Authors: Stephen Schottenfeld
The widow smiles, appreciating Huddy’s opinion and expertise, as if he’d said her husband was a rarer specimen than one of his prized Winchesters, but Huddy knows the son is here to make sure Huddy adds more. He’d tell them this list is a wish list—if only the prices weren’t here. But they aren’t. Next to the prices are dates, and Huddy sucks the inside of his mouth when he sees that the prices aren’t current values but purchase prices, the dates Yewell took them in, some as old as fifty years. Huddy always looking for an opening in the deal—staring at one as wide as a howitzer. And sure, they would see these dates, too, but they wouldn’t know what an old Winchester price meant. Unless they brought in an appraiser, and Huddy’s not that.
Fifty-year-old prices. Before the Civil War centennial, before the antique-gun craze got cracking, back when you could get a musket for forty dollars. Huddy nods to himself. I can tell you something educational, give you the whole history of the Yellow Boy, and we can talk about the pioneer days, but today I will not tell you how Winchesters have appreciated. I don’t understand your life; why should I tell you what is mine? I am not my brother’s keeper, Huddy thinks, especially here in Germantown.
Even on the recent purchases, the prices look good. Yewell paid smart money for good guns, and Huddy liked to joke about Yewell’s bargaining, how he had to insult the piece before he bought it. “The bore is terrible, Huddy, you’re gonna have to cut me another ten percent.” Yewell telling how somebody refinished the wood, how the model was common, how the bluing wasn’t what Huddy graded it. But Huddy knew Yewell bought not just for condition but for romance, too, so he could push right back. “That ain’t rust, Yewell, that’s blood-rust. Sure it’s broken, but things break when they fall off horses on the frontier.” A deal they both enjoyed playing, as if they each rode a trail a thousand miles out west to win. And now Yewell’s bargaining is part of how Huddy can win again.
He turns the next page, sees an 1860 Henry .44 rimfire and his heart just about bursts. Stops his hand from coming to his mouth. His fingers pinch pages. And then below the Henry is a Yellow Boy, as if Huddy weren’t just reading the list but Yewell were reading
him
, taking his thoughts and arranging them on the page, a staring contest in which Yewell could X-ray through him to make Huddy blink. And he does. Then he reads the two rifles again—to make sure they don’t disappear. And they don’t. They’re here, and Huddy can’t believe it. His tongue pushes against his teeth. His head’s down but he’s aware of other eyes in the room studying him now, seeing that he’s hooked into something first-rate but not knowing what. The holy grail of rifles, is what Huddy would say, if he were talking. It makes perfect sense that if you had a Henry, you’d have a Yellow Boy, too—a pair going together just like this mansion and this guest house. The purchase date on the Henry is forty years old, the price two thousand, and Huddy could sell it for forty, easy, the rate of return so large he can’t do the math. The Yellow Boy is even older, bought in ’56 for a thousand, the profit margin higher.
Yewell, you should’ve put an asterisk next to these
. Huddy almost shaking his head, fighting his face, at what Yewell didn’t do. Sure he put a space between the Henry and the Yellow Boy, between the Yellow Boy and the rest of the cowboy guns, but the spaces almost look like typos when they should look like neon lights. Yewell, how the hell’d you get these two? Thought they only went to presidents and kings.
Aw, Huddy, I just picked them up from some collector calling it quits. Some collector older than me, back when I was younger than you.
Huddy’d like to keep talking to unburied Yewell, but now he needs to know if these are the two missing guns, and he feels himself rising from the seat as if his body were helium-filled and he pushes himself down. He turns the page to slip away from his ballooning thoughts, because the deal is oversize—even without them knowing about the Henry and the Yellow Boy they’ll still expect a too-big number, still want a number from their world—and he skims shotguns now, the long row of Model 42s and 12s and 97s, the fine guns popping out and Huddy almost looking for hundred-dollar guns instead of thousands, and then the list switches to pistols, ten then fifteen single-action Colts tumbling down the page.
“Huddy,” he hears her say, “Lee said that you would know what they are worth and you would be able to propose a correct figure.”
Huddy nods at this estimation. “I’ll need to check the conditions,” he says, as if what he’d been looking at were only dull utility guns, worn and bumped around. “Can’t offer a price off of a list. These are fine guns. But I’ll have to see how fine they really are. Condition of a Winchester is extremely important.”
