There are worse things in Trinidad than roadkill—there are gangs here, a nasty drug trade, and people are bought and sold for God knows what. Earlier this year, they found a shipping crate at the port full up with children a few days dead, if you could believe that. A lot of people said that Trinidad was just the transit point and that we didn’t have human trafficking ourselves, but I didn’t buy it.
We had everything else, after all.
So maybe cleaning up roadkill wasn’t the most important job in the world, but you would’ve sure as hell missed me if I ever called in sick.
There are a lot of bad smells out there, but none worse than rotting flesh, if you asked me. I took one on the chin for you lot—held my breath and cleaned those carcasses up, even though I could never get used to it.
You're all welcome.
To be clear though, my official title wasn’t ‘Roadkill Collector’ or anything like that and really, clearing roadkill wasn’t even in my job description. But when you’re employed part time by the City Corporation here, you end up doing fuck all until someone finally notices you taking up space in their office, and then they haul you off to work on some project that could probably get by just fine without you. You end up looking like an idiot—a member of a six man brigade charged with cutting a half acre of grass, or something like that. But an office full of government workers sitting on their asses all day, fucking around on their phones doesn't look much better, so off to cut grass you go.
It just so happened that I was the sorry idiot who got stuck with roadkill—and the fuckest coworker I ever had.
But before I get into the guy—he went by Ravi—let me tell you something about my "office".
Even though we worked for the entire municipality, our unofficial roadkill headquarter—the "Office"—was this three kilometre stretch of road near the airport.
We weren't exactly sure why, but that stretch—more than any other—was absolutely littered with dead animals. There wasn't a single day that we didn't find at least two or three new kills. And we didn't go every single day either, so sometimes they'd pile up. I suppose I don't need to tell you that a lot can happen to an animal carcass if you leave it out for even a day. We once came across an agouti that'd swollen up like an oversized balloon—but pumped up with methane and hydrogen sulphide instead of helium. Inhale some of that and a lot more'd happen to you than your voice getting squeeky, I'll tell you that.
Needless to say, it’s an embarrassment to have tourists coming in from the airport, seeing our country for the first time and having to breathe in a lungfull of rotting flesh.
So Ravi and I gave the spot some special attention.
Ravi—now there's a guy I could go on about. My first day of work, I show up at the Office and he’s already filthy. He was soaking with sweat, and his jumpsuit was so grimy it looked like he'd used it to clean the inside of an exhaust pipe.
And first thing this guy says to me is:
“Smelling, eh”?
So I nod. “smelling” was being kind. I felt like I was one breath away from throwing up.
“I wouldn’t know, though", he told me, "Believe it or not, I cyah smell a thing. Nose doh work. Is a rare condition. I guess that makes me the perfect man for the job, eh”?
And to prove it, this fucker took in a big, exaggerated, gulping breath through his nose and he exhaled with a deep, luxuriating, “hahhhhhhhhh.“
I'd never disliked a man so quickly in my life.
As for his "rare condition" yarn, I guess I believed him at first—no reason not to—but after a week of working with the fucker, I was almost certain he was lying through his teeth.
He enjoyed that job way too much. Whenever we’d find fresh roadkill, I couldn’t help but notice the way Ravi's eyes would light up.
You can put it off to laziness or incompetence or just lack of hygiene, but there were definitely some days that he didn’t use gloves either. He’d just scoop some rotting, half-liquid corpse into his hands before throwing it into our bag, and I could tell he enjoyed it. He used to dig his fingers into that slush of organs and rotting flesh way deeper than he needed to.
Call it intuition, but I guess I didn’t exactly trust the guy.
And I only got more skeptical as that first day together went on.
That morning, a truck had picked me up at the overpass near my place and had dropped me off at the Office. Naturally, Ravi was already there when I arrived—the guy probably woke up every day for work like a kid on Christmas.
Once we got the pleasantries—if you could call them that—out of the way, I asked Ravi when the truck was coming back, because even though there was a lot of roadkill and it was a decently long stretch of road, I couldn’t see the job taking more than an hour or so at the most. But, as it turned out, the higher-ups weren’t overly concerned with our efficiency. We were to spend the rest of the day—a cool five hours of roadkill collection with my new pal, Ravi.
I guess that's civil service for you.
