"
Alan gawped. The dumpster was seven feet cubed, the duckies a few inches
on a side. There were thousands and thousands of duckies in the
dumpster: more than they could ever fit into the Buick. In a daze, he
went off and pulled some likely flattened boxes out of the trash and
assembled them, packing them with the duckies that Kurt passed down to
him from atop his crunching, cracking mound of doomed duckies that he
was grinding underfoot.
Once they'd finished, Kurt fussed with moving the boxes around so that
everything with a bootprint was shuffled to the bottom. "We don't want
them to know that we've been here or they'll start hitting the duckies
with a hammer before they pitch 'em out."
He climbed into the car and pulled out a bottle of window cleaner and
some paper towels and wiped off the steering wheel and the dash and the
handle of his flashlight, then worked a blob of hand sanitizer into his
palms, passing it to Alan when he was done.
Alan didn't bother to point out that as Kurt had worked, he'd
transferred the flashlight from his mouth to his hands and back again a
dozen times -- he thought he understood that this ritual was about Kurt
assuring himself that he was not sinking down to the level of rummies
and other garbage pickers.
As if reading his mind, Kurt said, "You see those old rum-dums pushing a
shopping cart filled with empty cans down Spadina? Fucking *morons* --
they could be out here pulling LCDs that they could turn around for ten
bucks a pop, but instead they're rooting around like raccoons in the
trash, chasing after nickel deposits.
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