Damaged Goods (9 page)

“You can’t buy me like that,” she snapped.

“Buy you?” Hershel looked confused.

“I’m sorry. You don’t know how important it is that I get that car back.”

“It doesn’t run. Why not let him have it? I can look up the sale price. I won’t take a commission. Just let him have it. I’m sure he’ll give you your personal belongings back.”

“I don’t want anyone going through my stuff!”

Hershel sighed heavily. “This is my fault. I was off my game last night. I’m sorry. I don’t remember selling your car.”

“Carl told me about”—she immediately regretted starting down this path—“the car. The Charger.” She looked down at her hands, feeling self-conscious. “It was a bad wreck, huh?”

Hershel nodded and looked out the window, as if to escape the conversation. “Yup. Pretty bad.”

They sat in awkward silence for several moments; then the phone rang, startling them both.

Hershel swiped it up in his fist. “Swift.” He held it away from his head as the man at the other end shouted.

“I’ll reimburse you for your trouble. It was a mistake. C’mon, don’t be an ass.”

Silvie studied Hershel’s face, but he wouldn’t look at her.

“Is this because I didn’t sell—” Hershel glanced at Silvie, then away. He lowered his voice. “Is this because of that other item you were after last night?” He rubbed his eyes. “Fine. It’s yours,” he said in a hushed tone. “Just bring the fucking car back.” After an extended pause, he set the phone down. “I guess he agreed; he hung up.”

Silvie felt no sense of ease at the news. Now she waited with mounting anxiety about whether the angry man on the phone had ransacked her things and gotten his hands on Jacob’s box.

“Please, let me buy you something to eat,” Hershel said. “To make up for all this. Please.”

Silvie shook her head. “How soon do you think he’ll bring it?”

“What’s in your car that’s so important?” he asked.

She looked away.

“I should fire Carl for this.”

“He’s a nice man,” she said. “I don’t think you should fire him.”

“No, you’re probably right.”

“Has he worked for you long?”

“A couple of years. Tell me again why you’re going to Lincoln City. Are you going after a job?”

Silvie bit at her lower lip. “I’m just … I just want to be near the ocean, that’s all.”

He studied her. “So what’s all the fuss about the ocean?” he asked.

“I’ve never been.”

“You don’t have to move to the coast to see it for the first time.”

She kept her eyes on the floor, her mouth now set in a hard line.

“You’re not from Montana. Not with Wyoming plates on your car. You should take the money. It’s more than you’ll get for it anywhere else.” He sat back in his chair, looking suddenly confident. “So why would a girl who can’t even afford a motel room prefer a dead car over a little extra cash?”

“I’m running from an abusive man.”

He blinked.

“It doesn’t matter,” she went on with venom. “Now that I’ve been here and you know my name and what I look like, I’ll have to find some other place to go. It won’t be Lincoln City. It won’t be anywhere that you can tell him about, that much is for sure.”

Hershel opened his mouth to speak but didn’t.

“If—
when
he shows up looking for me, just tell him you never saw me. Okay? Tell him you found my car somewhere in Washington. Tell him—” She began to cry. “Tell him whatever you want.” Her narrow shoulders shuddered violently and she buried her head in her lap.

Carl pulled his jacket collar up to keep the morning rain off his neck as he stood on Yolanda’s step. The siding was rotting away, and he could see where water had seeped down into the seam and buckled the plywood. Mold covered the entire structure. All the cabins had been painted bright turquoise three summers back. The landlord had offered a week of free rent to tenants who painted their own, and everyone took him up on the offer. They complained bitterly about the color, though, saying it was “omosekswal.” The landlord had gotten a deal on the paint down at Columbia. An order that was never picked up—probably because the customer had come to his senses at the last minute.

“It’s too much,” Yolanda said, her face alight with surprise. Yellow light glowed through Yolanda’s open door, and the smell of fried tortillas wafted out into the damp Oregon morning. “It’s too much. I can’t take it.” Her frame took up the entire doorway as she clutched the KitchenAid to her chest with her doughy fingers. Her dark eyes twinkled with delight, and she held it out again to inspect it.

“You can. It’s for you.” Carl’s voice was strong, stern even. He had to work to hold back the smile that was fighting its way up from his center.

“No, no,” she said in her heavy Mexican accent. “I can’t pay you.”

“Have I ever asked you for money?”

“Carlos,” she said, resigning herself to the fact that he would agree to nothing but total acceptance. “Santa Carlos.”

“Make some cookies or something,” he said, throwing his hand up and stepping off the stoop. She would, whether he supplied her with a used mixer or not.

“You are so kind,” she called after him. “I will make you wedding cakes.”

Carl trudged through the muddy yard between the cabins, scattering large spotted hens and gaining the attention of an enormous gray rooster. They eyed each other balefully for a moment, the rooster’s guard feathers rising in preparation for attack. But Carl rushed the bird and sent it retreating behind one of the shacks before it could make its move.

A small boy was huddled on the step of the same shack with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders against the cold morning. He watched apprehensively as Carl intimidated the rooster.

When Carl noticed the boy he said, “That one’s mean. Don’t let it get the upper hand. Chase it off before it thinks it can take you.”

The boy stared, and Carl knew that he didn’t speak English. His face was dirty and his jeans were torn at the knees. The warmth Carl had carried from Yolanda’s porch dissolved as he was reminded of the overwhelming need in this place.

He nodded at where the bird had gone and flapped his hands, making the child smile. The door came open suddenly and a short, work-worn man with a hard expression stepped into the light behind the boy.

“Adentro,”
he said, and the boy rapidly scuttled past him into the dark interior. The man leaned against the doorjamb and lit a cigarette, appraising Carl.

