Friday Fiction: Just Noodling

 

It might go something like this.

“Timmy!” his mom called. The boy jerked out of a waking dream and lowered the Kindle. He had been reading a Young Adult Fantasy, the fourth in the series. It was, admittedly, a rather poor offering; there had been diminishing quality since the first volume. But he was like that; he had invested a lot of time, and intended to follow it to the end, whatever the journey.

“Coming, Mom!” Timmy set the device down on the bed without much regret. The longer he could put off the last page, the longer he could put off having to find something else to read. He ran a hand through his black flop of hair then tugged his striped shirt down. He had been lying in bed in his shoes already, so it was only a short hop to get to the living room.

Mom was there, already in her coat, purse over her arm, putting a floppy brown knit hat over her auburn hair. Timmy looked at her curiously.

“Are you going somewhere?”

“We are going somewhere,” she said firmly, reaching into her purse and fishing her keys out. “We’re going to help Granny clean out one of her storage units. She’s doing one of her random purges again, downsizing.” She smiled. “And you are my muscle. Get your coat.”

Timmy groaned and hung his head. “Do I have to go? Why don’t you take Gabe?”

“You know he’s got football practice. And you’re just slouching around the house. A great big thirteen-year-old like you should be doing something, even if it’s only playing video games online like your uncle.”

Timmy yanked his fuzzy red jacket off the coatrack by the door.

“Why doesn’t he help Granny? After all, he lives with her.” He grumpily thrust one arm into a sleeve.

“Now, now, you know how your Uncle Jimmy is.” She looked mournful. “Sweetest guy in the world, of course, but useless at taking directions. Trying to get him to work drives Granny to distraction.” She watched Timmy trying helplessly to catch his other sleeve, half turning in a circle, then grabbed him and tucked his arm in. “Maybe when we’re done you can play some of his games with him while I visit with Granny.”

“Hooray,” he said flatly. He looked out the window. “It’s raining!”

“Not yet.” She ran her fingers through his hair, flattening down a cowlick. “Go to the bathroom before we leave. They don’t have any facilities at the storage units.”

Minutes later they were on the road in the SUV, driving through the misty atmosphere that beaded on the windshield, mildly obscuring the way ahead but not quite heavy enough to merit the wipers. Mom was headed to the outskirts of town, rather than to Granny’s house. She explained that they were to meet there to work on emptying the storage unit and then lug the contents away, mostly in a rented van that Granny was bringing.

They came to the complex, a series of concrete units with sliding metal doors, surrounded by a security fence. It was rather isolated, surrounded by winter-weary fields and hackberry trees blackened and shedding with cold. But there was Granny, waiting at the gates in a fifteen-foot U-Haul.

Timmy always thought that Granny looked the least like a stereotypical Granny he had ever met. Most grandmothers he knew had receded into a comfortable frumpiness or into a painful artificial mockery of youth. But Granny looked only a few years older than Mom, slim, wiry almost, just a few creases around her eyes and a touch of grey in her long brown hair. Her age showed itself mainly in her authority and her assurance.

Now she leaned out the truck window and called into the office, “Alright, Mr. Jackson, they’re here now!” The gate crawled open mechanically and with a flash of brakelights she pulled in, Mom following her carefully a vehicle length behind. Timmy looked back to see the chain-link gate trundle shut behind them.

Granny parked at a unit near the back of the lot and hopped out; she was wearing a black scarf tightly knotted over her hair and sunglasses. She seemed impatient of the few minutes it took Mom to park behind her and the two of them to hop out.

“Okay, what’s the project here?” Mom looked around. “I don’t remember this storage company.”

“You wouldn’t. Cecily and George helped me pack this one here. It was after your Uncle Samuel died.”

“Uncle Samuel?” Timmy asked skeptically. “Who’s he? I never heard of him before.”

“You met him though, when you were only about one and a half,” Mom explained. “He was Granny’s older brother. You probably don’t remember, but it was him who gave you Owlie.” She smiled. “We used to call him Uncle Sam-Sam.”

