HEAVIER THAN AIR
Chapter One
When a guy gets down in the dumps because his grades don't come out the way he hoped, or his girlfriend won't look at him seriously like a real girlfriend should, or his dog won't come when he's whistled for, then it's a good idea to go out to the actual dump to look for something you can call your own. The Balona Dump is the place a depressed guy can go in Balona to sort of renew his spirit.
Since I don't have a dog-except maybe my dad's dog Killer who smells at me every time he sees me but then goes right back to Dad-and since I don't actually have a girlfriend because Millie Wong is always hanging around Sal Shaw and won't look at me at all except to smirk at me over the rim of her foam coffee cup, and since I don't have actual good grades from C4 (which is what us more sophisticated Balona guys call Chaud County Community College which is located over in Delta City, nine miles from here)-since because of those things and this case of depression I, Joseph Oliver Kuhl, find the Balona Dump a place of recalcification and remorse and maybe reward.
For example, feeling low a few days hence, I went out there east of town to the place we call the East Bridge over the Yulumne. Right there on the town side of the river is our beloved dump. The place is supervised by one of the Langsam brothers, son of Mr. Marvel Langsam, the bandmaster at Big Baloney (our high school), a guy who has been there for a hundred years. The son, Lud, is not his dad's favorite kid, I bet, since he didn't take up music, and instead took up trash.
But old Lud will let you in to walk around and pick up stuff. He'll let you take away anything you want for a dollar, providing he doesn't think he can get more for the item at the Delta City Fleamarket or some place like that. I have found all kinds of treasures that my ma right away has thrown out again for Lud to pick up and return to the dump, since Lud is also our garbage man. You can see how this business could be pretty profitable for old Lud.
When you go into the dump you better be wearing rubber boots. You could wear regular shoes, but they wouldn't be much good for anything after the dump experience. Even leather boots will stink a lot for quite a while after a trip to the dump, especially in the spring, summer, or fall. So rubber boots is the way to go, which you can spray off with the hose on the front lawn when you get home, which is what I always do, or my ma would bust my buttleywutt (which is a verb from my ma's refined home-made cusswords list). Since this is fall in Balona, rubber boots are what I was wearing on this particular trip I went on.
There I was, poking around with my dumpstick. All Balona guys have a dumpstick, which they have usually modified to suit their individual tastes. You usually keep your dumpstick on your back porch along with the brooms and mops. My dad and my little brother Richie have their own dumpsticks, lined up right next to mine. My own dumpstick I made from a straight willow branch has a sort of fork at the end so you can pick up stuff with it that you couldn't do with a straight pointed dumpstick. My Cousin Zack Burnross's dumpstick's got a hook he screwed on the end so he can snag stuff with it.
Most dumpstuff you wouldn't want to pick up with your bare hands, so you take this stick and poke around with it or turn stuff over with it. If you are a dumpstick pro, like I am, you get so you can actually lift stuff up with the dumpstick and carry it out of the dump to some place where you can wash the gunk off of the stuff, whatever it is.
Me and Zack have actually been thinking about going into the dumpstick business: making the instruments and selling them around town, along with special dumpstick attachments for them. (The enterprise is still only in the thinking stage, though, since Zack is such a grinch he wants 75 percent, just because it was his idea.)
Anyway, to get back to my story. There I was, depressed, down at the mouth during Thanksgiving Vacation, a time when the college youth of Balona were all celebrating being out of school while their high school inferiors were still struggling with nouns and verbs. Chaud County Community College gives lots of vacations and holidays where Balona High gives you only Thursday and Friday at Thanksgiving.
The weather was almost rainy. Cold. Dark clouds. I'd just last week got a D for my quarter grade in English 1B, my first D in this second round of 1B, simply because I missed a few assignments due to poetic thoughts and the press of business (I was helping Mr. Keyshot find his dog, Lamont). Perfect depression weather. I was thinking about going up to my ex-high school counselor's new office and having a counseling session where he listens to my troubles, but instead I decided to be my own counselor and not have to owe Mr. Keyshot another private-eye session, where I tell him about secrets of the private-eye profession in payment for my counseling.
I poked around listlessly with my dumpstick, not feeling the joy of life. The smell might have had something to do with my mood, since even in November there's a certain odor that goes with the dump. Then I came upon the box containing the object. When I prodded open the box, the object inside looked like it came from outer space: rings inside of rings perched on a stand. Sort of like the globes at school with maps on them that kids throw around the classroom for sport and drop and dent-up all the time, only this was hollow. And pretty heavy, probably made of metal and about the same size as the globes.
Usually, Lud homes right in on cardboard boxes, especially with metal stuff inside, but this box he missed, probably because of the lettuce leaves and spaghetti spangled all over the top of it. Lucky for me.
