Chapter Twelve

His finger froze on the phone above the zero button. " You know, lady, I ought to—"

" Oh, shut up, you talking hairdo. My name's not Lady, it's Marilyn, which doesn't mean much. What does mean something is that my daughter wins tomorrow's title. She's going to play Fur Elise and it doesn't matter if Miss Iowa cures cancer on stage, or if Miss Idaho gets stigmata, my daughter wins. Period. And you will make sure this happens. "

" This is a joke. " Eugene's face relaxed. " The guys at the sta­tion did set this up. "

" No joke. "

" You're good. "

" There's nothing for me to be good at, Eugene. This is for real. "

Eugene's face clenched and his voice assumed the cool me-tered speech of TV reason. " This is so totally Gothic, isn't it? You'd kill for your little proxy to win. I bet you and your lit­tle Miss. . . "

" Wyoming. " The family still had yet to move to that state, but Marilyn had already begun creating technical citizenship by renting a small storage locker on the outskirts of Cheyenne under Susan's name. At the present moment she wanted to unbalance Eugene's thinking. " You're wearing a beef bikini, Eugene. "

" Wha—? " He reflexively reached for his privates, which had perhaps escaped containment.

" Read these. " From her handbag she removed a bundle of photocopies and slapped them onto the bedspread, and from where he stood, Eugene could tell what they were. " How do we spell 'mail fraud, ' Eugene? We spell it F-B-I. " Marilyn walked to the door and yanked it open. " You're a big fish in an itty-bitty pond, Hairdo. But it's my pond. Give me what I want and it doesn't go beyond these walls. " She stepped outside and looked in. " I could otherwise care less about you. Turning you in would be like spraying sewage onto a burning house. It'd get a job done, but—well, you think it over. Good-bye, Eugene. " She shut the door.

Onstage that night, the pageant flowed like soda. Susan made semifinalist, then finalist, played her Fur Elise and then stood with the other finalists on the stage directly before the judge's stand. She felt lovely. She had learned to work with the new all-angle beauty her jaw correction and nose job had loaned her. And then, looking through the lights, one face opened up through the optical fog—a face that broke through and became disembodied from all others in the auditorium. It was Eugene—the trash man! —and he was looking at Susan with the same wise, knowing face as his 8-x-lO head shot. Her eyes linked with his, and for the first time in her life she felt sexual. She didn't just put on the pose, she felt naked, proudly naked, and she pulled her shoulders back as if to give more of herself to Eugene. She was being judged, and she knew she was coming out ahead.

Eugene, meanwhile, looked at Susan. He wondered how he could have overlooked this scrumptious little gazelle at a previous competition. Fur Elise? Hell, she could play " Chop­sticks" with a spatula and he'd vote for her. He pointed at Susan and then back at himself, smiled broadly with film-star teeth, then winked with the force of a blazing iron scorching linen.

Susan heard music and she heard her name. And then a tiara landed on her head and she felt the reassuring cool fluttering sensation of the winner's sash draped from her right shoulder.

Afterward, when the crowds had dispersed, Susan tried to lo­cate Eugene amid the vanishing crowds under the ruse of look­ing for another show dog, Janelle, from Hawthorne, California.

" Janelle? " asked Marilyn. " You hate Janelle. "

" I don't hate anybody, Mom. "

" Janelle hid your left pump in Spokane two years ago. "

" They didn't prove that. "

" Winning seems to make you so charitable. Testy, too. "

" I'm not testy. " But she did feel nervous. She was panicking, as her eyes darted about looking for Eugene. Her stomach felt like a kite that was having trouble getting airborne.

" Of course not, sweetie. Oh, look—there she is over there. . . "

" Where? " Confused, Susan snapped her head in the direction her mother had pointed to. No Eugene there.

" Gotcha. "

" Oh Mom. "

" Don't worry, sweetie. Whatever's going on, I'm not going to press it tonight. You " re a champion. "

Chapter Twelve

Susan felt the heat from the cooling cheeseburgers slither­ing from the trash bag beside her. Having recovered from the explosive clamp of the dumpster's lid, her ears now registered her own slow breathing and the rustle of the bagged trash looming above her like a potential Nerf avalanche. The smell— that was the strongest sensation, sickly sweet—ketchup, buns, fish, beef and potato mingled with their greases and liquids, varnishing the metal beneath her shoes.

