Bluff City Pawn (34 page)

“It don’t mean the rest of what he’s saying is.”

“Who, Joe? Or Hollis?”

Harlan stares unblinking, returns to measurements and cut­­­ting. “I always said he should be H-something.” He grabs the upended gun.

“So you fixed his name.”

“If daddy named him wrong, I’d name him right. Now, three of us, we whole blood. Joe, he wasn’t named after no one. Now he’s named after us.” He doesn’t speak spitefully, only to set the record straight.

“You renamed Joe, and you remembered Del.” Huddy naming names, but none trips up Harlan, who keeps moving efficiently from the wall to the saw and back, shooting the trim and tapping the studs.

“I tole Joe, don’t you think Del suspecting when the person he meets ain’t sound like the person on the phone? ’Cause Joe won’t touch the phone. He don’t want to touch the deal either, but he don’t trust me on that. But Del, he don’t care. If it’s smoking and on fire, he’ll buy it. Either he ain’t hearing the difference, or he don’t care to. Maybe we sound the same. Me and Joe. Same enough. Then again, only voice Del hears is hisself.”

Huddy follows the threads—Harlan impersonating Joe to say he’s Hollis. “He’s probably cheating the weight.” Which to Huddy seems fair, if both brothers are playing impostors.

“Ain’t me he’s cheating.” Harlan looks as uninterested in discussing
now
as Joe is with
then
, as if recent events were as vague as Joe’s memories. But then his eyes glimmer, just like Joe’s when the old tin roof surfaced. “You should see Joe after he’s done the deal. He looks like he’s gonna pop. Like his own sick twin. Telling you, his heart’s gonna vapor-lock one day. I told him, your wife better know CPR, because one day she’s gonna be pumping on you. This hooking-and-crooking thing, it ain’t for Joe.”

“It’s for you.”

Harlan can’t decide if it’s an insult or a compliment. He moves for the tape measure, but stops working, his hand at his side. “I guess it is. I’m running out the house. Five blocks from the car, where I parked it, and I hear the police. No siren, ’cause they’re running stealth, but that big engine roaring. They’re quiet, see, trying to be, but they’re turbo-loud. I’m hiding in bushes, ducking under cars, and I hear them horses, and they pass me, and then I’m back on my feet running. Hear that sound and I know they’re coming for me, but they don’t know it’s me, and they don’t know I know they’re coming . . . I’m on the ground but it don’t feel like it. I feel like I got a hundred brains. Seeing if mailboxes is full. Newspapers in driveways. Outdoor lights on in the daytime. Get inside, I’ve got dog biscuits in my pocket.”

“I know what you’re planning.”

Harlan ignores it, measures and marks the wood and slides over to the chop box and cuts square.

“Does Joe?” Huddy says.

“Whatcha mean?”

“You’re fixing to rob Del.”

Harlan looks at him.

“Getting gone.”

“Well, I guess you a mind reader. No, Joe don’t. Or else he does. He’s ahead of us in lots of ways. So maybe he knows what I think I just know myself. ’Course, I can’t ask him if he knows ’cause then he’ll know. Then again, if
you
know, that must mean he knows. ’Cause Joe always been first. But he sure didn’t know how to build this place.”

“Couldn’t know about a recession.”

“This ain’t nothing but greed taking over.”

Huddy looks outside. Across the street, a bunch of plumbing stubs stick out of the ground, and he thinks of Harlan’s maimed buddy, his transplanted finger. Huddy couldn’t have seen these stubs the other night, but he imagines they weren’t here last time, that the development has regrown, sprouted up on second sight. “You know Del’s got a bodyguard.” Which Harlan didn’t, because Del was alone in Huddy’s shop, and Huddy watches his face tense. A split-second whitening, maybe the face Huddy wore when the policeman showed up to ask about the AK. He doesn’t mention the tilted head, the fearsome cell phone, because the distracted man is still armed, and Huddy wants to talk Harlan down, to show he’s weak-handed. But Harlan just shrugs. Strong-arming Del would have been too easy, and now it won’t be. His shoulders flex, some imagined bumping or struggle, because he’s already made a decision, and Huddy’s only complicated it before helping him overpower.