“I went on the Internet and checked some prices,” Kipp says, as if Huddy had just tried undercutting, and Huddy’d like to ask him if he even knew where or how to look, but the Internet sounds good; with Huddy holding the pages, the son needs to show he’s holding information, too. Huddy nods as the son cups his hands. “He also instructed if you couldn’t give a right price, we should auction them off.”
“I don’t want auction,” she announces, her hand waving dismissively. “I don’t want people knowing they all came from this house.” And Huddy’s pleased to hear the irritation in her voice. She looks toward the double doors as if she hears a crowd banging and demanding she open up. “People’ll think we had some arsenal here.”
“It’s not an arsenal, mama. It’s daddy’s guns.” The son shakes his head and frowns at her for showing how much she enjoys having the guns in her home, for signaling what she expects for their removal. He turns to Huddy and Huddy can feel his annoyance transferring over. “You’re prepared to buy them all?” he asks.
“Yes . . .” Huddy says, but his voice trails off. “We can do it as a bulk purchase. Or we can . . .” his voice tiptoeing, “piece it out, in stages, which’ll make you more money in the long run. There’s different ways.” Because Huddy’s plan going in was to take twenty of the best pieces, sell ’em and come back for more. But now the plan is wrong. Even if he’d wanted to cherry-pick the Henry and the Yellow Boy and . . . there’s too many other special guns to pick out a best twenty—he can see they won’t let him, the transaction is too long and messy. And not just
their
mess, either. Huddy knows if he stretches things the collection will scatter to other dealers and relatives and a dozen other ways of moving or going over him. So he’ll buy them all at once. Now. The son is demanding Huddy be big and Huddy wants to be big, too. Why would he tell them that it’s impossible to do what they want to do? Why would he talk about only what his finances make possible? Why lose a chance to see the guns?
“Are you talking consignment?” the son asks, confused, even accusing. Maybe they are both wary of him now, the widow not from what Huddy said but because he’s a pawnbroker, a man who deals with the sad part of life and only makes it sadder. A place where needed belongings must be sold away.
“No, not consignment,” Huddy says firmly. “Consignment is a pain. I don’t wanna keep track of someone else’s guns. Got enough trouble keeping track of my own. Sounds like you wanna do one-money,” and Huddy nods at the son, “and that’s fine. We can do it bulk purchase.” His voice sounds final. He isn’t here to talk about his problems, to tell them he can’t get close to what they expect to hear.
“Huddy, where in the city are you located?” she asks, and Huddy says near Memphis State, which is false but being out here makes it true. “Lamar,” he adds, regretting it, because it sounds like murder. He should’ve said Chickasaw Gardens. Or the Pink Palace.
She nods, as if to forgive him. “When I was a girl, that’s all we wanted to do. To go to the city. Downtown, all by ourselves on the bus. We’d shop in the morning at Goldsmith’s. See a fashion show. Have lunch there. And then we’d go to the Fun Shop. They had those glasses that spilled when you drank from them. And the . . . gum that snaps on your fingers.” She laughs, all the old gags returning. And maybe, Huddy thinks, the fond memories of old prices. Get a Popsicle for a nickel and look how happy you were. “You don’t have to go there anymore,” she says. “Everything is out here.”
All inside this house, Huddy thinks.
“Would you be selling any of Lee’s guns to the coloreds?” she asks, and Huddy looks at her, and the son looks away. “I’m not prejudiced,” she says before Huddy can answer. “It’s just that with the crime and all, I’d hate for one of Lee’s guns to wind up connected to trouble. You read in the paper, there’s already so many guns on the street.”
“These are collector guns, Missus Yewell. They’d be priced above all that.”
“I care about the city,” she says, shaking her head. “It is hard to watch the disintegration of something you cherish. There’s just no respect for life. And that mayor has set us back twenty years. He’s far too confrontational. He has fostered bad relations.”
“He’s crazy,” Huddy says, “that’s for sure.”
“He’s a drug addict,” Kipp says, “is what he is.” And Huddy watches his face turn hard and contemptuous and certain. “We know that for a fact. This city will eat shit as long as he’s running it.”
