Pawned

by Laura Bickle

  “Dad, I...” I squeak.

  Bert leans forward. His tail lashes in agitation. “Look, don’t make the kid do it. You’ve seen enough.”

  “Bert, shut it. You don’t get a vote.” My dad looks at me. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to. I’ll ask Carl to do it later.”

  I swallow. My cousin Carl is at ball practice. This would sure as hell ruin his evening. “Give it to me.” Taking a deep breath, I reach for the gun.

  The instant my palm connects with the engraved butt of the pistol, there’s a flash of light and I’m hurled out my reality and into the world that exists beneath it.

  CHAPTER 2

  I would swear, but I never really have the presence of mind to do that when I do the Bunko. It’s like being clubbed with something heavy, a nauseous pitching forward into light and black. The wind is knocked out of me, and I’m gasping for air, hearing it whistle down the back of my throat while my eyes tear up.

  It’s a gift. Really. That’s what they always tell me, anyway.

  I squinch my eyes shut, but it doesn’t really matter. A fragment of the past still plays out behind them. It’s grainy, hiccupy, and full of golden static, like a bad video stream.

  A man is walking in half-light. I can hear his jagged breath, see the glint of perspiration on his upper lip. He’s dressed in tall boots and a frilly shirt that looks like it belongs to a girl in art school. He faces a stand of trees as he walks, counting while his breath steams in the air.

  “...six...seven...eight...” His steps make sucking sounds in the mud. A slash of red daylight forms at the horizon, dimming the stars that haven’t yet burned out.

  In his right hand, he holds the same pistol I hold in the present day, back in my everyday world. In his, it seems much shinier. It glows like the moon.

  “...nine...ten...”

  He whirls around, and he pulls the trigger. The echo of the shot rolls over the clearing like thunder, disturbing some birds roosting in a tree, who exit in a black cloud. I can’t hear anything else for seconds afterward.

  My field of vision widens, pans out. A body wearing some kind of embroidered coat lies face-down in the mud. The fingers of this body are still moving, scrabbling over an identical gun in the muck. A dark stain blossoms in the mud, as if someone has spilled ink. It’s not ink.

  The shooter clomps over to him. I think at first that he means to pull him out of the mud. But he presses his boot to the back of his victim’s neck, forcing his face into the grime. The loser’s arms twist and writhe, while the victor grits his teeth. He stands hard on the other man’s neck, as if grinding out a cigarette under his boot. Bubbles form in the mud, tinged red with blood. I watch in fascination as they burble. After a few minutes, they stop rising.

  Finally, the prone man stops moving. The victor’s smile is wide and white in the dimness.

  Growling emanates from the forest. Something unearthly, like the sound of metal being sheared. The victor turns, gasping. I can smell fear on him, like sour sweat.

  I don’t want to see any more.

  I SLAM THE GUN DOWN on the glass with as much force as I can muster, nearly cracking the case. Lurching backward, I stare at the gun like it’s a striking snake.

  My dad reaches out to grab my wrist. “Hey, you all right?”

  Nodding furiously, I stare at the gun and struggle to control my breathing. “It’s real. It’s real.” I back away. Cold, clammy sweat streams down the back of my neck.

  The lady chatters at my dad, demanding money. My dad tells her to hold her horses. When his back is turned, I slip away.

  I run down the rat’s nest of hallways at the back of the store, past storerooms and a glowing vending machine. The smell of burned coffee stops me at the door to my grandpop’s office.

  He’s leaned back in his chair—a thin, wiry man, with his hands clasped over his chest. His head is thrown back, and a snore escapes his lips. He’s slept through all the commotion.

  I reach into his office and unplug the sizzling coffee machine, then slip back down the hallway, flicking on all the buzzing fluorescent lights overhead as I run. I stop in the kitchenette, crank open the tap water above the sink. I wash my shaking hands with a bottle of nearly-empty dish soap, scrubbing hard with the hot water, as if I could scrub the last of the vision from my hands and my head.

  I wash until the water runs cold, until my hands are red and chapped, and goosebumps are indelible on my arms. Drying my hands on my pants, I head to the back door. An EXIT sign flickers above it, daylight leaking through the cracks underneath.

