Trash Mountain. Bradley Bazzle
knife with a laser beam for a blade.
I cruised the city on my bike, brainstorming. I knew from movies that sometimes people put HELP WANTED signs in the windows, but the only signs I saw were for pit bull puppies. Dog breeding was an option, but pit bulls were where the money was, clearly, so I would have to catch a few stray pit bulls and make them have puppies. But the strays were scary, and I didn’t relish the idea of encouraging them to copulate.
On the window of the drugstore were flyers for paid drug trials, but you had to be eighteen to do them. There were also flyers offering money for blood plasma, but you had to be eighteen for that too, and anyway I had a notion that blood plasma was something only diseased people had, in place of normal liquid blood. I imagined it to be a sort of blood-colored mucus.
Thwarted, I decided to ask Demarcus for advice. He was a year ahead of me even though we were the same age, so he had started at Pansy Gilchrist, the high school, and had friends who were older.
Demarcus told me the best I could hope for were odd jobs like raking leaves for old people, but there were so few odd jobs in Haislip, he said, that for his own part he gave up long ago. “My Dad told me to start a paper route,” he said, “but who reads the newspaper anymore? Nobody in Haislip, that’s for sure. Maybe Komer’s different.”
“Probably not,” I said, “what with the internet.”
“Nobody in Haislip has the internet and they still don’t read that shit. As soon as I turn fifteen I’m gonna get a job bagging groceries. That’s good money, plus you get a discount on certain items.”
“But I don’t turn fifteen for a year.”
“Me neither.” Demarcus thought for a moment, which wrinkled his eyebrows together in a way that made him look older. “One time Dad let Daryl be a coat-check boy at the Motown Lounge.”
“What’s a coat-check boy?”
“A boy who holds your coat until you’re done drinking. Daryl says Dad didn’t let him stay up long enough to give people back their coats, though.” Demarcus shook his head. “Probably it would be best to invent something.”
“Like what?”
“Something everybody needs, like stronger cement that’s got a nice color to it, or tinfoil with self-cleaning nanoparticles. But to make money off it you gotta have a patent, so I’m thinking I might become a patent lawyer.”
“Don’t you have to go to college for that?”
“College and more.”
“What about until then?”
Demarcus thought for a moment. “You tried Bi-Cities?”
“What’s Bi-Cities?”
“Bi-Cities Sanitation and Recycling. The dump.”
“Hell no,” I said, kind of offended. A few months ago we had tried to blow the place up, and now Demarcus thought I should work there?
“It’s the only place that hires,” Demarcus said.
“I ain’t working for no dump.”
“It’s not just a dump, though. There’s a recycling center and a toxic waste storage facility.”
“No way.”
“Look, man, you said you needed work.”
The idea of working at the dump turned my stomach, but the more I thought about it, the more it made perverse sense. By working at the dump I’d accomplish two things at once: 1) getting money to torch the place later, and 2) casing the place so I could optimize the torching.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said, “but what kind of job could I get there?”
“There’s internships,” he said, “but you’d have to lie about your age. That, or gofer type jobs.”
I nodded. The idea of lying appealed to me. “Maybe I’ll try the dump after all,” I said. “Know your enemy, isn’t that what they say?”
Demarcus nodded seriously. “Let me know how it goes.”
I told Demarcus I would, and we shook hands in the elaborate way he favored.
It went horribly.
Bi-Cities headquarters was a squat gray office building that looked like a jailhouse. The building and its parking lot full of pickup trucks were surrounded by a razor-wire fence. The only entrance had a guard booth with tinted windows. I rode up to it on my bike. I was wearing a collared shirt and the pants from my funeral suit to look presentable. The guard was slouched, reading a magazine. It took him a while to notice me down below. When he did, he chuckled like a dimwit. He said, “Can I help you, little partner?”
The term little partner was distasteful to me but I smiled. “I’m interested in inquiring about employment opportunities,” I said, which was something I got off the internet at school, along with key phrases like “self-starter” and “team-player” and “I’m familiar with the work you do and consider myself an expert in your field.”
He chuckled again. “Any particular job posting you’re inquiring about?”
“The internship,” I lied.
“What internship?”
I hated this man. He had a stubbly red neck pinched by a starched collar, the sort of neck I would come to associate with thoughtless white men in positions of power.
“See,” he said, smiling as he put down his magazine to lift up a clipboard, “to get in you have to be on the list.”
“How do I get on the list?”
“You make an appointment.”
“I have one. They wanna interview me for the internship.”
“If you had one you’d be on the list.” He took up his magazine again, which was called POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine and had crosshairs on the O.
“There must be a mistake,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Can I use your phone?”
“Nope.”
I was kind of thankful he said no, because who would I have called? I didn’t have an interview. The rejection allowed me to take the higher ground, to save face as I rode away indignant.
As a last resort, I decided to talk to Dad. I had to wait until the weekend, though. He had taken a construction job in the city two hours away, where he shared a shitty little apartment with guys from work. He stayed there weeknights and got drunk, Mom said, and when he was home she barely talked to him. Neither did Ruthanne. Dad said we were lucky. He said there were dads from the Chinese countryside who lived in big cities all year, working 24/7, who only got to go home for Chinese New Year and by then they were so tired they just slept the whole time. Plus, he said, they often gave the rest of the family communicable city diseases.
When I approached him he was watching a TV news show. “Look at this goddamn idiot,” he said about an anchorman with gray hair like a helmet. “Bet he’s naked from the waist down behind that fake desk of his. That’s how they do, you know. The sports ones too. And when the cameras stop, they bitch and moan like Mickey Rooney.”
I asked Dad what kind of job I could get, and he said the first job he ever had was running errands for Donkey Dan Connors.
“You ran errands for a donkey?” I asked.
“A gangster,” Dad said. “A two-bit gangster. Whole family is gangsters, Whitey included.”
“Who’s Whitey?”
“Whitey Connors. He runs the dump.”
That was the first I ever heard about Whitey Connors, but the name stuck with me. I imagined a sort