"That's it boy, show 'em where the bear went in the buckwheat!"

Orton supposed the boy had found the red plastic football helmet somewhere in the junkyard. The graying security guard didn't remember him wearing it when he was dropped off with some rusting car parts on Tuesday.

The boy collected himself off the ground, and with hands groping in front of him, teetered off. He'd put the football helmet on, backwards, sometime this morning. For the past half-hour, he'd been running full throttle into the junkyard's chain link fence. If the force of impact didn't dump the child's figure to the dusty ground, he would just stand facing the fence, stick straight and still, before repeating the process.

Orton thought the boy was becoming disoriented, however, as sometimes he would not turn to face the fence before his charge, and crash headlong into a pile of hubcaps or worn window weather stripping. It was Thursday and Orton was considering calling someone. He'd never had to actually watch anything in the junkyard before, just guard it. Ostensibly, its contents weren't going to move.

Tendrils of steam snaked up from Orton's coffee cup, faded in the noon air. The boy's impact mustered another sparse jingle from the chain link fence.

"You gotta lead with the shoulder there, boy; gotta get your weight behind it!" Orton wiggled his ring finger into one of the holes below his eyes, flicked a bit of crust onto the guard booth floor.

Orton had grown even less attractive since his nose had been shot off in Vietnam. He was heavyset since childhood, a quality that had become decidedly more pronounced through the years. His bad jawline barely allowed his chin to exist. His hair, while real, resembled a toupee, a grey brown wavy mat that seemed to rest on his head rather than grow out of it. Years of cigar smoking had left brown columns in between his yellow teeth. Maroon liver spots adorned his callused, pudgy hands.

Orton sometimes wished he'd looked harder for the nose, but a bit of skin and cartilage had proved tough to find in the middle of a fire fight. There were so many leaves on the jungle floor, so much sound from the guns and the screaming. Orton remembered thinking it seemed strange the noise was disrupting his search, that his ears could distract his eyes. He remembered his finger slipping off the trigger of his rifle as the blood fell from his face onto his hand.

Orton stepped down from the guard booth as the boy rammed the fence one more time. Pushing himself up from the ground, the boy swung the football helmet around and ran off down one of the junkyard's winding paths. As he turned a corner and disappeared past a stack of oxidizing aluminum siding, the boy emitted a quick, shrill bit of sound, somewhere between a squeal and a hiccup.

It was the only sound Orton heard the boy make in the past two days. Larry Briggin's gray cargo truck had pulled up Tuesday morning to the junkyard. After half an hour of removing rusting mufflers and crushed car doors from the back of the truck, Orton and Larry had gotten to a pile of balding tires. Orton was picking up the tires one by one and tossing them to Larry outside of the truck. A dozen tires in, Orton noticed an old running shoe. He picked up another tire and saw the shoe was connected to a leg, which was connected to the boy Orton presently had running around the junkyard.

"Larry-Hey, Larry, get in here a sec!"

Larry swung a leg onto the truck's bed and pulled the rest of his ample body in. Larry looked like his truck in the same way people start looking like their pets. He closer to seven feet than six and had a huge gut from a steady diet of steak, eggs and whiskey. Aside from his size, he was nondescript; his hair was a standard brown, his face average. He smoked nondescript cigarettes. Orton had seen him pop nondescript pills upon occasion. Like his truck, a lot of junk went into Larry.

"What is it, Orton, cut yourself on something?"

"There's a kid in here, Lar." Orton had his hands on his knees, back bent down, head close to the child. Larry peered down over Orton's shoulder.

"There sure is a kid in here."

The boy was asleep on his side in the back of the truck. He had his legs tucked up to his butt, hands stuck in between his knees. White tube socks covered most of the boy's calves; a pair of red running shorts barely covered the beginning of his thighs. There was some writing on his shirt Orton couldn't see enough of it to make out.

"He alive?" Larry asked.

"Yeah yeah- you can see his ribs risin' there." Orton gave a quick flick of an up nod in the child's direction.

"How old you think he is?" Larry perched his hands on either side of his gut as he straightened his back. The flab managed to untuck his grimy white t-shirt from his old Levi's.