A hand twitches up to stop her son’s anger, pushes forward against his words. She is uneasy, not by what he has said, but by why he would need to express it here.
Huddy nods—Herenton is an enemy, a poison the city drinks every day—and he watches her straighten in her chair as high as she can go, and the son keeps going, too. He sniffs loud, revulsed, as if inhaling the rank and steaming air. But Huddy can assure him the rankness and excrement are far away, unless they brought back horses. “The city is out of control,” Kipp says, throwing up his hands. “There’s no common sense coming out of it. The blacks here in Germantown, they’re well-educated and you talk to them and they’re devastated to see how their people live. Different fathers and the mother is on and off crack.”
Huddy returns to the list. At the end is miscellaneous, which Yewell has listed as “junk,” a couple dozen guns with missing or broken parts lumped together, although even the junk is pretty good. If the city burnt to the ground, the flames wouldn’t make more than a vague haze in the Germantown sky, a far-off sunset flare. But it would show clear and close on your television—maybe you’d see the fire trucks arriving too late to save Huddy’s house—the sirens and cries like news from another nation. Black-gray smoke and houses shriveling and unroofing, and your frantic hand reaching for the remote.
And suddenly she is gone from him, climbed a tower or maybe just a horse, so that Huddy feels like she’s moving over him with her next address: “You and Lee Junior can arrange a proper transaction. I will trust you both to do what is fair and right.”
And Huddy’s gone, too, ready to find the damn guns.
“You can access the room through the garage,” she says, and then a bright smile spreads across her face. “It’s been such a pleasure meeting you.” The smile stretches and clenches, like she’s just come from a horse show and a wedding and a christening—three gifts all on the same blessed day.
The gun room is
a lost space in the house unfound until you enter the garage and come around the truck and enough into the lane between the truck and a Lexus to see a wooden door centered in the back wall, a door mostly hidden behind wooden ammunition crates glued against it. Kipp swings the door open to reveal a second door—not just a door but an old safe door—and Huddy reads the logo, Second National Bank, and halts while Kipp turns the combination and spins the wheel, and then he follows Kipp again inside the inner room, a windowless slab all wired up, the air smelling of oil and wax and steel, zebra skin over concrete instead of Oriental rugs over hardwood. In his sightlines—guns. Hundreds of guns you’d be tripping over if they weren’t racked up neatly. Standing racks extending the entire left wall, two layers of racks like Huddy’s seeing double, never seen a private collection so big, not even through bad vision or if the guns got cloned, and Huddy so eager to walk down that line. It’s as if walking through that safe door vaulted him ninety miles to Dixie Gun Works—been awhile since Huddy’s driven the road to Union City, so maybe he’s now in Dixie. What he knows is that the countryside he saw beyond the hunt room can’t match what’s walled up here, not the buildings or the open land, not rainbow flower patches or deep woods or stands of centuries-old trees rising hundreds of feet and spreading thick canopies into the air. All of that together could never be as pretty as what’s standing bare along this white wall. Huddy smells the pipe smoke but feels it wasn’t smoking or age that caused a heart attack but the size of this lineup. If I’da had all this, I would’ve died, too. Maybe them black-powder granules got into your lungs. He’d like to go over and inhale the charcoal odor, but he’ll wait for the son’s clearance. Kipp observes the military scenes behind glassed cabinets, so Huddy does, too. He searches the combat photos just like he searched for Yewell atop horses. He sees a battalion at an air base, soldiers loading up trucks and engaged in a firefight, the faces too battle-blurred and distant, but then there he is in another shot at the far left with three other uniformed soldiers to his right, arms draped, the words
four buddies
written at the bottom, signatures and nicknames scrawled across their bodies. Found you, Huddy thinks, and it figures he’d be in this war room and not the horse world Huddy sat in to get to here. And there Yewell is again, smiling, shirtless in a tin bathtub. And then leaning against the big tire of a howitzer, until Huddy realizes it isn’t, just like the grinning helmeted head popping out of a tank isn’t him either. Crouched soldiers with hands plugging their ears as a howitzer booms; soldiers under an archway in an unknown city until he sees the handwriting on the white border that says
seoul
. “Your daddy bring that back from Korea?” Huddy nods at the flag in the next case and the remembered conversation.