Trash Mountain

by Bradley Bazzle

  “No problem,” I said. He meant these coffee beans with chocolate on them that were sold at the drugstore. They were disgusting. “But, um, can you drive me?”

  “Take the truck,” he said.

  “For real?”

  “It’ll take more than the likes of you to bust that old truck.”

  “But I don’t know how to drive.”

  “I’ll teach you.”

  “Don’t I have to take a class from the city?”

  “Nonsense.”

  “I think I have to take a class to get a license.”

  “Who said anything about a license? Mine expired six years ago.” Grandpa explained how the Komer police had better things to do than to hassle good drivers, such as busting up dope rings and rustling hobos and illegals. He said the trick was to go five miles over the speed limit at all times.

  “Wouldn’t it be smarter to stay under the speed limit?”

  “Everybody breaks it by at least five. Driving the speed limit is conspicuous, like you’re driving dope up from Mexico, or human cargo for white slavery.”

  “What’s white slavery?”

  “Slavery of a sexual nature fueled by dope.”

  Learning to drive was pretty easy. Grandpa was a patient teacher. So patient I started to wonder if he was having a stroke or something. He stared out the window and breathed real slow, like a ninja. He didn’t even mind when I backed the truck into one of the fence posts we dug. He said that was what bumpers were for.

  We practiced in the driveway and then on the little road his house was on. There were barely any cars, but one time a truck got behind us and wouldn’t go away until Grandpa reached over and pounded the horn with his fist until the truck pulled around. The driver scowled at us. The curving two-lane road was pretty blind.

  Grandpa’s truck was a 1991 Chevy Silverado with paint peeling off the hood, and it handled like a pontoon boat. I wouldn’t have minded except I had a hard time telling where the perimeter of the car was. I stuck so close to the double yellow lines, from fear of veering off the road, that Grandpa sometimes tugged the steering wheel in his direction.

  We cruised up and down the narrow road, going faster and faster, until eventually I was going five miles over the speed limit. Grandpa told me to keep going instead of turning around. We came to a four-lane highway, and he told me to stop.

  “This is where you turn to get to town,” Grandpa said, and that was that. I was ready to drive.

  Now that I could go to town on my own, I wasn’t sure what to do. I couldn’t go to the dump again in case Grandpa smelled it on me and flipped out. The dump would have to wait until school started, when I’d have proper cover and could shower at the gym. I considered cruising around but decided it wouldn’t be as fun as cruising on my bike, because I’d be so nervous. I decided to call Pete.

  Pete was glad to hear from me, which made me feel good. He said he was bored and wanted to hang out, but that he didn’t have a car so we’d have to hang out in the woods behind his sister’s trailer, where there wasn’t anything to do but smoke weed and shoot guns, and he didn’t have any guns. When I told Pete I could pick him up, he was pumped. “It’s on now, motherfucker,” he said.

  Pete’s sister’s trailer park was terrible. There wasn’t the pride of ownership one sometimes sees in trailer parks, with little flower beds and trellises under the trailers and people sitting on lawn chairs and grilling burgers. Half the trailers looked like they were sinking in the mud. The only person I saw was an old man sitting in a rusty chair on the porch of a whompyjawed farmhouse near the entrance. The house was terrible, too. A couple windows were broken, and the white paint looked like somebody had taken a sander to it.

  Pete’s sister’s trailer was powder blue with a half-decent, makeshift porch. Pete shot out the front door before I could even park the truck. He climbed into the passenger’s seat and we bumped fists. “Dang, dog,” he said, “this is sweet.” He started pressing buttons on the radio and raising and lowering the window.

  When we drove out of the trailer park, the old man on the porch was glaring at us. Pete said the trailer park used to be the old guy’s farm, but he got too old to take care of it so he rented it for trailers. “He hates Mexicans,” Pete said, “and forget about blacks—he won’t even rent to the fuckers.”

  “What a motherfucker,” I said.

  Pete wanted to drive out to the old shooting range so that’s what we did.

  There were more cars in the field than I remembered, which didn’t surprise me, since everything was turning to trash, and the Whitey Connors billboard said CONNORS FOR STATE TREASURER instead of for Comptroller. Unbelievable, I thought. Wasn’t Comptroller enough?

