Brownfields, Brokering Boards and Scrap Haulers' Dreams

Yeah, that Matt Karney is a mean dealin' wheel. All day long, me and Troy carried this foundry scrap out of some weedy old brownfield on the North Side. Man, there were bushes all over the place and it was hot -- too hot to wear flannel shirts to cover our arms. But that's 'zactly what we did. We weren't going to wear tee-shirts and we got all scratched up carrying those rusty old ingots out of that dilapidated old foundry yard.

"I knew a lot of folks who worked at this foundry," Troy said. "A lot of them were my friends. Jimmy, he's workin' as a janitor, Kenny, he got himself a job in a grocery uptown. Tony, he went and got himself a degree. Now he works on computers all day long."

I just nodded. I knew quite a few of those foundry workers, too, but it's all too late now.

That foundry closed up shop a good ten years ago.

I like Troy. He's not a juicer or a druggy and when I tell him to be at my house at seven-thirty, he's there. Over the years, I've hired a lot of guys to help me haul scrap. Half the time -- if that -- most never even bothered to show up for a decent day's work. And as soon as I paid `em, most were down at the Wooden Nickel or The Side Door drinkin' up their profits and tryin' to find a skirt.

I knew the price of scrap the preceding day was fifteen dollars a ton higher than the price Karney shelled out. And fifteen bucks might not sound like all that much, but after collecting a couple tons of those ingots, it sure makes a difference.

Not only did that Karney cheat us, I cut myself real bad on one of those steel forgings. Right on my left leg, in fact. At first it didn't hurt. It sort of felt numb, like sometimes you feel after bein' out in the cold in the wintertime. Then, with bushes all around me in that horrible field, I looked down and saw the whole outside portion of my right leg covered with red and I knew it wasn't rust from them ingots. When I got cut, see, I got numb and couldn't feel anything down that leg. I grabbed this rickety old blue jean jacket from behind the seat and cut it into swats with a pair'a wire shears. I wrapped the strips around my right leg. That gash was big and deep. The bandage stopped my leg from bleeding and I was able to continue working. When I got home that night and took off the bandage -- that dark, mean cut was all crusted over all sappy and sort'a nice. Right then, I knew, I just knew my leg would be all right. I put some rubbing alcohol on it, along with some other stuff.

Do you know what that Karney said to me when me and Troy hauled in that load after I got cut real bad? He said I looked like some horror show outcast.

Lazarus rises from the dead! I wanted to grab Troy by the arm and dump that scrap right in the middle of Karney's office and leave it all there.

But Matt Karney's the king of rusty metal in this city and all me and Troy are is a couple'a scrap haulin' jokers who ride around all day in a beat up old pickup painted three or four different colors.

Yesterday wasn't the only day Matt Karney blinded us with that arithmetic hodgepodge. He changes that metal brokering board all the time. Up and down, up and down goes that green chalkboard in his yard's front office. Not the board, but the chalk. But he's the only show in town. He's the boss.

Yeah, ole' Karney thinks he's the New York Stock Exchange as much as those numbers change. And how about that $15 drop for a ton of steel scrap in one day? In a strong steel market, like now, scrap never changes more than $10 over a long period of time, let alone fifteen bucks in one day. Any scrap hauler knows that.

"I'm a metal broker and metals go broke once in awhile. That's why the numbers go down," Karney told me this summer, after a pound of aluminum cans dropped from forty-one cent to thirty-five cent in three hours.

Fire and brimstone -- if I was watchin' that aluminum notch on the board awfully close, I might have believed the old bum. But until today, aluminum never changed from forty-one cent in over five weeks. So I asked Karney how he gets all the pertinents needed to change the board. He just shakes his head and tells me I could go down to Bucknell's Salvage and dump my aluminum there.

"It's my way or the highway," he says, all arrogant, with his chest puffed out like he's some kind'a would-be king.

