Killer Market

Herman says never mind about passive solar. He and Annie Sue and Reese will wire a house for me at cost.

My nephew Reese, who’s closer to my age than his father is, says I just ought to pull in a double-wide on the back side of that Stephenson land, well away from the rest of the family, and make sure it has a king-sized water bed.

Reese has a point.

Since Kidd’s the reason I do finally want a private place of my own, maybe I should start with the bedroom and branch out from there.

But just looking at the variety of beds along this hallway made my head spin: old-fashioned four-posters or modern versions with posts that were a foot square and eight feet tall? Mahogany Chippendale headboard or oak Moderne? Organdy ruffled canopy or tapestried tester? Or, hmm-m. What had we here?

The showroom was locked, but lights had been left on inside. Above the door hung a wide white board that was lettered in shiny black enamel: Stanberry Collection. A leafy green vine with generic purple berries twined through the letters.

Although there were several hand-painted three- and four-panel folding screens scattered around the small showroom and clustered across the rear corner, the Stanberry Collection seemed to consist mainly of headboards, headboards of a design I’d never seen before. These were like upright wooden boxes that slanted back at a slight pitch and had a wide ledge at the top. With a few pillows, you could lean back at a comfortable angle to read or watch television and the ledge would still be a few inches higher than your head so that your pillows wouldn’t bump into your books or pictures or whatever personal knick-knacks you wanted to display. The slanted headboard was hinged at the bottom and magnetic latches at the top allowed access to a concealed space that could store extra pillows or hide the family silver. The box extended around on either side of the mattress where it jutted forward to become built-in bedside tables wide enough to hold reading lamps, radios, and bedtime snacks. Some were a series of open shelves, others had a couple of drawers built in below. Some were constructed of fine-grained natural woods, but most were painted and then stenciled in sophisticated colors and patterns.

They really were quite striking and extremely practical and I was not the only one drawn to the Stanberry Collection. Another man had left his briefcase on the floor beside me and was roaming up and down the long windows, occasionally pressing his face right up against the glass and cupping his hands around his eyes as if to see past any reflected glare.

All of a sudden, I heard a muted roar from inside the showroom and saw a man, his face contorted with fury, dart out from behind those screens at the rear and rush toward the door.

Instantly, my fellow viewer jerked back from the window and hurried over to collect his briefcase, which was now behind me.

I tried to zig as he zagged and we wound up in that embarrassing tango of two strangers trying to pass each other, until he quit trying and barreled right into me. I went flying into the projecting corner of the hall with such force that my shoulder hit the sharp edge and I gasped in pain. In his haste, he stumbled over his briefcase and sprawled full length on the floor. He scrambled up almost immediately but that slight delay was just enough to let the second man fling open the door and pounce on him.

“Okay, asshole! Gimme the film,” he snarled.

The first man tried to bluster, but even though he was a couple of inches taller and several pounds heavier, the showroom proprietor wasn’t intimidated.

“Give me the film or I’ll stomp your camera.”

Defeated, the man took a tiny camera out of his pocket, snapped it open, and extracted the film.

“I see you or anybody from your company back here again, I’ll stomp your camera and smash your face. You got it?”

“Yeah, yeah,” muttered the other man as he slunk away.

Hie second man finished exposing the roll of film and turned to me with a big smile. “Hey, you okay?”

“I guess so,” I said, rubbing my bruised shoulder. “What was all that about?”

“Bastard was trying to steal our designs.”

“Jeff?”

The woman who came out to join us was about my age and height, but her almond-shaped eyes and straight black hair showed an Asian heritage even though she spoke with no discernible accent. She carried a battery- operated vacuum cleaner and gave me a friendly smile as her husband explained why he’d rushed out like that. “And if this lady hadn’t been there to slow him down, he’d have got away.”

“We’re Mai and Jeff Stanberry,” the woman said. “If you’re interested, we’ll be glad to show you our line.”

According to the clock on the wall behind her, I had enough time and soon I was happily wandering through the Stanberry Collection, opening drawers, admiring the capacious storage space in each headboard, and picturing my mother’s Made in Occupied Japan porcelain shepherdess and a few other personal treasures clustered on the top ledge of a painted headboard while the Stanberrys proudly explained that theirs was a fairly new company.

“Originally, we were just going to build screens. I’m an artist and Jeff’s an engineer. He knows about hinges and strapping and ratios of board feet to finished product, and I know decoupage and stenciling. We brought two dozen to our first show three years ago and sold out, but there’s not much profit in them.”

Their line of headboards grew out of a lack of finances to buy a ready-made one, coupled with their fondness for reading in bed.

“So Jeff started out with a slanted backrest.”

“And Mai realized that a piano hinge at the bottom would let us utilize the empty space behind for storage.”

“Then Jeff wanted a place for his cassette player—”

“I like to listen to old Nichols and May routines when I’m going to sleep.”