Garbage Disposal

by Tiddler

It was hot, that Summer. The Interstate, which ran close to Aaron’s house, was constantly buzzing with three lanes of traffic in each direction. It was enough to make anyone want to go outside with a shotgun and just blow away some of the drivers. Aaron was a tolerant man, however, and thought that he should just think himself lucky that he was not one of those pitiable commuters, who had to, daily, travel that highway from their home to the city. The traffic and the noise that it created, though, was beginning to get to him. It was like a constant stream of ants running past his back door. Even when he could not hear it, he knew that it was there. When he went to the town, he knew that those cars and trucks were still running past his back door and would still be there when he got home. Aaron was retired, now. When he had moved to this house, he and his wife had come to an area that was open countryside. That had been fifty years ago, even now, no-one else lived within a mile of the house. His wife had died in 1982 and since then he had lived alone. The Interstate had been re-routed, past the back of his house, in 1990. The original bridge, that took the road over the river had been found to have been built on an unstable foundation, and a new bridge had had to be built, not far from Aaron’s house. The traffic had to go past his house to get to the bridge over the river. Just down, past his house, was some waste land. People had started to throw garbage there. At first it had started as a small mound, but it had built up into something of a small mountain, since the local tip had closed down the rubbish had to be taken miles further away and the garbage disposal truck had been coming around less frequently. Aaron suspected that some of the people around him had taken to just throwing rubbish onto what was already there. He thought that it was a disgrace that people should be so messy. The old man had not been brought up like that and he wished that he could catch someone doing it. In the summer heat, the garbage had began to stink and the stink had got as far as Aaron’s house. It was something else that was getting to him. Most of the rubbish seemed to be put there overnight, usually on a Tuesday, or Wednesday. Aaron settled down into his armchair, which was beside his fire. It was a good fire, where he burnt wood from the surrounding area. He looked up at the wall, over his fireplace, where he kept his old crossbow, as an ornament. Once he had taken part in competition shooting with it and had won some trophies, which were on his fireplace. He decided to go for a walk and thought that he would go down to the riverside, where he and Cheryl, his ex- wife, had liked to sit, when she was alive. To get there, now, he had to cross the road bridge, over the Interstate. Not much traffic used the road bridge, but it had had to be built, so that local farmers could get to their fields, which had been cut in two by the building of the new road. It was next to this bridge that rubbish was being dumped. He followed the track, until he reached the bridge. The stench was almost overpowering, it was the foul smell of rotting egg, drifting from the heap of garbage. A fly buzzed past him and he noticed that there were lots of them, collecting around the rubbish. Aaron carried on, onto the bridge, and looked over it’s concrete parapet, down onto the Interstate, underneath. The nearside lane of each carriageway carried a constant stream of trucks, with cars mainly occupying the other two lanes. The trucks barely abated at night time. Lots of truckers seemed to prefer to travel at night, particularly if they were travelling long distances. He thought that many of the trucks were much too close to each other, and wondered why there were not more accidents there. Suddenly, he saw some movement at the side of the Interstate. He saw that a dog was chasing a rabbit, which was running for it’s life. The rabbit ran towards the ferns, on the edge of the road and then straight out onto the carriageway. Aaron didn’t think that the truck driver even noticed that he had hit something. The first truck hit the rabbit and it was killed, instantly. This was followed by a constant stream of trucks running over it, until it’s little body was flattened completely into the road. The dog, also, watched from the roadside. He had been tall enough to see the traffic, above the foliage, but the rabbit had been running too frantically to check where it was going. Aaron loved animals, and this was a shock to him. He decided that he didn’t want to continue his walk, and went home. The next Tuesday night, he took down his crossbow from over his fireplace. He also took down the crossbow bolts that were displayed on each side of the weapon. The bolts were parallel shafts. They had pointed ends, with no barbs. The fact that the tips did not have barbs made it easier to take them out of the targets, without damaging either them or the target that they were fired at. Aaron went upstairs and got a toilet roll from the bathroom, also a plastic carrier bag. He put crossbow, bolts, toilet roll and carrier bag into a large shoulder bag, which he took down into the cellar. There he collected the cart, that his children had used, years ago, to race down the hill. Aaron never saw his children, any more. George had moved to Alaska, for a job with an oil company, and Helen had moved to Kansas City when she had married. He put the bag onto the cart and wheeled it outside. The back door of his house was on a lower level to the front and the back cellar had a door to the outside. He wheeled the cart to the bridge, beside the dump. Then, he made his way into the bracken, which was beside the track. He loaded the crossbow with a bolt and waited. He sat there, until it went dark, then he laid down in the bracken and waited some more. Soon, it was pitch dark all around him, except for the glare of lights from the highway, which ran under the bridge. Around about 2 am, a small truck came along the track and stopped at the foot of the bridge. Two people got out of it. Aaron recognised the truck. It belonged to Jim and Annie Tucker. Other neighbours, that he had talked to, had some harsh things to say about them. Most had agreed that Jim and Annie were an unhappy partnership, and that it would probably have been better if they had never married in the first place. It was well known that Jim had knocked Annie around, and she had not been reticent about blackening his name in public. Jim