American Waste
JASON CHRISTIAN
I had decided it was time to grow up, whatever that meant, so I cut off my dreadlocks and talked to this guy about a job. The guy went by the name of Hippie. He was an acquaintance of another guy I used to sell speed to, someone who owed me a favor.
Hippie worked with a crew of framers that built houses all over the suburbs. He said the boss was looking for a new hand. That’s how he put it, a hand, somebody to carry boards to the other guys and clean up the jobsite. Piddly shit. I said okay. I needed the money and it would come weekly and under the table: seven bucks an hour, which was good in 2002.
The first day I showed up to the jobsite in my friend Ernie’s puke-brown car. The place was way in the outskirts down west I-40, where some rich man was building a house in the middle of a fresh clearing surrounded by scrubby woods and flanked by two large piles of bulldozed trees, just asking to become bonfires. Stacks of lumber pushed into sand damp from a rare July rain. Tire ruts crisscrossed the inevitable red clay. Trash lay everywhere in sight.
The other guys’ trucks—all of them had trucks—were parked in a crooked line off the main driveway, wedged haphazardly between pathetic stunted trees that constituted our woods. The clearing was large enough for the mansion we were building and a yard that somebody would roll out after we were gone.
As I parked I killed the radio and saw through the cracked glass a short stocky man walking straight at me as though ready for a fistfight. He began speaking even before I left the car.
“You the new guy?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “My name’s Rice.”
“What kinda fucking name is that? I won’t remember that.” This must be the boss. He turned toward the others who were moving quickly, carrying tools, unrolling cords and hoses, setting up for the day. I looked at my watch: five minutes early. The boss looked back at me and spat tobacco on the ground beside my boots.
“Got any tools?” he said.
“I brought a hammer, a tool bag, a tape measure, and a square. That’s what Hippie told me to bring.” I was hoping Hippie used that name around the boss. I was also thinking that I was lucky that I had a friend to borrow tools from. Of course I didn’t know how to use them, but that I wouldn’t admit. I was used to being judged by my exterior: black clothes, tattoos, and bright-colored hair invited stares. Anyway, I figured he’d act somewhat friendly since he’d gone to the trouble of recruiting a new worker. Besides, I’d cleaned up my appearance for his sake, for the job’s sake. But I kept quiet and played it cool. I had no doubt construction sites were unforgiving.
“Pick up all the trash,” the boss said. “Anybody yells, do what he asks.” He turned around and walked toward his dented gray Dodge dually with red mud smeared all the way to the windows. I began picking up trash. The rest of the crew finished unloading tools, setting up saws and compressors and other contraptions I had no idea of their use.
It was eight a.m. and the other guys were already laughing and chitchatting about women. Despite my best intentions, I was anxious and someone noticed. He said his name was Kurt, and he wore nothing but frayed cut-off jean shorts that barely reached mid-thigh, and a tool belt that seemed to enhance his round over-sunned belly. His skin was dark brown and leathery like an old catcher’s mitt, his feet shod with formerly white Wal-Mart-looking shoes. Somehow, despite the belly, he ran across the top of the two-by-four walls as graceful as a ballerina. Real precision. Kurt said I looked as nervous as a whore in church. I asked him what I should be doing.
“Boss already said pick up all the cut ends and make a pile. There’s the dumpster for the shorties.” He pointed to the green roll-off dumpster across the yard. The side of the dumpster had the words “American Waste” stamped on it. I thought of that Black Flag song I used to like in my younger, idealistic days.
“Yeah, but after that,” I said.
“You know how to cut straight?” Kurt said. “Lost our cut-man. Quit last week.” He turned away from me and flipped off the sky as if everything was God’s fault. I noticed he had a blurred tattoo of Wile E. Coyote on his right shoulder.
“I learn fast if somebody wants to show me,” I said to Kurt.
“New guy!” the boss roared from behind me. I spun around.
“What the fuck are you talking for,” he said. “I thought you were working. You’re just standing there with your goddamn teeth in your mouth.”
I said nothing.
“Cut that stack down to ninety-two and five eighths. We got the wrong order.”
I had worked jobs where men barked orders but this was “slaves building pyramids” work. It was one thing to be told to wash a pile of dishes or pick up trash or shovel dirt all day, but another to quickly do skilled labor under a tyrant’s watch. It’s hard to explain why, but I needed the job to last, it was important for me to finish something that I had started for once, so I tried.
I wrote the dimensions the boss gave me down on a scrap of wood, while he stood beside me staring, his nostrils flaring as he breathed. I couldn’t tell if he was older or younger than Hippie, who I had guessed to be about forty-five.
“I think I can do it,” I said.
“Goddammit new guy, you better fucking know.”
“Okay,” I said. “No problem.” I skittered over to the stack of lumber and noticed Hippie gazing at me from the second story floor where he was building walls. He had a guilty look on his face, probably realizing I was scared and trying to hide it.