"Dunno; nine, ten maybe?" Orton couldn't remember ever being so small.

"Dunno...".

"Uh- how you suppose he got in my truck there, Orton?" Larry moved a hand from his hip to rub his average chin.

"Dunno, Lar. Where ya been today?"

"Well, dropped Little Lar off at the university, he started that construction job this week; went to Ned's for a box of steering wheels... uh, Marcel's Auto Body and Smith and Sons. That's it, I think." Larry's and resumed its place on his hip.

"Didn't see the kid any of those places?"

"Nope, not a one."

"Huh."

"Suppose he's being junked, Orton?"

"What's that Lar?" Orton was staring at the child's nostrils, the black circles growing and shrinking with breaths.

"Said you suppose he's being junked? I mean, someone tossed him in the truck on account of knowing it was comin' here?"

"I don't think people junk children, Lar."

"No I don't think most do, but suppose someone couldn't take care of the child correct, didn't know what else to do, saw the truck..."

Orton knew Larry was trying to be discreet, to not have to come out and say directly he didn't want to deal with the kid they'd found in the the back of his truck. It was fine by Orton. It was barely ten in the morning and Larry already stunk of booze. He'd lost his license for running over the telephone booth he'd used to find out his wife was leaving him. He had to keep working to pay off the fines.

"I'll take care of it, Lar."

"What's that, now?"

"I'll deal with the kid. Let's get him outta the truck."

"You sure about this, Lar? I mean, I can keep him in the truck with me and drop him off downtown on my lunch. Sure a cop'll find him."

"I don't think a kid should be wandering around Downtown Columbus, Lar."

Larry jumped out of the back of his truck and tucked his t-shirt back into his jeans. Orton carefully picked up the child and handed him to Larry before following him out of the truck. Larry returned the child to Orton's arms and lit up a cigarette. He ambled over to the truck's driver side door and swung it open.

"Saw this thing on Fox last night, Orton- friggin crazy- this woman had a three hundred pound cyst removed from her ovaries. A three hundred pound ovarian cyst. So the doctors remove this thing and they find its got human teeth and hair in it. Friggin crazy, man. Can you believe that?"

Orton slid the the truck's bed door down with his free hand and locked it. The t-shirt again came undone from Larry's jeans as he climbed up into the truck and shut the door. A glass bottle flew out the open window. Larry stuck his head out, smiling.

"She let it get that big without going to a doctor, Lar?"

"Yeah, well they explained she was all depressed and scared to leave the house- what they call it . . . agnostic."

"You mean agoraphobic?"

"Yeah! That's what it was."

"Get outta here, Lar, and drive safe."

The t-shirt again came undone from Larry's pants as he climbed up into the truck and shut the door. A glass bottle flew out the open window. Larry stuck his head out, smiling.

"You're a good man, Orton, a good fine man." The oversized truck's exhaust pipes emitted an enormous belch of sooty air as Larry hacked out a cough, cajoled the vehicle into gear.

Orton carried the child back inside the junkyard's gates. He thought that there was too much dust for an Ohio spring; should be some slush left, or at least mud from rain. Just dry, though. He strode towards the '61 Mustang he didn't drive anymore. The car had been Orton's since he was six. His mom dropped the cold metal keys into his hand the morning she found Orton's dad swinging in a noose tied to their basement's ceiling beams. She was twenty-three then, a local jazz singer. She took vodka with her All-Bran in the mornings. The morning of her husband's suicide, Orton remembered half a pack of Virginia Slims 100's laying extinguished in the still full cereal bowl. Mom had taken a taxi to the liquor store to get more milk and Kahlua for White Russians when the police arrived.

"Your last name's Feterev, son??

"Federov, sir," Orton had answered.

Orton carefully laid the child on the tan vinyl of the Mustang's back seat. The boy pressed his palms tight as he reinserted his hands between his knees. Orton softly clicked the car door closed and went back to the A-frame he'd built the year he moved into the junkyard. Randy, the junkyard's owner, gave him the title "Full Time Junkyard Monitor." Orton guarded junk deemed valuable enough that someone might take it.