Truants by Ron Carlson Read Free Book Online

staring at the rear-ends of all the cows in bewilderment, trying to figure out why these beasts were here at the fair.
    At one point an entire busload of oldtimers, senior citizens, hobbled through. They struck me as being ninety times as curious as the cattle. I studied them, trying, as is my habit, to establish some natural link between them and myself. What happens? Do I get that old? It didn’t go. I couldn’t imagine any elderly cattle, limping around the pasture, wrapped in wrinkles, blind and drooling. It seemed, and this is the truth: unnatural. I absolutely couldn’t imagine being that old, and I have a versatile imagination, though I did share the proclivity to walk in meandering lines with many of them. Several thrust stainless-steel walkers before them, devices used for balance. It took the group thirty-five minutes by my watch to walk through.
    Later, Captain Fowler drove by, his cart full of three bureaucrats in five-piece suits. I didn’t even wave.
    I met Steele at the back driveway of the fairgrounds at three, and climbed way up into the rumbling dumpmobile garbage truck. He had already rolled a joint and the cab was fumified. I declined a hit and settled as he held his breath, as you should, I guess, when turning into the traffic.
    “Got a bear,” he wheezed, containing smoke.
    “What?”
    He blew the smoke in a cough all over the windshield and blinked in the rush. “Got a bear on board. Died in the Zoo garden.”
    “A bear! A real bear?”
    “Dead. A dead bear. Seems they downed him to travel, then upped him for the show: overdose. A cub.” He sucked another bodyfull of smoke.
    I looked out the window at the forty million pizza parlors and dry cleaning shacks that free enterprise defines as landscape. I would’ve slumped in my seat, but Steele wouldn’t have got it. We had a dead bear cub in the dump truck, headed for the Deer Valley Sanitary Landfill. The pizza joints became drive-in groceries, and they became bar and grills, and they became gravel then cactus, and in the distance the monsoon clouds of early September waited near Flagstaff.
    There was a huge sign at the Deer Valley Sanitary Landfill announcing a thousand details about how much fun the park that they were going to build on all this garbage was going to be. The sign’s most arresting feature was the governor’s signature; he’d had to sign it with fourteen spray cans.
    The director of the dump, whom we called “Coach” because he wore a whistle around his neck, came over and told us where to park. He indicated the space with the same menace others use to notify you that they are going to kidnap your daughter. He acted like a recent graduate of the Home, and was actually assessing our load for redeemable goodies. Steele backed in over all the matted trash and edged the truck up to an abyss full of debris: couches, lumber, Christmas trees, auto parts, entire automobiles. When I jumped down to see if the truck was clear to dump, I noted that the flatbed pickup next to us was in flames. Evidently, the driver had left it running while he pulled off sheets of rusted corrugated tin, and the exhaust pipe had ignited some packing material and subsequently the body of the truck.
    The driver ran around screaming and beating the flames with a large palm leaf he’d found. The coach of the dump came running, blowing his whistle for the fire to stop. Then the driver snapped to, discarded his frond, and boarded the truck. He drove it around for a while, the bed of his truck a bright load of growing flames.
    Finally the man collided with a pyramid of the coach’s salvaged washers and dryers, and we all saw the windshield go smoky as the cab filled. The coach was there, though, blowing and huffing. He pulled the driver from the truck and we heard the FFFaaaaahhhhhhhhhuuuummm as the flames licked the wet under-engine and climbed the grille. Since there wasn’t any explosion, all the dump-goers returned to hurling trash into the abyss, and