Bluff City Pawn (23 page)

“So that’s what this is? You take ’em ’cause of something I didn’t tole you?” This sneak raiding the shop and he’s telling me about lessons and secrets. Joe knew he’d be caught on video, but that still didn’t make his act not a lie.

“Well, since we’re sharing the whole truth,” Joe says, “no, that’s not it.”

“You know shit about guns.”

“What’s to know? Bought ’em here. Sell ’em that way, too. I figure I can just go over to the Hunt & Polo Club and find a buyer. My banker, he collects guns. You said yourself—you never seen guns like these. Well, me neither. These guns are as far from you as they are from me. Except I live here.”

“So you a gun dealer now? I’d suggest wearing one, if you are. And if someone breaks in here, you better show ’em more than your ADT license.”

“You threatening?” Joe wiping a wet hand across his mouth.

Here we go, Harlan thinks, can’t fight over guns without a gunfight. Two casualties in a duel, except the third brother would never know from the one brother where the guns are hidden, and he wouldn’t know from the second what to look for. Unless they used the guns they’re arguing over, ten paces and turn and draw and they both hit dead center—one-two—and drop and Harlan steps through the powder to pick up the pieces, the guns like blown-off bones from the bodies. Only right now, it’s a standoff to be settled with fists, and Harlan’s here to overwhelm, to turn a fight into a beating—not that he knows this from Huddy, Huddy didn’t even say destination, but Harlan knew without word or signal what they were tracking down. Huddy’s face red-hot, his clenched hands ready to sock hard at Joe’s mouth, drop him to the ground or back undersea, but then he collects himself. He’s wanted to wring somebody’s neck every day of his pawnbroker life, had years of practice with restraint.

“Fine,” he says, shoulders shrugging out a truce. Pulls back to a better punishment. “Go sell the guns. You do it right, they’ll bring fifty thousand. And you better, ’cause your fifty’s done. I’m doing the rest.”

“Ain’t.” Joe frowns, looks dumbly at Huddy as if he’d already given this same answer and why can’t Huddy get it? “That wasn’t the deal.”

“Wasn’t the deal!”

“Deal was sell the guns and split the final number.”

“That was before you took them pieces. Ain’t halves anymore.”

Harlan with zero, listening to his two brothers, two partners with equal portions arguing about equal shares, half and another half, and not a cut left over at the end.

“What I took was my collateral,” Joe says.

“I told you, your collateral was me.”

“You don’t decide.” Joe points and then his eyes shift two ways, to size up both of them. “And no brother is ever gonna be my collateral.” He looks twice, face to face, his lips twisting in a sneer. “I’m holding these guns. Holding ’em ’cause I need more coverage than my collateral being you. What I got is first-dollar coverage. You want ’em back, start selling the others. The timetable is now. Or I’ll close up the shop. What do I care? You must be crazy if you think I’m gonna invest fifty thousand dollars and have you tell me wait. You don’t take my money and take charge. Fifty thousand, that buys me yes—and yes again. We still dividing the total. I gave you fifty ’cause I’m getting more.
Never about breaking even. And don’t tell me about no waiting period. It’s over.”

“Waiting is what’s legal,” Huddy says, but all Harlan’s hearing is that thousands number Joe said and repeated, and Joe squints to see that line between what’s legal and not.

“This thirty-day thing, it’s a gray area. Postdate the damn sales.”

Huddy shakes his head. This isn’t collateral but blackmail. “ATF comes in when these guns are in my book sold—sold, but they’re not in the store—I’m done.”

Joe shrugs. What Huddy just said changes nothing. “You were the one that wanted to be a pawnbroker.” His shoulders jump. “That’s your problem.”

Huddy thinks, He takes my guns, our guns, guns that were his and not his, mine and not mine, and now his expense is protected and I’m the only one risking penalty and loss. Took his part of the deal and now he’s dealing me.

“My problem,” Joe says, double-tapping his chest, “is I just finished this subdivision and the market bottoms out. Don’t give me hypotheticals about how you might get hurt. ATF comes in, whatever. I’m getting hit right now. Interest bill due every month. Taxes due. Insurance. I got more problems than you. How about you, Harlan? What’s your problem?” But Joe answers it himself—Harlan can’t have a new problem when he’s squandered his life from the beginning. Harlan’s failure, it started too far back to remember. A long time ago, before adulthood, Harlan took some wrong turn, walked through some wrong door, and was done. Fell down in a ditch and the lid closed tight over him, and you could pry it open, but it’s too late for saving, so why spend energy on a dead thing?

