I can’t remember if I decided ahead of time I would sleep there that night, or if it just sort of happened. Boss had lined the floor with cardboard, which was dry and clean, and pretty soon it started looking good to me. I decided to lay down and rest my eyes.
When I woke up I thought I heard voices, something like whispering, but too rhythmic to be actual human whispering. I was curious but afraid to open the door, in case a security guard was making his rounds in a cart or something. I fell asleep again and woke up to a smell so sharp it stung my sinuses, high up in my nose. This time I was sure I heard something. It sounded like the truck that pumps the sewer, a rumbling sound with a knock, knock, knock on top of it. The smell wasn’t anything like the sewer, though. The sewer would have been a relief. I pulled my shirt up over my nose and mouth so I wouldn’t have to smell it, but the smell came through so strongly that my eyes watered. Forget about sleeping, I thought. Maybe I could burst out the door and make a break for it in the dark, but the noise was so loud I knew for sure there was a big machine out there. I pictured the slumbering excavator, alert and extended, ferocious. It might have scooped me up and crunched me for sport.
After a while the noise got softer and the smell got less bad, or I got used to it, and I was able to fall back asleep.
I woke up at dawn with a headache. I stood up and felt lightheaded, like I was high and hungover at the same time. The awful smell had persisted, but it no longer made my eyes water. Now my eyes were itchy and dry.
I opened the door of the shelter for a breath of fresh air, but there wasn’t any fresh air to be breathed. I saw two men in white hazmat suits, like something from an A-bomb movie, and I ran the other direction, towards what I thought was the main entrance, but I got turned around. The dump had changed again. I peered through the fence to get my bearings in relation to Komer, and I saw the main street that went by my old house. I didn’t see my old street, though, which should have been right there. There should have been an alley too. That’s what had gone along the fence, when we lived there. In my confusion (or maybe it was the smell, messing with my brain) it took me a while to notice I was standing on firmer ground than usual. Beneath the thin layer of new-looking trash was a concrete slab. Twenty yards away was another slab, then another. A feeling of dread welled up inside me as I looked for signs of my old house, of any house, but all I found were an old bathtub and some bricks from a chimney. The rest of the house parts had been bulldozed somewhere else, I guess. Into one of those cubes, maybe, or up against the base of Trash Mountain itself.
I should have been angry, but instead I felt sad. I had avoided the house for years, not wanting to see another family in there, or to see it empty and filled with ghosts, and now it was gone. Vanished. The fact that it was indistinguishable from our neighbors’ houses really bothered me. What if we had kept a family graveyard back there, like country people sometimes do? How would we visit our dead loved ones? But who was I kidding. We never even had a dog to bury, or a cat or a goddamn fish.
It was only later, on my way back to Grandpa’s, that the anger came. I had a vision of other houses getting bulldozed. Schools and businesses too. I wondered how many busted up buildings could fit inside Trash Mountain, and what about gassed out bodies? What if Boss and them had fallen asleep and never woke up, and were tucked up in there dead? It made me think of Komer and Haislip and all their buildings and people as one big trash pile, the dumpster of the world!
I would buy the Red Dragon 400,000 BTU Backpack Torch Kit with Squeeze Valve, I decided. Hell, I had $2,013 in two shoeboxes wrapped in duct tape; I could probably buy a Stinger missile launcher from an out-of-work mujahideen. I could douse the place in napalm then shoot it from a distance like a sniper. I could fill Grandpa’s truck with nitroglycerine, bum rush the gate, then crash the truck into the base of Trash Mountain and blow it sky high.
Turns out I didn’t have to do that stuff, though. I got a call from Bi-Cities a few weeks later, and they pretty much invited me inside.