Damaged Goods (4 page)

Her stomach rumbled with hunger and she dug through her backpack, coming up with a half-eaten Hershey’s bar that had melted and re-formed as an indistinct brown slab shot through with creases and bubbles. She ate it slowly, making it last. She tried to get a channel on the old television, but nothing tuned in. She finally settled for the company of shadowy figures moving through a hazy picture like yetis in a snowstorm.

As she sat in the eerie apartment, her senses tuned to the sounds an intruder might make, rain began to pound down on the metal roof. It reached a deafening roar, and Silvie found that she could no longer hold back the tears that had stalked her all evening.

Hershel lay in bed listening to the torrent of rain on the roof and the splashing of the overflowing gutters. He contemplated going to see if she was okay—or even still there. He half expected that she’d packed what she could carry and hit the road as soon as he’d left. She had stared at him as if he were a complete imbecile when he couldn’t remember which key opened the door. Then, when he’d offered to help her with her things, she acted as though he were going to attack her. He didn’t know what to do, so he just left her there. Alone with no heat or food.

He tried to remember her name. Sandy? Sally? Neither sounded right. Sarah? He got up, stopping short to let the onslaught of pain subside before going to the kitchen and pouring himself a glass of brandy. Sophie?

He put the glass down on the dining table, a finely polished
walnut pedestal table with ball feet that he’d picked up at one of his many antiques sales. He ran his hand across the smooth grain, admiring the burl figuring, but it imparted something uncomfortable. Another lost story. All that remained of its history for him was that he’d paid one hundred dollars for it—a steal. This table, which might fetch a thousand dollars in an antiques store in Lake Oswego, was his to enjoy until he got tired of it and something more interesting came along. He had only to load it into his truck and take it down to the sale barn to dispose of it. He’d make sure he timed it well. Wait until the right crowd and economic circumstances would bring several times the price he’d paid. It was a beautiful prospect.

Hershel pointed at the table. “Dining table,” he said quietly. He pointed around the room. “Glass. Newspaper … dining table.” How could he look at an object and register its value in an instant but, too frequently, not its name? Or the names of half the people who would buy these things from him? He was like an Alzheimer’s patient with moments of pristine clarity and stretches of hazy wordlessness.

He shoved aside the newspapers and magazines that littered the table, sending them cascading to the floor, and looked around at the house now littered with yellow notes. He had been a maniacally clean man before the accident, and the messy state of his home was a reminder that he wasn’t right. It was a testament to his invalid condition. Besides the visual aids, he needed a housekeeper.

The idea brought back that he’d been married once. It was long ago, and had lasted only a few months. They were both just out of high school. Hershel had only recently attained his auctioneer’s license and was working for a man out in Oregon City. The girl he’d married was local, someone he’d known since the seventh grade who had graduated from Sherwood High School the same year he had. Candice was her name. Tiny. Lovely. Homecoming queen. So enamored of Hershel that she would have done anything he asked without question. The marriage ended almost before it got
started, though. He slapped her across the cheek when he came home one evening to find their breakfast dishes still in the sink, soaking in cold, gray water. What had she been doing all day?

“If I wanted to pay for a maid,” he shouted, “I wouldn’t have gotten married.” He cringed now at those words. Hershel leaned forward on his elbows, staring down into the gold liquid in the glass. “Stupid bastard,” he whispered. He’d revisited that moment at odd times in the intervening years. It was the most pertinent lesson of his life—perhaps the reason it was not lost, as so many others had been. The lesson wasn’t that he shouldn’t have hit her; he already knew that. It was the one and only time Hershel had ever hit a woman, and his meek little worshipper had found some cord of strength neither of them knew she possessed. Candice had had the good sense to leave him that very night, under the protective watch of her father. The lesson she taught him, though, was never to underestimate anyone. No matter how mild or weak she appeared.

Silvie couldn’t stand the cold any longer. It felt as though the dampness had seeped into her bones, putting a freeze over her that she couldn’t shake. She rifled through the single kitchen drawer, finding only a fork and a stubby little paring knife too dull even to peel an apple. But it was something. She took it, pulled the dinette away from the door, and peeked down the wooden stairway into the hulking warehouse. She felt along the exposed studs, tangling her fingers in sticky cobwebs and yanking her hand back. Finally, she found the switch for the bulb above the dusty stairs. The snap echoed, and she was certain that she heard someone downstairs. She stood unmoving as seconds passed, listening with every part of her body. But it was still and quiet, save for the continuous patter of rain on the roof. She gripped the tiny knife and stepped watchfully, letting her weight settle against each tread.

