wounded gatos

It’s been a long day. My head is aching with hunger and the glare of the Spanish sun as I stumble into the house. Levi’s on the couch. He greets me and then sinks back into the cushions. There’s concern in his eyes.

-I had a weird moment today, he says. His fingers find their way to his hair and tug, the way they tend to when he’s thinking something through. 

-It could be weirder in my head than it really is...But I’m walking to the grocery store and I pass some dumpsters in this roundabout. This guy comes up with a bookbag. He lifts up a trash bag out of the dumpster and carefully puts the bookbag back in. Then he puts the trash on top of it, and he runs away. I go to check it out. I open the backpack and- 

He pauses, his hands still in his hair, his eyes glazed as if he’s replaying the memory to make sure he’s got it right. 

- and it’s full of hair. Thick, black hair. Full to the top. I mean, it could have been a doll, but it was just so...thick. I freaked out a little; I just put it back in the dumpster and walked away.

My appetite’s gone.

-....hair?

-It was hair.

-Was the bag...heavy?

-A little, yeah.

-Are you sure he ran? He didn’t just sort of jog away?

-No, he kinda took off.

It’s bizarre, but of course it’s nothing. We decide to let it go. But my stomach’s in knots, and I can tell it’s still on Levi’s mind. It just doesn’t feel right.

We take a walk. At this point I’m obsessing.

-Ninety-nine percent chance it’s nothing, I say.

-It’s nothing. Of course it’s nothing.

I can’t leave it alone. It's just too bizarre and too creepy and frankly, intriguing not to investigate. As absurd as it seems, we turn around and start down Levi's path to the supermarket.

My imagination calms down a bit when I see the area around the dumpster. It’s an open roundabout in full view of at least a hundred apartment-complex windows. This wouldn’t be the place for that outrageous worst-case scenario whose visions I’ve been repressing.

But someone’s returned here. The bookbag, left on top of the pile in Levi’s hurry to get away from it, has been reburied under bags of trash. Levi pulls it out, a dirty, worn old backpack, and unzips it. My stomach muscles relax. Having never played with Barbie dolls or worn witch’s hair on Halloween, he’s simply failed to recognize a wig composed of those frizzy, ever-tangled threads of polyester. He shakes the bag around, revealing what appears to be just more trash in a plastic bag. My childish scary-movie chill subsides.

-That’s good enough for me, I say. Despite the apparently innocent nature of this bag, something just doesn’t feel right and I’m ready to leave.

But as we walk away, we’re both still wondering. Why would the guy run away? Why hide it under trash bags instead of just tossing it in? And why return to rebury it?

The curiosity is now stronger than the nerves. We turn back. Levi opens the bag, this time turning it upside down and shaking it.

I can’t help but laugh at how silly we’ve been. It’s just someone’s stash. A glass jar about a third full of weed has fallen out. Some teenager just dumped off his stash, afraid his mom would find it. Paranoid, he ran away when he saw Levi and came back to make sure it was still hidden from view.

But Levi’s still shaking the bag, and a brick falls out. Then another and another, then four or five smaller ones. It’s hash. I’m no market expert, but this is hundreds of dollars in hash.

We both just freeze, staring at the visual evidence of this ludicrous situation into which our curiosity and overactive imaginations have thrust us. It’s broad daylight. Here we are, two foreigners hunched over a dumpster in a highly populated area, two bricks of hash in his hand and five or six more and a jar of weed scattered across the top of the pile of trash. The dealer came back once; he knew his goods had been disturbed before their intended recipient found them. He had been watching. He was likely still watching. And all these windows...so recently comforting, they now looked sinister, each one obscuring a would-be good Samaritan watching the scene from above, misinterpreting the role of the foreigners at the dumpster. And that guy, this clumsy dealer...that guy's around here somewhere. 

-What do we do? Levi asks, a little numbly, turning a brick over in his hand.

-We need to go. We need to get out of here.

We all but bolt, leaving the bookbag open and the bricks scattered across the top of the trash bags. A man a house or two away watches us as we hurry off, pulling out his cell phone as we pass him. We take the long way home.