Bluff City Pawn (29 page)

“So have ’em bring the stuff somewhere else.”

“Like, my house? Oh, that’s miles away, I’m safe there.”

“How about I
offer
you a house?” Joe says, his voice uncertain, hedging.

“What, to stash?”

“To have. After,” he says, and he waves his hand to present the property rights, and his voice is secure. “You get me out of this mess, the last one’s yours.” He points a finger, a confident line aimed straight at Huddy’s reward.

“You’d sign it over?” Huddy asks, and he air-scrawls a signature.

“Exactly.”

Huddy aims two fingers back, extending his index finger and raising his thumb.

“What’s that?” Joe asks.

“That’s my bullshit detector.”

“You know—I’m getting tired of you pointing guns at me.”

“And I’m glad there’s a wall behind my back. You think for a second I believe one of these houses is mine? And how do I take that promise to the bank, after they foreclosed? ‘My brother said it was free. He said if I stole enough, I’d get this freebie house.’ I suspect they’d reject them terms. ’Sides, I already got a house. You ain’t never been there to know.”

Joe’s back is stiff against the wall, his hands stacked in his lap. His face holds still, like a mask of his real face. In this blank room, there are no plans and no obstacles to them. Huddy eyes what statement is building, sees a hand come up and squeeze the side of his skull. Then Joe slides the hand over his mouth as if he were smothering himself. All the times Huddy’s driven over to Joe’s house to urge and beg, and now he can not talk and just wait and outsit him because it’s Joe’s turn to devise. He watches Joe’s fingers touch together to form a cage, which he sets around his eyes as if to compress his mind, and he stares through the cage as if staring through a circle, a zero. “Maybe I got something,” Joe says, and he wrings his hands, his fists tensing, opening and closing, little squeezes. “This neighbor—not here, where I live. She and her husband—filthy rich. Lake house, yachts. Four-wheelers to play in the mud. Stupid money. Went to a party at their house. Platters of filet mignons. Should see her. Full mink, cowboy boots. She’s wearing four bracelets just to upstage the other wives. The two of ’em: Clampetts got rich. Well, they’ve been having money troubles. Like a June frost—gone. So this lady, I run into her last week, and we get to talking about times is hard, and she asks me if I was wanting to buy these Christmas gnomes.”

“Gnomes.” Huddy’s whole day with ATF, in his records and all up under his clothes, and now it’s ending with a nickel-and-dime story about gnomes. Tried paying in for guns, and now let’s chip in for gnomes and eke out a profit. Today, Huddy just can’t hear a small-time scheme.

“Says she got like twenty of ’em and they’re worth fifty apiece, but she’ll sell all twenty for a hundred, and she’s telling me about the bank and how dumb her husband’s been. All this money, but her husband’s just been pyramiding. She don’t say it, but it’s how. Now, she don’t want nothing to do with a pawnshop, but I figure if I buy this stuff, funnel it to you, and you sell it—”

“Gnomes?” He looks at Joe, propped up on the wall.

“It’s a hell of a lot more than that. She’s just
starting
there. It’s name-your-price. And she ain’t the only one who’s down to the nub.”

“Fine, go crumb this lady.” Huddy rubs his fingertips. “Right now, the retail market ain’t too strong on gnomes.”

“Will you stop saying
gnomes
?”

“Why not? Sounds like these are premium gnomes!”

“Just stop.”

“Are they twenty
different
gnomes, or they all the same kind, or maybe somewheres in the middle—like, five sugarplum fairies and five Princess Whatevers? She got a Santa Claus fairy? She got Father Time? She got any bells on the feet? And have you
seen
these items? ’Cause condition would be important. If she’s kept them in mint, that’s one thing. Maybe she preserved them in plastic? But, the way you describing, she probably been sleeping with all twenty. And a bunch of ’em been falling on the floor, and a few of ’em been chew toys for the poodles. I’m asking cause, moneywise, I’m at zero.”

“And I’m at minus zero.”

