“Really? I always think they’re kinda funny.”
“To each their own.” He hefted the frame. “What do you do with this in the meantime?”
She took it from him and tossed it onto one of his bookshelves. “Pretend they’re your cousins or some such until they return that call. Or you call them back, or you give up and put it into the sale.”
“I can just give up? Won’t I get in trouble for that? What if they call back two months later?”
“Meh, their loss. Obviously they haven’t been looking for it all that hard.”
“I guess.” Ben picked up the squat Santa figurine that was next in the pile. “Well, I’m going to start on this. You go do some shelving or shredding or something and then come back to double-check me?”
“Thought that’s what I was already doing.” She slipped off the edge of his desk and headed out to the bullpen. “Holler if you need me!”
Ben worked his way through the pile meticulously, double- and triple-checking before he entered it into the sale spreadsheet along with his appraisal of its value. He pulled up a couple sites dedicated to collectables once or twice, but there wasn’t anything really exciting. An hour later, he flagged down Sylvia as she trundled another cart into the warehouse.
“Okay, I think I’m pretty well set with these. Tell me if I missed something.”
Sylvia shooed him out of his seat and settled in with the trackball mouse, swiftly alternating between screens. Ben grabbed the cart and wheeled it down to the appropriate bay and started shelving. In the second tray, a green Hess truck leered up at him. He picked it up, and carried it back to his office.
“Hey, Sylvia.”
“Go away, Ben, I’m not done yet. Do some shelving, or something.” She grinned at him.
“Sure. But afterwards, do you think you could show me how that DMV database works?”
Appraisal
This takes a keen eye and a sharp mind. After years and years of practice, I can immediately tell what something is worth. And if it will sell. All those pricing catalogs are useless; the only surefire way to price things appropriately is by personal experience.
~ Gertrude Biun, Property Office Manual
That evening, as Sylvia hollered, “Goodbye, don’t stay long,” from the door of the warehouse, Ben pulled up the DMV database to put what she had taught him into action. He started poking around in the database settings, getting familiar with the search restrictions for car registration by color, partial license plate, make, model, state, and even county and city.
He narrowed his search to the state of Georgia: green pickup trucks, and hit the search button. There were 2,763. In the state of Georgia. It was an impossibly high number, and there was no way he could check out everyone who owned the elusive vehicle. He stared at the screen trying to decide what to do next and then narrowed it down to just the counties surrounding Savannah. There were still 1,579. Better, but still too many to try and track down just on his own. He’d have to get more specific in his search by going back and seeing if there were any other details that the eyewitnesses reported. The printer took a long time to spit out the list of fifteen hundred trucks, but he was determined to bring it home with him to see if anything aligned with the tips waiting at home.
He was just about to log off of his computer when his inbox chimed. He opened the message titled, “Your Report.”
Thank you for reporting this problem in the United States Postal Service. Employees like you help us to continually improve the working conditions and service of the USPS. A case log has been opened and you will be contacted within 4-6 weeks to resolve this matter if we find it requires our attention.
~Senior Management.
“Well, someone thinks their time is valuable,” Ben muttered to himself as he grabbed his briefcase. Bureaucracy at its finest, but if they didn’t think a safe full of missing goods was important, he wasn’t going to waste his time on it either. He shut down his computer and shoved the leftover half of a sandwich from lunch into his briefcase, crumpling a few of the Missing flyers. He pulled them out and tried to smooth them. He’d gone through quite a lot of flyers that weekend, a couple hundred at least, and he was angry for ruining even a few. His working theory was that you never knew which flyer was going to be the one to bring his boy home. Plus, all the copying was starting to get pricey.
Tossing the ruined flyers into the recycling bin under his desk, he headed out toward the front door. He passed the industrial photocopier in the hall and he paused. There were still a few good copies in his bag; what would it hurt to run a few off in the office? It would only be a few, not too many, and he doubted anyone would even notice. He made twenty-five copies and thrust them into his bag before hurrying out into the evening.
Ben arrived the next morning with a list of details about the green truck that he had pulled from the tips and planned on diving back into the search engine since the list he had printed had just been too long to wade through in an evening. But as soon as he entered the warehouse, he was derailed from his planned research by Sylvia, who bounded out of his office chair when he walked in.
“Ben! We have a claim!” She grabbed him by the arm and towed him over to his computer. “Log in! Geoffrey said he sent the form to you this morning. God, I love these days.” Her excitement was a bit over the top for his hangover to handle, and Ben wished she had just taken care of this herself before he’d gotten there so he could just dive back into the database.
Sylvia circled his chair like a caged animal while he logged in and booted up his email. The first email did indeed read, “Claim.” He opened it, found the retrieval tag, and headed back into the warehouse to find it. “So I take it we don’t get many of these.” He told himself he didn’t really care, but Sylvia’s enthusiasm was infectious. She was literally skipping down the aisle ahead of him.
“Maybe two or three a week. We manage to just return a lot of the mail. Most of this stuff, though, people don’t care about. So I really like these days.”
