FICTION: “Waste” by Meredith Shapiro

Illustration by Maura Walsh.

FICTION
WASTE
By Meredith Shapiro

It had been a couple weeks since April from the front desk disappeared, and we had no leads on where she went. Mike was the first one to notice she was gone. Mike S – a lot of us are Mikes. He’d gone up to the front office to use their bathroom. We’re not really supposed to do that. Our boots are dirty, and we have oily grime on our hands. We try not to make a mess, but we always end up leaving little streaks around the sink and on the doorknob. Trying to wipe it off just smears it around worse. So the front desk girls always complain when we use their bathroom, but ours is out of order a lot.

Mike was on his way back from the john when he noticed Dawn sitting in April’s spot. The front desk girls sit in a row of five cubicles. They always stick the newest girl at the desk closest to the front door, the desk with the customer walkup window, so she has to deal with the customers who come to complain about their trash pickup in person. The new girl sits there until one of the others leaves, and then they all move one desk over, hire again, and stick the next new girl at the window.

We thought that seemed dumb, and a little mean, to put the new girl there to get yelled at, and be on the spot to answer questions she’d have no way to know the answer to – Yes, we take paint cans, but only if they’re completely dry. You can stir in kitty litter to dry them out. We don’t take fluorescent light bulbs. You can throw away a mirror, but please use masking tape to make a big X on each side. If the mirror breaks, the tape might trap the pieces in the frame and keep the guys from getting hurt. Or, okay, keep the pieces from ripping a huge gash in your trash bag, which is something customers actually care about. We thought this policy probably had something to do with most girls leaving after less than a year. But nobody was asking our opinion.

The line of girls ends with Dawn, who’s been here more than five years. She has a joke about cursed earpieces – when they start, all the girls get a generic headset for taking customer phone calls. But since they spend so much time on the phone, the foam ear pads dig into their ears. Once they’ve been here a few months, the office manager orders them a custom molded in-ear headset. They can pick whatever color plastic they want the earpiece made of. Shiny pink or red or green, they look like little melted lumps of hard candy. But, often within weeks of getting the earpiece, they leave. Dawn collects all the old ones in a desk drawer. Which seems gross, and kind of ironic since she’s the loudest complainer about us messing up the office bathroom.

Mike asked Dawn if April was out sick.

“Nope. Gone.”

He tried to ask where she went, but Dawn got a call then, and shook her head. He told us that she shot him a look that he took to mean: “Something bad happened. Don’t ask any more questions.” We pressed him – how did he get all that from a look? But he couldn’t explain it. That’s how we got on the idea that she disappeared, rather than just left like the rest of them. She wasn’t great at her job, but we liked her best. We didn’t think she’d leave without saying goodbye to us.

~

She was young, not long out of high school. Her hair was thin, but a pretty color. Some of us thought it was blonde. Others said more red. Jesse, the shyest of us, said it was called strawberry blonde. Just saying it made him blush. If we had daughters, she reminded us of them. If we didn’t, she reminded us of our sisters when they were young, or nice girls we knew in school, back when we wouldn’t have said “garbage man” to the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” What had we said? We couldn’t remember.

April got in trouble a lot. She’d disappear from her desk to come hang out with us in our breakroom and shoot the shit. The other girls never come back here unless they have to. They say the smell is worse back here, closer to the transfer station, even though really it stinks just as bad in all of the buildings on the property. We’re used to the smell. It gets in our skin, and never leaves us. But for the girls, it’s different. They don’t live with the smell. Sometimes it gags them on a Monday morning. We work at Green Valley Disposal, but the smell isn’t really a garbage smell. Sure, there’s that smell too, especially for the guys who work residential or small commercial, but the overwhelming smell of the place is tangy, metallic.

Once, when April had only been working here for a few weeks, she walked all the way back to the mechanic bay, carrying an old recycling tote that had a crack in one side.

“Customer says her recycling bin broke. Can I give her a new one?”

We told her that everyone gets their first one for free, and replacements are fifteen dollars.

