It Flaps Over Heavy and Clashes Down

I’m living in an old textile mill a man converted to apartments rented out to liberal arts majors willing to overpay for the novelty of the thing before he lost it to the bank. My window faces north, looks over the railroad tracks where the trains run coal southeast towards the power plant. When the train isn’t running you can see into the houses of the poor blacks on the other side.

The apartment's walls don’t go to the ceiling, so it’s too big to cool, and at seven o’clock it keeps me in a sweat. So I take a beer and a few Bukowski poems and head down to the deck that’s part of the new building they added here a year or two ago. There is a table there, and a few chairs, and hardly ever any people, so I can go there and sit and read and drink before the sun falls.

I get out there, facing west, towards my building, and sit for a while, and sip on my beer and read a little Bukowski. He goes to a whorehouse and skips on the whore and gets kicked out of the place, after he pays.

Then some folks walk by and catch my eye. A man and two women, Mexican, the man, in front, wearing a cowboy hat, on his cell phone, and the women, one young, one old, in grey jogging pants and sleeveless t-shirts, pushing a couch on rollers. I watch them pass by and turn at the tracks, up towards the dump.

These people live two doors down from us, at a discount they get for cleaning on Saturday mornings before we wake up. We know them best from the morning after Halloween, when we went into the hall to assess the damage of our party the night before, and saw countless cigarette butts and dripping beer cans, and the older one walking with push broom in hand, followed by the younger girl with a mop. We meant to apologize, but the moment wasn’t right, and by Christmas, which we’d all agreed to remember them on, it seemed too late.

They wheel the couch down about seventy yards, to the dumpster, and leave it there with two others. The man, still on the phone, takes a stick and lifts the top of the dumpster and I hear it clang against the metal side. The women toss trash bags over the top and laugh. Then the man, still on his phone, takes the stick and goes to push the cover back over the top. He fumbles with it. It bounces on the stick for a minute while he keeps trying to push it over from his toes. “You gotta take it from the bottom up,” I say to myself. Then he lets it drop low, and he runs it high with the stick and it flaps over heavy and clashes down.

There is a field out another fifty-or-so yards beyond them, and somebody in a red pickup drives out in it and tracks up dusk and it rises high and runs far. It makes the sun, sitting behind the old brown silo in grey clouds, look closer to dusk, and it makes the older of the women cough, and the three Mexican workers come back my way.

They stop about right in front of me and the man gets off his cell phone. The older woman rolls down the bottoms of her grey pants, the younger woman looks my way and smiles a little, and Bukowski reaches to the left “for the last glass of the Blood of the Lamb.”