BY THE SUMMER, I was sending half my paychecks straight to Ruthanne and living in a squat beneath a mansion on Grande Esplanade. Squatting turned out to be pretty easy. The house upstairs was empty so nobody could hear me in the basement, and I came and went through a cellar door in the backyard, where the weeds were so tall nobody could see me. To get the water turned on all I had to do was show up at the county water office and give them enough money to cover the deposit and back bills. I didn’t even have to pretend to be the owner of the house, a dead lady named Delores Jermyn. Electricity was harder, though. I had to show a title or lease and when I told the lady at the electricity office that Mrs. Jermyn was dead she went back to get her supervisor, so I left. I made do with camping lanterns, which I hung from the low ceiling by hooks. I had a camping stove too, but I didn’t do much cooking since I didn’t have a fridge. I kept milk for breakfast cereal along with some sandwich fixings in the break-room fridge at Bi-Cities. I was working at Bi-Cities HQ instead of the campaign office because Whitey Connors lost the election.
After he lost, Whitey asked Marie to stay and be VP of Public Relations for Bi-Cities, but she said no. She told me privately that she thought hard about it, because she was getting sick of moving around all the time, but her mom had cancer back in Rhode Island, so that’s where she went. I was sad to see her go. After she left, it fell to me to take photos of Whitey at all the events he went to and spoke at, and whenever a photo was really bad I emailed it to Marie as a joke, like when the new PR guy convinced Whitey to wear a chicken costume at a half-marathon sponsored by a sports bar called Chicken Fingerz. I sent her a photo of Whitey sipping his soda through a hole in the beak and she wrote back, “What a clown—lol.”
Whitey was a clown, for sure, and a weirdo and a terror, but I liked him. My job was to help his assistant, Carol, keep his schedule and arrange his travel. So I was sort of like the assistant to the assistant, and also the assistant to the body man, Daryl, though Daryl worked strictly from nine to five so if anything happened early or late, I was substitute body man. If we stayed past seven Whitey would send me out for food and tell me to spare no expense. Then, at the end of the night, he’d peel me off a couple twenties. Overtime, he called it. Things might have gone on like that forever, and I would have been fine with it, if it wasn’t for this one thing that happened, which reminded me of my former life, and of the underbelly of Whitey’s success.
It happened at a fancy new grocery store on the outskirts of town, where the campaign office use to be. I was buying groceries for Grandpa and me (I still spent weekends at Grandpa’s, where I could shower and have some company), and when I came out of the store with my groceries and was about to get in the truck, I noticed a man bent over by the dumpster. He was picking through trash that had overflowed from the top of the dumpster and fallen to the concrete below. His gray overcoat looked familiar. His hands had a careful quickness that was also familiar, tapping along the surface of the trash like a pianist. When he held up a bag of romaine hearts to get a look at them in the sunlight, I recognized his grizzled bird-like face.
“Leo!” I said. I was happy to see him. Enough time had gone by that I didn’t think about all the mean stuff he did to me.
Leo peered at me from under the brim of his hat, a stocking cap on top of a baseball cap like some folks wear, but he didn’t say anything. Maybe he didn’t recognize me, I thought, so I got closer. I waved and acted real smiley because I didn’t want to spook him, but when I was close enough to shake his hand he still looked like he didn’t recognize me. He had little red flecks on his cheeks, like shaving bumps, except he hadn’t shaved in quite a while. He looked older than I remembered. On the other side of the dumpster was a shopping cart full of overstuffed black trash bags.
“Any cell phones in there?” I joked.
Leo seemed confused. He glanced back at his shopping cart, then at me again. I was starting to get offended, but I reminded myself that Leo was older; he’d seen many more faces than I had. Plus he probably loomed larger in my mind than I did in his.
“I tried to find y’all, you know,” I said. “I tried to find you, but you were gone.”
“Where?” His voice was raspy, like he hadn’t used it in a while.
“The dump. Remember?”
“Where did we go?”
I was confused. “I don’t know. You tell me.”
Leo didn’t say anything. He glanced at his shopping cart again. Maybe he was just being secretive, I thought. He had always been paranoid.
“How’s Boss?” I asked, to change the subject. That’s what I really cared about anyway.
Leo still didn’t say anything. It occurred to me he might not know who I was talking about. He almost certainly hadn’t called the man Boss, and I couldn’t remember Boss’s real name. I tried again: “How’s Candy?”
At the name Candy, Leo looked down and grunted. “Candy,” he repeated.
