The thing to remember about a funeral is that it’s not about you. At least you hope it’s not.
My dad, Charlie Waters Sr., five feet six, weighed 310 pounds when he died. Thank goodness for the cancer boiling him down at the end there. Can you imagine what it would have cost to buy a suit, size Godzilla short, that was only ever going to be worn once anyway? It would have been the suit or the coffin, but there was no budget for both.
Dad would have understood that. He didn’t understand the small but significant things, like Butter by itself is not a snack. But he understood big stuff, such as It’s not about you. Possibly more than anyone ever, Charlie Waters Sr. understood it’s not about you.
Which is why, in an odd way, he wound up in the pawnbroker business. He understood it was about everybody else. Which was why he was an uncommonly unsuccessful and well-loved pawnbroker.
Which is why I, Charlie Waters Jr., age nineteen, am now in the pawnbroker business.
And I have a burden: My dad was a nice guy in a very unnice business. Senior’s business is now Junior’s business.
Dad insisted—insisted—on appearing at his own wake with a big smile across his face. Whatever the process is in the funeral business for freezing a toothy smile on a guy—probably involving toothpicks, since the undertaker was a local—they must have undertaken it, because Dad lit up the proceedings with this electro grin like the expression on a very fat skeleton head. Some people found the effect unsettling.
I just kept thinking, What are you smiling at? Even when I caught the urge to smile along with him.
The funeral saw nearly everybody in the town in attendance, because Charlie Waters Sr. was basically the guv’nor of the place. When the guv’nor of a place is the broker of pawns, that place is an unfortunate place. Lundy Lee is that place. It sits at the tip of a peninsula that sticks out like a finger pointing to all the places across the sea that you would really rather go. The closest thing to the tip of that finger is the Big Island, which is really not big by any standards other than those of Lundy Lee.
There is a ferry port in the town, and that is the main thing. The way a big nice clock would bong in a nice town, the ferry bops a couple times a day between the Lee and the Big Island, and then on to someplace else that nobody is quite sure about because nobody has ever gone away on it and bothered to come back and tell the rest of us.
Mrs. Waters, wife of Charlie, mother of Charlie, was one of those. Took that cruise to nowhere but somehow forgot that nowhere was a round trip. She’ll remember eventually, though. That’s one of the few things Dad and I seriously disagreed on. I figure people always come back. Until they don’t. My mother hasn’t not come back yet.
So Dad’s funeral was filled with the people of the town, as well as most of the people who had disembarked from the eleven-fifteen ferry, because that’s how it is when you disembark from a ferry. You follow along with everybody else, obeying the flow of traffic and peer pressure, and since the funeral was the absolute only activity in Lundy Lee that day, what with the ferry being already in and the pawn shop being closed, that meant everybody came to a stop at the funeral of the guv’nor.
One hundred and fifteen mourners at the very least. Biggest gathering in the town in years, and all the locals had it marked on their calendars for days—the more observant ones for months if they’d noticed his sickly decline. Even the boat people almost all knew who Charlie was, because Big Islanders not only passed through Lundy Lee a lot, they often made special trips over, to see the sights—there is a cannon on a hill aimed at the Big Island for some reason—and to ask generous, soft-inside-soft-outside Charlie Waters Sr. if he could maybe give them a few too many bucks for the bicycle, flugelhorn, or framed authentic photograph of General Ulysses S. Grant that came straight out of Life magazine, but that nobody wanted out on the island.
Every crew member on the boat knew my father. He cashed dubious checks, advanced payday pay well before payday, taking a stained sailor’s hat for collateral. The kitchen guy came in with a foot-long whitefish and cabbage sandwich, asking for a week’s advance, and Dad didn’t say no.
He never said no to a sandwich. Not even whitefish and cabbage. Jesus, did he stink sometimes, and Jesus, did I love him. The other thing he could never say no to was people. He considered his job to be public service, a calling, and that is what he handed down to his son.
I knew the day was coming. I didn’t know for a whole long time, since Dad never went to the doctor and therefore didn’t realize he had tumors until he was about equal parts tumor and Charlie, but I did have some time to prepare myself. Not time enough to get a proper running start away from the responsibility and the new, real life I was bequeathed, but time enough to see it coming my way.
I never wanted this. He wanted me to want it, even though he knew I didn’t want it.
Now, standing in front of the mesh cage that protects the plate-glass window that carries the logo, BREAD&WATERS LOANS, in arching burnt-orange letters, as if the sun were always rising on this particular window, Charlie Waters Jr. isn’t a happy-happy guy.
I’m not alone, either. The shop has been closed for a week for all the mourning, and so there is to be expected a slight backlog of business this day. My first day.
“Where’d the fat man go?” asks the voice behind me. I can just see the reflection of a face in the window, as if I’ve sprouted a second, swollen, white head from my shoulder.
“He’s gone where all the fat men go,” I say, shrugging. The extra head doesn’t move.
“McDonald’s.”
“No, the other place.”
“Dead?”
“’Fraid so.”
“Who you, then?”
“Fat man Junior.”
“You ain’t even fat. You got my concertina?”
