Bluff City Pawn

by Stephen Schottenfeld

  And Huddy doesn’t want that either.

  “I know what I’m doing,” Harlan says, and he gestures at the outside corner, the tight miter joint, as if robbery were just another house project fitted exactly right. Look how skilled and responsible he is.

  “It’s two against one,” Huddy says.

  “So what?”

  Which is true, every game the brothers played was uneven, even if the one wasn’t always Harlan, and even if it was almost never Joe. But these other two will have guns. Both carrying, and you can bet Del’s got another one stashed in his car, on a side panel or in the center console. Huddy doesn’t say this, because when he told Harlan about the bodyguard, it didn’t stop but only abetted. Harlan slipped a gun out of Huddy’s store, so Huddy will slip one out of this story.

  “Where you gonna meet him?” Huddy asks, and Harlan shrugs as if it were just some small errand.

  “Where does Joe meet him?” Huddy asks. If Joe were here, they’d make fun of Harlan, and then they’d all go back to Joe’s house and make fun of Joe, and then drive together to Huddy’s for his laughing turn. He sees Harlan’s hand shaking and he calls his brother’s name and points a finger at the tremble to put the crime off, but Harlan screams, “Let me finish this room!”

  Huddy shakes his head. He’s in Joe’s house, with Harlan building it, and the three of them, however close, will never get closer. But, like Harlan said, Joe isn’t here, and Huddy looks at Harlan, and Harlan looks far off, as if the room were lengthening, so Huddy will leave, too, let Harlan make his room. He walks to the front door, studies it—maybe Joe hung it himself. This is Joe’s house and no matter how much Harlan works with it, it will never be his. Huddy opens the door and exits and feels defeated and released. He drives out and over to Joe’s, passing midway a row of pillared houses, set back in the woods, which reminds him of the deal’s origins even though the widow lives on a different street, only a mile away but in the countryside.

  When he reaches his destination, he doesn’t know if he should go inside and warn Joe about Harlan, or go back to Harlan and warn him about Joe. He should call the police, provide information and whereabouts; he should give up Harlan. He should call Del and tell him not to answer his phone. He should do all, some, none of this. He wants Harlan to get away, to get the money, for no one to get hurt, and to get some of the money for himself without joining Harlan and for Joe to get none. He wants to prevent and benefit. Maybe Harlan will drop the robbery, or accidentally cut fingers on the chop saw, just stow away traceless with a bandaged hand. The longer he sits out here, his car idling rough and trembly, the more Huddy feels like a trespasser, and when a light switches on in Joe’s expensive house, and something flickers behind the thick curtain, he drives away and turns a corner and feels like he’s fleeing. Heading west, he senses that he’s reached a distance equal to the north-south divide of his brothers and he slows but refuses to turn back and interfere, he keeps driving and separating, into the city, he’s had enough with showing up at other houses. He has spent the last five years sitting behind a counter, waiting for people to come to him. Home isn’t neutral, more like hiding, but it doesn’t seem like the wrong location. Huddy enters and locks the glass outer door and shuts the inner door and locks that, too. He flicks on a light, then kills it, and he imagines watching from outside, as if it were a signal being sent to himself, or just the house short-circuiting. The house is silent except for his shoes, so he kicks them off. He sits in the dark, in the corner, and when Christie walks in, he doesn’t move, and then he says, “I don’t know what to do.”

  “About what?” she says, and he can’t even answer that.

  “I don’t know who to tell what.”

  “Are you in trouble again?”

  “Where’s Cody?” he says, looking up.

  “Where do you think?” she says.

  “Sleeping?”

  She smiles, but Huddy doesn’t, because it’s one more thing he should know. But then she laughs, and soon he joins her, and the doors are locked and windows are latched and barred and the blinds are drawn, and the room is sheltered by the wide porch. His small house is as secure as a fortress.

