MOST OF THE cleaning services I phoned weren’t interested. The housecleaners said to call an industrial cleaning service, and the industrial cleaning services thought I needed a housecleaner. Dirt R Us never called back, JB’s Krew took one look and declined to give an estimate, Royal Custom Cleaning left an estimate of $6,800, then called me in New York a week later and said they’d changed their mind and didn’t want the job. I was driving back and forth from upstate New York every other weekend, with little success. I had no intention of cleaning it myself—it would have been impossible—and actually began to feel some relief, as though the responsibility were slipping through my fingers. There was nothing I could do. I realized that must have been Paul’s conclusion too. It was like holing up in a small protective cave inside a mountain of despair.
Maybe I could hire Alex’s two strapping boys and their teenage friends. But Alex never got in touch with me again.
I made most of the calls to cleaning services from Jud’s Mobil station, and the third or fourth time I borrowed his phone book he asked what I was looking for. So I emptied my story right there in his store like a bucket of slops. He knew Paul’s house well, drove by it every day. Knew the town had been having trouble with teens breaking into it, he said. Knew Paul himself a little, knew he smoked Kools, had sold him many cartons, stocked them mostly for him. I did not tell him where they wound up, as one-inch butts stuffed inside a thousand Pepsi bottles.
Jud spoke with a slight hesitation and stutter, and asked obtuse questions, such as, How come you wanna clean it out? I explained that I thought I’d have a better chance to sell it. He wrinkled his brow. Tall and thin, sandy-haired, hook-nosed, he was slow to react yet quick and efficient as he went about his business. And capable, it seemed, of doing several things at once—of talking with me, ringing up sales, pumping gas, and answering the phone, all, as it turned out, while his gears turned. He possessed the disconcerting trait of glancing off to the side as he talked, not once or twice but every few seconds. His eyes blinked a lot. One ear was pierced and displayed a silver bead. He gave me the name of the town scavenger, the man who would haul off anything for anyone, and who always had two or three friends in need of work. But still he seemed preoccupied. Then he stammered, What the hell, I could use an extra buck. I got some friends who could too. How about I take a look?
It took several months to go from talk to an agreement. We even drew up a contract: he and his crew could have anything they found, except ham radio equipment, important papers, and cash. I told him even though I’d be around, still I’d have to rely on his honesty. He said that I should ask around town, ask anyone at all, and they’ll tell you I’m straight. I stick to my word and keep my agreements, he said. But I never asked.
Our arrangement was that he’d hire and pay the crew, order and pay the deposit on the dumpster, then I would pay him on completion of the job $1,275. I’d also pay for an extra dumpster if needed. Jud and friends would empty out everything, basement to attic, and leave it broom clean. They’d do it in three days. The question of workers’ comp or health insurance would have been shrugged off, I realized. But who knew what sorts of hazards lay buried in that trash? One reason I wanted it cleaned in the first place was my fear that the county health department would sooner or later come sniffing around. Be sure to wear masks and gloves, I told him.
The day before they started, I removed whatever boxes and files of personal papers I could find. My plan was to park outside the house and sit in the van and go through them while they worked. Then I wandered the house one last time with plastic bags and gloves and bagged every cat and dog corpse I could find. They were stiff and mummified, some flat as road kill, though the flat ones generally stuck to any surface from which I tried to peel them. Those had a tendency to pull into pieces.
It was May already. Little green bat wings had begun to unfold from deciduous trees and bushes outside, and the day was drizzly—as my cousins in Maine used to say, it was spitting out. But I was inside trying to save my dead brother that much more shame, though I knew it was really me who’d be ashamed. Buried in his house, climbing through debris with a sack across my back, I cursed the absent gods for not striking the place with lightning long ago. What are you waiting for? I felt myself drawing a line in my soul beyond which forgiveness for Paul would not cross. His life had slowly contaminated him, leaving him helpless. He’d become a man tormented by the same compulsions that were medicine for his torment: the need to hoard, the inability to throw things away. For this existence—for its sadness and waste—I’d filled, drop by drop, day by day, since his death, with a numbing cold sorrow. It seemed to come from far away, from a spring inside the earth.
