Q: Collecting Bottles

Chapter: Kid, Collecting Bottles

By our apartment building they are putting up a new set of houses. The
air is filled with the smell of sawdust and the stink from the portable
toilets used by the construction workers. These new houses are very
different from our building, which is painted brown and surrounded by a
sticky tar parking lot where half the cars never move. The new houses
are made of light bricks, with sandy colored shingles on top. Each will
have its own driveway of smooth white concrete.

The construction area is full of glass soda bottles, which we collect
in a stolen grocery cart and roll noisily to the U-Totem. Some of the
bottles still have soda in them, bright red or brown, depending on the
brand. Bees fly around those bottles, so we are careful to empty them
before putting them in our cart. Otherwise we might get stung, which
feels like a cigarette burn, only sharper. The bee stingers can stay in
your skin, pumping away like a mosquito in reverse. When a bee has
crawled all the way into a bottle, we shake it around and then dump the
bee out onto the ground, away from the cart in case it manages to get
back up and come after us.

The U-Totem pays ten cents per bottle, a fortune if we can fill the
grocery cart. We don't pick up broken bottles, which are worth nothing,
and even though I try not to, I keep a running tally in my head of all
those broken bottles, and what they would have been worth. I've gotten
up to four dollars and thirty cents before.

We also have to wear shoes when we go into the construction site. Some
of the workers drink soda and beer out of aluminum cans, and the sharp
tabs they pull off and throw on the ground get hidden in the sand and
mud. These tabs cut cleanly, but cause a lot of blood. Also there are
nails and pieces of wood, which can be so sharp that they get stuck in
the rubber bottoms of our shoes. You can make tap shoes out of some of
the metal trash if you know where to stick it on your shoe soles.

My little sister is good at finding the bottles, and is even willing to
dig through the big metal dumpsters to get at them. Sometimes I lift
her over the edge and drop her in, but usually she finds a way to climb
in herself, handing bottles up two at a time while she balances over
naily pieces of wood that look like old weapons. The dumpsters make
good hiding places if we are bottle hunting and someone comes by, but I
can't stay in one of them for too long. My sister doesn't know it but
the dumpsters make it hard for me to breath, and I get pictures in my
head of one of the big trucks backing right up to us and dumping us
into that machine that smashes all the garbage together. Somewhere, I
am sure it has happened to someone, and how would the truck driver ever
know? So my sister goes in, and when she is done I pull her out and we
move on to the next area.

We never run across anybody else collecting these bottles, although
maybe other people do it while we're asleep, or in school. I like to
think that the bottles are endless, enough for everybody, or at least
enough for us to keep collecting. We have brought other kids from our
apartment building before, to help us look. We promised them a candy
bar or a soda from the U-Totem. But usually those kids just wanted to
play, throwing chunks of dirt at us and each other, or running around
screaming. They wouldn't crawl into the dumpsters, saying they smelled
bad, or go near any of the bottles with bees in them. Now we only look
by ourselves, which is fine with me, because it only takes a couple of
hours to fill the grocery cart on a good day, maybe longer if it's
raining and the workers have left early.

Sometimes we come across a house that has no doors, or is just the
wooden outline of a house. We walk through these, careful not to touch
anything and watching for holes in the floor. Mostly we do our
collecting after the construction workers have left, but still we know
we shouldn't be in these unfinished houses. We probably shouldn't even
be on the construction site, which is marked off by long yellow pieces
of tape that break and float around if it's windy. I dream about living
in one of the houses, after it's finished, and can picture the kind of
furniture I would buy. I would leave the walls painted white, and have
those curtains that you can see through over the windows. I would have
a dishwasher in the kitchen, and a bathroom with bright silver faucets
and cabinets that are painted white. We might have a maid who would
keep the mold off the tiles on the walls, and the floors would be
covered in that kind of carpet your feet sink into. Although maybe
there would be wood floors. I haven't
decided.

