Bluff City Pawn

by Stephen Schottenfeld

  “Four charges. If you’re convicted of all four counts, you’re looking at a minimum of twelve years. We’re offering you an opportunity to play right, but you’ll catch these charges if you don’t play. We will refuse to prosecute on the condition that you give up all your guns and surrender your license. And you agree to contact Memphis Burglary Bureau if an individual is looking to drop off stolen merchandise.”

  Huddy avoids the man. If he never looks up again, if he only looks down at the paper but never touches it, maybe the charges can never touch him.

  “That’s the offer. Today. Right now.”

  Huddy shakes his head. The man can stay, but the paper doesn’t belong here.

  “You won’t cooperate?”

  No, the man can’t be here either. “I don’t know who you think I am.”

  The man points to the paper for his list of answers. There is nothing more to understand.

  “I’m not some undertrader. These gun charges—”

  “Sir, I’m only gonna run it down for you one more time. We’re done talking.” He repeats the charges, fast and emphatic, as if they’ve been memorized for years. “And you agree to apprise us of other criminal activity. Do you accept the terms?”

  What about if Huddy knew of a plan in the works? Would he get his guns back? Keep them? But he can’t get credit for what he’s agreeing to do.

  “No jail?” Huddy asks.

  “As long as you play ball.”

  He waits for something—a thought, a call, a signal. He is silent a long time. The wall clock reads 9:22 or 23, an in-between number, misaligned, as if this moment were happening too early or even more late. If this paper is on Huddy’s counter, why isn’t it for sale? His mind narrows. Then he nods.

  “I’ll need you to open up your gun safes,” the man says, and he gets on his phone and Huddy sits and buries his face and before long two more vehicles appear, one identical to the investigator’s sedan, the other a white panel truck with gold lettering. The truck swings around and backs in next to the parked sedan, the other sedan parks on the other side, boxing the truck in between. Four men step out of the two vehicles and slide open the truck and remove Anvil cases and carry them into the shop. The investigator meets them inside the door and they huddle together and then the men walk to the back room and grab the guns and tie-wrap the cylinders, the guns go in a box, the box goes in the Anvil case, a receipt is attached to the case with the serial number of each weapon inside. Two men grab handles and carry a case to the investigator, who stands near the counter writing out the serial numbers. Huddy looks away, but the monitor shows the same image, as if the seizure is happening twice at once, one real and one recorded—but it should be happening a million real times. He’d switch off the recording, erase the footage, if it would help him forget this wrong moment, but it’s already his worst memory. The cases go out to the truck, the gate slides up and then down, the men return to the store with more cases and disappear into the back and emerge again. Huddy wants to leave. He doesn’t want to see this awful procedure. The men convey the cases, pause before the investigator for the writing, and walk again. The investigator provides Huddy with a copy of the manifest, three eleven-by-seventeen pages, all the guns listed, and Huddy can’t take his eyes off the pink pages. Confiscated by Shelby County District Attorney’s Office, Criminal Investigative Division, File Number—ten digits, far bigger than the profit Huddy would have made. You want to know how to make a million? Did he hear this line or think it himself or say it aloud? The investigator turns his back and leaves. Huddy stares at the gun list and wishes he were seeing these numbers for the first time, that he was back in the hunt room with the widow, starting the acquisition, his initial sight of those fine makes and numberings. He has a sick thought that these agents are working for her, that they’ve confiscated the guns to return them to her—perhaps the son has arranged it—to rest them back on the racks in Yewell’s gun room, which sits inside the treasure house, as if Huddy’s bid and purchase weren’t nothing but a breakin. When he closes his eyes, he sees the investigator handing the widow the original white copy of the manifest. He sees Kipp spinning the wheel. He opens his eyes and watches three cars drive off in a line, and it’s surprising that they turn left, away from Germantown, because he’d already completed the neat circle in his mind. It’s the quietest robbery ever, no smashed glass, no taunts, no roughing up. Nothing ransacked, everything standing. Never once rubbed his face in it. He’s never been so politely bullied.

  He stares at the duplicate pages and calls Joe. “The guns are gone,” Huddy says, and he’s phoned because he doesn’t want to hear more face to face. “I’m out,” and the silence means Joe knows it’s more than the guns. No scanner, no selling.

  “Me, too,” Joe says, but Huddy doesn’t believe him, he hears it being said to a third person who’s not listening in.

