Trashed!, page 2
Arthur often tried to imagine what his ancestor’s life had been like. He had left everybody and everything he knew; slept on hard ground; felt hunger; worked hard from sunup to sundown, maybe longer, not knowing if he’d ever have any money.
Also no computer, no car, no toilet even.
Arthur pushed the bangs back from his eyes, stared at his own reflection, tried to see some trace of his great-great-great. Was he there in the pale skin, the green eyes, the straight dark-blond hair? Maybe he was in the round cheeks, but his dad claimed the cheeks were from his side of the family, the Popper side. There was no royalty on the Popper side, just a lot of plain working people.
“What’s on the agenda for today, Arthur?” Watson had appeared beside the hot-water tap. In daylight she looked even more transparent than she had in the dark. Until she spoke up, Arthur hadn’t noticed her at all.
Arthur grinned, glad she was back, glad she hadn’t been a dream. “Veda’s coming over,” he said. “She’s my friend. On Sunday afternoons we both help out in the store.” Arthur turned off the tap. “Uh… I’m gonna go eat breakfast now. How does this work exactly? If you want to come with me, do I pick you up? Can I pick you up?”
“No, no.” Watson had been nosing around the toothbrushes. Now she curled her tail and shrank back. “I am incorporeal, Arthur. Try to pick me up, and you’ll grab nothing at all. But I’ll see you later. You can count on that.”
Arthur had recently learned that word, “incorporeal.” It meant “without a body.”
“Okay.” He started for the door, then stopped. “Can I tell people about you?”
“Up to you,” the mouse said. “You might want to think twice, though. Some people will think you’re crazy.”
Arthur didn’t see Watson again that morning. He didn’t tell Ramona about her either. He wasn’t worried Ramona would think he was crazy. He didn’t care about that. It was more he worried she might feel bad Mouse 4 wasn’t haunting her.
* * *
The stairs from the family’s apartment to the store led down from a landing by the pantry behind the kitchen. The landing itself served as the family’s mudroom. There were hooks for coats, backpacks, and umbrellas, two low shelves for boots. On the wall were some old family photographs of Colorado long ago, the black-and-white kind that had gone yellow with age.
A few minutes before one o’clock, Arthur descended without turning on the light. At the bottom were two doors. One led outside to the parking lot. The other, which Arthur opened, led into the store’s office. In the room were three old-fashioned wood desks, assorted chairs—comfortable and not—and a love seat. The walls were lined with shelves. Neatly arranged on the shelves were dozens and dozens of three-by-five index-card boxes.
Nothing matched—not the desks, the chairs, or even the index-card boxes.
Veda, always early, was seated behind one of the desks. Grandpa B was behind another, which meant Arthur’s dad must have been out front helping customers.
“Here’s the boy at last,” said Grandpa B.
“I’m not late,” Arthur said. “Am I?”
“Early bird catches the worm, Arthur,” Grandpa said.
“If you like worms,” Arthur said. “Hi, Veda.”
“Hi back,” Veda said. “We’re supposed to inventory the costume jewelry from the Carson estate, your dad says. Maybe we’ll find some diamonds and my mom can retire.”
“And buy a castle!” Arthur said.
Veda shook her head. “She doesn’t want a castle. Too much to dust.”
“This girl’s practical, Arthur,” Grandpa B said. “If I were you, I’d propose now. She won’t be on the market long.”
Grandpa said embarrassing stuff like that a lot. Luckily, Veda was used to him.
“I don’t want him,” she said. “Too skinny.”
Veda herself was strong, not skinny, with straight black hair and tawny skin.
“He’ll fill out in time.” Grandpa B gave Arthur a hard look. “There ain’t no wimps in this family. We’re Colorado royalty! Did you know that, Veda?”
Veda nodded. “I sure did.” Then she turned to Arthur. “I gotta be home by four fifteen.”
“Then let’s go,” said Arthur.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Universal Trash was huge.
