Bluff City Pawn (31 page)

“Are they shutting you down?” Her eyes squinch and study him as if she were reading a page of rules to find the exact penalty.

“They ain’t running me. But they cutting me down. A lot.”

She looks older, Huddy thinks, or an older version, like when she first walked into his life talking about her younger self. He can’t help but picture her again before and now.

“I’m losing the way I run it. But there’s different ways to farm. Guess I’m about to learn another way.”

“Harder?” she says, and he nods. “I guess no Summer,” she says, and it isn’t until she gestures in a direction that Huddy realizes she means street and not season. “Maybe you stop farming, then. Sell cars. Houses.”

Sure. He even knows where he’ll start, a whole mess of overbuilt houses. Good money there. “Not neither. Them markets done a swan dive. Buyer’s market, but no one’s buying.”

“I’m just trying to talk up some facts. You talking about farming.”

“Look, I just need to find out where I’m headed. Soon as I figure which way, we’ll be fine. I’ll get moving again.” He shrugs his shoulder, to signal a minor adjustment, some small change, but it looks like a tick he can’t control, and it only increases the annoyance on her face.

“Funny you should say that. Moving.”

“What’s that mean?” He looks back at the deadbolt, thinks of the snicking sound of the lock, along with her fiddling hand that he thought was for leaving the house.

She folds her arms, her body hunched and coiled. “All this talk of Germantown.”

“Germantown?” he says, surprised but relieved, since he thought she meant going, even if she’s never said so before. “I thought you was pulling the pin.”

She frowns, because she doesn’t want to discuss what she’s
not
doing. He watches her arms tighten against herself.

“You wanna live out in Germantown?” he asks.

“Wouldn’t mind living in a bubble. But no, not there. Farther.”

“Collierville.”

“No,” she says, louder. “I mean being gone from Memphis.”

“Thought you like it here. Thought you were alright with it.”

“I am. And if you said, ‘Let’s move tomorrow,’ I’d say, ‘Let’s go.
’
”

“You need more house?” he says, and he gestures around the bungalow spaces.

“House is enough. I might like this enough . . .
elsewhere
. You like hearing gunshots?”

“That’s over there. Other side of McLean. Always,” Huddy says, and he extends his arm fully to push the trouble far out—go past McLean to another world—even though the crime is near, just a couple blocks, same street, a half-mile. Still, his eyes pinch to insist the trouble is concentrated there.

She throws her hands out right and left. “North and south ain’t any better.”

So what, he wants to say, about the surrounding area. This long street is fine, and he’s pretty sure that every respectable city neighborhood borders on a ragged edge.

“It’s stuff spilling over,” she says. “Matter of time before what’s there overtakes what’s here.” And then she tells him about the neighbor who’s been pruning his bushes so he can see his driveway better, keep an eye on his car. Because he’s had two break-ins already. Another neighbor, who lives on a corner lot, thinned his trees to watch for activity along the side street, because a pedestrian got pistol-whipped and robbed. “He told me
another
neighbor was pulling her hedge for the same reason.”

Huddy’s never heard of this, people unplanting their land for safety and sightlines, shedding limbs so nothing hides behind. He imagines this street of shrinking trees, cut down to a clearing, this old neighborhood now an open field. Or maybe, Huddy thinks, instead of trying to see everything, how about just grow gardens made of thorns. The street could have its own anti-theft garden club—roses and nettles and cacti—prickers as if the ground were topped with barbed wire, and then every burglar or robber would get snagged on vines when they attempted to rush out from the street or climb up to windows.

He can’t take his neighbors’ fears seriously, even if the threats are real. Their actions, their in-house stakeouts, spook him more than the assaults and disturbances. If this neighborhood of tree surgeons is worried that their borders and hedgerows aren’t safe, if they’re concerned about protecting their property and themselves on a walk, he might suggest stronger defenses.

“Another neighbor says we ought form an association and document all the incidents, so the police will know to patrol more.”

