Authors: Stephen Schottenfeld
“You know, I’m still thinking of that tree I fell down with.”
“Why?” Huddy says, and he shakes his head, but it’s a memory of Joe and Huddy planning and playing together, and he smiles. “That was Joe’s idea. He done the chopping. Said so yourself.” The tree on the ground and Harlan, too, beside the stump.
“Yeah, but you were the one that got me to climb. Watched you go up first, and nothing happened so I figured nothing happen to me. Didn’t know you two were scheming.”
Huddy sees Harlan up in the tree, his climbing feet, his arms pulling up on the next limb, and Joe waiting for his footing to get high enough before grabbing the hidden ax to cut him down.
Harlan turns off the TV, which turns him serious, his eyes not moving. He collapses the footrest, leans forward on the edge of the chair. And Huddy waits to hear him say, Me, too. Let
me
be necessary. He feels stingy for thinking this, for neglecting Harlan if he asks about income, but it’s not Huddy’s fault for keeping his own life to himself, for judging Harlan an intruder. “Truth is, Huddy. Me and KayKay, I told her I was working for you tomorrow early, and I wasn’t ’bout to mess with that. Heck, I even cleaned your kitchen. I’m being straight here.” He blinks and looks around the room. “I wish you had a lie-detector machine. One of those ever come into your shop?”
Huddy grins. Sure, Harlan. A lie-detector machine, a pair of mink goggles. Flyswatter made of . . . Huddy can’t complete the thought. Snakeskin. Snakeskin flyswatter. He waves his hand at items he’s making up.
“I wish I could talk to you with one of those strapped to my skin, so you’d know how much you could trust me.”
“I trust you, Harlan.”
“I’d trust myself more, if I was wearing one all the time. Name: Harlan Marr. Place of residence: my brother’s house.” And he smiles but then the smile gets swamped, and Huddy watches what empties and fills in, Harlan’s pain and contempt for how his life made him answer where he was. His body anchored in the chair; he shakes his shoulders free. “Name of brother: Huddy. Other one is Hank.” And Harlan laughs a little as the machine catches him, his finger rising and falling to signal his first lie.
Huddy steps quietly to the crib, his eyes seeing nothing. But then they adjust to darkness, and when he reaches the railing his son is visible, asleep on his side, lying in pajamas without a sheet or blanket covering. A squeak comes out of his nose. Huddy watches him breathe through his tiny new teeth, his gentle chest lifting and falling and lifting, the cartoon pajamas snug to his belly, and beneath his body more cartoons on the sheet. His son lightly snores and Huddy hears himself hum along with the noise.
Christie stirs awake in another dark room Huddy enters. She rubs her eye, squints for the night hour on the clock. Her face bunches at his lateness. The TV is on—the beam flickers and flashes—but without sound.
“Was just watching Cody sleep,” Huddy says.
“He’s getting good at it.” She props up in bed. “Where you been?” she says groggily.
“Germantown.”
“Joe’s?”
“And elsewhere. A house I always thought I needed a passport to walk through.”
“And that’s why you’re smiling so much?”
“Well, I’m having a good day.”
“But you’re not gonna tell me about it.”
Huddy zips his mouth and then talks. “If I tell you why I’m happy, you’d just say, ‘You’re gonna spend what?’” And Huddy can’t help it, he’s already messing up, saying too much, but after a day like this, and the hopeful ones to come, he’d like a small applause. He’ll shake a finger at himself in the morning. “Let’s just say, I found a bird’s nest on the ground.”
“A bird’s nest on the ground. Maybe you can tell me something that’s not in code.”
“Chirp chirp.” He pulls off his shoes, feels like juggling them but instead flings them at the closet. He’s gonna wear an all-night smile, a loud one, because making Joe agree to stay silent made Huddy want to talk. “Some news, but I can’t say what.”
“Thanks. You’re really painting a picture.”
He laughs. His mind fools with him, imagines his pillows stuffed with cash. “What time Harlan get here today?”
She shrugs. “Dinner. Sitting in that chair since then.”
And Huddy thinks of Harlan pleased after his La-Z-Boy line hit the mark. But then he remembers the device cuffed to his arm, his answers graphing up and down in measurements of true and false and true enough. “He cleaned the kitchen,” Huddy says.
“Yeah,” Christie shrugs, “sort of.”
“How you mean?”
“I don’t know, Huddy, I guess he did.”
