Ghost. That was my new boss. We watched his truck pull in around front, but I couldn’t see him go into the store, nor from there into the back room that Mr. Golly had told me was the headquarters of the recycling business, which I was not ever to go into because it was private. I didn’t get a look at my boss till he came out the back door and gave me surprise number three.
Ghost was the pale, white-haired guy with the crazy ink, Stoner’s friend that I’d met one time in Pro’s Pizza. With the other one, Hell Reeker, that had come over and teased Stoner about foxes whelping their pups, Mr. Grin and Bear it, all that. Ghost was Extra Eye.
If I say I had to sort through people’s filthy, crappy trash, I’m saying there were diapers. Human shit. If I say there were rats, I don’t mean we saw one or two. Rats were part of how we got through our day. Target practice, company, whatever you want to call it. Some we named. Rinsing bottles and squashing cans was Swap-Out’s department, and Ghost put me on the jobs that took any brains whatsoever. He said finally the damn gook had hired him some help that was playing with a full deck. Evidently the kid he’d just fired, Rotten Potatoes, was missing the cards in his deck that tell you not to eat food that’s been in the trash too long before you find it.
One of the first jobs Ghost showed me was how to drain the acid out of old car batteries. You hammer a nail through the bottom to puncture it. Most batteries have several compartments so you figure them out, punch a hole in each one, then turn it up and drain out the acid into something glass, like a jar. （Not plastic. Never plastic. Rotten Potatoes evidently was missing those cards too.） Ghost collected up all the acid into metal cans where he wrote “acid” on them, lined up alongside of his paint thinner cans outside the back door of his HQ, by the propane tanks. He said he didn’t want all that shit inside stinking up the place.
Which is a joke because he’d come out of there stinking to high heaven, sometimes like rotten eggs, usually cat piss. He had window fans running all hours, even on cold days, and the cat piss smell coming out of there hung over the place worse than the stink of garbage. What Ghost was up to, anybody’s guess. He’d have frying pans and bottles for us to hose out, and bottles he said to put straight directly in the landfill pile, do not mess around. We’re talking things that are no friends to your skin or your clothes. I got some of the acid on my jeans, and after they ran through the wash, every stain was a hole. I got why Ghost had put me on the batteries instead of Swap-Out. Poor little guy, a few days of that and he’d be a window screen.
I got paid four dollars an hour, sixteen a day. Cash. I went straight from school, and Mrs. McCobb would pick me up around nine after she got the kids in bed, so it was more than four hours a day, but after dark Swap-Out and I would come in the store to eat Mr. Golly’s leftovers. He had a bathroom where we could wash up. I helped him stock his shelves after deliveries came in, and saw what people around there were living on. Mainly beer, toilet paper, Campfire pork and beans. Cold medicine, holy mother. He’d get in a hundred boxes of Sudafed. Two days later it’s gone. I didn’t see people buying it, either. If Mr. Golly was having all those colds, you’d not have known it. Actually, if he was alive, you couldn’t be sure of that. He had a grayish look to his skin, and would sit for hours not moving. Watching his little TV he had by the checkout.
Mr. Golly didn’t at all mind us hanging around. He said he grew up working in a junkyard as a boy, just like us. But! Happy ending, now he lived in America and could send money back home to his family. He’d had a wife at some point, but lived by himself now in a small apartment in Duffield. He said he didn’t need anything in his apartment because he lived at the store, cooked his food and everything, which was true. If he ever closed, I didn’t see it.
There weren’t any houses around that area. People stopped on their way to someplace better. Sometimes it would be a mom with kids, obviously unfamiliar with the layout and only there to get somebody into the bathroom ASAP. They’d buy a Coke or some little thing for a cover story, but you knew. Then there were the respectable types that would pay Mr. Golly their ten bucks, drive around back to drop off their month’s worth of trash bags, maybe purchase a chili dog to celebrate. Other than that, it was a rough crowd. Some, and I’m saying more than one, did not use trash bags. The back of their pickup was the trash can, and after it got piled high, they’d drive over, pay their fee, open the tailgate, and rake it out. I’m discussing bathroom trash and all. You tried your best not to picture the homestead.