Meat

Nobody wants to get runned over, but it happens.

 

 

I can tell you a lot about dead animals. I’ve seen enough of them to know probably everything there is to know about them. They could make one of them television shows about my life, like Law and Order or C.S.I, only it wouldn’t be about these detectives trying to find out what killed a person, it would be me in my old truck driving these old two-lane highways and finding dead animals and then telling what happened to them. I could be Mark Stinnett, Lead Animal Homicide Investigator. Maybe they could get that Jimmy Smits to play me.

Example:

A three year old doe in heat. She tried to cross the road to get to the old pond on the other side. Ran across, just like deer do. Didn’t look. Couldn’t look. Too worried about getting to that pond. A truck hit her. See how high she was hit? Right on top of the haunches. She almost made it across. If she had hesitated, or if the truck had slowed down just a little, she would have made it. But she didn’t. The front bumper knocked her down and then the wheels ran over her hind legs. The driver didn’t stop. Funny. She had a lot of meat on her. Looks like he would have throw’d her in the back. He didn’t though. It didn’t kill her right off. See there, she crawled across the blacktop. Made it over to the ditch. Reckon that’s why it took so long for somebody to see her and call the county. She’s been dead four, maybe five days.

Or:

An old dog laying with three quarters of it off the road, and its back legs on the blacktop. A real old dog. Maybe 10 year old. Starved to death, is what happened to it. See its ribs there? See how the backbone and the hips stick up? Somebody set this old dog out. Somebody didn’t want him no more. Just drove way out here to where there ain’t too many houses around and let him out. Told the kids he would be alright. Said, “Dogs know how to get along in the wild. He’ll hunt to find food. He’ll find him a place to stay out in the woods somewhere. Or somebody’ll come along and pick him up.” But he didn’t find food. He couldn’t find food. He didn’t know how to look for a place to stay. All he know’d to do was to wait for humans. To watch the cars. To watch the faces inside and wait for someone to get out and take care of him. But they wasn’t too many people wanted an old dog like him. So he just wandered this old highway until he died.

Or:

There’s a female possum with a whole litter of youn’uns in her pouch. Somebody swerved to hit her. See the tire tracks? I’ll tell you, a possum ain’t got a lick of a chance in this country.

But they won’t never make no television show about me. I guess nobody would care to watch something like that. Hell, I don’t guess I’d even watch it. But a man knows what he knows, and they ain’t much you can do about it. I work for the county, Animal Control, but it’s kind of funny, ’cause all I do is pick up dead animals. I mean, they ain’t much controlling going on with what I do. It’s kinda the lowest rung on the ladder around here. Nobody wants to get stuck on Scraping Detail. That’s what everbody calls it. Usually they give it to somebody who had got in trouble for something, laid out too many days or used excessive force on somebody’s pet, but I kind of like it. They ain’t too much to it. It can be pretty disgusting, but you get used to it. Plus, you work all by yourself. And the calls don’t come too often. The bosses don’t mind me not having much to do. I figure they’re just happy to have somebody that’ll do it. Usually all I do is drive around and smoke cigarettes and listen to the radio. Tracy said I ain’t got no ambition, and I guess probably she was right. I like being content. But she left me over it. That, and a few other things. Took the kids and went to live at her momma’s. That was two weeks ago.

Monday morning it was a dogfight. They was 16 dogs. Most of them had been killed in fights. 4 losers had been shot. 2 of them had to be put down by the police right there on the spot. They was so tore up they wouldn’t let nobody get to ’em. They had their dogfights out in this old barn. When I got there, the carcasses was all scattered all over the place. It looked just like a war zone, or what I always figured a war zone to look like. Me, I ain’t never been to no war. My great-granddaddy fought in the trenches in the first war. He left an arm and part of his right ear somewhere over there in France. My granddaddy invaded Normandy and come back to tell about it. My daddy fought in Vietnam and spent over a year in a POW camp. Nobody said too much to them after they come back from their wars. I mean, about what they were doing or not doing. Nobody got on to them too much. I guess everybody figured that what they had been through gave them the right to do whatever they wanted to. But me, I ain’t never done nothing. I could of joined up after them crazy Arabs blowed up the twin towers, but I didn’t want to. I was happy with where I was. My job. Tracy and the kids. Course, I never did think on things like that until after she run off and left me.

