This is my latest prompt.  We were given several choices, one of them being ‘doing the right thing for the wrong reason.’  As usual, it’s just a touch of 500 words!

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Cleaning up the sides of highways was a good thing, a commendable thing, even.  He wore the plastic orange blazer with pride.  He’d found the group ‘Ordinary People Clean Up’ on the MDOT web site.  They picked up garbage and road debris, specifically from along the two mile stretch between exit 62, Harris Road, and M51.  He called the contact number and joined two days before their third and final cleanup effort of the summer, claiming he wanted to get involved in some kind of effort to make amends for his disposable lifestyle.  ‘And to round out my resume,’ he’d said with a wink when he’d met the organizer, flirting a little.  Mindy was young and cute and idealistic, but not so much of an idiot that he thought she’d really buy the making amends explanation.  Most of these people were her friends or wanna-be boyfriends, roped into trolling for crunched up packs of Kools and empty beer cans by means of her smile.  He didn’t get asked many questions, and any he did he deflected with his wit.

Scanning the weedy sides of highways was surprisingly interesting.  Though his main focus was looking for the hand, or preventing someone else from finding it, he found himself pondering the types of people who left a trail of debris behind them as they sped along at 75 mph.  Technically, he was one of those people, but his litter had been accidental.  The tarp wasn’t tied down properly, which he knew when he left for the river, but he’d been trying to hurry when creating a web of bungee cords over the bulky pieces of corpse.  If it weren’t for those damned nosy neighbors he could have taken his time and none of this would have happened.

His most interesting (and potentially useful) find was a cheap pleather purse, barely weathered, complete with a lady’s wallet (no ID or cash), a tube of mostly used lip gloss and small hash pipe.  He found a pink lighter with a chipped bottom nearby and assumed it fell out of the same bag.  Somebody got nervous, he thought grinning.  He knew the feeling.

He was straying from the group, clutching the purse in one gloved hand and a garbage bag in the other.  It billowed around his feet and kept getting caught on the prickly burweeds that were, as far as he was now concerned, the street-punk bastards of highway plants.  He was letting out a stream of curses after pulling his bare wrist across one thorny plant when he spied something that looked out of place.  There it was, bloated and dirty and partially hidden by the leaf of a milkweed plant.  The gray fingers were curled in toward the palm.  He glanced back at Mindy and her crew, who were now headed toward him.  He snatched it up, shoved it into the purse and then dropped the purse into the garbage bag.  It couldn’t have been smoother.  He knotted and then double knotted the thick garbage bag as Mindy approached him with a toothy smile.

“What did you think?” She asked  “Going to join us again next summer?”  She piled her garbage bag on top of his, and several others did the same.

“It wasn’t bad,” he said.  “It felt kind of good to do a good deed.  It’s like we made the world a better place today.”  He grinned from ear to ear as they walked back to their cars.  Maybe he would join them again next year.