Buried Stuff

by Sharon Fiffer

  Tuning the memory channel to Fuzzy, Jane got a clear picture. A tall man with black-framed glasses, a toothy smile, a spikey crew cut, which somehow must have translated into “fuzz” hence “Fuzzy.” Nicknames were an odd mix of skewed observation and grammatical adventure. For example, Nellie’s sister, Veronica, was tall and thin and a marvelous athlete, a center on the Orange Crush girls’ basketball team, and this somehow earned her the nickname “Fat.” Jane called her Aunt Fat for twelve years without question, despite the fact that the woman hadn’t an ounce of extraneous flesh. The fat part hadn’t even raised Jane’s eyebrow, but the grammatical construction of using “fat” as a proper noun had always given her pause. Kankakee did strange things to syntax, grammar, and intellectual curiosity.

  Anyway, Fuzzy or Fuzz or Fuzzy Wuzzy, had a tall stand of salt-and-pepper hair, an easy laugh, and a gee-whiz kind of expression that Jane found endearing. He worked at Roper, but his real love was farming. He had a place west of town, twenty acres or so that he farmed himself on weekends and hundreds more acres that he leased out to others. Corn and soybeans were the major crops, but Fuzzy’s vegetable patch was the love of his life.

  August first or fifth or thereabouts, depending on rain, sunshine, and how late the frost had visited during the past spring, Fuzzy would appear in the doorway of Nellie’s kitchen. The EZ Way Inn might belong to Don and Nellie, they might share the floor space behind the bar and in the dining room, but the L-shaped alcove behind the bar and in the northwest corner of the tavern held Don’s desk and adding machine and was Don’s. The kitchen, accessible through an open doorway and down a step from the barroom, as well as through a flimsy screen door from the parking lot via a concrete slab porch, was Nellie’s. She allowed Don to help with chopping onions on cubed steak days and wash a few pots and pans while she cleaned the rims of the ketchup bottles and mustard pots, but the space itself remained hers: Nellie’s kitchen. And when Fuzzy appeared in her doorway with two newspaper-wrapped orbs in each of his large, meaty hands, holding them out to Nellie with a wide-open grin, it signaled the peak of summer.

  Beefsteak tomatoes; redder than the reddest thing you can remember, the tomato nearly bursting out of its skin. A solid slicer, holding its shape and looking like a magazine advertisement, it had a flavor so warm and earthy and sweet that just a wave of the salt-shaker took it to culinary heaven. Nellie would sniff it and pinch it and slice it. Don ate his with salt and pepper and a knife and fork, Nellie tasted it plain, nothing to interfere with her pronouncement of whether Fuzzy had bested last year’s cream of the crop.

  Jane loved it plain, with salt, with pepper, with the juice running down her chin. But best of all, she liked it on two slices of white bread with a smear of mayonnaise. Yes, a sacrilege to some, and as an adult, a cholesterol-laden, food-snob no-no, but at eight years old, tomato and mayonnaise oozing out of both sides of the first bite of the gummy Wonder Bread, it was as close to perfection as the EZ Way Inn experience allowed.

  For the adults who called the EZ Way Inn their second home, it might have been an ice-cold bottle of beer pulled from low in the cooler or a frosted mug of whatever Don had on tap that season, but for a kid like Jane and a teetotaler like Nellie, the tomatoes were summer. When Fuzzy arrived, fruit in hand, Nellie’s straight line of a grim mouth cracked into a million pieces, wreathed in a hopeful smile.

  “They good as last year’s, Fuzzy?” Nellie would ask.

  “Better,” he’d say, nodding and placing them on her wooden counter, offerings to the great Nellster at the altar of EZ Way.

  “Reports of Fuzzy’s death were, it appears, greatly exaggerated,” said Charley, hanging up.

