Joe by Larry Brown

five minutes I’ll call the law out here and you can smart off to them.”
     
    Wade blinked. “Come on, boy.” He nudged him. “Get down here and start pickin this stuff up. I told you not to make all this mess.”
     
    Gary bent and picked up an armload. “Ain’t you gonna help me?” he said.
     
    “I’m helpin,” Wade said, tossing in a soup can, a rag, an emptypotato chip bag. Nothing too heavy. A cereal box, a paper, an egg carton.
     
    “I want it just as clean as it was before,” Shelby said. He watched Gary for a bit, watched him bending over trying to pick up the myriad scattered lumps of trash. “Wait a minute,” he said. He walked back to his truck and reached into the bed and brought out a new shovel with the price tag still attached. “Here,” he said. “Use this.”
     
    “Yessir,” Gary said. He started scooping. Wade stopped and raised one side of his hat, scratching at his head. He leaned back on the hood of the truck, the limp sack of cans tinkling faintly. He drew a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. The man on the tractor was coming alongside them in the field and he had his head bent to see the wheel in the row. He and his machine were engulfed in dust, the thin silt rolling up on the tires and pouring like water off the cleats. They watched him pass, and as he came by he lifted a hand in greeting. The blades of the plow where they cut the earth were polished bright as chrome, rising and falling in the lifeless dust and the steady chug of the tractor echoing endlessly over the silence against the scrape of the shovel.
     
    “He wants it clean, now,” the old man said.
     
    Gary nodded and kept at it. Shelby looked at his watch. The boy was pushing small piles of rubbish together, pushing them up against the wall of the Dumpster and using his hand to get it all in the shovel.
     
    “I guess that’ll do,” Shelby said. Gary straightened and looked at him and then looked at this father. Wade nodded. Thesupervisor held out his hand for the shovel and the boy gave it to him.
     
    “I don’t want to see this happen any more,” he said. He tossed the shovel into the bed of the truck and it hit with a loud bong. He waited for Wade to unlean himself from his hood.
     
    “My hands has got enough to do as it is. If you want cans you better get out and pick em up off the side of the road. That’s where most of em’s at anyway.”
     
    “Yessir,” Gary said. Wade had his hands on his hips and was looking around like somebody deaf.
     
    Shelby opened his door and stood with one hand on it, fixing them with a cold stare, each in turn. “I keep my eye on these things,” he said. “I come by here just about every day.”
     
    Wade wouldn’t even look at him.
     
    “All right,” he said. “You been told.”
     
    He got into the truck and cranked it and pulled away. They stood beside the Dumpster and watched him go up the road slowly, then pull off to the side and turn around. He was doing forty by the time he came by them again. They waved. He didn’t. He went down the highway out of sight and finally even the sound of his tires vanished. It was hot and still where they stood, and the tractor was turning to make another pass.
     
    “All right,” Wade said. “He’s gone. Get back up in there.”
     
    “What if he comes back?”
     
    “He ain’t comin back. It’s dinnertime.”
     
    “He might, though. He might come back after while to see if we still here.”
     
    “You hear what I said?”
     
    “Yeah.”
     
    “Then do like I told you.”
     
    “We done got just about all the cans,” he said, but he was already climbing back up through the door.
     
    A pattern emerged, one they discovered by employing a system of regular reconnaissance. The Dumpsters were emptied on Tuesdays and Fridays, which left the other five days of the week for harvesting the depths of them. They changed their salvage operations to night, covered safely by the cloak of darkness.