003
As Is
Fiction
by JJ Clark-Finalist Spur Award | 1 Comments
Her grandfather told her once that Asa Bordona had worked for a turkey farm out at Chinese Camp as a semen sucker. He had explained that the sucker was the boy who used a straw to draw the semen out of the male turkey to put in the female turkey so she would hatch eggs. As she and her grandfather walked from the parking lot towards Bordona’s Furniture and Appliances, Lily June wondered if this was where the song “Turkey in the Straw” came from. “That damn Portagee got paid twice what me and the other boys on the crew did,” Bud had told her. He had told her this so she’d know something about Asa Bordona.
At the entrance of the store, she dragged the heels of her Dingos across the pale tiles, enjoying the black scuff marks they left behind. She had cleaned and polished both her and her grandfather’s work boots early that morning so they would be dung-free for their trip into town. She had wanted to wear her blue plaid shirt, but Bud was wearing his blue one with the pearl snaps so she wore her brown one, and both wore their stiffest pair of Levis. They entered through Bordona’s automatic doors and Bud doffed his second best straw hat, the one without the sweat stain at the band, baring a buzz cut and uneven ears. He hadn’t gone with the black Stetson because it wasn’t a wedding – they just needed to buy a deep freeze. Since girl hats only came in the color of Easter eggs, she didn’t wear one.
They walked together down the center aisle of the store, the Barcaloungers lined up on their left and the La-Z-Boys on their right. The whole place reeked of lemon furniture polish and synthetic leather and high prices. Asa Bordona approached down the aisle to meet them in fancier boots and dressier pants. He gave his hand-tooled leather belt a tug so that his gigantic sterling silver eagle buckle would show above his paunch. “Young lady!” he said to Lily June. “Have I got a deal for you on a butfor.”
“What’s a butfor?” she asked, backing away as Bordona squatted down in front of her. He wore a pomade in his hair that smelled like expired medicine.
“For crapping!” Bordona laughed and tugged one of her pigtails before he stood back up. To her grandfather, he said, “Freezer finally conk out on you, Bud?” Bud’s real name was Leroy James, but everyone called him Bud because that’s what they had called him in the Marines. Lily June had no idea why the Marines called him that because he never talked about it.
The truth was that their deep freeze had conked out on them, leaving them with almost a whole steer thawing in the kitchen at that very moment, but Bud knew better than to sound desperate. “Burtschi told me that the trade-in he gave you was in good shape. I figured it might not hurt to have two. Lots of pheasants this year. Geese, too.” He tilted his head towards Lily June. “L.J. here keeps me in bass and catfish besides. Some as big as she is.” He exaggerated, but she appreciated it.
“Only bass and catfish? Too little yet to shoot, I guess.”
Her grandfather nodded. “I guess.” There had been hell to pay at school when she had trimmed a thread from the hem of Miss Trudy’s skirt with Bud’s hand-me-down buck knife, so she kept her mouth shut now concerning the .22 rifle he had given her this past Christmas. He had taught her how to fire it at cans, but she hadn’t killed an animal with it. She wasn’t yet sure she wanted to kill something that was warm and had rust-smelling blood like hers. Even Bud had warned her to take her time – that once she had killed an animal, it was killed and she had to live with being the one who killed it.
Bordona walked them past sofas, loveseats, end-tables, and lamps on their way to the appliance section of the store. Across from the dining room suites, he pointed to a waiting area next to the office. Twin girls wearing identical department-store dresses sat crosslegged on the floor and sifted through a mound of Barbies and Barbie accessories. One of them stared at Lily June, then whispered to the other one, who smiled. “Do you want to play dollies there with Randi and Candi while Bud and me talk business?”
“No.”
“Oh, go on. Their grandma and me buy them more doll crap than they know what to do with. They’re happy to share, right girls?” The twins scooped their goods a little closer in quiet suspicion, their eyes not leaving Lily June.
“I don’t like Barbies. Their feet are deformed.”
“Is that so?”
“They have lotus blossom feet. I saw a picture under China in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Sasquatches have huge feet. There are drawings of sasquatches under Bigfoot. That’s the scariest entry so far, but I’m only up to Daoism.”
Bordona looked to Bud for clarification. “Jolene’s old set of encyclopedias. Hauled all eighteen volumes from the house to the shed so she could read them while I work. She’s going in order.”
Bordona stared at her a moment, then said, “Huh.” To Bud he said, “Maybe you should buy her some real toys if the best her mamma can do for her is an outdated set of encyclopedias.”
