Pawned

by Laura Bickle

“Not just now. He’s done it before.”

  My father’s staring at his reflection in the glass.

  Sid kicks the case, leaving a black scuff on the wooden base. “If you don’t tell them, I will.”

  Bert looks away.

  My dad places both his hands on the glass, stares at them. “Your granddad was sick before. Many years ago.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He has that scar from open-heart surgery. I know.” But my skin is beginning to prickle.

  “He almost died then. I asked Bert...to make an arrangement for me.”

  “With that guy in the hoodie?”

  “Yeah. With him. Or something like him.”

  My mouth feels dry and sticky, and it’s not just because I haven’t brushed my teeth. “What did you sell and what did you get? Another hourglass?”

  “I got time. It was a coin, actually.” My dad chokes up. “I traded blood for it.”

  “Blood?” I echo.

  “I thought it was mine,” he whispers. His face creases in pain.

  “Whose blood?”

  “I thought it was mine,” he repeats. “But...they took your brother.”

  CHAPTER 8

  “I don’t understand.” My voice sounds low, cold. “I was there. He fell from the bridge.”

  My father shakes his head. He can’t meet my gaze. “The night that happened, the demon came by the shop. He said he was calling in the loan. I didn’t...I didn’t know what that meant, at the time.”

  I feel dizzy, furious, shocked, queasy. Like I have the flu. I also want to rip his lying head off. “Zach died...because of you? Because you asked for more time for Pops?”

  “Yes,” he whispers. “I didn’t mean for it to happen...”

  “Does Pops know?”

  “No. Not a word.”

  “And you didn’t...you didn’t tell me.” Something hot rises in my throat. It tastes like bile. “You let me believe Zach’s death was my fault.” The volume of my voice rises, but I don’t feel like I’m part of myself. I watch, disconnected, as I take two steps toward my father.

  I want to take a swing at him. I do. My fists are curled so tight they ache. One of my English teachers says that every son wants to kill his father at some point in his life. My father even told me stories of his father chasing him around the house in an alcoholic rage when he was younger.

  I want to have the balls to do this. But I don’t.

  “You don’t understand,” my dad snarls. “He’s my father. I would do anything for him.” His hands wad into fists, too. Veins pulse in his neck, and his right eye twitches.

  Bert steps between us, his massive lizard hide blocking my view. Tail lashing, he spreads his tiny T-Rex arms out like a referee. He’s wearing a pink golf shirt, and the effect is utterly ridiculous. “What’s done is done,” he says. “What remains is to figure out a way to live with it.”

  “But not all of us are going to be able to live with it...is that right, Dad?” I spit. I glare at Bert. “And you...where do you get off brokering these deals? Do you get commission or something? Brownie points in hell?” I’m not sorry for a damn thing I said to my father, but I instantly regret talking that way to Bert.

  His head lowers a couple of inches, and his tail droops. “When someone who knows my name asks for an audience with another demon,” he murmurs, “I have no choice.”

  I want to apologize to Bert. I want to kill my father. I want to see Pops. I feel overwhelming grief for my brother, who died for a reason I have no way of fathoming. I want to scream. I want to protect Carl. I want Bert or Sid or someone to hug me and to tell me it’s going to be all right.

  Instead, I leave.

  Fight or flight. I’m reduced to simple, animalistic dichotomies.

  I storm off the shop floor to the back. I feel like a drowning rat, going up and up to escape. I climb up the stairs, up to my room, to snatch my wallet from the desk. I pause, staring out the window at a swath of blue sky. My breath and heart churn in my chest.

  All this time, I wanted answers. I wanted to make sense of a senseless thing. I wanted to stand and scream at the sky, to break that silence. And now I have everything. And I don’t want it. Can’t process it.

  I open the window, warm air sliding over me. I scramble up to the ledge and swing my legs over the sill. The fire escape spreads out below me, creaking under my weight. Shadows of laundry and pigeons flap over me.

  “Hey. Raz.”

