Pawned

CHAPTER 1

Iwas born into crazy .

My dad, my uncle, my grandpop, even my cousin—they’re all completely batshit. They spend their time talking about ghosts of drunk Civil War soldiers pissing in the corners, demons stealing socks from the dryer, and whether duct tape will keep the cap on a Coke bottle that houses a particularly nasty djinn (for the record, it was decided that duct tape can override any black magic. So far, it’s held).

The women in our family, like my mom, tend to get their fill of the crazy and bail out. If they don’t die early, like my grandma did. She kicked the bucket from a stroke over some totally off the hook artifact that my grandpop dragged home. Rumor was that he’d carted home a deck of haunted Tarot cards that bled all over her new white carpet. You’d understand popping a clot over that, if you knew Grandma.

If they don’t die, they leave. My mom left. Dad said that was because she was smart, and had an unusually high degree of common sense. She used to send me postcards and birthday cards from cool places like California. Once, she sent me a postcard of the Grand Canyon. Not so much anymore. I think she’s figured out that I’m too much like my dad, so immersed in the insanity that I’m not salvageable.

She’s wrong.

Even though I was born into the crazy, that doesn’t mean I don’t try my best to avoid it.

I adjust my backpack on my shoulder as I push open the door to Stannick’s Pawn Shop. It’s a big brick building ribboned in iron bars, five blocks from the boardwalk. It’s sandwiched between a used car lot and a burger joint. I was told that it was a bank once upon a time. There are some crumbling crenellations and part of a column that was cut off at some point but never removed.

The really nice hotels and casinos are within two blocks of the boardwalk, where all the tourists go. But the tourists don’t usually make their way back here. You can’t see the ocean from here, and it can get a little seedy. Okay, a lot seedy. It doesn’t smell like ocean. It smells like stale French fries and car exhaust and the fact that somebody (me) forgot to take out the garbage. Again.

But it’s home. My family runs the pawn shop on the first floor and lives on the second. If living upstairs from the craziest pawn shop on earth is what you call a life.

The bell jangles on the door, and I wince. I reach out to catch it, a moment too late. The ‘OPEN’ sign bangs against my elbow. I want to slip in, head up to my room and decompress unnoticed.

But that’s not to be. The demon guarding the front door has seen me.

‘Sup, Raz? he says by way of greeting. A miniature Godzilla perches on a stool, gnawing pizza bones. He’s still a big creature, almost seven feet tall, but small for a demon. An old T-shirt of mine that says, "I do evil things" is stretched over his scaly belly. No pants. He never wears pants. He looks down at me and rubs tomato sauce from his green scaly chin.

Hey, Bert. Nice shirt.

Bert plucks at a fleck of tomato staining the heather-gray fabric. It was left in the dryer for three days. Finders, keepers.

I roll my eyes. Yeah.

Those are the rules. Bert gets to keep any laundry that goes unclaimed. Part of his care and feeding as the Demon Sockmonster and security guard of Stannick’s Pawn Shop. He takes unmatched socks, shirts, and hoodies. But never pants. Bert hates pants. He says they’re uncomfortable on account of his tail. I just never bother to look below the waist. Eyes up. Always look the demon in the eye.

Business has been slow today, he says, yawning. His back teeth are covered in gold. I have no idea where he finds a dentist to work on him. I don’t want to know.

With a seven-foot demon guarding the door, you’d think business would be slow, but ordinary people don’t see what I do. When most people look at Bert, they see the reflection he casts in the jewelry-case mirror: a tall, buff dude in jeans and a muscle shirt that reads SECURITY. He has an orange tan and an impressive amount of banana-scented gel lacquering his hair. Bert calls it the glamour, and he can change it at will to look like anyone he wants. It fools everyone...except people who know his true name. When you know it, you see him as he really is. And he’s not an orange guy in sunglasses.

Bert catches me looking and flexes one of his tiny T-rex arms. He grins at his reflection in the glass. I work out.

I snort. Keep lifting those pizza bones, man. I slip past him and almost make it to the back stairs before my dad calls me.

Erasmus.

I shut my eyes. Dammit. I haven’t escaped my dad’s notice. Only he and Pops call me by my real name. Even Bert calls me Raz.

The book bag slides down my arm, and Bert chortles. I dump it behind Bert’s stool. I stare at the toes of my beat-up combat boots. He wants me to do the Bunko again, doesn’t he? I sigh.

Bert crunches a pizza crust. I imagine so. That weird lady came in about a half hour ago. I think they’re waiting for you. To do the Bunko.

I hate doing the Bunko. I trudge across the floor to my dad.