  The heavy security door rips open with a clang, and I plunge into the sunshine outside. I lean against the brick wall of the building, hands behind my back. Deep slurps of air rattle down my throat, smelling like smog and garbage from the nearby Dumpster...and cigarette smoke.

  “Hey, Raz.” My uncle kicks gravel along the edge of the building, smoking a Marlboro.

  Uncle Sid is one of those guys who always manages to be effortlessly cool. He’s a big guy, like my cousin Carl, tall and broad, and is dressed in a black T-shirt, jeans, and rattlesnake boots that probably belonged to a real cowboy at some point. He wears a goatee, with his curly hair back in a ponytail, even though bits of gray are beginning to wind their way under the elastic. He puts on sunglasses at night. He’s my dad’s opposite. My dad drives classic cars, and Uncle Sid always revs along on motorcycles.

  “Hey,” I say. Smoke makes my eyes water, so Sid always smokes outside. I never have to ask him to do that. He just does.

  Sid taps some ash into the alleyway. “Your dad was looking for you. I see he probably found you.”

  “Yeah. He did.”

  “He asked you to do the Bunko on those guns.”

  My fingers clench, and I duck my head. “Yeah.”

  In my family, we always call it the Bunko. I think the adults call it the Bunko because they want to minimize it—like a game or a quick way to get an advantage in a trade or swindle. But to me, the fact that it has a name makes it that much bigger. Personifies it, makes it alive...like a monster under the bed.

  My uncle nods. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Yeah.” I stare up into the blue sky. It’s covered in cirrus clouds, like angel wings. “I think he just...he forgets what it’s like.”

  “To be able to do the Bunko?”

  “I think he forgets a lot of what it’s like to be my age. That’s one of those things.”

  My uncle laughs. He scrubs out his cigarette on the side of the building, reaches into his shirt pocket for a pack. He taps out another cigarette, offers one to me.

  I shake my head.

  He takes the cigarette and touches it with a silver lighter cast in the shape of a dragon. When you push on the head, it spits fire. The reason so many of the green plastic army men of my youth melted in spectacularly contorted ways was battles with that lighter. Sid would always retrieve it, lecture me about fire, and I’d find it again a week later.

  “Your dad has always been fifty years old. Even when he was fifteen.”

  “He’s not fifty now!”

  My uncle chuckles. “I know. He’s always been sort of an uptight stick in the mud. And he didn’t handle the Bunko well.”

  I kick a stone, watching it bounce west across the alley to an abandoned warehouse, where it strikes a piece of dangling gutter with a satisfying clang. “I can’t imagine him with the Bunko.”

  All the men in our family have it...well, had it. The Bunko makes it possible to see the history of an object, pieces and vignettes of the past. My grandpop calls it a kind of psychometry. We’re born with it and can use it until we get laid. Then...poof! It goes away, and life gets ordinary real fast. Afterward, we can only see the same supernatural shit that everyone else can—which is to say not much, not often.

  But like so many things in life, getting laid appears to be the solution to the Bunko problem. We joke around about it, a lot. But I’m decidedly not cool with my family being involved in my sex
life. Even if I don’t have one. My dad—and everyone else—would know if I ever got lucky. And they’re invested in it not happening.

  A grimace tugs the corners of my mouth. “I still can’t see him with it.” My first memory as a toddler was Dad lifting me above the counter to touch a pair of clown slippers that were supposed to be haunted by a kid who died in a fire. They made me cry.

  “Well, we all had it, to some degree or other. It was actually really strong with your dad. Gave him nightmares.”

  “You’d think he wouldn’t ask so much, then.”

  “Our dad asked us to do it a lot, too.”

  I think back to harmless, sleeping Pops in the office. Sleeping like a dragon. I shake my head. “Then he should understand.”

  “Let me tell you a bit about your dad.” Sid blows smoke out toward the alleyway, and his gaze becomes unfocused. “His visions were intense. Really intense. He went out and got laid just to make them stop. And then, when it stopped...he was bereft. He said it was like losing a whole hidden world behind the regular one. He said this one was like cardboard. Nothing under it anymore.”