The bad tallies, the claim and counterclaim, echo in the air. The room is smaller with nothing in it, but their discussion is bigger for the same reason. Huddy feels double sensations, closeness and distancing, far apart at opposite ends but identical in their positions. “Why are we talking trinkets?” he says. “Why are we talking
cost
?” Everything is out of the room because everything is inside them, all personal effects emptied so he and Joe can focus on one essential fact. Huddy’s eyes narrow. The room is only hard edges. “I’m at nothing. You’re at negative. We both out of pocket. Unless there’s some number I ain’t crunching. Far as I’m concerned, anything we buy, we overbuying. Unless we buying it free. Unless we use
play
money.”

“I ain’t a criminal,” Joe says.

“Ain’t one either.”

They stare deadlocked.

“I don’t care what you are,” Huddy says. “I’m talking against payments. You best stop asking me to open my shop to thieves. You’re the one trying to buy time. I’m just saying—maybe you should steal it.”

“I’m not a criminal.” Joe laces his fingers and Huddy studies his interlocking hands.

“That’s what I tried telling ATF—about me.” Huddy gestures at the surroundings as if the contents were lifted, the entire house burglarized. “Maybe for just a little while, we are.” He can’t decide if he’s in a crime scene or a hideout, a place where things have been taken from or later taken to. The police, ATF, and now his brother all suspect him of lawbreaking. Okay, the little daily maneuvers: Someone brings you a fifty-dollar Sears gift card and you know it’s stolen and you buy it for twenty and sell it for thirty-five, and they bring you another card the next day, and you take it or don’t, but either way you stop. And when a young man brings in twenty memorial coins, with the impression of his grandpa on the front of the coin, do you ask, Did you steal this from the old man’s funeral or from your grandma’s safe? Or do you listen to the bogus inheritance story and ask how much? And when this family thief returns with another stack of death benefits, do you cut him off then? But Huddy’s never been so bad as to buy fifteen engagement rings from some fella saying they’re all mama’s engagement rings, when mama ain’t been engaged but once. And Huddy never was the broker who had thieves working for him, who paid addicts for stolen goods with drugs he kept in back. Or like another broker, who intentionally scrambled the serial numbers when he’d fax the merchandise list downtown. Huddy’s crimes have always been about omission, just little cases of daytime blindness. But why not, for a quick fix, be the lowlife people think he is? Especially if he gets to tell his brother, as they sit in one of his unsellable houses, that he’s one, too.

No table to gather around but Huddy feels like they’re hunched together in a corner booth, and without the table, Huddy can see all of Joe, no body part hidden underneath. He suddenly realizes how visible they are from the street, but no one’s looking in. They’re in a subdivision that feels like a clearing, on a site without a street address, in a house that’s not a home. It’s hard to feel like their words have any substance, that their crimes could occur in any real jurisdiction. Hard to feel like yourself, much less like anyone, in an empty location. Nothing hanging on the walls. No clock with ticking hands, as if any time—five minutes or all night or into a second day and onto next week and passing through a different year—is this same hour. No one else is in the room to say, “Stop.”

“Harlan ever tell you what he done in Florida?” Joe says, which to Huddy sounds like another world, as far off as the future undetectable crimes he just imagined. He shakes his head, but he already knows why Harlan’s been named. “Shed burglar.”

“When’d he say that?” Huddy says. He’s hearing about Harlan’s past exploits to learn how best to exploit him, to put Harlan’s illegal actions into practice. Joe wouldn’t mention Harlan unless he’d already made that decision.

“Today.”

“Piss-ant burglar.” Huddy’s pictured Harlan out in the woods, and now he’s a sneak thief, busting doors, smashing glass, slicing through screens. “Get caught?”

“Petty-theft conviction. Misdemeanor.”

“That’s why he left Florida?”

“Sort of. Did time, got out. Stopped doing sheds. Got to stealing credit cards, taking ’em to a gas station, say, ‘I’ll fill up your car, you give me twenty bucks.’ He’d do it three, four times, go to another station. I guess he got to feeling awful. Came back to Memphis.”

“Lassie comes home.”

“Says he was a good thief before he got busted.”

“You believe that?”

Joe shrugs.

“He tell you that, or you ask him?”