The actual pawnshop’s a huge space with a bunch of really cool shit—so I’m told. We have a whole lotta stuff you’d expect to find in a pawnshop. We’ve got lit glass cases full of coins and gently-worn jewelry and watches. Sparkly. One guy comes in here every six months to get the same engagement ring off pawn for a different chick. The walls are full of rock ‘n’ roll posters, old photographs of people from the Wild West, and various guitars signed by famous rock stars who are older than my dad. Some older than Pops.

We have old pith helmets, bits of pirate bullion. Part of a World War II airport cockpit is assembled next to replicas of Fat Man and Little Boy in the middle of the floor. The bombs give me the creeps, but my uncle insists that someone would want them for something, someday.

And we have weapons. Guns of all kinds: flintlocks, breechloading rifles from the Civil War, a tommy gun from the twenties. Derringers that hold only two shots and fit in the palm of my hand. We have hundreds of modern guns of various kinds: revolvers, rifles, shotguns, and semi-automatics. My dad always examines those carefully. The police came by a few years ago and found a few hot pieces. They got confiscated, and we were out the money. Luckily, no one got charged for receiving stolen property. Dad runs the serial numbers every time now. Mostly.

And then there are the more exotic weapons. We have a set of throwing stars once owned by ninjas, a small cannon that really fires potatoes, some funky Klingon daggers from Star Trek, and a replica halberd that’s way too heavy to lift over my head. But it’s really cool—it looks like something right out of anime. I posed with it for my Facebook profile picture. Not that anyone ever sees it.

My favorite tchotchke is a winged Egyptian goddess cast in bronze, Ma’at. She’s about two feet tall, all voluptuous and cold-eyed and gorgeous. She was my mother’s. She’s holding an ostrich feather, the feather of Truth. Osiris, a god of the afterlife, weighed the hearts of the dead against Ma’at’s feather. If the heart was heavier than the feather, the heart got devoured by Ammit, a voracious goddess with the head of a crocodile. The dead were erased from existence. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.

Tough customer, Ma’at. Like all of ours.

I clomp up to the counter. My dad stands behind it, staring into a wooden case open on the glass counter. My dad’s getting shorter all the time. I’m almost his height now, at just about six feet. He’s a little pudgy underneath his T-shirt and has a receding hairline. His hair is curly, like mine, but with streaks of gray in the dark brown. His brow furrows as he stares into the box. He just started wearing glasses about a year ago. It’s weird. The way he squints through them and rubs the stubble on his chin makes him seem sort of old.

I can tell before I get close that the lady standing before him on the other side of the counter looks a bit nuts. She’s wearing a hippie print blouse and black pants covered in cat hair. Her salt-and-pepper hair is greasy, and she smells like tuna. Her rings click against the glass as she stares down into the wooden box. She leans on the counter with her elbows and boobs pressed against it. I hope to God she isn’t hitting on my dad.

I jam my hands in my pockets and nod at my dad. Hey.

He crooks a finger at me, not looking away from the box. Come look at this.

I peer into the box. The case itself is old and wooden, with handles on the top. It reeks of tobacco and dry rot. The interior is lined with frayed red velvet, like a half-fallen cake. There are two pistols inside, situated so that they face each other like a pair of new shoes in a box. Yin and yang.

I emit a low whistle. These are really ornate guns. Lots of engraving in a pattern of leaves, flowers, and vines along the grips and barrels. I can make out faces in those vines—winged creatures and devils. The grips are sloped, like a lot of guns from times way past, and I know they’re old. Or at least, fancy reproductions.

Dueling pistols, the lady says. Eighteenth century, French.

I look, but don’t touch. I know better than to touch. My fingers feel cold and clammy in the pockets of my utility pants.

My dad nods at the lady. I think that much is true. They’re really antiques. But I don’t know about the rest of the story.

I keep my hands in my pockets.

The lady purses her lips. She has wrinkly smoker lips that aren’t enhanced by bright pink lipstick, but she’s smeared it on anyway. It didn’t take evenly, and one corner of her mouth looks like it’s smiling, and the other like it’s frowning.

She peers right and left to make sure no one else is listening and says, They’re haunted.

Haunted? I echo.

Well, cursed, actually.

I close my eyes to keep from rolling them. Awesome. Just fucking awesome.

The lady continues, One of them is supposed to always hit its target. The other always misses.

So which one is which? My mouth is dry.

Don’t know. They’re identical. Her fingers flutter helplessly over the case.

How did they get cursed in the first place? my dad asks.

The woman clasps her hands. My grandfather said he bought them at an auction. The story he got was that they belonged to a pair of brothers who were running a scam. They supposedly made a pact with the Devil to lead a life of murder and leisure, and the Devil gave them the magic guns to work the scam of all scams. One would challenge a guy with a lot of money and a pretty wife to a duel, and the other would swoop in to comfort the widow. The one who comforted the widow would walk out with what remained of the estate.

