Issue #1 Winter 2002
Pulu Si Bagoomba
by Tim Wenzell
On most mornings, he would kill the silence by pressing the crunch button. The loud grinding noise of the compactor had whittled away at his eardrums over the years and left him partly deaf.
When he started hanging off garbage trucks years ago, the thing that mattered to him most was how many people was he going to wake up, and could he dump softly. But, eventually, he gave in to Willie and Sash, who had grown careless of the sleepers. They had grown tired of their own cautious footsteps and whispered directions and listening to each other's voices drown beneath the crunching. No, they told Spookytooth, you have to shout and rise above the noise. So what if you wake them, they told him. They'll all be getting up to their noisy clocks anyway, and why should we suffer?
They named him Spookytooth on the second day. He had just visited a dentist who installed, at the tip of one of his incisors, a temporary bond that turned out to be phosphorescent, and, for the two-week interval between visits, his mouth glowed in the dark. From the opposite side of the truck and in the morning darkness, when it was blue but mostly black, Willie and Sash said they could see the dark shadow of their new co-worker moving over to the curb and back with a little glow in the middle of his face. Sash said he would "eyeball the star" as it whispered across his mirror and crept back to the truck.
At the bottom of Lincoln Drive and across the silent ocean of sleeping houses, he heaved the metal can toward the curb with a snap of his forearms. He turned back for the slippery rusting handle just above his shoulder and anticipated the crash of the can and the lights that might flick on somewhere nearby. "Let's get a move on, a get-go" he shouted out to the morning. His body lurched as the truck pulled ahead and he dragged his toe heels across the moving street and over the glistening of several spilled sandwich bags.
Seventeen years, he counted, as he picked up 43 Elsie. Seventeen years and six months come Sunday since he walked into the inner office and applied for the job. Twelve years since Eddie left, two years the last he heard from him. Eleven since they ripped down the mall after the shooting to put up electrical coils and six and a half since they fired Neal when he took the teenager home. His memories were merely islands now, foggy patches of rock thousands of miles apart, and here he was, sailing and wondering when was the next good one.
Spooky could tell from across the wet black lawn there'd been hell last night in 43 Elsie. The bedroom curtains were drawn and there was another broken window in the room above the garage. They'd lost their twist ties again, too. He could hear the muffled echo of some shouts from the back kitchen and the faint dropping of what sounded like a heavy appliance.
Spooky remembered the dog accident just at the end of their driveway two years back--the poor lady who sat drunk in a sweat suit on the boulder as he lifted her cans. She was crying with her drink tipped at 5 a.m., staring at the dark stain on the blacktop as if it had just happened, muttering to herself 'my baby was alive just a minute ago' and hoping that the trash men might solve her problem. Some drunken visitor must have backed over her dog, that's what he remembered thinking anyway, some stranger that just came and drank her alcohol and staggered to his van and then crushed her Daschund with his back tire. He figured that she was going to stay there on the rock staring a while longer next to her empty cans to think about things, all drunk and pie-eyed and searching in the shrubs for the answer.
Something somewhere was going to give at 43 Elsie; Spooky could just feel their tension in their bags. He heaved their load into the back, watching one of the bags burst open, spilling two empty cans of solid white tuna out the edge of the truck. She had got it on sale, he thought as a can rolled over his shoe: normally there were cans of chunk light in her garbage. The guy he heard yelling from the back room and punching the paneling probably hated solid white tuna. There was a little trail of tall grass along the edge of the sidewalk leading to the door. The guy had done a poor job cutting, and she probably let him know about it while he was drunk off the football game. Or maybe the mower was old.
Somewhere something clicked in the part of Spookytooth's brain that could make him predict short-term futures (that was why he did little stock market ventures and football pools on the side). He saw the next trash pick-up at 43 Elsie like the next logical step in a series of algebraic variables: there was going to be blood on something that someone dumped in the trash, dried up perhaps in clumps of cheap paper towels and stuffed carelessly near the top. Nobody would be home and he pictured their
minivan gone. Yes, he thought, someone somewhere would have to die at the end of this equation.
The grind of the motor into drive beckoned him to the handle as he glanced ahead at 45. He felt the dew dangling from his shirt. It chilled him, though nothing like the sweat later on as the sun came up and the smell began to rise.
