and coffee. For dessert he had ice cream. It was cold, but no longer frozen, but that couldn’t be helped. It was just too much of a nuisance to carry ice to the farm.
After he finished eating, he washed the dishes and the pots and pans and put the garbage into one of the grocery bags. He would take it to the garbage dump in the morning.
If, he thought, making a wry little joke with himself, if there was still any place to dump garbage in his garbage dump.
The problem with the farm, Marion often thought, was exactly opposite from the problem he had with the house in Philadelphia. In the city, people were always trying—and often succeeding—in taking away things that belonged to him. At the farm, people were always giving him things he hadn’t asked for and didn’t want. Such as worn-out automobile tires, refrigerators, mattresses, and bed springs.
He didn’t like it, of course. No civilized person could be anything but annoyed with the transformation of one’s private property into a public dump. But he understood why it had happened, and why the police couldn’t do much about it.
While the land was mostly flat, there were two depressions, each more than two acres in size, both of them touching the road that cut across the property from one county road to the other. The garbage dumpers simply backed their trucks up to the edge of the depressions and unloaded their worn-out mattresses, rusty bed springs, old tires, and broken refrigerators.
Marion had from time to time complained to the authorities about the unauthorized dumping, but to no avail. They told him that if he, or they, caught someone dumping, they would of course deal with the matter. But since there was no one living in the area, police patrols seldom visited it, their presence being required elsewhere.
His only solution, they told him, was to both fence and post the property. Fencing 1,280 acres was of course for financial reasons out of the question. And when he had put up PRIVATE PROPERTY— TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED signs where the paths began at the county roads, the only response had been that the garbage dumpers, or someone else, had used them for target practice. It had been a waste of money.
Four months before, on one of his monthly weekends at the farm, he had taken the canvas tarpaulin off the old Fordson tractor his father had bought years before, jump-started it with jumper cables from his rented Chevrolet, and driven it around the farm on what he thought of as his quarterly inspection of the property.
This time there had been something new in the larger of the two garbage dumps. Lockers. They appeared to have been in a fire. There were approximately fifty of them, each about three feet square. They were painted green, and they were constructed in units of three.
Curiosity had overcome his disgust and annoyance, and he’d gotten off the Fordson, leaving it running, and gone down in the depression and opened them. It was only then, when he found keys in most of them, that he recognized them for what they were. They were the lockers one found in railroad stations, where travelers stored their suitcases. You put a quarter in the slot, which allowed you to withdraw the key. When you returned to the locker for your belongings and put the key back in the lock, the door could be opened, but the mechanism now seized the key and would hold it until another quarter was deposited.
Marion had happened to have two quarters in his pocket, and tested two of the lockers. They were operable.
He had then regretted having thrown the fifty cents away, and climbed out of the depression and got back on the Fordson and drove back to the farmhouse. He had made his supper, and then got on his knees and prayed for the souls of those of his men whom the Lord had chosen to take unto Him in ’Nam.
He would have thought that he would have given no further thought to the lockers than he had to the refrigerators and worn-out tires or the other garbage, but they stayed in his mind. Where had they come from? He thought he would have heard if there had been a fire in a railroad station. Why, since some of them had hardly been damaged, had they been discarded?
He had thought of the lockers not only during that weekend on the farm, but often