Bluff City Pawn

by Stephen Schottenfeld

  “Gnomes.” Huddy’s whole day with ATF, in his records and all up under his clothes, and now it’s ending with a nickel-and-dime story about gnomes. Tried paying in for guns, and now let’s chip in for gnomes and eke out a profit. Today, Huddy just can’t hear a small-time scheme.

  “Says she got like twenty of ’em and they’re worth fifty apiece, but she’ll sell all twenty for a hundred, and she’s telling me about the bank and how dumb her husband’s been. All this money, but her husband’s just been pyramiding. She don’t say it, but it’s how. Now, she don’t want nothing to do with a pawnshop, but I figure if I buy this stuff, funnel it to you, and you sell it—”

  “Gnomes?” He looks at Joe, propped up on the wall.

  “It’s a hell of a lot more than that. She’s just starting there. It’s name-your-price. And she ain’t the only one who’s down to the nub.”

  “Fine, go crumb this lady.” Huddy rubs his fingertips. “Right now, the retail market ain’t too strong on gnomes.”

  “Will you stop saying gnomes?”

  “Why not? Sounds like these are premium gnomes!”

  “Just stop.”

  “Are they twenty different gnomes, or they all the same kind, or maybe somewheres in the middle—like, five sugarplum fairies and five Princess Whatevers? She got a Santa Claus fairy? She got Father Time? She got any bells on the feet? And have you seen these items? ’Cause condition would be important. If she’s kept them in mint, that’s one thing. Maybe she preserved them in plastic? But, the way you describing, she probably been sleeping with all twenty. And a bunch of ’em been falling on the floor, and a few of ’em been chew toys for the poodles. I’m asking cause, moneywise, I’m at zero.”

  “And I’m at minus zero.”

  The bad tallies, the claim and counterclaim, echo in the air. The room is smaller with nothing in it, but their discussion is bigger for the same reason. Huddy feels double sensations, closeness and distancing, far apart at opposite ends but identical in their positions. “Why are we talking trinkets?” he says. “Why are we talking cost?” Everything is out of the room because everything is inside them, all personal effects emptied so he and Joe can focus on one essential fact. Huddy’s eyes narrow. The room is only hard edges. “I’m at nothing. You’re at negative. We both out of pocket. Unless there’s some number I ain’t crunching. Far as I’m concerned, anything we buy, we overbuying. Unless we buying it free. Unless we use play money.”

  “I ain’t a criminal,” Joe says.

  “Ain’t one either.”

  They stare deadlocked.

  “I don’t care what you are,” Huddy says. “I’m talking against payments. You best stop asking me to open my shop to thieves. You’re the one trying to buy time. I’m just saying—maybe you should steal it.”

  “I’m not a criminal.” Joe laces his fingers and Huddy studies his interlocking hands.

  “That’s what I tried telling ATF—about me.” Huddy gestures at the surroundings as if the contents were lifted, the entire house burglarized. “Maybe for just a little while, we are.” He can’t decide if he’s in a crime scene or a hideout, a place where things have been taken from or later taken to. The police, ATF, and now his brother all suspect him of lawbreaking. Okay, the little daily maneuvers: Someone brings you a fifty-dollar Sears gift card and you know it’s stolen and you buy it for twenty and sell it for thirty-five, and they bring you another card the next day, and you take it or don’t, but either way you stop. And when a young man brings in twenty memorial coins, with the impression of his grandpa on the front of the coin, do you ask, Did you steal this from the old man’s funeral or from your grandma’s safe? Or do you listen to the bogus inheritance story and ask how much? And when this family thief returns with another stack of death benefits, do you cut him off then? But Huddy’s never been so bad as to buy fifteen engagement rings from some fella saying they’re all mama’s engagement rings, when mama ain’t been engaged but once. And Huddy never was the broker who had thieves working for him, who paid addicts for stolen goods with drugs he kept in back. Or like another broker, who intentionally scrambled the serial numbers when he’d fax the merchandise list downtown. Huddy’s crimes have always been about omission, just little cases of daytime blindness. But why not, for a quick fix, be the lowlife people think he is? Especially if he gets to tell his brother, as they sit in one of his unsellable houses, that he’s one, too.

