by Joe Clifford
Unlike pawn shops in the city, you didn’t need to be buzzed past a metal grate to get inside. A little bell dinged above the door, announcing our arrival.
“I help you boys?” The man behind the counter had a country-mean expression with an alcohol-pickled face. Zeroing in on us had been easy. There was no one else inside. Although hearing anyone call Francis “boy” felt out of place.
“Maybe,” I said. “I’m wondering if my…brother…was in here.”
“Am I supposed to know who your brother is?”
I chuckled. No one else did.
“He took our mom’s jewelry,” I said. “I think he may’ve brought it here.”
“Any transactions are confidential—”
“I understand—”
“If you think your ‘brother’ brought in merchandise that didn’t belong to him,” the man replied with a bored, aggravated cadence, “that’s theft. You’ll have to go to the police.”
“I don’t want to get him in trouble.”
“I’m sure.” The man at the counter scratched his beard, smiling a big, fake smile. “Of course, we don’t ever knowingly accept stolen merchandise.” He pointed out the window. “Fill out a report at the police station. Soon as you have the proper forms, I’ll be more than happy to show the police our new inventory list. Then it’ll be up to you if you want to press charges. If we have the jewelry in question, that is.” He waited, glancing at the clock, the workday almost over. “Of course, if you don’t wish to cause your…brother…any more trouble, you might want to fuck off.”
I waited for Francis to go after this guy like he did Gustavo at the bus station—not that I wanted to see that. I was surprised when Francis, without a word, turned and left.
When we got outside, I glanced over.
“You can’t push around a man in a pawn shop,” he said. “They keep shotguns under the counter.”
“We should try the other shops.”
“What makes you think they’ll be any more accommodating?”
“Jacob had to unload the jewelry somewhere. How else did he get that much cash?”
As we discussed this, I felt the eyes around us. Strangers, we stood out.
Francis followed me into the next two pawn shops, and, as he predicted, no one cared, each proprietor as hostile as the next.
Following our last attempt, I saw a café and suggested taking a load off, talk, regroup, get a bite, some coffee, since it appeared it might be a while before we slept. Without a better option, Francis followed me inside. We sat at a scarred, wobbly table in the corner, nicknames and initials carved in the soft wood. I dumped half a pound of sugar in my coffee, hoping to mask the burnt taste of an old pot.
“How do you even know about pawn shops?” Francis asked. “Can’t imagine Lori needing to take out a loan on her fancy dishes. Or did she have a secret habit I didn’t know about?”
“Mrs. Balfour,” I said, taking offense at his slight, “was a wonderful caretaker.”
“I’m sure.”
“I didn’t always live with her.”
“I know—”
“And my parents weren’t as well off. They drank. They used drugs.” I took a sip of the sewage, setting down the mug, tapping out. “Our TV was often on loan, let’s put it that way. A lot of weeks what we had in the refrigerator came down to whether we had a refrigerator.”
“You remember your childhood that well?”
“Yes. And no.” It was hard to explain. I had these stories. Like the pawn shop, the drinking, drugging, but they weren’t memories. Not like the ones formed after I went to live with the Balfours. My life was split in two, before and after. The after was clear, normal recollection. Christmases and church and playing with Jacob, visuals getting crisper as time marched toward the present. The before? A television show or movie preview, a highlight reel. I had a list of factoids to repeat but not ones that had been experienced firsthand.
And then it happened again. Until that moment, I’d been having a good day. A regular day. A “back to me” day. The paranoid unease that had plagued me of late had been relegated to aberration. Now I felt its creepy, crawly return even before I saw the boy in blue out the window.
