Damaged Goods Read online

  Praise for the novels of Heather Sharfeddin

  SWEETWATER BURNING

  (originally published as Blackbelly)

  “Sharfeddin has captured the family-like entanglements in a small community—by showing us what happens when those relationships begin to come apart.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Superbly crafted … Characters are wonderfully drawn.… Explores a wide range of themes related to sin and guilt, personal integrity, and the destructive power of prejudice. Essentially, however, this is a story about the miracle of love blossoming in unlikely places. Highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Comparisons will be made to Kent Haruf.… Sharfeddin’s … eye for detail … and her unsentimental compassion for her characters … will entrance readers. The stark terrain is beautifully rendered.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Striking … A deceptively simple contemporary western about two loners who have learned from their mistakes and flaws, but not overcome them.”

  —The Portsmouth Herald (New Hampshire), in selecting Blackbelly as one of the top novels of 2005

  WINDLESS SUMMER

  “Heather Sharfeddin’s characters are so complex and well-meaning and so frequently wrong you’ll want to step in and hug the one you just slapped around. The woman can write. Imagine Annie Proulx taking on the Salem witch trials.”

  —Robin Cody, author of Ricochet River

  ALSO BY HEATHER SHARFEDDIN

  Windless Summer

  Mineral Spirits

  Sweetwater Burning

  (originally published as Blackbelly)

  Damaged Goods is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  2011 Bantam Books Trade Paperback Original

  Copyright © 2011 by Heather Sharfeddin

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Sharfeddin, Heather.

  Damaged goods : a novel / Heather Sharfeddin.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-440-33955-7

  1. Auctioneers—Fiction. 2. Oregon—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.H35635D36 2011

  813′.6—dc22 2010 046235

  www.bantamdell.com

  Cover design: Beverly Leung

  Cover image: Alan Ayers

  v3.1

  For Holli; thank you

  for becoming a doctor.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  A Tom Petty song seeped from the car radio, static-riddled on the vintage speaker. Hershel Swift punched the dash lighter in his Dodge Charger and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. He bobbed his head in time with the music.

  “Don’t come around here no more,” he sang quietly.

  The car hummed over the bridge as he crossed the Willamette River, the dark Oregon countryside falling away behind him and the amber lights of Newberg winking into view. Another twenty minutes over Chehalem Mountain and down into Scholls and he’d be home. An empty house. A quiet retreat. A welcome bed.

  He’d take care not to draw attention as he passed through Newberg; leave no witness to point out his car to a jury in some unimaginable courtroom in the distant future. No, he’d travel with caution.

  “I’m a fucking genius,” he said. He wondered if thinking that was a sign that he was actually crazy. He rubbed a dark stain on his jeans, still wet, and inspected his finger to see if it was blood. Too dark to tell.

  The lighter snapped up hot and he touched it to the tip of his cigarette, drawing the woody smoke into his lungs and holding it there for a long moment. He rarely lit up anymore—the toll on his vocal cords too costly to business. But tonight he needed the nicotine rush. It would calm his nerves.

  He was keenly aware that the events of the evening had affected him far less than they ought to have. Perhaps another sign that he was crazy. He blew a thin streak of smoke against the windshield and leaned over to replace the lighter. His arms and shoulders ached deep down through the muscles. He straightened to relieve the pain, dragging the mud-caked sole of his boot across the floor mat, and rubbed his eyes.

  He’d closed them for only a moment. He tried to make sense of the object in the road. Black and white. Huge. The impact flipped it onto the hood of the car, shattered the windshield, and then crumpled the roof. The car careened to the right and rolled as Hershel fought for control. Dirt flew into his mouth and up his nose. The ceiling cracked across his head with staggering force. His thoughts flickered, random images that made no sense, then went out.

  1

  “I can’t believe all these people waited for him to open his doors again,” Linda whispered. “It can’t be because they missed him.”

  “They’re here for the deals.” Stuart scouted the cramped booth and plucked up grease pens. “There ain’t no one here tonight that gives a damn about that asshole.”

  Hershel paused outside the door, listening as his staff gossiped. His stomach tightened at their words. Tonight would be the first auction Hershel had conducted since the accident, and his chest and hands tingled with nerves. A sensation he’d never known before, even when he was young and just starting out. What if he forgot the numbers? What if he couldn’t remember the names of the things he would sell that evening? Lawn mowers and washers and hydraulic lifts.

  A line of fifteen or so people snaked out of the building, into the weedy parking lot and the late-October chill. Bidders signed in and collected their numbers, glancing curiously in Hershel’s direction. None smiling. Swift Consignment Auction was a Tuesday-night institution in the farming community of Scholls, and it appeared that people had missed the weekly event, if not him, these past three months.