As long as I've been in this business, I've known that scrap prices are controlled by COMEX, which is a global securities exchange, whatever that is. The London Metals Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade have something to do with it, too.

You might think of me as some kind of simple scrap hauler. But I'm actually a lot more than that. I'm a businessman. I keep up with what's going on in my business world. But in this city, Matt Karney draws the bottom line. Myself, I don't know how the prices change with these big operations. I just know that Karney finagles the board quite a bit. And I doubt if he knows a single soul at any of those fancy-assed outfits. Anyhow, those starched white shirts that probably sit on those boards probably never loaded a ton of scrap in all their lives. . . .

One day this summer, after we collected a bunch'a aluminum cans in these barrels outside this closed bar, I mentioned something to Troy about droppin' `em at Bucknell's yard.

"Bucknell's shadier than the devil," Troy says.

You see, Bucknell is this old codger who has a scrapyard down on Railroad Street. He don't even use no board to tabulate scrap prices. He just goes by what he feels at any given moment. And what he feels is always lower than fair market share; lower, even, than what Matt Karney pays for scrap.

But geez, that was a heartbreaker, the day we hauled all that aluminum.

Aluminum is so light and it takes so many loads just to make a few bucks.

And then again, when you have some board changin' fool like Karney sabotagin' your scrap-haulin' operations, it sure puts a dampener on your day. We worked from early morning to late at night on that job. After we got all the aluminum cans from outside that bar, we started carryin' that aluminum out of some extrusion plant on the city's South Side that needed to have all its aluminum scrap cleared right away. Overall, we must'a collected ten or eleven truckloads that day. Then we high tailed it from that extrusion plant to Karney's like this old pickup was a Nascar. Funny, two or three good loads of high carbon steel would've paid us more than what we got from that bauxite trash.

Yeah, I remember feeling really depressed after that job was done. Me and Troy stood outside Karney's Iron and Metal Co., lookin' at the third quarter moon, and we was both too bewildered to think about much else.

"Just take two or three days off. We'll get back to this next week," I told him.

"Man, it wasn't even worth coming out here today," he said.

"Some days you get the bear, some days the bear gets you," I said.

After a day of listening to religious music on the spiritual radio station, I called Troy and told him to be at my house at seven. I heard through the grapevine there was some copper at this old dairy that just closed up shop and we were going to raid the place to make up for the aluminum fiasco. Yeah, we went there and hauled out a good load `a copper. Most times, Karney's board lists copper at a little over a buck a pound.

We made a bundle that day and I paid Troy three times what he usually makes. But then again, I made about ten times what I normally make.

Every scrap hauler's dream is a good load of copper.

But when we went back for another load, the cops pulled in the drive. Boy, it was a good thing Troy was out in front by the pickup, 'cause I was way in the back of that dairy tearin' copper tubes from the wall. Troy started yellin' like crazy and I ran out'a there. I thought Troy was dying, he was screaming so frantically. Anyhow, I took a look at what was comin' up the drive -- a cop car -- and I knew we could've been facing some serious charges -- stripping that costly orange metal from the walls -- so we both jumped in that old truck and got the bajezabel out `a there.

Being that there were crab apple trees all over that place and it was the height of summer, with leaves and old bushes here, there and everywhere, the cops didn't even see us leave that dairy. I doubt if they even knew we was there at all, but I wasn't about to go back. No, never. Once was enough. Anyway, we took the copper to Karney and on a half load, made much more than we would've hauling a whole day's steel. But then again, we could've been facing some serious misdemeanors, maybe even felonies, if the city's finest would've caught us in that derelict eyesore tearin' tubes and pipes off the walls.

