Crang Plays the Ace Read Online Free PDF

feet. At the bottom, workmen were laying foundations for the new building. My truck had braked its way down a steep incline to the base of the excavation. My truck. Already I was feeling proprietorial.
    My truck wheeled in a semicircle and stopped. The driver opened his door and leaned over the side of the truck, half in and half out of the cab. As he leaned, he operated a couple of levers with his right hand. In response, the empty bin on the back of the truck lifted up and out and down. Gradually it settled on the bumpy ground of the excavation.
    I patted myself on the head. Metaphorically speaking. The truck operated in just the way I’d thought back at Ace’s yard.
    The driver closed himself back in the cab and jockeyed the truck several yards north in the excavation. He backed up to another bin that was sitting on the ground. The second bin overflowed with irregularly shaped chunks of cement, broken two-by-fours, and other construction debris.
    The driver worked with the levers in the cab. An arrangement of forklifts reached out from the back of the truck and hoisted the full bin into the spot that had been vacated by the empty bin. Rube Goldberg couldn’t have diagrammed it better.
    The driver gave a ho-hum wave to a group of workers in yellow hard hats and steered up the incline out of the site. I crossed the street and started the Volks. The truck driver picked his way through the streets east and south away from downtown. I remained in surreptitious pursuit.
    Following a large truck through slow traffic in clear daylight. Did that qualify as surreptitious pursuit? Close enough for a beginner.
    The driver got the truck on to Leslie Street and aimed south at the lake. He drove as far as he could go. That brought him to a sign that read “Metropolitan Toronto Dump Site. No Admittance.”
    The driver ignored the instruction.
    I didn’t.
    I pulled off to the right and parked on the shoulder of the road. I watched the truck through the side window of the Volks.
    The truck passed through an opening in the wire fence around the dump. It stopped fifty feet inside at a building that was about the size of a booth on a parking lot. On either side of the small building were large metal platforms.
    I gave the metal platforms a solid five seconds of scrutiny. Right, got it, the metal platforms were weigh scales. Time for another metaphorical pat on the head.
    The truck drove on to the weigh scale at the west side of the small building. At an open window with a counter on it, a man in a short-sleeved, open-neck white shirt consulted a little gadget in front of him. He jotted something on a sheet of paper that looked like it had three or four carbons attached to it. The little gadget figured to be the weigh-scale indicator. The man in the white shirt had weighed my truck. He gave a nod of his head at the driver. The truck pulled away and disappeared out of my sight into the mass of mounds and hillocks that made up the dump.
    I waited.
    More trucks arrived at the dump. Some were dusty red and had Ace’s name on the side. Some came from other disposal companies. The trucks stopped on the weigh scale at the west side of the building.
    Other trucks, some Ace and some not, came out of the dump. They stopped on the weigh scale on the east side of the building.
    The man in the white shirt took care of both sides. He consulted the weigh-scale indicator on the west side and a similar indicator on the east side. For each truck, he wrote down something on a different sheet of paper with carbons, giving the bottom copy to the driver. He moved purposefully back and forth between the two windows in his little kingdom. He didn’t appear rushed. None of the drivers honked a horn at him. A professional at work.
    My truck came out of the dump in twenty minutes. It had a jolly bounce that told me its bin had been emptied of the construction debris. The truck pulled on to the east scale. The guy inside the booth jotted his