  He decided not to ask if Linda needed anything, but left the two employees alone before they saw him standing near the door. He poured himself a Coke from the concession stand and didn’t bother to say hello to the teenage girl—another unfamiliar face—who was setting up for the evening. He thought he should know her. Was certain he should. There were only eight employees, and he’d hired each one personally. The smell of popcorn was rapidly overtaking the aroma of axle grease in the hulking warehouse building. The gir
l poured hot water into the coffeemaker without looking up. She was diligent in her duties, but seemed self-conscious in his presence. He assessed her more carefully. She was thin and wore a leather thong around her neck with a bear claw dangling at her throat. Red hair, long. Freckles, of course. A modern hippie or a greeny. She wore Birkenstocks with thick wool socks against the chill of the cement floor.

  “Have everything you need?” he asked.

  “Yes, Mr. Swift. Thanks.” She was polite and soft-spoken. Wouldn’t make eye contact, though.

  What did she think of him? “Are you the runner tonight?”

  Now she looked up, pale eyes catching the last of the sunlight through the cloudy window behind him. “I can’t run tickets and do the concessions at the same time. I usually have a line.”

  Hershel grunted. “I thought you were just helping out the regular girl tonight.”

  She furrowed her brow at the stream of coffee trickling into the pot. “I … am the regular girl, Mr. Swift.”

  Hershel nodded. He gave her an awkward thumbs-up gesture, turned, his face hot, and headed down the corridor from the concession stand through the long, alley-like storage area beneath the bleachers. It ran the length of the building on the north side and was where the sold items were marked and shelved until their purchasers collected them. A dark catacomb of cubbyholes with numbers scrawled in permanent marker on bare studs—251-75, 226-50, 200-25 on down. He came out into a small room at the west end of the building, toward the glaring light of the open warehouse and the hum of myriad conversations. He nodded at the man who would accept and organize the sale items into their allotted cubbies. Hershel tried to remember his name. He had looked it up that afternoon. A balding fellow with broad shoulders and thick arms, who bent over his task of tearing off three-inch bits of masking tape and sticking them to the edge of the battered workbench in a neat row. The man’s back pocket was crammed with grease pens ready to jot winning numbers on the scraps of tape. He looked up as Hershel passed. A wary eye, as if expecting something unpleasant.

  “Walter,” Hershel said, hoping he’d gotten it right.

  “Boss.” The man turned back to his task, but his eye followed Hershel out of the back room, out of his dark warren and onto the sale floor.

  Hershel nodded to the life-size cardboard cutout of John Wayne near the bathroom. It looked so damn real that he thought it was an actual person. He felt thick and retarded when he realized what it was.

  Out on the floor, he moved along the narrow path between the bleachers and a three-month backlog of ready-to-be-sold merchandise taller than his own head in places. He was the object of blatantly curious stares. As he edged by the three men working the floor—Stuart, Carl, and Henry—he repeated their names in his head. He’d been doing it all evening. These were the men he’d direct, and the ones whose names he most needed to recall on the fly. Stuart and Henry were in their late thirties, old enough to appreciate a good deal. They were pawing through the items even at the last minute, looking for treasures alongside other bidders. Henry examined a set of wrenches. He was a plumber and a family man who always looked for pipe fittings, sinks, and water heaters as they came through the sale. Stuart plucked at the strings of an acoustic guitar to see if it would hold a tune. He was a second-rate musician who played in a band down at the Elks Lodge in Salem. He was married—at least that seemed right to Hershel now. It was the microwaves and stereos he picked up here that kept him tinkering on the weekends and out of trouble.

  Carl, the third man, was nearing sixty. He didn’t poke at the merchandise like the others but looked out over the sea of items—shopping with his eyes. He still had a strong back, though, for moving washers and refrigerators.

  Hershel let his eyes settle on Carl for a moment. Carl was the only one who had visited Hershel in the hospital, standing awkwardly near the door, asking if he needed anything. Hershel had vague recollections of the man recounting information about his business, his house, but the facts had dissolved in that drug haze of convalescence. Carl chatted sociably with the regulars in the front row tonight, illustrating his stories with broad gestures. A stream of laughter from that direction rose above the crowd, irritating Hershel’s nerves. He’d seen Carl finally pick up an old box fan. Of everything there, he picked up the box fan, and that irritated Hershel as well. Carl was a ne’er-do-well Vietnam vet who bought whatever struck his fancy. Hershel guessed the man was a junkie.

  The front row of the bleachers, where the regulars sat, most of whose names Hershel gratefully remembered, was filling fast. Number twelve, Bart Hanson, owner of Hanson Second Hand in Hillsboro. Number thirty-one, Winona Freehauf, an antiques dealer from Portland. Sixteen … Hershel couldn’t remember his name. A Greek-looking fellow with a heavy mustache and dark eyes. The man nodded solemnly as Hershel walked by.

  Hershel paused at the center of the sale floor, overwhelmed by the task ahead. The bright lights burned his eyes, and the noise made his head ache. Above him taxidermy moose and deer heads gazed down with dull eyes. He took his place on the platform.