“Aw man,” she said, doing a goofy, fake pout. “I can tell she’s gonna bitch at me if I say that.” She tossed the bin up in the air, then jumped and gave it a spin kick. A big piece of it broke off. She had on puffy sneakers, like skateboarders wear.

We laughed and said “forget it, just give her a new one.” We pointed her to the shelf of new bins. She jumped again to show us she was too short to reach them. Rick, the mechanic, handed one down to her.

“You totally saved my ass,” she said, and extended her fist to bump.

That’s when we fell in love with her. Even though only about five of us were there when it happened, the story spread. We could all imagine it as well as if we’d been there.

~

The girls type instructions into work orders, and the work orders print out on the dispatcher’s special tri-copy paper. He tries to catch weird orders – things the girls must’ve gotten wrong, so he doesn’t send us on a suicide mission. Like to a remodeling job that’s not done yet, but the order says just to take the can without replacing it with a new one, and then when the foreman calls back to complain we have to make an extra trip to Sun Prairie with an empty one.

We admitted to each other that April did seem to put in a lot of those bad orders. But she always felt really guilty about it. Once she brought in donuts for all of us, just to say sorry for

sending Mike F to do an extra pickup at the wrong Walgreens. That’s an easy mistake to make, because we service all the Walgreens in town.

We’re on the road all day and get new orders on the radio from the dispatcher. Sometimes he reads the address off wrong. But he always just tells us, “The girl messed it up.” So we weren’t sure how many of the mistakes were really April’s or how many were his.

~

Most of the time we were out on our routes. It was hard to find time to talk or investigate.

We swung between feeling sure that something really had happened to her, and trying to tell each other that we were just being dramatic. After all, most of the front desk girls leave. Some of them leave for college, or tech school. Most of them go do the same kind of front desk work at a normal place. Somewhere like a bank. Somewhere that doesn’t smell. April hated the smell, just like we all do, but she didn’t complain about it as much as the other girls. Or complained about it in a different way – Some of the girls act like they’re above the smell, like they just ended up here by mistake, as opposed to us, who must belong here. Like the smell is gross, and we bring the trash that makes the smell, so we’re gross too. That day that she brought us donuts, she ate one with us in the break room. We asked her, didn’t she mind the smell, cause the other girls all said they had to leave over lunch, couldn’t eat anything in that stink. She shrugged and took another bite of her Long John.

“I mean, yeah, it’s bad. But I can get used to anything.”

We were the same way. We’d all had the same guess about the smell when we started: Is that the smell of tin cans, hosed down with hot water in the recycling center, before being smashed into giant conglomerate cubes? But, as we all learned, it’s actually the smell from our biggest client, the Oscar Mayer plant. The tang is the iron in coagulated pig’s blood. Somehow, knowing what it was made it less gross. And then we got used to it.

~

We asked the dispatcher what happened to her. He just shrugged and said “Same as all of ‘em, maybe she went to college.” But April didn’t seem like college material. She wasn’t dumb, but didn’t seem too book smart either. She was rough around the edges, like us. We could see her at tech school though, maybe for the vet tech program. We thought we remembered hearing her say she liked animals.

Rumors spread fast at Green Valley. One morning, a handful of us were standing outside the dispatcher’s office, waiting for the morning’s first batch of work orders, and one of us said he heard Bill and April were friendly. By the time Charlie was back from his first run to Oscar’s, those of us in the break room told him that everyone knew Bill had grabbed a bicycle from the transfer station for April.

You can get fired for picking stuff, but we all have stories of things we’d taken, from the rubbled floor of the transfer station where we all dump our trucks before we head back out, or from the belt in the recycling center. People throw stuff away by mistake all the time. They also throw away things that look brand new on purpose. When someone calls to say they think they dropped their wedding ring in an empty can of SpaghettiOs and threw it in the recycling by mistake, the front desk girl has to tell them that she’s sorry, but we don’t take anything out of the trash, and that all trash and recycling is processed same day - tons and tons of it mashed into cubes and sold to China or dropped in the ocean. “I’m sorry ma’am, but if your ring was in last week’s recycling, it’s already long gone,” she needs to be able to say, and have it be true. So, taking things is a big deal. But it still happens all the time.