  “Where’s Harlan?”

  “You lost the guns. Got no right to find anyone.” The phone shuts off.

  Driving home, he sees a dead animal on the road, but on closer inspection the carcass is nothing but a wet, mashed-up cardboard box. He tells Christie that it’s done, that he’s not going to jail, and when she asks about the guns, he turns away from the center of the bed and repeats to the wall that he’s not going to jail. He doesn’t mean to snub, but he just wants to be shut of the day. Except, he keeps thinking of the widow—as if each eye-blink trips a silent alarm in his head. He can’t help reconnecting the confiscation to her. She graciously thanks the men for the recovery, the pages a valued want list, while Kipp excuses himself to recount the guns.

  It’s quiet and Huddy keeps to the bed edge. He can feel Christie deciding what to do with his ignoring. And then the mattress jostles as she shoves her weight out, her feet down on the floor and away. He pushes out, shuffles along the narrow aisle between the bed and the wall, through the hallway and follows her into the living room, where she’s at the front door, and he thinks she’s turning the key to go outside—he’s about to say, “Wait”—but she’s just double-checking the deadbolt. He hears metal click against metal. The sound is thick and solid. Not a safety lock, but it still feels pickproof and secure.

  “I’m glad you ain’t going to jail, Huddy,” she says, and she falls back on the couch. He stands before her, his toes touching the scatter rug. Her hand rakes across her face, and then drops to her lap. “Now, you wanna tell me where you are going? Maybe fill me in on that.”

  He presses a hand to his forehead to stop the pounding. He tries to answer, but his day’s been too full of demands and penance.

  “Are they shutting you down?” Her eyes squinch and study him as if she were reading a page of rules to find the exact penalty.

  “They ain’t running me. But they cutting me down. A lot.”

  She looks older, Huddy thinks, or an older version, like when she first walked into his life talking about her younger self. He can’t help but picture her again before and now.

  “I’m losing the way I run it. But there’s different ways to farm. Guess I’m about to learn another way.”

  “Harder?” she says, and he nods. “I guess no Summer,” she says, and it isn’t until she gestures in a direction that Huddy realizes she means street and not season. “Maybe you stop farming, then. Sell cars. Houses.”

  Sure. He even knows where he’ll start, a whole mess of overbuilt houses. Good money there. “Not neither. Them markets done a swan dive. Buyer’s market, but no one’s buying.”

  “I’m just trying to talk up some facts. You talking about farming.”

  “Look, I just need to find out where I’m headed. Soon as I figure which way, we’ll be fine. I’ll get moving again.” He shrugs his shoulder, to signal a minor adjustment, some small change, but it looks like a tick he can’t control, and it only increases the annoyance on her face.

  “Funny you should say that. Moving.”

  “What’s that mean?” He looks back at the deadbolt, thinks of the snicking sound o
f the lock, along with her fiddling hand that he thought was for leaving the house.

  She folds her arms, her body hunched and coiled. “All this talk of Germantown.”

  “Germantown?” he says, surprised but relieved, since he thought she meant going, even if she’s never said so before. “I thought you was pulling the pin.”

  She frowns, because she doesn’t want to discuss what she’s not doing. He watches her arms tighten against herself.

  “You wanna live out in Germantown?” he asks.

  “Wouldn’t mind living in a bubble. But no, not there. Farther.”

  “Collierville.”

  “No,” she says, louder. “I mean being gone from Memphis.”

  “Thought you like it here. Thought you were alright with it.”

  “I am. And if you said, ‘Let’s move tomorrow,’ I’d say, ‘Let’s go.’”

  “You need more house?” he says, and he gestures around the bungalow spaces.

  “House is enough. I might like this enough … elsewhere. You like hearing gunshots?”

  “That’s over there. Other side of McLean. Always,” Huddy says, and he extends his arm fully to push the trouble far out—go past McLean to another world—even though the crime is near, just a couple blocks, same street, a half-mile. Still, his eyes pinch to insist the trouble is concentrated there.

  She throws her hands out right and left. “North and south ain’t any better.”

  So what, he wants to say, about the surrounding area. This long street is fine, and he’s pretty sure that every respectable city neighborhood borders on a ragged edge.

