Me and Danny waved out the dumper and got to working on the new pile of scrap. Red dust rolled out from all the junk, came up in a cloud that stuck to our sweat. We dragged out stuff that people might want to buy. Mostly old car and appliance parts. If it could be sold, we’d drive it out to the stock field. Every day we’d have a few people swing by—car junkies and repairmen, mostly—looking for things like a ’65 Mustang bumper, or a replacement panel for a mid-seventies Maytag washer. What wasn’t worth keeping got put in a scrap pile, sorted through with a magnet, and crushed into cubes for smelters and recyclers. We’d both been working the junkyard since we were in high school, so we knew the routine pretty good.

 

We’d just gotten started when the foreman called us over and handed me an inventory clipboard for the stock field. “Guy called looking for a Frigidaire refrigerator door that’s got a working latch on it. Says anything made in the fifties will do. Don’t need to be pretty.”

 

I took the clipboard, walked around the office to the stock field. Danny followed me.

 

“Lunch break coming up, Steve,” he said.

 

“Yeah.”

 

Lunch break was all we had to look forward to. We’d usually find some shade under the crusher’s conveyer belt, break out a sandwich and a cold soda. The crusher was an old one, with the press walls sitting on top of the hydraulics, fifteen feet up in the air, with the two belts coming down from either side. You could get some good shade beneath those belts. If it was real hot and we figured we could afford the gas, we’d sit in our cars, get the air conditioning rolling good, though mostly we’d eat under the belt.

 

We passed the car lots heading towards the appliances, and along the way Danny stopped by the GTO Judge that’d been dropped off a week back. It was missing its wheels, doors, trunk lid, clutch parts, and most of the small wired bits, like lights and gauges. No paint, was rusted all to shit. Just about all of the engine was still in it, though, and if me and Danny had time to work on it, we could get it running again. Pontiac was chickenshit when they released the Judge, rated it at two-fifty horsepower or something, but really they could give you four.

“I’m gonna buy me this car,” he said as he climbed into the driver’s side and put his hands on a steering wheel that wasn’t there. “We’ll fix it up, get it on the road. Take it out for the weekend shows. Paint it bright red, man.”

 

“We should,” I said, knowing we were bullshitting ourselves. We’d never have money for the car, not as long as we were working at the yard. Danny sure as hell wouldn’t—his girlfriend was pregnant, so he was marrying her. Besides, another week or two and that engine was sold to someone, maybe the whole car. Nothing decent lasted long at the yard. One morning we had a ’77 Corvette come in, and it was sold that afternoon to someone buying over the internet. We’d said we were going to buy that one, too, and a T-Bird that came through before the ‘Vette. Those were just the junked ones. We never figured on having a chance at the new cars. Sometimes they came in almost brand new, and you had to figure they were stolen and heading for a chop shop somewhere. You never asked about those cars, or anything that looked new, if you worked at the yard.

 

“C’mon,” I said, “let’s get this done.”

 

 

 

It was a long walk. The stock field was a patch of dirt big enough to play four games of football on at the same time, and was filled from end to end with old appliances. All that junk soaked up the heat, fed it back to you like a stove eye. The air shimmered so bad you’d think you were walking on a lake. Sweat kept dripping off my forehead, splattered up the clipboard every time I looked down at it, made the ink run. Danny would take off his cap and shake his head like a dog. Sometimes he wrung out the hat. I guess the heat kept us pretty thin, too, because we never felt like eating much and we probably sweated off a damn bucketful of water every day.

 

We got to the fridges, started counting off the lot numbers. Must’ve been three hundred of the damn things lined up like rusty tombstones. Plenty of old Frigidaires, but they were all mixed up in the other fridges. And when we finally got to one on the list that was about the right age, it was either missing the door or was missing completely. Nobody would steal a junk fridge, so whoever sold them hadn’t noted it on the stock sheets. It wasn’t our job, so we didn’t mark them as gone, either. We didn’t get paid enough to fix inventory mistakes.

 

I guess it was the fifth or sixth Frigidaire we checked. We got to it, saw that it had a door and a latch that looked okay. All rusted up, so bad it looked brown, but nothing was gone. Danny kicked it real hard, made sure there weren’t any bees inside. We’d gotten smart on that one the hard way.

 

I lifted up on the latch. It was stuck.

 

“Damn thing’s rusted through.” I’m a skinny guy, and after a few tries—I even got up on my toes so I could pull better—I told Danny to do it. I gave him room, got to hoping he’d get the door open because I didn’t want to spend any more time in the stock field.

 

Danny grunted, pulled back on the handle like he was yanking a tree out of the ground. He stumbled back and almost fell on his ass. The door whiffed open and something gray and old fell out like it had been leaning against the door.

 

I yelled and jumped back because it popped out so quick. Landed right on my feet. I didn’t even see what it was until I kicked it off me and I realized there was a skull staring at me with empty holes where eyes should’ve been.

 

“Shit, Steve, what’s got you scared?” Danny asked like he was getting ready to laugh. He hadn’t even seen it.