I’d like to say that, surprise of surprises, the work wasn’t actually that bad, but Christ almighty, was it. The actual work itself was fine—don't get me wrong. It was just picking shit up and putting it in a bag—but I've never been as uncomfortable around anyone as I was with Ravi. And I know I’ve already said it a thousand times, but it’s worth repeating: the scent was unbearable. You’d almost rather hold your breath until you turned blue and passed out than stay in that stink.
But what else could I do? We went about our business—four dogs, two manicous and a tiny, totally flattened kitten. Whole thing took us a grand total of maybe half an hour. So, naturally, I asked Ravi what we were going to do for the rest of our five hour shift and he looked at me like I was some kind of idiot.
“Why? You want to sweep the street or what? Paint the lines”? And he gave a stuttered cackle, coughing into his filthy hands between laughs.
Truth be told, I would’ve rather kept working just so I could keep my hands busy and my mind off the guy I was there with. But I’m not a workaholic or anything—not by a long shot. So doing nothing was fine by me.
“Was just wondering”, I said.
“Well”, Ravi started, “There is ONE thing we could do. Is not exactly allowed, but you look like the kind of fella I could trust”.
I raised my eyebrow. I didn’t want to see what Ravi deemed “not exactly allowed”, but at the same time, of course I was interested.
I mean, what did I have to lose? Ravi had been on that job for years and his job security seemed rock solid, somehow. And time was passing like treacle in a refrigerator, so I said, “Sure—what you have in mind?”
Big mistake.
Ravi told me that when the truck came back, we were meant to take the roadkill out to the Labasse, which was our giant landfill just outside of Port of Spain. There was a designated spot for roadkill there, and I guess they must’ve burned it after or buried it or cut it up and solid it as meat to the dingy supermarkets in the area or something—didn't make any difference to me.
But of course, the truck didn’t always come on time, and going into the Labasse could be its own headache: the unending after-work traffic jam, police roadblocks (an annoyingly regular thing), or the simple fact that the Labasse was a literal shit hole, and after long a day at the Office, you didn’t really want to have to go into a landfill on top of everything.
Honestly, I was a little surprised that Ravi wouldn’t want to go into the Labasse based on how much he seemed to like getting his hands dirty with the most disgusting shit out there, but maybe he had other, more disgusting things to do in his spare time.
In any case, we didn't need to worry, he'd said, because he had the whole thing figured out.
The road we were working hugged a little wooded area that eventually came out near the border of the Labasse. Ravi told me that he had a little spot in the forest where he’d gone and dug a pit to toss the roadkill. And if you kicked a little dirt over, you could stifle the smell some and people would be none the wiser, he'd said. Plus, it was far enough away that no one really noticed, anyway.
So, in the four or so hour wait for the truck to come back, he’d put in a little extra work and he'd drag the roadkill over there to dump it. That way, we could go home right after work. The truck driver, he told me, never seemed to mind—of course he didn’t—and besides, the little detour into the forest helped to pass the time.
It was almost a little disappointing how reasonable the whole thing sounded.
Not that I was wild about breaking the rules like that, but it seemed harmless enough.
So off we went.
Turns out Ravi didn’t have a proper path made to get to his spot—I guess he didn’t want his secret to get out too easily—so we ended up having to walk through a lot of bush and bramble to get to the place.
Ravi was right; the smell didn’t really carry far (or so he must've been told, I guess, since he claimed he couldn’t smell in the first place). But once we got right up close—it was a thousand times worse.
The best way I can think of to describe the smell is that it was like a piece of meat you leave out until it goes bad, and then you blend it up with sour milk and sip it through a straw. That’s what taking a breath in that place was like. At that point I was ready to believe Ravi’s bullshit claim that he couldn't smell because how anyone could tolerate that stench for more than half a minute without throwing up was beyond me.
I would’ve left myself, but since there was no path out, I had to wait for the fucker to chuck the animals into the stinking pit. They made a squishy, splattery sound when they landed, like they’d fallen onto the older corpses and they’d burst from the impact. I kept my distance. Didn't need to see that sort of thing before lunch.
Mercifully, it was over soon enough.
We made our way back out, and the whole way back, I was gagging and retching and Ravi just laughed, like I was being soft or something. As if I were the weird one for not being able to handle the stench.
