It was then that an even darker thought occurred to me: what if it wasn’t drugs or drink or boredom that had changed Leo, but the dump itself? I remembered the noxious smell of the dump spray the night I stayed there, and the peculiar smell of the metal shavings Leo scraped from the circuit boards. Rare earth. It sounded so strange now. They mined it in China, Grandpa said, and Dad said the Chinese didn’t care what happened to the working man. Maybe in China there were thousands of old wrecks like Leo wandering zombielike through the streets.
I had to say something to Whitey, I decided, but what could I say? Whitey hadn’t done anything directly, or maliciously, and he could spin what he did as a favor to Leo. Leo made money, after all, and he did the work by choice. Whitey was a smooth talker. I had to practice what I would say to him. I would start off slow, something like “Mister Connors, may I have a word? I ran into an old friend of mine, and he wasn’t looking too good. His name’s Leo. Maybe you remember him?” But Whitey might say no, he didn’t remember Leo, and where would I go from there? And how would I make it clear, without being rude, that I blamed Whitey; that, in my opinion, Whitey should bear some responsibility for Leo? And for Ruthanne’s weird spine? And for bulldozing my childhood home to make room for more trash?
“Listen, motherfucker,” I said, staring at my own face in the bathroom mirror and karate-chopping the air for emphasis, “here’s how it is: you bulldozed my goddamn house, and now you’re gonna pay!”
When I got to work, I felt awkward asking Carol for an appointment to see a man I saw every day, but Carol didn’t seem fazed by it. Maybe she figured I was asking for a raise. She said Whitey could fit me in at 4:15, and I agreed to it.
For the rest of the day I rehearsed in my head what I was going to say. I even wrote it down, pondered it, revised it: “You bulldozed my home, Mr. Connors. You ruined my sister’s spine. Yeah, she’s okay now, thanks for asking.”
At 4:10 I was sitting on the loveseat across from Carol’s desk, waiting. It reminded me of Principal Winthrope’s office, like I was the one in trouble, not Whitey. I tried to think of Leo, Ruthanne, the noxious dump spray. But then Whitey poked his head out to say something to Carol and saw me sitting there.
“Goddamn, girl,” he said to her, “don’t keep this man waiting.” I knew he was just saying that to flatter me, at Carol’s expense, but it felt good anyway.
Whitey ushered me into his office and we sat down on either side of his desk. There were framed photos of him all over the walls, smiling among bigger and older men in suits, breaking ground with golden shovels, snipping ribbons with big novelty scissors. I knew I needed to dive right in, before he got the best of me, but Whitey was too quick: “Ben,” he said, “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Me first! Listen, school’s about to start, and I know, I know, you don’t wanna go. School’s for dummies. I hear you. I dropped out myself and would do the same again, so I can’t stand here and tell you to go back to school. And I don’t want you to go back to school. What would I do without you? ’Specially now that Marie’s gone. But listen—” He launched into a spiel about the importance of education while I sat there, stunned. I had come into the office ready to tell him off, but he was bombarding me with fatherly advice. “Which is why,” he concluded, “I want you to take night classes for a GED.”
“What good would that do?” I asked. “I have a job already.”
“We got a good thing going, for sure, but businesses don’t last a lifetime, not even for Russian oil tycoons. What if you gotta do a résumé again? You can’t keep lying on your résumé, Tex.”
“But why would I pay for night classes if I can go to school for free?”
“Opportunity cost. Besides, I’ll pay.”
I couldn’t believe it. Whitey was pulling me deeper than ever. I tried to refuse the offer, but he insisted.
“Never look a gift horse in the mouth,” he said. “Ever heard that one before?”
“Sure.”
“Ever thought about it?”
“Not really.”
“The meaning is twofold. The first meaning is obvious: if a horse is given to you as a gift, don’t look in its mouth for a horse disease such as distemper or horse gingivitis, at least not in front of the fella what gave you the horse. That’s the way everybody takes it, and that’s good advice, let me tell you, on the campaign trail especially. But there’s a second way to take it. That’s where the horse isn’t the gift but the giver.”
“A horse that gives gifts?”
“Yep.”
“There’s horses like that?”