But for his treatment of his pets, all I felt was anger. Couldn’t he have left a door or window open? Does feeling so abject excuse anyone from a modicum of feeling for other living creatures? I pictured them roaming the darkened mounds of trash, searching for scraps, ripping bags open, climbing and clawing at the walls, while all the time—summoning up a thin wire of strength—they protected shifting territory and slashed at each other. They probably died of thirst, not hunger; every corpse was desiccated. Then something strange happened. As I stood in Paul’s kitchen, paper mask on my face and rubber gloves on my hands, my own feelings of rage, like a chemical solution, catalyzed to abjection. I noticed bits of fur and leathery skin clinging to the yellow gloves, and something drained inside me. This entire business was crazy and disgusting. I felt emptied out, almost dizzy. Everything, I thought—cleaning out the house, selling it, being a responsible fiduciary, in the probate court’s language—was all a crock of shit. Why not go ahead and burn the place down? At least that would purify it.
But what would purify me?
So I finished the job, tied up the bag, and went down through the basement. A poem by Philip Levine began to haunt me. In it, a pig being led to market pictures his innards released from his body and shaken out “like a hankie.” Not this pig, he thinks, but he trots along anyway on his owner’s leash. Above all, it was the title that kept running through my head as if on a loop: “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives.” But they take their revenge, I thought, they pass away but pile up. Meanwhile we remember, as in a dream, far back, the time when we shared a life with animals. And our myths remember too, from the Shoshone stories of Coyote and Wolf to the ancient Greek legends of Leda and the swan.
Today, however, our myths are neuroses, and our stories “cases.” Two of Freud’s most famous patients have come to be known as the Wolf Man and the Rat Man. Apparently, the animals’ revenge takes the form of haunting our inner lives. The Wolf Man experienced an intense fear of wolves, identified, says Freud, with a primal scene in which his parents copulated like ferocious beasts. The Rat Man thought if he did something wrong, rats would eat their way into the anuses of his father and a woman he loved.
Freud wrote of other animal phobias—fear of horses, for example. I’d experienced mild dog phobia myself after Paul’s dog, Rip, had bitten me on the leg: dreams of ferocious dogs in dank cellars, fear of approaching them . . .: But they diminished over time. It was only after Paul’s death that I discovered Freud’s suggestion, in Totem and Taboo, that animal phobias were a characteristic disturbance of our age. I came across this idea in trying to understand my brother—in a search for reasons. Why was Paul the man he was?
The case of the Rat Man became the central one in which Freud discussed, in our lingo, obsessive-compulsive disorder. He called it “obsessional neurosis.” Howard Hughes, for example, was obsessive-compulsive. He insulated and darkened his room with paper towels and tissues. Fearing contamination, he stopped wearing clothes. Yet he never washed, never cut or combed his hair and long beard, never pared his nails, which curled back as they grew. Before handing him a spoon, his Mormon attendants wrapped the handle in tissue paper, sealed it with cellophane tape, and wrapped a second piece of tissue around the first. Hughes then took the spoon, discarding the second piece of tissue, and used it with the handle covered by the first.
It should come as no surprise that Freud traced obsessional neurosis back to infantile anal eroticism, and identified its etiology as severe toilet training, an explanation not generally accepted today. The three character traits of anal eroticism, he said, were orderliness, parsimony, and obstinacy, all learned by means of the infant’s control over excretion. The infant takes pleasure in keeping back and postponing, in holding in his feces as long as possible, and then, once they’re out, not letting them go, but playing with them instead, smearing them around. The impulse to gather, collect, and hoard, say the Freudians, stems from an arrested anal eroticism. Ernest Jones: “All collectors are anal-erotics.”
