The Footlocker Nobody Threw Away

I put my hand over my mouth. I made a noise, and I do not know what it was.

“A young man came in Monday,” Irv said. “About ten thirty in the morning. Twenty-three, twenty-four. He had it in a Kwik Trip bag. He wanted to know what I would give him for some old Army medals.”

“What did you give him?”

“Eighty-five dollars. I’m not proud of the number. I had no idea whose they were. Wisconsin law says I have to record the seller, so I took his license and made a copy and wrote it on the ticket.”

He took out a pink slip. He turned it so I could read the name.

Kevin Steffen.

“Mrs. Mertz, I did not put these in my case,” Irv said, and his voice cracked once, and he cleared his throat. “My father was in the Fourth Armored in the war. He came through the Bulge. He sold watches out of a suitcase when he got home, and this was his store before it was mine.”

“A Purple Heart does not come into a shop on a Monday morning in a grocery bag from a boy who does not know what it is. I put it in the safe. And then I read the paper and saw your father’s name.”

I reached into my purse for my checkbook. I said I would pay him back whatever he paid, and a good deal more.

Irv put his hand over mine. It was a small dry hand, and it was shaking.

“No,” he said. “You put that away. I would like you to leave me out of the arithmetic. I have been in this business fifty-one years, and this is the one thing I have gotten right.”

The Phone Tree

I called the Veterans of Foreign Wars post that night from the car, because my father had been a member for forty-one years and I did not know what else to do with a day like that one.

A man answered on the second ring. He had a gravel voice and a television going behind him.

“Post. Duane.”

“This is Ray Dvorak’s daughter.”

There was a long pause. “Jodi,” he said. “I was going to call you tomorrow. I am so sorry. Your dad and I sat at the end of that bar for thirty years.”

I told him all of it, from the dents in the carpet to the pawn ticket. I told it flat, because I could not afford any breath.

Duane Pietrowski was seventy-seven. He had been a Specialist Four in the Army in Vietnam, a radio man, and he had run the post for nine years. He listened without a sound until I finished.

“Give me till morning,” he said.

That was all he said. I did not know what it meant.

It meant that by seven the next morning, in a small town, the thing had already gone around. Duane called Fran Mikulski, who had run the Legion Auxiliary for twenty years and kept a phone tree older than the internet. Fran called eleven women. The women called their husbands.

Duane called Shirley at Pierce Disposal. So did Fran. So did three other men, one after the other, all polite, all with the same question. Where did Monday’s Elm Street route go, and who was driving it?

Shirley got tired of repeating herself, and she said it on the fourth call, almost without thinking.

“Well, I’ll tell you what, that’s funny. Lyle Kuehn’s been asking me about a footlocker since yesterday. He wouldn’t say why. He wanted to know who owned the building on Elm Street.”