  Pete raised an invisible rifle to his shoulder and aimed it at Whitey Connors, squinting. “Pew!” he said, like a cartoon gun. “Pew, pew, pew!”

  When Pete was done shooting we sat on the hood of a LeBaron convertible and Pete took out a cigarette pack that was empty except for a half-smoked joint, which he lit. He sucked on the joint for a while then passed it to me. I took a tiny hit, to be chill, but the weed was so strong I felt lightheaded immediately.

  “That’s Milk Dog’s shit,” Pete said, laughing. He took back the joint and sucked on it until it was so tiny he had to hold it between two long fingernails. He flicked it away and started talking about his sister and Milk Dog. He said they didn’t show him any respect. “Ever since Milk Dog got a job with the cable company he thinks he’s a big man,” Pete said, “king of the castle. Yesterday he told me to get him a beer. Can you believe that shit? There I was, minding my own business, and he was like, ‘Yo, Pete, get me a beer!’”

  “Did you do it?”

  “Hell yeah. Milk Dog’s scary as hell.” Pete said they treated him like a second class citizen even though he took better care of their kids than they did. “Milk Dog’s always working, and Angie’s always doing stupid shit with her girlfriends.”

  The thought of being in such close quarters with a drug dealer like Milk Dog, even a family man drug dealer, made me uncomfortable. But Pete never mentioned illegal activity. His complaints seemed pretty typical, the same kind of stuff I might have said about Ruthanne and Mom.

  Abruptly Pete said, “Yo, dog, let’s look through these glove boxes,” and we stopped talking and started searching the glove boxes and center consoles of cars. The cars had been picked over for valuables, but a Toyota still had its owner’s manual and a little kit with a tire gauge and a pen light.

  “This is real leather,” Pete said, stroking the kit with the backs of two fingers. He inspected the manual. “1999 Toyota Camry LE. Think we could sell this online?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You got internet?”

  “No. My Grandpa doesn’t even have cable.”

  Pete let the kit drop to the ground, stunned. “You gotta get out of there.”

  “I don’t know. I kind of like it. My Grandpa’s acting weird, though.” I tried to describe to Pete how Grandpa had changed: the sleeping, the lack of emotion. “I backed into a fence post and he didn’t even care.”

  “Sounds like he’s depressed,” Pete said.

  “No way,” I said, but the idea troubled me. Were spells the same thing as depression? I remembered the pills in Mom’s bedside table, the ones that weren’t for diabetes. Mom slept all the time, too.

  “He should see a doctor,” Pete said, “so he doesn’t kill himself or whatever.”

  “What?”

  “Like Tom Talamantez.”

  “The weatherman? He killed himself?”

  Pete nodded. “Hung himself, dog.”

  I pictured Tom Talamantez, the handsome smiling weatherman of my childhood, gesticulating in front of a cartoon map of Komer and Haislip while co-anchors Jasmyn Jones and Jerry Tidmore watched with feigned interest. The image was extra lucid from the weed I smoked. It was almost too much to bear. I thought about Grandpa. I pictured him hanging from the rafters of the living room like that old guy in
the prison movie who got out of prison and hated it so much that he hung himself in a shitty halfway house.

  “If he does it,” Pete said, “you can crash with us.”

  “Thanks,” I said, but I wanted to change the subject, to get those images out of my head.

  Thankfully Pete was a frequent changer of subjects. He was already talking about a girl in the trailer two down from his who had unusual boobs. Then he said, “Yo, you seen Ronnie?”

  “No,” I said, and I felt kind of bad about that.

  “Me and Red Dog got so drunk last weekend. Shit, dog, we called Ronnie all drunk and shit and Ronnie was like, ‘Fuck y’all.’ It’s like he forgot who his boys are. He got all prude.”

  I nodded, but the word “prude” didn’t ring true. I thought of how Ronnie had been stalking the seedy parking lot across from my old apartment, and his weird flaming skull Jesus tattoo. I didn’t want to talk about Ronnie anymore, and I didn’t want to talk about Grandpa or Ruthanne or any of the rest of it. I told Pete we should go home. I was tired.

