Sitting high in the cab, she sped down the winding, isolated asphalt ribbon that led, as far as she knew, to three destinations: deeper into the swamp, Poor Spot Cemetery, and the Southern Aucilla County Waste Disposal Depot, which lay like a bald spot on the edge of Lake Prohibition, the largest in a chain of lakes that included Morality and Reform, their Indian names long ago relegated to trivia contests conducted among history geeks.
She took a dogleg turn, leaned to the right, rumbled past a stand of cypress, and eased up on the accelerator as the depot came into view. The primeval music of bullfrogs and cicadas rose from the surrounding swamp. She thought she heard the hollow, low whomp of a gator. Her tires crunching and grumbling along the depot’s gravel road prevented her from hearing a lizard traverse a stash of junk mail jammed behind her seat. She sat up a little straighter. Not having been here before, she didn’t know what to expect. As far as she could tell, the depot was a ghost town and she was its only living soul.
“I do not like this,” Clarissa said to the cracked windshield. Shadows darkened the gravel path. She leaned forward and looked at the sky just in time to witness a real-life cliché. Vultures, riding the thermals, circled lazily: black hats floating in a blue sky. “Perfect,” she said, wiping sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand.
Not seeing anywhere to check in, she pulled alongside three giant trash bins designed to be loaded onto a flatbed truck and hauled to some other dump station. A girl could die in a place like this and never be found. She checked her cell phone. Just as she feared: no signal. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. No wonder her husband had never emptied the truck: He didn’t want to die. She thought about turning around and going home, the truck still stacked high and reeking. He’d want to know where she’d been. He’d laugh at her, ripping open her folly and weakness.
She turned off the ignition. Better to die with dignity than go home whipped.
Clarissa jumped out of the cab and, with a fervent desire to prove that she was capable of this mindless if unsavory task, got busy. She considered the three bins. Evidently, recycling was not an option. She fished the bandanna out of her back pocket, put it on bandit style to kick back the stench, pulled on her gloves, climbed into the truck bed, waded into the sea of trash, and started heaving four months of refuse into the bins. She hoped to God she wouldn’t run across any rodents, living or dead. Maybe the living ones had leaped out of the truck when she first headed down the road. She smiled as an image of rats jumping ship bloomed.
She heard glass break when one of the bags hit its mark. Perhaps she should have also brought goggles. She paused, and as she struggled for a decent breath behind the bandanna, she wondered why she’d elected to do this on the hottest day of the year. Oh, yeah. Adams. She wiped the pooling sweat off her face, reached for another bag, slipped on a rot-swollen watermelon, and fell flat on her back. “Fuck!” she yelled, and struggled to her feet. Frustrated, she kicked aside a pizza box. The moment her toe made contact, out swarmed an insect version of the Red Army. Roaches rushed in frenetic waves over her feet, around her ankles, up her legs.
She screamed and danced the banshee dance, slapping everywhere she could reach, nearly knocking herself out. It was perhaps a miracle that while she hollered and yodeled and flailed and yelled epithets such as, “Die, you sons a bitches!” she heard someone behind her say, “Ma’am, why don’t I give you a hand.”
She spun around, slapping her legs, and attempted to make a break for it, but her feet got tangled in the morass of bags and malodorous crap. She fell face forward, toward the wheel well. This was going to hurt. A bruise? Concussion? Coma leading to eventual death? She did not want to die amid trash and cockroaches in the middle of a no-man’s-land swamp. Sure, she had fleeting thoughts of suicide. Didn’t everyone? But death here? Right now? No way.
As she attempted to twist her torso to avoid the wheel well in favor of a garbage bag that, unbeknownst to her, contained the jagged shards of a green glass bowl her husband broke when ferrying it to a woman’s house (he’d painted Elsa Sloan in the nude and had wanted her to hold the bowl in her arms, baby style), the young man who had offered his help bounded into the truck and caught her, moments before she would have surely cracked open her head.
Her chin planted in his chest, she yelped even as she noticed that his arms were long, lean, muscled, but not grotesque.
“Sorry to startle you, ma’am.”
