Bluff City Pawn (19 page)

“This about what you told me before? You back in that bedtime conversation? Old monkey ring. Or, in your spare time, you just become some Summer Avenue expert.”

Cody starts complaining about his seat.

“That’s right. My wandering eye is this here street. Looks like the boss wants to skedaddle.” He tips his soda cup to get the sweet remains from the ice.

“Hold it, Cody. Wait,” she says. She pinches some burger roll for Cody, flings it on his lap. Then she switches onto Huddy, her hand touching his arm and pressing. “Tell me.”

Her face urges him, her eyes not quite hurt. There’s a break in Cody’s complaint, as if he too were listening. “That,” Huddy says, pointing, and he tilts back in his seat so she can see across. He turns his head away so she knows not to study his sitting position, to encourage her to go beyond it to the dim nighttime shape. “You see it?” He’s surprised he’s just done this, but it feels more good than harmful.

“Pawnshop.”

He turns back to her to see her gazing toward it. His finger presses the corner of the driver-side window, as if the shop were pinned there against the glass and not entirely outside. She looks around, her eyes opening, her thoughts clicking together, about the disguise of the dinner and why he wanted this particular food—this pit stop now arranged like a fancy reservation.

“Should be able to see it,” Huddy says.

“I do.”

“Because it’s bigger. Now if I was just teasing, I’d only show you some small hint.” He watches her mind seek and discover meanings. “Sometimes, a great view—it ain’t always the pretty one.” He feels like he’s just brought her blindfolded to a place that isn’t a majestic overlook or a high bluff or even a low bank along the river, and now that her eyes are uncovered she should understand why this trip is still worthwhile.

“This is your deal?” she asks. She says hush to Cody, but they both know he won’t stop.

“I ain’t saying anymore.”

“But I’m supposed to connect this to what you were saying in bed?” He doesn’t answer her train of thoughts, and she nods. Cody kicks and tugs to get freed, and Christie offers another scrap of food, but it doesn’t work—it makes him angrier to be so misunderstood—and Huddy can feel the front seat tremble with his son’s frustrated position. Christie turns to him and smiles as the noise takes over. “There he goes. On a timer. I guess we best get moving, Huddy.” She gathers wrappers, collapses the bag. “Unless we like screams.”

“Right idea,” he says, and he drums the dashboard. “Let’s bolt.” He restarts the car, gives the marquee a final look. He feels like flashing his brights at the store, to signal Keller to come out from the other side, to give notice that his time is up. Or maybe Huddy should honk his horn, tap it repeatedly, like he’s playing his own hundred-gun salute.

Nine

There is no name
on the truck, but when Joe sees who’s inside it his eyes grow like he’s reading capital letters, an even wider expression of surprise than when Huddy last appeared at his door and Harlan didn’t. And Harlan won’t turn his face from the windshield to explain why. “Get in here,” Joe snaps, his eyes lighting on Huddy. “You said we were telling no one!” Yelling before Huddy’s inside the entryway, the argument without the security of a room, the door slamming behind him, and Huddy figures nobody’s home.

“Yeah. Wives. And Harlan is—”

“Is what?” Joe’s neck wrenching.

“We need three sets of hands.” Huddy’s voice as quiet as Joe’s is explosive, hoping to meet up in some calm loud middle.

“Three sets of hands,” Joe says, shaking his two. “This is a
two
-way deal. You got the math wrong. You’re already fucking up numbers.”

“You wanna carry two hundred guns?”

“Why can’t
you
carry them?” His teeth grit, his mouth champing down.

“Because. I’m in the gun room. And you’re guarding the truck. Harlan’s doing the lifting.” Joe shakes his head at the last name. “You got someone you trust better? Maybe one of your ex-wives? Or maybe you wanna ask Lorie for a little help with a couple thousand pounds. Of guns. And all you do is bitch about who’s working for you. This one’s lazy, this one’s suing, this one’s stealing. Ain’t never heard about no right-hand man.”

“You never mentioned needing three on this,” Joe says. “The whole time you talked, it was me and you. You sat at my table, you never said him.”

“We can’t leave the truck alone when the guns are coming or going. Are you crazy?”