They got away with it? My dad picks up one of the guns and stares down the barrel. It’s made funny—hexagonal-shaped. This thing is in excellent condition, though it’s been fired. A lot. And modified.

They got away with it until they had a falling out over the wife of an aristocrat. They couldn’t agree who would be the shooter and who would be the Casanova. She was the wife of an oligarch in Russia. A former prima ballerina, very beautiful. She was said to be more precious than a Fabergé egg.

My dad runs his fingers over the inlay of the gun. People kill for three reasons: money, love, and sheer evil. This story sounds like all three.

The brothers challenged each other to a duel.

Let me guess...one of them died?

One of them was shot dead. The other dropped dead of a heart attack seconds afterward. People said it was the Devil come to collect his due.

She falls silent for a moment. The only sounds in the shop are the whirring of the air conditioner, Bert gnawing on crusts, and the click of my father pulling the hammer back on the gun.

Surely they had a way to tell which was which, he says. I can hear the skepticism in his voice. Neither brother would want to be the one with the dead gun.

The woman shrugs. The guns were marked. But they removed the marks before their duel. Said they’d let the Devil decide.

I lick my lips. "So you take the guns to the range, see which one hits the target, and which one misses. That would give us the truth of it. If it is real."

The woman casts me a dirty look. Sellers always hate it if you question the authenticity of their item—whether it’s purported to be a wrapper from Babe Ruth’s chewing gum or fucking Excalibur. I don’t care about offending her. Frankly, I hope she’ll get huffy, sweep the guns back into the case, and leave.

It’s not that simple, she says. They’re only supposed to fire at live targets.

My dad’s left eyebrow crawls halfway up his shiny head, like a caterpillar up a leaf. Oh, yeah? I can hear the challenge in his voice.

I rub the bridge of my nose. Jesus Christ. Here we go. Again.

My dad rattles around in drawers for ammunition. The woman sputters and protests. My dad finds some gunpowder and a pencil. He dumps some round pieces of lead on the table. I catch them as they try to roll off.

He and the woman are arguing. My dad has that maniacal glint in his eye he gets when he’s latched onto some mystery. This woman arguing with my dad sounds a lot like my dad arguing with my mom, when she was still around.

Don’t damage them!

I just want to see.

You can’t fire them in here...

Watch me, lady. I test ’em, or you can walk away right now.

I shrink back into the shadows. Bert climbs down from his perch on the stool by the door to amble over to us, still wearing his Jersey Boy persona.

Whatcha doin’? he asks.

The woman pauses, at eye-level with his unnatural pecs. Um. I can’t—

My dad is shoving one of the little lead balls down the hexagonal shaft of the pistol with a pencil. I can tell he’s concentrating because he sticks the tip of his tongue out when he does it, like a big kid.

If this checks out, I’ll give you what you asked for them—two thousand dollars. If either one of them fires, I’ll only pay you what they’re worth as mantle decorations. Five hundred. My dad jabs a gunpowder-blackened thumb at me. But the boy gets the final word.

Goddamn it. I do not want to be involved in this.

The lady stops protesting. I can’t tell if it’s the money or the mesmerizing effect of Bert’s pecs. Bert twitches the right one up, as if he caught us looking at his reflection in the glass. He winks at me.

All right, she relents.

My dad grins, aims the gun upstairs, and moves his finger to the trigger.

Jesus Christ! I blurt.

Bert and I both reach for the gun as he pulls the trigger. Nothing happens.

Sweat prickles on my brow. My fingers are wrapped in Bert’s reptilian ones. Bert and Dad yell at each other.

Pops and Uncle Sid are upstairs! I shout. Are you crazy?

Bert growls at him. What the fuck, man? You’d blow out our hearing, shooting that thing in here—if it didn’t explode in your hand first!

My dad shrugs. Nah. Pops is sleeping in the back room, and Sid’s smoking out in the alley. He sets the gun down on the scarred glass with a clunk. Stick your fingers in your ears next time.

I wipe my sweaty hands off and press them to the counter.

The woman is shaking. She’s now beginning to get an inkling of the crazy.

My dad loads the second pistol with gunpowder and a lead ball. He aims it at a framed poster of Al Pacino in The Godfather Part II that hangs over a trophy of a stuffed moose.

Dad... I begin.

The moose is too pretty to shoot, he says. Al is another story.

I cram my fingers into my ears, sweat squishing. My pulse hammers.

He squeezes the trigger. The hammer hits the strike plate.

Again, nothing happens. Al Pacino has not been torn from his red, white, and black poster.

I pull my fingers out of my ears.

The lady sticks out her hand. Two thousand bucks, mister. Cash money.

My old man shakes his head. The boy decides if they’re real. That was the deal. With one hand wrapped around the barrel, he offers me the gun.

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

Iwould 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