“Sure there are. Santa’s reindeer, for instance.”
“A reindeer’s a type of horse?”
“For sure.”
“I thought it was a moose.”
“You’re missing the forest from the trees, Ben. A bird in the hand, is what I’m saying. A stitch in time. I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I did.”
“What mistakes?”
“Choosing too soon. You don’t have to choose between work and school. A boy can do both, and anyone who says different is a pansy. The way America is today, it coddles the young person. Go to high school, it says. Go to college. Spend a couple years after college waiting tables so you can get to feeling unfulfilled and wind up in grad school for social work. But some people, they don’t have to noodle around like that. They’re like arrows shot from a quiver. Take Ben Franklin, for instance. Did you know Ben Franklin was apprenticed at the age of thirteen?”
“No, sir.”
“To his brother, as a printer. And Ben Franklin became one of the greatest printers in the history of the United States, and a writer and a diplomat. An inventor, too. He invented the lightning rod, the bifocals, and a glass harmonica for which Mozart and Beethoven composed. Now, would Ben Franklin have ended up where he did if he were left to noodle around a few more years before getting into the printing game? Maybe. But why risk it, is what I’m saying. And that’s the way I feel about Bi-Cities Sanitation.”
I didn’t follow. Was Whitey Ben Franklin in the analogy, and Bi-Cities the glass harmonica? Whitey had a way of overwhelming you with words. For a moment I forgot my purpose in meeting with him. Then he said, “Ben, how do you feel about Bi-Cities sanitation?” and it all came back to me. Now was my chance to tell him what was on my mind.
I looked at Whitey, who had been pacing around. He had stopped, though, and was waiting for me to speak. “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I kinda felt more comfortable working for your campaign than for Bi-Cities, you know?”
Whitey withdrew slightly, crossing his arms. “More comfortable?” he repeated. “So you’re saying you’re uncomfortable working here at Bi-Cities?”
“No, sir.”
“Bi-Cities puts money in your pocket. Mine too. Good clean money. And that’s hard to come by nowadays.” He started pacing again, like he was looking for something. “Where’s my drink? You seen my drink?”
He meant his giant soda. It was on the floor beside his desk so I picked it up for him. It smelled kind of funny, like cough medicine.
“Thank you kindly,” he said, then sat down and started slurping the warm drink through a straw. When he stopped, he leaned back and sighed. He said, “It’s the trash, isn’t it?”
“Sir?”
“The stigma of working with trash. I wouldn’t have figured you for it, Ben. A Komer man. A man who made it by the skin of his boots. I wouldn’t have figured you for having secret delicate sensibilities.”
“I don’t have sensibilities,” I said, feeling defensive. “I was picking trash before you even knew me. I probably spent more time in that dump than you have. I definitely spent more time looking at it. You can’t even see Trash Mountain from this office.”
Whitey spun in his chair to look at me. “What mountain?”
“Nothing,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about Trash Moun
tain, to besmirch my memories by sharing them with Whitey, who, like any other adult, might have turned them into something they weren’t, some kind of boys-will-be-boys, oh-you-kids bullshit. So I cut to the chase: “Remember Leo?”
Whitey smiled. “Of course I do. What’s that old rascal up to?”
I almost told Whitey how I saw Leo behind the dumpster, but I didn’t know how to describe what I saw in Leo’s face, or what I failed to see, and I didn’t want to hear Whitey say something glib about the man. Leo deserved some dignity, was how I saw it. “He isn’t doing too good,” I said.
“How about his girlfriend, that black lady? I always liked her.”
“Candy. I didn’t see her.”
“What about the other one? Tall fella? Harelip?”
“Boss. I haven’t seen him either.” I was surprised Whitey remembered Leo, let alone Boss and Candy. I wondered if he knew more than he let on.
Whitey forked his fingers and pointed at his two eyes. “Ben,” he said, “my office may not face it anymore, but I see everybody who comes and goes from that dump. Hear me?”
“Yessir,” I said, “but why’d you fire them?”
“Fire them? They never worked for me.”
“They recycled for you, the rare earth and whatnot.”
“They screwed me is what they did. I told them they could pick over the trash for recyclables, but they got greedy. I got another guy, Ramón, who salvages the electronics. Not that it matters anymore.”
