Discarded Blessings
James A. Moore
FIRST DIGITAL EDITION
Discarded Blessings copyright 2009 by James A. Moore
All Rights Reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Discards
"It's enough money to pay for next semester's tuition. Two more semesters to go, and I'll be done with all of this." He said the words and stuck the blade of his shovel deep into the hard-packed earth. The sweat and the stench were enough to make his eyes water.
Most people walked a little faster as they came in sight of the Dover Street Reclamation Center and Landfill. It wasn't a conscious thing; it was just that their eyes would shift to look at the barren field on the other side of the street. In the winter they would bury themselves deeper inside their coats, suddenly remembering that they had someplace else to go.
If anyone had asked them why, the same people would have said it was because they didn't like the smell of the air; or because of the huge swarms of gnats that thrived around the rotting debris behind the tall corrugated steel fence enclosing the garbage heap. They would have even made the excuses with conviction, because no one believed in ghosts anymore.
Donny Waters was like most people, aside from the fact that he worked at the landfill. It paid for school and kept him with a cash flow. Donny didn't admit to believing in ghosts either, but he still didn't like the landfill. "Ghosts I could live with, it's the rats that bother me," he once explained to his little brother. "Those rats are as big as terriers, and a lot meaner."
His brother Billy had asked him about the dump, because he had heard about the accidental deaths that had occurred over the years. As with so many of the poorly managed junkyards, a few accidents had indeed occurred. In '88 one of the Newberry kids had managed to climb into an old refrigerator and suffocate while the attendant was sleeping off another all-nighter. The attendant had been dismissed from his job, and Amos Newberry was buried at the county's expense. Amos had lost his shoes along the way, and those stupid shoes had never been found. The Newberry's probably missed Amos, but not very much. They had eleven other children to watch over, and really didn't have time to miss the little tyke.
Of course Amos was only one of over a dozen people to have died in accidents at the landfill, but he was the one best known. He was the one people claimed to see walking in the dump late at night, with his face swollen and blue, looking for his shoes and calling for his mother in a garbled voice. Most of the others had been simpler cases: kids climbing onto the unsteady piles of crushed cars and looking over the area for hidden treasures that only a child could possibly find of interest. Instead they sometimes discovered that the car they balanced on was not securely placed on the sprawling hill of rusted frames that made its foundation.
Those were the deaths that no one wanted to remember, the deaths that involved screams of agony fading into whimpers and finally silence.
Donny had been there for the last one. A five-year-old girl was crushed to death under two tons of Detroit steel, because her little friend hadn't thought about a little thing like safety; what kids ever do? The little girl--Donny thought her name had been Sally, but he really couldn't remember for certain--had been standing at the base of one of the rusting metal piles. Her best friend Susan had been at the top, looking for God only knew what. When Donny saw them, he tried to warn the two girls away, but the warning came too late. Susan had jumped down from the steel tower and, in doing so, had sent the top three cars sliding toward the left, where Sally stood.
Donny still remembered the look of surprise on Sally's face as the cars came toward her. She wasn't even afraid, just surprised, her face crunched up in curious concentration. Then she was dead, the only sign that she had been there was the crimson stain rolling off of the oil-soaked dirt beneath the cars.
Donny didn't want his little brother going to the dump, but the deaths of a few kids weren't his reason for talking about giant rats that ate curious little children. No, he knew that Billy was a good deal too smart for climbing the piles of misbalanced garbage that could collapse on him, even at only eight years old he was more cautious than that. The reason was more along the lines of not letting his brother find out what happened there regularly, not letting him see Donny hide the bodies.
Carlos Vigil ran the dump, and Carlos had a brother with connections in the Mob. Now and then, the Mob liked to use the junkyard to handle their own trash, and Carlos let them. One day, after a hard eight hours of tossing scraps into the compactor and stacking the endless supply of old, worn tires, Donny went back to the dump only half an hour after leaving. He remembered half way home that it was payday, and a date with Tina Fitzwater wouldn't amount to much without at least a portion of his pay.
Carlos Vigil wasn't in the office when he got there, and Donny went looking for him. He found his employers just in time to see the fat man push the remains of a small time pusher into a hastily dug grave. Carlos saw him around the same time he saw the bloated remains flop into their final resting place. Awkward didn't begin to cover the silence between the two of them right then. Donny had been hired to handle the legitimate work that had to be done at the landfill. It really was a case of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. That might have been the end of the matter and Donny's time among the living, but Carlos genuinely liked him.
Carlos had to talk Antonio out of killing Donny on the spot, actually managed to convince him that they could use another digger for all of the corpses. These days there were as many as three a week, and Carlos' back just wasn't as good as it used to be when it came to heavy digging. For Donny it was a very simple decision: dig a few graves or pick the spot where he wanted to be buried. Donny often wished that he had never gone back to the junkyard after it closed for the day, but he had, and now he worked a few extra hours a week as the penalty for what he had seen.
