"Juno can tell you."
Juno rolled her eyes. She had just turned twelve and hence found everything annoying.
"About two feet and nine pounds."
"Go on, Alex," Maggie said.
"Let's see." He paused to remember the exact words the way he was supposed to.
"Groundhogs are wonderful diggers, using their powerful claws to break through the earth and their paddlelike back feet to shove dirt out of the burrow behind them. An adult groundhog can move as much as one cubic meter of earth when digging a burrow. "
"Almost as much as you, Mom," Juno said.
"Enough chatter from the peanut gallery," Maggie said. "I didn't hear about any useful information you dug up today."
Juno waved at the mounds around them. "All the trash up here is about celebrities I never heard of. Can we go back down to the nineties where people still printed stuff?" "Yeah, the nineties," Alex said.
"I don't want you kids going near the pre-'85 lifts. Too much lead in the newspaper ink. We'll stay in the upper layers for now."
Juno kicked a twist of scrap metal off the path and swung the bucket higher. "I don't know why we have to read about all this stuff anyway. We're never going to see a groundhog."
"You mean a whistlepig?"
Juno smiled at that.
Maggie said, "I'm always telling you kids, you never know when some little piece of information is going to save your hide—"
They rounded a corner and stopped. Three men wearing clean CBRNs and respirator hoods stood in the path ahead. Two of them scraped the side of the garbage trench with tools while a third supervised. The supervisor saw them and waved.
"Stay behind me," Maggie said, and moved closer.
"Margaret Tyler Moreno?" the stranger said. "Widow of Jacob Moreno?"
Maggie could see through the clear plastic of his faceplate that his eyes were hidden by a pair of those chunky black goggles that linked him to the Globnet. His breast pocket had a corporate logo she didn't recognize.
"This is our stake," Maggie said. "You're not supposed to dig here without permission."
"Forgive me, Ms. Moreno," he said. "The men aren't taking anything away. They're just sampling the air. My name is Beausant."
"I heard of you. Building those methane stacks down by the old recycling sheds. You looking for landfill gas?"
"Yes, but not finding much here." Beausant gestured up and down the sides of the trench. "Plenty of organics, but not much decay."
"Haven't been in the garbage business long, Mr. Beausant?"
"I'm in petroleum," he said. "I'd appreciate any help."
"Well I can tell you the same thing any miner in the landfill can tell you. When they buried this stuff, they thought it would all sort of rot away down there. Just one problem."
"What's that?"
"No moisture for the bacteria. They squeezed out all the water, so the waste just mummified down there. I've seen a newspaper from 1979 with clear type. Bags of lawn clippings from the '80s, still green. Once I found a fifty-year-old purple cabbage that looked good enough to eat. On one side at least."
"I see," Beausant said. "So that's why there's not much outgassing?"
"You could do a bioreactor here. Pump down a slurry of genemodded bacteria. But it might cost more than the value of the gas."
"I wonder that you find anything at all of value here," Beausant said. "These mounds have been picked over for years."
Maggie held her hand out and Juno gave her the bucket. Maggie took the lid off and showed the slivers of fluttery black plastic inside.
"Number seven HDPE," Beausant said.
"You are a petroleum man," Maggie said.
"The Mexicans call it siete. It's what's left of the tarps they used to keep the rats and fire out of the lifts."
"So you must use some kind of bulk mining equipment?"
She clapped the lid on the bucket and handed it back to Juno. "Just a shovel and a fifty-gallon crank tumbler. It isn't glamorous, but it's steady money."
"I see. Thank you for your help, Ms. Moreno. May we have your permission to take more air samples?"
Maggie resettled her hardhat and glanced back at the kids. They were getting bored.
"All right, but stay away from the pit on the southeast side. That's where my late husband's uncle and his family died."
"Something hazardous?"
"They hit a patch of cat litter. A mountain of it, like out of a kennel or something. A week later they were all dead, which is how Jake inherited the place."
Beausant nodded. "Thank you for your help, Ms. Moreno. Clearly your expertise is comprehensive. Please take my card and contact me if you think of anything else we should know."