  Lily’s perched on her windowsill. Her hair is loose over her shoulders, and she’s wearing a T-shirt that comes down to her thighs—disappointingly long. Nothing else. I assume she slept in it. She’s holding a plate of bacon, and cats mew at her, begging for their breakfast. Her bare toes curl on the railing. She sets the plate down for the cats to attack.

  “Are you doing all right?”

  I hesitate, mid-bolt. I shrug. “No. Not really.”

  “We came by the hospital. Your granddad had a scare, but he came out of it pretty good.”

  I nod. “Yeah. That’s what they tell me.”

  Lily purses her lips. “You going somewhere?”

  “I need to get out. Clear my head.” That much is true.

  “Do you want company?”

  “Sure.”

  Lily swings her long, pale legs back over the windowsill. “C’mon over. I’ll just be a minute.” She disappears behind the flowered curtains.

  I stare across the void. When we were kids, we’d strung a string with tin cans across the span to send messages late at night. Secret instructions from spies and aliens.

  I still want to bridge that gap.

  I jump.

  I land on the fire escape outside Lily’s window. My boots make a clanging sound that scatters the cats. They don’t wander far—they know me. Before I have one foot through Lily’s window, a gray and white tabby sneaks back to snag a slice of bacon.

  And I step out of my world and into Lily’s. I leave the dirt, and the demons in hoodies, and dueling pistols, and smell of stale pizza behind.

  Lily’s world is unlike any other. She has the ability to build something from nothing, which is a considerable talent. It’s like watching an alchemist at work—not the shady magic that Bert’s friends have or the kind that festers in our vault. This is pure, good magic. It turns negative into positive, base metal into gold.

  The first thing I always notice about Lily’s realm is that it smells like magnolias. It doesn’t smell like the hot asphalt or garbage outside. She has a line of candles on her shelf. One is always burning when she’s in her room, and I can see that dim light from mine. It’s comforting, in its way.

  Lily’s room is painted pink. And purple. And green. And yellow. And just about every other color you can imagine. She’s always painting murals. She started coloring on her walls with crayons when she was a little girl. Her mom threw up her hands and let her do it. Now, she’s painting murals. When she gets bored with what’s up there, she paints over it again. The current one is a mermaid. She’s facing the ocean. Her hair is long and blond and wound with seaweed, and the ocean is a blue frothy line on the sand.

  Lily’s paints and easels occupy easily more than half the room. There’s an old-fashioned sewing machine that folds into a table, which we found in a Dumpster when she was ten. The rest is a clutter of found objects that she’s gathered and cobbled together into art: bits of sea glass wound together with wire to make a necklace, a cat sculpture made of steel cans, mobiles of sharp-toothed fairies made from cut-up pop bottles. There’s a dressmaker’s dummy made entirely of mattress springs and papier-mâché, on which a dress is taking shape.

  Lily’s in her closet. The light is on, and I can hear her rustling around. The door’s slightly ajar, but I don’t want to be an asshat.

  Instead, I stand before the dressmaker’s dummy, sculpted to be Lily’s double. She’s making a dress out of duct tape. You wouldn’t be able to tell it’s duct tape from looking at it. Most of it’s black. It has a high stiff collar, and the duc
t tape material covers the front of the dummy down to the knee. There’s a bow at the waist. The rest of it looks like streamers. I don’t know if it will stay that way. She hasn’t shown me the design in her sketchbook.

  “The dress is really coming along,” I say. “It’s nice.”

  “Thanks.” Her voice is muffled from the closet. “It should be done soon.”

  I look at it, bite my lip. I’m kind of glad she’s in the closet. “Are you going to wear it to prom?” I try to make it sound casual.

  There’s a pause in the rustling in the closet. “I guess I could. But I dunno if prom’s my thing. I’ve never been to it before.”

  I reach out and touch the bow on the dress. “I could take you. If you want. No pressure or anything.” I mostly just want to see her in this, her fantasy dress.

  There’s another silence from the closet. “Just as long as we don’t do it the way that everyone else does it.”

  “What do you mean?” I have no idea how everyone else does prom.

  “Not dumb. Not with a rented limo and tuxedo and corsages.”

  “I have no idea what the hell a corsage is, so I think you’re safe.”

