The Pawnbroker (9 page)

"Whyn't you and the gal come on over to sit with us," Tangee offered. "Be sociable."

Jesus looked at Mabel, then got up and went over. She followed him, a shy smile on her face. There was some shifting of chairs, little darts of smile.

"Billy an' Thelma, say hello to Jesus Ortiz an'...I didn't catch your gal's name...." Tangee leaned over, the diplomatic link between all their dissimilarities.

"Mabel," Jesus said, and endured the giggling salutations, the embarrassed shifting of Buck, to whom amenities were complex and better avoided. Buck's wife, Billy, stared blatantly at Jesus over her conversation with the other two women, and Buck dreamed of the sacks of gold with which he could earn his wife's febrile attention.

"Now I been wonderin' somethin', Ortiz. I don't want you to take it bad. I'm just curious." Tangee looked at Jesus' small, hairless hands, with their delicate, thin fingers, and noted how he balled them up into little fists under his scrutiny. "How come a smart boy like you got to work in that pawnshop? I mean you used to have faster games than that. I happen to know you worked for that pusher, Kopey, one time. Even numbers a couple years ago. How come you go for that nigger job? What could you make—thirty, forty bucks? You just don't figure like for a janitor."

"That my business, Tangee."

"Okay, but it don't make no sense to me."

"I got my plans."

"Sure you do; ain't we all?" Tangee toyed with the ash tray, his eyes on the clenched, childish fists. After a decent interval, casually, he asked, "Say, tell me, that there pawnshop a goin' thing?"

"Much cash," Jesus said, staring hard at Tangee's face to force him off the study of his hands.

"Yes man, that what I thought," Tangee said. "That what Robinson say, ain't it, Buck? Just them same words, 'Much cash.'"

"He say like dat den when he..." Buck confirmed, stopping before the words got him out of his depth.

Billy White frowned disdainfully at her husband and began running her eyes from Jesus' hair to his mouth to his hands.

"It somethin' to think on, all that cash," Tangee said.

Jesus looked at him with a flat, unreadable expression while the orchestra pounded the beat on walls and floor, pulling at the smoky-sweet air so people's hands and feet followed the rhythm. The woman Thelma tapped her large, black hand and hummed indistinguishably. The turning prisms on the ceiling swung the phosphorescence of color over faces and bottles. There was, in all the hubbub, the clear sound of the three men's careful, speculative breathing.

"He's cute," Billy White said suddenly. They all turned to look at her. "I mean look at how cute he is," she said, gazing at Jesus' mouth. "Got a face like a girl. And look at his hands—pretty, like a girl's. I like fellas with like delicate hands and all."

Jesus felt his throat close, his whole body go rigid with fury and pain. All the hands seemed displayed on the table; Buck's mammoth ones, Tangee's, Thelma's, even Mabel's were slightly larger than his. Tangee smiled slyly. Buck just lifted his hands with mild amusement; he had never considered them before. Suddenly Jesus felt his arms twitch, as though pulled by someone. A glass turned over and fell to the floor without breaking. Mabel gave a little gasp, bent to pick it up, and then stopped, remembering some devious propriety.

"You just like fellas, period, Billy," Tangee said after a little laugh. But his own gaze followed the chiseled line of the Ortiz features, noted the lovely oversized eyes, the shapely lips, now compressed by some odd tension, and the hands bunched up at the very edge of the table. And his scrutiny was for something he could use, something perhaps too devious for him to seize on, but
there,
there all the same. "Don't pay her no attention, Ortiz; she just tryin' to embarrass you is all."

Jesus spread his mouth in a rigid smile and stared insolently at Billy. "Why, she like my type. That's no insult."

Buck stared at his new-found hands and began rubbing their knuckles together, his massive face perplexed, fermenting.

Jesus pushed back his chair and stood. "We got to cut out now," he said softly, the pale smile still in place. Mabel stood up with him.

"It somethin' to think about, all that cash," Tangee said.

"Well then, I think about it," Jesus answered. He gave a little wave to all of them. He looked at Tangee a moment longer, took the other man's veiled, suggestive expression, and returned it unopened.

"Maybe we talk some more, another time, Tangee," he said.

