Buried Stuff

by Sharon Fiffer

  “Two double hamburgers, onion and pickle, and a vegetable beef, extra crackers,” Leroy would yell, then move on to grab a seat at the bar and down two bottles of Pabst during a thirty-minute break from building stoves at Roper across the street.

  “I’m charging you for extra crackers,” Nellie would yell, flipping burgers, then preparing buns on a paper plate, throwing on the onions and pickles as she listened to the next order.

  During the hour-long wave of factory workers that poured into the tiny tavern and clogged the kitchen doorway at the back of the shack, Nellie never stopped her constant motion of stirring, flipping, ladling, and plating orders. She never wrote anything down.

  Since there were no bills, customers were on the honor system. After wolfing their food, washing it down with bottles of beer, they told Don what they had had and he collected the money or wrote it down on their lunch tab. They then settled those tabs on Friday when they brought their paychecks over and Don, with cash picked up from the bank earlier in the day, set up the check-cashing station in a back alcove of the bar. The EZ Way Inn might have predated credit cards and ATM machines, but in its heyday, it was as full-service and high-tech as its customers demanded.

  The honor system worked, too, in those days. Although Jane did suspect that people might have been more honest then, she knew that the secret to Don and Nellie’s high degree of success with their operation lay in the fact that Nellie’s hearing was as sharp as her eye for seeing a smudge on a glass that Don had inadequately rinsed behind the bar.

  From the kitchen she listened to the boys, as she always referred to them, recite to Don what they had ordered and consumed. If Leroy failed to mention the extra crackers, Nellie would come storming out of the kitchen, lambasting the red-faced Leroy.

  “Who do you think pays for those crackers? Don’t you think I got to pay somebody? Don’t I deserve a dime for what I do?”

  The regulars knew that Nellie’s bark was worse than her bite. She would never let any of them starve. When Roper began a series of cutbacks and layoffs, long after serving food made any sense or profit, Nellie would still go in with Don at 7:00 A.M. and fire up the grill and chop the vegetables for soup. If Jane, or God forbid, Don, tried to reason with her about the sanity of pouring money into the food operation, Nellie would shout back, “Who’s going to feed those boys? They got to eat.”

  Only after Roper Stove closed its doors for good did Nellie allow her kitchen to go dark. Don plugged in a pizza oven, and they kept the freezer stocked with pepperoni and sausage pies for the boys—now mostly retired stove workers—who might need a snack after playing cards all day or watching a doubleheader. The regular days of homemade soup turned into the occasional pot when Nellie was in the mood, and Nellie’s incredible melt-in-the-mouth cubed steak and onions on white bread passed into a kind of folklore that the old-timers shared with their sons when they brought them in for their first legal beer.

  This cigar box, this equivalent of Proust’s madeleine for Jane, was, or rather had been, part of Don’s EZ Way Inn system. Once a cigar box was empty of cigars, in this case, El Producto Blunts at two for twenty-seven cents, it entered into a new life as office equipment. Don wrote the month and year on the box lid and it became the file for beer and whiskey orders or canceled checks or whatever turquoise markers meant in June of 1967. He had a constant supply of cigar boxes, so once he rotated them out of use, Jane snatched them up for her various childhood and teenaged collections.

  Gum-ball trinkets, ticket stubs, crayon stubs, shells, stamps, pennies—all had taken their turn as cigar box treasure. This particular one, though, was filled with what looked to Jane like rocks. But, of course, they were more than rocks to Charley.

  “Some nice agate, a few hunks of quartz. Pyrite? What’s that doing in … hey, Nick, look at these arrowheads,” said Charley, wandering away with the box.

  Jane didn’t remember stashing any odds and ends from rock-hunting expeditions in one of her dad’s old cigar boxes, but she had stacks of his old empties in the basement and Nick might have taken one for his own stuff. The zealous Claire Oh might have grabbed a few items from the hall closet out side Nick’s room. Jane began to scan the tables frantically for some of Nick’s carefully stored treasures, his old coins and baseball cards, items even more off-limits than all the other items that, in Jane’s mind, were all off-limits.

