Shovel Ready by Adam Sternbergh Read Free Book Online Page A

to get some idea.
    No. I don’t think you do.
    Sheaths the blade.
    But if you’re on his payroll, you should know.
    Puts the sheath down.
    He’s my father.
    Pulls her knees up. Hugs them hard.
    Yes. I know. I know he’s your father.
    No. You heard me wrong.
    Hugs them harder. Arms round her knees. Arms round her baby.
    I said, he’s the father. He’s the father. That’s what I said.

11.
    I worked as a garbageman for ten years, more or less. Lost my father, my union card, and my marbles, in roughly that order.
    Father went first. Died of a heart attack he worked a lifetime to earn. Strict regimen of smoking, bacon, and television. Man loved his Jets. Claimed they were Jersey’s team. Forty-five millionaires in green helmets somewhere, carrying his heart into battle every week.
    He didn’t die on the job, thank God, stink of other people’s garbage in his nose, not that he would have cared. When people asked his line of work, he never faltered. It was a good union wage and he wanted the same for me. My first day, he took me out to the truck yard, pulled the gloves on, drew a deep breath.
    Smell that? That’s security, son.
    He was felled too young, in his own backyard. The plot of ground he’d bought by hauling other people’s trash.
    Barely room enough to fall down.
    My mother sat on his chest, pumping, wailing, waiting for an ambulance that came ten minutes too late. Two streets with the same name. One avenue, one lane.
    They picked wrong.
    My mother tried. She was a nurse. Not the kind that fix feed tubes to rich people either.
    By then I’d married my Stella. A Jersey girl, she swore never to live in Jersey by choice. I said Queens. She said Manhattan.We split the difference and ended up in Brooklyn. Carroll Gardens. South, down by the expressway. The part that’s not so gardeny.
    My parents wanted to see a family. We were trying, but we weren’t in a rush. We tried long enough to worry something might be wrong, but then we decided to stop worrying. We were young. My Stella wanted to be an actress. She rode the train to Times Square every day. Acting class in a shabby studio. Half my union wage.
    I rode a route up through brownstone Brooklyn. Nicer neighborhood than we could afford. Nicer garbage too.
    Boys on my truck gave us a nickname for a joke. Not garbagemen.
    Trash valets.
    It’s hokey but it’s true. You learn things hauling trash.
    Lesson one. Don’t buy cheap bags. They always tear. If not in your hands, then in mine. No discount bag ever went to its grave without being loudly cursed along the way.
    Lesson two. There is nothing, and no one, that you will become attached to in this life that you will not one day discard.
    Or they discard you.
    Or you die.
    Those are the only three outcomes.
    A bartender I know once quoted me a poem, by a guy named Idol or something similar.
    Every human being who’s ever lived has died, except the living
.
    Lesson three.
    You’ll leave a trail of trash on this Earth that will far exceed anything of worth you leave behind. For every ounce of heirloom, you leave a ton of landfill.
    That’s not a poet. That’s me.
    What can I say? Sometimes you’re on the toilet and you’ve already read all the magazines. Inspiration hits.
    But that’s the lesson. Your real legacy will be buried in a dump somewhere.
    And the richer you are, the more trash you leave behind.
    After the first attacks, the ones on 9/11, so they tell me, they took the rubble of the towers to a landfill.
    Fresh Kills.
    Sifted through it, searching for bodies. Bits of bodies. Bits of bits. Did their best and found what they could and left the rest of it there, buried.
    True story.
    Landfill became a graveyard.
    The landfill doesn’t care.
    Never more than a whisper of difference between them to begin with.
    Every garbageman has funny stories of stuff he’s found on the job, of course. False teeth, brand-new flatscreen still in the box, a fake leg, a stuffed ferret. A double-ended dildo switches