Trash Mountain. Bradley Bazzle
had dug it out. I watched with reverence as Demarcus took off his shirt, balled it up and stuffed it into his pocket, then slid on his back under the fence. I did the same and slid after him pretty easy. By the time I put my shirt back on, Demarcus had found a chrome-sided toaster and was inspecting it. All around us were tin cans and plastic bottles and scraps of wood and trash bags, some closed and some ripped open with their guts hanging out: coffee filters, banana peels, wadded up Kleenex. Some furniture was arranged in a ring nearby, and some faded beer cans were stacked in a pyramid. I was so dazzled by the spread that it took me a while to remember we were at the base of Trash Mountain. When I did remember, I looked up from the junk furniture and ripped trash bags, up from the dried grass clippings and dirty plastic toys, up and up until the surface of the mountain was so far away it looked like pieces of a colorful jigsaw puzzle spilled in a big, tall pile. I was overwhelmed. It was like when we went to this lake one time and I was sitting on the dock, not really thinking about anything, just staring at the calm, dark water, when suddenly I thought about how deep the water might be, and the thought of all that cold, dark hidden space made me dizzy. That feeling by the lake had been frightening, but this, I decided, in the shadows of Trash Mountain, was the greatest and most frightening feeling of my life.
Demarcus acted real casual, though. He said he and his friends messed around in there all the time. That made me sore. I guess I felt like a softie for being so moved. “You and your friends, huh?” I said in a needling way. “Were those boys playing ball without you your friends?”
“They aren’t my friends,” Demarcus said. He had popped the chrome shell off the toaster and was inspecting the inside. “They’re older. My brother’s with them.”
“Where are your friends?”
Demarcus didn’t say anything, and in the silence I pictured a bunch of black boys lying in bed wearing braces, like Ruthanne. That made me feel bad for saying what I did. Demarcus was a good man, I decided. He could be trusted. So I told him Trash Mountain made my sister’s spine weird and was poisoning the rest of us and stinging Jesus’s eyes worse than sin. Demarcus nodded in a serious way that made me think he had suspected this all along. Then he said, “But we don’t eat it or nothing.”
“You don’t gotta eat it,” I said. “It’s in the air. It’s all around. We’re breathing it right now and getting it into our skin. Don’t worry, though. I’m gonna blow it all up.”
Demarcus squinted at me. “What?”
“Well, maybe not all of it, but part of it.” I didn’t have time to go into more detail. The sun was just over top of the trees, which meant I wouldn’t get home before dark. I was scared, not of the scolding I might get from my parents but of that stretch through the forest, with the hobo beds. The crazed hobos came out at night, I suspected, to do their perversions. I decided to call Carl. I asked Demarcus if I could use his phone. He said of course and led me back under the fence, then a few blocks away to a little wooden house with a sagging front porch. The screen door was latched to keep a gray cat inside. We slipped in sideways, using our feet to block the cat, whose name was Ghost.
Demarcus said “Hey Dad” as we passed through the front room. Demarcus’s dad was wearing a bathrobe and sitting in a lounge chair, reading a newspaper. He eyed us over the paper as we went into the kitchen. After Demarcus showed me the phone and I took it off the cradle, Demarcus’s dad called to his son in the warm yet commanding voice I associated with dads on TV. I was convinced that he, unlike Demarcus, knew at a glance I was a terrorist. So after I called Carl, who was startled by my request to be picked up in Haislip and said he’d come right over, I walked boldly into the living room. I had decided I would introduce myself to this man in a friendly way that suggested I had nothing to hide.
“Hello, sir,” I said, “I’m Ben. Pleased to meet you.”
The father, who was very tall and had graying puffs of hair over his ears, shook my hand and introduced himself as Mr. Caruthers. He asked what brought me to Haislip, and I surprised myself by telling the truth: that I was following along the fence until I found a way inside the dump.
“Why on Earth do you want to go inside that nasty old dump?” Mr. Caruthers asked.
“To see it,” I said, which was true, though I left out the part about strategizing to destroy it by firebomb.
“Can’t you see it from over there in Komer?”
“There’s razor wire to keep us out.”
He shook his head. “Figures,” he muttered, then told us we shouldn’t be playing in that dump, though he admitted the temptation to be irresistible. He told us about a creek where he grew up and how they built forts out of old tires and driftwood that floated down the muddy water. “Simpler times,” he said.
When Carl showed up, he looked stoned. Mr. Caruthers shook his hand in a stiff way and asked if he was here for his brother. I’m not sure why Mr. Caruthers thought Carl and I were brothers—we looked nothing alike—but for some reason I blurted, “Yeah, he’s my brother. He’s gonna take me home.” Then I shook hands with Mr. Caruthers and on my way out I whispered to Demarcus that I would be back to finish the job.
In the car, Carl started making a speech about how I shouldn’t wander so far away, but I told him to fuck off. He said he was doing me a favor and I should be more respectful. I said I was sorry. Then I asked him about Haislip. Carl said he sometimes delivered pizzas over there but it was scary at night because the empty houses had vagrants inside. I had no idea what a vagrant was but assumed it to be a sort of creature.
We went back the opposite way that I came, completing my loop around the dump. Turns out I had walked the long way before, and Haislip and Komer were only a mile or so apart. I made note of this for later.
When I got home, Ruthanne was washing dishes and asked me where I’d been. I told her the whole story, leaving out the particulars of my plot but allowing that I had been casing the dump. It was important to tell at least part of the truth to Ruthanne because she had a nose for lies.
“I swear, Ben,” she said, “sometimes you just don’t think.”
“I think all the time,” I said. “Pretty hard, too.”
She snorted like it was ridiculous, the idea of me thinking. That made me mad. It also made me mad she had the energy to stand there washing dishes but hadn’t told me before, because if I knew she felt strong we could have rode bikes. So I went into my room and didn’t sneak into hers even once that night.
During computer class the next day I tried to find out more about Haislip. I wanted to know if it was worthy of my sacrifice, if saving Haislip, in addition to Komer, would doubly glorify me. The internet said Haislip was named after a Civil War guy and was known as Flag City, USA. I was confused. I thought Komer was Flag City, USA. Then the internet said Haislip was the hometown of mountaineer Bob Bilger, who was the first man to videotape climbing Mount Everest and wrote a book about it, but I thought Bob Bilger was from Komer. Then the internet said Haislip was the birth-place of the frozen hamburger even though everybody knew Komer was the birth place of the frozen hamburger, so when Mr. B came over to bug me about staying on task I asked him where was the birthplace of the frozen hamburger.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Is that question on the internet treasure hunt?”
“I finished that. You know anything about Haislip?”
“Haislip is a very interesting city, full of history and hardworking people, not unlike Komer. You’ll learn more about Haislip in high school, where half the students will have gone to Truckee.”
He meant John R. Truckee, the middle school in Haislip. I was at Milford Perkins, the one in Komer, which people said was better but had sloppy joes made of rat meat.
“Why the curiosity about Haislip?” Mr. B asked.
“No reason.” I didn’t want to let anything slip that might be a clue when the FBI questioned everybody who knew me. “I gotta finish my internet treasure hunt now.”
Mr. B walked