Bluff City Pawn (28 page)

The guns will be lost. Soon. He’d be charged, and they could stall with four thousand pages of paperwork, and request a hearing, but the government would never yield on the violations, and he’d never convince them that his actions were defensible. He might be facing prison, or, more likely, the leveraging of prison to get him to forfeit the guns and surrender his license. He said as much to his lawyer, who paused before acknowledging that he could imagine the U.S. Attorney’s office signing off on that type of deal. “That would be a way to avoid prosecution,” the lawyer said, as if Huddy had just outsmarted them and won a split decision. “And we’ll fight against a fine,” the lawyer added, as if Huddy shouldn’t underestimate the extent of their plea bargaining, but all Huddy heard was the added fees for arguing the fine’s dismissal. And now Huddy has to re-enact the day’s events and the eventual pleadings, to hear about Joe’s worries and what’s life-threatening to him, when the agents’ discovery wasn’t only inside that gun but inside of Huddy’s skin, like they’d cut him open in his sleep and stitched him up before waking, and then cut him again to show him what had been hidden there.

He rounds the horseshoe bend and circles back, Joe already exiting the house and down the steps before Huddy’s rolled to a stop far behind the Lexus. Joe slants along the path and into the bending driveway, his hand shielding the headlights’ glare. Huddy switches off the engine and gets out and when he looks at Joe, he sees it wasn’t just the lights bright on him that made him seem crazed. “What happened?” Joe asks, and Huddy might ask the same of Joe, the sawdust in his hair, the golden shavings on his shoulders, powdering his flannel shirt, the dirtlines of salt and dust on his neck. “What the hell were you doing? You seen my car. You keep going?”

“Missed it,” Huddy says. “Too many houses in the dark.”

“This one’s lit!” Joe says, and points behind and walks off, and Huddy watches him corner the hedgerow and disappear into the downstairs light. He follows him, slower for Joe’s impatience, loping around the clumps of bushes and into the open house, his feet loud on the stone entrance. He gazes ahead at the flight of stairs that looks shiny and unclimbed, and steps left into the empty living room, Joe already deep across the wide-planked floor, and Huddy moves forward, hearing the hollow sound of the hardwood, and without any furniture he’s unsure where to stand, so he stops midway. The dining area is only a chandelier hanging. The interiors seem not just empty but abandoned. The windows are closed. Huddy inhales the uncirculated air. The brand-new house, freshly painted, already smells stale.

“This your new office?” Huddy says. He eyes Joe in this clean room and sees more of his changed outfit and harassed condition, the dirty pants, the right knee torn, the toes of his shoes discolored. The gray undershirt is filthy, striped with the same horizontal grime as the neck. Huddy half-recognizes him. It’s like he’s the teenage Joe after a backbreaking day, even while he looks overage for the job—been decades since he’s done this hard work.

“How did Harlan get a machine gun?” Joe says, his anger rising up to the vaulted ceiling. “You fucked this deal.”

“
He
fucked it.” Huddy looks around unobstructed, seeing all the way through to the kitchen and out the back. A living room with no pictures, a dining area without chairs. How strange, to move from a day with ATF delving everywhere to a night with blank spaces and no shelves and no possessions to uncover or find.

“He didn’t say a word,” Joe says.

“Where is he?”

“What did you tell them?”

“It’s what they told
me
.”

“Which was?”

Huddy gives a recap, except for the AR and what was housed there. “They ain’t brought charges yet. But it’s coming.”

“Who’s your lawyer? Forget it, call mine.”

Huddy shrugs, I’ll call as many lawyers as you want me to. “They froze the collection. That’s just today.”

“How can they get the guns? Harlan . . .” his arm outstretched to signal who should be implicated, who shouldn’t. “Why is it touching us? Why’s it touching
me
?” He slaps his chest, yanks his shirt, aggrieved at the collateral damage. “You didn’t say nothing about machine guns! You talked about collectibles. I knew he’d do something stupid. But you? You must be the smartest stupidest person I know!”

“He stole that gun, ’cause you took yours first. You started it.”

“Me? No, you, Huddy, you!” The words tearing out of him and Huddy tears back.

“You! Pushed it downhill, and I’m at the bottom with my hands out catching all the shit you rolled onto me.”