“Hippie, come down here and show this new guy how to do it,” the boss said, still planted in the same place “Tell by looking at him he don’t know shit.” He was pointing at me with the wooden handle of a framing hammer, nearly as big as an ax handle.
“All right, Junior,” Hippie said. Now I knew the boss’s name.
I let him help me, did the job, and then they left me alone. Every instinct in me told me to flee. I struggled against the urge to drive away until lunchtime came. All six guys, besides the boss, smoked weed, ate gas station food, and joked around. Lunch break was more than a break, it was a relief. At some point in the afternoon, boss left for some errands and never returned. I finished out the day with less worries, even allowing myself to stop to pet Hippie’s young brindle pit bull that lay all day in the shade of Hippie’s beat up Toyota. Hippie said he always brought the dog to work. He called him Brutus.
Day two was easier. By easier I mean the boss wasn’t there most of the day. The work itself was backbreaking. They made me carry about a hundred four-by-eight-foot pieces of plywood up a rickety wooden chickenwalk to the second floor. One after another, all day long, each feeling heavier than the last.
At lunch, like the day before, we all piled into somebody’s truck and drove to the gas station at the interchange down the road. They had a hot box full of chicken strips, potato wedges, fried chicken, onion rings and other fried foods, the kind of food that won’t kill you but you don’t want to live on. I didn’t complain and, of course, no one else did either. We each bought our lunch and a 32 oz. soda pop. Then we went back for what they called “lunchtime entertainment.”
“What’s that?” I asked Hippie in the truck on the way back, thinking that he was somehow closer to me than them. He said nothing. I didn’t want to repeat myself so I let it go.
When we got back to the jobsite, everyone exited the truck and began setting his own personal lawn chairs into a straight line facing away from the house. I didn’t have a chair. I thought I’d just stand to eat or stack boards to make a seat. The heat was sweltering and the humidity was high. There was a dead quality to the air, that deadness you find in Oklahoma summers.
“Got a coon for Brutus today,” Hippie said to no one in particular. “Missed one yesterday, but caught one last night.”
Everyone laughed or began chattering in a knowing way. I still didn’t understand what was happening until he picked up a steel box from the back of his truck. It had been there all along. Inside the box an animal frantically clawed and shuffled from side to side. Brutus stood on two legs, whining, licking at the box.
Hippie set the box on the dirt. Brutus began clawing at it and barking. The barks were shrill. He was still young.
“What is this?” I said.
“This fucking dog will learn to run off varmints, yet,” Hippie said. “I live fifty mile south of here in the country. I need a good coon killer. Those sonsabitches get into my food all the goddamn time.”
“Let that sumbitch go, Hippie,” one of them said.
“Tear up the walls of my trailer,” Hippie continued. “Last week they ripped out all the insulation. Decorated my house like a goddamn Christmas tree.”
He released a little metal door, a full-sized raccoon burst from the cage like a bull from a rodeo chute. The dog and raccoon instantly began fighting in a death-like dance—rolling, scratching, biting. The growl of the dog was familiar, but the raccoon sounded like an angry tomcat slowed down and deepened in pitch, something like an otherworldly lion’s roar, or maybe a lion in heat, sounds of rage, rabid sounds.
The raccoon was vicious, ruthless. After a minute it managed to break away from the dog and run toward the trees, but the dog caught up quick and the dance began anew. Behind me the crew cheered, made a commotion. It felt like being at a bar, watching a featherweight championship on HBO.
The dirt was torn up where the animals had been. Spots of blood here and there marked the animals’ paths. Eventually the raccoon broke away yet again and ran fast enough to lunge up a tree. Brutus went hysterical, barking and yipping and whining at the base of the tree, trying to jump into it and climb it, circling like a shark. Hippie skipped over to him, grabbed him by the collar and lifted him in the air, then walked back to the jobsite while Brutus looked back hard over Hippie’s shoulder toward the raccoon in the tree.
“That’s a good boy, Brutus,” Hippie said. “Kill that fucking beast.”
“Man, that bastard was tearing him up good,” someone yelled. I didn’t look to see who it was. So far, only one or two of them were separate people.
“Varmint’s tougher than the damn dog,” another said. I didn’t look up that time either. Like Brutus, I stared at the raccoon in the tree.
“Bullshit,” Hippie said. “Coon just got lucky. Dog’s still a pup, you know.”
We went back to work. I finished lugging the stack of plywood, one board at a time, fifty pounds each, fifty-seven more trips up the chickenwalk—I counted. I almost fell a couple of times. I tried not to think of anything but holding on to the board stretched across my shoulders. I was drenched in sweat and muttered under my breath like a mad man as I hunched up the chickenwalk over and over until five o’clock finally came.
That night at the house my friends were indignant.
“You gotta quit that job,” Ernie said. “Fuck those rednecks!” He was vegan then, and had a dog of his own that he found in a dumpster one night while out looking for food behind the Homeland grocery store. It was a tiny puppy someone had wrapped up in a black trash bag and thrown away. He called it Yelp because it was yelping through the plastic when he found it.
