Clean-Up Crew
by Brett Biebel
Mrs. Horowitz has a barn full of animal skeletons. It’s the small ones mostly. Mice and voles and fish. She’ll pay you 125 for a new specimen, as long as it’s clean and complete and in good condition, and what she does is use them on her anatomy students. The gifted kids. Track 1A and AP, and it’s all this real special kind of final exam. She throws the bones in a bucket, I think, or maybe it’s a trough or a barrel or something, and she puts the kids in groups, and she’ll tell ‘em like, “This tub here’s a sunfish, a raccoon, and a cat got clipped by a Volkswagen in 1987,” and they gotta put ‘em all together no mistakes. First team to finish gets an “A,” and then it’s all downhill from there, and me and ol’ Evo couldn’t hack it, not by a longshot, and so we keep our eyes out for fresh kills. The rare and newly dead. There’s a few other groups around town always try to get in on the action, and it’s mostly real friendly like, but the other day we find this bald eagle, and Scottie from the Cub store is there at the same time, and we let it lay there between us, and it’s all knives out and icy stares, and “I’ll flip you for it,” he says, and we nod. We wait. Evo’s got this Eisenhower silver dollar he always insists on, but Scottie wants a quarter he found by the old railroad tracks back when he was 12, and the procedure here is simple. “We toss ‘em both,” says Evo, “And if they’re the same it’s us, but if they’re different it’s you,” and Scottie’s alright with that, and so up they go. Spinning. Twisting. Ours ends up heads, and his lands on the fucking bird, and we walk over there real quiet and real pained, and when it’s tails, we watch him throw the thing into the cab of his truck.
“Gentle, asshole,” I say, and he laughs. Drives off. It’s only later we think about America, and we’re drinking coffee and Kahlua at this shitty folding table out on his deck, and, “Better it’s Scottie, really,” says Evo, on account of something about symbols. Hexes. Something about stripping all that beauty just so some egghead can feel good about putting it back together. Hooking a cheap scholarship. Grabbing herself a taste of that big-time college debt.
Brett Biebel teaches writing and literature at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL. His (mostly very) short fiction has appeared in Hobart, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Masters Review, Emrys Journal, and elsewhere. 48 Blitz, his debut story collection, is available from Split/Lip Press. You can find him on Twitter @bbl_brett.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Clean-Up Crew”? I almost got in a car accident while staring at an eagle. It’s hard to look away from a bird like that, and I think that’s probably where this story came from. I’m also obsessed with the urban/rural divide in the US and the difference between following the rules and scraping out a living on the margins, and I spend a lot of time thinking about all the weird things we incentivize in every system I can think of, including and maybe especially education. All of that plus a rainy day and a little bit of time, and here’s the result. Usually, I’ll have an ending in mind before I start writing, but this one began with the eagle and the image of middle-of-nowhere students using roadkill to study anatomy. The last lines came more or less spontaneously, which was refreshing. A rare and welcome change of pace.
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