Harlan sees the wealth and the luxury and feels numberless. How is this hard times? “Man, I wish I could be
this
broke. All this, and you broke.
You
,” Harlan says, and it sounds like not only a laugh against Joe, but a brag about himself, Joe fallen means Harlan’s risen a level. If Joe is broke and so is Harlan, then all this bankrupt excess must be his somewhere, too. Or maybe Harlan’s seeing a game of seesaw, if Joe goes all the way down, then Harlan must swing up.

“I ain’t broke,” Joe says.

“You’re just leveraged,” Huddy says.

“What’s that?” Harlan says. “That mean you out of money? You talk to Huddy here, he come up with a payment plan. Or maybe you wanna liquidate some things. Sell these decorations. Sell or pawn, he’ll set you up both ways.”

Joe looks around, his eyes crossing the garden, lost in the path’s windings. He squints at the big dimensions of the house, at the brick façade, then high up to the second story where the bedrooms blur in darkness. He shakes his head, bites his mouth. How did this happen? How did he get all the way out here only to be on the brink of where he started? Worked and overworked, drove hard and far on a self-made road that seemed straight and suddenly doubled back. “Highly leveraged,” he says. “Full-bore taxes on completed homes that no one’s buying.”

“Filthy rich and dirty poor,” Harlan says.

“You ain’t been but one,” Joe says, but it’s a different sound, and Huddy’s surprised to hear it sputter out from him, Joe’s mouth a choked vent that won’t fully open, or his anger too deep inside to get out clear and across to Harlan.

Huddy looks back at the house, doesn’t see any boarded-up windows, just glass unbroken and clean. “Give me one now,” Huddy says. “One of the two, and I’ll start selling.”

“You got plenty to sell,” Joe says, his voice restored.

“It’s about you taking what wasn’t full yours.”

“I already told you what it was. People like me are going
under
. People with more.”

“And I’m telling you what it was, too. I know when my pocket’s been picked.” At the kitchen table, Joe’s delayed thinking—it wasn’t confusion but cunning. Huddy thought Joe couldn’t read the gun list, but he was just scheming ahead to the timing of his con. “And I don’t like this now-or-never shit. You talking like you bought me.”

“I own the store. I bankrolled you—then and now. Propped this deal up till you got your half scraped together.”

Huddy shakes his head, ’cause he is and
isn’t
in Joe’s pocket. He was, but he won’t be. “We sat at your table and you worried over all the ways this deal could go wrong, and now you making it wrong.”

Joe’s shrewd face tells Huddy that he both agrees with him and who cares? “Sell twenty, you get one.”

“Twenty to get one, twenty to get the other.”

“Get the other at the end. A fair compromise. Which one you want first?”

“You pick,” Huddy says, blank and neutral, both guns are his favorites, both are nothing, and Joe smiles at Huddy not naming the one or bluffing with the other. “Don’t worry,” Huddy says. “Whichever you keep is the one I’m wanting.”

And Joe laughs into Huddy’s dead stare. Then he checks his watch, gestures at the ground. “Like I told Lorie, y’all helping me with this net. Roll it out.”

Harlan looks at Huddy, who shrugs yes, and Harlan shakes his head—came here to get payback and instead Joe gets helpers, free hands—and nudges the net with his foot. Joe grabs it himself and unfurls it more. They take positions, Harlan staying in place and Huddy moves away and Joe past him to the other side, so they stand around the ring, all gripping the edges of the net in their hands. Joe nods and they swing their arms and send the net floating and it settles down and catches on the beam. They bend and stretch the edges to the ground, the net tight and transparent, the water closed up but not disappeared beneath the scrim, like blood seen through skin.

“Don’t pull too hard,” Joe says, calling across. “Tension’s gotta be just so. Harlan, you pulling too hard.”

“I ain’t.”

Joe points at the peak. “You getting the pipe out of whack.”

“Well, maybe that’s a problem with the pipes. Maybe they sitting in the buckets weak.”