Then Dee chimed in: “You should sabotage their shit first. Slash their tires, or something. Or steal their tools and pawn them.”
“Man, they know my name,” I said. “That would be really stupid.”
We were drinking Side Pocket forties. Drunk for a buck, we used to say. Except I was trying to pull my life together, so I just poured myself a cup.
“You want a bump?” Ernie said. His hair was spiky on top and dyed black. The sides were shaved revealing a tattoo of a screaming skull.
“Man, I’ve gotta work in the morning.”
“All right. Be boring,” Ernie said. “Just don’t forget whose car you’re using.” His eyes darted everywhere as though following a fly around the room.
“Turn up the music,” Dee said.
All conversation was shut down by Napalm Death or something in that vein. Heavy, dark, violent music, an assault on our ears. Not the political punk that got us into this lifestyle in the first place.
This was normal. We talked sometimes, but music and drinking was usually better. If I wanted intellectual stimulation I could go to my room and read.
I had lived in that house off and on for three years. The house was Ernie’s, technically, though everyone thought of it as our own. Ernie inherited the house from his dad, who passed out one night drunk and fell into the swimming pool of some lady he was fucking, and drowned. He was the lady’s lawn man and somehow had breached her glittery world. Her rich husband was out of town when the accident happened. It was some kind of scandal on the news. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. We called the house “The Crack House,” which was supposed to be ironic but the front windows were boarded up from a party that had gotten out of hand, and we had definitely smoked crack there more than a couple of times. I had moved back in when my girlfriend Abby kicked me out. Ernie was happy to have me there, liked to tell me about every five minutes Abby was a stupid stuck-up college girl. “Out of your league, man,” he’d say. “Probably be a lawyer or something, someday.” I deflected this talk or sometimes turned it back at him.
“Maybe, if you’re lucky, she’ll save your ass from prison.”
The next morning was hell. I was so sore I could barely move. Somehow I had ended up drinking a Side Pocket after all, and then some whiskey, staying up half the night. By some miracle I managed to roll out of bed and make it out the door on time. I bought a barrel full of coffee on the way to our half-built mansion.
That day was like the one before: same rednecks, same yelling boss, same dog-raccoon fight at lunch. We worked fast, the hot summer air echoed with rapid-fire nail gun sounds, hammering, men’s murmuring and swearing voices. It sounded like war. Everyone was in a hurry and the boss yelled “hurry up, ladies” about once an hour.
I was told to cut some boards and given a list of dimensions so somebody could make some headers. As I cut the boards my mind was somewhere else, thinking about how I shouldn’t have drunk so much last night, wondering why I was working at a place where I belonged even less than my normal jobs, when I cut right through the air-hose. The hose wiggled and flopped in the air and I couldn’t catch it. The boss screamed at me, but somebody quickly fixed the problem and put me back on cleaning up and running boards to whoever yelled “new guy.”
The week passed and the dog and raccoon scrapped every day. On Friday two raccoons were caught and, though they were on the small side, I thought they might get the upper hand on Hippie’s pit bull. On that day more blood splashed than usual. I wondered how much longer the carnage would last.
My second week of work, on Monday, Brutus finally triumphed. Hippie had trapped a young raccoon the night before, and that day at lunch it fought just as hard for its life as the rest of them, but it wasn’t quite tough enough to hold its own. The raccoon nearly reached the trees, and I was secretly rooting for it even when Brutus clamped down on its neck and wouldn’t let go. He thrashed it in every direction, in spasms, whipping it like a Teddy bear around and around. Then he carried it to his master and dropped it at his feet. It lay there soaked in dirty saliva and blood, a ruddy ring around its neck, its fur spiked out with moisture. Its coat had a sheen to it, kind of like punk hair. The men slapped Hippie’s back and pet Brutus, who was prancing and wiggling his butt as though he’d won a prize.
“All right, ladies, you’ve had your fun,” the boss yelled, as he came out of the port-a-john. I hadn’t known he was there. “Let’s get back to it. Throw that motherfucker in the woods before the customer shows up.”
Hippie picked up the raccoon by the tail and walked to the edge of the woods and tossed it onto the tangled underbrush of briars. It lay there atop springy vines, several feet from the ground, swaying in the wind. I watched Hippie as he strolled back toward us, seemingly following the thread-like trail of blood. It was all I could do to keep quiet.
“What the fuck are you staring at, new guy?” the boss screamed from behind my ear.
“Huh?” I said, without thinking.
“Goddammit! Only faggots say huh. Are you a faggot, new guy?”
The day was warm, but my neck was a volcano. I was powerless. I was enraged. I wanted to take a hammer and bury the claw in his forehead. But of course I did nothing. There was nothing to do.
“No.” I said.
“Good, cause I wouldn’t have one on my crew. Bring those studs upstairs, stud.” He pointed with a nod of his square sunbaked head. I hated him, hated his kind. I pictured his thrashed bloody body lying next to the raccoon’s on the briars, his tongue hanging out, his clothes in tatters. It wouldn’t do me any good to dwell though, so I put everything out of my mind and did what the boss wanted.
