From Keith Lee Morris’s story “The Children of Dead State Troopers” (NER 23.1, 2002):

It was an unusual method of phone solicitation, no two ways about it, this method of Joe Butter Rentals’s, and effective in a sense, though Randall Moon wondered when the part about money would come around, and as he let the phone ring twice, three times, he compared briefly this temporary job of Officer Joe Butter Rentals’s, who must surely be out there on the roadways himself most days, to his own job, picking out a suit in the near dark of the bedroom, driving, gliding by the kudzu, the train tracks, the old abandoned railroad depots, general stores, into the little towns, the main streets lined with once-proud homes, dilapidated now, plywood on the windows, rotten porches, peeling paint, and then the doctors’ offices, striding in head up, shoulders square, gripping the briefcase tight, then waiting for the doctors, for the breaks between patients, the lunch breaks, and the noises from the rooms in the meantime while he made sure his samples were straight, his tie straight, the coughing, the complaints, the shuffle of feet down a hallway, and then the doctor’s handshake and the touting of decongestants, antihistamines, antibiotics, analgesics, pimple creams, none of which would be of much assistance if one were, say, crushed, struck, shot in the head, or if one had a brain tumor like his wife, Connie, thought she had, and she should be home by now, and it occurred to Randall Moon as he prepared to answer on the fifth ring that it might be better if he did not tie up the line, and that if Joe Butter Rentals had something to sell he’d better sell it quick.

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