I jumped up from my seat, knocking over the chair, racing into the street. Striding off the sidewalk, I slipped between parked pickups, a tight fit. My knee got caught on a bumper, which forced me to slow a second, crouch, clutch, wriggle free. When I righted myself, I popped out, darting into the street without looking, stepping in front of a gas-guzzling SUV. Instincts took over. Already in motion, I kept going, even though returning to the sidewalk was closer. I didn’t have the luxury of calculating odds and checking my math. My legs kept pumping, which was the right move, inertia giving me a half step before the car would’ve hit me. I fell to my knees, half guitar hero stage slide, half collapse from relief. It all happened so fast. The driver never hit their brakes—they didn’t even have a chance to lay on the horn.
By the time I glanced up from the ground, the driver was around the bend, turning a corner. A few passersby had stopped, rubbernecking and whispering. The entire scene lasted a matter of seconds but drew out longer, my heart caught in my throat, brain unable to process.
I got to my feet, swatting the dust off my pants, squinting into the blazing orange ball sinking in the summer sky.
“What is wrong with you, boy?” Francis shouted from the coffee shop entryway.
I focused my gaze in the opposite direction. Of course the boy in blue was gone.
“You got a death wish?”
“I thought I saw someone.”
“Who?”
“This guy, this kid…he’s been following me. In Cortland. Utica once. I think…”
“You think?”
“Forget it.”
“You almost ate Cadillac grill, boy. This close.” Francis smidged his fingers. “Almost gave me a heart attack.”
When I looked in Francis’s eyes, I would’ve sworn he was getting choked up. Why? He didn’t know me, didn’t seem to like me. Then again, watching someone almost getting run over would shake up anyone.
“You were in my father’s shop?” she said.
We both turned. The girl was skinny to the point of gaunt, dressed in a loose dirty tee and dirtier jeans, skin an unhealthy shade of pale.
“Ace’s,” she added.
It took me a moment to realize she was talking about the pawn shop.
“Yes,” I said. “We were looking for jewelry that…my brother… took—”
“I can’t get you the jewelry back.”
“We don’t want it back.”
Biting her lower lip, the girl surveyed the scene. That’s what I saw her as—girl, not woman—even if she was around my age; she seemed fragile, a flower without sun and in danger of wilting.
“Jacob? He your brother?” She alternated between Francis and me.
I nodded. She knew his name. This was a good sign.
The girl turned toward the direction of the pawn shop, which had now closed for the day. “I can’t be here.” She pulled a chewed-on pencil from her front pocket and scribbled on a scrap of paper from her back. “Meet me here in half an hour.”
Francis and I watched her rush past, swirling dust, before turning down a dirt path, going the same direction the boy in blue had gone. At least Francis had seen her, so there was no debating whether she was real.
I looked down at the scrap of paper she’d handed me. An address.
At last, we had a lead.
Francis and I drove his big ol’ Buick to the address, a rural residence without a neighborhood, defined by trees, canopies, and bramble. We parked down the road. I made to get out but Francis grabbed me by the arm.
The old faded blue house crowned a hill. Beat up, vacant, smashed windows with a rusted car on cinderblocks in the weeds. It looked abandoned.
“What are we supposed to do?” I asked him.
“Sit tight.”
We sat tight while Francis cased the place from his driver’s seat. Looking for what, I had no idea.
Soon, the sun had set. Francis and I sat in his old Buick on the side of this old country road in front of an old beat-up house without lights. This didn’t feel like much of a lead. No clue where to go next. I still had all my problems waiting for me back in Cortland. I still didn’t know if the police—or whoever was pretending to be the police—were looking for me. The night plummeted country cold.
Francis smoked his cigarettes, ignoring me, eying the house.
“This was a waste,” I said.
He didn’t respond.
“I guess we should get a hotel room—”
“Shut up, boy. Give me time to think. Someone’s inside that house.”
“What do you mean?” He saw the same house I did, swallowed in woodland and shrub, incorrigible wilderness. No lights. No electricity. Silent.
With the lit end of his cigarette, Francis pointed toward the backfield. “Someone went in.”
“The girl? Let’s go talk to her.”
“Wasn’t no girl,” he said.