The ones in 45 are restaurant people, Sash told him. The son took over the house after his father had moved out with Greenpeace and left the eighteen-year-old his house and his bank account along with a good luck note with a P.S. that condemned capitalism and a twenty dollar bill with a hammer and sickle buried in Hamilton's head. Or at least that's the way Sash remembered hearing it.
"Yep," Sash said in the morning blue, "Guy in maintenance told me the kid got himself a waiter job at The Twisted Vine Veranda and brings all his other waitbuddies over every single night. And the son of a bitches must be makin' some damn good tip money." He lifted a Cinch-Sak full of clinking bottles and the bag glistened with wet, stale beer. "Damn if every one of these isn't imported."
Spooky thought Sash an okay co-worker most of the time, except when he would go to sleep on the passenger side. That was when Willie would have to shove him hard against the door to wake him. While he was driving along, Willie would curse Sash in his high-pitched shouts to get to the back of the truck and slap him around with his right hand. "Wake the fuck up," his demand would burst out on open bedroom windows. Sleeping families must have thought he was speaking to them.
Spookytooth remembered the verbal lashing Corky the district supervisor had given Sash in the lot one Friday afternoon about the complaints he was receiving. "What the hell is going on?," Corky asked. "We've gotten a couple of angry calls about dirty-mouthed trash men and a serious letter about someone slamming cans and using the f word all the way up the street."
Sash never admitted to acting that way. "We're almost quieter than church mice," he fibbed.
Besides those calls and that single letter, no one else had ever complained of Willie and Sash's weekly ritual. With each loud outburst, Spooky imagined all the listeners lying awake in their beds, angry and under control for years, tired men and women staring at their ceilings, some of them a razor-line away from shouting out the window. He could just feel their mental anguishes hanging in the air with the dew. It was only a matter of time before there came stamps across the wet grass in bare toes and bathrobes and raised voices. Today might be the day the fellow over at 77 Sullivan comes out and clenches his fists, Spooky thought. Or the big game hunter over on Wellsley might advance on us with a moose rifle.
Sash stayed up nights and watched his Gilligan's Island videos. When he wasn't asleep on the passenger side, or whispering about the houses and the people beneath their roofs, he was talking about some episode of Gilligan and hitting Spooky on the head with his cap, just like Skipper.
"Damn if that one when they turn into chicken people isn't funny...you know, the one where the Mars probe accidentally lands on the island and the space guys in Florida think it's on Mars because Gilligan put the lid on the pot of glue?... it blew up and got on everybody and they were so pissed they chased Gilligan into a feather hut and all got a million feathers on them so they looked like birds and they ran in front of the camera when the Florida guys turned it on and the stupid Florida guys thought they were watching Martians and the castaways didn't get rescued." Sash whistled a couple notes of the theme song. "Yep, they sure were pissed at Gilligan."
Sometimes Spooky would interrupt him, and tell Sash he'd heard that particular episode a thousand times too many, like the ones Sash called favorites, when Maryann thought she was Ginger or when the Kincaid guy hunted Gilligan or when they all ate the mind-reading seeds off the mysterious bush. He'd ask Sash if there was something else he could talk about because it was such a ridiculous show and how they didn't have energizer batteries for radios back then or Republicans going out to sea with Democrats running the boat and who were they fooling with their three-hour tour. But that would always make Sash throw the cans harder and talk louder and wake more people, so Spooky would usually listen and take it, anticipating Sash's words and tone as he replayed the memory of a just-watched episode.
Over at 66 Omega, they'd just sprung for new cans. New cans were nice because they were easy to spot with their shiny aluminum glow, and they were lighter because they weren't weighed down by the heavy crust of years of leaking milk and rotted fruit. They smelled like freshly stamped metal; there was no sourness here. As Spooky picked them up, they reminded him of his years at Standard Pressed Steel, when he was grinding away at the lathe; how the boys would all punch out at three and dash across the boulevard to play baseball and drink beer. He used to catch, and he squatted in the dirt with the mitt his father had given him from when he played with the Senators. He called the pitches, too, even though it was only softball and the choices were either underhand or overhand. He'd keep his plastic cup of beer right there in the dirt, and he'd have to quick pick it up if the batter got a hit and somebody rounded third and he'd guzzle it if he knew there was going to be a play at the plate. He remembered the boss suspended him because Spooky had tagged him out at home, though Mr. Burton used the excuse that Spooky hadn't recalibrated the lathe the next day and he had had enough of the misfired hex nuts.
