A Key to Paradise

by Barry Rachin

  Grace went back to where her daughter and Carl were waiting patiently. Five minutes later, the doors burst opened and a hoard of customers flooded into the hotel ballroom. The first wave of shoppers drifted past, some eyeing the boxes and stopping to chat with Carl. A middle-aged woman who was looking for a present for a nephew promised to return after she toured the hall. “Blondie’s killing the competition,” Carl said tongue in cheek. “That despicable BS artist is putting us all to shame.”

  Sure enough a crowd three-deep had gathered around the jewelry booth where silver bracelets, pendants and rings were flying off the table. “Yah, that’s a one-of-a-kind... No I don’t personally make a thing. My Uncle Sid from New Jersey is the creative genius. He designs every piece. A regular Picasso with precious metal! … Yes, everything’s on sale. I can let those go two for $25. A steal at that price!”

  “What did I tell you,” Carl chuckled. Smaller clusters of shoppers were gathered around various booths. The salsa lady was alternately refilling empty tortilla chip bowls and ringing up sales. Everybody was grabbing the free samples. A handful of customers floated past Carl’s boxes but didn’t stop or show much interest.

  Finally an older married couple strolled by. “Hey, Ralphy, look at these splendiferous boxes.” The pudgy woman wore thick, glasses and a slap-happy grin. She stood with her hands on her generous hips studying the merchandise. “Ralphy, get a load of this neat stuff!” Her husband, scowled and moved away to examine a collection of handmade soaps and body lotions. “You make these boxes?”

  The woman clearly had no intention of buying anything but that didn’t seem to bother Carl. “Me and my mother.” He smiled and cocked his head to one side. “You know my mother,… Mother Nature. She does the hard part. I just throw it all together.”

  The woman reached out and stroked the surface of a ring box. “Gorgeous stuff you make. I can’t hardly believe my freakin’ eyes!” She turned impatiently and shout at her husband. “Ralphy, for crying out loud! Come over here and get a load of this guy’s fancy shmancy jewelry boxes.” The husband, who was stout and balding in the rear, rushed off even further down the hall. The woman bent far over the table, “My husband makes boxes, too, but he only uses cheap pine and a quickie coat of varnish. Nothing like yours.” She wandered off in search of the man who had disappeared in the crowd.

  At ten-thirty, Carl made his first sale, a poem box done in cherry and quarter sawn oak. A half hour later another woman bought a large band sawn box and a man’s valet with a sliding tray. He put the money in a small cash box and turned to Grace. “I’m going to bathroom. You’re in charge.”

  “What about customers?”

  “Take their money and give them a box.” He walked off in the direction of the lobby. Grace looked at her daughter. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “No, not really. But how difficult could it be?”

  Five minutes later a gaunt man in his early thirties ambled up to the table and stared at one particular box with a queer intensity. He bent over at the waist so that his ferret like eyes were no more than an inch from the wood and continued to gawk at the keepsake box. Then, without straightening up or even bothering to look at either one of them he growled, “Take it off the table.”

  “Excuse me?” Grace stammered.

  “Take ...the box...off the table,” he repeated in a furtive, clipped tone, “and put it out of sight.” Only now did he straighten up and look directly at Grace. “It’s a present for my daughter. She’s over there with her mother.” He indicated a teenage girl with dark hair a few tables away.

  Angie eased the small box off the table and secreted it into a gift bag. The thin man all but threw the money down on the green cloth and rushed off spastically as though fleeing the scene of a crime.

  “So what was that all about?” Angie looked at the crumpled bills in her fist. Three twenties. The fellow never even waited for his change.

  “I haven’t a clue,” Grace said. Her first sale! She tried to gauge her feelings but nothing registered. She felt mildly disoriented, like when she got lost one time in Boston driving back and forth over the Charles River, unable to find her way home. Carl returned and they showed him the money.

  “Every sale’s different, I guess,” he replied philosophically and handed the money back to Angie. You keep it. Gives you a hankering for corporate greed.”

  Angie stuffed the money in her jeans then pasted Carl with a wet, sloppy kiss on the cheek. “Hey,” he cautioned, “don’t mix pleasure with business!”

