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I saw a mass grave last week. They called it a salvage yard.

It was no Arlington Cemetery, with row upon row of neat, white crosses defusing the reality of the place, replacing the chaos and disorder of death with a symbol of its opposite. The dead at the yard were not even buried. They were lined up on the hard-packed dirt instead, and no attempt had been made to cover their broken, rusted chassis.

A man with grease-black hands and sun-red arms walked me back to the Hyundai Sonata. It was not exactly the same model as my own, but it was close enough. On the way, we passed a pair of killing machines. I did not know what the machines were called, but I knew what they did. One was the Lifter, and the other was the Crusher. They were a team.

It reminded me of going to a neighbor’s house as a kid. He and some of his friends had gone hunting with my father. They came back with three dead deer, which they hung up upside down in a shack behind his house. My father pressed a pocket knife into my hands and walked me through the process of cutting open the deer, so that their intestines would spill just-so into the waiting buckets. When we finished with them, the deer were flat, too.

There were no buckets around the Crusher to collect anything. Oil and transmission fluid dripped from the cars and stained the dirt black, and cube-like chips of safety glass covered the ground. Safety glass is used in cars because it doesn’t shatter like normal glass. The pieces had no sharp edges. They looked like loosely scattered handfuls of chipped ice.

It took us a few minutes to find the Sonata, down at the far end of the yard. The hood was propped up, and the engine was missing, but that was okay. I didn’t need an engine. The yard worker opened the door, bent down, and ran his hands along the plastic molding of the dash and under the steering wheel.

“Ya know where it’s at?” he asked me. I shook my head. He grunted, then sighed out a curse and started to walk off. “I gotta get my tools. I’ll be right back.”

Watching him walk off, I noticed for the first time a shack in the middle of the yard, along the fence. A truck was pulled up beside it. A real truck. One that people still drove. An older, heavyset black woman tossed tires into the back of the truck, where a man stood and neatly stacked the tires, once she got them up to him. The woman’s kids–I assumed they were her kids, anyway–stood nearby. There were three of them, all girls. The oldest tried to keep the others in line, but her heart wasn’t in it. It was hot, and she was as bored as the other two. The youngest one screamed and ran in circles.

The salvage yard worker returned in a car, a beat up old jalopy. It didn’t have a license plate. The windshield had a large crack that ran diagonally across the width of it. The car wasn’t legal to drive on the highway, he explained. They just used it to get around the yard. Strapped to the top of the car was a battery and a set of jumper cables. In the back seat was a tool set and some rags, buckets of nails and screws and wires and god knows what else.

He took apart the dash of the Sonata, and when he finally found the part I needed, I thanked him. He handed it to me and opened the door to his car, the jalopy. He paused before getting in all the way. “I would offer you a ride up to the office, but…” He shrugged, and I nodded. It was a one-person car. All the passenger space was claimed by junk.

Walking back to the office, I saw that the Crusher was gone, and the machine that had been feeding it was parked nearby. Left behind was a stack of cars, six or seven high. Flattened now, the pile did not quite reach the top of my head.

Before I stepped into the office to pay for the part, I stood at the edge of the yard and took one last look back at the weeds and the dirt that made up the yard, and the rows of cars missing wheels and engines and, in the case of at least one Hyundai Sonata, airbag control modules. I looked at the crushed ones, and the ones whose trunks and hoods were propped open. I looked at the pile of tires to one side, and the haze of dust kicked up by the salvage worker’s junk heap of a car. I looked at the part in my hands.

Imagine, I thought, kind of stunned and maybe a little loopy from standing out under the sun for too long. Just imagine if they were people.

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