In the warehouse below, the cavernous room was packed with
junk—garbage, really. It smelled of dust and grease and stale popcorn. She’d taken note of the odd assortment of tires and appliances, furniture and boxes. It seemed that this place had one of everything, no matter what it was. The path from the stairs to the front door was crooked and littered with strange objects at unpredictable intervals. She brushed against things she was afraid to touch, pulling her arms tighter around herself and walking with careful, tiny steps. Too many places for someone to hide, she thought. Near the front door, her foot caught an electric cord, dragging its nameless owner down from its perch with a metallic clatter. Her heart drummed at her throat. Her hands trembled as she fought with the lock, finally throwing the door open and stumbling out into the parking lot.

She stood in a steady rain, panting, no longer cold.

“Everything okay?”

Silvie shrieked. It was
him
. He was standing beside her car, a black shadow against the filbert trees.

“Hey, I didn’t mean to scare you. You okay?” He walked toward her.

She held up the little knife. “Don’t come any closer,” she shouted, her voice quavering.

He halted. Confusion worked over his face. “I’m not going to hurt you. I just …” He turned toward the orchard, then back to Silvie. “I just worried about you being here without any food or … or anything.”

“Where did you come from?” Silvie demanded. “Where’s your truck?”

Hershel held up a sizable flashlight, and shined it on a paper bag in his other hand. He cast the beam out across the murky orchard. “I came through there. I live on the other side. It’s a shortcut—well, not really a shortcut. It’s almost a half mile. But I take it all the time.”

“A shortcut?”

“Yeah.” He stepped closer, but stopped. “I’ve frightened you. I’m sorry.”

“Or maybe you didn’t want anyone to know you’re here, that’s why you came through the trees,” she stuttered.

“See me here? I—” Hershel looked around again, as if there might be some explanation for her behavior written in the darkness. “I own the place.”

He took a tentative step forward, holding the bag out to her as if she were a cornered animal. “I brought you a sandwich. I thought you might be hungry. I’ll just be going. I didn’t mean to scare you. Really.”

She squinted at him, knife still poised. “A what?”

“A sand-wich,” Hershel repeated. “It’s … cheese. I think.”

Silvie dropped her hand to her side. “I’m such an idiot. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I thought. You just scared me. I didn’t see you there.”

“It’s okay.” He set the bag on her car and headed toward the orchard, clicking the flashlight on and off as he went.

“Wait,” she called after him. “Please.”

He turned back, but didn’t come any closer.

“You’ve been so nice, and I’ve treated you awful. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t know me. It’s okay.”

Upstairs, Silvie wrapped herself in the blanket she’d dug from her car and sat remorsefully on the sofa, holding the soggy paper lunch bag on her lap.

“He must be wishing he’d never stopped to help me,” she muttered.

In the morning, when it was light, she would pull everything out of her car to get to the box, then leave Hershel a thank-you note and head for the coast on foot. But she wouldn’t go to Lincoln City. She’d already left a trail. She’d go north, to Astoria, cross into Washington, and head up the Olympic Peninsula. She’d have to risk it hitchhiking. She wouldn’t stay here for two more days; she couldn’t even imagine facing Hershel in the morning.

She opened the bag and pulled out a cheese sandwich on whole-wheat bread with mustard. She also extracted a Bosc pear and held it to her nose for a long moment, inhaling its sweetness. Pears were her favorite. She peered inside the bag and found at the bottom a small package of candy corn with a black jack-o’-lantern and
HAPPY HALLOWEEN
printed across the cellophane.

“He gave me candy corn.” She held a piece up to the light, as if examining the man who’d brought it.

Silvie was awakened by a loud clatter below, and for a brief, panicked moment she couldn’t remember where she was. A man shouted something, then the floor beneath her vibrated as the overhead door in the warehouse went up. She flew from the foldout bed into the bathroom, craning to see down to the parking lot below.

She’d overslept. The sun was well up, and two men were unloading some sort of combine or swather from a flatbed truck. A third shouted directions as they placed the hulking piece of green equipment so snugly against the rear of her car that she would never be able to get to the hatchback.

She forced the window open and pressed her face against the dusty screen, ready to shout down to them. Cool, moist air rushed in at her. Sweet with the scent of rotting cedar and mist.

“We’ll put the Charger right there,” one of the men hollered across the lot. He was stout, with a neatly trimmed beard, and he pointed at the space on the other side of her car. “It’s what people will want to get a look at, I expect.” He planted himself with a cocky, wide-legged stance and spotted the driver.

Silvie watched as another flatbed backed in. On its platform sat a ruined Dodge Charger. It must have been well cared for at one
time—its paint still glossy red, though crumpled and distorted. The tires were intact and new. The roof had caved in and the windows had blown out, leaving ragged chunks of glass along the edges. Clods of dirt and dead grass were lodged into the crevices around the hood and the windshield. No doubt the driver was dead, she thought. The car’s broken body seemed frozen in a scream of horror—unable to let go its last terrified breath.

The stout man whistled in amazement. “I’d say Mr. Dickhead is one lucky son of a bitch.”