the driver of a D- 1 2 Cat moved in on cue and shoveled the flaming flatbed into smoking shreds over the edge, as if it were an ordinary item burning for disposal.
Then Steele threw the switch for our truck, and we heard the hydraulic screaming which indicated the truck was dumping. The back arched and heaved, and Steele goosed the clutch twice and we were free and clear. I walked around the quaking earth, and went around behind.
“Where you going?”
“Just a minute,” I told Steele. He wasn’t moving too fast, hearing the recent inferno replayed in his stoned head. I jumped, fell, crawled through all the sludge, down into the gorge, putting my hand once on the oily skull of an old toaster, until I found a bear cub’s paw protruding from the cliff of waste. By pushing over part of a sink and part of a picket fence, and then lifting a television tube, I looked into the bear’s face. I wanted to see it as a fact. A dead bear. It was the first bear I had ever seen.
Standing there in Arizona, in heat shimmering and humid with the tangled melting fumes of a county’s garbage rising around me, the very planet throbbing under the heavy urging of a forty-ton bulldozer, I thought again about the basis of things. Were we upside down? Soon above me, fathers and sons would toss frisbees back and forth in pre-picnic horseplay, and they would not have a single inkling, and what a word inkling is, not a faint whisper of what slept below. It’s just a planet, I was trying to think: leave it alone. It’s just a planet.
Then Steele, moving into his own version of acute paranoia, a feeling he always traveled through on his way up from marijuana poisoning, called from above, and I ascended. On the way up I fell only once, gouging my palm on the broken end of some hero’s javelin.
11
*************
Same as 10, only worse
Okay, it had been an August afternoon in Phoenix, the heat flat, the sky doing a reasonable imitation of Los Angeles, not blue, not gray, the color of a squint, and Steele, conducting a dump truck full of only me now, was driving maliciously through the shiny traffic, intimidating cars in all the lanes. He always sweetened to meanness on his second joint, his rancor emerging from the corners of his head the way bushes become snakes in the desert. I wondered if he got high just to glimpse his own rage at the series of accidents which composed his life.
So Steele, merging left and right, as he pleased, to cut off all cars, drove us over to Right Way Lumber where we were to accept a load of sawdust for the horsebarns. He negotiated the driveway with shortsight, as always, and I felt the rear wheel rise over the curb, lawn, and crush out a sprinkler mid-spray. When the wheel reassumed the parking lot, I looked back and noted the throttling geyser where the rainbird had been. Steele, however, was not looking backward, or forward, as far as I could tell. He maneuvered the truck under the sawdust chute and clamped the hydraulic brakes shut; I hit the dash. He looked over at me, his eyes all pupils now, dead glass, and he pointed. This meant I should climb up and unfold the canvas funnel on the chute.
He was supposed to wait for me to knock on the roof of the cab. But when I was in the swimming-pool-size bed of the truck, unpinning the funnel, Steele didn’t wait . He was on the ground pushing the load switch, and I felt the canvas chute gorge and ship straight out of my arms, taking skin, as the sawdust cascaded down in a nostril rush. It swept me down and into the corner of the bed swarming to my waist, neck (I couldn’t breathe!), before I reached up in a panic for the lip of the truck bed and pulled myself up and over.
I jumped to the ground, jamming my ankles on the pavement, and walked in circles spitting sawdust. It was in my eyes, my ears, my throat. As I spat and circled, I thought: this is drowning; I am finally drowning. There was blood in it now and I knelt between two cars, keeping my arm on one for
Then Steele threw the switch for our truck, and we heard the hydraulic screaming which indicated the truck was dumping. The back arched and heaved, and Steele goosed the clutch twice and we were free and clear. I walked around the quaking earth, and went around behind.
“Where you going?”
“Just a minute,” I told Steele. He wasn’t moving too fast, hearing the recent inferno replayed in his stoned head. I jumped, fell, crawled through all the sludge, down into the gorge, putting my hand once on the oily skull of an old toaster, until I found a bear cub’s paw protruding from the cliff of waste. By pushing over part of a sink and part of a picket fence, and then lifting a television tube, I looked into the bear’s face. I wanted to see it as a fact. A dead bear. It was the first bear I had ever seen.
Standing there in Arizona, in heat shimmering and humid with the tangled melting fumes of a county’s garbage rising around me, the very planet throbbing under the heavy urging of a forty-ton bulldozer, I thought again about the basis of things. Were we upside down? Soon above me, fathers and sons would toss frisbees back and forth in pre-picnic horseplay, and they would not have a single inkling, and what a word inkling is, not a faint whisper of what slept below. It’s just a planet, I was trying to think: leave it alone. It’s just a planet.
Then Steele, moving into his own version of acute paranoia, a feeling he always traveled through on his way up from marijuana poisoning, called from above, and I ascended. On the way up I fell only once, gouging my palm on the broken end of some hero’s javelin.
11
*************
Same as 10, only worse
Okay, it had been an August afternoon in Phoenix, the heat flat, the sky doing a reasonable imitation of Los Angeles, not blue, not gray, the color of a squint, and Steele, conducting a dump truck full of only me now, was driving maliciously through the shiny traffic, intimidating cars in all the lanes. He always sweetened to meanness on his second joint, his rancor emerging from the corners of his head the way bushes become snakes in the desert. I wondered if he got high just to glimpse his own rage at the series of accidents which composed his life.
So Steele, merging left and right, as he pleased, to cut off all cars, drove us over to Right Way Lumber where we were to accept a load of sawdust for the horsebarns. He negotiated the driveway with shortsight, as always, and I felt the rear wheel rise over the curb, lawn, and crush out a sprinkler mid-spray. When the wheel reassumed the parking lot, I looked back and noted the throttling geyser where the rainbird had been. Steele, however, was not looking backward, or forward, as far as I could tell. He maneuvered the truck under the sawdust chute and clamped the hydraulic brakes shut; I hit the dash. He looked over at me, his eyes all pupils now, dead glass, and he pointed. This meant I should climb up and unfold the canvas funnel on the chute.
He was supposed to wait for me to knock on the roof of the cab. But when I was in the swimming-pool-size bed of the truck, unpinning the funnel, Steele didn’t wait . He was on the ground pushing the load switch, and I felt the canvas chute gorge and ship straight out of my arms, taking skin, as the sawdust cascaded down in a nostril rush. It swept me down and into the corner of the bed swarming to my waist, neck (I couldn’t breathe!), before I reached up in a panic for the lip of the truck bed and pulled myself up and over.
I jumped to the ground, jamming my ankles on the pavement, and walked in circles spitting sawdust. It was in my eyes, my ears, my throat. As I spat and circled, I thought: this is drowning; I am finally drowning. There was blood in it now and I knelt between two cars, keeping my arm on one for
Similar Books
My Texas Sweetheart (book one)
Pauliena Acheson
Charmed by His Love
Janet Chapman
Cheri Red (sWet)
Charisma Knight
Through the Fire
Donna Hill
The Hen of the Baskervilles
Donna Andrews
Can't Shake You
Molly McLain
A Cast of Vultures
Judith Flanders
Wings of Lomay
Devri Walls
Five Parts Dead
Tim Pegler
Angel Stations
Gary Gibson