Dunc's Dump (4 page)

“Just follow my lead. Now be quiet and sit still, and watch up there.”

Amos hunkered and peeked up the hill from beneath his lampshade. “It would help if I knew what I was looking for.”

“Bad garbage.”

“Oh. Well, that helps a lot. I was going to look for good garbage.”

“Amos.”

“It's so easy to tell the difference, you know, here in the dump. There's good garbage and there's bad garbage.…”

And he was still talking when a truck backed to the top of the heap and tipped a Dumpster to drop a load down the side of the pile, and Dunc grabbed him by the shoulder, or more correctly the sack, and said in his ear, “There it is! See the powder? Come on, follow me!”

“What?”

But Dunc was halfway up the hill of garbage, scrambling on plastic bags, before Amos could catch up with him.

And then there was no time for talk.

Dunc worked around the freshly dumped load to the still-tipped Dumpster. The driver hadn't even gotten out of the truck and couldn't see around the back, and the men on the tractors were working another pile.

Dunc grabbed the edge of the open Dumpster and swung up and over and in and turned to help Amos.

Amos stopped. “
Inside
the Dumpster?”

“Hurry up!”

Dunc grabbed him by the shoulders and heaved and flipped Amos up and into the Dumpster just as the hydraulic arm started to bring it back up.

The lid closed with a grinding bang.

It was completely dark.

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“Are you out of your mind?” Amos had to fairly scream to be heard over the sound of the garbage truck's engine. “We can't ride inside a Dumpster!”

“What do you mean, we can't? We're doing it, aren't we?”

And they were, if it could be called riding. The truck bounced with every rut or chuckhole in the road, and there were no springs to absorb the shock inside the Dumpster. The boys bounced from top to bottom, pranging off the steel like rubber balls, and each prang gave a new bruise.

“Ouch!” Amos landed seat first on the cold
steel floor, then shot to the top where he smashed the lampshade so hard down on his head it hit his shoulders. “Mmmmphhh.” He spat out a banana peel. “I don't know what we're doing, but I don't think it's riding. People die doing this.”

“From what—being in a Dumpster?”

“Yeah. They catch plague and things. It happens all the time.”

“No it doesn't. Plague comes from fleas on rats.”

“Just the same, just the same—ouch!” Amos slammed into the side wall. “How long do you think we can last?”

Dunc scrabbled his way to the front of the Dumpster, where a faint beam of light came through a tiny hole. He put his eye to the hole. “I don't recognize where we're going—oh, no!”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing? What did you see?”

“Well, nothing, really. I just recognized where we're going.”

“Where?”

“I could be wrong, of course. Looking through that little hole. I just saw a corner with a street sign flashing through. It could have been anything.”

“If you don't tell me I'm going to take something off my outfit and shove it down your throat.”

Dunc hesitated another moment and when Amos was about ready to start for him he gave up. “You remember the parrot?”

“The one that would talk to me only when I swore?”

“Yeah. You remember where he sent us?”

“Sure. Down to the water”—Amos bounced as the truck turned and stopped—“front. You mean we're going to the waterfront?”

The truck engine changed pitch and the Dumpster swung up and out, then dropped to the ground with a thump.

“That's where we're going, the waterfront? Where we blew it apart?”

The truck engine changed again, roared briefly, then grew fainter as the truck drove away.

“Not going,” Dunc whispered in the sudden quiet. “I think we're already here.”

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9

Dunc waited another moment, until Amos was standing next to him, and then raised the lid and the two stuck their heads up.

Directly in the face of a man named Charlie Rags. Charlie had seen the truck drop the Dumpster and had decided since it was newly empty—Charlie thought of it as “clean”—he would set up housekeeping. Charlie had once been either a doctor or a flute player—he couldn't remember which. But that was before he had discovered beer, wine, whiskey, cheap wine, and shaving lotion in that order. He had been living in Dumpsters for some years now,
drinking what he could get, and would probably have done it for many more years.

“Hello,” Dunc said. “Are we close to Fifth Street?”

Dunc and Amos were still in their camouflage. If you looked carefully it was just possible to see an eye or a nose.

But Charlie Rags didn't—indeed, couldn't—look closely. He hadn't been able to look closely at anything for over three decades. His eyes didn't work close. Or far, for that matter.

But he could hear just fine, and he heard Dunc talk. Charlie had heard some strange things talk to him. Bugs, snakes, a lamp pole, and in New York a horse with a policeman sitting on him—the horse said his back was sore—but he had never had garbage open a Dumpster and ask him for directions.

“That way.” He pointed, closing one bleary eye. “Two blocks.” Then he threw away the wine bottle he was carrying and walked away, swearing never to drink again. Talking garbage was too much.

“Thank you,” Dunc said to his back.

Dunc pushed the lid back all the way and climbed out and started walking away.

Amos clambered out of the Dumpster. “Wait a minute—where are you going?”

“Home. We have to hurry and change outfits and come back here after dark.”

“We do?”