I’ll never forget the sound of his voice as he said her name: a croak, but not like a frog’s croak; like something halfway between a burp and the sound a machine makes on the fritz. The sound was chilling. It combined with his hollow expression for an uncanny effect that revolted me. I wanted to get away as quickly as possible, but I felt bad. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, in case he had any left. “Leo,” I said, “are you okay?”
Leo turned without looking at me and started away, like I wasn’t there. I felt sorry for him. I figured he must be fried on drugs, a bad trip or something. That would have explained why they left the dump: if something had happened to Leo, Candy and Boss wouldn’t have been able to keep the operation going. But the idea of a bad trip didn’t quite ring true. Leo didn’t seem like the type who took enjoyment from the escape offered by drugs—unless something terrible had happened, something that changed him.
I watched him push his cart across the alley behind the grocery store, where the trucks came and went. The concrete slab backed up to some dirty thin woods. Leo pushed his cart between the trees and disappeared from view. I decided to follow him.
Where he disappeared turned out to be a dirt path, worn from use. I walked along the path, dodging tree branches, until I saw Leo up ahead. He was moving real slow so I kept my distance. My view of Leo came and went among the trees, but I could always hear his rattling grocery cart. There must have been cans in there.
We kept walking and walking. Instead of harder to follow, the path got wider. It made me think of the ancient buffalo traces, worn by animals and the hunters who hunted them. Now we were the animals.
I wasn’t sure why I was following Leo, since he had made it clear he didn’t want to talk to me. I guess I just wondered where—and how—he lived. Plus Boss might have lived there with him, though I hoped not, because if Boss was still hanging around Leo, this Leo, he couldn’t have been in much better shape himself.
There was light up ahead. Leo had entered a clearing full of tall grass and weeds. Beyond him were the backs of three houses along a winding road of pristine black asphalt. Beyond the road was what looked like a dried up pond. One of the three houses looked incomplete. The top was jagged, like a dinosaur had come by and taken a big bite out of it. It looked new, though. All the houses did. I thought they might be brand new construction, but later I found out online that the houses had been aborted in 2008, around the same time as my first attempt on Trash Mountain. No one ever moved in. The new people, the people who bought groceries at the fancy grocery store, didn’t like those houses I guess.
Leo pushed his cart up to the sliding glass door behind one of the houses, slid open the door, and went inside. If it had been anybody except Leo, I would have knocked on the door, but Leo had threatened me with a chef’s knife the first time we met. For all I knew he still kept the knife in the pocket of his dirty cinched trousers. I imagined knocking on the door only for Leo to circle around the house from the front door, sneak up behind me, and stab me in the back again and again until I flopped face-first into grass and tossed around clutching my wounds, gasping for breath, then looked up at the sun through a death mask of terror and regret.
It wasn’t worth it.
On the way back to the grocery store, I started feeling sorry for Leo again. Maybe he got senile from boredom, I thought. Grandpa once told me how old men who retire get senile because they don’t have anything to do, but how he, Grandpa, had retired young enough to develop hobbies like growing sweet potatoes and dragging his property for hobos. If Leo was senile from boredom, I reasoned, it was because he got kicked out of Bi-Cities. It was because of Whitey. It was because of me!
When I got back to the truck and my bags of overpriced groceries, I felt low. The parking lot was full of fat people pushing grocery carts. The SUV parked in front of me had stickers on the back of stick figures representing the husband and wife and their three little kids. There was even a goddamned dog sticker. Were there hobo stickers? Jailbird stickers? Or how about a Sleeper sticker, where the Sleeper’s stroking his veiny Sleeper dick while leering at the rest of those goddamned stickers?
Grandpa and I had a nice dinner of hot dogs and baked sweet potatoes, which made me feel better, but I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept picturing Leo shuffling around behind that dumpster, and me coming up behind him, coming closer than I had in real life. The way I pictured it, half dreaming, I put my hand on Leo’s shoulder and he turned to face me but his face was slack. He was looking at me without seeing me. His eyes were dead. The brain they led to had been hollowed out like a dried-up beehive.
It was then that an even darker thought occurred to me: what if it wasn’t drugs or drink or boredom that had changed Leo, but the dump itself? I remembered the noxious smell of the dump spray the night I stayed there, and the peculiar smell of the metal shavings Leo scraped from the circuit boards. Rare earth. It sounded so strange now. They mined it in China, Grandpa said, and Dad said the Chinese didn’t care what happened to the working man. Maybe in China there were thousands of old wrecks like Leo wandering zombielike through the streets.