For hours I hauled a pile of boards upstairs and stacked them for the walls the others would make. The whole place looked like a multi-tiered jungle gym with diagonal braces going every which way, holding the walls in place until we could put a roof over all of it. It looked strong, but I knew it was still vulnerable without the braces. A strong wind might topple the whole thing over.
“Oh my god. Somebody should call animal welfare on those fuckers,” Ernie said that night at home.
“I don’t think they give a shit about raccoons,” Dee said.
“I was talking about the dog,” Ernie said. “That’s animal abuse.”
“Yeah, but we don’t call the cops, remember?” I said. It was true. We always said calling the cops was cooperating with the state, and the state was a bunch of murderers. I remember being shit-faced one time and arguing about it with some liberal college girl who was dating a friend of mine. I was out of my mind on speed, chewing my face off, not backing down in the argument.
“What if there was a dead body in your house,” she had said at the end of our drawn out debate, as though saving it as her final trump card.
“We’d compost the bastard,” I said. I knew that was a lie, but I said it anyway. The girl wouldn’t let my answer suffice, so I finally admitted we’d probably take the body and drop it off at the morgue or something. All of it was a moot point anyway because there wasn’t going to be a dead body.
“Animal welfare isn’t the cops, dumbass,” Ernie said. “I think we should ambush that fucker and kick his teeth in and steal his dog. I’ll volunteer to take care of him,” he said. “The dog, I mean.”
“I can’t do that, besides the boss is a bigger problem. I haven’t told you what he said to me.”
“Why are you working there, man?” Ernie said. “Are you that desperate?”
“Dude, get a job at a coffee shop or something,” said Dee. “Or sell weed again. It’s not like it’s speed.”
“Sell your plasma till something better comes along,” Ernie said. I knew he was just trying to help. What they didn’t understand is that I was growing weary with all of this, the all-night drinking, the filthy, squalid living, the gratuitous bumps of speed, not knowing where my next dollar would come from.
“I feel like I need to learn a skill,” I said. “I’m twenty-five-years-old. I should be trying to figure shit out, right?”
The next day I came to work prepared. I had plotted during the night. I bought a summer sausage and stabbed holes all over its surface and pushed rat poison into each hole. It would be a toxic weapon.
At lunch Brutus had his daily fight for Hippie’s pride and honor. The raccoon was normal sized and fought like the rest of them, and survived, which was a comfort. I didn’t want to kill the dog but I didn’t see any other way. Wasn’t it okay to kill something to stop further bloodshed?
When the fight was over the guys went back to wall building and I cleaned up the yard until I had a load to throw in the dumpster. I had cut up the summer sausage into four pieces, each exposing green pellets that resembled broken jagged Pez candy, the color of chalkboard. I squatted on the other side of the dumpster, the sausage stuffed down in my tool bag, waiting for the dog to approach.
While I waited I thought of Abby. She loved animals and would be horrified if she knew what I was planning to do. She’d want me to call the cops on Hippie, but that fucker would sell me out in a second. He’d tell them I sold speed. It didn’t matter that I had quit. A house raid was a house raid. They’d find something there to put us all away. I couldn’t explain any of this to Abby.
I wanted to call her again; it had been two months since she kicked me out. I wanted to tell her that I was making changes, that I was working toward goals and learning things, that this job wasn’t much, but it might lead to better opportunities. Only now, as I write this, do I know how far from the truth I was in those longing moments. I thought I might call her that night and see if we could talk sometime soon. Have a coffee or something. Maybe work something out between us. She would be back from her parents’ house soon to get ready for school to start.
I peeked from behind the dumpster and noticed the dog lying on the dirt in his usual spot beside Hippie’s truck. I pictured him poisoned, walking in circles, licking the air, foaming at the mouth. I pictured him bloated and whimpering at his master. I knew then that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill an innocent, even a dog. Especially a dog. I might have killed Hippie in that moment, or the boss, but I didn’t do that either. I did nothing. I threw the sausage in the dumpster and stared at the trees for a while until I was yelled at to pick up the trash around the yard.
I didn’t go back to work after that day. Seven days wasn’t much, but it was the longest I’d worked in a while. I called Hippie a week later to tell him where to have the boss mail my check. At first he was irritated that I hadn’t shown up, but then perked up and told me Brutus finally killed a full-grown raccoon. He planned to buy another dog, too, to train him to fight. He said he’d keep a weight around his neck so he could beef up and kill other dogs. I hung up the phone before I could give him my address.
I went back to selling weed for a while, just to get on my feet. I never talked about Brutus or the job again to Ernie or Dee. It was easier that way, to let the memory disappear into oblivion. The summer clapped to a close with me drunk every night, staying away from speed but still not winning any awards for success. I tried calling Abby a few times when I knew for sure she’d be back in town. I don’t know what happened, but she never picked up the phone.