  She pulls open the closet door, hopping on one foot. She’s trying to get her foot into a boot. She’s wearing leggings and the same long T-shirt I saw her in before, like a dress.

  She catches me fondling the bow on her dress.

  My hand drops.

  Outside of my family, Lily’s really the only friend I have, and I can’t lose that. I don’t want to do anything that would make things weird.

  “I think I’d like that,” she says. She gives me a smile. It’s the only warmth I’ve felt today. She looks me in the face, and her smile falters. “What happened?”

  “Um. My dad and I had a disagreement.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Lily leads me downstairs. We slip past the kitchen and snag some more bacon. Lily’s older sister, Rose, is working the grill. She’s home from college for summer break. Her dark hair is braided back like Princess Leia’s under her hairnet. Earbuds trail from her hairnet, and she dances as she works. She’s gotta be feeling the loss of the jukebox more than anyone else. Her favorite massive orange plastic cup, shaped like a grimacing Tiki god, is perched beside her. It’s actually more like a pitcher. There’s Coke in it, and probably a bit of rum under the lid and straw. The back of her T-shirt rides up to show a tattoo: a dude with a moustache in an old-timey suit, holding a lightning bolt. I’m pretty sure Mrs. Renfelter hasn’t seen it yet, because there’s been no nuclear explosion at Betty’s Burgers.

  “Nice ink,” I say.

  “You like it?” She lifts the back of her shirt up.

  “Um. Yeah. Who is it? Harry Houdini?”

  She rolls her eyes. “It’s Nicola Tesla. The designer of alternating current. Science god.”

  I can see it now. “Oh, yeah!”

  With her knuckles, she gives me a full noogie on the top of my head then hugs me. Lily tugs Rose’s shirt down in the back to cover the ink. “How are you?” Her eyes glitter with mischief and eyeliner, but they are solemn in their concern.

  I look away, rubbing the back of my neck. “I’ve been better.”

  “Anything you need, you know we’re here for you,” she says.

  That gives me such a lump in my throat I can’t speak.

  I’m saved by a whirlwind slamming into my stomach. Two small arms squeeze me hard, and a dark curly mop of hair is buried in my chest. “Raz!”

  “Hi, Callie.” Callie is the youngest sister, the spitting image of Lily and Rose when they were little. Except she has her father’s clear blue eyes. She looks up at me. “Mom said Pops is sick.”

  “Yeah. But I think he’s gonna get better. Don’t worry.” A muscle in my jaw hardens and twitches when I tell her that.

  Lily draws me away. “Tell Mom that we’ll be back after a bit, would you, Rose?”

  “She’s actually next door.” Rose frowns and spanks a patty with her spatula. She does a little shimmy with her hips in time to whatever she’s listening to on her iPod.

  “Next door?”

  “She left with her jewelry box. Something’s going on.” Rose’s glittery eyes narrow.

  Lily and I swap glances. I wonder if Mrs. Renfelter is pawning stuff to pay off those Mob guys. I open my mouth, but Lily stomps on my foot.

  “Just tell her we’ll be back, okay?”

  “I will.”

  I never tell my dad or Sid or even Carl that I’m going. The girls always make sure their mother knows when they’ll be home. I’m not sure my dad would notice if I was gone for days. Bert might. Carl would. But I never know what’s going on in my dad’s fucked-up head, and now that I’ve had a little glimpse of his mind, I don’t want to see any more.

  Lily leads me from the hamburger shop. We walk down the street, past the tattoo parlor and bail bondsmen. A girl about Lily’s age walks out of the tattoo parlor with her arm covered in plastic wrap. Through the plastic, I can make out the outline of a butterfly. In front of one of the bail bond places, two men dressed in black walk toward a shiny sport utility vehicle. They both have handcuffs jingling from the backs of their belts and carry file folders of papers. I imagine those are files of criminals they’re going to run down.

  The bars are closed. It’s hard to tell, since they have no windows, but the neon signs are unlit. It’s still too early even for happy hour. A man outside hoses down the sidewalk mess from last night. It looks sticky—like vomit.