“I don’t know for certain, sir, but I’m guessing I probably do have your concertina.”
This is a salty sea dog, following me into the shop for the start of the first day of my new life with my own business and without my own father. Right off the boat, this salty sea dog. Or more likely, judging from his essence, off the boat sometime yesterday, wandering around the bars and benches for twenty-four hours waiting to be reunited with his concertina.
“I got my ticket,” says Salty.
I wade in unfamiliar, like I haven’t been here hundreds of times before. Because it is all different now, a new place, different slants and slashes and angles everywhere.
Salty slaps the ticket down on the counter as I take up my place behind it. “This is a ferry ticket,” I say. “You need the pawn ticket.”
Salty points at me and winks.
Is it like a game show? Is this what my dad’s days were made up of? Is that what the big fat smile was about, because it was all one great goof all the time?
“Right,” he says, and slaps down a new ticket.
“That’s a receipt for fish and chips. Okay, right, just point out your thing. Where is it?”
The old man doesn’t even need to look. He points at it about six feet up the wall, in the corner behind me, hanging there in a jumble of other old-timey noisemakers. There’s a ukulele, bagpipes that look like a giant mounted spider, a shiny black clarinet.
I follow the pointing finger back there, step up on a little two-step, and bring my quarry down.
“What do you owe on it?”
Salty shrugs. “Dunno. Few bucks? A fiver?”
I am struggling. I’m struggling with my first-ever transaction of my new life. “Come on, guy,” I say to the guy, “this can’t be the way it works. I don’t even want to take your money, but this thing”—I gesture with a broad sweep of my arm at all the stuff—“has to function somehow, and since you are clearly more experienced with it than I am, why don’t you tell me what’s supposed to happen here?”
“It’ll be in the Testament,” Salty says. He’s pointing again, and I get it, that this place is more like the customer’s than the proprietor’s. There is a bank of drawers built right into the wall behind my station at the desk, and Salty is pointing down, at the bottom drawer.
I pull open the drawer, which fights me, and pull out a thick black leatherish three-ring binder. I throw it open to the middle and see lines after lines after lines of people’s names and their accounts, their records, their phone numbers, their status, their stuff. Charlie Waters Sr. did not have normal-bad writing. He did not even have doctor-bad writing. He had head-injury-bad writing, but I could always read it, always took pride in that fact, and I’m enjoying it now more than ever, like it’s some secret code the two of us are sharing across time and death and everything.
“Right,” I say, “what’s your name?”
“Seven.”
I sigh. How could I be this fatigued, this early, on the first day of the welcome-to-the-world part of my life?
“That’s a number, sir,” I say.
“Right-o so. Let’s try Admiral Seven.”
I am sighing too much for a guy my age, but with another sigh, I flip to the A section of the binder, and there I find the listing for Admiral 7.
It’s a substantial listing. Ol’ number 7 has pawned, over the years, clothes, pots and pans, boxing gloves, wooden clogs, war medals, books, stuffed animals, scrimshaw, luggage, timepieces, motorcycle tires, baseball equipment, board games, pornographic magazines, exotic spices, original sheet music, unlisted phone numbers, a cat, coins, rocks, animal pelts, allegedly famous human teeth, house paint, gardening tools, life jackets, rare Pez dispensers, shrubs, lamps, flags, fossils, curtains, horseshoes, copper wire, more war medals but from a different war, a beer-making kit, and one item that just says “undying gratitude,” for which he received six dollars.
There is a note, highlighted in yellow, that says the admiral may pay in installments, for the rare item he actually wants back.
The Testament says 7 owes five on his concertina.
“Says you owe five,” says Charlie Waters’s son.
Admiral 7 has a big broad smile and a full set of pearly teeth. The teeth are up on a shelf in the shop someplace, but the smile is right there in front of me as I hand over the little squeeze box.
“Had this sweet thing for forty years,” Salty 7 says as he digs and digs around in his many pockets. He has sailor pants and that shorty sailor jacket, pockets inside, tiny breast pockets and hip pockets…
Which all together produce about a buck forty in coin. It is a long, sad sea change as Salty searches again the same dry pockets for the money that was probably there when he got off the boat yesterday but is long gone now. His puckered old face, too, shifts tides from high to low as the obvious finally comes obvious to him and he has to look at me all wrong.
How does it get to here? How does it get to where a guy like this with probably a million miles and stories and adventures and songs accumulated has to look embarrassed to a pale Lundy Lee whelp like me? Something went wrong, don’t you think, for it to get here? Something got broken, didn’t it?
I’m a broker now, funny enough. Pawnbroker is my title, my legacy, my slot. Is it true? Is it accurate? Did my dad spend his hours breaking things? Breaking people? Is that who I am now?
“You must have dropped it somewhere,” I say. “Happens, y’know?”
He turns his back to me, his face to the window, to the distance, to the sea and the Big Island, where he has to go back concertina free.
He starts squeezing little squeezy noises from the concertina. Not a song assembly, not even what you might call notes. Squeelches. But little quiet ones.
“You like this jacket?” he asks, still with his back to me, still laying down eerie unpleasant background sounds.
It’s not much of a jacket.