I'm not sure what my sister thinks about when we're inside these
houses. She walks from room to room, staring out of the windows in each
room. When the windows aren't put in yet, she'll stand at the cut out
space, her hands resting on the edge. Sometimes she leaves the house
through one of the holes cut in the wall, or climbs up and sits on the
sill. This always leaves a chalky mark across the seat of her pants or
dress, which fades later, as if by magic. More than once she has come
back to our apartment with the chalk mark on her rear end, and I know
she's been at the construction site. I don't think she's collecting
bottles without me, because she doesn't have any money, but I don't
ask, either.

One time we came across two workers who had stayed late. They were
putting tar on the roof of an almost-finished house, a noisy machine
rattling away next to one of the workers while the other one was up on
the roof. The one sitting next to the machine smoked a cigarette while
his other hand rested on a lever that had "Emergency Stop" written
along the side. We should have heard the machine, and gone the other
way, but we were trying to find a new area. When we turned the corner,
there they were.

The tar smelled like burning food and the oily smell that came out from
under the hood of a car after it had been turned off, a smell that was
always around our apartment building. At first we held our noses, which
made the smoking man laugh. Eventually we got used to the smell, or at
least I was able to take shallow breaths through my mouth, blocking it
out. The man asked us about our bottle collecting, and how much money
we made. I answered him while my sister watched the man on the roof,
who moved quickly and fearlessly from the edge of the roof to the top,
back and forth.

Mostly I watched the smoking man. Not because of his questions, but
because he had holes in the corduroy pants he was wearing. One hole was
right at the seam of his crotch, and the other was higher, above the
bulge. He wasn't wearing underwear, so I peeked at the bit of pale skin
poking out of the lower tear, and above it, where there was brown hair
just visible in the light. I was almost speechless, answering his
question with a yes or no if possible. I felt like my stomach had moved
into my throat. I felt hot.

"How old are you?" the man asked, staring straight at me. He had caught
me looking down there, and he leaned back slowly, his knees spreading
further apart. I wasn't sure where my eyes should go, so I looked from
his crotch to his face. He was smiling, one corner of his mouth up,
looking like he knew everything about me. I could feel my face turning
red.

I looked over at my sister, who was still watching the man on the roof.
She'd sat down on the ground, and tugged on one of her shoelaces. I
decided we should go, but also I wanted to stay.

"How come a pretty girl like you has to collect bottles?" the man asked
me, and then I really was speechless. This wasn't the first time
someone had thought I was a girl. Once, while I sat in the living room
of a classmate, her grandmother came into the room wearing just her
bra, and didn't leave until my classmate told her I was a boy. The
grandmother had thrown her hands up and run out of the room screaming
while we laughed. But the smoking man didn't look like he'd do that. He
looked like he might get mad, or worse. My face was burning.

I do have long hair, almost to my shoulders, and the front of my shirt
sticks out where my chest is. "Baby fat," my mother calls it. "Fat
pig," my big sister says, especially when I sit in our apartment and
it's too hot to wear a shirt.

The smoking man smiled at me while I prayed my sister didn't say my
name. Or that the man didn't look at my shoes, because already I was
wearing a men's size eleven, bigger than my father's shoes. But he just
stared at my face, smoke coming out of his nose and mouth and the hand
with the cigarette resting on his leg.

"Come on, let's go," I said to my sister, backing up the grocery cart.
I was smiling but already planning the fastest way out of the
construction site. I knew that if it came down to it, I could leave the
grocery cart there, grabbing my sister's hand and running through the
houses. But when the smoking man stayed where he was, I pushed the cart
away from him with my sister right behind me, going too fast and not
caring if any of the bottles broke. They made a terrible racket, but I
could still hear the man laughing behind us. Maybe the man on the roof
was laughing, too. I didn't turn around to see.

But I would see that pale skin and that hair showing through the holes
in the man's pants for a long time, keeping my eye out for him whenever
we went bottle hunting. I would see him taking me into one of the
unfinished houses to do things, things that were hazy and shadowy but
clear, too, so clear that they made me want to lie down or run
someplace or both.