  I won’t ask any questions about my dad having sex. It squicks me out, but I’m fascinated by how it changed him. Fascinated and envious.

  “He fell into a deep depression. I had to talk him off the roof.” Sid points up past the layers of rusting fire escape. “Right there. He was going to jump.”

  “Wow.”

  “Obviously, he didn’t. But he regretted losing that power every day of his life since then. I think he probably blamed your mom for it, on a lotta levels.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Your dad isn’t prone to fair behavior.”

  “Looking back...I guess I wondered why they fought so much, over such stupid things.” About artifacts and shit that didn’t really matter. But it somehow mattered to my dad.

  “You were too young to know. And your dad running your mother off had nothing whatsoever to do with you. It was all him. Him trying to hang onto the magic and hating not having it.” Sid takes a drag on his cigarette. “And when your brother died...he just lost his grip.”

  I’m silent for a long time. Neither of us says the truth—that my dad blames me for my brother’s death. Instead, I say, “I just wish...I wish I could be normal, you know?”

  “You will be,” Sid says, flipping his cigarette to the ground. The spark vanishes under his boot, reminding me of my vision of the boot on the losing dueler’s neck. “You will be soon enough, and all the wishing in the world won’t bring it back.”

  MY RELATIVES THINK they understand, but I still think time really screws with them. Makes them romanticize things they shouldn’t. I don’t think they feel the sharp, painful edge of it anymore.

  They’re so used to being in the safe nest of the pawn shop, only interacting with each other and the new shinies they gather. Crows with bottlecaps. It’s like they’ve forgotten everything about the world outside, about wanting to be a part of it. The shop is their entire world. They spend their whole days on the sales floor and nights sleeping above, in shifts. They don’t get out, see anything. My dad hasn’t seen a movie since Star Wars. They don’t talk to anyone outside of the shop. The place smells like sweat socks and stale testosterone. That shop is their past, present, and future.

  And I don’t want it to be mine.

  Time for a hamburger.

  Betty’s Burgers and Brats is right next door to us, a narrow alley separating our building from theirs. The alley’s maybe ten feet wide, running on the north side of our building and connecting to the alley out back with the Dumpsters. The alley between us is covered with a spider web of rusted fire escapes, where laundry flaps. It’s never ours—it’s always girl stuff. Dresses, socks with fuzzy balls on them, and bed skirts. Cats weave in and out of the shadows. Betty’s is a long, funny-sized building that must’ve been conjoined with ours at one point. You can see the skeletal outlines of corresponding floors and steps in the brick.

  The front brick is all painted white, and it takes some doing to maintain it. Seems like Betty is out there with a paintbrush at least twice a year, trying to keep it clean-looking. There’s a red and green striped awning and a wilted topiary tree next to the door. In red script, ‘Betty’s Burgers and Brats’ is written on a sign hanging above the big window out front. Betty puts a Christmas tree in the window every year.

  I open the door, jangling a fistful of jingle-bells tied to the push bar. The smell of burgers and grease hits me as soon as I walk inside, and my stomach growls.

  Betty’s probably hasn’t changed since the 1950s. It has booths upholstered in red glitter vinyl, black and white tile floors (probably made of asbestos), and a jukebox containing actual vinyl. I walk up to the stainless-steel bar and slink down on a stool. I’ve picked the one with a duct tape patch and try to fight the urge to pick at it. My feet hook around the chrome rungs, and I stare at the straw dispenser.

  “Raz!”

  Giant aproned boobs are in my face, and I’m buried in a hug over the counter. Mrs. Renfelter—Betty—is a plump pillow of a lady with curly dark hair, glasses, and laugh lines that reach to the ceiling. She wears bright red lipstick, which she smears on my cheek. She smells like French fries and Aqua Net.

  “Hi, Mrs. Renfelter,” I say, unable to smother my sheepish grin.

  She’s the mother I never had. Sometimes, I well up with tears when she’s nice to me. I don’t ever let her see, though.

  She cups my face in her hands and smooths my bangs from my forehead. “How’s my favorite guy?”