JASON CHRISTIAN
I had decided it was time to grow up, whatever that meant, so I cut off my dreadlocks and talked to this guy about a job. The guy went by the name of Hippie. He was an acquaintance of another guy I used to sell speed to, someone who owed me a favor.
Hippie worked with a crew of framers that built houses all over the suburbs. He said the boss was looking for a new hand. That’s how he put it, a hand, somebody to carry boards to the other guys and clean up the jobsite. Piddly shit. I said okay. I needed the money and it would come weekly and under the table: seven bucks an hour, which was good in 2002.
The first day I showed up to the jobsite in my friend Ernie’s puke-brown car. The place was way in the outskirts down west I-40, where some rich man was building a house in the middle of a fresh clearing surrounded by scrubby woods and flanked by two large piles of bulldozed trees, just asking to become bonfires. Stacks of lumber pushed into sand damp from a rare July rain. Tire ruts crisscrossed the inevitable red clay. Trash lay everywhere in sight.
The other guys’ trucks—all of them had trucks—were parked in a crooked line off the main driveway, wedged haphazardly between pathetic stunted trees that constituted our woods. The clearing was large enough for the mansion we were building and a yard that somebody would roll out after we were gone.
As I parked I killed the radio and saw through the cracked glass a short stocky man walking straight at me as though ready for a fistfight. He began speaking even before I left the car.
“You the new guy?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “My name’s Rice.”
“What kinda fucking name is that? I won’t remember that.” This must be the boss. He turned toward the others who were moving quickly, carrying tools, unrolling cords and hoses, setting up for the day. I looked at my watch: five minutes early. The boss looked back at me and spat tobacco on the ground beside my boots.
“Got any tools?” he said.
“I brought a hammer, a tool bag, a tape measure, and a square. That’s what Hippie told me to bring.” I was hoping Hippie used that name around the boss. I was also thinking that I was lucky that I had a friend to borrow tools from. Of course I didn’t know how to use them, but that I wouldn’t admit. I was used to being judged by my exterior: black clothes, tattoos, and bright-colored hair invited stares. Anyway, I figured he’d act somewhat friendly since he’d gone to the trouble of recruiting a new worker. Besides, I’d cleaned up my appearance for his sake, for the job’s sake. But I kept quiet and played it cool. I had no doubt construction sites were unforgiving.
“Pick up all the trash,” the boss said. “Anybody yells, do what he asks.” He turned around and walked toward his dented gray Dodge dually with red mud smeared all the way to the windows. I began picking up trash. The rest of the crew finished unloading tools, setting up saws and compressors and other contraptions I had no idea of their use.
It was eight a.m. and the other guys were already laughing and chitchatting about women. Despite my best intentions, I was anxious and someone noticed. He said his name was Kurt, and he wore nothing but frayed cut-off jean shorts that barely reached mid-thigh, and a tool belt that seemed to enhance his round over-sunned belly. His skin was dark brown and leathery like an old catcher’s mitt, his feet shod with formerly white Wal-Mart-looking shoes. Somehow, despite the belly, he ran across the top of the two-by-four walls as graceful as a ballerina. Real precision. Kurt said I looked as nervous as a whore in church. I asked him what I should be doing.
“Boss already said pick up all the cut ends and make a pile. There’s the dumpster for the shorties.” He pointed to the green roll-off dumpster across the yard. The side of the dumpster had the words “American Waste” stamped on it. I thought of that Black Flag song I used to like in my younger, idealistic days.
“Yeah, but after that,” I said.
“You know how to cut straight?” Kurt said. “Lost our cut-man. Quit last week.” He turned away from me and flipped off the sky as if everything was God’s fault. I noticed he had a blurred tattoo of Wile E. Coyote on his right shoulder.
“I learn fast if somebody wants to show me,” I said to Kurt.
“New guy!” the boss roared from behind me. I spun around.
“What the fuck are you talking for,” he said. “I thought you were working. You’re just standing there with your goddamn teeth in your mouth.”
I said nothing.
“Cut that stack down to ninety-two and five eighths. We got the wrong order.”
I had worked jobs where men barked orders but this was “slaves building pyramids” work. It was one thing to be told to wash a pile of dishes or pick up trash or shovel dirt all day, but another to quickly do skilled labor under a tyrant’s watch. It’s hard to explain why, but I needed the job to last, it was important for me to finish something that I had started for once, so I tried.
I wrote the dimensions the boss gave me down on a scrap of wood, while he stood beside me staring, his nostrils flaring as he breathed. I couldn’t tell if he was older or younger than Hippie, who I had guessed to be about forty-five.
“I think I can do it,” I said.
“Goddammit new guy, you better fucking know.”
“Okay,” I said. “No problem.” I skittered over to the stack of lumber and noticed Hippie gazing at me from the second story floor where he was building walls. He had a guilty look on his face, probably realizing I was scared and trying to hide it.