  In the late afternoon, Grace went off to check on the competition. The flow of customers had dropped off considerably, but the blond whose fictitious Uncle Sid from New Jersey supposedly hand-crafted every bracelet, pendant and ring was still doing a brisk business. The spunky street fighter gibber jabbered with every customer, cracking an endless stream of corny jokes and frolicking her way through the final few hours. The homemade soaps were still selling well; the twenty varieties of homemade, organic salsa display looked like it had taken a direct hit from a nuclear weapon. Empty Styrofoam bowls and broken tortilla chips littered the floor. But the salsa lady was still chatting it up with a few stragglers. Diagonally across from the salsa lady the water color artist was sitting on the folding chair with her hands folded limply in her lap. All of her artwork was neatly arranged against the wall. All of it.

  “I didn’t sell a damn thing.” She looked like one of her flowers after a prolonged drought. “If I earned a tenth of what that woman did with her crappy salsa, the show would have been a modest success.”

  Crappy salsa. Grace wasn’t sure if the painter’s assessment was based on an actual taste test or an indictment of the process. Self loathing and despair oozed from every pore in her body. “Well, for what it’s worth, I like your paintings.”

  The woman glanced at her suspiciously. “Yah, but that’s what everyone says, and I’m going home broke.”

  Grace edged away. Maybe she should have told the woman that her droopy, tortured artist demeanor was a liability. While the tortured, water color artist sat morosely waiting to be discovered, Blondie was whooping it up, engaging everyone from frumpy housewives to an elderly woman with nasal oxygen and a portable tank strapped to her waist. Grace remembered the Chickasaw Indian woman with her woven baskets. Humility, talent plus a smattering of self-deprecating humor - not necessarily in that order - was what the flower lady lacked.

  At a booth on the far side of the hall, Grace bought some tea from an effeminate man who ordered leaves through an Asian wholesaler and mixed his own unique blends. “Bags? God forbid!” the man, who spoke with a pronounced lisp, seemed mildly horrified. Teabags were bleached. Bags were blasphemy! They adulterated—that was the word he used—the true taste of the delicate leaf. The ambrosia was perverted, desecrated, defiled. Would you take a bath in lye? All his selections had to be steeped in metal strainers. Before she left, the fellow loaded Grace up with free catalogues and samples. She would bring the teas to Mrs. Shapiro and, while they indulged their taste buds, recount the story of the overly sensitive tea salesman.

  “What a surprise!” Pam Sullivan, the office manager, was fingering a selection of alpaca wool sox imported from Mexico. “What brings you here?”

  “A good bargain,” Grace shot back, momentarily regaining her composure.

  “I just bought these crazy socks,” Pam boasted. “The dye is all natural. Natives soak the wool in a vat of crushed beetles and boiling water. Isn‘t that a hoot!”

  “Yes, I know.” Grace had spent some time talking with the vender earlier in the day. The red die was extracted from the pulverized bodies of the female cochineal beetle. The insects were soaked in hot water to remove a waxy residue then dried in the Southwest desert sun. Seventy thousand female beetles were sacrificed to produce a single pound of cochineal powder. Because the organic dye was absolutely non-toxic, it was widely used in cosmetics, food coloring and soft drinks.

  Grace studied Pam’s selecti
on. The socks were ugly. The young couple manning the alpaca sock booth had fair skin and hair. They didn’t look like they’d jetted in overnight on a red­eye flight from New Mexico. More buy/sell.

  “Did you see who’s here?” Pam said leaning closer. “Carl Solomon’s got a table over by the main entrance.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “How utterly absurd!” Pam tittered. “He’s hawking a bunch of tacky boxes that you couldn’t unload at a flea market.”

  Grace cringed. “That bad?”

  “The guy should stick to taking out the trash and general maintenance.” Pam rolled her eyes and made a motion to leave.

  “I don’t suppose you actually got a look at any of Carl’s boxes?”

  Pam’s features clouded over but she left the question hanging. “A woman’s holding scented candles for me three tables down. I gotta run.” Pam wandered off.

  When Grace returned, Carl was beginning to pack up some of the smaller items. She grabbed one of the prettier boxes off the tiered display. In response to Carl’s quizzical look she barked, “Don’t ask!”