“Why doesn’t it matter?”
“The Chinese are paying for all of it, and they don’t want it picked over before it gets to China. You seen those dozers making it into cubes?”
“Sure.”
“That’s to ship it. I didn’t kick your friends out, just tightened up security. I do it every few years anyway, to keep kids out more than anything. There isn’t a kid in this county who hasn’t snuck into Bi-Cities and made himself a trash fort. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” He eyed me across his desk, a smile creeping up his cheeks. “You never snuck in and messed around, huh?”
For a moment I panicked. Did he know I tried to blow the place up? Had he been keeping track of me all those years? Keep your enemies close, is what they say. But no, that was impossible. He would have had to be omniscient to keep track of all those people. Godlike. Hundreds of kids snuck in to stack beer cans and pull apart rusty appliances and poke dirty condoms with a stick. The ovens and refrigerators had been hiding places for a whole generation.
“You know the insurance I pay on this place?” Whitey asked. “All kinds of ways for a person to die in a landfill. One of the deadliest jobs in the country. There was a TV show on it. But the Mexicans, it’s this or the chicken factory for those boys. I put ads in the newspaper down there and they come. Why you looking cross, Ben? Who’s gonna do it if they don’t? You? That old criminal Leo and his crew?”
“I’m not cross.”
“Don’t lie to me. You got a face like an open book. That’s why I can trust you. Goddamn, Ben, people try to make it so simple. They try to make like there’s this evil dump that’s poisoning everybody and everybody’s innocent. They never write about how people be climbing in and out of the dump like goddamn monkeys. But you know what? It’s been three years since anybody died here, including Mexicans.”
“I guess I don’t see why you care so much about safety inside the dump when there’s people getting sick from it and stuff. Rashes and stuff.” My voice was cracking. My face felt warm so I knew it was red. I was too embarrassed to look at Whitey so I looked at my hands.
“I know about Ruthanne,” Whitey said.
I looked up. Whitey’s face was kind of pinched, like he was trying, and failing, to manufacture the appropriate expression. He said, “I know and it breaks my heart. And I know she’s in school right now and doing fine. And I know I don’t know a damned thing about airborne particulate waste matter, and nobody else does either. As for Leo, that old drunk, he had some good years, right? Why you looking at me that way? Listen, Ben, there’s something I’m gonna say to you. People pretend it ain’t true, and maybe it ain’t, but we act like it is so what’s the difference. Here’s the thing: some people’s lives aren’t as valuable as other people’s.” He raised his hands, like he was sorry to say it but somebody had to. It made me wonder if it was a speech he had given before. “Unchristian? Sure. But we don’t live in a Christian world, Ben. Religion is a Band-Aid. Think about war: how do we go off and fight other people if we think their lives are as valuable as ours? And what about the clothes we buy? Would we let our own kids work in the sweatshops that make them clothes? Hell no. We won’t even let ’em work in a goddamn dump. That’s for the Mexicans. Only reason we let our kids fight in wars is the ones who fight are like you, Ben: poor kids, city kids who’ll never get a job otherwise, country kids who’ll waste their lives on couches, eating junk food, raising fat little babies just like them. At least the Chinese are honest. They throw bodies at projects like you wouldn’t believe: construction projects, mining projects, engineering projects like that three-forked dam they got. One time I was in a Shanghai hotel and woke up in the middle of the night. I couldn’t sleep so I went to get my soda like I do, and my soda was on a table by the window. The hotel was in this tower, see, and when I looked out the window the sky was black—there weren’t no stars, from the smog—but the ground was covered in clusters of twinkling lights. Do you know what those lights were, Ben? Those little white lights like stars?”
“No, sir.”
“Blowtorches. Men were down there working construction all through the night, every hour of every day, every day of every week. Those men went home to see their families maybe once a year, too tired to do anything but sleep.” It was exactly what Dad had said on the subject of the Chinese working man, which made me wonder if Whitey had really been to China or if he saw the same TV show Dad did. Whitey said, “They call it human capital down there, and that’s what it is. We could learn a thing or two from China, let me tell you.”
“Seems like you already have,” I said.
