The Gold Amongst the Filth

https://soundcloud.com/brett-hernan/war-stinks

    Driven by a memory, for thirty years he roamed between the rocky outcrops and sandy desert passes scouring the surface of the earth for that which he had lost within himself, without knowing it. Caught in a perpetual state of remembrance, fixed upon the present moment, as decades escaped.

    Stumbling through the hot dust of decaying arroyos, making friendly faces out of the sulfurous twisted veins of rock. Always watching for the foggy eyes of diamonds, embedded in their earthen sockets, like droplets of congealed to stone cataract dew.

May as well have looked into the cradled embers of the midnight camp fire throwing shadows of waltzing misshapen ghosts over the rocky facades. The torrid desert heat of each day caused the blurring of the horizon to become for his eyes a goal as hard to attain as those gems he had so long sought after.

    He occasionally stumbled over sections of the highway and never noticed the changes in the models of cars, just recognised them as cars. Here he sometimes met people, lost, hitch hikers, drifters, or stranded businessmen with petrol cans walking along in exactly the wrong type of shoes. As the years folded, he had ceased looking for diamonds.

    Once two city kids spent the night with him by his camp fire. One of them was dressed as a woman and the other was throwing away a peeling false mustache and beard when he first saw them. They asked him all kinds of questions for which he could find no answers. They wore factory molded rubber basketball boots that padded the desert sands with an uncomfortable and alien relationship to its grains. 

They had run from the city and he could tell they were in trouble but asked no questions about it.

    The strangest story he had ever collected was on a day he wandered, head down, through the heat haze and found himself closer to town than he had intended to be, and he saw after exiting his oblivious trance that its boarders had expanded into a valley he had previously known as a small wooded creek. An oasis where he sometimes took refuge from the heat when it threatened to become an element which overcame him.

    This valley now had a fence surrounding it. The creek ran in sickly putrid pools and had been partly filled in in places by trucks emptying green plastic bags full of rubbish and construction sight refuse. A bulldozer scraped soil over the objects thrown from the trailers and car boots of the local citizens and cascaded them over a precipice beneath the indignantly rising screeching flocks of sea birds.

    This was a much unexpectedly horrific spectacle, and it stank with an horrible fetid odor, a visceral noxiousness, as though odium itself were present. He found it reminiscent of the aroma of the basketball boots of the two city kids who’d kept warm by his camp fire that cold winter's night.

    Whilst he sat there, on the edge of a hill, watching the activity from a safe distance and unknowingly breaking pieces from a twig with his thumb, the old prospector bore witness to the bulldozer driver who'd turned off and thereby stopped his machine, dismounted as he jumped from its cabin to the garbagey, glittering, broken bottle, smashed record, ground up woman's handbag pieces, twisted fishing rod halves still held together by the twisted fishing line threaded through it, as the bulldozer had had backed up and then slowly driven over the most recently discarded from a parked car or truck, no longer necessary remains of timbers and metals and all manner of other materials which were crushed down into a salami-like flattened layer amongst all of the others, but at some distance, by each other amongst all of this chaos, threaded through all wonky like, pulverized mud and rock and muck strewn ground.

    These two tip workers stood awhile and talked, unheard from the top of the hill that the old prospector had sat upon. Later he saw the men had left the site in a human skin cell dust streaked council ute containing a third man, the driver of the vehicle, from down at the main gate, the main gate key keeper who had come up the incline from the main gate to meet them.

 When the ute stopped at the front of the tip, the key man saw that the entrance gates were pulled shut, padlocked, and the car full of only the correct council workers.

   All three of them had soon disappeared along a road the view of which was lost when it went behind the trees that made the entrance to a rough-hewn track, into and through, the leaves of the gums to the old man’s left.

    The sun was still high and the place was now of every living human form deserted, except for the seagulls and ravens fighting for lumps of old, used, discarded and semi-used food descending upon each other calling an air raid siren, feathered dive bombers in a hunger battle.

   Another car appeared its driver stopped and disappointedly looked at the sign displaying the opening and closing times and he went at the chained lock on the front gates, giving it a testing shake. As it turned to drive away yet another too late car filled with cut tree branches, so fresh that they were still alive showed up a few minutes later on, when the council tip site workers were already at the the front door of the pub not two blocks away. The driver thought,

"Close enough!" and then he and the two small kids who were traveling with him, both in their dressing gowns, opened the car boot and threw their rubbish into the storm water drainage ditch by the side of the road, then drove quickly away.

    A soft breeze washed over the hill and its myriad of trees where the old man sat.

He picked up his hat from the rock and put it on his head as he rose to his feet and started down the hill toward the huge mound of garbage, tying his handkerchief over his mouth and nose to dampen the repugnant scent of its filthy being.