“Crazy is what’s sitting there right now. What you worrying over, someone walking in off the street? On Dogwood? Come on.”

“I’m being careful. With the house. With the son—”

“Please. I trust him more than Harlan.”

“You never met him.”

“Exactly.” He stares at Huddy, his eyes measuring. “This is your big chance. Why you chancing it?”

But Huddy thought the saying went different. The man who never took a chance never had a chance. Or maybe, He never had a chance because he didn’t take one. Something about your big one-time moment. He won’t correct himself or Joe.

“You just like him, borrowing trouble,” Joe says, seeing one bad brother mirroring the other; the business barely begun and Huddy already needs to redeem himself. “He stays in the truck. He stays till we seal the deal. Signs on the dotted line, and then we fetch him.” Harlan stuck in the driveway, just like he is now—Joe the mean parent keeping his boy in a room—a precondition Huddy should’ve thought of first. He looks up and nods.“When we get to the shop, when I’m on lookout, I’m watching him.”

“Watch everything.”

Joe shakes his head. “Harlan . . .” But it’s too much at once and he can’t figure out what part to bury. “He’ll just run his mouth. ‘You remember this?’ No. No, Harlan, I don’t. My whole life, what I remember—work. Twelve years old. Changing truck tires. Fifteen years old. Mowing. Pulling weeds with a butter knife. ’Cause some customer don’t want no weed-killer and I don’t care if she pays extra.” Joe turns and leaves the front room to go deeper into the house, which means he’s fixing to walk with Huddy into hers, and Huddy follows him into his office, where there’s a briefcase atop the desk. “How we doing this?”

“The money?” Huddy asks. “Hundred-dollar bills.”

“How we
bringing
it?”

“In a cotton sack.”

“Do me a favor with jokes.”

“A
business
envelope, okay? Three of ’em.”

“Mine’s in the case.”

Huddy gestures at the desk. “I seen that.”

“You wanna put yours in mine? Maybe it looks more right that way.”

But—but Huddy doesn’t like Joe ordering an arrangement he agrees with.

“My case, but you’re holding it,” Joe says.

Which is better, Huddy guesses, but Joe’s still carrying instructions. “Hey,” Huddy says, but he can’t think of how to get in charge. He slips his cash out of his envelopes while Joe clicks the clasps and spins the case around to Huddy to consolidate. Fifty grand meets fifty grand—even money, but it ain’t. Huddy sees the difference when the case opens and he compares the halves. The same denominations but Huddy’s stacks are wrapped in rubber bands, while Joe’s are held with bank straps, and Joe’s money is new—must have requested fresh bills—crisp and edged and tight, while Huddy’s stacks are thick and round, dirty and oily and finger-marked. “Looks like our money don’t match,” he says.

Joe shakes his head. “You got fifty K?”

“Yep.”

“Matches fine,” Joe says. “Money’s money.”

“I’ve always said that, what’s green is green.” Huddy got dressed up, laundered his shirt, but forgot to clean his cash. His hundreds look like more, but a messy more, taking up too much space to be worth the same small. Who cares, Huddy thinks, some high-low split with both players getting the pot. U.S. mint meeting city ghetto, and he unites them by sliding his commerce under.

“I don’t want to go over there holding anything,” Joe says, and he holds his hands up and away. “I ain’t a builder, developer. Just someone from Old Germantown talking old times. Flowers and horses, right? That’s my specialty. That’s what I’m hoping she sees.”

“What
you
hoping?”

And Joe considers, his eyes squinting, a fishing expedition that comes up empty. He checks his watch, some schedule they’re late for, and Huddy follows him to leave and sees Joe’s right arm push out against the air before he reaches the door and yanks it. He hustles outside but at the pavement’s edge he turns back. “Weeds growing up through the floor. That’s what I want to see there.” Then he hurries around the front of the truck to the passenger side and flicks out his fingers, his chin pushing Harlan to slide over in the seat and be the one between. And Huddy takes the shorter walk to the wheel.

