Then the pirate—for there could no longer be any doubt that such he was—started the Chriscraft motor and set off upstream with his five helpless captives.
After mooring his boat alongside a ramshackle dock on the other side of the river, the pirate loaded the outboard motor and the appliances onto the wooden bed of a very dusty pickup truck—except for the radio, which he took with him into the front seat. As it drove off, the truck jolted and jounced and bolted and bounced so violently the toaster feared the ride would cost it every coil in its body. (For though toasters look quite sturdy, they are actually among the more delicate appliances and need to be handled accordingly.) But the blanket, realizing the danger the toaster was in, managed to slip underneath its old friend and cushion it from the worst shocks of the journey.
As they rode they could hear the radio in the front seat humming the poignant theme-song from Dr. Zhivago.
“Listen!” the Hoover hissed. “Of all possible songs to be singing, it has chosen one of the master’s favorites. Already it has forgotten him!”
“Ah,” said the toaster, “what choice does it have, poor thing? Once one of us had been turned on, would we have behaved any otherwise? Would you? Would I?”
The old vacuum groaned, and the radio went on playing its sad, sad song.
What graveyards are for people—horrible, creepy places that any reasonable individual tries to stay away from—the City Dump is for appliances and machines of every description. Imagine, therefore, what the appliances must have felt when they realized (the pirate had parked his pickup in front of high, ripply iron gates and was opening the padlock with a key from the ring that swung from his belt) that they had been brought to the City Dump! Imagine their horror as he drove the truck inside and they assimilated the terrible fact that he lived here! There, with smoke curling from a tin chimney, was his wretched shack—and all about it the most melancholy and fearsome sights the toaster had ever witnessed. Dismembered chassis of once-proud automobiles were heaped one atop the other to form veritable mountains of rusted iron. The asphalt-covered ground was everywhere strewn with twisted beams and blistered sheet metal, with broken and worn-out machine parts of all shapes and sizes—with all the terrible emblems, in short, of its own inevitable obsolescence. An appalling scene to behold—yet one that exercised a strange fascination over the toaster’s mind. As often as it had heard of the City Dump, it had somehow never really believed in its existence. And now it was here, and nothing, not even the pirate’s stony gaze, could prevent its shudder of fear and wonder.
The pirate got out of the truck and took the radio, along with his fishing rod and his day’s catch, into the hovel where he lived. The appliances, left to themselves in the back of the truck, listened to the radio sing song after song with apparently indefatigable good cheer. Among them was the toaster’s own favorite melody, “I Whistle a Happy Tune.” The toaster was certain this couldn’t be a coincidence. The radio was trying to tell its friends that if they were brave and patient and cheerful, matters would work out for the best. Anyhow, whether that was the radio’s intention or just a program it had been tuned to, it was what the toaster firmly believed.
After he’d had his dinner the pirate came out of his shack to examine the other appliances. He fingered the Hoover’s mudstained dustbag and the frayed part of its cord where it had been chewing on itself. He lifted the blanket and shook his head in mute deprecation. He looked inside the lamp’s little hood and saw—which the lamp itself had not realized till now—that its tiny bulb was shattered. (It must have happened when the lamp had fallen off the office chair, just before they’d found the boat.)
Finally the pirate picked up the toaster—and made a scornful grimace. “Junk!” he said, depositing the toaster on a nearby scrap pile.
“Junk!” he repeated, dealing with the lamp in a similar fashion.
“Junk!” He hurled the poor blanket over the projecting, broken axle of a ‘57 Ford.
“Junk!” He set the Hoover down on the asphalt with a shattering thunk.
“All of it, just junk.” Having delivered this dismaying verdict, the pirate returned to his shack, where the radio had gone on singing in the liveliest manner all the while.
“Thank goodness,” said the toaster aloud, as soon as he was gone.
“Thank goodness?” the Hoover echoed in stricken tones. “How can you say ‘Thank goodness’ when you’ve just been called junk and thrown on a heap of scrap?”
“Because if he’d decided to take us into his shack and use us, we’d have become his, like the radio. This way we’ve got a chance to escape.”
The blanket, where it hung, limply, from the broken axle, began to whimper and whine. “No, no, it’s true. That’s all I am now—junk! Look at me—look at these tears, these snags, these stains. Junk! This is where I belong.”
The lamp’s grief was quieter but no less bitter. “Oh, my bulb,” it murmured, “oh, my poor poor bulb!”
The Hoover groaned.
“Pull yourselves together, all of you!” said the toaster, in what it hoped was a tone of stern command. “There’s nothing wrong with any of us that a bit of fixing-up won’t put right. You—” it addressed the blanket “—are still fundamentally sound. Your coils haven’t been hurt. After some sewing up and a visit to the dry cleaner you’ll be as good as new.”
It turned to the lamp. “And what nonsense—to fuss over a broken bulb! You’ve broken your bulb before and probably will many times again. What do you think replaceable parts are for?”
Finally the toaster directed its attention to the vacuum cleaner. “And you? You, who must be our leader! Who ought to inspire us with your own greater strength! For you to sit there groaning and helpless! And just because some old pirate who lives in a dump makes an unflattering remark. Why, he probably doesn’t even know how to use a vacuum cleaner—that’s the sort of person he is!”
“Do you think so?” said the Hoover.
“Of course I do, and so would you if you’d be rational. Now, for goodness’ sake, let’s all sit down together and figure out how we’re going to rescue the radio and escape from here.”
By midnight it was amazing how much they’d managed to accomplish. The Hoover had recharged the rundown battery from the battery in the pirate’s own truck. Meanwhile the lamp, in looking about for another doorway or gate than the one they’d come in by (there wasn’t any), had discovered a vehicle even better suited to their needs than the office chair the pirate had thrown in the river. This was a large vinyl perambulator, which is another word for pram, which is also known, in the appliances’ part of the world, as a baby buggy. By whatever name, it was in good working order—except for two minor faults. One fault was a squeak in the left front wheel, and the other was the way its folding visor was twisted out of shape so as to give the whole pram an air of lurching sideways when it was moving straight ahead. The squeak was fixed with a few drops of 3-in-1 Oil, but the visor resisted their most determined efforts to bend it back into true. But that didn’t matter, after all. What mattered was that it worked.
To think how many of the things consigned to this dump were still, like the pram (or themselves, for that matter) essentially serviceable! There were hair dryers and four-speed bicycles, water heaters and wind-up toys that would all have gone on working for years and years with just the slightest maintenance. Instead, they’d be sent to City Dump! You could hear the hopeless sighs and crazed murmurings rising from every dark mound round about, a ghastly medley that seemed to swell louder every moment as more and more of the forlorn, abandoned objects became conscious of the energetic new appliances in their midst.