Biting the Moon (20 page)

All along the top of the landfill, up above the area where you could drive in your car, were figures “sculpted” of parts that could only have been salvaged from the town's trash, a pile of heavy rusted pieces sitting at the far end, probably the raw junk pile from which the sculptures were constructed. In among the cast-iron stoves, the refrigerator doors, and heavy car parts were aluminum pieces: parts of bumpers, grilles, hubcaps. It was really amazing, especially since the parts hadn't just been piled together to form some unnameable object but had been carefully welded to form the unnameable object; whatever the object formed in this manner, it resembled things she'd seen resting on public lands—gracing state capitals, libraries, parks. What a great place to display them, Mary thought, on that beak of higher ground overlooking the big Dumpsters and the curving road. She was about to leave the car to get a better look when she saw a tall man in a leather jacket and black hat coming slowly toward them who didn't look much like he wanted their company.

What he looked like was one of those state cops whose opaque black sunglasses made you think they saw everything, saw right through you. He was very tall and had to bend down pretty far to lay his arm across the passenger door and look from one to the other, pushing back the black Texas-sized hat as if its brim might be obscuring something more interesting than them. He had a craggy face, a meaningful face, and gray mixed in with the dark brown hair of his sideburns.

“You need a permit to dump here.” His voice was surprisingly soft and the tone only marginally annoyed as he tapped the windshield. “A sticker.”

“We're not dumping anything. Are you Mr. Reuel?”

For a moment he didn't say anything, just frowned, as if the question of his own identity were a puzzle he hadn't yet mastered. “You old enough to drive this car?”

Andi ran her hands around the steering wheel. “I'm eighteen.”

Mary always marveled at Andi's lack of hesitation in announcing facts that she didn't know about herself. One corner of Reuel's mouth might just have quivered, one corner of a smile been suppressed. “I make that out to be—oh, somewheres around seventeen, sixteen, that right?”

Andi ignored this. “The drugstore owner in town told us a Mr. Reuel maybe could help us locate somebody.”

“Would you mind getting outa the car?”

Mary was alarmed. “Why?”

“I'm getting a crick in my neck's why.”

His face disappeared from the window; they got out.

He said, “You don't need to call me mister. Plain Reuel, that'll do.”

Andi and Mary leaned against the dusty car. Andi said, “We were told you know just about everybody around here.”

“Maybe. Why?”

“We're looking for someone.”

“And who might that be?”

Andi looked off across the land, empty but for the Dumpsters. “We're not sure about his name; it could be C. R. Crick.”

“Don't know anybody by that name.”

Andi ran through the same description she'd given the pharmacist. “Dark brown hair and very, very blue eyes.”

Reuel removed his dark glasses. “Well, that could be me, I guess.” He looked from one to the other. His eyes were an almost electric blue.

“He doesn't squint,” said Andi.

“I see. Looks like me except for the squint.”

“I didn't exactly mean that. And he's shorter than you, maybe five feet ten or eleven.”

Reuel was silent for a moment, considering. “Looks to me like you're looking for someone you don't really know what he looks like and don't really know his name. That makes for a real questionable search.”

“There's another thing. He was gone from here round about February. He was in Cripple Creek, Colorado. There's a lot of gambling there.”

“
Maybe
he was,” Mary put in. “We can't be absolutely sure about that.”

After another moment of silence—he seemed to be a man who always had to consider what he was about to say—Reuel asked, “Mind telling me what you want to see this fella for?”

“I do mind, as a matter of fact. It's highly personal.”

Mary thought it would be better not to take this lofty tone with a man she needed help from.

An old coffee-colored truck with a busted muffler was coming up the landfill's rutted road. With all of its dents and scratches it looked as if it were molting. The truck bed was heaped high with trash and children: a couple of kids sat dangerously atop it. The driver was a woman and the other occupants were children ranging from what looked like just-born upwards to Andi's age. There wasn't enough room in the cab to hold everyone, so this accounted for the two little boys in the pickup's bed.

The woman jumped down and waved at Reuel, who returned the greeting, saying, “Hey, Bonnie,” whereupon she started unloading the bed of the truck, the two boys shoving things her way helpfully. The oldest girl got out and the two younger girls stayed hanging out the windows. One of them held a baby, perhaps a year or two old.
Reuel shook his head. “One of them kids'll get hurt someday, she lets them ride in the back that way.”

