The fence stretched around the junkyard, red and translucent and full of little holes. If I put my face up to it I could see inside at all the huge heaps of metal and plastic, the assorted detritus of an industrial civilization. Hills and mountains of discarded components, parts, pieces and shards reaching up as high as possible, as through craning their necks to see over the fence and peer at the outside world, the dingy field of dry grass, the weeds and the shrimpy trees beyond.
There was a kid a few years past who went into the junkyard and came out in a bag. His name was Dim, which was fitting though that was actually his real name, Vietnamese or something. Dim snuck into the junkyard on a Sunday afternoon because there were no workers there at that time, of course, and no one could go in at night because of the motion sensing flood lights. Turns out no one could go in in the daytime, either.
What the owner had done was get some black market chimpanzees, about five or six of them I think, and he trained them to act like junkyard dogs, protective and territorial and violent. They all had collars with buzzers built in, and the motion sensors on the lightposts still worked during the day. When these sensors were tripped, the collars buzzed and the chimps loped around like rabid hairy children. One chimp found Dim and it let out the most bloodcurdling hoot and all the other chimps came tearing around the trash piles or clambering straight over the tops of them. The chimps all wore fingerless gloves on their hands and their feet. The owner put them on because you can't run around in a junkyard like that with no protection. The metal and glass would cut you to pieces, and I guess the owner wanted to protect his investment, or maybe he just had a soft spot for chimpanzees.
The chimps in their double pairs of fingerless gloves came hollering and screaming over the heaps of junk and chased Dim and he made it about ten feet from the fence before they ripped him to shreds. Sometime after that the cops got called and the owner was put in prison and all the chimps were euthanized, and Mama Dim got her son back in a watertight bag to be buried with great ceremony and much crying and moaning I'm sure, though of course I wasn't there because I didn't know him.
I was looking for some of those copper-coated valve clamps they use on hydroturbines, not because I was building a power plant but because they look like vertebrae and I was making a twice-life-size marionette skeleton and I wanted to do it on the cheap. That's why I almost hopped the fence that Sunday afternoon, for surely in those mountains of junk there are buckets full of metal engine parts and similar things that look remarkably like parts of the human skeleton and musculature. I didn't go in, even though the chimps are all euthanized and the guy who trained them is rotting in some overcrowded cell somewhere. I heard the junkyard stayed in the family, and who knows what type of crazy the new manager is, and what his preferred defense organism is, flesh-eating bacteria or flesh-eating tigers or something even worse.
It's obvious to me that a giant marionette made of found objects is not worth the risk of being torn apart by black market animals. Some people would face that challenge without a second thought, but I have always been the cautious sort. There are other junkyards in this town. However, I suppose I could just shoot out the bulbs in the motion sensing lights with my pellet gun from outside the fence, and then come back at night. Dim, that brave soul, would not have given up if he had been given a second chance instead of being torn apart. He was a pillar of honor, a beacon of courage. I must go get my pellet gun! We should all be as brave as Dim.
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