I'd done work I wasn't too proud of in the past, but Ravi's pit was my limit. When we finally got out, I gave it to him straight: "You can keep taking the animals there if you want, but I’m not coming with you."
I smoothed it out a little bit and told him I had a bit of a good reputation and I didn’t want to risk getting caught breaking the rules—but honestly, I just wanted to avoid that godawful scent, not to mention Ravi himself.
And as much of a dirty, aggravating motherfucker as he was, Ravi was surprisingly cool with it—didn’t come across even a little bit bitter.
I guess in hindsight, you could say we had a functional working relationship, despite the way I felt about the guy.
I kept doing my thing, and he kept doing his. The way I saw it, he was saving me a couple hours in the afternoon, and what the hell did it really matter, anyway? The animals were already dead, and the Office was never, ever going to smell anything other than putrid.
Plus, those animals would’ve all died in the woods anyway if they hadn’t been run over, so really, all Ravi was doing was keeping their corpses where they belonged.
Work went on like normal for a while after that. I still never got used to Ravi or the smell, but I’d fallen into a rhythm. It was easy work and it paid. I couldn’t really complain—or I shouldn't have, anyway.
Now mind you, the rest of Trinidad continued to be hell on earth while I was there, upset with my cushy, union-backed job because it was too smelly. People were still dying, people were still being shot, guns were still being sold, and I realised that I never did hear what became of the the container of children or if it was even a true story in the first place. But it was just that kind of place and that kind of era. There was so much shit going on that you could forget about even the most heinous things like they were your quiet coworker's middle name.
All that awful stuff was looming over the whole country like a big, black storm cloud. Most of the times, you just went about your life and tried not to think about the darkness cast onto the country. But I guess sometimes, the weight of everything just hit me all at once and even little, unimportant things would under my skin.
Case in point, one day, we got a surprise visit from a hairy, squatty little man who was calling himself the foreman for our roadkill gig. We had a foreman? News to me, but I hardly knew a single person in the main office anyway, so I bought his story wholesale. Not that it mattered either way.
But this guy—the foreman, I guess—came down to the Office and asked where Ravi was because "he needed to talk about something urgent with him". Thing was, Ravi was in the woods taking out the roadkill. Was that the day we got busted? I thought on my feet a little and said that he'd popped into the woods to take a shit—which didn’t come across all that great, but it was the best I could do on the spot. The foreman didn’t seem too bothered by it, though—just a little anxious like he had somewhere to be after. And so, despite how much I disliked Ravi, I guess I covered his ass that day, if you can believe it.
I told the foreman that Ravi had been in the woods a while and that I could go get him if he could just wait two minutes.
And the foreman just said, “Okay, fine, but be quick about it”, like I was his secretary. The guy rubbed me the wrong way the way he was talking to me, but I wasn't about to give one of the higher-ups lip, so I dashed out into the woods to find Ravi before the foreman got too suspicious.
Once I got a little way into the woods though, something about the squatty fuck's bad attitude and me running through that awful forest having to fetch Ravi from his pit of animal carcasses just got to me. In a way, it felt like the reality of all those terrible things that were happening all around us in Trinidad hit me. Ravi not being there and me having to go into the woods to find him—it felt like I was in a horror movie and I was running into an abandoned sawmill for shelter.
The problem with finding Ravi, of course, was that there wasn’t a path to his pit, so I ended up walking around for much longer than I should have. And sure, it wasn’t a big enough forest to really get lost in, but still, I walked in what felt like circles and didn’t come across the stupid pit or any other recognisable landmarks or anything.
After some bumbling through the brush though, I did stumble upon something else. It was a little clearing in the forest, no bigger than maybe fifteen square feet. And within the clearing, there was a wrought iron pen tied together with wire and zip ties. A bunch of emaciated little animals were trudging about inside: really sickly looking bastards, many of them missing hair in patches, a few of them with limps and quite a bit of them with lacerations about their bodies that didn’t look like they were going to heal any time soon.
The ground was muddy, despite the dry weather the past few months, and I realised that it was wet with blood, shit and the oozing gunk from the animals’ wounds. I noticed then that there was a stump nearby that had some chips in it too, like it’d been stricken with a cutlass, and it was stained with a lot of different shades of blood and pus.
At first, I was so confused that I couldn’t put two and two together like it was just complete coincidence that I’d stumbled across this place.