Freudianism has always been a species of informed speculation, of course. Its explanatory power is more metaphorical than biological, though Freud himself often suspected that biology was the true answer. In the continuing war between culture and nature—between world-historical explanations, say, and those that refer all character traits to hardwiring in the brain—no one walks the fence between the either/ors as well as Freud did. For one thing, his explanations have passed into the lexicon of popular culture. Everyone knows what “anal” means: those with a mania for cleanliness and order. Yet few psychologists today would dare suggest that animal phobias are symptoms of a discontent of our age.
What would Freud have thought of Paul? Was it really toilet training? I sometimes imagined frightening scenes between Paul and Grandma, whose methods, I knew, were of the old school, and included rubbing sheets wet with urine in the face of the accused. I know because, to my mother’s dismay, she’d once done this to me.
Yet my brother possessed no mania for order, and surely not for cleanliness. He did hoard and collect with a sort of passive passion, with the carelessness and haste of an unconscious person fulfilling a need. What he hoarded was his trash.
I wonder if he even saw what he’d accumulated. Most of us don’t. That’s why we keep accumulating. Think of it this way: the duty to be orderly, obscurely felt as disturbing, unravels from within. You begin by tolerating neither waste nor disorder. Where does waste come from, anyway? From throwing things away. Therefore, do not throw anything away. Retain everything instead, even if it piles up. Over time, you won’t notice. You’ll look right through the mounds of trash, brush them aside as inconvenient obstacles. Gradually, then, out of the impulse toward order and control, the debris of order blossoms—waste and filth. It can take a long time, twenty years or so. One day you wake up as though shaken from a dream and look around and see it. I suspect the big change came with Paul’s retirement, three years before his death. He no longer had work to occupy his mind and time. How does it feel to open your eyes and see that your life has piled up around you? “I HAVE GOT TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT GETTING HOUSE CLEANED UP!! I DONT KNOW WHAT??”
It could be at this time that the animals around him first became a burden. He tried giving them away—“Want a cat?” he could have asked Woody—but they clung all the more. It’s like shattering a mirror—it just produces more reflections. “I HAVE TO GET RID OF CAT’S!!” he wrote. Exactly when it was impossible, it became necessary to get rid of everything. Filth is the excluded, says Julia Kristeva. Filth is defilement; it can come from the body, expelled by the body—spit, blood, shit, piss, sweat—but once it crosses the frontier of skin, it must be thrown away. Why? To establish the self as clean and pure. Filth, in other words, is matter out of place, as Mary Douglas says, matter in the wrong place. Cat shit in the sink. If it’s not thrown away, I am not clean and pure. To say the same thing, I’m thrown away myself, I’m abject. Abject: ab plus jacere, “away” and “cast.” I’m cast away from life. I’ve thrown everything away yet at the same time I haven’t, because I’ve managed to hoard it. Because I’ve thrown it away, I’ve done my duty, but because I’ve hoarded it, I’ve covered my bets. I’m dinging to myself. I’m the person given the impossible job of saving the very things I throw away. I both retain and exclude them—I foul my own nest. I’m a castoff. An animal.
The solution, then, is to leave the filth behind and move back in with mother.
At the door to the basement, I threw the plastic bag in a pile of trash, peeled off the rubber gloves, the paper mask too, and tossed them after it. But locking up the house I remembered something, and pushed the door open and climbed the cellar steps to get it: the photograph of Grandma. Paul’d kept it all those years on the desk beside his mattress; I pictured it now as the eye of his hurricane.
I was a pimply adolescent the year she died. Four years earlier, both she and Paul had lived with us in Boston for a whole summer, I’m still not sure why. Her roof in Wire Valley was being replaced, or her wiring, or her plumbing. Or maybe my father was keeping an eye on her—she’d been acting strange lately. Once, in his Chevy, she’d opened the door of the moving vehicle, and Mom had to grab her. After that, someone else always sat beside the door.
That summer in Boston she grew even more troublesome. She sometimes left the house and wandered the neighborhood, forcing Dad to search for her. He tried locking the apartment, and this resulted in struggles between him and Grandma, frightening to remember. They happened in darkness. Her strength, he said later, was surprising, even shocking.