That was when Spooky owned the duplex out in Fergusonville and lifted weights, when he had the bushy moustache and a blonde wife and he was taking in forty grand from the job and selling water purifiers on the weekends. That was when he had the tenants below him dealing drugs at all hours, heroine and cocaine stashed behind the cabinets he'd installed, and he didn't know about the drugs until the FBI came swarming up his driveway in black cars and holsters filled with loaded guns. He could still hear the echo from the megaphone, ordering him and his wife to the floor and calling for the criminals to come out, and then the scuffle of feet from outside the windows, tackling and yelling obscenities as his tenants were hauled away. The arrest was on the front page of the paper the next day, a picture of his duplex in the background with the handcuffed boys brushing past the camera, and the little quote his wife had given the reporter, "We were harboring criminals and didn't have a clue."
Mr. Burton called him into the office and slid the newspaper forward, with red ink circled around the words "works at Standard Pressed Steel." Burton told Spooky, "I've had about enough of you disgracing the name of this company, and your consistent errors and your talk about unionizing and this especially, living with felons... I'm afraid I'm going to have to let you go."
So he moved on, and found no luck in securing another factory job, finally applying to the sanitation company and settling for the offer of second shift. His hours were now opposite his wife's, and he'd leave the house at midnight and get home in late morning, sleeping through the afternoon and part of the evening. Most of the time he'd come home tired and smelly, and his wife began to complain about the clothes she'd have to wash, and the way they left all the others with a stench. She'd insisted he find something with better hours and a more pleasant odor, because she couldn't take him laying asleep on the couch all the way through the evening news with no one to talk to, always eating alone and keeping the leftovers warm. "Besides that, I've got a closet full of dresses that reek of old garbage," she said.
Spooky had lost his sense of smell as the years went by, and then his hearing began to go. He couldn't find another factory job, and eventually had given up trying, given up losing sleep to go out in the afternoons to look for something better. He had filled out applications across town and wore suits to interviews, flossing his teeth and smiling, but to no avail. His blonde wife had begun to see another man, the cashier over at Flash-Mart that always wore the bow tie. Then she cleaned out the bedroom closet and left one morning, when Spooky had just fallen asleep under the fan. He'd found her apologetic note tacked on the refrigerator, wishing him the best. He sold his duplex at a loss several months after her departure, and moved closer to the sanitation plant.
Spooky picked up the load of the widow at 66 Omega, two large trash bags stuffed to capacity. He felt the bottom of the bags begin to give and he quickly swung them in a circle around his back and heaved them into the air and toward the truck. They tore apart as they settled into the back, spilling the guts of a renovated room, old wallpaper and plaster and crusted newspaper. He looked at the front of the house as he crunched her debris. Judging by the knick-knacks in her picture window, she was a neat freak. It seemed to Spooky as if every alabaster figure on the ledge had been measured and placed at the same distance from the next figure. The arms and legs conspired in the same direction like Rockettes, shiny and polished and at equal distances, their little beady black eyes all lined up and looking at you as you advanced up the walk, guarding things almost.
Behind her drawn curtains, the living room had to be spotless , and you could probably catch the odor of Boysenberry before you walked in the door, and there were probably cut lilies in the foyer and Architectural Digests fanned out on her Butler table. She either had a fish tank with an aquatic frog, or a wall of awards from some long-gone son for amateur wrestling and an Executive-of-the-Year award from her dead husband's job. She had furry slippers and drank her tea out of little porcelain cups that could pass for a dollhouse set, except the china was imported from England and you had to wash it in room temperature water or it would shatter. Spooky remembered the empty cardboard case of Darjeeling one trash day and he thought she must be addicted to the stuff to buy it in bulk supply like that. Or maybe it was just a moving box.
Sash was loud again this week, mostly because Willie had badgered him about the palm trees; how four able-bodied men couldn't fashion some sort of boat out of logs to take them off the island was beyond him. If all the dumb natives that showed up in canoes could do it, why couldn't some big seaman and a smart intellectual? Sash started cursing and tossing cans high in the air and made them crash louder as he tried to defend Skipper and Professor.
"You idiot! Can't you see if they get off the island the whole series would be over?"
