Damaged Goods

by Heather Sharfeddin

  Hershel, still ominously silent, joined Silvie.

  “Look at this,” she whispered. “They’re thank-you notes. There must be a hundred of them here.”

  He sniffed hard, and she realized that he was trying to hold back tears. He returned to the truck, pulled out the things he’d brought, and carried them to the table. The woman opened the door again and, seeing Hershel there, stepped outside.

  The picnic table was covered with spent candles, and wax had dripped over its surface, giving it an eerie shine. Tendrils of hardened paraffin were frozen down its sides like icicles, and in the center stood a cross made of thin wood. The name Carlos was carefully spelled out in ornate lettering on the crossbeam. Silvie ran her finger over it, and the woman stiffened. These people—Carl’s neighbors—believed he was dead.

  Silvie listened to Hershel’s deliberate articulation of what he’d brought as he unloaded the items onto the bench of the picnic table. “Food. Blankets. Coats.”

  “Come inside,” the woman said.

  The woman motioned Silvie in also. The interior of her cabin was cramped and warm. It couldn’t have been wider than twelve feet in either direction. Someone had painted it yellow, and put down a square of deep-blue shag carpet, now matted and muddy. Her dishes and cookery were lined up on open shelves above a small freestanding range, next to which stood a tiny table with three wooden chairs. One side of the room housed a twin-size bed, the other a pair of bunks.

  “Sit,” the woman said, motioning them to the table, and they obeyed. She then pulled down an old mixer and set it between them. “This is from Carlos. A gift.”

  Hershel smiled at it and nodded.

  “He brings us many gifts.” Next, she took out a serving plate and set it by the mixer. “From Carlos.” And a stack of pretty dishes. “From Carlos.”

  “He was very generous,” Silvie said.

  Tears welled in the woman’s eyes. “My sons go to find his killer.”

  “Tell them to leave it alone,” Hershel warned.

  “There were bad men here. But immigration took them away. We do not know who has done this.” She wiped her face with the hem of her apron and stared longingly at the mixer. “Last night we have a memory gathering for Carlos with candles. People came from far away—people who lived here before. Some from Yakima and Medford. We wrote our thank-you notes and put them on his door in case by some miracle he comes home again.”

  Silvie found herself struggling against tears.

  Hershel stood. “We can’t stay.”

  The woman nodded, and Silvie realized that she had simply wanted them to understand who Carl was to them. When they stepped outside, she tipped her head up at the sky, its pale blue stinging deep in her retinas.

  People had gathered around the table and were sifting through the things Hershel had brought. Yolanda said something in Spanish and gestured at Hershel, and they paused to look at him with awe. They smiled and exchanged comments.

  “What did you say?” he asked.

  “I tell them that Carlos worked for you. They know about your sale. It is where he got the things he gave to the people.”

  Hershel seemed disturbed by this and pressed his hand against Silvie’s shoulder, guiding her back to the truck. But before he climbed in he said to the woman, “Send your sons to see me.”

  She neither agreed nor disagreed, but stood watching as they pulled away.

  Kyrellis settled into his overstuffed chair and sipped a glass of Polish vodka. It wasn’t particularly smooth; in fact, the first sip always elicited a hard shiver, but that’s what he liked about it. He enjoyed the sensation of drinking something near caustic. It was early for liquor, but it always helped him think.

  He had a little more time, though not a lot. He’d agreed to let Silvie call the shots when they met tomorrow. That wouldn’t do if he was going to capture her for Jacob Castor, though. The timing needed to be just right. Perhaps this first visit would be as she wanted it, and he would hand over five of the photos. Then he’d cut a new deal. The balance of the stash if she let him tie her up? A girl like that would agree. She’d had practice. And the pictures were of monumental importance to her. That was all he needed, an opportunity to restrain her, then give her to Castor in exchange for a million dollars. Even half of that would solve all his problems.

  Back to the details. How would the transaction go down? He couldn’t bring her with him to the meeting or Castor might simply kill him and leave with the money and the girl. No, Kyrellis needed to plan this out carefully. The pictures he’d keep. If Castor could raise a million dollars for his sweetheart, he could raise more for the photos.

