Sam Johns
Work
Excerpt
“I promise you not all days are going to be this slow. It was that tip we got that screwed us. People in the suburbs call us then call the exterminator. They want it fast or free, and they don’t care whose time they’re wasting to get it. Only take the requests from the rural areas, and you’re likely to run into three deer on your way to the property. Oh course the only downside with them is what you find when you get there is bound to be messy. Pack animals take care of the small stuff, and the rednecks take care of the big stuff, if it’s fresh enough...Best call I ever got was from a little old lady out by South Pike. I figured she had a little place out there and something dropped in her driveway, or there were something that needed moving or something, and when I get there, oh you should’ve seen it! She hit the damn thing with her car! Huge eight point buck taken out by this little grandma—and she didn’t want it removed! No! She wanted help bungeeing it to the roof of her car! So I get the thing bound up for her and follow her back out to her place and we get the thing strung up in her garage. She sent me home with fresh venison steaks and two gallon bags of jerky from the freezer as a thank you. I wonder where she sourced that from, ha! Course, I could have gotten more for turning it into the state, but yeah, it was sure worth it for the story… Oh, you should have seen it. Easily three times more deer than lady. She had these…gnarly, old fingers that looked like tree roots, but you never would have guessed it by the way she handled that knife. Must’ve been the type to know how to handle lean times. Old habits, ya know? Stay on the job long enough and you’ll get some stories of your own. But I guess we won’t see you for very long, huh? College bound. I got to tell you, that is pre-tty cool. Your dad must sure be proud. You know, Doc and I actually used to work together in the mills? We’re not just old grade school buddies. He was thirty-two when that I-beam swung loose. A lotta men didn’t survive accidents like that, even Bethlehem knew it. If he was gonna walk away from that accident they weren’t gonna grudge him for walking straight out the door. He took a hell of a settlement out with him too, could have retired right then and there, I bet…I wish you could of heard how hard we was laughing when he said he was gonna be a doctor. There was just no way if you’d known him back then. What a asshole. Throwing all that money away like that. Always too cocky to keep his eyes on the ground. I guess he can back it up though, huh? Shut us up real quick, that’s for sure. And now his son is going off to college too. I gotta tell you, that is really some impressive stuff. Really cool…. But, you know, if you get there and you decide it’s not for you, there’s plenty of honest work waiting for you back here. There’s a lot of work that needs done and there’s no shame in jumping right in. No one way you have to keep busy, you know? And truly, I love this job. I was just a sign-turner for years before I started to supplement my pay with it and now I’m my own boss! It really is wonderful getting to drive around and breathe in that fresh country air. It comes with job security too—people are always hitting things. In the winter it doesn’t even smell too bad, ha! Obviously not every stomach can handle it, but it’s actually quite beautiful when you think about the part you’re playing. It’s not like we drive around with them in the bed forever. The state’ll compost them. It might seem gross when you see them lying on the side of the road, but the guys we pick up are probably the only ones to get something like a proper burial. And people need that, you know? A proper burial for themselves, sure, but the animals too. Gophers an’ that. It’s not just a cleanliness thing, nature has a way with dealing with things that drop dead. We like to be reminded how far human kindness extends.”
Ron taps a dog collar hanging from the rearview mirror—
O
Ron taps a dog collar hanging from the rearview mirror—
O
“Like this guy right here. That was somebody’s baby. Maybe some kid’s best friend. And they never would have known what happened to him if not for us. For people like us, the ones doin’ the work, you know? We won’t take this guy to compost. State’s got freezers for that. I’ll have to call them but the state will make sure they can pick him up. If I think one of them is family I let them right up here in the cab, but they really don’t make great company after a few days, trust me. Freezers better…People think you gotta be able to lift to keep this job—and with all the deer we got around here, you sure do—but what ya really need is empathy. You gotta care about the people you’re talking to. Some of them have suffered real loss. Some of them just don’t like the reminder of death hanging around the highway. I was seeing a girl that would shake and cry every time we passed a deer on the road—course she’s gone now, but—I didn’t know it then, but her sister died hitting a deer up on Laurel Mountain. It went right through the windshield but it didn’t die, not right away, I mean. Thing was scared, thrashing around, getting all cut up on the broken glass and all that. It was just trying to get away but it clipped the sister in her neck, maybe three, four times? They sure are cute, but people forget those antlers are for fighting. Anyway the poor girl was buckled in next to her sister when it happened. Too shook up to get her hands to work or something and watched the whole thing happen. I think about her a lot on the job. Any time I clear a deer off the road it’s just one more she doesn’t have to worry about driving past. This work is for the living, you know? Course that doesn’t mean it never gets boring. I don’t think I’ll ever quit exactly, but when I retire I’m moving out to Arizona. I got a brother out there, he says driving out in the desert is the closest thing you’ll ever get to going to Mars. And I don’t mean on account of all the sand and red and sun and whatnot—it’s the space. He says you’ve never felt so small. First time he was out there he says he thought he was having a heart attack. They got more sky than sand. Plus they got the weirdest little critters running around down there. Have you ever seen an armadillo? I hear they got them down south too, but I ain’t never seen one. You ever go down south, to Myrtle Beach or something?…Damn, I’d love to scrape one of them little guys off the road. They’re little tanks. You’d think there wouldn’t been so many getting hit bein’ little guys and all, except when they get scared they can jump three feet into the air, can you believe it? Three feet! That’s fender height. Might even crack the windshield depending on what you’re driving. You could just drive right over them things like a little yellow speed bump except they jump right up into the air. Can you imagine driving along and a goddam armadillo comes jumping at you outta nowhere? I’d shit the bed. For real, I would. That’s just too fucking funny.”
About the Author
Sam Johns is a writer living and working in Brooklyn, New York. They’re currently writing for DC Comics and Boom! Studios, as well as pursuing their MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Fiction at Columbia University, where they were awarded the Felipe de Alba Fellowship.