“It’s a fine jacket.”
“Gimme six for it?”
I’m thinking maybe, if it had seven in the pocket. Which, as we know, it doesn’t.
“It’s cold out, sir,” I say. “You need that jacket.”
“No, I need this concertina. Need it. Jacket has been all over the world,” Salty says proudly.
One toilet at a time, from the smell of it. “I bet it has.”
“Six, then?”
“Is that what the fat man would do?”
He spins and grins. Gives me a little shiver, actually.
“That’s just what the fat man would do.”
“I’d better do it then. A boy doesn’t want to disappoint his dad, does he?”
Salty is already shedding the jacket as he heads my way. He slips it onto the counter and we shake hands, most of the money changing hands the way it always does in high finance, invisibly. I pull a fabricky tired dollar from my pocket and slide it across, and it looks very much like jackpot time for the salty seadog.
“You gonna play me something?” I ask. I don’t know anything about the concertina, never heard one, never saw one, except in an old family photo of my uncle Otto, who legally married his while in prison. But it looks like something I would not like the sound of. But anyway…
The admiral throws his whole shrivel of self into the effort of squeezing that box and pressing those keys. It is a mighty effort, and a mighty sound that comes from it.
And even I know this is not what the thing is supposed to sound like.
Despite the joy on the old man’s face, the impression is more of aggression. Like he has some kind of grudge with the concertina that has been building for all of those forty years and is going to be solved right here right now. Salty’s efforts produce a squealing, bleating, screaming noise that all but pulls items down from shelves all over the shop. There is pain in this operation, and for the long three minutes it goes on, the instrument’s reasonable response is just to cry.
Eventually it just stops, the way a car crash does, with an abrupt crunch. The old man looks at the young man, beaming. The young man looks back smiling, wincing, happy the old man is happy, happy it’s over.
“That was an old Welsh sea shanty,” the man says, “and at the end there, that was ‘Greensleeves.’”
“I thought I heard that in there,” I say as I step from behind the counter to see the man out before he attempts to encore. “That was lovely, sir.”
My hand is on the man’s back, gently suggesting to him the door, and the world outside it. The man is looking, or trying to look, behind him at the hand, like he’s surprised, disbelieving, disappointed. The smell coming off the man, from up close, is rum and fish and a tiny spritz of urine. I breathe it in, a little put off, but then not as much as you might expect.
“You smell just like Lundy Lee,” I say as I usher the man out to the sidewalk.
He nods, and his wind-worn happy face firms up serious. “Your dad was a fine man,” Admiral 7 says, standing on the blank sidewalk with the ferry and the sea and the world off over his shoulder.
I take it. Start to answer, hitch back, look down at his feet briefly, then back up.
“So was yours,” I say, even though I never met the old man’s old man, even though he was probably dead already several wars ago. Because that’s what Charlie Waters Jr. was taught by his dad. Everybody’s dad is a good man, Charlie always told his boy. And why ever would I not believe him?
“Wanna go for a drink?” the admiral asks hopefully, fingering the keys on his deadly concertina.
“Thank you,” I say, “but I have to run the show here.”
I do not go back to running the show, however, until I have gone to the spot in the front window where the old man had been watching the sea. And I see that the sea was not really what he loved so dearly from this spot. I watch the salty old sea dog meander his way across the street, along the promenade, up to the establishments that want him as much as he wants them. He takes his unexpected $2.40 windfall and a squeeze-box full of good times and pours through the front door of the Compass Inn, right next door to the North Star Bar.
“I don’t know, Dad,” I say, still watching, still hearing the godawful misery of the concertina in my head. “Was that a good thing? On balance? Will the world forgive me for that? How do you know? How do you measure these things? What have you done to me here, Dad?”
I wait for an answer. I am somehow surprised when he does not provide me with one.
“You’ll get back to me, then.”
I head back to the job, and further into the life. I immerse myself in the Testament, working out who is who, matching up nicknames and details and figures with the hundreds of items lining the walls of Bread&Waters Loans.
And there is commentary, written in the margins of people’s listings.
Too much jockey, not enough horse, it says in the margin of a man who seemed to pawn a lot of women’s dresses.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I say, laughing and tracing the path to the dress section. I am coming on fast now, into the business. I am learning right off to laugh at it all. And that you talk to yourself a lot in the pawnbroker business. “How is that supposed to help me, Dad…jockey, horse? Ya big fat fool.”
I do a flinch. I’m not there yet, but I know only when I try. It’s like jabbing myself with a knife still, saying that pointed wiseguy stuff. Dad is still my big fat hero. Crap-talking like he’s here only calls attention to the big fat absence, which calls attention to the big fat gatekeeper no longer standing guard between Charlie Waters Jr. and “that rat-ass world” Dad always laughed about.
Six weeks before my father died, I bought him a big fat festive Hawaiian shirt. Because it was festive, it helped us both. How could bad things be coming to a man in a brand-new big fat festive Hawaiian shirt? They couldn’t.
That’s why I could go it even further. That’s why—seeing big fat don’t-you-goddamn-do-that eyes on my dad at receiving the shirt, the gift, the scaredy, and the message—that’s why I could say to him, “Hey, old man, keep those tags on there, just wear them tucked inside, because I want to return the shirt after you’re meat.”
