Bluff City Pawn (11 page)

“The hunting lodge,” Kipp says. “Mama calls it the lake house, and daddy called it the hunting lodge.”

“We were very close, Mister Marr. May I call you Huddy?”

“Of course.”

“Lee had time to come home every day for lunch,” she says. “And that’s both a good and a bad thing, since lunch is every day.”

Huddy smiles. But what he wants to know is, Close enough for him to tell you the values of his guns? He slips a hand inside his sport-coat pocket and finds a bottle cap hidden in the lint.

The widow laughs childlike and then a memory stiffens her face; she sits charm-school straight on the edge of her leather chair and directs Huddy to a matching one across the table from her. The son positions himself in the middle of the couch—a guard dog, between Huddy and the widow’s money, dressed in Weejun loafers—then maneuvers sideways to cross his legs, showing the sole of one shoe. Across from him is an empty couch, like a missing fourth piece of the game about to be played, and Huddy pictures Yewell stationed there to complete the square, but if Yewell were here, Huddy wouldn’t be.

On the table are printouts—the gun collection, Huddy knows. But he can’t see the number of pages because they’re stacked so exactly, the corners aligned in a perfect rectangle inside the rectangle of the table, like stationery set in a box. Huddy steals a glance at the widow’s hands, her long fingers and manicured nails. Her gold necklace holds a diamond, U-shaped pendant that Huddy realizes is a horseshoe. He imagines her arranging the pages before his arrival, like a centerpiece, her neck tilted in contemplation as she surveyed its placement, her index fingers like rulers, her eyes scanning the compass points of the table. The pages are facedown, topped by a pen that cuts diagonally across, its tip pointing at one of the corners, which has enough separation for Huddy to now see at least three sheets, and he counts and figures seventy or eighty guns, easy. The direction of the pen makes Huddy feel as if it were spun and landed there, as if it were now his turn to act. He wants to jump from his chair and flip the pages, but he knows it’s their move, so he looks elsewhere on the table, at a brass ornament saying
tally-ho
, at tiny jockeys on matchbook covers, and then around the room at a plaque saying
spirit of the sport
, and a painting of a horse in close-up profile, the one big eye open and staring back at Huddy so he looks away, out the barless windows onto the backyard, but it’s too wide and long and multiplied to call it that. A brick terrace and then gardens and ivy beds wreathing the thick trees, and Huddy’s eyes keep filling, a pillared guest house that was probably the servants’ quarters until they left and it was renovated, and then across the yard another house, this time a barn that you’d take for a house, and between these houses a riding ring that to Huddy looks like a winner’s circle, and then pastureland and a vast expanse of acreage sweeping back and outward as infinite as the sky. He imagines flying out of the barn and riding out into that deep beyond—just amazing that you could vanish inside your own land, your vision of your property blotted out not just by trees or buildings but distance, a rolling territory that extended and probably came out east of Nashville—and then Huddy comes out of the reverie by realizing he doesn’t smell manure. “You keep horses?” he asks. He looks back at her, her hands composed on her lap, as if she were part of the picture of what he’d been seeing outside.

“Not for a time,” she says, her voice soft and small. “When I was a child, we had Morgans. Beautiful black Morgans. And I bought a little Welsh jumper for my daughter, named Royal.” And Huddy doesn’t ask if that’s a horse or daughter. “My other son took two for his farm, and my daughter has the jumper in the country, and two other Morgans are retired over at Wildwood.” She gazes outside as if hearing some faraway hoofbeat music. “I thoroughly enjoyed our horses,” she says, her voice scraped with grief, and then her face flinches. She swallows, shakes her head, frightened but annoyed—for being unable to think of what to say next, for not containing her grief, much less to a stranger. She turns and blinks hard to switch off her memories, to not see a horse or a husband or anything else gone, and Huddy watches her hands wring, and then run along the sides of her legs, perching on her knees. A smile breaks across her face, as if she’d only been carried off by delightful dreams, and her shoulders spring up and her chin rises.

“Mama still has a clock that whinnies,” Kipp says, his eyes holding on her, his voice amiable but uncertain. “You stay here long enough you’ll hear it.”

