a nod of his head at the driver. The truck pulled away and disappeared out of my sight into the mass of mounds and hillocks that made up the dump.
I waited.
More trucks arrived at the dump. Some were dusty red and had Ace’s name on the side. Some came from other disposal companies. The trucks stopped on the weigh scale at the west side of the building.
Other trucks, some Ace and some not, came out of the dump. They stopped on the weigh scale on the east side of the building.
The man in the white shirt took care of both sides. He consulted the weigh-scale indicator on the west side and a similar indicator on the east side. For each truck, he wrote down something on a different sheet of paper with carbons, giving the bottom copy to the driver. He moved purposefully back and forth between the two windows in his little kingdom. He didn’t appear rushed. None of the drivers honked a horn at him. A professional at work.
My truck came out of the dump in twenty minutes. It had a jolly bounce that told me its bin had been emptied of the construction debris. The truck pulled on to the east scale. The guy inside the booth jotted his notations, tore off the bottom copy, and handed it to the Ace driver.
Presumably—no, certainly—the sheet was the same paper that the man in the white shirt had used for his notations when my truck arrived at the dump and weighed in on the west side.
Old white-shirt gave a nod of the head to the driver. The truck moved off the scale.
I turned my head from the side window and looked straight ahead. The Volks was parked under a tree, and the front window was in shadows. My face reflected back at me in the semi-darkness. The expression on it was studied. When I look studied, I also look like I should be wearing a tall hat in a conical shape. I let the studiedness slide off my face.
My truck had weighed in with a full load.
It weighed out empty.
The man in the small building had recorded the two weights.
Subtract the second weight from the first and you had the weight of the load.
That figure was the basis on which Ace paid Metropolitan Toronto for the privilege of dumping waste on Metro land.
Ace passed on the charge to its customers. Customers like the guys who were putting up the skyscraper on York Street. Ace charged the customers the amount of the charge it paid Metro plus something for its own services in hauling the stuff to the dump.
All very legitimate and businesslike.
I checked my reflection in the window. Nobody in there wearing a conical hat on his head.
Hot dog, I’d mastered the basics of the disposal business.
6
I FOLLOWED THE TRUCK around for the rest of the day. Maybe more surveillance would firm up my analysis of the Ace operation. Maybe I’d discover something dodgy about the disposal business. Maybe I’d pick up a light tan with the top down on the Volks. Maybe the George Hamilton look would come back in style.
The truck made two more runs. Each took us to a different construction site and back to the dump. Empty the bin, take the paper from the man in the booth, move on.
After the third trip, it was two o’clock. The driver parked his truck a few blocks up Leslie from the dump in front of a place called Jerry’s Tavern. The driver went in. Jerry must have been a cheery soul. His tavern was painted canary yellow and had more than its complement of neon. It was also ancient enough to offer two entrances. The custom dated back to genteel days when Ontario law required ladies to arrive in drinking establishments through a door exclusive to their sex.
I went into a variety store across the street from Jerry’s. A small Korean lady was selling a fistful of lottery tickets to a large black man. When they finished, I bought a quart carton of two-per-cent milk and a package of butter tarts. A sugar hit to carry me through an afternoon of surveillance. I sat in the Volks, sipped the milk, and tried to pin down the flavour of the butter tarts. Band-Aids. The tarts tasted like Band-Aids.
An hour after the driver entered Jerry’s, he exited. He stood on the sidewalk and belched. I noted two fresh pieces of information. His T-shirt wasn’t all black. It had Duran Duran printed on the front in faded white lettering. At his right hip, hooked on a belt loop, he wore a ring of many keys. It looked heavy. If I carried a load like that on my belt loop, my pants would fall around my ankles.
The driver climbed into his cab and drove north on Leslie. I did likewise.
Duran Duran. Was that the name of the guy or of the band? You didn’t run into such conundrums in my kind of music. Stan Getz was the guy. The Stan Getz Quartet was the name of the band.
The truck drove straight across the city to a residential street in the Annex district near Bathurst and Bloor. A triplex was going up on a lot between two Victorian houses. The driver dumped the empty bin from the truck on the front lawn and scooped up another binful of construction trash. All as before.
What wasn’t usual was that a short, heavy man in green pants counted off several bills from a fat roll in his pocket and handed them to the driver. It was the first time all day I’d seen money change hands.
The truck went north on Bathurst Street. Bathurst is long and narrow, and as you get farther north, apartment buildings line the street. Out of polite earshot, some Torontonians call it the Gaza Strip. It’s a middle-class Jewish neighbourhood peopled by families who have moved up the immigrant corridor of Bathurst Street from the earlier ghettos downtown.
North of Steeles Avenue, about the time I began to ponder the question of our destination, the high-rises peter out. Rural Ontario breathes a few defiant last gasps, maple trees, oaks, and elms. Housing developments would take care of them in another half-generation. The truck caught the orange light at Highway 7. I pressed the accelerator and hung on its tail.
Past Royal Downs Golf Club, the truck turned left on to a dirt road. The driver hadn’t signalled for the turn. My tires squealed when I followed him in. I didn’t follow him far. He stopped twenty yards down the dirt road. By the time I braked, the driver was jumping down from his cab.
He waddled in my direction. His hands were hitching up his pants and he was speaking to me.
“Hey, you, shit-face,” he said.
It wasn’t going to be an invitation for drinks at the Park Plaza.
The dirt road was too narrow to turn the Volks around, and accelerating backwards on to Bathurst seemed more chancy than a confrontation with fatso. I got out of the car and watched the driver come the rest of the way toward me. The waddle had been upgraded to a swagger.
“All day I look in the rearview, I see you, turd,” the driver said. He was near enough that I could smell Jerry’s beer.
“Tenacious son of a gun, aren’t I,” I said.
“You and that fag car.”
“Steady,” I said, “let’s leave the vehicle out of it.”
Up close, with all the gut and beard and black T-shirt, the driver had a tendency to loom. He weighed about two-fifty, but he looked as fit as Oliver Hardy. That might help my cause if it came to fisticuffs.