  No table to gather around but Huddy feels like they’re hunched together in a corner booth, and without the table, Huddy can see all of Joe, no body part hidden underneath. He suddenly realizes how visible they are from the street, but no one’s looking in. They’re in a subdivision that feels like a clearing, on a site without a street address, in a house that’s not a home. It’s hard to feel like their words have any substance, that their crimes could occur in any real jurisdiction. Hard to feel like yourself, much less like anyone, in an empty location. Nothing hanging on the walls. No clock with ticking hands, as if any time—five minutes or all night or into a second day and onto next week and passing through a different year—is this same hour. No one else is in the room to say, “Stop.”

  “Harlan ever tell you what he done in Florida?” Joe says, which to Huddy sounds like another world, as far off as the future undetectable crimes he just imagined. He shakes his head, but he already knows why Harlan’s been named. “Shed burglar.”

  “When’d he say that?” Huddy says. He’s hearing about Harlan’s past exploits to learn how best to exploit him, to put Harlan’s illegal actions into practice. Joe wouldn’t mention Harlan unless he’d already made that decision.

  “Today.”

  “Piss-ant burglar.” Huddy’s pictured Harlan out in the woods, and now he’s a sneak thief, busting doors, smashing glass, slicing through screens. “Get caught?”

  “Petty-theft conviction. Misdemeanor.”

  “That’s why he left Florida?”

  “Sort of. Did time, got out. Stopped doing sheds. Got to stealing credit cards, taking ’em to a gas station, say, ‘I’ll fill up your car, you give me twenty bucks.’ He’d do it three, four times, go to another station. I guess he got to feeling awful. Came back to Memphis.”

  “Lassie comes home.”

  “Says he was a good thief before he got busted.”

  “You believe that?”

  Joe shrugs.

  “He tell you that, or you ask him?”

  Joe doesn’t respond, his eyes shifting away, and Huddy’ll count the answer as both, hearing one of Harlan’s brags secondhand from Joe. Huddy adds up the grains of truth. Or maybe Joe, in paying the bail, is entitled to a full confession, and now Huddy will confess to what else is true, just a small amount, almost weightless.

  “Gold,” Huddy says. “No electronics, nothing bulky. An ounce of gold, sits on your finger. You can turn it quick. Always have a buyer, and the buyer is the fence. No paperwork, no inventory, no serial numbers. Not after you hit it with a hammer. Engravings come off with a torch. Mash up all the gold chains and rings. There’s your quick untraceable cash. Start bringing gold.”

  Joe stays silent, and Huddy talks to mean the same wordless thing.“I’m already caught today. Got my hands full with ATF. I ain’t going near a crime, and the crime ain’t going near the shop. I’ll move it for you, but I ain’t getting tied. I’ll sell, but not steal. It’s time for you to get brave. You a big keyholder, Joe. I already seen you with mine. Start using some others. You probably got master keys to all of them houses you built. And the alarm systems, I bet you got a bypass code. Looks like you just found a way out. Or in.”

  Joe shakes his hand, nullifying, impossible. “You’re wrong, both ways. Sure I’ve got bypass codes. Except the alarm company would know the numbers I pressed to disarm the system. As for keys, the master gets disabled on first use. The doorknob re-keys it.”

  “Looks like we’re stuck at zero. Or minus.”

  Their eyes meet. Neither brother can give ground because bo
th are backed against a wall. Huddy looks around. It’s the first vacant house he’s been in where a person hadn’t left to make it empty. The first house he’s been in that’s all gone just because it’s new. “The last house we were in with nothing, it was mama’s, when we cleared it together.”

  “So what?” Joe squints his eyes as if he can’t hear what Huddy’s saying, then shakes his head as if it were said too loud. “Jesus, who cares?” he says, as if Huddy’d said it a hundred times.

  Huddy laughs at his exasperation, a joke about Joe’s mind and the direction it won’t work. Can’t do family history, can’t do the past. No old days, no then. No remembering, even if it’s recent. But looking at Joe, in his grubby jeans, Huddy can see him smaller at fifteen, like he was wearing an old disguise that he thinks no one will identify because he’s grown into someone else. Teenage Joe and his dead mother—it’s like Huddy’s returned to a new place, not a complete reunion, not seeing both parents and not every sibling but enough of a homecoming, the rooms cleared like furniture pushed back for the evening dance. But Joe doesn’t care about remembrance, so neither will Huddy. Joe was there, Joe wasn’t there, same difference.

