The old man walked up to the bed of my truck when I pulled through the landfill’s open gate and he counted eight trash bags in the back before hobbling to my driver’s side. I rolled down the window, the stench of trash spanking me in the face. With a hitch in his step and clothes from a job that he’d long since retired from, he held out a rusted single-hole puncher in his right hand. In all the years I’d been going there, I’d never seen his hand not clasping that piece of metal tight. And every time he held it up at customers, it was as if it was some kind of unspoken threat. Either that or it was a barrier between him and the other person like those tinted sunglasses he wore to stunt his awkwardness. To me, he looked like he was in transition to become a real-life Terminator. But the way he hobbled and how his eyes slowly registered movement, he was more of an outdated T-800. Except there wasn’t a Sarah Connor for him to fight alongside—just him and the other two men who looked like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, piddling around the little white office building with cigarettes, dropping salted peanuts, one by one, into cans of Coke. And I wondered what would happen to them if the world awoke from within and unleashed all the A.I. that the government supposedly worked on. Would they fight back with that “old man strength” that only came from years of cutting pulpwood or would they be laid to waste like dried up shrubs in a brushfire? Would they still be around after it was all over?
Honey had told me to stop wondering about people like that. To focus on my own life and not pick people apart in my mind. She’d tell me to stop reading so much science fiction. I told her that Asimov was onto something. And I told her that cockroaches are the last thing to survive. Old, hard-shelled cockroaches that never changed their ways. She said that the end of the world would never happen. Not like that. Said the sun would run out of light before we were taken over by our own inventions. Before we outsmarted ourselves. “If there even is such a thing,” she’d said.
“Garb card,” the old man said, peering through those shades as thick as bottle caps. Couldn’t tell if he was looking at me or the cemetery of books and mail and expired food coupons in the floorboard.
“How’s that brother of yours?” I asked, reaching into the middle console, fishing through old cassette tapes of Robert Earl Keen and Cary Hudson until I came across the lime green card with four holes already punched through it.
“He’s holdin up alright.”
“Still working over at old what’s-his-name’s place?”
“Hamilton’s?”
“Yeah, that one.”
“Holed up in there like a grunt in a bunker.”
“He got plans to leave anytime soon?”
“Not anytime soon.”
I handed him the garb card and he got greedy and punched the last three slots. It didn’t make matters any better knowing that I’d have to go back to the gas station down the road and buy another five dollar garbage card. Didn’t like going to that hole in the wall. They called it Country Corner and they were the only ones still around that pumped gas for you. A man older than this T-800 guy would come out, back bent like he’d been sitting on a stool for a week, and pump gas for people. When he pumped mine, he’d linger around the front end of my truck, blocking my way out so that he’d get his little tip for squeezing a nozzle. And every time he did that, I’d pull out three or four dollars and oblige him. But somehow, that guy was never grateful. Every time I pulled away, he’d look at me all side eyed and spit brown juice on the ground out of spite.
After I unloaded the eight bags at the dumpster and turned the truck around to leave, I passed by a bushy bearded man in a brown jacket that looked like it had been worn by some unlucky enemy of The Punisher, holes all in it. He pushed a grocery cart, its plastic faceplate on the front advertising Winn-Dixie in red, its back right wheel skidding along the pavement and spinning in its loose socket. In the rearview mirror, I could see him roll it to a stop in front of the old Terminator who pointed his hole puncher hand toward the rising mountain of trash in the distance, showing the bearded man the way.
I had the day off work and headed to that day’s job site—a personal project that I’d been putting off for a long time.
***
Sat there with it looming behind me, its shadow cooling sweat that made the crew neck stick to my back. Sat there with a wilted cardboard box in front of me that I’d found in the carport back at the house. Had to sweep out white spider eggs and took out a few yellowed and forgotten newspaper articles from it earlier.
I turned around to face it. All those hot summer days as a boy, working with my daddy, nailing up boards and watching him calculate things with a yellow retractable tape measure. There it was. All the memories in that tree house that hung from the tree that it was built on, its roof stuck in an eternal slump. That tree house still there, sliding at an odd angle, ravaged by weather and old age and termites.