*** **** **** ****

I remember one day me and Troy was carrying these cast-iron forgings from this weedy brownfield in a city about an hour from here. Troy picked this huge piece of metal and gentle as a lamb, laid it in the back of my truck. The shocks on that truck sagged. We decided to drive easy on the way back to Karney's, but one of the shocks blew out on the ride there. Bajazabel! It sounded like a piece of dynamite went off! We had to unload that big piece of scrap and throw it in the weeds, alongside the interstate. We drove back home on an empty bed just so we could make the trip. That truck was rattlin' to beat all hell on the drive back. The darned bed was hunkered down so low it looked like a sagging pillow! The next day I took the truck into the garage and had it fixed. It cost a good bit of money -- as much as a good day's haul -- to get that truck back in operation. Anyway, I gave Troy the day off that day the truck was being fixed. Hell, I didn't yell at him. He didn't know any better. Picking up that big forging for him was like me pickin' up a heavy suitcase.

It's a good thing Troy has a real gentle side. He'd be a menace to society, with his god-awful strength, if he even had even an itsy bitsy bit of a mean streak in his bones. But he's really as gentle as a country stream. He loves little kids and buys 'em candy when we're out and about. He opens doors and carries grocery bags for little old folks. He gives dimes and quarters to bums on our routes. And even though he acts kind'a stupid, he's not dumb at all. Sometimes he surprises me. He watches that board at Karney's yard and understands the way it goes up and down. He knows his math pretty good. Yeah, I think a lot of the time that bein' dumb for him ain't nothin' more than an act. Sure, lots'a folks thinks he's dumb, but he's not. He's pretty sharp, actually.

A long time ago, heck, it must've been a good two or three years ago, me and Troy got into a jam down at the old iron millworks on McMurry Street. This old mill's been closed a long time and a bunch of scrap haulers already raided the place, so there wasn't much more than bones off the picked chicken to take out'a there. But sure enough, every time we go there we find something to suit our fancies. One time, we came upon a whole back room full of iron forgings. We broke a padlock on the door and found our treasure. But after we picked up a good portion of those forgings and already took three loads to Karney's, we uncovered a human skeleton. Troy looked down and he started movin' his lips up and down, up and down.

"What're we gonna' do 'bout this?" he asked.

"We're gonna' leave him here, after we load the rest'a this scrap," I told him.

"How'd he die?"

"You must think I'm a fortune teller, Troy. Who the hell you think I am, God?! Holy Moses, I don't know how he died! All I know is that we didn't kill the poor fool!"

I never saw Troy work so hard after he saw that skeleton. He must've loaded ten forgings in 'bout a minute. After ten minutes of uncovering that skeleton, we had all the ingots in the back'a the truck and we was gone. Man, that skeleton stunk. It smelled like the most rotten hamburger you'd ever want to take a whiff of -- and it looked ridiculous, dressed in a beat up old flannel shirt and faded blue work pants. But we made a good bundle off that haul and Karney didn't even change the board that day, so we got a good price on the seven and a half ton `a forgings we took into his yard.

Anyway, what surprised me about Troy that day was that Karney rated one of the loads low -- he wanted to give us a hundred bucks for a haul when really, it should've been more like one-ninety. Troy checked the board and came up with the correct figure. Old Karney was shocked. He thought there was no way Troy could figure out that board. What took Karney a half minute to figure out on a pocket calculator, it took Troy only a few seconds to figure out in his head. Troy should be an accountant or some kind of physicist, not no scrap hauler!

*** *** *** ***

This city's seen better days. When I was a kid, the mills were churning out orange and black smoke and everybody was working and eating. If you couldn't find no job around here, you just didn't want to work. The bad thing is, all that's left of coke and ore around here is scrapyards filled with asbestos, scrap and rats. Right around the corner from these unsightly nightmares, there's usually a couple'a whore bars. But me and Troy, we make it through okay. Just as long as he don't buy no stupid dog, things'll be fine. That's the last thing I need him to do is buy some stupid mutt. He'll miss work half the time, since he'd stay home to play with the dumb animal. But for me, Troy's the best thing that happened to my scrap haulin' business. Before Troy, there was a whole slew of helpers who just didn't work out. One of 'em was drunk all the time. You can't hire some scrap helper who's stoned all the time. Pickin' up these iron forgings can be dangerous when you're sober, let alone drunk.