Sash started talking about Edgar, his old co-worker, the one he referred to as "The Philosopher."
"Now he used to listen with respect to my Gilligan stories," he said. "He'd listen and then he would talk about being trapped... you know, how Gilligan always screwed things up so they never got rescued and how maybe it was a voice coming out of Gilligan's head telling him he really didn't want to be rescued, to stay in the misery of his island with a fat guy forever beating on him."
Sash glared at Willie's reflection in the mirror.
"Yeah, Edgar used to tell me Gilligan wasn't just Gilligan, but a symbol for every human being -- we are all stuck on islands just like his and trapped by a fear, a fear of change, a fear that things might get worse. 'Better to be familiar with misery', Edgar used to say all the time. 'When the time comes,' he used to say, 'we all lock ourselves in caves just as the rescue plane flies over.'" Then, as Sash grabbed hold of the handle, "God, I miss Edgar."
Spooky saw the truck turn up Marshall to 65 to the house with the dirt lawn and the beige shutters. He noticed the boy coming out of the hedges just then, pushing along in his big wheel in only a pair of stained underpants. The doors were shut, that's what Spooky noticed, the front door was closed shut as this two-year-old kid made his way up the driveway all glassy-eyed in his underwear, turning his wheel into the stones and dragging his bare toes across the cement, slurring out long unintelligible words that Spooky translated to "I want to come inside". The pity Spooky felt just then was unlike any other pity, an empty churning in his stomach he hadn't had since those sleepless nights after his wife took off with the bow-tied cashier.
Willie whispered as he picked up their cans, "The mother got taken away for stealing evening dresses from K-Mart a month back...it was her tenth shoplifting offense and while she was in overnight, in a cell with a bunch of animal rights activists, she unthinkingly squashed a roach with her high-heel as it tried to run past her...before she knew it they were on her, a pack of animal rights activists, clawing and scratching the way angry ladies do, screaming 'lousy murderer' and slamming her head against the bars, all the while screaming about bug feelings and who the hell are you."
Willie and Spooky watched as the little boy tried to look in the misted windows, dropping the stones from his hands, cooing like a hungry pigeon. But the house was shut tight as a drum. The truck moved on.
Spooky was quietly listening today, as Sash arrived to the subject of Gilligan. Sash recounted the totem pole episode, another one Spooky had heard a hundred times. He noticed Willie's face in the mirror as he hung, the contorted grimace of bearing down to listen to the same old thing again. The noise of the motor would drown most of Sash out, at least for Willie. Spooky knew he was going to have to hear all of it.
"Well what happens is, Gilligan finds this old totem pole in the jungle and at the top is a carving that looks just like him...well, he chops it off because Professor tells him it's the dead koopakye king Bashooka, a god of the headhunters, and Gilligan wants no part of it because he thinks he's related and he doesn't want to have headhunter blood because he might go on a rampage and chop off everybody's head...anyway, the headhunters find the chopped-off totem head and vow to kill the castaways... they capture the Howells and Ginger and Maryann and then tie them to poles until their head-shrinking water boils."
Spooky noticed the cans of 77 Marshall were spilled onto the street, and that the trash bags had been torn open. "Looks like our raccoon is back," he said to Sash. They bent down and scooped up most of the debris, and flung it into the back, leaving a trail of chips and soggy noodles.
"Anyway," Sash said. "Professor gets the idea to dress up Gilligan like the dead koopakye king Bashooka, so he might scare the headhunters into releasing the castaways. Him and Skipper try to teach Gilligan the koopakye words "pulu si bagoomba" which means "free the prisoners" so the headhunters would set the others free, but Gilligan can't get it right. Three simple words and he can't say 'free the prisoners' no matter how hard he tries. As he's practicing in front of a mirror screwing up the words, the headhunters capture the Skipper and Professor..."
Sash never finished telling the episode, about how Gilligan winds up saving them because he accidentally kicks the head after it falls off the totem pole and the headhunters think they chopped off the king's head and run away. Instead, Sash began calling out "pulu si bagoomba... pulu si bagoomba... pulu si bagoomba" as he picked up the cans, all the way up to the end of Marshall and then down Freemont and halfway across Sinkler. Free the prisoners, he was calling out to the sleeping masses long and loud. Free the prisoners.
