The man stares at Huddy through small eyes. His socketless hand curls up to his shirt and fidgets between his chest buttons, scratching or reaching inside for something, and Huddy watches and doesn’t see black skin, but a white shirt, a second shirt, underneath with a front pocket where the money’s at. A dollar comes out crumpled on the counter. The man nods, twirls his socket fingers, and Huddy watches him leave. It wasn’t as if he expected the man to flash a weapon, but he wasn’t looking for the money there either, the balled cash like a torn-out heart.
Huddy looks at his watch and decides to close early. But he can’t. Three white men walk in, scruffy, in hats, and Huddy recognizes the front man as a customer. The one in the back is wearing a coat. Heavy. The coat, not the man, who’s stick-thin. The front man approaches the loan counter, the other two separate—the coat going over to the jewelry and leaning on the case, the third sliding over to the guns. Three pawn tickets on the counter, Huddy’s problems multiplying. A shotgun, a necklace, a tool bucket. Huddy sighs. These tickets’ll have him running around the store in ten different directions. He plugs the man’s name into the computer. Tells him, “Five hundred.” The man signs the tickets and Huddy takes the money. Always take the money. He does the jewelry loan first. Steps behind him to the safe—his back turned like Mister Barnes—gets the envelope and returns to the counter, the necklace spilling out with Huddy’s fingers never touching it.
Now the gun. Takes the man’s fingerprint on the pad, gives him the federal form while Huddy does the call-in. Everything’s clean. No back child support owed, no domestic violence. Huddy logs out the loan, but now he’s stuck. He won’t give the man the gun until he goes to the back for the toolbox, and he can’t go for the toolbox with all three of them here. “Gentlemen, I’m gonna have to ask you to step outside.”
They all straighten and regard each other, the guy in the coat zipping and unzipping.
Huddy turns to the lender. “Just take me a minute to get your stuff. We’re done here.”
He nods, and the two follow him out, with Huddy trailing behind them, locking the door.
He fetches the tool bucket, all the way to the back of the storeroom, where there’s fifteen other buckets of miscellaneous tools, then up to the gun safe behind the stock-room petition wall, where all the shotguns look alike so Huddy’s checking fifty to find the one. And when he gets the gun and carries both back to the floor, he looks to the door and outside in the dimness there’s four men huddled. What’s forming, being planned? Huddy feeling like the redcoats are coming. Until the fourth one is Harlan. Tan skin. Looking even younger than when he left. Harlan sees him and waves. Harlan, three years gone in Florida, the last without a phone call answered. And Huddy knew Harlan wasn’t bringing back what he borrowed, but right now that doesn’t make him any less happy, Huddy almost running with the gun and the toolbox—when has he ever gone to this door like this?—he’ll finish the exchange out there since there’s no reason to bring the three inside. Carrying the pawns like he’s bearing gifts, like some family gathering, greeting everyone, come in, come in. Even these party crashers can join the fun. The gang’s all here.
“Look who’s arrived,” Huddy says, and he’d clap his brother but he’s holding stuff.
“Am I late or early?” Harlan says, and Huddy doesn’t know. The hour is early, but the day feels delayed, arrested. He surveys his brother. Harlan’s got more hair, the same big smile, but the rest of him’s less.
“Both.” Huddy steps out and hands the shotgun to the loaner and gives the bucket to the guy not wearing the coat. The breeze feels good. Only a small bit of one but enough to cool Huddy’s face, which is as hot and red as Harlan’s is tan.
“We were trying to figure out what those balls mean,” Harlan says. “This sign here.” And he points to the window.
“That’s your pawnshop symbol,” Huddy says. “Three brass balls. Every shop’s got that.”
“See, I was trying to tell these folks it meant you got ’em by the balls.”
Huddy smiles. And the others do, just less so.
“Hey man, can I see the gun?” Harlan asks, and before the owner can say no Harlan adds, “You got a premium gun there,” and his hand is out, his eyes signaling he’s not some stranger off the street. The owner offers it slowly, puzzled, like Harlan’s the old friend he can’t yet recognize.
Harlan steps aside, points the gun at the street. Puts his cheek against the stock, looks down the barrel. Then he wheels at Huddy. “Your money or your life,” he says, in an old-movie stickup voice, and Huddy doesn’t laugh, his back bumping the door, but Harlan does, then lowers the gun, returns it. “Yeah, this gun fits me. This gun is premium.”
