Heart of Stone
Rufus Cox missed the Refuse Getter he piloted down alleyways when he worked as a refuse collection driver in Vancouver. The low-slung rear mount bucket made it easy for his partner to heft garbage cans into it without straining. That wide bucket could hold over ten cans worth before his partner had to activate the motors to lift the bucket and dump it into the large enclosed body from above. The two of them could work half a day before they had to drive to the dump down Grandview Highway to offload by opening the back hatch and tipping the entire dump bed.
Rufus enjoyed the shudder of all the refuse sliding out of the truck like a massive bowel movement as he drove forward and the truck springs lifted.
When he moved to Penticton where a war buddy had a job waiting for him, they gave him a Ford Model AA garbage truck that was no more than a low-sided dump truck, able to hold less than half the Refuse Getter could haul.
They also made him work alone, driving and stopping to hop out and heft the garbage cans himself.
Lifting the cans to shoulder height was heavy work and if there was any liquid in the can he ended up wearing it when he upended the can. It was filthy work, but better than nothing, which is what he had when he couldn't work in Vancouver anymore.
Rufus lost so much of his life when he left the coast.
He left behind a steady girl he planned to marry one day. She didn't understand why he quit his job nor why he wanted to move to Penticton.
"Because I don't have a heart of stone." he told her and she slowly shook her head and clucked her tongue, and thus did their love affair end.
This day, early morning found Rufus sitting in his empty truck near the Penticton train station drinking his morning coffee out of the cup that capped his thermos. It was Arawana's garbage day, so he was waiting for the morning train to pull out so he didn't have to play tag with it all the way up the hill as the rails cut a straight line through the winding road he had to navigate.
He sipped his coffee and watched the spiralling steam that leaked from the engine to lift and vanish like a ghost over the station roof.
During the war, Rufus had been an aircraft mechanic, stationed for a time with the Number 9 Royal Flying Corps, patching bullet holes in Sopwith Camels and replacing broken spars and restringing snapped cables.
His fellow mechanics would joke that they were the only soldiers smart enough to stay safe behind the lines and send their officers into the thick of the war.
Rufus had good memories of the war, even patching up the Camel of Flight Lieutenant Arthur Brown who one day shot down the Red Baron himself; Rittmeister Manfred von Richthofen of the Jagdstaffel 11 squadron.
It was a proud day for the 9th, and a proud day for Rufus who gave Brown a flying machine he could rely on.
When he returned home after the war he got a job as a mechanic servicing city trucks in Vancouver and found out he could earn more driving the new Refuse Getters with a partner perched on the back step doing the heavy lifting. The young fellow that rode on the back of Rufus' truck and hefted dozens of cans an hour was Clarence DuBois and they'd eat lunch together after stopping somewhere to wash their hands. Rufus carried soap and a scrub brush for their fingernails in a tin can on the cab floor. He'd learned about germs that caused diseases and avoided them at all costs.
Even though he rarely touched the garbage cans in Vancouver, he somehow managed to absorb the stink. So each afternoon after he rode the streetcar home to the room he rented in the rooming house on 7th avenue, he went straight to the shared bath to scrub the stink away before dinner. He was a considerate man who always washed down the tub before he returned to his room.
Most evenings in Vancouver, Rufus remained at home and ate a cold dinner while he listened to the radio, then telephoned his sweetheart Jinny after the dinner hour.
Saturday nights he'd pick Jinny up and they'd streetcar it down to Granville Street for dinner and a movie or sometimes went dancing in the flood of sound from Wendell Dorey's orchestra at the Commodore Ballroom.
Jinny Horner was a sweet and playful girl that Rufus delighted in and who he always treated with respect. It was his manners and the fact that he'd served his country in the war that earned him an honoured place at Mister Horner's dining room table every Sunday evening with Jinny sitting across from him. Sure they played around when they were out together; necking and fondling each other in theatres, dance halls, and during picnics in Stanley Park. But in front of her parents Rufus always treated Jinny like an untouchable princess.
Rufus believed he was in it for the long haul back then, knowing that once they were married all the promised delights of her lithe body would be his to enjoy, and according to Jinny his would be hers as well.
Mister Horner also hinted that when they wed he would find him a position better suited than a garbage man for his daughter's husband.
"Refuse Collector, sir." Rufus reminded him.
"A rose by any other name." Mister Horner quipped, leaning close and giving him a playful elbow nudge to the ribs.
Mister Horner never tired of that joke.
Despite the depression, Rufus' future looked bright in Vancouver. Even if Mister Horner''s hinted position never materialized, Rufus was well-liked by his bosses in the Vancouver yards so his job was secure. No matter how poor, the city would continue to generate tons of refuse every day that had to be hauled and buried. And a future with Jinny and the promise of children and a home of their own shone before him like a perfect scene on a movie screen.
But that was then. That was before he knew he could no longer love her.
"You wanna buy some Mary Warner?"
Rufus turned his head and saw a scrawny man standing at his open driver's door window, his teeth gone bad and breath stinking. The man had that punch-drunk look of a man who'd been up all night.
"What?" he asked the man, thinking he might be a pimp.
"You know. Giggle smoke. Goof butts."
Rufus got it then. The scrawny man whose face was cratered with healed up measles scars was trying to sell him marijuana.
"Not interested, bud. Take it on the arches." Rufus told him.
"How about some smack? One sniff and your day gets a lot dreamier."
"I'm going to give you a smack if you don't bugger off."
"Come on, man. I know you wanna."
Rufus reached down and pulled the door handle like he was about to get out and slap the man silly.
