The sound of the chipper ripped through my brain like the sound of my skin being torn off and I watched as my hand came within an inch of the blades before the oak branch was pulled from my grasp and was sucked into the chute. I watched the chips fly up into the bed of the dump truck. It looked like confetti at a parade. It was hot and the sweat fell off my forehead onto my hands and when I picked up another branch it slipped and fell to the ground.

“Pick that up! Whaddaya doin ya dumb hippy? We gotta chip this shit, pronto!”

“It was an accident Francis! I’m so sweaty I can’t get a grip on anything!”

“You better get a grip boy ‘cos boy we workers down here! We work hard! The town is countin’ on us! We the clean-up crew!”

“Thah’s right! You better listen to Francis! Francis knows whuts whut!” Timmy had come out of nowhere it seemed, and was standing behind Francis like an impenetrable barrier. He was six-foot-six and his shoulders were massive and he cast a dark shadow onto the ground at my feet as he stood and blocked out the sun.

I looked at them like they were pillbugs doing the tango, but there wasn’t much I could do. These guys were my bosses. I needed the job.

Francis was squat and round and paunchy and grizzled and whiskered and stupidity dripped from his eyes like blood from a wound.

Timmy was tall and bulky and like a Paul Bunyan of the suburbs and stupidity was a thing that was too clearly defined to describe what dripped from his eyes. He was beneath stupidity.

I was 17 years of age working a summer job that was the last thing I wanted to do. I had just graduated from high school. Many of my acquaintances were getting ready to go off to college, and were spending their last summer in party mode. I spent hour after hour thinking about the fun things I could be doing — like swimming at the club, watching the girls in bikinis; or trekking down the railroad tracks past the new tract houses into the undeveloped land, all the way into the next town or beyond; or playing baseball on the diamonds below my old elementary school, imaging myself as Sandy Koufax; or drinking beer down at the drinking rock in Tomahawk Park, hooting to the sky in hopes of some kind of redemption; or lying with my back against a tree reading a book, thinking of all the books I’d write; or visiting buxom Rona Concerti, doing my best to get my first piece of ass.

Instead, I was down at the Municipal Recycling Center, where the whole town brought their cuttings and clippings and prunings, from far too much property maintenance; and where the town maintenance crew made daily drop-offs from their allotted scavenging through the streets and the leafy canopies that arched over the colonial facades of far too many houses.

That’s the way it was in my town — the bourgeoisie at its best — it was the very defining model of bourgeois respectability. My innate sense of its stink was likely what brought out the rebel in me. In fact, the very reality of my being down there at the Recycling Center with Francis and Timmy was probably a sullen expression of my rebelliousness — to my own detriment. Damn them all, I’ll bury myself down here!

I wasn’t alone, however. A neighborhood friend worked there too; he had gotten me the job in fact. Ever grateful for that favor I never let him forget it.

“I don’t know what I was thinking when I let you talk me into this job,” I said one day over our baloney sandwiches.

“You were probably thinking you’d like to have some money to buy records with.”

“Well, there is that. But I’m pretty sure being able to buy a few records isn’t worth this.”

Timmy was lurking in the background, not five feet from us, peering over the hood of the battered old dump truck that we pitched the chips into. He was always lurking around somewhere, trying to get some dirt to bring back to Francis. I caught his eye and saw the depths of doom, the sign that said No Way Out.

“There’s that fucking Timmy, creeping me out.”

“Don’t mind him. He’s harmless.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“He’s nothing to worry about, just a moron. Get a grip.”

I took the last bite of my baloney sandwich and swigged the last hit off my secret beer. I could feel Timmy at my back.

“What records you been listening to lately?” I asked.

“Sly and the Family Stone! I want to take you higher! UH, Uh, uh, uh, uh…”

“Let’s not get you behind a mic anytime soon.”

“Fuck you asshole.”

He was tall and thin, almost bony, but what mattered was that I knew he had a good heart, and I knew he would be a good man someday, and a good friend always. I also knew that he didn’t deserve to be down there any more than I did.

“Does it bother you that we’re working down here, with these idiots, busting our backs?” I asked.

“It sucks, but it’s only temporary. Write it up to a ‘life experience’.”

“It is that, no doubt.”

“HEY!” Francis’ voice came out of nowhere like a blast from hell. “IT’S TIME TO GET BACK TO WORK!”

We lifted our sorry asses off the creosote soaked railroad pile we were sitting on and got back to work.

