style="font-size:15px;"> Johnny told me I could do whatever I wanted with those things.
I threw the Bibles in the dumpster.
Robby and I climbed down the ladder. It deposited us, like visiting aliens, into a common back room that connected Tipsy Cricket Liquors with From Attic to Seller.
The ladder was attached by metal brackets to a plasterboard wall where the electrical panel box for the store was located. I’d seen the ladder there plenty of times. I had even noticed the Roof Access↑ sign posted on the wall with an arrow pointing up, as though you might not know where a roof could be, direction-wise.
I never thought about going up on the roof of the mall before I went there with Robby.
On the other side of the wall was the shop’s toilet. It was such a small space that you would be looking straight across at your own face in the mirror, and could reach the soap and paper towel dispensers and wash your hands in the sink while you were sitting on the toilet.
Ollie Jungfrau could never take a shit in there.
There was a sign on the door that said: No Public Restroom
Everyone knew the public restroom was at the launderette, or between the dumpster and the couch in Grasshopper Jungle if you couldn’t hold it that far.
There was a homeless guy who’d come riding through on his rickety old bicycle about once per week or so. His bicycle was always teetering, precisely and ridiculously balanced with huge bundles and bags strapped to any available rusted crossbar. Robby and I called him Hungry Jack, but we never asked him his name.
Hungry Jack didn’t have any front teeth.
Hungry Jack fought in Vietnam.
When he came through, Hungry Jack would stop and climb into the dumpster, dig around for things.
Robby and I caught him taking a shit one time, between the dumpster and the couch.
I have read that the human memory for smells is one of the most powerful bits of data that can be etched into our brains. Although it seemed so foreign to me, being inside From Attic to Seller in the middle of the night, the smell of the place was entirely familiar. The shop had this constant, perfumed odor of sorrow, death, abandonment, condoms, and Bible verses; that was like nothing I’d ever smelled anywhere else.
I felt as at home there as you’d have to feel, lying in your own coffin.
JOHNNY’S THINGS
“THIS WAY,” I whispered.
Robby had never set foot inside the secondhand store until that night. I’d told him about it enough times.
“This is rather scary,” Robby said.
Now Robby was speaking like a non-Ealingite.
“Do you want to get out?”
“No.”
Robby put his hand on my shoulder so he wouldn’t trip on anything. I led him out around the back counter, which was a rectangular glass case where Johnny McKeon displayed watches, jewelry, cameras, guns, and three framed insect collections.
There were only a few things in From Attic to Seller that I favored. The insects were among my most appreciated abandoned items.
One of the frames contained only butterflies. For some reason, I always found the butterflies to be boring. But the other two frames were wonders: One displayed forty-one beetles. I counted them. There were all kinds of oddities in the frame, including beetles with horns, and some nearly as large as my clenched fist. The beetles in the center were posed so their shells were open and their glassine wings spread wide.
The last frame had fifteen bugs in it. An enormous centipede curled around the bend at one corner, and a glossy black scorpion raised its stinging tail in the other. Centered against the white backing board was a vampire bat with little beaded eyes, frozen with its mouth snarled open.
“Isn’t that the coolest shit?” I asked.
Robby said, “No.”
Robby remained attached to my shoulder and I took him along the circular path around the main floor of the store.
Johnny McKeon arranged From Attic to Seller Consignment Store so that shoppers, or even people coming in to inquire about using the toilet, would have to walk a serpentine path from the front door to the back counter. His path led past every stack of clutter Johnny offered up for sale. Tipsy Cricket was different. At the liquor store, the counter was right up front, a deterrent to booze and cigarette thieves.
Johnny McKeon was a good marketer.
“I’ve never seen so much shit in my life,” Robby said.
There were nightstands on top of end tables stacked perilously on dinner tables. And every flat surface of every item of furniture was covered in figurines, place settings, ashtrays, silverware, toys, picture frames, clocks, crucifixes, candles, rock collections, pocket-knives, and too many other things for me to list.
I put the price tags on almost every one of them for Johnny, too.
Johnny McKeon made a lot of money.
As soon as one corner of the shop would empty out, it quickly filled back up again. A lot of the things came from realtors and loan agents. Some people in Ealing left behind what they couldn’t fit in the trunks and backseats of their cars when the banks took their homes.
Abandoned stuff from defeated Iowans had a way of migrating into Johnny McKeon’s hands.
Robby’s hand slipped from my shoulder.
He said, “Oops.”
Objects clinked together in the dark. Figurines fell.
“Be careful,” I said.
“Where are we going?”
“I want to see what Johnny’s hiding,” I said.
That scared Robby.
Robby grabbed my hand.
“Don’t be such a baby,” I said. “You wanted to come down here. I know where I’m going.”
Robby started to let go of my hand.
“It’s okay,” I said. I pulled Robby along by the hand like a little kid.
Johnny McKeon kept things in his private office. He never let me go in there. Johnny never let anyone go in there.
There were things Johnny wouldn’t sell. One of them was a sealed glass globe he kept on a shelf beside the office door. I was fascinated by the globe. It had been made by some of the scientists in the lab at McKeon Industries, and contained a perfectly balanced universe.
There was water, land, plants, bacteria, a species of tiny shrimp, worms, and even some translucent fish in there.