Maggie took the Maizeolite plate and stuck it in a pocket, then led the kids past the three men. When they reached the next turn in the trench, Beausant called out.
"Just one thing, Ms. Moreno?"
She paused and turned back.
"You said your husband inherited the claim from his uncle. I assume that your marriage was officiated?"
Maggie swallowed. "Of course."
"Naturally. Thanks again for your help."
Maggie turned and led the kids on.
"What was that all about?" Juno said.
"Just a man looking to do business," Maggie said. "Nothing personal."
In a little while they came into a small yard where a tilted shack stood. Maggie took the bucket and sent the kids to check the traps. She pitched the day's haul of siete into the handcart, checked the pressure on the biogas reactor, and fed it a stack of computer printouts—somebody's PowerPoint presentation from the '90s.
Her headset keyed and Juno said, "Mom, come quick." Maggie rushed around the house.
The kids crouched at the edge of the yard, huddled around something on the ground. Maggie ran up and saw fluttering wings. A young barn owl had tried to take a rat caught in a snare and gotten tangled in the wire. It beat its wings.
"Can we help it, Mom?" Juno said.
Maggie took off her hard hat and pulled out the bandana inside. She dropped the cloth over the owl's head. "Gently," she said. "They have very light bones."
The owl raked a talon over the back of Juno's hand when she grabbed it, but the heavy garbage picker's gloves didn't tear. Maggie took the wire cutters off her belt and made three deft cuts, then pulled away the bandana. Juno let go, and the owl took off, unharmed.
"Thanks, Mom."
"Help your bother with the rest of the traps," Maggie said. "Don't dawdle if you want supper quick."
There were only two other rats in the snares—little guys, smaller than squirrels— and another rat they didn't take because the other rats had gotten to it first. Maggie looked over the carcasses for signs of disease or toxicity, but they were clean as far as she could tell. She skinned them while the kids hung up their CBRNs and took turns in the solar shower. Once the kids were inside, she pulled off her own suit and stepped into the shower.
She scrubbed the day's grime off. She checked for cuts, scrapes, and rashes, but she was clean except for the one dark patch on her thigh that had showed up a week ago. It was still tender, but starting to fade, so maybe it was just a bruise. She tugged on her short-cropped hair to check if it were coming loose, but it stayed in.
Inside the house, she put the headsets into the solar recharger. The kids sat at the table and chattered while she lit the biogas ring and melted some Soylio in the frying pan. Everything in the house was reclaimed from the landfill, battered mismatched furniture, no two boards the same, lots of beat-up books that were still readable and mostly complete. Hanging from the ceiling were trinkets that Jake had called his "whimsies"—small, bright things he'd dug out, cleaned up, and hung as decoration. Most of the house ran on Jake's contraptions: the biogas fermenter, the gray-water cistern, the salvaged datafly and radio headsets, the roof garden and composting outhouse. His presence was still everywhere.
And so was his absence. When things broke, M
aggie didn't always know how to fix them.
Maggie made dumplings from TVP and the last of the Soylio and fried them with the quartered rats. She added in a chopped onion from the roof garden. Everything was cooked in a few minutes, and she gave the kids each two dumplings and three pieces of rat, while she took less for herself. The kids ate every scrap, crunching up the bones and sucking the tender bits from the heads.
After dinner Maggie cleaned the dishes, and the kids climbed into their mismatched beds. Juno wanted a story from the Arabian Nights, but it was Alex's turn and he picked the Irish folk collection with its leprechauns and pots of gold. After they'd fallen asleep, Maggie dimmed the biogas sconce and went outside.
The moon had set, and some horsetail clouds glowed with the light spilling up from the Vegas strip in the distance. Down by the recycling sheds, the methane flare stack flamed softly blue. She took the broom from the porch and went to the edge of the yard where a door-sized concrete slab lay flush with the ground. She swept away the windblown trash that covered where his name was scratched in the cement, above where she and the kids had pressed their handprints.