  “Shall we?” asked Claire Oh, directing her question about re-opening the garage door and cash box more to Tim than to Jane. She had not given up on salvaging the garage sale, even though they had lost much of the prime Saturday morning first-hour crowd. Any early shopper who had come by in these first fifteen minutes and seen the garage door closed would have rushed to the next house. They wouldn’t loop back this way until they had gone through their ranked list. Claire, a dealer now, had not picked a garage sale herself for many years, but she remembered the drill. First hour, jammed, a small drop off, then the second wave of shoppers who had marked your sale the second most interesting of the morning. People would roll in like the tide until around 1:00 P.M., then no one would come until fifteen minutes before your closing time, hoping you were dog tired and brain-dead, ready to give away the kitchen sink and all the old, unopened wedding gifts, stained linens, and electronics in questionable working order.

  Bruce Oh, sensitive to his wife’s promise that she would assist Jane Wheel in clearing out some of her “extras” as a personal thank you for Jane’s help in clearing her name and reputation as a dealer, appraiser, and upright citizen in general, noted the horror on Mrs. Wheel’s face when she realized that she might not have gotten out of today’s sale after all. They were so different, these two women in his life. A bystander might say that they had so much in common, both interested in antiques and the business of collecting. Oh knew, however, that his wife had an eye for the business, the buy and sell. Mrs. Wheel had an eye for the romance, the buy and protect.

  “First, before we discuss reopening,” Oh said, subtly directing that toward his wife, “may we know what happened to your friend?”

  “Fainted,” said Charley. “Stress, heat … he was out in his garden in the sun all morning. I pieced that together listening to Nellie grill him and Don getting him to drink water.”

  “Stress?” said Jane. “Fuzzy Neilson used the word ‘stress’?”

  “My word. His statement went something like, ‘I been banged around so much lately, my teeth are rattling,’” said Charley, “or something like that.”

  Jane tried to picture Don and Nellie and any of their customers succumbing to stress. All the ailments she and her contemporaries suffered—anxiety, carpel tunnel syndrome, stress—would be dismissed by the EZ Way crowd. Whenever Jane complained as a child about any ache or pain, her mother’s response had always been the same. Mom, my leg hurts. Oh yeah? Well, everybody’s leg hurts. Nellie had been a pioneer in tough love.

  “What did Fuzzy want, Charley? Or what did Mom say he wanted?” Jane asked.

  “Seems Fuzzy’s made an interesting discovery on his land,” Charley said, pouring himself coffee and waving the pot around to offer some to the others. “Some weekend gardener was driving around in the country and saw Fuzzy out working in his vegetable patch, admired his corn and tomato plants, and asked for some tips. Fuzzy extolled the virtues of his dirt, and the guy asks to buy some topsoil.”

  “What guy? Did Nellie give a name?” asked Tim.

  “No, why?” asked Charley, rummaging in the refrigerator for half-and-half. When he found a carton, he read the date, sighed, and poured the lumpy mess in the sink.

  “I don’t know. Seems like a funny thing for any townie to do if they’re from Kankakee. Just seems out of character for anyone to be offering money for soil. I can’t get them to part with a dime to buy decent flowers, so”—Tim stopped—“Hell, it makes perfect sense, I guess; they’d rather spend money on the dirt. Figures.”

  Tim mumbled something about Kankakee, and Jane gave him the evil eye.

  “If you dislike it so much, move up here. You can’t go around knocking all the people who live there if you’re one of them.”

  “So what’s the problem, Dad?” asked Nick. “Money for dirt sounds like a great deal.” Nick was still looking through the cigar box that Jane had snagged away from the sale. He was lining up the rocks in front of him at the kitchen table.

  “Fuzzy thought so, too. In fact he stuck a sign out by the road advertising topsoil for sale, and when someone came along wanting to buy a big load of it, Fuzzy got out his tractor or tiller or whatever he was using to dig it up and turned up more,” said Charley.

  “You’re being pretty dramatic about this, Charley,” Jane said, smili
ng. What was making her quiet, thoughtful husband so bright-eyed and expansive?

  “Well, my dear, it seems you’re not the only one who finds bodies strewn about your path. Fuzzy uncovered some skeletal remains.”

  “A body?” Jane asked.

  “Bones, anyway,” said Charley. “Might be something. A real find.”

  Claire, looking out the kitchen window, reminded everyone that people were still arriving for the garage sale.

  “Are we closed for good?” she asked. “I’d be happy to go out and handle things while you all discuss …” What was it they had been talking about? Claire had been calculating how much money they were losing huddled together in the kitchen when they should have been moving merchandise in the garage. What was the big deal in here again? Oh, yes. “… the bones in question,” she said.