Any other day, Huddy’d be glad to hear about an extra sweep.

“People drive through here crazy. ’Member when that car flipped over?”

He does. Screaming tires and a loud crash in a small hour that woke them and sent them outside to see the smash-up, a car flipped over and the engine still running, the driver’s-side door open with no driver. Cops chased the suspect across yards and tackled him in the neighbor’s driveway. Smoke billowed, and a cop asked the crowd for a fire extinguisher before the vehicle sparked. It reminds Huddy of another story, another chase a cop told him of. A late-night traffic stop, the driver ditching out, and when the cop found him, the guy was hiding in a backyard—not just hiding but buried into the earth, he’d climbed down into the garden and thrown the dirt back over him, except his eyes were poking out, and the cop, shining a flashlight, caught these sparklers staring back at him. Huddy knows right now to keep this creepy story to himself. Instead he says, “This stuff happens once in five years.”

“Flipped cars, maybe. But not the crime. And how about the panhandlers? That’s a daily thing. Going door to door.”

“They just knock, go away. You don’t even gotta answer.”

“They walk up . . . After a while, it’s like they live here more than I do. We ain’t raked the leaves, so every day somebody comes to the door asking to do it for money.” Which is true with the panhandlers: the branches shake and the doorbell rings as soon as the leaves fall and reach the ground.

“I’ll get to the leaves,” Huddy says.

“That ain’t the point. It’s our yard. Half of them don’t even ask to do work. They just poor. They come up to our house at night, even. Maybe we put up a lawn sign, says, ‘We’re on it. Stop asking.
’
”

“Or just ‘No Panhandling.
’
”

“Or we could get a dog. Some of the dogs on this block, I can’t believe they ain’t tore the door from the hinges.”

“Maybe the neighbors could ask the panhandlers to prune their trees, too.”

She doesn’t laugh and he doesn’t blame her because nothing’s laughable today. “Huddy. We’ve lived here all our lives. It ever feel like spending your whole life in the same place is wrong? I don’t mind it, as long as I’m the one choosing. Take away the choice and I’m stuck in West Tennessee. I mean, are we attached to here? If not, maybe we try something new. My sister, she’s lived other places. Dallas, Nashville, Missouri. Been like a tourist her whole adult life. Ain’t saying it’s made her happier, all that change. But she ain’t homesick, neither. It’s when I think about how I never left—I start thinking this might be all I’m gonna see. Then I start dreaming about it.”

“Dreams?”

“Yeah. Wake up and I’ve been in Louisville. I hear Louisville is nice.”

“Where else?”

“California—I always had a thing for it. Used to think about New Orleans, but that won’t work no more. Middle Tennessee would be good, for country living. Wouldn’t mind living in a good part surrounded by good. Or surrounded by nothing. Farms, fields. I don’t know, I like it here, it’s a regular house.”

“Might take a long time, to make a house change. Longer, now. Bad time for everyone, for relocating. The whole country’s stuck where they at, so if you haven’t gone to where you wanted—got no choice but to overstay here. The ones that
are
moving, they ain’t got no say in the matter.” He looks down at his wedding ring, and when he looks back to her, he says, “I lost fifty thousand dollars today.”

“Jesus Christ!” she says, burying her face, her voice deep and echoing inside her cupped hands. He listens to her blow heavy breaths into her palms, and he watches her eyes open but her hands stay veiling, as if she were staring out at a movie’s scary parts. She opens her hands to the side of her face, like shutters flung, and holds them there, as if she were shielding her eyes to better see the sum. He sits beside her on the couch. She looks straight ahead and then around, to survey the items contained here, the secondhand TV, the mismatched chairs. No signs of splurging, which makes her both mad and afraid. “Where’d you
find
fifty thousand?” She turns to him, sickened and confused at the spending, the lost money from an unseen source, squirreled away and then stolen out.

“Scraped every surface of the store. Scraped it clean.”

“What about the house?”

“Didn’t touch the house.”