“What you think?” the pawner says to Huddy. “You think my gun’s premium?”
Huddy steps forward, doesn’t want to feel jammed. “I think it’s a good, strong loan. You can bring it back anytime.”
The three men troop off to their truck. If I was on Summer, Huddy thinks, I could loan on the vehicle, too. He shakes his head, not about title loans, but all the day’s complaints and curves. He unchains the merchandise. “Grab this mower,” he says. “I got no help today.”
“Why not?”
Huddy shrugs. “Because my best employee is the computer.”
They move the mowers inside and Huddy goes back for the bike, then back in to close out. He transmits all the sales downtown. Puts the pistols and jewelry in safes, puts the loans up.
“Fishtank, huh?”
Huddy looks up from the counter but Harlan’s already off it, over to the jewelry.
“You stop in Knoxville?” Huddy says.
“No. Not really.”
He checks the coffeepot, the back door. Pumps the hand sanitizer onto his hands. The phone rings. Damn, Deanie. Maybe Christie, or Joe again, so he answers. But it’s just a man wanting to sell a pressure washer. “It’s new,” the man says.
Of course it is. “Bring it in tomorrow, we’ll see what you got,” Huddy says.
New, Huddy thinks. Tomorrow it’ll be ten years old.
Harlan singing, “Golden rings, golden ring, with one tiny little stone. Waiting there, waiting there …” He looks at Huddy. “You gonna harmonize with me or what?”
Huddy croons his face, eyes closed, lips puckered.
“Man, where’s the music? It’s too quiet. Stereos on the shelf, stacks of CDs. This should be a party place.” Harlan goes to the stationary bike, climbs on and starts pedaling.
“Come off of there,” Huddy says. He turns off the signs, the lights, sets the alarm. Steps outside with Harlan and closes the metal shutters. Harlan’s truck is double-parked, although who can see the lines out here? Huddy stares up at the darkness. “You see, these lights are supposed to be on. Joe’s supposed to be taking care of that.” He hears Harlan laugh about responsibility. “Near an hour ago they should be lit.”
Trucks rumble down Lamar, shaking the air. “You got yourself in a no-neighborhood.”
Huddy surveys the ruins. A sign down the street says, best prices in memphis, but the store’s gone. He knows the decline by heart. The office buildings going derelict. The projects torn down. Churches closing, too. The train container yard closed and the warehouses moved to Mississippi. Now Mister Barnes leaving. “Surprised the sidewalks don’t roll up.” He scans the rooftops where thieves keep ripping up the A/C units, going for the copper.
“Everybody split but you.”
I’m working on that, Huddy thinks. He looks next door at the construction, thinks of the needles sticking skin and the livid blood running all day, through veins and up tubes and into Huddy’s mouth, thick and heavy, a coppery taste. “You know what’s going there? Blood bank.”
“That’s good, right? It’ll bring a crowd.”
“The worst kind. Night of the living dead. They gonna hang out in my shop because it’s warm and they think they belong here.”
“You know what I think? I think the city ain’t never recovered from Ki
ng.”
“I ain’t talking about King. I’m talking about me.”
“You ever think what this city’d be if King got killed somewhere else?”
And Huddy knows Harlan’s saying it wrong—how some assassination should’ve been farther—and now a panhandler is creeping close. This lurker, working his way over, with a hurt dip to his legs, like every step’s gonna make him take a knee. “Here comes the birdman.”
Harlan shrugs. “That guy’s just a methhead. He looks sprung.”
“Huh?”
“Sprung. Where you done so much, you ain’t coming back.”
“Good to know.”
The man reaches them. Eyes wasted and hungry, face mauled with sores. Huddy waits for the dirty hand, this guy looking like he’s standing, hustling, and sleeping all at the same time. “Look here now, I’ve got a wife and—”
“No, you don’t,” Harlan says, and Huddy watches his brother stare him down, daring. “Here’s a buck,” he says and reaches into his pocket, thrusts it forward.
The man examines Harlan and the dollar, the bill folded up so it looks like only a piece of something real, some trick money that couldn’t open and be whole. The meth mouth—rotten, jagged teeth, the crocodile smile flashed at Huddy, and Huddy’d like to fend him with the gun, but his eyes are enough, pushing the man to go. And he does, away, but hardly making space with his injured steps, swerving like he’s following a trail of switchbacks and it’ll take him all the way to the next night to get distance.