“Really?” Owlie had been his constant companion when he was smaller, the partner of a thousand imaginary adventures. He’d had it so long he never thought of where it came from; it seemed to have always been there. A hollow plastic owl, the paint a little worn here and there, it rested now high on a shelf in his bedroom.

“We just packed his stuff away after he passed.” Granny got out her keyring and bent down to the lock. “Nobody seemed to want it, and somehow it didn’t seem right to get rid of it right away.” With a heave she raised the clattering door. “I haven’t given it a thought for over ten years, except for a bill every month, but now I’ve got to make economies.” She brushed her hands and looked wryly into the shadowy recess of the unit. “I guess we’ll have either a bonfire or one hell of a garage sale.”

Timmy gazed into the unit through a haze of dust that the raising of the door had set dancing in the air of its passage. Inside, the room was half-full of blue plastic bins. They looked old-fashioned, not quite the same kind you could buy now-a-days. Somehow the thick layer of dust and cobwebs floating in the corners made them seem piratical, or relics from ancient times.

Granny groaned.

“And they all weigh a ton, too. We’re in for a hard one.”

“Really? What’s in them?”

“You remember your Uncle Sam-Sam. Books. Thousands of books.”

Timmy blinked.

“Books? You mean real books?” It seemed unbelievable. The last retail bookstore had gone out of business five years ago. He remembered; it was in all the papers. E-books had finally driven them out of existence. There were still barely touched shelves in the library, but mostly people ‘borrowed’ downloads. They had been completely eliminated from schools.

There were still a few used bookstores here and there, but compared to the pennies being charged on downloads, their prices were exorbitant. But Timmy still coveted books; he had three treasured hand-me-down volumes of his own, and something about their feel in his hands and the smell of the paper and the connection to the past thrilled some deep part of him.

“Can I look at them?”

“We’re not going to go digging around just yet,” Granny said briskly. “First we have to clean all these up and get them loaded. Today’s the last day on the rent. When we get them out of here … we’ll see.”

She reached into the van and pulled out a couple of brooms. They all put on battered cotton gloves and then set in to work.  Mom sent Timmy to damp a few hand towels at a faucet at the side of the building. When he got back, she and Granny had wrestled down a bin from the top of a pile, the blue lid gray with dust. They swept it off and Timmy ran the wet cloth over it. Then he hopped up into the van and they raised the bin over the tail. He shoved the heavy container to the back, and then the whole process started again.

The sun lay low in the west and evening shadows lay long before they were done. Timmy had rinsed the rags several times by then; they smelled heavily of sour dust and damp. Mom and Granny were covered with powdery gray. They had filled the van to the top, mother and son heaving the containers into stacks, and now were shoving the last few into the back of the SUV.

Granny dusted herself off and shoved the brooms and towels into the front seat of her van.

“All right, let’s get moving,” she said briskly. “It’s almost five.”

“Where’re we headed?” Mom asked.

Granny sighed.

“It’ll have to be my garage, I guess. And I just got it cleared out! But this junk isn’t staying there long, if I can help it.”

Timmy stood at the back door of Mom’s vehicle, shifting the last bin into place. He stared at it. It came to him suddenly that he was owed at least a little peep into this one, just a quick raise of the lid before they started out. He had been hoisting them all day. Mom and Granny were doing some last-minute gabbing. He reached out furtively and with a little cracking sound he popped the plastic lid up.

Notes

This is just a bit of writing I started this week. The story is loosely set about ten years in the future, when books might start becoming exotic artifacts, and characters are loosely extrapolated from my own family. LOOSELY. It has no title as yet and may indeed never come to any sort of conclusion; I'm just seeing where it might go, if anywhere. It's based on one of my constant fantasies: having a fabulous hoard dropped on me as a kid.

The odd thing is that one day after I started writing my sister Susan (on whom 'Granny' is kind of based) actually started a new clean-out project on one of her store-rooms, working on my nephew's old books and toys. Daffy Duck: "Am I ... a wizard?!"