  Jane grabbed a deck of cards, whose backs advertised Butter-Nut Bread with the animated figure, Fred. Jane could still sing the jingle, “Bring home the Butter-Nut Bread, Fred,” and as long as she could remember that, she thought she earned the right to keep the deck of cards. She also retrieved an apple corer with a red Bakelite handle as well as a Bakelite-handled cake breaker.

  “Those are doubles,” Claire said, seeing Jane grab the vintage utensils, “and besides, I put a high tag on them. You’ll make money on those.”

  Jane noted that Claire was charging eight dollars for the corer and ten dollars for the cake breaker, so called because it could be used to separate hunks of angel food more efficiently than a knife could slice through it. Hefty garage-sale prices, especially since Jane had paid only a dime and a quarter for them, respectively, at a rummage sale last fall, but still … Yes, she had others, but these had red Bakelite handles and red was her favorite. The ones that Claire had left in her kitchen drawer had Butterscotch handles. She didn’t want to part with them either.

  “Take me out to the ball game, take me out with the crowd….”Hearing the familiar melody, Jane started humming along, then realized that there must be a music box playing. Where had Claire found her music box that played “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”? And was the sweet little music box already in someone’s hands; was another picker already shelling out money for it? Would Jane have to buy it back?

  Wait. Did Jane have a music box that played “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”?

  She focused in on the tune, reached into the pocket of her carpenter apron, and fished out her despised cell phone. Nick. He changed the ring almost daily, which made her hate the thing even more than she did when she had first gotten it. It was supposed to make Nick feel safe. Before becoming a picker a few years ago, Jane had worked long hours in advertising, producing television commercials. Charley, a geology professor and part-time paleontologist, was often in class or unreachable. And there was that little stretch when Jane and Charley lived apart—only a few blocks apart, but apart nonetheless—and Jane had promised Nick that she would always answer her cell phone. She’d sworn that no matter how seductive the rummage at a sale was, she would stop what she was doing and be there for him. It didn’t always work out quite like that so Nick got his revenge by changing the ring on the phone almost daily. Every time “Jingle Bells” or “Greensleeves” started playing in the produce section of the grocery store and all the shoppers started slapping purses and pockets, Jane was always the last to know.

  Tim and Nick were rocking side to side, singing “buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack, I don’t …,” laughing and slapping each other five, when Jane, glaring at both of them, ended the musical accompaniment by pushing the talk button.

  Jane could tell right away that the worst morning of her life—okay, maybe not the worst, since she had found a few dead bodies in her day, although strictly speaking, she thought each of those events had taken place after noon—was about to get worse.

  “Yeah, you’re not driving in your car, are you?”

  Jane’s mother, Nellie, always started a conversation in the middle, never saying hello and always acting like she was the one being interrupted.

  “No, I’m in the garage, I … we’re …”

  “Turn off the car. Don’t back out while you’re talking on the phone, for god’s sake. Don, she’s backing out of the garage and on the phone …”

  “No, Mom, I’m standing here, just standing here, talking to you,” Jane said. “What’s up?”

  “You still picking through junk or are you playing police with t
hat Oriental guy?”

  “Mom, I’m still a picker, and I’m assisting Detective Oh, who happens to have a Japanese father, on a case by case …”Jane stopped. Her mother never asked her what she was doing. Something was wrong. Nellie needed something.

  “What’s up, Mom?”

  “Oh I don’t know, your dad has some idea about what’s going on out at Neilson’s farm, thinks you and Charley can help with it, but I told him it was probably a waste of everybody’s time.”

  Okay, thought Jane, just sort it out like untying a knot. Keep the threads loose and work them out slowly, one at a time.

  “Fuzzy’s here if you want to talk to him,” Nellie said.

  “No, wait,” Jane said, too late. Fuzzy Neilson, an EZ Way Inn customer for as long as Jane could remember, was saying hello.

  “That you, Janie?”

  “Hi, Fuzzy,” said Jane, watching someone carry off a box of Nick’s old AYSO (American Youth Soccer Organization) jerseys. She had wanted to save them and make them into a quilt for Nick when he went to college. He was only thirteen. She could learn to quilt by the time he was eighteen, couldn’t she?

