by Luke Geddes
“You have quite the collection,” Ronald said. “Seeing all these dolls together, it really triggers the imagination. Like, for instance, what if Barbie were a real person? Think of the life she’s lived, of all she’s been through. Working a fast-food job one minute, and the next she’s president.”
“Barbie is a real person.” Delores lunged for one of her dolls and began to comb its hair with her fingernails. “More real than a lot of people I know.”
Ronald frowned. She must have been kidding, but it was a joke he didn’t get. Ronald reassured himself that he was such an easygoing and well-liked fellow that his very presence solicited the kind of joshing of which he was now on the receiving end. One thing that differed greatly from generation to generation, he’d observed, was sense of humor; modern comedy films and television programs frightened him with their vulgar mean-spiritedness, their dizzying camera movements, and bawdy dialogue; he preferred to watch the old movie channel or rent tapes of the classics at the library. There was no better movie, in his mind, than Some Like It Hot. Among Delores’s many iterations of Barbie was one modeled on Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch. What an ideal topic of conversation! He racked his mind for an opener. He could simply come out with it and ask if she’d seen it. But that lacked a segue and maybe it came off as insulting if she had in fact seen the movie; of course she’d seen it, why would he even have to ask? No, that wouldn’t work at all. He could start by complimenting the doll and, if only it would come to mind just now, he could charm her with some trivia about the film he’d learned from the tweed-jacketed man on the old movie channel’s introduction segments. Then, once they got talking about Some Like It Hot, they could move on to the complete works of Billy Wilder, and who knew where they’d go from there—the possibilities were endless; pretty soon Stacey would be announcing over the intercom that the mall was closed and the Dealer Association meeting was about to begin and the two of them would be shocked at how much time had passed. It was a perfect plan. The only trouble was he couldn’t think of what to say. Ronald, as outgoing as he was, sometimes had the tendency—especially since Melinda was no longer around to share his every thought with—to draw inward and become consumed with his own inner monologue, not realizing how much time had passed upon finally reemerging into what Melinda had called, teasingly, the waking world.
Quick, he told himself, keep the conversation alive. Say anything. You’re losing momentum. Finally, Ronald coughed out, “Acute barbiturate poisoning!” recalling something the man on the old movie channel had said about Marilyn’s tragic death. He had nothing to follow it, but that didn’t matter. Delores either hadn’t heard him or was pretending as much. With an unblinking eye, she inspected every last strand of hair on the doll. “I’ll be seeing you at the meeting, then.”
Unsettled, he sidled down the aisle. His exchange with Delores wasn’t as satisfying as his last two, with Jake and Jimmy. Maybe he’d gone about it all wrong, but he couldn’t figure how he’d flubbed up. He had really been feeling in tip-top shape and thought his opening bit, about what if Barbie were a real person, had been inspired, a little off-the-wall, maybe, but not off-putting. He was only kidding. He didn’t think Delores would act so insulted. The trajectory he’d envisioned for the conversation got disrupted somehow—it was Delores; she was supposed to play along.
Oh well, he thought. Delores is one of God’s unique ones, that’s all. A little too shy for her own good. Yes, that was it. They can’t all be like you, Ronald, old boy, a people person, born to talk, the life of a party no one else yet knew about.
Still, he couldn’t shake this awful flustered feeling. If he ran into a customer who needed help, he would gladly assist him or her (unless he or she needed one of the cases opened—Keith and Stacey took away his keys privileges after the string of thefts that occurred under his watch), but he would not attempt another conversation. Now, if someone, anyone, approached him for a gab about today’s edition of Mary Worth, say, or even deltiology, he was ready to return the kindness. Until then, the most anyone would get out of him was a simple hello. Continuing down the hall, he merely waved at Pete Deen, a quiet, chubby fellow who sold comic books and toys of all sorts, Pez dispensers, G.I. Joes, and Looney Tunes memorabilia. Pete glanced up from his hulking comic book price guide and muttered back, “Hey.” But it was, Ronald thought, in a very friendly tone. His confidence increasing, he said, “Beautiful day today. Love those fall colors,” to the gentleman around the corner who dealt in all kinds of vintage advertising including a treasure trove of material scavenged from the defunct Joyland Amusement Park; “Hidey ho, there, pal,” to the wiry fellow in the next booth who focused on political memorabilia. But he didn’t stop to chat, no. He didn’t want anyone or anything to send him off his groove the way Delores nearly had. He was looking for someone who could always be counted on for a little small talk.
