Juarez Square and Other Stories (9 page)

A stern-faced security guard appeared and slapped a heavy hand on his shoulder. Deke had lingered too long. “Come on, robot man,” the guard said. “Back to your trash.”

With the guard following close behind, Deke approached the towering wall, the barrier separating the Dump Lord’s estate from the twenty square miles that provided his livelihood. The engineer in Deke never failed to admire the genius of the landscape architect’s design, how the wall’s dense covering of vines and well-placed olive trees cleverly concealed any view of the massive garbage dump that lay beyond. No matter where you stood on the estate’s grounds you’d never guess how close it was. They’d even installed a ventilation system to keep the stink out.

And it was the stink that hit him like a slap in the face as the guard jostled him through the gate to the other side.

* * *

Deke meandered through the dump’s lonely maze of narrow paths. Walls of compressed fetid garbage, a century’s worth, towered over him five meters high on each side. Spare parts, he thought, shaking his head.
Idiot
. Chang was right. Spare parts weren’t a crisis. Deke would have to come up with something better.

A shoe box-sized dump bot whizzed past his feet. It beeped rapidly as it scanned through the dense layers of trash, searching for scrap aluminum, pockets of biogas, vintage fashions, anything the Dump Lord could sell in the markets for hard currency. He watched the tenacious little machine stop and go, scan and re-scan.

His pulse suddenly quickened as he stared at the robot, an idea taking shape. A word repeated itself over and over in his head.

Leverage
.

He walked faster. A minute later he arrived at the trailer and threw open the door, breathless with excitement.

“Timo?” he called. “You here? Timo?” The trailer was empty except for the usual scattering of clothes and empty food boxes. Deke exited the trailer and found the boy down one of the less traveled paths, methodically picking through a small animal’s carcass with his bare fingers.

Deke threw his hand over his nose, the rotten stench so strong it overpowered dumpside’s ambient odors. “Jesus, why don’t you have the bots incinerate that thing? It’s disgusting.” He loathed the boy’s interest in dump rat dissection, but tolerated the odd habit as a trade-off, a small price to pay for the perfect helper. The boy never asked for much, did what he was told, and was a quick study with the bots.

Timo didn’t look up as he poked through the entrails. “I know it don’t smell like roses, Mr. Deke, but take a look here.” He smiled and held up something small and shiny and covered in slime. “There you go, ruby ring, pretty as you like. These here dump rats love anything shiny, and sometimes when they swallow stuff they shouldn’t it gets stuck in their gut. Mostly they just got cockroaches in there, but every once in a while you win the lotto.”

Deke grimaced at the sight of the boy’s hands, shiny with rat goo. “Leave that thing alone, I’ve got news.”

* * *

Deke knelt over a pair of dump bots, tapping in the final sequence of their new instructions. He snapped the lids closed, watched them skitter away, and smiled. “Fly, my pretties.”

A voice behind him said, “You actually talk to them? Why am I not surprised?” Deke nearly fell over as he whirled around.

Chang
. Deke blinked and stared with his mouth open.
Chang…here
. In his eight years working with the Dump Lord’s robots, he’d never known Chang to take a single step beyond the estate’s barrier wall, but now here he stood, ten miles dumpside.

It could only mean the plan was working. The Chang who Deke had known would never have lowered himself to come here and dirty his precious clothes, unless there was something big on his mind.

A surgical mask covered most of Chang’s face, everything but his glaring eyes. “What the hell’s wrong with your phone? I’ve been trying to reach you for two days.”

Deke’s stomach fluttered; he resisted the urge to smile. Instead he shrugged and feigned ignorance. “I needed the phone parts for a bot. What are you doing here?”

“Is there someplace around here we can talk that doesn’t stink so bad?”

Deke motioned for him to follow and led him through a narrow, upward-sloping path. The Dump Lord’s right hand lagged behind, gingerly avoiding contact with everything around him and wincing at the sight of dump rats. Deke glanced back and stifled a laugh.
You’re on my turf now
. Back at the estate Chang might be the big shot power-tripper, deciding who got in and who didn’t. But this was dumpside, and dumpside was Deke’s side.