Because it couldn’t possibly happen if you said stuff like that, could it? No, and then the great, massive pagoda-guy in the birds-of-paradise tent shirt could continue standing guard at the gate like always, like should-be.
I still have the shirt and the shirt still has the tags. In the closet in the house where the mail keeps coming anyway.
Back to the Testament. Severe Gail, bordering psychotic, it says, echoing the shipping forecast, next to the name of a woman who left a baby carriage three weeks ago and hasn’t been back.
Dad loved that shipping forecast.
I loved Gail.
Gail McGill—I knew it right away. She was always a little bit nuts, all the way back to fourth grade, when she demonstrated her unlimited devotion to me by licking pigeon droppings off a picnic table. Devotion and insanity may have been indistinguishable in the nine-year-old mind, but Gail and I got along better than fine for a lot of years, until we went our separate ways. Separate meant the Y in the road that splits the main thoroughfare of Lundy Lee into two pointless directions inland. Separate meant I stayed on my old right fork while Gail traveled two miles and two babies up the other way, and while living in a place such as the Lee means everybody sort of knows everybody, it somehow means in a way that everybody eventually becomes a stranger too.
Gail pawned her baby buggy to my father.
I circle around from my place of authority to get over to the furniture section since, after all, what’s a carriage but baby furniture with someplace to go. I find it, and find it to be one of the nicer items in the shop. It’s one of those overspecial, overpadded all-terrain baby vehicles that, if they were a lot bigger and motorized, could work as a grown man’s sleeping quarters and an eye-catching set of wheels to show off for the chicks. It has never been used. Or: It has been used by an uncommonly tidy and unbabylike baby, because this thing is showroom buff. And from the little bits of news that ever rolled down the two miles from Gail’s world’s end, her two babies (and very possibly an approaching third) were not even in the regular category of slop-slinging, tire-chewing, cat-scaring bundles of terror, never mind the extradelicate kind.
It’s a buggy that made no sense. Maybe that’s why she pawned it.
“Why are there so many Tuesdays?” I read out loud as I make my way back to my post. I read from the book like I’m reading from literature. I read to the assembled tools and toys and antique advertising signs like I’m reading to an audience of the willing.
You worsen the person, I read.
“How?” I ask. “How do you worsen them? And who is the person? You? Me? Them?”
Answer? None. Silence.
Alone again, but not alone enough, I sit frozen at the counter occupied for years by my father, the guv’nor, the beloved. Surrounded by the merchandise, the remains of the comings and the goings of the interactions of the relations of the customers/characters/clients/clandestines of Lundy Lee and the open sea.
The open sea. My body cannot move, but my eye is live. Out to the horizon. Out the big faded stenciled window, over parked cars, across the street, beyond the gapped grin of low salt-eaten buildings, to the sea, which is always in sight from just this spot where my father spent his progressively sedentary years. You can see a storm coming for miles from this spot, and I watch as one comes running right now. A charcoal avalanche of malevolent cloud is pushing its way across the chop face of the water so fast, it will be here in minutes. Wind begins to rattle the windows, and the first sharp dashes of rain begin hitting everywhere.
I love this. This, to me, is life. The universe giving Lundy Lee CPR, hammering its chest and blowing somebody else’s air in to revive it if just for a little while, and it’s a thrill.
It is almost a disappointment that I can see the end of the storm nearly as soon as I see the beginning. For seven, eight minutes, this thundering, blustering beauty pounds the front of the shop so hard that it could very well wind up letting itself in, but there, right behind it, comes the lightning-crack tail, following it home, passing overhead, whipsnapping, leaving the town wet and breathless and alone again gasping. I miss it already.
“Holy hell, huh?”
I barely look in the direction of the door as the kid ambles in. It’s the lifeguard from the municipal pool, and he looks as if he has swum his way over in his clothes.
“Holy hell,” I say with a wave.
“I timed that perfectly,” the kid says. “Stepped out the door just as the thing blew in, then came in here just as it blew away again. Woulda stayed drier if I’d stayed in the pool.”
“Isn’t that where you should be?” I ask.
“Ah, not a problem. Nobody ever comes on Mondays. Ever. Just wind up talking to myself, and that ain’t mentally healthy.”
He is about two years older than me, but we have no history. He’s just one of those people who wash up in this type of town, live above one of the shops for a while, doing this or that job nobody really needs them to do, then move on again. Nice enough guy, been here over a year already. You can hear the time ticking off of him.
“Wanna buy a ring?” the kid asks.
“Not really,” I answer. Buying stuff had not really entered into my mind much. I knew, mostly, what the business was about, but until now I had not gotten my mind around the idea of bringing merchandise in. This was supposed to be my livelihood now, carrying on my dad’s business, holding steady the core center of the “community” of Lundy Lee for the greater good and for life. But to be honest, I was thinking of it more in terms of outgo. Of seeing the current inventory delivered to the previous owners or the new owners, finishing up Senior’s uncompleted business and then…
What? And then, what, Junior?