From the office, Arthur and Veda hung a right beyond the art gallery on the back wall, and then past Lighting, Small Appliances, and Housewares till they arrived at Dining Room Furniture. There they took their usual spots at an antique oak table in good condition but, according to Dad, “too big and too ornate for contemporary tastes.”
The table’s original price, $750, had been crossed out, as had $500 and $375. The current tag read: Make an offer!
Sometimes Arthur found himself caring about a piece of merchandise the way a little kid cares about a teddy bear, or his grandmother cared about her motorcycle. And when the price fell and fell on something he liked, Arthur felt sad, like a friend was being insulted.
Arthur knew that was crazy. This table, just for an example, didn’t care about him. This table didn’t care about itself. Heaped with silver and polished, or chopped up into firewood, it was all the same to the table.
Arthur knew this in his head, but in his heart he didn’t believe it.
As usual on Sunday afternoons, Dad or Randolph or Jennifer Y—they were the two clerks—had set up Arthur and Veda’s work station, and everything they needed was waiting for them: soft cloths for cleaning, plain white stickers, price tags, pens, index cards, a stapled printout of the UUI sort criteria, and, in a heap on a stained old cloth, the jewelry from the Carson estate.
Arthur and Veda’s job was to enter each brooch, necklace, pair of earrings, barrette, and bracelet into the UUI, Universal Universal Inventory. This meant they made an index card encoding the piece according to certain sort criteria, wrote the code on a sticker, and attached the sticker to a price tag on the jewelry.
The sort criteria included appraisal (how much Dad thought the item was worth) and provenance (where it came from). Veda hadn’t known any of that when she’d first come to work for Universal Trash. She hadn’t known the going rate for an old pair of fake pearl earrings; a set of four wineglasses; or a linen tablecloth, still in the original packaging, either. Now, a year later, she knew all that; she was a pro.
Arthur took a blue-and-gold enamel bracelet from the pile. Veda took a pair of silver hoop earrings. They wiped the treasures with a cloth, looked them over, grabbed pens and cards, wrote quickly in small, neat letters.
This is what Arthur wrote about his bracelet:
043023AJ
S, J, C, Bt, bg
Carson
$1.25
The first line meant April 30, 2023; that he, Arthur, had made the file card; and that it was jewelry.
The next line meant it was small [S] (not an appliance [A], or an electronic [E], or a piece of visual art [V], or a musical instrument [M], or furniture [F], for example); that it was jewelry [J]; that it was costume [C] (not real gold or a real gem); that it was a bracelet [Bt]; that it was blue [b] and gold [g].
The next line was the consigner—the Carson estate. The contact information for Carson, and everyone else who left items for sale at Universal Trash, had been written on another card at the same time the lot of items had come in.
The last entry was price. Arthur hadn’t had to think much about that. Unless it was special in some way, all bracelets started at one dollar and twenty-five cents. After a couple of months the price dropped to a dollar, or seventy-five cents if there were too many on hand. Two months after that, if the bracelet was still there, somebody would box it up with other unsold merchandise and haul it to a charity.
It took Arthur about a minute to write a card for the blue-and-gold bracelet, attach a tag to it, put a sticker on the tag, and place the bracelet in a bin on the floor. Either Dad or one of the clerks would take it from there, arrange the tagged jewelry in a display case to sell, and file the index cards in the UUI master system, which was contained in the index-card boxes on the shelves in the office.
Arthur reached for a pair of rhinestone earrings at the same time Veda grabbed a fake turquoise necklace. When Veda had first come to work, the two of them had competed over who could tag the most items. Then Dad had complained that their handwriting was so sloppy, he couldn’t read the index cards, and they’d slowed down, and now their output was almost identical, right around one hundred items each in a two-hour shift, with a ten-minute snack break in the middle.
The work wasn’t hard, but it held your attention. Arthur and Veda were barely aware of customers drifting in and out, the bell on the entrance door tinkling. They had been at it for about half an hour when two guys, maybe in their twenties, came over to check out dining room furniture.
“OMG, can you believe this place?” one said to the other.
“I know, right? I don’t know what to look at first.”