She grunted in single syllables, her blue eyes wide as they searched for more roaches.
“Don’t worry. It’s okay. I work here.” He helped her to the ground, said, “If you don’t mind,” and then plucked a roach off her shoulder.
Clarissa heard herself moan. There was nothing worse in this whole world than roaches.
Trash Man, who Clarissa guessed was in his early twenties, pointed past the Dumpsters and was evidently worried that her reaction was because she feared him. “That’s the office over there. See? The trailer.”
“Are there any more on me?” Clarissa feared she might have dislodged her heart. She flapped the denim shirt, checked her arms and legs. He kept his eyes on her face.
“No, ma’am, I don’t think so. They’re nasty little critters, ain’t they?” He glanced at the trash, took off his Aucilla County ball cap, wiped his brow, and said, “Really, I don’t mind helping. Looks like you’ve got quite a load there.” His blue eyes flashed in the bright light; he was sincere, Clarissa thought, a man who’d been raised right.
She peeled a rotted lemon rind off her shin. The sun beat clear and relentless.
“Whew! It sure is hot, ain’t it?”
“Yes. Yes, it is,” Clarissa said. He had broad shoulders. She liked broad shoulders. But she had come here on a mission. She looked to the truck bed and its wild tangle of yuck. In all honesty, the roaches hadn’t hurt her one bit, the little bastards. And this was her chore, her goal. She could do it. Self-sufficiency without complaint: That needed to be her new motto. “Thanks for the offer, but I can manage.” And she meant it. After all, it was just trash.
“All right.” He repositioned his ball cap. “But if you change your mind, just holler. I’ll hear you.” He smiled. It was a nice smile. Pretty teeth. Not stained by cigarettes or chewing tobacco or hard-knock coffee.
“Thank you. But I think I’m okay.” She felt herself smile in return; she hadn’t meant to do that.
A dog—part pit bull, part hellhound—bounded up, barking, growling, snarling.
“Don’t worry, Maggie won’t hurt you. Come on, girl, come with me.” He turned and headed toward the entrance. The dog fell silent and, wagging her tail, followed at his heels.
“Hey!” Clarissa called. He turned around, and the dog did, too. “Thanks for breaking my fall.”
“No problem, ma’am. Couldn’t let you hurt yourself. That would’ve ruined my day.” And then he ambled off.
Clarissa found a brick nudged in the corner of the truck bed near the tailgate. She used it to smash to smithereens the remaining roaches. “Ugh, roach guts,” she said, whaling on a particularly juicy one, but the truth was, she was happy she’d declined Trash Man’s offer. If her husband was too good to deal with unpleasant chores, she was well equipped. What are men good for, anyway? she wondered, pausing to watch Trash Man in the distance gain the trailer steps, taking note of how well he wore his jeans. If not for physical pleasure, mental companionship, carpentry skills, culinary aptitude, or brute strength, why have them around?
Shit, she thought, lifting another putrefying watermelon (her husband had used them as props in one of his naked sessions), she could learn how to use a power drill. She tossed the jelly belly fruit through the air and turned to see if she could catch one last glimpse of Trash Man, who had paused before entering the depot office.
He turned around, placed his hands on his hips—they were fine hips, narrow and strong. “You sure?” His voice echoed across the wide expanse of gravel.
“I’m positive,” she said as t
he watermelon hit a rusty radiator, releasing a spray of festering juice.
He grinned again, shook his head as if to say, “You are a marvel,” and stepped inside the office.
Nice, Clarissa thought, very, very nice. I’m standing in a garbage dump thinking about fucking the trash man. She supposed it could be worse. At least he was thoughtful.
The pheromones that mingled with the stench gave Clarissa a needed energy boost. It took her all of twenty minutes to clear the four months of garbage—bag after disgusting bag, some of which had been torn open by possums, raccoons, rats, and squirrels. I’ll be lucky not to die of typhoid, she thought.
Soaked in sweat, splashed with the decomposing liquids of various vegetable and animal matter, stinking like a whiskey still gone bad, her hair a mess of wet ringlets, a smashed grape stuck to her ankle, she stood in the empty truck bed and felt an unusual sensation wash over her: satisfaction.