and Annie got out of the truck. They took a sofa from the back of the flatbed truck and took it to the tip. Both together they heaved it, so that it was on the dump. Annie went back to the truck, as Jim pulled the sofa a little further onto the rubbish. Jim was only about ten yards away from where Aaron lay with his crossbow. He dropped like a stone, without making a sound, as the crossbow bolt scored a direct hit, through his heart. The noise of the traffic drowned out the whoosh of the bolt and the sound that Aaron made, as he reset the crossbow and fitted another bolt. "Jim", Annie shouted, after a minute or two, "where are you, what are you doing?" She came back to the tip, towards where Jim’s lifeless body was, but never saw Jim again. Aaron’s second bolt hit her, right through the chest, just as he had hit Jim with the first one. Annie, too, dropped lifelessly to the ground. Aaron went up to the motionless bodies of the couple. The bolt slid easily out of Jim’s chest, likewise the one that was in Annie’s was easily removed. There was hardly any blood at all, as their hearts had stopped pumping, immediately, when the bolts had gone through them. He wiped the bolts with the toilet roll, that he had brought with him and put the bolts and the toilet paper into the plastic bag. In turn, he put the plastic bag into the shoulder bag. Aaron wheeled the cart up to where the bodies of Jim and Annie lay. He put the body of Jim on the cart and wheeled it onto the bridge, being careful to duck down low, as he wheeled the cart onto the bridge, so that drivers on the Interstate could not see him over the parapet. He took the cart, with Jim’s body on it, to the side of the bridge that could not be seen by the oncoming traffic. He was over the southbound, nearside lane that was constantly full of trucks. The truck drivers would not see the body drop past the body of the bridge, before they hit it. All that they might see would be the body dropping under the far side of the bridge before it hit the road in their lane. Aaron rolled Jim’s body from the cart, and left it beside the parapet, whilst he went back for Annie’s body. He brought her body and put it on the far side of the bridge, again he put it on the side of the bridge away from the oncoming traffic, so he had two bodies, one over the northbound nearside lane, one over the southbound nearside lane. First he rolled Annie’s body up and over the parapet. The truck driver was just changing the channels on his radio as he went under the bridge and didn’t see Annie’s body drop straight in front of his truck. He just felt a jolt as he ran over her. He thought that maybe a piece of masonry had fallen from the bridge and he had just run over it. The following trucks were all too close, really, and the roadway was unlit along this stretch. One of them did see a bundle, but thought that it was a bundle of clothing that had probably fallen from someone's roof rack. Aaron went over to Jim’s body and did exactly the same thing as he had done with Annie’s. He was lucky again. Henry Cook, the truck driver who first hit Jim’s body, was thinking about when he was going to get to his destination and about the girl that he knew in the town, who would be so pleased to see him. She thought of him as her intrepid hero, driving through the dark, longing to be with her. Henry thought that he might have seen something drop onto the road, but it was so quick that he couldn’t be sure. He was pulling forty tons and the truck barely shuddered as he ran over Jim’s body. Aaron went back to where he had been lying and put the crossbow back into the shoulder bag, together with the four unused bolts. He trundled the cart home, with the shoulder bag on it. He put the plastic bag, containing the bloodstained crossbow bolts and toilet paper onto his fire. Soon, the only things left were the metal tips of the bolts. He put the crossbow back in it’s place, over the fireplace, together with the remaining bolts. After a while he heard the sound of police and ambulance sirens. Then the noise of traffic on the road ceased, as the road was closed and both northbound and southbound traffic diverted along preceding slip roads. Someone in the northbound carriageway had seen a body drop onto the southbound road and had ‘phoned the police on a mobile telephone. When the police arrived, with search lights, they found a mess on the road, in both carriageways. It was not much different to what had happened to the rabbit that Aaron had seen, earlier. There was no way that the police or forensics could determine that the couple had been killed by a crossbow, as their remains were so splattered into the road. It looked probable that they were joint suicides. That night, Aaron went to bed, drinking in the beautiful silence that followed the closure of the road. He slept like a log, it was wonderful. The road was closed until about noon on the next day, as the bits of Jim and Annie could not be properly located in the dark. The police took a look at the bridge that carried the track over the Interstate. They noticed Jim and Annie’s truck, nearby. It had the doors shut and the lights off, just as Jim and Annie had left it. The keys were found in a pocket, in a tattered rag, which had once been Jim’s jacket, on the Interstate, close to the remains of his body. There was an inquiry into the incident, but it looked very much like it was either suicide, or that Jim had murdered Annie and then thrown himself over the bridge, too. The testimony of the neighbours suggested that the unhappy couple had finally snapped and whatever had blown up, between them, had led to their deaths on the road. At first the old man wondered if he had been foolhardy to kill the litterbugs, and whether he would be found out. But, it seemed that even when the police definitely knew that someone had been murdered, they found it hard to solve the cases, so they were not over keen to disprove that the suicides had been anything other than that, and nobody was pressing them to look into the deaths of the unpopular couple. Aaron complained to the refuse disposal office about the dump near the bridge and it was cleared up. He was surprised to find that no more rubbish was left there. It must have just been Jim and Annie who were responsible for the whole mess. He still had to put up with the noisy traffic, though. After all, nobody was going to buy a house in the situation that his was in. Word List Provided by: Rajah Carriageway = piece of highway in which all traffic moves in one direction.