  “Don’t get her agitated; she’s got the car in reverse,” Nellie said in the background. Jane could also hear her father’s voice, shushing Nellie, the original unshushable.

  “Hate to bother you, Janie, but your mother was bragging about you being able to figure out stuff, and she said your husband knew a lot about rocks, so …”

  So far Fuzzy wasn’t coming in so clear. Jane’s mother, Nellie, bragging about her? Jane highly doubted that.

  Jane heard a clunk and some heavy swearing. Nellie. Then she could hear Don yelling Fuzzy’s name.

  “Nellie, let him alone. Call an ambulance. Fuzzy? Fuzzy Wuzzy? C’mon, Fuzz! Get up!”

  “Don’t think he’s breathing,” Nellie said. “Dead.”

  “What’s going on?” Jane shouted as loudly as she could into the phone.

  Everyone in the garage, sellers and buyers alike, stopped at the sound of Jane’s voice. Claire Oh, in the middle of a transaction, stood frozen with a twenty-dollar bill in her hand. Charley, Nick, and Tim looked up from the box of rocks, concerned. Bruce Oh looked Jane in the eye, calm and expressionless as usual, but fully engaged and curious, also as usual.

  Jane heard her dad say something ending with the word “dead.”

  “Sale’s over,” Jane said firmly. “Everybody out of the garage.” She had her finger on the electric door button. “Now.”

  Shoppers grumbled and groaned. Claire handed back the twenty and pointed the woman who had been waiting to buy three old wooden jigsaw puzzles the way out. Jane pushed the button as the last of the bargain hunters rushed under the closing door. The garage door clunked to the ground at the same instant Jane’s phone clicked off.

  Fuzzy Neilson, a Roper Stove press room worker, a weekend farmer who supplied Jane’s family with fresh tomatoes and peppers all summer long, a kind old man Jane had known all her life, was calling for her help.

  Dead?

  Fuzzy wasn’t, was he?

  “Two hundred and forty-one dollars and fifty cents,” Claire said, placing the wrinkled bills firmly on the kitchen table. “We were open for just under fifteen minutes. Can you imagine if …,” Claire began, then looked at Jane, pacing the kitchen, punching redial on her phone. She let the rest of the sentence go.

  “That’s exactly what my lawyer charges when I talk to him on the phone for fifteen minutes,” said Tim, poking through the refrigerator. He found a foil-wrapped triangle and held it up. “Anybody have a clue what this once was?”

  Nick took the leftover pizza, unwrapped it, zapped it in the microwave, and handed it to his godfather. “It’s only from last night. Mom says we can eat it up to three days, four or five if it’s vegetarian.”

  “How did you arrive at that time frame, Ms. Home Ec Dropout?” asked Tim, taking a small, careful bite of pizza.

  Jane stopped pacing, looked at Tim, looked around at everyone standing and sitting in her big friendly kitchen, and was glad to see them all—Nick, Charley, Tim, Oh, and Claire—but she couldn’t for the life of her think why they were all there expecting her to say something. Her eyes fell on the money Claire had placed on the table.

  “What did we sell that made so much?” Jane asked. She still held her cell phone with both hands. She looked from it to Claire to the money.

  Before Claire could recite the list of objects that had passed through her hands in the quarter hour of Jane Wheel’s first ever giant garage sale, a picker’s delight, tons of vintage and collectibles, according to the classified ad Claire herself had placed, Charley interrupted.

  “I got through,” he said, holding the kitchen phone out. “It’s ringing.”

  “You talk, Charley,” said Jane. “Ask if …”

  Jane stopped. Was it because she was confident that Charley would know what to say, could speak to Nellie and Don more efficiently than she could? Yes, absolutely. It was also because she was afraid to hear her mother say that Fuzzy Neilson had dropped dead on the floor of the EZ Way Inn and that the dead body problem that had dogged Jane for too long was now rubbing off on her parents. If people started dropping dead around Nellie, what was next? Would Tim find a body every time he opened up a hand-painted marriage chest?