“Hippie, come down here and show this new guy how to do it,” the boss said, still planted in the same place “Tell by looking at him he don’t know shit.” He was pointing at me with the wooden handle of a framing hammer, nearly as big as an ax handle.
“All right, Junior,” Hippie said. Now I knew the boss’s name.
I let him help me, did the job, and then they left me alone. Every instinct in me told me to flee. I struggled against the urge to drive away until lunchtime came. All six guys, besides the boss, smoked weed, ate gas station food, and joked around. Lunch break was more than a break, it was a relief. At some point in the afternoon, boss left for some errands and never returned. I finished out the day with less worries, even allowing myself to stop to pet Hippie’s young brindle pit bull that lay all day in the shade of Hippie’s beat up Toyota. Hippie said he always brought the dog to work. He called him Brutus.
Day two was easier. By easier I mean the boss wasn’t there most of the day. The work itself was backbreaking. They made me carry about a hundred four-by-eight-foot pieces of plywood up a rickety wooden chickenwalk to the second floor. One after another, all day long, each feeling heavier than the last.
At lunch, like the day before, we all piled into somebody’s truck and drove to the gas station at the interchange down the road. They had a hot box full of chicken strips, potato wedges, fried chicken, onion rings and other fried foods, the kind of food that won’t kill you but you don’t want to live on. I didn’t complain and, of course, no one else did either. We each bought our lunch and a 32 oz. soda pop. Then we went back for what they called “lunchtime entertainment.”
“What’s that?” I asked Hippie in the truck on the way back, thinking that he was somehow closer to me than them. He said nothing. I didn’t want to repeat myself so I let it go.
When we got back to the jobsite, everyone exited the truck and began setting his own personal lawn chairs into a straight line facing away from the house. I didn’t have a chair. I thought I’d just stand to eat or stack boards to make a seat. The heat was sweltering and the humidity was high. There was a dead quality to the air, that deadness you find in Oklahoma summers.
“Got a coon for Brutus today,” Hippie said to no one in particular. “Missed one yesterday, but caught one last night.”
Everyone laughed or began chattering in a knowing way. I still didn’t understand what was happening until he picked up a steel box from the back of his truck. It had been there all along. Inside the box an animal frantically clawed and shuffled from side to side. Brutus stood on two legs, whining, licking at the box.
Hippie set the box on the dirt. Brutus began clawing at it and barking. The barks were shrill. He was still young.
“What is this?” I said.
“This fucking dog will learn to run off varmints, yet,” Hippie said. “I live fifty mile south of here in the country. I need a good coon killer. Those sonsabitches get into my food all the goddamn time.”
“Let that sumbitch go, Hippie,” one of them said.
“Tear up the walls of my trailer,” Hippie continued. “Last week they ripped out all the insulation. Decorated my house like a goddamn Christmas tree.”
He released a little metal door, a full-sized raccoon burst from the cage like a bull from a rodeo chute. The dog and raccoon instantly began fighting in a death-like dance—rolling, scratching, biting. The growl of the dog was familiar, but the raccoon sounded like an angry tomcat slowed down and deepened in pitch, something like an otherworldly lion’s roar, or maybe a lion in heat, sounds of rage, rabid sounds.
The raccoon was vicious, ruthless. After a minute it managed to break away from the dog and run toward the trees, but the dog caught up quick and the dance began anew. Behind me the crew cheered, made a commotion. It felt like being at a bar, watching a featherweight championship on HBO.
The dirt was torn up where the animals had been. Spots of blood here and there marked the animals’ paths. Eventually the raccoon broke away yet again and ran fast enough to lunge up a tree. Brutus went hysterical, barking and yipping and whining at the base of the tree, trying to jump into it and climb it, circling like a shark. Hippie skipped over to him, grabbed him by the collar and lifted him in the air, then walked back to the jobsite while Brutus looked back hard over Hippie’s shoulder toward the raccoon in the tree.
“That’s a good boy, Brutus,” Hippie said. “Kill that fucking beast.”
“Man, that bastard was tearing him up good,” someone yelled. I didn’t look to see who it was. So far, only one or two of them were separate people.
“Varmint’s tougher than the damn dog,” another said. I didn’t look up that time either. Like Brutus, I stared at the raccoon in the tree.
“Bullshit,” Hippie said. “Coon just got lucky. Dog’s still a pup, you know.”
We went back to work. I finished lugging the stack of plywood, one board at a time, fifty pounds each, fifty-seven more trips up the chickenwalk—I counted. I almost fell a couple of times. I tried not to think of anything but holding on to the board stretched across my shoulders. I was drenched in sweat and muttered under my breath like a mad man as I hunched up the chickenwalk over and over until five o’clock finally came.
That night at the house my friends were indignant.
“You gotta quit that job,” Ernie said. “Fuck those rednecks!” He was vegan then, and had a dog of his own that he found in a dumpster one night while out looking for food behind the Homeland grocery store. It was a tiny puppy someone had wrapped up in a black trash bag and thrown away. He called it Yelp because it was yelping through the plastic when he found it.