I remember that guy well. Drivin' `round here with him was like smellin' the outside of a bar at 1 o'clock in the afternoon on a hot July day. Boy, did he stink! And cuss, boy did he ever! Long, scraggly beard, big and fat with gray blubber stickin' out the sides of his greasy tee-shirt. He was a mean cuss. And like me and almost every scrap hauler, he lived by himself. He told me at the time that he lived in a basement apartment he rents off some senile old uncle of his. He said the last job he had was a millwright in a steel mill. Hell, the mills closed a good ten years before I hired him!

He must `a been livin' on a no-food diet or somethin'. He was always drunk. He turned that metal haulin' talent to booze right quick and he only worked for me for about two weeks. Then he got thrown in jail for gettin' into a bar fight. He beat some old wino up really good. You could tell he was frequenting some high rollin' places.

Anyway, when he got released from jail he came to see me about work. So I told him there wasn't any work for me and him. Man, he started rantin' and ravin' at me and started moving his hands around, like he was punchin' at air. Realizin' I didn't need to stay there in the first place, I jumped in my truck and left him at Karney's. Why in the hell not? Give the problem to Karney. Heaven knows, Karney's caused enough problems for me.

Although you'd probably never guess it, at night I like to read The Holy Bible. Sure, like everyone else, at times I watch TV but most nights, I read the good book. I like to meditate and there's no better way to meditate than to sit in the dark and listen to the crickets chirp outside on a hot summer day. In the wintertime, I fire up the old wood-burning stove and watch the flames crackle. Sometimes in the summer, a nice cold beer or an ice tea is good after a long, sweaty day of scrap haulin' in the scorching sun. In the winter, a good glug of bourbon in a strong cup of coffee is a nice night-time companion. Sometimes I smoke this pipe I keep in the cupboard. I always have some cheap tobacco somewhere around here. I don't smoke too much, but I like a good pipe at night, especially in the wintertime when it's cold and snowin' outside. I helps me with my meditations and my little talks with God. Boy, He probably thinks I'm simple and dumb. But He's smart as smart can be, so it don't matter.

I have just the surroundings to meditate. My little house trailer sits up on a hill. It's in a trailer park but my trailer is way up on this hill all by itself. There's some nice trees around and the nearest trailer is a good thirty or forty feet away. It kind of makes me feel good to have some privacy.

An old woman on Social Security lives in the trailer next door. She has a son who lives with her. He's about Troy's age -- late 30s or early 40s -- but he don't work. He's on a mental disability. He looks so sad most of the time. I try to talk to him, with his scraggly beard and all, but he never answers me. He just looks into the distance like he's seein' somethin' there that just ain't there. I don't know why he looks like that. He just sits outside in the summer, in this beat up old lounge chair, and stares straight ahead, smokin' one cigarette after another. In front of him is an ashtray with enough butts in it to start a scrap yard.

His mother told me one time he's on medicine because he's paranoid schizophrenic, whatever the hell that is. Sometimes he yells and screams at himself. His skin looks so pale and white. He looks like someone laid out in a coffin, he's so white, and sometimes he looks even worse -- he's gray and all ugly crusted over. But in the summertime, he gets this really red skin from the sun. He has a little patch of hair on top of his head. It looks sort'a funny, like a little fuzzy bird.

I'm just a scrap hauler. I keep to myself. Anyhow, I don't have the means to help him. I don't know anything about paranoid schizoprenia (I looked those two words up in a dictionary and spelled them out about a hundred times. It made me feel good to be able to spell such a high-falootin' word).

