“Jenny?” My father shouts up the stairs. “You going to lay in bed all day?”
     My brand new AM-FM radio alarm clock I received on my twelfth birthday last week sits on my night table. Seven o’clock Saturday morning. Dump Day. “I’ll be right there, Dad.” I yell. I throw back the covers, pull on a pair of denim shorts and the T-shirt I’d gotten as a souvenir from the Catskill Game Farm. I raise the shade and see my father loading the trash barrels into the back of his pickup. No time for breakfast. Dad was in a hurry. Then I remember. It is the second Saturday of the month. Dump burning day. I jerk open my underwear drawer for a pair of socks, pick up my sneakers and rush downstairs. I open the screen door and step out. The grass glitters with dew, wetting my feet. I hardly ever wear shoes in the summer but the dump is a dangerous, exciting place that warrants sneakers.
     “Come on Jenny. I’ll buy you a doughnut at Auntie’s for breakfast.” My father opens the truck door for me. “Your chariot awaits.” He always says the same thing.
     The dump isn’t much more than a hole filled with trash that smolders a bit and stinks a lot. I make sure I finish my doughnut before we get there. Any food left in my mouth tastes like the dump smells. There are other pickups already here, empty and waiting. My father backs up to the hole and sets the emergency brake.
     “Don’t want to fall in.” He says. He hoists himself onto the back of the truck and empties the barrels. I kneel on the seat and look out the rear window and watch our trash join every other person’s in Delicious.
     Odie Burgess, the Dump Master, weaves up to the hole carrying two gallon jugs of gasoline.
     “Had enough to drink, Odie?” one of the men yells.
     He turns around to face the crowd and says, “Not yet.”
     Odie punctures the sides of the jugs and throws them into the rubbish. Nothing happens for a minute. No one looks anywhere else.
     With a great whoosh the smoldering gives way to fire. Leaping orange flames rise to the sky accompanied by rolling black clouds of smoke. The smell grows in the air until it is everything. My nose seems to get bigger, swelling like a tomato before it bursts in the sun.
     Suddenly the rats scatter out of the hole. Hundreds rush from their flaming trash homes and run willy-nilly across the parking lot, scattering toward the men who are waiting to shoot them.
     My father picks me up off the seat and boosts me into the back of the truck. “Don’t want to miss nothing, huh Jenny?” He reaches into the cab and takes his 22 out from behind the seat, loads it and climbs onto the back bumper.
     He is a good shot, my father. One of the best. None of his rats suffer. They just explode like a stepped on grape. Some of the other rat aren’t so lucky.
     Eventually the fire dies back. Odie meanders around the parking area pushing a wheelbarrow and shoveling rat remains into it. “Hell of a haul boys,” Odie slurs as he shovels. “This here’s a public service. Otherwise these sons-a-bitches would run over us in our sleep.”
     Someone offers my father a beer. I lay in the back of the truck, my head on an old burlap grain sack, and watch the cloud of smoke drift away and disappear.