—

Like any job, you can get into a rhythm turning oak and maple and sycamore branches into chips. After a while the chipper blots out all evidence of another life. The noise that emanates from the machine envelopes you in a cocoon which necessitates oblivion. Anything could happen in your surroundings and you would not know — a car wreck on the street, a robbery or murder in the parking lot, a fire in the forest. You are clued out. All movements are rote: lift the branch, wrestle it into the chute, guide it carefully and push it ever so gracefully into the whirling blades…watch the chips fly before turning around to do it all again…and again…and again. It gets manic after a while and you speed up, wanting to get more and more of the stuff decomposed, pushing the brush and branches into the vicious chute, barely seeing it as it chews it all up and spits it out to the sky.

Finally sense might come to you and you might stop to take a breath…glance off toward the treeline…perhaps see a bird alight from a terminal shoot on a tree and fly away.

I often did just that…stop to take a breath and glance off toward the treeline. It was a wonder that birds could just fly away. If only I could do that, I thought.

I’d look at my arms and see them raked with the scrapes of random twigs and broken branches as they had passed with gleeful ferocity into the chipper and drew blood like the bite of some slavemaster’s whips. Scabs from days past festered with the newest incisions.

It was a war down there, make no mistake.

“WHADDAYA DOING? WHADDAYA DOIN? WHADDAYA DOIN? WHADDAYA DOING?” I finally heard Francis’ voice as he come rushing toward me from across the asphalt lot, red in his fat bristled face. I reached over and turned the chipper off. I waited till it stopped its revolutions, as Francis came ever closer.

“What did you say Francis?” just before it seemed he would collide with me.

“I said whaddaya doin’, staring off into the trees? You think this is a nature reserve or somethin’?”

“Oh no, I don’t think that Francis.”

“You a wise-ass, ain’t you? You think you got some schoolin’ you’re better than us down here, me and Timmy? You ain’t better than us! You ain’t nothin’! You a lazy punk! I’ll show you how hot you are! Get over there and haul that pile of brush over here to the chipper!”

“We can just move the chipper Francis…”

“Get over there and move that pile of brush!”

I don’t know why I did it, but I did. It was six feet high and about twenty feet in diameter. It took me the rest of the day.

I tried to write a story that night but I couldn’t — I was dead.

—

My parents had some kind of weird pride in me because I was working…never mind the kind of work that I was doing — the degradation it involved, the physical danger and damage that it entailed. I was out there working, earning my way. What was even weirder was that I myself on occasion felt the same way. I had my own money to buy records and books and illegal beer on weekends.

That was a transient feeling however — make no mistake — in moments of lucidity I could see clearly that there was no pride to be found from working at the Municipal Recycling Center, chipping the town’s cast-off brush. There was no value to that ethic. That ethic was a lie, and no one who ever espoused it told you about people like Francis and Timmy, or of all the others that one would encounter who were far more grotesque, however sophisticated they might appear. They were silent, when they spread the lie, about what had happened to those kinds of people, and what those kind of people wanted or needed to do to anyone that came their way and fell under their influence. Maybe it was a never-ending cycle of paying it backwards that drove things along.

They were silent, or perhaps ignorant, about the people who knew all too well how the system worked, and who manipulated it and would always justify it, in the name of the nature of things, in the edict that the ends merit the means.

I felt no pride. It shamed me that I was allowing myself to be degraded in such a way. I didn’t know if I would ever be able to forgive myself.

I was caught in a vicious game and I knew it was wrong and I knew that it turned people to pulp to be cast off like the chips we sent off to be spread as mulch to keep the weeds down. I knew I didn’t want to be a part of any of it — I was a weed. There were times when I felt like I wanted to kill somebody. I didn’t know who; my enemy was too diffuse and powerful.

—

One day Timmy came over to me and said, “Why do you want to piss Francis off?”

“I don’t want to piss Francis off Timmy. What made you think that?”

“You’re always sayin’ stuff that pisses him off.”

“Hell man, I’m just being honest. Can’t a guy be honest?”

“You can’t piss Francis off. He’s mean when he’s pissed off.”

I got a sudden fright in my bones, and I looked into Timmy’s blank eyes and wondered if there was more there than what I had thought. Maybe he knew something that I didn’t know. I knew he was Francis’s prime confidant. Was this a message from Francis?