She smoothes fingers against her eyes; pinches the bridge of her nose, sniffs. “Damn, Huddy, that’s some fucked-up sweepstakes.” She shuts her eyes again. She sighs, exhausted, and doesn’t speak, and it almost looks like she’s sleeping.

He struggles for an explainable statement. Except, to talk about his surefire plan is to talk about how it wasn’t. He looks at her flushed cheeks, then turns away, to the fireplace, the chimney, thinks of cash going up sooty walls. The money he might’ve earned—the number sounds uncountable, irrational. It’s as if he expected to purchase a million-dollar gift at a dime store. When he closes his eyes, he thinks of the neighbors hacking trees, cutting them down to stubs.

He returns to her, watches her think in silence, her hands stacked in her lap. “I guess one way to look at it is, fifty thousand to keep you from jail.”

“That’d be
one
way. One way of saying I got skinned.” He shakes his head. “I missed something big.”

“Missed jail.”

“That, too.”

“You missed something, and it missed you.”

“It don’t make it feel even. Way I’m seeing it, I feel like I’ve been pushed out. Or kept in. Everybody’s just standing around a circle, holding me right here.” He sees everyone standing about him, taking up their positions.

“Who’s everyone?”

“Cops. Feds.”

“Brothers?”

He shifts side to side. Then he nods at the scope of the scam and investigation.

“Well, you saying you got skinned. Maybe not all of you. What’s left of your skin—you
save
it.”

He nods.

“You do that?”

He nods again. Sure, it’s history. He better.

“Let them people go about their business. They over with you. They gonna disappear and the next bad part happens elsewhere. Let that circle of yours go circulating. Gang up on someone else.” Her face is severe, and he stays on her eyes which won’t blink.

Two days, and then Huddy reads an account in the paper, a string of break-ins, the Germantown police on the lookout for a serial burglar, cash and jewelry taken from five residences. Doors unlocked, back doors pried open, no sign of forced entry, and Huddy pictures Harlan turning handles, bumping locks, mule-kicking doors. Rings and chains from a jewelry box, cash from drawers and counters. Huddy calculates the melt value. There are no reports of suspicious behavior in the targeted neighborhood. Residents are reminded to secure their homes.

The following week is quiet, the second part of the pattern, the lull between strikes, Harlan prowling and casing and laying down in the dark. Huddy sees Harlan’s eyes through the eyeholes of a mask. Another series of home burglaries, this time in adjacent counties, Harlan dipping across the state line to hit Olive Branch and Southaven. Engagement rings, family heirlooms lost. A crime spree, the police matching the methodology. One neighbor heard broken glass and phoned the police, who arrived to find a smashed sliding door. Another resident spotted a white male walking down the street, in the late-morning hours, but could not provide a detailed description. Unnamed and unrecognized, but the stranger is so blatantly Harlan that Huddy’s surprised the writer didn’t identify him. Caught, or beginning to be, the blanks filling in, and Huddy is happy to sit on the sideline, relieved to have stepped aside, thankful even when he imagines a broken promise, a hypothetical scenario where he didn’t back out and Joe still doesn’t bring the gold. But why does Joe have to use Harlan to recover his debts? Huddy wants to discuss this dirty work, he even wonders if he’s obliged to intervene. Joe selling the stolen gold, but not in a store, where he’d get ID’d. Of course, with half the city on the gold bandwagon, he could go around the stores, and then Huddy realizes that Harlan’s remembered a name, and that Joe has his fence.

He unbelts and steps out on the passenger side, and the driver stays in, eyeing the mirrors to catch what’s approaching behind. Del’s driver and the poorer clothes could mean hidden wealth, but he won’t act poor-mouthed when he reaches Huddy. Huddy watches him walk through the open door, smirking like he’s just gained illegal entry, striding forward like he’s been ushered in. He surveys the emptiness and grins as if the tables have been turned, as if the merchandise had accumulated elsewhere, stored off in Del’s trophy room.