Somewhere around Tomah, the memories of that Red Asphalt video they played in drivers ed started to roll around. Steel carnage and masticated flesh against the eponymous earth, sometimes against trees, but more often against each other.
Around that time was when Rob emerges from his zombified stupor. The guys laying the cement did a shit job about thirty years ago, so the median sways a hypnotic meter for a hundred mile stretch.
Doesn’t help that the classic rock station left the dial on blues after leaving the metro. Stevie Ray Vaughan croons, getting the sun to rise. His ghost rattles the loose screws around Rob’s Chevy. A shiver that starts from his heart finishes with a firmer grip of the wheel. Stevie died on his birthday. He hovers into the right lane, letting the song finish out.
Chicago was a few hours away, he could tell you every mile. Normally, his youngest sat shotgun, listening to his old chain-gang tales. Even alone, he returns to his automated somnambulism.
It was always 7 hour shifts, they needed an hour and a half on either side to get to and from Oshkosh. It was a classic his first day: a scorcher and humid as all get out. Of course, the truck that the deputy drove them around in didn’t have AC, or he got his sick kicks drowning inmates balls in their assorted oranges and greens. Then the first one shimmered, glinting sideways with the low highway haze.
The car caught as each gear ratcheted down towards a stop. Rob sent a silent prayer, for the deer, and that this job never got easier. The freshman met fresh meat, while the geezers established a coned perimeter. Rob traced the ghost’s path from right lane back towards the breaker, from there to a patch of tall grass, then lost into the wilderness. Well, what did that matter now? That question never really got answered.
Auburn. Rob had thought roadkill was just red, when he was feeling academic, he might say maroon. The jellied brain under his shovel was auburn, the same color he saw when the sunlight filtered through his closed eyes. The viscera glittered as it flew through the air, hanging there for a short eternity. The most important art was letting the remains fall without making a sound.
No one ever spoke, except Jamie. Jamie was always the first to sign up for shifts, every summer. He’d outlasted most of the COs at Oshkosh by now. To him, a shift was about figuring out which guy was gonna stick around to the next shift with him. Rob thought that, if Jamie started to make him laugh, he was never making it home.
Sweat poured with each haul and mingled with the dried blood below. Dad taught him how to hunt but they must have carved that first stag up pretty quick, it never stank like this, like death for lunch. The poor thing’s right leg, pinned down by brute mechanic force and gravity. Rob needed two other guys to lever it loose. A plume of fur, a couple coughs, a moment for respite, job almost done.
His shovel was a third leg while he watched the old-heads work. They mopped with religious focus. Of course, a mop doesn’t know blood from dust, everything came up, and neither did a CO. Scrub and scrub until it gleamed like it did for Eisenhower. Or until they bitched enough to move on to the next one. Normally, somewhere in the middle of the two. The same argument for a whole summer, Rob never joined in. Never made the time go any faster.
Now, all he remembers is that first deer. It stared at him. Pupils frozen in a moment just before, saying: fuck.
Awake, Rob flips the blinker, and merges to the left.