“He says he did, is all.”
“Well, okay. I don’t keep track of his chores. Stacked the plates in the sink. Stopped there. Whatever, I ain’t grading. He had us laughing. You know how he is.”
Sure, like telling how granddad finished himself. Funny, morbid stuff. Huddy drops onto the bed, stares at the ceiling.
“He asked if you owned a motorcycle,” she says.
“Why?” he says, rolling to face her.
“He says he couldn’t understand all these people who own houses but no motorcycles. Thought people had their needs all backwards.” Her eyes pinch. “You know, it ain’t much fun if you aren’t gonna share the good days. ’Cause you never tell the bad.”
“You wanna hear the bad?” Huddy stares at the TV. He can hear the low voice from the other set, like some sound being thrown. “Why’s the sound off?”
“I fell asleep to it that way.”
He looks at the sheets and blanket bunched at the foot of the bed, like she’d got up to leave but fell asleep suddenly while rising. The pillows aren’t flat on the mattress but tilted up against the wall. He stares at her angled shoulders, at her neck almost upright. “You sleeping funny tonight.”
“It was Harlan—what he said.”
“The motorcycle?”
“About how we met. He was asking.”
Huddy shakes his head, Harlan pulling at the strand of a personal story, pulls and pulls until it loosens and out it comes. Harlan in his shop, and now in his own rooms. Huddy glances back at the TV, expecting to see a picture of Harlan inside, but it’s just a car chase, cars moving and going, engines gunned. The first car makes the tight turn, but the second one charges the corner overfast and skids, fishtails. “You tell him?”
“Sort of knew already. But you skipped the rest. Part before.”
“None of his business.”
“Maybe you just didn’t want to tell him what I been.”
“It was before I knew you. That was something you’d settled out of. Said so yourself, your wild teenage years.”
“Before you knew me—but it was still me.” She looks at him, long, her eyes lowered but her face staying turned, as if she wanted Huddy to not only see her now but also then, to recognize behind this face to what she looked like and took prior.
“You know what I mean. Just some bad bit.” Huddy remembering her first appearance, twenty-four, coming in to look for a ring she’d pawned to Mister Jenks six years earlier. She figured it was gone, but she had to see, because the ring was special: an elephant ring, with ruby eyes and a diamond headdress. Huddy checked but there was no paper trail. Maybe Jenks had held it for a bit, or shopped it to some specialty buyer who liked oddball things, but more likely he just chopped it up, plucked the bigger stones, if there were any—Huddy suspected they were just tiny diamonds clustered together to give the illusion of more diamond—and sent the gold to the melt. Huddy said sorry, wished it was here, but she didn’t go. She turned over her shoulder to the display cases and squinted, as if the elephant ring were there but she couldn’t quite pick it out. And then she told him the reason the ring got here—although Huddy mostly knew, can’t imagine this ring as a teenage gift, so he’d assumed it was one swiping account or another. He realized he was hearing some twisted-up nostalgia, not some sunny tale about what she used to have or be but instead an upsetting, darker story, told by this changed person who beforehand had acted worse and crooked and stolen a ring from her grandma. She’d straightened herself out, had her own housecleaning business, but she was still feeling bad about her past trouble. Huddy had never had this return situation, someone looking for a ring, much less an elephant ring, and hoping to amend a wrong. He felt like they shared a disbelief: He couldn’t believe she’d tried retrieving a long-lost ring and she couldn’t believe she’d ever needed being here before. She wore no wedding ring, and when she mentioned later, over the phone, that she lived nearby, he was surprised, since her life had traveled to a different part, that she wasn’t from farther.
“I pawned it,” she says, “because I thought I’d be able to get it back. But I couldn’t.”
“Probably better that way.”
“That I couldn’t?”
“Better that you pawned it, instead of wanting to sell. Look, we don’t have to talk about this.”
“Because it made me less suspicious?”
Huddy nods, but he doesn’t want to. “He might’ve been thinking, why would you be selling this sentimental thing? A ring like that’s gotta be sentimental. Can’t be much else.”
She nods and stops facing him. “Maybe I knew that at the time.” He watches her stare at her ring finger. Her head tosses back, a hurt swarms and reddens her face, a fresh bruise. “Would you have been suspicious?” She looks again at her finger, nudges it with her thumb, puzzled, like she’s seeing the wrong ring, the incriminating one, and she can’t force it off.