I’ll stay forever, Huddy thinks. Hang around for months and months swapping stories: She’d tell him about her horses galloping over the ground, and he wouldn’t tell her about his brothers shooting a turtle with a pellet gun—or maybe he’d say they’d kept it as a pet. He’ll just listen to her stories about happy games she played with the servants’ kids, like having them chase her or braid her hair. Swinging on swings and tree limbs, and dunking them in a washtub in a pretend baptism. Talk plenty and bond until Huddy isn’t a stranger but someone familiar enough to become her little friend, and then the gun list upturning and offered like leftover wealth and his life rescued.

He can’t imagine spending your entire life in this much ease, your days and years not divided between those and these times but one unbroken line of what you always had. What would his life have been if he’d been born into this instead of something low and puny? But then, look at Joe: grew up and shoved his way to the top. At least it seemed the top until Huddy got here and saw the tippytop. The inside of this house feels bigger than all of Huddy’s pinched childhood, her outdoor world bigger than all the ground he ever covered.

“You would have seen more of the garden a week ago,” she says. “You are late for the azaleas, but at least you’re getting more than the garden’s bones.”

And Huddy suspects he’s been staring long but then sees he needn’t worry, because she’s fogged up in her own words and losses, her memories growing on her face. Her hands knot. She searches the room, as if she were trying to find a vase or jar to deposit the memories. And then she bows her head at her son as if to apologize for her manners, and his eyes narrow, his face tenses. Huddy can’t blame her—losing and dying seem unimaginable here. Or maybe this is the good place you go to after you die. When his mama got sick, six years ago, and talked her heavenly thoughts, was her vision of eternity as good as this? If he died here, Huddy wouldn’t want to go anywhere
but
here, put him right out in that golden yard. He looks outside—doesn’t see death but growth, life and afterlife—and then his mind conjures Yewell ripping out of the ground like some uprooting flower, dirt tumbling off him like a landslide, Yewell reborn and the torn-out flowers dead.

“My brother Joe,” Huddy says, nodding to kill the vision. “He lives here. Germantown. Over on Wickersham. He just put in a water garden.”

“Oh, that’s very nice,” the widow says, thankful to switch subjects. “I gave some thought to arranging a water feature. Wickersham—that’s Kimbrough Woods.” And Huddy watches opinions form between them, mother and son marking streets and incomes, Huddy for once not bitter but thankful that Joe lives here and is similar, their lives harmonizing with Joe’s but maybe not joining his.

“That’s right,” Huddy says, staring outside.

“Kimbrough Woods has a garden club. I don’t believe it’s federated. I don’t know if he’s a member, or his wife is.”

“I’d have to ask her.”

“I’ve been a member of Suburban Garden Club for most of my adult life. My mother was one of the founders and I just followed her in. I do love the garden club.”

“And the herb club,” Kipp says, eyes rolling in fake exasperation. “And the charity horse show. And the neighborhood task force.” His voice pokes at Huddy and Huddy laughs, nods knowingly as if they shared the same experiences, the same superior mothers, the same uncommon ground.

“I belong to too many things,” she says, her voice a cheery protest, shaking her head as if she can’t understand the busyness of her life, all the joyful ways of making the time pass. “When it comes to volunteering, I’ve always been a worker bee. Kipp here, he volunteers at church. And he belongs to Rotary. Mostly, he networks.”

Kipp shrugs and folds his hands. And pauses. “I suppose you didn’t come all the way out here to hear about our activities.”

“Or floral arrangements,” she says, leaning forward, the pages centered between them and all eyes finally pointed there, the room contracting as everyone quiets, and Huddy’s heart quickens and he knows it’s time to shop. Okay, Yewell, let’s see what you put together. Let’s see what your list says.

She grabs the pen and the pages fan out and Huddy sees it’s much more than three, the figures climbing in his head just as she sets the pen aside, lifts the pages and taps them neatly back to one. “Huddy, Lee kept these records.” Her hand quivers a little, but Huddy knows it’s only age. The biggest deal of his life and he’s never had a seller less desperate to make it, which means the desperation is his—or the son’s, too, his eyes like edged weapons and his face bobbing attentively. “The list says one hundred and eighty guns,” she says. “One eighty-one, to be exact.” Huddy nods simply but the number screams in his head. “But Kipp has counted them and come out with less.”