And the money was damned good. He had to admit that part, at least. The jump in his pay had been more than generous.
Between the rat stories and a powerful fear of ghosts, Billy had yet to build enough courage to hunt for treasures in the dump. Donny couldn't have been happier. Thinking about Carlos and his brother meeting with Billy wasn't a very pleasant idea; Donny had some suspicions about a few of the "accidents" that had happened at the yard with some of the smaller kids. He knew for a fact that Carlos and Antonio had a thriving business in the Porn industry, and that part of their work involved children. He hadn't seen any faces he knew in the pictures they had hidden around the trailer Carlos called his office, but he wouldn't have been very surprised about finding them either.
Once in a while, Donny let the morality of working for the brothers get to him. It was hard not to wonder who he was burying and whether or not the deceased had a family that was worrying over what had happened to daddy. His own father had left town years ago, and money for college just wasn't going to come out of his mom's little five and dime convenience store. His mother made enough to keep the family out of debt, but that was about all.
The job also made sure that the people Carlos worked for didn't lean on his mom, and that was important. His mom had worked hard to get where she was, and he was damned if he'd let it be taken away by some goons with an "insurance plan" and an attitude. If working at the landfill and dumping the occasional corpse helped his mom stay afloat
, it was okay. Donny could sacrifice a few morals, and the return in cash for the sacrifice made it all work out.
Besides, Travis Hicks hadn't wanted to continue working in the special disposals, had in fact threatened to call the police, and even as Donny was thinking about what had happened to Travis, he was carefully arranging debris on top of the man's grave.
Long before Donny came on the scene, Travis had been handling a lot of the special waste management cases for the Vigils. He had even helped Carlos in the argument about whether or not Donny should be allowed to live, because he liked Donny. Now Donny was shoveling refuse and disposable diapers onto the grave of his benefactor. For the first time in over a year, the idea of burying a body was bothering him again. Travis had never been a friend, but he had been a face that had some pleasant memories associated with it. This was the only time that Donny had ever buried someone he knew. He was having trouble convincing himself that he was only burying another piece of garbage.
It had to have something to do with getting older. That was all he could figure. Some time after his fortieth birthday a month earlier, Travis had decided that his morals were too important to throw aside, and Donny could respect that. The good Lord above knew he'd had a few issues along those lines himself. What Donny couldn't respect was Travis' decision to tell Carlos that he was going to call the cops. Travis had suddenly developed morals; unfortunately, common sense didn't come along with them.
Carlos listened to Travis' explanation, even nodded sympathetically as Travis explained that he would give Carlos and Antonio enough time to get out of town before he made his anonymous call. Then he beat Travis to death with a hefty section of lead pipe. Donny had seen the whole thing, watched from outside the office while Carlos splattered Travis' balding head like a half rotted Jack 'o lantern. His eyes refused to look away from the man's head caving in, and Donny could still see the way Travis's body twitched and shuddered as gray and red pudding spilled from his shattered cranium.
That had been three hours ago. Now, at half past midnight on a school night, he was feeling the sweat stick to his body along with the rotted bits and pieces of a hundred other people's leftovers, and doing his best to ignore the nocturnal bug bites that came with the territory.
"It's enough money to pay for next semester's tuition. Two more semesters to go, and I'll be done with all of this." He spat after saying the words, a little mantra he'd repeated a hundred times in the past. He also kept telling himself that he couldn't have helped Travis, that it had already been too late when he went to the office window. He hoped he could make himself believe it.
Donny just kept thinking about his mom and his little brother; if things worked out okay, Billy would go to college too. Billy would go to college without dirtying his hands. That made all of the difference in the world; it made all the guilt go away. Well, almost all of it anyway.
Donny shook the reeking layers of crap off of his work gloves and picked up his digging tools. His work for the night was over, and it was definitely time to go home. Right after he picked up his money.
The walk between piles of broken furniture and the moldy remains of foodstuffs mixed with old clothes was always unpleasant. Everywhere he stepped he thought about what might be buried in the ground beneath his feet. Or who might be buried there.
Late at night, when the cool springtime breeze rushed through little gaps in the mountains of debris and seemed to moan, he could almost let himself believe in ghosts. Late at night he could almost hear the cries of the angry dead mourning the lack of a body and a means of revenge. He had to work hard to convince himself that the chill he felt came only from evaporating sweat. That was the part of his job that he hated the most. "The graveyard shift." he chuckled. "Shit, I hate this place." The words were just loud enough to let him be reassured by the sound of his own voice.
Donny took a hard left through the labyrinthine sprawl of waste and looked over at the trailer where Carlos kept his office. The lights were on, so he knew he could get his money tonight, before he went home.