"Okay! Okay! No need for violence." the scrawny man screeched as he hobbled away on disjointed stork legs, muttering to himself; "People today, all they turn to is violence. Some giggle smoke and smack would turn the world right."
Rufus had seen a lot of drug dealers in Vancouver, but this specimen was his first in the Okanagan. He relatched his door, wondering what other human garbage was going to find its way up here.
Rufus looked up as he heard the steam engine chuff and the couplers stretch and bite as the morning train dragged itself out of Penticton station. He watched it slowly pick up speed as it passed the nose of his truck on its way up the cut toward Arawana. Rufus sipped his cooling coffee and lit a cigarette as the train made the the slow curve and then watched the caboose shrinking away from him, pulling a hushed silence behind it like a wake. He had to give the train a head start so it was clear of the road he had take so they didn't meet each other again and again at crossings like square-dance partners.
A few more minutes of peace with coffee and a smoke before he took the first lid off the first can of the day.
The first can was always the hardest.
Rufus drove his truck up the winding hill road after he capped his thermos and squeezed the ember off his cigarette onto the pavement. He liked Arawana because he only had to attend the houses and businesses in the town's oblong core.
The orchards, ranches, and some farms up the hill all had compost trenches and burn barrels. Many of the other farms had pigs that ate food scraps. But the close homes in town dragged their garbage cans to the curb if they didn't have an alley, so Rufus always started on Strayhorse Road, the highest stretch of houses in town. He appreciated home owners who clustered their cans together with their neighbours' to save Rufus shoe leather.
Dropping his truck in neutral and ratcheting the parking brake, Rufus donned his gloves and walked to the first cluster of cans. Grabbing hold of the first lid he took a deep breath and pulled it loose. It was like pulling off a bandaid; fast and clean and get it over with. The can was three-quarters filled with food waste, crumpled paper, and ash from a wood stove. Rufus blew the air from his lungs and relaxed, relieved that no horror awaited him inside. He carried it to the dump bed of his truck and upended it.
Then on to the next and the next and the next, placing the empty cans back where he found them and never mixing up the lids as he put them back like hats on children.
Each can got easier to uncap as his day progressed, the repeating memory of his muscles making his work a thoughtless routine and allowed his mind to relax its grip on the horror that lived in his troubled mind.
It had lived there for these past two years, vivid and dreadful like none in his history, like a tolling bell calling the faithful to a funeral.
That memory was born on a spring day and because it was Vancouver it was raining. Rufus drove the Refuse Getter down the alley behind Prior Street in Strathcona like it was on rails, moving slower than walking speed so Clarence could lift and dump the garbage cans from each side of the alley. Rufus was counting the cans so he was prepared to stop and let his partner activate the lever lifting the rear mount bucket and dumping the collection into the bed.
The routine of that morning was about to unravel like a battle-torn flag in a gale.
Rufus heard the clatter of a lid being lifted then dropped, then Clarence's shrill shout. He hit the brakes and checked his side view mirrors but couldn't see Clarence, but he could hear him.
"Jeezuz! Oh sweet Jeezuz!" Clarance shrieked, "Roof! Roof! Sweet Jeezuz!"
Rufus pulled the stick shift out of low gear and rattled it in neutral then yarded on the brake lever. Leaving the truck idling, Rufus opened his door and jumped onto the slippery cobblestones and ran to the back of the truck.
Clarence had run out of voice by then and was sitting in the puddled water along the centre of the alley, pointing a suddenly palsied hand at one of the three garbage cans.
"What is it?" Rufus asked, but Clarence could no longer speak.
Rufus walked to the suspect can and lifted off the lid that sat askew from Clarence dropping it.
Inside, on top of all the garbage was a baby. It was curled on its side the way babies do when they sleep. But it wasn't sleeping. Rufus knew that at first glance. Its eyes were half open, its skin was mottled pale blue and grey, it wore no diaper, and was wrapped in no blanket.
It looked like a newborn.
Someone had thrown a baby in a garbage can and walked away, and that image burned itself in Rufus' memory like an unwanted photograph.
Rufus couldn't remember if it was Clarence or himself who found a telephone and called the police. He couldn't remember if it was the police or the firemen from Firehall #1 who arrived first. He couldn't remember answering the questions the police asked him but he was sure he had. He couldn't remember the driver his boss sent down to drive Rufus and Clarence back to the city yards, nor the streetcar ride home after he was given the rest of the day off.
After seeing that discarded dead baby in a garbage can, Rufus' mind was tangled with questions that he couldn't answer; Who was that baby? Was it stillborn or was it left in a garbage can to die cold and alone? Did the baby's mama not want the baby? If she didn't, why not walk the extra block and leave it on the doorstep of the firehall and ring the bell before running off? Or did its daddy do this horrible thing? Did it come from one of the tenements lining Prior street? Or from one of the hobo jungles that had sprouted in downtown parks as the homeless and unemployed migrated to Vancouver?
Much later in the day he remembered calling Jinny and her meeting him in a park. She said it was awful that someone would do such a thing, but didn't know why he wanted to quit his job. She didn't know why he suddenly wanted to move away from Vancouver. She didn't know why he was letting someone else's bad behaviour affect him so much.
"Because I don't have a heart of stone." he told her and she slowly shook her head and clucked that perfect pink pointed togue, puzzled by his words.
"It's just a dead baby, Rufus." she said, rubbing his back.
And in that moment he knew he no longer loved Jinny and never could again.
'Just'
It was ironic that the only job his old war buddy in the Okanagan could find for him was as a refuse collector. But a job was a job and he doubted people up here threw babies away in the trash.
