Nobody knew exactly whether it was equestrian, military, ornamental, or had some other function. Tapered black lacquer about two feet long, brass tip bottom, but with a huge brass knob on the top and a big number "3" in relief on the crown. A jocky's crop? An officer's short staff? Odd gent's accessory? Magick wand? Who cared! It was neat and fell into the hand easily.
We'd been giddily branishing it about for a week or so, Ed hitting his people with the retail lovetaps, Sean daringly flipping it over near precarious stacks of CDs, Scott using it to help sell a VHS Charlie Chaplin box set, and Violet marching around with it like a parade baton. The stick was one of those items we would all play with for a good long while before we'd actually bother putting the thing out for sale because we enjoyed having it around.
Tim calls me to electronics in that unnecessarily imperative way he has, so I grabbed the stick for backup on my way over. His panties in a bunch over why some complainer hasn't purchased an Xbox 360 request, I point at the system, flick my wrist to bring the stick over in a whistling arc in front of his face -- then we notice the knob's flown off somewhere and bust out laughing. After five minutes of crawling about the floor to look for it, complete with jests about "my knob being lost in Mary's box", it turns up on the lowest tier of a cart, nestled in a cleaning rag right in plain sight.
"Hey, what's that grey powder on the floor next to it?" Tim asks. I pick up the brass knob and even more silt falls out of it to the floor.
Taking a closer look, an inscription on the knob's collar reads: "Clyde O. Maddox Jr, 1st Lt, O3D13005, Korea 1959-60".
"Holy cats! That's not dust! That's human cremains!" I'm simultaneously amazed & mortified, and suddenly feel completely horrible for spilling someone all over the carpet.
"Oh my God!" Greg says.
"Ewwwww!" Mary says.
"Now the store's going to have a third ghost!" Samantha says.
After getting a brush and dustpan, Tim & I proceed to get as much of Clyde as we could off the cart and floor and back into the head of his stick.
Someone had sold us a bit of dead person. It's priced for $5, so that means we picked him up for about $2.50 in trade credit or probably a cool $1 in cash.
The Grant store's still not quite sure what to do with Clyde, whether that's find his family, turn him over to a veteran's organization, or see what the military has to say, but we think we're probably not going to resell him for $5 in any case. As of this writing, he rests on my office desk, and he seems okay there for now until we figure something out.
And maybe it wasn't just us that was so fond of the stick. Maybe it was the stick who was fond of us for liking it so. Thank you for coming in, Lt Clyde. Our staff salutes you.
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| [Not our stick, but Charles Darwin's walking stick, for illustrative purposes.] |
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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.
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