  Kyrellis took a long pull on his drink and studied the white rosebush through the foyer window. Then again, maybe it was best to let this one go. A million dollars was much more than he needed to repay his creditor, and he still had Hershel’s Charger sitting in a heap behind the greenhouse.

  He considered Hershel—a man who had cheated his way through life. A man whose business was bought and paid for with stolen guns, shady practices, and raw greed. In some ways they had traded places, he and Hershel. Kyrellis had never set out to get involved in gun sales. He had only ever wanted to be a horticulturist and a collector. Somehow he’d gotten sidetracked after a string of bad business deals no more sinister than a failed lemonade stand. Nonetheless, failures add up. They begin to eat at the core of a man. And a man desperate to prove his worth is indeed a man at risk. Kyrellis understood this; he knew the path he’d taken, and he knew why. It was Swift who’d first suggested that a person could make a nice profit on a piece if there was no federal paperwork. It was after Kyrellis had confided that business was poor, and he couldn’t support his gun-collecting habit. Swift was all greed in those days. Kyrellis believed he would have sold his own mother if she’d have brought a decent price.

  The details were flooding back at Hershel so rapidly now that he wished he could retreat into his unknowing state once again. He drove out toward the coastal range, away from French Prairie, hoping to quell the onslaught. But still it came. Albert Darling’s storage unit had been mostly packed with worthless garbage: old clothes, a mouse-infested sofa, a particleboard bedroom set that had been badly warped in a flood, a sack of putrid tennis shoes. The odor that issued from the room when they opened it caused them to stand back and look at each other, wondering if a dead body lay beneath the filth. It turned out to be an entire family of the mice decomposing inside the couch. Nothing was salvageable. Except for that one most unexpected item. It was a Winchester rifle in mint condition, well over a hundred years old. A Henry lever-action, .44-caliber rimfire. From the 1860s. Only thirteen thousand had been made, and this one looked as if it had never been fired. They almost missed it—almost sent it to the dump—because the idiot had wrapped it in a ratty old electric blanket the color of vomit.

  Woody had gone back to the office for some trash bags when Carl unsheathed the beautiful gun. He and Hershel both stared openmouthed at the piece, a knowing glance passed between them, and Carl shunted it away to Hershel’s truck.

  When Woody returned, he was sweaty. “Why do people hold on to shit like this? Can you imagine wasting forty dollars a month just to keep this crap dry?”

  “Apparently Darling can’t, either,” Hershel remarked. “Or he would’ve paid his bill.”

  A new name came to him now, as he neared McMinnville and turned back. Pauline Rainwater. She was a county clerk, and a woman who was overtly in love with Hershel. He took her out from time to time, but not because he liked her. She was homely, carrying thirty pounds more than her small frame could gracefully support. Her sallow skin bore the scars of teenage acne, and she wore tiny glasses that were neither in style nor flattering, perched above crooked teeth on a thick nose. Hershel strung her along just enough that she’d do him favors. He’d called her up that afternoon, in fact, cooing that she was his sweetheart and asking if she’d run an FBI check on his new Winchester. He didn’t really have to use her,
but the near-reachable promise of love that he held out as a carrot ensured that she didn’t tell anyone which guns he’d checked over the years. Upon his request, she never kept a paper trail.

  It struck him with absurd irony that not even she had visited him after his accident. Not even Pauline Rainwater would date a brain-damaged man.

  And what of Carl Abernathy? The man his neighbors eulogized in hand-drawn notes commemorating his simple gifts. How had he justified his willing part in all of this? Hershel had been humbled that morning at the migrant camp. And he couldn’t bear the faces that looked at him as if he were some good soul, like Carl. If they only knew the truth.