I was sleeping on the couch, and lay there and listened. Grandma had been given my bed and shared my room with Paul—the same room, several years later, I would share with him. As I’ve said, our place was pretty small. It seemed odd to hear my father first negotiating with Grandma, then pleading and cajoling, at last ordering her to bed. She rattled the door, kicked it, and they scuffled. He called her “Ma.” That may have been the first time I realized she was his mother, not just my grandma.
The next day, she knelt at the living room window—open to the street—and prayed as loudly as she could: “Forgive my son his trespasses, as we forgive those . . .”
Later that summer, she crept up behind me at the same window and gripped my arms by the elbows with the strength of steel clamps. “Lean out,” she said.
I didn’t, of course. I tried to lean in.
“Lean out, you stubborn child.”
We lived on the second floor. It was twenty feet down. “Take a deep breath. Lean way out.” My arms felt like pencils in her tight grip. The top half of my body began tipping out the window, at the mercy of her strength. Then she pushed.
I barked helplessly, “Oh!”
She yanked me back in, limp as a rag doll. “There. Are they gone?”
“Are what gone?”
She wasn’t listening. “My own mother cured me of the hiccups that way. Nothing beats a good scare. When I was a child I had the hiccups once for four days running.” She’d turned me to face her. Her round black eyes, her peanut-shell face, her masculine nose, and lips thin as liver sliced with a razor blade—all had relaxed into a kind of nectar. No one could be more sweet than my grandmother, yet she’d just terrified me for no reason. “Hiccups wouldn’t stop,” she continued. “I slept with them, ate with them. Stuck my head underwater and counted to a hundred. Held my arms above my head and panted like a dog. Nothing worked. Then Mama snuck up and pushed me from behind at the window to my room. She grabbed on, just like I did with you, so I was safe. But I thought my heart would stop. My own mother! Thought creation was against me.”
“That’s what I thought too!”
“After something like that, you cherish every breath you draw. No more wishing for the evening if it’s morning, and wishing for the morning if it’s evening. It don’t work unless you’re trusting.”
Trusting? I remembered the time I’d lived with her a week when I was five or six years old. She accused all her children of stealing her things. Liddy had taken the Chinese checkers game, Madge the lawnmower, Winona the window fan. We rummaged in closets, in the cellar, in the attic, looking for clues of these crimes against nature, against the debt of love and gratitude owed to a mother. My most vivid impression of Grandma is seeing her bent into a closet, searching through boxes, paper bags, and shoes, while I stand behind on tiptoes craning my neck. The closet recedes like a pop-up book back into its folds as the door swings slowly shut, gathering Grandma into its dark wings . . .
In Boston, she once consoled me for some injustice I felt, some perceived martyrdom—not being allowed to watch I Love Lucy on television, I think, even though it was summer.
My mother’d told me that when she and Dad were newlyweds living with Grandma, Aunt Liddy often visited from Maine. Aunt Liddy had committed a terrible crime: she’d married a Methodist. She began having children and one by one brought them to visit in Wire Valley, without her husband, Uncle Jason—and one by one, Grandma took them to St. Patrick’s to have them baptized by a priest.
After that summer with us in Boston, she returned to Wire Valley. But each succeeding weekend, Dad found more evidence that her world had gone centrifugal, like beads whipped off a necklace and scattered everywhere: social security checks in the trash, windows left open, pipes frozen, no heating oil. Paul couldn’t help much; he had a job by then at the little airport in Wire Valley. The job paid for his car, which he needed to commute from Grandma’s house to the job.
Within a year, Grandma had moved in with Aunt Winona, and Dad told stories of her taking off her clothes and sitting in protest on the living room floor. Six months later she was in the senile ward of the state hospital in Worcester, a house of horrors so terrible that my father left Mom and me in his Chevy, parked on a road beside a high brick wall, when he went to visit her. Meanwhile, Paul joined the army. She died when he was stationed in California. He couldn’t come to her funeral, but once his hitch was over he moved in with us in Boston.