  I squirm a bit under the attention, but I beam inside. I’m her favorite.

  It’s not that the other guys don’t help her out. The guys from the pawn shop always take out the trash, and Mrs. Renfelter feeds us. She says we’re a pack of wolves, but in the nicest possible way. She’s convinced we’ll starve without her help. Whenever there’s a problem, we come over.

  Last fall, some guy tried to rob Betty’s. My dad and Bert heard glass breaking next door and hauled ass to see what was up. A guy was ripping open the cash register, and Mrs. Renfelter was hiding behind the counter. Bert grabbed a skillet of hot grease and very calmly proceeded to smack the guy over the head with it. Again and again. With gusto.

  I only heard it from next door. My job was to call the cops. When I saw the ambulance take the guy out, he was pulp. Bert came back to the store to wash his hands.

  He was seething, tail lashing on the ground like a metronome. He just kept saying, over and over, “Nobody fucks with Mrs. Renfelter. Nobody, man. Nobody fucks with Mrs. Renfelter...”

  Though Bert kicks serious ass, I know why I’m her favorite. I come over here a lot. I help carry the boxes of tomatoes in from the delivery truck, wipe down the tables, and scrub the pots. I like being next door. It’s normal. People actually give a shit if there are dishes in the sink.

  Mrs. Renfelter asks me, “Are you hungry?”

  Before I can answer, my stomach growls.

  Her smile brightens. “Boys are bottomless pits!” She leans back to yell into the kitchen, “Lily! Raz is here!” The door jingles behind us, and Mrs. Renfelter grabs a menu pad to take a new order.

  I bask in the smell of the diner, the feeling of sunshine, the sound of grease bubbling and the cooler whirring. My eyes drift closed.

  “Hey, Raz.”

  My eyes open to see the most important reason I like being at the Renfelters’.

  Lily.

  Lily walks from the back kitchen, the soles of her combat boots squeaking on the tile. She smells like hamburger grease with magnolias underneath. The magnolias never seem to eclipse the hamburger, no matter how much she tries to mask it. She’s a slender ghost dressed in black jeans and a T-shirt. The spattered white apron seems entirely out of place on her, as out of place as the crinkling plastic gloves over her armload of rubber bracelets and blue nail polish. Caught up in a hairnet, her dark brown hair is streaked with maroon. She looks at me with eyes
the color of chocolate against her pale face. Her mouth quirks upward—lips the color of the filling in her mom’s cherry pie.

  She leans her elbows against the counter. “Hi, Raz.”

  My feet wind tighter in the rungs of the stool. “Hi, Lily.”

  “I’m glad you stopped by.” When she’s this close, the smell of magnolia is clearer. I’ve never smelled a real magnolia before, but that’s what she told me that it smells like when I asked.

  “You guys been busy?”

  She shrugs. “Mom tells me it’s been pretty steady today. Not so bad right now.”

  Lily works in the shop after school, like I work for my dad. She has two sisters, one older, one younger, and they live and chatter like magpies upstairs. Lily and I are the closest in age, in the same grade in school. We’ve grown up together, kicking cans in the alley, exploring my dad’s storeroom, and feeding the stray cats leftover hamburger. We pick pieces of green slag out of the gravel in the alleyway and save it in coffee cans because she thinks it’s pretty.

  She knows me better than most, but she doesn’t know my secret. And things have gotten a little weird between us in the last couple of years. I don’t know if it’s because she grew up to be a girl, and has thus become absolutely terrifying, or whether it’s something else.

  Lily frowns at me, pressing her chin into her crinkly gloved hands. “Hey, what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.” And there really isn’t anything out of the ordinary happening. That’s what makes me crabby.

  She punches my elbow playfully. “I know what’ll make you feel better. Milkshake and burger? With fries?”

  I grin. “That would be awesome. But only if you aren’t busy.”

  She shakes her head. “Coming right up.” She bounces on her heels and disappears into the back.

  I sit by myself at the counter for a moment. Part of me wants to be alone, to stare at the delaminating edge of the menu and fade away into anonymity. But I’m afraid I’d start thinking too much. Thinking about the pistols, the store, my dad.