I squinted, removed my glasses, cleaned and put them back on. Through the settling gloam, I had a hard time seeing the edges of the decrepit house.
Flicking the cigarette stub, Francis climbed out of the car, leaning back in. “You coming, boy? Or you too scared?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Granted, my eyesight had never been good. I was both farsighted and nearsighted, which left a sweet spot of about ten to twenty feet. But I had no idea how Francis knew people were inside that house. Creeping closer, I conceded he was right. I made out the dim blue cadaver lights in the windows, the tint blending with dusk and gloam. Had they been on the entire time?
I was following Francis’s lead with no idea what he was going to do. This wasn’t a house where you walked up and rang the bell. I now knew there were several people inside and could hear muffled chatter. I couldn’t wrap my head around when they arrived. The place appeared condemned fifteen minutes ago. Now I heard voices, low music, murmurs emanating from the cracks in the bowed planks as if the house itself were groaning.
Eyes adapting, I could see the house better even if my opinion of it didn’t improve. On the blind side, mountains of trash bags were stacked to the windows, rat-torn holes spilling contents, paper cartons of milk and empty jars of spaghetti sauce. Did garbage men not travel this far into the sticks? The shingled house, dingy baby blue pockmarked with black rot, perched at an angle. Whole place could use a new paint job. Or at least a good power wash. This house was evil. I could feel it. Bad people did bad things inside there. The strangest part was the field beside the house, which was littered with old, junky cars and parts, an automotive graveyard. Not that all were that old. Or that junky. A few looked like they could still run. Some had shells but no engine, others engines but no shell. A handful were in decent shape. Old muscle, meathead cars. At the end, a couple appeared downright drivable, with shiny paint and gleaming chrome. Not high-end, luxury models, but starting from the back of the lot, traveling to the front, you got the sense you were on an assembly line. None of this had been visible from where we were parked. A frenetic energy emanated off the house. As if during the day it had been asleep. Come nighttime, the demons had awakened.
I tugged Francis by the sleeve.
He stopped bulling forward long enough to look at me.
“What are you going to do? Knock?” I gestured around the western backwoods where lawless hillbillies were birthed with a shotgun in their hands and an outstanding warrant on their head. “I don’t think it’s that kind of house.”
“You can wait in the car if you’re scared.”
“Stop saying that. I’m not scared.” I lowered my voice. “I’m also not stupid.” There was only one reason people went into houses like this: drugs. This was a drug house, and people who did drugs weren’t going to throw open their doors and invite us in.
“I ain’t scared of a bunch of junkies,” he said. “That girl gave us this address for a reason.”
What could I do? I couldn’t leave an old guy like Francis alone. A requisite amount of fear keeps us safe. Maybe I was overreacting. He didn’t seem worried—at all.
When Francis got to the front door, he didn’t bother knocking, turning the handle and striding right in.
Low discordant music bled deep within the bowels, rising past rows of rooms with their doors closed. Candlelight illuminated sporadically, flickering flames dancing shadows. We didn’t bother with a light switch.
Voices grumbled as we entered a common area, which I deduced to be a kitchen. Less from furnishings and more because of layout. There was no refrigerator. There was part of a stove, with unhooked, unattached, bent pipes dangling from the ceiling in proximity of an exhaust. The peeling paint exposed punctured sheetrock, naked floorboards and studs. Water dripped methodically, plinking in a pan, as far-off storms rumbled in distant black hills.
Dark lumps lay in the corners. Bodies. Not dead, sleeping, evidenced by their sluggish reptile movements. Legs stretched, arms reached, hands pawed, guttural voices groaning, groveling without words, validating my deduction we’d entered a drug den. People, men, women—boys, girls?—as sickly and gaunt as the girl outside the coffee shop populated the cracked linoleum, sleepy snakes on cold rock. Aroused from a state of suspended animation, they stirred, hissed. I spotted several rubber tourniquets, syringes beside burnt spoons and mutilated cigarettes, the wretched slowly coming to life.