Bud’s expression changed just enough to show that the cut had its intended effect, but Bordona’s was the only game in the county for used freezers – any appliances at all, for that matter – and both men knew it. Bud said, “Just show me the trade in.”
They wound through the washers and dryers and past the refrigerators until they got to the deep freezes. Bordona pointed towards the back row at a scratched and dented avocado green Kenmore. Its rubber sealers sagged around the lip of the door, and it sat crooked because one of its bottom corners was rusted almost entirely through. “That’s Burtschi’s. This here,” he patted the side of a gleaming white Frigidaire on the aisle directly in front of them, “is what you’ll be missing.” The pristine Frigidaire had its top propped open like the hood of a sports car to reveal adjustable chrome shelves, an automatic ice maker, and several intriguing dials and thermometers. Bud glanced with appreciation over the newness of it all before his eyes landed on the price tag and dimmed. “Burtschi’s will be fine.”
Bordona allowed the drone of the store’s easy-listening music to settle on the three of them for a minute before he squatted down and said to Lily June, “What if I told you that I’ll give your granddad this here Frigidaire free of charge? All you have to do is answer one question for me. An easy one for a smart girl like you.” Lily June could tell right away that Bordona was setting her up for a scam. “Trust me, any moron could answer this question,” Bordona said, less to reassure, more to taunt. “You’re not a moron, are you?”
“Knock it off, Bordona. She doesn’t need more people making her deals they don’t plan on keeping.”
“Aw, come on. I’m just having a little fun with the kid.” To Lily June he said, “How many fingers do I have?”
There was definitely a trick here – she was certain of it, but she couldn’t tell what it was. She had once seen a cowboy’s finger pop off like a bottle cap when it got tangled in the rope he was using to tie down a calf, and she suspected that Bordona’s con might likewise involve a missing digit. She said, “Let me see your hands.” Bordona wiggled his fingers in front of her. To her dismay, they were all intact. “So you just want to know how many fingers a normal person has?”
Bordona nodded. “That freezer’s top of the line. Think about it.”
Lily June wouldn’t have let Bordona rope her into his stupid grift if she hadn’t seen how Bud looked at that Frigidaire, but now she was stuck. “On one hand?” Bordona nodded again and she felt her face get hotter as the moment stretched outward and grew deeper with her silence.
Bud said, “I don’t have the time for this, Bordona...”
Even though she was sure that the obvious answer was likely to be the wrong answer, she knew that the slim chance she had of winning that Frigidaire for Bud was slipping away and that she had to say something. “Five? Is it five fingers?”
“Aw...” Bordona said. The look of false regret that washed across his face made her want to stab him in the eye. “That’s a shame. Everyone knows you have four fingers and a thumb. I would have thought you would have got that one, no problem.” Bordona laughed.
The fact that she had expected to lose on just such a technicality only made her feel like more of a chump. “Thumbs are fingers,” she argued, peeved, determined to beat Bordona at his own game. Thumbs were fingers. She was positive.
“No point in getting riled up,” Bordona said, laughing, holding his hand in front of her face and peeling down the digits one by one as he said, “We all have a pinky finger and a ring finger and a middle finger and a pointer finger, but we don’t have a thumb finger. The thumb is in a class by itself.”
“Thumbs are fingers,” she insisted, steaming forward with the full fury of her conviction. She was right. She was sure of it.
“Why don’t you go wait in the truck?” Bud said to her – a demand, not a request.
Her throat tightened and her face burned. “You’re nothing but a greedy Portagee,” she shouted. Her rage only made Bordona laugh harder.
“The truck,” said Bud.
She kicked the Frigidaire hard enough to leave a mark, but not hard enough to dent it. “Hey, now!” said Bordona, no longer laughing. She turned on her heel and stomped towards the front entrance as if to leave, but while the two men bent down to inspect the freezer for damage, she hid just out of their line of sight in the trash compactor aisle.
Bud pulled a red bandanna out of his back pocket, spat on it, then rubbed out the scuff. Both men stood and he said, “When you can spare a minute away from picking on little girls, I’d appreciate it if you’d write me up a tag for that Kenmore.”
“Picking on little girls, my ass. What kind of kid can’t take a joke?” Bordona pulled a receipt book and a gold pen out of his shirt pocket and began to write. “Her mama still camped in that rusty Airstream parked out on the Lazy H?”
“Yep.”
