Page 32 of Demon Copperhead

My first day, Mr. McCobb drove me over and introduced me to the owner, Mr. Golly that was from overseas, with an accent.

I was to ride the school bus out there every day after school, and Mrs. McCobb would pick me up.

The place had snacks and food so I could eat my dinner there free as part of my pay, which turned out to be the one good thing about working at Golly’s Market.

Mr. Golly said it was a shame how much he always had to throw out in the way of hot dogs and such that he’d put under the heat lamp for the day. So I got to be his trash can, yes!

Other than food and gas, Golly’s sold the usual things you’d want to pick up on your way home: Hostess cakes, beer, Tylenol, Nicorette gum, etc.

The more expensive items like medicine and cigarettes he kept on a shelf behind the checkout.

Mr. McCobb chatted with Mr. Golly, and I got nervous.

Having no idea how to work a cash register, plus was I going to sell cigarettes and beer?

Would I go to prison? Reaching the cigarette cartons was not the problem, I was some taller than Mr. Golly, that looked like a little brown tree somebody forgot to water.

People were always mistaking me for older.

Probably he didn’t know I was eleven, and maybe Mr. McCobb was banking on that.

But I was pretty sure they had laws about who could sell what in America.

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!”

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.