  When he hears about it, in the middle of the next afternoon, it’s from Joe. Eventually, the story will be everywhere, headlines announcing a botched robbery, and three dead bodies, two men in a car, and a third man bleeding out on the driver’s side. A resident hears gunshots that he thinks is construction work in one of the many unfinished houses, until he doesn’t hear more firing, and calls the police. Huddy will follow the subsequent articles and news segments and wonder if any cash or gold went missing—it seems a low number but more likely Del’s own estimation of his take was inflated. Joe didn’t arrive until after the police and paramedics, according to reports, and Huddy won’t question the order of the gathering, the emergency vehicles and then Joe, just as he won’t ask if Joe stood over Harlan, as long as Joe doesn’t ask what Huddy knew and where he searched beforehand and what he might’ve stopped. When the police trace Del’s cell-phone records and ask Huddy about a call he made the day prior to the robbery, Huddy will explain that Del was a regular customer, always on the lookout for bargains—his story reinforced by the weight bench which he points to without hesitation. The police will knock at Joe’s door, too, both of the perpetrator’s brothers will be questioned, because of the pawnshop meeting and the crime scene, but both will be cleared of any connection, their business transaction and their land ownership incidental and unrelated, and the case will be closed around the shooter.

  And Huddy can then begin to forget Harlan’s final dragging steps on his own legs, and untug the weight on his chest of the bullet in Harlan’s body, and also silence Joe’s voice, aching and shamed and unconcealed, screaming over the phone line, “He’s dead”—especially Joe’s voice, which Huddy will not hear in his head, saying, “Lying on the street. Harlan! Dead. On my damned street!”

  Sixteen

  A man stands at the front door of Bluff City Pawn and Fine Junk. He’s just left Lifecare Blood Services, in the next building, but the window sign here says closed, even though it’s near noon on a Saturday. He walks up to the bus stop, sits on the bench, maybe the store will open before the bus arrives to take him elsewhere.

  The store opened at ten, after Huddy picked through yard sales for camera equipment and movies, grabbing the newer releases and staying away from the old-old duds, and then hit a couple estate sales, where he bought a silver platter and a candelabra and an antique headboard and footboard. He brought the merchandise back to his store, posted all the A/V items and furnishings and decor on eBay, and then he locked up and went out again, to a midday auction on Summer Avenue, in a store a half-mile past Liberty Pawn, which is now another Cash America, the owner selling out to the chain.

  Huddy goes inside and signs in and gets his number and grabs a seat on a side bench and before long the auctioneer up in the booth starts the microphone patter, the floorman catching quick bids for dinner plates and arrowheads and rough-hewn lumber and toy planes and a box of children’s books and floor lamps and memorabilia and pottery and flatware. The action of the room is both dull and hurried. Huddy sits and waits. He can’t trap the cash like he can in his shop, because he can’t set the price and stop the raises, but he has a feel for what everything brings, and he can still make money on the buy, get 35 percent or even double on most sells. He buys an ornate picture frame—he’ll bust the picture out—buys a Limoges jewelry holder, buys a display case for twelve and a half dollars. He outbids the others for a mahogany bedroom suite, but loses out on Tiffany pieces to a bad bidder in the second row who always bids first and then stops, but for some reason, maybe he’s a collector, he has no limit on good glass, and he keeps raising, going back and forth with Huddy, as the floorman catches and shouts with his arms flinging this way and that, and the auctioneer’s eager voice rises, like some cheerful speech impediment, a pricing error to correct fast, until Huddy’s profit margin g
ets squeezed enough and he drops out. Next is a cowbell, and then a spice rack, and a cast-iron doorstop, and a karaoke machine, and vintage medicine bottles, and Memphis Tigers cufflinks, and Huddy appraises the stuffed tables and shelves, and hears the prices spasm, and decides there’s nothing left. He could wait around for the Hummels, but he knows the couple in the front row is only here for figurines. He takes his tickets to the payout window. Behind him, the noise is raucous, but it’s just the auctioneer opening the bidding. There are a few newcomers here who build too much value in their mind—one rookie paid over retail—which is fine, as long as it’s for what Huddy doesn’t want. Huddy gathers the smaller items and loads them in his truck, and hauls the suite out with a man who attends the storage-unit auctions, first of the month, the man boasting about a Bose box that didn’t have a Bose inside it, but old celebrity photographs that’ll fetch more money than the stereo he expected to find. This new story has replaced the nightmare from last month, when the man bid three hundred dollars on a storage room filled with boxes and boxes that contained only concrete samples, thousands of pounds that the man was legally bound to remove within twenty-four hours.