A minute later they emerged from the path and into the warm sunlight at the top of a mound. A light breeze lessened the stink.

“Jesus, that’s better,” Chang said. His eyes widened as he took in the view around him. “Christ, I never realized how big it is.”

Deke nodded. “This is one of the taller mounds. You can see just about all of it from here.”

Gently rolling hills of compacted garbage stretched for miles in every direction. An endless supply of windblown paper formed itself into swirling eddies, animating the dump’s surface like plumes of sand in a desert. Crisscrossing the dump was an ever-deepening network of paths carved out by the bots over time.

Deke remembered when he could step into a bot path like stepping off a curb; now they were five, even ten meters deep in places. He reached up and touched his face, running his fingers over the lines around his mouth, the loose skin of his jowls. The telltales of middle age. During his morning routine lately he’d found himself staring into the bathroom mirror, imagining tiny unseen bots scurrying back and forth inside the wrinkles of his face, slowly deepening them like the dump paths. Turning him into an old man, alone and miserable.

“The daily take is down,” Chang snapped. “What the hell’s going on out here?”

Deke shrugged. “You came all the way out here just to tell me that? The dailies go up and down all the time.”

“I’m not talking about
normal
ups and downs. The take is
way
down in the past few days. Lowest I’ve ever seen.”

“Lowest you’ve ever seen, huh?” Deke echoed, playing dumb. “You don’t say?”

Bits of ancient yellowed newspaper stuck to Chang’s jacket; he furiously brushed his sleeves and lapels. “How can you not have noticed? What the hell are you doing out here, sleeping all day?”

Deke paused before answering. The moment had been a long time in coming, and he was going to savor each delicious second of Chang’s discomfort.

“Sleeping?” he said. “Of course not. Let me tell you what I did today. First I woke up, brushed my teeth and had breakfast…No wait…I had breakfast,
then
I brushed my teeth.” He smiled stupidly as Chang’s face reddened. “What good would it do to brush my teeth before breakfast?” He rubbed his chin. “Where was I? Oh yeah, so anyway, after breakfast I thought about going down to Tijuana for more parts. But then I remembered this time of year the wind blows so much dust around you just want to stay inside and—”

“I don’t care about any of that! There’s something wrong with those bots and you need to fix it quick.”

“Okay, okay,” Deke said. “Let me take a look.” He took out his slate and tapped it to life. He hummed a pop song as he lazily swiped his finger across the slate’s surface, basking in the heat of Chang’s growing frustration. “Hmmm, been four months since the last full-blown diagnostics. Everything looked fine back then.” He looked up from the slate at Chang and lifted his eyebrows. “You want to stick around while I run some new ones? It’ll only take a few hours.”

Even with half his face obscured by the mask, Deke could see Chang was losing it. “A few hours,
here?
” The possibility of spending so much time dumpside seemed to horrify him.

Deke chuckled. “Well, not right here. You can wait in my trailer while I run all the—”

“Enough!” Chang took a menacing step toward Deke. “Let me keep it simple for you. Your job is to keep those robots running and keep the daily take up. My job is to keep my employer’s businesses running smoothly.”

Deke swallowed. Chang took another step forward and said, “So if one of his whores won’t put out, I have her beaten until she does. And if a crank peddler skims profits, I cut his hand off. Now listen to me close, you fat fuck. You’re no less replaceable than any random whore or crank pusher. And if I have to come back out here it won’t be for a chat, you get me?”

Chang turned around and disappeared down the path. It was several minutes before Deke stopped shaking.

* * *

Nighttime was always peaceful dumpside. The solar-powered bots hibernated until morning and the only sound was the soft rustling of windblown paper and debris. The light from the windows of Deke’s trailer was the only illumination for miles in every direction, a beacon in a sea of darkness.

