Dunc's Dump (2 page)

“All right, all right. So there's weird garbage at the dump. How does that become a science project for school?”

Dunc smiled. “Simple. It's like any other case. We just find out who's polluting the dump, and then you do a paper on it.”

“Other case?” Amos turned. “What do you mean, other ca—”

He was going to say more, but the phone rang.

One clear ring.

And no matter what Amos was doing or saying, when he heard a phone ring, he had to answer it by the end of that all-important first ring because he was certain, absolutely positive, that it was Melissa trying to call him, and if he didn't make it on the first ring, she would hang up.

There were phones located throughout Amos's house. After having been trampled several times, even his older sister—who
called him things with the word
butt
in them, like butthead and buttface and buttbreath—had voted to have a phone in nearly every room.

But they were working on the walls in the entry hall.

And there was no phone there.

There were, however, two half-filled pails of warm soapy water positioned one slightly forward of the other, approximately thirty-five centimeters apart—in short, the perfect distance for what was about to happen.

Amos was the world expert on phone rings, and as he had told Dunc perhaps two thousand times, the ring can be broken down into a series of sound pulses. There were between sixteen and twenty-two sound pulses in each ring, depending on the type of phone, but the exact number didn't matter. What counted was the first four pulses.

On the first pulse the feet had to be moving, right foot first, driving down, and by the second pulse the left foot had to be starting its upswing to come down and power the speed up. At the same time the arms had to come up in the classic form, the head back, the tongue
out the side of the mouth, nostrils flared—without all these ingredients, it was impossible to make the phone by the end of the first ring.

On the first pulse of this ring, Amos was nearly perfect. Instantly, when the ring started, his mind calculated the exact distance to the nearest phone—seven point three nine meters to the phone hanging on the kitchen wall—and the right foot came down, the left up, his arms raised, nostrils flared, tongue out, a bit of spit flying from the end. Absolutely classic.

It was during the second and third pulses that things started to go horribly wrong.

The left foot came up, powered down like a driving piston, and would have moved his body correctly.

Except.

With amazing accuracy, as if it had cross hairs and a scope, the left foot came down in the center of Dunc's bucket of warm soapy water. And even here it would have been possible to avoid disaster if Amos had only had smaller feet. But his tennis shoe was the exact
size needed to cause his foot to jam down and stick hard in the bottom.

Approximately three-tenths of a second later his right foot came down and with the same accuracy jammed into the other bucket of warm soapy water and the potential disaster was complete.

Had he been able to stop, there would still have been time to avoid complete catastrophe. But his weight was forward of his movement, his arms were pumping, and his brain was centered on one thing.

The phone.

Later, Dunc said it looked like a nuclear device had detonated in a soap factory.

His momentum carried Amos four quick, choppy steps, his feet acting like plungers in the buckets, turning them to foam that flew around him, ahead of him, behind him in a wild spray that covered everything, blinding Amos, smearing the walls, floor, ceiling as he propelled his way into the kitchen.

And even here there was a slight chance to at least lessen the damage.

Had Amos caught the phone, it might have stopped him, or at least turned him.

But he was blinded by the soap foam that clouded around him, and he missed the phone by a good three centimeters.

Which allowed him to drive straight into the kitchen, aimed at the kitchen table.

Where his mother was sitting looking at an antique glass fishbowl she had just purchased. She looked up just as Amos—or the cloud containing Amos—came barreling in through the kitchen door.

By this time, Amos was starting to fall, tripped by the buckets, and his head came down at the exact angle to drive into the fishbowl.

Still moving well, he bounced off the side of his mother, tipping her chair backward, past her and out into the porch, through the porch, where he carried the screen door off and somersaulted into the back yard, where he finally emerged as a large white cloud topped by a glass-enclosed head, causing their neighbor—an old man named Clarian who sometimes drank red wine during the day—to call the police and report a “UFO man.”

Dunc helped Amos pull the fishbowl off his head—luckily there was still enough soap to
make his ears slide easily—and pulled Amos to his feet.

“What do you think,” Amos said. “Too much speed when I hit the kitchen?”

Dunc nodded. “Yeah—but good form. Absolutely classic.”

•
3

“It'll be like a commando raid,” Dunc said. “I saw this old movie on television about the Second World War where these guys get into dark clothes and make a raid on some radar installations.”

Amos shook his head. “You're gone. Completely gone.”

“No, really—”

“Dunc, you're talking about going to the dump after dark to collect samples of garbage.”

“So you have to use your imagination a little bit, that's all.”

“That isn't all you have to do. This is a
dump, not a radar station. There are rats out there as big as Ford Fiestas, just waiting for somebody to be dumb enough to come into the dump at night.”

“We have to go at night—they wouldn't let two kids in there during the day to rummage around through the trash.”

Amos shook his head. “I still think it's a bad idea.”

But he was weakening, and Dunc felt it. “It's the only way to do this—you'll get a good grade in science, and we'll crack the case of the errant trash.”

“What?”

“I'm going to name this the case of the errant trash.”

“Name what?”