There was no light, and in its absence, the shapes she touched burst forth on her fingertips like crippled fireworks. She was hungry, but her repulsion for the dead food overrode her hunger. She tried shrinking herself, like a bird caught inside a house. And then she relaxed. A bit.

She tried to make a seat for herself, batting her hands out into the trash bags and locating a springy one full of paper cups, foam clamshell containers and paper napkins. She sat on the bag in her corner. The smells around her were not diminishing, and her nose refused to acclimatize the way it would around a barnyard's manure. The smell wasn't enough to gag her, but it refused to be ignored.

Her hunger grew worse, but the thought of eating one of the burgers cooling around her made her retch. She was thirsty, and the energy bars in her travel bag tasted like paste and required water to eat. She reached for her bag—her bag! She'd dropped it onto the concrete under the dumpster when the workers came by. She warbled with regret.

Hours passed.

Now she was unbearably hungry. She crumbled, and reached for one of the unsold burgers, its heat gone, recognizable as new only because of its wrapping. She ate it with as much gusto as she might eat Styrofoam packing peanuts.

Her mouth felt like the inside of a catcher's mitt. She ripped open the bag beneath her and rooted through its contents until she came upon a waxed paper cup containing drink remnants. She found a dash of Orange Crush happily diluted with melted ice cubes and downed it in one swig. She rummaged more, culling inert french fries, packets of honey-mustard dipping sauce, prickly drinking straws and smudged napkins. Presto! An almost full medium-sized Diet Coke, metallic and body tem­perature, flat and wet. She drank it and then tossed the cup to the top of the heap. Then she needed to pee, and her hands fum­bled in the trash in search of disposable commodes, two empty milkshake cups.

Using folded cardboard, she built herself an impromptu shanty in the corner. For the shanty's floor she placed a buffer layer of dry garbage to insulate her from the dumpster's bot­tom, and to one side she built an avalanche shed, so as to be safe if the trash collapsed during the night. For a pillow she used folded cardboard, onto which she placed a bag full of crushed waxed paper cups.

She was surprising herself with her adeptness at navigating inside her new world—in her new life she'd have to start at the bottom—this was her trial by fire. And so it was with a strange pride that she fell asleep, proud she could handle herself no matter what was tossed her way, and her sleep was dreamless.

She was wakened with a stun-gunned jolt of fear by the  

industrial crash of steel on steel. Morning—a dump truck come to lift her and her new home away.

She heard the locks above her being unlocked and then almost immediately the dumpster was jolted upward, and her body was compressed by the wall of trash bags that had been against the opposing wall. Her mind raced—a trash compressor—oh God. Within seconds she was upside down and drenched in trickling soda pops which percolated into her sleep nook. Then the bottom fell out of her world and she was briefly weightless while tumbling into a truck bed, pelted with waste, the morning sun blinding her.

The bed was full, and mercifully it had no compressor. Feel­ing like Bugs Bunny, she poked her head up from her trash and looked over its edge and into the commercial strip she'd walked the night before, haloed in sunlight beaming in low from the eastern horizon. The truck moved onto an interstate with fresh, nonburger winds filling her nostrils and cleansing her hair of ketchup packets and salts and peppers.

It was a long ride, and Susan lay atop the waste and felt the sun on her eyelids.

The truck slowed down, changed gears, stopped, started, made various turns and then rumbled onto the dirt of a sanitary landfill. Trucks around her were beeping as they maneuvered themselves in reverse gear, as did Susan's. Its bed tilted up, up, then up some more, and yet again Susan felt weightless, scram­bling up the dumping trash as though she were a monkey walk­ing up a down escalator. She finally came to rest on the crown of a crest of a heap of trash. Sun—warmth—freedom.

She could only see trucks, not people, and she walked down and through the cones of junk, seemingly groomed but utterly filthy.

She came across a scarecrow for seagulls. She stole its mantle, a men's XL down ski jacket with felt pen stains around its hem, and small castanet of sporty ski lift tags chattering on its zipper.

Inside its chest pocket was a pair of bad, cheap aviator glasses of the sort found in dime stores. She put them on. She swept her hair back and left the dump, smiling.

She headed toward Indiana.