Stephen Dixon - Garbage

That evening while drinking with a customer at the bar I tell him my dilemma from almost the beginning and say “I’m at a loss now to know what to do. You used to have a store, Red. What way in the same spot would you get rid of your trash without having the same bags pile up on you with twice as many others the next day?”

“Take them to the garbage pier.”

“What garbage pier where?”

“Uptown along the river on the West Side where they unload all the city’s garbage into barges and tug them out to the ocean to dump. You want a van, say the word. A friend for a small fee for him and me. You have to do the driving, I’ll only help you pile them in, as I don’t want to get too involved in this if those shits who are screwing you are as serious as you say.”

I call Sanitation and learn it’s okay to unload my trash at the pier after two a.m. when there’ll be no city garbage trucks to interfere with. I give Red the money. He comes by around one with the van and we fill it up with bags. He says “I wish I could help you with the second load but have to get some sleep.”

“Next round I can probably do myself though it’ll probably kill me.”

“Make sure you get the van back to my friend before you croak or he’ll kill me. While it’s still out you, me and the bar are on loan.”

I drive to the Sanitation dock, enter the pier through a gate onto this old covered wooden structure like an old-fashioned covered bridge upstate but much longer and which has at the end of it floating in the river a huge barge. I back up and drop my bags in it one by one. All kinds of things are already in the barge and as trash some I’ve never seen before. A hammock that looks brand new. If I had any use for one or knew anybody who did and felt it’d be safe to climb in to get it, I would. A set of golf clubs, half a big tree, what seems like a good restaurant freezer, shrubs that have green flowers on them so they must’ve been growing indoors, a bunch of small men’s hats the same size it seems and in what look like perfect blocked condition and shape and some still fitted bottomside up in lidless hat boxes. Rats are in the barge also and mice or maybe they’re baby rats, these mice, a special river barge kind, not like what I’ve seen in my bar cellar from time to time. And various animal carcasses. I almost think a dead human hand sticking up, its fingers outstretched, with the rest of the body underneath covered by garbage. Next time I drop a bag in I think it’s definitely a human hand with blood on it even and on the forearm puncture marks and around the wrist a patient’s identification bracelet. I drive to the man at the gate who seems to be in charge here. He says “It’s probably your imagination or part of a store manikin or something,” and I say “No, it really looks real, come and see.”

“It’s happened before, I won’t say it hasn’t. One time I found five whole baby bodies in it and not fetuses, all tied together and gagged and smothered, worse thing anyone’s ever seen here. It made the papers.”

“I think I remember hearing of it.”

“You’d have had to. None were traceable, case went unsolved, all sorts of speculation, no crime could have been viler unless there were more bodies of them. Let’s take a look if you insist.”

We get in a two-seater electric cart and when we’re halfway there he stops and says “Oh yeah, now I recall, sorry for wasting your time, because I was to expect them. A small truckload of cadavers from a medical school, or parts of what’s left of them, arms and legs and things, no heads, that’s not allowed to be scrapped the law says. I think next time they should consign them to a common pauper’s grave, but I suppose they think what use would a nameless tomb be to anyone and also the expense and who’d keep it up over the years?”

“In the special field they have, the city.”

“Then it’s you and me, Jack, you and me and every taxpayer, which comes from our billfolds. Better here.”

“I don’t mind paying for it when it’s just a few cents per taxpayer, especially when I now know they’re ending up here and then the ocean.”

“They don’t float, they sink, nothing to bother your beach house about unless they have an unusual bloated condition. And it’s good for the water and earth and so eventually us. Helps replenish the minerals in them exactly like everything we excrete.”

“I still think it’s worth a check to see if that hand’s not connected to somebody murdered.”

“No, I know what it is, was forewarned,” and he drives to his wooden shack by the gate, I get out and drive to the barge and drop some more bags in it, trying to cover the hand which I can’t stand seeing anymore. One of my bags finally knocks it over and the next one sinks it.

A truck pulls up. Private carter, not from one of the companies I know of. Man jumps out of the cab, dump part of the truck rises to about forty-five degrees up and the back flap flips open, something like a coal chute drops out and the garbage starts sliding down it into the barge.

“What are you doing here? “the man says. With a long iron hook he’s dislodging some garbage stuck at the sides of the raised rear.

“My bags. I’m all done but this one.”

“You private or public?”

“I own a bar if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s where your bags come from?”

“No, from home.”

“What ‘ s in it then?” and he slashes the bag I ‘ m holding with his hook.

“All right,” when the bottles drop out, “they’re from my bar, what of it?”

“What of it is what are you trying to do, put us out of work? Get off the dock with your garbage and don’t come back.”

“Hey look, don’t talk to me like that. I’ve had more than enough crap from you private garbage guys.”

He puts the hook up to my face. “Smell this. Smell good? Smell like dogwood? Your face and van’s going to smell like this when I push both you and it into the barge after splitting your nose and tires. Because store people start depositing their garbage here to save on the private costs and not one of us truckers will have a job. Foy?”

Driver gets out of the cab. Big guy also. Both bigger and much younger than me and I’m big. Truck’s rear is still in midair but only some dark liquid’s dribbling down the chute. Nobody else is around. Electric cart’s parked the length away of three city blocks and man’s probably in the shack.

“I wish you fellows would understand me but it seems—”

“That’s right,” Foy says.

“That’s what I said. And you can see,” bending over, “by my head that I’m not here for trouble and have really had plenty of it, so excuse me,” and I go back to the van holding the slashed bag together so nothing will spill out and drive off the pier, honk my horn thanks to the shack, leave the bag in front of a store where there’s garbage and drive back to the bar.

I fill the van with the remaining bags and get very tired doing this and my headache comes back bad. I think I feel blood running down my neck and in the dark outside taste it and it’s sweat. I haven’t really cried for I don’t know how many years when all of a sudden there it is. What’s making me so sad? and I answer to myself it’s probably my head that hurts worse than it has in days that’s causing some chain reaction to the tear ducts or whatever they are that start the crying process off and that squeezing feeling inside my neck and chest. But that’s not it. I know what it is. It’s my weariness and frustration with just about everything concerned with this trash thing from the beginning and my near future prospects in the bar combined. Is that it? That’s it or close as I can get. Then go inside, not out here, someone might pass, and let it out for once and maybe you’ll feel better and I go in the bar, lock the door, pull down the shades, try and cry but can’t now and pour a double, shoot it down, another and yell “Cocksuckers, motherfuckers, I hate all you guys, every last bastard one,” and throw the empty glass against the wall and almost collapse from the effort and maybe from my yelling as well and rest a bit more and drink just a single and put an icepack to the hurt part of my head and get back in the van and drive across the bridge singing from all the liquor I drank and actually feeling happy till I thought of it and drop off a bag here and there in that borough and drive to the borough next to it and drop off a few more. When I’m walking back to the van with almost all the bags gone a police car pulls up alongside of me and its top lights blink on and start spinning.