Pawned

by Laura Bickle

  “Yeah.” My dad licks his lips and rubs his palms on the thighs of his khakis. “How’s my dad doing?”

  “I’m Dr. Huffman.” She extends her cool, small hand to each of us to shake. It feels like a waste of time. A meaningless formality.

  “How is he?” I demand, unable to bite the words back until the pleasantries are concluded.

  “He had a heart attack. The worst of it is over. That’s both bad and good. We have him in the ICU. He’s receiving painkillers, fluids, and we’re monitoring his heart. We think his coronary artery is mostly blocked.”

  “He’s gonna live?” Sid asks.

  “He’s doing all right now, but we suspect there are more clots. We ran an EKG on him, and it looks like there could be more problems with the structure of the heart itself. If not now then later. The blood vessels to his heart are nearly seventy-five percent blocked. As a result, we’re putting him on blood thinners to try to break up those clots before they get to his heart.”

  My dad is nodding, his head bobbling up and down. “He’s okay now, right?”

  “We may have to do surgery.” The doctor’s brown eyes are full of sympathy. “It’s too early to tell. We need to run more tests, see how responsive he is. We’ll talk it all over with you and with him, and we’ll do the very best we can by him. I promise.” I know they will. We don’t have insurance, but my dad likely slapped down a wad of cash to the billing clerks. He knows that cash talks.

  “Can we see him?” Carl asks.

  “Yes, but only for a few minutes, and only a few at a time,” she says.

  My dad and Sid go first, leaving me with Carl and Bert on the benches. Bert perches to my right, in my dad’s warm seat, and Carl stays on my left.

  Bert has gotten a piece of jerky out of the vending machine and is gnawing at it like a dog with a rawhide. “He’s a tough old bird,” Bert says with a full mouth. “He’ll get through this. You’ll see.”

  “Are you trying to blow sunshine up my ass, Bert?” I narrow my eyes at him.

  Bert crosses his tiny T-rex arms over his belly, letting the jerky stick droop under my nose. “Nope. We’re gonna find a way to help him.”

  “The old man had surgery before, years ago.”

  Bert nods. “Yeah, and he got through it. You’ll see.”

  I’m not so sure. My dad and Sid return from a corridor past the nurses’ desk. My dad’s white as a sheet, and even Sid looks subdued. Sid gives Carl a hug, and I stand awkwardly before my dad.

  “You should go back and see him,” he whispers. “He’s not all there, but he’ll know that you came.”

  I swallow and nod. Stuffing my hands in my pockets, I walk down the hallway. Carl’s shadow is behind me, and Bert’s toenails click on the green tile. Stripes are painted on the floor. Red for ICU. I follow the red stripe to a supernaturally quiet area. I give Pops’s name—Clyde Stannick—to the nurse at the desk, and she points us to room four.

  I’m first through the door, though it probably would’ve been comforting to let Carl or Bert go first. That way, I could’ve just stared at their backs until I got used to seeing my grandpop looking like a broken doll in an adjustable bed. Too late now.

  Pops is dressed in a polka-dotted hospital gown, a blanket drawn up to his elbows. His hair sticks out in unkempt curls, his eyes are closed, and his face is covered with an oxygen mask. Little wires lead to electrodes taped to his skin and machines that beep. An IV pole is connected to his liver-spotted arm through a clear tube. Even the tattoo of Lola on his arm looks pale.

  I steel myself to step forward. “Pops?”

  His eyes slit open. They’re teary. I don’t know if it’s because of the pain, from fear, or because of the drugs. His gaze fixes on me, then drifts away.

  I move to one side of the bed and take his hand. I pick the arm with the IV in it so Carl won’t have to. My stomach flops when I try to avoid the needle stuck to the inside of his elbow with tape.

  “How are you feeling?” Carl crosses to the opposite side to take Pops’s other hand. He rests his hand on the old man’s forehead. Bert stands at the foot of the bed, his little fingers knitting together anxiously under his chin.

  Pops hisses something that sounds like, “Sssssssshitty.” I can’t tell for sure.

  “We love you, Pops,” I say. I never had the chance to say that when my brother died.