  ******

  “Marquetry. It’s an ancient skill dating back to the 14th century Italian Renaissance.” Grace was standing next to Pam Sullivan. The secretary was writing out a check while the candle maker wrapped her merchandise. Grace thrust the slender bracelet box under the secretary’s nose. “Each piece is hand-fitted to create an intricate pattern, a mosaic in rare woods.”

  “Well, I don’t see where -”

  “And these aren’t just hinges.’ Grace flipped the box over. “No, no, no! They’re precision, fine-tuned Brusso hinges that hold the lid open at exactly 95 degrees. You’d have to visit the posh galleries and boutiques on Newbury Street to find such lavish, high-end quality.” Grace slid the box out from under Pam’s nose. “Or a shrewd shopper could buy direct from Carl Solomon.”

  When Grace returned to the booth, Carl and her daughter were breaking down the table. “How’d we do?”

  “Four hundred and eight-five dollars.” Her daughter pulled out a wad of bills. “Carl let me keep what I sold.”

  “What was that all about?” Carl asked.

  Grace told Carl about Pam Sullivan. Then she put her arms around him and kissed him on the mouth.

  “Mom!” Angie shook her head in disbelief.

  Grace kissed him a second and then a third time. “One last question. If all the products at a craft fair are suppose to be handmade by the local artisans, how can they peddle alpaca socks imported from Mexico or Mary Kay cosmetics?”

  “The Mansfield fair wasn’t juried,” he replied. “Pretty much anyone who filled out the registration form was accepted. No questions asked.” Carl explained that Blondie with the fake silver jewelry probably wouldn’t know a soldering iron from a blow torch. All her inferior goods were purchased on the cheap from overseas markets. There was nothing original about her product line just as Uncle Sid from New Jersey was nothing more than a figment of her cunning imagination.

  The same for the Gringo sock merchants. While their products were made in Mexico, Guatemala, Chile or God-knows-where and colored with beetle juice, the vendors had no part whatsoever in the design or manufacture. Even the Salsa lady was suspect. “So she cooks up a five-gallon vat of salsa on her kitchen range,” Carl argued, “She’s a glorified cook not an artisan. Why should she be hawking dip at a craft fair and taking business away from serious crafters?”

  Grace thought of the droopy water color artist, sitting with her hands folded in abject resignation. Would this first craft fair ultimately be her last? Perhaps she would try one more only to be sandwiched between the phony baloney blonde sales dynamo and the Caucasian couple pushing south-of-the-border footwear. The water color artist’s worse nightmare!

  “The next fair will be different.” Carl said. “It’s juried, which means they only accept serious crafters. No buy/sell. No imports. No Avon or Mary Kay cosmetics. If somebody sneaks in under false pretenses, the management will refund their money and throw them out.”

  “What about the Salsa lady?”

  “She can come to buy my original artwork,” Carl was laughing now, “but she can’t sell her funky salsa.”

  ******

  In the morning when Angie went out to retrieve the newspaper, the mail box was smashed. Obliterated. The metal pole was bent double, the box flattened like a pancake and unceremoniously hurled into the bushes. When Angie tried to straighten the pole, it snapped off in her hand.

  “The Village Idiot.” Grace put a pot of coffee on and called the police. The same officer who took the report when the house was egged pulled up in a blue cruiser.

  “Did you see who did it.” “No. I didn’t see a thing.”

  The officer pawed at the dirt with the toe of his shoe. “Too bad you didn’t have a surveillance camera. Could of nailed the little bastard.”

  “Tall, ungainly bastard,” Grace corrected, “with a bad complexion.” The officer threw his hands up in a gesture of exasperation and left.

  Hubert Fenster. Fernwall, Feinstein. Fenton, that was it! The name of the electronic whiz who set up the surveillance equipment at the high school. Grace found him in the yellow pages under the security heading. She called and left a message on his answering machine.