Right before she jumped down, Trash Man (his blue eyes, she noticed, were the color of plumbago blossoms) sauntered by, all cock walk and charm, whistling. “Would you look at that!” he said.
Clarissa blushed and thought, He’s at least twelve years younger than me. She pulled a strand of hair away from her face. “Yep, I did good, even if I say so myself.”
He offered her his hand. At first she didn’t know what he was doing. She giggled, felt something good surge through her veins, and then decided it would be rude if she didn’t let him help her. She put her slimy hand in his callused one. He supported her all the way to the ground. She felt faint, happy. She and Trash Man had bonded. Maggie ran up and he caught her by the collar. “I think she wants to go with you.”
Clarissa petted the dog. Trash Man smelled like aftershave and sawdust. “Maybe next time, sweetie.” She made goo-goo eyes at the dog and then got in her truck.
As she drove away, her tires crackling over the gravel, Trash Man yelled, “Hey, wait a minute!”
She stopped, stuck her head out the window, and feared he might be about to ask for her phone number. “Yes?”
“You ain’t got no brake lights. That’s dangerous. Somebody rear-end you and a pretty little thing such as yourself could go flying through the windshield.”
Glowing all over, she said, “Thank you. I appreciate it. I’ll put it on my to-do list.”
“Sure enough. You come back and see me.” He winked. It was the second time in under an hour that a man had winked at her. Earlier Dibble had, but he didn’t count. Must be the stink, she thought.
She waved good-bye like a beauty queen on a flower-studded float. “Have a good day.”
“You too.”
Again she pressed the gas harder than she’d meant to—she was having a hard time getting used to the truck’s calibrations. Her tires spun in place, hissing against the gravel, kicking up a white, chalky cloud, and then the truck took off like a bat out of hell. “Don’t forget to get those brake lights fixed,” he yelled, his voice trailing in the dust.
Hoping to catch one last glimpse of him, she looked at where the rearview mirror should have been and then to the passenger-side floor, where her husband months ago had tossed it amid the Twinkies wrappers. “Damn it all to hell,” she whispered. Trash Man was right: She could get killed driving this rattletrap truck. And then it dawned on her that perhaps that was why her husband had let the vehicle get in this condition in the first place. Perhaps he, too, was burdened with spousal death scenarios. “You first,” she said, and then sighed at the pitifully optimistic thought that at least someone had flirted with her before she’d met her demise.
In her temporary state of hormonal oblivion, Clarissa took a right onto Tremble and Shout, which meant she was heading away from civilization. She checked the clock on the dash. Five-fifteen. Was almost everything on this truck broken? She guessed it couldn’t be much past one. She was sure her husband was with Yvette and Natalie and maybe even Yvette’s boyfriend, and she had to push out of her mind fears that her husband might be, if truth be told, a pornographer.
She gazed at the swamp with its cypress hammocks and mallow and yellow-cupped bladderworts and thought, Hell, I’ve come this far; I might as well go ahead and check out Poor Spot Cemetery. It couldn’t be more than a few miles away.
An egret flew low, across a ridge of bulrush, and she mused that wouldn’t anyone, even a corpse, tremble and shout if her final resting place—for all freaking eternity—was Poor Spot Cemetery? She imagined a long line of skeletons dancing conga style as they made their sad approach to the grave. “Boom-shaka-shaka, boom-shaka-shaka,” they sang, their bulrush skirts wafting in the breeze. Clarissa tapped the steering wheel in time to their zippy funeral march.
Her macabre musings skidded to a halt, however, as she realized that Tremble and Shout was narrowing, the swamp encroaching ever closer. She took stock: no cell service, alone on a wilderness road, and driving an unreliable vehicle. She eased up on the accelerator and searched the distance: no side streets and pavement too narrow to accommodate even a three-point turn. Not wanting to risk ending up stuck in swamp muck, she had no choice but to keep heading south.
“Enjoy the ride, girlie,” an ovarian shadow woman said, her voice dry and crackly and eerily reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West.
