Authors: Stephen Schottenfeld
Not married, but still hitched, Huddy thinks. And what he sees on the video, when he comes in next morning and sees the two cases from his secure back room gone, is a brother. Not Harlan, although Huddy thought it might be. Harlan with his hands on every other piece, had to pinch his fingers against the cased two. Two Harlans, both inside the store at different times, one here now, one last night. But instead of Harlan, it’s the other—inside the tape, inside the store, Joe’s store, but he ain’t a picklock because he has the keys, and he ain’t a burglar because he owns the building, and he ain’t even a thief when he’s stealing from a deal where the first money was his. Huddy watches Joe stab his key into the gun locker, like some after-hours workout, watches him walk inside and disappear and reemerge with the cases. It feels like watching a body scan, Huddy’s own X-ray, the key cutting through layers of his skin, the guns two bones Joe was carrying out. Harlan hears Huddy cursing and asks, “What?”
“Come here, Harlan,” Huddy says. “I wanna show you what a bank run looks like.” Let’s bring my bad brother over here to show him what the good brother’s done. Let’s make it so all three brothers are here.
Not Joe at the
door and Huddy’d like to push past her to get to him, the same way Joe cut straight through his shop, but instead he says, “Evening.” When he rang the bell, he wanted to ring it over and over, the noise repeating, until a body appeared in the doorway with their hands held to their ears. “Need Joe,” Huddy says, and Lorie stares at Harlan beside him, Harlan not an onlooker stuck in back now but up front in the door light with his brother, the two of them lined up tight together.
Huddy watches her mouth move to tell them he isn’t here, but she’s not used to this lie. “Okay,” she says, and her mind searches for a problem at home. Then she smiles, a smile Huddy takes as, You brothers keep pestering at night with your games, but it’s time to stop. “He’s busy with the garden.”
Huddy shrugs. Guess there won’t be a tray with drinks. “Won’t take long,” he says simply. “Need to ask something.” Just,
Where are they?
“That right?” she says, but it’s not a question, and Huddy sees her head shake a little because he should know he’s an intruder and doesn’t belong here.
“Yep,” Harlan says, “something he done to Huddy.”
Which is okay, Huddy knew he was bringing Harlan’s mouth, didn’t bring him for quiet, and he figures he’ll match his voice. “Need to ask about some guns,” Huddy says, and talking too much feels better.
“Guns?” she says, her voice scraped with fear. Her eyes shift to Harlan. She touches her neck. Her cheeks flush like makeup smudging, her mouth opens in a puncture.
“His and mine,” Huddy says, pointing inside the house and then turning the finger around on himself. “Not us,” and he flicks his finger between Harlan and him. “Me and Joe’s guns. Our guns.”
He didn’t ring the doorbell repeatedly, but now he’s got a better alarm, a word that for her is both warning and warfare. He watches her eyes blink.
“I’m just here to help patch things up,” Harlan says, grinning.
A gun: not just harmful but criminal, a shot and the blood spray and a splayed body dead on the floor. Their hands are empty, but she worries what arms they’re concealing beneath. Nowhere for her to look off or see past, the two of them filling the doorway, Huddy feels like bringing Harlan is like bringing a crowd, not just a second man but others added onto him, midnight prowlers circling the house, hugging the corners and dark walls—that’s what her scared face tells him, no word or sound coming out of it.
“You want us to wait here?” and then the memory of Joe, his keys in hand to let himself in, and forget about permission and the proper time to enter when Joe’s already barged through. Huddy had only seen the video once but Harlan watched all morning, rewinding it in a loop and doing play-by-play, “Here he is at the counter and where’d he go and now he’s back with presents. Now
that’s
the way to shop.” The camera catching Joe’s wrist and the Rolex he took years ago, as if he’d worn it last night to justify his claim—and so Huddy, when he saw Joe’s stride without a pause or second thought, would understand Joe was acting ordinary, doing what he’d always done with valuable possessions and therefore regular and right, the guns just another giveaway. Huddy leans close, puts his hand on the door and says, “Let’s all go. Me, you, and Harlan.” The way he buried Harlan at Yewell’s, kept his name down, too, but resurrecting him now. He claps Harlan’s shoulder. She hesitates, eyeing them like thieves or thugs who whisper their crooked plans at her door, when it’s what’s behind her that helped himself and stole. Her suspicion and fear pleases and angers Huddy, but Joe isn’t worried, or else he wouldn’t be back there letting her play doorman. Huddy didn’t call him today, because he wanted to read his expression—plus Huddy needed time to change the locks and the code.
