Bad Things Happen

by Kris Bertin

  By the time fall came and they were taking away leaves and pumpkin guts along with their regular loads, Richard could sense when Gene needed him. Could swoop in and give him a hand and do it wordlessly, and Gene could do the same. When a bag was stuck, in the microsecond it took to feel it sticking, one of them could grab the can and pull it free for the other in one quick motion. He had put himself inside of Gene’s range of motion, too. Had built in himself a copy of Gene, a careful record of all of his movements and estimations, his timing and range. On the run, they were fast-moving reflections of each other that would stop, empty, throw, and leave in efficient little bursts.

  Gene had remarked in small ways about Richard’s development. When he achieved a long-distance throw, and the bag arced overhead with the perfect whoosh, Gene would give him the A-OK sign with his fingers and thumb. He would laugh with joy when Richard one-handed a heavy, bloated bag over his shoulder.

  Now you’re working, he’d say, and they both would smile.

  But still, when they passed over the threshold to that other place, nothing had changed. Even on beautiful days, when all was quiet except for birds and trees and the sound of their small movements, something felt wrong. Richard could see it on Gene’s face, an expression he knew was on his own face too: worry. It kept them quiet and, at the Clifton’s, completely silent, as if a single wrong word might summon the whole clan from their nest.

  When Richard finally told his wife about them, it was because of the swing set.

  He had kept them from her, had kept all mention of their waste separate from their home and the people in it. Had never mentioned the blood, or the mess, or the crimes Gene had told him about. But the swings had broken this barrier for him.

  It was winter, and the yard had become a maze again—even worse than before—but there was something else, too. Something at the head of all that trash, waiting for them.

  When they were pulling up to it, from afar, he didn’t know precisely what he was looking at, but he knew it was going to make him angry. It was a swing set, enormous with thick, metal poles—the kind you’d find at a school—maybe ten-feet tall, with cracking blue paint. Each one of its legs rested in a trash barrel, and the whole thing was leaning strangely in the snow bank, towering over them. It was so huge it couldn’t fit in the truck even if it were empty and they had four guys to move it. And yet it had come here from somewhere else, had been brought here by them. How had it even made it here?

  When he gazed upon it, Richard felt the same thing he’d felt before, when the roofers didn’t pay him and he’d shown up on the job to collect. Not just anger, but a righteous fury that came with such a sense of certainty that he felt invulnerable. If the men on the roof, all of them holding hammers, had come after him, he imagined their blows would have bounced right off him. He felt the same now, like if the Cliftons came out all at once he could pull them apart with his bare hands.

  When they got out, both men stood and looked at it for a while. It had no seats, just hanging chains, clinking like wind chimes.

  After Richard jerked at the legs and found that he couldn’t even budge them in the cans, he laughed:

  Are you fucking serious?

  Gene pinched between his eyebrows. He spoke quietly, with his eyes closed:

  We have to find a way to take this.

  Why not just go talk to them? Richard asked, knowing the answer, feeling something sour blooming inside of himself.

  No, Gene said with some effort. Just leave it be.

  They had gone through this in the fall, when the Cliftons put out an entire shower stall with a toilet inside of it. It was smashed and sliding around in four big pieces, and Gene accepted this without question, took on the extra load as if any other course of action were impossible. Richard protested for the first time by asking if they really had to take it, but did it while helping to heave it up and over the second closed gate.

  Don’t you get sick of this shit? Richard asked him.

  Gene swallowed instead of answering, then wiped his forehead.

  Ten minutes later the stall came off the back and tumbled onto the road. They stopped, not to heave it back onto the pile, but to shove it down into a ditch. It landed in thick mud and reeds, on its side. Gene felt satisfied leaving it like that.

  We can just say we didn’t notice it go, he told Richard. If anybody asks.

  And Richard watched as it collected brown water from the little brook flowing through the ditch before he moved on.

  With the swing set, Richard decided that if it were still there when they came back the next week, he would go and talk to them, with or without Gene. When the truck shuddered around the corner, and they saw it for the second time, it had taken on new shape. With the snow bank at its side, all the new bags of waste had collected against the swing set and on top of it, giving it new mass. Richard thought it looked like a temple in the making, somewhere you’d sacrifice virgins to the spirits circling overhead. With the Cliftons’ garbage cans out of commission, more bags than usual had been left out and torn open. Crows were eating what was left.

  Richard felt something familiar.

  It pulled him out of the truck, past all the fleeing birds, and onto the property itself. It moved him through the rotting fence and past two speakers, stripped of their foam, sitting next to a gutted dryer, the little pieces of litter probably thrown directly from the house. Then he was up and onto the porch, a mess of trash and snow and ice and junk either too difficult to get out onto the yard or into the house. Two frozen couches, a china cabinet without doors. A set of aluminum blinds twisted and wrapped around a red snow-blower blade. There was warm air blowing out from inside the house. Richard realized he was knocking on the door.

  A dog barked.

  He waited.

  When it opened, the old man was there, smoking a cigarette, looking sickly thin, like a mummy in long johns. He didn’t say hello or ask any questions. He crumpled the checkerboard of lines on his forehead and made his eyes disappear in a squint.

