'Salem's Lot(21)
Someone on the girl's side laughed - a high, mocking sound that carried with cruel clarity on the morning air.
He didn't took up to see who was laughing at him.
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11:15 A.M.
The Jerusalem's Lot Town Dump had been a plain old gravel pit until it struck clay and paid out in 1945. It was at the end of a spur that led off from the Burns Road two miles beyond Harmony Hill Cemetery.
Dud Rogers could hear the faint putter and cough of Mike Ryerson's lawn mower down the road. But that sound would soon be blotted out by the crackle of flames.
Dud had been the dump custodian since 1956, and his reappointment each year at town meeting was routine and by acclamation. He lived at the dump in a neat tarpaper lean-to with a sign reading' Dump Custodian' on the skew?hung door. He had wangled a space heater out of that skinflint board of selectmen three years ago, and had given up his apartment in town for good.
He was a hunchback with a curious cocked head that made him look as if God had given him a final petulant wrench before allowing him out into the world. His arms, which dangled apelike almost to his knees, were amazingly strong. It had taken four men to load the old hardware store floor safe into their panel truck to bring it out here when the store got its new wall job. The tires of the truck had settled appreciably when they put it in. But Dud Rogers had taken it off himself, cords standing out on his neck, veins bulging on his forehead and forearms and biceps like blue cables. He had pushed it over the east edge himself.
Dud liked the dump. He liked running off the kids who came here to bust bottles, and he liked directing traffic to wherever the day's dumping was going on, He liked dump-picking, which was his privilege as custodian. He supposed they sneered at him, walking across the moun?tains of trash in his hip waders and leather gloves, with his pistol in his holster, a sack over his shoulder, and his pocket knife in his hand. Let them sneer. There was copper core wire and sometimes whole motors with their copper wrappings intact, and copper fetched a good price in Port?land. There were busted-out bureaus and chairs and sofas, things that could be fixed up and sold to the antique dealers on Route 1. Dud rooked the dealers and the dealers turned around and rocked the summer people, and wasn't it just fine the way the world went round and round. He'd found a splintered spool bed with a busted frame two years back and had sold it to a faggot from Wells for two hundred bucks. The faggot had gone into ecstasies about the New England authenticity of that bed, never knowing how carefully Dud had sanded off the Made in Grand Rapids on the back of the headboard.
At the far end of the dump were the junked cars, Buicks and Fords and Chevies and you name it, and my God the parts people left on their machines when they were through with them. Radiators were best, but a good four-barrel carb would fetch seven dollars after it had been soaked in gasoline. Not to mention fan belts, tail?lights, distributor caps, windshields, steering wheels, and floor mats.
Yes, the dump was fine. The dump was Disneyland and Shangri-La all rolled up into one. But not even the money tucked away in the black box buried in the dirt below his easy chair was the best part.
The best part was the fires - and the rats.
Dud set parts of his dump on fire on Sunday and Wednesday mornings, and on Monday and Friday eve?nings. Evening fires were the prettiest. He loved the dusky, roseate glow that bloomed out of the green plastic bags of crap and all the newspapers and boxes. But morn?ing fires were better for rats,
Now, sitting in his easy chair and watching the fire catch and begin to send its greasy black smoke into the air, sending the gulls aloft, Dud held his .22 target pistol loosely in his hand and waited for the rats to come out.
When they came, they came in batallions. They were big, dirty gray, pink-eyed. Small fleas and ticks jumped on their hides. Their tails dragged after them like thick pink wires. Dud loved to shoot rats.
'You buy a powerful slug o' shells, Dud,' George Middler down at the hardware store would say in his fruity voice, pushing the boxes of Remingtons across. 'Town pay for 'em?' This was an old joke. Some years back, Dud had put in a purchase order for two thousand rounds of hollow-point .22 cartridges, and Bill Norton had grimly sent him packing.
'Now,' Dud would say, 'you know this is purely a public service, George.'
There. That big fat one with the gimpy back leg was George Middler. Had something in his mouth that looked like a shredded piece of chicken liver.
'Here you go, George. Here y'are,' Dud said, and squeezed off. The .22's report was flat and undramatic, but the rat tumbled over twice and lay twitching. Hollow points, that was the ticket. Someday he was going to get a large-bore .45 or a .357 Magnum and see what that did to the little cock-knockers.
That next one now, that was that slutty little Ruthie Crockett, the one who didn't wear no bra to school and was always elbowing her chums and sniggering when Dud passed on the street. Bang. Goodby, Ruthie.
The rats scurried madly for the protection of the dump's far side, but before they were gone Dud had gotten six of them - a good morning's kill, If he went out there and looked at them, the ticks would be running off the cooling bodies like . . . like . . . why, like rats deserting a sinking ship.
This struck him as deliciously funny and he threw back his queerly cocked head and rocked back on his hump and laughed in great long gusts as the fire crept through the trash with its grasping orange fingers.
Life surely was grand.
11