Trash Mountain. Bradley Bazzle
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the lock while he fooled with the combination, hunched over and squinting, his tongue sticking out from concentration. The box popped open. There were papers inside it, and notebooks. The top paper said SATANS MANIFESTO in big block letters.
I was intrigued, remembering what Ruthanne told me about their secret Nazi book. I was flattered, too, that they trusted me enough to show me their work. They were the first people besides Bob Bilger I ever met who did a book. Anyway, Kyle gingerly raised the top corner of the title page between his thumb and pointer finger and turned it over to reveal a page of type-written text, like a paper for school.
“The notebooks are first drafts,” Kyle said, “and we’ve got lots of them, enough for ten books probably. Now we go through them and pick the best stuff and sort of fix it up, then Red Dog types it.”
Red Dog nodded.
“What we need,” Kyle said, “is illustrations.”
I was stunned. I was happy too, because this gave my presence some meaning. They had seen my dirty drawings and wanted my help. They respected my abilities.
Pete raised the lockbox towards me and I was about to read the first typewritten page when Ronnie came quickly around the car hollering about how they couldn’t trust me yet. He snatched the box out of Pete’s hands and slammed it closed.
“This is important work,” Ronnie said.
“We know that,” Kyle said. “That’s why we want illustrations, to make it better.”
“More engaging,” Pete said. “We talked about this, dog.”
Ronnie said, “Yeah, well, that was before I found out this kid’s such a pussy.”
I didn’t take the comment personally. To Ronnie, everybody was a pussy, or had a pussy, or didn’t care about anything except pussy. He said to Pete, “We can’t trust him yet, you pussy.”
“Yet?” Pete asked.
“He has to prove himself. The stakes are high. We could go to jail for this shit.”
I expected the others to tell Ronnie he was being ridiculous, but they seemed to agree with him. I wondered what kind of book could get a person put in jail. At Milford Perkins, there’d been a story about a kid who sold drugs and got put in jail for life when they found a bloody gun in his locker. The judge wanted to hang him, but the governor said no, he was just a kid. As a compromise they put him in a man’s jail with grown men, and people said you could see him at his window at night with his hands together praying for a quick and painless death.
“You have to earn our trust,” Ronnie told me. It might have been the first time he spoke to me directly without looking at somebody else. His eyes were bright and fierce, but the skin around them was purplish, like he was tired. His face made me think of the prickly, sore-eyed feeling I got when I woke up too early, and I imagined that was how Ronnie felt every second of every day.
“How can I earn it?” I asked.
“Go to the dump,” he said.
I nodded, thinking I had this in the bag. I knew all about the dump. But I had to play dumb. I said, “But it’s got a big fence around it.”
“Break in,” Ronnie said. “There’s things there I want you to find for me.”
“I’ll try,” I said.
“You’ll do.” he said, “if you want us to trust you. Find me a used crack-pipe.”
Kyle shook his head. “Come on, Ronnie—”
Ronnie spun on Kyle. “Don’t you get it? It has to be incriminating. It’s this or we make him commit an honest-to-God crime like stealing liquor, but he’s too much of a pussy for that. Now shut up until I’m finished. A used crack pipe,” he continued, “and a dirty needle. And a used condom!”
“What’s incriminating about a used condom?” Kyle asked.
“Nothing, but it’s risky. He might get AIDS. That’ll show his commitment.”
“I don’t know—”
“Make that five used condoms.”
I looked at Pete, who shrugged, and that was that. I had no choice. These boys were better than nothing, friend-wise, and I really was curious about that book. So I headed to the dump in search of a crack pipe, a dirty needle, and five used condoms. I didn’t even know what a crack pipe looked like.
I rode to the dump on Ruthanne’s bike, which I owned outright by then. The first thing I did after I finished the six-month installment plan was paint it black, but I accidentally bought paint with matte finish so it looked weird. I used a paintbrush to add badass flames but the enamel paint was expensive so I only had one color, and the color turned out to look more red than orange so the flames looked like I was bleeding all over my bike or had rode through a slaughterhouse, which was pretty badass too, I guess.
The closest part of the dump was where our house used to be, but I didn’t want to go there. I wasn’t as upset about moving as Ruthanne was, but I didn’t want to see another kid staring out my window at Trash Mountain. I might feel like I was missing out. So I rode to the Haislip side.
Trash Mountain still loomed, taller than ever, but the perimeter of the dump was changing. In some spots the fence was reinforced by plywood, and holes like the one I climbed through with Demarcus were plugged up with blobs of tangled barbed wire, half buried so there was no way to push them aside. I figured it was the dump workers, cracking down, but there were rumors of hobos who tried to seal up the dump for a lair. There were rumors too of a coven of witches and wizards who conjured spells using cat’s blood and precious ingredients they gathered from Trash Mountain. One time a gray-haired coot who caught me snooping behind my old house told me space aliens crash landed there, years before, and the trash was to hide them, but now the government wanted to study them and had to make the site impregnable. Who knows. All I knew was I had to get in there.
Since the fence was stronger than ever, and topped by gleaming coils of brand-new razor wire, I started inspecting the junctures between the fence and various outbuildings. Nearby was a giant tin structure like an airplane hangar, for the trucks and loaders, and sure enough the fence post was fastened to the side of the building with nothing but plastic zip ties. I tried tugging one of the ties apart, then biting it, but it was tougher than it looked, like the handcuffs plainclothes cops use in movies.
There was a dumpster behind the tin hangar, and I thought that from the lip of the dumpster I might be able to jump up and grab the edge of the hangar, climb onto the hangar roof, then scramble overtop of it and lower myself into the dump. But the lip of the dumpster was slippery with trash juice so it was hard to get a good jump, and when I did, I couldn’t get a good grip on the hangar roof. I scraped my hands on the edge of the roof and fell to the ground. It didn’t hurt too bad, but the whole thing was embarrassing and made an awful clamor, so I crouched down behind the dumpster to hide for a while.
I was hiding there, plotting my next move, when somebody said, “Hey, little buddy.”
I looked around, startled, but I didn’t see anybody.
“Over here, buddy.” It was a man’s voice, sort of nasal and wet sounding.
I thought about running but decided a grown man could probably outrun me, and if I took the time to mount my bike he’d have me for sure. So I mustered a tough, deep voice and said, “Who is it?”
“Boss,” he said.
“The boss of what?” I asked.
“Boss of nothing,” he said. “They call me Boss is all.”
I wondered if the man was a hobo. Hobos had nicknames, I knew. Grandpa told stories about a childhood hobo named Charlie Nickels who trained a pigeon to filch cigarettes. I prepared in my mind for a vicious thieving hobo to slit my throat from ear to ear.
“You looking for somebody?” he asked.