by David Haynes
Finally the whole mess concludes with a heartfelt prayer: there is even applause at the end. Lonnée strikes up what could be “Zippidy Doo Da” for all I know.
There’s Rev at the portal huggin, kissin, and blessin up a storm. Everyone tells him he was never better, volunteering for the shut-in program and for youth activity night. All of them promise to be back next week and forever. Lucille, waiting to greet him, is waving and blessing everyone in every direction. The congregation waves and blesses her in return. They even pat me on the back. I am held hostage, my arm hooked through hers, my hand locked in a white-gloved vice.
When it’s our turn to greet the Williamses, I am reminded of my manners and make the formal presentation.
“Reverend and Mrs. Alan T. Williams: this is my aunt, Mrs. Lucille Robinson.”
They receive her as visiting royalty. Lucille praises Rev for his inspirational service—praises him to the point I expect her to get down on all fours and kiss his feet. This his annual animal protection sermon, no less.
“Miss Robinson, you have graced our sanctuary. Marshall, you must bring your aunt to us again.”
Lucille bows deeply, discharging another Lifesaver from her mouth.
Up ahead, Sister Ida and clan wait at the parking lot. Warm greetings are exchanged by all. There is an extra measure of praise for Mr. Arthur Warner, who today is dressed as if he were the best man in Barbie’s wedding party. Sister Ida invites us home for fried chicken and glazed ham (sorry Rev), potatoes, and green beans cooked in salt pork. We pick up Sam and make it an afternoon.
Since I have had it with Queen-for-the-day Lucille, and am not speaking to a certain Arthur Warner, who has turned into a regular Little Lord Fauntleroy prick, I park myself between Sam and Sister Ida. Sister Ida spends dinner praising Jesus with Lucille.
On the other side of me Big Sam and Betty are chortling and giggling and picking off each other’s plates. Sam tears huge hunks off a drumstick. He finishes it off in two bites. He is grunting with pleasure. Betty Lou smacks her lips in delight.
Sam, using this big deep laugh not heard in months, saying “Mmm, mmm, mmm, Miss Betty, you sure nough fry up a good chicken.”
“Hush your mouth, Big Sam,” Betty says.
Suddenly I find myself in a goddamn Crisco commercial.
Shortly after some hot peach cobbler and vanilla ice cream, I stand up and announce I’ve got homework. Artie shakes his head “no,” as if it were important to him that I stay, but I hit the door at practically a run. Not surprisingly no one comes after me. So they sit up there doing Lord knows what the rest of the afternoon.
*
After her big day, Lucille goes to soak in a hot tub. When he comes home, Big Sam stops by my room. I am lying back checking out the ceiling. I pick out one place and stare. It becomes a hole, starts pulsing and rolling in my direction like hyperspace in the movies. Or I am rolling into it. From somewhere out there I here Sam talking.
“Quite a meal we had there,” he says.
“Yes, sir.”
He gets a hanger on which to hang the good blue blazer he’s taken out of mothballs just for today. The coat hardly closes at the middle anymore.
“I understand we had quite a church service this morning, too. Sorry I missed that.” Sam chuckles for the second time in months.
“It’s not funny,” I say. “She floorshowed. I’ll never even be able to show my face …”
“Boy, you’re so full of shit,” Sam says. He goes and changes into some overalls. “Let me tell you something,” he says on his return. “Didn’t nobody know you was there. Bless her meddlesome old soul, she loves her Jesus.”
“She’s driving me crazy. I wish she’d leave.”
Sam shrugs. “Not my problem,” he says.
I sit up. I ask what he means.
“She sure ain’t here to see me,” he says. “You got to be a man, son. Sometimes you got to be a man.” He just walks away. He dumps it all on me. And, that’s the last he’ll say of it, too. I know.
*
As I hug Aunt Lucille at the end of the next week, she squeezes me as if she wanted all of the life to leave me. She rubs me on the head and she looks at me, her green eyes all watered over. She says, “You’ll be just fine, so don’t fret.”
