The Smell (fiction)

The smell stopped him on the busy downtown sidewalk. A man who’d been following too close bumped into him, and muttering something unclear and unkind, brusquely pushed past. The steady flow of pedestrians parted around him, a sweaty flood around a sudden obstruction.

It was a sweet smell, medicinal, somehow reassuring. Something from long ago, a time when things were simple, when the world was black and white, and everything was clear. Love, hate. Right, wrong.

He turned and sniffed. A few steps back the way he had come was an old hardware store. The battered outer door was open, the smell was stronger. A screen door kept the flies at bay, a tin sign displayed an impish yellow-haired boy, wearing a soda bottle cap and waving customers in:

Switch to Squirt!
Never an Afterthirst!

OPEN
Hours: 7:00 - 6:00

Drink Squirt!

He stepped in. It was cool, dark, and musty. The old wood floor was worn, nail heads crowned tiny wooden peaks, like little rows of volcanoes in an ocean of rippling grey wood, marking the beams that had supported thousands of customers, salesmen, and loiterers for nearly a century.

The walls were covered with tools and farm implements. The smell was stronger. It had something to do with animals, from a time when he was little.

The roof was high and dark, hidden beyond dusty trusses, past the glare of tin-hooded lamps that shone through ancient webs, garden hoses, long pieces of molding, scythes, railroad lanterns, and scores of other half-remembered things.

“Can I help ya son?”

“Oh. Uh, yeah. I mean, I don’t know. I’m just looking.”

Why was he in here? He had a job to get to. He was an important man. An editor for the metro section of the largest newspaper in the region. And here he stood, in some ancient store following his nose when he should be worrying about inept employees, column space to fill, and ever-present deadlines.

Embarrassed, he tried to look like he had a purpose for being here. He strode toward the back of the store so he wouldn’t feel the pressure of the eyes of the old man. He squeezed past a trash can restraining the leaning rakes grasping at his expensive suit, past bins of nails, nuts, bolts, hinges, and found himself staring at shelves in the back of the store.

There was a pail on a lower shelf, a regular tin pail, except it had a nipple like a cow’s udder at its base, and the smell was suddenly strong. On the farm of his early childhood his father had a cow, and when it calved they milked her and the calf was fed from a pail like this one. Dad had put something in the pail, some mixture of dehydrated milk with vitamins and medicines to help the calf survive. This smell drifted from a sack on a shelf above the pail.

“This is silly,” he muttered.

Still, he could not leave yet.

His father had been a good man. At least it seemed he was. He could not really remember. Dad had left when he was just eight. He had never known why. There was a silence around the event. The adults would stop talking when he came into the room, and when his questions had come close to asking where his father was, the talk had quickly drifted somewhere else.

The stack of bags rose to just above his eyes, and he reached to stand the top one up so he could read the label. It was only a twenty-five pound sack, but he found it surprisingly hard to lift with one hand. He put his immaculate leather briefcase carefully down.

His father had handled such things easily. He had held such bags with one hand while the other had torn the corners. At the time it was part of what adults did, giants did.

He now realized his father had been a young man, probably half the age of this portly and greying figure trying to mimic the careless ease of handling such things. Perhaps his age was showing in more than the paunchy belly that was gradually descending toward his belt. He had been too long behind a desk.

With both hands he sat the bag up. An Indian maid seductively offered a box of butter, and a green, blue, and yellow border framed a picture of a calf:

Land O Lakes
Maxicare
Instaflake

Milk and Glymaxene
Calf Milk Replacer

25 Pounds

The cloying aroma filled his nostrils. He set the bag back down and looked at the fine white dust on his hands. He worried for a moment about getting his suit dirty.

There was a time when this stuff seemed pure magic, clean, mysterious. This was the miracle-working concoction his father used to turn a scrawny, moaning calf into a healthy animal frolicing in the field.

He picked up his briefcase and turned to go, but the smell held him, the way his father had held him a long time ago. The gentle pressure of the scent reassured him, told him he belonged. Suddenly it didn’t matter if his suit got dusty.

Impulsively he picked up the sack with his left hand, which was after all just as strong as his father’s had been, and swung the dusty sack atop his shoulder. He grabbed the pail, which banged against his briefcase, scratching the leather, and strode to the old man at the counter.

“Didja find everthin’ ya wanted?” The grey eyes twinkled in the wrinkled face, not at the incongruity of purchase and customer, but in a friendly private way filled with understanding.

“Yeah, this is it.” He had no idea why he was doing this.

“The calf milk is $28.99, and the nursing pail is $9.49. Your total is $38.48.”

He pulled out his wallet and fished out a credit card, not caring how he would justify this on his expense account.

Click, CLACK. The old man ran the card through an old fashioned credit card imprinter, filled out the information, and slid it across the plate glass counter top for his signature, not asking for ID.

The businessman signed it, hefted the sack back up to his shoulder, and gripped the pail and briefcase with the other hand.

He sauntered through the door like a young man. Rejoining the throng on the sidewalk he turned left toward his office.