Free Mislaid by Nell Zink Page B

felt on some level it was the strangest thing she had ever seen: innocent porn. No wonder it had to go. A wife who discoveredit could no longer feel superior to the whores in her husband’s freak books. She would see that in England, for reasons unknown, a woman can simultaneously be cute as a bug’s ear, a serious rose gardener, and a nymphomaniac. The false dichotomies promulgated by Tammy Wynette et al. would vanish like morning fog, leaving her alone with her self-doubt.
    Or were they the possessions of an old man, trying to manipulate how he would be remembered? His heirs, trying the same thing? Was he rich, poor, addicted to Masterpiece Theatre, raised in the Church of England, in love with flowers, an Englishman?
    There was no way of knowing. The cover price was high, suggesting a wealthy man, but pornography is a classic payday splurge for the shiftless.
    The magazines didn’t turn her on. One woman standing over another with a whip, absentmindedly fingering its thick, braided handle: that image, seen for a fraction of a second while leafing through a coffee-table book in the Lambda Rising Bookstore in Georgetown before she fled blushing, was burned into her memory, and she seldom had an orgasm in which it was not implicated. These girls, with their apple cheeks and dahlias, were by contrast disquietingly perverse. But they had to be worth money to someone.
    She weighed her options. The county did in fact have a junk shop. It lay in the crook of an unfinished half-moon road, just off the new four-lane highway. She got twenty dollars for thirty-eight magazines, but the shop owner leered in such a way that it was clear to her she would never again sell pornography to a filthy-minded good old boy. Since that demographic sort of dominates most aspects of the pornography market, her days in the secondhand sex industry were over almost before they began.
    But the scavenging bug had bitten her. Her next find was a dead raccoon. She took it straight to the bait shop and sold it tothe bearded white guy behind the counter for six dollars. He said in good repair they could go as high as ten.
    Roadkill in good repair: not an easy assignment, even at first light. She started swinging by the county dump several times a week.
    Like Dante’s Inferno, the dump had circles. The outer circle was where people unloaded discrete and possibly salvageable objects such as planks and furniture. In the next circle, plastic sacks hit the ground and were pushed into piles with a front loader, and somewhere back of that were the looming brown mountains of decay and the overweight turkey buzzards that couldn’t fly.
    It was to these mountains that items were taken directly when no one was supposed to know they were in the dump, for instance human bits and parts from funeral homes. It was also said that a certain white man who had treated people badly had driven his pickup deep into the dump to unload construction trash, and while he was still in his cab a black man at the controls of a lordly Caterpillar had unceremoniously covered him with dirt and shoved his truck, still running, into the mountains of the dump, burying him alive. Whether he was crushed or asphyxiated or fell unconscious from the fumes or rotted from the inside out due to the radioactivity of his load depended on whom you asked. The truck had never been found, nor looked for, because people were scared of the radiation.
    Or so the story went. There was no question of his having vanished in the usual way. He would never run out on his family like that.
    Meg first heard the story on her return visit to the junk shop with a chair from the first circle of the dump. The shop owner said he leaned toward the carbon monoxide theory as being more “mercified.” Meg said she didn’t believe anything about it, because the police would surely investigate the death of a white man and arrest eight or ten black people just to get started.
    “Not if the sheriff wants reelection they