I had to say something to Whitey, I decided, but what could I say? Whitey hadn’t done anything directly, or maliciously, and he could spin what he did as a favor to Leo. Leo made money, after all, and he did the work by choice. Whitey was a smooth talker. I had to practice what I would say to him. I would start off slow, something like “Mister Connors, may I have a word? I ran into an old friend of mine, and he wasn’t looking too good. His name’s Leo. Maybe you remember him?” But Whitey might say no, he didn’t remember Leo, and where would I go from there? And how would I make it clear, without being rude, that I blamed Whitey; that, in my opinion, Whitey should bear some responsibility for Leo? And for Ruthanne’s weird spine? And for bulldozing my childhood home to make room for more trash?
“Listen, motherfucker,” I said, staring at my own face in the bathroom mirror and karate-chopping the air for emphasis, “here’s how it is: you bulldozed my goddamn house, and now you’re gonna pay!”
When I got to work, I felt awkward asking Carol for an appointment to see a man I saw every day, but Carol didn’t seem fazed by it. Maybe she figured I was asking for a raise. She said Whitey could fit me in at 4:15, and I agreed to it.
For the rest of the day I rehearsed in my head what I was going to say. I even wrote it down, pondered it, revised it: “You bulldozed my home, Mr. Connors. You ruined my sister’s spine. Yeah, she’s okay now, thanks for asking.”
At 4:10 I was sitting on the loveseat across from Carol’s desk, waiting. It reminded me of Principal Winthrope’s office, like I was the one in trouble, not Whitey. I tried to think of Leo, Ruthanne, the noxious dump spray. But then Whitey poked his head out to say something to Carol and saw me sitting there.
“Goddamn, girl,” he said to her, “don’t keep this man waiting.” I knew he was just saying that to flatter me, at Carol’s expense, but it felt good anyway.
Whitey ushered me into his office and we sat down on either side of his desk. There were framed photos of him all over the walls, smiling among bigger and older men in suits, breaking ground with golden shovels, snipping ribbons with big novelty scissors. I knew I needed to dive right in, before he got the best of me, but Whitey was too quick: “Ben,” he said, “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Me first! Listen, school’s about to start, and I know, I know, you don’t wanna go. School’s for dummies. I hear you. I dropped out myself and would do the same again, so I can’t stand here and tell you to go back to school. And I don’t want you to go back to school. What would I do without you? ’Specially now that Marie’s gone. But listen—” He launched into a spiel about the importance of education while I sat there, stunned. I had come into the office ready to tell him off, but he was bombarding me with fatherly advice. “Which is why,” he concluded, “I want you to take night classes for a GED.”
“What good would that do?” I asked. “I have a job already.”
“We got a good thing going, for sure, but businesses don’t last a lifetime, not even for Russian oil tycoons. What if you gotta do a résumé again? You can’t keep lying on your résumé, Tex.”
“But why would I pay for night classes if I can go to school for free?”
“Opportunity cost. Besides, I’ll pay.”
I couldn’t believe it. Whitey was pulling me deeper than ever. I tried to refuse the offer, but he insisted.
“Never look a gift horse in the mouth,” he said. “Ever heard that one before?”
“Sure.”
“Ever thought about it?”
“Not really.”
“The meaning is twofold. The first meaning is obvious: if a horse is given to you as a gift, don’t look in its mouth for a horse disease such as distemper or horse gingivitis, at least not in front of the fella what gave you the horse. That’s the way everybody takes it, and that’s good advice, let me tell you, on the campaign trail especially. But there’s a second way to take it. That’s where the horse isn’t the gift but the giver.”
“A horse that gives gifts?”
“Yep.”
“There’s horses like that?”
“Sure there are. Santa’s reindeer, for instance.”
“A reindeer’s a type of horse?”
“For sure.”
“I thought it was a moose.”
“You’re missing the forest from the trees, Ben. A bird in the hand, is what I’m saying. A stitch in time. I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I did.”
“Choosing too soon. You don’t have to choose between work and school. A boy can do both, and anyone who says different is a pansy. The way America is today, it coddles the young person. Go to high school, it says. Go to college. Spend a couple years after college waiting tables so you can get to feeling unfulfilled and wind up in grad school for social work. But some people, they don’t have to noodle around like that. They’re like arrows shot from a quiver. Take Ben Franklin, for instance. Did you know Ben Franklin was apprenticed at the age of thirteen?”
“No, sir.”
