Trash Mountain

by Bradley Bazzle

  I lay on my back until the laughter dwindled. Beyond the low trash hills that encircled me loomed Trash Mountain, hazy in the distance. A black vulture was standing near the top, the shoulders of its wings hiked up to its burrowed head. Another vulture circled then came down beside it.

  I climbed back onto the path and walked deeper into the dump, trying to maintain a mental map in case I had to run for cover again. There seemed to be more paths than before. I was way off to the left, on the Komer side, when I decided there was something different. It was like I was in a whole new part, familiar but strange, like a dream. The trash itself had a different quality: brighter and newer, the hills less settled. The fence was like that too. It was the same type of fence as before, but the mesh was darker and the tips of the razor wire were brighter in the sunlight.

  “Psst!”

  At the sound of the human voice I searched for a place to dive and bury myself in trash, but before I could make my next move I saw Boss. He was a ways up the path, crouched like he was hiding. He waved me towards him.

  When I got close he raised his finger to his lips. He turned and walked, still crouching, and I followed him away from the path, over some well-worn trash, to a spot where his wheelbarrow was leaning against the fence.

  “Welcome back!” Boss smiled and made conversation like nothing was different. When I asked what happened to Leo and Candy, he said they had a new hideout. He had worked on it for two whole weeks while Candy gathered trash for Leo, who had set up shop in a new spot each day. “We could have used ya,” he said, and I felt bad.

  “Sorry it’s been so long,” I said. “My Grandpa lives real far away.”

  “Why don’t you stake out your own place?”

  “Maybe I will,” I said, though I wasn’t sure what he meant by that.

  Boss said he was on his way to the hideout, if I wanted to join him, then he righted his wheelbarrow and we set off along the fence. I knew without asking that he had cleared the path himself, to keep out of sight. I wondered why all the secrecy. Didn’t Boss and the garbage men have an understanding?

  I asked Boss why the fence looked different, and he said they had expanded the dump again. The part we were standing on was brand new. He described with amazement how one day they just dug up the fence and moved it. “All that was here before was a crumbly street, some tree stumps and a couple concrete slab foundations,” he said, “so I guess there were houses here, years ago. But mostly it was just weeds.”

  I was disturbed. My old house had a concrete slab foundation. I pressed my face to the fence to see where we were, in terms of Komer, but the weave in the mesh was too tight. All I could see were tiny pinpricks of light. “Right here where we’re standing?” I asked.

  “Yep,” he said. “They covered it in trash pretty quick. The trash is brand new so it’s high-yield picking, is the good news. Bad news is there’s way more people around.”

  We entered an older part of the dump, near the shitty woods, and came to a long flat hill of ancient looking trash. Beside the fence were stacks of different recyclables—cardboard, cans, bottles, the usual—and Boss started pulling stuff out of his wheelbarrow. I helped.

  “This is the new spot?” I asked, kind of disappointed.

  Boss laughed. “Out in the open like this? Hell no. In the new spot there isn’t room for this cheap stuff, so I leave it out here.”

  When the only stuff left in the wheelbarrow was cell phones, remote controls and the like, Boss pushed the wheelbarrow about a hundred yards further along the fence, where he rested it. Then he got down on his knees and started pushing through trash like he was looking for something. What he was looking for, it turned out, was a roughhewn wooden hatch like the door to a cellar. He opened it just wide enough for me to creep through, which I did with some trepidation. The space it led to was dark and cold. Boss came down after me and wedged his wheelbarrow halfway in the door to keep it propped.

  The propped door let in enough light that I could see we were in a tiny room reinforced by wood and sheet metal. Leo and Candy were sitting across from us, tinkering. A dim camping lantern hung between them. Boss started pulling stuff out of the wheelbarrow and piling it at Leo and Candy’s feet. The ceiling was so low he had to sit down, but he could reach from the door to the table without moving, like he planned it that way.

  “Hey there, sugar,” Candy said without looking. “Like our new digs?”

  “Seems pretty secret,” I said.

  “That’s the idea.”

  Leo didn’t look at me or say anything. But later, when I was helping Boss unload the wheelbarrow, I caught him giving me a dirty glance.