It turned out that the object in question was a taxidermied armadillo from 2008, frozen in a state of half-curled agitation. It sat on its back and rocked gently when nudged. Sylvia set it in motion and laughed. “This thing is kinda cute, isn’t it?”
Ben grimaced. He didn’t think taxidermy should ever be practiced as it always just looked creepy to him. “I don’t know. It’s trapped in an eternity of exposed fear. Not sure ‘cute’ is the right word.” He scooped it off the shelf and was surprised by the heft it had. “One armadillo, returned to its rightful hunter.”
He returned to his desk with the creature in question and turned to the filing cabinet. “Any other forms I have to fill out for this poor sod?”
“Nope, just the communal log, and then that log over there where you sign it, and then take a photograph of it and upload it to the database, and then I’ll go pack it up for you.”
A sigh escaped him. It was a ridiculous amount of paperwork just to return something to its rightful place. “Well that’s not much at all, now is it?”
“Compared to how these systems used to run, it’s hardly anything at all.” She reached into the recycling bin to find a piece of paper to write down the claim’s address. “In the 1890s, it was all paper forms, and no one knew how to find them again once they’d been filed. This is much better.” She flipped over the paper to see what she was writing on and Benny’s face stared back at her.
Ben looked over to see what had silenced her and felt the heat rising in his face. He didn’t want to share this with her. Not now. But he had been stupid enough to leave those here, so he tried to cover his pain and embarrassment with nonchalance. “Sorry, they were in my briefcase and got messed up when I was on my way out yesterday.” He tried to snatch the flyer from her, but she moved the paper out of his reach.
She examined him just as closely as she had
been examining the paper. “Don’t want to talk about it, huh? Fine. But I’ll figure it out, you know.” She turned it back over and smoothed it out, grabbing a pen and jotting down the address of the armadillo’s owner. “I’ll just go get this part started.”
Ben stared after her as she left the room and then realized his hands were gripping his chair tight enough to cause his fingers to tingle. She hadn’t asked, hadn’t pried, like everyone else did. She didn’t start offering false sympathy. He told himself that was a good thing, and he didn’t want to explain it to anyone, let alone her. But she had hardly even said anything about it. He wasn’t sure which was worse. He was so used to people just diving into the burden of his life without asking, but when she saw it, she said nothing, and it had hurt.
Shaking out his hands, he rolled his shoulders to try and release the tension caught there, then turned to the forms on his screen. He dutifully entered the information it requested and then printed out the hard copies that got sent to the filing center of the USPS in Omaha, Nebraska. When Sylvia came back, she took the armadillo from his desk and settled it carefully into the paper nest she had created in the center of the box.
“There. He should be comfy on the ride now, don’t you think? Were there any notes or anything accompanying this that need to be retrieved from the files?”
Ben glanced back at the claim log and shook his head. “Just the ‘dillo.” In an effort to distract himself more than anything, he added, “I really want to know the joke behind this thing.”
“I just keep imagining some farmer being pestered by this thing rattling past outside his window all night and running out in his birthday suit, waving his gun around until he finally caught it, and then had it taxidermied in its final retreat as a trophy.”
“Ha. So why was it lost in the mail for so long, then?”
“Dunno. Maybe he was sending it to an old war buddy to prove there was actually something under his window all this time.”
The laugh that erupted out of Ben was genuine, much to his own surprise. “You think up the craziest things, you know that?”
Her shoulders hunched and she at scuffed the floor with her toe. “It’s not crazy.”
Ben grinned and leaned back in his chair. “Come on, they’re a little crazy, I mean, I’d never be able to think up a story like that.”
“You know what’s crazy? Let me tell you. Abandoned children, genocide, starving families, drug abuse, and broken homes. That’s crazy. And if I make up a few stories here and there to break the tension of the really crazy shit that’s out there, how is that crazy? What the hell gives you the right to call how I think crazy?” Her voice had increased in speed, but not volume, leaving her panting at the end of her tirade.
Ben raised his hands in surrender. He had no idea what landmine he had just stepped on, but it appeared to be a doozy. “I didn’t mean crazy per se, more unique? I think they’re fun. I meant crazy in the unique and fun way.”
Sylvia turned and stalked out of the warehouse, the boxed armadillo under her arm. Ben let out his breath in one long sigh and ruffled his fingers through his hair. He couldn’t fathom how what he said could have set her off like that, but he’d had the same problem with his wife from time to time, accidentally trodding all over her buttons. In an effort to see if he couldn’t find out what button it was he’d hit, he made his way across the way to the bullpen and wandered up to the reader, Mina, who was taking a break and stretching out her back.
“Hey, Mina, quick question for you?”
She bent over into a quick downward-facing-dog position and looked up at him. “Where’s your little sidekick to answer for you?”