“I don’t see no good coming of this, Mister Deke.” Timo looked troubled as he placed their dinner plates on the small folding table. “Why don’t you just go down to the city and get a whore? Tijuana’s full of whores.”

Deke exhaled. Ever since Chang showed up dumpside two days ago, Timo had been a nervous hand-wringing nuisance.

“Look,” Deke said, “I don’t want a whore. I can get a whore anytime.”

Timo sat and chewed his lower lip. “That Chang’s a monster. Not the kind of fella we want pissed off at us.”

Deke took a bite of stew. “I told you you’ve got nothing to worry about. Chang doesn’t know you help with the bots. He thinks you just run errands and make food for me. This whole thing is on my head, understand?”

The boy’s face didn’t change. “That still don’t make me feel no better, Mister Deke.”

“You’re going to make yourself sick worrying so much,” Deke said, chewing. He forced himself to look unconcerned as the image of Chang’s scowl flashed across his mind, the menace in his eyes more a promise than a threat. Two days had passed since Deke had sabotaged the dump bots’ search patterns. The daily take was down to nearly nothing.

Deke looked out the window. Chang was out there somewhere, flipping through his slate, growing angrier as the latest figures came in, each report worse than the last.

No daily take meant no money coming in, and the longer the situation persisted, the more Chang’s coveted role as right hand man was at risk. And while he might bluster and threaten, eventually Chang’s pragmatism would overcome his rage. Deke was counting on that.

Leverage
.

Deke had the leverage, and if he held firm and didn’t back down, Chang would have grant him an audience with the Dump Lord. That was the plan, anyway.

Timo fiddled with his spoon, his food untouched. “And what if you do get that meeting, Mister Deke? You just gonna ask the big boss to let you bring a woman in here?”

Deke smiled. Every time he started to think Timo had half a brain, the boy would say something that changed his opinion. “It won’t be that simple,” Deke answered. “It’s a long play. First I tell him about ‘the crisis,’ how the dump bots can’t find anything because they’ve harvested all the easy surface-level resources. Low-hanging fruit, understand?” Timo nodded and Deke continued. “Then I tell him not to worry, that I’m on top of it, and I wanted to come and tell him that personally. Then, a few days later when the daily take miraculously hits an all-time high…”

“You’re the big hero,” Timo said.

“Bingo. And no one could refuse the big hero a favor, right?”

After dinner Timo served coffee, his face still twisted with worry. “Just don’t get why you need to do this,” the boy said.

Poor child, Deke thought. Of course he couldn’t understand. Deke had taken the boy off the streets six months ago, and before that the boy had only known a life of hustling and panhandling in Tijuana’s brutish squalor. For a street kid like Timo, life inside the Dump Lord’s razorwired perimeter, with regular meals and a safe place to sleep, had to be paradise by comparison. The endless mounds of trash an oasis in the West Texas desert.

Had Deke ever felt the same way? Lucky to have work, grateful to have any job under any condition as long as it kept food on the table? Maybe. But things had changed after eight years. Eight long years living under Chang’s silly ‘no women dumpside’ rule. Eight years with no human connection except Timo his helper and Chang his tormentor. And the infrequent whore down in Tijuana wasn’t enough, not nearly enough to fill the emptiness inside.

“I know you don’t understand,” Deke said, patting the boy on the shoulder. “Someday you will.”

Someday the boy would understand there were worse things to lose than your life.

* * *

The next morning Deke stood at the north entrance of the Dump Lord’s estate. He took a deep breath, raised a trembling hand, and knocked on the door. Chang answered with dark circles under his eyes. The man looked as if he hadn’t slept in days.

“What are you doing here?” Chang snapped.

Deke’s pulse began to race. He’d hoped to find Chang beaten down and desperate, softened up by two sleepless nights of waiting for the numbers to get better. Instead a monster with red-rimmed eyes, simmering with rage, stood before him.

You’ve got the leverage
. Deke repeated it to himself as he stepped into the foyer. The Dump Lord’s right hand awkwardly moved back a step, shocked by Deke’s sudden boldness.