  “Eight hundred square feet,” Joe says. “Our home. That was the size of it. That metal roof. It was so loud when it rained, it sounded like trains going over us.”

  “I remember that,” Huddy says. “Like airplanes.”

  “We were gonna be put out on the street,” Joe says, and Huddy remembers that, too, their father splitting, and they borrowed some money from their aunt, but mostly it was Joe keeping them inside. There was a house up the street that had been demolished and Joe picked through the ruins to salvage bricks for resale, took a hatchet to chip off the mortar. Another time, he collected newspapers by the pound to bring down to the paper plant. All the ways that Joe cleared money.

  “I remember,” Joe says, “a renovation. Here, in Germantown. This was when I was starting out. I was moving up. I hadn’t done houses yet, but I was close. And the owner comes over, he was a real society type, and we got to talking, and he asked me, ‘And where do you hail from?’ Just like that. Hail from. I thought I’d spiraled off into outer space.” He shakes his head, both at the story and the reminiscing. “The thing about Germantown,” Joe whispers, but in this room even a low voice is raised. “Most everyone got security systems. But half of them feel secure enough not to turn them on. They got the alarm sign in the yard, but that’s it. This house is protected by a lawn sign. And the old-timers, they still unlock their doors. They think it’s 1950.”

  “Like the widow Yewell.”

  “Somebody like her. But not her.” He brings a hand to his head, scratches his hair, his hand circling like he was spinning his mind, until he stops and says, “Harlan,” and Huddy thinks he knows what he means. “He owes me for the bail. And I’m gonna hook him in with a big lawyer, who’s in tight with the DA. He’ll cut his time.”

  “You’ll have him commit crimes to get a lighter sentence?”

  “Backwards, huh? ’Cept forwards is going broke. Don’t tell me what’s fair. I ain’t hearing from a loan shark about fairness. If I did what you did, it would tear me up. I’m saying, Harlan, he’ll be on board with this.”

  Harlan worked for Huddy, and now he’s been passed on to do contract work for Joe. Huddy forgave Harlan’s debt, but Joe will make sure he redeems the bail. Why does Joe get to set Harlan’s amends? Where is Harlan? Here, nearby? Kept upstairs in a bedless room? Huddy listens for footsteps, a creak of a door half-opening. He looks to the window for a face to show, turns to the doorway for Harlan to cross the threshold. Maybe he’s skulking in the street, or hiding behind the roundabout rock.

  “And this big lawyer, this plea deal, Harlan gets less by telling more?”

  “Are you crazy? And lose the guns?”

  But the guns are almost lost. Sitting level with Joe, and Huddy thought it was a clear conspiracy between the two of them against Harlan, thought Harlan was theirs, and now it’s Joe and the lawyer and Harlan colluding against him. Huddy is in the room, but he’s the odd man out. Firstborn and last-born, with Huddy in the excluded middle. “I think I’ma stick with my lawyer.”

  “I’m not gonna play him against you, ’cause I’m in with you.”

  “How do I know you’re bringing me all the gold?”

  “How do I know you’re bringing back all the cash?”

  He eyes Joe, who eyes him back with mutual suspicion. “I guess everyone’s siding with everyone.” Mirror images, with Joe trying to make money on both sides. “As long as we don’t trust each other equally, we’re okay.”

  A shaky deal with no agreement, not even a hands-free nod. Joe’s arms stay folded and he adds to what wasn’t finalized, to what he might not deliver. “I can’t do halves on this. It’s gonna have to be two-thirds, one-third. ’Cause my risk is double.”

  “Your risk? What role you playing? Maybe you ought split your thirds with who’s risking. Fifty-fifty. This money ought be shared three ways.”

  “Okay,” Joe says, but Huddy knows how he’ll divide the difference, a high-low split with his third worth more. But Huddy won’t negotiate percentages for an absent party, and he won’t demand evens. “He said the way he did sheds was fast. Four or five in a night. Full speed, then wait for things to quiet down. Full speed again.”