  Back on the surface, making our rounds, Boss apologized for Leo. He said Leo was even more paranoid than before on account of being arrested.

  “Leo got arrested?”

  “For trespassing. Spent the night in jail.” Boss said the unspoken agreement they used to have about collecting recyclables, to beat the inspectors, didn’t seem to hold anymore. He didn’t know why. “Thing is,” he said, “I never see those Bi-Cities boys scavenging for bottles and such, but there’d be plenty to go round even if they did. This new trash is filthy with it.” He pointed with his shoe at six brown beer bottles in a cardboard case, neat and tidy. “See what I mean?”

  “Maybe they’re after the rare earth,” I said, testing Grandpa’s theory.

  “Maybe so,” Boss said. “Leo tells me to keep the phones in my pockets in case I run into trouble, but my waders don’t have pockets so I still put them in the wheelbarrow.” Boss laughed. “Old Leo probably thought you was a spy sent by Whitey Connors to infiltrate our operation.”

  I laughed, to be congenial, but the name Whitey Connors was starting to make my blood boil. These were hard working people, the way I saw it, and Whitey Connors was stabbing them in the back. I wondered if I should tell Boss I was turning it around on Whitey Connors—that I was going to infiltrate him—but I decided to keep it secret.

  Boss gathered electronics while I gathered the more obvious recyclables. Boss said he had my makeshift wheelbarrow in a secret place but that I shouldn’t use it until I got a feel for how things had changed, since we had to be extra careful.

  The wheelbarrow was almost full when Boss whispered “Shh!” and got low. He knocked the cheap recyclables off the wheelbarrow with a sweep of one long arm and started stuffing the cell-phones down the front of his waders. “Take cover,” he whispered, and we scrambled over the nearest pile of trash. He started digging into the pile until he had made a sort of hollow for himself. I dug too, but my hollow was so close to his that by the time we slid into our respective hollows and started covering ourselves with trash, to hide, we were right next to each other. The smell of the trash wouldn’t have been so bad—I was used to it by then—if it weren’t for the reek of Boss’s steamy breath. His breath was tinged with the sweet smell of decay, like the trash all around us had somehow contaminated his body.

  Some men strolled past, speaking Spanish. One made a joke, I guess, because the others laughed like hell. I was afraid. I should have listened to Grandpa, I thought. I should have listened to Ruthanne. This was serious trouble. What we were doing was illegal now, if it hadn’t been before. Leo had spent the night in jail for it. My heart was racing. I tried to control my breathing like Rick Zorn in Detroit Ninja, where some ninjas show him how they slow their heart-rates until they’re legally dead, but I just couldn’t do it. I wasn’t a ninja, and I wasn’t Rick Zorn. By the time those garbage men were out of earshot I was ready to burst. I clawed my way out of the trash Boss had piled on top of us and hunched over with my hands on my knees. I was almost crying. Boss leaned over me and said he was sorry. I said I was too. I said I had to go home.

  I would have gone straight home, to Grandpa’s, if I could have found my bike. I had left it in my old hiding place behind some bushes next to the gravel parking lot across the street from the dump, but it was gone. At first I was confused. I thought I must have left
it somewhere else, by mistake. I looked behind all the bushes and all the trees until it dawned on me that my bike had been stolen. I couldn’t believe it. It was a kid’s bike! Sure I was sixteen, seventeen almost, but nobody would have known that by looking at the bike. What was the world coming to?

  I considered calling Grandpa to explain and get a ride home, but I didn’t have any money for a payphone and I didn’t feel like going anywhere to ask to use a regular phone. I was angry. I was also hungry. I would have bought a sandwich except I didn’t have any money, like I said. What an idiot I was.

  The walk to Grandpa’s took much longer than I expected, and was pretty awful. I was hungry from the start, and the two-lane highway was so narrow I had to jump out of it a couple times to avoid oncoming cars. By the time I got to Grandpa’s it was well past nightfall.

  Grandpa had the front light on and was waiting for me in the kitchen, which surprised me. I wasn’t used to having anybody wait up for me. When I came through the door, he set down his book and lowered his reading glasses. He looked pissed.