Joe doesn’t respond, his eyes shifting away, and Huddy’ll count the answer as both, hearing one of Harlan’s brags secondhand from Joe. Huddy adds up the grains of truth. Or maybe Joe, in paying the bail, is entitled to a full confession, and now Huddy will confess to what else is true, just a small amount, almost weightless.

“Gold,” Huddy says. “No electronics, nothing bulky. An ounce of gold, sits on your finger. You can turn it quick. Always have a buyer, and the buyer is the fence. No paperwork, no inventory, no serial numbers. Not after you hit it with a hammer. Engravings come off with a torch. Mash up all the gold chains and rings. There’s your quick untraceable cash. Start bringing gold.”

Joe stays silent, and Huddy talks to mean the same wordless thing.“I’m already caught today. Got my hands full with ATF. I ain’t going near a crime, and the crime ain’t going near the shop. I’ll move it for you, but I ain’t getting tied. I’ll sell, but not steal. It’s time for you to get brave. You a big keyholder, Joe. I already seen you with mine. Start using some others. You probably got master keys to all of them houses you built. And the alarm systems, I bet you got a bypass code. Looks like you just found a way out. Or in.”

Joe shakes his hand, nullifying, impossible. “You’re wrong, both ways. Sure I’ve got bypass codes. Except the alarm company would know the numbers I pressed to disarm the system. As for keys, the master gets disabled on first use. The doorknob re-keys it.”

“Looks like we’re stuck at zero. Or minus.”

Their eyes meet. Neither brother can give ground because both are backed against a wall. Huddy looks around. It’s the first vacant house he’s been in where a person hadn’t left to make it empty. The first house he’s been in that’s all gone just because it’s new. “The last house we were in with nothing, it was mama’s, when we cleared it together.”

“So what?” Joe squints his eyes as if he can’t hear what Huddy’s saying, then shakes his head as if it were said too loud. “Jesus, who cares?” he says, as if Huddy’d said it a hundred times.

Huddy laughs at his exasperation, a joke about Joe’s mind and the direction it won’t work. Can’t do family history, can’t do the past. No old days, no
then
. No remembering, even if it’s recent. But looking at Joe, in his grubby jeans, Huddy can see him smaller at fifteen, like he was wearing an old disguise that he thinks no one will identify because he’s grown into someone else. Teenage Joe and his dead mother—it’s like Huddy’s returned to a new place, not a complete reunion, not seeing both parents and not every sibling but enough of a homecoming, the rooms cleared like furniture pushed back for the evening dance. But Joe doesn’t care about remembrance, so neither will Huddy. Joe was there, Joe wasn’t there, same difference.

“Eight hundred square feet,” Joe says. “Our home. That was the size of it. That metal roof. It was so loud when it rained, it sounded like trains going over us.”

“I remember that,” Huddy says. “Like airplanes.”

“We were gonna be put out on the street,” Joe says, and Huddy remembers that, too, their father splitting, and they borrowed some money from their aunt, but mostly it was Joe keeping them inside. There was a house up the street that had been demolished and Joe picked through the ruins to salvage bricks for resale, took a hatchet to chip off the mortar. Another time, he collected newspapers by the pound to bring down to the paper plant. All the ways that Joe cleared money.

“I remember,” Joe says, “a renovation. Here, in Germantown. This was when I was starting out. I was moving up. I hadn’t done houses yet, but I was close. And the owner comes over, he was a real society type, and we got to talking, and he asked me, ‘And where do you hail from?’ Just like that.
Hail from
. I thought I’d spiraled off into outer space.” He shakes his head, both at the story and the reminiscing. “The thing about Germantown,” Joe whispers, but in this room even a low voice is raised. “Most everyone got security systems. But half of them feel secure enough not to turn them on. They got the alarm sign in the yard, but that’s it. This house is protected by a lawn sign. And the old-timers, they still unlock their doors. They think it’s 1950.”

“Like the widow Yewell.”

“Somebody like her. But not her.” He brings a hand to his head, scratches his hair, his hand circling like he was spinning his mind, until he stops and says, “Harlan,” and Huddy thinks he knows what he means. “He owes me for the bail. And I’m gonna hook him in with a big lawyer, who’s in tight with the DA. He’ll cut his time.”