Trash Mountain. Bradley Bazzle
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on fire and found out the cops could tell when you did it on purpose and put you in jail. The jail was a building by the highway with tiny windows and razor wire around it where sometimes, when we drove by, I could see guys playing basketball and smoking cigarettes. There was a big gray bus like a school bus that took those guys places. They always had their heads leaning against the windows with their eyes open, like they were really tired but couldn’t fall asleep.
Jail wasn’t for me, I decided. I would either succeed or be killed. So I opened my notebook and wrote down the names of the most combustible chemicals I could find: chlorine trifluoride, cellulose nitrate, phosphorus heptasulfide, phosphorus sesquisulfide. I had no idea where I could get any of those chemicals. Eventually Mr. B saw me writing stuff and said, “Hey there, Ben, whatcha working on?”
“Nothing,” I said, covering my notebook with my forearm.
“Mind if I have a look?”
“It’s private.”
“Totally cool, Ben. I respect your privacy. Just let me know if you have any questions, okay? The internet is an unfiltered source of information, and sometimes a parent or teacher can help put things in perspective. But will you do me a favor?”
I shrugged.
“Try to finish the internet treasure hunt before period ends?”
I said I would.
The internet treasure hunt wasn’t a treasure hunt at all, just a list of lame facts we were supposed to find on the internet. This one was Alaska themed, like how tall Mount McKinley was and why Alaska was called Seward’s Ice Box. The questions took about ten seconds so I did them all, to keep Mr. B off my back, then I took my paper to him and he graded it right in front of me and gave me an A-plus. I was a genius at geography, he said. Geography was another thing I could have done for a living if it wasn’t for Trash Mountain.
I stayed on the lookout for chemicals, but by the time Saturday came I hadn’t found any so I decided to proceed to stage two of my plan: canvassing the target area. I told my parents I was going to the empty school where I liked to kick a ball against a brick wall, but instead of going there I started walking the perimeter of the dump, probing for weaknesses.
The wire fence went along the other side of an alley behind our house. It was ten feet tall with planks of wood that went up maybe six feet, and on the very top was a stretched out coil of razor wire. I had climbed the fence before and knew there was no getting through that razor wire, which was woven through the chain-links so you couldn’t lift it up. I kept walking.
Where roads dead-ended into the fence, there were little guardrails to keep drunk drivers from crashing through. Beer cans and soda bottles and fast food wrappers were all around the guardrails, like maybe people had been sitting there during a party. There were clothes hanging in backyards, and sometimes rusted-out cars and appliances that looked pretty cool. I saw an old man watering what looked like a sandbox except there were plants in it. He waved his cigarette at me but I didn’t wave back. I was on a mission.
In half a mile the alley hit an empty six-lane road with a dead grass median, and the fence took a sharp right. There wasn’t any sidewalk so I walked along the median, kicking trash as I went. The sun was up high by then and stung my neck. I wished I’d worn a hat, but I didn’t like wearing hats because I had a big head and hats made it look weird. Eventually the road veered left and the fence kept going straight. Between the fence and the road was a patch of shitty looking forest. The trees had flaky bark and some were dead. The ground between the trees was slick and smelled like the bowling shoe stuff they sprayed at the dump. I wondered what would happen if a person breathed the smell too long. Would he pass out and never be found again?
I saw an empty plastic vodka bottle and some wadded up clothes, what Grandpa would have called a hobo bed. The vodka bottle scared me because the person who had drunk it might be crazed. We saw an educational movie about it at school. The movie was in black and white and the people talked like idiots, but the drunk character made a shocking impression on me. His eyes were bugged out and he had drool all over his lips, and he tried to grab a lady’s boobs with both hands.
I started walking faster but not too fast, hoping to look casual. Then I heard something that sounded like a crow but I decided in my head was a crazed drunkard making crow sounds to signal his crazed partners that there was a kid in their midst, because they preyed on kids like me for who knows what, so I started to run.
When the forest ended I stopped to hunch over and catch my breath, and I saw that the fence looked different. The razor wire had turned into a droopy coil of barbed wire, which any self-respecting thief could get over with a heavy blanket or scrap of old carpet. But I had neither. I thought about climbing the fence to get a good look at the trash, but I was too tired. Thirsty, too. Lucky for me, there were some houses in the distance. I crept towards them along the fence, hoping to find a hose or something (I would have drunk out of a dirty kiddy pool by that point), but before I got to the houses I heard some kids. I followed their cries to a big, empty lot where crumbling asphalt was being overtaken by weeds. Some black boys a few years older than me were drinking beer and playing catch with a football. I watched them for a while, waiting for a break in the action to test my courage and ask them about the water situation, then I noticed a boy standing apart. He was a little younger and was digging in the dirt with a stick. When he saw me his stick went still. He glanced over his shoulder, like he was deciding whether or not to holler at the older boys, then he resumed poking around with his stick. When I got closer, I saw he was working loose some kind of soiled garment from the rocky dirt.
“That yours?” I asked.
“Hell no,” he said. “Look like I wear teal?”
I laughed. The garment had indeed been teal at one time, and had fringes like a lady’s shirt. I told the boy my name was Ben, and he said his was Demarcus. I never heard that name before so I said, “Like Marcus?”
“Of Marcus.”
“So your dad’s named Marcus?”
“Gerald.” On the subject of Gerald, his dad, Demarcus opened up considerably. Demarcus’s dad owned a bar outside Haislip that kids weren’t allowed to go to. He came home early each morning to have breakfast with Demarcus and his brother, Daryl, but by the time they came into the kitchen he was usually hunched over the table sleeping.
Now that Demarcus was warmed up I asked him about maybe getting some water, and he glanced back at the older boys before leading me across the overgrown lot to a tin building painted white. Behind the building was a hose faucet. Demarcus turned the spigot and each of us drank some water.
The water was superb. I felt like it was going straight from my stomach into my blood and the skin on my arms, and my eyes too. Everything was bluer and greener now, somehow more hopeful. Demarcus’s face was shiny with sweat. He had a bald spot on his head, and when I asked him about it he said he fell off the monkey bars and they shaved it to give him stitches but when they took out the stitches the hair didn’t grow back. It was lumpy, he said, and he let me feel it. It was lumpy, and I told him it was cool. He said he didn’t think so. But I told him that when he was older and had more muscles it would make him look hard, like a guy in an action movie. He agreed.
I had a notion I couldn’t ask Demarcus directly about Trash Mountain, couldn’t let him know what I was after in case he thought differently and told the police on me, or maybe even the FBI, since I was basically a terrorist by this point, so what I did was ask him what he thought about “that old trash pile over there,” tilting my head in the direction of Trash Mountain without looking at it so the overall effect was, I hoped, nonchalant.
“There’s pretty interesting stuff in there,” Demarcus said.
I was shocked. “You’ve been in there?”
Demarcus shrugged.
“How’d you get in?”
Demarcus led me across the street and between some houses to the fence. Here, the fence didn’t even have barbed wire, let alone razor wire, so I thought we were going to