The dump site was marked off by cheap metal fencing, jagged holes cut into it. Waist-high weeds grew everywhere like prairie grass, and tiny bonfires flashed in the distance. I drove along the perimeter of the fence, the weeds and loose gravel rattling against the undercarriage of my car more and more insistently until I came to a stop. I closed the car door with a quiet tamp, my eyes on those distant flames. It’d be about a ten-minute tromp to reach the camp. I slipped easily through a wire-snipped hole in the fence to my right, started walking, foxtail swatting my legs. The sky was draining quickly now, the horizon just a cuticle of pink. I realized I was humming “Uncle John’s Band” to myself for no good reason.
Scraggly trees stood in the distance, but for the first few hundred yards it was all rolling, waist-high weeds. Again I was reminded of my childhood, the safe feeling of all that grass grazing your ears and wrists and the insides of your calves, like the plants were trying to soothe you. I took a few loose strides and jammed the point of my boot into a woman’s ribs, actually feeling the bones part as the leather tip slid between them. She had been curled on the ground in a puddle of piss, her arms wrapped around a label-less bottle of liquor. She sat halfway up, groggy, the side of her face and hair caked with mud. She hissed at me with a withered face and beautiful teeth. “Get off me, get off me!”
“What the hell?” I yelled back, taking a scurry of steps away from her, my arms up in the air like I was worried about touching her. I walked briskly on, trying to pretend it hadn’t happened, hoping the woman would pass out again, but she kept yelling after me, between gulps off the bottle: Getoffmegetoffmegetoffme, the screams turning into song turning into weeping.
The woman’s cries aroused the interest of three men, whose faces appeared from behind the crooked copse of trees I was walking toward. Two of them glared at me, belligerent, and the youngest one, a skeletal man maybe in his forties, shot out, running toward me full bore bearing a stick he’d lit on fire. I took two steps back and planted myself.
“Who is it? Who is it?” he yelled. The thin flame of his torch weakened in a gust of wind and blew out as he neared me. The man trotted the last few steps, then stood in front of me, staring limply at the ember and smoke, his machismo turned to sulking with the loss of the fire. “What do you want, you shouldn’t be here, you have to have permission to be here, it’s not OK.” The man was goggle-eyed, smudged everywhere, but his hair was glowing yellow, like a cap, as if it was the one thing he took care of. “It’s not OK,” he said again, more toward the trees than me. I wished then that I’d brought my Colt and wondered when I’d stop being so goddam stupid.
“I’m trying to find a guy by the name of Runner Day.” I didn’t know if my dad had bothered with an alias, but I assumed even if he had, he’d have forgotten by his third or eighth beer. I was right.
“Runner? What do you want with Runner? He steal something from you? What’d he take? He took my watch and he won’t give it back.” The man slouched into himself like a child, picked at a loose button at the bottom of his shirt.
Just off the path, about forty feet away, I saw an irritation of movement. It was a couple rutting, all legs and hair and faces bunched up in anger or distaste. Their jeans were both bundled around their ankles, the man’s pink ass going like a jackhammer. The yellow-haired man looked at them, giggled and said something under his breath, like fun.
“I’m not upset with him, with Runner,” I added, pulling his attention back from the couple. “I’m just his family.”
“Runnerrrrr!” the man abruptly screamed over his other shoulder. Then he looked back at me. “Runner lives in that farthest house, out on the edge of camp. You got any food?”
I started walking without a reply, the couple climaxing loudly behind me. The bonfires got brighter and closer together as I hit the main drag—a scorched bit of ground, dotted with tents that sagged like storm-ruined umbrellas. A big firepit blazed in the center of camp, a woman with deep jowls and a distant stare was tending the flames, ignoring the cans of beans and soup that were turning black from the heat, their innards sizzling over. A younger couple with scabby arms watched her from half inside their tent. The woman wore a child’s winter hat partway on her head, her pale face peeking out, fishbelly ugly. Just past them, two old men with dandelions woven into their matted hair sat greedily eating food out of a can with their fingers, the thick stew steaming in the air.
“Come on, Beverly!” the scabby man snapped at the fire-tender. “I think it’s damn done.”