   When the old man was midway toward the tip face, on the hill opposite him he saw in the distance, a man with a backpack distantly climbing over the fence by the entrance gate, and so, the old prospector, he quickly squatted in the undergrowth and waited there, watching this intruder's movements in hidden safety.

Pieces of plastic shopping bags were caught on the rocks and in the shrubs around him, as well as a flurry of polystyrene beads, (looking not unlike the unmeltable traces of an industrial plastic impregnated snow drift).

    This newly arrived man hungrily threw his backpack over the fence and then himself, and set to walk up the steep incline of road until he arrived at the tip face whereupon he commenced as he began a strident inspection of the goods on current display, and all of them 100% free from charge of any type whatsoever, at all, i.e free, in the truest sense of the word.

Proudly he waded through it's displays and away toward other objects which were too far from the side of the hill to be seen clearly.

He stopped and gathered various objects as, one by one, he held and inspected them, before placing them into a cardboard box.

   However, after a while, a second man alighted the fence. And, as he journeyed also toward the tip face, the first intruder man stopped in the act of being, 'mid-scavenge', stopped steelily and cast a poised and examining eye over this new adversary for the inevitable nuggets of gold amongst the filth, then he went on again with his searching but with his body poised by the knowledge of the other.

   The second man, likewise began to sift through the junk, but with less enthusiasm than the first, as though his had been usurped completely by his discovery of the first man’s prior arrival.

Side by side, while maintaining an incommunicably hostile distance, they lifted and dug, held up and studied, discarded and gathered, into piles; their prizes, whilst the sun moved a few degrees closer to the edge of the hill that made the valley.

    The two men, each being in obvious opposition and so, deliberately ignorant of the other, whilst absorbed with fervor for their free junk scavenging, both failed to notice that in their desire to discover the greatest ever undiscovered relic dumped upon the tip on that day, both of them, being so very deliberately ignorant of the other's position had, unwittingly, caused the men to have both moved to the exact location where the other man stood looking, and, given the virtues of the randomly placed circular nature of a refuse dump's design features, both of these men came upon an object which, with equal measures of gusto to possess, both of their pairs of hands fell upon and seized at, simultaneously!

    What ever 'it' was, it was obviously of great value to both.

Trying wrench the object free from the other's grip, the men turned to face one another and began to argue while their exchanged words progressed into profane shouts, which the old man on the hill could quite easily hear, as the sound of their utterance was what had drawn his attention away from the tiny winged beetle he had been watching walking in crooked lines across the rings of a young, yet freshly surgically cut, tree’s stump.

    Neither man was prepared to yield to the other this prized object, and they struggled over it until, between their forceful pulls it escaped both of them and fell to the ground between them both.

It was broken!

Both stood, funeral crowd internment ceremony heads bowed with loss, motionless to look... at it... until, it became obvious from their next set of movements where between the two of them they gathered up and compared broken pieces, that it was now, not only broken, but broken beyond repair.

    For a while there was silence, but for the fluttering of loose edges of paper within compressed clumps of garbage and sea gulls taking advantage of the slight breeze to maneuver themselves onto more delectable slop. Then one of the men picked up a long and sharp looking smashed piece of 'it' and accusingly thrust it out at the other’s face, whilst screaming insanely and obscenely.

This action was met by a swinging fist. It caught the side of the other’s face and they began wrestling amongst the rubble. They fell apart on a little jagged mound which must have hurt them both as they jumped up from it rubbing themselves and ignoring their conflict for a moment. They used the distance this pause in battle created between them to arm themselves with projectiles.

    They threw, between them; a record player, bottles, a wicker basket, a lump of sodden newspaper, fluorescent light tubes, a broken rake, clods of poisoned earth, and a loaf of bread, which the gulls swept down on as it sailed into the safety of the empty plain beyond the rim of the muck plot.

    One of the men was felled by a large hardback book which slapped into his face and the other took this chance to run and hide under the wheel arch of a mangled car skeleton on the summit of a garbage bag precipice...

                            ***

    During the time that followed; the old man saw the man who had fallen so violently after the fins had fallen off, and his own chain had hit him right in the leg!

Clutching his face we see him rise, and wipe his hands and nose across his sleeves with red streaks and then look desperately through the small circle of junk around him for any sign of his enemy. 

 Failing to seize upon his quarry, he found and seized a dented and rusty fuel can, and with a nuclear research laboratory technician-like precision he lined up, in a row, all of the bottles he could find.

    He stood them up in a little circular group before him and dispensed the fuel can's contents into each of them. He doused strips he had torn from pieces of old, missing a button, unwanted, out-of-date fashioned clothing and shoved these rags, torn from them, into the bottle necks, waving his hand in the trail of liquid  fuel oil, falling splashing them sodden with what was left in the can with his hand.