Spooky lay with his thoughts after one fourteen-hour day, an exhausting affair in which he had to return with a truck from out past Midvale because the hydraulics had jammed on the compactor. By the time they took the replacement truck out, it was late afternoon and Sash was completely useless, asleep against the door and dreaming of Gilligan marathons, giving only a groaning response to Willie's kicks and yelling that he wanted to go home.
Spooky remembered back to the summer of '80, when the hydraulics had jammed on another truck. He had parked it at the end of the lot and it sat broken there that whole summer, because it would cost five grand to fix. So the company bought a new truck instead. He remembered walking across the lot one blistering afternoon and watched the old rusted truck as it swayed back and forth, as if a heavy wind was hitting against its side. He remembered thinking there must be someone rocking it from the other side because he couldn't figure what else could do something like that.
"Them's maggots," Willie motioned. "Trapped in there all summer in this heat, hell, that truck is wall to wall maggots."
Spooky wanted to get out, to put his trash days behind him and start again somewhere, in something new and alive. He thought about bartending, or maybe an office job where he might learn all about computers and invoices and where he could wear fancy ties and put on cologne, and have a secretary who would open his mail and tell him what was important. Somebody would give him a company car with a moon roof and he would smoke cigars dipped in Grand Marnier and watch the girls by a kidney pool beneath expensive sunglasses. Or maybe he would backpack through the Alps for a year with nothing but two pairs of jeans and a couple of golf shirts and a jelly sandwich and a road map. Or maybe he'd go back to school and learn some military history.
The images became murky as he drifted off, as he fell into a hot sleep, and for one defining moment he found himself nine years old and alone in his mother's living room back in Vermont, standing on the shiny hardwood floor in his pajamas, as the glare of the hall light stretched his shadow across the darkened room. Spooky stood before the pie table and looked up at his mother's expensive Hummel of a boy and his father fishing, emplastered with permanent smiles. He stood just as he had stood thirty years ago, eyeing the thing and being frightened by it, because he was just some nine-year-old insignificant speck alongside it, remembering his mother's warning not to go near it because it was so expensive and not to touch anything else in the room or the house for that matter. He remembered turning away, feeling the mighty intimidating impassivity of that figurine that reached out with invisible fingers and crushed his value to the level of dog shit, tugging away at his insides until he could no longer go near it.
But in Spooky's dream the world was changed: he turned to the pie table and shoved it, then stood and watched the boy and his father go crashing to the floor, breaking into millions of pieces and spilling like water across the hardwood floor, little pieces of man and boy and smile. In this dream moment, the churning in his stomach had suddenly gone and he felt the invisible fingers let go of their hold. He felt alive and free as he stood over the million shards, as his shadow disappeared with the light coming through the picture window. Now he could do whatever he liked, free and alone. He was free falling after that, like he'd done on the skydiving dare. As the silence enveloped him, he tried to stay suspended in the air in that dream spot, just float there with the wind pulling back his face, looking down forever at the muddy green fields. But he began to feel the tug of the earth pulling him down, pulling and then the muck of the swamp enveloping his ankles.
Spooky awoke and realized he needed to set the alarm. He wanted to get in early, because he had found out Willie just got a raise, and he wanted to ask Corky where was his pay hike. He laid back down and thought about his alarm going off, that maybe he would be so tired this time that he would sleep right through the chirps, or that maybe the deafness creeping up on him would finally close his ears off for good. Drifting off, Spooky pictured 244 Worthington, and the alarm that was going off there every morning he picked up their cans. He never remembered anything but the sound of that alarm, even above the
grinding, it seemed. Coming out of the top room, that's all there ever was. Maybe it just went on and on and nobody ever bothered to shut it off.
©2002 Tim Wenzell
Tim Wenzell has published a novel, Absent Children. He has also published fiction in Potomac Review, Timber Creek Review, Images Inscript, Aethlon, Spitball, Eclectica, Kansas Quarterly, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Synapse, and Read Me, essays in Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, Philadelphia People, and Full-Time Dads , and poetry in Myriad, Poetry St. Corner, Curbside Review, Stirring Magazine, Fresh Ground, EWG Presents, New Press Literary Quarterly, and The Comstock Review. Wenzell earned a Master's Degree in English from Rutgers University and is currently teaching English at Seton Hall University in South Orange, NJ.