“See, I usually say no to that,” Huddy says.
“The city ain’t got no loose money. Rich folks have it all tied up to themselves.”
“So now you’ve come back to Memphis to give some away. You’re in the right place.”
Harlan smiles. “It was your money he wanted. I was just trying to distract him.”
“Me? Don’t got none. Pawnbroker with cash in his pocket ain’t gonna live long. I already got enough of a bull’s-eye coming out of there.” Huddy checks around for more bum traffic while Harlan looks back at the store.
“I thought you might’ve changed the name to Huddy’s. Unless it’s supposed to say Joe’s.”
“Ain’t Joe’s,” Huddy says, glaring. “You don’t put names on it. You give it something neutral like Capitol, Empire. Liberty.”
“Well, you can call it Harlan’s.” He makes a sign with his hand, then stops smiling. “You tell Joe I left Florida, coming back?”
“Nope.”
“Yeah, I bet he’d say, ‘That Harlan can cut and run with the best of them.’” Huddy watches his brother’s mouth clamp shut, his body held still to kill the insult.
“Why you back?”
“Well,” Harlan says and closes his eyes, tilts his head like he’s draining water. “I guess I stayed too long to where my tail got torn off. Might see Joe, go watch him eat. Same house?”
Huddy nods. “It’s bigger.”
“Yeah, I gotta get me one of them houses that grow.”
“I was thinking you’d come over to mine tonight. See my family.” But Huddy needs a face-to-face with Joe now, not at week’s end, when Joe gets his payment. “Let’s go out there. Joe’s.” Not waiting to get robbed by Barnes’s men, not waiting for no blood bank. I ain’t a dead carcass on the side of the road for somebody to tear a piece out of. Ain’t just twitching roadkill. Sorry, Barnes, I’m leaving first. He reaches for the phone, but he’ll call Christie from the car. Tell her about Harlan, say sorry for interrupting Cody’s sleep. Forget dinner, but he’ll aim for bedtime.
He eyes the street. Any danger or demand coming off it is smaller with Harlan here, just a nagging threat or test, only spare-change, peg-legged shakedowns. Here’s a quarter, go get your bang of coke. Just needy scavengers and addicts with diseased mouths and dead legs.
“If these lights don’t go on, I’ma cut down Joe’s chandeliers.”
“Maybe you’re supposed to clap ’em on.” Which Harlan does, loud.
“Hey, quiet there.”
“What, you scared? This is your place of business. Nobody’s coming anyway.”
“Oh, yeah? They’ll come. And it ain’t gonna be the church bus.”
“What you got for me? You got that ho line down the road. Lamar and Getwell.”
“Oh, they up here, too. Twenty dollars’ll get you a big ol’ lip lock. Too bad y—”
The lights come on, pieces of darkness burning away, the bulbs buzzing like voices, as if Huddy’s walked into a room where everyone’s saying surprise.
Three
Joe has a water garden. He already had the pool, a kidney-shaped, in-ground beauty with fieldstone edging, but now the yard’s gone, replaced with pebble paths and paving stones and cantilevered decking and clusters of blooming flowers spearing the air with green. It’s some alternate universe, Huddy thinks, surveying the scenery from the patio, or like some twister had lifted the botanical garden in the city and flung it all the way out here.
“Ain’t it heaven?” Lorie says, with her hands spread wide to this new paradise, and Huddy wonders if he’s supposed to applaud plant life. “Joe saw a picture in one of my magazines, and then he went out and got all these books on how-to and drew up the design and everything.”
“When’d this happen?” Huddy says, his throat knotting.
“Summer.”
All these months Joe coming into the shop and never saying what got switched and assembled. Not after he looked for TVs—or before when he took a two-carat solitaire, which Lorie’s wearing now, or the ladies’ Rolex, also there. Or the bracelet, the earrings. Huddy looks her over, picking out Joe’s visits. Been married two years, enough time that she can’t wear all of it at once—unless she’s a pawnshop mannequin. Truth is, Huddy likes Lorie more than the other wives, but Lorie likes the jewelry more, so he should like her less. At least Huddy’s lucky with Christie; about the worst he gets is her buying all these trinkets from flea markets and thrift stores and Huddy’s always knocking them over in the hallway. Plus she gets the mall itch too much, but Huddy’ll explain he’s worked too long in a pawnshop to pay retail.
