Trash Mountain by Bradley Bazzle

Author:Bradley Bazzle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

LIVING WITH GRANDPA was great and it was terrible. There were days in the sun and nights in the cold spooky darkness. There were suppers of sugary beans with bacon, and breakfasts of corn flakes with water because Grandpa forgot to buy milk. There were grilled cheese sandwiches and mustard sandwiches. Sweet potato stew and tomato soup made from ketchup. The screens had holes so there were mosquitoes in the house, but Grandpa didn’t care. His leathery skin had lost its food-like aspect. Mine had not. I tried to sleep under the covers but got so hot at night that if I did manage to sleep I would kick off the covers and wake up with mosquito bites on my face and neck. There wasn’t central AC, and the only room with a window unit was Grandpa’s bedroom, but he never used it. He said part of getting old was feeling cold all the time, no matter how warm it was. It was closeness to death, he said. He had come to terms with the fact that he would never feel warm again.

I slept upstairs in Dinwiddie’s bedroom. Dinwiddie was my mother’s brother. He died when he was a kid so I never knew him. It was something with his heart. Anyway, his bedroom was tiny. Drafty too. As a kid I used to fuss about it because Ruthanne got to sleep across the hall in Mom and Aunt Sheila’s old bedroom. There were two beds in that bedroom so I could have slept there too, was the way I saw it, but Mom got mad when I complained. She said Grandma wanted me in Dinwiddie’s room. It was before Grandma died of lung cancer, but she was already on her way so everybody was extra nice to her all the time.

Between the heat and the mosquitoes and the possible ghost of Dinwiddie, it was hard to get a decent night’s sleep. Add the creaking noises the big old wooden house made as it cooled at night, plus the weights inside the old windows that knocked against the sills like insane clocks keeping random time, plus Grandpa, who could be heard snoring in the distance, or pacing on the squeaky floorboards, or opening and closing drawers, and it was damn near impossible to sleep for more than ten minutes at a time.

The lack of sleep might have been tolerable if Grandpa hadn’t been trying to work me to death. First, we dug postholes for a new fence. We dug twenty-seven postholes in one day and would have dug thirty-two if one of the wood handles on the posthole digger hadn’t broke. I was used to laboring in the heat from my work at the dump, but this was a whole different level. To keep my strength up, Grandpa fed me huge helpings of pinto beans from big pots he made every Sunday, with onions and garlic and a bay leaf for flavor. Those beans were damn good after a day in the sun.

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