  The weed made the truck feel like a flying saucer, which wasn’t something I was prepared for. Red Dog had smoked and driven all the time, sometimes intentionally. Pete asked why I was driving so slow, and I told him.

  “If you go too slow they’ll pull you over,” he said, echoing what Grandpa told me about the Komer cops. I had to pick up speed. But we were already going so fast!

  By the time we got to Pete’s trailer I was freaking out. There was no way I could drive the ten miles back to Grandpa’s house on country roads. It was starting to get dark.

  Pete said I could crash with him. I didn’t think Grandpa would mind, but I had to call and tell him so he wouldn’t worry. But I sounded so high. I was sure he’d be able to tell I was fucked up. I started practicing aloud what I’d say to him: “Hey Grandpa, it’s Ben. It got kind of late, and I don’t really feel comfortable driving at night yet—how does that sound?” I was asking Pete, who thought I was crazy. He said I sounded perfectly normal. So I practiced my lines a few more times then called Grandpa on Pete’s cell phone.

  Grandpa didn’t pick up, which surprised me. It was seven. Dinner time. Was he out in the garden? Was he already asleep? It was possible. I wished I were home to check, though, to make sure he wasn’t hanging like Tom Talamantez.

  I left a message that I was sure sounded nervous, like I was about to rob a liquor store.

  Pete and I watched TV with his sister, Angie, until Pete heard a car in the driveway and stood up. I followed him into the tiny second bedroom where he slept on the top bunk of a bunk bed and the older of his two nieces, Gabby, slept on the bottom. Gabby was five but spent half the time at her grandma’s, Pete said. Pete suspected this was because of him. The grandma, Milk Dog’s mom, didn’t trust him, even though it was Milk Dog, not Pete, Pete said, who “deals drugs and looks like a fucking cholo.”

  We sat on the bottom bunk talking—Pete was always talking!—and I tried to listen, but when the front door opened and closed I got scared. The Milk Dog of my imagination was massive and violent and hated white kids. I pictured him poking his head into the bedroom, seeing me, and throwing me headlong through the window.

  The trailer felt like it sank a little as Milk Dog plopped down on the couch. I could hear him speaking Spanish. His voice was deep and lethargic. He started changing TV channels in rapid succession, and Angie complained in a mixture of Spanish and English that Milk Dog changed the channels too fast to tell what was happening in the shows.

  Pete wanted to smoke again, but I told him I couldn’t. I said I didn’t want to be foggy with Grandpa the next morning, but really I just didn’t want to freak out about Milk Dog any more than I already was. I wished I were in Dinwiddie’s room, where I could turn off the bedside lamp and have peace and quiet and eight hours’ sleep. Who cared about a few mosquito bites?

  Pete told me I could sleep in Gabby’s bed. I was tired and thankful for a place to sleep, but the bed had three teddy bears on it, and a stuffed unicorn. The sheets had cartoon princesses and wizards and talking donkeys. It felt weird to be sleeping in a kid’s bed. Taking off my pants made it extra weird.

  Pete turned off the lights, but I couldn’t fall asleep. The TV was still on so I kept thinking about Milk Dog out there. What if he stumbled into the room looking for his daughter, whom he loved, and found a skinny teenaged boy in his underwear between her sheets? I wouldn’t have time to scream before he twisted off my head.

  I may have fallen asleep at some point, but I woke up soon thereafter. I had to pee. The bathroom was in the main part of the trailer, and I was afraid to go out there. The TV was still blaring. I almost peed out the window, but what if Milk Dog was out there smoking and saw the window slide open and a little white penis come out? I had to hold it in. I fell asleep again but kept dreaming about peeing then waking up worried I had peed all over Gabby’s princess sheets.

  The alarm on my watch went off at six. Pete was sound asleep, breathing heavily, but the TV was still on in the next room. I couldn’t believe it!

