Note: Last night was prompt night at Write On. There weren’t
any prompts this month, so we did some free writing. I had written a story a
couple years ago that was a scene contained to a basement where two young teen
boys played a baseball card board game and discussed theoretically hiding a
dead body. I had liked the characters and the setup, but the story hasn’t gone
anywhere, so I thought I’d try reworking the premise into a longer work. I have dropped the last two paragraphs that I wrote last night because they felt too heavy handed. Not sure if I'd stop the scene where I do here. If you have thoughts, feel free to share. This
is an attempt at that. Thanks for reading.
Joyce Laudner was no student of history only a connoisseur of retrograde products, and that’s why she eased her Chrysler to the curb on a chilly April morning in front of a house with siding the color of dried cornstalks and shudders the rich tones of communion wine. A blue balloon was tied to the mailbox and next to that a black-and-white sign that the newspaper provided for free for advertising in the classified section alerting all passersby that this was the site of a garage sale.
“Isn’t the sign a misnomer?” Digital asked from the passenger seat, pointing to the row of tables arranged in the front yard. He couldn’t even see a garage anywhere near this shithole on the west side of the railroad tracks.
“I think the family’s name is Wilmer not Misnomer,” his grandmother, the venerable but often aloof Joyce Laudner, replied.
“I meant…”
“Save it, Junior, we’re missing the deals,” his grandmother flung her door open. She was a slight woman, barely a hundred pounds and so short that she peered between the steering wheel and the dash rather than over it. Her bifocals were spotted, her haired dyed some color that Digital’s friend, Riley, referred to as bloody stool, and a cigarette was tucked behind her ear.
Digital Laudner, her thirteen-year-old grandson, was a student of history. Well, he liked the obvious patterns of history as he recognized them. He saw everything in patterns just like a computer was programed to recognize coded ones and zeroes. His wealth of statistical and mundane knowledge was why his peers at Jordan Junior High nicknamed him Digital, and considering his other choices for names were Aurelius or Junior, he gladly embraced the moniker. His grandmother would never accept it, even though her insistence on calling him Junior made even less sense.
Garage sales were the American contribution to the long-standing human tradition of the trade of goods. Well, the term goods was generous in his mind. While his grandmother saw treasures, he thought most of the stuff piled on tables throughout Jordan and the rest of this star-spangled plot of land was junk. Used and useless junk, and he struggled to understand how this version of the goods trade fit in the grand history that preceded it. Even before the Ancient Greeks and Romans ruled the world, wars were started over goods, be it for precious metals or necessary spices. Heroic spirits set sail into the unknown and unforgiving ocean to find faster paths to Asia. Explorers puttered around artic waters often losing fingers and toes, if not their lives, to frostbite trying to find a northern water route from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Digital even suspected that NASA and all the foreign space programs’ long-term goal was to find someone somewhere to sell them something that would make all their advanced math equations and theoretical physics worth it.
“Are you coming, Junior?” His grandmother was already trudging through the yard, and he knew she wanted him beside her to steady her passage. She was only sixty-three, but she looked twenty years older and the cigarette now dangling from her lips had a lot to do with that. His friend Riley liked to ask what would happen to Digital if his grandmother died, and Digital had run the possible outcomes in his mental mainframe, and the results were bleak if she keeled over before he turned eighteen.
He caught up with her before she reached the tables, her arm instinctively finding his even though she had to lift it up to meet his. Digital was tall, over six feet, and while his personality categorized him as a nerd or dork or dweeb, his looks placed him in an entirely different social stratosphere among his peers. He had wide shoulders, thin hips, and muscled arms, all without trying or participating in sports outside of gym class. Unlike his peers, his face was clear of acne, his chin chiseled, his hair always cut short on the sides and just long enough on the top to lay flat in a neat and attractive manor. If he had been built in a factory as his personality sometimes made people joke then there had been an error when his brain had been placed in this body.
“Look at these doilies,” his grandmother said. “How much does that tag say?”
“Seventy-five cents,” he responded. “You already own forty-seven doilies, you don’t need anymore.”
“Oh, a good garage sale isn’t just about what you need,” a woman who had fat sagging from her arms, stomach and chin appeared. “Am I right?”
The woman, Ms. Wilmer Digital assumed, flashed a smile that included one black tooth before producing a Kleenex from her slack’s pocket and wiping her nose.
“Sure right about that,” His grandmother said, picking two doilies from the stack.
“What is your highest priced item?”
“Junior,” his grandmother gasped even though Digital asked this all the time.
“Well,” the woman put a thumb to her fat chin, “I’m trying to get rid of that old trolling motor for fifty bucks.”
“I see.”
“Kind of a weird question.”
“Don’t get him started,” his grandmother released Digital’s arm, moving toward another table that featured stacks of paperback books, VHS tapes and other miscellaneous items.
“High price items lure people in and that’s your best shot at selling the rest,” Digital said. “Word of mouth can spread about something like that motor. There is an average of two-and-half garage sales in the greater Jordan area every weekend from the end of April to October not counting the townwides the third weekend of June. The average price at a garage sale is seventy-five cents, meaning you need to sell about sixteen items an hour to average twelve dollars, and probably twice that much to actually make a profit.”
“Hunh,” Ms. Wilmer walked away, but Digital followed.
“Did you know there are between 6.5 and 9 million garage sales per year in the United States?”
“Is that so? Oh, clothes are all dollar,” Ms. Wilmer said to another morning shopper.
“Leave that poor woman alone, Junior.” His grandmother had added a ceramic Cardinal, a VHS tape of the Laurence Welk show and a green candy dish to her haul.
Digital made to join his grandmother when something caught his eye. A tattered box with red letters “All Star Baseball Card Game” written upon it. He picked it up, reading the back of the box for the instructions on how baseball cards were used to simulate games.
“Oh, you see something there?” His grandmother asked. “Baseball? You don’t care about baseball.”
“Oh, that damn thing,” the woman chimed in. “My boy tried redoing an entire baseball season using that thing. Had all the lineups and stats scribbled in a notebook.”
“How far did he get?” Digital inquired.
“Not far. My Ralphie always had big ideas, but not much follow through.”
His grandmother was right, Digital didn’t give two shits about baseball, but he had to admit there was something almost poetic about the statistics and the way they fit together to produce results. He wondered if a game that basically used two dice and a batting outcome card would bear the validity of those statistics.
“How much?”
“Tell you what, I’ll give you that and this set of old ball cards for three bucks if you don’t spit any more garage sale facts at me.”
“Deal.” His grandmother said, handing her a twenty for all the items in her hands and the baseball game and cards. “And you say there’s never anything good at these sales.”
“I might stand corrected.” Digital whispered.