“To his brother, as a printer. And Ben Franklin became one of the greatest printers in the history of the United States, and a writer and a diplomat. An inventor, too. He invented the lightning rod, the bifocals, and a glass harmonica for which Mozart and Beethoven composed. Now, would Ben Franklin have ended up where he did if he were left to noodle around a few more years before getting into the printing game? Maybe. But why risk it, is what I’m saying. And that’s the way I feel about Bi-Cities Sanitation.”
I didn’t follow. Was Whitey Ben Franklin in the analogy, and Bi-Cities the glass harmonica? Whitey had a way of overwhelming you with words. For a moment I forgot my purpose in meeting with him. Then he said, “Ben, how do you feel about Bi-Cities sanitation?” and it all came back to me. Now was my chance to tell him what was on my mind.
I looked at Whitey, who had been pacing around. He had stopped, though, and was waiting for me to speak. “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I kinda felt more comfortable working for your campaign than for Bi-Cities, you know?”
Whitey withdrew slightly, crossing his arms. “More comfortable?” he repeated. “So you’re saying you’re uncomfortable working here at Bi-Cities?”
“No, sir.”
“Bi-Cities puts money in your pocket. Mine too. Good clean money. And that’s hard to come by nowadays.” He started pacing again, like he was looking for something. “Where’s my drink? You seen my drink?”
He meant his giant soda. It was on the floor beside his desk so I picked it up for him. It smelled kind of funny, like cough medicine.
“Thank you kindly,” he said, then sat down and started slurping the warm drink through a straw. When he stopped, he leaned back and sighed. He said, “It’s the trash, isn’t it?”
“Sir?”
“The stigma of working with trash. I wouldn’t have figured you for it, Ben. A Komer man. A man who made it by the skin of his boots. I wouldn’t have figured you for having secret delicate sensibilities.”
“I don’t have sensibilities,” I said, feeling defensive. “I was picking trash before you even knew me. I probably spent more time in that dump than you have. I definitely spent more time looking at it. You can’t even see Trash Mountain from this office.”
Whitey spun in his chair to look at me. “What mountain?”
“Nothing,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about Trash Mountain, to besmirch my memories by sharing them with Whitey, who, like any other adult, might have turned them into something they weren’t, some kind of boys-will-be-boys, oh-you-kids bullshit. So I cut to the chase: “Remember Leo?”
Whitey smiled. “Of course I do. What’s that old rascal up to?”
I almost told Whitey how I saw Leo behind the dumpster, but I didn’t know how to describe what I saw in Leo’s face, or what I failed to see, and I didn’t want to hear Whitey say something glib about the man. Leo deserved some dignity, was how I saw it. “He isn’t doing too good,” I said.
“How about his girlfriend, that black lady? I always liked her.”
“Candy. I didn’t see her.”
“What about the other one? Tall fella? Harelip?”
“Boss. I haven’t seen him either.” I was surprised Whitey remembered Leo, let alone Boss and Candy. I wondered if he knew more than he let on.
Whitey forked his fingers and pointed at his two eyes. “Ben,” he said, “my office may not face it anymore, but I see everybody who comes and goes from that dump. Hear me?”
“Yessir,” I said, “but why’d you fire them?”
“Fire them? They never worked for me.”
“They recycled for you, the rare earth and whatnot.”
“They screwed me is what they did. I told them they could pick over the trash for recyclables, but they got greedy. I got another guy, Ramón, who salvages the electronics. Not that it matters anymore.”
“Why doesn’t it matter?”
“The Chinese are paying for all of it, and they don’t want it picked over before it gets to China. You seen those dozers making it into cubes?”
“Sure.”
“That’s to ship it. I didn’t kick your friends out, just tightened up security. I do it every few years anyway, to keep kids out more than anything. There isn’t a kid in this county who hasn’t snuck into Bi-Cities and made himself a trash fort. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” He eyed me across his desk, a smile creeping up his cheeks. “You never snuck in and messed around, huh?”
For a moment I panicked. Did he know I tried to blow the place up? Had he been keeping track of me all those years? Keep your enemies close, is what they say. But no, that was impossible. He would have had to be omniscient to keep track of all those people. Godlike. Hundreds of kids snuck in to stack beer cans and pull apart rusty appliances and poke dirty condoms with a stick. The ovens and refrigerators had been hiding places for a whole generation.
“You know the insurance I pay on this place?” Whitey asked. “All kinds of ways for a person to die in a landfill. One of the deadliest jobs in the country. There was a TV show on it. But the Mexicans, it’s this or the chicken factory for those boys. I put ads in the newspaper down there and they come. Why you looking cross, Ben? Who’s gonna do it if they don’t? You? That old criminal Leo and his crew?”
“I’m not cross.”
