Damaged Goods (2 page)

The front row of the bleachers, where the regulars sat, most of whose names Hershel gratefully remembered, was filling fast. Number twelve, Bart Hanson, owner of Hanson Second Hand in Hillsboro. Number thirty-one, Winona Freehauf, an antiques dealer from Portland. Sixteen … Hershel couldn’t remember his name. A Greek-looking fellow with a heavy mustache and dark eyes. The man nodded solemnly as Hershel walked by.

Hershel paused at the center of the sale floor, overwhelmed by the task ahead. The bright lights burned his eyes, and the noise made his head ache. Above him taxidermy moose and deer heads gazed down with dull eyes. He took his place on the platform.

His clerk, Marilyn somebody, sat on the stool next to his, bent over, testing out ballpoint pens by scribbling on the desk-size calendar that covered her work surface. Her eyes shifted in his direction, but she went on, silently separating the pens into piles of those that worked and those that didn’t.

“Guess I should pick up some new pens this week,” he said, noticing that the defunct pile was larger and growing.

She glanced up, seemingly surprised. “I can bring some in from the school like I always do,” she said with a tone of apology.

Oh yeah, Marilyn Stromm. She worked as a secretary at Groner Elementary during the day. As he looked out over the amassing crowd, he noticed her sneaking glances at him from the corner of her eye.

It was five after six, and he picked up the microphone. His hand trembled as he turned it on, and he gripped the metal handle tighter to still his nerves. He cleared his throat and lifted the mike to his lips.

“Good evening, everyone. Thanks for coming. We’re gonna get started now.”

The crowd applauded, startling Hershel. His hand shook harder. A whoop went up from the group in the front row. Hershel smiled tensely, his breath catching in his throat.

“Make room up in the bleachers, would you?” he said, trying to appear calm. “We’ve got a lot of folks still getting numbers down here.”

“What’ve you got, boys?” Hershel asked, and Carl thrust a toaster oven into the air. “Okay, let’s open it up with a bid of twenty dollars.”

The crowd continued to talk among themselves, keeping a half-interested eye on the item in Carl’s hand. But this was the way it went.

“Give me fifteen, then.”

No one bid, and Carl flipped open the little door and showed it around with a graceful sweep of his hand. “She’s a good little toaster oven,” Carl called, showing off his missing front teeth. “Just look at her. Practically brand-new.”

“Give me ten,” Hershel sang into the microphone, but he didn’t get a bite until he dropped the opening bid down to two bucks. It was rapidly bid back up to seven dollars and sold to Bart Hanson for his secondhand store. As Carl ran the toaster oven back to Walter in the storage area, Stuart held up a sewing machine and Hershel began to feel the rhythm of his work once
again as it rolled along in that smooth way. A rapid singsong of numbers: “Gimme five, five, five, who’ll give me five? Three then, gimme three, three, three. There’s three, how ’bout five now. Got five, gimme eight, eight, now ten, ten, now twelve. Who’ll gimme twelve? C’mon, folks, it’s a decent little sewing machine. Twelve, twelve, that’s right, fifteen.” And on until he’d sold it for seventeen dollars to a woman standing in the aisle.

At eight o’clock Hershel stared down at the still-full warehouse. They seemed to have made no progress in the mountain of things yet to be sold. His head ached above his eyes, a heavy throbbing in that place so familiar since the accident. He cupped his hand over the microphone and leaned down to speak to Marilyn.

“You need a break?”

She glanced up, her mouth open in confusion. “Who’ll record the sale items?”

He scowled. “Don’t … isn’t …” Hershel waffled between trying to remember who usually gave Marilyn a break and the intense desire to sound as if he knew what he was doing. “Who usually relieves you when you take a break?”

“You don’t let me take a break.” She continued to stare at him, waiting for him to say something.

“What d’you mean? I make you sit here all night?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, still not looking away. “When you hired me you asked how strong my bladder was, ’cause there wouldn’t be a bathroom break.”