And then I felt a hand on my shoulder and I almost shat my pants.
It was Ravi, and for a moment, I was convinced he was going to kill me. My mind began racing: he’d been killing the animals for sport and they always said that the people who torture or kill animals are the ones who’ll end up becoming serial killers or something like that, didn't they?
But Ravi didn’t kill me. He just gave me this sheepish look like I’d found porn on his computer or something.
“You caught me, huh?” he said.
And I’m such an idiot—I’m still confused, wondering what he’s talking about.
“Caught you doing what?” I asked. I’d completely forgotten about the foreman at that point.
And he just said, “We gotta keep these jobs somehow, right? It’s a pretty good gig, wouldn’t you say?”
And then I get it—the sick fuck. The reason that there were so many dead animals there wasn’t because of some superstition or city-planning faux-pas—it was because Ravi put those skin and bone fuckers there himself, or maybe he released them near the road after he’d nicked them, so nature could run its course a bit more quickly and we'd still have a reason to come into the Office every other day.
Maybe it was a little fucked up on my part, but at that point, I just wanted to get out of that place. I'm not proud to say it, but I didn’t care about the animals—not really. I didn't care about the foreman either, but I wanted to get out of that place. I just had a moment of sudden terror—my hair standing on end and a chill running down my spine and I just wanted to get out. It was too much.
So I told Ravi that I didn't care what he did out there, but we had to leave—that someone was there to see him.
So we left the woods.
Ravi said whatever he had to say to the foreman (I listened in to what I could), and after a few minutes, the man drove off in a hurry. Ravi came over and said offhandedly that there was an inspection of some sort coming up, which was strange because I didn’t overhear the foreman saying anything about that—only about moving the carcasses more quickly, but naturally, I couldn't care less. If Ravi were a pathological liar, too, it’d be the least fucked up thing about him.
Life and work went back to normal after that, but it made me realise how much on edge I must've been all the time. I guess being around someone like Ravi or doing work like I did really was taking a toll on me.
I guess around that time I started drinking a bit more, too. It wasn't that my life was in shambles or anything, but it'd just gotten a bit harder to get through work and then lay in bed sober waiting for the next day of it to begin again. Nothing tragic or out of the ordinary, really. The thing that'd kicked it up—my drinking, that is—was something I'd seen at work.
You wouldn't notice it unless you had a job like mine or flew pretty frequently, but droves of Trinidadians go to the airport each day—paying their twenty dollar parking fees and everything—just to sit in trays of their pickups or to stand before their popped trunks and drink, watching the planes land and take off, land and take off, land and take off again. It almost made me a little sad for some reason, like I was taking pity on the saps who'd head out to the airport, through that gauntlet of stenches and without a place to fly off to—and for what? Just to watch the planes do what they did every day ad nauseam? There was just something hopelessly sad in it, to me.
But somehow, I ended up doing exactly the same thing. Maybe at first it was just to try it out, but after that, I couldn't really explain it. Maybe I was a sad person myself —who knows? In a way, whenever you saw one of those planes take off, it was like a little piece of you could leave with it to whereverthefuck—and who didn't dream of leaving every once in a while?
Most nights I went to drink there in the airport parking lot, I drank more than I should've. And some nights, I drank even more than that, too. I remember being really drunk and watching one of those big 747s taking off, its tail lights streaking across the sky and all of a sudden, I couldn't explain it, but I just started to think about those miserable little animals in the pen Ravi had built, and I knew I had to go knock the thing down.
I guess maybe I had some morals after all, and it just took a bit of drinking in the right conditions to earth them up.
I stumbled out of the parking lot and, naturally, I knew the stretch of road like the back of my hand, so even though I was drunk as hell, I found myself before the part of the woods where Ravi'd slip in to throw out the roadkill.
The place smelled just as bad at night, but I had to find that pen, so I sucked it up and walked right on in. What were the odds that I'd find Ravi there, butchering one of those sorry fucks so that we could keep our jobs cleaning up their corpses? Whatever they were, I stumbled through the woods, lamely holding out my phone for light, trying to find that pen again.
Luckily, I could just barely make out where Ravi must have passed since the last time—there were a lot of broken twigs, heavily trodden grass and the like. It looked like he must have been rushing to get there last time he'd gone. Or was it that he was rushing to leave? As it turned out, Ravi hadn't been running to (or from the animal pen), because the clearing I ultimately came out in was that godforsaken pit of animal carcasses.
