It turned out I would not be selling anything. I would be working for a different business on the premises run by a person that was referenced to Mr. McCobb by Murrell Stone. I started backing out the door, saying, Nuh-uh, no way am I dealing with Stoner, and they said, No, not him. Some friend of his. I had no idea Mr. McCobb even knew Stoner, but again, it’s Lee County.
He wished me luck and took off. I waited while Mr. Golly did something to lock the cash register, wiped off his hands, and took me outside, doing those things slower than you would believe. We finally got around to the back, and here was shock number one of my new career: the highest mountain of trash I’d ever seen, outside of the actual dump. My new situation of employment, and, I was soon to find out, hell on earth.
Not that there is anything wrong on principles with a trash pile. Like any boy, I liked them. Maggot and I always begged to go with Mr. Peg whenever he took the week’s garbage to the county landfill. There was so much to see. People carting off more than they came with in the way of furniture, appliances that might have potential, etc. Actual fact: you could make an entire second world out of what people throw away. The landfill is where I figured out one of my main philosophies, that everybody alive is basically in the process of trading out their old stuff for different stuff, day in day out. The idea though is to be moving up the ladder, not down, like the McCobbs were. Landfill, pawnshops, Walmart. All places for moving things one way or the other along that road. I had this nonsense idea of a comic strip with no superhero, just some item of earthly goods like a chair that gets passed downhill from one family to another until it’s a chair-shaped dirt pile. I would call it Earthly Bads.
I’d always thought every good American took his garbage to a landfill every week, but it turns out if you live in town, like the McCobbs did, there are people that come and take it for you. I was amazed. An entire truck existing for the sole purpose of garbage. Men working their way down the street, emptying people’s cans. A town thing. Out in the county, obviously we’re on our own. Mom and I toted ours next door for Mr. Peggot to haul away. At Creaky Farm we burned it, or if it wasn’t burnable, tipped it into a steep gully on his back forty where he’d had a pile going for maybe a century. You’d see things like a wringer-washer machine poking out, fenders, bed springs, all rusting back into the ground, which is how I got my comic strip idea. That’s the normal for a farm. But some won’t have farms or any place for their trash other than the landfill, and that can be a hell of a drive, especially if you don’t have a pickup.
That’s where Golly’s Market came in handy. People could pay a small price to dump their trash in the lot out back. That was the separate business, with boys hired to pick through it. Anything worth money like aluminum cans went in one pile, plastic bottles in another. Batteries another. My new boss wasn’t around. Mr. Golly told me to wait there, he’d come back soon and get me started. Then he shuffled back to his register, and I had a look around. Behind the trash mountain I found shock number two, standing there washing out plastic pop bottles: Swap-Out.
“Wildman,” I said. “What’s going down?”
He stopped hosing out his bottle and stared at me. The spray nozzle was leaking all over the place, and the little guy was shivering, hoodie and jeans all soaked from where he’d sprayed himself. Then his face lit up and he screeched, Diamond!
I couldn’t believe he remembered my Squad name. This kid that reliably did not remember to zip his fly. I wanted to hug him but of course didn’t. We just stood there like lost boys on our own garbage island. I tightened up the hose nozzle for him and asked questions. He was working here now, every day. No more school, he was done. Meaning he might actually have been sixteen. Or else over at Elk Knob they figured they’d done their worst, and gave up. He wasn’t at Creaky’s now, living with some guys in an apartment, the who-what-where I couldn’t really guess. Swap-Out’s way of telling you anything was like his sentences got dropped and broken all to pieces. You had to take whatever you could pick up, and work backwards.
He wanted to know if I was working here now instead of Rotten Potatoes, whatever the hell. Is that a thing or a person, I asked him, and he said yes. Rotten Potatoes was a person. Was he our boss, I asked, and Swap-Out said no, a kid. He puked all the time and got fired. The boss guy wasn’t there right now, and his name was Ghose.
Gose? I asked. No. Goes? No.
“Whoooo,” Swap-Out said, flapping his hands, scary. “Ghose like a dead guy!”