Had a friend back then when I was about nine. Name was Travis. Couldn’t remember his last name. He’d come home with me after school and we’d sit up there in that tree house and draw pictures of monsters and quote horror movies out the wazoo. We’d seen them boys on The Monster Squad do it, quizzing each other on Frankenstein and unusual ways to kill a werewolf. We were waiting for some kind of monster apocalypse ourselves. Getting ready for it all, sharpening pieces of wood with Uncle Henry pocketknives into stakes for vampires. And I’d read some of Pet Sematary (because Sean, in that movie, wore a red shirt that read STEPHEN KING RULES) while Travis would either look through binoculars out the window, surveying the area for any possible invaders from the netherworld or sift through his baseball card collection, carefully pulling them out of their plastic sleeves to inspect them one by one. He had this deep red birthmark that grazed his Adam’s apple and ran along his chin and jaw. Looked like the shape of Florida. I’d never seen anything like it. Looked like he’d been caught up in a fire from somewhere that happened just before birth.
I always thought about that kind of stuff. What if something had happened to us all before birth? Some trial by fire that we had to pass through so that we could live here on earth. Prove ourselves worthy. A buddy of mine who listens to podcasts said that, on one of them with the guy from Fear Factor, they talked about a director’s friend’s son asking his six month old brother to help remind him about heaven because he was starting to forget. What if we all had forgotten where we came from? That kind of stuff keeps me up at night.
Guess Travis and I could imagine anything monstrously bad happening back then. Especially me. One time, I caught a glimpse of a dead man at the bottom of a bridge when I was out looking for frogs. I’d kept the terrarium from a school project for Mrs. Moore’s science class and I intended on snagging a few of those amphibians and study them for a bit before letting them loose in my back yard. But when I saw that dead man, I’d lost all sense of what I was doing. He was face down in a carpet of kudzu, his arm bent across the lower part of his back. Whole hand was missing. Looked like it’d been chopped off at the wrist bone. I heard something move off in the trees and the rest of that kudzu, and I skedaddled on out of there. Sprinted for home like I’d never sprinted at any football practice before. Figured I might have set a land speed record of some kind. If only someone would’ve had a stopwatch nearby, I could’ve proven it.
That image was burned into my mind. And I wondered what was out there that could do that kind of shit to a man. Tear him up and rearrange his body and then leave him all embarrassed looking to strolling strangers who he’d never meet. That kind of thing is like some kind of undercover sin that no one even knows about or was told about. To haunt people’s thoughts forever with an image of your dead body all messed up, even after you’re long gone and buried. Someone that was killed like that couldn’t help that kind of sight. Felt downright sorry for them. I knew that we all had to leave this life in one way or another, but the little praying I did do covered things like that—things that others wouldn’t think of. Hopefully, if the Lord answered my prayers, I could die in some decency and not scar a little boy’s mind.
I’d wanted to list the land that the tree house stood on for sale for a while. It was my deceased dad’s land. And his dad’s before him. None of them ever had the mind to sell it. I don’t know why I was the first one to do so. I guess they were too sentimental about it. I wasn’t. Sure, me and my friends had some good times on that land, shooting BB guns, running after each other in the dark with airsoft guns, and shimmying up trees at night while playing hide and seek. But I’d outgrown all of that. And there was a good chance that old Travis had. He probably didn’t even watch horror movies anymore, especially the newer ones, wherever he was in the world. The Witch was something else and awfully eerie, but it wasn’t the same as watching The Lost Boys and The Evil Dead and Fright Night on VHS tapes back in the day when my dad would let all my friends spend the night and gorge ourselves on pizza. But times had changed. And I needed the money. My wife would also be grateful if I sold the land.
I went ahead and went to work on the tree house. Took a rented bulldozer to it, knocking it down like a tower of Jenga. Came down easy, but those memories sure didn’t.
I took a crowbar to some of the big nails and a hammer to the smaller ones (we’d used whatever shapes and sizes we could get our hands on when we built it) to break them into more manageable pieces. Held some longer beams up at an angle and broke them down the middle by stepping on them with my boot. They broke easily. The termites had done a helluva job already and mangled them beyond redemption. Loaded them all up in the bed of my pickup and, when it was mostly full, headed back to the dump.
Then I saw the same homeless man from earlier that morning pushing his grocery cart down the road at oncoming traffic, the left set of wheels scraping along the highway and the right set digging into the moist grass on the shoulder. That cart was piled up like the plate of food that goofy giant was eating off of on that old Mickey Mouse cartoon where Mickey had climbed up a beanstalk. I could see blankets in the bottom of it, a lamp, a folded up egg crate foam topper, some framed paintings of apples and grapes in bowls on kitchen tables, pregnant black trash bags tied off on the sides of the cart, latched on like ticks chock-full of blood, and what looked to be Stretch Armstrong’s rubbery body dangling from the side, hanging on for dear life. That dump sure was a treasure island for somebody like him.
