The Footlocker Nobody Threw Away

The Face of the Pile

Pierce Disposal opened at seven on Tuesday morning. I was on the phone at six fifty-eight.

The dispatcher was named Shirley, a smoker’s voice, fast and tired. She pulled up Monday’s Elm Street route and put me on hold with a country station, and she came back with news that was the worst news I could have had.

“Honey, everything from Monday’s morning route tipped at the county landfill by ten. They push it and compact it by noon. I’m sorry. I’d tell you different if I could.”

“Can I come look?”

“You can come to the gate.”

We went anyway. Ken took the day without asking, and we drove out County Road K behind a gravel truck, and we came over the last rise, and I saw the landfill.

The ground goes gray and chalky, and the sky above it fills with gulls, hundreds of them, turning slowly like paper in a draft.

A man in a hard hat met us at the scale house. His tag said Dennis. He was polite and he did not budge.

“I’d let you walk it if I could, ma’am. I can’t. The working face is a machine yard. We had a man killed in two thousand eleven.”

I stood at the fence with my hands through the wire. Ken stood behind me with his hand on my back, and neither of us said anything for a long time.

Dennis walked us back to the truck. “I’m real sorry about your dad,” he said. “What did he do in the service?”

“Infantry. Vietnam.”

Dennis took off his hard hat and held it against his chest all the way to the road.

The Man in Wausau

I will remember the phone call on Tuesday afternoon for the rest of my life.

I was in the funeral home office signing for the casket, a plain oak one my father would have said was too much money. My phone buzzed on the desk. It was a Wausau number I did not know.

“Is this Jodi Mertz?” A man’s voice, careful, a little hoarse. “From Eau Claire? The daughter of Raymond Dvorak?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Irv Feldman. I own Feldman Loan and Jewelry on Third Street. I read your father’s obituary in the Daily Herald this morning with my coffee.”

“Ma’am, I think I have something of your father’s,” he said. “It’s in my safe. I would like to know whether you want me to describe it, or whether you would rather just come and see.”

I drove to Wausau with Ken in forty minutes. I do not know how.

Feldman Loan and Jewelry was a narrow store with bars on the windows and a bell on the door. A man stood behind the glass counter, seventy-five maybe, with white hair combed straight back and half-glasses on a cord.

“Mrs. Mertz.” He did not say anything else until we sat down in his back office, on two folding chairs. Then he put a cigar box on the desk.

It was a Dutch Masters box, and I knew it. It had been in the third drawer down in my mother’s kitchen for as long as I could remember. My father kept his buttons in it, and a flashlight battery, and a small key to something.

Irv opened it with both thumbs.

Inside, on a bed of yellowed cotton, was a Purple Heart in its blue and purple ribbon, and a Bronze Star beside it, and a typed citation folded in thirds with my father’s name at the top.