Trash Mountain. Bradley Bazzle
sound like a murderer, I had to admit, so I opened my eyes, which had been closed from fear, and looked around. Nobody was there. I looked up at the edge of the hangar roof, but nobody was there either. I peeked inside the dumpster. Nobody.
“Where are you?” I asked, preparing in my mind to mount my bike and escape.
“On the other side of the fence. I saw you jumping and came to tell you to be careful. If they catch you they’ll send you away.”
“Send me away where?”
“They’ll load you into a van and take you to a place outside of town and leave you there in the middle of the night with nothing but the shirt on your back, like a goddamned raccoon.”
That didn’t sound like a logical punishment to me, but the man, Boss, seemed pretty worked up so I didn’t comment.
“Like a grown man can’t find his way back to a place he been before,” he was muttering. “What’re you doing here anyway?”
“I’m supposed to get some stuff for some guys.”
“Sounds secret.”
“Pretty much.”
“Tell me what you need and I can help, maybe.”
I didn’t want to tell him, from embarrassment, so I asked if there was a secret way to get inside. “Not that I don’t appreciate your offer,” I said. “It’s just, you know—”
“It’s secret, I hear you. Unfortunately there ain’t no way to sneak in here like there used to be.”
“Then how’d you get in?”
He paused. “I work here.”
I was relieved. If he worked there as a garbage man or whatever, then he wasn’t a hobo; I could trust him. I said, “Okay, here it goes: I need a crack pipe, a dirty needle, and five used condoms.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“I know. I’m real sorry. You don’t have to get it.”
“No, no, I can get it.”
“For real? You got that stuff?”
“Oh yeah, we got it. If you can name it, it’s in here. This place, it’s like a second world where everything’s mushed together within easy reach.”
The term second world intrigued me. I thought about the netherworld occupied by ghosts and wizards, and possibly Jesus and God.
The man told me about some bio-waste bags from the hospital that were supposed to go to a special bio-waste site, but the hospital cheaped out and put them in the dump, which meant plenty of dirty needles. And condoms were pretty much everywhere, the man said, but highly concentrated in a spot where they put what got filtered out of the sewer water, since people were always flushing condoms down the toilets. “As for the crack pipe,” he said, “I’m not too sure. Most of that stuff gets tossed on the floor and crunched up underfoot. The one-hitters, I mean. People don’t just throw away nicer pipes. But I’ll see what I can do.” He asked if I could meet him there the next day, and I said I would.
I wasn’t sure what to make of the man’s kindness. I wondered if he worked for the dump and didn’t have enough to do, or if he liked little boys. I had never met a sex offender but knew they existed. I also knew that sometimes adults without kids, like Ms. Mikiska, took a special interest in kids and liked to do nice things for them then give long-winded advice afterward.
The next day at school I avoided Ronnie and them because I didn’t have the stuff yet, and I didn’t want to seem like a failure in case they expected me to procure it within twenty-four hours. That meant I had to sneak out before last period, which I didn’t mind. That, in turn, meant I showed up at the hangar building an hour early. There was water dribbling through the fence, and when I got close I could hear men talking. I thought my contact might be among them, but I didn’t hear his weird nasal voice.
The men were hosing something off, and I pressed my eye to the gap between the fence and the hangar and saw a brand new front-loader, red and shining. One man was blasting it with a hose while another gesticulated beside him. Both wore gray coveralls like garbage men. The old yellow frontloader I used to watch from Ruthanne’s window was idling in the distance, waiting its turn. Beyond the frontloaders was an honest-to-God excavator. It was like a construction site in there, like they were building Trash Mountain on purpose. The idea bothered me, but I had to admit it would be pretty cool to ride those machines when nobody was around, even just to sit in the driver’s seat and pretend.
I hid behind the dumpster like before and kept quiet until the voices stopped. I waited until I smelled cigarette smoke, at which point I poked my head out and saw the back of a tall man leaning into the narrow gap between the fence pole and the side of the hangar. He wore black rubber waders caked in mud. Above the collar of his dirty flannel shirt was a sunburned neck and some greasy tentacular hair.
I didn’t know what to say in case the man wasn’t my contact so I mounted my bike preemptively, to be ready for a getaway. “Boss,” I whispered.
The man turned his head to look over his shoulder. His big white face was like a cinderblock, with blonde stubble and a sort of gash going up from the top lip to a thick crooked nose. Maybe whatever broke his nose had broken the lip part too.
He held up a brown plastic grocery bag. “I got good news and bad news,” he said. “Good news is the needles and prophylactics was easy. Bad news is the crack pipe, but check it out.” He lowered the grocery bag and opened it so I could see. There was a thick syringe with reddish liquid crystallized inside, and some condoms that were caked in mud but obviously hard used. There was also a glass tube of some sort. The man picked up the tube between his thumb and forefinger and held it close to the gap for me to see. There was some dark stuff inside one half of the tube, and the glass looked smoky.
“Is that a real crack pipe?” I asked, kind of bewildered. The idea of crack was mysterious and frightening to me.
“Nope,” he said. “It’s just a glass thing I got from the bio-waste pile. What I did was stick some mud in it then light it on fire. Looks pretty convincing, huh?”
“Definitely,” I said, though I wouldn’t have known a crack pipe from a corncob.
He tried to push the bag through the gap but couldn’t get his big hand through. “Reach in here and grab it,” he said.
In a flash I pictured him grabbing my wrist and holding me until some other men captured me from behind. I had to remind myself he wasn’t a sex-offending hobo. This man had done right by me, and I owed it to him to show my trust. Plus I wanted the stuff he got me. So I reached through the gap and grabbed the bag, and when he let go I pulled it through.
“Thank you,” I said. “Can I pay you or something? I have some money at home.”
“On the house,” he said. “Favors always come back around.”
I thanked him again, caught off guard by his friendliness. I wasn’t used to people doing nice things for me, let alone garbage men, who tended to be stoic or surly, maybe on account of having to wake up so early. Or maybe this man wasn’t a garbage man, it occurred to me. He wasn’t wearing coveralls, and he kept glancing over his shoulder. Come to think of it, he had been speaking in a loud whisper ever since we started talking. But if he wasn’t a garbage man, what was he? And what was he doing in the dump?
Asking those questions might scare the man off, I decided, so I waved in the direction of the new frontloader and said real casual, “You ever get to ride that rig?”
The man laughed. “I wish,” he said. “It would make my life easier, let me tell you. Better picking than ever in here.”
“I bet,” I said, though I had no idea what he was talking about. “What kind of picking they got, nowadays?”
“Oh, all sorts of stuff. You could live five lifetimes