By the time I arrived the next morning at eight—our agreed-upon hour—Jud and his crew were already working. Trash was strewn across the yard. It turned out they’d come at sunrise, and had tom off the shutters, opened the doors, and removed the back windows, beneath which the dumpster sat.
But why all the cars? The whole town had shown up, or so it seemed to me. People watched from the road. Children ran around, more cars pulled up and parked, rap music blasted from a pickup truck. Several television sets sat beneath a tree, also some chairs, a microwave oven, sorted piles of videotapes, and a telescope. Then I noticed the sign, spray-painted on the back of a shutter and propped against a tree: Yard Sale Today.
Sunlight slanted through trees. The new leaves had perked up. Birds flocked about, singing happy songs, and townspeople honked at their friends as they passed. I felt caught in a nightmare.
Men tossed plastic bags out a window of the bedroom with the carpeted walls. Most landed in the dumpster. I crawled through a window in the other bedroom, where several teenagers were pawing through the ham equipment. Jud was in the hallway, his two helpers in the bedroom. One of them was up to his neck shoveling trash into a bag held open by the other, who averted his face. All three had shovels the size used by cleanup crews behind the elephants at the circus. They wore masks and gloves, at least. Only idiots wouldn’t. Dust filled the air and floated lazily everywhere. It colored the light yellow and brown and made the place feel underwater, like a giant cup of tea whose bag had ripped open.
“What’s this?” I shouted at Jud. In the hallway, he shoveled bottles and shit into a bag.
“What’s what?”
“All the people!”
“We’re clean—cleaning out the house.”
“I told you I didn’t want anyone in the house except the crew. You agreed to that. It’s a liability nightmare, for one thing. What’s with the sign?”
“You got a problem with that?”
“Yard Sale? Are you serious?”
One of the helpers burst out of the bedroom, chased by the other holding up a centerfold. I realized they’d removed all the doors. Jud introduced me. “This is Ray, this is Eric.” Ray closed up the magazine, pulled off a glove, and removed his mask. He reached to shake my hand. His arm looked like a leg. Wrapped in each sleeve of his white T-shirt was a pack of cigarettes. I wanted to tell him not to smoke in here, but too much was going on. I felt overwhelmed. In the tea-colored light he looked menacing: crewcut, pirate earring, stubble of blond beard, muscular torso. He was clearly a dedicated lifter of weights. He shook my hand firmly.
Eric, on the other hand, held back. He’d gone from a kid being chased by a friend to a somber adult in an instant. His eyes were dark, whereas Ray’s were blue. His shoulder-length hair looked mostly black, but the cobwebs and dust made it hard to tell. I should have told them to wear shower caps, I thought. He’d begun to cough, and while Ray slapped his back, he glared at me, it seemed. He blamed me for this job he’d gotten into. Get men who will not walk away from the job, I’d emphasized to Jud.
Jud seemed to be ducking in the hallway. I realized his head was almost to the ceiling on that thick floor of cat shit and bottles. All at once he asked his crew, “Who painted that sign?”
“I did,” said Eric.
“Take it down.” Eric left. Then Jud looked at Ray, who walked back into the bedroom. He turned to me, and for once hardly stammered or shifted his eyes. “You want us to do this job? You said we could keep what—whatever we found.”
“I didn’t say you could sell it.”
“What the hell else did you think we’d do, give it away?”
“I meant not today. Didn’t I say nobody in the house except you and your helpers? There’s two kids in there going through the ham equipment.”
“Ray’s two boys.”
“I don’t care. It’s too risky. I can’t have a mob of people in the house. And those people outside. You’ll have to ask them to leave. Also, we agreed the ham equipment’s mine.”
“They’re just look—looking at it. Here, do me a favor. Hold up that bag. I keep missing it.” He drove the shovel with a fury into a hardened crust of excrement. A bottle flew past my foot down the hall. When he dumped it in the bag, a mushroom cloud rose, and we both turned away. “One more,” he said, and I held out the bag.
When it was full he tied the thing shut and gestured me to follow. We walked through the bedroom and climbed out the window. He threw the bag into the dumpster.
