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The Goodwill Murders

Dennis Delrow

    You came about ten minutes after the hour and joined three others waiting. The store should have opened. One, two, three more arrived. It was unusual; they all knew it. The manager always opened early, if not right at ten. A man wearing a cowboy hat waving a can of foam spilling Adler Brau walked over from the Diamond Bar across the street.
    “What the fuck is this? Not waiting for an answer, turned, said “Shit.” and walked back to the bar.
    Four. Five. You were six. People complained, speculated.
    “It should have opened a half hour ago.” Maybe the manager had an accident,” someone suggested.
    “Where’s the other employees?” someone else asked.
    “You said, “This shit never happens at the nice, rich stores. Yesterday, I worked at the car wash and a customer told me he was getting his ride cleaned up and polished just to go to the Apple store and buy a new computer. Imagine.” People nearby looked at you with a question mark.
    Seven, eight, people, who had sat and waited in their cars joined the growing crowd including those from the too, too few ‘Restricted Handicap Parking Only’ spots that were quickly grabbed. Ms. Wrigley in her old Spinner wheel chair, often as disabled as her, shot through the parking lot at a high speed, a gardening service pickup suddenly backed up and pushed a screaming Wrigley and chair into the path and under the chaise of a slow moving Ford van from drug rehab. You ran out; tried to be of assistance calling 911 with your new phone. The van passengers tried to simultaneously free and revive MS Wrigley whose raised and askew left chair wheel rapidly spun through several long minutes mirroring her desperate scream. A bright morning sun illuminated blood flowing in the cracks of the aging asphalt parking lot, soon overflowing into two dark pools.
    Still, more came and stood, waiting. A man with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice yelled something out his window driving slowly by in a 1951 Dodge Delivery Van, a bread truck splashed in bright neon red, blue, orange and yellow swirls written over in black with obscure, juxtaposed biblical quotes in Arabic.
    You yelled back at him, “Get out of here!” Then, speaking to the crowd, but really just the people around you, “They don’t understand this is the only retail store in miles. Ain’t no fuckin’ Oscar de la Rent or Giorgio Armani around here.” You said with a rising voice and again earning quizzical looks.
    You were right of course (except it’s ‘de la Renta’), but those are miles away and it’s hard to imagine their customers shopping here, although they could never beat Goodwill’s biweekly 50% off sale. Many of the same people come everyday, buy something cheap just to feel the surge of power inherent in the act of consumerism, feel juiced, alive. Goodwill is a barometer of the economy, a reflection of society. Only at Goodwill can real people buy broken-in, wrinkle-free, Armani shirts for a dollar or less and have a direct, intimate experience in America’s redistribution wealth. People kept coming. People who had nothing else to do but stand around and wait for a revolution, or a second coming. Soon, there were fifteen, maybe twenty and then the crowd stopped growing.
    “We could just break down the door. Toss a brick through the window. Right?” The cowboy hat shouted. He had returned to Goodwill from the bar with a cold, fresh one in hand and another in his bulging, back, blue-jean pocket. He gestured to throw his hand held can at the big red spot in the window that said “Please Donate” in white letters. You knocked it out of his hand instinctively like a martial arts expert. He looked confused as if he had simply dropped it. And again, he walked back to the bar.
    Goodwill Industries does not sell food, water, booze, drugs, or any essentials of life. But people, Goodwill customers, have a habitual need to shop; pushed by a primeval urge, their evolutionary psychology from the long ago days of hunting and gathering on the Savanna. Or, are they just America’s well-trained, capitalist dogs unable to find contentment and meaning without making a self-empowering purchase?
    Several wheel chairs began chanting, “Open. Open. Open. Open. Open.”
    “Jessie, your, perpetually laughing black neighbor came walking by with his white, standard sized poodle holding hands with and his albino girlfriend, a refugee from Tanzania, where she had been targeted by witchdoctors wanting her body parts. You approached them and gave or loaned him a twenty.
    Another bar patron wearing an orange Hawaiian shirt and a Cubs baseball cap on backwards crossed the street with a bottle of Old Dominion. He loudly told the crowd that the bartender called the Goodwill Regional Office and someone would soon come and unlock the door. The crowd cheered and the man threw his drink smashing the glass against the building causing one of the cops investigating MS Wrigley’s accident to confront him. It was then that a very short man in a grey suit with a handful of keys materialized out of the multitude and unlocked the door.
    People, everyone but you, screamed and trampled over the key man and pushed themselves into the dimly lit store. You trailed the crowd, found the main light switch and illuminated the store for everyone. Women went to the many clothing racks in the center of the room, men to the back for hardware, used and beaten stereo equipment and mysterious multimedia constructs with attached cord. You wandered the store not looking at anything in particular, but everything in general, like you owned it. A woman screamed. Others hesitated while calculating its source. You immediately ran to the blue, painted plywood dressing rooms on the west side of the room behind the used books and bedding. There, holding a door to one of the three dressing rooms open was the widow Rankin looking at her husband, whom she had not seen since the day before. He was stone still. His white eyes bulged. A thick coat of dark red and black blood covered from the neck with dark blood that ran across the wood floor where rats and roaches ran in every direction. You froze. You spaced out. Others appeared and moved past you to aid Mrs. Rankin. Police from the accident outside came quickly and took charge calling for reinforcements and ambulances as the remains of two employees were found in a similar condition in the other two dressing rooms. You found your way to the used furniture and sat in an old fashioned, upholstered chair staring at nothing. The same chair you sat in the night before, after work and shopping, after hiding inside as the store closed, doors locked, after selecting and testing a kitchen utensil for a good edge, after emptying the cash register, before going to the Apple store.

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