No Such Thing as the Real World Read online

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  Arrangements

  Chris Lynch

  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.