  Huddy returns to his store, driving across an overpass with god look spray-painted on the cement barrier. At a stop sign near railroad tracks, he watches a man walk an empty shopping cart into the tall weeds. He wonders if the glass collector will be at the next auction. If so, maybe Huddy can get to the auction earlier, see if there are multiple lots of glass—a couple of months back, there was both Tiffany and Heisey glass—and Huddy’ll negotiate, corner the man and say, How ’bout you take the first lot, I’ll take the second, that way we leave each alone and keep both bids down. He passes a sedan with the trunk open, the latch bungee-corded to the bumper, the kitchen appliance tipped down inside. He sees barbershops, nail salons, all with signs saying we buy gold. Huddy wants to walk in and say, I’m gonna start cutting hair in my pawnshop if you keep buying up the gold. A tempting confrontation, but instead he imagines himself with scissors in his own shop, snipping bangs for gold. Sometimes, after he leaves the auction, he hears the auctioneer’s voice, the price bumping and vibrating and bumping again in his head, and if Huddy’s bothered by it, there’s always the radio.

  He reopens the door, brings the merchandise in, checks his online accounts. The DVDs selling like always. Buy something for a dollar, sell it for two, and do it a lot of times. Find the market value and blow them out. He is thinking about one last shopping spree, maybe late afternoon, to a salvor who called earlier about salvage goods, a furniture buyout, leather sofas with a little light smoke in them that you can’t even smell. Huddy wasn’t sure about nonsmelling smoke, but the man also talked about store returns, these shelf-pulls from a major electronics retailer, and Huddy said sure, he’d come look. He sees a man enter with a bandage in the crook of his arm—which means next door. “I got there too late,” the man says. “They telling me my blood’s worth twenty-five bucks before ten a.m., but only twenty after.” The man shakes his head at the missing five, stares at the fingers of his hand.

  Ever since the bank opened and the cash paid banner went up, Huddy’s been hearing about midmorning rate switches, about donors rejected for insufficient iron. The next customer comes in, and the blood donor slips out, toward the bus stop, where no one congregates, to face the road and stick around there or inch back.

  “I pawned a mower here, for a time,” the customer says, and Huddy thinks he remembers, the mower and this man for six months. “I paid it out. Then I was … out of town a stretch. Back now.”

  Which might mean jail, but Huddy doesn’t ask.

  “Now, I’m working. Full week. Not this week. This week, I got but two days, but next week’s full, and I’m hoping it stay that way.”

  “What can I do for you?” Huddy asks.

  “Listen, man, I got this TV.”

  “Flat screen?”

  The man shakes his head. “Big, though.”

  “Can’t take it.”

  “See, here’s the thing, I ain’t selling it.”

  “I can’t do nothing.” Huddy stares at the man, at his front shirt pocket stretched and empty.

  “I got this room, where I’m staying. And the lady, who owns the place, see, she wants to watch TV every night. She got her own TV in her own room, but she wants to watch with me, you hear? But I don’t want nothing to do with her. My situation, I need to have women out of my life, just for a while. But she runs the house. And she’s in my room all day, watching the TV, and that’s good, because if she weren’t, somebody else’ll steal it. So it’s good that she’s in my room, but it’s bad, I can’t have it no more, she’s got to go. I gotta do something to correct this—”

  Huddy looks outside as Joe’s car pulls up to the curb. Joe parks and steps out, and then he reaches back inside—Joe who he hasn’t seen in months, carrying a gun case that Huddy hasn’t seen in longer.

  “The TV, this lady, my room,” the man says, shaking his head, as if the story were mixed up or maybe it’s just Huddy half-hearing and understanding. “I’m wanting to bring my TV, duck it here for a while, and then, you know, I get my own place and come back for it. I’m getting my own place next month, but I’m already starting to argue with her.”