The first time she'd seen Jake, he'd been driving the Public Assistance water truck that serviced the Leisurewood Mobile Estates where she lived with her mother. She hadn't liked him much at first. He'd seemed arrogant, full of facts, too proud that he was self-educated. Maggie couldn't even read back then. He'd called on her every week at her mother's house—if you could call a FEMA-surplus extruded foam shelter a house. Like an old-fashioned suitor, he'd brought her little presents and sat with her in the parlor, teaching her how to sound out letters and words.
After he'd inherited the stake and convinced her to elope, he'd taught her everything she knew about mining. She'd helped him work the hills, carrying Juno, and then later Alex, in a backpack carrier. He named the kids after characters in the Greek history books he loved. Jake had been the first to volunteer for the hunting party to deal with the feral dogs menacing the south end lifts last spring. What they'd brought back of him was buried under the concrete.
Looking out over the hills of trash and the desert beyond in the twilight, Maggie's thoughts ran back to what she and Jake had always talked about in the evenings: How to get a chance for those kids.
Maggie had taken Juno to town outside the fence to register for school when she was six. The principal pulled Maggie aside and explained that Juno was a "discipline problem" and would have to be homeschooled. Meaning—Maggie found out later—that Juno's landfill address told the principal she was poor, and so might threaten the test scores that his job depended on. All the landfill kids were "discipline problems."
They also died a lot. Toxic residues, heavy metals, infections, tetanus, diseased and toxic animals, and things even more mysterious, outgassing, genemodded microorganisms, biomedical waste, even radiation. Only by constant vigilance, drilling them on safety, hygiene, and thoughtfulness, had Maggie and Jake been lucky enough to get them this far.
Now it was just Maggie.
And now this petroleum man sniffing around. Surely, even if he could prove anything, the kids were still the legal heirs to their father's property, right?
Maggie kicked a can and watched it arc into the side of a pile of trash, setting off a cascade of broken glass and bits of rock.
There had to be a way out.
The next day was market day. Maggie made the kids TVP mush and powdered eggs. While they were suiting up, she opened the hatch under the stove and looked in the cashbox. Only two clinkers left, their New Apex Landfill logos glittering. She stuck both coins in a pocket on her CBRNs.
She dropped off the kids at the Mortensen's house next door, warning them not to waste all day watching the vidfeed with the Mortensen kids (they ignored her), and joined Bill Mortensen on the path. Bill wore patched CBRNs and had a shotgun slung by a rope over his shoulder. Like Maggie, he towed a cartload of salvaged plastic and empty water jugs.
"How's it going?" Maggie said.
Bill grunted. "One of the kids put a whole phone book in the bug tank, clogged it up."
"I'll send Juno over with a bucket of sludge to get you going again."
They walked for awhile. Bill said, "Did you hear about Frankie Farad?"
"No."
"Dug down into the '80s. Found a pair of welder's goggles mostly in one piece."
Maggie nodded. Twentieth-century welding goggles contained cerium, lanthanum, and other metals that had become rare.
"He get a good price for 'em?"
"Enough to buy that membership in the Neolatter Days he wanted. But then he went blabbing around Park's, and some thugs rolled him."
"Some thugs, eh? He gonna be okay?"
"He'll limp a bit now." Bill spat expertly at a tin can beside the path. "Rivits probly has a shiny new titanium lip ring or whatever."
They walked on. After about twenty minutes, they crested a ridge and came out over the squat buildings of the transfer station, the only gate in the perimeter fence that ringed the landfill. They went down the path, past the stalls that sold tools and useful junk, through the wide, rolled-up garage door of the old scalehouse. There was no line yet—most diggers weren't the type to get up early—so they split up and each went to a different scale. Maggie tipped the plastic into the hopper. The clerk looked down at the black slivers.
"Still digging the siete, eh Mags?"
"That's what miners do, Reese." He nodded and tapped his handpad, checked the scale, then reached into the cash-box and dropped three clinkers on the table.
"That's it?" Maggie said.
