Trash Mountain

by Bradley Bazzle

  “I was an idiot.”

  “You were his friend. So was I.”

  “If you like him so much, you should visit him.”

  “I do,” I lied. The truth was I didn’t know I could visit Ronnie. I didn’t know how jail worked. “Maybe I’ll drop by tomorrow.”

  “Go for it.”

  “Maybe I will, and maybe this time I’ll pull a few strings.”

  “With the warden?” Kyle smirked. “Or maybe you know the governor?”

  “I know Whitey.”

  I was bullshitting, of course, but it had the desired effect. Kyle seemed cowed: I was the one who knew Whitey, not him. When Kyle was in-house lawyer or whatever, he’d be answering to me too. Hell, I might have taken over Bi-Cities by then. That’s what was going through my head at that moment. Later, I would remind myself not to indulge in fantasies like that. Bi-Cities was temporary. I was on a mission. A more important mission than the likes of Kyle would ever know.

  Visiting Ronnie turned out to be pretty easy. The county sheriff’s office website listed which unit people were in and what they were in for. The different units had different visiting hours. MLEZCKO, RONALD NMI was in Unit Five for POSS OF MARIJ-1OZ, POSS COCAINE W/INTEN, PROBATION VIOL, UNDERAGE POSS/FURN ALCH, and POSS/MAKING FALSE ID. His name was listed once for each crime so it was like there were five Ronnie’s in there, which seemed pretty dire until I saw that one guy, PATTERSON, DUANE TYRELL, had his name posted twenty-six times. I clicked on Ronnie’s name, thinking it would give me more information on his case, but it took me to his mugshot. He looked terrible. There were wrinkles around his nineteen-year-old eyes, and the whites were bloodshot. His mouth was partway open so the yellow tips of his buckteeth stuck out. He hadn’t shaved and his black hair was greasy. His skin was so white it was green. After I got over the shock of Ronnie’s appearance, I started to get mad. What was the point of humiliating him by posting that photo? Even worse, his address was on there: “Park Place Homes #13-B.” Why did anybody need his address? It wasn’t like Ronnie was a sex offender or a spree killer. He wasn’t even a burglar! I could just picture a bored old lady pouring over this list for somebody who lived near her, just to warn her old lady friends about that no-good Ronnie Mlezcko down the block. It made me sick.

  Anyway, all I had to do was call the jail and say I wanted to visit Ronnie Mlezcko. The jailor looked at some kind of schedule on his computer (I could hear him typing) and said, “Wednesday at three p.m.” He didn’t even ask Ronnie.

  After lunch on Wednesday I told Marie I had some personal business and she said no problem. We had that kind of a relationship.

  On my way across town to the jail, I got nervous. It was the same old building I had passed a thousand times, the same little courtyard with inmates playing lazy games of basketball, the same tall wire fence, the same sad looking gray bus parked outside. Whenever one of the school buses broke down, the old gray jail bus used to be brought in to replace it. The inside of the jail bus was exactly the same as a school bus except for a cage around the driver and these metal rings on the backs of the seats where they could shackle you, if need be. Usually I sat alone, but if I was sitting with anybody else I liked to tie my wrists to the ring by my shoelaces, as a joke. I used to be excited to ride that bus, to pretend to be a jailbird, but now that I was going to the jail to see somebody I knew, it felt different. What if other jailbirds stared me down? What if Ronnie had got all hard and wouldn’t talk to me? What if he had a face tattoo? I almost turned back, but then I thought about how they probably had told Ronnie by then so he might have been expecting me. I didn’t want to disappoint him.

  I parked in visitor parking and walked inside, where a corrections officer looked at my driver’s license (Marie made me get one) and had me sign something on a clipboard, probably agreeing not to pass Ronnie a saw, or that if Ronnie shanked me in the neck I wouldn’t press charges. I don’t know. I didn’t read it.

  I expected a long glass divider with old phones you had to talk through and people pressing their hands to the glass in solidarity or passionate love, but the visiting room looked more like the inside of a barbecue restaurant. Instead of tables and chairs there were picnic benches.