Clarissa sped up again, pegged it at what she presumed was in the neighborhood of sixty miles an hour. Surely the road led somewhere. And despite her attempts at positivity, her anxiety level rose. Here she was, alone in the world, surrounded by a swamp filled with gators, water moccasins, bobcats, bears, and God only knew what else that could kill her. How much worse can things get? she wondered, and then decided that wasn’t a question she should ask.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a red-winged blackbird approaching low and fast. She fought against her instinct to swerve. The bird hit the windshield. Clarissa screamed. One obsidian eye gazed at her.
With nowhere to pull over, she checked for traffic, stopped the truck, got out, and hoped the bird was dead. She breathed out hard and pulled it off the windshield. No such luck. Its beak was open; the poor thing was alive. She wrapped her hand around its wounded body. The bird struggled. Its feathers—black crowned with shoulder badges of yellow and red—gleamed iridescent; divine. She stroked its head and damned this moment.
“Everything is going to be okay, baby.” She opened her palm, a futile gesture fueled by the hope that the bird might fly away. It did not. Clarissa knew what she had to do—allowing a creature to suffer was out of the question—but wasn’t sure if she could. She remembered back to earlier in the day when she had killed the fly. But that was different. The fly was a nuisance. The fly did not inspire beauty or dreams. Why, it probably didn’t even have a soul.
Clarissa cupped the bird in her hands. Killing it felt like a sin; not killing it felt like a bigger one. Perhaps some mercies—even though violent—were still mercies. She looked into the heat-bleached sky, whispered, “Please forgive me.” In the hard and soft and sinewy places of her palm—in every cell—she pulled the bird’s head away from its body and twisted. She felt its neck snap.
Just like that, in the span of one breath, the bird was gone. No more misery. That’s what the shadow women, including the Wicked Witch, whispered: “No more misery.”
Clarissa tried to not feel. She did not want a single emotion to drip like poison through her bloodstream. She walked to the swamp’s edge, dug a depression in the muck with her heel, placed the bird in the hollow, and buried it. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She got back in the truck and put it in drive, the warmth that had been the bird’s life searing her hand.
Two minutes later, she turned onto Poor Spot Cemetery Road, and the guilt over having killed the bird was subsumed by the surprised panic that overtook her as an insect horde engulfed the truck, turning her view of the blanched sky black. As she rolled up the windows and cranked the air-conditioning (at least that worked), a panoply of bugs splattered the windshield in such n
umbers that they created a tight netting of blood and guts, making it nearly impossible to see out. She hurtled down the road, damning herself for going for this ride. But she stayed steady.
As she barreled on, the swamp grew more substantial, morphing into a wet jungle shaded by cypress, pine, magnolia, sweet gum, tupelo, and oak. Without warning, the pavement ended and she found herself bouncing down a dirt path once considered a road. A fawn darted out of the dense growth, and a group of ghosts—all women and girls, some holding babies—emerged from the shadows and ran alongside the truck. They threw stones, sticks, pebbles, the button off a hunter’s shirt. Clarissa, unaware, thought the wind was creating a debris storm. She slammed her brakes to avoid hitting the fawn; the smell of rubber grinding against metal filled the cab. The truck veered to the right, but Clarissa managed to keep it on the path.
The fawn disappeared back into the understory, but the ghost women with their children continued to crowd the truck, yelling, hissing, hurling whatever they could find. Even as ghosts, fear clouded their faces and fueled their mass tantrum.
Clarissa bumped along for half a mile or so, amid palmetto, marsh holly, wild azalea, and vines, until she reached a clearing that was also the end of the road. She knew she’d found it: Poor Spot Cemetery.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said, putting the truck into park. She jumped out of the cab and sank a couple of inches into the soft, damp, tangled earth. It was quiet here—no birdsong, no wind tripping through the canopy. What happened to the wind? Clarissa wondered. She grabbed a moss-covered limb, thrown there by one of the ghost children, off of her hood and tossed it to the ground. This place is indeed, she thought as she slapped at the mosquitoes descending upon her, a piss-poor spot to bury the dead.