Bad Things Happen

by Kris Bertin

  the community of

  LONG LAKE

  But on the third leg nothing was written. There was just the moment when you were on pavement, surrounded by trees, and the moment after when the road turned to dirt or mud where swamp crept across ditches. Their truck did well enough on the rest of their route, but here it shook and shuddered and groaned from overwork. When their shocks started to shriek, Richard knew they had passed over. The place was called the narrows, or sometimes Kennedy Narrows, or the old township. Richard had heard Gene use all three, and once heard an old man at the diner call it the narrow passage.

  Heading up the narrow passage today?

  Not today, Gene said. Thank the lord.

  It took a half hour of driving down a logging road just to get to the first house, which was nothing more than a wooden shack next to an old gas station canopy with no gas station in sight. A pile of wood, a towtruck and a lot of cars parked where the pumps must have been. Once, they saw an old woman asleep in the towtruck, and another time they saw her in a lawn chair with a blanket pulled up over her.

  Out there the workload doubled, even though there were fewer houses than even the first leg. Where it sometimes took five minutes of driving to get to the next house, and where Richard and Gene uncovered cans and found far more than they were supposed to even take. The limits, which kept them from having to dump at the sorting centre several times a day, and which would have been useful here, went ignored. In any of the other three legs of the run, if someone left too much, Gene would march up to the door, and knock—even in the dark of early morning—to set them straight. But in the old township, he did no such thing. Here, all the rules were different—bent and reshaped, or even ignored—and Gene was quiet about this inconsistency.

  The first time Richard was able to address it, after eight months of working with Gene, he did it carefully. They had just pulled thirteen bags from a rotting wooden bin that had pushed itself apart from the weight. He didn’t look at Gene’s face, staring ahead, instead, at the sinking little trailer where it came from. He asked:

  Do you want me to talk to them?

  He had learned by then not to ever make any kind of accusation against Gene. He could only make a suggestion about himself, and what he could do for his boss.

  Gene responded by shaking his head without looking at him:

  They’ve been here longer than I have. Were here before we even had the rules.

  Later he added, at the sorting centre that—to be fair—a lot more people lived out here than on the rest of the run. Even if there were fewer houses, there were more people inside of them.

  Then, because he was away from it, and in a place he felt comfortable, he added:

  It’s different out there.

  Houses were bungalows and saltboxes, sometimes with garages, but usually not. Some had house numbers, but others didn’t. A string of newer-looking mini-homes had their civic numbers spray-painted on boulders at the edge of the properties. There were a few active farms, seated in rolling hills, but plenty more stretches of farmland where families lived and did no farming. Where fences surrounded empty corrals, and chicken coops made of greying wood leaned in on themselves, ready to collapse.

  Early on, Richard asked him where the animals were, and Gene told him there had never been animals out here as long as he remembered. The only ones they saw were wild, deer or moose. Once, they saw a black bear saunter out of the open doorway of an old church that Gene said had once been the school, too.

  About this place, Gene had no theories to share, and at the sorting centre had none of his usual vigilance with the third leg’s load. He waited and watched, shyly and silently, off to the side. Suddenly his duties seemed ceremonial, his attendance merely compulsory.

  Another time, they came across four plastic barrels at a curb, too heavy to lift, stinking and sloshing with some kind of liquid. When they took the lid off and saw a putrid black substance that Richard knew could only be the contents of a dredged septic tank, Gene said for fuck’s sake.

  Then he put the lid back on and walked away from it.

  We have to report this, Richard said. Don’t we? This is hazardous material, right?

  Leave it, Gene said.

  Later, when they were back in the truck, Gene explained as best he could:

  I didn’t grow up out here. I don’t know why it’s like this.

  The Clifton farm, Richard noticed, was always in flux.

  Sometimes the yard would be overrun with things, with La-Z-Boy chairs and dressers and desks, swollen from rainwater or separating into thick layers like roast-beef sandwiches. Little broken pieces everywhere and stacks of cardboard boxes gone hairy with mould and plastic bags blowing around like tumbleweeds. Other times, like in the summer, it would be bare, picked clean, and almost normal-looking. Just an ordinary property that was on its way to becoming somewhere you’d want to live. Then, it could be overrun with junk cars like Sunfires and Tercels and more half-ton trucks and four-wheelers parked crookedly on the dirt lawn.

  That’s when there would be beer bottles and forty-ouncers left standing upright in the ground, or lying where they had come to rest after rolling away from a sweaty hand. Or on the road, shattered into brown necks and bottoms from their trip through the air and across the dead earth.

  The things that they’d spotted on the lawn sometimes ended up at the curb, a week later, and items that they had passed over at other curbs sometimes ended up on the Clifton lawn too. And even though Gene had named the very things they picked up and threw into the truck as unhaulable everywhere else, Richard knew better than to make anything of it. From the Cliftons, they would take mattresses and boxsprings, a beer fridge and a deep freeze, a ride-on lawnmower with its wheels and seat and steering wheel dismembered.

  After the bonfire, Richard didn’t see any of the people who lived there for a long time.