  Claire was explaining to Oh why people were willing to pay money for pieces of a wrought-iron fence that Jane had dragged home from the alley. Jane had kept the most ornate two sections, thinking they would make a great headboard. If she ever cleaned them up. If she ever got the hardware to mount them on the wall behind their bed. If she ever found them again under the pile of old wooden shutters where she had stored them. The intricate ironwork had initials in the two front sections and Jane was a sucker for initials. If you squinted on these gates, one of the letters could almost be a J.

  Jane carried the following in her oversize bag: A leather business-card case monogrammed with ASF; two handkerchiefs, one embroidered with a blue AUNT BETTY and one with the initials ss; a vintage compact with the inscription JESSIE FROM ALVAH. When Tim, pawing through her purse in search of food, questioned all the initials and names that were not her initials and names, Jane could only shrug and explain that the names belonged to someone. The objects had someone’s identity entwined with their history. Someone had loved them or been loved enough to receive them, and Jane’s job was to allow the history to continue.

  “Yeah?” Tim had asked her, chomping on the celery sticks he had fished out. “What about your history? What’re you entwining with your identity?”

  Oh was telling his wife that he understood the wabi-sabi of the gates, the beauty of the worn and well used. However, since Mrs. Wheel had found them in the alley, or the Big Store, as she preferred to call it, why did people now pay money for the sections of fence? Couldn’t they find their own pieces of—what was the word his wife preferred to garbage? Refuse? No. Salvage. Yes, couldn’t people find their own salvage?

  Jane saw Charley nod and smile, although she hadn’t heard him say anything into the telephone. Not unusual for a conversation with Nellie. Listening was one’s primary role or, in Jane’s long-running mother-daughter drama, listening and knowing when not to listen.

  Charley would not nod and smile if they were describing Fuzzy’s demise. Charley would get that concerned scrunchiness around the eyes, all the weathered creases at the corners forming a network of concern and compassion. Jane began breathing more normally; and as she calmed her fears about a corpse at the feet of Don and Nellie, she got more and more curious about why Fuzzy Neilson had wanted their help.

  Fuzzy was a regular at the EZ Way Inn, had been since Jane could remember. As a matter of fact, Jane couldn’t think of one new customer at her parents’ tavern. Every one was a regular. Fuzzy, Gil, Pete, the two Barneys, Vince, Henry, Junior, Willy, and Aggie had all been sitting around the bar at the EZ Way Inn since Jane’s first memories of hoisting herself up on a bar stool and having Nelli
e tell her to get down and take her coloring book to a table in the adjoining dining room. The dining room was not separated from the barroom by a wall or a door but by a slight rise in the floor, a tip-off that this adjacent room with eight tables and the only pay phone had been built as an afterthought to the real business of the EZ Way Inn. That business was conducted around a large square mass of oak with dim lights hanging from the low ceiling, a brighter light coming from the television perched high on a corner shelf, bearing a sign that reminded all watchers that only Don and Nellie adjusted volume or changed channels.

  Nellie told Jane that the bar was no place for children, but she never found it necessary to explain or ironic to observe that Jane spent all of her after-school hours at the EZ Way Inn waiting for Don and Nellie to finish up the business of the day and hand over the reins to the evening bartender, who came in at six.

  Nellie was a literal-minded woman. A pragmatist. It was a fact of life that if you owned a bar and happened to also have a kid, the kid might have to be there waiting while you mopped up, counted money, served customers, or finished a card game. It did not mean that said kid could actually sit at the bar. Kids didn’t belong in bars. Nellie didn’t bother much with explanations and wanted nothing to do with irony. It held no interest for her unless it had something to do with washery or dryery.

  So Jane, the kid in question, would take a seat at one of the tables, open her coloring book or pad of paper, spill out the crayons, and begin to practice her art. With every passing day of childhood, it had less to do with applying color to paper and all to do with listening and watching. She might not be able to see the TV in the corner, always tuned to the White Sox by choice, the Cubs by default, but she had the big-screen view of the barroom where Nellie and Don performed their give and take with the customers, Nellie scolding and harassing, Don serving and soothing. Jane’s art, it seemed, would be the art of observation.