We found Bill on break. Did he know anything about a bike for April? Bill was eating a vending machine sandwich, clutching it by the wrapper so he wouldn’t get grime on the bread.

He hung his head. “Yeah, I was gonna get her a bike. I did get her a bike – ”

“Why?” We asked.

“She said she needed one. She wanted it to bike to the farmer’s market in summer, cause it’s too crowded to park anywhere near there.” We nodded. Farmer’s market is a big weekend draw in our town during the warmer months. Most of us have never gone. True enough, you can never find a place to park even if you wanted to. It’s a place for people who already live downtown and can walk, which means college students and rich people with little kids who haven’t outgrown their downtown condos yet. We liked the idea of April rolling up on a trash bike to buy cucumbers or something.

“So, you did find a bike?” We asked him.

“I did. I saw a perfect bike. Pink. I thought she’d like that.”

We nodded again, even though we thought privately that April was kind of a tomboy. She mostly wore gray and black clothes, and probably didn’t like pink. But Bill’s daughter was seven or eight. Pink must have been her favorite color.

“So, what happened?”

“I never gave it to her. I got it home, cleaned the chain, put air in the tires. But it smelled.

I couldn’t figure out why at first, but then I realized it was the seat. It had a big squishy seat, a really nice seat I thought. But trash juice got into the foam. The seat soaked it up like a sponge. I tried to hose it down, but it didn’t help. And it would never dry. I wanted to get a new seat for it, but I just never had time. It’s still waiting in my garage. Maybe she left because of me. I told her I’d have an eye out for bikes. I think I got her hopes up.”

Bill did have a way of exaggerating. He probably made it sound like it would be just a few days before a Tour de France bike showed up in the trash. Probably he did get her hopes up.

But would someone really quit just because of that? Most of the girls at the front desk seem used to disappointment. Their eyes are like a door left open just a crack.

~

We weren’t sure what to do after striking out with the Bill lead. One of us suggested again that she probably got a job somewhere else, somewhere better. That would be nice if it was true. We’re all rooting for each other to go somewhere better. A few guys have gotten out. Mostly to other jobs where you drive. Trucking sometimes seems like a better deal, but it’s not really. At least we get to go home at the end of the day. The best we have to hope for, we think, is courier driving. We know some guys who work medical courier jobs now. You drive a van instead of a truck, and you only go to clinics and labs, and you get to go in and talk to nice ladies in scrubs. You still have to pick up blood, but it’s in neat little vials instead of spilled over the bottom of a can.

But it’s hard to leave. You can’t really take off in the middle of the day for an interview. And if you did, you would probably bomb it, because of the smell. A lot of us are missing a few teeth, too, because we don’t have time to go to the dentist. And people don’t like to look at empty holes in your smile. So, we stay, and clap anyone on the back when they manage it.

~

One morning, we watched the dispatcher shuffling through the work orders and sorting them into piles. He told us we were finally going to pull cans on the Washeteria.

The Washeteria was always behind on their bills. When a business signs up, they have to choose a frequency for pickup. Usually once a week, but could be more or less. But some business, once they get set up, call and get themselves on an as-needed basis. Then they have to call every time they need a dump. And stingy assholes, or people who are going under, will try to stretch the time between as long as possible, mash the garbage down into the can more and more. They’ll set bags on top of the can, or around the can on the ground, even though they know they have to pay for extra bags. Then we have to walk through the sprinkle of maggots on the ground, and let the garbage sweat drip down our arms when we toss the bags into the truck.

Sometimes you see a battle between the business owner and whoever owns the building they lease. Landlords and property management companies don’t want old overflowing garbage in their alleys, so then they might see the telephone number on our can and call for a pickup, even though they’re not the ones paying for it. That’s another thing the girls can miss sometimes; they assume the person calling is who they say they are. Then when we pull into the alley, the business owner runs out screaming at us not to pick up, and they’re not paying, and it was the asshole landlord who called, not them. Washeteria was one of those.