In the wintertime, a scrap hauler's day is long and mean. Fightin' the rain and snow around here can really get to you. Sometimes it rains and snows during the same day, and in between, there's a purgatory of freezin' rain. But my philosophy has always been to get the scrap before some other joker gets his grease-stained hands on the stuff. Scrap ain't real plentiful. It's been picked over unmercifully since those mills closed, a long time ago.

When you're out in a brownfield in a good foot of snow, those big metal pieces hide themselves from you really well. No gloves are too thick in the wintertime. That cold, the snow and the rain cuts right into your bones like a scrap metal saw Karney cuts up old cars with -- and when I go home at night and warm myself by the fire, sometimes I just open and close my hands, in and out, in and out, all night long. Sometimes my hands are just too numb to even turn the brittle, slim pages of my Bible and I just put it back on the shelf. I'll settle in and instead of reading The Bible on those really cold work days, I'll listen to the radio or watch my TV set with the satellite perched on top 'a my trailer. I even get Russian, Portuguese, French and African television stations. Of course, I don't watch them. I can't understand a thing they say. I wish I could though. I really do. . .

When summer comes, it's sort'a nice for a couple'a scrap haulers. It's always nice being out in the sun. God's green earth is wonderful and good enough to put on a plate and eat. You'd be surprised to see some of the nice flowers that grow in these brownfields in the summer. If you had yourself a camera and could zoom out all the rest of the brownfield junk and just focus on those little patches of blue, purple, yellow, orange, red and lavender petals, you could take yourself a picture sweet enough for a calendar. Yeah, since I've become a religious man, I try to focus my attention on God's grand scheme of things and throw out all the negative malarkey. And since I'm closin' in on the big FIVE-0, I better find some good in this world to tell God when I see him. It might not be all that far off, you see.

Every Sunday is the day of the Lord's and I get dressed up in my suit and drive down to the Good Hope Baptist Church on Mulberry Street. Troy goes to church most Sundays, too. He goes to some other sort of Protestant church up on Whitehill. Bein' that he's black and I'm white, we don't mix our religions too much on Sundays, but we talk a lot about it during the week, when we're toilin' with that rusty metal. What's the good book say, "Whenever two or more are gathered, there I am, too?" Well, Jesus is definitely the third man on our scrap haulin' team, for sure.

Before I started worshipping with the congregation at Good Hope, I was pretty miserable. Bein' that I was 'round scrap all day, which ain't so pleasant in any regards, and even worse, around the people who make their livin's haulin' scrap, I felt pretty bad about things. Hell, I don't know what's worse, pickin' up and loadin' scrap or dealin' with some rip-off artist like Matt Karney. Anyhow, things really started getting to me. And things of this world -- my things, at least -- is nothin' more than an ugly ole' scrap pile. Before, when I'd see a patch'a nice flowers in some brownfield, I'd just overlook them and look around for scrap. Now, I usually just pick a few of 'em, put 'em in a hanky and take `em home and put `em on the dinette in a little vase.

It's five o'clock in the morning and it's rainin'. I sure as hell don't feel like goin' out and pickin' up scrap all day in this mess. Troy's `sposed to meet me here at six. It's gonna' be a long day. We're goin' back to that dairy today —the dairy with all the copper tubing. I'm a little bit nervous about the possibility of bein' caught by the police, but heh, there's so much tubing in that dairy that if a man was to get it all out 'a there and trade it in, even at a bastard thief's yard like Karney's, that man could build himself a castle.

Yep, we're goin' back to the dairy today. Me and Troy. My partner. Usually my partner in talking about The Good News and working hard for a buck but today, my partner in crime. But with copper payin' a buck ten a pound, it'll be well worth it.