But this yard project, this refuge. A refuge from what? He’s already in the suburbs, now he’s somewhere else twice. Already gone to White America and now on a private island inside it.
“He’s setting under the pergola.” She points to the far-left corner, but the corner’s blocked by ferns and shrubbery and shade trees, Joe tucked snug behind the foliage. “Joe!”
“Yeah?” they hear back.
“You got your brothers here.”
“That Harlan, too?”
“Guess he can see us,” Harlan says, and he brings fingers to his mouth and whistles.
“What you doing here?” Joe shouts.
“Came to smoke your cigars,” Harlan calls and Joe replies, but Huddy can’t hear the words, until he realizes it’s not just the acreage but a sound drowning it. The pool, only it’s too loud for the filter. A water noise, Huddy’s sure of that, past the pool, bigger than a trickle, some rush of water going over rocks.
“What’s the water I’m hearing?” he says.
“That’s the stream waterfall,” Lorie says. “It feeds into the pond.”
“Pond?” Huddy pulls at the sides of his mouth, rubs knuckles against his teeth. Every day my heart’s in my throat and Joe’s coming home to tropics. But he can’t say Joe’s rubbing it in his face when he’s never mentioned what got scrapped and added.
Huddy sees him emerge from the corner like he’s tunneling out, a hidden figure half-lit by the hanging lights, made partial by the mesh of ferns. Joe clears the shade trees but then he’s screened again, big rocks blocking him and the high hedges and tall flowers a curtain of colors that he keeps coming through and slipping behind. They keep seeing more of him then less, here but not here, branches beetling down to take his face, then a clearing to see him whole until the spaces fill in again and the hedges get his legs so it looks like he’s floating or cut in two; th
en he’s broken up and flickering and gone, then the path straightens and unfills to show him once more whole. Harlan’s the one who’s been away, far off in Florida, but watching Joe weave through his backcountry, it’s like he’s returning, too, from the Far East of Germantown, the other side of the world—and Huddy’s the only one who’s been stuck. The path swerves again so it looks like Joe’s walking toward them but away, passing through plants and flowers like some shifting disguise.
“Can I get you anything?” Lorie says, and Huddy feels like he should be ordering mint julep. She’s dressed all in white, and he keeps expecting she’ll offer a silver platter with tiny foods and napkins.
“He still drinking Buffalo Trace?” Harlan says.
“Working on a bottle out there, I’m sure.” She turns to Huddy and he nods. “I’ll get you glasses,” she says. She twirls with a hostess flip and flourish, and Huddy hears the jewelry on her neck jangling while Harlan sniffs her perfume and eyes her ass and thighs. “Wife number three,” Harlan says, and they wait for the door to slide. “’Member what daddy used to tell us: Didn’t have to marry ’em all.” Huddy smiles, then his eyes sweep the grounds. Firefly sculptures and a metal cowboy riding a propeller plane. He stares at the spinning parts. Past the pool, the path is bordered with rows of footlights that look like spaceships and Huddy’s waiting for the little green men. When he shakes his head, it feels like a planet orbiting his body. “Life on Mars,” he says.
“Ain’t that.”
He looks back at the spectral lights. “Well, it’s some kind of afterlife out here.”
“Ain’t that either.”
“Well, what is it then, Harlan? ’Cause it looks kind of unusual to me.”
“It’s a war movie, man,” he says. Huddy watches Harlan sniff loud. “The generals setting under their tent, drinking their tea, while the battle’s going to hell.”
He looks at Harlan. Pictures white tablecloths and sprinkled sugar stirring into liquid. But then, he thinks: I’m the foot soldier, Harlan, dodging cannon fire. You’re just the deserter.
Joe climbs the bridge like some carrying wave, held aloft, then dips down as if descending from air, out of the half-shadows and into the glow coming off the water, in full view, nearing them now, poolside between the webbed chairs and the water’s edge and close enough for Huddy to see Joe’s face, eyes beaming, lit with the surprise—and relief, maybe—of Harlan’s return. “Harlan, Harlan …” The second time louder, some bit of exhilaration slipping out.
Bluff City Pawn Page 3