So mad and Joe’s hands come out to spring, and Huddy quick-pivots with a hand going straight to his pocket. Joe stops, startled, legs faltering, mouth open. His fear in a moment returns to anger, and he stares in confrontation. Glares at his trigger finger, shakes his head at Huddy’s violent self-defense, at the gun worn under, here in Joe’s house. “You little thug.”

Huddy nods at Joe’s critical face, but he’s already been accused too much, and he’s already been hit. His hand stays there. “You walking the wrong way.”

“My thug brother,” Joe says, his face sneering, revolted. “Guess I should expect as much, with where you work, what you do.”

“That’s right. Now move back,” he says. “You need to get yourself normal. You come at me, I’m gonna sit you down on the floor.”

“Normal,” Joe says, and he steps away, carefully. “I feel so normal it’ll scare you.” But his voice doesn’t threaten, is wrong for scary, too weak, surrendering. “Sure scares me,” he mutters darkly. “You’d pull that? You serious—you gonna shoot?”

“You going for my throat?”

“For a headlock!” he cries. “Jesus Christ.”

But Huddy can justify his instinct, after being challenged unevenly. “I seen you. Weren’t no headlock.” Looking like he could break through a door. “Knock the fuck outta me.” Knot his head, so he’ll put a bullet in his foot.

Joe frowns out his residual anger. Screws his face at the explanation, at his own blocked aggression. Thought they were scuffling, a hand-to-hand fight, and his underhanded brother outfoxed him—no way is Joe holding him harmless. Still, he nods a truce. He rotates his shoulder, stretches his back, flexes out his sore right leg. He winces, the aches and pain of a twelve-hour day spent balancing doors, crouching down on his knees. “He told me the gun was never logged in. How’s that, Huddy? You find something bad and just ignore it?”

He’s right, Huddy admits his guilt. He didn’t need to dump the AK, shred it, cut it up. Just say,
Come get this gun
. They might’ve done a spot check, they might not have checked the AR, and if they had, the trouble wouldn’t have been compounded by lies. He’d apologize, but only to himself. He looks back at Joe, who’s still extending his hurt leg, and Huddy feels sorry but then resentful, because he’s also afflicted. “You got your money out. Go sell your two prizes.” But he knows the guns won’t recoup the expenditure on the houses and the lots.

“I sold one. The other, it’s tied up.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Posted bail. They got him on federal charges. Took the Yellow Boy down to Poplar.”

“Bullshit.”

“Go down there. Across from the courthouse. They got a two-in-one operation, part pawnshop, part bail bonds. You just switch counters, paperwork. They didn’t need nothing but the gun. ’Course, they put on a lien on it, so I can’t get it back until the case is over.” Joe looks around, bewildered, lost in an empty house. “I can’t afford frozen. Frozen means time runs out. Lorie’s gone back to work. I’m back to installing doors. Long hours, upgrades, repairs—but I can’t offset the losses. Just wake up owing more. Can’t sleep, ’cause there’s no off-hours on the debt. Every hour is the same—midday, midweek. I went from planning early retirement to never retiring, and now I’m just trying to save my own home. I’ll be damned if the bank’s taking that.”

Huddy raises his hand for Joe to stop, slow down, his labored breath relentless and outspent. It’s hard to look at this panic and pressure, so Huddy turns aside, listens for Joe’s breathing to lengthen and normalize. He examines the construction. The surfaces fit perfectly. No gaps in the casing joints, no wide seams in the floor, no taping lines in the walls. “I can’t believe no one lives here,” Huddy says. How does a big, new Germantown house with no mistakes stay vacant? He exchanges half-grins with Joe, lifts an appreciative hand to pay tribute to his brother’s design. It must be an accomplishment to make something this solid, to build something that won’t come apart and destruct, to feel such pride of place, even if it breaks you.

“Upper-end homes,” Joe says. “When no one can afford upper-end. Looks like I built the wrong product.” His hands form an empty bowl and he splays his fingers to show the money sifting through. “Maybe I should take out the chandelier? Maybe I picked the wrong doorknobs? Go less neutral with the walls? You think if I switch out the doorknobs, darken the floor, I solve my problem?”

Huddy shrugs at the alterations, the retouchings and different colors. “Up the road looks good. Sold some.”