On the ground beside the dumpster were fifty or sixty rolls of plastic trash bags. Also wheelbarrows, rakes, more shovels, and a toolbox. The dumpster seemed almost the size of a boxcar, and trash was spread around it—scraps of paper, bottles, wounded umbrellas, crushed boxes, magazines.
I looked out toward the road. The music had stopped and there were fewer people now—at least so it seemed. Full plastic bags flew out the window of the other bedroom. Jud took my arm and we walked toward the dirt road. “I called up the guy who hauls away the appliances. He says there’s a charge of fifty bucks each for the air conditioner and fridge. EPA regulations.”
I shrugged and looked away. What choice did I have? I felt tongue-tied. “Fifty bucks each?”
“One thing you—you might want to do? Take all the ham equipment you want to keep and put it in that closet.” He gestured at the house. “Then it won’t get mixed up. You okay?”
“Yeah, sure.” I couldn’t stop coughing. I’d been brushing off my clothes when suddenly it felt as though someone’d jerked a rope knotted to my stomach and running through my mouth.
Jud watched me. “You ought to wear a mask.”
We stood in the sun. Today would be warm. I finished my fit, gulping air, catching breath. “I brought some soft drinks in the van,” I gasped. “I’ll go get the cooler. You and your crew help yourselves anytime.”
“Hey th-thanks. We brought some too.”
For the rest of the day I sat in the van going through Paul’s papers and throwing most of them in trash bags. Jud came and went in his pickup all day. Every now and then a car or truck pulled up, and someone approached the bedroom window and drove off with a bundle—of what, I couldn’t tell. I didn’t really care. The dust from the house had left my insides swarming with pestilence. All day I kept coughing, the swampy tissue in my throat seething as if it had been shot full of needles. Also, I realized I’d never been a boss. This was something new to me. I taught college students how to think and write, but didn’t make them sweep the floors. I began to feel guilty for sitting in my car while Jud’s crew worked. One time Ray shot out the back door screaming through his mask. He looked at the sky, tore off the mask, took a deep breath, then swaggered back in.
They took breaks to smoke or drink sodas, but not for very long. Was Jud paying his friends by the hour or the job? They had only three days. Had he promised them booty? Made them think they’d find a treasure? I never did ask what they did for a living. What wormholes of fate and space-time, I wondered, put them inside the house and me outside watching? I’d parked beneath a tree down the dirt road, with the house in full view up an incline before me. They were younger than I was, but no different from the friends I grew up with in Boston, in my neighborhood and high school. Every now and then, one of them on break snuck a peek in my direction. Sometimes I got out and leaned against the car or walked around the house. I watched dust drift out the windows.
When he wasn’t gone or working, Jud sat in his truck making calls on his cell phone. A small man built like a fireplug pulled up in a dump truck, and he and the crew wheeled out the appliances—two stoves, the refrigerator, air conditioner, washer, old water tanks from the basement.
The extra charges mounted. I imagined Paul warning me: They’ll walk all over you, better be careful. Sitting in the car, I mentally reasoned with him: No one else would touch the job, I should be grateful, I couldn’t do it myself. Fuck the extra charges. I feel so weird, I said—or imagined saying. I feel like an outcast.
You? snorted Paul.
In the late afternoon, Jud strolled down, swinging his arms, glancing left and right—every way but at me. He said they almost had the bedrooms cleared out, but the whole thing was taking longer than he thought. And that dumpster was outside the bedroom windows, so when they cleaned out the other end of the house they’d have to carry or wheel everything to it.
I pointed out to him that there wasn’t as much in the other end of the house.
“There’s a shitload,” he said. “What—what about the basement?”
I shrugged. “What about it?”
He looked around, then snapped his fingers. “I got an idea.”
The idea was, he had a friend with a backhoe. He thought he could get it. They could throw things out windows into the loader and drive it around and dump them in the dumpster. They could load up right at the entrance to the basement.
Sure, I said. Sounds like a good idea.
It’s seventy-five bucks an hour, he added. Plus a hundred to bring it to the site.
Sure, go ahead.