“I got a gun,” Harlan says.

“Better not be one of mine.”

“Street gun,” he says flatly. “Any old street.”

Huddy eyes Harlan’s equipment and the robbery seems not sinister but ridiculous. He’s dressed as a trim carpenter, and maybe the caulk gun is the stick-up weapon. Maybe he’ll slap them with the tape measure, poke them with a utility pencil, bonk their heads with base scrap. Not even the nail gun looks dangerous. Huddy pictures Harlan not wearing a mask but safety goggles, as if a work costume makes him unsuspecting. But it can’t. Huddy gazes at him, and he’s regular Harlan, same old, and what he’s about to do is what he always was, except he’s a felon now, so he’s himself plus a look-alike, identical and transformed. “You really stepping up to armed robbery?”

“Well, let’s see,” Harlan explains, as if Huddy had asked only something technical. “I want his bundle. And he won’t want to hand it over. And we ain’t gonna play tug of war.”

“Why?” Huddy says.

“I’d rob you, but you ain’t got enough money.”

Huddy keeps asking.

“Don’t ever ask me why again.” Harlan turns aside, to find a lawless reason beyond himself. “Del’s a slug and anybody that can stick it to him needs to stick it to him. You said it yourself, he’s cheating. He’d steal the gold out of your teeth. There’s bottomfeeders, and there’s bottomfeeders with money, and that second one is him—and now it’s gonna be me.”

If it were me, Huddy thinks, I’d do it on a Friday, late. End of the day, end of the week, he’ll be in a Friday groove, not looking around as much, thinking of the weekend.

“What?” Harlan says.

“What?” Huddy says back.

“Your face was saying something.”

“I don’t give a fuck about my face.” And Huddy won’t say what he was thinking, won’t give a set of instructions. He isn’t a robber, he isn’t Harlan, and Harlan’s not him. “You think no one’s gonna suspect you? You think you gonna wear a mask and it somehow ain’t you?”

“Fine,” Harlan says. “It’s me. Or maybe I’m Joe. You think he knows, but he don’t.”

Unless I tell him, which is why Harlan’s telling me. Not out of loyalty to Harlan, or spite for Joe, but enough of a combination.

“These type of things, Huddy, you’re smarter. Joe don’t know my mind. Only you do.”

Been setting this score up the whole time. Gave Del’s name to Joe, but he was giving Joe’s name to Del, even if he didn’t supply Joe’s real name.

“The only one who knows this plan is you, because you’re here and he’s not.”

“We’re in
his
house,” Huddy says.

“This ain’t a house. Not yet.”

“Look. Do your time, come out, come back here . . .” Huddy speaks carefully, to slow down Harlan’s thinking, but all it does is lengthen the incarceration.

“I’ve already done that.”

“Do it again,” Huddy says, faster, a small sentence, but now the words feel unimportant, Harlan’s life mere repetition. “You’ve already run away, too. To Florida.” Huddy wants to speak of a beginning, not an ending, not something late.

“Go farther, then. This time.”

But Huddy can’t imagine Harlan in a different part of the country. “I’m supposed to tell the police about crimes. That’s part of my plea.”

“You ain’t gonna say a thing. ’Cause I didn’t say nothing about you. Don’t tell Joe! That ain’t fair. Don’t tell no one. Something goes wrong, I don’t want Joe standing over my body.”

And Huddy doesn’t want that either.

“I know what I’m doing,” Harlan says, and he gestures at the outside corner, the tight miter joint, as if robbery were just another house project fitted exactly right. Look how skilled and responsible he is.

“It’s two against one,” Huddy says.

“So what?”

Which is true, every game the brothers played was uneven, even if the one wasn’t always Harlan, and even if it was almost never Joe. But these other two will have guns. Both carrying, and you can bet Del’s got another one stashed in his car, on a side panel or in the center console. Huddy doesn’t say this, because when he told Harlan about the bodyguard, it didn’t stop but only abetted. Harlan slipped a gun out of Huddy’s store, so Huddy will slip one out of this story.

“Where you gonna meet him?” Huddy asks, and Harlan shrugs as if it were just some small errand.

