“It’s Huddy. I’m looking for Harlan.”
But she doesn’t answer and he doubts the voice he recognized—maybe he’s dialed a wrong number—until she says, “Me, too.”
“He ain’t there?” Which he knew, but he thought she might know elsewhere.
“Not no more. Last time he called, I was asleep.”
“He say where he was?”
“Ain’t said nothing. Just hello on the machine. You talk to him, tell him to call me when I’m awake.” Her voice is slow and smothered, as if she were again asleep.
He won’t call Joe to get to Harlan. If Harlan isn’t staying with KayKay, and he can’t be at Joe’s, there’s only one place left, which isn’t a place at all. He drives back to the trouble spot, through the double entrance, past the retention basin with the dead fountain, past the common island. In the daylight, Huddy sees more upmarket features, bay windows, Palladian windows, double turrets and copper cupolas, bird boxes in the gables. Every driveway hooks and curves. One-of-a-kind homes, customized, but patterns emerge in the layout, the same houses but turned at angles so it isn’t box after box. Different façades, varied elevations and colors, but maybe the floor plans are identical and flipped. Costless tricks to make a house look custom.
There’s no car in the driveway of the previous meeting, and the three-car garage is windowless. Huddy parks, walks and knocks, but there’s no answer. He’ll go door to door to all the pockets of finished and framed houses. He drives and knocks and peers through windows and waits in doorways, returns to his car and reverses and pulls in elsewhere and backs out again, up and down driveways like a deliveryman bringing phone books to new addresses, to unarrived residents, like a salesman who can’t drum up business, like a disoriented messenger, until he tires of searching one by one, and he speeds past trenched land and onto the next built pocket, where he stops in the middle of the empty street.
He climbs out and he’s about to call to a half-dozen houses within shouting distance when he hears gunfire, the sound of a .22, popping again a few seconds later, and again. Too quiet for a nail gun, Huddy thinks, and no compressed air escaping, and then he remembers the stolen compressors, and maybe Joe owns a battery-powered gun. Maybe the electrical isn’t switched on inside, or maybe Joe just wants no engines, and to keep the work quiet, even with no one living next door. More firing inside, and no other noise outside, and Huddy listens and follows the noise in a diagonal, and he knows who’s holding the gun. He approaches the filmed window, clouded by sun and work suspension, and he presses his face but Harlan isn’t visible. A ladder and the sound of shooting right inside the room, but there’s no body materializing. It feels like some deception, as if Harlan is there but vanished, as if Huddy were staring into a dark well, except the room is lit by an overhead light. He steps from the windowpane to the front door and turns the knob and enters and looks sidelong to the right and in the oversize room is Harlan, his back turned, crouched down on the floor, under the window that Huddy just gazed through. The shooting is louder, and Huddy waits for him to clip the gun to his belt and rough-measure the wall, and then Huddy identifies himself. “Harlan,” he says.
Harlan scrambles, tool belt clanging, but he turns enough to the naming, and halts. He faces Huddy, relieved and suspicious, unsure if he’s still scared that it’s only him.
“You think I was someone else?” Huddy says, and he walks through the warm air and across the plywood.
“Didn’t know,” and Harlan studies him, as if he still doesn’t. “What you doing here?”
“Ask you the same.”
“What, I look different, ’cause I’m working?”
The same, Huddy thinks—as Joe, with his gold dust in your face and eyes, the dust all over you. Whenever Huddy sees his brothers here, they always look different, younger, older, the same. “Thought those were warning shots,” Huddy says, nodding at the gun. “First ones. You camping out here?”
Harlan nods. “Got my bedroll in the master. You know why nobody can’t live in these houses? Because they’re already occupied. This is the family plot. I’m the night watchman, walk the grounds, and everybody’s here. Mama’s in one, and daddy’s in another. I been over to them’s houses. You ’member daddy telling us how he’d go up in the attic? When he was a kid, he’d go up there at night and kill pigeons. For food.”