  All eyes went to Jane. She closed her own eyes and pictured the garage, the tables and the racks they had filled with stuff. Most of the dishes and the smalls were pieces she had collected for Miriam in Ohio, then realized that her old dealer friend wouldn’t want them, they were too common to be worth shipping out. Or the stuff was mistake stock: stuff that looked good from the auction floor, bought on a quick, cheap whim, then unpacked and found to be worth even less than the dollar she had given the cashier. There were also things in the garage she had dragged home from the alley. What was it that made a green ceramic lamp look so great perched on a Dumpster and look so terrible wiped down and set on a table?

  “Why were Mrs. Wheel’s parents calling on you about this?” asked Oh.

  “The police came and determined that the bones weren’t anything to do with their watch, so they suggested calling somebody in from the junior college. An expert needs to come in and figure out exactly what the find entails. Is it a burial ground? A village site? Is it Native American at all?” said Charley. “Sometimes it turns out that what farmers or construction workers turn up are animal bones and no big deal, but even if that’s the case, the bones have been reported, someone is going to have to take a second look, complete the paperwork, and sign off on it.”

  “You would be that pair of eyes?” asked Oh.

  “I’ve got the whole month before school starts. August is usually when we try to go away somewhere, but we didn’t make any plans. Nellie said something about an old log cabin on Fuzzy’s farm, and I was thinking maybe we could set up a camp there for a few days—it’d be fun. I could teach Nick some more stuff, and Jane, you could go poke around in Kankakee basements with Tim,” said Charley, hope raising the pitch of his voice slightly, sounding just like Nick when he really wanted to do something.

  “Or I could dig with you guys,” said Jane.

  Charley and Nick looked at her with such surprise, she laughed out loud.

  “Come on, a treasure hunt’s a treasure hunt. I could—” Jane began.

  “Okay,” said Tim, “I give you one day in the field before you call me on that cell phone of yours and beg me to find an estate for us to sell.” Jane started to protest, but Tim continued. “Besides, I’ve got a huge deal cooking. Huge. A deal that will make you eat your little ‘self-loathing’ dig, dear. And you are seriously the person I need to make it happen.”

  Jane was a sucker for flattery and for being needed. Combine the two and you had her right where Tim knew he had just put her.

  In fact she was so pleased that she didn’t notice Tim give a subtle nod toward Claire Oh to indicate that the timing would never be more perfect.

  “Please, Jane, while we’ve still got customers coming, how about I just clear out a bit of stuff for you?” Claire asked.

  “Okay,” Jane said. “Go ahead.”

  Claire raced toward the garage.

  “I’ll help,” Tim offered. “We’ll just thin the herd, ma’am. We won’t sell off any of the good breeding stock.”

  Jane sniffed the air. Eau de she’d-been-played was wafting toward her.

  “There better be some big deal,” Jane called after Tim. “Huge. And don’t you dare sell the ladders or cigar boxes.”

  Jane looked under the kitchen table. Good. The two boxes she had dragged inside from the garage last night were still there. Did Tim and Claire really think she was going to part with her sets of Alice and Jerry readers? She reached into the box that held the old grade-school textbooks and pulled out Runaway Home. This book held as much sway over her as Charlotte’s Web and The Catcher in the Rye put together. It was a sensational story of a family that traveled across the country in an Airstream trailer. The father was an artist and painted landscapes and portraits along the way. The kids picked up odd jobs. Jane had begged Don to buy a house trailer so her family could follow the example. Don, however, had pointed out that the EZ Way Inn was anchored to the ground, and, for better or worse, Don and Nellie were anchored to the EZ Way Inn.

  The other box Jane had snatched back from Claire’s and Tim’s clutches held old autograph books that Jane had been collecting from estate sales and flea markets for years. She caressed the small, velvet-covered book, the first one she had acquired that had belonged to Maud Gomel. Most of the entries in her little keepsake were dated 1900. Who would take care of that if Jane let it be sold out there in the cold, dusty garage?