  The room was empty except for a somber mustachioed man in coveralls talking softly to his wife or girlfriend, or maybe it was his sister; they weren’t too affectionate. In addition to the corrections officer who had escorted me into the room, there was another standing in the far corner with his thumbs hooked over his belt. He had a big black gun and was wearing sunglasses.

  I sat down as far away from the talking couple as possible, to give them privacy. I expected to wait a while, but Ronnie came right out. He didn’t look nearly as rough as I expected from his mugshot; he looked like the same old Ronnie, except he was growing a beard and his coveralls fit. The little coveralls, unlike his droopy jeans and hooded sweatshirts, made him look wiry and spry. His face was real cold while he came towards me, so I thought he might be pissed I was visiting, but when he sat down he held up his fist and I bumped it. He said “What up, kid?” and I said what up. Then he glanced from side to side and leaned forward. “We gotta talk quiet,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Thanks for visiting. It’s good to see a friendly face.”

  “Doesn’t your mom visit?”

  “Not much. She’s got lots of people to visit.”

  “Sure.” I felt awkward. I wasn’t sure what was appropriate to talk about with somebody in jail. I really wanted to ask how he got arrested, if the cops had busted through the door and stuff, but maybe that was rude? “So,” I said, “how you holding up?”

  “The black guys beat the shit out of me and the white guys ignore me. If it weren’t for my uncles they’d beat the shit out of me too. One guy, my uncle’s buddy, is some kind of Nazi, swastikas and everything. I gotta choose sides, man.”

  “In what?”

  “The race war.” Ronnie explained how his theory of the coming race war apocalypse had been confirmed by his jailhouse experience. “I try to tell people, but it isn’t a popular subject. There’s this one guy, Beauregard, who knows what’s up. He writes letters to news outlets and lets me read ’em as long as I promise not to tell anybody inside. His idea is that the black people are gonna overthrow the white government and CEOs and put them on a secret shuttle to the moon. He’s says there’s another NASA—Black NASA, he calls it—that’s got a shuttle and stuff in a cave in Tennessee, where there’s thousands of unexplored caves so nobody could find the shuttle even if they knew it was there. I know what you’re thinking: ‘How they gonna fit all the CEO types, let alone the government, onto one shuttle?’ Beauregard says shuttle technology has made major strides, but we don’t know about it because the government, via NASA, white NASA, has been holding out on us. It’s like with cars. We could all be getting fifty mpg right now, but they won’t let us. They got an agreement. Why do you think Hyundai gets forty while the Jap cars get thirty? It’s because the Japs and the Americans are colluding but the Koreans, they hate the Japs. They’re like, ‘No deal, motherfuckers,’ and that’s why they build the cars down in Alabama. The workers there are disenfranchised. They don’t give a fuck. The Koreans will be on the black side in the coming race war apocalypse, along with the Polacks and Jews, and also the Lithuanians and former Yugoslavians—the basketball countries. You ever wonder why poor people play basketball? Because it’s cheap. The communists back in Poland or wherever, they just nailed a few hoops to brick walls and said ‘Here you go, kids. Don’t assassinate anybody.’ It’s an opiate, like religion. Beauregard never plays and neither do I. Some say music’s an opiate too, but I don’t know. Pop music? Sure. Soul music? Country? Anything you can fall asleep or fuck to is an opiate, for sure, I hear you, but what about the hard stuff? Gangsta rap, thrash metal—that stuff isn’t opiating anybody. It’s waking people up. I got these Corpse Christ bootlegs, I listen the hell out of ’em. The songs are the same as the album versi
ons but each one’s kinda different, like a separate work of art. Beauregard says art’s another opiate. He thinks we’re all doomed, but I don’t know. I guess I don’t see why we can’t break free when the shit hits the fan and make our way to the shuttle. He says he can get me in with Black NASA, even though I’m white, but when we get to the moon all bets are off. Every man for himself. We gotta start thinking about the terraforming of other planets. The population is growing, that much is obvious, so what happens when we run out of oil? Water? Rare earth metals? Anyway, what you been up to?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You working or something?” He was eyeing my jacket.

  “Oh yeah. Um—” Before I came, I had been debating whether or not to tell Ronnie I worked for Whitey, but now I was so dazed by his monologue that I didn’t care anymore. “I work for Christian Connors for State Treasurer.”