  We pass the county jail, a concrete façade with high walls. Police cruisers go in and out through an underground tunnel, and we avoid the entrance, where inmates get released. Too many people there panhandle for bus change, carrying brown paper sacks that likely contain all their worldly possessions. A man in a deputy’s black uniform talks into a radio clipped onto his shirt. Something about serving a warrant and lunch.

  What I see in our neighborhood makes me sad. I don’t like the idea of dealing in the misery of others, in their pain, whether it’s from a needle or a cell.

  “Did your mom tell you what the visit from the Mob was about?” I ask.

  Lily shakes her head. “She won’t tell me. She’s acting weird. And I don’t like the idea of her trying to pawn her jewelry.”

  “I’d act weird, too, if the Mob showed up and killed my jukebox.”

  Lily doesn’t respond, but she’s clearly stewing in it. I let it drop.

  I’ve heard schoolyard stories of what the Mob has done in our town from the time I was old enough to play cops and robbers. They were heroes during Prohibition, importing cheap alcohol, funding elections, and keeping speakeasies open. The cops largely ignored them. Their primary opposition was the women in the Temperance movement, who would stage protests at the speakeasies and along the docks.

  One demonstration didn’t end peacefully. A mobster fired a shot in the air to scare the women away, and the gun misfired. The bullet killed a pregnant woman who had nothing to do with the demonstration while she was crossing the street—Mary Stellera. She was pretty much canonized by the Temperance movement, and then the law had to get involved.

  All the publicity forced the Feds to act, and the Mob went further underground. Things got ugly. A judge was murdered, and then it was pretty much war in Starboard City. The local police department has a memorial to eighteen cops who were executed on a single day in 1928. They weren’t killed running to a bank robbery call. They were all off-duty. They were hunted down, one by one. Some in their houses, shot at the kitchen tables or in their easy chairs. Four were shot dead playing poker in a guy’s garage. Even the chief of police was found dead in the theater. One detective was killed in a locked room—locked from the inside. No one knew how anyone got in and out. They call it the Halloween Massacre, saying it could only have been carried out by ghosts.

  So, yeah, I’m not eager to fuck with the Mob. Though it’s widely believed that the Mob has mellowed since the eighties, focusing on high-end
prostitution, high-stakes gambling, and drugs—things that don’t concern me—everyone still remembers what they were capable of, once upon a time.

  “I don’t know how much longer I can stay at my dad’s,” I say, changing the subject.

  Lily glances at me, takes several steps before answering. “You can always stay with us.”

  I shake my head. I know that if I leave, I have to make my own way in the world. “Thanks, but...if Pops gets out of the hospital, I’m going to give some serious thought to finding my own place.”

  She places her hand on my arm. “When he gets out.”

  “When he gets out,” I amend.

  She takes her hand back. She looks down, not at me, but rather at the cracks in the sidewalk. “I would miss you. We all would. Mom and Callie and Rose, too.”

  “I’d miss you, too.”

  We cut down a block east, and into the waterfront district. It’s as if we cross some invisible barrier from our world into one that’s completely alien.

  The casinos aren’t illuminated by day, but they’re still spectacular. Glittering and modern, the hotels reach many stories upward to the sun. All the balconies face the water—none face west, where we’ve come from. Fountains spurt up from street level into grates and pools, on which security guards keep strict eyes—children from our neighborhood who sneak over to play in the water in the summer are marched off immediately. Bellmen in red uniforms stand beside tall glass doors, watching glossy cars pull up and men in elegant suits emerge. A tour bus disgorges its cargo of elderly people dressed in pastels, hobbling toward the entrance. From the street, I hear the musical tinkling of the slot machines and whoops of delight.

  The boardwalk extends east, running north and south along a narrow strip of beach. The sand is rocky and prone to bits of glass in it, despite the best efforts of a guy who drives a machine that combs it every morning at dawn. We call it the Sand Zamboni. A few tourists will usually wander down to the water, but locals rarely do. It’s got some kind of film on it. Last time I went in, I got a rash. But even with the gulls picking in the trash at the margins, it looks pretty from a distance.