The smell should have clued me in, but what can I say? I'd been drinking. It was strange, there being such an awful, strong smell but having the night be so still and quiet. It felt like the place was out of balance that way. Put me on edge somehow, and I would've almost rather had Ravi there with me. Almost.
I was standing completely still, just breathing in the scent of death and listening to the eerie stillness of the forest, wondering how I was gonna find my way back and into that pen of tortured little animals when I heard a sudden gurgling sound coming from within the pit.
My heart jumped in my chest and I felt the rum I'd been drinking earlier bob in my throat before I swallowed it back down. The fuck was down there?
Part of me wanted to turn face and bolt out of there, but what I ended up doing out of sick curiosity was name my way up to the lip of the pit with slow deliberate steps so that I couldn't lose my balance and fall in.
The thing gurgled again, like an unclogged drain suddenly sucking in its festering dishwater. Slowly, I shone the light into the hole, and for the first time, I got to see what was really down there in Ravi’s pit.
Much of it was scattered dirt and twisted carcasses, like you'd expect, but there amongst the animal corpses, just rotting amongst them, were the bodies of at least half a dozen little girls, some of them staring back at me with their gaping, dead eyes.
That horrible smell was never just roadkill. Every day at the Office, I was breathing in the stench of those tragic little kids. The pit must've been nothing more than Ravi’s sick cover up. I shone the light across the pit, taking stock of who was down like I could've done anything about it when my light shone upon a fresh human face propped up against a bloated dog's carcass.
Ravi.
And then, he opened his mouth, blood oozing out of the thing, and he let out that sick gurgling again, locking his terrible, dire eyes with me. It almost looked like he was trying to say something, but couldn’t get the words out.
He could only manage his gurgle, because his neck'd been slit open with a thin, wide gash. The sorry fuck.
One of the little girls must've wrestled herself free and got the jump on him. Or maybe some black market business had gone south. That was the most likely story, wasn't it? Ravi actually managed to raise an arm towards me and he made this pathetic gesture with his filthy, grubby hand and it made my blood run cold, but I just stumbled back to where I couldn't seem him or any of those bodies anymore.
And then, I ran.
Even though I knew there was no chance of Ravi getting out and following me, I ran. And even though I didn't have my bearings and was drunk off my ass, I ran until I tumbled out of the forest, falling flat on my back, so that a sky of all those planes going and coming opened up above me.
The next day in the papers, there was a story that a delirious, naked little girl had been found wandering the streets in Piarco, near the Office. She'd been in a stupor, didn't seem to speak English—or anything else for that matter—and appeared to be, frankly, all kinds of fucked up. No mention of a pit in the woods or a civil servant by the name of Ravi, though. In other words: nothing to connect the whole mess to me. Which is how it should've been, of course—I'd never killed any little girls or penned up animals, myself, after all.
There was one other curiosity in the papers that day, too. Not quite the frontpage material of a delirious, lost little girl, but interesting to me, in any case. A man living in Tabaquite had hanged himself. There wasn’t much of an article—just a picture and a few words. Guy’s name was Randolph Green, and apparently he’d been a carpenter. Not a foreman like he’d told me when I met him.
How about that.
I went into work as normal that day,and in the back of my mind, I was hoping that Ravi would show up—so I could know I'd gotten too drunk and dreamed the whole thing up. But obviously, Ravi didn't come into work. Or, maybe more accurately, he was already at work, just a little ways into the forest.
Believe it or not, I actually ended up going back in. Not back to the pit, mine you, but in the daylight and without an alcohol-clouded head, I managed to find my way to that pen with the miserable little animals, after all. Some were already dead in the pen—ripe for being strewn across the streets late at night like Ravi would have done, but others were still hopping around on their lame, sick legs.
Nobody left to keep them alive or slaughter them and scatter their bodies anymore.
So I knocked the enclosure down. Kicked it, snipped the zip ties with my pocket knife—just took the whole things apart.
Sure, I’d probably end up seeing most of those sorry creatures on the road in the week to come, but I just knew that I had to do it.
Submitted December 05, 2016 at 10:33PM by HMBlanc http://ift.tt/2h77pdS nosleep
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