“Do you kids work here?” The first guy—who had a neat black beard and a buzz cut—paused by the old dining table and smiled at Arthur and Veda.
Arthur put on his best customer-service smile.
“We do, yes,” he said. “And welcome to Universal Trash.”
“We saw that ad, the one on the bus?” the second guy said. He was a little more rumpled than the first. “Something about the earth? And we thought that made sense, so here we are, and, um… if you don’t mind, what is it you guys are doing exactly?”
With practiced efficiency Arthur explained. Veda, meanwhile, dropped a tagged red pendant into the bin and reached for a beaded bracelet.
“Oh, wow, that’s so old-fashioned!” the first guy said.
“It is, but it works,” Arthur said. “My grandpa came up with it when he and my grandmother started the store a long time ago.”
“Before computers?” The slightly rumpled guy couldn’t believe it.
“I just love this place.” The bearded guy looked around as if he were in a church; then he cracked up.
“Look at this,” he said to his friend.
On the wall by the window was a framed poster, a motto scrawled by Grandpa long ago:
Herein the collected work of humankind
Some of it useful
Much of it useless
All of it for sale
The rumpled guy grinned. “Suits me,” he said. “We may be here awhile.”
Having almost grown up in the store, Arthur sometimes forgot it was awesome. Now he looked around too. The building was essentially a well-insulated warehouse with windows on the street side. What made it special was the inventory. Dad did his best to rotate goods out quickly if they didn’t sell, but even so, it was packed full, and the variety of goods, the colors, the shapes and sizes—the sheer abundance of stuff—hit some visitors hard.
Over the table where Veda and Arthur sat, for example, hung a constellation of crystal chandeliers, seven altogether, among a couple dozen lesser lighting fixtures made of ceramic, brass, fabric, aluminum, glass, porcelain, and even calfskin.
Surrounding Arthur and Veda’s big table were smaller tables in all styles, some of them set up for a holiday meal with floral centerpieces, salt and pepper shakers, crystal goblets, silver place settings, china platters, china dishes. The aisle leading away from the dining room furniture held more crystal, more silver, more china. “Decades of wedding presents, mostly unused,” according to Arthur’s dad.
And that was just one corner!
Beyond Dining Room Furniture was Living Room Furniture, and beyond that, most of it hanging from the wall, was the section they called Wildlife, dead wildlife more accurately. The centerpiece was an African lion, its mouth open in either a yawn or a roar. An exception to Dad’s rule about rotating stock, it had presided since before Arthur was born. The price tag, which never changed, read $5,000. Occasionally someone asked about buying it, but so far no one had followed through.
Surrounding the lion were more heads: elk, bighorn sheep, and lots of deer, all of them with impressive antlers. On the shelves below were taxidermy mounts, whole animals posed to look like they might have in the wild: beavers, coyotes, foxes, raccoons, minks, birds, and snakes.
For a while they’d had a prairie dog mount, two little guys posed on hind legs as if they were sniffing the air. But prairie dogs were controversial in Boulder, and when a pro–prairie dog group threatened to picket the store, Dad had, somehow, made the little guys disappear.
The wildlife always attracted attention, but now the bearded guy’s eyes turned to a painting in the gallery, located on the same wall as the entrance. “Is that one for real?” he asked. Arthur swiveled and saw that he meant a blotchy copy of a painting by the artist Vincent van Gogh, the one called The Starry Night. The real thing was in a museum somewhere, Arthur thought, worth millions of dollars. This was probably a high school art project.
“It’s a real painting, and it’s for sale,” Arthur said. “If it’s perfect for your apartment, I can offer you an excellent price.”
“It might be!” The bearded guy was enthused. “Let’s take a look,” he said to his friend. “This place is incredible!”
Arthur logged one more piece of jewelry, a diamond necklace made of plastic, before Veda said, “Let’s eat,” and it was time for their snack.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Snacks were located in the mini-fridge by the cash counter. There, Dad was completing the sale of a movie camera so big and heavy that it must’ve been ancient.
