This Is Where
Jeremy died yesterday.
That doesn’t have anything to do with this story, but it was a car wreck on I-540. A semi merged on top of his Civic and killed him and his wife. His seven year old daughter died this morning in ICU.
You might ask yourself why I tell you about him if it bears no relevance with what follows.
But if you want a more proper beginning, then I’d say…
Things never really disappear here.
That’s the truth I bury beneath my feet. You might not think so, but I found a newspaper from 1987 last week. Maybe the real question is why someone would hold onto a 30 year old newspaper.
There is a haze atop this hill. The atmosphere is gritty and tinted yellow, like an aged oil painting left in a grandfather’s attic, waiting to be rediscovered by bored children during Thanksgiving. Parental litter fences that look like soccer goals stop any adventuring waste from tumbling over the edge. Interstate 540, the one where Jeremy died, carves a lazy arc through the valley between me and the far side of town. I can see the spot where the accident happened because an IHOP billboard of pancakes crowned with a dollop of butter marks it like a tombstone.
A bearded man with cropped brown hair glares at me from his red Ranger. I beckon him forward with a wave of my hand. He spits a brackish ball through his window, then backs a trailer toward me until I raise my hand, clenched tight in a fist signaling him to stop. My yellow leather gloves make my hands look primal. They blend into the haze. To the left of his trailer, I spot a cushion-less leather couch that could make for a good seat. I plan to take it after he leaves.
He shoots me a stern look, then the corner of his lips lift subtly into a wry smile. Many people who come here do. I’m well versed in the language of eyes. His betray the familiar smugness of “you’re doing what you should be doing, black kid” that is common in Arkansas, even at the fringes of the liberal parts of the state. Of course, he says something more acrid than “black kid,” but you learn to steel yourself against it; you have to, especially when you make your living in a government-maintained shit hole. He makes a comment about how it smells like a sewer as he tosses contracting materials from the back of his trailer. I want to tell him that it’s his shit that is piling up here, but I move on to the next car. Thomas drives a bulldozer that could crush a semi like Jeremy’s Civic. It carves through the trash like a glacier and settles its load before an equally massive Caterpillar 826H compactor, with steel-tipped metal wheels five feet tall that are designed to pulverize whatever it drives over into six inch blankets that drape the ground. We do close to 5 blankets every day on this patch.
Fort Smith is a city that grew up never knowing what it wanted to be. So it became a little bit of everything, but in the worst way possible, adopting major chains in place of raising its own, accepting the unfiltered drainage from its surroundings like a watershed. It used to be a garrison against the west, Isaac Parker’s noose closing on the necks of outlaws. Now it just does what it has to do to survive, painting itself the picture of upper-middle class white luxury from its flash-frozen crab legs to its picket fence suburbs.
Some days the trees and reeds of tall grass seem to swallow up my hill. Others, the vegetation peels back as if poisoned by a blight beneath the dirt. Today is hot, but a steady breeze keeps the air fresh and the leaves dance in the wind. On my lunch breaks I retreat within the edge of the forest. I sit rigid on a tree stump to focus my thoughts that run rampant like bags through the breeze. My mother says meditation might be the warmth I need to keep the cold of depression away. I focus my thoughts in a void, which takes on the form of an empty landfill cell. The refuse of my mind jettisons into the pit, where a compactor begins its Sisyphean duty.
Maria’s smile burns down my neurons. My chest tightens along my sternum as though the compactor were driving over me, and I realize I’ve fallen into my thoughts again. Each breath feels like daggers in my lungs that deflate any hopes for air. Drops of water splash onto my fingers and I notice my eyes are watering.
My phone buzzes impatiently in my pocket. Monochrome lips whisper “I had a dream about you the other day and…,” And the planetary eyes of Maria pull me into a familiar orbit. It was once a space I revered, but between the isolation and coldness necessitated by the view, I learned it wasn’t for me. So I stopped trying. Which is when she picked up the slack. When we finally dated, it took a while for the adrenaline to wear off before I realized there is no air in that space. She and I haven’t spoken for three months, so I consider keeping it that way and leave the message unread. The compactor roars to life and splintering two-by-fours ring out over the hill.