“Isn’t that what you do?” Kid asks.
“I guess,” I answer. I put out my hand.
Kid pulls a ring from his pocket, places it in my palm. The ring looks the real thing, a 1929 gold Indian head coin in a chunky ten-carat gold setting that looks like something a bishop would wear. The underside is open so you can see the details of the back of the coin, with a slick American eagle etched in it trusting in God and everything.
“I know next to nothing about jewelry,” I say, squinting at the ring and turning it over and over.
“Cool,” Kid says. “Then it’s worth two million.”
“Sorry,” I say, “but I left it in my other pants. Is it stolen?”
“No way. My mom gave it to my dad; then she ran away to find herself, before anybody ever knew she was lost.”
“Did she find herself?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Huh. Well my mother’s looking too, so maybe if they don’t find themselves they’ll find each other.”
“That would be very sweet. Anyway, then my dad and me went fishing, to forget her, like, and he threw the thing in the river near home. The only thing I can do great is swim, so when we went home and he went to sleep, that is just what I did, I swam. I went back to that lazy no-fish river and I dove in where we were, and didn’t I find that gleaming shiny ring in about five minutes?”
“That’s nice,” I say. “But maybe, the way it happened and everything, it’s like a sign or something that you should keep the ring.”
“That’s what I thought. But then I need money, like ya do, right? And I don’t make dirt over there guarding nobody’s life, watching nobody swim but me. So I came in here and I had to make a choice and I chose to keep the ring, but I put up a couple of trophies, my swimming trophies, for a few bucks with your dad. He was a fine guy too, your dad…”
“So is yours.”
“Thanks. But I figured, like you figured, that I should have the ring. But know what? The ring doesn’t make me happy. I been blue since the day my swimming trophies left me, and I think I made the wrong choice, y’know? So I was thinking, how ’bout you just give me those two trophies, I see them right there, the ones that have little divers on top that actually do look like me, and I will give you this ring and we will call it all square?”
I look over at the small swimming trophies. They aren’t even nice trophies. Plastic. Chipping. One of them has the name plate glued on crooked.
“The ring’s got to be worth about a thousand times as much as the trophies,” I say.
Kid shakes his head, many times. He looks embarrassed, exposed, suddenly younger even than Junior. “Not really,” he says, “not really, though. For one thing, your dad gave me too much to begin with….”
“Why am I not surprised? I don’t know how the man stayed afloat.”
“And also…just, not really. Here, make the trade. Here, let’s.”
I still have the ring in my palm, bouncing it, weighing it up, when I retrieve the two little statuettes from the shelf. They weigh not much more than the ring.
Kid is reunited with the trophies, clutching both little divers with exactly that same grip Academy Award winners use when they get their mitts on the big one. Only he stares at them more like he has been reunited with long-lost loves—parents, siblings, children.
I suddenly feel something. I am overcome, overwhelmed, with a rush a of good feeling like I have not recognized before, certainly not in recent times, as I oversee the sad little reunion. I beam over the ceremony as if I have really accomplished something here instead of having done, really, nothing at all.
Can you see? Why a guy would want to do this? Why a complete, fully functional person would want to waste his hours and months doing this stupid business?
So this is what good really feels like.
So this is what Charlie felt like.
“I don’t really need the ring,” I say.
“But I really need the trophies,” Kid says. “And I don’t have money. Really I’m only part-time, part-part-time even, at the pool, so they don’t pay me for but a few hours a week. Most of the time I’m just hanging around there for the swimming, and to have someplace to be, and so maybe a nice girl or something might come in.”
I laugh as I force the ring back on Kid. “No, don’t worry about it. You’ve been the highlight of my day, really. And I think I’m doing…what I should do.”
Kid looks at his great bounty, then back at me with a suspicious, quizzical look. He takes one jokey, testing step toward the exit. “You gonna call a cop on me now or something? This some sick game?”
I wave my friendliest unthreatening good-bye.
Kid takes his luck while it’s warm and continues on out. “Hey, I’m gonna do a swim, like a charity swim, from here out to the Big Island and back. For charity. You wanna sponsor me?”
“When’s the swim?”
“Dunno. Maybe later today.”
“What’s the charity?”
I keep smiling and waving.
“Not sure. Something really sad, though.”
I smile, I wave, I don’t hold my breath. “Let me know.”
It’s visible, what my father meant. About this job maybe being a public service, about it maybe being central to the community. I could be getting ahead of myself, but right now it feels pretty all right what I’m doing. Could I be the guv’nor?
It must be ages I’m dreaming on that, because I hardly notice the door swing open. I hardly notice the rail-thin scarecrow of a man walking my way, walking through the door, top of his head bald as beefsteak, blond cornsilk fringe hanging down back and sides.
“What can I do for you?” I say, almost as a way to slow his coming at me.
He lopes his way over regardless, swinging far right and left as he walks. He could fail a drug test from halfway across the room. His eyes are dewy and kind, smiling and unsettling.
“I am very, very, very sorry for your loss. For our loss,” says the man. “My name is Beech, and I came to meet the new boss, hoping he’s the same as the old boss. Right?” he says, smiling harder and shake-shocking my hand. “Like the Who song, right?”