“No.”
“Whatcha mean no? You was there!” And what looks different is his eyes.
“Wasn’t,” Huddy says, but he remembers he was, but not right now—that time isn’t in him.
“We talked about it after. Dad the Pigeon Eater.”
“Okay.”
“Bet you don’t remember rats in the pantry, either.”
“Is that dad, too?”
“That was us! We’d hear ’em knocking over pans.”
“Guess I dropped it somewhere along the way.”
“You as bad as Joe.”
Huddy stares at a floor wrapper, a few sandwich bites uneaten, a thick bread end, along with a soda bottle almost dry. “He bring you that?”
“Why you here?” Harlan says, and Huddy says he tried calling and then he asks the question back. “Keeping busy with housework,” Harlan says.
More like house arrest, Huddy thinks, his eyes swiping top to bottom. The drywall and doors are up. Harlan’s run the crown molding and hung the door casing, and now he’s shooting base clockwise. An A-frame ladder is pushed in a corner. A battery-run chop box is dead center on the floor, with a bundle of wood trim stacked nearby.
“That ain’t all you doing,” Huddy says.
But Harlan doesn’t show the smallest of double takes on his guiltless face. He pushes the tape out toward the next wall and pulls it toward the cut. Transfers the tape measurement to the board. Goes over to the chop saw, feeds the wood in, sets the other end on a wooden block he’s rigged, the saw and the block both on the ground so Harlan can stay at floor level and work faster. He swings the blade to make a forty-five cut, and Huddy watches him cut it on the line without pausing, not slightly long but trusting the tape, trusting his skill. Every time Huddy comes into these houses, he admires a brother’s craft. The saw grinds and whirs to a stop.
“Buddy of mine in Florida,” Harlan says. “Worked with him. He lost his thumb bad on the saw. Cut it way down and they couldn’t salvage it. And you can’t work with no thumb, so the doctors—they took the pointer finger off and moved it over to the thumb. He’s got this four-fingered hand, but it’s like five fingers ’cause he’s got his thumb back, even if that thumb was his pointer. That thumb has learned how to become a thumb. When you see that hand—that pointer sticking up where the thumb should be, and the stub where the pointer ain’t—it’ll freak you out.”
“So he can still do sheds,” Huddy says, “if he’s your work buddy.”
“Well, I’ve done a little of this and that. I’m mostly ex-something.”
“Joe told me about his backwards plan. Working off the bail.”
“I’m already looking at jail. Get busted, it’ll all be the same time. They’ll just run ’em together. What’s that word?”
“Who told you this?”
“Joe. Said his lawyer would make that happen. Money equals justice.”
“Except he’s broke.”
“That’s just on paper. Out in the world, he’s still rich. Thing is, it would’ve been better if my charges were state. Lawyer says. He’s still gonna whittle it down, but—so much for get-out-of-jail-free. And I’m not built for prison.”
“Yes you are. I hope you pushed that AK hard. I hope you killed that trigger, for the time you’re getting.”
“I ran the hell out of it. And when the cops came and grilled me, they told me that I was looking at five years versus six months. Six months—that’s your life, on the dotted line, they was wanting me to sign away.”
Huddy looks back at the wrapper and sees it as a tray slid beneath a door. Harlan lines up the board and holds it in place and shoots the
nail into the stud and the board pulls tight. He slides and shoots again, and releases his hand, and eyes the board and frowns. He takes a knuckle and knocks the wall, and hears the stud and reshoots it. Releases his hand again and sees a better fit. He keeps going across the floor, flowing with the studs, shooting the base. When he finishes, he turns to Huddy and sets the gun on its head. “It was stupid, what I done.”
Not as stupid as what I done after you. And before. Huddy nods at his own mistakes.
“Joe says I do enough for him, he’ll give me this house.”
“That right?” All these houses in the bargain.