  “It’s stuff spilling over,” she says. “Matter of time before what’s there overtakes what’s here.” And then she tells him about the neighbor who’s been pruning his bushes so he can see his driveway better, keep an eye on his car. Because he’s had two breakins already. Another neighbor, who lives on a corner lot, thinned his trees to watch for activity along the side street, because a pedestrian got pistol-whipped and robbed. “He told me another neighbor was pulling her hedge for the same reason.”

  Huddy’s never heard of this, people unplanting their land for safety and sightlines, shedding limbs so nothing hides behind. He imagines this street of shrinking trees, cut down to a clearing, this old neighborhood now an open field. Or maybe, Huddy thinks, instead of trying to see everything, how about just grow gardens made of thorns. The street could have its own anti-theft garden club—roses and nettles and cacti—prickers as if the ground were topped with barbed wire, and then every burglar or robber would get snagged on vines when they attempted to rush out from the street or climb up to windows.

  He can’t take his neighbors’ fears seriously, even if the threats are real. Their actions, their in-house stakeouts, spook him more than the assaults and disturbances. If this neighborhood of tree surgeons is worried that their borders and hedgerows aren’t safe, if they’re concerned about protecting their property and themselves on a walk, he might suggest stronger defenses.

  “Another neighbor says we ought form an association and document all the incidents, so the police will know to patrol more.”

  Any other day, Huddy’d be glad to hear about an extra sweep.

  “People drive through here crazy. ’Member when that car flipped over?”

  He does. Screaming tires and a loud crash in a small hour that woke them and sent them outside to see the smash-up, a car flipped over and the engine still running, the driver’s-side door open with no driver. Cops chased the suspect across yards and tackled him in the neighbor’s driveway. Smoke billowed, and a cop asked the crowd for a fire extinguisher before the vehicle sparked. It reminds Huddy of another story, another chase a cop told him of. A late-night traffic stop, the driver ditching out, and when the cop found him, the guy was hiding in a backyard—not just hiding but buried into the earth, he’d climbed down into the garden and thrown the dirt back over him, except his eyes were poking out, and the cop, shining a flashlight, caught these sparklers staring back at him. Huddy knows right now to keep this creepy story to himself. Instead he says, “This stuff happens once in five years.”

  “Flipped cars, maybe. But not the crime. And how about the panhandlers? That’s a daily thing. Going door to door.”

  “They just knock, go away. You don’t even gotta answer.”

  “They walk up … After a while, it’s like they live here more than I do. We ain’t raked the leaves, so every day somebody comes to the door asking to do it for money.” Which is true with the panhandlers: the branches shake and the doorbell rings as soon as the leaves fall and reach the ground.

  “I’ll get to the leaves,” Huddy says.

  “That ain’t the point. It’s our yard. Half of them don’t even ask to do work. They just poor. They come up to our house at night, even. Maybe we put up a lawn sign, says, ‘We’re on it. Stop asking.’”

  “Or just ‘No Panhandling.’”

  “Or we could get a dog. Some of the dogs on this block, I can’t believe they ain’t tore the door from the hinges.”

  “Maybe the neighbors could ask the panhandlers to prune their trees, too.”

  She doesn’t laugh and he doesn’t blame her because nothing’s laughable today. “Huddy. We’ve lived here all our lives. It ever feel like spending your whole life in the same place is wrong? I don’t mind it, as long as I’m the one choosing. Take away the choice and I’m stuck in West Tennessee. I mean, are we attached to here? If not, maybe we try something new. My sister, she’s lived other places. Dallas, Nashville, Missouri. Been like a tourist her whole adult life. Ain’t saying it’s made her happier, all that change. But she ain’t homesick, neither. It’s when I think about how I never left—I start thinking this might be all I’m gonna see. Then I start dreaming about it.”

  “Dreams?”

  “Yeah. Wake up and I’ve been in Louisville. I hear Louisville is nice.”

  “Where else?”

  “California—I always had a thing for it. Used to think about New Orleans, but that won’t work no more. Middle Tennessee would be good, for country living. Wouldn’t mind living in a good part surrounded by good. Or surrounded by nothing. Farms, fields. I don’t know, I like it here, it’s a regular house.”

  “Might take a long time, to make a house change. Longer, now. Bad time for everyone, for relocating. The whole country’s stuck where they at, so if you haven’t gone to where you wanted—got no choice but to overstay here. The ones that are moving, they ain’t got no say in the matter.” He looks down at his wedding ring, and when he looks back to her, he says, “I lost fifty thousand dollars today.”

