Joe (6 page)

“Where you gonna find one at?” the old man said.

“I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to go look for one. How far is it to town?”

The old man looked around at the woods as if the trees bore road signs that marked the route to civilization.

“It’s about ten mile, I guess.”

“Ain’t there a store no closer than that?”

“They’s one over here at London Hill. Or used to be.”

“Reckon they’d give us some credit?”

“They might. You could ask. They might give us credit.”

“Well, why don’t we walk over there and see? We got to do somethin. We can’t set around here all day.”

“You go. My legs is hurtin s’bad I can’t hardly get up.”

The old woman had not spoken but she was unfolding limp green paper in her hands. Each of them realized it gradually, turning one by one to look at her as she sat with her head down, her fingers trembling slightly as she fumbled with the wrinkled bills. She smoothed each one on her knee as she drew it from the wad.

“Where’d you find that, Mama?” Gary said.

“I had it,” she said. Her hair was coated with dust and it hung limply around the sides of her head so that her ears stuck through.

“How much you got?” the old man said. He was taking it off her knee and counting it. “Eight dollars? You got any more?” She shook her head.

He got up immediately, his leg forgotten, and put the bills in his pocket.

“I’ll go on over to the store,” he said. “See what I can buy.”

Gary got up. “Let me go with you,” he said.

“Ain’t no need for you to go. I can do it.”

“Go with him, Gary,” Fay said, nudging him.

“Just stay here. I’ll be back after while.”

“You gonna get some gas?” Gary said.

“Gas? What for?”

“For that wasp nest.”

Wade shook his head, already starting off. “I ain’t got nothin to carry it in.”

“We gonna have to rob that wasp nest before we can stay in there.”

“Well, if I find a jar to bring it back in I’ll buy some.” They
stood and watched him stagger away through the hot woods. When he was out of hearing Fay turned on her mother.

“What’d you give him all that money for? He ain’t gonna do nothin but catch a ride to town and buy whiskey with it.”

“Leave her alone,” Gary said. “She don’t need you fussin at her.”

At nine that night they were gathered around a small fire in the middle of the yard, mute in the thunderous din of crickets. The grasses and weeds were beginning to look like a bedding ground. They were cooking a meal of pork and beans in opened cans, and the old man was halfway through a bottle of Old Crow. They had foraged for firewood and had a pile nearby.

The faces around the fire were pinched, the eyes a little big, a little dazed with hunger. They sat and watched the blaze burn the paper off the cans. When the beans began to sizzle, the woman stooped painfully on her bad hip and reached for the cans with a rag wrapped around her hand. Clotted strings of hair hung from her head. She took five paper plates, set them out on the ground, and dumped the beans onto them, shaking them as she went, the way a person might put out dog food for a pet. She dumped the largest portion into the plate intended for the old man.

The breadwinner was sitting crosslegged on the ravaged grass, the whiskey upright in the hole his legs formed. He was weaving a home-rolled cigarette back and forth from his lips, eyes bleary, red as fire. He was more than a little drunk. His head and chest would slump forward, then he’d jerk erect, his eyes sleepy. Grimed and furtive hands reached out for the plates quietly, took them
back and drew away from the fire into darker regions of the yard. The old woman took two small bites and then rose and scraped the rest of her food into the boy’s plate.

The fire grew dimmer. The plate of beans before the old man steamed but he didn’t notice. A candlefly bored crazily in out of the night and landed in the hot sauce, struggled briefly and was still. The old man’s head went lower and lower onto his chest until the only thing they could see was the stained gray hat over the bib of his overalls. He snuffled, made some noise. His chest rose and fell. They watched him like wolves. The fire cracked and popped and white bits of ash fell away from the tree limbs burning in the coals. Sparks rose fragile and dying, orange as coon eyes in the gloom. The ash crumbled and the fading light threw darker shadows still. The old man toppled over slowly, a bit at a time like a rotten tree giving way, until the whiskey lay spilling between his legs. They watched him for a few minutes and then they got up and went to the fire and took his plate and carried it away into the dark.

Noon. The field bordering the road lay baking beneath a white sun, pale green rows of little plants that merged far away. The earth seemed to be smoking and it had no color, so dry was it, as if it had never known rain. It seemed dead as old bones. Down at the south end of the bean patch a tiny blue tractor was turning and coming back. It struggled against the immense flat landscape, crawling at what seemed an inch at a time, the dry soil not folding but merely breaking into dust across the plows. The old man scowled up at the blistering sky.

“Throw the rest of em out,” he said.

The green metal Dumpster he stood beside was positioned off the blacktop on a bed of pit-run gravel as hard as concrete. The county workmen had bolstered up the shoulder of the highway and widened it, and bits of ground glass lay everywhere.

The boy was standing inside the rusty iron bin. He picked up another black garbage sack and slit it open with a knife; then, leaning toward the open door, mired to the knees in refuse, he dumped it out. A rain of cast-off matter cascaded: wet beer cans,
egg shells, a half-pint whiskey bottle, cigarette butts and blowing ash. Unidentifiable bits of ruined fruit and fly-specked vegetables. Here a half-chewed weiner that a dog or a small child had worked over. All of it covered with wet coffee grounds. The old man bent over, pawing through it. He lifted three Diet Coke cans and fourteen Old Milwaukee cans from the rubble and put them into his tow sack.

“Ain’t you gonna mash em?” the boy said.

Wade made a dismissive gesture with his hand. The boy bent to the piles of sacks behind him. He picked up another one and said, “If you’d mash em it’d make more room.”

