One Man’s Trash

It was a Thursday in September, late in the month, if I am not mistaken, because I seem to recall walking past a store, seeing Halloween costumes in the window, and wondering what the kids might want to be when they go trick-or-treating. I think I had been on shift for some hours when we got a call over the radio. The raspy voice said that some elderly Italian woman on the west side -that is, the wealthy part of town- had gone to take out her recycling and found a man, supine, beside her garbage cans, one of which had been knocked over, likely when the man fell. When she called she was too flustered to tell us if he were alive, but when we arrived he was as stiff as a board and as cold as the cement on which he lay. The autopsy clearly revealed he had died of a heart attack, but the strange thing was that he had had an odd sort of smile of truly heartfelt satisfaction checkered upon his face.

I suppose you are thinking that finding a body beside some garbage cans might be something interesting if it were happening to you -the kind of thing that you would likely mention as an experience which influenced your awareness of your own mortality in a conversation with a close coworker around the water cooler- but surely not worthy of a written story. Well, I would tend to agree with you, but it wasn’t finding the man’s corps which was so fascinating to me; it was what we discovered in the investigation thereafter.

I shan’t bore you with the mundane details of completing paperwork, making phone calls, and finding kith and kin. Rather, I will explain what I was able to find and where I was able to find it, in the hopes that either in organising the case thusly I will happen upon some missing detail, or else some reader may observe something which I have overlooked and be able to shed some light on that haunting death-smile.

I believe that his name was William Gunnarsson, but, according to the handful of eyewitnesses I was able to track down, he prefered to go by Bill, when he went by anything at all. His parents had been Jan and Ruth Gunnarsson who had immigrated to Washington state in the 1940s, hoping to do better for their children than Iceland had to offer. According to the patchy employment records, Jan had worked as a mechanic at Flenderson’s Automotive (up on tenth, nearby where the old Woodwards used to be) for most of his career, a job he had obtained through a friend, also from Iceland. Ruth had worked part time as a seamstress for a local taylor several blocks away from the home which the family rented. The two did alright for themselves but had only two children, Wilma (the elder) and Bill (the younger). I believe that Wilma returned to Iceland in the mid-60s and raised her family there in a Reykjavik suburb. When I contacted her son he said he knew little to nothing about his uncle, and that his mother had rarely mentioned him. None of his family showed any interest in his life or his death, and, as he had nothing of value, there were no arguments over inheritance.

It appears that when he had completed high school (the picture I found on the wall of the school showed an awkward-looking boy with a bad late-70s haircut), Bill attended university, nearly completing a degree in anthropology, but left early to pursue a ‘career’ as a book shelver in the university library. The pay cannot have been very good, and what little I learnt of his parents led me to believe that they, being hard-working immigrants, would not have approved. I was able only to find one very old and somewhat dotty librarian who had worked directly with him -Phyllis Wattleman-, but she was of little service to me save to elucidate that Bill never married and kept very much to himself.

My best guess work indicates that his employment was really just a means of supporting his simple life. His apartment, when I was finally able to find it on the east side of town, was little more than one small room with only a hot plate, two brick-and-board shelves of ratty, damp old books, several worn maps of the city, and a mattress in one corner with a well-read Bible beside it on the floor. The cupboards were almost entirely bare and there was no refrigerator. From what the dirty dish (there was only one) in the sink and the contents of the recycling bin could tell me, he subsisted on tinned beans and steel-cut oats. Yet at that, the petty wage of a library shelver could not have supplied the income necessary for both rent and food: there had to have been something more.

As I sought information, the character of this shadowy Bill Gunnarsson began to fascinate me more and more. He was an enigma. A strange, solitary creature, who, for some reason remained in the midst of a congregation of people with whom he had nothing to do. The things which usually occupy men seemed to have held no interest to him: he never married, and I did not even find the token pornographic magazines which litter most bachelor tenements; yet he had all the usual social graces, and was said to be quite charming; money and career were not driving forces in his life either. Moreover, he was not mentally arrested in any way as his high school and university transcripts clearly demonstrated; there was no evidence that he was unhappy, anxious or depressed. Yet this endearing character was so isolated that when I went to interview the only people I could find who even recognised his picture, none of them knew that he had died, and there was no funeral of which I ever heard tell. So what was his motivation in life? Why was I called to find his stiff body lying by a garbage can with a strange look of utter satisfaction stamped upon its cold, chalky face?