“I’m not telling you how the world should be, Ben, just how it is.”
“But what’s the point? Why build all those buildings so fast? Why mine so much rare earth? Just to make more cell phones?”
Whitey rubbed his fingers together and smiled. He didn’t speak, like the answer went without saying. But I wasn’t satisfied.
“What’s it for?” I asked. “Look at you. I mean, no offense, but you don’t spend it any way I can tell. You don’t have a fancy car or go on vacation. You don’t have shiny teeth like Doctor Tom, or an expensive haircut. You don’t even wear nice clothes. No offense.”
“None taken. You’re right, Ben. I didn’t get into this business for money. I didn’t get into this business to recycle anything either, let alone some doohickey for cell phones. Where I grew up, we burned our trash.” He swept his arm vaguely. “If it was all the same I’d burn it still. Burn every single piece of trash in Bi-Cities Sanitation. That would speed things up.”
“Speed things up for what?”
“All I’m saying is I didn’t buy this place for trash. I bought it as a long-term real estate venture. This is prime real estate. I did my research. You know where Staten Island is?”
“New York City. That’s where Fresh Kills is.” Fresh Kills was a famous dump that got clogged up with chunks of the World Trade Center. I knew about it because I’d made a study of dumps during computer class, years before.
“Exactly,” Whitey said, “and you wouldn’t believe how much they make on the little pieces of that place they carve off and sell to developers. What I didn’t expect was to make such a killing on the trash part. The people who ran this place before—the government people, before they had the good sense to privatize—they must have been goddamn idiots. They didn’t make a dime!”
“You said it wasn’t about the money.”
“It isn’t! Oh, Ben, it isn’t!
Look here.” He sprang from his chair and opened the closet. On the back wall was a safe with a combination lock he quickly spun. He withdrew what looked like a thin coffee table book. He turned to me, clutching the book to his chest. “Have I ever told you my thoughts on racism?”
“No sir,” I said, bracing myself for another speech.
“Racism is a species of suspicion of one’s fellow man. So are sexism and gerontism, which is hatred of the elderly. The slow separation of Komer and Haislip, first by class, then by race, is the legacy of hatred, the devil in man’s heart. But one day the two will be reunited as a glorious whole. Ever heard of Budapest?”
“Sure, up north somewhere.”
“Hungary. It’s a glorious city, but it’s actually two cities, Buda and Pest, with a lovely river between them.”
“But we’ve got a dump, not a river.”
“One day, not too far in the future, the dump will be the single spot of undeveloped land in the middle of a great metropolis.”
I found that hard to imagine, but I played along. “So you’ll sell it?”
“I’ll donate it, but not before I flatten it and make it into a municipal park. You heard of Central Park, in New York City?”
At first I thought he was kidding, but Whitey proceeded to lay out a vision so grandiose, so elaborate, that he had to be serious. With whispering care he described groves of crepe myrtles and azaleas, hills of native grasses, an outdoor café, a Shakespeare garden, decorative boulders rolled in from the piedmont. The park would be an inclusive space, he said, a neighborhood anchor, a focal point for the daily rhythms of the lives of its users, promoting ecological, programmatic, experiential, and social diversity. I couldn’t believe the stuff that was coming out of his mouth. I never heard him talk like that before.
“Ben,” he said, “I’m gonna show you something I’ve hardly shown anybody else in this world. It’s precious to me, so be gentle if you think it’s corny.” He knelt beside me and opened the thin book so we both could see it. On the cover it said it was a Proposal for Landscape Architecture Services by Vokler Associates LLC. Whitey said Mr. Vokler was the best in the business, a real gentleman, then he started turning pages in the book for me. There were sections and plans, mockups and photos. The photos were done up on a computer so you could see people lounging and cavorting in a park that didn’t yet exist. Sometimes there’d be a photo of the dump on the left-hand page then a photo of the exact same spot on the right-hand page but with, say, a man walking his dog while talking on a cell phone. There was an outdoor café, just like Whitey said, and a bunch of big boulders. There were little cartoon people eating lunches on blankets, kids riding dirt bikes, a dog high up in the air catching a Frisbee.
Trash Mountain Page 22