Sam watches out the door not saying anything while I load what little she’d come with into the big Lincoln.
Was I afraid Lucille was made of glass? Did I expect her to fall apart like a cheap toy? All you know to do sometimes is what’s best for you. For me, I decided Lucille had better go.
When I told her, she was in the kitchen scrubbing at a stain in the sink.
“Maybe Sam and I will be okay,” I said. Which means only that she was never gonna work out whatever problems there were between him and me. I know it wasn’t news to her.
Lucille raised her head high and faced me. “Well, I guess I can be moving on,” she’d said, almost dry-eyed. She said it almost with a smile.
I cried, patting my fingers under my eyes because I didn’t want to be crying. I couldn’t look at her.
She pulled me to her, insisted I was right and it was time she left.
I wanted to die.
Out of the car window she says to me “You’ll always have a home with me. Anytime. Tell me you know that. Say it to me.”
“I know,” I say, and I do know. I bet myself right there that even the worst person in the world, greased up and ready to fry in the electric chair, has an Aunt Lucille telling him he’s okay. And even if you accidentally gave her the finger as they grilled you, which would make the last thing you did in life flipping the old girl off, she’d be at your grave to see you off to your eternal damnation. There, just because you are someone she loves.
As she pulls away I smile despite myself and feel incredibly safe, indestructible.
I turn around and shrug. Big Sam shrugs back.
The next day a postcard addressed to me waits in the mail. A picture of downtown Las Vegas at night. It says:
Marshall,
Everything will be okay. I can feel it.
Trust me.
Mother
*
Can you imagine? Part of being a Finney is never knowing what to think.
6
SOMETIMES IN THE summer, when we were smaller—what Big Sam called little sawed-off runts—the boys and I would sneak up Dorset Road, hop the fence, and go poking around in the old gravel pit. You might find anything in the landfill or at least we thought we might: diamonds, gold, arrows, trinkets from lost civilizations. You couldn’t tell us then there wasn’t anything there but crushed sandstone, that this was only a garbageman’s dream.
I’d boost little Todd up, he’d grab hold of Artie, and we’d roll over the fence like ants crossing a stream. This was until we discovered ourselves a hole low in the fence that some previous explorers had dug. Todd always kicked a few rocks underneath first. He’d decided that this was the sort of place copperheads liked. At the time the landfill was still mostly a quarry, more gravel than rats.
Most often we’d start off the day land skiing and sledding.
Here’s how: You run up a little hill and then take off skidding until you start an avalanche that carries you down with it.
Then someone would notice a pretty stone, maybe the color of a shrimp, or maybe pointed like a spear tip. So everybody’d be digging around to find his own. We’d see that our diggings looked like cave villages, or like cities in the desert. We’d build roads and canals in the soft sands to connect our kingdoms, roads that coiled and wound around like snakes. After a soaking rain you could even make tunnels in the hills.
Then someone would misstep and smash-up someone else’s stuff. Sometimes on purpose. What else could a boy do but declare war, bitter wars, fought with great clumps of rock and missiles of sandstone as light as feathers.
“Cr-crck-cruck, splatt, boom, pish,” our whiny voices made the sounds of heavy artillery. Miraculously all sides surrendered in exhau
stion long before feelings got hurt, or a too well-aimed salvo found its mark.
Here would be three sweaty, dust-caked boys panting in the gravel pit, two burnt black and the other bright red by the midwest summer sun. until we remembered it was suppertime, scurried back down the hollow, forgetting even to kick rocks under the fence hole. One mamma or the other would want to know where you’d gotten so scruffy, so ashy.
“We was just playing,” we’d say.
When Big Sam got wind of us in the landfill, that bout put an end to our little visits. He said he didn’t want to hear ever again as long as he drew breath of us playing in no trash pit. He about tore up two little black butts, and would have torn up a red one, too, had he been sure how those people ’cross the tracks would have taken it.