He pulled out his cell phone, extended the antenna, and walked back to the house.
Meanwhile, I sat and went through Paul’s stuff. Once in a while I found something of interest. An annuity contract. Two or three stock certificates. I found his large cache of sketches, memos, and notes about reinventing the notch filter. I also found letters Hannah and I had sent him years ago, before we moved to New York. In one, we thanked him for forgiving the loan of a thousand dollars to help buy our first house.
But mostly it was all unrelenting sameness. Its sheer tedium wore me down. Why save every phone bill you’ve ever received? Why, for that matter, did I feel the necessity to go through each one, thinking something might be there? I had to, I felt. It was my duty. Doing so brought me closer to Paul, to the life of the recluse who was my brother.
I asked for a wake-up call at the Red Roof Inn, rose before dawn the next morning, stopped at IHOP in Salem, and made the house at first light. A man I’d never seen before was dismantling the tall radio antenna bolted to the chimney. From high up on the aluminum tower, he asked me to help him. Could I tie on that wrench beside my feet to this rope?
He lowered the rope. I tied the wrench on. “You from the Volunteer Fire Department?” I asked.
“Sure as hell am not.”
“Who said you could do this?”
“Fellow inside. From the Mobil station. He sold me the antenna.”
“How much?”
“Six hundred bucks.”
I crawled through the window. Jud and Eric were ripping up the rug from the living room floor. Ray hadn’t arrived yet. “I need to talk with you,” I said from the door. Jud gave the rug a last violent yank and walked into the kitchen. “That antenna outside. You told me you’d give it to the Volunteer Fire Department.”
“They didn’t want it.” His expression was different—hard yet neutral. He held back from expression and didn’t stammer at all.
“That guy on the roof says you sold it to him.”
“You got a problem with that?”
“I’ve got a problem with everything.”
“What is it this time?”
“We agreed you could keep anything you found except the ham equipment.”
“That’s not ham equipment.”
“Of course it’s ham equipment.”
“Ham equipment’s the radios and mikes and things.”
“And tower and antenna.”
He looked at my mouth. “So fire me.”
“Okay.”
He neither frowned nor smiled. His face did not move. It became a mug shot. Then he broke into a self-reflexive smile and shook his head, looking down. “Whatever.”
I waited. His mannerisms came back: swiveling his head, shooting glances here and there. Outside, a loud machine bubbled up, and we heard a triumphant whoop. Ray with the backhoe. Eric and Jud ran through the dining room and jerked the front door open.
Hadn’t I just fired them?
Later, Jud walked down to the car with a box full of papers he’d found in the basement. Looked like they might be important, he said. He rummaged in the box. “Passbook. Pay stubs. This here looks like an insurance—insurance policy.”
“Thanks.”
“What about those cars?” He gestured toward the three junk cars in the brush behind the house. “I could get rid of them for you,” he said. “Won’t charge you nothing.”
“Fine. Sure. Whatever.”
He’d won. Yet relief washed over me.
The day soon grew hotter. By mid-morning, Jud and his crew were working shirtless. As the dumpster filled up, they used the loader on the backhoe to crush it down. Ray chugged and spun and maneuvered the machine like a cowboy on a yellow palomino. He positioned the backhoe with the loader raised beneath a living room window, and Eric and Jud stuffed the rug they’d ripped up through the narrow window, and it puddled in the loader. As he sped back and forth from the garage or front door to the dumpster out back, his tires left ruts like huge unzippered flies. Meanwhile, Paul’s house poured out its junk like some diabolical, mocking cornucopia. I had no idea why I insisted on keeping the ham equipment, incidentally. I must have thought it would be a memento.
The same man who’d come yesterday with the dump truck showed up with a flatbed and hauled off the three cars.
Gradually I began to feel lighter. I realized why I was going through this nightmare: to cleanse and renew myself, not Paul—to exclude the filth he couldn’t exclude. In the dumpster, the trash made a giant mound, but Ray packed it down with every new load. They were almost finished, Jud announced. No sense ordering another dumpster. Each time he packed it down he gained another foot. Then another inch. Then nothing.