Carl nodded a greeting. When the man didn’t respond, he turned toward his own shack, just past the picnic table, across the small yard.

“Cabrón,”
the man said in a barely audible tone.

Carl walked on without looking back. A new crew had arrived the previous day while he was working. The ten shacks at Campo Rojo were full again, and a handful of tents were set up in the adjacent field. Fresh from who knew where. California? Arizona? Straight from Mexico? They were here for the fall pruning of fruit trees and vineyards. It was always this way when a new bunch of workers arrived. Suspicious stares and muttered racial slurs. They assumed that he worked for Arndt, the landlord. They believed Carl was stationed there to keep an eye on the goings-on in camp. Yolanda would fill them in. They wouldn’t believe her at first, thinking she’d been duped, but over time things would bear out and they’d see that he was just a resident, the same as themselves. Then they’d move on and a new crew would arrive, and it would begin again.

Inside his one-room house, Carl shook the rain off his jacket and hung it on a peg next to the door. A small potbellied woodstove put out a generous heat, and he kicked off his muddy boots and warmed his fingers.

He craved. Today it was severe—worse than most.

He tried to shut the thoughts out of his mind, turning them to Silvie. She’d been constant on his mind since he discovered the terrible mistake he’d made in selling her car. But it wasn’t his screwup that weighed on him, though he harbored a strong desire to somehow make it up to her. No, it was her fear that bothered him. Kept him up most of the night thinking about it, in fact. He could understand her frustration, anger even. But the overriding emotion she’d shown upon discovering that her car was missing, a car that Hershel told him didn’t even run, was terror. And that, Carl could not shake.

Silvie found Hershel in the cashier’s booth the following morning, poring over receipts. She’d wandered every square inch of the
warehouse the previous day as she’d awaited the return of her car, and had discovered a back hallway leading to the room where they cataloged merchandise. She had pawed through boxes of weird and incongruent things like hair dryers next to poultry feeders. There was a life-size cardboard cutout of John Wayne leaning against the wall next to the women’s bathroom, and its realness unnerved her every time she passed it, giving her the sense that she should say “Excuse me” as she went by. She kept up her energy with small cups of Coca-Cola from the fountain in the concession stand. But hunger never found her.

Hershel looked up when she appeared at the window, as if she were a customer waiting to receive a bidding number. “Hello,” he said. “How did you sleep?”

She shook her head. “When do you think he’s going to bring my car?”

Hershel picked up his phone, scanned through, and held it to his ear. “Kyrellis. Swift.” He listened a moment. “Silvie is wanting her car back. How about you let me come get it?” Another long pause. “Okay, but if it’s not here in an hour I’m coming over. She needs her things.”

He hung up and looked at Silvie. She tried to smile, but the expression eluded her.

“He says he’s on his way shortly. Give him an hour.”

“Did he go through it?”

“Let me buy you breakfast,” he said. “I know you haven’t eaten. You have to eat something.”

She shook her head and glanced around at the mostly empty warehouse. “How does this work? Your business.”

Hershel lumbered up from the chair and came around to stand next to her. “It’s simple,” he said. “People bring in anything they don’t want anymore and I sell it for them. I take thirty percent of the sale price as my commission. That’s it.”

“How do you remember whose stuff it is? Was everything you sold Tuesday from one person?”

He laughed. “That was about twelve different consigners. We
track it with lot numbers. A lot number is assigned to each seller.” He picked up a cordless drill set that had come in that morning and pointed at the “22” scrawled onto a piece of masking tape stuck to the plastic case. “Twenty-two is Greg Westerman—at least this week it is.”

“How much money will you make on that?”

He glanced over it briefly. “It’s worth about fifty bucks. Probably sell for around thirty. I’ll make ten.”

“How do you make a living on that?”

“Three hundred items a week, give or take. Some big, some small like this. The trick is to never lay out your own cash. Bring it in and get it out within a few days. Volume.”

“What if it doesn’t sell?”

“The seller takes it back. It’s in the contract.”

She studied him, watched his eyes survey his kingdom. “It’s the perfect business. Really,” he said. “When times are hard, people sell. They also buy used instead of new. Business booms. When times are good, people have extra cash. And business booms.”

She tipped her head back and let her eyes roam the drab warehouse with its open beams, adorned in dusty cobwebs. He wandered down to the merchandise room at the other end of the building, and she followed. He called out the value of items they passed: seventy-five dollars for a chrome dinette set from the fifties, twenty for the darkroom supplies, eighty for large tractor tires that were taller than she was.

In the catacombs under the bleachers, she asked, “Don’t you ever buy anything for yourself?”

He pulled a yo-yo from the box she’d found the previous day and threaded it clumsily over his finger. “Only if I know it can bring several times more than anyone bidding is willing to pay. Then sometimes I pick it up and resell it later.” He released the yo-yo and it twirled down smoothly to the top of his shoe and back up again, causing him to grin. “It’s simple. Anyone can do it. But to do it well you have to be able to tap into people’s greed.”

She turned abruptly and looked at him.

“Seriously,” he said, watching the yo-yo spin. “They call it a bidding contest for a reason. There’s a winner and a loser. A good auctioneer keeps that war going as long as possible. We pit bidder against bidder like fighting cocks.”

“You’re proud of this?”

“I’m not ashamed of it. I don’t force anyone to buy anything. I simply leverage what’s already there.” He tossed the yo-yo back into the box. “C’mon, let’s get breakfast. We’ll go down to the South Store. It’s close, and we have time.”

She shuffled her feet. “Can we drive?”

“Of course. How else are we going to get there?”

Finally, she relented and followed him outside to his truck. The interior had warmed, despite the lack of real sunlight, and for a fleeting moment all Silvie wanted in the world was to lie down there and rest.