  The old man lapses into unconsciousness.

  Carl looks down at me. I’m very conscious suddenly of being the older one, as he asks, “Is he gonna be okay?”

  I can’t say, feeling the old man’s clammy hand in mine.

  Bert lowers his head, and his golden eyes gleam in the fluorescent light. “He will be. You’ll see. No matter what it takes.”

  I stifle a shudder.

  CHAPTER 5

  The ice cream truck was a result of bad decision-making all the way around. Pops started taking beta blockers when I was a little kid, and they were still fiddling with his dosage. He got a little loopy sometimes. A toothless guy came in trying to offload his 1950’s ice cream truck. Pops said no, so the guy then tried to pawn it. Pops gave him two thousand dollars, and we never saw the guy again.

  We asked the police if it was stolen, hoping they’d take it off our hands. But, alas, it was legit. And we couldn’t chase the guy down and force him to take the truck back. It’s entirely up to the customer whether or not they want to take the money and run. He did, and we got a fucking ice cream truck.

  Now Bert drives the ice cream truck. The truck is red and white, and it has a cartoon picture of a clown holding a teetering cone of sugary goodness on the side. It plays a warped jingle when you press a button under the dash or whenever you hit a bump.

  I know that conjures up all kinds of images of a demon selling ice cream to little kids—Bert in a white paper hat, scooping out big globs of Superman ice cream to unsuspecting tots. Don’t get me wrong—Bert lobbied hard for the chance to start his own ice cream business, but my dad nixed that. Bert sulked about it for months. I mean, it was there, so why not? But he wanted his own vehicle, at the very least.

  My dad threw up his hands and allowed it, saying that the hoses and bearings would rot if it wasn’t driven. So it’s not uncommon for me to see a T-rex wearing no pants driving down our street in an ice cream truck.

  It was pretty darn cool when Zach and Carl and I were kids, don’t get me wrong. My dad was all disgusted with it and parked it out in the back alley. It became our favorite toy. It was, at various times, a castle to be stormed, a mad scientist’s laboratory, and a spaceship. The shiny chrome freezers in the back look really science fictiony. We’d pretend we were in the movie Alien and that creatures were gonna pop out of them unless we shot ’em with our water pistols.

  One time, Zach crawled in one of them with the intent of popping out of it and scaring the shit outta me, but he got stuck, and I got distracted by a real ice cream truck going down the street. He nearly suffocated, and we were terrified to tell our dad. They would’ve banned us from the truck and hauled it off to the scrapyard if they’d known.

  We would lay our hands against the sheet-metal walls and close our eyes. I’d see images of the truck tooling down the street decades before, when little boys wore collared shirts and girls were in dresses, clamoring for a chance to buy ice cream from a clean-cut young man in a white uniform and black bowtie. The lawns behind them were perfectly green and cut, and bicycle bells jingled. Little ranch houses stood far off the well-paved street, identical except for their color. Women hung their wash on clotheslines, and somewhere, someone was baking bread.

  I have no idea where that was, or exactly when. The three of us debated whether the young and happy ice cream man was really the toothless dude who pawned it, but we never arrived at a firm conclusion. I always wanted to be in that place, where everything was clean and safe and happy. Suburblandia, Zach called it. I don’t know if it still exists anywhere. But it had at some point in time, and we could experience it through the
Bunko. It was one of the few times we could use our special powers for good and not evil.

  The truck used to be cool to ride in, but now it’s annoying as hell. Unless you’re sitting up front with Bert, you gotta sit on the freezers in the back and slide around. There’s no visibility, so I get a little carsick. The damn jingle goes off every time you hit a pothole—which is a lot. And it tends to really piss people off when you’re going down the street late at night. Top speed on this thing is about thirty miles an hour, so it’s not out of the question to occasionally have a pissed-off crackhead give chase on foot.

  Despite the truck, my dad and Bert are really quiet on the way back from the hospital. They just look at each other, nod, and stare straight ahead. It’s as if some silent agreement has been reached, like they’re going to go back to the shop and call Batman on the Batphone to get all this straightened out.

  Sliding around on the top of the freezer, I swap glances with Carl. This isn’t going to be good. I can feel it.