“Real bullish up at the front. The first offerings went quick, then . . . it slowed. Then . . . Like a spigot turned off. But you took a look, didn’t you? You seen what’s out there.”

Huddy can’t see beyond the windows, but he knows there’s nothing hidden in the darkness. No people, no trees, no activity, no noise. Not some hushed suburban evening but a street gone mute. “Ain’t your fault it’s a dead market.”

“Dead market? Smell of death, alright. The owners, the few I got, they complaining how I won’t bring in mowers, keep the entire place neat and clean. I’m like, go talk to the bank. They’re past renegotiating. They’re doing a cash call. Calling the loan. I’m hanging on for dear life. Bankruptcy, receivership . . . All that fine print you don’t read. This wasn’t supposed to be a gamble. I built the houses they wanted built. I was punching out fifty houses a year, and people were paying before I finished painting the baseboards. Selling faster than you could build them. Come in on a Monday, you’d have multiple offers, three, four contracts on my desk. And now . . . I can’t get out from under. I’m upside down. I can’t
work
my way out of this.” He wrenches his arm from a sleeve, sets a hand on the mantel ledge to steady himself. “I did it right. These other builders—I didn’t go down to Florida and play. Get crazy with money. I’ve stayed on every job. Walked it every day. It’s insulting, when you build something like this, and you don’t get a single person to rag you on the price—you can’t even sell it below market. Can’t even fire-sale it. I know what’s in this house. How do you do everything right and it’s wrong? I don’t know, Huddy, you think I should try arson?” He looks up at the beamwork, a place to set the spark.

“You serious?” Huddy glances at the fireplace, with its one fake log.

“Am I serious about full replacement value? Now why would I be serious about that? Except I’d only get away with it once. So I guess I’ll have to be serious about killing myself.” He looks above again to the ceiling—a place to suspend the rope. Huddy shakes his head, won’t imagine a strung-up brother. Joe turns, scrubs his face, drags his fingers across his skin, tracing a raked outline. “I can’t believe they froze the guns. I’ma talk to my lawyer, we gonna unfreeze those guns. Government agents, who’s paying their salary? I am. You know, some thieves stole my compressors? Scum driving around. They vultures, circling this place, and they on it like a dead cow. If I catch ’em . . . Only person who’s gonna steal from me is me.”

He removes his hand from the mantel, squares himself on the wall, crouches and sinks to the floor. Huddy stares at slumping Joe. He feels foolish, left standing while his brother sits, as if Joe had stepped down into his backyard pit, so he finds a spot against the other wall. Their bodies fold at right angles and face each other. But now Huddy feels sillier, staring up from the ground at a bare room, the two of them sitting without chairs when a moment before it was just Joe. Joe scratches his hair and the dust falls, collects on his sleeve. “Ain’t I shaggy dog?” he says, and he shakes out his shirt, and Huddy thinks, You look like an honest day. “You gotta come up with a Plan B,” Joe says, and Huddy is almost flattered that Joe would defer to him a second plan, even if he doesn’t have one, and even as he mistrusts the flattery, which is confirmed when Joe inserts, “squeeze more from the shop.”

“How I do that?”

“You tell me,” he says, only curious. But then he adds, “Maybe roll the dice a little,” and he nods, chin nudging, a small favor, nodding again, already decided. He twists his wrist, as if Huddy just needs more flexibility to generate cash. “Don’t tell me you always been by-the-law legit.”

ATF accuses him of being a criminal, and now Joe’s accusation is he better be. Huddy laughs.

“Something funny?” Joe says.

“Oh, I don’t know. Sure, Joe, I ain’t been no poster child. Some controlled instances, but I never gone overboard. You want me to put some kind of word out? Maybe I should read
Break the Law for Dummies
?”

“Don’t lecture me.”

“I’ll have every hoodrat bringing me shit, and two months from now, one’ll get caught and his new best friend is a detective. I ain’t getting rolled by some crackhead with a case of iPods.”

“Nobody cares about some pawnshop on Lamar.”

“Except now they do.” The sign in his shop that says,
smile shoplifters you are on camera
, but now the sign is flipped. “You ain’t getting the part about me being monitored. ATF already swarming my place. I’m a target. Whatever happens, cops’ll still be stinging the area. Ain’t getting my ass burned on parking-lot buys.”