Dunc's Dump

•
1

Amos Binder held the two test tubes up to the light. “Yellow and blue,” he said. “If I mix them, I should get green.”

Dunc Culpepper, Amos's best friend for life, looked up from a newspaper he had spread on Amos's bed. They were in Amos's room, which always looked like a disaster area—unlike Dunc's room, which was always neat. Dunc put the paper down. “I don't think that's what your parents had in mind when they gave you the chemistry set—making colors.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your grades in science. I was here the day
your dad said they were in the toilet. They gave you the set so you could understand science, not play color games.”

“Melissa,” Amos said.

“What?”

“Melissa. She likes colors.”

Amos would have died for Melissa Hansen, thought the sun rose and set on Melissa Hansen, thought his very heart beat and would always beat for Melissa Hansen. Melissa Hansen didn't know he was alive.

“What are you talking about?” Dunc put the paper down in the only clear spot on the bed—between a half-finished model dinosaur and an almost-used piece of pizza. “What do you mean Melissa likes colors?”

“I overheard Janey Halverson tell Rebecca Bisgaard that she heard Janice Blitzer talking to her brother—you know, the one they call Garbage Can because of how he eats, except not to his face because he can unscrew your head …”

“Amos.”

“… and she said, Janice to Garbage Can, that she heard her best friend tell her
other
best friend that she knew Melissa Hansen liked to wear colorful clothes.”

Dunc waited, but Amos didn't say anything more.

“That's it?” Dunc asked.

Amos nodded.

“From that you think Melissa likes colors?”

Amos nodded again. “It's just logical, isn't it?”

“And you think that if you know about colors Melissa will like you?”

“It's a start. All I have to do is learn about colors. I can see it all now. I'll be walking down the hall and Melissa will meet me and she'll be wearing something with, you know, colors in it and I'll look at it and I'll say, you know, that I know about colors and then she'll like me because I know about colors and I'll ask her to go bike riding with me and while we're riding …”

“Amos, it's getting away from you again.”

“… I'll ask her if she wants to go to a movie sometime, and she'll say yes, and it's all, Dunc, all because I know about colors. Now watch while I pour this yellow into the blue and get green.”

“Amos, what are you mixing there?”

“I don't know. Just some things that came with the chemistry set. They had names on them, but I was more interested in the colors.”

“Do you think it's a good idea to mix them without knowing what they are?”

“I know what they are—they're blue and yellow. And I know if I mix them I get green.”

“Amos—”

“Watch.”

Amos held up the yellow test tube and carefully poured the entire contents of the blue test tube into the yellow.

The results were immediate.

There was a loud
whuummph
kind of sound, like a large belch, and the room was instantly filled with a huge, packed cloud of green fog-smoke that smelled like a cross between rotten eggs and a skunk that's been dead on the highway for about a month.

“Fire!” Amos yelled, choked, and ran for the door—or for where he thought the door ought to be. He missed by a good six feet and plowed into the dresser, where his entire collection of soccer bubble-gum cards was stored. “Fire!”

Dunc dropped to all fours. There was an open area there about six inches high, and by laying his head down sideways, he could get a breath and see clearly. “There's no fire, Amos. Just get down on your face, and we can crawl out.”

Amos bounced off the dresser twice more before falling down and finding the clear area. Dunc was ahead of him by this time and had crawled to the door and had it open. The cloud, which had been getting thicker and stinkier all the time, was suddenly free and rushed out of the room into the hallway, down the stairs, into the living room, and spilled into the kitchen, where it swirled around the corner and caught Amos's mother as she was taking a sip of coffee.

“Amos!” she croaked just before the stink took her down, spilling coffee on her new realty suit as she crawled for the doorway and fresh air. “Amos, you get down here right now!”

•
2

“It could have been worse.” Amos put the sponge back in the bucket of warm water and rinsed it before squeezing it out and wiping the walls. “They didn't ground me at all this time. Remember when I ran across the rug with the lawn mower that time? Dad grounded me until I was eighty-four. But all we have to do now is clean up the mess.”

Dunc paused in his wiping. The green fog had left a soft slime on all the walls. It looked bad, but it wiped off fairly easily. “And do a project for science at school. Something to bring your grade up.”

Amos nodded. “That, too—but they wanted
me to do that anyway. I figure we got off fairly easy, all in all.”

“I'm not sure why I'm helping at all.” Dunc was wiping again. “I didn't mix the junk up.”

“Because you're my best friend for life,” Amos said, “and because I would do the same for you if you tried to make colors and it got away from you.”

“I suppose you want me to help on the science project too.”

“Let me put it this way. You know how much I know about science, and I know how much you know about science. I vote for using you. How do you vote?”

Dunc nodded. “I agree.”

“So what are we going to do?”

Dunc frowned, thinking, his sponge stopped for a moment. “Something was in the paper—”

“Oh, no. Not that.”

“Not what?”

“The paper. You read the paper and get us into things.”

“No I don't.”

“What about the ring of monkeys stealing toilets? You started that with the paper.”

“Well …”

“And I wound up with a toilet on my head.”

“Not this time. This was something else, something I read about the environment. Oh, yeah, I remember now. Somebody is polluting the garbage.”

Amos stopped wiping. “I must have heard wrong. I thought you said somebody was polluting the garbage.”

“I did.”

Amos stared at him. “I had a cousin once who held his breath until he turned blue because his mother wouldn't buy him candy. He says things like that, like ‘Don't pollute the garbage.' Have you been holding your breath?”

“No—it's not like that. Somebody really
is
polluting the garbage.”

“How can you? Isn't garbage already, you know, polluted?”

“Well, there's garbage and there's garbage, isn't there? Some of it's worse than other types, and they've been finding a lot of strange garbage in the dump.”

Amos sighed. “Only you, Dunc—in all the
world, only you would know what's going on at the dump.”

Dunc rose up on his toes. “I make it my business to know things, and the dump is one of the things I know about.”