Instinctively, he worked his way to Hall Four, a section of the mall with wider aisles and more open space reserved for dealers of furniture and other large-volume goods. Feeling frisky now, he slowed his walk to an amble. He even began whistling. Whistling! He was becoming, no doubt, what many people affectionately referred to as a real character. Look at him, whistling and ambling his way to the floor space maintained by Veronica Samples, who specialized in midcentury modern furniture and who was, in her late twenties, the mall’s youngest dealer by a wide margin.
Ronald had had his booth at Heart of America longer than anyone, save for Margaret Byrd, who’d been here since opening day, and it brought him great pleasure to serve as this youngster’s mentor. He liked to think of her as a sort of surrogate daughter. Because of what one doctor had called—putting the prognosis from a series of complicated tests into layman’s terms—a “biological fumble,” he and Melinda had never had kids of their own.
Veronica touted her wares at all the seasonal flea markets and had a horde of loyal customers who followed her from one show to another hoping to snag her latest offerings. As Ronald approached, she was bent over a credenza, making room among piles of flea advertisements for a new flyer. Feeling a little goofy, Ronald crept up behind her and yelled, “Howdy!” Spooked, she yelped and spilled the fluorescent sheets all over the cement floor.
With her gaunt physique and hip clothing, Veronica was the sort of woman Ronald would call a real classy lady. “What in the shit are you doing?” she said. Before he could answer, she got on her knees to collect the papers. Ronald would have liked to help, but his old back wasn’t what it used to be. Veronica’s houndstooth skirt rumpled, and a tiny blue triangle of her undergarment showed beneath her pantyhose. Ronald sobered a little and cut his eyes modestly up at the ceiling. When he brought them back down a moment later he was startled to see that the papers she held in her hand were MISSING posters for Lindy Bobo, the little girl presently locked in a dog kennel in his basement.
Dread struck him like lighting, an electric jolt that entered his forehead, burned through his spine, and shot out of his quivering arms and legs. He’d had Lindy hardly more than a day and already there was, according to the information on the flyer, an entire task force dedicated not only to finding her but to turning any wrongdoers involved in her disappearance over to the authorities.
Veronica stood and smiled professionally. “I’m sorry about that, sir. You caught me off guard and I didn’t get much sleep last night, as you can imagine. Before I ask if there’s anything in particular you’re looking for today, can I take a moment to tell you about our efforts toward the safe retrieval of Lindy Bobo?”
She was acting like she didn’t recognize him. Was she only fooling around, or was it her subtle way of casting suspicion? He couldn’t seem to move his body. It’d be rude to exit a conversation he’d only just initiated, but he wanted to run. He wanted, also, to confide in his trusted friend. Ronald had never been good at keeping secrets; Melinda could always tell when he had a good hand in gin rummy. He was no wrongdoer. It was all a misunderstanding, an oopsie. “Hello,�
�� he said again, Lindy’s fluorescent face beaming at him. They stood for a moment in silence. “It’s me,” Ronald said uncertainly, as if he were trying to convince himself, “Ronald. I sell postcards in Hall Three.”
She squinted through her stylish cat-eye frames, followed Ronald’s line of sight to the flyers in her hand. “We’ll be meeting in College Hill Park to organize a search party every night until little Lindy is found.”
Ronald swallowed dryly. “That’s just dandy. I’m sure she’ll turn up real soon. Safe and sound.”
“I share your optimism. I truly do. But we’re on a ticking clock.” Veronica disclosed some sobering statistics that Ronald couldn’t follow for the deafening clatter inside his skull. He grasped only stray phrases: “… still a lot we don’t know… within the first seventy-two hours… eighty percent of kidnappings committed by… to the harshest extent of the law.”
