I roll my shoulders and try to relax the tension in my neck. Keep my eyes peeled and try to think, try to find a place to put his body, somewhere it will not be discovered. Somewhere it can drop into oblivion. I wish I were in the South. Where swamps and gators lie in wait, ready for a juicy dead body to rip to shreds, the evidence crunched and slurped down in minutes.
Oklahoma doesn’t have swamps. We have open stretches of land, nothing for miles, a guaranteed ability to stand out like a sore thumb if doing anything other than driving. I drive until the sky starts to turn, a hint of pale blue and lighter pink, streaks of yellow beginning to smear across the landscape like a child’s finger painting. I turn off the highway, turning my headlights off and scanning, worrying. Once day breaks I will not be able to hide, could be discovered halfway through my drop. I wind down country roads, my eyes taking notice when a recycling sign, drooping and bent, the faded splay of white along its metal bottom indicating that it was, at one point, victim to a paintball gun. I turn, following its arrow, the paved road turning dusty, and move between crop fields, picking up speed until I see chain-link fence and Dumpsters.
A county trash depot. Small towns don’t have curbside pickup. My childhood home did, the huff and clang of six a.m. often eliciting a curse from my mother, our cans locked and hidden in the garage, no one remembering to drag them to the curb. But my grandparents’ home, the big old two-story, stuck at the north end of a long dirt road, didn’t have those city comforts. We bagged our trash, kept it in the barn until the plastic pile rose high, then loaded up the back of the truck. Drove four miles to the county dump and stood, tennis shoes on tailgates, and heaved the bags through the air, out of the bed and into the giant green Dumpsters, praying the bags wouldn’t bust, our waste stacking atop others, making the green monster one big rectangular box of nasty.
Our bottles, few that they were, went in a round hole, one of three on an orange trailer, the other two holes dedicated to cans and paper. And in the back, lined up like misbehaving children, were the Dumpsters dedicated to yard waste and large items. Our weak arms and dead hearts tossed the items without thought, piling the bits of our life high, a compactor once a day crushing everything together into one squished-together cube of waste.
I pull up to the gate, an unhinged padlock hanging loosely from the latch. I hop, unlatch, open, then pull through, the layout different but similar to my grandparents’. I’m alone. The night is so quiet that I hear a coyote howl, over the fields, the lonely animal probably a half mile away. I find the bulk waste on the right, the Dumpsters clearly marked, the trash not yet compacted. They probably squash in a few hours, at the start of the workday, a gazillion tons of force crushing toilets, two-by-fours, and fifteen-year-old sofas flat, in one effortless push. That works for me. I jump into the Dumpster, moving carefully around a tire, what looks to be a wrecked lawnmower, and someone’s ancient CPU, pushing a few items into place until there is a hole. A gap between abandoned items, one that looks deep enough to submerge at least half of my mattress.
More sweat. It is harder this time, the initial lift of one end until it is high enough to push, the edge of the truck and Dumpster beds acting as fulcrums. I work in the dim light of dawn, the truck off, the gate closed behind me, my vehicle between two Dumpsters, relatively hidden. But I still pray. I pray that no one will also spontaneously decide to embark on an early morning trash run. Hope that kids on four wheelers don’t come screaming over the closest hill, their headlights picking up my form, their curiosity bringing them closer. Just a girl, dumping a mattress. No cause for alarm. But later, if something goes wrong and his body is found, that girl, dumping that mattress… it won’t take long to put the clues together. I heave, every muscle I barely have working together, the box spring making the slide into the Dumpster, the momentum of my push shoving me over the edge of the bed, and I grip with my fingers and hands, coming back into the truck. The box hovers, one end jutting out over the hole I have created. The good end. The one that contains Marcus’s body, the body that, despite the cold temperatures that are fogging my breath and chapping my nose, will start to smell. Need to get it compacted and moved. Put in the dump, alongside festering maggot- and rat-filled heaps of trash, where its odor will mix with a thousand others and be ignored until it decomposes into nothing.
Again, that guilt. It chases me as I lift the light end of the spring, physics behaving as the other end dips, allows itself to be pushed, and falls, three or four feet down, the top, empty half of the box spring sticking up like a flag. Look at me, look at me. But no one will look. Things are jutting and hanging all over these boxes. Toilets don’t stack neatly upon bifold doors upon broken treadmills. The guilt nags at me as I brush my gloved hands off on my jeans. No proper burial. Not for this man. No idea, for his wife or family, what had become of him. A trip to Mexico gone wrong? A bullet in a motel room somewhere from an affair gone awry? I almost wish I could write a letter. Explain. But I’m not sure that would help them. Hearing about his death would not give them peace. Maybe ignorance will. Or maybe I am a justifying monster. Yeah. Most likely that.