What I do, is I get my plastic gloves out of the truck, and sometimes I put on this facemask that covers your nose and mouth if the smell is too bad. It wadn’t too bad this morning though, ’cause they was all fresh. Then, I get the shovel and the plastic bags. They were all mangled up pretty bad. I could tell they had suffered a lot. But I didn’t think too much on that while I was stuffing them into the bags. They were just meat now. When I get the carcasses in the truck, I take them down to the landfill. They got an incinerator there. It’ll burn meat and bone right down to ash. We used to just bury them, but the EPA come down and told us that it was against the law to do that. The guy who runs the landfill, he give me my own key to the incinerator, showed me how to use it. He said he wanted to make sure I know’d how to do it, in case I had to bring a bunch of carcasses in while he wasn’t here, but pretty soon I figured out that it was because he didn’t want to be bothered with burning up no animal meat and bones. I didn’t care too much. It was something to do. So I got all these dogs together and bagged them up and took them down to the incinerator. There is this conveyer belt that hauls whatever it is you want to burn into the furnace. They burn a lot a trash in it, I guess stuff that the EPA says they have to burn. I put the dogs on the belt one by one. For some reason though, I don’t know why, I pulled each one’s head out of the bag and looked at it before I sent it in. These boys had died in combat. They had went down fighting. I thought about if I was a dog, that would probably be the way I would want to go. Seems to me like that would be a lot better than getting runned over by some truck, or left out to starve, or just shot up off in the woods somewhere. Then I got to thinking about that documentary by Ken Burns I watched on television one night, where they were talking about the holocaust and how these American soldiers found the death camps and these big furnaces that were kind of like the one I was using. They showed all these dead bodies all piled up and waiting to be put through, but they didn’t get put through, ’cause the Germans got outta town before they could. I got to thinking about them bodies, and then looking at these dogs again and wondering if they were the same thing. I mean, I know a dog and a human are not the same, but after they’re dead, aren’t they both just meat? Alive, they are two different things, dead the same. Humans and animals. The hard part, I guess, is getting them from living to meat. I didn’t have no problem closing the door behind them.

Tracy said I ain’t got no ambition. She said that because I don’t ever try to move up in my job. Try to get a job up there in the offices where they sit and fill out papers and punch computer boards and come to work with suit and tie on and collect the big checks. They’s plenty of jobs like that for the county. And I’ve seen what people have to do to get there, and then what they got to do to stay there. You’ve got to kiss a lot of a*s and get a lot of stuff on people and then let them know you’ve got it and you’ve got to support the right politicians and you’ve got to laugh at the right jokes and you’ve got to work on Saturdays and you’ve got to not do nothing except these things. If that’s ambition, I’ll take the silent dead, thank you very much. I wish she could learn to be content, like me. Trouble is, she was born into a well-to-do family that always had money. Poor people don’t think about getting ahead too much, just about getting along. If Tracy had of been born poor, she might have been happy living in our little trailer, with me bringing home my $8.25 an hour.

Tuesday it was cats. They was this lady, she was what we call a “cat collector.” She was one of them old ladies that lives alone, ain’t got no family or friends and she adopts all these stray cats and keeps them in her house. Every cat she sees that looks like it needs a home, she lures it in. She’ll put food out on the porch and then catch them when they come up on it to eat. She’s kind of like that old witch in the Hansel and Gretel story, only she don’t want to eat them, she wants to love them and take care of them. The sad part is, she can’t take care of all the cats that she collects. She can’t feed them. She can’t provide enough litter boxes for them. She can’t play with all of them. And after they die, she can’t get rid of them. So there’s all these dead bodies she keeps, laying around with the live ones, and all this cat crap all over the floor, and hairballs and all that. She don’t eat them, but she does kill them. It’s her love that kills them. When I got there, there was eleven dead cats throughout the house. Most of them was pretty stiff and starting to rot. The smell was pretty bad. I had to put on my mask to stand it. Some of the bodies were almost petrified. The place was a mess. Cat hair everywhere. Garbage all over the place. Flies flying all over the place. How could anybody live like that? I started picking them up and putting them into the plastic bags. I started doing something strange. For some reason, I don’t guess I know why, I started talking to them dead cats while I was picking them up. I wudn’t talking about nothing too important. I just started telling them things like how me and Tracy met, and how old the kids was, and how sorry I was that this had happened to them, and that maybe there was a cat Heaven somewhere they could go to. Stuff like that.