Ronald smiled painfully. Drool glistened in the corners of his lips. Today was just a day like any other, he reminded himself. “Oh my, I can’t imagine something so nasty lurking around in our sleepy little neighborhood.”
“Nasty things exist. I would know.” Veronica’s eyes moistened. Her lip quivered just a little. She composed herself, looked at Ronald as if she couldn’t figure out why he was still here.
“Probably she got lost,” Ronald offered. “She was at a friend’s house and lost track of time. She’s safe and sound but afraid to go home and get in trouble. You know what they say about the simplest explanation.”
“Your hopefulness is appreciated.” Veronica placed a few of the MISSING flyers in his trembling hand. The rest she set on the credenza. “You can leave these in your booth in Hall Three. Dissemination of information is the surest path to Lindy’s recovery.”
Of course, he was happy to spread the word about Lindy Bobo, Ronald tried to say. He opened his mouth. A barely audible squeak emerged, as if the tiniest white mouse had taken Ronald’s throat for its new home. He twirled himself around, nearly tripping on his own foot, and hurried back into Hall Three.
At a trash can outside a restroom, he scanned his surroundings to make sure no one was watching and deposited the flyers under a layer of candy wrappers and soda cans. He wiped his empty hands on his shirt, as if there were blood on them.
He’d had high hopes for his walk when he started, but it had turned into one of those days. One of those days, Melinda used to say, when he was talking louder than anyone but the world wouldn’t listen. He decided to head to the café and have a cup of coffee. There, if he was alone, he could pray to Melinda. She wouldn’t talk back, but at least she would listen. Feeling her spirit with him, he would figure out what to do about Lindy.
4 SEYMOUR
It was called the Soul-Array Method, and Lee had forced Seymour to perform it as they’d unpacked at the house. Oprah-approved and superficially spiritual, it involved touching each possession and asking if it “initiates a feeling of belonging,” whatever that meant. With Seymour, it was never a solitary object to which he was attached but the mass of objects that formed the whole, a collection. Each thing, whether the teddy bear you cuddled in your crib or a Fonzie doll bought on a whim for a nickel at a garage sale, acquired under singular circumstances, became inextricable from personal history. Mass production didn’t a thing make; experience did. A collection was a record of a life lived, maybe not well or happily but at least with attention and passion. It was autobiography made tangible. Without his stuff, what did Seymour have but the following dreadful statistics: forty-four years old, buried in debt, currently residing in his boyfriend’s childhood home in, of all places, Wichita fucking Kansas.
But he could see the value of, in Soul-Array parlance, “exonerating one’s life-materials” now as he carried down the aisle labeled MEMORY LANE yet another box filled to the brim with the detritus of a lifetime of collecting: a set of complete Soupy Sales Society membership kits, a loose seventies-issue Stretch Armstrong, a Mattel Herman Munster talking hand puppet, various Keane-knockoff art prints, a couple generic tiki glasses, ceramic TV lamps, and novelty decks of cards. They were on the fourth carload with at least a couple more to go and their booth was already overflowing, but Seymour would defy physics to fit more of this stuff into their allotted space. It was mostly leftover stock from the short-lived vintage shop in Cambridge, a plentiful reminder of what had driven them to make the cross-country move here.
Only Lee’s brown eyes and the dark, gel-stiff swoop of his hair showed behind a towering stack of boxes. “Is that the last of it?” he asked.
“Not even close,” Seymour said.
Lee pulled the Stretch Armstrong out of the box and held its head daintily between two fingers. “The feel of this thing always grossed me out.”
“I think there’s something vaguely erotic about it.”
“Well, keep it vague,” Lee said and disappeared behind the boxes.