Quick travel, the directions a reversal from hers to Joe’s before, this time starting out from Joe’s rich neighborhood and passing other subdivisions of same-size residences and equal acreage and stick-treed greenery, and then cutting across a commercial dividing line and then an old railroad depot before houses resume, remote and neighborless, the yards loosening into deep fields and forest. Huddy is the only one to find this place, his two passengers first-timers to where they’re heading. Nothing happens until he moves the three there. Harlan begins to speak but Joe’s body jackknifes, so Harlan’s mouth shuts and the only noise on the grand tour is Joe’s angry breaths.

Huddy turns left into the driveway, both sides of the lane tree-lined and the road inclining so you feel you’re going up into them. He parks and Joe hops out and Harlan slides over to go next. “Sit tight,” Huddy says.

Joe shuts his door without looking back and Huddy steps away on his side, closes his cab door, leans in the window to peer at Harlan.

“Sure thing, boss,” Harlan says and nods, but Huddy knows he’s being seen with a black hat. “I’ll wait for the signal.”

“Should only take minutes. Three of us is too much, make her nervous.”

“Say hello to the horses,” he says, and his eyes fall to the floor.

“They’s gone.”

“Well, whatever’s inside, then. You best catch up before he kicks in the door.”

Huddy looks across the windshield to see Joe angling ahead but slowly, some investigator combing the grounds for clues, and Huddy the jailer about to grab the keys but then leaving them for Harlan to get radio.

He joins Joe and feels not disloyal to what’s behind him but disciplined to what’s ahead. He feels lighter, even with the weight of the case a small stone in his hand, or maybe because of it, too, and Huddy knows Joe was right to control it this way, to limit Harlan, to draw up a line that Huddy told Harlan not to trespass. Joe not advising now but Huddy listening if he does.

Back on the doorstep but this time with a brother beside him, the other not belonging. Joe tucks his shirt inside his cinched pants, his chest expanding, then tugs the shirt away from his skin. He combs his hand through his hair, and his head bobs a nod and Huddy steps forward and presses the bell, steps away, waits for the door to open for business. He follows Joe’s eyes as they sweep across the façade and then turn to study the pillars up and down. “Like what you see?”

“Yep,” Joe says, chin jutting. “Paint’s peeling.”

Huddy glances up at the balcony and sees paint pecked away from a second-floor shutter. Down at his feet, the cement of the porch step is cracked but also broomed clean. He hears the door open and he knows it will be the son materializing, which lifts Huddy to see what’s there before it emerges, Kipp again, identical and advantaged, but maybe smaller, a houseboy on this second day, standing on a higher stair, but his eyes lowered to the cashbox. He smiles at Huddy, and Harlan’s probably watching the trio merge hands. The truck in the driveway as if it drifted down a channel and Huddy landing ahead on this platform, where he’s supposed to be and deserves. “My brother Joe,” Huddy says and smiles back at Kipp for being only a doorman and not an attorney.

He steps in first, but his thoughts are behind him to what Joe’s seeing but not as far as to what disappeared upward for Harlan. Going through the big rooms, the wide rectangles and long corridors, but Joe eyeing a different shape and design to things, trying to figure out how in late age you maintain all this. No signs of ruin or weeds sprouting, like Joe hoped, but Huddy now seeing in the yesteryear fixtures and furnishings some neglect—a dim chandelier with two bulbs not changed, a grandfather clock showing the wrong hour. Same wallpaper ungluing and above a chipped ceiling. The king-size grand piano and then they pass along the hallway, where Huddy views the close-up poses of the first family, of early kin and clan once here, young smiling faces on summer lawns and bodies adorned in formal suits and gowns, charmed circles grouped around white tablecloths, and the one person who remains here to gaze at her dressed-up relatives—this first lady now like the final chaperone of the dinner dance. An old woman in an older house, like centuries adding up.

Back to the hunt room, where he spots the widow same as last time rising, but now stiffer as if overnight she’s been hurt, the chair arms like crutches to steady her standing. Huddy about to introduce when a voice nudges, “I’m Joe, Huddy’s brother,” and he watches a welcome hand extend quick and direct to meet, and Huddy smiles inside and shakes his head inward, too, at the way his own name was called and how it took Joe near fifty years to turn family man.