  “I called Bi-Cities,” he said, “and no one named Leo is on the payroll.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Don’t play dumb. There isn’t any recycling program either.”

  “But I’ve been recycling. I swear.”

  “These people you work with, where do they sleep?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Don’t talk back. Where do they sleep?”

  I thought of the shelter Boss had dug. “I really don’t know,” I said. “Trailers, maybe?”

  “How do they smell? Are their clothes clean?”

  I wanted to say Boss smelled great and dressed like a banker, but I couldn’t. I was tired of lying. I was upset, too, because I knew what Grandpa was getting at. I said, “Don’t hobos, like, ride the rails and stuff?”

  “Sometimes,” Grandpa said, “but sometimes they stay put in one place for quite a while. The important part is they live by stealing. This so-called scavenging business is just stealing by another name.”

  “Leo had a deal with Whitey Connors.”

  “If he’s dealing with Whitey Connors, then he got what he deserved. My God, boy, do you realize the danger you’re in?”

  “I’m not in danger.”

  “Not in danger, huh? Hobos use sodomy as initiation!”

  “They aren’t hobos!”

  It was the first time we ever yelled at each other. Mom said Grandpa used to yell at lot when she was a kid but that he mellowed with age, so I guess I caught a glimpse of the old Grandpa, before he was Grandpa and was just a mean dad. I didn’t like it. I felt sorry, though. I had stayed out late and made him worry.

  He seemed sorry too. He offered me dinner, and I accepted.

  After a dinner of beans and white bread we sat by the windows in the kitchen. That’s where Grandpa kept his recliner, along with a scratchy old chair he had dragged over from the seldom-used living room when I first moved in. The windows faced the screened-in back porch, but it was hard to see much through the screens.

  After a bourbon and soda Grandpa said, “In the Army, to train the medics, they had us do trachs on goats.”

  “What’s a trach?” I asked.

  “A tracheotomy. It’s where when somebody’s choking you stick a pen or a straw into their necks.”

  “The goats were choking?”

  “No.” He got quiet, remembering. “It was just for practice.”

  I was shocked. “You practiced on goats? Live goats?”

  Grandpa nodded.

  “Did they die? The goats?”

  “Yeah, but we could do few on each goat before it ran out of room on its throat or bled to death.”

  It took me a while to notice Grandpa was crying, and when I did I tried to pretend I didn’t. But he knew I noticed, and he said he was sorry. I wanted to tell him he didn’t have to be sorry, but by then he was telling me how by crying for the goats he was actually crying for the men who died. But also for the goats. It was confusing.

  “I have to keep up the fence for appearances,” Grandpa said, “to make it look like I’m still raising them, to keep my Ag exemption.”

  I had lots of questions. Like why had the Army taken Grandpa’s goats? Or were those different goats? Were there two sets of goats? But it would be better to change the subject, I decided, and seeing Grandpa cry made me feel like I could open up to him about my own life. But I didn’t want to talk about Mom and Dad or Ruthanne, and it was too soon to open up about my secret inner feelings on the subject of Trash Mountain, so I ended up just sort of sitting there until Grandpa started in on his story about the time he found a hobo bed in the converted garage (“A hobo bed atop an actual bed—whoever heard of such a thing!”) so he had stripped the blanket and sheets and burned it all in the back yard as a warning to the hobos. He sat back and crossed his arms, like thinking of the burning still gave him a satisfied feeling, years later. But burning perfectly good sheets seemed pretty stupid to me. Probably those hobos, if they even existed, just needed a place to sleep and figured he wouldn’t notice. He never used that part of the house. In fact, he used so little of the house except his bedroom and the kitchen that a whole squadron of hobos might have been living there as we spoke, which was creepy to think about so I didn’t say it. Anyway, the whole thing made me wish Grandpa could get an Ag exemption for hobos instead of goats.

  Chapter 10

  HARD AS GRANDPA and I worked outside digging postholes and whatnot, rainy days inside were worse. We just sat in the kitchen in our respective chairs, swatting mosquitoes and reading. Grandpa didn’t have cable, but he had a VCR and fourteen VHS tapes, mostly erotic thrillers. The best was one called Taxi Dancers, where a gangster trying to turn his life around teams up with some strippers against an Asian street gang called the Yellow Dragons. There’s decent motorcycle action, and the Yellow Dragons are pretty fierce pool cue fighters.

