Bluff City Pawn (10 page)

When the phone rings minutes later, Huddy hopes it’s Yewell asking for the gun, but it might be KayKay calling for Harlan, and instead it’s Joe. “He’s here,” Huddy says. “Working.”

It’s a long pause before Joe says, “Fine. Let him be
your
sidekick.”

“Oh, was he working by your side?” Huddy sees Del pull up. Even for Del it’s quick, no day between visits.

“That Joe?” Harlan says.

“You two coming over again?” Huddy hears Joe ask, and he replies, “How ’bout you coming to
me
?” Which isn’t what he wants, Joe touring his mud hut like some ambassador slumming the village.

“I’m building a house that’s three-quarters done and I ain’t been paid.”

“Looks like you gonna have to pick up the hammer yourself. I got twenty of ’em here.”

“What’s different about me?” Del says, arms spread, and Huddy presses dead the phone.

Huddy seeing the same parasite, the same pawn bullshitter, same flapping mouth. “Am I supposed to ask about your weight?”

“No, it’s different than that.” He turns sideways.

Huddy rolls his eyes. “You got a twenty-year-old girlfriend and she works at Hooters.”

“No.
Outside
.”

Huddy sees a new used car. “Car.”

“Bought it online. Guess how much. And Huddy, you know I’m married so I wouldn’t have no girlfriend from Hooters.”

Huddy stone-faced wanting to be nameless and unknown to Del.

“You ain’t gonna guess the price?” Del looks at Harlan. “How about you? You gonna guess? I bet I’ll make a thousand, for what I paid. They sold it like it’s a beater but it ain’t that.”

Del makes a beeline for the jewelry and Huddy hears a buzzing noise from his lips, this fly-wing sound Del always makes when he doesn’t see what he wants. “You still hiding those Rolexes?” He switches to Harlan. “He tell you where he’s hiding them?”

“Not yet,” Harlan says. “But I’m thinking he buries them out back.”

“Ha. Well, how ’bout you and me go dig ’em up? I bet we strike oil, too!”

A black man comes in, approaches with a VCR, which he sets down carefully. “I’m wanting to sell this.”

“Sorry, my man, I get those all day every day.”

“For real?” His face falls.

Del smirks at Huddy, and stops when the man looks behind at the electronics and then carries his VCR out like a sad hat in his hands. Huddy watches Del sneer, like he’s sitting on a mule grinding his bootheels into the world beneath him.

“You wouldn’t even take it for
free
. He must be thinking technology stopped.”

Huddy shakes his head, not at Del’s judgment but his disdain, the door not even closed.

“Dolls!” Del moving toward them, two Teresa dolls inside their packaging. “My niece . . .” Then he waves his hand like an eraser. “I got this idea to bounce off you.” His palms press together and flatten. “Gold. How much you getting for your scrap? I got the gold fever.”

“Already got someone, Del.” Trying to make his voice sound dull and valueless.

“What’s he giving you? Ninety percent?”

Huddy crosses his arms, turns himself into a rock that Del can’t push uphill.

“Damn, you ain’t telling me nothing today.” He looks around like Huddy’s buyer is hiding. “Who’s your guy? I bet you gotta count your money six times with him. Me, you know I got a clean score. I’ve been buying your stuff for years. Bought watches, rings, guns—how many guns I bought? Drills. Saws. Bought something from there and there and there. Hell, I probably bought a
vowel
from you!” Pointing to claim every inch of the room, the shelves, the walls all a part of his belongings, his fingers smearing the air. “So now I’ma buy your gold.”

“Del, you really wanna drive around with all that money? It’s nerve-racking work.” But Huddy’s also thinking, Bullshit you got the cash for gold.

“You the one to talk,” Del says. “You got buzzards circling this place. ’Sides, I don’t scare easy. Your buyer’s paying ninety, isn’t he? Maybe I do a notch better. He can’t be giving you ninety-
five
? It’s between, right? Yeah, I bet you got bagfuls of wedding bands.” Huddy feels like the whole city is listening, Del’s mouth moving through streets and alleyways and doors, bodies rising out of bed and coming to crowd their faces at his windows. “Go from pennyweights to grams to ounces to pounds and we all make money. Come on, Huddy, give me a piece of it. Whatever you get, I’ll bump it
point five
. Let’s say for example—”

“I get it, Del.”