It was a laundromat with a bar in it. You could drop off a bag of laundry for someone there to wash, and drink while you waited for them to be done. They were near campus, and we figured they were trying to get the rich student business. We shook our heads at this. Imagine the kind of money you’d need to have to waste on this. But now they’d gone out of business. In a way, this was reassuring. If a business like that failed, it means even spoiled college kids weren’t that lazy.

We heard that the last time someone went to pick up at Washeteria before they folded, the trash was overflowing but the business owner ran out and said he hadn’t called for service, and he wanted the name of whoever put the order in. Whichever one of us it was who was there, would have told him the standard line, that we don’t have a way to track work orders back to the girl who entered them in. That isn’t true, but angry customers don’t need to know that. We try to protect the girls as much as we can. When we heard the dispatcher mention Washeteria, we got to thinking about that last pickup. And the more we thought, the more we seemed to remember it was April who had put that order in.

Even though the dispatcher said he didn’t yell at April about scheduling an unauthorized pickup, we didn’t really believe him. He could have been lying, or maybe he just didn’t remember. Once he’s done yelling, he forgets what he was ever mad about. Mike J was the one pulling the cans. We told him to ask the landlord when he got there, about whether maybe he remembered talking to April on the phone. Maybe there would be some clue in their conversation that would help us understand why she left.

At the end of the day, we asked him whether he got anywhere. He said he asked the landlord who he talked to when he called for the unauthorized pickup.

“You better not have called it that, when you talked to the landlord,” we tell him.

“No way! You think I’m stupid or something? He told me, ‘How the hell am I supposed to know who I talked to? It was a girl.’ I asked him was it possible her name was April, and he said, ‘It’s possible’ —”

We gaped at him.

“Hold on boys, I’m not done. He said, ‘It’s possible her name was April, but it also mighta been May. Or June.’ He thought he was real funny.” Mike shook his head. “I wish I coulda had a picture of her to lay down in front of him and see his reaction, like they do on the cop shows.”

“But Mike,” we said, “that wouldn’t work. He never saw her, they just talked on the phone.”

“Oh yeah,” he said, but didn’t sound convinced. He might not be the dumbest guy on the crew, but he probably is the dumbest Mike.

~

After that we tried to set it aside and just keep working. We work hard, we don’t really have time to solve mysteries. Some of us swore off talking about her at all anymore. Dave said he didn’t want to think about her, or whether she went to college, or what, and in fact to never say the word “college” to him again, because he serviced the big college apartment complexes, and his back still hurt from last move-out season, all the old mattresses he had to drag off the floors of the trash rooms and fling into the truck.

A lot of us get hurt on the job, mostly our backs. People leave out stuff other than normal trash – furniture, broken TVs, rolls of old carpet. We’re supposed to leave little stickers saying “oversize item, call this number to arrange pickup” and then the number connects them to the front desk girls. But most of the time, if they call and pay same day, the dispatcher just makes us go right back at the end of our route. Sometimes he’ll grab another one of us who’s about to clock out and make him go with, in case the stuff’s too heavy for one guy. So, a lot of it we’ll just muscle into the truck alone, so we can be done at the end of the day. And then we get hurt.

Some of us were in the break room, dirty snow melting off our boots, when Rick said he heard maybe something happened with April and the accounting manager. Like what? We asked. He didn’t remember who, but someone told him that April got a ride home from the accounting manager the evening of the big blizzard, which had been right before she left. She drove a little Ford Focus and it always got stuck in snow.

Blizzards are bad for us, because even though we have to go out on routes, everyone else is stuck at home, loses track of the days, and forgets to set their trash out. When they realize they missed us, they call the front desk girls and argue about why we should come back. When there’s a lot of snow, we can’t get into the back alleys for our downtown commercial pickups, because plows don’t fit in the alleys and then the snow packs down into ice. More angry calls for the girls.

~

The accounting manager, Jeff, got sent to us from the corporate office and drove a Cadillac SUV. He’s a big, glowering guy, who honestly looks more like us than a front office worker. He has huge hands with thick fingers, and dirty fingernails. He looks so much like a garbage man that we actually wondered if maybe he started that way, and worked his way up to accountant and then manager. But of course, that’s ridiculous. There’s no garbage man to accountant career path. The only thing we could get promoted to here is dispatcher, but there’s only room for one or two.