The old man just grunted. Each time he bent over, the boy could see a patch of loose belly flesh, pink and soft, in the gap where his overalls buttoned on the side. He tottered light-headed and delirious with hunger over mounds of garbage inside the smoked-up walls. He moved a newspaper. Green bottleflies swarmed up off a stringer of bream that somebody had thrown into the Dumpster. The fish were bloated, their eyes solid white. Their bellies were pale and their scales were gray. His stomach heaved but there was nothing to come up.

“Hurry up,” the old man said.

The boy bent once more to his work. He knew his father was wanting to finish and get away from the road quickly, but before they had the tow sack half full, a pickup appeared far down the road. He raised himself up.

“Who is it?” he said.

“I don’t know. You got any more in there?”

He didn’t answer, only stood watching apprehensively as the
vehicle grew nearer and slowed. They looked at each other and Wade said: “Get outa there.”

Gary climbed down from the Dumpster, holding onto the door. The pickup had slowed to a crawl and now a shield emblazoned on the door appeared, a county emblem like a Maltese cross. The truck stopped and the driver shut the motor off. They waited. A tall man with brown hair and khaki clothes got out. He didn’t say anything at first, only studied them as if they were errant children whose unacceptable behavior he had suffered far past reason.

“Hidy,” Wade said. “How you?”

The man put his hands on his hips and walked over to the Dumpster. He looked inside and shook his head.

“You don’t care for us gettin these cans, do you? We didn’t figger nobody wanted em.”

The man kicked at the piles of trash they’d thrown on the ground, nudging at the mess with his toe as if he’d lost something in that stinking heap of offal. Then he looked up.

“You people are unbelievable,” he said. “You really are.” He kicked at the stuff again. “What do you think this Dumpster’s for?”

“We ain’t hurtin nothin,” the old man said. “We just after these cans. Who are you, anyway?”

The man stared hard at him. “By God, I’m Don Shelby. I’m the supervisor of this beat. Who in the fuck are you?”

Wade Jones toed among the mosaic of ground glass and said nothing.

“Look at this mess,” the man said. “Who do you think’s going to clean it up? When we had a dump here and kept it bulldozed
you wouldn’t even drive down to the end to throw it out. And now I’ll be goddamned if you’re not throwing it out of the Dumpsters.” He looked at Gary. “Do you know you can get put in jail for this?”

“Nosir,” he said. He was wondering if he should run for it. The woods were pretty close.

“Well, by God, you can. It’s a five-hundred-dollar fine for littering. Have you got five hundred dollars?”

“Nosir. I ain’t.”

“Well, that’s what it would cost you. It’s a state law.” He looked at the pile of trash again as if he couldn’t believe it was still there. “My hands can’t run over here every fifteen minutes and pick this stuff up. They’ve got other things to do. Now you two pick up every bit of this mess and put it back where you got it. And I’m gonna stand here and watch you.”

“Say you the supervisor?” said Wade.

“Damn right.”

“But you ain’t the law,” he said doubtfully.

Shelby stepped up until he was in the old man’s face. “Naw, I ain’t the law. Smart son of a bitch. But I got a radio in that truck. And if you don’t pick this shit up in the next five minutes I’ll call the law out here and you can smart off to them.”

Wade blinked. “Come on, boy.” He nudged him. “Get down here and start pickin this stuff up. I told you not to make all this mess.”

Gary bent and picked up an armload. “Ain’t you gonna help me?” he said.

“I’m helpin,” Wade said, tossing in a soup can, a rag, an empty
potato chip bag. Nothing too heavy. A cereal box, a paper, an egg carton.

“I want it just as clean as it was before,” Shelby said. He watched Gary for a bit, watched him bending over trying to pick up the myriad scattered lumps of trash. “Wait a minute,” he said. He walked back to his truck and reached into the bed and brought out a new shovel with the price tag still attached. “Here,” he said. “Use this.”

“Yessir,” Gary said. He started scooping. Wade stopped and raised one side of his hat, scratching at his head. He leaned back on the hood of the truck, the limp sack of cans tinkling faintly. He drew a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. The man on the tractor was coming alongside them in the field and he had his head bent to see the wheel in the row. He and his machine were engulfed in dust, the thin silt rolling up on the tires and pouring like water off the cleats. They watched him pass, and as he came by he lifted a hand in greeting. The blades of the plow where they cut the earth were polished bright as chrome, rising and falling in the lifeless dust and the steady chug of the tractor echoing endlessly over the silence against the scrape of the shovel.

“He wants it clean, now,” the old man said.

Gary nodded and kept at it. Shelby looked at his watch. The boy was pushing small piles of rubbish together, pushing them up against the wall of the Dumpster and using his hand to get it all in the shovel.

“I guess that’ll do,” Shelby said. Gary straightened and looked at him and then looked at this father. Wade nodded. The
supervisor held out his hand for the shovel and the boy gave it to him.

“I don’t want to see this happen any more,” he said. He tossed the shovel into the bed of the truck and it hit with a loud bong. He waited for Wade to unlean himself from his hood.

“My hands has got enough to do as it is. If you want cans you better get out and pick em up off the side of the road. That’s where most of em’s at anyway.”

“Yessir,” Gary said. Wade had his hands on his hips and was looking around like somebody deaf.

Shelby opened his door and stood with one hand on it, fixing them with a cold stare, each in turn. “I keep my eye on these things,” he said. “I come by here just about every day.”

Wade wouldn’t even look at him.

“All right,” he said. “You been told.”

He got into the truck and cranked it and pulled away. They stood beside the Dumpster and watched him go up the road slowly, then pull off to the side and turn around. He was doing forty by the time he came by them again. They waved. He didn’t. He went down the highway out of sight and finally even the sound of his tires vanished. It was hot and still where they stood, and the tractor was turning to make another pass.

“All right,” Wade said. “He’s gone. Get back up in there.”