They were done.
It was nearly dark. They’d finished in two days. I shook their hands and tipped them twenty bucks each. Jud and I settled up. The overcharges came to about a thousand dollars, including the max extra weight for the dumpster. Total, $2,335. I happily paid, and watched them leave. Then I walked around the house with a plastic bag and lawn rake, and cleaned up debris. Inside, I took up the bathroom rug myself, since they’d neglected to. Underneath were little checkerboard tiles, white, green, and pink. They looked brand-new.
Our agreement had been to leave the house broom clean, but that was a laugh. What are contracts for? I smiled and shook my head. The next morning I bought a shop vac at Sears, though I remembered there’d been a new one in the basement; the crew had taken that. I vacuumed the house, including all those oily threads hanging from the ceilings. I checked the attic—empty except for a couch they apparently couldn’t squeeze through the door.
I was loading the ham equipment into my van when the man from G & C Container Service arrived and had what my brother would have called a shit fit. “Christ almighty,” he said. He asked where Jud was. I told him to try the Mobil station. No, he said, he’d stopped there. Jud wasn’t around.
“What seems to be the problem?” I asked.
He waved at the dumpster. “What seems to be the problem is I can’t take it like this.”
“Why not?”
“Suppose to be level with the top.”
“We couldn’t get another dumpster.” I tried not to panic. “It was Sunday. Nobody answered the phone.” This was not the whole truth.
He walked around picking up things. Threw a piece of cardboard on top of the load and it slid down and struck him on the shoulder. Threw it up again. “An inch don’t make no difference. Hell, a foot. That shit’s three or four feet over the top.”
“We had to keep packing it down with the backhoe.”
I bit my tongue. Don’t tell him that!
“You the owner?” He hadn’t looked at me once. He kept climbing on the dumpster and pushing at the trash with both arms.
“Yes.” With his back to me, he looked out at the road in his blue jumpsuit. It wasn’t clean. “I already paid the extra weight,” I said.
“How the hell did you know what the extra weight is before somebody weighs it?”
I shrugged. Crossed my fingers. He walked to his truck and spoke on the two-way radio in the cab.
“Look,” I said when he came back. “I know it’s a pain. Here,” I said. “This is for your trouble.” I held out two twenty-dollar bills.
He waved his hand in disgust. “Forget it.” Already he’d begun unfolding a tarp. He threw it over the dumpster, walked around to the other side, reached for the rope, and pulled it down. He walked around the dumpster again, straightening the tarp and tying it down on hooks beneath the rim. When he was finished, the canvas tarp was stretched tighter than a corset. It looked like a shroud in a morgue for pregnant giants.
He climbed into the cab and backed up the truck. “Another inch,” I shouted, gesturing with my hands. He wasn’t paying attention. The pneumatic beam resting in its steel frame was just about to kiss the front of the dumpster when I raised my hand and shouted, “Whoa!” But he’d already hopped out and started working, stomping back and forth. I stepped out of the way. He hooked a steel cable onto the dumpster, then pulled a lever on a box behind the cab. The steel frame of his truck rose into the air on huge shock-absorber legs. He pulled another lever and the cable tightened. The engine whined so loud I thought its gears were stripping. The dumpster didn’t budge.
Then it heaved and lurched forward. The slot in its bottom clumsily fitted itself on the beam, and this seemed disturbing—an act of sexual congress performed under duress. It lurched forward some more, tilting to one side. For a horrible moment I thought the whole thing would tip and crash and spill its contents.
But it slid up the beam with a sound of screaming steel. I felt it in my teeth. As the dumpster inched up, the beam slowly lowered on grasshopper legs, which folded in half and tucked themselves away with apparent haste. I could see why. The dumpster slammed down and the whole truck shook. He turned off his winch.
He drove off without a word, the truck slowly swaying with its awful weight. I feebly waved as it labored up the road. I was giddy with joy.
Then I hopped in my van and drove down to Wal-Mart and bought the thermometer with which this book began.