Clean

by John Nees

In mid-December, I was remanded to the Marion County Landfill to serve my community for a period of two weeks. I detoxified on the third floor of a beige building near the airport. My rectum was searched for contraband. Then I was shown the orientation video.

Now that you are clean, a voice-over said, it is time to get dirty.

From a ramp inside the main gate, I was picked up by an olive-drab bus piloted by an obese woman with extremely thin hair, her voice weak with emphysema. A frail man in a county uniform, eyes bulging and red around the lids, sat in the first seat just over the driver’s shoulder. They were discussing birthdays, and the man complained over and over about the burden of providing each of his sextuplet nephews with suitable gifts. The driver nodded and laughed and coughed. He said, “If I could, I’d give them all the shit in the world. I love them. They’re little pissers. They tear up my back porch. You should see them run sometime.”

I was not in handcuffs. It was important that we not be treated as criminals. But if there were any snafus, relapses, detours, I was assured, there would be state time.

Along the road’s berm: exhaust-darkened pools of Ohio slush, glass, the carcass of a full-grown buck, its snout pointed tail-wise. We dipped into a depression and crawled up the rise of a small hill, the driver talking cryptically into CB static. The frail man said, “They’re like a tiny cult of pulling and punching. You can’t believe how fast they swim. They conspire.”

We entered the landfill through a long and secluded access road, bypassed a weigh-station ramp. The air brakes went hoosh. Waiting and idling, wipers on sporadic abrading dry against the windshield, a hot and quiet detention.

Someone approached in a golf cart.

“Roger. Another hand for you,” the woman shouted and then coughed.

“Rehabber or what?”

“Yep.”

She turned the door crank. The frail man said, “Here you go, Joe.” I was transferred to the cart, wind cutting through my pants’ legs. Leading up the hill, the earth was mud-globbed and rutted by what looked like tank tread. It was 20 minutes at 10 m.p.h., curling up a path cut into the hillside as though into a deftly peeled orange.

“You are Jim Young?” The driver’s face was fat and flushed pink. His beard’s thickness harkened back to dim Civil War daguerreotypes.

“I am.”

He handed me a clear plastic bag filled with orange coveralls crisply folded and rawhide gloves.

“It’s windy as Jesus up there today.”

“Just glad to be outside. The great outdoors.”

“Not for long you aren’t glad.”

“What are my responsibilities here? At the detention center I washed dishes. I was a dishwasher. I ran the large steaming machine.”

“Responsibilities? You will walk the fence most of the day. You were shown the orientation video, or weren’t you?”

“No, I saw it.”

He pointed over my chest at an unbroken line of wire fence running the outer perimeter of the hill. Back-hoe cranes lifted and dipped at mounds of debris farther on.

“See all that shit at the bottom, stuck?” The fence was thick with shopping bags, cups, assorted, cast-off and wind-blown, caught in the mesh. “We give you a roll of trash bags, pull handles.

Nine to five. Break for lunch, two breaks for coffee or what have you. You smoke?”

“Not a smoker.”

“Just as well. No smoking at the top. There is a sign that indicates this. You will dump your collections near the sign at day’s end. So don’t smoke at this time. During the drop-off. No matches or lighters up there ever.” He almost collided with a truck passing on the downgrade. He shifted and splashed mud, pudding smooth and cold, onto my leg. “Caution must be exercised at the top. Dry as I don’t know what the fuck up there now. We didn’t have what you could call a rainy fall. And, so far, no snow.”

Everything was hypersaturated, viscously motile, TV quicksand. “Seems pretty wet down here,” I said.

“Sides are wet. Ground at the bottom is wet. So wet you can’t believe how wet. The trash gets compacted at the top and all the juice comes running down the channels. A system of run-off. Or else it would just be one collapsing sinkhole of a mess up there. When we have rain, the top stays wet, but right now it’s kindling.” He snapped his fingers as though lighting a Zippo and made the lippy exploding sound. He nearly collided with another truck.

“What’d you do so as we know you aren’t violent,” he said.

“Baby stuff. Drugs. Lots of drugs. Nipple substitute. Gimme, gimme.”

Rivulets of dark water cut veins in the hillside.

The service garage where I was to report each morning was halfway to the summit. At a picnic table rutted with graffiti inside Garage A, I waited, surrounded by a cloud of oil smoke and radio static, the nightmare sounds of redoubtable industry. A sign near the timeclock read Safety is Our Mission. There was a picture of a burning human head with a slash mark through it.

Roger entered with an armful of portable lanterns. “So, if there is something you need short of poontang or weaponry, come and ask me. Right this minute you are the only rehab-type. Winter they don’t send many of you, but now, with no snow, we have work for you. Questions thus far?”

“Where am I spending my nights?”

“The other side of the hill. Quarters are over there. One-room little places. What you call your efficiency. Spartan. Community kitchens. What have you. Food in the kitchens. Here, I’ll just read this to you now.” He unwadded and read the official dispatch from the county that outlined what was to be provided me and what was to be removed, what would inevitably happen if I were to be insubordinate or failed to report to work detail in a timely manner. “Get here around nine. Nine is fine. You don’t have to be here on the second of nine. And if you need to sit down once in a while, just go ahead. You’ll get tired. You’ll get goddamned tired. Just don’t be up there reading a People. But if you have to, sit. Know what I mean? Sit too long, and the drivers report you. Their eyes are peeled for this type of deal. Then I got to drive up and tell you to get moving, which I don’t at all enjoy.”

“I just want to get through my two weeks and get out,” I said. I had been carefully detoxified by medical professionals and was ready to immerse myself in health, I said.

“That’s a good philosophy to have. You dick around here, you get carted to Marion. State time.”

“I seek to avoid state time....”

John Nees lives in San Diego, where he conducts focus groups; recent products include spray-white lithium grease, thermal-cycler PCR machines (used to analyze DNA), children’s footwear. This is his first story in print. E-mail: johnnees@msn.com