Reese shrugged. "There's a glut of number seven on the market."
Maggie leaned forward and stabbed the table with a finger. "There's no glut. You're just trying to squeeze me."
Reese spread his hands. "Word is there's a glut. What can I say?"
"You can say you'll pay a fair price."
"Maybe you think you can get a better price somewhere else."
"You know goddamn well there is no fucking where else."
A shadow fell across the table. Maggie looked up saw a huge man with military-cut hair and splotchy brown and pink skin. In front of him stood a normal-sized young man with pale skin and a smooth, shaved skull. The smaller man had piercings all over his face and head: spikes and studs and rings of gold, platinum, rhodium, an ostentatious fortune in scavenged metal. Both men wore tailored silver suits, as though they were actual businessmen and not corporate thugs in charge of North America's largest garbage dump.
The pierced man said, "Is there a problem, Ms. Moreno?"
"You bet your ass there's a problem, Rivits." She pointed to the clinkers on the table.
"What are you trying to pull here?"
He glanced at the scale. "This siete is shit."
"I can read a commodity report. I know the market price on number seven hasn't changed."
Rivits twitched one shoulder in the smallest possible shrug. "Everybody says you know more about what's buried in the 'fill than anybody, Maggie. This is the price you get for your plastic. You want to make better money, maybe next time you bring better salvage."
Maggie opened her mouth to say something, but the huge man behind Rivits shifted slightly. He was a genomorph, bred for the Unwar, working—like many veterans—as a freelance tough. She glanced up at his impassive face, took the three clinkers, and hauled her cart away.
In Park's General Store she waited her turn at the counter. Mister Park was usually chatty, but he'd obviously already heard what had happened, so he gathered her groceries in silence. A little Soylio, TVP, and salt, and the tokens to fill her government water jugs at the potable cisterns. No powdered egg or cornmeal this week. They'd be lucky to make it through three days on what she got. She handed over the three clinkers plus the two from the emergency stash, took her groceries and was about to leave when Mister Park stopped her.
"There's a registered letter you have to sign for," he said.
Maggie froze. She'd
only seen two paper letters her whole life—one telling her mother that she'd lose her public assistance if her father didn't move out, and one from the insurance company saying they wouldn't pay on Jake's policy. She fought the urge to run out the door. She signed for the letter and opened it. It was from a lawyer representing New World Petrochem. She couldn't understand most of it, except the part about her marriage records not being found and new probate court proceedings on the homestead. Beausant hadn't wasted any time.
The next morning, Maggie woke up hours early and lay in bed staring at the ceiling. They still had the house and the gear. But once you started selling tools, giving up your ability to mine safely, you were on a slippery slope to starvation. Outside the 'fill there were no honest jobs for much of anybody, much less a single mother with no real education.
When the sun rose, she got the kids up and made them soy porridge for breakfast.
"Aren't you going to eat, Mom?" Juno said.
"Already ate while you were still in bed," Maggie lied. "Quick, now. There's a long day ahead."
While they ate, Maggie went outside and unlocked the tool shed. She brought out the full respirator rig and Jake's heavy-duty military surplus CBRNs. She suited up, checked everything again, and went back inside.
"I'm going down toward the pit today," she said. "You two will have to take care of yourselves."
"What's wrong?" Alex said.
"Nothing," Maggie said. "I'm going a little deeper today, and I don't want you kids digging down there."
Juno's eyes narrowed, and Alex rocked a bit in his seat. They knew she hated leaving them home alone. Maggie wondered how much they had figured out.
"Stay on the radio, check in every half hour." She managed a bit of a smile. "Don't worry. I feel lucky today."
Maggie walked south and downward, past the dug-over twenty-first-century lifts, down to the cells in the lowest layers: before the Unwar, before recycling, before hazmat regulations. She put on the respirator, sealed the hood, and turned on the suction. The rig had a built-in air supply, but that was only good for about an hour, so the filters would have to do for now. She carried only her entrenching tool and a sack. Anything of value that had been overlooked down here was going to be small anyway.
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