  I close my eyes and place the palms of my hands on the freezer. An image bubbles up for me: a little boy in a plaid shirt, pedaling hard on his bike, trying to catch up to the ice cream truck. It’s summer, and the sky is cloudless blue. The truck slows, and the boy huffs up beside the window, a nickel is in his sweaty hand. The ice cream truck driver has black shiny hair like Elvis. He smiles at the boy and hands him a scoop of chocolate ice cream in a waffle cone. The boy grins and buries his teeth in the ice cream. I can almost taste the sticky sweetness of it.

  Carl kicks me. Not hard, just a nudge with the toe of his shoe. My eyes snap open, and he looks at me with an expression of sympathy. “We’re here,” he whispers.

  The ice cream truck rumbles down the back alley, pulling up before the back door. We pile out, and I suck in the cold night air. There’s laughing from the distant boardwalk, the wail of a siren, and somebody yelling down the street. I glance up at the fire escape, and a black cat with eyes like glowing coals stares down at me.

  My dad lets us in the back door, and we file down the back hallway, flipping on lights. Bert heads out to the front shop to remove the closed sign and open up the night window. He switches on the outside neon light and lifts the metal curtain on a bank teller’s bulletproof glass window. The building still has many of the features it did when it was a bank in the forties, and we use all of them in our nighttime business.

  People who need money at three a.m. walk up to the window. We don’t let anybody into the shop—it gets weird at night. We have a strange assortment of pimps, gamblers, and relatives of folks in jail hocking everything from jewelry to their own grandmas.

  Bert digs working at night—he says there’s nothing he hasn’t seen before in hell, and demons don’t sleep a whole lot after dark. They gotta be on their toes when the seedy shit goes down. But there’s something odd in the solemnity with which he counts out the cash drawer and opens the receipt book tonight. He reaches under the counter for a black bag like a doctor’s, glossy and elegant. He opens it and pulls out black candles, a dagger, and a feather.

  Fascinated, I take a step forward. But my dad’s hand clamps down on my shoulder. “I need you boys to do some work.”

  I inwardly recoil but follow him back to the store room with feet dragging. Carl and I stand in the doorway with our hands in our pockets. Fluorescent lights flicker overhead, illuminating shelves and shelves of banker’s boxes and plastic bins with dates scrawled on them in magic marker. These are the items moving in and out of the store, things coming off pawn, and things we legally have to hold for a month before we sell them. Most of it is the ordinary miscellany and debris of lives: stamps, power tools, musical instruments, vinyl record collections, and bad art.

  The really valuable shit goes into the vault. Gold, jewelry, magical items. The old green bank vault is set into a wall in the back of the storeroom, a room of its own. My dad often says it would take a ton of dynamite to remove it. Nobody wants to find out.

  My dad hauls the vault door open and turns on the light inside. The light’s yellow, like bug-repellent bulbs. It illuminates a room about three hundred square feet, lined with open safe deposit boxes and shelves.

  “All right,” my dad says. His eyes are shadowed. “We need to find something—anything—that will help Pops.”

  “Like what?” Carl’s brow wrinkles.

  “Any kind of magical artifact that’ll help him. Anything for health or longevity.”

  I swallow, refusing to remove my hands from my pockets. “Wouldn’t all the magical stuff be cataloged?” I sure as hell would rather go through our paper records than do what my dad’s suggesting.

  “Yeah, well, you guys can go through all of that, too. But shit slips through the cracks. We have to find something.” His gaze scalds me as he pulls out a banker’s box from a shelf and starts rifling through records.

  “Wouldn’t it just be easier to call one of those crazy guys in robes?” I ask. We have a steady stream of self-styled witches and wizards who come to the window, usually at night, to buy magical items. Sometimes they make appointments if they’re coming a long distance. Bert will always call up to my dad or uncle to make the deal. I can tell when that happens because I’ll have shitty dreams, and Dad sends us outside.

  My dad glares. “What the hell do you think Bert is doing?”

  I shut my trap and grab the nearest box.

