The Head/ Chapter 2

we ought to steal it off him

Chapter 2

Thursday morning, when Mitch gave his partner Buddy his half of the can money, the transaction felt funny. Something about it. The amount was just what Buddy had expected; then, Mitch had handed him a twenty dollar bill, saying he’d got forty bucks for that head thing. “Except it wasn’t gold. Not real gold. I got forty for it. That’s your half.”

Buddy had stared at the twenty-dollar bill in his hand, but he had experienced a funny feeling. “From the pawn shop, you mean?”

“It wasn’t never gold. It was just one of them tin alloys that looks like gold, but ain’t gold. The recycling guy wanted to give me only twenty for it, cheap bastard, so I took it to the pawnshop and got them up to forty. Your half is twenty, see. Pretty good, huh?”

Buddy had looked Mitch in the eye. “Who was it, at the pawnshop?”

Mitch looked back, “What you mean, who was it?”

Buddy took a half step forward, so he was right in Mitch’s face. “Was it the old man or was it his kid?” When dealing with the pawn shop, Buddy preferred dealing with the old man, not the son. He considered both the old man and his son to be cheap, but the kid was the worst. He was always trying to prove himself to his dad, what a good wheeler dealer he was. You could always get more money for your goods from the old man.

Mitch retreated half a step. He looked down and then up. “It was, uh, you know, it was the old man. His kid wasn’t even there.”

There was something about that reply that bothered Buddy. Those hesitations, that step back, the lowering of his head as if, before Mitch replied, he needed to think about his answer.

The rest of the day went as usual, but Buddy kept thinking about the situation. Every now and then, while they were emptying trashcans, he would look over at Mitch. Each time, Mitch seemed to be off in dreamland. On a typical day, Mitch was talkative to a degree that could be irritating, but today he had almost nothing to say.

At lunch, Buddy said, “The head sure was a pretty thing, that gold head. Sort of creepy though. Like it could almost look back at you. It was just tin, huh?”

Mitch stared at the half-eaten sandwich in his hand. “It was never gold. It was just one of them tin alloys.” Then, he changed the subject to sports.

When they finished their route, Buddy said today he would take the canvas bag to recycling by himself. “Since you did it yesterday. Besides, I got something else to do over there.”

Mitch looked a little funny, and then he said, “OK, sure. Whatever.”

Buddy kept looking right at Mitch, and Mitch kept looking away into the distance. Buddy said, “All we got is cans today.”

“Right, just cans.”

“I got some shopping to do, out there in that part of town, so I might as well do it myself. You don’t mind?”

“Why would I mind? Absolutely, sounds great. See you tomorrow. You can give me my share then.”

That was it, except when Mitch was getting into his truck, he looked mad. Like he had not played his cards right.

While Buddy was at the recycling, he found out Mitch had come by the day before with the cans and whatnot but also with the golden head. The recycling guy had no trouble recalling that head; it was not the sort of item that normally arrived at recycling. “I tried to buy it off him, but Mitch didn’t want to sell it, said he was gonna get it appraised.”

“Appraised by who?”

“Like a jeweler is what I told him. They know about gold.”

“You think that head was real gold?”

“It looked like gold. Heavy like gold. I offered him thirty for it. Course if it was real gold, it’d be worth more.”

After he left the recycling, Buddy drove to the pawn shop. The old man and his son were in there. “Yesterday, my partner, Mitch, he come in here, in the afternoon?”

The old man said, “I never seen Mitch yesterday. Hey, Junior, you see Mitch in here yesterday?”

Junior was with a customer, but he looked over. “I never seen him. Not yesterday.”

“He didn’t come in here with a gold head? About this big?” Buddy showed them how big the head was by holding his hands apart. “About the size of a bowling ball?”

The old man said, “Both of us was working here all afternoon yesterday. We never saw him.”

Buddy got back in his car and sat there in the front seat for a while. He got out his wallet and extracted the twenty-dollar bill Mitch had handed him. It looked normal. He just stared at it for a while and then put it back in his wallet.

“That foxy motherfucker,” he said.

Red, the owner of Red’s Place, the neighborhood bar, was a man who had opinions. One of them was that young men like his son Slick had undeveloped brains. Slick was 25 years old. This explained why Slick lacked common sense, why he was prone to doing stupid shit. Red felt idiots like his son should not be allowed to vote, maybe not even drive, not without adult supervision.

Red let Slick manage the bar on slow nights, but tonight, a Thursday, there was a game on TV so Red was tending bar himself. He had a dozen of his regulars including Billy the Cop sitting at the bar, watching the game with him. Slick was huddled in a booth with the fatso Rodney Schwartz. Three old ladies were drinking beer at a table. Two guys were shooting pool. The nerd Franklin Birch and the deaf one were in a booth, motioning at one another. Otherwise, the bar was empty.

The deaf one’s real name was Laura Ott. Because there were three more Lauras in the neighborhood, people called her the deaf one, the deaf Laura. She lived in the same trailer court where Mitch lived. If you wanted to talk to the deaf one, you had to look her right in the face and enunciate so she could read your lips. If that didn’t work, you had to write her a note on a piece of paper. Probably the deaf one got a disability check from the government because of her deafness, but she also earned money by cleaning people’s houses and painting windows. She specialized in holiday themes, Thanksgiving turkeys, Christmas Santas and candy canes, Halloween monsters and witches, Easter eggs and bunny rabbits. The streetside windows of Red’s Place currently displayed one of her masterpieces, a flag and an American eagle done to celebrate the Fourth of July.

Franklin Birch, the guy in the booth with the deaf one, was called the nerd because he read books. Sometimes, he even brought a book with him to the bar and read it while sipping his beer. People said he had a house stuffed full of books. Franklin (he didn’t like you to call him Frank) was almost a decade older than the deaf one. So far as Red knew, the deaf one in her whole life had never had a boyfriend. What he’d heard was Franklin hired her to clean his house, people said it was a pigsty, books stacked up everywhere, and that was how this romance or whatever it was had begun.

Red watched the lovebirds for a bit. Was it possible this was the first love affair for each of them? Imagine that. Two lonely hearts. Love at last. It was sort of sweet in one way but nauseating in another. Look at that. The nerd was hand-talking. Maybe the deaf one was giving him a lesson in hand-talk. Hard to say. The deaf one was sipping her Coke; she never touched alcohol, and the nerd was just finishing his beer. In a second, Red was going to tell his barmaid Becky to walk over there and ask them if they needed refills. Now, they were finger-talking at the same time, leaning over the table toward one another, their hands and fingers flying, staring into one another’s eyes. It was almost indecent. He ought to send Becky over there and tell them to get a room. He looked back at the game.

At the booth in the back, Red’s son Slick and his pal Rodney Schwartz were talking about something. Their voices were rising, getting loud. Red thought about going over there and telling them to tone it down, but then his team got another hit, and the game got interesting again.

In the booth at the back, Rodney told Slick that the night previous he’d got a phone call from Mitch Nelson. A very interesting phone call. About gold. “That asshole was trying to play me. He’s got something going on.”

Slick said that if he ever got a phone call from Mitch, he would hang up.

Rodney leaned toward Slick, insofar as this was possible considering his girth, “Mitch has something. Something he found in somebody’s garbage. Something made of gold. We ought to find out what it is. We ought to steal it off him.”

Link to Chapter 3