“This whole case.”

“It's not a case, Dunc. It's a science project.”

Dunc nodded. “I know, I know. But if it
were
a case, I would name it the case of the errant trash. All the best detectives named their cases like that—you know, later, when they wrote about them.”

Amos stared at Dunc for a long time, then
shook his head and sighed. “I think you've gone too far on this one. If I didn't need a good science grade, I'd walk out this door right now.”

But he didn't go. They were in Dunc's room where Dunc kept all his “equipment”—black sweatshirts and stocking caps and a small flashlight—that he used when they needed to work at night.

Dunc looked at his watch, which told the exact time, date, and elapsed time in the mainland United States as well as in Alaska, Asia, and Europe, plus the tide tables in all the major oceans of the world, and—according to Amos, who had an old digital watch that didn't work unless you hit it on a rock—told Dunc when he was hungry as well.

“We have thirty-one minutes, forty seconds until sundown, according to my watch.”

“Approximately,” Amos said. “Don't you mean approximately?”

“No. Exactly. But it still won't be dark enough to perform our mission.”

“Don't do that. Don't say things like ‘case' or ‘mission' anymore. Every time you say that,
I wind up getting pooped on by bats or forgetting my name.”

“Project,” Dunc added quickly. “We won't be able to go on our science project until solid dark. There's a half moon tonight, and it won't be too bright, so we should be all right for a go …”

Amos winced.

“… at sunset plus one hour forty-two minutes. Maybe we'd better synchronize our watches.”

Amos stared at him.

“Right,” Dunc said. “We'll skip that part. Let's go over the plan one more time.”

“Dunc—”

“I've written it out as a poem so it will be easy to remember. You remember how well that worked, don't you?”

“
Dunc
—”

“ ‘A pocket a pence, over the fence. Oh what a bash, sample the trash. A tin can, a rag, into the bag. We've got it taped, make good our escape.…' ”

Amos closed his eyes while Dunc droned on and thought: Where's my bat, look at
the rat. Oh what a treat, it's eating my seat.

He shuddered. It was going to be a long night.

•
4

Amos picked his foot up gingerly and tried not to throw up. He couldn't help it. Every time he stepped on something soft, he wanted to throw up, and there seemed to be about a million soft things to step on. Soft and runny things. Soft and runny things that smelled really bad.

The problem was, it was so dark.

Dunc had been right. The moon was half full, and it should have given them some light, but the clouds had come in just at sunset and blocked the moon completely.

By the time they had arrived, dressed in dark clothes, at the fence surrounding the
town dump, it was so dark, Amos couldn't tell if he was seeing or not seeing.

It was as dark as the inside of a dead cow, Amos thought—sure there must be several of them around. His brain ran on automatic. As dark as the inside of a
really
dead cow. A cow that's been dead at least a week under a hot sun with flies and maggots.

He stopped thinking, swallowed, and tried not to breathe.

Getting over the fence had not been as simple as “a pocket a pence, over the fence.” It was an eight-foot-tall chain link fence with three strands of barbed wire on the top, tipping out, and by the time they'd gotten over the wire, Amos felt as if he'd lost at least a pound of flesh.

Dunc had the flashlight but didn't want to use it for fear they would be seen—although Amos couldn't believe there was anybody to see them. It wasn't as if there were a guard on the dump.

Something grabbed at his left leg, held it back. Amos stopped, reached down to push whatever it was away, and felt a familiar shape.

For a moment he couldn't place it. He touched it with his hand, felt the sides of it, and realized suddenly that he was touching fingers, touching a hand.

“Dunc …”

“Shh. Remember the poem—‘to avoid a fright, stay still and quiet.' ”

“Dunc …”

Dunc turned. “Stay
quiet
!”

“
Dunc, there's a hand holding my leg
.”

“What?”

“A body, there's a body, somebody's body right down here, holding my left leg, and you just tell me to shut up, and I can't stop talking, you ninny, because there's a body, a really really
real
body, down here holding me, and I think I'm going to blow chow now—”

Dunc flicked the light on momentarily and jumped when he found himself looking at a nude body. Then he looked at it a bit more closely. “Take it easy, Amos—it's just a department store dummy.”

Amos was bent over losing everything he'd eaten since he was four years old. “What?”

“It's a dummy—just an old department store dummy. The hand got caught up in your pants leg. You've got to cool it.”

“That's easy to say. It wasn't you the dummy grabbed. I just about had a heart attack.”

Dunc switched the light on once more, untangled the hand, and turned the light off. “Now come on—we have to get to the new section, where they're dumping now. It's over there.”

He set off in the darkness, vanishing instantly in the blackness. Amos held back for an instant, thought about returning to the fence where they'd left their bicycles, but realized he didn't have the slightest idea where it was and set off after Dunc.

Or tried to. He hadn't made a step before his foot caught inside a can and he went down. Face first. In a pile of something not only soft and runny and stinky but that seemed to have life because it stuck to him and wouldn't let go and he promptly lost whatever stomach contents he had somehow retained from the body incident.