  It was rare to even see anyone awake during the earliest part of the run anyway, except for the farmers who’d wave from their tractors on the third leg, or the army guys running with weighted packs on the second leg who wouldn’t. Sometimes they saw young men in camouflage jackets on four-wheelers with rifles, buzzing alongside the truck in the ditches. But Gene and Richard were both always on the lookout for a Clifton.

  When Richard finally saw one of them again, it was winter. Two of the women, both of them large with long, blonde hair, getting little Cliftons in snowsuits down the steps of the main house and into the van. Later, they’d seen the old man carrying what looked like two bottles of Javex from one house to another, early in the morning, wearing a short jacket over a robe and rubber boots. The old man stopped. His hands were full, so he didn’t wave, but he nodded at them.

  Good morning boys, he called.

  That was the day before Gene finally explained about them, rotating his neck carefully before he spoke, making sure it was in the right place. They were in the truck.

  Their brains are scrambled, Gene said quietly.

  A gentle explanation, long overdue. A guilty look on his face.

  That’s what I figured, Richard said. Crazy people.

  Then Gene leaned in, his hand nearly touching Richard’s.

  They’ve hurt people, he said. More than a few.

  Really?

  Two of them did, he said. The brothers. Or cousins.It was a long time ago but everyone remembers it.

  Richard didn’t know what Gene wanted him to say, so he said nothing. They were on the fourth leg, the furthest they could be from the third. Before the silence went for too long, Richard tried a joke:

  They didn’t shoot their garbage men, did they?

  Richard smiled, and waited for one in return. Gene’s moustache widened for a moment, but no teeth flashed from underneath. His mouth became small and said ha.

  After months, the work hadn’t gotten easier. With Gene, there were no e
asy days.

  Richard had worked past the pain, like he figured Gene must have, but he almost couldn’t cope with the smell. It stayed with him even after he changed and cleaned, even though his wife said she could smell nothing on him. He learned it was something that was still inside him when he made a tiny cone out of toilet paper to scour the insides of his nostrils with. He understood that he was taking it home with himself, in little pieces, particles that were hiding wherever they could. Something that was so dangerous to him that his body set off alarms at the presence of even the tiniest bit of it. Deadly harmful, but ordinary and ever-present, sitting in every single driveway, produced by mere existence; which grew, and would continue to grow and thrive so long as there were people to keep feeding it. When he cleaned himself, Richard imagined that whatever specks he washed off would look like the landfill in miniature, that up close it would look like the same writhing, grey heap, clinging to him.

  The job was only four days of work, but each day could drag on for twelve to fourteen hours. Other than trips to the dump, and when they would pull over to piss, Gene gave them one lunch break, and took Richard to the same diner off the highway every shift.It was in the next county, but nearest the sorting centre, so they could eat having already dumped their first load. They would order first, then go to the bathroom together, unzip their coveralls to the waist, and soap their arms up past their elbows. Set the taps as hot as they could stand and wash until the water in the sink was clear and their skin was red.

  You wash good or you get sick, Gene said. The only people who clean better than us are surgeons.

  Then, with their elbows lifted and their hands forward, they’d return to their table and eat as much as they could stand to put inside their bodies. This was also something that Gene instructed Richard to do on his first day, something that Richard failed to do. It was noon but they had already been going for seven hours.

  We’re going until it’s dark out so eat up.

  Richard ate most of a plate of fish and chips and had a cup of coffee. Didn’t really touch his peas. And then he watched Gene eat a hamburger and fries, a bowl of tomato soup that came with a roll, a big chicken Caesar salad swimming in dressing and bacon bits, and a cinnamon bun. He ate by opening his mouth and pushing the food in, letting his throat and jaws work on their own. He didn’t try to speak, or even look around. He was focused entirely on the next bite and nothing else. He drank a coffee and a water and an orange juice in big gulps between mouthfuls and finished the coleslaw on Richard’s plate before he was done.

  Four hours later, Richard found himself falling behind Gene. He began to miss his throws into the truck, going through the motion of it without looking. Another time he failed to pay attention to the weight and integrity of a bag, covered himself in wood ash and cat litter when it all came apart at the apex of his throw.

  And Gene kept going.

  He was sixty-one with grey cheeks and a moustache, had a stomach that protruded from under his coveralls, bad knees and bursitis in his elbow. He had difficulty turning his neck and said it could get locked into place if he wasn’t careful. And he could move faster, more efficiently than Richard, who was thirty-six and thin, who had once been on the football and rugby team and who played softball in an amateur league for a decade. On the last half of the first day, Gene was emptying cans and throwing three bags for every one of Richard’s. He had done it for long enough that he knew exactly how much of himself to put into every movement. Took all of his available energy and divided it evenly between households, filled himself up with the exact amount of calories needed to do it all over again.

  On his first day, in the time it took Richard to retrieve a bag that had gotten away from him, he saw Gene climb the gates of the truck and get on top of the pile. He held the sides of the truck and pushed down hard. He went down, slowly, pushing the air out, crushing the softer parts of things, making it possible to take more on.

  Next time you’re doing it, he said.