“Think I’d work on it if it ain’t gonna be mine? Pride in ownership. I’ll say this, Joe knows how to incentivize.”
Must be what Joe meant by multiple offers. And we would’ve been almost neighbors.
“I don’t know, Huddy, never thought I’d live in Germantown. Side by side with the Cotton Carnival crowd. I told Joe, I want all the fancy features. All the trappings. I want a froufrou house.”
“Lying.”
“It don’t mean the rest of what he’s saying is.”
“Who, Joe? Or Hollis?”
Harlan stares unblinking, returns to measurements and cutting. “I always said he should be H-something.” He grabs the upended gun.
“So you fixed his name.”
“If daddy named him wrong, I’d name him right. Now, three of us, we whole blood. Joe, he wasn’t named after no one. Now he’s named after us.” He doesn’t speak spitefully, only to set the record straight.
“You renamed Joe, and you remembered Del.” Huddy naming names, but none trips up Harlan, who keeps moving efficiently from the wall to the saw and back, shooting the trim and tapping the studs.
“I tole Joe, don’t you think Del suspecting when the person he meets ain’t sound like the person on the phone? ’Cause Joe won’t touch the phone. He don’t want to touch the deal either, but he don’t trust me on that. But Del, he don’t care. If it’s smoking and on fire, he’ll buy it. Either he ain’t hearing the difference, or he don’t care to. Maybe we sound the same. Me and Joe. Same enough. Then again, only voice Del hears is hisself.”
Huddy follows the threads—Harlan impersonating Joe to say he’s Hollis. “He’s probably cheating the weight.” Which to Huddy seems fair, if both brothers are playing impostors.
“Ain’t me he’s cheating.” Harlan looks as uninterested in discussing now as Joe is with then, as if recent events were as vague as Joe’s memories. But then his eyes glimmer, just like Joe’s when the old tin roof surfaced. “You should see Joe after he’s done the deal. He looks like he’s gonna pop. Like his own sick twin. Telling you, his heart’s gonna vapor-lock one day. I told him, your wife better know CPR, because one day she’s gonna be pumping on you. This hooking-and-crooking thing, it ain’t for Joe.”
“It’s for you.”
Harlan can’t decide if it’s an insult or a compliment. He moves for the tape measure, but stops working, his hand at his side. “I guess it is. I’m running out the house. Five blocks from the car, where I parked it, and I hear the police. No siren, ’cause they’re running stealth, but that big engine roaring. They’re quiet, see, trying to be, but they’re turbo-loud. I’m hiding in bushes, ducking under cars, and I hear them horses, and they pass me, and then I’m back on my feet running. Hear that sound and I know they’re coming for me, but they don’t know it’s me, and they don’t know I know they’re coming … I’m on the ground but it don’t feel like it. I feel like I got a hundred brains. Seeing if mailboxes is full. Newspapers in driveways. Outdoor lights on in the daytime. Get inside, I’ve got dog biscuits in my pocket.”
“I know what you’re planning.”
Harlan ignores it, measures and marks the wood and slides over to the chop box and cuts square.
“Does Joe?” Huddy says.
“Whatcha mean?”
“You’re fixing to rob Del.”
Harlan looks at him.
“Getting gone.”
“Well, I guess you a mind reader. No, Joe don’t. Or else he does. He’s ahead of us in lots of ways. So maybe he knows what I think I just know myself. ’Course, I can’t ask him if he knows ’cause then he’ll know. Then again, if you know, that must mean he knows. ’Cause Joe always been first. But he sure didn’t know how to build this place.”
“Couldn’t know about a recession.”
“This ain’t nothing but greed taking over.”
