One
Anerd Woods, king of used auto parts, gagged on the stench of rotten cabbage and spoiled meat. A high-pitched beep—beep—beep jolted his eyes open.
The groan of a heavy machine made the ground tremble. Its steel blade grumbled unevenly, scraped across putrefying refuse, and sent a flood of soured milk cartons and shit-filled disposable diapers onto Anerd's naked torso. He couldn't find his legs, but he could feel his balls crushed in the vise of his fleshy thighs. That was the least of his problems.
"Hey! Hey! I'm down here. Stop!" His words drowned in the beep—beep—beeping. The foul stench blistered his lungs.
The bulldozer groaned into forward gear and the blade came down again, propelling another avalanche of decay onto Anerd. This time it oozed up to his neck wattles and over his plump right arm.
"Hey! Hey!" His voice rose another octave in panic. He thrashed against the garbage but it pulled him down like quicksand.
Beep—beep—beep. The scrape of the blade. Anerd raised a flawlessly manicured pudgy left hand against the approaching bulldozer and waved frantically. The boulder-sized diamond on his gold pinky ring sent a laser beam of light across the dump. He screamed and gagged on spittles of blood. His brain squirmed with the certainty of his fate, and without thinking he uttered unfamiliar words:
"Forgive me, God."
A muddy cloud smothered the autumn sun. He shrieked until the dregs of household waste knocked his overpriced dentures down his throat.
Had Anerd's plea for God's mercy been heard under different circumstances it might have been considered fulsome. He didn't ask for forgiveness for his sins, which he minimized, but for surrendering his auto parts empire to his wife, Mavis, round-shouldered from carrying the weight of the world, and for forsaking his daughter, Sally. The small part of Anerd's mind that remained rational as the garbage cascaded over him recalled that Sally was the reason he lay at the bottom of the dump.
The day before, Sally had brought two of her skinhead boyfriends and an Indian into Anerd's recycled auto parts shop. He preferred the term recycled to used because he felt it sounded more sophisticated and citified to simple rural folk. Sally's friends inquired about a carburetor for a '67 Chevy station wagon, which Anerd didn't have in stock, but thought he could filch from his competitors—one more small step in helping them go out of business. He informed the boys that he could receive the carburetor by UPS next week for a small additional charge of $25.
The boys and the Indian and Sally left the store in a battered baby-shit yellow Toyota pickup with the "TO" and the "TA" painted out leaving the "YO" as a tailgate greeting. Anerd noticed that Sally climbed onto the Indian's lap in the three-person cab. He didn't like that Indian. He didn't like Indians much to begin with and this one had looked a little too clean, which meant he must be uppity.
Anerd went about his business until closing, at which time he counted his cash, stuffed it into an envelope, and placed it in the breast pocket of his Levi's Western jeans jacket. He drove home in his brand-new Ford Explorer to find the house empty. This didn't concern him much as his wife, Mavis, tended to annoy him and he relished the rare nights she found someone else to torment. Mavis was a professional victim and made sure everyone knew it.
Anerd threw a beef burrito into the microwave and popped the tab on a Coors. He moved to the front window to close the curtains and noticed a strange sight. In the dim light from the waning moon he could see that the Indian who had come to his shop earlier in the day was standing motionless in the front yard. He was holding a pair of gloves, which he dropped on the ground when Anerd's face appeared at the window. The Indian kept standing there in the dark, black eyes staring into the house at Anerd, not moving a muscle, and looking like he belonged in front of a cigar store.
Anerd clutched the breast pocket of his jacket and headed toward the safe in the bedroom. Before he got there he heard the back door being kicked in. He ran for the bedroom but didn't make it halfway down the hall before a hand yanked him up by his collar.
Anerd struggled to keep his balance, all the while keeping his hand over the envelope of money in his pocket. He was pushed forward and a thick musty blanket was thrown over him. Fists pounded his head, then something heavy smashed down on his back—a baseball bat? He felt his feet sliding out of his Tony Lama snakeskin boots. Time stretched into slow motion. Odd bits of reality struck him—the smell of burned burrito, the Coors burp earthy in his nose, the sour sting of bile in his throat. He struggled until the bat whacked his head and the next thing he knew he was up to his ears in garbage.
________
The spotter at the Cedar Gulch Sanitary Landfill was a twenty-two-year-old high school dropout named Billy whose primary pastimes were smoking pot and trying to screw virgins. He'd been partying the night before Anerd showed up in the dump and didn't get to work until well after seven-thirty in the morning, at which point Norm, the Caterpillar operator, had already started leveling the garbage left over from the previous day. Billy drove his minibike past the rows of yellow garbage trucks and parked as close to his watch position as possible. He set his helmet on the bike, squinted in the early-morning sun, pulled his shades out of the pocket of his leather jacket, spit on them, and rubbed them on his shirttail.
Billy was in the process of making himself comfortable on a webbed aluminum lawn chair when the glint from Anerd's diamond ring flashed across a smudge of dirt he'd missed on his glasses. At first he dismissed it as an aluminum can or a bottle, but something about the brightness of it made him look a second time. He saw the sparkle attached to Anerd's hand the moment before the Cat pushed a load right over it.
Not prone to reacting quickly, Billy walked to the radio and summoned the Cat operator.
"Norm, man. Better stop a sec. Something pretty weird down there."
Norm backed up the machine and climbed down. Billy motioned him down the garbage mountain and they met at the bottom.
"What's up?"
Billy led the Cat operator to the place he'd seen the glitter from Anerd's ring. He took a long moment to pull on a pair of canvas gloves and then kicked his army surplus boots at bursting soggy paper bags and disintegrating white plastic grocery store sacks until he hit something. It was Anerd's shoulder.
Norm, upon seeing a human body part lying under his handiwork, spun into action. He pulled frantically at the garbage until he freed Anerd's head.
He hollered at Billy. "Get the hell up to the office and call an ambulance right now!"
Bending over Anerd, he pulled open the man's flaccid jaw, and with great effort and trembling fingers yanked the dentures out of Anerd's throat. "Come on, you old fart. Don't give up."
He began mouth-to-mouth on Anerd's polluted maw and only vomited twice in the process.
Perhaps Anerd's plea for forgiveness helped, or maybe he was just damn lucky, but miraculously he revived. He coughed and sputtered and opened his eyes to a gray northern California autumn sky and a wide-eyed Caterpillar bulldozer operator. Although he had no teeth and he was still encased from the nipples down in garbage, he seemed to feel his words couldn't wait. He pulled his rescuer close and hoarsely gasped, "Uh inan id ih."
"What?" Norm wanted to tell the man to calm down, help was on the way, but the urgency of the man's voice gave him pause.
"Uh inan id ih." Anerd pulled at his rescuer's jacket and repeated himself, working his way up to as much of a scream as he could muster as though that would help transmit the message better.
Finally the Cat operator got it. "The Indian did it?"
Anerd nodded with his last ounce of energy and passed out.