  When he got home, he finished working on the Porsche and let it idle in the driveway for fifteen minutes before taking it out for a test drive. It was loose in the steering, and it rattled like a tin can, but he reckoned it was safe enough. The smell of fuel seemed to linger, and he made a mental note to check that. When he reached Scholls Ferry Road, he turned left before thinking about it. He hadn’t planned to drive past the South Store, but then he guessed Silvie was too busy to notice the cars that passed the front of the building. He made a loop through Hillsboro, bypassing the store. He would not give her the car as he had promised—not yet. Things were going to get dangerous, and he needed to know exactly where she was every moment.

  27

  Silvie worked to hold back tears through the day. The lunch crowd at the South Store was light, and Karen had Silvie bleach down the tabletops. The visit to the migrant camp had made real for her that Carl was dead. Everyone seemed to know it, even though no one had proof. She wanted to call her mom, listen to her voice. In the early months after Silvie’s father left, Melody had sung to her daughter at night. She had a soft voice that smoothed out the edges of the words, left them unarticulated and sleek, like strands of soft pearls—wet and indistinct syllables. It had eased their loneliness. For a time, anyway.

  “I’m sorry I don’t have more for you today,” Karen said from behind the counter. “I wish I could keep you on for another hour or two, but there just isn’t enough business.”

  “That’s okay,” Silvie said. The understanding that she’d sent Carl on his death errand was too large a burden for her to care about the job anymore. She’d spent the afternoon working out her plan for Kyrellis. All she needed was a car. She glanced at Karen. The soft lines at the corners of her eyes had been etched there by a million smiles. She was a kind woman.

  “Do you think I could ask a really huge favor?”

  “What’s that?” Karen asked, retying her apron.

  “Could I borrow your car to run up to the store?”

  Karen didn’t answer right away, taking her time to consider it. “Do you have a driver’s license?”

  “Sure, wanna see it?”

  “No. That’s fine. You won’t be gone long, though, right?”

  “An hour maybe. No more.”

  Karen disappeared into the kitchen, returning with her keys. “It’s not much.”

  “Thanks. I promise to return it just like it is.”

  The ten-year-old Corolla was a stick shift and Silvie popped the clutch, spraying gravel across the parking lot as she pulled out. She hoped Karen wasn’t standing at the window, regretting the favor.

  Silvie missed a turn as she searched for the Walgreens store she’d passed on her way to find shoes, but after a few circles around the southern end of Hillsboro she found it again on the corner of Tualatin Valley Highway.

  Inside, she wound her way to the personal items and inventoried tubes of lubricating jellies and massage oils. She gathered up three bottles of motion lotion in varying scents and colors.

  As she returned, her purchase stashed in her backpack and fifteen minutes to spare on the hour she’d promised Karen, she glimpsed a small orange car, just like the one Hershel owned. As it neared, she craned to see the driver. It was him. He’d gotten it running finally.

  The day remained dry and cloudless, a strange break in the Oregon winter, both unexpected and intensely rejuvenating to the landscape. The sweep of marshlands below Hershel’s house colored up the way it looked in spring, with vibrant green and auburn. Branchy trees along the Tualatin River attracted a family of blue herons, which perched in the canopy today instead of wading the murky waters along the bank. Upstream from where the police had removed the body.

  His phone rang. Kyrellis. He let it ring two more times, contemplating whether to let it go. “Swift,” he said, flipping the phone open.

  “Have you considered my offer?”

  Hershel stiffened.

  “Better they go to you, so you can destroy them, than back to Castor.”

  “They found a body in the river yesterday.”

  “I heard.”

  “You know goddamn well who it was,” Hershel said, seething.

  Kyrellis sighed into the phone.

  “Why did you kill him?”

  “Swift, listen to me. He was set to double-cross you. There was no loyalty there. You should be grateful to be rid of him.”

  “What did he threaten you with?”

  “You never should’ve let a man like that into your business, Swift. He had records of every gun transaction you’ve ever made, and I’m not talking about the legitimate ones.”

  Hershel’s chest tightened. He wanted to believe that Carl wouldn’t have sold him down the river, but why wouldn’t he? Hershel had never done a kind thing for the man.