“Right,” I say. “I hope I’m mostly the same.”
“I hope you are mostly the same,” Beech says. “We all hope you are mostly the same. The universe hopes you are mostly the same.”
I wait. The air goes still.
“I’ll try,” I say with a shrug I really put my back into.
More still air.
“Can I help you?” I ask after we have run out of polite.
“You can, my man. I am here to collect my rightful belongings.”
“That’s good.” I nod energetically. “Rightful belongings are our business. Ticket?”
“No ticket,” Beech says brightly.
I sigh. “Then how—?”
“It’s in the safe,” he says, pointing to the narrow closet door next to the stack of drawers right behind me.
“There’s a safe?”
“That’s what Charlie called it. I don’t think it’s a real safe, though. I think it’s a closet.”
It is a closet. Shelves along the left side, boxes and bags stacked floor to chin elsewise. There is a bare bulb hanging from an ancient cloth-wrapped cord, with a little chain attached, to illuminate all.
It illuminates very little, but it does cast enough buttery glow to leave me none the wiser. “What is it?” I ask.
“It’s a Viking,” he says, as if the question itself is puzzling.
“It’s a Viking,” I repeat, looking back over my shoulder at the customer.
He nods at me, friendly and understanding. “Don’t be scared. It’s not a real one, like from Denmark or something. It’s a two-foot-tall statue of a hairy Viking leaning on a mace, and with one of those horny helmets and extra big feet. Did Vikings even use maces? I don’t think that’s really historically…”
I am already buried in the dim closet as Beech comes to his conclusion about the validity of the Viking’s relationship to the mace. I dig, and things fall off shelves and something hard clomps me good right where the spine meets the head, but I find the historically dubious gentleman, swing him right around, and present him handsome on the counter.
They are clearly both happy to be reunited. Viking wears wide goose-egg eyes of excitement and a plunderer’s grin through his beard. Beech wears practically the same expression.
There is an awkward moment. Like sitting on the bus next to some saddo whose birthday it is and somehow you just have to be made to know or he can’t enjoy it.
“Check it out,” Beech says slyly. “His head twists off like this….”
The Viking is hardly headless before the whole room knows his secret. The grass crop tucked in his belly has a smell so strong, when the bag is opened I’m sure every dope-fiend seagull is going to crash into my front window within minutes.
“What have we got here?” I ask needlessly.
“My homegrown. Two exceedingly smooth ounces, if I may pat my own hairy back. Right, funny thing: I had this stuff, and then some other stuff, way different but interesting stuff in its own special way, y’know?” He is waving his hands and spindly fingers in the air between us as if he is trying to mesmerize us both. He’s only batting .500 with the mesmerizing, but I am a little slack-jawed. “And this stuff doesn’t come across these shores often, am I right?”
“I don’t know if you’re right,” I say coldly. “Just finish the story.”
“Okay, well I don’t have a lot of time because this Afghanic guy is away on the next boat and I don’t have enough bones to stand up a cat. But because of the reputation of your straight-up old man, and of Bread&Waters Loan Company as the only true-blue supporter of the local small businessmen of Lundy Lee—”
It’s like the expression
world’s oldest profession.
Everyone knows what everyone means
by the local small businessmen of Lundy Lee.
“That never happened,” I say, as flat as the calm dead sea.
“Huh?” Beech asks, bumped right off his story.
“Your story isn’t true. It did not happen, so you should just stop telling it now. My father did not know what is in that statue, because if he had, he wouldn’t have kept it here.”
Beech has visibly deflated. What was clearly one of his better days has now been run right into the ground.
And, bizarrely, I feel a pang of bad as I see him and his Viking lose their moment. I feel both totally, righteously right and guilty as hell, and it is one of the crappiest combinations ever and I cannot get them out of my shop fast enough.
Beech mutters something as he wrangles cash up out of a deep pocket and lays it out on the counter like a child with his coloring pages.
I point at the cash. “That is what he gave you, to pawn him?”
“Well, there’s the what he gave me, and the what for interest, ’cause I’m late. I was in bed a few days with a fluish, and there’s the what more, like usual, that I add on for the, y’know, profit thingy, which was better than usual because of the unusual opportunity that it was. He was the only guy,” Beech adds wistfully, “ever supporting the local small—”
“Just keep it,” I say, gathering up the bills and tucking them together the way careful people do with money. I hand them over. “We don’t handle that kind of business here. Sorry.”
Beech looks a little sad, a little lucky, but more sad, I believe. My heart likes that in its flickering way.
“In that case,” Beech says, “you might want to give me that sacred heart statue up there on the top shelf. And leave his head on.”
I think I hear myself laugh as I bring Jesus down from up there. Beech smiles and nods and backs away from the counter, clutching his twins. He turns and walks to the door with less of the side-to-side than he brought in, but turns in the doorway and calls back, “Your dad was a fine guy, no matter.” He stands there firm with an I-mean-it look.
“So was yours,” I say.
You can see that he can practically smell it when he backs into Lundy Lee’s one honest-to-god cop. Clutching his treasure, Beech looks desperately back to me but doesn’t give up the show.