"That be fine if we do,
very
fine," Tangee said after them, and he watched Jesus' slender back with a flat yet avid gaze until it disappeared among the thronging men and women in a last reflection of blue and red from the prismatic light.

Mabel preceded him up the stairs to the Ortiz apartment. His mother would be long gone for her night job downtown, where she still worked as a scrubwoman in a big office build
ing. They walked into the three-room apartment, and Mabel turned on the little radio while Jesus went into the kitchen with the bottle of gin he had bought. She hummed the tune as she waited, her eyes wandering absently over a familiar place, familiar in its resemblance to the ten thousands like it all over the city. She knew that Jesus and his mother had lived in a dozen different places in the last ten years, and that each flat was as like another as if they had all been the rooms of one gigantic house. Her gaze was uncritical of the paint-swollen walls, which were lumpy because of the many layers of pigment, as though poverty itself dented the rooms beyond any attempts at concealment. In one corner a little lantern flickered on a saccharine Mary, and farther away a gold-colored crucifix picked up the Mother's light. Shapelessness infected the modestly covered bed and the tired stuffed chairs. You sensed that the peculiar odor of poor living was somehow held slightly at bay by the desperate cleanliness of the woman who lived there. There was a picture of Jane Ortiz, Jesus' mother, a dark-skinned woman with pronounced Negroid features who smiled self-consciously, as though shy at the proximity to her husband in the twin frame. The father, long absent from their fives (Mabel had always been afraid to ask Jesus what had happened to him, well aware of his strange, inexplicable sore spots), looked almost white, a thin-nosed, narrow-lipped man with large, sensuous, slightly goiterous eyes like those of an ancient Spanish grandee.

"Here you go, Baby," Jesus said, handing her a glass full of gin with clumsily broken chunks of ice in it. He put the bottle down on the end table and sat beside her on the couch. There was a light in the kitchen, but the only light in the living room came from the little altar in the corner. The radio played a rock-'n'-roll tune, and Mabel hummed to it, occasionally inserting a string of words she remembered. Her head rested comfortably on his shoulder. Jesus sipped at the drink and stared at the dim colors reflected on the window shade from the scattered neons and street lights. Side-stepping his fearful rage, he placed himself on a great, flat plain with no one in sight, no house or tree, no rise of ground. And then he imagined himself approaching a great light in the earth, filled with an immense trembling excitement, not knowing the source of the light, moving toward it and wondering whether it would be fearsome or exalting.

"Penny for you thoughts, hon," she offered timidly, willing to go infinitely higher.

"Nazerman say to me one day, 'You know how old this profession is?'" His voice was soft and musing, almost as though he talked aloud to himself. "I say no, how old? And he say
thousands of years.
He say one time the Babylon ... some crazy tribe, they use to take crops and even people for pawn. A man make loans on his family—wife, kid, anything. I mean you see what a solid business that is—thousands of years. Hard to think on thousands of years, people back then..." He laid his head back against the couch, his eyes burning at the dimness. His mind reeled at the succession of rooms he had lived in. He remembered, a thousand times multiplied, those few times his name had been doubted, his paternity jeered at. He recalled the hundred times he had experienced the same humiliation he had felt that same night when the woman had called attention to his delicate face, his small, girlish hands. His home, his name, his gender—all a tenuous, unproved thing. The world had no up or down for him; he floated disembodied in a dark void and he was forever clawing at the random things he passed, seeking a handhold, a mystical history. Only the Pawnbroker, with his cryptic eyes, his huge, secret body, seemed to have some sly key, some talisman of
knowing.

"Only for the money. I learnin' that business, estimatin', figurin'. If I had me a bundle..." He turned to her, and she, mistaking his intention, opened her lips to him. "You got any idea what that Tangee hintin' at, back there in the dance hall?" he asked.

"He didn't say much of anything."

"He didn't
say.
But you know what that man is, who he hangs out with."

"He got that friend Robinson. I know
him.
You smart you don't get mixed up with that man. He's a ex-con, a real bad, bad man." She studied him for a moment and then lowered her eyes. "Yes," she said solemnly, "I do know what he getting at. But honey, you don't
need
to get in with them. I told you I gonna raise some money, and you save some here and there. Pretty soon you get it—safe!" She looked at him again, and her anxiety was not just for his welfare but for the threat to her contribution, her only possible claim on him.