  His clerk, Marilyn somebody, sat on the stool next to his, bent over, testing out ballpoint pens by scribbling on the desk-size calendar that covered her work surface. Her eyes shifted in his direction, but she went on, silently separating the pens into piles of those that worked and those that didn’t.

  “Guess I should pick up some new pens this week,” he said, noticing that the defunct pile was larger and growing.

  She glanced up, seemingly surprised. “I can bring some in from the school like I always do,” she said with a tone of apology.

  Oh yeah, Marilyn Stromm. She worked as a secretary at Groner Elementary during the day. As he looked out over the amassing crowd, he noticed her sneaking glances at him from the corner of her eye.

  It was five after six, and he picked up the microphone. His hand trembled as he turned it on, and he gripped the metal handle tighter to still his nerves. He cleared his throat and lifted the mike to his lips.

  “Good evening, everyone. Thanks for coming. We’re gonna get started now.”

  The crowd applauded, startling Hershel. His hand shook harder. A whoop went up from the group in the front row. Hershel smiled tensely, his breath catching in his throat.

  “Make room up in the bleachers, would you?” he said, trying to appear calm. “We’ve got a lot of folks still getting numbers down here.”

  “What’ve you got, boys?” Hershel asked, and Carl thrust a toaster oven into the air. “Okay, let’s open it up with a bid of twenty dollars.”

  The crowd continued to talk among themselves, keeping a half-interested eye on the item in Carl’s hand. But this was the way it went.

  “Give me fifteen, then.”

  No one bid, and Carl flipped open the little door and showed it around with a graceful sweep of his hand. “She’s a good little toaster oven,” Carl called, showing off his missing front teeth. “Just look at her. Practically brand-new.”

  “Give me ten,” Hershel sang into the microphone, but he didn’t get a bite until he dropped the opening bid down to two bucks. It was rapidly bid back up to seven dollars and sold to Bart Hanson for his secondhand store. As Carl ran the toaster oven back to Walter in the storage area, Stuart held up a sewing machine and Hershel began to feel the rhythm of his work once again as it rolled along in that smooth way. A rapid singsong of numbers: “Gimme five, five, five, who’ll give me five? Three then, gimme three, three, three. There’s three, how ’bout five now. Got five, gimme eight, eight, now ten, ten, now twelve. Who’ll gimme twelve? C’mon, folks, it’s a decent little sewing machine. Twelve, twelve, that’s right, fifteen.” And on until he’d sold it for seventeen dollars to a woman standing in the aisle.

  At eight o’clock Hershel stared down at the still-full warehouse. They seemed to have made no progress in the mountain of things yet to be sold. His head ached above his eyes, a heavy throbbing in that place so familiar since the accident. He cupped his hand over the microphon
e and leaned down to speak to Marilyn.

  “You need a break?”

  She glanced up, her mouth open in confusion. “Who’ll record the sale items?”

  He scowled. “Don’t … isn’t …” Hershel waffled between trying to remember who usually gave Marilyn a break and the intense desire to sound as if he knew what he was doing. “Who usually relieves you when you take a break?”

  “You don’t let me take a break.” She continued to stare at him, waiting for him to say something.

  “What d’you mean? I make you sit here all night?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, still not looking away. “When you hired me you asked how strong my bladder was, ’cause there wouldn’t be a bathroom break.”

  He straightened up again, removing his hand from the microphone. A sea of expectant faces all looked back at him. They were waiting for him to move on to the next item.

  “Guess you really did hit your head,” she whispered to herself.

  He stuttered out the opening bid on a rotary-dial telephone.

  Marilyn spent the rest of the evening stealing furtive glances at Hershel as they worked their way through the heap of household castoffs, until the crowd in the bleachers had thinned to a dozen people and the line at the cashier’s booth once again wound its way out into the cool and moist Oregon night.

  Hershel thanked everyone for coming and slumped down on the stool with his aching head resting in his palms.

  “Are you okay, Mr. Swift?” Marilyn asked.

  “Yes, just tired.”

  “It was a good idea to keep it short tonight.”

  Hershel rolled his hand back and studied his watch. It was just past ten. He’d routinely run sales that went as late as one and two in the morning before. He couldn’t imagine doing a marathon like that now. Even the smell of the popcorn had begun to wear on him.

  “You’ll get your speed back,” she said as she gathered up the last tickets and shoved her pens to the back of the desk. “Some things just take time.”

  He sighed. His rhythm had been fine, even therapeutic, but he knew that he was moving through the merchandise at half his usual pace. As he surveyed the floor in front of the podium now, he saw that there were still large stacks of items he hadn’t gotten to. The stove and dishwasher in avocado green, the sea trunk with its faded stickers and rusty lock, the cardboard boxes filled with books, and the antique banister rails salvaged from some long-ago architecture. It would all be here waiting for him next week. He could hardly face the idea.