  “Who’s Christian Connors?”

  “Whitey Connors.”

  “Holy shit. How deep are you?”

  “You mean at Bi-Cities?”

  “Yeah. I assume you’re infiltrating?”

  “Definitely,” I said, though I hadn’t taken stock of my progress in a while, infiltration-wise. I tried to tell Ronnie about my day-today, Marie, etc., but he didn’t seem interested. He kept asking about Whitey: how many cars he had, how the dump made its money, if they brought in truckloads of guys from Mexico then hid the bodies when they died on the job. He kept going and going until finally he said, “You have to kill him.”

  “What? Come on.”

  “You used to talk about how you tried to blow shit up, how you’re a terrorist at heart, but nothing changes until Whitey Connors is out. What happens if he becomes treasurer?”

  “Nothing. He’s just treasurer. Better to have him up there in the capital than down here bulldozing houses.”

  “The houses get bulldozed either way, motherfucker. He’ll probably make a law so he can bulldoze the whole city. Can you imagine? Komer and Haislip, just one big dump. It might take a while to notice the difference.”

  Ronnie may have been exaggerating for effect, but the spirit of what he was saying rang true to me. It cohered with my own dim vision of the future. I started feeling kind of emotional, and Ronnie seemed to notice. He said, “Shit, man, you okay?”

  “They bulldozed my house,” I said.

  “Fuck. Really?”

  I nodded. I hadn’t talked to anybody about it, not even Ruthanne, so it felt weird to be telling Ronnie. But I knew I could count on Ronnie to react with appropriate outrage, and he did, muttering about “fucking Whitey” and “fucking Bi-Cities” until the corrections officer in the sunglasses looked up at us. Ronnie didn’t seem to care. “When Komer and Haislip are one big dump,” he said, “they could use prisoners like me as workers, like a penal colony, and if anybody acts up it’ll be trial by combat, gladiator style, prisoner against prisoner. That’s good money right there.” Ronnie laughed so I laughed too, even though it wasn’t funny to me; it was disturbing.

  “Let’s be honest,” Ronnie said, “Komer, Haislip, they’re small potatoes. Nobody cares. But what if Whitey Connors is on his way to bigger things, know what I’m saying? It’s like that movie where the guy can see the future and knows that this candidate guy is going to turn into a crazy fascist Hitler guy, so the one guy, the psychic, who’s otherwise a pretty peaceful dude, takes it upon himself to stop the proto-Hitler guy by sniping him.”

  “Sure,” I said, even though I never saw that movie. I just wanted to get out of there at that point. Ronnie looked good, and I was glad to see him, but listening to him put me on edge. It stirred up something inside me, something uncomfortable. “Listen,” I said, “I should go, but I’ll visit again soon.”

  “You do that. I enjoyed this talk.” Ronnie leaned back and his face got hard. I wondered if he could tell I wasn’t really listening anymore. I felt bad.

  We stood up and bumped fists again, and I left.

  Most of what Ronnie said was kind of crazy, sure, but the thing about Whitey stuck with me. Whitey wasn’t a maniacal fascist Hitler guy, but he was definitely on the rise. I didn’t have to kill him, necessarily, but I had to do something. I had gotten too comfortable, with the meetings and joking around and now the training of interns. I had to remind myself that I was there to do my job, not their job.

  I thought about that on the way back to Bi-Cities, and I got pretty fired up about injustice and whatnot. But it was hard to stay fired up when I got there and saw Marie. She was so pragmatic. Right away she was telling me how the Haislip Kiwanis wanted money for a bingo ball machine, and could I find one on eBay? I told her sure I could, and there I was, just minutes after firing myself up, sitting in front of a computer weighing the pros and cons of manual versus hydraulic bingo cages.

  The problem was I liked Marie. I liked running errands for her, arranging travel. I liked calling people on the phone and saying, “Hi there, I’m calling on behalf of Marie Angiulo, and she’d like to talk to so and so,” then handing off the phone when the person she wanted was on the line. Sometimes it was Marie’s sister in Rhode Island and the sister would joke that Marie was such a bigshot she couldn’t even punch a few numbers anymore. Marie and her sister talked all the time. When I asked Marie about it, she said family was a choice.