  When I got through all the VHS tapes, I had no choice but to read. The only book I brought was The Highest Mountain by Bob Bilger, so I started reading it again. I skipped the childhood parts and went straight to the climbing parts. But Mount Everest got me thinking about Trash Mountain and about the fear I had felt while lying there with Boss as the workers passed by. I was a pretty half-assed adventurer, it seemed to me. Climbing Everest with your Sherpa buddy and a Betamax camcorder was pretty much the opposite of sitting in your Grandpa’s kitchen.

  Grandpa, who read mostly historical fiction and presidential biographies, told me he tried to read The Highest Mountain but couldn’t get through it.

  I was shocked. Who couldn’t get through The Highest Mountain?

  “The man’s a windbag,” Grandpa said.

  “Maybe,” I said, “but he’s also a great adventurer.”

  “Adventure is overrated.” Grandpa went into his usual rigmarole about how adventure and warfare were closely related, the result of man’s restless nature. He had no use for either. “And anybody who saw action in Vietnam,” Grandpa added, “wouldn’t glorify it.”

  “He barely even mentions Vietnam,” I said, and I showed Grandpa in the book how it skipped from Bob Bilger’s teenage years in Haislip to his disillusioning young adulthood on the streets of San Francisco.

  “Maybe you’re right,” Grandpa said, “but I still think the book’s for shit.”

  “Got another I can read?”

  Grandpa looked at the stack of library books on the kitchen table and pursed his lips like he was thinking, but he didn’t say anything.

  A few days later we drove into town to buy groceries (cornflakes, white bread, onions, and a five-pound bag of dried pinto beans) and afterward we stopped at the library. The Komer/Haislip branch “didn’t have books for shit,” according to Grandpa, so he ordered them from the city through a loan service and picked them up once a month. This time there were more books for him to pickup than usual, and he sorted through them at the counter. I thought it was to make sure they gave him a
ll the books he ordered, but then he handed half the books to me.

  “These are some real books,” he said, and I thought he meant “real man” books, or something like that, until I saw that half the titles had girls’ names in them. I thanked him, though. It was the thought that counted.

  I tried to put off reading the books, but it kept raining and raining and I had seen all the VHS tapes and finished The Highest Mountain so I had no choice. I started with the book that looked most like an adventure. It had a jungle on the cover. It was about an explorer named Henry Morton Stanley who navigated the Congo River and was the first white man ever to do so. The book started off pretty good, but the guy Stanley turned out to be a psycho. He was obsessed with gold and treated the Africans real bad. The ones he didn’t work to death got sold as slaves. I told Grandpa about it and he nodded. “How’s that for adventure,” he said.

  The next book I read was about some farmers in Nebraska. One of them was a girl who reminded me of Ruthanne, except she was way more useful on a farm than Ruthanne would have been. She saw a guy get sucked into a thresher and killed. Another guy ate a dozen melons in one sitting, like a sumo wrestler. The book was okay until the kids got older and moved to town and it got boring.

  The next book I picked up was definitely for girls, though. It was about an orphan girl someplace in Canada who got adopted by a grumpy old brother-and-sister combo. The girl was a smartass and kept getting into trouble. Grandpa seemed to take a particular interest in that book so I wondered if the little orphan girl reminded him of me, which was embarrassing, but later he said it was Mom’s favorite.

  “But Mom doesn’t read,” I said.

  “She used to,” he said.

  Even after the rain stopped, we spent more time indoors than we did before. At first I thought it was because Grandpa wanted me to read all those books, but his interest in them seemed to dwindle. More often than not he’d be in his recliner sleeping, not reading. I was worried he was starting one of his spells. I didn’t know how seriously to take it. All I knew was it made things even more boring. I didn’t dare sneak out to the dump again, but I did think it within my rights to visit Komer. Lucky for me, whatever made Grandpa sleep all the time also made him more pliable. When I worked up the nerve to ask if I could go into town on my own he said, “Sure. While you’re down there pick up those candies I like.”