And then my headlights caught a piece of torn fence as the road curved right. Just big enough for one man to get through — even one man dragging another.
He must have a mother somewhere, I suddenly thought. I pictured her as a typical suburban mom. I didn’t know where he’d grown up, so maybe she wasn’t a suburban mom at all. But that’s the way I imagined her. Divorced, maybe, disillusioned by now, but still proud of her grade-school son with the 3.7 GPA. That pride tested through the years, of course, as Winston got into drugs, then into dealing drugs, and then, God help her, into prison for dealing drugs. But wasn’t he putting his life back together again? Wasn’t he the owner of a legitimate job these days — okay, just delivering mail for now, but you couldn’t keep a good man down for long, could you? Not with his brains. Before you knew it, he’d be running that company, sure he would. And such a good-hearted boy, too, and likable — everyone but everyone liked Winston — and he never forgot her birthday card, not once. She still had that lopsided clay ashtray he’d made her in second grade, didn’t she — sitting up somewhere on the mantelplace. Winston’s mom, who wouldn’t be getting a birthday card from him this year or any other year from now on.
I wished I’d asked Winston more about his life. Anything about his life. If he did have a mom waiting for his Christmas cards every year, or a girlfriend sitting up tonight and wondering just where Winston was exactly, or a brother or sister or favorite uncle. But all I’d asked him about was baseball and prison, that’s it, and then I’d asked him to do something that had gotten him killed.
I stopped the car right by the section of torn fence, then sat there for a while to make sure I was really alone. Yes, as far as I could tell, I was very much alone, alone at the dump, alone in the universe. “Deanna,” I whispered, my partner in life, but only the one she knew about — Charles the nine-to-five adman, as opposed to Charles the adulterer and accessory to murder.
I got out of the car, I walked around to the other side, I opened the door and watched helplessly as Winston fell over onto the ground. I would try to think of it as the body — the thing that’s left behind when the soul, what made Winston Winston, had already departed. It was easier that way.
I lifted the body by its arms and began dragging, and I immediately realized that the term dead weight was not a misnomer. Dead weight was the immovable object, panic the irresistible force, but who said the irresistible force wins out? I could barely move the body; an inch or three at a time. It felt as though it were pulling back—tugging at my shoulder sockets, at my elbow joints and aching wrists. At this rate, I’d have the body through the fence by daybreak, just in time for a fleet of sanitation workers to point me out at the police lineup. That’s him, they’d say — the man pulling the deceased into the garbage dump.
But slowly, torturously, I made progress, working out a kind of routine: one huge pull, then a dead stop to catch my breath, shake my hands, and rev up for another. In this fashion, I got the body all the way to the torn section of fence without suffering a single heart attack. And still hours from sun break, too—twelve-thirty, according to my luminescent-dial Movado, a forty-second-year birthday gift from Deanna, who was probably starting to wonder where I was. She worried, and she did it better and with greater dedication than anyone I knew.
I fished my cellular phone out of my coat pocket, flipped it open with a now throbbing wrist, and pressed 2 — my home number. Number 1 in automatic dialing was Dr. Baron’s office.
“Hello?” Deanna, sounding, yes . . . upset.
“Hi, honey. I didn’t want you to worry — it’s taking longer than I thought.”
“Still at the office?”
“Yeah.”
“Why are you calling on your cellular?”
Yes, why was I?
“I don’t know. I walked down the hall for coffee and suddenly realized how late it was.”
“Oh, okay. How much longer do you have?”
Good question. “An hour or so, maybe . . . we have to show these stupid aspirin boards in the morning.” I was kind of surprised how adept I’d become at telling lies, surprised too that I was having this perfectly normal domestic chat — I’m working late, dear — while standing over a man with half a head.
“Well, don’t work too hard,” Deanna said.
“Yes, I won’t.” Then: “I love you, Deanna,” saying her name this time, which on the scale of I love yous ranked somewhere near the top, uttered as something meant as opposed to just another way to end a conversation. Love you — love you, simply a more intimate version of good-bye, but not when you put a name there. Not then. . . .
“I love you, too,” Deanna said, and I knew she meant it, no name necessary.
I put the phone back in my pocket, put one foot through the open hole, reached down, and began to drag Winston through.
The stench was worse over here — hard to imagine, but it was. Outside the fence I was smelling it, but inside the fence I was eating it, ingesting it smell by smell and beginning to turn sick to my stomach.
I pulled the body farther into the dump, closer to the edge of the enormous mound of ground-up garbage. Now that I was this close to it, it looked like one of those temples to the sun I’d seen in Mexico City on a long-ago trip with Deanna. PreAnna, and we’d spent the mornings sight-seeing and the afternoons soaking our livers in tequila. Lots of lovemaking, followed by long drunken naps.
Now what?
You could think in the general all you wanted, but sooner or later the specific starts snapping at you for answers. I’d gotten the body to the dump, I’d dragged it through a barbed-wire fence, I’d brought it to the very foot of the temple of the garbage god.
I looked down at my hands, the very hands that hugged Deanna, that gave insulin shots to Anna, that once upon a time had explored every inch of Lucinda, now being asked to moonlight on a very different kind of job. To shovel a grave.
I dug in, scooping out handfuls of ground-up waste, sharp pieces of tin and bone, glutinous pieces of gristle and fat, man-made fibers of cardboard and Sheetrock.
If I’d been trying to remain dispassionate before, I took it up like religion now. As if my soul depended on it, my very life, this objectification of tonight’s events. Merely smells, merely hands, merely a body. Focusing solely on the act of digging — so much material removed at such and such a rate, leaving an ever widening hole.
By now, I had garbage all over me, up to my elbows in garbage—dangerously close to becoming garbage.
I heard something from far off, the sound of a thunderstorm that might or might not be coming this way — but maybe it wasn’t a thunderstorm after all. The sound was a little too thin for thunder — and as far as I could tell, it was a more or less cloudless night. I heard it again — ears wide open this time — and finally recognized it for what it was. And in recognizing it, I pictured it, too: black pointy ears, snub tail, and sharp white teeth practically dripping with saliva.
And it was getting closer. The junkyard dog of my nightmares.
I dug quicker, scooping out the worst kind of shit with broken-nailed fingers like a dog digging for bones. And every passing minute I could hear the real dog getting louder — distinct barks and growls drifting around the mounds of garbage and over to me, just as my scent must have been drifting back the other way.