Salem's Lot

6

It was midafternoon when Franklin Boddin and Virgil Rathbun drove up to the slatted wooden gate at the end of the Burns Road fork, two miles beyond Harmony Hill Cemetery. They were in Franklin’s 1957 Chevrolet pickup, a vehicle that had been Corinthian ivory back in the first year of Ike’s second term but which was now a mixture of shit brown and primer-paint red. The back of the truck was filled with what Franklin called Crappie. Once every month or so, he and Virgil took a load of Crappie to the dump, and a great deal of said Crappie consisted of empty beer bottles, empty beer cans, empty half-kegs, empty wine bottles, and empty Popov vodka bottles.

‘Closed,’ Franklin Boddin said, squinting to read the sign nailed to the gate. ‘Well I’ll be dipped in shit.’ He took a honk off the bottle of Dawson’s that had been resting comfortably against the bulge of his crotch and wiped his mouth with his arm. ‘This is Saturday, ain’t it?’

‘Sure is,’ Virgil Rathbun said. Virgil had no idea if it was Saturday or Tuesday. He was so drunk he wasn’t even sure what month it was.

‘Dump ain’t closed on Saturday, is it’?’ Franklin asked. There was only one sign, but he was seeing three. He squinted again. All three signs said ‘Closed’. The paint was barn-red and had undoubtedly come out of the can of paint that rested inside the door of Dud Rogers’s caretaker shack.

‘Never was closed on Saturday,’ Virgil said. He swung his bottle of beer toward his face, missed his mouth, and poured a blurt of beer on his left shoulder. ‘God, that hits the spot.’

‘Closed,’ Franklin said, with mounting irritation. ‘That son of a whore is off on a toot, that’s what. I’ll close him.’ He threw the truck into first gear and popped the clutch. Beer foamed out of the bottle between his legs and ran over his pants.

‘Wind her, Franklin!’ Virgil cried, and let out a massive belch as the pickup crashed through the gate, knocking it onto the can-littered verge of the road. Franklin shifted into second and shot up the rutted, chuck-holed road. The truck bounced madly on its worn springs. Bottles fell off the back end and smashed. Sea gulls took to the air in screaming, circling waves.

A quarter of a mile beyond the gate, the Burns Road fork (now known as the Dump Road) ended in a widening clearing that was the dump. The close-pressing alders and maples gave way to reveal a great flat area of raw earth which had been scored and runneled by the constant use of the old Case bulldozer which was now parked by Dud’s shack. Beyond this flat area was the gravel pit where current dumping went on. The trash and garbage, glittershot with bottles and aluminum cans, stretched away in gigantic dunes.

‘Goddamn no-account hunchbacked pisswah, looks like he ain’t plowed nor burned all the week long,’ Franklin said. He jammed both feet on the brake pedal, which sank all the way to the floor with a mechanical scream. After a while the truck stopped. ‘He’s laid up with a case, that’s what.’

‘I never knew Dud to drink much,’ Virgil said, tossing his empty out the window and pulling another from the brown bag on the floor. He opened it on the door latch, and the beer, crazied up from the bumps, bubbled out over his hand.

‘All them hunchbacks do,’ Franklin said wisely. He spat out the window, discovered it was closed, and swiped his shirt sleeve across the scratched and cloudy glass. ‘We’ll go see him. Might be somethin’ in it.’

He backed the truck around in a huge wandering circle and pulled up with the tailgate hanging over the latest accumulation of the Lot’s accumulated throwaway. He switched off the ignition, and silence pressed in on them suddenly. Except for the restless calling of the gulls, it was complete.

‘Ain’t it quiet,’ Virgil muttered.

They got out of the truck and went around to the back. Franklin unhooked the S-bolts that held the tailgate and let it drop with a crash. The gulls that had been feeding at the far end of the dump rose in a cloud, squalling and scolding.

The two of them climbed up without a word and began heaving the Crappie off the end. Green plastic bags spun through the clear air and smashed open as they hit. It was an old job for them. They were a part of the town that few tourists ever saw (or cared to)-firstly, because the town ignored them by tacit agreement, and secondly, because they had developed their own protective coloration. If you met Franklin’s pickup on the road, you forgot it the instant it was gone from your rear-view mirror. If you happened to see their shack with its tin chimney sending a pencil line of smoke into the white November sky, you overlooked it. If you met Virgil coming out of the Cumberland greenfront with a bottle of welfare vodka in a brown bag, you said hi and then couldn’t quite remember who it was you had spoken to; the face was familiar but the name just slipped your mind. Franklin’s brother was Derek Boddin, father of Richie (lately deposed king of Stanley Street Elementary School), and Derek had nearly forgotten that Franklin was still alive and in town. He had progressed beyond black sheepdom; he was totally gray.

Now, with the truck empty, Franklin kicked out a last can-clink!-and hitched up his green work pants. ‘Let’s go see Dud,’ he said.

They climbed down from the truck and Virgil tripped over one of his own rawhide lacings and sat down hard. ‘Christ, they don’t make these things half-right,’ he muttered obscurely.

They walked across to Dud’s tarpaper shack. The door was closed.

‘Dud!’ Franklin bawled. ‘Hey, Dud Rogers!’ He thumped the door once, and the whole shack trembled. The small hook-and-eye lock on the inside of the door snapped off, and the door tottered open. The shack was empty but filled with a sickish-sweet odor that made them look at each other and grimace-and they were barroom veterans of a great many fungoid smells. It reminded Franklin fleetingly of pickles that had lain in a dark crock for many years, until the fluid seeping out of them had turned white.

‘Son of a whore,’ Virgil said. ‘Worse than gangrene.’

Yet the shack was astringently neat. Dud’s extra shirt was hung on a hook over the bed, the splintery kitchen chair was pushed up to the table, and the cot was made up Army-style. The can of red paint, with fresh drips down the sides, was placed on a fold of newspaper behind the door.

‘I’m about to puke if we don’t get out of here,’ Virgil said. His face had gone a whitish-green.

Franklin, who felt no better, backed out and shut the door.

They surveyed the dump, which was as deserted and sterile as the mountains of the moon.

‘He ain’t here,’ Franklin said. ‘He’s back in the woods someplace, laying up snookered.’

‘Frank?’

‘What,’ Franklin said shortly. He was out of temper.

‘That door was latched on the inside. If he ain’t there, how did he get out?’

Startled, Franklin turned around and regarded the shack. Through the window, he started to say, and then didn’t. The window was nothing but a square cut into the tarpaper and buttoned up with all-weather plastic. The window wasn’t large enough for Dud to squirm through, not with the hump on his back.

‘Never mind,’ Franklin said gruffly. ‘If he don’t want to share, fuck him. Let’s get out of here.’

They walked back to the truck, and Franklin felt something seeping through the protective membrane of drunkenness-something he would not remember later, or want to: a creeping feeling; a feeling that something here had gone terribly awry. It was as if the dump had gained a heartbeat and that beat was slow yet full of terrible vitality. He suddenly wanted to go away very quickly.

‘I don’t see any rats,’ Virgil said suddenly.

And there were none to be seen; only the gulls. Franklin tried to remember a time when he had brought the Crappie to the dump and seen no rats. He couldn’t. And he didn’t like that, either.

‘He must have put out poison bait, huh, Frank?’

‘Come on, let’s go,’ Franklin said. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’