Discards by David D. Levine Page B

fluorescent vests that showed their authorization to work and caught a truck to the landfill.
    But when he arrived, he found the yard empty, with stacks of sorted plastics, papers, and metals sitting silently beneath the buzzing floodlights. The last truck had already departed. Only old Vitor, guardian of the cash box, remained, sitting on an upturned plastic bucket and smoking.
    As he approached, Vitor looked up lazily, then jerked to his feet. “Porra!” he swore, the bucket rattling away behind him.
    â€œIt’s just me, Vitor. Tiago. The one who always brings the nice clean PET bottles.” But his hopes were already fading.
    â€œCuringa!” the old man replied, crossing himself and backing away.
    Tiago’s lip curled and he prepared to spit back a matching insult at the weak, shabby old man. But then he realized that Vitor’s slur, curinga, was just the literal truth.
    Tiago had become a curinga —a joker. A twisted, pathetic victim of the wild card virus.
    He didn’t belong here, not anymore. Not even the catadores, the lowest of the low, would associate with him. He was diseased, abased, offensive. There was only one place for him to go.
    â€œI just need some money, man,” he said. He realized that tears were leaking slowly down his cheeks. He ignored them. “I need to get to Bairro dos Curingas.” Everyone knew Rio’s Jokertown—the neighborhood where the virus’s most unsightly sufferers gathered. There, at least, he would fit in. But Rio was a long way from the landfill, and he would need bus fare. “Can you give me an advance on tomorrow?”
    Advances were strictly against the rules, and they both knew that Tiago would not be working tomorrow. Nonetheless, Vitor went into his little shack and returned with a small wad of money, which he flung at Tiago. The bills landed on the ground halfway between them.
    Tiago sighed and took a step forward, reaching for the money. But before he could touch the bills, they fluttered up, seemingly of their own accord, to his outstretched fingers … and stuck there.
    He blinked, shooting Vitor a glance that said Did you see that? But the old man just stood there trembling, clearly just wishing the scary curinga would go away.
    â€œThanks, man,” Tiago said. He pulled the bills off his fingers—they came away easily—and stuffed them into his pocket without looking.
    As he trudged away toward the bus, Tiago wondered what the hell had just happened. Probably it was just a breeze that had moved the bills, and as for the sticking to his fingers … Well, what was there here at the dump that wasn’t sticky? Anyway, he was still feverish. Maybe he’d imagined the whole thing.
    *   *   *
    The few other people at the bus stop kept their distance, muttering and casting glances, and the driver eyed him warily. But he accepted Tiago’s fare—it was almost all of what he’d gotten from Vitor—and Tiago found a seat way at the back of the nearly empty bus.
    Hours passed in diesel-scented, lurching motion. People got on, people got off; no one sat near Tiago. From the occasional muttered “Curinga!” he knew that it wasn’t just the stink of the landfill on him.
    The last time he had traveled this route had been a couple of months after his mother had disappeared. He’d spent the first month in a series of wretched little homes, handed from one to the next; there was no government assistance for abandoned children, he had no relatives that he knew of, and none of his mother’s friends had the space or the money to house a hungry teenaged boy for more than a few days. But then the boyfriend of a woman who’d taken him in had tried to take Tiago’s clothes off. He’d kicked the man in the nuts and fled with only the clothes on his back.
    After that he had lived on the street, becoming increasingly hungry and filthy, until one of the