“
Two
less,” Kipp says, to insist he doesn’t share his mother’s disinterest, but Huddy can’t concentrate on his words and needs because the numbers still fill the room like a noise he can’t yet talk around, a noise that would make him crazy if he weren’t so stunned and happy. His head shakes at the son, then at her. I’m here, he says, but he isn’t, his mind leaping out of the room and running through their house and opening doors, the next room and the next and the next, until he enters the gun room and finds racks and racks of long guns, racks on the floor and racks on the walls—the guns standing and horizontal and surrounding him in all directions.

“Maybe you will find the other two when you go through the collection,” she says. “Lee had his gun buddies come over and he’d share his guns, and he might have traded a few or maybe Kipp has miscounted.”

Two less, twenty less. It doesn’t matter. One hundred and seventy, eighty, whatever guns—a fat number you could cut into but never thin.

“I have made a copy of Lee’s list for you. And you may borrow this fountain pen if you’d like. Lee said a thousand times it’s not called a fountain pen anymore, but I can’t just call it a pen.”

Huddy taps his shirt pocket. “Got one here,” he hears himself say. And the tap is a sensation that brings him back, a pulse returning through him. He pushes his fingers into his flesh, like he’d found a seam to hide his nerves.

“As you will see, Lee wrote down what he paid for them. We know that what they’re worth and what one can get for them are two separate things.”

“That’s right,” Huddy says, feeling alert now, “what they’re worth and what they bring,” his voice measured and correct. He thinks about Yewell’s gun buddies and what they’d seen and would want, and Huddy wishing Yewell had been some closet collector, the loneliest collector in town, everything put behind glass and in safes and in drawers and under beds, but Huddy knows Yewell wasn’t that. Not in this house, where everything is like artwork, enjoyed every day. He reaches for the list, and she smiles as if she were greeting him again, the pages between their outstretched hands. He draws them toward him, the pages colder than her hand and heavier than his own, but in his mind he is not a dealer but an accountant, about to peruse a balance sheet that doesn’t contain money in its numbers. A counting game in which the zeroes don’t count or
only
count. Huddy blinks to decide which. He switches to the guns, telling himself they
aren’t
, just bits of old gray metal.

He stares at the page and what he notices first is not the guns but the system that organizes them. Yewell the mechanical engineer, always a bit of a mechanism himself, coming in quick during the slow hours, and Huddy figured he kept his list precise, too. Along the top are the categories: the make and the model and the serial number and the type and the condition and then the price, but Huddy’s not ready to read for dollar signs. “He sure was organized,” he says, and she smiles and the son just nods, unsure if money got made. Huddy looks at the photocopied black circles on the left-hand side, like three bull’s-eyes.

R1, R2, R3—the rifle numbers running fast down the page but the sequence of model ’73s staying still while Huddy’s mind jumps by the thousands. He scans the column of serial numbers, sees one of the serializations is only four digits, and he feels his shoulders pump. The ’73s stop and then it’s a handful of ’76s and even more ’86s, Huddy catching all the odd calibers, and then the collection goes on repeat again with ’94s, carrying over onto the next page, Huddy reading every configuration—Timber Carbine, Timber Carbine Scout, Timber Carbine Scout Takedown—like he’s reading straight out of the blue book. On page three, the guns become bolt-actions, the Model 70s spreading through all production periods and capacities and chamberings, like Yewell couldn’t die until he bought up the entire history.

“He sure liked his Winchesters,” Huddy says, almost blurting it, like some pressure pushing out of his mouth. “Some people, see,” more words surging, “they’re gun accumulators, but Lee was a gun
collector
.” Which is what Huddy suspected and hoped for, Yewell trading up his whole life. Huddy scans the conditions, sees nothing less than good, and he knew Yewell wouldn’t fool with fair or poor, but he’s still surprised to see how many are graded as very good and excellent and NIB, Huddy picturing all those pristine guns in boxes. He’ll need to check the conditions, but Yewell’s eyes were as sharp as the pocket magnifying glass he always carried.