“Of a young girl, selling a ring like that?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Of me.” She itches again at her knuckle.
He can answer directly, but he doesn’t. “Depends on the story that goes with it. Somebody comes in with an out-there story—”
“Whatever . . .” He watches her back straighten, as if she were trying to sit up tall over the memory.
He looks back at the TV, three people walking with no footsteps. Each person seems like they’re talking to themselves, each word caught in a defective throat. “So what did Harlan think of the story?”
“He thought it was sad.”
“’Cause you lost your family ring?”
She nods, and Huddy looks away. It’s nice watching a muted show, every conversation avoided, every person unnamed. The miniature characters talk and threaten, but it’s all some wordless calm. “He said it was a happy story, too. ’Cause it brought me to his good brother. But then
he
got sad.”
Huddy doesn’t want to listen to Harlan reacting three ways before Huddy’s even felt the one. He returns to the TV, where there’s no racket. On the other TV, though, Huddy detects channels flipping.
“’Cause he says you never believe any of
his
stories. He said if he walked into your shop with some old story about what he’d done, you’d be doubting.”
“That don’t make sense. You were
confessing
. Why wouldn’t I believe a confession?” Huddy shakes his head. Some memory that was his and Christie’s, their first day together, but Harlan’s got not just involved but in front of it, and now Huddy can’t see the meeting because Harlan’s blocked it, casting his shadow. On the TV, no noise, as if people are talking in high notes only audible to Harlan’s characters on his TV, who understand and answer back in muffled voices that get stuck in Huddy’s shut door. His house feels like a large television, the divided rooms a single split-screen broadcast.
“He said you probably didn’t believe my story at first, ’cause you don’t believe nothing people say when they walk through your door. I told him I’d trust nothing neither, if I was you.” She smiles, but her face stays afflicted. “But I hadn’t really thought about that, what you must’ve thought of me that moment. Or what that man must’ve. I must’ve put the ring on, right before I walked in. Then took it off?” And she looks at Huddy, but he doesn’t know this prehistory. Harlan’s bent the memory back to some new beginning that Huddy can only guess at and Christie vaguely half-remembers. “Wait, that’s not true. I put it on, but I knew it wasn’t mine—it was her ring, and it fit fine, but it felt more like stealing than when it was in my pocket, so I slid it off and kept it there. I thought if I wore it, it would look less believable. But he didn’t ask questions. Either he believed, or he didn’t care not to. Story checks out, if you don’t hear it? But I don’t know why I went looking for the ring again. I knew it wasn’t there. Six years, come on, that’s dumb.”
“You shouldn’t’ve told this all to Harlan. He’s always wanting to hear the bad part. Part you don’t want to talk about, is the part he likes to hear extra.”
“He didn’t ask all this. It was after I told him, went to bed, why I switched the sound off.”
The TV characters keep talking into the next room, or maybe they’re fake-talking, mimes with mouths opening and closing, silent to spy and listen in on secrets.
“You remember when you wrote your info down?” Huddy says, and he tries to make eye contact. “On my business card. On the back. Your name and number was on one side, me and mine on the other.” He’s hoping to pull her to a better part, not the shameful part. “I kept that card for a long while.” But it doesn’t work. Her face stays in profile. The card won’t remind or substitute, like an invitation she can’t yet accept.
“She didn’t have enough jewelry, that if you took it, it wouldn’t count. I knew that, but I took it still. And I knew she’d be missing that ring more, but that didn’t stop me neither. When I took it, she was in the house, the next room. She never went nowhere. Maybe that’s why she liked the ring. Thought she was in Africa, or just the zoo. Somewhere else. But I took that away from her. When I took that ring, it felt like I took everything.” Her eyes widen, bits of the memory reconnecting, her past relived. “And when they found out the ring was gone, they knew it was me. They knew it wasn’t my sister. Or my brothers. No—they went to one of them. Billy. He was real mad at me, that they were also suspecting him. Took a long time to get forgiveness on that.” She traces her thumb in a line down her finger. Then she rubs her fingertips against her palm, her hand now a fist. “Can’t say how long it was before they knew it was gone, but it was fast—fast enough that I knew it was still in your store. Not your store, but, you know. But I wouldn’t tell them where it was.” The scene cuts out and the TV darkens, Huddy’s vision emptying and then filling back with bright commercial colors. “Guess that elephant ring never walked back into your shop.”