Mary frowned. “It must be hard to watch over six kids, though.”

Reuel smiled. “That ain't all of them. She's got another three or four at home. Someone told me she'd ten altogether. But I don't recall ever seeing them all at once. Their name's Swann. The one driving's the mother, Bonnie Swann.”

One of the boys who'd climbed down from the truck now stood in the dust, midway between the truck and the three of them. He was grinning.

“Brill, how are ya?” Reuel called out to him. But the child didn't move and just kept on smiling, as if the grin were plastered in place. He raised his hand to suck his thumb. His most noticeable feature was his bright red hair. When the sun lit it, his head was shiny as a copper bowl.

Mary said, “They all look different, nearly. I mean from each other.”

Reuel had his knife out, scraping down a stick of wood. “That's probably because they had mostly different daddies.”

Andi flinched at the word. Mary asked, surprised, “
Ten
different?”

“Well, maybe not that many, but off the top of my head I can think of at least five men Bonnie picked up with. That one there”—Reuel nodded toward the lad with red hair (who was still trying to grin around the thumb he was sucking)—“his father's the longest she ever lived with a man. Brill must be five, six, maybe. Name's Brilliance, if you can believe it.”

“What? Why would anyone ever name a poor kid that?”

Reuel grinned back at Brill. “Oh, they all got names like that. Bonnie claims she was trying to name them after what she calls the Seven Virtues.”

“I never heard of it. And even if there is such a thing, Brilliance isn't one of them.”

“No, I expect not. But I'm thinking Bonnie just couldn't resist that red hair of his.” Reuel gave Brill a little wave. “There's the others: Honor, which is pretty straightforward; Tru, that's for Truth, but of course people think it's Trudy; Goody's for Goodness; Happy, for Happiness; Hope, that's easy. She's the oldest.”

“Hey, Reuel,” the older boy called out, his face expressionless as a plate. He was walking over to where they were.

“Earl,” said Reuel.

“You find any bicycle wheels yet?” asked Earl, his voice as flat as his face. He had that pale blond hair that's almost white and eyes that looked lashless.

“No, son, never did. But I'm keeping a lookout.”

Earl blinked his white-lashed lids, did not look at either Andi or Mary, which Mary found disconcerting, coming even from a backward boy. She felt invisible. Then he turned around and walked away like a little robot.

Mary asked softly, “Is there something wrong with him? And that little one, that Brilliance, is still just standing there staring.”

“I'd guess a little something's wrong with most of them. Though Hope seems sane enough.”

Hope was still unloading trash; it looked as if an entire dining room set was being tossed overboard. She was as dark as her mother and probably pretty underneath the surly mad-at-the-world expression. But then Mary thought she herself might get pretty surly if she had eight or nine young ones to help out with.

“Earl. That's a pretty ordinary name,” said Andi.

“Yeah. Well, it would be if that's all it was. Early-to-Rise is his whole name.”

“That's certainly not one of the Seven Virtues, even if there were seven.” Mary felt irritated by this profligacy on the part of the Swann mother, Bonnie. She shook her head, murmured, “Brilliance, of all the names! You shouldn't saddle little kids with names like that.” Brill was still sucking his thumb, watching the three of them as if they were interesting as acrobats or jugglers.

“I guess you're right.” Reuel laughed. “Kids around here call him Brillo Pad.”

“See,” said Mary, justified in her irritation.

The bed of the truck was empty now and Hope climbed up to the passenger seat, but not before she shoved the heads of the two girls back from the window. Bonnie walked over to where Brill stood, sucking his thumb and grinning, and yanked him back to the truck to join
his brother. Waving again at Reuel, she mounted the driver's seat and started the engine up.

In silence, the three of them watched the old truck, nearly hidden in clouds of dust, bump off down the road.

Reuel said, “Tell you what: I was about to leave here, go home. Maybe you'd like to talk to me there?”

Andi and Mary exchanged glances.

“Oh, don't worry yourself; I'm safe. I live in a trailer park outside town. There's always plenty of people around. And you girls look like you could use a cup of coffee.” He chewed his gum meditatively and added, “Or a beer.”

Mary wasn't sure whether he was kidding or not, which really exasperated her.

There weren't many things funkier than a trailer park.