  After measuring out this small amount of dangerous distilled emollient into each of them, he vindictively commenced shouting obscenities, as bait, in the directions of the locations he imagined the other man to be hiding.

(He had thrown aside a brassiere after discovering that it had wire sewn into it and could not be used effectively as a fuse.)

    After completing his design and product release task he carried these bottles by their rags with them as was his intent ready to be dispatched in the nastiest of imaginable ways and with each step his mad rage began to rise anew as he continued stalking through the garbage piles.

    Through the car’s empty spaces where it had been stripped of any useful part before being dumped, the other man had been watching. He revealed himself with a raised length of curtain rail pipe to his mouth and funneled a breath through it sending a nail-tipped paper dart at his target. It missed and embedded solidly into the flesh of a young gum tree only a few trees away from where the old man sat on the side of the hill.

The old man slowly and carefully crept over to where he’d heard it impact, and saw around the protruding length of its shaft, a green-grey ring of tip-goo poison. The tail was made from a piece of a Super-hero comic book cover and had been fastened with some old chewing gum.

    In the valley, the blow pipe was being rearmed and other darts were tracing lines around their prey, who desperately scratched the flint of an old cigarette lighter with its rusty wheel attempting to ignite the rag fuse of a Molotov Cocktail 'bye-bye' bomb.

 Whilst stumbling on the illusory sedentary planes made by the under foot rubbish, weakly, he tossed the bomb, under-arm, and it clipped the rear bumper of a car wreck to create glass shards, spraying mini fire balls between them as each of them dived back, repelled by the brute force of its heat. Neither of them had been visibly hurt, but trillions of bacteria were instantly incinerated.

The small patches of burning rubble proved to be perfect for automatically exploding the bombs as they were thrown at one's enemy and this saved the trouble of sparking up the lighter which was also then discarded as useless and so was thrown as a projectile weapon.

The man with the blow pipe was using it to steady himself as he almost lost balance, treading the staircase torn from an old worm eaten timbered house as he tried to escape the onslaught of thrown containers like a hound chased rabbit, spawning patches of fire at its every turn. This staircase was rapidly alight given it's wafer constitution.

   Both of them, they worked out independently that any exploding bomb is far more proficient at spraying a destructive pattern of damage and death when exploded, not at ground level, but up in the air and above the ground and target. They had it worked out to the exact millimeter, from space live via satellite to the exact point cartographically and geographically and knew the exact proportions of kill zone creation for the make and model of each and every numbered bomb.

    The Molotov thrower was very happy with the confusion and flight he was inspiring in his victim, but this triumph proved to be only momentary as his supply of bombs was limited and a number of them failed to explode. The police later found that these duds had a proportion of water mixed in with the petrol, neglected in the haze of haste employed in their production that effectively stopped them from igniting.   

  Instead, he now just threw things he found in their place but found that he was too far from his quarry to hit him.

But... the blow pipe had a far greater range and the sound of a dart passing close enough to be easily heard sent him into a hasty and panicked retreat for cover.

    These darts too inevitably needed to be replenished. Both found that neither of them could find all of the materials needed to make their ammunition and the result was an imposed lull in the battle.

 The old man could see neither of them for a short while until they resurfaced simultaneously and raced over the last thirty meters, across these mounds of soon to be forgotten garbage, toward the open plain. They held in their hands lengths of wood and steel pipe and chased each other, in turn taking lavishly vehement open swings in a desperate search for a show of blood.

 Occasionally the weapons bit into flesh and produced limps, jerks and howls as less vital parts of the anatomy were damaged and let flow their running life fluid.

   This went insanely on, like two moths bumping blindly into each other against the glass of a furnace window, until they were hardly moving, and, as both staggered on the verge of collapse, the corners of their wings torn and charred, their feelers burned back to the brow as split, carbon-ended stumps, bruised and twitching, between the ashes on the floor, below the furnace door...

    All that remained now was for an overflow from a scoop of the coals surrounding the white hot metal to drop from the sides of the long handled shovel to finish them both off.

  The Sun threw their shadows long on the plain as it lightly smeared, with an illuminated orange coloured oil, every surface with this sunlight, imbued inherently to tint with orange luminosity.

Its cautionary flare to both warn of the imminent arrival and also to summon the night.

  These two men crumbled and fell like time-lapse film of long gone buildings in a vandal ridden neighborhood, as the wind picked up and searched for the right direction to go in to escape the approaching night.

    The old prospector wondered if both these men were dead and went to have a look until he paused and stopped dead in his footsteps as he recollected observing, when suddenly he saw one of them lift himself up and call loudly over to the other. He also slowly rose with a jerking and extremely sore and blood-soaked movement, utterly spent yet taking energy from some place preceding imminent death.