Tracy left with the kids two weeks ago. Said she didn’t want to live in a trailer the rest of her life. She took the kids and all her stuff, her clothes and make-up and all and just left. I come home from work that evening and they wudn’t nobody home. Just an empty trailer. I stood in the living room for a while. I wudn’t thinking too much, as I remember. I was just standing there. At first the empty trailer seemed a lot bigger than usual, with no kids hollering and screaming and no Tracy talking and talking and talking. But the longer I stood there, the more it seemed to shrink in around me. Down to where it was before, and then smaller and smaller. I started feeling like I couldn’t breath good. I had to go outside. I ain’t been back in the trailer since. I just mostly been working, and after work I been driving around all night, listening to the radio, smoking cigarettes. They got a shower at the animal shelter where I work, and I usually go in early, before anyone else gets there, take me a shower, change clothes and then sit in the break room and wait for everyone to come in. That way they won’t know I been living out of the country truck. I don’t reckon any of them would care, anyway. But for some reason, I didn’t want them to know.

Wednesday I didn’t do much. I just rode around all day, thinking about stuff. I don’t remember what. Somehow or another, I got out to Tracy’s momma’s house, where she and the kids were staying. I sat out there for three or four hours, way back from the house, where nobody could see me, just watching the windows. Looking to see if I could see them. I started thinking about all them dogs I had fed into that incinerator. How they were just meat. How when you emptied the thing out they were just ashes. Ashes that would scatter to the wind and disappear.

It was pretty late in the evening when I left her momma‘s. I didn’t have anyplace to go, so I was just riding around, smoking cigarettes, listening to the radio. I was out on Highway 11, minding my own business. They wasn’t too much traffic, and I liked it that way. It was like I was all alone in the world, or like I was on the moon, or something. The only thing I could see good was what my headlights lit up, and that was mostly just the lines painted on the highway. All of a sudden, there was this blinding light that hit my rearview mirror. Somebody had their bright lights on. They were set up high off the road. Had to be a truck or an SUV or something. It come up on me pretty quick, and it didn’t dim it’s lights. I flipped the mirror up, but whoever was driving still didn’t get the hint. I slowed down a little, and it come out of its lane to pass me. When it did, I saw that it was a big Lincoln Navigator, eating up the road. There was a light above the back seat, a television screen. They was two or three kids bouncing around back there. The driver was talking on a cell phone. The woman riding shotgun was putting makeup on in the mirror. They went past me fast. Probably doing eighty or ninety miles an hour. These are the kinds of people that run over animals and then just leave them in the road for me to clean up. I thought about running them off the road. It would have been easy. Just a little push with the bumper, just like in Nascar. I thought about it a lot, about making them see what it’s like to get runned over. But I didn’t. I only thought about it. Seems like thinking about stuff is all I ever do anymore.

Author's Note

Any critiques or comments gladly welcomed

Reviews

[Writer CW Kirkland]

Great job with this story. I think you effectively developed the main character; readers can understand his emotions and motivations even if they cannot relate to his life. I don't usually say this, but the use of poor grammar was good...almost necessary. Words like "ain't", "runned", and "wudn't" show us the character's education level. I was able to get a mental image of each event in this story. Thank you for sharing this story with the Cafe, and I look forward to reading more of your writing.

[THE BLACK SEAL]

i would agree with kirkland on this one. i think the story could be tightened a little by embelishment in some areas to give it a better consistancy but overall it kept my attention and was a good read