Huddy looks outside. Across the street, a bunch of plumbing stubs stick out of the ground, and he thinks of Harlan’s maimed buddy, his transplanted finger. Huddy couldn’t have seen these stubs the other night, but he imagines they weren’t here last time, that the development has regrown, sprouted up on second sight. “You know Del’s got a bodyguard.” Which Harlan didn’t, because Del was alone in Huddy’s shop, and Huddy watches his face tense. A split-second whitening, maybe the face Huddy wore when the policeman showed up to ask about the AK. He doesn’t mention the tilted head, the fearsome cell phone, because the distracted man is still armed, and Huddy wants to talk Harlan down, to show he’s weak-handed. But Harlan just shrugs. Strong-arming Del would have been too easy, and now it won’t be. His shoulders flex, some imagined bumping or struggle, because he’s already made a decision, and Huddy’s only complicated it before helping him overpower.
“I got a gun,” Harlan says.
“Better not be one of mine.”
“Street gun,” he says flatly. “Any old street.”
Huddy eyes Harlan’s equipment and the robbery seems not sinister but ridiculous. He’s dressed as a trim carpenter, and maybe the caulk gun is the stickup weapon. Maybe he’ll slap them with the tape measure, poke them with a utility pencil, bonk their heads with base scrap. Not even the nail gun looks dangerous. Huddy pictures Harlan not wearing a mask but safety goggles, as if a work costume makes him unsuspecting. But it can’t. Huddy gazes at him, and he’s regular Harlan, same old, and what he’s about to do is what he always was, except he’s a felon now, so he’s himself plus a lookalike, identical and transformed. “You really stepping up to armed robbery?”
“Well, let’s see,” Harlan explains, as if Huddy had asked only something technical. “I want his bundle. And he won’t want to hand it over. And we ain’t gonna play tug of war.”
“Why?” Huddy says.
“I’d rob you, but you ain’t got enough money.”
Huddy keeps asking.
“Don’t ever ask me why again.” Harlan turns aside, to find a lawless reason beyond himself. “Del’s a slug and anybody that can stick it to him needs to stick it to him. You said it yourself, he’s cheating. He’d steal the gold out of your teeth. There’s bottomfeeders, and there’s bottomfeeders with money, and that second one is him—and now it’s gonna be me.”
If it were me, Huddy thinks, I’d do it on a Friday, late. End of the day, end of the week, he’ll be in a Friday groove, not looking around as much, thinking of the weekend.
“What?” Harlan says.
“What?” Huddy says back.
“Your face was saying something.”
“I don’t give a fuck about my face.” And Huddy won’t say what he was thinking, won’t give a set of instructions. He isn’t a robber, he isn’t Harlan, and Harlan’s not him. “You think no one’s gonna suspect you? You think you gonna wear a mask and it somehow ain’t you?”
“Fine,” Harlan says. “It’s me. Or maybe I’m Joe. You think he knows, but he don’t.”
Unless I tell him, which is why Harlan’s telling me. Not out of loyalty to Harlan, or spite for Joe, but enough of a combination.
“These type of things, Huddy, you’re smarter. Joe don’t know my mind. Only you do.”
Been setting this score up the whole time. Gave Del’s name to Joe, but he was giving Joe’s name to Del, even if he didn’t supply Joe’s real name.
“The only one who knows this plan is you, because you’re here and he’s not
.”
“We’re in his house,” Huddy says.
“This ain’t a house. Not yet.”
“Look. Do your time, come out, come back here …” Huddy speaks carefully, to slow down Harlan’s thinking, but all it does is lengthen the incarceration.
“I’ve already done that.”
“Do it again,” Huddy says, faster, a small sentence, but now the words feel unimportant, Harlan’s life mere repetition. “You’ve already run away, too. To Florida.” Huddy wants to speak of a beginning, not an ending, not something late.
“Go farther, then. This time.”
But Huddy can’t imagine Harlan in a different part of the country. “I’m supposed to tell the police about crimes. That’s part of my plea.”
“You ain’t gonna say a thing. ’Cause I didn’t say nothing about you. Don’t tell Joe! That ain’t fair. Don’t tell no one. Something goes wrong, I don’t want Joe standing over my body.”
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