In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [92]
At first when the full delicious impact swept over me that it was Saturday—no school today—blessed, fantastic Saturday and that this afternoon Flick and Junior and I would ride the range with Roy Rogers and Trigger at the Orpheum, I reached over in ecstasy, belting my brother in the ribs, ready for action. He groaned almost at the same time that I remembered something funny was going to happen today.
I got up and padded into the kitchen where breakfast was already on the table. The Old Man, dressed in his Saturday clothes, was halfway through his eggs. Drifting through the kitchen window from somewhere outside came the roar of a truck motor backing and shifting. My mother, over near the sink, looked out.
“They’re here.”
My father dropped his fork, circled the table, and peered from the other window. I stood on tiptoes.
At an angle, almost filling the whole of their sandy, weedy backyard stood a tall, gray official-looking truck, behind the Kissel’s house. Men in overalls moved in and out the back door, carrying boxes and barrels. Already piled high in the sunlight, warped, cracked, and stained with the chewing of the years, stood the Kissel furniture. The men struggled under loads of nondescript junk, back and forth, from the basement to the attic, from the garage to the kitchen.
The sheriff drove up in a black Ford with a white star on the door and got out. He didn’t look like a movie sheriff at all, being fat and wearing a long, grayish overcoat. He really looked more like a dentist than a sheriff. He had two men with him; one a tall, thin, red-faced man with eyes that popped, who began making a list in a notebook. The other set up a kind of platform behind the back porch. It folded, and looked as though it had been used. One of the workmen brought out a microphone and hooked up a leatherette-covered speaker on the ground near the truck. We watched from behind the geraniums.
From behind geraniums all over the neighborhood other eyes watched. Strange people began arriving in dented blue cars, panel trucks; some just wallking, carrying baskets and bags. They were the first Auction Followers we had ever seen. There is a race of Human Vulture that lives off the disaster and defeat of others, picking the bones clean. They perform a necessary function, just as any scavenger does. Those on the scene early were rummaging through the piles of coffee pots, old tires, potted ferns, and Mr. Kissel’s toolbox which he carried to the roundhouse on the few days he worked every month.
“There’s Mr. Kissel’s bottle-capper,” I said, breaking the silence in the kitchen.
“Yeah,” my father answered, continuing to stare into the bright sunshine.
Mr. Kissel made Home Brew and when we played in Junior Kissel’s basement we always fooled around with his bottle-capper, capping bottles of water, pretending we were bootleggers. Now the bottle-capper lay in the yard next to Mrs. Kissel’s old Hoover vacuum cleaner.
Old furniture under the light of a bright sky seems more tired and worn than anything else I know. In an eerie way more human, too. The crowd was getting bigger by the minute. Some carried lunches; others babies. They were excited and anxious for the action to begin. None of the neighbors showed up. At least they weren’t in the crowd that pushed and waited around the platform. They were strangers. It doesn’t pay for vultures to make friends.
My kid brother wanted to go out and join in the fun, but the Old Man said:
“We’ll go out and play Catch after the people go. You stay here until they leave.”
He was a dedicated Catch player. Any time he announced that we were going to play Catch kids listened, and hunted for their mitts. His slider was the best I’ve ever seen outside of Comiskey Park.
The sheriff got up on the platform to begin the proceedings, his voice echoing hollowly among the sagging garage doors, the drooping clothespoles, and the limp wetwash. The auctioneer began with a brass table lamp, the one we used to see through their dining-room window, with the green shade. It