  Dwight Goober was a one man wrecking crew, a destructive, insolent, psychopath, and nobody could touch him. He spent his days locked away in a ‘special-ed’ classroom at the regional collaborative and, like a prisoner on work release, scurried back to the community in the late afternoons. He needed to be taught a lesson, Grace thought. No, the wording was too antiseptic. He needs to be hurt really bad—pulverized like the mailbox, fractured and splintered like the ruined metal pole. Everybody knew about the goons on Federal Hill. The lugs who would rearrange somebody's anatomy or tap dance on a spinal column for a few thousand dollars, no questions asked. A simple business agreement without a binding contract.

  It was curbstone justice at its best. The way things got done before the era of criminal rights, ACLU and all that libertarian hogwash. What frightened Grace more than the smashed mailbox was the revelation that she had entertained the notion of stopping by the sporting goods store at the Brookville Mall to checking out the offerings. What gauge weapon would you rec­ommend for hunting wild game. Something, say, in the two hundred pound range. A dull witted, feral beast with chronic acne and a compulsive inability to leave decent, law biding citizens alone?

  Hubert Fenton, a middle-aged man with bushy eyebrows, stopped by the next night after supper. Grace told him about the mailbox and the eggs. “Latchkey brats,” Hubert said gruffly, “they’re taking over the universe.”

  “I thought maybe a camera in the front of the house might work.”

  Mr. Fenton shook his head. “Soon as he sees the solitary camera up on the front, he’ll just target the sides or rear. These kids aren’t stupid.”

  “Actually he is quite stupid.”

  Hubert Fenton ignored the remark. “I wouldn’t go with anything less than four cameras. One on each corner of the house.” He pulled out a blank form and began scratching some figures. “You’d need a router to send the video signals from the various perimeter locations directly to your computer hard drive. You’ll also require a set up with night vision capabilities.”

  Grace bit her lip. “Sounds expensive.”

  Hubert looked up. “We’re looking at four thousand depending on how much trouble we have running cables. Some of these older houses can be tricky.”

  Grace’s brain shorted out. She didn’t have that kind of money to throw away on Dwight Goober. Four thousand dollars would replace the mailbox a hundred times over. How many Dirty Harry-type, long-barrel magnums could you buy for that kind of money? Hubert Fenton left a detailed proposal on the kitchen table. The paperwork described all the scintillating bells and whistles, the electronic gadgetry with the stipulation that additional installation fees would ultimately effect the final cost.

&nb
sp; When Hubert Fenton was gone, Grace called Carl and launched into a maniacal rant cursing Dwight Goober and threatening the thug with all sorts of outlandish abuse. Grace was just venting, blowing off steam. She could no more stop Dwight Goober from vandalizing her property than the police or ineffectual courts could. At the end of her tantrum Carl only mentioned that Mrs. Shapiro was feeling much better since the bronchial infection and, in his low-keyed unhurried manner, added, “Replacing the post and mailbox is no big deal. I’ll come by over the weekend.”

  Neighbors on Bovey Street cursed Dwight Goober through the previous summer. Every time he trashed their lives and property, they shook an impotent fist in the air, hollered and cursed until they were blue in the face, nearly apoplectic. But they never did squat. No one ever sued the family or confronted the insolent fishwife of a mother. They never even called the police or confronted the youth face to face. No, it was all empty posturing and hot air. They were afraid of retribution pure and simple. They waxed philosophical. Oh, he’ll just grow up and move away from Bovey Street or get sent to the ACI for some major offense. Better to be longsuffering and wait it out.

  What the neighbors never counted on was the possibility that their diabolic nemesis might hunker down on Bovey Street for the next twenty years, finding new and ingenious ways to torment them well into their doddering old age.

  Carl was a loner. Unlike the frightened neighbors, he studied a problem, whether a delicate bridle joint or a pimply-faced punk, and didn’t worry about extraneous details. That worried Grace.

  ******

  Mentally Unbalanced English Teacher

  Romantically Involved with School Janitor!!

  Pam Sullivan might as well have broadcasted the late breaking news over Brandenburg Middle School’s public address system. Ed Gray stopped by her classroom at the end of fifth period. “I heard a rumor,… totally absurd, but I thought I owed you at least the courtesy of -”

  “Courtesy,” Grace cut him short, “Interesting choice of words. And, yes, the rumor is true.”