Bluff City Pawn (3 page)

“Just tell him . . . not to forget about my lights.” But that’s not enough of his worry anymore.
Tell him I’m tired of him getting his rent but me not getting my living.
Joe with his monthly rent and his weekly cash. And his shopping sprees, cherry-picking the best jewelry from the showcases, only paying cost so Huddy can’t make a profit. Just saying, “Book it,” then stepping to the back to tape his name on sale items that haven’t cleared thirty days.

Huddy frowns at the bulky analog TVs on the shelf. He’s in no man’s land with televisions; the flats ain’t coming in yet, and he’s stuck with those.

Then a lever-action collector comes in, mentioning the L.C. Smith double-barrel he’s just seen at Liberty Pawn, over on Summer, a gun he knows Huddy would want for himself. “Your eyeballs gonna jump when you see it. Man named Keller—he’s got it locked away ’cause he ain’t letting the yahoos play with it. It’s so clean and smooth, you gonna think it’s a reproduction.” Huddy decides to close up and chase down a special gun.

Two

Liberty is old and
tired, but the building is freestanding, the neighbors far off, and the driveway is big. When Huddy parks, he sees good bars on the windows. Inside, the lighting is poor, but a quick peek tells him the guy is killing him on merchandise. Like a fine catalogue of secondhand everything. Better saws, DeWalt drills, the tools mostly Black & Decker, Rockwell, Milwaukee, and not all used up. Huddy scans the guitar wall, picking out the Americans. One Martin, two Gibsons. And the handful of customers—busy for early afternoon—are nice working people. At the jewelry counter, a well-dressed black couple is picking out a ring, the woman in a sleeveless blouse, designer pants and sandals, hoop earrings and a purse on her shoulder; the man in a short-sleeved button-up. The white customer at the tools is wearing a tie! Huddy thinking, A guy comes in my shop with that, it’s the taxman come to audit. Huddy walks behind the couple and glimpses the filled trays. Bigger stones. A two-carat, a couple larger than a carat. One Rolex with the watches.

“Can I help you with anything?” Huddy hears from the loan counter. Must be Mister Keller, since the employee at the guns is Huddy’s age. Combover hair and a smile like a piano. Huddy points at the guns and Keller nods and goes back to his customer. Forty bucks on the counter. No merchandise, so the cash must be interest on a two-hundred-dollar loan. Huddy looks past Keller, at the solid double-door safe.

The L.C. Smith isn’t on the racks, but there are others to admire: two Weatherbys, a Browning Citori over-and-under. The rest are Remingtons and Mossbergs and Marlins. Even a couple Sears. But three high-end shotguns, plus the hidden L.C. Smith, when Huddy is lucky to have one in six months. And the handguns are just as good. Not just the regulars like Taurus and Ruger, and a notch up with Smith & Wesson, but a Colt Python in its original box, and a Kimber. Huddy feels like he’s browsing the Guns & Ammo store down the street. Doesn’t even see the cheapies, Hi-Point and Jennings and Bryco, Huddy’s bread-and-butter.

A customer grips a Ruger. “My brother, he been enjoying the Bearcat he got from you last month.” The employee and the buyer walk over to the loan counter, and Huddy thinks, This place is hooked in with
families
. Got brothers bringing each other here.

“How about I help you now?” Mister Keller says, same wide smile at the gun counter.

“Bill Mowry comes into my shop talking about an L.C. Smith, because he knows I like doubles.” Huddy hands him his FFL and watches Keller read it.

“Bluff City Pawn. That’s where Nat Jenks was.”

Huddy nods. “I’ve been running it six years.”

“How’s Lamar?”

“Terrible. But if I could see that L.C. Smith, I’d be happier.”

Mister Keller steps over to the gun safe and pulls out the shotgun, and Huddy leans in, ready to grade. Case colors swirl the receiver, the bluing on the barrel is barely faded. When Keller breaks it open, Huddy hears the automatic ejectors click. Add five hundred.

The gun right there in front of him and Huddy’s hand upon it. He shines his LED light on the chamber. No rust or dings or pitting. He closes the barrel gently, turns the gun over and back. The stock is triple-A fancy wood, French walnut.