  “Jesus Christ!” she says, burying her face, her voice deep and echoing inside her cupped hands. He listens to her blow heavy breaths into her palms, and he watches her eyes open but her hands stay veiling, as if she were staring out at a movie’s scary parts. She opens her hands to the side of her face, like shutters flung, and holds them there, as if she were shielding her eyes to better see the sum. He sits beside her on the couch. She looks straight ahead and then around, to survey the items contained here, the secondhand TV, the mismatched chairs. No signs of splurging, which makes her both mad and afraid. “Where’d you find fifty thousand?” She turns to him, sickened and confused at the spending, the lost money from an unseen source, squirreled away and then stolen out.

  “Scraped every surface of the store. Scraped it clean.”

  “What about the house?”

  “Didn’t touch the house.”

  She smoothes fingers against her eyes; pinches the bridge of her nose, sniffs. “Damn, Huddy, that’s some fucked-up sweepstakes.” She shuts her eyes again. She sighs, exhausted, and doesn’t speak, and it almost looks like she’s sleeping.

  He struggles for an explainable statement. Except, to talk about his surefire plan is to talk about how it wasn’t. He looks at her flushed cheeks, then turns away, to the fireplace, the chimney, thinks of cash going up sooty walls. The money he might’ve earned�
��the number sounds uncountable, irrational. It’s as if he expected to purchase a million-dollar gift at a dime store. When he closes his eyes, he thinks of the neighbors hacking trees, cutting them down to stubs.

  He returns to her, watches her think in silence, her hands stacked in her lap. “I guess one way to look at it is, fifty thousand to keep you from jail.”

  “That’d be one way. One way of saying I got skinned.” He shakes his head. “I missed something big.”

  “Missed jail.”

  “That, too.”

  “You missed something, and it missed you.”

  “It don’t make it feel even. Way I’m seeing it, I feel like I’ve been pushed out. Or kept in. Everybody’s just standing around a circle, holding me right here.” He sees everyone standing about him, taking up their positions.

  “Who’s everyone?”

  “Cops. Feds.”

  “Brothers?”

  He shifts side to side. Then he nods at the scope of the scam and investigation.

  “Well, you saying you got skinned. Maybe not all of you. What’s left of your skin—you save it.”

  He nods.

  “You do that?”

  He nods again. Sure, it’s history. He better.

  “Let them people go about their business. They over with you. They gonna disappear and the next bad part happens elsewhere. Let that circle of yours go circulating. Gang up on someone else.” Her face is severe, and he stays on her eyes which won’t blink.

  Two days, and then Huddy reads an account in the paper, a string of breakins, the Germantown police on the lookout for a serial burglar, cash and jewelry taken from five residences. Doors unlocked, back doors pried open, no sign of forced entry, and Huddy pictures Harlan turning handles, bumping locks, mule-kicking doors. Rings and chains from a jewelry box, cash from drawers and counters. Huddy calculates the melt value. There are no reports of suspicious behavior in the targeted neighborhood. Residents are reminded to secure their homes.

  The following week is quiet, the second part of the pattern, the lull between strikes, Harlan prowling and casing and laying down in the dark. Huddy sees Harlan’s eyes through the eyeholes of a mask. Another series of home burglaries, this time in adjacent counties, Harlan dipping across the state line to hit Olive Branch and Southaven. Engagement rings, family heirlooms lost. A crime spree, the police matching the methodology. One neighbor heard broken glass and phoned the police, who arrived to find a smashed sliding door. Another resident spotted a white male walking down the street, in the late-morning hours, but could not provide a detailed description. Unnamed and unrecognized, but the stranger is so blatantly Harlan that Huddy’s surprised the writer didn’t identify him. Caught, or beginning to be, the blanks filling in, and Huddy is happy to sit on the sideline, relieved to have stepped aside, thankful even when he imagines a broken promise, a hypothetical scenario where he didn’t back out and Joe still doesn’t bring the gold. But why does Joe have to use Harlan to recover his debts? Huddy wants to discuss this dirty work, he even wonders if he’s obliged to intervene. Joe selling the stolen gold, but not in a store, where he’d get ID’d. Of course, with half the city on the gold bandwagon, he could go around the stores, and then Huddy realizes that Harlan’s remembered a name, and that Joe has his fence.