    After this series of oddly uncharacteristic, unaggressive movements, these two adversaries, they helped each other to walk back to their respective stashes of retrieved scavengings, laughing, side by side, as children would after a hard fought afternoon's war games!

 Then, for a long while they stood talking onward toward the very edge of the night, making re conciliatory gestures to each other until the Moon had reached the summit of the hills surrounding them.

They extended their arms to shake hands and moved to pat one other on the back.

    The old prospector looked up and thought it was about time to leave this place, as the sky showed the reins were whipping free and would soon be taken up completely by the Moon and many of her squadrons of cold wind. He wanted to be far away from this 'orrible place. well before the full installment of that dark.

 He began to walk back toward the hill’s summit, taking one final glance in amazement over his shoulder towards the men whom he then stopped in mid-stride at the sight of, as he turned fully around, turned back to observe, lying on the ground a few feet apart both of them, obviously mortally wounded, writhing around, agonizing contortions in their bodies.

    It appeared, as he stood over their dying forms and made as much sense as one ever can in the sense of their dying eyes, that they had used the opportune moment of re conciliatory embrace to, instead of embrace, slide a hidden blade of some type into each other’s back.

    One had already expired by the time he was close enough to them to see their conditions. The other’s eyes fell about, in the glaze of nearing death, which coated their gleams with a film of unreality, as horrible, throaty gurgles bubbled from some place below his shoulder.

    He looked up at the old man with the last flow of lucidity he was to have and moved his lips, trying to say,

   "It’s all yours now." as he died.

   His decades wandering the desert had not prepared the old man for death in this way, and with disbelief, he waited for a moment, in the thought that no one would ever again wait for either them as he looked around at what they had chosen to die for.

   Under the last red lip of failing light that had drenched the Moon and had drained away from it to white, black and grey tones, all of which were glowing.

  On the tip site the old man dragged each of the men's corpses over to the face and let them slide away, disrupting rubble as they descended down the slope, to rest across each other at its base.

Really big, black, mean-eyed rats were waking in their hollows on the hill side and rubbing the sleep from their eyes with their paws before sniffing the air to check whether it was yet dark outside.

   The old man kicked bits and pieces from the top to hide both the men and he found and threw their bags down there as well, after taking out his inheritance compensation for having witnessed this distressing display of human nature, and by the time they were both covered, the bacteria-laden shadows under every ugly corner had begun to loosen and ooze out.

    Like an oddly illuminated light inside the stuck swung open broken hinged door of a broken refrigerator, lit and half buried in today's special, a garbage dump's flowing mound sea. The moon, smouldering under thin clouds.

   The old prospector, he left this place-disgusting, amidst the chilled gusts of night air which had brought to it an appropriately rejected atmosphere, given the previous events transpiring.

 As he walked away, he noticed a small section of landscape, still intact, that he recognised.

It was that moss covered rock he’d sat on many times before and from where he'd watched the creek, as it used to overlook a placid circling root bound inlet full of small, shallow eddies.

The creek that was now, of course, gone. The former picturesque drooping gum sapling was just a stump cut neatly by a spinning bladed electric hand saw, something akin to bone cutters used, hopefully only when necessary, in surgery only, please and thank you.

   Now, all that flowed around it were the discarded relics of expended use. The 'Cripples of Planned Obsolescence' brand's thirteen quadrillionth empty imitation Maple Syrup type empty plastic food dispensing condiments bottle, into which dust and dirt from the side of a highway had, over time, seeped into its interior chamber and remained. Irrevocably sitting embedded in the remaining smatters of unobtainable syrup Sunlight glue adhered onto the walls therein.

Instead of morning pancake splashing, children’s giggles, it bore a potential black smear, the dystopic negative, forever waiting to happen, embodied as a deposited toxic sludge slop goop which had made its way down the hole intended from which to dispense the formerly held delightfully tasty Imitation Maple Syrup and it had been instead injected from the splatter of the dump truck's tires, in the cold, dark, windy winter morning's mud slush splatter, as after splashing it, the dump truck slows as it drops a gear into first and commences onward once again on the steep uphill road ahead.

    Final Scene: Trucks for three days coming up the road to the tip. A truck backs up and empties crud onto the face.

 Through a tear in a garbage bag trickle sticky, wine soaked playing cards.

The last one falls face up.

It is the ace of spades.

    We pan out to see a bulldozer mashing them into the rubbish for forty five seconds.

Some people have already stood to leave.

Roll end credits.

Exit picture theater.

   Toss screwed up admission ticket into foyer ash-tray, and walk away.