Carlos was in his usual place, staring vacantly at the distorted faces on a salvaged TV when Donny came in. He held one fat, chocolate-stained finger up for silence, waiting until the punch line to Jay Leno's latest joke was finished before allowing Donny to speak. "All done, Carlos." Carlos nodded, knowing that Donny had no intention of lying to him, and started counting out hundred dollar bills. As added incentive, Carlos put three extras in the stack.
"Thanks, Carlos. I really appreciate this." It was the truth. He was grateful for the extra cash, and for the fact that he was alive. In a twisted way, he knew that Carlos was his savior.
Carlos glowered at him for a moment, and then shrugged with an almost smile breaking through the two day stubble on his fat face. "S'okay Donny. You earned it. You should maybe start doing some more work for us. Ey?"
Carlos was obviously in the mood to convince Donny that college was a nowhere proposition, but Donny had heard it all before, and his attitude hadn't changed. He had no desire to work at the landfill and carry half of the town's drug trade for the Vigil Brothers. Computers and Communications were the roads to a more stable future, and one that did not involve going to jail if you got caught. With a half hearted smile on his face, he shrugged his sun-burnt shoulders shook his head. "Naw, I gotta give school a chance, Carlos. It'd break my mom's heart if I didn't."
Carlos shook his head with sympathy. "You're a good kid, Donny. Most kids your age would tell their mothers to go to hell. But you? You got class."
"What can I say? She's been good to me n' Billy, I want to return the favor." He could have added that he really did love his mom, but that would have made Carlos frown. It was okay to respect a woman, but as far as Carlos was concerned, love equated only to lust. Carlos had probably "loved" half a dozen little girls right into their graves by now. The thought made his skin crawl. It was bad to dwell on that sort of shit. Look at where it had gotten Travis.
Donny forced his mind away from those thoughts and pushed a smile back on his face. "Listen, I gotta get on home. I'll see you on Saturday."
Carlos nodded, his attention being drawn back towards the bleeding colors of the TV as if Donny had never been there. "See ya, Donny. Stay out of trouble."
Donny walked as quickly as he could towards the dump's main entrance, scurrying past the piles of refuse and pretending he didn't hear the sounds of sorrowful cries lifting from the ground. "Just the wind, it's always the wind." The cool night air seemed much colder than before, and what sweat remained on his body was all but freezing to his skin. Off to his right, a can skittered across the ground, literally moving from one pile to another, and Donny shut his mind away from the sight, convincing himself that it was only a rat.
Donny was about half of the way to his car when the noises started. From behind him, all the way back towards the trailer, he heard the sound of rattling cans and rustling papers sliding from one of the heaps. There was no breeze over his way, but he knew that the piles settled sometimes. Still, he hated being around the place late at night.
He heard the screams coming from the direction of the trailer as he unlocked his car door. The sounds were unlike any he had ever expected to hear from Carlos; they were cries of pain and fear. Carlos had never shown any signs of being familiar with either one.
Donny turned on his heels and started back towards the trailer at a fast trot. It took a few seconds for him to override his instincts and start giving some thought to what he was doing. Carlos was in heavy with the all the wrong people, and he would hardly be the first person to ever stiff his associates out of some money. He certainly wouldn't be the first person to maybe have to pay the price for stiffing the wrong kind of people either.
Courage faded fast as he thought about the people he'd helped bury in the landfill. "Shit." He spat and looked toward Carlos's office. Anything could be waiting back at the trailer, even another sight like what he'd seen with Travis earlier in the night. His heart was telling him
to help Carlos, but his mind was trying to explain why just leaving would be better. Swallowing the dust in his mouth, he allowed his humanitarian feelings to win. In a few minutes, the trailer was before him.
From outside, everything looked the same, except that the door was open. Nervously, Donny called out. "Carlos? You okay?" He listened for a reply, but none was coming. "Hey Carlos, you still here?" Nothing. Not even a peep.
Donny made the door on watery knees. From where he stood, he could see Carlos very clearly. There were pieces of him everywhere. The blue shag carpet on the trailer's floor was black in most places from the blood that had erupted out of Carlos. Trash had been pushed into the room, had flowed over furniture and carpet alike before settling into vague Rorschach patterns throughout the cramped room. The flow stopped at Carlos' chair. What was left of his employer's face was still staring at the battered old Sony, where Jay Leno was introducing his special musical guest through a thin glossy coat of red. There was no one else in sight.
Donny turned tail and ran as fast as his long legs would take him; nothing short of a gun in his face would have made him stay a second longer. From the trailer, the sounds of scraping wood and slithering plastic drowned out Leno's next question and the audience's tinny laughter. Donny ran even faster, afraid of what he might see if he looked over his shoulder.
Peripheral vision showed Donny more than he wanted to be shown, as the heaps of mankind's leftovers started moving, convulsing as if about to give birth." Fuck this. Fuck all of it. Not enough money in the whole fucking world..." He did not want to see the baby that came out. He forced his feet to move faster still.
Discarded Blessings Page 1
