When I
was 16, I was a garbage boy. Me and my coworker, who was a couple years older
and could lift more trash than I could, would spend hours sifting through
bottles and trash-juiced newspapers for empty Cool-Whip canisters to inhale the
fumes through the nozzle. The high was similar to laughing gas, or what I imagine
laughing gas to be like. One day, after finding a fresh canister during our
pick-ups in the park, we drove our golf cart deep into the woods where we would
climb up the thinner trees until our weight would bend the narrow trunks and
carry us down gently. The tree would be left with a bowed posture. We called it
tree-surfing. My coworker, being older and stronger and wanting to impress what
he thought of as his apprentice, was more ambitious than I was with
tree-surfing. Whereas Cool-Whip fumes greatly enhanced his tree-surfing
abilities, mine were significantly hindered—the slightest body motion could
send my brain into a hazardous frenzy which caused me to feel wonderfully dizzy
and keel over with painful laughter. On this occasion, he pointed to a tall
narrow tree, twice as tall as any I'd ever seen surfed. He started toward it. I
warned him that the tree was too tall, no matter how high on fumes he was, even
if he climbed to the top, the tree would bend and fall into another and he'd be
stuck—he was already halfway up. Of course, as he reached the top, the tree
began to bend gently until it lodged itself into a massive oak. My coworker was
dangling from what seemed like 100 feet of impenetrable distance. He was
muscular and in an ROTC program so I figured he'd be able to climb down or jump
or something. I took another hit of Cool-Whip to pass the time. As I watched,
my coworker began swinging his body to grab a lower part of the trunk. His hand
slipped and he fell in slow motion until he slammed into the ground with his
his horizontal body.
Some
time went by before I ran over and pushed him onto his back. I saw that a stick
had impaled a part of his chest and was jutting out of his sleeveless t-shirt
like a third mutated arm. My coworker saw this and passed out. I immediately
assumed he was dead and looked around at all the bent trees. I was confused—my
brain felt like a small heavy rock surrounded by static jelly. I thought I'd
killed him. I thought no one would believe me if I told them he fell, I'd go to
jail for murdering him, which I certainly had fantasized doing on numerous
occasions, though always with a gun or blunt object to the face, never by
stabbing him in the chest with a stick. I thought about the news article—LOCAL
GARBAGEBOY STABS COWORKER IN COOL-WHIP FRENZY. They'd call me the Cool-Whip
Killer. Cool-Whip would go out of business.
I thought about
how killing someone isn't that different than fantasizing about killing
someone. I walked away from the body and made sure to leave the Cool-Whip
canister nearby thinking it would look more like an accident that way. I also
left the golf cart and headed back to the park where I would say my coworker
had dropped me off hours before. I began picking up trash with my little pokey
stick and thought about the body in the woods. A while later, still unnerved
since no one had confronted me about my coworker's absence yet, I saw the golf
cart approaching, my coworker driving with a look of betrayal and a hand to his
chest.
John Kropa is a recent graduate from Pratt Institute. His fiction has appeared in elimae.
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