“Sure. You don't think they'll come in the daylight and leave illegal garbage, do you?”

“No. Of course. It was stupid of me.”

“Well, then.”

“Of course we have to come back after dark. I should have guessed. It's the waterfront and there are people down here who would sell us for yard ornaments. Of course we have to come after dark. Otherwise it wouldn't be dangerous, would it?”

“You're mumbling,” Dunc said over his shoulder. “And don't lose your garbage yet until we get to a bus stop. Nobody will bother us looking like this.”

“Seems stupid to me, coming back in the dark, just stupid.…”

“You're still mumbling.”

“It's the lampshade over my mouth.”

“What? I didn't hear you.”

“Lampshade.”

“Hurry up, will you? The buses come on
the hour and we've only got a couple of minutes to make the corner.”

Amos ran to catch up, which brought him slightly ahead of Dunc as they reached the corner of Fifth Street where the bus would be.

Later they would argue about Amos's position and how it had caused the disaster. Amos blamed Dunc for yelling at him to hurry up, which caused him to increase speed and put him at the bus stop at the precise moment he needed to be there for the calamity to occur. Dunc said no, things happened with a natural flow, and what happened would have happened anyway, no matter what, but Amos didn't believe it.

The difficulty lay with cellular phones.

Amos had done research on cellular phones, trying to find out just when they had been invented and just exactly why. He did this about the time he wrote the President of the United States and explained just exactly why they should be
un
invented, although he never got an answer.

The problem was his apparently genetic phone-answering code. Anytime a phone rang, anywhere a phone rang, he was convinced
that it was Melissa calling. At first it seemed to include almost any bell—causing a memorable catastrophe when his mother's new oven timer went off and Amos destroyed the kitchen trying to answer the oven. It had taken a doctor to get the oven grate off. He had since worked some of the bells out of his system so that he no longer ran for oven timers or children's tricycle bells or the belt beepers worn by doctors.

But it was different with cellular phones.

It is true that he did not often hear them ring. The odds were that if he happened to be near one, it wouldn't ring, and he had only once before actually had a problem with a cellular phone. He had been riding in a car, stopped at traffic, and a phone in the car sitting next to them had rung. Luckily, the man in the car had a twelve-year-old daughter and understood the problem with phones and didn't press charges, but it had been a narrow escape.

He was not so lucky with the bus.

Whatever the reason—fate, or because Dunc had told him to hurry—Amos arrived at the bus stop just a half a step in front of Dunc,
at the exact moment when the bus door whooshed open, and a cellular phone on the bus driver's belt rang with an incoming call.

As it turned out it was actually his wife calling to tell him to stop at the store for some cheese dip but it didn't matter.

Nothing mattered but the ring.

All the instincts kicked in and by the end of the first pulse in the first ring Amos had a foot on the bus step and was powering into the bus, left leg nailing the second step, classic form, arms pumping, hand out for the phone, a little spit flying from the side of his mouth.

Except none of this showed because he was still in deep camouflage, peering through a crack in a garbage-encrusted lampshade at the cellular phone hanging on the belt of the bus driver.

What the driver saw was terrifying. The door opened to show him a pile of banana peels and coffee grounds and bits of paper and rags and other disgusting trash suddenly come to life and come bounding up the bus steps with an appendage reaching for his belt.

He naturally slammed the bus door shut.

Or tried to. Dunc, realizing what was happening, was reaching for Amos, trying to grab him and stop him, which put his arm in the bus door as it closed. The rubber gasket kept it from cutting his arm off but did hold him firmly while inside Amos, powering into his second and important driving step, clawed for the phone on the driver's belt and missed, thrown off by running head-on into the coin and token collector.

This deflected him enough that he passed the driver completely and wound up in the front passenger seat of the bus.

The seat was not empty.

It was occupied by an older woman who had been visiting a friend on the other side of the river. The woman carried an umbrella in case it should rain. It had not rained in weeks and the umbrella had become packed and hard from not opening so that when she used it as a weapon to kill the garbage suddenly landing in her lap, she swung very hard and it was very heavy and came down with tremendous force.

Fortunately her aim wasn't that accurate so she missed Amos, except that unfortunately
she aimed high and the full force of a double-gripped overhand blow brought the umbrella down on the bus driver's head, jamming his hat over his eyes.

In a reflexive action the driver jammed down on the accelerator while jerking left on the wheel. The bus took off away from the curb in a sweeping turn to the left—Dunc running alongside because his arm was caught in the door.

The sudden turn threw Amos back off the old woman toward the door. On the way he grabbed for the phone, missed again, and caught the door handle, which whooshed the door open, releasing Dunc and allowing Amos to tumble back out of the bus on top of him.

The boys rolled and stood just in time to see the bus jump the curb and come to a stop with its front window almost touching the large glass window of a Chinese restaurant.

“I think,” Dunc said, “it might be time to lose our deep camouflage.”

“And run,” Amos added. “I just hope Melissa isn't mad because I missed her call.”

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