“You’re gonna have to up your game tomorrow—Carol’s on the truck!” That thrown down at me from the truck window and Clayton B. Hill—a big man, and owner and operator of Clayton B. Hill Sanitation. “Double route tomorrow and we’re gonna be rollin. She’s gonna kick your ass.”

Carol. His eighteen-year-old daughter. He didn’t know I’d met Carol months earlier. I’d been her teacher—her student teacher in the town of five-thousand.

Carol was tall, square-shouldered, dark and still as the country night, and no-nonsense beautiful. She rarely smiled. Sitting alert in the third row, her eyes took me apart—my tie, my beard, my sweaty palms.

That summer following college graduation, I heard that one of Mr. Hill’s guys had broken his arm, and they were looking for his replacement. I’d also heard the guy made about three times what I made tending bar. I jumped at the chance. Hat in hand, I approached Mr. Hill. He immediately hated me but gave me the job, I have to believe, to break me—to see my long-haired, bearded, hippie ways get hosed, wrung out, and wadded up in the bedlam of banging trash cans, moving hydraulics, and airborne dumpsters. Mr. Hill would drive the massive truck, and I’d be his can monkey hanging off the back.

I showed up way before the start time and stood in the shade of one of the trucks behind the house. A mile from town, cool morning, a couple dogs barked on the adjoining farm. Too many beats waiting, I knocked on their kitchen door. Mrs. Hill answered, said they’d be out in a minute, and closed the door. I chilled. There was shouting inside. Things not right. The door yanked open, and Mr. Hill was on the porch—irritated. “Get on the truck.” I did. Moments later, in work gloves, wool socks, ankle boots, and long baggy shorts, Carol climbed on. No eye contact. The truck pulled out.

Carol was fast and able as she leaped off the moving truck, grabbed full cans, lifted them chin-high, dumped them into the hopper, and set them back at the side of the road. Then, she ran and jumped back on. Plenty busy working the other side of the road, I didn’t have much time to watch. In a glance, I saw her slick with sweat, long hair pulled back and unwinding, dead eyes.

End of that Friday and back from the dump, the empty truck bounced into the Hill’s yard. Mr. Hill shut it down, and we stepped off. He came to the back to congratulate us. Carol took off her gloves like he wasn’t there, placed them on the truck’s rear platform, shot a look at me, and went into the house. That was the next to last time I saw her.

“Jim, you want some extra time?” He didn’t say overtime. “Come back for a half day tomorrow?”

“Yeah, sure. Thanks.” I needed the money. That Saturday, I scrubbed, disinfected, and hosed out the huge, pungent trash compactor on the back of that truck. Climbed in with the hose, stiff brush, a few gallons of ChloraClean, and had at it. Hours later, I crawled back out to daylight, soaked and sanitized.

Mr. Hill was starting to like me. “So whatta ya do when you’re not working here?”

“Tend bar.”

“Where? When? You’re here nine hours a day.”

“When I leave here. I strip on the back porch and get a shower. Then I tend bar at The Pub until ten. I work full shifts Saturday nights.”

“Well, maybe me and the missus’ll come down to see you sometime!”

That Saturday night, they looked their stylish best at the end of the packed bar. I was gassed from being on the truck all week, and they ordered another couple drinks—Grasshopper and a Manhattan.

Clayton B. Hill must have had a hard go much of his young life. Now, with his own successful business, he seemed pretty proud. An unyielding man, I’d heard he killed the judge’s big dog on the judge’s front porch as the judge peeked out from inside. The dog had torn into Mr. Hill as he picked up the can. Mr. Hill put the can down, limped out, bleeding, to the truck for the shovel, returned to the house and whacked the dog.

He told me he and Mrs. Hill had wanted a son, but Carol is what they got. He said that about the time Carol was eight, he’d shown her how to drive a nail and use a power drill. At nine she was mowing the grass. He said, with what appeared to be pride, “There’s nothin girly about Carol.”

It was another extra time Saturday, and Mr. Hill told Carol, “Take Jim down to the flats, and clean out them houses.” She nodded, and we left the shade of the porch. Humid heat, dust and bugs, we tromped through waist-high weeds, over a rise, across a dirt road, and onto the dry, mown flats by the creek. There, it was a surreal scene—a platoon of tall, blue port-a-potties stood in three long rows. The sun in our eyes, I broke the silence. “What’s this?”

“Outhouses.”

“Yeah?”

She turned and stared fully at me for a long three seconds. “We empty them.”

“Okay. So, like, where’s the pump?”

She opened a toilet door and extracted two five-gallon plastic buckets. Each held a pair of heavy, black, arm-length rubber gloves, and a cut-off Clorox bottle scoop. She set a bucket at my feet. I’d read that a blackout from trauma is sometimes referred to as dissociative amnesia. It’s probably why, to this day, I couldn’t tell you what happened next.

When I showed up for work that following Monday, the curtains were closed, the house quiet. Mr. Hill sat alone on the back porch step. He leaned elbows on knees and held Carol’s note.

 

HJ Brennan has taught inner-city school, designed theater sets in Philadelphia and motorcycled many of The West’s two-lane blacktops. His third novel, “Miriam Unfinished,” was released in May, 2026. He divides his time between daylight and dreams and lives with his artist wife in Northern California.