He straightened up again, removing his hand from the microphone. A sea of expectant faces all looked back at him. They were waiting for him to move on to the next item.

“Guess you really did hit your head,” she whispered to herself.

He stuttered out the opening bid on a rotary-dial telephone.

Marilyn spent the rest of the evening stealing furtive glances at Hershel as they worked their way through the heap of household castoffs, until the crowd in the bleachers had thinned to a dozen people and the line at the cashier’s booth once again wound its way out into the cool and moist Oregon night.

Hershel thanked everyone for coming and slumped down on the stool with his aching head resting in his palms.

“Are you okay, Mr. Swift?” Marilyn asked.

“Yes, just tired.”

“It was a good idea to keep it short tonight.”

Hershel rolled his hand back and studied his watch. It was just past ten. He’d routinely run sales that went as late as one and two in the morning before. He couldn’t imagine doing a marathon like that now. Even the smell of the popcorn had begun to wear on him.

“You’ll get your speed back,” she said as she gathered up the last tickets and shoved her pens to the back of the desk. “Some things just take time.”

He sighed. His rhythm had been fine, even therapeutic, but he knew that he was moving through the merchandise at half his usual pace. As he surveyed the floor in front of the podium now, he saw that there were still large stacks of items he hadn’t gotten to. The stove and dishwasher in avocado green, the sea trunk with its faded stickers and rusty lock, the cardboard boxes filled with books, and the antique banister rails salvaged from some long-ago architecture. It would all be here waiting for him next week. He could hardly face the idea.

He lumbered down onto the floor, and Stuart slapped his shoulder on his way past. “Good to have you back, boss.” The sentiment rang empty, especially after the glare he had given Hershel the third time he couldn’t articulate the name of the item Stuart had held up.

“Blender,” Stuart had called out to the crowd with clear annoyance. “It’s a
blender
, folks.”

Hershel slept until noon the following day. He woke several times that morning, feeling as though he should get up and head over to the auction barn. People would be returning for items that they
couldn’t haul away the night before—unplanned purchases and miscalculated sizes. But Carl would be there. Carl always worked on Wednesday mornings, which Hershel knew only because it was included in the note taped to his refrigerator. A page of yellow legal paper with a tight and slightly backward slanting script. It had random bits of information, like what day the garbageman showed up, when advertisements needed to be submitted to the
Hillsboro Argus
or the Sunday
Oregonian
, the combination to his safe. It wasn’t the only note like this, and Hershel was pretty sure he hadn’t written them. But he’d added to the collection, decorating mirrors and doors.

Hershel briefly wondered if it was a good idea to leave Carl in charge of his business. Had he always done that?

He moaned as he sat up and held his head gingerly with both hands. He was so tired of the pain. He’d tried to return to work too soon; he wasn’t ready. He was irreversibly altered by the accident. He’d suffered a serious brain injury.
Brain damaged
, they had called it. The doctors warned him that his cognitive skills might never return to the level where they had once been. Everything felt different and wrong. He thought back on the conversation he’d overheard between Linda and Stuart. Those words people associated with him. And those hostile looks he caught out of the corner of his eye from everyone. This morning he’d had other distractions to keep him from looking at the raw seed in the center of it all. Did people really dislike him that much? He felt vaguely nauseated. What had he done to earn such contempt?

Hershel had lost the context of his life. He’d returned home with only one recognizable aspect intact: a singular focus on making money. Though he couldn’t remember the names of many of the items he’d sold the previous night, he could still assess their value with a single glance. It had comforted him at first, and made him believe he was ready to return to work. But last night had proved just how much was still missing.