The thing looked like the kind of strange mysterious object a private eye should have in the front window of his office, a place I share with my dad on Front Street with our names in gold letters on the window. Not a high-class place like the Stilton Hotel over in Delta City, but it's home to my dad's real estate business and my vicarious enterprises.
I poked the thing with my finger and then scratched it a little with my fingernail. It looked shiny underneath the gunk.
It was gold!
I had found a treasure.
My depression lifted up.
It took a little doing to get it out of the dump without Lud inspecting every part of it and reclaiming it. I just told him it was a dead possum I was going to stuff and mount, and did he want to take a look and a sniff. "No, thanks!" he went, listening to the ball game on his radio and not paying all that much attention. So I gave him his dollar and got out of there fast. Went straight up First Avenue to Tabernacle where Pastor Nimitz MacArthur Chaud hangs out, since Nim is my blood cousin and knows something about everything.
He was in his office writing poems or letters or diary pages on his old IBM electric typewriter. I keep telling him he needs a computer, but he always says he's got nothing much to compute and the typewriter does him just fine, costs a whole lot less, and never needs upgrades.
"Look what I found at the dump!"
"You have a fine instrument here, Joe," he went. "A tad crusted over, but I'll bet you can clean it up just fine. I suggest that you might brush it with soap and water to begin with and then give it the Brasso treatment."
"What treatment?"
"Brasso. That's what I polish brass with. This instrument appears to be made of brass."
Not gold. Fooey.
"You found this at the dump? My word! It's probably a pretty valuable piece of antiquity."
"What's it for?"
"Well, nowadays you have your satellites and computers, and if all else fails, you have your sextant, but in olden times this thing was used to tell you the altitude of the stars and the sun."
"What would you want to know that for?"
"If you had such information and a map, you could know approximately where you were-say, on the ocean or the desert. Valuable tool to keep you going in the right direction. A beautiful artifact to display in one's living room. I'm surprised somebody threw it away."
"Well, there's all kinds of stuff out there. What I mean is, you could find practically anything you wanted out there, providing you cleaned it up a little, washed it off, like."
"Just get out your elbow-grease and that brush, Joe, and I think you'll be surprised at what appears from under the crust. And I know for a fact that Mr. Carp carries Brasso."
So I take off for home with my dumpstick laid over my box. Lucky for me my ma was taking a nap again (she takes quite a few), so I didn't have to run through the flanks, like they say. My ma is a very big, tough, also mean person.
Cousin Nim was right. The thing looked better as soon as I washed it up a little. So I trotted off to Mr. D. H. Carp's Groceries & Sundries to get me a jar of that Brasso. Actually I found it comes in a can, and it's not all that easy to use since you have to put it on, then rub it off with a cloth, and then do it all over again and again. Where I put it on and rubbed it off the thing looked more like gold, even though Cousin Nim says it's brass. He called it an astrolube, I think he said, which sounds like something you'd get for your spaceship at Fring's Service, but which name makes sense, since any fool who's suffered through Mrs. Carp's Senior English at Big Baloney knows that astro means something to do with the stars.
My astrolube is a fine piece of work. It's got actual moving parts, which I discovered by squirting it with WD-40 and messing with it. But the neat thing about it is that it looks so suave and mysterious and scientific. I found a little table in a corner of the garage and dusted it off, took it up to the office where Dad waits for real estate customers and I wait for private-eye customers, while I sort of do homework and watch stuff on the Internet. Me and Dad spend quite a lot of time waiting for clients.
Anyway, the table fits exactly under the office front window, and I put my astrolube on it there. The thing gleams like gold in the afternoon sun. If you stand on the sidewalk across the street outside Peking Peek-Inn you can see it through our window plain as day, even in the fog.
Naturally, Patella had to stand out in front for an hour looking at it through the glass. I finally went to the door and told her to come on in. "Say, Joey Kuhl, what is that thing?" she went right away. "It looks like it's about to take off."
"That's my astrolube, and I'm planning to use it in navigating my world travels some day. Right now it's just gonna stay where it is, attracting attention and customers and clients."
"Well, where'd you get it?" Patella is my classmate at C4 (or 4C which is what we say sometimes), but she's also a Big Baloney grad and works part-time for her grandpa who runs the Courier. Patella thinks she's a big-time journalist because she writes a column once in a while and delivers the Delta City Beacon as well as the Courier. I write a column, too, but it usually never gets printed or else people over there change the wording to make it sound like somebody else wrote it.
"Where'd I get it? Well, I got it sort of by accident." I don't need to reveal the source of my treasure. Besides, this way it sounds sort of mysterious and attractive.
"I could write it up in my column, and then lots of guys would come by to see it, and maybe you'd, like, get some business." She sort of smirks at me, like I could use some business.
"Well, Patella, I got a lot on my mind right now, so why don't you run along and I'll tell you all about it some other time." What I'm doing here is playing it suave, the way you got to do if you're going to maintain your manly reputation
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