“Don’t lie to me. You got a face like an open book. That’s why I can trust you. Goddamn, Ben, people try to make it so simple. They try to make like there’s this evil dump that’s poisoning everybody and everybody’s innocent. They never write about how people be climbing in and out of the dump like goddamn monkeys. But you know what? It’s been three years since anybody died here, including Mexicans.”
“I guess I don’t see why you care so much about safety inside the dump when there’s people getting sick from it and stuff. Rashes and stuff.” My voice was cracking. My face felt warm so I knew it was red. I was too embarrassed to look at Whitey so I looked at my hands.
“I know about Ruthanne,” Whitey said.
I looked up. Whitey’s face was kind of pinched, like he was trying, and failing, to manufacture the appropriate expression. He said, “I know and it breaks my heart. And I know she’s in school right now and doing fine. And I know I don’t know a damned thing about airborne particulate waste matter, and nobody else does either. As for Leo, that old drunk, he had some good years, right? Why you looking at me that way? Listen, Ben, there’s something I’m gonna say to you. People pretend it ain’t true, and maybe it ain’t, but we act like it is so what’s the difference. Here’s the thing: some people’s lives aren’t as valuable as other people’s.” He raised his hands, like he was sorry to say it but somebody had to. It made me wonder if it was a speech he had given before. “Unchristian? Sure. But we don’t live in a Christian world, Ben. Religion is a Band-Aid. Think about war: how do we go off and fight other people if we think their lives are as valuable as ours? And what about the clothes we buy? Would we let our own kids work in the sweatshops that make them clothes? Hell no. We won’t even let ’em work in a goddamn dump. That’s for the Mexicans. Only reason we let our kids fight in wars is the ones who fight are like you, Ben: poor kids, city kids who’ll never get a job otherwise, country kids who’ll waste their lives on couches, eating junk food, raising fat little babies just like them. At least the Chinese are honest. They throw bodies at projects like you wouldn’t believe: construction projects, mining projects, engineering projects like that three-forked dam they got. One time I was in a Shanghai hotel and woke up in the middle of the night. I couldn’t sleep so I went to get my soda like I do, and my soda was on a table by the window. The hotel was in this tower, see, and when I looked out the window the sky was black—there weren’t no stars, from the smog—but the ground was covered in clusters of twinkling lights. Do you know what those lights were, Ben? Those little white lights like stars?”
“No, sir.”
“Blowtorches. Men were down there working construction all through the night, every hour of every day, every day of every week. Those men went home to see their families maybe once a year, too tired to do anything but sleep.” It was exactly what Dad had said on the subject of the Chinese working man, which made me wonder if Whitey had really been to China or if he saw the same TV show Dad did. Whitey said, “They call it human capital down there, and that’s what it is. We could learn a thing or two from China, let me tell you.”
“Seems like you already have,” I said.
“I’m not telling you how the world should be, Ben, just how it is.”
“But what’s the point? Why build all those buildings so fast? Why mine so much rare earth? Just to make more cell phones?”
Whitey rubbed his fingers together and smiled. He didn’t speak, like the answer went without saying. But I wasn’t satisfied.
“What’s it for?” I asked. “Look at you. I mean, no offense, but you don’t spend it any way I can tell. You don’t have a fancy car or go on vacation. You don’t have shiny teeth like Doctor Tom, or an expensive haircut. You don’t even wear nice clothes. No offense.”
“None taken. You’re right, Ben. I didn’t get into this business for money. I didn’t get into this business to recycle anything either, let alone some doohickey for cell phones. Where I grew up, we burned our trash.” He swept his arm vaguely. “If it was all the same I’d burn it still. Burn every single piece of trash in Bi-Cities Sanitation. That would speed things up.”
“Speed things up for what?”
“All I’m saying is I didn’t buy this place for trash. I bought it as a long-term real estate venture. This is prime real estate. I did my research. You know where Staten Island is?”
“New York City. That’s where Fresh Kills is.” Fresh Kills was a famous dump that got clogged up with chunks of the World Trade Center. I knew about it because I’d made a study of dumps during computer class, years before.
“Exactly,” Whitey said, “and you wouldn’t believe how much they make on the little pieces of that place they carve off and sell to developers. What I didn’t expect was to make such a killing on the trash part. The people who ran this place before—the government people, before they had the good sense to privatize—they must have been goddamn idiots. They didn’t make a dime!”
“You said it wasn’t about the money.”
