Dumpster Diving
C. Sieg
My dad often took me to dumpsters. He never seemed to pick any particular one. It usually started with walking along the street downtown, slipping coins into the parking meters, and talking about odd subjects he pulled from that morning’s paper. That Saturday, someone used vintage luggage in an ad. Dad said, “You don’t see hat boxes around anymore.”“Why would you need a box for your hat?”
“To keep it clean.”
I eyed the dingy Blue Jays cap of a man across the street. “Wouldn’t you just get the box dirty?”
“Not if you kept it clean from the start.”
“But what would be the point of a cap if you can’t get it dirty?”
“It’s like skirts.”
I rolled my eyes at that, but instead of rebuking me for the sign of disrespect, Dad suddenly veered away from the street sidewalk and into an alley. Our town didn’t have real alleys, not like the ones you see on Law & Order, but more like spaces accidentally left between buildings. My mom always said when the city planner was young, he believed, like all children, that you don’t actually use math in real life. She finished with, look where it led him and the entire town. Some kids got inspiring speeches to encourage them to learn. Not me.
Nothing usually exists in that space except a few cigarette butts and a dumpster. No one walks down the alleys because, well, it’s an alley and we’re a small town, and the two just don’t work.
Dad stopped by the dumpster and pushed up his sweater sleeves. They fell right back down, but the gesture was more psychological than anything. It signaled getting into his “zone” — trash diving zone, that is. He flipped the black cover off and didn’t flinch when it banged against the side. The sound echoed down the alley, and I was sure everyone on the street heard it, but none of them looked our way. It was one of those damp, cold type of days, where every movement took too much effort.
Dad smiled at me over his shoulder. “Want to come this time?”
I made a face. He only winked at me and hopped down into the trash. He disappeared from view, but I could hear him rooting around. I knew he would take a while, so I slid down the wall to sit on the ground. Down there I could see the ants, working their way across the cracked cement. It seemed like a lot of bother, legs flailing, bobbing on a sprig of grass, without even carrying food. It reminded me a little bit of my mom’s jazzercise class. All of that frenzy and the reward is . . . what? An unflattering leotard turned into a body cast by sweat. I hoped I never got middle aged enough to understand it.
From the dumpster came the swish of garbage bags against each other. Every once in a while, something metallic clanged against the side of the dumpster. I relaxed, the familiar sounds soothing me like Dad’s off key renditions of Conway Twitty never quite managed.
Dad finally hoisted himself out of the dumpster. He dropped down to the ground across from me, stretched out his legs, and placed his findings in a pile. It looked like garbage to me. It always did. He untangled each thing and set it in a line: a pepper shaker cap, rubber cement, a finger sized plastic kangaroo with its tail broken off, a chicken leg not completely meat free, an electric handheld fan, and a dozen of those fancy toothpicks with the colored plastic wrap on the end.
“A bone?”
“An extremely straight bone.”
“A bone.”
“Any saliva has dried up.”
I rolled my eyes. This time he caught me, and gave me the rigid jaw, creased forehead, frowning with his eyes look. I almost rolled my eyes again, but the smell of A1 steak sauce mixed with old shrimp kicked my gag reflex into action. Someone probably tried to make shrimp on the barbie because they saw it on a movie. And failed. Dad asked, “Do you want to finish this somewhere else?”
I shook my head. I had a feeling the horrible odor came from the dark stain on his sweater, so moving wouldn’t improve the situation. Besides, I wanted to see if that ant ever found its way down the dandelion stem without falling.
Dad went to work on the chicken bone first. He used his pocket knife to strip off the remaining skin and meat bits, and to smooth away the rounded edges of the joints. The result was a bone stick, which he set aside. Next he went to work on the electric fan. He pried off the blades, leaving a single screw exposed. He fingered the screw for a second, eyed the bottom of the bone, then twisted the two together. He used the rubber cement to attach the pepper shaker cap to the bone and wedged the toothpicks into the tiny holes of the pepper shaker. Only the kangaroo remained. Dad tossed the rubber cement back into the dumpster and stood. “Off we go.”
I followed him out of the alley, dusting the dirt off my jeans. “What is it?”
“Not finished.”
We walked faster down the street this time, the noble calling of feeding parking meters forgotten. Even Dad’s feud with Frank, the meter man, disappeared during a dumpster haze. We went into the corner shop called R-Mart. I debated over the million types of gum while Dad went off to get whatever he needed. He came back in a second, grabbed the WinterFresh, and paid for it along with some batteries.
I followed him back outside to sit down on the curb. By then the mist had solidified into a drizzle. “Maybe I didn’t want the WinterFresh.”
“You always choose WinterFresh.”
“Yeah — after long and careful deliberations. Now I don’t know if it’s the right choice.”
Dad dug out a quarter from his pocket and handed it to me. That’s the one nice thing about R-Mart; they keep their gum at the old prices. It almost makes up for the cheesy name. They adopted it after they got robbed, hoping to instill a sense of community into the fine hooligans of our town. The hooligans responded by scrawling “we real cool” in red spray paint across the windows.
Dad opened up the base of the electric fan and slipped a battery inside. He held it up and slid a look at me. “Ready for this?”
I popped a stick of WinterFresh into my mouth. The moment wouldn’t be right without the gum. “Ready.”
Dad flipped the switch. The fan hummed slightly as it turned on. Once again, a person threw away something that wasn’t broken. I never understood that. Or how Dad could recognize that it still worked. I asked him once and he just shrugged and said, “Faith,” like it was some common sense thing.
The chicken bone twisted around smoothly, gaining speed as it went. The multicolored toothpicks twinkled in the light. The flashing reds and blues and greens blended together as they spun faster. Color smeared into color, creating a halo of light.
The kids playing four square in the empty parking spaces stopped to watch. The slouched man selling something to a trio of middle school students stopped to watch. The UPS man savoring his daily Wendy’s Frosty stopped to watch. For a moment, all activity in that corner of the plaza paused, to watch my dad’s garbage sparkle.
In the next minute, the novelty faded and they all returned to their lives. Dad turned the fan off. I popped another stick of gum into my mouth. “What about the kangaroo?”
Dad held the plastic figure in his palm. “This guy?”
“Yeah. What are you going to use him for?”
“I don’t know yet; I just like the way he smiles.”