Then Dee chimed in: “You should sabotage their shit first. Slash their tires, or something. Or steal their tools and pawn them.”
“Man, they know my name,” I said. “That would be really stupid.”
We were drinking Side Pocket forties. Drunk for a buck, we used to say. Except I was trying to pull my life together, so I just poured myself a cup.
“You want a bump?” Ernie said. His hair was spiky on top and dyed black. The sides were shaved revealing a tattoo of a screaming skull.
“Man, I’ve gotta work in the morning.”
“All right. Be boring,” Ernie said. “Just don’t forget whose car you’re using.” His eyes darted everywhere as though following a fly around the room.
“Turn up the music,” Dee said.
All conversation was shut down by Napalm Death or something in that vein. Heavy, dark, violent music, an assault on our ears. Not the political punk that got us into this lifestyle in the first place.
This was normal. We talked sometimes, but music and drinking was usually better. If I wanted intellectual stimulation I could go to my room and read.
I had lived in that house off and on for three years. The house was Ernie’s, technically, though everyone thought of it as our own. Ernie inherited the house from his dad, who passed out one night drunk and fell into the swimming pool of some lady he was fucking, and drowned. He was the lady’s lawn man and somehow had breached her glittery world. Her rich husband was out of town when the accident happened. It was some kind of scandal on the news. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. We called the house “The Crack House,” which was supposed to be ironic but the front windows were boarded up from a party that had gotten out of hand, and we had definitely smoked crack there more than a couple of times. I had moved back in when my girlfriend Abby kicked me out. Ernie was happy to have me there, liked to tell me about every five minutes Abby was a stupid stuck-up college girl. “Out of your league, man,” he’d say. “Probably be a lawyer or something, someday.” I deflected this talk or sometimes turned it back at him.
“Maybe, if you’re lucky, she’ll save your ass from prison.”
The next morning was hell. I was so sore I could barely move. Somehow I had ended up drinking a Side Pocket after all, and then some whiskey, staying up half the night. By some miracle I managed to roll out of bed and make it out the door on time. I bought a barrel full of coffee on the way to our half-built mansion.
That day was like the one before: same rednecks, same yelling boss, same dog-raccoon fight at lunch. We worked fast, the hot summer air echoed with rapid-fire nail gun sounds, hammering, men’s murmuring and swearing voices. It sounded like war. Everyone was in a hurry and the boss yelled “hurry up, ladies” about once an hour.
I was told to cut some boards and given a list of dimensions so somebody could make some headers. As I cut the boards my mind was somewhere else, thinking about how I shouldn’t have drunk so much last night, wondering why I was working at a place where I belonged even less than my normal jobs, when I cut right through the air-hose. The hose wiggled and flopped in the air and I couldn’t catch it. The boss screamed at me, but somebody quickly fixed the problem and put me back on cleaning up and running boards to whoever yelled “new guy.”
The week passed and the dog and raccoon scrapped every day. On Friday two raccoons were caught and, though they were on the small side, I thought they might get the upper hand on Hippie’s pit bull. On that day more blood splashed than usual. I wondered how much longer the carnage would last.
My second week of work, on Monday, Brutus finally triumphed. Hippie had trapped a young raccoon the night before, and that day at lunch it fought just as hard for its life as the rest of them, but it wasn’t quite tough enough to hold its own. The raccoon nearly reached the trees, and I was secretly rooting for it even when Brutus clamped down on its neck and wouldn’t let go. He thrashed it in every direction, in spasms, whipping it like a Teddy bear around and around. Then he carried it to his master and dropped it at his feet. It lay there soaked in dirty saliva and blood, a ruddy ring around its neck, its fur spiked out with moisture. Its coat had a sheen to it, kind of like punk hair. The men slapped Hippie’s back and pet Brutus, who was prancing and wiggling his butt as though he’d won a prize.
“All right, ladies, you’ve had your fun,” the boss yelled, as he came out of the port-a-john. I hadn’t known he was there. “Let’s get back to it. Throw that motherfucker in the woods before the customer shows up.”
Hippie picked up the raccoon by the tail and walked to the edge of the woods and tossed it onto the tangled underbrush of briars. It lay there atop springy vines, several feet from the ground, swaying in the wind. I watched Hippie as he strolled back toward us, seemingly following the thread-like trail of blood. It was all I could do to keep quiet.
“What the fuck are you staring at, new guy?” the boss screamed from behind my ear.
“Huh?” I said, without thinking.
“Goddammit! Only faggots say huh. Are you a faggot, new guy?”
The day was warm, but my neck was a volcano. I was powerless. I was enraged. I wanted to take a hammer and bury the claw in his forehead. But of course I did nothing. There was nothing to do.
“No.” I said.
“Good, cause I wouldn’t have one on my crew. Bring those studs upstairs, stud.” He pointed with a nod of his square sunbaked head. I hated him, hated his kind. I pictured his thrashed bloody body lying next to the raccoon’s on the briars, his tongue hanging out, his clothes in tatters. It wouldn’t do me any good to dwell though, so I put everything out of my mind and did what the boss wanted.