“Gravel’s stabilizing ’em,” Joe says, slowly, and Harlan looks across the pond, then at Huddy, and Huddy reads the face: Does Joe ever stop telling what you done wrong? “Don’t make me build my rafter again,” Joe says. He walks to the brick pile near Harlan and stacks three and carries the stack to his side. He sets them on the ground, a small tower, and takes the top one and wraps the netting around it. “Every couple feet, roll the bricks up in the net.”

Harlan tugs again and the brick at Joe’s feet tumbles forward, teeters at the rim, like some clumsy trick where what’s supposed to stay in place doesn’t.

“You trying to hit my fish. I know you ain’t trying to whack my koi.”

“Checking how it holds up to wind,” Harlan says. “Straight-line winds’ll rip this thing right up. Take this whole thing off. Fish might blow up with it. Poor fish. They leaving the ground. They hearing that wind coming overhead and they eyeing the net and they know it ain’t holding. Ain’t trying to kill your fish, Joe. I’m trying to keep ’em alive.”

And when the last brick’s been rolled, the ends weighed down, Harlan reaches inside a gravel bag and picks a pebble and skips it at the net and the pebble bounces off the tented surface, lands somewhere else with a quiet tap. “Tension seems right,” he says, which Joe ignores, a harmless throw, forgotten. He concentrates on the rigging, the buckets centered in the pond, the poles upright under the net, the bricks lining the rim. He frowns, frustrated but then pleased—whatever is wrong is just a minor nuisance or fault, like the cover’s been put on backward when both sides fit.

And Huddy waits for the wind to come and shed leaves down upon them.

Eleven

He gets going, sets
up appointments. Chats over the phone about models and ranges of years, emails photos for first looks. The visits will be one at a time, two per day—a more crowded schedule will cause too many mistakes—ten or twelve guns displayed per dealer. Not gonna show everything to one and have his collection get creamed. The dealers can name their price, set their stakes, but Huddy won’t let the game be dealer’s choice. He’s holding the guns and he’ll watch their surprise that he’s holding them, watch their hair stand up. They’ll come looking for bargains, thinking Huddy specializes in lawnmowers and electronics and jewelry and guns and guitars and tools, and they’re right, he can’t know as much as the pros, can’t have their knowledge, because he’s never handled this kind of collection, but he knows enough of what he’s got and what it ain’t. No alterations, no re-bluing or re-wooding, no extra holes, nothing touched up and ruined. Nothing out of place with these guns, except for them being here. All these rare originals in a secondhand store. Never sold guns like these on Lamar, and the dealer’s gonna think he’s in Tulsa at a table at a major show, so they’re both gonna feel elsewhere.

“I’ve always seen this gun at eight,” the first dealer says, and Huddy thinks to point out the finish, but he nods, eight doesn’t sting. Huddy shows twelve, the man wants all of them. Probably buy them to sell eleven and make enough to keep the twelfth. The man not blinking, so Huddy won’t either. He makes his offer and Huddy pushes it up, and the man knocks it down a notch. Two happy hunters, so easy to sell real guns, the dealers bringing big cash to get ’em. Huddy’s been grinding away all these years, hitting singles, and he’ll never own this stuff again, but his consolation is a pile of money.

Harlan sees the cash get counted, sees Huddy’s pocketbook getting thicker. He watches Huddy log out the first batch. “You ain’t postdating ’em?” he asks, after the dealer departs.

“Why, ’cause Joe said to?”

Harlan shrugs.

“I entered
today
’cause that’s when they been sold. Unless something pops up stolen, no one cares. Year from now, feds just gonna slap my hands when they see this book and these hurry-up sales. I pay a fine, or pay a lawyer to get me out of paying it. Joe don’t tell me how to do my gun book.”

But Harlan shakes his head. “Postdating it seems better. Leave it blank, fill it in later. What’s the difference? Two weeks?”

“I ain’t fudging my book. That’s federal. I’m up and up with ATF. They come in tomorrow, instead of a year, they look at my books—”

“Nobody coming in here except the buyers. You wait two weeks, you write it down then, you ain’t done nothing wrong. You write it down now, somebody comes in tomorrow or next year, you caught. So what if it’s small-time? You get busted the second way, not the first.”