Keller’s eyes move up the frame. “Hand-engraved. No machine doing that. Guy with a little bitty tool going tick tick tick.” His finger notch up and down.

Huddy wiggles the gun, no play in the metal. He scans the wood-to-metal fit, everything flush and continuous, nothing proud. “You mind if I take the barrels off?”

“Not if you’re serious about the gun.”

Huddy scans the steel for blemishes, studies every line and crease and edge, every number and proofmark. A Premier Skeet Grade. The gun needs to come home with him and he’ll sell three, maybe four, from his collection to make it happen. “Little defect under the hand guard,” he says, and Mister Keller’s eyes twitch up, “Okay.” Huddy reassembles the barrels, hands the gun back. “How’s a pawnshop get a gun like this?”

“I got forty years in this shop. This is the only one I’ve ever seen come in.”

Huddy nods at the racks. “You got other stuff, too. You got some primo guns.”

“Some plain-Jane, too,” Mister Keller shrugs. “A little bit of everything.”

Huddy glances down at the case. “Python NIB. Wish I was selling this everything.”

The front door dings open. A customer with tattoos, long hair, face grimed, looking like Huddy’s clientele, but at the loan counter, he changes to here. “I come for my trailer,” he says.

Huddy didn’t see a trailer in the driveway, which means there must be a lot behind the building. Which means Keller is doing title loans. Huddy searches around for other secrets. Like maybe he’s missed the platinum mine in the corner. “You say you been here forty?”

“My daddy did forty-four. And granddad did a stretch, when we were down on Beale.”

Huddy imagines the green-visored father running the shop—maybe generations of Kellers going all the way back to year one, to the customer in a toga pawning his oil lamp.

“I’d like not to go as far as daddy,” Keller says, “but my kids don’t want to fool with it.”

All the scouting that Huddy did—he never thought about moving his pawnshop into another pawnshop. “You thinking of retiring?”

“I ain’t put a sign on the marquee yet, but my wife keeps telling me to climb up there.”

“I wish I was off Lamar.” Huddy scans the floor. Two new customers. A scummy, low-end guy at the tools, but also a father and son at the guitars. “I wish I was here.”

“Yeah? Well. We should talk. I should listen. You want the book, the inventory, the building? If I talk too much, tell me to stop. We talking about the gun anymore?”

“Hell, yeah. But I don’t see no sticker price.”

“Price is up here,” Mister Keller says, tapping his head. “I figure, we both know ballpark. We both know book.” His hand opens in a giveaway. “I’ll let you have it for five.”

“Thanks,” Huddy says before he can stop his voice, but he doesn’t need to, ’cause eight would have been a steal.

“I’ll take my five and you’ll get your ten.”

Huddy pays cash and wants Keller to think he can pay for the store, too. He drives east out of the driveway to survey the storage lot, and there are two, the front one a chain-link fence for trailers, and then another behind it, with wooden privacy fencing inside the chain. He hooks right at the side street, drives past the first lot and parks. From his car, Huddy peers through the gaps in the slats. A boat, a car. He sees a trenching machine. A stump grinder. A riding mower. Big tickets, quality loans. Keller is a pawnbroker, a repo man, and a high-dollar merchant, and Huddy wants to be all of them, instead of feeling like a small-time clerk. It takes half the drive home before the two deals—buying the gun and buying the shop—separate, the consolation being that Huddy is still holding his finest double. But he needs to figure how he can dig a couple hundred thousand out from his brother Joe.

The phone rings. Lost his pawn ticket, the caller says, and Huddy searches the computer, tells him the payment date.

He wants to hear from Joe, wants to see Harlan—Huddy’s thoughts falling in a brotherly line, been awhile since that happened. Is Harlan showing today? He was first popping in on some buddy in Knoxville, just a quick hi.

Mister Ramirez comes up to the counter to purchase a caulk gun, a blaster, two scrapers; must’ve switched from carpets to painting. “You done with carpets?” Huddy says, and Mister Ramirez nods uneasily, so Huddy shows the price with fingers.

The phone rings again and Huddy answers.

“Sergeant Bell here, down at pawn detail.”

“Hello, Sergeant Bell,” Huddy says, taking a deep breath as he hears the damage, some jewelry coming up on the database. He copies down the tag numbers, and could Huddy have the stuff ready tomorrow morning for pickup?