"Sure, sure," he said blandly, excluding her once more with a covering smile. "Don't worry about a thing, sweety."

Then he pushed her back roughly and began fondling her thighs. The recent rage returned to him, and he demanded she forget how small his hands were by crushing her full breasts with them. He delighted in her groans of pain, saw himself as a great rutting male, for the while, in his assumed brutality. She cried out many times, "I love you, I love you, I love you," ecstatic in the glamour of the unpaid-for lovemaking she endured under her unfathomable lover.

And later, while she sighed wistfully and cast about in her mind for sudden wealth with which to ensnare him, Jesus puffed on a cigarette as he lay, thoughtfully blowing his scrambling dreams at the ceiling in dim clouds of smoke.

Maybe I have a tumor, Sol thought with bitter amusement. He tried to visualize that peculiar knot of pressure, tried even to localize it. It would seem to be here, just below the breastbone and then ... up here near his neck ... no, more toward his back and down.... For a moment he thought of death, that old companion of his youth. Ortiz feather-dusted quietly, and he watched him. That sourly anticlimatic joke; it only made him feel cold, not fearful at all.

"Mail this on the corner," he said.

Ortiz took the envelope and studied the address.

Sol sighed mildly. "Just mail it, will you," he said. "Don't waste time. Maybe when you get back I'll tell you a few things, give you a
lesson
in pawnbroking. You are always after me to."

Ortiz smiled and walked swiftly out on his errand. Sol studied his debts while he was waiting. He made a dozen small calculations which proved he didn't make enough money to pay all his bills. Then he just let the pencil meander over the paper in small, amoebic doodles until his assistant returned.

"All right. That thing you just mailed was the list of yesterday's hocks, the things I loaned money on."

The eager acolyte leaned on the counter, his eyes on the Pawnbroker's mouth, all of him narrowed to that mundane information. It occurred to him that great secrets could come from tiny perforations, inadvertently. He must be patient and receptive.

"All the information about an item of jewelry, for example, must be on that list; the amount loaned on it, the complete description. In describing a watch, you must have the case and movement numbers, the size, any unusual markings, any engraved inscriptions. In jewelry, you use the loupe to..."

The store creaked under the grotesque weight of its merchandise, and the air was respectful of the teacher's voice. No customers came in; the street in front of their doorway seemed deserted and even the traffic sounded distant. It seemed to Jesus that all the city found the time suddenly hallowed, and he offered himself to the Pawnbroker's dark, indrawn voice with an unconscious sensation of privilege.

"To find the purity of gold in something, up to fourteen karat, you scratch a tiny mark. I say
tiny
in the ethical sense. Actually, this is an area for dishonest profit, too; the filings from a year's gougings can add up to a pretty penny. Anyhow, you drop nitric acid on the scratch. If there is brass, you will get a bright green, silver will show up a dirty gray, and iron will give you a blackish-brown color. Now if the gold is above fourteen karat, you must use these special gold-tipped needles and a touchstone. The acid we use for this is a secret to the trade...."

"
Secret,
huh," Jesus echoed in a languid voice as the Pawnbroker gave him the barest outlines of the mysteries.

And it seemed to him that many things of great significance just lay in the quality of the big Jew's voice, that he might, at any moment, surprise the great complexity of his employer just in the ponderous breath that carried the droning words. Horror and exaltation seemed to reside in the Pawnbroker's mysterious history. Jesus Ortiz crouched in the imminence of revelation, oddly eased and enriched in the things beyond what he could form in thought, beyond what the older man said.

"... so you must watch out for the professional confidence men, the gyp-artists. They are shrewd and practiced and they have a huge bag of tricks. In jewelry, for instance. Take a good-quality pearl which has been accidentally ruined by acid or sweat. The con man will peel the vital top layer to expose the second layer. This layer
will
have a similar appearance to the unspoiled pearl. For a few months! But then you will realize that you are stuck with a dull, worthless nothing. It is important to examine the apparently beautiful pearl, for only the original top layer is really smooth; the other layers are coarse by close comparison."