  Listen, Richard heard himself say. You gotta get this thing outta here.

  He looked past Richard, and searched in the distance. A smile opened his face back up and he laughed when he saw the mound.

  The boys put that out. He shook his head. I told them you fellas wouldn’t take it but they didn’t listen.

  We can take five bags from most households. For you guys, we do more. But we can’t take your swing set.

  Well, he said, his smile leaving him. You gotta take it.

  We can’t take it.

  Whatever we give you, you take it. You put it in that little truck and you go. It’s your job to take it.

  Actually it isn’t, Richard said. It is a little truck, though, you’re right. And we can only take so much. And this is too much.

  Who says it’s too much? He looked at him. You? There are fourteen of us.

  He peered with one burning eye at the road, at Gene, looking small in the driver’s seat. He pointed with a knobby finger.

  Does he decide?

  Then there was silence except for the wind sucking the smell out from the house. Richard clenched his jaw and swallowed before speaking.

  We can’t even move the thing.

  You take what we give you, he said.

  You get that out of there or else we can’t take any of your trash. Period.

  The two stood for a moment, looking into each other’s eyes.

  Then, Richard tried again:

  We can go to the county, he said. Go and get a fine for all this.

  Is that the truth? Can you?

  We can, Richard said.

  Well, the old man said, we’ll see.

  He shut the door.

  When he crunched back to Gene through the snow and saw him trying to pull a garbage bag off the top of the mound, Richard told him to stop, and Gene di
d. He brought his arms down to his sides, slowly, then looked to Richard, who told him to get back in the truck. Gene obeyed, because things were different now.

  It all changed when Richard surpassed Gene.

  When he was faster and used to the system and terrain and could act before a need even arose. It was when Gene had him back to the garage and sat him next to the little wood stove again after they were back from the run. The truck parked next to them, grey and dented and covered in a film of grease that was cleaned off only once a year.

  I could write my name in that, Richard thought.

  Gene spoke at length about what good a job Richard had been doing, and offered him a raise. He had brought him there expressly for this purpose, and was frank about it:

  I’ve given two guys a raise, and it was only ever after a good five years or so, he said. But I’m older now and you help me a hell of a lot. So I thought I’d let you know I want to pay you more, if the idea is that you want to keep doing this.

  I do, Richard said. I want to keep doing this, Gene.

  Well then, that sounds good to me.

  They shook hands then, and sat inside of what seemed like happiness.

  The change came later, in Richard’s mind. When it occurred to him for the first time that all of this was malleable. That they could get people to follow the rules if they really wanted to, if they weren’t afraid. That Gene could spend a quarter of the money he spent on his raise and get a new truck. Or a second one. That they could split the work between them and be finished faster, spread it out over one extra day and not have to work so hard. That this whole operation hinged on the fact that Gene wanted four days straight to do whatever the fuck he needed all those hours for.

  The next time he saw Gene, it had become something he could feel. A difference in balance, in the space between them. He didn’t have a word for what was gone. When he and Gene emptied cans in unison, put them down, and went their separate ways to the driver’s and passenger’s side, it was something missing in their movements. A tug.

  He came up with the word looking into his son’s mouth, wet with orange mush, at his lips and the ridge of pink where his teeth were beginning to sprout. He thought of the name of what had been between them that was now gone, or else something that was imaginary and never there to begin with.

  Tether, he said.

  When Richard walks towards the Clifton house for the last time, Gene stays in the truck and waits. The pyramid is nearly a complete, missing only a few blocks near its middle. A mound of garbage nearly big enough to necessitate its own run to the sorting centre. Its chains no longer clinking, but resting on a heap of taut, black bags.

  This time, Richard knocks on the door with enough force that he feels it give a little.

  This time, he receives no answer.

  He waits, and knocks again. Looks to his left. Just past the porch, a picnic table beside a mound of dirt. A hole nearby with half a motorcycle in it.

  As he waits, he starts to deflate. He feels Gene’s gaze burning into the back of his head, a hot tickle.

  Finally he turns around, and leaves. Goes down the steps and begins to walk back. He sees that Gene’s face is turned in his direction, but it’s looking past him, at the house. Richard turns just in time to see the door shutting, and something shoot out. At first he doesn’t know what he’s looking at because it’s bright, and all he can hear is the wind.

  It’s black and low to the ground, coming at him like a tiny storm cloud.

  He realizes it’s a dog when it’s close enough to open its mouth, and by then it is too late to run, or really do anything. All he can do is offer up his hand in place of his neck or face or crotch, and the mouth accepts, taking it on with ease. Then it has him, and they are one, a man with a black dog on the end of his arm. Richard holds his own wrist, trying to pry himself free, and trying to kick the dog, too.

  From the truck, it looks like they’re dancing. It sounds like Richard’s singing, crying out in whoops and hollers, even though he isn’t. It takes a long time before Gene is able to move, to unclick his seatbelt, and open the door, heave his weight from the seat and rush forward. For a while he watches them through his own clouded breath on the window before he opens the door.

  After Gene finally gets to him, a heavy flat-head shovel clenched between his gloved fingers, it still takes twenty more minutes.