  With all of the self-control she could muster, Jane did not follow Claire and Tim to the garage. She had saved the important things, she told herself. If she didn’t see the other stuff when it was carried away, maybe she wouldn’t miss it. It was the idea of the stuff being sold, being carted out in old, brown grocery bags, wrapped in last week’s newspapers. She had gathered all of these objects to save them from the rubbish bin or the rummage table; now their rescue was being transferred to someone else. Jane swallowed hard and fought the urge to run out to the garage and throw herself on top of the folding metal tables Claire had loaned her for today.

  Instead she turned to Charley, Oh, and Nick, all sitting at the kitchen table. They were waiting to see which side won the tug of war. Jane placed the copy of Runaway Home on the table in front of her and resisted the impulse to begin paging through Maud Gomel’s autograph book. Instead, she tucked the little treasure into her bag by the door. Three pairs of eyes watched her, followed her movements. Would it be the stuff or them?

  Jane picked up Runaway Home and considered the illustration of the family in front of the Airstream trailer. Squinting just a bit, she made herself substitute Charley and Nick for Dad and son and slipped an image of her own self into Mom’s apron. Yes, they should hit the road, take off on a working vacation.

  Pulling up a chair, she sat down, took another cleansing breath as she heard the garage door go up, and said, “Let’s talk bones.”

  “I guess Fuzzy just wants somebody there who can explain what’s going on, somebody on his side,” said Charley, turning up the car’s air conditioner, “an interpreter and an advocate.”

  “My mother explained it that way?” Jane asked, closing Maud’s autograph book. It had become a habit, reading a page every time she opened her bag. The entries had become daily affirmations, and Jane thought she owed it to Maud to piece together some of her friendships, some part of her life, by reading the messages. After all, why else would the book have fallen into her hands? Jane shifted the vents away from her, directing some air toward Nick in the backseat.

  “Not exactly. She said Fuzzy had dug up some rocks that somebody thought they could make a buck off of, so everybody wants a piece, and now they’re trying to screw Fuzzy out of his own dirt,” said Charley.

  “What about the bones?” asked Nick.

  “That’s what we have to find out—whose bones, how old? If Fuzzy has been growing those tomatoes on a significant site …”Charley let his voice trail off.

  Jane saw a faraway look in Charley’s eyes. Desire, curiosity, and what was that deep glow? Lust? Oh my, Jane recognized this. It was her own look when she stood in the doorway at St. Anthony’s rummage sale and saw a box of vintage flowerpots that everyone else had missed.

 
; Nick was looking through some of the boxes Jane had stuffed into the backseat. “Are we going to need tent stakes, Mom? Are we really camping out?” he asked.

  Jane had agreed that in lieu of the family vacation she had failed to plan, they would take a few days and camp on Fuzzy’s land. Although her mother had claimed there was a cabin, Jane wasn’t sure what they would find. Since she didn’t have time to locate the perfect Airstream camper for them, she had packed tent, sleeping bags, stove, the works. They had put everything together in record time and now, at 3:00 P.M., just two hours after Claire Oh had made the last deal with a Willie Nelson look-alike—fifty dollars for everything that was left—closed the garage door, and rubbed her hands together over the till, Jane, Charley, and Nick were on the road to Kankakee.

  She had nodded in agreement with everyone when they admired the empty spaces in the garage, the clear path to the side door, and she had marveled at (a) how easy it was to find the camping gear now that all the other stuff in the garage was gone, and (b) how easy it was to pack when you could park the car in the garage. Jane didn’t mention how the clean shelves and empty corners cried out to her to be filled. That could wait. Want less, she told herself, want less. The rest of this weekend, she was going to devote herself to Charley’s profession, to his and her son Nick’s passion. No sales, no auctions, no … The William Tell Overture interrupted her thoughts.

  Nick laughed at Jane’s puzzled look. He stretched his arm over the seat and lifted her cell phone out of her bag.

  “I like this ring, Nick. Can we keep it for more than a day?” Jane asked, pressing the answer button without first checking to see what number was calling. She steeled herself for Nellie since Nellie always caught her in the car, always scolded her for having a cell phone, always castigated her for answering it. She never seemed to think she had any part in the technological conspiracy to ruin the world by dialing the number. It was Jane’s responsibility not to answer.