For hours I hauled a pile of boards upstairs and stacked them for the walls the others would make. The whole place looked like a multi-tiered jungle gym with diagonal braces going every which way, holding the walls in place until we could put a roof over all of it. It looked strong, but I knew it was still vulnerable without the braces. A strong wind might topple the whole thing over.
“Oh my god. Somebody should call animal welfare on those fuckers,” Ernie said that night at home.
“I don’t think they give a shit about raccoons,” Dee said.
“I was talking about the dog,” Ernie said. “That’s animal abuse.”
“Yeah, but we don’t call the cops, remember?” I said. It was true. We always said calling the cops was cooperating with the state, and the state was a bunch of murderers. I remember being shit-faced one time and arguing about it with some liberal college girl who was dating a friend of mine. I was out of my mind on speed, chewing my face off, not backing down in the argument.
“What if there was a dead body in your house,” she had said at the end of our drawn out debate, as though saving it as her final trump card.
“We’d compost the bastard,” I said. I knew that was a lie, but I said it anyway. The girl wouldn’t let my answer suffice, so I finally admitted we’d probably take the body and drop it off at the morgue or something. All of it was a moot point anyway because there wasn’t going to be a dead body.
“Animal welfare isn’t the cops, dumbass,” Ernie said. “I think we should ambush that fucker and kick his teeth in and steal his dog. I’ll volunteer to take care of him,” he said. “The dog, I mean.”
“I can’t do that, besides the boss is a bigger problem. I haven’t told you what he said to me.”
“Why are you working there, man?” Ernie said. “Are you that desperate?”
“Dude, get a job at a coffee shop or something,” said Dee. “Or sell weed again. It’s not like it’s speed.”
“Sell your plasma till something better comes along,” Ernie said. I knew he was just trying to help. What they didn’t understand is that I was growing weary with all of this, the all-night drinking, the filthy, squalid living, the gratuitous bumps of speed, not knowing where my next dollar would come from.
“I feel like I need to learn a skill,” I said. “I’m twenty-five-years-old. I should be trying to figure shit out, right?”
The next day I came to work prepared. I had plotted during the night. I bought a summer sausage and stabbed holes all over its surface and pushed rat poison into each hole. It would be a toxic weapon.
At lunch Brutus had his daily fight for Hippie’s pride and honor. The raccoon was normal sized and fought like the rest of them, and survived, which was a comfort. I didn’t want to kill the dog but I didn’t see any other way. Wasn’t it okay to kill something to stop further bloodshed?
When the fight was over the guys went back to wall building and I cleaned up the yard until I had a load to throw in the dumpster. I had cut up the summer sausage into four pieces, each exposing green pellets that resembled broken jagged Pez candy, the color of chalkboard. I squatted on the other side of the dumpster, the sausage stuffed down in my tool bag, waiting for the dog to approach.
While I waited I thought of Abby. She loved animals and would be horrified if she knew what I was planning to do. She’d want me to call the cops on Hippie, but that fucker would sell me out in a second. He’d tell them I sold speed. It didn’t matter that I had quit. A house raid was a house raid. They’d find something there to put us all away. I couldn’t explain any of this to Abby.
I wanted to call her again; it had been two months since she kicked me out. I wanted to tell her that I was making changes, that I was working toward goals and learning things, that this job wasn’t much, but it might lead to better opportunities. Only now, as I write this, do I know how far from the truth I was in those longing moments. I thought I might call her that night and see if we could talk sometime soon. Have a coffee or something. Maybe work something out between us. She would be back from her parents’ house soon to get ready for school to start.
I peeked from behind the dumpster and noticed the dog lying on the dirt in his usual spot beside Hippie’s truck. I pictured him poisoned, walking in circles, licking the air, foaming at the mouth. I pictured him bloated and whimpering at his master. I knew then that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill an innocent, even a dog. Especially a dog. I might have killed Hippie in that moment, or the boss, but I didn’t do that either. I did nothing. I threw the sausage in the dumpster and stared at the trees for a while until I was yelled at to pick up the trash around the yard.
I didn’t go back to work after that day. Seven days wasn’t much, but it was the longest I’d worked in a while. I called Hippie a week later to tell him where to have the boss mail my check. At first he was irritated that I hadn’t shown up, but then perked up and told me Brutus finally killed a full-grown raccoon. He planned to buy another dog, too, to train him to fight. He said he’d keep a weight around his neck so he could beef up and kill other dogs. I hung up the phone before I could give him my address.
I went back to selling weed for a while, just to get on my feet. I never talked about Brutus or the job again to Ernie or Dee. It was easier that way, to let the memory disappear into oblivion. The summer clapped to a close with me drunk every night, staying away from speed but still not winning any awards for success. I tried calling Abby a few times when I knew for sure she’d be back in town. I don’t know what happened, but she never picked up the phone.