“It isn’t! Oh, Ben, it isn’t! Look here.” He sprang from his chair and opened the closet. On the back wall was a safe with a combination lock he quickly spun. He withdrew what looked like a thin coffee table book. He turned to me, clutching the book to his chest. “Have I ever told you my thoughts on racism?”
“No sir,” I said, bracing myself for another speech.
“Racism is a species of suspicion of one’s fellow man. So are sexism and gerontism, which is hatred of the elderly. The slow separation of Komer and Haislip, first by class, then by race, is the legacy of hatred, the devil in man’s heart. But one day the two will be reunited as a glorious whole. Ever heard of Budapest?”
“Sure, up north somewhere.”
“Hungary. It’s a glorious city, but it’s actually two cities, Buda and Pest, with a lovely river between them.”
“But we’ve got a dump, not a river.”
“One day, not too far in the future, the dump will be the single spot of undeveloped land in the middle of a great metropolis.”
I found that hard to imagine, but I played along. “So you’ll sell it?”
“I’ll donate it, but not before I flatten it and make it into a municipal park. You heard of Central Park, in New York City?”
At first I thought he was kidding, but Whitey proceeded to lay out a vision so grandiose, so elaborate, that he had to be serious. With whispering care he described groves of crepe myrtles and azaleas, hills of native grasses, an outdoor café, a Shakespeare garden, decorative boulders rolled in from the piedmont. The park would be an inclusive space, he said, a neighborhood anchor, a focal point for the daily rhythms of the lives of its users, promoting ecological, programmatic, experiential, and social diversity. I couldn’t believe the stuff that was coming out of his mouth. I never heard him talk like that before.
“Ben,” he said, “I’m gonna show you something I’ve hardly shown anybody else in this world. It’s precious to me, so be gentle if you think it’s corny.” He knelt beside me and opened the thin book so we both could see it. On the cover it said it was a Proposal for Landscape Architecture Services by Vokler Associates LLC. Whitey said Mr. Vokler was the best in the business, a real gentleman, then he started turning pages in the book for me. There were sections and plans, mockups and photos. The photos were done up on a computer so you could see people lounging and cavorting in a park that didn’t yet exist. Sometimes there’d be a photo of the dump on the left-hand page then a photo of the exact same spot on the right-hand page but with, say, a man walking his dog while talking on a cell phone. There was an outdoor café, just like Whitey said, and a bunch of big boulders. There were little cartoon people eating lunches on blankets, kids riding dirt bikes, a dog high up in the air catching a Frisbee.
After turning all the pages in reverent silence, Whitey explained how he was going to sell the outskirts of the dump to real estate developers in order to create “a self-perpetuating endowment that will last for eternity.”
As I listened I was stunned but also relieved, and a little confused by this turn of events, this re-jiggering in my mind of Whitey’s motivations and, by extension, his character. Only minutes before, I’d been angry, thinking about Leo and Ruthanne and everybody else who suffered because of this man, but now I felt different. It was a beautiful park. I guess I felt proud of Whitey, and a little bit sorry for him too. I thought about the empty unfinished subdivision where I found Leo, and about the weird ziggurat apartment Debbie showed me. The man walking his dog, the people eating lunch, the kid on the bike—where would they come from?
“Thanks for sharing this with me,” I said.
Whitey stood up and tucked the book under his arm. “It felt good to show it to somebody like you,” he said, “somebody young and full of ideas. The kind of person I hope this town can keep, down the line.” He glanced around. “You seen my drink?”
“I think it’s empty.”
“Shit. Anyway, what did you want to see me about?”
“Pardon?”
“You’re 4:15 on my calendar and it’s damn near five.”
“Oh, nothing. I just wanted to touch base.”
“You want a raise, but you lost your gumption, didn’t you?” He wagged the book and smiled. “It was the park, wasn’t it? You think I’m a philanthropist now. Nobody wants to swindle a philanthropist.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess that’s it.”
On the way home I was relieved. I didn’t have to confront Whitey quite like I thought I would, and I didn’t feel bad about it because Whitey really did have a vision that went beyond money. I admired it. So what if the vision was self-aggrandizing and possibly delusional, built as it was on a hypothetical Komer/Haislip metropolis? It was more vision than anybody else had in Komer, or Haislip, or in Buda or Pest, probably. I was relieved, like I said, but a little dispirited too. I guess I wished it was my own vision, not his.
I parked down the block and was walking to my squat when a lady in a tracksuit came towards me smiling and waving. I thought she was just being friendly, but she stopped. She said, “You the boy who lives down there?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, since she was old enough to be called ma’am.
“That’s the old Jermyn place,” she said.
“Delores Jermyn?”