“Um, that’s part of the question. I kind of made a comment about how a story she made up was crazy, in a good way, but she kind of—”
“Blew up?” Mina popped back up and clapped him on the shoulder. “She’s from a rather long line of crazies. All worked at one branch of the post office or another, I heard. She even claims to be related to the blind reader herself.” Here Mina gestured to the austere portrait of Patti Lyle Collins, which observed all the proceedings in the mail room with a critical eye. “Her grandmother had a stroke last year. Used to work the front desk at a branch, quickest sorter I ever saw, but man could she tell a whopper. Never knew what was truth and lie with her. Well, back to work for me. You, too. And best to lay off the word ‘crazy’ ‘round the little minx.”
“Thanks for the advice, Mina.” If a bit late, he thought. Back in the hall, he heard the distinctive sound of shredding coming from the sorting room and went to apologize to Sylvia, even though he felt her reaction was a bit over-the-top. He had learned a long time ago to just apologize first to a woman; things settled down a lot faster that way, even if he didn’t really understand what he had done wrong.
She was perched on the rail of the steps pitching letters in twos and threes so they sailed through the air like Frisbees before being munched by the machine. “Sylvia?” he called up. When she didn’t respond he raised his voice a little. “Sylvia!” She slipped off the rail, the box of shredding on her lap tumbling across the platform.
“Jesus! What?” She bent down and began scooping the letters back into the mail crate.
“I just wanted to apologize for earlier. I didn’t realize my words were, well, offensive to you. Peace?”
She squinted down at him for a moment, arms akimbo. “Ok, who said what?”
“Well, Mina in the bullpen said—”
“Bet she left out the part where my family had me committed.” She dumped what was left in her basket into the shredder and then shut it down.
The situation was making Ben more and more uncomfortable. He was completely unprepared to get drawn into anyone else’s emotional mires. There was more than enough for him to be worried about as it was without adding Sylvia’s drama to it too. “Frankly, I don’t see how that’s any of her business anyway. Everyone needs a break now and then.”
Sylvia snorted and crossed her arms, leaning back against the shredder. “A break. I had a break alright. I was fourteen and when I came back to school, when the kids found out where I’d been for two weeks, well...suffice it to say, I don’t like being called crazy.”
“Point taken. Apology extended most sincerely.” He didn’t want to get involved, but couldn’t help wondering what had happened at fourteen that caused her to spend two full weeks in a mental hospital.
Sylvia leapt off the stairs and stuck the landing right in front of him. “Well, now that my deepest, darkest secrets are out of the closet, may we continue with our jobs?”
“Of course. Were there any other claims that came in?”
Sylvia walked past him, barely brushing his shoulder as she went. “No. By the time the readers give up on them and pass them to us, it’s unlikely that anyone is actually looking for the stuff. Instead, I got a lot of shelving to do today. How about I bring you a cart and you do the entry, and when you’re done I’ll bring you another cart and then shelve the one you entered?”
“Sounds like a plan that has me chained to the desk all day and likely to give me a headache.” Ben followed her down the hallway to the warehouse.
“Exactly. Once your punishment is done, I’ll forgive you the crack about me being crazy.” Her shoulders were still stiff with ire, and she didn’t look back as she talked to him.
“That doesn’t exactly seem fair. I didn’t even know it was a sensitive subject!” He stopped rebelliously in front of his desk.
“I didn’t say what they said wasn’t true, just that I don’t like hearing it.” She finally flashed him a smile and went scampering across to the bullpen for his first load of the day.
Ben was forcibly reminded of a quote from an old Melville novella he read in his intro level English class. It was about the insanity-inducing burden of working with the lost letters, something about t
hose who died unhoping. He had thought at the time that it was just more old-fashioned melodrama, but after being here for a few days, he could almost see the truth in the passage.
They managed to get through the backlog of carts fairly quickly, which left their afternoon free to catalog items for the auction once more. Focusing on books, they managed to prep sixty items for the next sale.
“I just still can’t believe the magnitude of stuff that gets lost.” Ben tossed the dual-language copy of Chekov into the box labeled “Lot 34 – Fiction” before logging out of the shared auction document.
“It just seems like a lot because you have to move it not once, but something like four or five times around the warehouse. It’s really not all that much. I mean, how many books are in that lot?”
“So far? Twenty. And I’ve only scanned about half the shelf looking for the appropriate items.”
“I think the estimate last year of books mailed through the postal service was in the neighborhood of twenty million. So your twenty? Nothing.”
“I guess if you look at it that way.” Ben stood to stretch and then picked up the box to take it to the auction preparation section.
“Grains of sand on a beach, that’s all this is.” Sylvia picked up the armload of stuffed animals that they had also entered. A teddy bear with a worn nose and a missing eye escaped her grasp and fell to the floor with a muffled clatter.
“Did you hear that?” She dumped her armload into Ben’s arms and stooped to pick up the ragged bear.
He struggled to maintain a grip on the box that was now piled high with fake fur. “Heard you drop something. What was I supposed to hear?”
“It didn’t sound like a stuffed animal. There’s something in here.” Sylvia shook the bear, but nothing rattled, and it didn’t look like there was anything inside but stuffing. She poked its body and arms, trying to determine what it was.
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