Hey! I Found Your Keys!

Dateline: Thursday.

I'd only gotten a couple of hours of sleep for reasons too pathetic to get into. Although I was still able to rise when my alarm demanded, more time than usual in my morning routine was devoted to literally staring at the wall, thinking, "guh."

Consequently, I was unable to budget time for assembly of either my breakfast- or prandial-bagel-with-industrial caulk fat-free cream cheese. I hopped on my bike at 8:30 with only long-acting and a few units of fast-acting insulin on board, more to be delivered pending receipt of brunch.

My first class, as usual, more than made up for it. American Detective Fiction: more fun than drinking a lot of whiskey and being hit over the head. Having learned once more not to trust women or the Irish, I left on foot towards the row of fast fooderies that lines 13th as it deadends into the campus. I learned there that nothing was open, despite signs to the contrary; it's summer, so nothing that can help it opens before 11.

Not even Taco Bell.

I had a half-hour break that ended at 10:30. Clearly, this was unacceptable. After sniffing around the neighborhood and nearly settling for Starbucks, I eventually purchased a quantity of cottage cheese at the 7-11 and availed myself of a free, if poorly-designed, spoon. My stomach stopped chewing on itself and I walked back down 13th towards the business department and my next class.

I kept on the right side of the street to avoid Frog, the unwashed old guy aggressively selling self-published chapbooks of dirty jokes. He installs himself next to the student store most days and berates passersby into purchasing his books. I'd bought a couple of his books once, under the common misconception that he was homeless and needy, but since learned that he owns a house and does rather well for himself. I didn't want to deal with him, so like a bad walkthrough to a video game, cross street to avoid Frog.

As I walked on, I kept an eye on my surroundings at all times.

(I am good at looking at things, thanks to the secret government genetics project my father taking me to many garage sales during my formative years. I can look at many, many things for a long time without having to lie down.)

Between the bagel place and the bad music store, I saw something shiny among the leaves in the gutter. It was shiny in too solid a way for trash. "Cor blimey," I thought, "if that's quarters it's as good as my washing up for the week." Unfortunately, it was keys. Three keys; a house key and two for different Master padlocks. They were covered in enough trash not to look recent, so I picked them up. The keys were on a black machine-embroidered ribbon that said "Class of 2000" in white.

In my judgment, they were too far from the school for me to take them to the lost and found at the student union, especially since most people weren't attending school at the moment.

I would later come to regret my decision to take the keys with me.

I wiped them off and put them in my backpack. As soon as I got home I called the newspaper to place a found ad, where I found that unlike the Medford Mail-Tribune of my youth, the Eugene Register-Guard charges you for found ads unless you found a pet. The clerk on the phone with me thought that sounded as wrong I did, so she asked the lady next to her. She agreed; it was only free for living things.

I don't know what you do if you find a dead pet. I guess you pay $3, because that's what I did. I figured that if the person wanted their damn keys back, they could pay me $3, which is less than getting new ones cut would cost, not to mention the peace of mind of being the only one with your keys.

Being clever, I only said I'd found "3 keys on black ribbon, near UO on 13th." The person who called me would have to know what the ribbon said! It was just like being a Junior Crimestopper. I hung the keys on my floor lamp, waiting for the phone call that would make me a hero and send the keys back home.

Even though I'd called before the classified deadline, the paper didn't see fit to print the ad on Friday. There weren't any ads for lost keys, neither in the real paper nor the student paper. This was the first sign that things were not to go as planned.

Saturday, the ad was in the paper. It had interestingly variant capitalization, which is probably to be expected for phoning it in. I spent most of Saturday puttering around; darning socks, running the vacuum, defragmenting the hard drive. Around three in the afternoon, I stepped out with the trash and returned to a message on the answering machine.

Someone who didn't give her name but sounded female and semi-infantile, like a member of the class of 2000 preparing to return to the university might, said that those sounded like her keys and mumbled a number. Her voice was an interesting cross between a cowboy and a three-year-old, but I've run into that before in low-level university classes. Usually the spoiled daughter of hicks.

The telephone number was clear but for the first two digits, lost in an "umm." I guessed and confused a few people, then guessed right and got her. Her name was Tiffany.

Tiffany. After I got her machine, she called back and got me.

I asked her what was on the ribbon, and she said, "Graduation 2000." That was pretty close, so I asked her what the three keys were. She said that one was a house key, two were padlocks, so I figured they were probably her keys. We compared addresses, mine in the armpit of Eugene, hers in the nether regions of Springfield, and since I'd been meaning to run a few errands I offered to bring the keys by on my way.

After getting a Radio Shack adapter for my Pignose's transformer, I parked across from the address. It was a small house off Centennial, faded yellow with lawn ornaments. As I crossed the street, people started spilling out of it.

There was a silver-haired woman, a middle-aged woman with an unfortunate, greying mullet, a couple of feral-looking children and one woman I cannot and must not describe. She was short, about five foot even, and although she dressed like someone my age I could not guess hers. Her skin was mottled brown and cracked like leather in her halter top, her cheeks sunken and her facial bones protruding beneath it like a corpse left somewhere dry. Her eyes were dull and hairy, reflecting from dark hollows within her wrinkled face.

She also had a mullet.

I felt like Edward Derby, ambling pink plump and earnest towards the Waite homestead. I held out the keys in what must have been the dictionary definition of proffering. The skeletal she-thing reached out and took the keys, crooning over them unintelligibly.

"I'm here with the keys," I said, a bit stupidly. The oldest woman came up to Tiffany, standing on the gravel lawn, and looked at the keychain. "This is it," she said. Just then a young teenaged boy, looking normal if a bit slow, came up behind the two women and also put his hand on the keychain. They all looked at it for five very long seconds.

I said, "So it's the one?" They all said it was. The middle-aged mullet woman said it was weird because "the boy" lost it on 39th. I said, "Yeah, it was in a gutter on 13th and Kincaid." The scary mummy woman asked me if I wanted a dollar for gas. I thought about mentioning the $3 the ad cost, but then I decided to follow every instinct in my body and get the hell out of there.

I kept an eye on my mirrors but did not turn into a pillar of mullet.

I stopped at the guitar repair shop, where they told me the block in my tenor uke was inoperable, as far as installing a dingus for a strap went.

Back at the Hobart Arms, I found another message on my machine. It was Tiffany again, and she said that that wasn't their keychain after all. Theirs said "Graduation 2001."

...

I guess they hadn't finished reading the two words on the lanyard by the time I left. If I get a call about the keychain's real owner, I have to forward it to them.

Even staying off the Internet, I haven't gotten a call yet, for which I am exquisitely grateful. I'm still not sure if they were just that stupid, or if I was cold-read and they run this regularly as a scam to ransom rewards out of key owners.

Either way, now I'm out $3 and I hate everybody.