We learned our lesson, believe it or not, and the closest we’d gone since was to linger at the fence, longingly watching the last gravel go, watching the hole fill up with plastic milk jugs and lifeless refrigerators.
Never once had I gone to the landfill with Big Sam.
*
On a Saturday morning after school was out, Big Sam’s at my door saying to me “Get dressed,” which I do. The sun is barely over the top of the hill, the sky still streaked with gray, rose, and hot gold. We load in the pickup with a thermos of coffee and go rolling up Dorset toward Colerain Road. The brown Dodge pickup already sparkles in the morning light, so well-shined is she. In the back of the truck Sam lays blankets and tarps so the bed never gets scratched up by the junk he collects.
I am surprised that rather than go out Colerain to wherever, we pull off into the landfill. Sam gets out, so I take my cue and get out too. He leans back on the fender, by the headlamp, and pours himself a coffee. I climb up on the hood and slide back. My butt makes a loud squeaking sound against the metal. I lean on the windshield.
“You risking death, boy,” he says, giving me a mock-fierce look. He checks for scratches, and then offers me some coffee, which I decline. He swats my tennis-shoed feet off the edge of the hood, off to the side so that they hang in space.
The morning air is chilly, but you can already tell it’ll be a hot one. Sam stares out over the landfill as if it were the Grand Canyon. Above me some scraggly scavenger birds circle.
Sam sips on the steaming coffee. “We’re almost full,” he says. “Maybe another year’s worth, if that.”
“Then what?” I ask.
“Cover it up. Bury it and forget it.”
“Just like that?” I ask, flatly—more a statement, to make conversation.
Sam pours himself some more coffee. “Down south, I think it was twenty years ago, they had a hole that they buried up. Landscaped it and built houses on top. Nice houses. Time goes by and some of that gas backs up. These holes get full of gas. That mess liked to blow the whole place sky high.”
Sam laughs and I laugh with him.
“Really,” he says. “This here is most all clean fill—not too much garbage, but who knows what folks sneak in here at night. Won’t be my problem, I guess.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“When we’re full?” He shrugs. “Something. At least I’ll be free of it.”
Sam scans his domain and gets part of a smile across his face. “We used to own all of this,” he says. “All this land come to the Finneys after the Civil War. All this raggedy hollow land down to the tracks. Apple orchards and grapes. You still see those fruit trees, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” I say, but I haven’t seen anything except for a few crab-apple trees and some sour green grapes climbing fences.
“My grandpa wasn’t much for knocking apples, nor for scaring up vegetables from some damn rocky hill. He must’ve been scratching out here one day, hit something hard and dreamed up this: a rock pile. Mr. Samuel Finney Jr.’s Rock and Gravel company. The ‘colored quarry’ they called it.”
Sam sees a box of cans someone left by the big shed which sits facing Dorset road. The shed serves as office and warehouse and garage. He goes over and sorts the cans into one of his recycling bins. Sam can be very organized. All around this dump stuff stands, stacks, piles, or gathers according to category: washing machines here, dead cars there. When you think you got the system figured, like magic a whole pile disappears.
Sam comes back and empties the thermos.
“Yep, they made good money out of this hole. Good money. You’d never know it walking back down the hollow. Niggers living in shacks, lean-tos—some no more than caves. Clean, mind you. Yes sir, them was clean folks back then.
“My daddy tells he went into one joint. The floor was shiny like you’d never believe. Daddy says he’d never seen no linoleum that color. Boy with him says, Tool, that’s dirt.’ Shiny as a new penny, Daddy said.”
“Come on,” I say. When Big Sam and his cronies get going you have to remember everything’s got a little embroidery around it.
“I’m just telling you what my daddy told me,” he says. “Daddy knew all them old folks down there. He was born here. This was his. Ours.”
“Until?”
Sam moves his big hands through his hair, sighs and sputters. The sun, already high enough to warm the windshield, sparkles on a bend in the river that I can see in the distance. You only see that river from up here certain times of the day—like early morning and sunset. Sam catches the sparkle too, I can tell, and watches it until it disappears.