Beginning with the Bible that I had found, I asked around at the local Churches and discovered that he had sporadically attended several of the parishes nearby, but had always kept very much to himself. The priests said that he was friendly enough, but that he showed no real interest in ever being a social part of the congregation. Through our conversations it became clear to me that his austerity was not religiously motivated, although he was wont to donate regularly to the collection plate. When I asked who else might have any information about him, the Reverend Miles Cook recommended that I look to the east side of town, as he had seen him there on several occasions, wandering the streets close to where I had found the body. 

I continued my research by asking those living in the shabby and unloved apartments near his home and in the upscale neighbourhood where I had found him. Very few people from the local area knew him, and it was the latter of these locations which bore the first real fruits of my enquiry.

Apparently he had been something of a dumpster-diver. Not a disreputable one, or even a polite mendicant, but simply a man who enjoyed looking through society’s refuse for something of value. Many people said that they knew him well to look at him and several even admitted that they quite enjoyed his offbeat manner and would hold back anything which they thought might be of interest to ‘Backpack Bill’. But this also did not make much sense: why would a man who was working part time as a library book shelver and clearly had no interest in money or possessions spend all of his time going through the trash in the wealthy part of town?

The local pawn shops new of him -that is to say, they knew his face, but they never knew his name. They spoke warmly of him, saying that he never drove a hard bargain, nor that he ever seemed interested in the money for the things he had found. “I think,” said one, still nervously eyeing my policeman’s badge, “I think that his main concern was with the rarity of the items he found. What he really wanted was to have found something unique or special. An odd chap to say the least.”

The pawn brokers had proven yet another dead end, and I was beginning to become frustrated with my search, when I stumbled upon a man on the west side who had known more about him; an old banker named Kari Olafsson. A true Norseman and Icelander who spoke warmly of Backpack Bill, although he said he hardly knew him. As I soon discovered, Olafsson spoke warmly of anything from Iceland, and he spoke of little else. When I enquired about Backpack Bill the old man’s physiognomy lit up and he beamed at me.

“That old laggard!” he croaked in the horse voice so common to those in their autumn years. “When I first laid eyes on him I thought he was up to no good! But darned if he didn’t prove me wrong! Never took anything that wasn’t in the garbage, never said a harsh word. Just used to paw through the trash and make polite conversation: a real gentleman, and well read at that!”

For some time the old man babbled on in this manner, remembering a time when Bill had been very interested in an old painting, or a small, metal 1940s toy car from the Soviet Union. “Never liked furniture though, more interested in trinkets!” he concluded.

Able to get a word in at long last I asked if Olafsson had ever gathered any information on why Backpack Bill had been so interested in the urban middens or why he had died with that haunting smile upon his lips. 

“I don’t rightly know,” the old Norseman said looking more grim, “he wasn’t very interested in the worth of anything, though.” Then he leaned back in his chair -we were sitting in his living room at the time- and clasped his hands under his chin, his index fingers erect so that they touched the gnarled end of his hooked nose. After a time he said, as though coming out of a light nap, “I suppose it was his viking blood: liked the thrill of the hunt. Searching, searching like Leif Eirickson. Searching for the sake of searching rather than searching at need’s behest. Itchy feet and a desire to explore. Only everywhere’s been explored and you can’t find treasure in today’s world anyway, so he went in search of it where he could: in the trash. Strange fellow…” Then he drifted back into thought and his eyes glazed like one remembering a youthful summer spent in love.

Olafsson, although charming in his own doddering way, was of little help. It is true that I could now guess at a motivation for Gunnarsson’s lifestyle, but I had known for some time that Backpack Bill had gone through the trash, and it was plain from the state of his apartment and bank account that money was no object to him. But one thing still bothered me: why had a man of his character died with a look of such satisfaction stamped upon his face?

I reviewed the whole event in my mind time and again, but to no avail. After carefully photographing everything, and interviewing the poor woman who had found him, the other officers and I had bagged the stiffy and began to clean up the mess we had made in the course of our work. The trash which had spilled from the fallen bin was gathered up and returned into its vessel. The two garbage bins and their contents were then taken to the station as potential evidence, but when it was revealed that the cause of death was a mere heart attack the examination was abandoned.

The woman who had found the corpse maintained that there was nothing of particular interest in the trash, and, as I soon found out, she had been telling the truth. In fact, it was clear that Backpack Bill had not even gone through all of it, for only the top bag from the fallen bin had been torn, and the rip was only several inches long. All that could be seen were some chicken bones, an old pair of tattered trousers, and a stoven-in old children’s violin. This last piece I examined more closely. It was very, very old and the only identifying feature was a name-plate, half of which was missing. The remaining half read -ivarius, whatever that means.