“That’s a great item there,” Dad told the customer, a college-aged guy, who said goodbye with a grin that announced he had made a life-changing find. “Sometimes,” Dad turned to Arthur and Veda, “this job makes ya happy. Isn’t that right, guys?”
“Chocolate milk makes me happy,” Arthur said. “How about you, Darth?” He looked at Veda, who used to complain when he called her “Darth” but had finally decided she liked it.
“Job’s good,” she said, “but plain milk’s better than chocolate.”
By now she had set out the snack on the counter: graham crackers with peanut butter, apple slices, and milk—chocolate for Arthur, regular for Veda. It was an ordinary snack, but it looked special, the milk in teacups with saucers, the food on china plates, cloth napkins on the side. Veda was no girly girl, but she did love a tea party.
“How much did you get for the camera, Mr. Popper?” Veda asked.
“It was marked a hundred, but I gave it to him for fifty. Who knows? Maybe he’ll mention the store when he wins an Oscar.”
“So how does it work with the consigner if you lower the price?” Veda asked.
Arthur’s dad smiled. He liked it when Veda asked business questions. “If we lower it because the item’s been sitting, then we lower the payment to the consigner, too. It’s in the contract. But if it’s an impulse thing, like what I just did with Amy Merdle’s camera, then I pay out the full amount,” he said.
“Amy Merdle—the prairie dog lady?” Veda asked Arthur.
Arthur nodded. “The one who visits second-grade classes with pictures of prairie dog towns. She’s a regular customer.”
“I don’t remember much about the slides,” Veda said. “But she had earrings in the shape of prairie dogs.”
“Old friend of Arthur’s grandparents’ too,” Dad added. “Since she moved out of her big house, she’s been bringing us a lot.”
Back when Arthur’s grandparents founded Universal Trash, most of the merchandise had been what they picked up themselves at yard sales or from estates. Now most items came in on consignment. That is, someone brought something to the store for the store to sell. When it did, the store kept half the money and sent the rest to the consigner, the person who had brought it in.
While Arthur and Veda were eating, Randolph came over with the two guys Arthur had been talking to earlier.
“We’re buying the painting!” the bearded one announced.
“Along with a few other odds and ends.” His friend nodded at an almost-full shopping cart.
“Uh-huh,” Randolph said, clearly delighted with these new customers. He was grandparent-aged and skinny, with a scraggly white beard and matching hair he cut himself. He had been working at the store for about a year, but he’d hung around before that. Now he stood beside Arthur. “I’ll ring y’up if I can just shove this freeloader out of the way.”
“Hey, I’m working!” Arthur protested.
“We can vouch for that,” the bearded guy said.
Randolph said, “Hmmph,” but he was teasing. “I could use some counter space if you two don’t mind?”
“We gotta get back to it, anyway,” Veda said.
“Almost ten after,” Dad said.
“We’re going,” Veda said. “Come on, Arthur. I have to be home by—”
“Four fifteen. I know,” Arthur said.
“Thanks for keeping my kid in line, Veda,” Dad said.
“No problem. I’m used to it,” said Veda.
CHAPTER NINE
Arthur was just marking $2.50 on a double strand of glass pearls, the last piece from the Carson consignment, when Officer Bernstein showed up. He was standing in the Housewares aisle, staring at a red pepper mill. As if he felt Arthur’s eyes on him, he turned his head. “Hello, Arthur. Hello, Veda. How’s things?”
Officer Len Bernstein was a middle-aged white man with an ordinary, slightly pudgy face and thinning light brown hair. He wasn’t tall or short, fat or thin, handsome or ugly. His expression was always pleasant but a little sad, as if he expected disappointment. He must not have been on duty that day, because he wasn’t in uniform.
Veda and Arthur told Officer Bernstein that things were good.
“Are you interested in that pepper mill, Officer Bernstein?” Arthur asked. “It’s European-made, you know, fifteen dollars retail at least, and in very good condition. I think the sticker says three dollars, but I’m sure we could arrange for the friends-and-family discount. Call it two seventy-five plus tax.”