“Sure thing,” Huddy says, blood vessels about to pop.

The phone again—better not be pawn detail grabbing more merchandise. “Bluff City.”

“Huddy, how many times you gonna call me about this nonproblem?”

“Joe, don’t yell at me. It’s not a—”

“Your lights will come on. I got a buyer here who’s messing with the layout, wants to flip the design so the kitchen’s where the living room is. She’s moving things upside down and backwards.”

“Listen, I wanna talk to you about more than lights.”

“More than lights? You’re calling me twenty times about lights and you want to talk about something else?”

“It’s about the neighborhood.”

“What about it?”

“It’s picked clean. There ain’t no money to squeeze from it. Guy came in yesterday asking if I bought
towels
. And it’s bad. Bad dangerous.”

“You’re a pawnshop, Huddy. You’re supposed to be in a bad area.”

“Pawnshop should be
close
to bad. Right on the edge of bad. Just a little ahead of bad.”

“Thanks for educating,” Joe says. “You’re fine, Huddy. Gold prices are through the roof.”

“’Cept everyone and their brother’s buying it.” Huddy saying it soft, not to argue, fingers tapping air. “Furniture store down the street’s got a sign in the window: We Buy Gold.”

A black man in a hooded jacket.

“I’ll call you back,” Huddy says. He needs time to develop his pitch. He’ll have to make Liberty Pawn sound like First Tennessee and make the blood bank sound like a contagion. “How you doing?” The man doesn’t answer, so Huddy tries again. “How you doing today?”

“Fell through the floor,” the guy mumbles. He smiles and shakes like he’s being tickled. More muffled words, some sound thrown out, shifting. He’s at the sockets bin, rolling his hand through them like he’s combing seashells. Sockets spill over the sides, but the man doesn’t react, as if the ocean were loud in his ears. Huddy looks at the nearby fishtank—this guy’s making the whole shop feel underwater—then returns to the man. His hands are busy, but the rest of him is dead. The noise to Huddy is the sound of knuckles cracking. The sockets clicking together is the clock ticking wrong.

“Can I help you?” Huddy says.

There’s no answer, every question needs to be doubled. “Hey.”

“Couldn’t find the right sizes,” the man says, the sockets on three fingers like rings or brass knuckles.

Huddy eyes the bin and what’s been spilled. “Dollar.”

The man stares at Huddy through small eyes. His socketless hand curls up to his shirt and fidgets between his chest buttons, scratching or reaching inside for something, and Huddy watches and doesn’t see black skin, but a white shirt, a second shirt, underneath with a front pocket where the money’s at. A dollar comes out crumpled on the counter. The man nods, twirls his socket fingers, and Huddy watches him leave. It wasn’t as if he expected the man to flash a weapon, but he wasn’t looking for the money there either, the balled cash like a torn-out heart.

Huddy looks at his watch and decides to close early. But he can’t. Three white men walk in, scruffy, in hats, and Huddy recognizes the front man as a customer. The one in the back is wearing a coat. Heavy. The coat, not the man, who’s stick-thin. The front man approaches the loan counter, the other two separate—the coat going over to the jewelry and leaning on the case, the third sliding over to the guns. Three pawn tickets on the counter, Huddy’s problems multiplying. A shotgun, a necklace, a tool bucket. Huddy sighs. These tickets’ll have him running around the store in ten different directions. He plugs the man’s name into the computer. Tells him, “Five hundred.” The man signs the tickets and Huddy takes the money. Always take the money. He does the jewelry loan first. Steps behind him to the safe—his back turned like Mister Barnes—gets the envelope and returns to the counter, the necklace spilling out with Huddy’s fingers never touching it.

Now the gun. Takes the man’s fingerprint on the pad, gives him the federal form while Huddy does the call-in. Everything’s clean. No back child support owed, no domestic violence. Huddy logs out the loan, but now he’s stuck. He won’t give the man the gun until he goes to the back for the toolbox, and he can’t go for the toolbox with all three of them here. “Gentlemen, I’m gonna have to ask you to step outside.”

They all straighten and regard each other, the guy in the coat zipping and unzipping.