I nod.
He goes.
He’s not honest-to-god Lundy Lee’s cop anyway, since Lundy Lee only rates a part-time presence from the district force. “Officer Fortnightly” is how the officer is prominently represented in the Testament.
“Good day, sir,” I greet Officer Fortnightly.
“Good day to you, sir,” Fortnightly responds, extending a warm and friendly hand of authority. “What was that numpty doing here?”
“Same as everyone, financing this glamorous lifestyle.”
“Right,” Fortnightly says, eyeballing the new proprietor to see if the relationship will be as shipshape as the old one was. “You are aware that the merchandise you take in is supposed to be registered with us, to prevent movement of stolen goods and contraband.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you are supposed to get ID, and a picture. Nobody under eighteen?”
“Yes, sir.”
The straightforward uncomplication of the conversation does not seem to agree with the lawman. In fact it seems somehow slightly to agitate him. He begins wandering around the shop, fingering items, picking them up and putting them down as if he is on a shopping trip, which he sort of is.
“I was sorry to hear—”
“He was a fine man, my dad, wasn’t he?”
Officer Fortnightly is thrown for a second by the interruption. He stops his snooping, regards the boy businessman. “Yes,” he says. “Your dad was a fine man.”
“So was yours,” I say brightly.
Fortnightly gets all forthrightly, marching right up to the counter, leaning right up to me. “You being wise with me?”
“I don’t mean to be, sir.”
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“Really. You seem older.”
“Should have seen me this morning before I opened up. I was a kid then.”
We are inches from each other’s faces. We stay there for a minute, trading breath. It is not a fair trade, as most trades aren’t, and I begin to squint.
“I believe you have mail,” I say, sliding an envelope across the desk. An envelope that was sealed and marked by the previous regime.
The door opens, and a girl comes in, a young woman. “Should I come back?” she says quickly.
“Please,” I say, “do come in.”
Officer Fortnightly takes his envelope and tucks it away. He gives me another smile and a stiffer handshake and wishes me the very, very best in my new life at the helm. “See you in two weeks,” he says.
“Why?” I ask. Though I kind of know why.
Stumped, then not, he smiles. “To pick up my mail.”
“Oh,” I say. “That mail came from, like, the dead. Don’t know if we’ll be getting any more of that. You know how dead folks can be about keeping in touch. We’ll let you know if any comes in.”
He waves the envelope at me, waves my father’s beyond-embarrassing beyond-the-grave handwriting at me. “I’ll see you in two,” he says.
If I haven’t retired by then.
“Hi, I’m Sandy,” she says, and sandy she is. Hair, eyes, skin, all paled out like she’s been oversoaked in seawater, hauled out, rung out, beaten on a flat rock, and left drying in the wind and sun for a while.
I’m in love with her already.
“Don’t cops give you the creeps?” she says.
“Some of them,” I say. “I’m Charlie.”
“I know you,” she says, pointing in a way that would be impolite if I did not know her. I don’t know her, though.
“I know you,” I say, hoping I do, pointing right back. “Why do I know you?”
“I met you in the hospital. I was working there…”
Whoosh. It comes hurtling in my direction, the vision of this girl, this young woman, this kind and heartbreaking psychiatric nurse being so kind to my mother the patient, and father, and me myself. The other thriving institution, at the other end of Lundy Lee, bookending the town with the ferry port. The mental hospital, short-term no-hope a specialty. My mother had a holiday there once.
“How is your mother?” she asks sincerely. She looks less healthy than she did when we last met. She looks smaller, and younger, and less like a nurse.
“I’m going to take a guess and say, ‘Good,’” I say. “How are you?”
“I’m going to say…not so good. I don’t work at the hospital now.”
“No?”
“No.”
Conversation grinds itself to a severe halt, after starting so promisingly.
“Um, can I help you with something?”
“Well,” she says. “Yes. Yes. Yes, you can.”
It is a conversation that does not seem to want to sustain itself.
“You have something you want to pick up? Something you want to buy, or sell?”
“Um,” she says. “Um. Yes.”
I wait. “Listen, you don’t need to be bashful with me. You know, there’s a lot of people coming in here with a lot of situations, so nothing is really too big a deal after a while, whatever—“
“We had…an arrangement.”
I smile, happy to be getting somewhere.
“You had, what?”
It’s like she’s asking me now. “An arrangement? We had, kind of, a thing, me and your dad.”
The adult section of my mind does a runner, off to the darkest recess where it won’t be reached, while little-boy Charlie takes the controls.
“Right, lots of people did. That’s the kind of business we have here, you know, arrangements between…”
It is too late, though, as the blood rushing to flush every part of my visible skin attests.
“But we had…an arrangement,” she says softly, reaching out to pat my hand.
No. I loved, and love, every saturated fistful of fat that was my father. And my mother has been godknowswhere doing godknowswhat with godknowswho for ages. But this youngish, prettyish lady climbing around over my father…in trade? For what? For a rabbit coat? A blender?
“A what?” I bark, withdrawing hand and self from her. “A thing? What’s a thing…Sandy? With my dad? What’s a thing? With my dad? No, I don’t think you did.”