Seymour left to go lug some more boxes. He thought Lee laughed less in Kansas. Maybe it was something in the Great Plains air. Maybe it was that he rightfully blamed Seymour for the business going under. The problem had been that he knew how to accrue but not how to curate. He could barely tell what he himself actually liked anymore, let alone any potential customers, so he filled the shop with anything and everything but sold nothing. Lee loved being right, though it seemed to bring him smug satisfaction to never mention it, to act as if Seymour’s failure was a burden they quietly shared. Sometimes, as he lay awake in the middle of the night or as they sat watching TV on opposite ends of the sofa, an insight would flash before Seymour’s eyes before quickly fading: sooner or later, the accumulated weight of a decades-long relationship that, while not exactly tempestuous was at least periodically gusty, would be too much for either to bear and it would all come tumbling down like a precariously stacked pile of storage boxes.
He wondered if he’d be doing Lee a favor by leaving him preemptively. Lee was loyal to a fault. He couldn’t dump Seymour no matter what Seymour did, even to save his own sanity. Any mercy killing would have to be on Seymour’s hands. What was stopping him? The timing wasn’t ideal. It would have been better if he’d ended it back East, but he’d had to go and let Lee delude him into thinking their relocation would be just fine. The Embarrassment, one of Seymour’s favorite bands, had been from Wichita, Lee had argued, and the city had been home to one of the more famous serial killers of recent memory. There had to be an underground coolness to it.
But it hadn’t taken long for Seymour to get to know this town, and the reality was one hundred percent surface: an endless backdrop of big box stores, anonymous apartment complexes, blandly familiar restaurant chains, and treeless plains of grass or cement. He missed Boston, with its openly rude citizens, always crowded sidewalks, a vibrant arts culture widely available for him to ignore as he spent yet another night at home listening to records and drinking gin.
The Embarrassment and BTK must have been aberrations, exceptions to prove the rule. Back in their eighties punk days, Lee routinely lied about his hometown, saying he was from Kansas City originally, as if anyone out East knew the difference. And Lee had never, in all their relationship, taken him back for a visit until last year, when Seymour finally met Lee’s semi-estranged mother as she lay rigid in a casket. It was just their luck, or the old crone’s final act in a life fueled (as Lee told it) by bitterness and passive aggression, that her death and the bequeathal of her home coincided with a historic low in the housing market.
The Heart of America billed itself as “the largest and friendliest antiques market in the Midwest,” but no one here seemed all that friendly. In the lobby, the morose teenage clerk cowered behind an upright psychology textbook while an ignored customer wrestled with an unwieldy lamp. On the bulletin board the missing little girl asked HAVE YOU SEEN ME?, but what really caught Seymour’s eyes was the flyer beneath her:
RECORDS RECORDS RECORDS
EX-DJ’S COLLECTION
RARITIES APLENTY
PRICED TO SELL
He was tearing off an information tab when a heavy hand fell on his shoulder and gave a menacing squeeze. Bracing himself for his first Kansan queer-bashing, he turned around to be met by a guy as broad, soft, and tan as a hunk of cornbread. “Hey, brother. Didn’t mean to creep up on you,” he said. “I’m just so glad to meet ya. About time we pumped some new blood into the Heart. Saw your stuff earlier in Hall Three and I said, ‘Who is the fucker with the killer record collection?’ Said it to Keith, who told me to look out for you. Name’s Jimmy Daniels,” he said, sticking out his palm.
Seymour couldn’t remember the last time he’d shaken someone’s hand. It seemed an archaic gesture, but there was no way Jimmy was doing it ironically. If this was the friendliness the mall flaunted, Seymour could do without it. “Seymour.”
“And here you are, admiring my graphic design.” Jimmy referred to the flyer, which was adorned with 1950s sock-hop-themed clip art.
“You sell records?”
“I sell whatever comes my way. Last week it was spoons, souvenir spoons—and if you can believe it, I sold out in a day. Old ladies love that shit. This week it happens to be records. Next week it’ll be, who knows, presidential locks of hair. I’ll be seeing you Saturday at my place?”
“Your place?”
“The Heart of America is only one arm of my overall enterprise. I expect this collection to sell out so fast that it’d be a waste of my valuable time to set up here. Don’t worry, I don’t have bedbugs or anything.”
“Good luck with the sale.”