“Good.” He sniffs loud like there’s a gold dust in the air. “I’ll make it work for both of us. Don’t be hording. Gold. It’s just some low-hanging fruit and I wanna taste it.”

Give him more than a taste, Huddy thinks. Pour a stash down Del’s mouth, fill his cheeks with bent bracelets and the gold grill that he bought last month from a black kid, the kid pulling the grill right out from his teeth. Del’s mouth plugged with the gold brick Huddy’d set there.

“You see the quotes on platinum prices? You think there’d be a way to scrape the platinum off the catalytic converter.”

Huddy stares at the back of his head. “Huh?”

“From my car,” Del says, and he twists back and his face wrenches angrily. “The converter’s got platinum. How you get the platinum out but keep the converter running?”

“I really don’t know, Del.”

He wrings his hands like the platinum’s there, a polish he can’t peel off. “Forget it. We talk price next time. Gold. Now it’s me.” He nods to himself until it’s true and then leaves.

Harlan shakes his head. “What the fuck was that?”

“Del Twiggs.” Huddy shrugs.

“Twiggs—that’s about right.”

He looks at the car, sizes up the value inside it. “Next time I see him, he better have an ATM strapped to his back. And money coming out of his mouth.”

A white male looking to sell a mower and an edger, and Huddy doesn’t pin the guy for a thief, although maybe he’s stealing it from himself, doesn’t want to tell the wife about the gambling so now he’s gonna tell her someone broke into the shed and stole their lawn equipment.

A gun buyer in a camo cap but glazed eyes so Huddy tells him he can’t show him a gun. And when the man protests, Huddy says, “Maybe tomorrow we find a gun to put you in.”

“
Dying Young
,” a customer says, looking at the VCR tapes. “Man, that’s me.”

When he leaves, Harlan asks, “You think our daddy’s alive?”

Huddy makes a face. “He ain’t in
Memphis
if he is. Hope that’s not why you back.”

“Sometimes I think he’s living in our old house.”

“You do?”

Harlan shrugs. “He’s probably dead. But whenever I tell myself he is, he pops up in my mind as living.”

“You got heaters?” a customer asks, and the phone rings, and Huddy points and answers.

“Is this Mister Marr?” a woman’s voice asks.

“Speaking.”

“This is Miss Millie. Lee Yewell’s wife.”

“Oh. Oh, yes.”

“I’m returning your messages. I’m afraid . . .” Huddy already feeling a loss coming. “My husband passed away last month.”

“Oh . . . That’s terrible.” Huddy sorry for her loss, and his—but he knows he can always sell a good gun. “I saw him, two months ago.”

He’s lost his best customer and he looks over at his gun racks—and thinks, What’s she gonna do with the guns? And it’s as if she hears his mind when she says: “Lee left us some instructions. He said you’d be the person to call about the guns. But I’ve never called a pawnshop before. You understand.”

“Of course.”

Two black men come in and one tugs at his neck and asks Huddy if he’s got any big crosses, and Huddy holds up his hand and the guy breaks out his roll and Huddy watches Harlan watch the man flash it.

Every time the concrete goes into the steel container next door, it sounds like a building coming down.

“Would you like me to come look at them?” Huddy says, and hears back, “I suppose you should do that.”

Huddy remembers selling Yewell a Winchester ’76, a Winchester ’86. He wants to open his gun book right now to see how many went to him.

“That didn’t sound good,” Harlan says.

“Good?” Huddy says, hanging up, and he can’t even imagine the size of the man’s collection.

“Well, he’s dead, ain’t he?”

“Yeah, dead.” And Huddy’ll miss chatting about the seasons.
How did the birds treat you, Mister Yewell? Gearing up for the deers now?

“Well,” Harlan says, puzzled for having to say what’s obvious. “Tough selling a gun to a dead man.” And he looks at the men and they grin.

And Huddy grins, too. “It sure is.” Yewell coming in for years,
What you get this week, Mister Huddy?
A lifetime’s worth of collecting and Huddy about to get his hands on them. This has never happened before. Not even in his dreams. “This is it, Harlan, this is my home run.”