She retreats and he steps forward to find. Inside the house, his eyes searching the belongings and the rooms, but he won’t detect and recover what’s half his. No changed arrangement, the same clean order not affording any clues—he’d ransack and dismantle the furnishings, overturn cushions, tear out linings, but Huddy knows Joe stored the cases better—so he’s just walking in to go out again, sliding the glass door to set out for Joe. Can’t win hide-and-seek with the guns, but he’ll win against Joe. Huddy sights him in the middle distance beyond the pool, but not far off and unseen like before in a back corner. Still obscured by interlocking branches, but they’re only part of what’s screening him. Joe looks crouched, lower, as if he’d taken cover in the bushes, or sunk in a bunker or burrow, and then Huddy remembers the pond and realizes he’s inside the water. They march toward him, past the pool and its green glow, and Huddy grinds his teeth because he doesn’t have a jackhammer to break up the ground. Filing through the garden path, his prior footsteps retraced, and what was special at first visit is familiar on return. This big spread smaller for seeing the vastness at Yewell’s, even if the land between Joe and Huddy was still large and his envy was the same or grown. The blooming flowers, once bright and bunched straight, now paler and wilting. Petals of dying colors, limbs half-bare and some leafless, but the trees aren’t cleared—Huddy swats at a branch that nearly brushes his face, snaps a stick under his foot, which stops her, and she turns back and he sweeps his hand at the ground as if he were confused by the breaking noise, and she turns forward and quickens her step, to keep ahead and away and escape to Joe, her shoulders stiffening so her body looks frail, and Huddy’s happy to tail faster. He hears Harlan kick gravel behind him. Sees boulders that he’d like to roll free in a rockslide. Hears his own feet crush along the footpath. Crossing the bridge, the thin stream flowing underneath, the path curving and Huddy wishes he had a blade to hack through the brush and make his own short way instead of following the snakelines Joe ordered and angled.
“Joe!” Lorie calls out, her voice tensed with fear but also opening into anger, a better method to hail Joe’s attention, not to cry his name but curse it. Huddy advances to the water’s edge to stand over Joe, in waders, knee-high in the water, the rest of him sticking up like a stalk, but after seeing the three approach, he won’t quit working, too many things to do. Three five-gallon buckets of pea gravel, spaced three feet apart and running the length of the pond, PVC pipe driven down into the buckets, and Huddy not seeing a white flag flying from any pole. He stares downward at Joe, as he tests the buckets to make sure they’re set stable. Behind him, the waterfall gushes on the stones.
“If you hiding,” Harlan says, “you gotta go all the way under. You only half in.”
But Joe ignores him. Harlan’s been away three years and he’ll disappear again, so Joe won’t acknowledge him just to say farewell. Couple of years from now, he might sit back and remember what his brother was. As for Huddy, Joe’s got no interest in explaining his day-old intent.
So Harlan tries again, because he’s here, even if Joe pretends he’s no one. “If it ain’t Joe, then one of them fish swole up,” he says. “Or maybe it’s a turtle. It looks like a turtle but it’s dressed like a duck.”
Still a blind eye to Harlan, but he raises them to Huddy. Or maybe he’s saying he can see Harlan through Huddy, as if one fell into the other, their lives mixed up and run together.
He’s you and you him
, is what Joe’s stare says, and Huddy thinks, He ain’t me, I ain’t two—and you ought stand there upside down. Not a turtle, not a duck, but maybe Joe’s a bat that just needs a branch to dangle from. Huddy scans the bricks and the netting and the pipes and the hand truck holding the gravel bags. “I don’t see a hook to pull you out.”
“Joe,” Harlan says, “why don’t you come up to street level so we can talk?”
Come up from the pit, Huddy thinks, or I’m climbing down. Either way, you gonna listen.
