Trash Mountain. Bradley Bazzle
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I biked around the city looking for errands I could run, and odd jobs of the type Demarcus had described. Most of the downtown stores were closed, so I started at the fast food strip along the highway.
The cashiers seemed confused by my offer. They went to get their managers, and the managers said there wasn’t anything outside the store that anybody needed, not even office supplies. Everything was right there in the store. The manager at Burger Brothers said, “Burger Brothers is a completely self-contained replicable pod, which is why it’s such a successful—and delicious!—franchise burger establishment.”
I shifted my focus to non-burger establishments such as pawn shops and bank branches. People there were confused by me too. A lady at Komer United Credit Union said, “What does a little fella like you need a crummy old job for anyway?” which was a pretty stupid question. Everybody knew it was money that made the world go ‘round. I almost said something pathetic like “to eat, Miss,” but that would have been lying. We were poor, sure, but there was always cereal in the pantry, and macaroni, and a flaccid loaf of bread I could put peanut butter on. We had special big jars of Mormon peanut butter, which the Mormons made cheap for people in Guatemala or wherever, but also for people like us. It was kind of chalky and not very sweet but otherwise pretty decent peanut butter. I thought being Mormon wouldn’t be half bad if you got to work in a peanut butter factory and eat peanut butter all the time.
For inspiration I turned to The Highest Mountain. Bob Bilger was a mountaineer, after all; he climbed mountains, and I wanted to destroy a mountain. The first chapter was about Bob Bilger’s childhood in Haislip. He talked about his “dear sweet mother” and his father, “a monomaniac in the style of Long John Silver, who fine-tuned on his family the tyranny with which he cowed the simple-minded oafs on his road crew.” Then he talked about his boyhood pals, “a gang of true rascals,” but he didn’t mention anything bad they did. The only bad thing he mentioned, the thing that ended the chapter, actually, was how he lied about his age to an Army guy so he could go fight in Vietnam.
That gave me an idea: a thirteen-year-old, unlike a sixteen-year-old, had no driver’s license, which as far as I knew was the only means of identification a person could have, so why not just show up at the grocery store and claim to be fifteen?
That’s what I did. I approached the oldest looking checkout lady, hoping teens all looked the same to her, and sure enough she gave me a form to fill out. I lied about my birthday and put in a fake social security number, since I didn’t know it anyway. Under work experience I put “homework mostly.” Under why I wanted the job I wrote “money,” to sound honest, and also “to learn the value of hard work and possibly climb my way up to checkout, management, etc.” After I finished the application I gave it back to the checkout lady and asked to make an appointment to meet with the manager. The lady said they wouldn’t schedule an interview until they reviewed the application, to which I said that in the event they rejected my application I would cherish the opportunity to meet with them and learn what I could have done better on it. “Alright, alright,” she said, but I thought she might be lying so I made sure to read her nametag: NELDA.
Two days later somebody else from the grocery store called the house to tell me my application had been rejected and thanks for my time. Before she hung up I told her Nelda had promised me an interview.
“Nelda has no such authority,” she said.
“Please,” I said, “I know I’m out of the running for this position, but I sure would like to learn what I could do to strengthen my candidacy.”
“Persistent, aren’t you?” She told me I was welcome to come by the store and meet with her. She said she would give me some pointers.
The next day at school I had my funeral suit balled up in my backpack to meet with this lady, whose name was Darla Waddell, and I just couldn’t wait until three so I left at lunch. Maybe if Darla Waddell met me in person, I thought, she wouldn’t be able to resist giving me some kind of job. People told me I was a cute kid, or at least they told me that before my voice started changing. Ruthanne said my voice made me more creepy than cute, like the foulmouthed girl in that exorcism movie.
A checkout guy told me Darla Waddell’s office was in back, by the bathrooms, so I walked to the back of the store, which smelled like blood from the nearby meat counter. I knocked on a door marked OFFICE.
The woman who answered the door looked much younger than I expected. Her small face was dominated by heavy glasses, and she had long straight hair the color Mom called dishwater. She gestured to a chair across from her desk, which was cluttered with papers and a big dusty computer monitor. The windowless room was lined with big beige file cabinets covered in photos stuck in place by colorful magnets. The photos showed little kids.
“Cute kids,” I said.
“They aren’t mine,” she said. “Are you really fifteen?”
“Yes,” I lied.
She stared at me.
“Thirteen,” I said, cursing inwardly for giving it away so quick, “but in six days I’ll be fourteen. Swear to God.”
“Don’t swear to God in front of people.”
“Sorry, ma’am.”
“Don’t call women ma’am.”
“Okay.”
“That’s all the advice I can offer, I’m afraid. You seem like a smart kid, though. Come back when you’re fifteen. And bring your social security card so you can write down your actual social security number.”
“Hmm, I meant to. I must have got a number wrong.”
“Your actual social security number has nine digits, not four. If social security numbers had four digits, that would mean there were fewer than ten thousand people in America.”
“How many are there?”
“Three hundred million.”
“No shit?”
“Don’t say shit.”
This lady was smart, I decided. Now I wanted a job there more than ever. “Are you sure there isn’t anything,” I said, “anything I can do? Off the books, maybe?”
“You mean illegally?”
“No, no, just, you know—”
“You can offer to carry people’s groceries, but you can’t do it in the store; we have people we pay to do that.”
“And you’ll pay me too?”
“No, but the customers might. It’s called tipping.”
“But if they don’t want their groceries carried inside the store, then why would they want them carried outside the store?”
“Exactly. And if we get any complaints, I’ll call security. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a one o’clock with my mother.”
She rose and we shook hands. Her handshake was firm, but she didn’t look into my eyes. It was like she felt bad for me or something.
When I left I wasn’t sure what to think. It seemed Darla Waddell had left the door open for me, but only a crack. I sat on my bike at the edge of the parking lot and scoped the scene.
Almost everybody carried their own groceries, either by hand or in shopping carts, so nobody needed help except really little old ladies who couldn’t get the bags from their carts into their trunks. I didn’t see any of the helpers Darla Waddell supposedly paid, so after watching for a while I got up the nerve to approach and old lady who was struggling to heft a bag out of her grocery cart. When I offered to help she seemed startled, but when she looked up and down at my wrinkly black suit she sort of grunted “alright.” I hefted the bag out of the cart into the trunk, then I did the other bags too. She said thanks but didn’t offer me money, so I stood there awkwardly until she said thanks again and got into her car in such a rush that she left her