“I think I did.”
Betrayed simultaneously, instantaneously by a lovely dead fat man and the shiny new stranger love of my life, I am hunched with hurt and not intent on a healthy exchange of ideas with Sandy at the moment. I flip open the Testament and find her there, nearly hyperventilating as I read the word arrangement in the margin. I am too slow, though, to stem the flow, to get clear, as my eyes fall a few lines down to Steven, and the marginal arrangement. And on, and on, the word arrangement now written in boldface, leaping off the pages at me now from six different spots on this spread alone,
“I would just get my stuff back—without giving him any money—is all,” Sandy says, uninvited. “It was okay. It was okay both ways. It was good.”
“Could you leave, please? Could you leave? Sandy. Sandy Arrangement? Please?”
“I just thought that, considering, maybe you’re lonely just like—”
“Maybe not. Could you leave, please?”
“I would guess this is a lonely job here—”
“Please,” I snap, and stare at the counter, at the Testament.
Sandy’s quick breath comes out in choppy little bursts like the surf. She bites her lip and quick steps to the door.
“I don’t want you to think any bad thoughts about your father. He—”
“Don’t bother telling me what a fine guy he was. Just don’t bother.”
She turns around snappish and shouts, “He was! He was a lovely fine man, way more than you could ever be!”
I actually leap over the counter after her, and smack right into the thick glass door as she slams it on me. I remain there, pressed to the glass, closing my eyes, letting my hot cheek cool with the contact.
I walk so slowly back to the counter, I feel like a flower wilting in real time. I walk straight to the safe, the closet, the stash. I begin pulling things down and find guns. I find jewelry that for some reason cannot play with the jewelry out in the display case. I find photographs, men with women, men with men, taken from far away. I find loose gold teeth. I find bottles and bottles of pills. I find a finger in a box, dried like a long stick of dehydrated mango.
This is what it means to be the guv’nor.
In the door walks Andy LeBue, the world’s most godawful comic. He worked the local VFW until every last vet died of ill humor and the place closed down. Then he bounced between the ferry and the bars, working for coins until people stopped paying him to perform, then stopped paying him to shut up. He wears a rug on his head that was made for a head much smaller, and carries a blue-haired ventriloquist’s dummy named Blue that looks less scary than most because he looks so embarrassed.
“How are you supposed to tell which one’s the village idiot in a village like this?” Andy asks Blue, or Blue asks Andy, who can tell?
“I have a gun back here, Andy,” I say.
“Ah”—Andy laughs—“you know how often I hear that? How much will you give me for Blue, here?”
“I don’t wanna stay here,” Blue protests.
“He’s a nice boy,” Andy says soothingly. “I knew his dad. His dad always laughed for us. I loved his dad.”
And, for this.
For this, after all. For this, Charlie Waters Jr. begins to well up with an ocean’s salty tears. I keep them in the well, though.
“As a public service, for the sake of everybody in town, I’ll give you thirty for Blue, and I’ll give him a loving home until you come back.”
“See?” Andy says, both visibly happy and broken as he hands Blue over. “I told you he was his father’s boy. Now I don’t want to say Charlie Waters was fat, but I once saw him open a door with a burp.”
Andy looks shocked when I start to laugh. Something in there, in that stupid joke, felt so good and honest and real about the old man that it gave me an immense release of something better, spreading through my belly, lungs, and ribs.
Andy is fairly fleeing as Blue and I stand there, both waving him good-bye. “See you soon,” says Blue.
It is only lunchtime.
“Jesus H. Jesus,” I say, slumping exhausted into the low upholstered chair with the gigantic ass crater that sits behind the counter. It is positioned so that, no matter what, if you just had to collapse back there, you almost had no choice but to land in the chair. The chair sort of stinks. But it certainly is comfortable.
Blue is on my lap, and the Testament is in my hand. I flip it open with a great deal of trepidation. I open to the very first page, which I had not seen earlier. Come what may, Charlie Waters Jr. is going to read this book cover to cover, line for line, and every line in between.
It begins with a sort of title page. PRIVATE, it says in that mentalist handwriting scratch.
FOR THE EYES OF CHARLIE WATERS ONLY
I smile at the joke I share with my dad. How fantastically pointless that the only two people in the world who could read that warning were both named Charlie Waters.
Page two is blank; page three is a kind of dedication page, an inscription, as if this would be a real book.
JUDGMENT DAY WAS YESTERDAY.
SORRY, NO REFUNDS.
This is his book. This is Charlie’s Testament. And Charlie’s boy is reading it, come what may.
But it is lunchtime. So it may come after lunch. Dad would agree.
I flip to S. I dial her number.
She is still chopping that sad quick breathing like the surf as she answers the phone.
“This is a lonely job,” I tell her. “You want to do good for people, but what’s good? You want to be a fine guy, but what’s fine? You want to try, but trying is hard and it’s exhausting and, hell, it’s only lunchtime on day one.
“But I could buy lunch, Sandy,” I say to her, hopefully. “I could do that much, I know. Buy us lunch at the Compass or the North Star, watching the water?”