“Who the fuck are you?”
At the sound of the voice, I took a step back. Not Francis, who wasn’t intimidated by the shirtless guy with the Van Dyke facial hair and bugged-out eyes.
The man presented himself in a back-room doorframe, arms and fingers dug into the molding above. Shirtless, slathered in colorless tats, sinewed and roped without a percentage of extra body fat, the man let go, planting all his weight on both feet. Not that he was big or tall or sturdy. If anything, he was on the smaller side. Still, the floor shook with the disruption as he emerged from the darkness.
“You ain’t the cops,” the man said, stepping closer. He didn’t sound relieved. Stating fact.
“No,” Francis said. “We’re not the police.”
“And you ain’t buying. So I’ll repeat: why the fuck you here?”
“We’re looking for a girl,” I said.
He pointed past my shoulder. “Try the donut shop.” As my eyes better adjusted to the dearth of light, I caught flesh in the bedroom behind him. A woman’s bare leg. He turned and pulled shut the door, stepping to Francis. “You got a smoke?”
For a second I thought Francis was going to tell him to buy his own. I didn’t see Francis sharing hard-earned spoils, not with a man of this ilk. I was mistaken. Francis slid out one of his Winstons. Maybe they were the same, Francis and this lowlife, members of the same congregation of the downtrodden. The man didn’t say thank you, simply plucked it from the pack. He fired up with a lighter he whipped from his back pocket, face cast craven in the column of flame.
The room brightened, a high moon splashing clear white light across the filthy floor, uneven surfaces rivered with abrasions, a fault line disrupted. The addicts continued to rouse, listless. Their lethargy stood in stark contrast to the half-naked guy in front of us who seemed antsy, agitated, and wired.
“I don’t know who you’re looking for,” Van Dyke said. “But she ain’t here.”
“We met her at the café.”
“I don’t care where you met her.”
“She gave us this address,” I added.
That little bit of information seemed to give him pause. But it didn’t last long.
“I don’t know what to tell you.” He looked back toward his room. “But I was deep up in some guts. I’d like to get back up there—”
“She might’ve known my grandson,” Francis said.
“Listen, Pops. Maybe she did. Maybe she didn’t.”
Francis’s hand clenched and I feared we were going to have another bus depot situation. I didn’t expect Francis to get the better of this one. Serpentine, wiry, and underfed to the point of feral, this man looked psychotic. The shaky tattoos meant he’d been in prison. I’d seen that on a TV show once.
I stepped between them. “We’re trying to find out what happened to my friend, okay? We met this girl in town. Her father owns one of the pawn shops.”
“Lenna Ann,” he said, relaxing. “She ain’t here.”
“You have any idea why she’d give us this address?”
“Because she’s a bleeding heart?” The man paused, then nodded. He waited a bit, as if weighing what to say next. “Your friend. His name was Jacob, right?”
“How’d you—?”
The man gestured out the window into the night. “Sold him a car a couple weeks back.”
“A car?”
“Yeah. A fucking car.”
“How much?” I asked.
“A grand. I don’t remember. What do you care? He wanted to buy one. I had one to sell. Your girl, Lenna Ann, brought him by.”
“Why here?” I meant why would Jacob come out to a house like this in the first place? Why would he be in this town, period? If he needed a car, countless dealerships operate in Utica. Instead, he catches a bus to this hell house on the hill.
“Because he needed a car, and I had one to sell.” He said it like I was the dumbest bastard on the planet. Which was hysterical given I’d just completed a bachelor’s and I doubted this tool had his GED.
“You sure it was Jacob?” I asked, feeling stupid once the words come out. He’d already said Jacob’s name.
The guy turned into his room. A shrill female voice shrieked, and we heard him tell her to “shut the fuck up.”
A moment later he returned with a sheet of paper, passing it along. It was a scan of Jacob’s driver’s license and the bill of sale for a 1990 Chevy Camaro.