  Gene swings, sometimes hitting the dog, sometimes hitting the ground. When he does connect and the metal ricochets off the dog’s skull, pain shoots through Richard’s whole body and he cries out. Eventually Gene gives up with the shovel, grabs the dog by the hind legs and pulls back with all his strength, kicks at its underside, but it won’t let go. Richard grabs at whatever he can find littered on the ground. Snow and clumps of dead grass. An empty cloth pencil case. An old bleach container, stomped flat. A paint can lid. The chewed-up remote control from a toy car. A six-inch length of garden hose. At one point he tries to grab something round and red and comes away with nothing, realizing it’s his own blood. His scavenger hunt ends when his hand falls on the curved end of a broken cinderblock with real weight to it, fifteen feet from where this started.

  The dog releases him after five blows to its snout and head, but Richard doesn’t allow it to retreat. Instead, he is up and the shovel is in his hands—in both the good hand and the ruined one—and he’s swinging it harder than Gene ever could. Chasing after it. The dog takes more blows to the skull as it tries to run away, yelping and staggering with each one. It’s knocked over and silenced completely when the shovel is swung sideways into the bone of its neck with a hard snap. After it’s down, after it has stopped opening and closing its jaws, and even after its black lips have drawn back down over its teeth, Richard doesn’t stop. He’s working harder than he’s ever worked, bringing the shovel up and down, up and down onto the dark body lying in the yard with all the other things.

  Later, when Richard bursts through the Cliftons’ door with his hand dangling at his side and Gene following him, he hasn’t slowed any. He charges through the cold room and into a hallway with fake wood panelling, blue shag carpet. Stacks of dead TVs and radios and record players, all pushed up against a wall. Crosses into what looks like a living room.

  There, five children sit on a rug before a television, five bowls of cereal before them, their faces lit by a dull warbling. One boy, maybe the oldest, maybe nine years old, upright and leaning against the couch, looking out of place and awkward as he searches their faces.

  Richard goes to move, to search the kitchen and back and upstairs, but the entire motion is short circuited into a sort of twitch.

  He stops. Gene is saying his name.

  That’s when he realizes it, and feels it. A big feeling, so big it’s like he’s standing on it. He remembers outside, the van—the one he’d seen the children and the women piling into—up on blocks and under a tarp. And there were none of the usual trucks or rusting cars parked haphazardly across the lot. He looks at a child’s pale face, flickering blue from the light of the television, the only light in the house. They’re alone. The only adults are he and Gene, together in the dark. No one’s in charge. Not on this floor, or in this house, or on this parcel of land. Not anywhere along this road, not even where it ends and branches out in every direction, like lightning.

  GIRL ON FIRE ESCAPE

  I met her at a party for cam girls and cam boys. People who jerk themselves off in front of webcams for other people to watch. So that they can jerk themselves off too. If they have a credit card.

  At least that’s what I thought it was. I had seen camgirls before on pop-up ads, the kind you click away from because they cost money or give you viruses or keep you from getting to the real porn, and all I had ever seen in those windows were grainy, pixellated hands fiddling with grainy, pixellated crotches. At the party they explained that it was mostly a performance directed by the audience—a b
unch of people (men) demanding this and that in a chat window—and anything could happen. Show your ass, show your tits, put oil on them. Use the blue dildo. No, the other blue dildo, with the real-looking head and balls. Now the big red butt plug shaped like an atomic bomb. The combinations were endless.

  Marc, who cleans high-rise windows with me, was dating a girl who did cams for a living. Her name was Leslie and even though I met her only once, she had made it her job to find me a girlfriend. It was the first thing she said to me. Her, in a sweatsuit and without makeup, me in my soap-stained company uniform, sitting across from each other while Marc rooted around for rolling papers. She asked:

  Do you have anybody yet?

  As if being alone isn’t even a choice to be made, a default setting I was waiting to move past. But I said what she wanted to hear, which was no not yet, so she was able to get started right there on the couch, counting off the girls on her clicking corn-chip-sized fingernails. Marc said it was her way of making a little family out of us, to try and get some double dates and game nights going. She was new to the city like I was, Marc explained, and she got lonely. I said it sounded to me like she had lots of friends. Or fans, anyway. He didn’t like that.

  I almost didn’t go to the party. I had to clean a building in the morning and had decided I wouldn’t attend since I was in the dish pit at the restaurant that night too. Washing and bussing glasses and mugs and dishes—hundreds and hundreds of them until my hands were red and raw and ready to flake apart like puff pastry—and also drinking.

  Finding and consuming abandoned drinks wasn’t exactly allowed, but no one ever stopped us from doing it. The servers, who were repulsed by what we did—who could afford to buy their own drinks and disguise them as coffee in travel mugs—weren’t able to tattle because they were just as guilty. Untouched, or hardly touched, was my only rule—a rule that kept me relatively sober—but that night six businessmen walked out with a fresh round of Guinness on the table, and I was able to get there in time, get them back to the dish pit, and line them up side by side, right at eye level, on the shelf of cleaning supplies before anyone stopped me. By the time I ruined the perfect white head and sucked in the warm, black body of the last one, the choice had been made for me.