  When it was his turn, it was late in the day and they were full. Gene threw a final bag on top, then pointed and said get to it. They were stopped in the middle of a country road, at some spot in the narrows where dead trees stuck out of swamp water. Richard climbed up the gates and put himself in the middle of the load. Pushed his legs and boots into the pool of shiny green-and-black bags. It felt like it was eating him. There were a few dull pops below him, followed by a whine like something small and scared was getting suffocated. A burst of hot air rose up from below but didn’t keep rising. Instead it surrounded him. Then, after a while, when he couldn’t sink down further, he felt it fighting him, pushing back up, like he was the only thing keeping it in there. He imagined that if he weren’t there, all of it might surge over the edges of the truck, escape into the forest and multiply.

  Richard saw the worst of it late in the winter.

  It happened when he wasn’t sure if he could even keep doing the job. Back when he’d lost weight, and muscle too. When he’d lifted up his shirt to show his wife that the ring of fat around his middle had disappeared, and her smile only lasted as long as it took for her gaze to meet his face.

  You look tired though.

  I am tired, he said. Really tired.

  The job was the hardest work Richard had ever done. He’d dug holes and held up sheets of drywall, demolished homes and moved them, and this was the hardest. Moving came close, but with moving there were sometimes smaller houses, or houses without much in the way of books or furniture or the things that you had to work in unison with another guy to get through a hallway and down a set of steps. And with moving, even on the hardest days, you’d have at least ten guys to blow through the work, to take the place apart and move it down the road like ants.

  He and his wife had talked about whether or not it was smart to keep the job and decided that he was making more with Gene than he had at anything else he had ever done. Because she wasn’t working, and there was a child on the way, even if he wanted to look for something else, it would have to wait. So there was nothing more that he or she could say, and he was careful not to complain around her.

  He seemed to always have a dull headache that stayed with him so long everything seemed grey and strange, like he was in a dream. He felt empty and drained, like a shadow of himself cast upon the wall. It was in this state, early in the morning, that he tipped over a steel drum with his work gloves and saw it:

  Two beach towels, decorated with the California Raisins, soaked through with blood.

  They’d seen blood before. Blood was everywhere, all around them. In food and on maxi-pads; congealed in discarded bandages and wrecked clothing. Lining the brims of ballcaps and pooled in the middle of rusting duvets. But not like this, and never this much.

  The towels were balled up, and after he grabbed them, something fell out into the snow and landed with a thick kind of wetness. They were at the Cliftons.

  A girl’s nightie, green with lace trim, dark and wet.

  The blood looked fresh and red and only a bit of it gone brown, because it was partially frozen. Not even in a bag, but tossed in overtop of one, almost casually. Like it was meant to be there.

  Holy shit, Richard said.

  He’d grabbed it automatically, like he would have grabbed a bag, only to have it fall apart on him. And then he’d dropped it. Blood on his gloves and coveralls. A thick, congealed clot on his boot.

  Oh fuck.

  Throw it in, Gene said. Throw it in right now.

  He had taken one look at it, accepted it for what it was, and was ready to move on. But Richard stood in the snow, still looking down at it. The purple cartoon face had gone black with blood, and the yellow saxophone was completely red. A lot of it wasn’t yet unfurled. He was worried to move it, in case there was something inside, something small. He knew what it could be. His wife was five months along, and this was what they feared, what she took vitamins and drank
special shakes for, was why Richard moved the cat litter outside and cleaned it himself. He was looking at what they never wanted to see. Or something even worse.

  But Gene was quick to come over, grab all of it off the ground, and ball it up, another fat fleck sticking to his glove. He threw it in the back while Richard stood stone still.

  Hurry the fuck up, Gene said.

  They took the rest of the trash—twenty bags, far more than any one household was ever supposed to give them—with their heads down, and didn’t look up at the house it had come from until they were in the truck, and moving. Both of them saw one of the curtains from the main house pull back, and drop. Gene looked away, and Richard watched. A dark shape behind a maroon blind that lingered, then moved on.

  When this load was tipped, instead of watching it come out, Gene said that they had better get a move on. They pulled away from the bags they had collected and left them in an uninspected heap for the first time.

  At the start of his second year with Gene, Richard’s wife told him his body had changed again.

  His back and shoulders had grown muscular, overdeveloped from throwing bags, while his biceps shrunk. All the fat was gone from his body, and his face was hollow at the cheeks and full of muscle or tendons that weren’t there before. She told him—when she put his hand inside her bathrobe and onto her breast—that his hands were softer than they’d ever been.

  He had worked hard to prove himself to Gene, and did it by never calling in sick, never showing up hung over, and never complaining. He worked as hard as he could through the spring thaw, when they were rained on and their feet were ice cold, and every bag was at least three times as heavy. Worked through the summer heat, when everything stunk worse than it ever had and anything left too long was busy and alive with maggots working hard to transform themselves into hard, black horseflies that bit hard enough to draw blood. By then, Richard could finally keep up with him.

  Richard learned to act like Gene, to criticize the households for their shabby job of things. Used his lingo, too. Would hold up a bag full of computer parts and say, like Gene would, that these guys were trying to pull a fast one on them or that they think they’re sly, don’t they? They were something more than companions and less than friends, more than a boss and an employee.