Most of the people here were probably retirees, couples sitting out under their awnings, taking advantage of this freakishly hot end-of-May day. They read newspapers, did crossword puzzles, all of the middle-aged or older ladies with glasses dangling from garish gold or colored-bead chains that rode on their bosoms or swung down both sides of their faces. The men seemed for the most part to be wearing boxer shorts, but Mary supposed they were walking shorts. Their short-sleeved shirts were island-inspired, huge bright hibiscus and palm fronds.

Mary didn't think the land on which Sweet Meadows Trailer Park sat had anything to do with its name. Things seldom did. She remembered vaguely passing it when they'd been driving the other way. Like a lot of trailer parks, it sat back from the road and, except for its sign on the main route, was invisible in the way trailer parks tend to be. They were like little cities, had their small grocery business and laundromat
and, since Sweet Meadows was fairly large, even its own made-up little street signs (suggestions of money like Gold Rush Road or Fort Knox Way). They weren't much more than narrow dirt roads.

Reuel's silver Airstream trailer was in one of the middle lanes, on Silver Street, but at the end, so it didn't seem so closed-in as the others. Most of them had the equivalent of a neckerchief-sized lawn on which some of the owners had set out garden ornaments. The little lawn in front of the trailer across from Reuel's sported a family of ducks and ducklings positioned by the door, and in front of it ran an even narrower lane called Penny Alley. The trailer just below the Airstream was a white one with a fanciful garden of plastic tulips and daisies and petunias. There was a birdbath, on the rim of which was stuck a plastic cardinal. But it was a better setting, as it shared a number of trees with Reuel's lot, so that between Reuel and the owner of the garden there was a little wood, which made for privacy.

Across the way, the elderly couple who owned the duck family were sitting in aluminum lawn chairs with a green-and-white webbed backing, reading the newspaper. They both waved to Reuel, who returned the greeting.

He told Mary and Andi to take a seat while he went to let the dog out and get some coffee (“No beer, girls?” “No, thank you very much”). Apparently, what outdoors time he spent around here was spent on this side, for he had set out a white metal table and some molded white plastic chairs. On the metal table were a pile of papers and some binoculars with a leather cord wound neatly around them. There was also an old redwood picnic table. From here they could look off across sunburnt pampas grass, sagebrush, and a stand of ponderosa pines. It wasn't a breathtaking view, certainly, but it did give the impression that you weren't hemmed in, which of course you were if you lived in a trailer park. When he opened the door, the dog, some mixed breed—a little terrier, a little Labrador, a little German shepherd—clicked down the metal steps, hurried to a nearby tree, and then went snuffling around both of their chairs, tail wagging. Apparently unable to decide which one he liked better, the dog lay down at a point precisely midway between them.

Reuel came out through the door with a coffeepot, two cups, and a bottle of Red Dog beer. These he set on the table, first holding the beer up in an invitation to the couple across the dirt road.

They both smiled and shook their heads.

Reuel went back for the milk and sugar. He always forgot that, he said, because he drank his black. He returned, poured out their coffee, then settled down again and took out a tobacco pouch and a little silver box for holding cigarette papers. He measured off some tobacco in one of them.

“What's your dog's name?” Mary asked.

“Sinclair.”

“That's a strange name. Is that a family name?”

“Nope. It's for where I found him. It was along old Route Sixty-six, where I stopped to have a look under the hood. It was near a real old gas station: Sinclair Oil. You wouldn't recall Sinclair. It's the one had the dinosaur on top. This dog was lying under a bench with it looked like nowhere to go. Sorriest sight I ever saw, its old head lying on its paws. It wasn't no stray, it had tags and all. Owner's name and phone number right on a little metal heart. So I figured this dog got out of the car without the people knowing. I piled him into my car and drove until I found a telephone. Called 'em up and when I asked if anyone at this number lost a dog, whoever it was just hung up. I thought maybe I dialed wrong and tried again. Same thing happened. That made me hoppin' mad, that folks would just throw a dog out they didn't want and leave it to fend for itself. So, the third time I called I put on a different voice and told 'em I was the highway patrol and didn't they know leavin' an animal along a state highway was illegal? And that they could expect to be served with a summons. Whoever was on the other end was listening, I can tell you that. I threw a scare into 'em, even if not for very long. Anyway, I kept him, and I'm not sorry. Sinclair here's the best dog.”