Nothing came, and Hershel finally got unsteadily to his feet
and wandered into the bathroom. He uncapped a bottle of painkillers and swallowed one down. The vanished days preceding his accident were particularly bothersome. The last thing he remembered was calling Georgine McClintock about doing an estate auction out at her mother’s place in Gales Creek. That had been on Tuesday morning. His accident happened the following Saturday evening. He couldn’t recall the sale that he held the evening after he made the call, or any of the days leading up to the wreck. He tried again, as he’d tried so many times in the past several months, to remember some small detail. Leaning both hands on the sink, he rested the crown of his head lightly against the mirror. Why was he traveling that road south of Newberg in the first place? If he could simply grasp one tiny recollection from that night, it would be like getting a fingerhold under the seam of this black shroud, and he could tear it away a little at a time.

After brewing coffee, he took his mug outside and sat on the front porch where the sun shone brightest. He’d suddenly become prone to cold spells, and this was a newly favored spot of his, especially on these cooling fall days. He gazed out across the field between his home and the Tualatin River, about a half mile to the north. Midway, a pair of buzzards ripped apart a carcass. A raccoon or a coyote. Whatever it was, it was big enough to have been a formidable opponent in life. Now its limbs were unceremoniously being torn from its body, stripped of muscle and skin.

The oak leaves were turning, but not with the flare of the maples along the river. These did not go bright yellow or red or purple before drifting quietly down, but simply began to brown on the branch. Dead before they’ve hit the ground, he thought.

As he tried once again to grasp any small detail of that night, he caught sight of the
Watchtower
magazine sitting at the bottom of the steps, tucked under the mat. He stared at it for a moment, then out at his long and very private driveway. His ears burned hot
and he did find a memory, though not the one he sought. They had come here once before, a man and two women. Dressed in their Sunday clothes, with plastic smiles and polite gestures, they introduced themselves. Hershel was standing in the doorway in his boxers and a sleeveless undershirt, deliberately for the benefit of the women. It was what they deserved for dropping in on a stranger unannounced. He jutted his knee forward and his shorts gaped open, causing both women to pink on the spot.

When the man asked Hershel if he believed in God, he had responded with “I believe in my God-given right to run you off my property for trespassing.”

That was when they drew out the
Watchtower
to leave with him in case he had any future questions about the faith. Hershel thanked them and said he’d be pleased to use it for target practice, pointing at the clean-cut young man on the cover. The trio retreated in horror, and Hershel had stood true to his word, taking the magazine out into the filbert orchard behind the house and pumping fourteen rounds into it until all that remained of the face was a ragged hole.

Today, though, he simply scooted down and picked up the magazine. He thumbed through the glossy pages, annoyed, but not as angry as he knew he would have been before. Perhaps it was that the people who had left it were the only souls to venture down his driveway since he was released from the hospital—a fact that brought a fresh stab of pain to his head.

Silvie Thorne slumped against the fender of her Volkswagen Rabbit. She gazed out across the field on the other side of Scholls Ferry Road. Golden wheat stubble rolled away from her in finely combed, nearly invisible rows, but for the blaze of evening sun lighting the bristly tips in white-blond.
Where the hell am I?
She turned back to her car, a battered relic.

“You piece of shit,” she muttered.

She opened the passenger door and pulled out her jacket and backpack, then leaned over and locked the driver’s door. She glanced at the backseat, wondering if her things—everything she owned in the world—would be safe. There was no taking them with her. Her eyes skimmed the laundry basket with barely folded sheets and towels waiting for a bed and a bathroom she did not have. Buried down along the floorboards beneath a bursting suitcase and hastily collected knickknacks was a metal lockbox. She stared into the backseat for a long time, her gut telling her to take everything out and bring the lockbox.

She straightened and surveyed her surroundings. The valley was narrow, and she could see several houses and farms fanned out along the base of the foothills, which were a deep, silky green, even in this late month. Silvie had never been to Oregon before,
and the landscape reminded her of something from a fairy tale, with its ferns and mossy creek beds. The contrast of densely wooded hills and sweeping yellow glens. The road sign above her advertised Scholls two miles ahead.
Scholls
. Not a town she’d ever heard of. She’d been looking for Highway 99 en route to the coast. Now she stood on Scholls Ferry Road, wondering if there really was a ferry and what to do about her dead car.