“Where does
Joe
meet him?” Huddy asks. If Joe were here, they’d make fun of Harlan, and then they’d all go back to Joe’s house and make fun of Joe, and then drive together to Huddy’s for his laughing turn. He sees Harlan’s hand shaking and he calls his brother’s name and points a finger at the tremble to put the crime off, but Harlan screams, “Let me finish this room!”

Huddy shakes his head. He’s in Joe’s house, with Harlan building it, and the three of them, however close, will never get closer. But, like Harlan said, Joe isn’t here, and Huddy looks at Harlan, and Harlan looks far off, as if the room were lengthening, so Huddy will leave, too, let Harlan make his room. He walks to the front door, studies it—maybe Joe hung it himself. This is Joe’s house and no matter how much Harlan works with it, it will never be his. Huddy opens the door and exits and feels defeated and released. He drives out and over to Joe’s, passing midway a row of pillared houses, set back in the woods, which reminds him of the deal’s origins even though the widow lives on a different street, only a mile away but in the countryside.

When he reaches his destination, he doesn’t know if he should go inside and warn Joe about Harlan, or go back to Harlan and warn him about Joe. He should call the police, provide information and whereabouts; he should give up Harlan. He should call Del and tell him not to answer his phone. He should do all, some, none of this. He wants Harlan to get away, to get the money, for no one to get hurt, and to get some of the money for himself without joining Harlan and for Joe to get none. He wants to prevent and benefit. Maybe Harlan will drop the robbery, or accidentally cut fingers on the chop saw, just stow away traceless with a bandaged hand. The longer he sits out here, his car idling rough and trembly, the more Huddy feels like a trespasser, and when a light switches on in Joe’s expensive house, and something flickers behind the thick curtain, he drives away and turns a corner and feels like he’s fleeing. Heading west, he senses that he’s reached a distance equal to the north-south divide of his brothers and he slows but refuses to turn back and interfere, he keeps driving and separating, into the city, he’s had enough with showing up at other houses. He has spent the last five years sitting behind a counter, waiting for people to come to him. Home isn’t neutral, more like hiding, but it doesn’t seem like the wrong location. Huddy enters and locks the glass outer door and shuts the inner door and locks that, too. He flicks on a light, then kills it, and he imagines watching from outside, as if it were a signal being sent to himself, or just the house short-circuiting. The house is silent except for his shoes, so he kicks them off. He sits in the dark, in the corner, and when Christie walks in, he doesn’t move, and then he says, “I don’t know what to do.”

“About what?” she says, and he can’t even answer that.

“I don’t know who to tell what.”

“Are you in trouble again?”

“Where’s Cody?” he says, looking up.

“Where do you think?” she says.

“Sleeping?”

She smiles, but Huddy doesn’t, because it’s one more thing he should know. But then she laughs, and soon he joins her, and the doors are locked and windows are latched and barred and the blinds are drawn, and the room is sheltered by the wide porch. His small house is as secure as a fortress.

When he hears about it, in the middle of the next afternoon, it’s from Joe. Eventually, the story will be everywhere, headlines announcing a botched robbery, and three dead bodies, two men in a car, and a third man bleeding out on the driver’s side. A resident hears gunshots that he thinks is construction work in one of the many unfinished houses, until he doesn’t hear more firing, and calls the police. Huddy will follow the subsequent articles and news segments and wonder if any cash or gold went missing—it seems a low number but more likely Del’s own estimation of his take was inflated. Joe didn’t arrive until after the police and paramedics, according to reports, and Huddy won’t question the order of the gathering, the emergency vehicles and then Joe, just as he won’t ask if Joe stood over Harlan, as long as Joe doesn’t ask what Huddy knew and where he searched beforehand and what he might’ve stopped. When the police trace Del’s cell-phone records and ask Huddy about a call he made the day prior to the robbery, Huddy will explain that Del was a regular customer, always on the lookout for bargains—his story reinforced by the weight bench which he points to without hesitation. The police will knock at Joe’s door, too, both of the perpetrator’s brothers will be questioned, because of the pawnshop meeting and the crime scene, but both will be cleared of any connection, their business transaction and their land ownership incidental and unrelated, and the case will be closed around the shooter.