  I slid my shorts back on, feeling dirty for having taken them off in the first place, then crept into the living room. There, on the couch, was a fat man in khaki pants and an unbuttoned Bi-Star Cable shirt. A little patch on the right breast pocket said “Artemio.” Was that Milk Dog’s real name? It seemed kind of dorky. The shirt must have belonged to somebody else, I decided, somebody who owed Milk Dog money, or a snitch he killed to warn other snitches. Milk Dog had a bag of corn chips open on his chest. I couldn’t see any tattoos but there was a white tank-top undershirt over his torso and I was sure that under the tank-top was a big florid cross or maybe THUG LIFE in an Olde English font. Milk Dog’s head was propped up against the couch arm closest to me so I couldn’t see his eyes, but from the way his arm was flopped out, his meaty fingers resting on the carpet, I could tell he was asleep. I crept across the room as quietly as possible, and when I got through the door I shut it behind me and sped towards Grandpa’s truck.

  On the way out of the trailer park the old man was still on his porch. He glared at me, as if in warning.

  I wasn’t high anymore, but the drive was still tough. I was tired. When I got home I expected to find Grandpa in the kitchen, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t in his bedroom either. I got nervous, remembering my conversation with Pete about Tom Talamantez and the old man in the halfway house. I walked around the house calling Grandpa’s name, but I couldn’t find him. Walking and hollering wore me out so I thought I might close my eyes for a minute. Maybe he’d be back when I woke up. When I went upstairs, I saw that the door to Mom’s old bedroom was closed. I put my ear to the door and listened. I didn’t hear anything.

  “Grandpa?” I whispered.

  If he was in there he didn’t say anything, so I pushed open the door to take a look. The heavy curtains were drawn so the room was almost dark. The air was warm and smelled like cooked onions. Grandpa was curled in a fetal position on top of the covers of Mom’s old bed. I got close enough to tell he was breathing, then went across the hall to Dinwiddie’s room and took a nap myself. When I woke up, hours later, Grandpa was in the kitchen. He had a dazed look and seemed surprised to see me.

  “I’ll put more beans on,” he said.

  He did, and we ate some beans, but we didn’t talk as much as usual. When we were done with our beans Grandpa said, “Well, I think I’ll turn in early. Had a big day. You alright out here, partner?”

  I said I was.

  Grandpa piled the dishes in the sink without washing them and went to his bedroom. It was four o’clock in the afternoon.

  I sat in Grandpa’s recliner and tried to read for a while, but I ended up just staring out the window. The way the screens around the back porch blocked the sun made it seem like dusk. It always seemed like dusk in Grandpa’s house, perpetual dusk, like winter in Alaska. Without Grandpa puttering, the house was so quiet, the soft light so creepy, that I could imagine the house to be a sort of a
bandoned hunting chalet deep in the forest. There was so much wood everywhere. The chair frames were wood. The walls had wood paneling. The floor was made of wood, and the floor wood was so old that there were little gaps between the planks. In the gaps the wood was flaking and looked like dirt. It made me think the house was crumbling, sinking slowly but irreversibly into the muddy ground, like those trailers. Like trash. Everything was becoming trash. It made me wonder how long the un-trash, like Grandpa and me, could hold out.

  After two more days of Grandpa mostly sleeping and acting surprised whenever he saw me, I called Mom to ask her what to do.

  “Sounds like one of his spells,” she said. “It’ll pass.”

  “I don’t think he’s eating enough.”

  “He’s an old man. They don’t barely eat.”

  “Usually he does, though.”

  “Oh, Ben, you’re such a nervous nelly. Let me talk to him.”

  “He’s asleep.”

  “Wake him up then.”

  “Isn’t that rude?”

  “Well, Ben, I don’t know what to tell you. You wanted to live with Grandpa even though I told you how he is. He feeds you, don’t he?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know. It’s kind of lonely here, Mom.”

  “Oh, Ben!” I could picture her clutching the phone to her breast like she did. It made me happy. The thing is, I didn’t really feel too lonely, but I knew that saying it would make Mom treat me the way I wanted to be treated right then, which was with pity. I was a lone wolf, but I wanted someone to feel sorry for me. Mom said, “We been meaning to get down there and visit you, but Ruthanne’s so busy with school, and—”