“So much bullshit. So much you’ll never know,” he says. “Let’s walk.” We go ambling along, surrounded by rows of old rubber tires and stacks of rusted appliances. Sam carries a pointed stick, maybe to gather stray garbage, maybe to spear rats with.
“Think about it,” he says. “We emptied this old hole, now filled her back up again. Seems fitting, don’t it? Take and give back.”
“I remember,” I tell him, “when this was like a big canyon.”
“And I’m sure you remember how I wore out your little bottom for playing up in it. Stop right here,” he says.
We arrive on a rise of almost white clay studded here and there with cans, boards, and the bottoms of green glass bottles. A hot wind rustles our pants legs.
“What do you do with a big empty hole in the ground?” Big Sam asks me.
I make a guess. “Fill it up?”
“Smart boy,” he says. “County sees this hole and gets the same idea. Was my daddy’s hole then. Thing was: the county man wasn’t too crazy about paying some spook to use his landfill. Not in 1960, they weren’t.”
“So they bought him out?” I try another guess. Maybe something’s clearer. I’m not sure what. Sam so rarely talks. About anything.
“What’s this land worth? How much? Take a guess.”
Since I don’t have a clue, I just shrug.
“Land where your family’s buried. Bought with blood and sweat. Tell me. How much?” He squares off in front of me, demanding an answer.
“There’s … um … it’s not for sale?”
“Damn right. Remember that.” He goes back to his story. He’s like in a trance. He kicks rocks and throws stones as he talks. Eventually we crouch down, squatting on our haunches like cavemen. You wouldn’t want to sit down here.
“They offered plenty money. Some other land. Some good farm land down in the river valley. Daddy said ‘no.’ We held the title full and clear. That was that.”
“They took the land?”
“Nothing’s ever that simple, boy. Right here where we standing was a pile of soft powdered silt—so fine you couldn’t get a footing. Daddy brought it in here figuring it might be worth something to somebody. One night a couple of little ones snuck in here to play.” He says this and gives me one of his you-know-what-I-mean looks.
“They got in this mess just as a rain came. Like a cement it set up. Daddy found them the next morning half-dead from screaming and trying to get out. Right here it happened.”
Sam rises and stretches out each long leg. One of his knees pops. I follow him back to the truck. He backs the tru
ck out on Dorset, orders me out to padlock the gate.
“Those boys,” I ask. “Were they all right?”
“Tired. Scared. Not half as scared as Daddy. Something inside him changed. He gave this hole away. The old fool just signed a paper and gave it away. Stuck them papers away in the back of some file like they was nothing. Just like that.” Sam snaps his fingers. “Didn’t say shit to me. To no one.”
Sam laughed a bitter, full laugh. The sort of laugh the bad guys laugh in those James Bond films.
“The county was so grateful to him that they saved the hollow. Suburban renewed us. Built the Washington Park Estates. God’s Little Acre.” He laughed his evil laugh some more.
“I don’t see what’s so funny.”
“Don’t you see, son? You and me, we the trash kings of Saint Louis County. This,” he says, pulling into the driveway, “this is the house that trash built.”
Sam stops laughing. He gives me a sour look. “I wouldn’t of done it,” he says. “And I sure wouldn’t do it to you.” He gets out of the truck, goes in the house, slams the door. I just sit there. In the truck. In the sun.
In my mind I jump out and go after him.
Come back here, I yell at him. Get to the punchline.
Is this about what is supposed to happen or what just happens anyway? About you or about me? Tell me what you want me to think, how I’m supposed to feel. Why’d you take me to your stupid dump? I don’t half believe you anyway.
I get up enough courage to go in and ask questions. Which questions I don’t know yet.
That fast he has changed into some of his good clothes. His silky white shirt and fancy brown blazer.
I’ll be out a little while,” he says. “There’s plenty of food, I think.”
He lays a ten dollar bill on the cracked coffee table.
On the way out the door he stops and says to me, “You take what you get, you know?”