“That’s right. You knew her?”
“No, ma’am, but I tried to contact her next of kin.”
“Good luck.” She rolled her eyes. Then she said how she had known Delores Jermyn, who was “just the nicest little old lady you ever met.” This woman, whose name was Barbara, had been “school chums” with Delores’s younger sister, Pearl McCaskill. Pearl never married, Barbara explained, which was why she still had the last name McCaskill. Delores had married a serviceman by the name of Lawrence McCoughtrie, then somebody else whose name Barbara didn’t remember, and then, finally, the dentist Arthur Jermyn. “Everybody around here knew Arthur Jermyn,” she assured me, “and was his patient!” She laughed. I smiled. Then she told me about her own sister whose sister-in-law had married into the Donaldson family, and the Donaldsons were cousins to the Jermyns. “So we’re all related, you see? Why, Doctor Tom Donaldson and me go to the same family reunion. Can you beat that?”
I told her I couldn’t.
She smiled again and said, “Well, young man, I’m glad to meet you!” Then she walked away fast, swinging her hips with her fists tucked up near her shoulders. It was some kind of exercise, I guess. She seemed like a nice lady.
Downstairs I sat in a camping chair and tried to read one of the dusty National Geographic magazines somebody left behind. There was an article from March 1985 that showed some wrinkly Mongolian guys hunting with eagles. The hardest part, the article said, was racing on horseback to get to the dead rabbit or mountain goat before the eagle ripped it to shreds.
After I finished reading about the Mongolian eagle hunters, I couldn’t find another article that piqued my interest. All of them made me think of adventure, and here I was in a basement squat reading a magazine. It was pathetic.
I felt hungry so I could have passed the time cooking, but I didn’t really feel like it. I guess I felt lonely.
I called Ruthanne, but she didn’t pick up her phone. I called Pete, but he didn’t pick up either. It had been a couple months since I saw him, and he hadn’t graduated. I hoped he was okay. I couldn’t call Ronnie, though I made a note to visit him again in jail. I could have called Grandpa, I guess, but our conversations always involved errands or directions and only lasted about fifteen seconds. It wouldn’t have been satisfying. So I decided to call Demarcus. He had graduated and it was almost time for school to start, but I had no idea where he was headed. Tech, probably, or somewhere out of state for smart people. I would call him and find out, I decided, but his number wasn’t on the phone I got from Bi-Cities, which meant I hadn’t talked to him since I started there. Actually, I hadn’t even seen him since then. In all the years since I met him I never hung out with Demarcus even once outside of school, never even saw him. But why? He was my friend, wasn’t he?
I left the apartment and got back in the truck. It was six o’clock, a decent hour because it was late summer and still light outside.
The little white house looked the same, though the porch might have been sagging a bit more. Even the gray cat, Ghost, was still behind the screen door, so fat and old he barely raised his head when I came creaking up the stairs onto the porch.
I knocked on the doorsill real softly, in case Demarcus’s dad, Gerald, was asleep between shifts. But when I heard a man’s voice call out “Who is it?” I knew I woke him up despite my effort.
“Sorry to bother you, sir,” I said. “It’s Ben, Demarcus’s friend. He around?”
“He’s at work.”
“Oh yeah. Right. Where does he work again?”
“Hold on.”
The floorboards creaked, and the man I’d seen years before emerged in the same blue bathrobe. He wasn’t quite as tall as I remembered, and the puffs of hair over his ears were completely gray. He said, “I remember you.”
“Yessir,” I said.
“It’s good you came around. Demarcus is leaving soon.”
“Leaving, sir?”
“Yep. Made his decision. He can tell you all about it. He’s down at the Lounge.”
“The Motown Lounge?”
“That’s right. Go in the back, since you ain’t twenty-one. It’s the door by the dumpster. It’ll do him good. Pretty slow in there at this hour.”
When I got to the Motown Lounge there were a few cars in the parking lot, but some of them might have belonged to people inside the title loan office next door. As per Gerald’s instructions, I walked around back to a metal door beside a dumpster. I would have knocked, but I didn’t want to draw undue attention, so I let myself inside.
The inside of the Motown Lounge was dark except for some dim lights behind the bar and a lamp hanging over the pool table. The lampshade was stained glass with a Schlitz logo. There was a man leaning over the bar and another man in the corner at the table. Both looked at me then looked away. Demarcus was behind the bar fiddling with his phone.
I went to the side of the bar, not daring to sit down, and whispered “Demarcus? Demarcus?” until he looked up at me with surprise.