“She never did go back for her GED, I take it.” It wasn’t a question meant to be answered, and Bud didn’t. “She still running around with Bobby Sykes?” This was a question meant to be answered, and when Bud remained quiet, his silence drew a smile from Bordona. “No, that’s not it. Last I heard it was John Ray Fugitt, wasn’t it? Or did someone tell me that it was Nate Emory this month?”
“As the son of a whore yourself, I’d think you’d have more sense about what you say to a paying customer.”
Bordona snorted. “Paying customer.” He tore off the receipt and handed it to Bud. “Could we settle the bill now, your majesty? I’d like to go out and buy a platinum Trans Am during my lunch hour.” He pointed at the freezer with his pen. “My bet is, that sonofabitch’ll crap out on you within the week.”
“Anything wrong with that freezer, I’m bringing it straight back here.”
“Like hell you will. Used merchandise is sold ‘as is’ in my store. You bought that second-hand piece of shit; now it’s yours. I’m not your delivery boy, either – you’ll haul it out of here by noon tomorrow or I’ll sell it to someone else. I’m not running some sort of charity pawn shop here.”
While Bud paid up, Lily June slipped unnoticed out of the store ahead of him, and trotted across the parking lot towards the primer-colored Dodge pickup. With no small degree of effort, she wrestled the passenger door open, scrambled up to her seat, then wrestled it closed behind her. She rolled down the window just as the shift horn at Gilbert’s Feed sounded, and even from where she sat in the parking lot a mile away, she could hear the men banging on Gilbert’s towering hour-glass silos, the gonging vibrations loosening the grain so that it would slip down the sides and into the waiting trucks. She bent over to feel around under the seat, careful not to tip over the Folgers can of brown spit and spent chewing tobacco that rested on the center console. She fished out a long length of chain, a box of 12-gauge shotgun shells, a broken hotshot, a roll of duct tape, a half-empty bottle of bourbon, a crow bar, and the binoculars before her hands finally found her Webster’s. She settled back into her seat and opened the dictionary to ‘t’. She flipped pages. thrum... thrush... thrust...
Bud appeared at the driver’s side window. His door was harder to open than hers because the bottom hinge was actually baling wire, and as he struggled, the redness of his face deepened. He talked out loud, but not to her. “Platinum Trans Am, my ass. That arrogant sonofabitch. I could have bought and sold that bastard twenty years ago if I wanted to.” The door sprang open and he planted himself on his side of the bench seat with such vigor that Lily June bounced. “I’d sure like someone to tell me what it was I ever did to him.”
“There was that time you told him you could break that sorrel mare of his and you ended up hitting her in the head with a shovel,” she offered. If she could have guessed how this remark was going to be received, she would have kept her mouth shut. She decided to change the subject. “I was wrong about thumbs being fingers.”
He put the key into the ignition and made sure the clutch was in neutral. “What?”
She read to him from the Webster’s: “thumb: the short first terminating member of the hand, opposable to the four fingers.”
“Look up finger.”
She did, and read the entry aloud: “finger: any of the five terminating members of the hand.” The possibility of redemption flared through her. Slamming shut the dictionary she said, “We have to go back in.”
“We’re not going back in.”
“But we have to do something.”
“Doing nothing is doing something. Besides, according to Webster, it’s a draw.”
“Draw goes to the house.”
“Don’t be so ornery. This isn’t blackjack, so be happy with a draw.”
“But it doesn’t feel like a draw. It feels like Bordona wins.”
“Someone getting the better of you isn’t the same as them winning. Winning doesn’t mean anything without the chance of losing. If Bordona sets up the game so that he never loses, he doesn’t win. I don’t know what it is, but he doesn’t win.”
“He thinks he won.”
“Everyone thinks he’s the one wearing the white hat. Nothing you can do about that.” The truck started without protest for a change, and while they waited for the engine to warm up, Bud reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a rock. “What do we need with that Frigidaire, anyway, when we have this beauty here?” The oblong quartz stone was pinkish-yellow in color and opaque, veined throughout with rust-colored marbling, and it had a round brown flaw on one side. It looked like a rheumy eyeball that he’d plucked from the head of some sorry creature. She loved it immediately. “I carry this around with me as a sasquatch repellant. It’s yours if you want it.”
She took it from his hand and said, “Bigfoots don’t come down to this elevation.”
“Works good, don’t it?”
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Inspired. Love it. And tomorrow will be sure to remember that doing nothing is doing something. That's an easy one to forget.
Posted by Holly, 27/09/2010 10:33pm (1 year ago)
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