Karma Sack

Jacob Roberts looked like most teenagers, but he was as mature and responsible as most of the parents he knew. One of Jacob’s biggest fans was a man named Al who lived a few houses down from Jacob and had watched him grow up. When Al decided to spend extended stays away from Daytona Beach and rent his house using Airbnb, he asked Jacob to be his property manager.

Al’s house sat at the end of a dead-end street, in a sleepy neighborhood away from the beach. Jacob’s main responsibilities were keeping the lawn mowed and cleaning up when tenants departed. The house’s floorplan combined three bedrooms, two baths, and an open area that included a kitchen, entryway, and TV room. When a new guest arrived, Al wanted fresh sheets on every bed, spotless floors and toilets, and nothing in the sinks or refrigerator.

Jacob quickly memorized the cleaning routine. After only a handful of rental cycles, he could restore the house to a condition indistinguishable from the way it looked the moment a guest arrived. He knew where every wall decoration and throw pillow belonged. He tucked and flattened bedding with military precision.

Because Jacob lived so close to Al’s property, he got a good look at the different renters as they came and went. The more people he saw, the better he got at predicting behavior. He had a good idea of how tenants would leave the house based on their vehicles and general appearance. Moms in minivans usually meant the dishes would be clean and the garbage collected. A single retired person translated to untouched bedrooms and carpets that barely needed vacuuming. In lucky cases like that, Jacob could spend less than 30 minutes prepping for the next visitor.

On the other side of the renter spectrum were the groups of rowdy college-aged students who crammed as many people as possible into the house and threw late-night parties. Jacob called those kinds of guests “three trash bag people” because they usually left three trash bags’ worth of garbage.

When the newest week-long tenant showed up in late February, Jacob instantly knew the house was in trouble. The guy wore a camouflage tank top, baggy jeans, and wrap-around sunglasses. He drove a gigantic, white Chevy diesel pickup truck with oversized tires and a lifted frame. The tires extended out a foot from the wheel wells, making the truck too wide to fit in a normal sized parking spot. Every time the renter got in the truck, he revved the engine before lurching forward and belching black smoke from the enlarged exhaust pipes. Then he kept his foot on the accelerator to obnoxiously roar his way down the street. At night, a collection of visiting cars and trucks crowded the curb around Al’s house. Jacob heard loud music and laughter and was surprised not to hear police sirens arriving at the scene to break up the fun.

When the white truck’s stay was over, Jacob marched with dread to the end of the street to inspect the damage. He was mentally prepared for a disaster. What he found was worse. Every inch of the kitchen and TV room floor was covered in pizza boxes, food containers, aluminum cans, and glass bottles. Mattresses were flipped on their sides next to bedframes. Pillows and couch cushions lay in the backyard along with cups, plates, bottles, and fireworks remnants. The refrigerator door was wide open. The toilet was unflushed. Gooey stains covered the bathroom walls and floors. The place smelled like a dumpster.

Jacob choked with disgust but went to work restoring the house to its former condition. The restoration spilled over into a second day and took ten times longer than he usually spent. But finally, the dumpster smell was replaced by the standard citrus scent from the house’s air fresheners. Jacob hauled away seven sacks of garbage and found plenty of items that did not belong in the house but were not necessarily trash. He filled a special plastic sack with the miscellaneous stuff that included the following: a pair of flip flops, a half-filled bottle of cologne, a laser pointer, a Monster Energy trucker’s cap, a snorkel, a retainer, and a dull hunting knife.

As much as Jacob wanted to toss out the special sack along with all the other garbage, he had dealt with people in the past who returned to demand what they claimed were valuable possessions. Just to make sure, he left the garbage sack near the house’s front door and sent a text to the white truck guy.

“You left some stuff at the Airbnb rental. It’s in a sack sitting by the front door. It’ll be there for a week.”

Jacob expected to be ignored. To his surprise, he got a message back that said, “I’ll stop and pick it up.”

Jacob shrugged. He was not sure where the guy lived or how far out of the way he would need to travel to retrieve his treasures, but if he thought they were so important, let him come back. Personally, Jacob hoped he never saw any sign of the unwelcome pest who had caused him so much work and hassle.

The plastic sack was still on the porch after 24 hours. It was still there two and then three days later. Finally, a week had passed and no one had retrieved the special items.

“It figures!” Jacob said to himself. “I go to the trouble of keeping that junk and this is the thanks I get.”

A new tenant was scheduled to arrive the next day and Jacob knew he could not leave a mystery sack on the porch for their arrival. He hauled the sack to a dumpster and tossed it inside.

Much to Jacob’s relief, the new tenant who arrived was an older woman traveling alone, except for her large companion dog. She kept the dog in the backyard when she was not walking it around the neighborhood. When she passed Jacob’s house and he gave her a friendly wave, she waved back in a respectful way. He happily imagined how neat he would find the house when she was gone.

On the fifth night after the dog walker’s arrival, Jacob was copied on a frantic sounding text message sent to Al, the rental property’s owner. The words were hard to interpret, but the woman was worried about a porch pirate and someone breaking into the house. Al sent Jacob a separate message asking him to walk down to the house and look into the problem.

Jacob hurried over and found the dog walking woman peering out the blinds near the front door. He knocked gently and when she answered, he explained who he was.

“I’m glad you’re here. I just had a tremendous fright,” the woman said. “Right out there on the porch.”

“Why? What happened?”

“I heard a loud noise outside. A huge engine and loud guitar music. I looked through the window and this ruffian came stomping up to the door. He looked around suspiciously. Then he grabbed the sack I was storing outside, put it in the back of his truck, and drove off.”

Jacob nodded his head, but before he could ask a question, the woman added, “Do you think he’s going around stealing things? Should I call the police?”

“What kind of truck was he driving?”

“A big one. White. With giant tires.”

“I think I know who that was,” Jacob replied with a worried expression. He was already imagining the trouble of dealing with the white truck guy and getting the woman’s sack back. “There was probably a little mix-up. What did you have inside the sack? Was it very valuable?”

The woman smiled like she was slightly embarrassed. “It wasn’t valuable at all. When I walk my dog and he makes a mess, I collect it and put it in little plastic bags. Then I put all those bags in a big plastic sack and tie up the top. I put an extra full sack like that outside so it wouldn’t stink up the house.”

Jacob smiled and then laughed. “You’re saying he grabbed a sack full of dog poop?”

“Yes. That’s what it was.”

Jacob remembered all the garbage he had sorted because of the white truck guy. Then he imagined him getting out of his truck after a long drive and opening the sack to discover what he collected from the porch. “I don’t think we need to worry about porch pirates,” Jacob said, laughing harder. “I think that sack ended up just where it belonged.”