But Joe stays busy. He wades forward to the edge and grabs the joist, two pieces joined in the middle with a T, with elbows at the outer ends. He carries it into the water, holding the long pole out like a tightrope walker, and positions the T-joint over the center post and taps it down with a rubber mallet. Then he steps lightly on the algae to do the same with the elbows, Huddy watching Joe assemble the beam like he’s moonlighting in some underwater smith shop.
“I bet them rocks slicker than owl shit,” Harlan says.
“Everything alright?” Lorie asks, her voice careful, her eyes quick and alert, and Joe laughs at her concern and at what’s confronting him. Two against one, and the one defenseless in the water, but Joe’s sure of his advantage, bringing Harlan is a tactic that hobbles Huddy, and strengthens Joe. Down in his hole like a ditcher, but his position always topmost.
“They taking up my time, so they must be here to help me.” He glares at Huddy.
“Help you what?” Harlan says. “You been doing your work solo. ’Sides, what you on now, you a clamdigger?”
Lorie’s puzzled face, every line of Harlan’s a trick question, but when Huddy glances at Joe, he sees only certainty. Nothing wrong or off-limits with what happened or went missing, except Huddy screwed up by not opening the shop and holding the door for his spree.
“Leaves falling early this year,” Joe says. “Gotta build my roof.”
“They talking about guns,” Lorie says. “What y’all involved in?”
“Collectibles,” Joe says. “Huddy thinks they belong in a museum.” He looks off, here and there, settles on some midpoint between the brothers. “And I think they belong elsewhere.”
“What all’s going on?” Lorie says, hands on her hips. “What is this business? And y’all need to finish it.”
“Sure,” Harlan says. “Where you want these bricks?”
“Do I need to call the police?” she says, and Huddy watches the word speed her nerves. “I’m calling. This is harassment.”
“You don’t call anyone,” Joe says, and he gets out, the shallow water sloshing and breaking apart, dripping down upon the stones. Slips his gloves off his hands. “I’m gonna talk with Huddy about these souvenirs, and then we gonna roll out this net. That’s it.” The gloves slap on the ground. “They ain’t here but to cover up my pond.”
“We looking for a couple boxes,” Harlan says.
“You settle this,” she says.
“You ain’t seen any new boxes, have you?” Harlan says again. “Hate to ask twice, but Huddy’s business is
unsettled
until he finds them.” Joe’s eyes lock on Harlan. “Maybe you buried ’em,” and Huddy looks at the tools and can’t find a shovel.
“He your mouthpiece?” Joe says to Huddy. “He opens his mouth, you both sound stupid.” Turns to Lorie. “We’re good here,” he says, and his chin raises to wave her off. She doesn’t move, and he nods. “Go on back.” She stays on Joe, then looks at Huddy, then almost to Harlan, and they wait for her to do what Joe tells, to leave them alone for the next part. Harlan smiles at her going away. “Don’t you pick up the phone,” Joe yells, which Huddy hears as the start of the next divorce, and they pause till she’s halfway to inside, Huddy’s eyes following, then narrowed at Joe. “I’m late putting up this net, and the leaves mess up the water’s acidity. I put some salt in, to help the fish survive. Salt’s good for the fish, but it can kill the plants. What helps one don’t always help the other.”
“Where are they?” Huddy says.
“You best not’ve come over here with him, thinking you getting something back.”
“That’s right,” Harlan says. “Time to surrender what ain’t yours.”
“Yours?” Joe says, flicking out a wet arm. “You got nothing yours.” He turns from Harlan, trades stares with Huddy. “Locked up.”
“Already
were
locked up.” And now they’re gone. Behind some wall, or inside one. All the closed-off places that Joe owns and constructed. Houses and rooms and offices—locations high up and underground. “Two-way deal, remember.”
“Two-way—sure. But I went first so you could go second. So more like one-two.”
“Did you sell them? You best not sold ’em,” Huddy says.
“That’s the thing. I could’ve, right? Did some research. Turns out I don’t need you to sell ’em. Don’t need a license. Not if they’re older than—what’s the year?”
1898, but Huddy’s not giving dates.
“You didn’t tell me that, Huddy. All these fine points you made about how old and special they were. What’d you call ’em? Famous? Historical? This gun tied to so-and-so? But you should’ve just said they were antiques.”