  Huddy eyes the hard case, watches it tilt and slant in his brother’s hand, Joe’s fingers gripped around the center handle but the case not staying level, wobbling up and down. The inside weight tells Huddy it isn’t empty.

  “You got family?” Huddy asks.

  “Naw, man, that won’t work. Family’s a situation.”

  And Huddy looks at Joe, who places the case far down from the man—the caution is another reason the gun is contained there—and stares warily at him and then at Huddy without nodding.

  “Friends, too.”

  “You want me to warehouse it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “I ain’t a warehouser,” Huddy says.

  “Just for a bit. I figure, since I done business with you before, we do this thing, and then the next thing, I pay on this, what I bring you.”

  “You want me to store it for free?”

  “Asking a month,” the man says. “You can have the TV if I don’t come get it thirty days.”

  Huddy doesn’t answer, unsure why he’s not going against him.

  “I’ll bring it tomorrow?”

  Huddy nods.

  “The TV ain’t too big,” the man says, as he leaves.

  “I never done that,” Huddy says to Joe, wondering if Joe thinks he’s soft or crazy.

  “Got it back from the bondsman,” Joe says, eyeing the case, as if it were some machine or instrument that he’d never understood how to make work. “I’m coming together with a group of builders. Four-man partnership, split up the liability. Gonna build minimum-size houses, on zero lots. The market looks to be coming back that way. Reviving.”

  And Huddy realizes that Joe is mentioning recovery—these broke builders put together to get themselves unbroke—only to tell him why the gun can now be his.

  “I already lost Heritage Cove, so now I’m getting what else went under. We’re all swapping foreclosures. These other builders, the four of us—” He stops, their eyes meet, and Joe glances away as he shakes his head. He looks around the room, trying to see what’s different. No guns, but overall the floor looks full, the inventory replenished. Most of the items were bought elsewhere, Huddy could add, which means higher cost but no waiting on the pawn cycle, and they’re priced here for show, but also online, so Huddy’s on Lamar but not just.

  “You sold twenty, and I said you’d get one after twenty,” Joe says, as if it were a promise, and not the deal, that got broken, and Huddy nods to believe it. “And, like I said, don’t need a license to sell an antique. Guess that applies to both of us now.” The gun, previously half-owned and then taken, is now returned as a gift, like some defaulted loan that Huddy, with Joe’s forfeit, is reconfiscating from himself. Huddy feels both remor
seful and excited, and he’ll control both without denying either. The sale of this gun won’t change Huddy’s life, but it will start to. He’ll go to bigger auctions, move into commercial equipment, or even pallets of new clothing stacked high, and maybe before long he’s doing bulk purchases on home-theater systems, tractor-trailer loads on who-knows-what. Huddy went to one once, this all-day affair, and bought some industrial switches, but that was it, staying silent on the big-ticket machinery.

  Joe turns away, for a long moment, so Huddy will remove the case without Joe watching, and Huddy touches then grips the handle and lifts the case and brings it around to his side and lowers it downward to the floor. Joe turns back, relieved but distressed to find the case out of sight. His eyes stick on the empty counter. “Blood bank’s set up. That was fast.”

  “Tell me about it. They didn’t even slow down for hunting season.”

  “I heard something. About that widow Yewell. About her house.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Her son’s family moved in with her. In the guest house. When she dies, they’ll take it over. Guess she ain’t selling. Maybe she never was.”

  “Too bad. You might’ve been old money by then.”

  “Not in my lifetime. Those classic lines run too deep.”

  Huddy watches his brother laugh, Joe’s adult life out in Germantown adding up to such a minimal number. “So you building small houses?” Huddy asks.

  “Yeah. Still big, but smaller.”

  “You lose weight?” Huddy asks, because his face looks thinner.

  “No,” Joe says. “You’re the second person that’s said that.”

  “Who’s first?”

  “Lorie.”

  “She should know.”

  “Weight’s the same. Weighed myself yesterday.”

  “Maybe the scale’s wrong.”

  Joe rubs his belly. “I don’t know what y’all ain’t seeing.” He looks side to side at his wide waist. “I ain’t a pound less. Doctor got me eating even more pills.”