  I jam my hand into the box and stir. Through narrowed eyes, I register that there’s a bell, a clutch of old keys, and a tarnished mirror in it. My fingers hesitate only for a moment on each, but a cacophony of images blow through my brain: a woman screaming like a banshee, the click of a key in a lock, and an old woman staring intently at a youthful reflection. I’ve seen these before, and they rise in my memory.

  I withdraw my hand as if it’s been burned in scalding water. It almost steams.

  “Well?” my dad demands.

  “Just...just a signaling device. A key that can open a bunch of locks. And a truth mirror.”

  “Keep going.”

  I go for the books next. I take them out, one by one, and lay the flat of my hand on the covers. These are old grimoires, written in ink that smells like blood and berries. Most of these are incantations for revenge, for things that cause death and destruction. Dark images ooze into my brain, and I hear inhuman laughter when I touch them.

  “What about that?” my dad is asking, but he’s not asking me. He’s focusing on Carl, who’s holding a wooden statue of a plump nude woman in his hands. His hands are over her belly, studiously avoiding her overdeveloped breasts.

  “No,” Carl said, and a smile twitches the edge of his mouth as he hands it to my dad. “This is for fertility. Sell this to someone who wants a dozen kids.”

  My dad puts it back on the shelf as if it’s cursed—which it is.

  I stiffen my spine and go back to look.

  By the time we go through most of the inventory, we’ve come up with bupkis. Mostly just disjointed images—a few of the items, like the bell, mirror, and skeleton keys, I know for certain what they do. Others...I just get images of pain, or beauty, or seething vengeance. There are apparently a whole lotta pissed-off sorcerers out there. I dunno what that says about the human condition, but it’s pretty sad.

  Carl gets cranky and orders a pizza. My dad bitches and moans about having it around the merchandise, especially after the cheese slides off a slice of pie and lands on the front of his shirt.

  We succeed in finding a few health-related amulets: a hair loss prevention charm that’s supposedly a werewolf’s claw, a rattle that allows one to choose the gender of one’s baby, and four kinds of magical Viagra from China that have the souls of pissed-off tigers attached to the charms.

  And there are poisons of all types. When most people think of poison, they think of something that must be slipped into a victim’s food. We have poisons that work at a distance, through air, through thought, through sympathetic magic. On an intellectual level, I know from the reco
rds that we have these things. But touching them— I rub my hands on my pants. That darkness has seeped under my skin, and I look at my father with new eyes. I wonder if he’s ever sold any of it, or if he’s just keeping this shit for the apocalypse, like some magical doomsday prepper.

  “I got nothing,” Carl says, emptying out the last bit of dust from the bottom of a cardboard box.

  My dad stands still, rubbing his stubbly chin. “We’ll see what Bert’s come up with.”

  BERT HAS BEEN A BUSY demon.

  It’s sometimes easy to forget he’s a demon. I know that this sounds funny, since he’s obviously reptilian and nowhere near human in appearance. But I’ve grown up with him around, and he’s often been a sympathetic figure—sort of a mom in T-rex clothes. Not the kind of nurturing mom that Mrs. Renfelter is next door, looking after our intake of cheeseburgers like it’s her job. But sort of like someone’s chain-smoking mom who still does a bit too much clubbing, but who would blearily order a pizza and commiserate about what a jackass Dad is at two a.m.

  Not tonight.

  The lights are out in the shop. Lurid red neon light filters in from the night window, and diffuse yellow light shines from candles perched on the top of counters and on the floor. The candles are black and smell like tar. Chalk outlines of circles and geometric figures crisscross the floor, with the candles at points where lines terminate. An empty box of kids’ pastel sidewalk chalk lies in the corner.

  And there’s humming. I’ve never heard anything like it. It’s a deep buzz, something that sounds like it should come from a badly-tuned bass guitar or a sea creature from the bottom of the Marianas Trench. It shakes the crystal figurines in a case on the wall, providing a thin, high-pitched counter-note.

  I can’t see Bert. I cross into the room, and the hair on my arms stands up. Dad tries to grab my arm, but I shrug him off. Instinctively, I avoid the chalk lines—it feels like walking too close to power lines. A penny rolls along the floor, as if inexorably drawn to the outline, and collapses on the chalk.