Jim picks the cans.
He walks the roads and the sidewalks with his plastic barrow, one wheel grinding a little, and he picks the cans from the ground, and he picks the cans from the bins, and he puts them in the barrow. He picks the cans rain or shine; the rain doesn’t bother him; he knocked a little hole in the bottom of the barrow to let the water out. He picks the cans every day of the year, on every holiday; no denomination or cause forestalls him. He picks the cans all over town.
He picks the cans from the downtown, from the bins by the restaurants and the clothing shops and the apartment blocks. Some of the places lock their bins; some don’t. Jim makes do.
He picks the cans from the baskets in the parks and by the beach. In the summer he gets a lot; on summer holidays he gets a LOT; in winter he’s lucky to get anything.
He picks the cans from the side of town where the windows are covered up and missing. He walks a little quicker down his old street, so he doesn’t have to make conversation. Jim’s busy, and awkwardness takes time.
He picks the cans from the side streets with the two-story homes built fifty years ago and last renovated twenty years ago. Some of those houses are going missing one by one, torn down and replaced with something worthy of the million-dollar-land they’re sitting on. Jim can get some good cans when that happens; housewarming parties have that manic enthusiasm around them.
He picks the cans from the side of town where the driveways are long and the waterfront is in everyone’s backyard, and that one’s tough because if Jim goes in daytime he gets the cops called on him for vagrancy and if he goes at night he gets the cops called on him for prowling. He goes anyways, but he walks faster here than he does in the rest of town, and once he had to hide the barrow in a hedge and his body in a culvert. It wasn’t a good time.
He even picks the cans from the godawful suburban sprawl out by the ridgeline on the verge of town, which means he has to walk down roads with no sidewalks for hours just to get there while traffic zips by him at sixty kilometers an hour. Jim accepts that, even if he doesn’t enjoy it. That’s how it is.
That’s how it all is, really.
Jim picks the cans all week, and then he picks through them one more time and separates them in half. Then he takes the barrow and he redeems the deposit on one half of it, the lesser half of it, a dime a can. It gives him food and a new shirt now and then and a little bit put towards whatever else he needs, according to priorities. And it gets him one new, full can.
The other half Jim picked he keeps with him in the barrow, and then Jim and the barrow and the new can take one more walk, all the way down to the park by the water, to a bench where the city lawnmowers don’t attend properly because it’s practically in the lake when the waves get too big and the waterweeds are trying to eat it alive from the legs up.
Jim sits on the bench. His barrow sits next to the bench. The full can sits in his pocket. And he waits.
Some weeks he waits a long time. Some weeks it’s fast. This is a long week, and it’s a long wait, and that’s a little mercy. He watches the sunset bloom and fade and the clouds blend into ink along with the sky before it starts, which is enough time for a rest and to take off his shoes and rub his feet and listen to the birds singing good-night, good-night, see-you-tomorrow. It’s the longest he’s been off his feet without sleeping all week.
It comes after the birds stop singing, and it goes for the throat. Right there, WHAM, a lump like your stomach’s sprinted up your esophagus and gone bungee-jumping on your uvula. By the time you’ve registered it your heart’s already pitter-patting like you’ve been on a run, your limbs feel like you’ve been doused in ice water, and your hair’s prickled from the tug and flinch of your skin as it tries to shrink back from the world in general.
It’s in the water. The same thing that makes people scared of sharks and crocodiles is awake, and it’s loud, and it’s telling anyone nearby to pay attention and freak out properly and productively because This Is How It Happens. There’s nothing visible, no fin, no eyeball-laden dead log, nothing at all, until there is, and it’s the worst kind of thing to see because it’s been there all along. It looks like a muddy spot on the bottom, dark with weeds.
Those aren’t weeds. They never were. And the thing they’re swirling in isn’t a current.
And then, something breaks. And it doesn’t stop.
It breaks free of the bottom, comes boiling up like the contents of a burst kettle. It breaks into the ultraviolet, turns into something just out of the reach of sunlight’s illumination for a poor trichromatic primate. It breaks the surface, and just as the whorl begins to pile up on itself and reach for something above the waterline is when Jim picks a can and hucks it.
The can nails it dead amidships – the aluminum fizzling out into vapor on impact – and the noise that comes out is indescribable because it isn’t noise, it’s that sort of sound elephants make to talk to each other from very far away that the human ear can’t register, except using a medium that isn’t vibrations. Jim ignores it, and picks another can. And hucks it.
He picks a can from the street he used to live on.
He picks a can from the park by the high school where the kids hang out and make trouble.
He picks a can from the recycling bin next to the longest driveway in town, next to a sign that said TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED ACCORDING TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW.
He picks a tire-flattened can he pulled out of a ditch by the highway, and nearly cuts his fingers on its jagged edge
He picks a can, and picks a can, and picks a can, and with every can Jim throws it’s beaten lower, lower, deeper into the water, and when all that’s left is that seething, anxious fear in the air and the water’s calm Jim pulls out the new, still-unopened can and hucks that too. It unwinds into nothing but a spray of sour booze and with that last blow the whole thing falls apart, dread by dread, until there’s nothing left in the air but mosquitos.
Jim sits there for a little while yet, despite the mosquitos, since he wants to make sure. Then he sighs, and he stretches, and he tucks himself under his jacket for a blanket and twists his arm for a pillow and goes to bed.
It’s been a busy week, and the next one starts tomorrow.