We thought about the night of the blizzard, and more of us started to remember, how word had worked its way back to us that maybe some of the girls needed rides. But by the time one of us went up front, the details had all been worked out and we weren’t needed.

If Jeff took April home, maybe he did something to her that made her not want to come back. We thought he looked like he could be capable of hurting someone, even though we knew we shouldn’t think like that. Jeff always looked pissed off. But so do a lot of us, without even realizing it, because we’re in pain. Maybe he is, too.

~

It was Friday, and a gang of us went to the bar after work. We figured we could get someone talking about the accounting manager. Dave got a little drunk and slid onto an empty stool next to Dawn. The rest of us were jammed in, standing around near enough to hear them talk.

“Say darlin,” Dave said to her, “could you help us with a mystery we’re working on?”

“A mystery? You mean like The Case of The Missing Deodorant?”

Dave ignored this. “We’ve just been trying to figure out what happened to April. We have a few ideas – ” we shook our heads at him — what’re you saying, man? We knew she’d make fun of us. But our look rattled him and instead he doubled down, “A few leads, I mean.”

Dawn pretended to gasp. “Ooh, leads? Lay ‘em on me.” Dave could probably tell she was

being sarcastic, but he was too excited to care.

“Well, there’s the Washeteria.”

“What about it?”

“The building manager called for an illegal pickup. And then the business owner was real mad. So now we’re wondering, could he have been mad enough to do something to April? Or at least complain and try to get her fired? She took the call and put the work order in. And now they’re out of business.”

“Nope.” She looked smug. “Washeteria’s a chain, whole business folded. The manager there’s probably just some schmuck who has nothing to do with operations.”

“Okay,” Dave lowered his voice and we all leaned in. “How about Jeff?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“We heard he gave her a ride home, the night of the blizzard.”

She shook her head. “No, he actually gave me a ride.”

“You?”

“Yeah.”

Dave drummed his knuckles on the bar absently. “Huh. He just seemed kind of creepy, we thought. He’s always got a face like … I dunno.”

“He IS creepy! When he gave me a ride, do you know he didn’t say one word to me?

Other than asking me my address. But then once he put it in his GPS, nothing. It was so weird. I kept waiting for him to say something, but then the longer it went on, the silence got heavier and heavier, like it was suffocating me, you know? It felt impossible to find a way to say something, so then I just didn’t. Something’s definitely wrong with him. At the end, he did say ‘here you go’ when he pulled up to my house, and it was like a spell broke, and I could finally talk again. But I just said ‘thanks’ and ran up to my – ”

“Okay, but what about April?” Mike J cut across from a few stools away.

“What other theories you got?”

We didn’t say anything.

“Washeteria and Jeff? That’s all you brilliant detectives got?”

We murmured yes. It seemed like so little now.

“Then you’re all morons. I can solve the mystery for you right now. She went to beauty school.”

“Beauty school? Where?” Dave asked.

“Nowhere special, just the one in the strip mall on Ripp Road. It’s like ten minutes from

here. Actually, doesn’t one of you pick up there?” She cackled at this. “Maybe she’ll finally learn

to use toner, and her hair won’t be so brassy.”

“Brassy?” We asked.

“You know, yellowy, orangey. When you bleach your hair but it ends up orange instead of blonde?”

Was her hair brassy? It had only ever looked blonde, pretty blonde, to us. Dawn kept talking. She wanted to go back to the subject of her silent ride home with Jeff, but most of us edged away, pretending like we hadn’t been part of the conversation. Dave would have to think of an out for himself. We tried to tell ourselves that this was good, that she was in beauty school. It was better than working here. But we realized we had wished for her to get farther away. We didn’t like the thought that one of us could have run into her, carrying a big bag of hair out to the trash just as we pulled in for a pickup.

But beauty school is alright. A lot of our wives or sisters do hair. You can make good money in tips, especially if you work at a fancy salon downtown. You get to talk to people, which April would like. Seems like the only bad part is being on your feet all day. But we hear you get used to it.

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