“Ben?” He came towards me. “You can’t be in here. You have to be twenty-one.”
“Your dad said I could come see you.”
“Oh. Well, if Dad says it’s okay.”
The man at the bar croaked, “Can’t be in here if you ain’t twenty-one.”
“Can if my dad says you can,” Demarcus told the man in a different voice than he used with me. The voice was stern, and it made Demarcus seem pretty old.
“Your dad told me you’re leaving town,” I said.
Demarcus nodded. “The army.”
I couldn’t believe it. The army? Demarcus didn’t seem like the type. But he explained how the army would pay a hundred percent of his college tuition if he served on active duty for thirty-six months. “That way,” he said, “I can go wherever I want. I don’t have to go to Tech or some community college. No offense.”
“I don’t go to community college.”
“But Ruthanne does, right?”
I nodded, touched that Demarcus remembered her. He was a considerate person. I couldn’t imagine him marching around, hefting a gun, cleaning latrines and whatnot. I didn’t want to imagine those things. I said, “But what if, you know . . .” I didn’t know how to phrase what I was trying to ask. I didn’t want to jinx him.
“What if I get my ass shot off?”
“Yeah.”
“With my grades, I’ll get a desk job. Plus I got a skin condition.” Demarcus explained how he got rashes ever since he was a kid, and how it was probably related to the spray they put on the trash at the dump. There was a class-action lawsuit pending and his dad was looking into it on his behalf. We were discussing whether or not Ruthanne could get in on it, what with her weird spine and all, when it occurred to me I worked for the man Demarcus was planning to sue. I let the subject drop. Demarcus talked some more about the Army and how he was sure he’d get his ass kicked in boot camp since he was “pretty wimpy,” he allowed, but he looked forward to seeing other countries.
“Like Iraq and Afghanistan?”
“More soldiers are stationed in Japan and Germany, believe it or not. How about you, Ben? What you been up to?”
I decided to come clean. I told Demarcus how after the campaign was over I stayed on at Bi-Cities. I explained what I did as succinctly as possible, not wanting to sound like I was bragging in case Demarcus thought I was a sellout. But he didn’t. He was smiling like he couldn’t believe my good fortune.
“My man,” he said. “My man!” He gave me an elaborate handshake. “That’s the American dream right there. That’s sit-down work for sure.”
I wanted to tell him more, about the not-so-nice thing I did to Tom Donaldson, about what happened to Leo, about how strange Whitey was, but it made me feel good that Demarcus seemed proud of me. And anyway the man at the bar was asking for a refill and another bowl of goldfish crackers. I said I should probably go. I said it was good to see him, and Demarcus said the same about me. I said I’d see him around, but I wasn’t too sure.
After leaving the Motown Lounge, I felt nostalgic. I drove out to the west side of the dump, where Demarcus and I had snuck in, years before, and I walked along the strong new fence until I got to the outbuilding I used to climb. The dumpster was still behind it, so I climbed up the dumpster and onto the corrugated tin roof of the building. I didn’t care anymore if a garbage man saw me, since I worked there and some of them knew me by sight.
It was a clear day so I looked all the way across the dump and tried to approximate where my house used to be. In the distance were some houses I recognized, but I couldn’t remember which street was which anymore. I was still looking for my house when I noticed something different about Trash Mountain. It was still a mountain by any stretch, still as tall as it had ever been, but the trash all around it had gotten so high that Trash Mountain didn’t seem like a mountain anymore. More like a bluff or something. The flattened expanse of trash made it easier to imagine the park Whitey envisioned, the weird Central Park of his dreams. In my mind I could overlay the landscape of trash with rolling green hills of similar shape. I tried to see it like Whitey did, to see the picnickers and dogs, the outdoor café, maybe a fountain or two, kids running through fields of cut grass instead of picking through trash. But there was something sad about that. Picking trash was more fun than running in circles like an idiot. That vague sadness must have colored my thoughts, because the field I was seeing began to transform. It got spooky, less like a park than like a graveyard. A graveyard without headstones. I began to see dark figures emerge, first hands then heads full of foul yellow teeth, then whole pale rubbery bodies. The Sleepers. One of them might have been Leo, I thought. Another might have been Boss, bigger than the rest, a real Frankenstein. Yet another might have been Ronnie, the true seer of these horrors. Ronnie was alive, of course, but he was also dead. He was forgotten. You didn’t have to be dead to be forgotten, see? And if you were alive, you could still be partway dead. The trash was all mixed up with us. Trash Mountain could be flattened, sent to China, and replaced by a park, but it would loom out there forever, and inside us too.