Right now, the rain's splatterin' somethin' awful against the windows of this trailer. The wood burnin' stove's cracklin' and it's warm in here. The Gospel radio channels singin' Alleluias to the Lord, but I still feel pretty depressed. I don't want to go back to that dairy and pull those tubes off those ugly walls, with darkness all around. But I'm thinkin' if we can get two, or maybe three good loads today, we can knock off by noon and still make a mint. Beggars can't be choosers and that dairy is there for the pickin's. Maybe those cops pullin' in the drive this summer was nothin' more than some fluke. Maybe they hardly ever go back there. But who knows. . . .All I know is copper's payin' a buck-ten a pound and I have a big pickup truck that can haul a lot of those pounds of that copper at once.

I go to the woodburning stove and stir up the flames with this big iron rod I keep next to the stove. The flames shoot up and pop. Before I leave, I'm gonna' have to throw a good bit of water in there. I don't want that fire goin' when I'm gone. Probably nothin' will happen, but it's not worth the risk. Anyhow, it's a good half hour before Troy gets here in that beat up old jalopy he's driven since I've known him.

I go to the dinette and read a few passages out'a The Bible. I read Psalm 56, which says, "Be merciful unto me, O God, for man would swallow me up; he fighting daily oppresseth me. Mine enemies would daily swallow me up; for they be many that fight against me, O God most high. . . ."

I think for awhile about the dairy copper and how I don't want to go there. I remember how the police came up that rutted lane in the summer and almost caught me and Troy raiding that dairy.

"When I cry unto thee, then shall mine enemies turn back; this I know, for God is for me," my Bible tells me, after I turn my head down and read more of Psalm 56. I look out the window. It's pouring down rain out there. Two loads, maybe three, if everything's going well. I hope there's no cops. God, please keep the cops away from us today! I hope Troy works really fast today. Sometimes, when he doesn't feel good, it's kind'a like pullin' a big old pack mule up a hill. And one thing I know about Troy, he don't like workin' in the rain at all.

There's a rap on the door.

I look out the side window, from the dinette, and see big old Troy standin' there.

He's fifteen minutes early. It's only a quarter to six.

I rise and open the door.

"Hi boss. The rain's really hard. Are we still going to the dairy?"

I nod my head, usher him in, pour him a cup of coffee and put my heavy overalls, coat and vest on.

"One of us is gonna' have'ta keep our eyes on that old lane at all times. If those cops come and we don't see `em, we're gonna' go to jail," I say.

"Got'cha," Troy says, not looking up from The Bible.

"It's gonna' be a long day, Troy, and I don't expect it to last much longer than noon,"

"The cops won't come boss. I just know won't. Why would that go up that old rutted lane with all those dead crab apple trees on both sides? It don't make sense, it just don't."

I walk over to the woodburning stove in the next room, and with a bucket of water, douse the flames. The flames hiss and strong smoke hits my nostrils as the fire smoulders. I cough.

"You all right?"

"Sure," I say, placing the bucket in the corner.

I button up my big, furry coat and walk over to the dinette table.

I put my hand on Troy's massive right shoulder.

"It's time to go," I say to him.

We walk into the rain on my little porch. I turn the key to deadbolt my trailer.

We walk to my truck, get in, and I fire the beast up.

"I hope those cops don't come," I say.

"They won't," Troy answers.

The gentle pitter patter of the rain hits my windshield as we drive to the end of the rutted lane. Smoke rises from the chimney of the gray and white trailer perched at the highway. I feel warm and cozy inside. It starts raining harder and harder. I pull onto Route 422 and light my pipe.

^

Biography

About me,I have an MA in English (from Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio, USA) and have worked most of my adult life as a newspaper reporter. Today, I am employed on the faculty of a junior college system in central Mississippi (Hinds Community College). I was fiction editor of Pig Iron Press, Youngstown, Ohio, for 12 years. I have had poetry and fiction appear in the following: Clark Street Review, Connecticut Review, Dandelion, Gypsy Blood Review, Higgensville Reader, Late Knocking, Licking River Review, Lynx Eye, Nocturnal Lyric, Ohio Teachers Write, Poetry Motel, Red Dancefloor, Reed, Verve, Yasse, and other presses and literary journals.