  “If you must know, he wanted some of the money for the photos … in exchange for his silence.” Kyrellis exhaled, as if exhausted from trying to convince Hershel. “He threatened to go to the authorities if I didn’t cooperate. But you and I both know it wouldn’t have ended there. He’d have had us both over a barrel if we accepted those terms, and then what? Believe what you want about the man, Swift, but he was up to no good, and we both would’ve paid dearly.”

  “Why did you cut off his head?” Hershel’s stomach lurched at the mention.

  “Honestly, Swift. Must we? He was testing the water. If he could get the photos, he could get anything.”

  Hershel thought of the migrant camp, and the dozens of notes pasted to Carl’s vacant door.

  “I think you were mistaken,” he said quietly.

  “I guess we’ll never know,” Kyrellis replied. “But if you feel inclined to talk to the authorities, it’ll behoove you to remember Albert Darling—if you can remember Albert Darling. Now, about the photos—”

  “I don’t want them. Sell them back to your sheriff in Wyoming.” He hung up before Kyrellis could respond. Out along the river a pair of ravens were dive-bombing the herons, causing them to spread their enormous wings to stay afloat in the tree branches. The herons endured strike after strike, but they relinquished nothing.

  Hershel fingered his cellphone, then punched in the numbers that had never been lost to him. Odd, he thought, that he could remember these when so much else was missing. He listened to the ringing on the other end as he repeated the numbers to himself, just in case.

  “Hello?” Her voice was hoarse—a smoker’s rasp, coupled with advancing age.

  “Why didn’t you come?”

  An audible catching of breath as Hershel held his. A long strand of silence stretched between them, so fragile he could almost see it fray and pull apart.

  “My heart was already broken,” she said, and hung up.

  She’d spoken to him.

  Carl remained on Hershel’s mind while he drove to the restaurant to pick up Silvie.

  “Where is the car?” Silvie asked as they pulled in next to the house.

  “I put it back in the garage,” he said.

  “You got it running.”

  “No. I think it’s beyond repair.”

  She gazed at him curiously from the other side of the cab.

  “We’ll get you some wheels, don’t worry.”

  Silvie wandered outside and sat on the front porch, quiet and downhearted. He watched her go, wishing he cou
ld recapture the excitement of only a day ago. Now they seemed a pair of perfect strangers, even in their shared pain.

  She sat with her back against the window, looking out at the same river scene he’d inventoried earlier, her jacket wrapped around her and her hands tucked in. He joined her.

  “It quit raining,” Silvie said.

  “I don’t think you should go to work tomorrow.”

  She tipped her head back against the chair, unsurprised.

  “Kyrellis is dangerous, and he’s contacted—” The name fell away. He had trouble articulating it in her presence, as if its sound would crush her.

  “Okay.”

  He smoothed her hair. Squeezed her shoulder. “Trust me. This will be over soon.”

  She turned her eyes on him, pale and full of worry. “What are you planning to do?”

  “Just trust me.”

  “You won’t hurt Jacob, will you?”

  Her question sliced through the center of him, a burning sting.

  “I mean, there’s no reason to do that. If he gets his pictures back, he’ll be satisfied.”

  “Will he?”

  She stared through him. She wouldn’t answer.

  28

  Kyrellis hadn’t slept well, his limbs abuzz with anticipation of Silvie’s smooth skin, mixed with erratic dreams of Carl Abernathy demanding money from him, as if the man would return from the dead and join forces with his creditor. He’d gotten up shortly after three and vacuumed, dusted, mopped. Pine cleaner mingled with the faint smell of leather conditioner.

  He pulled down the shades at the front window, letting in a filtered light. It was almost a shame to block out the sun, so rare and uplifting this time of year. But she might be shy about these things. He’d laid ten photos out for her to choose from. He imagined that she wanted the bondage shots. They weren’t his favorite. He’d spoken the truth when he told her that he didn’t find pleasure in pain, and they gave him a bit of a sick stomach. All the same, he was careful in his selection; she wouldn’t get the bondage photos. He needed to maximize his bargaining leverage.