Read Online Garbage by Stephen Dixon - Free Book Online Page B

ago.”
    â€œI don’t believe you.”
    â€œAnd I don’t believe you don’t believe me.”

“Listen, you weasel.”
    â€œExcuse me. I don’t mean to cut into your conversation, so anyone wants to tell me to shut up, go ahead. But as long as I’m here, and you want to know anything more about me I’m a barowner of a cheap place called Mitchell’s on East 5th Street, but any of you know anything about a garbage company called Stovin’s on D and Sand?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œNo, why?” the man below me says.
    â€œYou know them?”
    â€œNo, what I got with garbage? I’m curious and just talking like the other two—what else we to do?”
    I make it brief about what’s happened to me the last few weeks and ask if they’ve heard of anything like that happening downtown and they all say no and then just generally in town and they say no and then what any of them would do if he was me.
    â€œSeems like two dudes just hustling you and your apartment fire wasn’t connected or they overfanned it to a mistake,” one of the men across from me says. “Don’t bother them again and they’ll go away.”
    â€œNever give someone advice that could cost him his life,” the man above him says.
    â€œWhy, he’ll come back to haunt me?”
    â€œHis brothers might, weasel.”
    â€œWhat I’d do,” the man below me says, “is lease for a cheap fee your bar for a year and take a southern vacation but tell your friends you went north, because you’ll get yourself killed resisting back to them like that.”
    â€œBut you never heard of them or the two men, Turner or Pete? Just by your voice you sounded like you might. And it’s all right if you did, as I won’t mention where I met you or your name. I just want to know what they think they have to do to me before they stop.”
    â€œI said no, go to sleep.”
    â€œGoodnight,” the other two say.
    â€œNight, fellas.” I fall asleep and am dreaming of getting into our old car in the neighborhood I lived in with my folks years ago. They’re what they look like and in the same clothes as in my photos I lost of them in the fire and I’m the same size, age and face I’m now but act much younger, so I guess I’m supposed to be in this dream about eleven or twelve which is when we had that car, when all four doors slam closed and my head flashes white, car my father puts the ignition key in explodes, dream suddenly ends and I feel tremendous pain in my brains and hands and legs, white breaks apart into stars and dashes and dots like a universe starting up and then I have to puke, I’m screaming and awake and want to bawl like a kid the pain in my head’s so great, but I just go out and next when I’m awake the cell’s lit and someone’s sticking needles in my arm and another’s sucking out something from my mouth and nose with a hose and next when I’m awake I’m on a stretcher zipping through an empty hall except for some police and a couple of rough-looking men in cuffs and I first think it’s another dream because my head and sight’s so indistinct and then I see and think it clear. I’m wet with sweat all over it feels, pissed or shit in my pants because something like that stinks and seems to be me and my lips are sticky and I got blood on my stretcher and chest.
    â€œNo problem, you’ll be okay,” someone says, man walking next to me it is with his clipboard clapping the wall and I say yes.
    â€œYou can hear?”
    â€œHear, yes.”
    â€œGuy’s got great recovery,” the bearer in front of us says and I say yes. “Good pair of ears too.”
    I reach up to feel where it is that still hurts so much in the head but the man next to me says “Put it down, don’t touch, I’m warning you, Fleet. That’s a clean