 

“There’s a body in here, man,” I said, panting like an old dog because I was so scared. And I’ll admit it, I was shaking, too, and my guts felt all bunched up.

 

Danny leaned over, looked at the corpse, a little pile of bones, really, barely stitched together with dry-rotted clothes the color of old newspapers. He was curled up, hands at his face.

 

“Goddamn…is that real?”

 

“Looks it,” I said.

 

“I’ll be a sonofabitch.”

 

We ran back to the office, got to the door out of breath and soaked through. The foreman looked at us like we were crazy when he saw us running up, but then he got calm once we told him what happened.

 

“Get in my truck,” he said, so we followed him out, jumped in the bed of his big Ram diesel, rode out to the stock lot.

 

We stopped at the fridge and showed him the corpse.

 

“You think he got murdered?” Danny asked.

 

The foreman shook his head, looked into the fridge and pulled out a little fringed cowboy hat and a cap gun, a metal one that was covered in flaking silver paint. He pulled the trigger but couldn’t get it to work. “Nah, wasn’t murder,” he said. He threw the hat and the gun back. “Junkyard mummy,” he said. “I seen one before.”

 

He reached out, jiggled the handle. “New fridges, they have magnetic seals on ‘em so you can’t get stuck inside. It’s a law: they gotta be magnetic. But the old ones, they still have latches that you can’t open from the inside. Same thing’d happen with car trunks. Kids be playing around—like hide and seek or something—and they’d get in there, get stuck.”

 

“So we gotta call the cops?” I asked.

 

The foreman toed the skeleton with his boot. “Don’t see the point in it. I betcha he’s been in here fifty years or better. Doubt there’s anybody out looking for him. Go on and see if you can get that latch off.”

 

Me and Danny got to it with screwdrivers and a crowbar, got it ripped off.

 

“A’ight,” the foreman said. “Put them bones back in the fridge.” When we didn’t start, he looked at us angry and said, “Go on now, do it.”

 

So we did. It was a tiny skeleton. The kid couldn’t have been more than eight or nine when he died. We tilted him up, the clothes and the dried up skin holding the bones together, and tucked him into the fridge. He smelled the way it smells underneath a bed when the floor gets dusty.

 

The foreman grabbed a roll of duct tape from the truck and bound the fridge door with a single strip. “Load it up,” he said.

 

We grabbed the Frigidaire by the bottom, tried not to burn our arms against the sides, and dumped it into the Ram’s bed. We closed the gate and jumped in. It felt like we were pallbearers riding along in the hearse, with that fridge rocking around on the Permaliner like a half-assed coffin, and the truck’s chrome glinting so bright you probably couldn’t look at it with the sun behind your back. Danny kept rubbing his arms like they were dirty. He’d rub all the way up and down them, from his gloves to his shirtsleeves. I remember good, because he pushed his sleeve back and I saw the dragon tattoo he’d gotten in the Navy, and the skin beneath it was white as milk.

 

The foreman stopped at the crusher belt. “Throw it on the belt,” he told us. “And don’t scratch up my truck.”

 

I tipped the fridge forward, imagined the body inside, curled up like it’d been crying. We lugged the refrigerator out and dropped it on the big belt. The warning bell sounded and then the belt started clanking up to the crusher. The fridge slid in and we heard the press walls hiss together and a second later the Frigidaire rolled out. It was just a cube of scrap, not much bigger than a decent-sized Christmas gift box.

 

“You boys follow me,” the foreman said. He led us to the office, bought us sodas out of the drink machine in the lounge. He waved us over to a desk, opened up the petty cash safe and pulled out two hundred bucks. “You two keep quiet about today, okay? Keep quiet and I’ll get you a little more. Go ahead and take your lunch break while you’re at it.”

 

We nodded and took the money.

 

Grateful. Real grateful. That’s how I felt when I touched that money. And kind of sick, too.

 

Danny grabbed the cooler from his truck. Money was tight for both of us, even with the two hundred, so we met under the crusher belt.

 

I expected him to talk about the body, though he didn’t. Guess he had his mind too full of other stuff. I was jealous of that, in a way. It wasn’t going by plan, but the new baby was going to make his life important, give him some meaning, I suppose. Me—I had as much going on with me as a cicada husk stuck to a tree. If I’d moved out of my trailer the next day, I would’ve packed a bowling ball and a couple of videos. Left the rest of it behind.

 

“You ain’t eating anything?” he asked, his mouth half-full of ham sandwich.

 

I shook my head. “Heat’s getting to me, I guess,” I said. And it was hot, real hot. Folks were dropping dead out west, out in places like Arizona. It was so damn hot I could hardly breathe, felt like I was stuck in an attic or something.

 

I got up and walked over to the back end of the press where the fridge was. It looked like wadded aluminum foil. Wasn’t a trace of the kid. It was like he’d been swallowed.

 

The foreman came over after a little while, handed me the clipboard again, told us to look for an old sink. I waited for Danny to finish his lunch and then we both got up, headed over to the scrap field. We passed the GTO on the way out. The foreman was there and so was a guy in a car shop jacket. They were talking price.

 

“Goddamn,” Danny said, like we ever had a chance at buying it.