Another Baby in a Dumpster

Mark came home and slumped in the chair. He looked tired. He asked me how my day was going and I blathered on about something or other. Then he picked up the phone and called our next door neighbor Susan. "I just saw something. I was riding up at the reservoir. A woman rode up in a private car and got out with a black garbage bag. She walked up the hill to the reservoir. The driver got out and looked under his hood. She came back in less than a minute without the bag."

Mark was really upset. He's a reporter for the New York Post, so his observation just made him depressed. He spends all week covering fires, subway wrecks and babies in dumpsters. And this one had to happen on his night off. He asked if I wanted to go up to the reservoir and poke around. I knew that he'd called Susan just to get me interested. When he asked, I was already putting my boots on.

We went off to Caldor to get a couple of flashlights and then drove up to the reservoir. We joked about how we would handle this. Do you call the editor first, or the police? Do you tell the police that you're a reporter? Of course, everything would go right out the window if that baby were still alive. I think that my policy at that point would be to vomit, and then freak out. Mark said that was his real hope. I agreed, even though neither of us likes babies very much.

This reservoir is one of the strangest places that I have ever seen. It's right in the middle of Queens, right in the middle of all of the cemeteries that interrupt most of the through streets. The Interboro Parkway runs along one side. From the center, there is an unobstructed view of the Manhattan skyline. Like most reservoirs, there is a fence that rings the top of the hill that it sits on so that people can't get into where the water supply is. The reservoir is no longer in use, so except for one football-field sized pool, there is no water inside the fence. There is trash littered about and a couple of stripped cars. Matted grass trails and holes cut into the fence indicate that the area is not as abandoned as it looks.

We walked around for a while and ducked under the fence. The hill down the other side was steep with trees and underbrush growing down the limestone walls. We walked around for a while and separated. There were helicopters searching for something as well. When one got close, I turned off my flashlight. When its spotlight hit me, I was on the other side of the fence. I decided to stroll around for a while. The excitement was getting to me. Not only were trying to bust a crime, we were trespassing at the same time. I needed to calm down. I stayed on the No Trespassing side of the fence and shined my light back toward the street, away from the reservoir.

And I saw the bag. I walked over to it and poked it. It stank. I went over to the fence and flashed my light at Mark. He climbed up the hill and opened the bag. My great find was a bag full of rotten leaves. It was embarrassing, but it brought us together to go over what we'd found. We tried to think like a woman who would drop a baby over the edge of a hill and decided that we couldn't. We'd lost some time with my false alarm, but it wasn't as if we were in a rush. I confessed how uncomfortable I felt with the helicopter pointing at me. Mark pointed out the second helicopter was searching with infrared. He was ignoring them, so I stopped worrying. Mark suggested that he go along the bottom and I go along the top of the fence. We would be able to cover the entire hillside. He climbed down the steep 50-foot incline and we started walking in the same direction.

I told him that I was having problems seeing through some thick brush. He said to keep on looking anyway, to keep on going. He called out again," Do you see anything?" and I said, "No. Wait. There it is." There was a black garbage bag sitting at the base of a cluster of three saplings about eight feet from the fence at the top of the hill. Someone who had thrown the bag over the fence would have been disappointed at how little distance his or her shot covered, but the bag blended in with all the other garbage on the hill. Just like the reservoir itself, it was invisible in the middle of plain sight.

Mark came up the hill. He pulled out a stick and poked it into the bag. He said, "Whatever it is, it's organic. Come here and take a look." As I came down the hill, I saw the spherical shape of the bag. It was the shape and the size of a head. He ripped a hole in the bag, exposing a yellowish-green curved surface. He ripped it wider, exposing more of the same, with a darker green shade marbled into its surface. I said, "This can't be right, but it looks like a watermelon. But it's too small. Roll it over."

Mark took the stick and turned the sphere over, exposing a red-striped tube sock wadded into a melon with one end cut off. The melon was orange and had large, flat, white seeds like a pumpkin. There was brown glitter sprinkled around the exposed edge of the orange-colored fruit. The section that had been cut away was also in the bag. The original tension was gone, but it was immediately replaced with another one. A baby would have been easy to explain. But what was the meaning of a tube sock, glitter, and some unidentifiable fruit wrapped in a bag and thrown over a fence into an abandoned reservoir by a woman who took a taxi to do it after dark on a Saturday night? And what kind of fruit was that, anyway? The skin was watermelon, the fruit was the color of cantaloupe, the consistency of papaya, and the seeds were pumpkin-like. It didn't look very appealing, and I am a big fan of cantaloupe.

Mark said, "I've seen a lot of babies in garbage bags, and this had all the markings of one." I, of course, had never seen a baby in a garbage bag, but I imagined that this case had very good potential for it, and no, I did not think that Mark was losing his mind. We were hungry, so Mark suggested going in to Manhattan for all-you-can-eat sushi. We got home really late. I got into bed at about four o'clock and lay there thinking for a few minutes. Suddenly I called into Mark's room, and addressed him with our special blend of mock formality: "Darling, that melon was not cut in half. None of it was eaten, and more importantly, it was not cut with the intention of being eaten." He said, "I was just thinking the same thing myself."

I rode up there the next day on my bike. It was starting to look less like an abandoned baby than a drug drop. A call to a friend in the business told me that a pound of meth was about the size of a softball, which was about the size of the section cut out of the melon. I wanted to search the area and examine the sock. I brought a knife with me to cut open the melon. I rode down the path, looking for more black garbage bags along the other side of the fence. There was only one, and both the sock and the melon were gone.

I rode along the path that separates the two sections of the reservoir. On one side, where Mark and I were the previous night, was swamp, but the other still contained a beautiful pool. What was miasmal during the night was glorious with the sun shining down on it. I looked off at the Empire State Building and wondered why the city didn't "do something" up here besides put up fences and No Trespassing signs.

It was then that I realized that the old reservoir was more important than another luxury apartment building or another nice inline skating path for the multitudes. There's a place for people to throw their drugs and old bodies. There's a place for the police helicopters to search for those same things. There's a spot where people can look off of the Jackie Robinson and wonder what's over there or ignore completely on their way into Brooklyn, past the acres and acres of cemeteries in Queens. There's a place that most people avoid. It's beautiful, with an unimpeded view of Manhattan.

I'm glad there wasn't a baby there, for that one baby's sake. There will be others at the resevoir soon enough.