I chanced to look over my shoulder and saw Francis with his clipboard on the hood of the municipal pickup, trying to make himself look tall, and staring over at me.

I gave him a little wave of my fingers.

He scowled and turned off toward the booth where people paid their dump fees and got receipts. I watched his squat round waddle and saw him for what I thought he was: an inbred hillbilly out of place and out of time in a suburb of New York City in the late 20th century.

“Hey Timmy,” I said turning back to the big sycophant, “fuck Francis.”

I got up and headed back to the chipper. There was a load of brush waiting for me.

—

Early the next morning, the moment I arrived, before my buddy had showed up, and with Timmy just leaving in the dump truck to pick up a load somewhere, Francis stormed over to me with beady eyed fury.

“What did you tell Timmy yesterday?”

“I didn’t tell Timmy anything. Maybe that his zipper was open or something.”

“You’re a liar! All you wise-ass kids are liars! You told him that I could go fuck myself! That I could go fuck myself!”

“I don’t think I said that Francis.”

“That’s what Timmy said! That’s what Timmy said!”

“No, I don’t think I said that Francis. I may have said…’fuck Francis’…but that’s not the same.”

“You know I be your boss?”

“I’m painfully aware of that Francis.”

“Then you need to treat me with respeck!”

I looked at him, and I knew right off that respect was the last thing my face was expressing. I wished it didn’t have to be that way. It wasn’t his fault that he was who he was, and that I was who I was. It wasn’t his fault that he had never had any better options than the town recycling center and a best friend like Timmy. It wasn’t his fault that he was my boss, or that I was trapped down there, not entirely sure that I wasn’t going to end in some similar sort of hell for the rest of my life. It wasn’t his fault that the mass of people were exploited and kept down by the few who were able to massage the system to their massive advantage and the detriment of so many others.

Whose fault was it?

I wasn’t sure, but I had a good idea and I just needed to let it come into better focus, so that I could fully see who my real enemies were.

At that moment, Francis was the face of my enemy, its living embodiment.

“Hey Francis, you know what?”

“I don’t want to hear ‘you know what’ from you!”

“Go fuck yourself Francis.”

He lifted his stubby right arm into the air as if he meant to hit me.

Almost as if I had been programmed I turned and grabbed the shovel that was leaning against the entrance booth and with more swiftness than I thought I was capable of I swung it at Francis’s head and the sound was sickening, and the shovel rang through the crisp morning air like a tuning fork, and his head smashed like a rotten watermelon. He fell over and crashed to the ground with breathtaking speed.

My action had no precedent and no forethought; I’d done it as though I was swatting a fly.

I carefully placed the shovel back where it had been, wiping off its handle with my shirt for some reason. I looked around. There was nobody and the road was as still as a flatland stream. It was quite peaceful and pleasant and comfortable there, before the heat and humidity of the day had had a chance to suffocate the life out of you.

I grabbed Francis by his legs and dragged him over to the chipper. He was heavy but I’d been carrying heavy loads around all summer. I got him over to the chipper, then went back and scuffed up the trail he’d left behind. I kicked all the cast-off clippings and leaves and twigs with a merry abandon, dancing across the open space of the Center.

Francis was extremely heavy, and his roly-poly body was like trying to get a beanbag into the chipper but I finally managed to get him up on the chute. Holding him in place and poised like an acrobat I reached over and turned the chipper on. The air screamed with its vicious and evil roar. Slowly and methodically I fed Francis into the machine. It almost got bound up on his head but after that he was sucked into the blades exactly like any old length of oak or maple or sycamore and he flew out of my hands and the confetti was red and pink and bone-white and it scattered all over the tarmac where the dump truck was normally parked to receive the offerings of the chipper.

I ran around and did my dance through the debris again, renewing the chaos of the world, removing the memory of something I still couldn’t quite put my finger on, obliterating the evidence.

Out by the road I gazed around the recycling center one last time, taking it in; then I walked away.

I’m still walking.

—

Doug Downie is currently an environmental scientist with the State of California. He recently retired as an evolutionary biologist/entomologist at Rhodes University in South Africa. He received a PhD in Entomology from University of California, Davis. He has been writing for most of his life. His poetry and prose has been published in South Africa (New Contrast, Botsotso, Itch, LitNet, The Fishing & Hunting Journal, and the Mail & Guardian) and in the US (Chiron Review, Down in the Dirt, Travels Thru History). He has also self-published (this is not a sin) five short novels, one with a collection of short stories included.