  His voice switches, and Huddy realizes Joe wasn’t just repeating Harlan’s words but attempting an impersonation. “Stash it here,” Huddy says. “No one’s worried about you.”

  “I’m worried about me,” Joe says, back to his own voice. He looks around to comprehend how his open house can become a hiding place. He stretches his face, as if that mask that Huddy imagined fit on too tight. He taps his jaw. His cheeks are red, his eyes bulging as if sitting by fire, too close to burning air.

  “I’m worried about you, Joe. You worried about Harlan?”

  “Harlan’s not worried about Harlan.” Joe looks off, disowning. “Yeah, I’m worried.” But not for Harlan’s punishment but his experience, about whether he’s competent enough to be a professional thief. “You?”

  “I think you better slap a GPS on him. Brand it on his butt.”

  Joe tugs his arm to check his watch, frowning at the time, but Huddy knows it’s not impatience but fear. Joe’s not delayed today, because today is over, tomorrow is beginning, and he’s already running ahead breakneck.

  “Harlan,” Joe says again, and for once tonight, the meaning can’t be apprehended. The name could be used as assurance or warning or grievance. Huddy’s only sure of what it’s long stopped being—a shared joke. Joe glances overhead, and Huddy can’t perceive that action either, if he’s confirming that Harlan’s up on the second floor, or if he’s praying to a higher power—for forgiveness or assistance or answers—or if he’s scared of all that could fall upon him, or if he’s saying, Look at me, Huddy, hanging on air.

  “Harlan,” Huddy says back, his eyes not going vertical but straight ahead at Joe, as if Harlan were right there, in between. Huddy sees through him and then beyond to Joe, who appears to look back but only gazes inward, his body freezing.

  “No,” Joe says, like he’d just flinched awake from a nightmare, and then he shuts his eyes as if he were entering another one, some picture of Harlan tripping alarms, being chased. Or maybe it’s his own arrest, Huddy can’t say. Joe draws his lips together, his eyes open and squinting to study what’s dreamless before him, which is just as confused, and he glances at Huddy for understanding, but Huddy can’t explain it—can’t find any reason in a voided room—how his life ended up here.

  “You want to know how to make a million?” Joe asks.

  “How’s that?” Huddy says.

  “Start with ten.” Joe covers his neck, but Huddy still sees him swallow. “Let’s get this over,” Joe snaps, and his face seems to Huddy both sad and ferocious. Huddy hears the bad rhythm, the heavy, overworked sound, of Joe breathless again.

  And with the conversa
tion settled and with no interference—nothing in the way on the walls and every wall the same nothing, no centerpiece on the floor as if the entire floor, including the two people at the margins, were in the center—Huddy doesn’t need to close his eyes to any clutter. He can envision his entire inventory, his mind running through his stockpile to furnish a useful accessory, like a police radio, left by a cop with a drug problem, who pawned it, got fired and never reclaimed the device.

  “You’re gonna need a scanner,” Huddy says, and they both sit still and don’t talk at all, as if they were already listening but not yet hearing outside voices.

  Fourteen

  But before any gold comes in, the guns come out. A car appears, a man exits, enters Huddy’s store. He wears a suit, a badge, a gun, and he identifies himself: Shelby County Criminal Investigator. He asks if he’s Huddy Marr, and Huddy wonders about the cost of saying no. For an instant, he thinks he might get off lighter, that his lawyer knocked the charges down, the U.S. Attorney’s office dropping it into the county’s lap. Federal got bigger fish, and Huddy wants to be small, and maybe this has all been a scare.

  “Mister Marr,” the man says, “the state is prepared to send to the grand jury a statement with the following charges.” He places a large sheet of paper on the counter, but Huddy is unsure if he’s supposed to read the paper or keep hearing the man, so he listens to the litany. “Two counts of unlawful possession of a prohibited weapon. One count, false statement to law enforcement. One count, tampering with or falsifying official documents and evidence.”

  Which means the charges haven’t been lowered, the federal laws mirror the state, the county DA treating him like he’s big enough to reduce him to nothing.