He must’ve hit something hard in the road because that rocked the cart to his left and an alarm clock toppled off that trashy heap and came cartwheeling into my lane. I slammed on the brakes, heard the undercarriage rattle and nearly fall off, and I got out of the truck as he shuffled over to the clock.
“Man. You gotta watch it. You’re gonna cause a wreck out here,” I told him. “Cause somebody to swerve and either kill you or kill themselves.”
“Sorry, sir,” he responded looking down at the ground and bending at his back like a broken accordion (which I didn’t think was even humanly possible). He grasped for the clock, but his reach was about two feet too short.
I looked off at the cart which teetered on the shoulder. He was standing in my lane now and an oncoming Chevy Blazer zoomed by the cart, the rush of wind toppling it into the lush grass. It fell on its side in a quiet stillness.
“Here,” I said and grabbed the alarm clock for him. I could tell he’d been drinking a lot for a long time. He’d reached a point in his drunkenness where I’d been before. And I knew that his peripherals were probably darkening.
“This thing even tell time?” I asked.
“If you want it to.”
“You need some batteries? I got some batteries. What does this thing take, triple or double?”
“Takes some batteries, sure,” he slurred.
“Where you heading?”
“Nowhere.”
“Long as I’m standing here, I ain’t letting you go off alone like this. Liable to get yourself killed.”
“Ain’t nobody gonna die around here.”
A belch came out of him that rivaled those loud frogs I’d hear at night back when I searched for them after it rained with my blue Eveready flashlight.
I thought about it for a minute. Thought about how far I’d come from drinking so much in my day. How, sometimes, I had needed to pass out on a bed more than anything else. “Need a lift somewhere?” I asked.
“I’m fine.”
“Boy, you can’t make it out here like this. You’re gonna embarrass yourself. Let me take you on into town and you sleep it off some. Take you down to the jail.”
“Ain’t nobody locking me up.”
“No one’s gonna. Sherriff’ll let you sleep it off in the cell. Got a nice a cot for you in there. I know him. He’ll be fine with it.”
My front passenger side didn’t have a seat. About four days before, I had to take it out because a lucky coin that my daughter had given to me rolled up underneath it. I’d just gotten off work that day and was examining the elephant’s scrunched up face etched on its copper side. It was a token she’d kept from some off-the-wall arcade I’d taken her to for her birthday. She held onto it and gave it to me for my own later that year.
“You’ll have to climb in the back,” I said. “Haven’t had time to put the front seat back in yet. Come on around here. This way.”
The man lost his balance and fell to one knee. I planted my feet in a staggered stance and picked him up by his elbow. Led him to the back. Lowered the tailgate. Helped him on into the bed with all that rotted tree house. Even though there was a bunch of wood in the back in disarray like pick-up sticks, there’d been just enough room for someone to sit down.
Once he got settled with his back leaning against the broad side of one of the beams, I closed the tailgate and got back behind the wheel.
I drove down the road and wondered where I’d be if it hadn’t been for my Honey, all those years ago, kicking my drunk ass out onto the street and warning that this, that and the other would happen unless I got sober. Wondered if I would’ve turned out like that hobo in the back of my truck. Wondered if I’d be dead in a ditch somewhere or with my truck wrapped around a tree. Wondered what I’d look like if I grew out my own beard like he had. If it’d be a thick, unstoppable bush burning of white wisdom or something dull and brown and scraggly.
Couple of minutes down the road, the homeless man started moving around as if the wind had woken him up some and I watched him out of my rearview mirror. He looked at the sky as the little tufts of hair on the back and sides of his head swirled around like cotton candy in a chaotic carnival machine. He fought his focus between realizing where he was for the first time and staring at the trees on the side of the road as they whirred by us.
He turned toward me and stared at me through the rearview for a second before looking up at the clouds. His beard lifted up in the wind and that’s when I saw the dark red birthmark clasped on his neck and hurrying up his chin, shaped like Florida, playing peek-a-boo with me, and I nearly wrecked the truck.
Brodie Lowe is a finalist of Broad River Review’s Ron Rash Award in Fiction and Still: The Journal’s Literary Contest. He holds a BA in English from Western Carolina University and is an alumnus of Spalding University’s MFA Community Workshop (Fall 2018) taught by author Silas House.