I tell myself that things will be better after I’m done with medical school, that the same man in the red truck is going to be a patient one day and that I will show him better kindness and respect than he gave me that day on the hill. But then I realize that’s just a narrative to make myself feel better. That’s what we all do. We write stories to make sense of the things we love and hate that love and hate us back.
Like most Tuesdays, no one is here around two, so I salvage some of the wood from the red truck and build a stable platform for my chair. After I finish, I look for the couch, but it is gone. I turn behind me to see the bulldozer place its offering in front of the compactor’s wheels, and I wonder if anything will ever break them.
I decide to send Maria a message.
She tells me that she’s doing well and that she’s moved out of our college town to Los Angeles. Her personality and ambition were too big for it anyway.
“I’m glad to hear that you are on your feet and running. LA seems awesome, I’m jealous. What are you doing out there?”
“You don’t plan to stay in Arkansas, do you? There’s all kinds of opportunity in places like this. I’m working with a human rights initiative to help migrants attain green cards. The people here can put me in touch with some of the state Democratic leadership.” She tells me that I may like it there, that if I’m ever in town we should get a coffee. My heart crunches against my ribs.
Maria could only love others to the extent that they would distract her from something that sewed her lips together at night. Which only made me want to love her more. At the time I likened love to a light, so I figured I could shine the dark away. Now I see that was just childhood romanticism flaring like a cold sore. But it made sense when she kissed me, the way her lips pressed into mine as though we were magnetized for each other, as though we were two planets locked in the cosmic waltz of gravity. They were soft, warm, and her breath tasted like the white tea she’d make the morning after a long night of drinking. It was during those nights that she’d be caught off guard by a flamboyant friend’s dry humor, and she’d double over in laughter. I could never tell if her smile or her eyes were brighter in those moments.
She and I continue to talk as the summer climate crispens into fall. In late August, she tells me she’s met someone and asks if she should give it a shot. When I realize I still love her, I stop replying, and I find myself laying in bed searching for patterns on my stucco ceiling.
It’s easy to lose track of time out here. I think it’s because it takes so long for anything to change. I’m a part of a system that operates in decades and centuries. From one day to the next, the same bags and banana peels and milk jugs still sit in their tombs. I am the groundskeeper burying them under one speck of themselves at a time.
The monument to my year of labor is thirty six feet of compacted refuse. When I follow the twinge in my chest when I think of Maria, it leads me to the shaded chair on top of my platform. I look down the slope of the hill and see methane caps jut from its sides and escaped refuse tumble into the forest. I rise from my bed and dig through my closet to find a rough cedar box with an Arkansas Razorback painted on the lid. Inside are the few letters and a donation receipt on my behalf that Maria gave to me over the time we were together. I bag them and throw them into my truck, my mental cell empty as I merge onto I-540’s lazy arc. I think of the compactor and the sofa, and how, like Jeremy’s truck, its frame snapped under the compactor’s weight.
I bury my gas pedal into the floor and race up the hill, then back my truck up to the edge of the unloading area. I see my lawn chair and makeshift platform and throw the bag toward it. I hop out of the bed and walk across a pile of construction materials toward the platform. A nail sinks through my boots and pricks my left foot. I reach the platform and upend it onto the white bag. Thomas waves from the dozer and shrugs his hands and shoulders upward. I lock eyes with him for a moment, wave once, then return to my truck. As I sit down, I realize the nail is still in my shoe. I pry it out and toss it into the mud, where it disappears into an endless void along with my bag and platform. The hill adjacent to this one, the one I first saw when I was in high school, sprouts bushes and reeds and long stalks of wild grass. It seems the appropriate place to repurpose my relics of a powerless past.
This is where I will bury them.
But things never really disappear here.