Five

The doorbell is regular
but the house isn’t. A colonial with columns rising higher than the roofline of Huddy’s one-story bungalow and the grounds unfurling to the street stretching as long as Huddy’s block. The ride over, Huddy was thinking about all the Winchester rifles and shotguns Yewell had bought from him. He was sure to see slide-actions and bolt-actions, along with handguns and drillings, but Yewell’s area of interest was lever-action Winchesters—Huddy’s mouth watering over the full scale of the collection and the first look he’d be getting at all the different calibers and models, but staring at Yewell’s estate now, Huddy can’t help but measure the enormous distance of their lives. He knew Yewell was rich, and yet he still misjudged him. Yewell talked about engineering, doing something mechanical, but you’d have to succeed with more than new money to live out on Dogwood.

Quick steps from behind the door and Huddy wipes his feet, tucks his tool bag and pad of paper to his stomach. He expects to see a servant but instead a man beyond Huddy’s age appears in an oxford and khakis. And loafers. Huddy doesn’t have to look down to know they’re there, the same way he doesn’t need to lift the cuffs to know the socks aren’t. And Huddy knew he was right to change out of his work clothes before driving out here, ditching the pawnshop jeans and T-shirt for slacks and a button-up, plus a sport coat for extra impression, did everything but get a haircut to make himself shiny and closer to their kind. “You must be Huddy,” the man says, and Huddy recognizes the resemblance to a Yewell younger than the one Huddy knew even before the two exchange hands, and the man smiles like he’s just been promoted and adds, “I’m Kipp—Lee Junior.” Junior. A similar face but softer, a trace of the daddy’s drawl but flatter, more suburban and rootless, and Huddy can’t imagine him holding a gun. Maybe a tennis racket or a golf club, which could be part of why the family’s selling the collection, so it’s good if the son’s upbringing turned him into a yuppie prince.

Huddy steps inside the large entryway that feels like a lobby and stares at the formal dining room to his left and straight ahead the ornate staircase going up. “Sorry for your loss,” he says, his voice bouncing off the marble floor and lifting up to the high ceiling.

“Thank you,” Kipp says, nodding, “we’re in the hunt room.”

Sure, Huddy thinks, sounds sensible, picturing antlers and head mounts, wet noses and bright eyes gazing down from walls, and he follows the son through a living room as wide as the house, the wedge of a grand piano as big as a king-size bed Huddy doesn’t own, the furnishings not brand-new this and brand-new that but better, original items you’d go to a deluxe designer store to get replicas of. Even the wallpaper looks antique, faded and peeling like paper money shedding off the walls, and the stains and age don’t look like damage or neglect but a more authentic kind of elegance. Imperfections that keep the value of the room by not fixing it, like an old gun you know not to polish and destroy.

“Here we are,” Kipp says, leading him through double doors into a pine-paneled back room in which are mounted not animals but black-and-white pictures that Huddy can’t scan because across the room is the widow, who rises from a leather chair to receive him. Cotton money, Huddy thinks. Or railroad money. Either way, old, and Huddy realizes Yewell’s job may have bought his guns, but his marriage done brought him here.

Her white hair as silken as the red sweater it spreads upon, like strands woven together and worn as a single uniform. “Can I offer you some ice water or tea?” she says, her voice warm and proper, her hands folded before her, and then she moves toward him—except it’s only her voice moving as she remains there, so he advances midroom until she offers her hand, and he reaches out and takes it and almost bends in a curtsy. He could come into this home a thousand times and still feel it was a restricted area he needed a ticket to enter. He repeats his condolences, tentatively, his eyes dropping down to the rug—not bearskin but Oriental—scuffed and worn on the hardwood floor.

“I knew Lee ten years,” Huddy says, nodding to connect what he knew to this. Curtains printed with horse scenes. First-place ribbons. Horse figurines and a carriage clock. “He once showed me a picture of you. Out at your cabin.” And his eyes skim the photos to search for a cabin or the face of Yewell, but instead he’s met with shots of horses and carriages, equestrian events that Huddy’s seen in the
Appeal
but never on walls in a room he’s been in. He stares at the marble fireplace. Carved above the mantel is a coonskin-capped hunter with a rifle aimed at the doors that moments before Huddy passed through.