  I told Marie how Mom and Ruthanne were always bugging me to visit them but never visited me themselves. I told her they were lazy. Marie nodded. I expected her to say how lazy people were the worst, but what she said was that part of being an adult was taking responsibility for your relationships. She said, “It’s decision time, Ben. If you want to keep having a relationship with your mother and sister, you gotta make an effort. Families drift apart all the time.” I thought about that, how Grandpa was alone and Dad was with Geraldine, and Mom and Ruthanne were far away. I guess our family had already drifted apart, except for me. I was in the middle. I tried to think of myself as connected to all of them, like the hub of a wheel, but I hadn’t talked to Mom in almost a month, Dad in three or four months. Even Grandpa I hadn’t seen in two weeks, and I lived with him, or was supposed to. If I was the hub, then the wheel was broke; the hub had popped out miles back and been left in a ditch.

  As if it weren’t hard enough to stay fired up working with Marie, one day in February she told me she and Whitey had decided in the budget meeting to start paying me ten dollars an hour.

  I was shocked. Minimum wage was one thing, but ten dollars an hour? That was good money. I thanked Marie again and again, but Marie said to thank Whitey.

  “Free work is easy to come by in this game,” she said, “but Whitey went to bat for you. Your new title is Assistant to the Campaign Manager.”

  I was dazzled. “Assistant to the Campaign Manager,” I repeated. “What do I do? Do I do something different?”

  “Keep doing what you’re doing.”

  I felt emotional. It was like I had been working all my life for the promotion when really it was just a few months. I felt so thankful it was corny. I tried to remind myself that the one who was paying me was Whitey Connors, my secret nemesis, but it didn’t make a difference. Whitey was the one who went to bat for me, like Marie said. I just didn’t hate Whitey Connors. I wanted to, but I didn’t.

  “The question,” Marie said, “is what you’re going to do with that money. I’d warn you not to blow it on liquor but you’re, what, sixteen?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “You still sleeping in the back of the office?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “Well, if you were, I’d say stop. It’s like getting paid twice. Find a roommate and get an apartment, like a couple city girls. It’ll be like a TV show except horrible. Sex in the Shithole. You could probably afford a mansion in this dirt-bag town.”

  “How do you find a roommate?”

  She laughed. “I don’t know anymore. Tell you what, I’ll give you the number of the lady who found my place for me.”

  The lady who found Marie
’s place for her, meaning the furnished apartment she had rented sight-unseen when she moved down to run Connors for State Treasurer, was a realtor named Debbie McIntosh. I arranged to meet Debbie at an apartment in downtown Komer, and she showed up wearing high heels and a skirt-suit. She drove a hybrid car and had a businesslike air. The only thing about her that said Komer, not the city, was a colorful mask of makeup.

  The apartment was in a new building where a parking lot used to be. It was four stories and each story had some terraces so overall it looked like a stucco ziggurat. Inside, the apartment had lots of windows and a shiny floor that looked like wood, but Debbie said was bamboo. The shower had two nozzles. The whole place was kind of creepy but I kept poking around to be polite and Debbie kept smiling and showing me the granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, linen closet, etc. Finally, when there wasn’t anything left to show me, she said the apartment cost twelve hundred a month.

  I couldn’t believe it. “Twelve hundred dollars?”

  “Quite a deal, I know.”

  “The last place we lived was three-fifty and it had two whole bedrooms.”

  Debbie looked at me quizzically. “You’re from Komer?”

  “Of course I am. Who lives in Komer who isn’t from Komer?”

  “Marie Angiulo, for one.”

  “For another?”

  Debbie sighed. “Young professionals, is the idea, but they haven’t gotten here yet. This building was supposed to be, like, an if-you-build-it-they-will-come thing.”

  “I’m sure it’ll get filled eventually.” I had my doubts, but I wanted to be nice. Debbie seemed to be taking this personally.

  “What kind of place did you have in mind?” she asked.

  I told her about the apartment where I used to live and said I wouldn’t mind living there again, but she told me it was dangerous, which was true, and for about the same price she could get me a place much nicer and more centrally located.

  “Central to what?” I asked.

  Debbie sighed again.